‘What is it, Mr Wyburd?’ she practically bellowed: his attitude was no more than slightly peculiar; she only felt so relieved it was not the person she had imagined, and yet, a man. ‘Is anything wrong?’ She laughed, and it would not disperse afterwards; it hung in the air, the same brassy tones as her spoken words.
‘Nothing wrong,’ he answered, removing his hands from his face. ‘I’ve been smelling this.’
‘O-ow-hh?’ she ended up giggling through her nose, and it might come back through her mouth as the raspberry vinegar had, she was a kid, in Con’s Caff, at Coff’s Harbour.
‘It’s rosemary,’ Mr Wyburd explained. ‘My wife is an expert. She can identify any plant you care to show her. I couldn’t compete — but do know rosemary when I see it.’
The solicitor too was laughing by now. It made him look rather silly: old men’s dentures, the cleanest of them, have a look of slime, their mauve gums.
‘Go on! Is that rosemary?’ She peered into his open hands though he was not really offering them to her; she looked inside the cradle the old fingers and creased palms were making for the crushed silvery spikes smelling of furniture polish.
‘Yes, of course. I can tell now. Isn’t it a — nostalgic perfume?’ The woman visitor at P. A. who brought, instead of the pink carnations, what she said was ‘pinks’ (actually they were wine colour) in a twist of crumpled brown paper: it’s the hot day making them smell nostalgic.
The solicitor was saying, ‘You can stuff fish with rosemary. You sew them up afterwards.’ Then they were both giggling, himself and this Sister Manhood, together. ‘I’ve never tried it. My wife and I prefer plain, wholesome food.’
Though she could take it as rich as it came, Sister Manhood was only too ready to agree. From giggling too much she would probably end up with a goitre. There was no medical reason; she might though, from the knotting and unknotting of a convulsive throat.
The solicitor was looking at her from under the brim of his Akubra: the way she saw it a hat is only one more thing to lose.
‘Won’t you come in, Mr Wyburd?’ she remembered, and started coaxing.
When she had got him past the door, he asked, ‘How is Mrs Hunter?’ as though he might find her in some way different from what she had been at any time that century.
‘You know they were here this morning?’ She had lowered her voice, and was treating the latch with the greatest care.
‘I don’t know, Sister. Who? You must be more explicit.’ He wanted to hold it off.
‘The children.’
If it did not occur to Sister Manhood to see the princess and Sir Basil as anything but evil and elderly behind the label she had given them, they flickered through Arnold Wyburd’s mind with the attributes he would have liked them to keep: grass-stained, scab-kneed, still a vision of potential good.
Irritated by the presence of this nurse, waiting like anybody else to accuse him, he mumbled, ‘Isn’t it natural to want to visit their mother?’
‘It could be, but isn’t — knowing what we do,’ Sister Manhood persisted as they accompanied each other towards the stairs.
Annoyance made Arnold Wyburd bluster. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re hinting at. None of us knows for certain what Dorothy and Basil’s intentions are. And in any case, they may change their minds.’
He was so furious with himself for letting Sister Manhood trap him into what amounted to an admission, and for referring to the Hunters as ‘Dorothy and Basil’ in her presence, he stubbed his toe on a stair, and might have fallen forward on his knees if the nurse had not grabbed him by an arm, as though he were one of the geriatrics she was experienced in nursing.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked with unnecessary concern.
‘I only came here this afternoon,’ he panted, ‘because Sister Badgery rang me about a document Mrs Hunter wants drawn up.’
Ah, then he must have known all along! Badgery could never bottle up information of importance, and what more important than the Hunters’ visit?
‘About what time were the princess and Sir Basil here?’ he lowered himself enough to inquire.
‘I don’t imagine it was too early. People like that don’t get moving early.’
His voice brightened. ‘You’re quite right. When Sister Badgery rang, I had just reached my office. She knew nothing about a projected visit from the young Hunters — which no doubt they decided to make on the spur of the moment.’ He hoped he had shown this girl that there was no good reason for bullying him.
Actually she would not have dreamt of it. She was too busy wondering what the ‘document’ could be. Was it a fresh will, perhaps? It was almost certainly a will. If she herself was dishonest enough to sleep with the son behind his mother’s back and conceive without his ever knowing, Badgery and Wyburd might be cooking up some plan to forestall the children by diddling the old girl out of her lolly. Naturally the solicitor would lie. Flora Manhood knew she would have perjured herself all the way, denying that she had seduced Sir Basil, anyway till she was certain of a positive result.
It was understandable that she and Wyburd, a couple of crims more or less, should nurse their silences for the rest of the climb.
Outside Mrs Hunter’s door, Sister Manhood whispered, ‘You must be very gentle with her, Mr Wyburd: she’s had such a dreadful morning.’ But you could not tell from glancing at him whether he suspected what was genuine anxiety.
When they went in, the room was practically filled with the ballooning curtain, though as soon as the solicitor closed the door the muslin was sucked back, flapping and battering, before subsiding in tremors, to cling like a transparent skin to the face on the pillow.
The nurse ran forward to deliver her neglected charge from this great caul. ‘There, dear. You’re all right. We’re here.’ Her sense of guilt quickened by thought of her own future trials, Flora Manhood comforted her baby.
Mrs Hunter emerged working her gums. ‘You know I’m not all right,’ she gasped, ‘and your being here can’t make me any better. I’m past that. Though nobody can do me harm either — or not in ways that matter.’
The solicitor thought her body had shrunk since he was last with her; on the other hand her spirit seemed to billow around them more forcefully.
So he attempted a jolly voice to boost his own flagging spirit. ‘I’ve come, Mrs Hunter — you remember me, don’t you? Arnold Wyburd,’ then sotto voce, ‘to discuss the document you have in mind.’
Sister Manhood began rearranging several unimportant objects in case the old bloke might show his hand. He wouldn’t, though. And it didn’t matter. Betty Hunter was right: she couldn’t be harmed, any more than you could kill your baby, if you had conceived it; you might get rid of the embryo, but its spirit would haunt you for ever after.
‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Hunter was feeling her way, ‘it’s you,’ she said. ‘I sent for you — because — I must try to remember.’
Sister Manhood could have slipped out to the nurses’ room, free at last to do her nails, consult the stars, or just sit mooning away the flattest stretch of the afternoon, if it wasn’t for having to satisfy herself about the blessed ‘document’.
‘It couldn’t be the rates and taxes, could it?’ Mrs Hunter asked.
‘You’ve never had to bother yourself, Mrs Hunter, about the rates and taxes.’
‘Always,’ she said. ‘Only oneself bothers enough. But perhaps this was more personal. Oh, yes! Nurse, fetch me paper — for Arnold. Something formal, and white. Arnold was the whitest — and the smoothest.’