At least, I thought with a groan, sinking down into Mrs Tilling’s chair, it had been. Without her and Pallister, we might as well be rats in a sewer.
Upstairs in my sitting room, therefore, I tried to make myself ring the agency in Edinburgh again, to beg a cook, a housekeeper, even an extra maid or two, but I held out no great hopes of success. The gorgon in charge of the telephone knew how things stood at Gilverton and appeared to view the girls on her books as orchids to be tended, not as labour for hire at all. It was too disheartening to be borne and in the end I rang the doctor instead, to arrange what was beginning to feel like a standing order.
It was then, at that moment, that the ninth circle of hell was unleashed upon me and, as I say, benumbed by misfortune, I took it calmly.
‘He’s no’ in, Mrs Gilver,’ said his housekeeper. ‘Have you no’ heard?’
‘Heard what? I don’t think so,’ I said, suspecting misfortune.
‘It’s all over Dunkeld. Scarlet fever. Thirteen cases and that was this morning.’
‘Thirteen?’
‘It was a birthday party. And one poor wee soul has been carried away.’
‘Dreadful.’
‘But she’d been bad with the flu already. Laid low, you know. And it’s a terrible fearsome strain of it, I’m thinking.’
Whether she meant the fever or the flu I could not say for sure, but I withdrew my appeal for the doctor’s attention – pressed it hard upon her that he was not required – and rang off. Neither Donald nor Teddy had had scarlet fever and, while I would not ordinarily worry about great lumps of eighteen and sixteen, I could not get the picture out of my mind of Donald shivering in his pyjamas as he stood on those bathroom scales.
‘Come on then, my darling girl,’ I said to Bunty. ‘Let’s walk down and shut the gates, eh?’ She was fourteen now, a tremendous age for a Dalmatian, and the loss of her daily romp while I was nursing had not been the privation it should have been to her even a year ago. Still, she got to her feet, stretched, shook her ears and came to lean against my legs with her tail waving. I put a hand down and felt the just of her pelvis under her warm fur, the slight scrape of bone against bone where all other tissue was gone. As Alec had said, ‘if you boiled her for stock these days, she wouldn’t set to jelly’. Just the sort of remark that the owner of a five-year-old dog will let drop unthinking. I had stored it up meanly deep inside and planned to use it on him when Millie, his spaniel, was toothless and threadbare, that way that spaniels go.
‘Not like you, my love,’ I said, letting her step ahead of me into the breakfast room, off which my sitting room opens. ‘You are as beautiful as ever. Aren’t you, my darling? Hm?’
‘Oh, madam!’ Becky had entered the breakfast room by the other door. ‘She is that but she’s awful stiff in the mornings. And when you think!’
She referred to an incident early in Bunty’s life when she had just grown from a fat bundle of puppy to a lolloping, seemingly boneless creature with easily eight enormous paws, three tails and half a dozen affectionate tongues. Becky had opened the garden door at dawn one day and Bunty had jumped clean over her head to escape, knocking Becky flat on her back and out cold when her head hit the flagstones. This was better than the garden, of course, and Bunty wheeled round to make the most of it – a human who lay there obligingly to be trampled over and saluted with the moistest kisses a dog could muster. When Becky came round she was bruised but giggling.
‘I can’t bear to contemplate it,’ I said. ‘Well, Becky, it looks as though you’re in charge. I won’t be in for dinner, so eggs on trays or whatever seems best, and no visitors, I’m afraid. There’s scarlet fever in the village.’
‘I’ve had it,’ said Becky.
‘Good. I’ll cancel all deliveries and perhaps you could go down in the dogcart and collect them instead.’
‘It’s just the fish tomorrow,’ said Becky. ‘Will I tell Miss Grant you’re away a walk then, madam? She was getting ready to come up to you.’
‘I shan’t be dressing,’ I said. ‘Tell Grant she’s free.’
Alec Osborne rarely uses his dining room. It’s a miserable crypt of a place (even as dining rooms go, and they are, to my mind, the least inviting chamber of any house) with dark oak panels to its ceiling, mossy green wallpaper all round, and only two small windows facing due east on its short side. Add to that the usual measure of ancestors in oils and sideboards like mastodons, and a party would be stone dead before it had half begun. For that reason, Alec times what few dinners he cannot escape hosting for the summertime and spreads his board in a little temple by a pond with room to seat twelve in comfort and a fireplace which throws out heat like a steam engine. (I wish the mason who built that summerhouse chimney had built a few of ours, is all I can say.) Out of season he restricts himself to cocktails in his drawing room and on ordinary evenings Barrow, his valet, sets a table for one or two in the library as cosy as cosy can be.
‘Still,’ Alec said, as Barrow withdrew and left us with the soup, ‘I usually manage to wriggle out of my tweeds, Dandy. Are you making a point?’ He raised his eyebrows at my coat and skirt and then at his own smoking jacket.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘When did I ever do anything so mealy-mouthed as that? I’ve just crossed some kind of Rubicon. Be glad I crossed it after tea or I might be here in my bedroom slippers and nightgown.’
‘Better than poor Miss Havisham at least,’ Alec said. ‘She’d have been much more comfortable over the years if the clock had stopped when she was in her nightie. What’s shoved you over the line then?’
‘Scarlet fever,’ I said. ‘The boys haven’t had it and it’s all over the village, so the butcher and baker are forbidden the gates and I’m going to have to go shopping for pounds of tea and legs of lamb like a housewife.’
‘Is every maid down?’ said Alec.
‘Not quite but they always make such a jaunt of it whenever they get away and Pallister and Mrs Tilling have got the flu.’
He dropped his spoon, but it was a plum-coloured smoker and Alec’s valet-cum-cook doesn’t allow so much as a sprig of parsley into the consommé so no harm came to him.
‘Remus and Romulus have crumbled?’ he said. ‘You seem remarkably calm.’
‘Yes. Good soup.’
‘You can take it home in a jar if they haven’t finished it up in the kitchen.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ I agreed. ‘The kindness of my neighbours is all that stands between me and destitution now. I only hope the range doesn’t go out because no one left standing knows how to relight it.’
‘Mrs Tilling won’t be off her feet for long,’ said Alec. ‘She’s an ox. And Pallister…’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Pallister ill is so far outside human understanding that no one could hazard a guess as to how it might go. Like those tiny objects the physicists keep falling over that are never doing what they ought to be. My worry is that as soon as they’re better the winter will set in and you know what that house is like in winter.’
‘Bracing,’ said Alec.
‘Bracing to the hale and hearty,’ I said. ‘Flattening to the convalescent.’
‘Are you thinking of going away?’ Alec had an odd tone in his voice, hopeful-seeming in a rather unflattering way. ‘Taking them off to the seaside and building them up with salt air and beef jelly?’