The Murder Room by P. D. James

Ponds and the viaduct to Spaniards Road and the museum. He found himself mentally summing up his life with a detached wonder that fifty-five years which had seemed so momentous could have left him with so meagre a legacy. The facts came into his mind in short staccato statements. Only son of a prosperous Cheltenham solicitor. Father unfrightening, if remote. Mother extravagant, fussily conventional, but no trouble to anyone except her husband. Education at his father’s old school, and then Oxford. The Foreign Office and a career, chiefly in the Middle East, which had never progressed beyond the unexceptional. He could have climbed higher but he had demonstrated those two fatal defects: lack of ambition and the impression of taking the Service with insufficient seriousness. A good Arabic speaker with the ability to attract friendship but not love. A brief marriage to the daughter of an Egyptian diplomat who had thought she would like an English husband but had quickly decided that he was not the one. No children. Early retirement following the diagnosis of a malignancy which had unexpectedly and disconcertingly gone into remission.
    Gradually, since the diagnosis of his illness, he had dissociated himself from the expectations of life. But hadn’t this happened years before? When he had wanted the relief of sex he had paid for it, discreetly, expensively and with the minimum expenditure of time and emotion. He couldn’t now remember when he had finally decided that the trouble and expense were no longer worthwhile, not so much an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, as a waste of money in an expanse of boredom. The emotions, excitements, triumphs, failures, pleasures and pains which had filled the interstices of this outline of a life had no power to disturb him. It was difficult to believe that they ever had.
    Wasn’t accidie, that lethargy of the spirit, one of the deadly sins? To the religious there must seem a wilful blasphemy in the rejection of all joy. His ennui was less dramatic. It was more a placid non-caring in which his only emotions, even the occasional outbursts of irritation, were mere play-acting. And the real play-acting, that boys’ game which he had got drawn into more from a good-natured compliance than from commitment, was as uninvolving as the rest of his non-writing existence. He recognized its importance but felt himself less a participant than the detached observer of other men’s endeavours, other men’s follies.
    And now he was left with the one unfinished business, the one task capable of enthusing his life. He wanted to complete his history of the inter-war years. He had been working on it for eight years now, since old Max Dupayne, a friend of his father’s, had introduced him to the museum. He had been enthralled by it and an idea which had lain dormant at the back of his mind had sprung into life. When Dupayne had offered him the job of curator, unpaid but with the use of an office, it had been a propitious encouragement to begin writing. He had given a dedication and enthusiasm to the work which no other job had evoked. The prospect of dying with it unfinished was intolerable. No one would care to publish an incomplete history. He would die with the one task to which he had given heart and mind reduced to files of half-legible notes and reams of unedited typescript which would be bundled into plastic bags and collected for salvage. Sometimes the strength of his need to complete the book perturbed him. He wasn’t a professional historian; those who were, were unlikely to be merciful in judgement. But the book would not go unnoticed. He had interviewed an interesting variety of the over-eighties; personal testimonies had been skilfully interspersed with historical events. He was putting forward original, sometimes maverick views which would command respect. But he was ministering to his own need, not that of others. For reasons which he couldn’t