The Black Tower by P. D. James Page B

of satisfaction from the blatant commercialism of it all, from the sight of thousands of my fellow beings who are more deluded than I.”
    â€œBut that’s blasphemy!”
    â€œIs it? Well, I enjoy that too.”
    Grace persisted: “If only you would talk to Father Baddeley, Victor. I’m sure that he would help you. Or perhaps to Wilfred. Why not talk to Wilfred?”
    He had burst into raucous laughter, jeering but strangely and frighteningly shot through with genuine amusement.
    â€œTalk to Wilfred! My God, I could tell you something about our saintly Wilfred that would give you a laugh, and one day, if he irritates me enough, I probably shall. Talk to Wilfred!”
    She thought she could still hear the distant echo of that laughter. “I could tell you something about Wilfred.” Only he hadn’t told them, and now he never would. She thought about Victor’s death. What impulse had led him on that particular afternoon to make his final gesture against fate? It must have been an impulse: Wednesday wasn’t his normal day for an outing and Dennis hadn’t wanted to take him. She remembered clearly the scene in the patio. Victor, importunate, insistent, exerting every effort of will to get what he wanted. Dennis flushed, sulky, a recalcitrant child, finally giving way but with a poor grace. And so, they had left together for that final walk, and she had never seen Victor again. What was he thinking of when he released those brakes and hurled himself and the chair towards annihilation? Surely it must have been the impulse of a moment. No one could choose to die with such spectacular horror while there were gentler means available. And surely there were gentler means; sometimes she found herself thinking about them, about those two most recent deaths, Victor’s and Father Baddeley’s. Father Baddeley, gentle, ineffectual, had passed away as if he had never been; his name now was hardly mentioned. It was Victor who seemed to be still among them. It was Victor’s bitter uneasy spirit which hung over Toynton Grange. Sometimes, particularly atdusk, she dared not turn her face towards an adjacent wheelchair in case she should see, not the expected occupant, but Victor’s heavy figure shrouded in his heavy plaid cloak, his dark sardonic face with its fixed smile like a rictus. Suddenly, despite the warmth of the afternoon sun, Ursula shivered. Releasing the brakes on her chair she turned and wheeled herself towards the house.
IV
    The front door of Toynton Grange was open and Julius Court led the way into a high square hall, oak panelled and with a chequered black and white marble floor. The house struck very warm. It was like passing through an invisible curtain of hot air. The hall smelt oddly; not with the usual institutional smell of bodies, food and furniture polish overlaid with antiseptic, but sweeter and strangely exotic as if someone had been burning incense. The hall was as dimly lit as a church. An impression reinforced by the two front windows of Pre-Raphaelite stained glass one on each side of the main door. To the left was the expulsion from Eden, to the right the sacrifice of Isaac. Dalgliesh wondered what aberrant fancy had conceived that effeminate angel with his curdle of yellow hair under the plumed helmet or the sword embellished with glutinous lozenges in ruby, bright blue and orange with which he was ineffectively barring the two delinquents from an apple orchard Eden. Adam and Eve, their pink limbs tactfully if improbably entwined with laurel, wore expressions respectively of spurious spirituality and petulant remorse. On the right the same angel swooped like a metamorphosized batman over Isaac’s bound body, watched from the thicketby an excessively woolly ram whose face, understandably, bore an expression of the liveliest apprehension.
    There were three chairs in the hall, bastard contraptions in painted wood covered with vinyl, themselves