As the doyenne of crime-fiction writers, P. D. James is not in the habit of dispensing mercy to those she bumps off. In her most recent novel there is a clinically executed strangulation and a messy suffocation in a freezer cabinet. Professionally necessary of course, but not nice, and it is no accident that as James is tidying up the loose ends in her closing pages — she is nothing if not punctilious in doing so — she raises the question of whether, in real life, it might sometimes be a kindness to assist another person’s death.
Her doughty detective, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, can indeed see himself “helping someone I loved to a merciful death if she were being stretched out on Shakespeare’s rack of this tough world, and every breath was drawn in agony”. And James? “If somebody I loved really was suffering terribly and they were old and their life was at an end, yes, I would feel that I would help,” she says. “I’m very unlikely to be sent to prison, but if I’m sent, I’ll go. This idea that you’ve got to be able to do it, and at the same time you’ve got to be safe and the law has got to be changed to accommodate you, is not something I think we should do.”
Would she want someone to help her in such circumstances? “Oh yes. I would expect my family to see that something was done, not necessarily by them. I’m 90 next year. If at 89 you don’t think about your death then you must be in denial. You do realise, you know, you’re probably folding up your tray table and putting on your seatbelt and hoping for a not too bumpy ride.”
She giggles as she says this and her next few words are lost in her laughter. “But I seem to be surrounded by tales of people who are over 100 and marvellous and, if they’re not actually climbing the Matterhorn, they’re doing other remarkable things. Which only has the effect of making me feel I’m a bit of a wimp compared with them.”
Wimp is not the word that springs to mind when you meet Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, and neither is she as formal as her elegantly modulated writing might lead you to expect. Naturally, the coffee at her London home is served in a Denby cup and saucer and with shortbread, because that is how her generation does things, properly. The walls of the sitting room are sage green, the sofas covered in an exuberant print, and the armchair opposite the television is well used, collapsed cushion on its seat, reading light at its side. James sits like a small attentive bird, missing nothing. My black coffee is very spartan, she notes: “Don’t let it get cold, dear, please. You’ll need it.” She is also dignified, practical and suffused with wisdom that has been accumulated the hard way, through her own experience.
This is why her views matter. Before she became a bestselling author she held significant roles in the NHS and the forensic science and criminal law departments of the Home Office, and since she was first published in 1962 she has been a magistrate, a BBC governor and on the board of the Arts Council. She is a widow, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and has been widely recognised for the quality of her work, both on the page and off. All this and much more is modestly catalogued in two sheets of A4 that she hands me shortly after I arrive: a polite way of making sure I get the details right.
Inevitably, her views on the debate around assisted death are informed by her membership of the House of Lords and you can see why this would appeal to her: she likes chewing over big philosophical questions. “We all want as merciful and painless death as we can have and we want that for other people too,” she says. “So I don’t think people who are against legalising euthanasia are any less feeling, they just see that there are great dangers in the state legislating for this, and indeed there are. There was a Private Member’s Bill some time ago in the House of Lords and it was so bound up with legal requirements as to be almost frightening, first of all to save this being a murderers’ charter, which it jolly well could be. That is a very real problem. We’ve got to be really careful when we start making it possible legally to end any life.
“They say that the doctor would have to certify that the patient really was dying and then a number of members stood up and said, ‘My mother was told that ten years ago’. If I were a doctor I wouldn’t get tied up in this. Does the doctor have to certify that the patient is in their right mind and knows what they’re doing? Then after all these experts have seen the patient an appointment is made presumably to come in on Wednesday to put mum to sleep. It’s deeply repugnant once it becomes institutionalised.
“I think we ought to rely on what I think is the law at the moment — and if it’s not the law, it should be. A doctor is entitled to relieve pain and suffering of a patient who is not going to recover and if what he administers shortens the patient’s life, that’s justifiable. That seems to me reasonable. Doctors should not have to worry about whether the dose is going to kill or not if that is what is necessary to do. We need to care about the dying more — their wishes should be paramount.”
James has always been publicly robust, if reticent about private matters, and both are relevant here. Her 18th and newest novel, The Private Patient, is classic James, her authorial control indomitable as she reels in the reader and holds them helpless until she has finished with them. It reeks of emotional containment, her characters remote from each other, their passions private and largely unexpressed. And of course there is the contradiction between these instincts and the sometimes cruel needs of a criminal investigation that seeks to strip away public faces and expose the private truths beneath.
