Lucy Partington's Last Three Things
I've been reading Martin Amis' autobiography EXPERIENCE, in which he discusses at some length the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred and Rose West.
On the day she was murdered, Lucy Partington’s handbag contained three objects: the past, the present, and the future.
Lucy Partington had spent the day with a friend, discussing her future, on the last day she would have. As the evening drew on, she went to catch the bus home. Somewhere, somehow, she encountered Fred West’s van. She probably knew him. Years ago, he’d had a bread delivery round in the small village of Gretton where Lucy had grown up. She came from a stable, loving family. A safe home life. Something a lot of Fred West’s victims didn’t have. They’d have warned her about strangers in vans. They’d have tried to keep her safe.
Lucy probably accepted the offer of a lift from the friendly bread man she remembered from being a kid. She probably thought it would be safer than waiting alone for a rural bus as it got dark that night. The bus was already late. She climbed in, her bag clunking against her hip, not knowing she was about to be driven out of her own life.
In her bag, Lucy carried three objects: the past, the present and the future.
ITEM - a translation of the Middle English poem Pearl. The poem is six hundred years old; ancient, complex and beautiful. The past. Lucy was herself a poet of some talent. The present. The poem is narrated by a man who has lost a pearl in a garden. He dreams that he meets a strange woman, a pearl-like maiden, who opens up the afterlife and shows him herself among the attendants of heaven. He wakes from his dream and wonders what it might mean. The future. Lucy, the lost jewel; the missing, and the missed; the encounter between a man and a woman unknown to one another; the life and afterlife where the maiden simultaneously exists.
The pearl that was Lucy was lost in the earth, among leaking sewage pipes and scattered hairpins. Her family did not find out what happened to her for twenty-one years. The length of her whole life.
ITEM - a completed application to study mediaeval art history at the Courtauld Institute. This was the future that Lucy had discussed with her friend Helen on that day. They’d filled the form in that day. Studious, chaste and religious is how they described her. Lucy has a flavour of the Spenserian heroine about her. Mediaeval art history. The past. Lucy’s ambitions here are suspended in amber, fossilised: on the threshold of postgraduate study, poised in the act of taking the next step. The present. The ink barely dry on the form. And the future. The plea for the future she wanted.
Lucy got into the van and pulled the door shut behind her. The door shut her off from possibility, from hope, from promise. Lucy’s future collapsed from decades into hours, then minutes, and was over before she knew it.
ITEM - a Victorian cut-glass jar for holding candles, amethyst-coloured, a gift from Lucy’s sister Marian. Did Lucy sneak her hand into her bag to hold it to fend off her growing unease as the van sped onwards into the dusk? Compared to the other victims of the Wests, Lucy was lucky. She had a safe home life and a family that could love her. The past. Lucy’s sister, holding a gift between her hands. Perhaps Lucy remembered the jar when it all went wrong, later; wondered vainly if she could smash it, wield it as a weapon, fight her way out of the nightmare in which she had found herself, if only she could reach it. The present. Unendurable. Later, the police thought they might have found the jar, but Lucy’s family didn’t recognise what they’d perhaps unearthed in the Cromwell street cellars, near to Lucy’s bones entombed in a jar-shaped, vertical grave. The future. The future thrust violently upon Lucy’s family. The future you can’t bear to look at, nor can you blink from. The future stolen from a girl waiting to board a bus that hadn’t come.