The Skull Beneath the Skin Read Free Page A

his lips with mordant satisfaction? She said: “But they don’t specifically threaten her?”
    “She sees this harping on death as threatening. She’s sensitive. Actresses have to be I suppose. They need to be liked. This isn’t friendly. I have the notes here, the ones she kept. The first ones were thrown away. You’ll need the evidence.”
    He unclicked the briefcase and took out a stout manilla envelope. From it he spilled a heap of small sheets of paper and began spreading them over the desk. She recognized the type of paper at once; it was a popular, medium-quality, white writing paper sold over thousands of stationery counters in three sizes with envelopes to match. The sender had been economical and had selected the smallest size. Each sheet bore a typed quotation surmounted by a small drawing about one inch high of either an up-ended coffin with the initials R.I.P. on the lid or a skull with two crossbones. Neither had required much skill; they were emblems rather than accurate representations. On the other hand, they were drawn with a certain sureness of line and decorative sense which suggested some facility with the pen or, in this case, with a black-tipped ballpoint. Under Sir George’s bony fingers the white slips ofpaper with their stark black emblems shifted and rearranged themselves like the cards for some sinister game—hunt the quotation, murderer’s snap.
    Most of the quotations were familiar, words which would readily come to the mind of anyone reasonably well read in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans who chose to ponder on references in English drama to death and the terror of dying. Even reading them now, truncated and childishly embellished as they were, Cordelia felt their potent and nostalgic power. The majority of them were from Shakespeare and the obvious choices were there. The longest by far—and how could the sender have resisted it?—was Claudio’s anguished cry from
Measure for Measure:
    Ay, but to die, and go we know not where
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods; or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world! …
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
    It was difficult to interpret that familiar passage as a personal threat; but most of the other quotations could be seen as more directly intimidating, hinting, she thought, at some retribution for real or imagined wrongs.
    He that dies pays all debts.
    Oh, thou weed!
    Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet
    That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!
    Some care had been taken in the choice of illustration. The skull adorned the lines from
Hamlet—
    Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come
    —as it did a passage which Cordelia thought might be from John Webster, although she couldn’t identify the play.
    Being heretofore drown’d in security,
You know not how to live, nor how to die;
But I have an object that shall startle you,
And make you know whither you are going.
    But, even allowing for the sensitivity of an actress, it would take a fairly robust egotism to wrench these familiar words from their contexts and apply them to oneself; that, or a fear of dying so strong as to be morbid. She took a new notebook from her desk drawer and asked: “How do they arrive?”
    “Most come by post in the same type of envelope as the paper and with the address typed. My wife didn’t think to keep any of the envelopes. A few were delivered by hand either at the theatre or at our London flat. One was pushed under the dressing-room door during the run of
Macbeth
. The first half dozen or so were destroyed—best thing to do with them