‘Mrs Hunter?’
Never had the nurse felt so powerless, so awkward, as in slewing this totem into its orthodox position.
In spite of the several corpses she had dealt with, it was Flora Manhood’s first death, and for this reason she walked backwards and forwards awhile, hissing and gulping, and trying to remember where to go from here.
She knew of course. The books tell you. The lectures. And Sister: remove any jewellery Nurse it may fall into the wrong hands. And practice: block every hole so that nothing nothing escapes.
Though the mind can become as functional as the digestive tract after your feelings have been minced up fine, it did not prevent her touching the body several times when she had laid it on the bed, not expecting evidence of life (she was too experienced for that) but illumination? that her emptiness, she ventured to hope, might be filled with understanding.
As for knowing what to do, the nurse was already turning back her sleeves in preparation for the unpleasanter duties she had been trained to perform. Her arms were strong rather than shapely. The carpeted landing was creaking and thundering around her as she advanced on the telephone, to report to the doctor that their patient was dead, that he should pay his last visit and confirm that her responsibility was ended.
Twelve
AT HIS LAST dozing Basil had willed himself to wake early, to avoid any possible Macrory invasion, but on opening his eyes next, he was in some way conscious of having failed. It was early enough: in fact the sheets of spent moonlight still showed their random inkblots. Then why this shock of cold terror? He covered parts of himself as though his parents were standing at the bedside.
And Dorothy waking, crumpled, crushed. Hadn’t she been supporting a weight? But smiling for Basil.
While prolonging the smile, Dorothy closed her eyes again. Less pressed for time in that the bed was officially hers, she could afford the extra snooze.
Till she too fully awoke to the same reverberating terror. The sheet hissed as she snatched up an armful of it to hide her breasts.
‘The telephone!’ Whichever of them had uttered the word, it echoed the other’s fears: ringing and ringing through a cold house; and ringing.
When the ringing stopped it was impossible to tell whether the telephone had given up, or whether somebody had intervened.
To escape from the clinging bed Basil tore himself out with such violence his balls tangled painfully. He was nothing less than skedaddling into the room beyond, resentful of a wind which was streaming past his nakedness. Nobody was exclusively to blame; though instinctively, he might have liked to hold Dorothy responsible.
Either exhausted or appeased she was slower to react. She could have been lingering amongst some of her more disreputable thoughts before clothing them for ever in convention. She lay nursing the bundle of grey, early-morning sheets and ailing blankets. The terror with which she had been flooded by the telephone had almost ebbed before she threw them off. She glanced along her nose at her own distantly exposed limbs, which became, more distantly still, in Hubert’s voice, ton corps qui se réfuse aussi passionément que d’autres se donnent.
The Princesse de Lascabanes shot out of bed and put on her mouth before anything else. There was nothing she could have done to hide from that cold increasing light the cruel slashes in her cheeks. Her general gooseflesh, her flapping sinews, she was able to clothe effectively before the sound of slippers reached her door.
‘Entrez done!’ the princess called in a rational voice, ducking at the glass to know the worst about her hair; her heart would become visible, she felt, beating inside the gown she had swathed too tightly.
Mrs Macrory should have made the perfect messenger for tragedy: manner direct; speech precise (Scottish at one remove); of moral integrity to ensure a respectful relationship with the audience she was about to shock as well as console. But this messenger could not rid herself of the mouthfuls of ugly words; emotions which she should have curbed with objective tact, left her eyes goitrous.
‘They telephoned,’ she began, and was cut off immediately.
Not to improve matters, Sir Basil Hunter made an entrance from the dressing-room, adjusting the cord of a robe he had thrown on in a hurry, tamping with the palms of his hands the hair which sleep had tousled. In spite of these side activities the great actor did not withhold his generous attention: he would not be accused of trying to steal someone else’s scene.
‘They rang,’ the messenger began afresh. ‘Mr Wyburd rang,’ she corrected herself.
‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez nous dire, chère Anne?’ If she had not steeled herself with her second language Madame de Lascabanes might have imitated the lamentable mouthing of her friend, whose hands she took out of charity to chafe and comfort. ‘Allons, voyons, n’ayez pas peur’ The princess half looked to Sir Basil to interpret, but saw him refuse; it would not have mattered greatly to any of them if he had accepted.
To Anne Macrory it mattered least of alclass="underline" she was too high on disaster. ‘Mrs Hunter, your mother — died,’ she said, ‘yesterday evening.’ It was so perfectly clumsily final the messenger sprayed the princess with the end of her line.
Incredulity rather than grief had moistened Sir Basil’s eyes. (Dorothy thought her brother’s expression made him look foolish.) ‘How did she die?’ he was also foolish enough to ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Macrory sobbed.
The Princesse de Lascabanes pleated her brows and lowered her eyelids to accuse her brother’s tactlessness and advertise her own formal grief. ‘She would have died peacefully, I expect, in her sleep. That is how it takes old people.’
She failed to prevent a whinge rising, which she tried to pass off as a wheeze; either way, it fanned her friend’s distress.
‘How sad for you!’ blubbered Mrs Macrory.
To disguise her shame for her hand in Mother’s death and to celebrate an innocence which exists, if only in others, Dorothy embraced this poor woman. ‘So tenderhearted! I do appreciate your sympathy.’ In fact Anne Macrory’s innocence justified one’s bursting into tears.
Scorn for Dorothy’s hypocrisy might have blazed up in Basil. (Or does a woman desperate for self-respect, reach a point where she can Christian Science dishonesty?) In any case, he had his own, more important part to play: that of the son.
So Sir Basil tensed his calves; he began striding, stamping (excusable on a freezing morning) digging always deeper into the pockets of his robe, which, since their visit to ‘Kudjeri’, he realized incidentally, equalled in sleaziness the garment decent Anne Macrory herself was wearing. It didn’t deter him: with the twitch of an eyebrow, he raised his profile against the window (it faced east, and the sun was rising from behind the hills) to deliver his awaited speech.
‘I imagine everybody would agree that Mother had from life all she could have wished for: beauty, wealth, worldly success, devoted friends, and — friends. We would do wrong, surely? in mourning her. Nor can I feel that, after living her life to the full, she would have regretted dying,’ (appalling if he had been weak enough to settle for ‘passing away’; he might have fallen if it hadn’t been for Dorothy) ‘if she was conscious of death at the time. It could happen, I suppose, that one who has led a materialistic life does become afraid at the last moment. I hope Mother was not afraid.’ He glanced at Dorothy, who had been frozen into listening regardless of whether she wanted it.