‘What time does this finish?’
‘Nearly over now.’
‘Mind you put it off the moment it is. Have you cleaned your teeth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good girlie. Don’t forget we’re going into Baldock in the morning.’
‘No.’
‘Good night, then.’
I bent over to kiss her cheek. At the same time, there came a succession of sounds from the dining-room: a shout or loud cry in my father’s voice, some hurried words from Jack, a sort of bumping crash made by a collision with furniture, a confusion of voices. I told Amy to stay where she was, and ran back to the dining-room.
When I opened the door, Victor rushed past me, his tail swollen with erected hair. Across the room, Jack, with some assistance from Joyce, was dragging my father, who was completely limp, to a near-by armchair. At my father’s place at table there was an overturned dining-chair and some crockery and cutlery on the floor. Some drink had been spilt. Diana, who had been watching the others, turned and looked at me in fear.
‘He started staring and then he stood up and called out and then he just sort of collapsed and hit the table and Jack caught him,’ she said in a jumbled voice: no elocution now.
I went past her. ‘What’s happened?’
Jack was lowering my father into the armchair. When he had done this, he said, ‘Cerebral haemorrhage, I should imagine.’
‘Is he going to die?’
‘Yes, it’s quite possible.’
‘Soon?’
‘Quite possibly.’
‘What can you do about it?’
‘Nothing that’ll prevent him dying if he’s going to.’
I looked at Jack, and he at me. I could not tell what he was thinking. He had his finger against my father’s pulse. My body, I myself, seemed to consist of my face and the front of my torso, down as far as the base of the belly. I knelt by the armchair and heard slow, deep breathing. My father’s eyes were open, with the pupils apparently fixed in the left-hand corners. Apart from this he looked quite normal, even relaxed.
‘Father,’ I said, and thought he stirred slightly. But there was nothing to say next. I wondered what was going on in that brain, what it saw, or fancied it saw: something irrelevant, perhaps, something pleasant, sunshine and fields. Or something not pleasant, something ugly, something bewildering. I imagined a desperate, prolonged effort to understand what was happening, and a discomfort so enormous as to be worse than pain, because lacking the merciful power of pain to extinguish thought, feeling, identity, the sense of time, everything but itself. This idea terrified me, but it also pointed out to me, with irresistible clarity and firmness, what I was to say next.
I leant closer. ‘Father. This is Maurice. Are you awake? Do you know where you are? This is Maurice, Father. Tell me what’s going on where you are. Is there anything to see? Describe how you feel. What are you thinking?’
Behind me, Jack said coldly, ‘He can’t hear you.’
‘Father. Can you hear me? Nod your head if you can.’
In slow, mechanical tones, like a gramophone record played at too low a speed, my father said, ‘Maur—rice,’ then, less distinctly, a few more words that might have been ‘who’ and ‘over by the …‘ Then he died.
I stood up and turned away. Diana looked at me with the fear gone from her face and stance. Before she could say anything I went past her and over to Joyce, who was looking down at the serving table. Here a tray had been placed with five covered plates and some vegetable dishes on it.
‘I couldn’t think what to do,’ said Joyce, ‘so I told Magdalena to leave it all here. Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
At once she started to cry. We put our arms round each other.
‘He was awfully old and it was very quick and he didn’t suffer.’
‘We don’t know what he suffered,’ I said.
‘He was such a nice old man. I can’t believe he’s just gone for ever.’
‘I’d better go and tell Amy.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘Not now.’
Amy had turned off the TV set and was sitting on her bed, but not in her previous posture.
‘Gramps has been taken ill,’ I said.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes, but it was all over in a second and it didn’t hurt him. He can’t have known anything about it. He was very old, you know, and it might have happened any day. That’s how it is with very old people.’
‘But there was so much I meant to say to him.’
‘What about?’
‘All sorts of things.’ Amy got up and came and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘I’m sorry your father’s dead.’
This made me cry. I sat down on the bed for a few minutes while she held my hand and stroked the back of my neck. When I had finished crying, she sent me off, saying that I was not to worry about her, that she would be all right and would see me in the morning.
In the dining-room, the two women were sitting on the window-seat, Diana with her arm round Joyce’s shoulders. Joyce’s head was lowered and her yellow hair had fallen over her face. Jack handed me a tumbler half-full of whisky with a little water. I drank it all.
‘Amy all right?’ asked Jack. ‘Good. I’ll look in on her in a minute. Now we’ll have to get your father on to his bed. You and I can do it, or I can go and fetch someone from downstairs if you don’t feel up to it.’
‘I can do it. You and I can do it.’
‘Come on, then.’
Jack took my father under the arms and I by the ankles. Diana was there to open the door. By holding him close against his chest, Jack saw to it that my father’s head did not loll much. He went on talking as we moved.
‘I’ll get young Palmer up here as soon as we’ve done this, if you approve, just to put him in the picture. There’s nothing more that needs doing tonight. The district nurse will be in first thing in the morning to lay him out. I’ll be along too, with the death certificate. Someone will have to take that in to the registrar in Baldock and fix things up with the undertakers. Will you do that?’
‘Yes.’ We stood now in the bedroom. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Blanket.’
‘Bottom drawer there.’
We covered my father up and left him. The rest was soon done. All of us managed to eat a little, Jack rather more.
David Palmer appeared, listened, said and looked how sorry he was and went. I telephoned my son Nick, aged twenty-four, an assistant lecturer in French literature at a university in the Midlands. He told me he would get somebody to look after two-year-old Josephine and come down by car with his wife, Lucy, the next morning, arriving in time for a late lunch. I realized with a shock that there was nobody else to inform: my father’s brother and sister had died without issue, and I had neither. By eleven thirty, a good three-quarters of an hour before the last non-residents would ordinarily have been out of the place, word of the death had spread and everything was quiet. Finally, the Mayburys and Joyce and I stood at the doorway of the apartment.
‘Don’t come down,’ said Jack. ‘Fred’ll let us out. Have a good long sleep—Joyce one of the red bombs, Maurice three of the Belrepose things.’ Speaking neither briskly nor with emotionalism, he added, ‘Well, I’m sorry he’s gone. He was a decent old boy, with plenty of sense. I expect you’ll miss him a lot, Maurice’