“Keith Blackley thinks your father should go on a diet.”
“He can’t,” said Iris. “Our other doctor says dieting causes cancer.”
“You can’t have heard that properly,” Netta said.
“It is like those silly people who smoke to keep their figures,” said Iris. “Dieting.”
“Blackley hasn’t said he should smoke, just that he should eat less of everything.”
“My father has never smoked in his life,” Iris cried. “As for his diet, I Weighed his food out for years. He’s not here forever. I’ll take him back as soon as he’s had enough of hotels.”
He stayed for a long time, and the cat did too, and a nuisance they both were to the servants. When the cat was too ailing to walk, the old man carried it to a path behind the tennis courts and put it down on the gravel to die. Netta came out with the old man’s tea on a tray (not done for everyone, but having him out of the way was a relief) and she saw the cat lying on its side, eyes wide, as if profoundly thinking. She saw unlicked dirt on its coat and ants exploring its paws. The old man sat in a garden chair, wearing a panama hat, his hands clasped on a stick. He called, “Oh, Netta, take her away. I am too old to watch anything die. I know what she’ll do,” he said, indifferently, his voice failing as she came near. “Oh, I know that. Turn on her back and give a shriek. I’ve heard it often.”
Netta disburdened her tray onto a garden table and pulled the tray cloth under the cat. She was angered at the haste and indecency of the ants. “It would be polite to leave her,” she said. “She doesn’t want to be watched.”
“I always sit here,” said the old man.
Jack, making for the courts with Chippendale, looked as if the sight of the two conversing amused him. Then he understood and scooped up the cat and tray cloth and went away with the cat over his shoulder. He laid it in the shade of a Judas tree, and within an hour it was dead. Iris’s father said, “I’ve got no one to talk to here. That’s my trouble. That shroud was too small for my poor Polly. Ask my daughter to fetch me.”
Jack’s mother said that night, “I’m sure you wish that I had a devoted daughter to take me away too.” Because of the attention given the cat she seemed to feel she had not been nuisance enough. She had taken to saying, “My leg is dying before I am,” and imploring Jack to preserve her leg, should it be amputated, and make certain it was buried with her. She wanted Jack to be close by at nearly any hour now, so that she could lean on him. After sitting for hours at bridge she had trouble climbing two flights of stairs; nothing would induce her to use the lift.
“Nothing ever came of your music,” she would say, leaning on him. “Of course, you have a wife to distract you now. I needed a daughter. Every woman does.” Netta managed to trap her alone, and forced her to sit while she stood over her. Netta said, “Look, Aunt Vera, I forbid you, I absolutely forbid you, do you hear, to make a nurse of Jack, and I shall strangle you with my own hands if you go on saying nothing came of his music. You are not to say it in my hearing or out of it. Is that plain?”
Jack’s mother got up to her room without assistance. About an hour later the gardener found her on a soft bed of wallflowers. “An inch to the left and she’d have landed on a rake,” he said to Netta. She was still alive when Netta knelt down. In her fall she had crushed the plants, the yellow minted giroflées de Nice. Netta thought that she was now, at last, for the first time, inhaling one of the smells of death. Her aunt’s arms and legs were turned and twisted; her skirt was pulled so that her swollen leg showed. It seemed that she had jumped carrying her walking stick — it lay across the path. She often slept in an armchair, afternoons, with one eye slightly open. She opened that eye now and, seeing she had Netta, said, “My son.” Netta was thinking, I have never known her. And if I knew her, then it was Jack or myself I could not understand. Netta was afraid of giving orders, and of telling people not to touch her aunt before Dr. Blackley could be summoned, because she knew that she had always been mistaken. Now Jack was there, propping his mother up, brushing leaves and earth out of her hair. Her head dropped on his shoulder. Netta thought from the sudden heaviness that her aunt had died, but she sighed and opened that one eye again, saying this time, “Doctor?” Netta left everyone doing the wrong things to her dying — no, her murdered — aunt. She said quite calmly into a telephone, “I am afraid that my aunt must have jumped or fallen from the second floor.”
Jack found a letter on his mother’s night table that began, “Why blame Netta? I forgive.” At dawn he and Netta sat at a card table with yesterday’s cigarettes still not cleaned out of the ashtray, and he did not ask what Netta had said or done that called for forgiveness. They kept pushing the letter back and forth. He would read it and then Netta would. It seemed natural for them to be silent. Jack had sat beside his mother for much of the night. Each of them then went to sleep for an hour, apart, in one of the empty rooms, just as they had done in the old days when their parents were juggling beds and guests and double and single quarters. By the time the doctor returned for his second visit Jack was neatly dressed and seemed wide awake. He sat in the bar drinking black coffee and reading a travel book of Evelyn Waugh’s called Labels. Netta, who looked far more untidy and underslept, wondered if Jack wished he might leave now, and sail from Monte Carlo on the Stella Polaris.
Dr. Blackley said, “Well, you are a dim pair. She is not in pu-hain, you know.” Netta supposed this was the roundabout way doctors have of announcing death, very like “Her sufferings have ended.” But Jack, looking hard at the doctor, had heard another meaning. “Jumped or fell,” said Dr. Blackley. “She neither fell nor jumped. She is up there enjoying a damned good thu-hing.”
Netta went out and through the lounge and up the marble steps. She sat down in the shaded room on the chair where Jack had spent most of the night. Her aunt did not look like anyone Netta knew, not even like Jack. She stared at the alien face and said, “Aunt Vera, Keith Blackley says there is nothing really the matter. You must have made a mistake. Perhaps you fainted on the path, overcome by the scent of wallflowers. What would you like me to tell Jack?”
Jack’s mother turned on her side and slowly, tenderly, raised herself on an elbow. “Well, Netta,” she said, “I daresay the fool is right. But as I’ve been given quite a lot of sleeping stuff, I’d as soon stay here for now.”
Netta said, “Are you hungry?”
“I should very much like a ham sandwich on English bread, and about that much gin with a lump of ice.”
She began coming down for meals a few days later. They knew she had crept down the stairs and flung her walking stick over the path and let herself fall hard on a bed of wallflowers — had even plucked her skirt up for a bit of accuracy; but she was also someone returned from beyond the limits, from the other side of the wall. Once she said, “It was like diving and suddenly realizing there was no water in the sea.” Again, “It is not true that your life rushes before your eyes. You can see the flowers floating up to you. Even a short fall takes a long time.”