'What do you mean?' she asked.
'Never mind,' he said, 'none of your business. Anyway, it's over and done with long ago. But I sometimes wish…'
'What do you wish, darling?'
'That I could shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.'
They turned over a few more pages of the album, and it was soon afterwards that she yawned, glancing idly about the room, and he sensed her boredom and said he would have a kip. No one could die of a heart attack because his daughter was bored…. But supposing he had had a nightmare in which she had figured? Supposing he had thought himself back in that sinking ship during the war, with poor old Monkey White, and Nick, and all those drowning men, and somehow she had been with him in the water? Everything became jumbled up in dreams, it was a known thing. And all the time that clot getting bigger, like an excess of oil in the workings of a clock. At any moment the hands would falter, the clock stop ticking.
Somebody tapped at her bedroom door. 'Yes?' she called.
It was the nurse. Still professional, despite her dressing-gown. 'Just wondered if you were all right,' she whispered. 'I saw your light under the door.'
'Thanks. I'm O.K.'
'Your mother's fast asleep. I gave her a sedative. She was fussing about tomorrow being Saturday, and the difficulty of getting an announcement in The Times and Telegraph before Monday. She's being so plucky.'
Was there hidden reproach in her voice because Shelagh had not thought of taking charge of these things herself? Surely tomorrow would have done? Aloud she said, 'Can nightmares kill?'
'What do you mean, dear?'
'Could my father have had a terrible nightmare and died of shock?'
The nurse advanced to the bed and straightened the eiderdown. 'Now, I told you earlier, and the doctors said the same, it would have happened anyway. You really must not keep on going over it in your mind. It doesn't help. Let me get you a sedative too.'
'I don't want a sedative.'
'You know, dear, forgive me, but you're being just a little bit childish. Grief is natural, but to worry about him in this way is the last thing your father would have wanted. It's all over now. He's at peace.'
'How do you know he's at peace?' Shelagh exploded. 'How do you know he's not hovering beside us at this minute in an astral body absolutely furious that he's dead, and saying to me, "That bloody nurse gave me too many pills"?'
Oh no, she thought, I didn't mean that, people are too vulnerable, too naked. The poor woman, shaken out of professional calm, sagged in her dressing-gown, drooped before her eyes, and in a tremulous voice said, 'What a terribly unkind thing to say! You know I did no such thing.'
Impulsively Shelagh leapt out of bed and put her arms round the nurse's shoulders.
'Forgive me,' she pleaded, 'of course you didn't. And he liked you very much. You were a wonderful nurse to him. What I meant was'-she searched in her mind for some explanation- 'what I meant was that we don't know what happens when a person dies. They might be waiting in some queue at St Peter's gate with all the other people who have died that day, or else pushing into some awful purgatorial night-club with the ones who were destined for hell, or just drifting in a kind of fog until the fog clears and everything becomes clear. All right, I will have a sedative, you have one too, then we'll both be fresh for the morning. And please don't think any more about what I said.'
The trouble is, she thought, after she had taken her sedative and gone back to bed, words leave a wound, the wound leaves a scar. The nurse will never give out pills to patients again without a doubt somewhere at the back of her mind as to whether she is doing the right thing. Like the question-mark in her father's conscience about not passing poor old Nick for promotion and so giving him his chip on the shoulder. it was bad to die with something on your conscience. One ought to have some warning, so that one could send a telegram to anyone who might have been wronged, saying, 'Forgive me', and then the wrong would he cancelled, blotted out. This was why, in the old days, people flocked round a dying person's bed, hoping, not to be left something in the will, but for mutual forgiveness, a cessation of ill-feeling, a smoothing out of right and wrong. In fact, a sort of love.
Shelagh had acted on impulse. She knew she always would. It was part of her character, and had to be accepted by family and friends. It was not until she was on her way, though, driving north from Dublin in the hired car, that her journey, hastily improvised, took on its real meaning. She was here on a mission, a sacred trust. She was carrying a message from beyond the grave. It was absolutely secret, though, and no one must know about it, for she was sure that if she had told anyone questions would have been asked, arguments raised. So, after the funeral, complete silence about her plans. Her mother, as Shelagh guessed she would, had decided to fly to Aunt Bella at Cap d'Ail.
'I feel I must get right away,' she had said to her daughter. 'You may not realise it, but Dad's illness was a fearful strain. I've lost half a stone. I feel that all I want to do is to close my eyes and lie on Bella's sun-drenched balcony, and try to forget the misery of the past weeks.'
It was like an advertisement for some luxury soap. Pamper yourself. A naked woman deep in a bath of bubbling foam. In point of fact, the first shock over, her mother looked better already, and Shelagh knew that the sun-drenched balcony would soon fill up with Aunt Bella's very mixed bunch of friends socialites, bogus artists, boring old homos, what her father used to call 'phoney riff-raff', but they amused her mother. 'What about you? Why don't you come too?'-the suggestion half-hearted but nevertheless made.
Shelagh shook her head. 'Rehearsals start next week. I thought, before going to London, I'd push off alone in the car somewhere. No sort of plan. Just drive.'
'Why not take a friend?'
'Anyone would get on my nerves at the moment. I'm better alone.'
No further contact between them on anything more than the practical level. Neither said to the other, 'How unhappy are you really? Is this the end of the road for me, for you? What does the future hold?' Instead there were discussions about the gardener and his wife coming to live in, visits from lawyers left until after her mother returned from Cap d'Ail, letters to be forwarded, etc., etc…. Without emotion, like two secretaries, they sat side by side reading and replying to the letters of condolence. You take A to K. I'll take L to Z. And more or less the same message to each: 'Deeply touched… Your sympathy so helpful…' It was like sending out the Christmas cards every December, but the wording was different.
Looking through her father's old address book, she came across the name Barry. Commander Nicolas Barry, D.S.O., R.N. (Retd.), Ballyfane, Lough Torrah, Eire. Both name and address had a line through them, which generally meant that the person had died. She glanced at her mother.
'I wonder why that old friend of Dad's, Commander Barry, hasn't written?' she asked casually. 'He isn't dead, is he?'
'Who?' Her mother looked vague. 'Oh, you mean Nick? I don't think he's dead. He was in some frightful car crash years ago. But they were out of touch before that. He hasn't written to us for years.'
'I wonder why.'
'I don't know. They had some row, I never heard what about. Did you see this very sweet letter from Admiral Arbuthnot? We were all together in Alexandria.'
'Yes, I saw it. What was he like? Not the Admiral-Nick.'
Her mother leant back in her chair, considering the matter.
'Frankly, I never could quite make him out,' she said. 'He'd either be all over one and the greatest fun, especially at parties, or ignoring everybody and making sarcastic remarks. He had a wild streak in him. I remember him coming to stay soon after Dad and I were married-he was best man, you know, at the wedding-and he turned all the furniture upside down in the drawing-room and got very tight. Such a silly thing to do. I was livid.'