Does she recognise this sense of emotional control? “Yes, I think that’s probably something of value and something strangely in myself. We all do it to an extent, there is a carapace behind which people present to the world and another self inside, which is not accessible and which they don’t share.”
The foundations of James’s carapace lie in her childhood in Oxford where her father was an Inland Revenue official. By her mid-teens her mother was in a mental hospital and James was caring for her two younger siblings. “It wasn’t a particularly happy marriage but in those days people stayed together. When you become a parent you have some understanding of the problems of having not quite enough money to go round and the kind of difficulties they were living under.”
She left school at 16, married a doctor, Connor Bantry White, who returned from war service mentally ill. To shield their two young children from their father’s illness, she sent them to boarding school and became the breadwinner. White died in 1964, probably through suicide.
“One faces things oneself and there they are. You deal with it,” she says, baffled by the 21st-century taste for sharing pain and eschewing privacy. “I feel that I have a responsibility to the dead, for what my husband might not want to be told. I don’t think that I should make money by writing details of private pain or private difficulties, which my children will find hurtful. My husband was — charming isn’t exactly the word, but he was in many ways a lovely man. I loved him and I still wish that he were here.
“But I think the more dramatic part of his life, of his illness, is for me. I don’t talk about it to my daughters and they don’t talk about it to me. They talk about him, but we don’t talk about sad bits. To write a book saying poor little me, seems to me nonsense. I’m here, I haven’t starved to death, we’re not in the Third World, we’re so incredibly privileged because at the back of my mind is always, look at what you have had. I’ve been incredibly fortunate in having a talent which I enjoy exercising. I have a great deal to be grateful for and very little that I need to be sorry about.
“We now have a world in which people write their diaries on Facebook for millions of other people. To me that is incomprehensible. There’s something rather sad about children who may not be making relationships at school getting home and blogging. When a child is run over you see all these toys and flowers piling up, then they have to have counsellors to deal with their grief and you see them all hugging each other and crying on each other’s shoulders.”
She remembers a day during the war when a recently married colleague heard that her husband had been killed. James said she was sorry and suggested to her supervisor that the girl might like to go home. “She said, ‘No, she’s got a job to do. She won’t want to do that.’ I felt if she went home she’d have her mother or somebody to comfort her and I still think she should have been allowed to go home, but I don’t think that woman was callous. I think she thought that’s what she wanted, to get on with the job.
“But the idea that we’d all go up to her and hug her — I do find it a bit creepy. I like emotional reticence. I accept that for many people who have appalling experiences psychologically they are probably better if there is someone they can share them with, but I can’t imagine myself getting any comfort from being counselled. If I lost a child, which must be one of the worst things to have your children die before you, unless it had happened to that person I would wonder what anyone had got to offer.”
There are times, she admits, when she gets home in the evening and would like to have someone with whom to share her observations of what she has just experienced, but there will always be people around the next day — her secretary of 30 years, or her family — and she is not lonely. As someone who has had to deal with profound emotional pain, she finds that crime fiction suits her because it is a way of creating order in a world that can seem morally ambiguous, a point she makes in another new publication, Talking About Detective Fiction.
“The psychological reasons that people read them are much the same as the psychological reasons why some of us write them. For me the difficulty is co-ordinating the setting and the characters and the narrative and building them together in a logical order. I think that is reflecting the need for it in my own life, the fear of chaos and the fear of violence, which is a form of chaos. I find deeply upsetting anything which makes one realise how very deep are the crevices of disorder and crime over which we construct our very fragile bridges of organised law and morality.
“I find anger difficult to cope with. I’ve been angry once or twice and I find that quite frightening. That’s why I’ve never taken drugs. The idea that I could be out of control is too frightening, my mind would no longer be my own. I drink very moderately, about one glass of wine a day. No, I’ve never been drunk in all my life, which some might think rather strange. It’s not through the exercise of any restraint, it’s just that I don’t want to. I would be frightened to, I would have lost control, which raises an interesting question of how much essentially we have any control? But we live with what is most comfortable for us, don’t we? That’s an essential of happiness.”
There are metal grilles on her windows and as I leave she stands smiling at the front door. She closes it and I hear the sound of a key turning in the lock.
The Private Patient, Penguin, £7.99. Talking About Detective Fiction will be published on October 1 by the Bodleian Library, £12.99
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