Gregory Hall - A Sleep and A Forgetting

Almost a day had elapsed since she would have taken the pills. More than enough time to ensure that they would do their job. That was why she had used a letter. To avoid any possibility that Catriona would arrive too soon. Flora would have done her homework on how many she would need to take, and then added a few more just to make sure. From the tone of the final paragraphs of that terrible letter, business-like, organised, efficient, there had been no doubt she had been in her usual state of mind. In that mood, if Flora had determined to do something, she would do it.

The letter had not, though, merely been a farewell. It had been a warning and an injunction. No one must know their secret. More than that, no one must ever know or suspect that there was a secret. The young life of Flora’s child must not be blighted further than it must inevitably be by loss and grief. The reason for Flora’s death must remain a mystery. But not only for Charlotte’s sake. For Catriona’s too.

Catriona laid the letter’s three white sheets in the empty grate and struck a match. The thin paper blazed briefly. The loops and curls of Flora’s handwriting were still dark against the grey flakes of ash when she crushed them to fragments.

It was time to answer her sister’s summons. She collected her car key from the hook by the bulletin board alongside the phone, and, pausing only to engage in a hurried search for her shoulder bag, which had unaccountably found its way into the bathroom, and to grab a charcoal grey shower-proof jacket from the bentwood coat-stand in the hall, went out into the agonising brightness of the morning.

At the time she received her sister’s letter, Catriona Turville was thirty-eight years old. For the previous five years, she had been the Bloomsbury Professor of English Literature at London University’s Warbeck College.

She had commenced her climb to this lofty academic peak at the Camden High School for Girls, where she had been by a long way the most brilliant pupil of her year. Her achievements at the school were, however, not merely intellectual. She had played sports and games with skill and a fierce determination to win, although this did not always make her popular, since her need to perform as an individual frequently took precedence over that of the team. At two sports in particular, she was outstanding: in judo, she had been the most skilful and aggressive student the school had ever had; on the running track she had had no equal. On numerous occasions, there had been attempts to persuade her to compete at a higher level, but she had disdained the blandishments. ‘The only person I’m running for is myself,’ she replied. Some more perceptive observers might have said that it was from herself that this austere, serious girl was running, but no one had had the courage or the honesty to point this out. Besides, she knew it already.

She had crowned her career by winning a scholarship to St Hilda’s College, Oxford. But it was there that the shadow side of this formidable young woman became evident. Although there were many at Oxford, themselves wealthy or well-connected or merely brilliant, who were fascinated and awed by her, who would gladly have befriended her, or borne her like a trophy to ball or country-house party, or bedded her, she made no close friends even amongst her own sex, and had no lovers, male or female. At some point in a burgeoning relationship, she would shy away, like a wild animal that is suddenly aware it has been tempted to venture too far out of its known territory. Then she could turn a hurtfully cold and indifferent face to someone with whom only the previous day she had seemed to be verging on intimacy.

Intellectually, however, she had no peer. She had continued to dazzle her tutors both with the awesome concision and maturity of her written papers, and with the calm assurance of her bearing. She gained a starred first, the most brilliant of her year. Three more years at Oxford saw her gain her doctorate – on Coleridge and the German Metaphysicians – then, despite the flood of offers to remain, she left the dreaming spires.

Wholly uninterested in doing what others of her generation called travelling – or, as she saw it, the pointless infliction of themselves on the parts of the globe that had already been thoroughly ravaged by colonialism and by its successor, foreign aid – she did nevertheless wish to see something of some other world than that bounded by the High and the Banbury Road. She enrolled as a post-doctoral student at McGill University, taught seminars, which she enjoyed, following which she was offered an assistant professorship. She had liked Canada and the Canadians, but after three years it had seemed increasingly artificial to be teaching English nineteenth-century literature in the context of a country whose language, landscape and traditions were so different.

Offered a number of appointments on her return, she had accepted a readership in the English department at Warbeck, and when one of the two Chairs fell vacant some years later, she had been the natural successor. In addition to an unusually heavy teaching commitment, which she had insisted on maintaining in addition to her departmental duties, she had produced several well-received books, as well as a regular stream of articles and reviews in learned journals. The pinnacle of her professional career to date had been the commission she had received to produce the first complete edition of Wordsworth’s poems to have the benefit of the most modern biographical and textual discoveries. The Grasmere Edition, which many lesser minds would have regarded as a lifetime’s work, was proceeding with quite extraordinary speed for such a vast undertaking.

Her colleagues in the senior common room were not a little jealous of her combination of intellect and energy. Workaholism is not particularly common in the Arts faculties of institutions of higher learning, where a high rate of production is often regarded as shallow self-advancement. But no one who knew Catriona Turville’s work could accuse her of being unscholarly, quite the reverse, and she was also unfailingly generous in the time she would spend assisting a colleague.

Personally, she was regarded as an enigma. In the prime of life, tall, slim and extremely fit, with a mass of jet-black hair surrounding a pale, classically featured face, attractive, even beautiful, she had never been known to have a sexual relationship, or even an intimate friendship with anyone of either sex. She never spoke of her private life, never referred to any personal tastes or preferences for anything other than authors and works in her chosen field of expertise, never invited anyone to her house – never, in fact, disclosed her address or even her telephone number to anyone who had not official authority to demand it.

Rumours abounded, of course – some of the most fanciful and fantastic kind – which she did nothing to confirm or deny, maintaining her habitual composure and calm indifference. Such a woman could not fail to be a target for those members of the university who prided themselves on their irresistibility in sexual matters. Over the years, many attempts at the conquest of this formidable woman had been made, but all, like the Knights in Browning’s poem who had ridden to the Dark Tower, had failed ignominiously in their quest.

Owlbury is a village in the Cotswolds, between the endemic shabbiness of Stroud and the despoiled elegance of Cheltenham. Those who like that kind of thing, and there are plenty who do, call it picturesque. The narrow, winding A46 climbs a hill, and becomes an even narrower High Street of gabled, stone houses, their plain facades given austere dignity by the precise fit of the yellow-grey ashlar and the skilful carving of lintels, dripstones, and mullions, their characteristic steeply pitched stone-tiled roofs enlivened as by an Impressionist with splashes of green, yellow, white and orange lichen.