Loring flushed. “I realize I’m not appearing at my best in this affair. But you can’t think straight when your career is due to blow up any minute.”
“Any other doctor involved?”
“Hale of the General helped me but I consulted him and it was my duty to report the poisoning, not his.”
“And why didn’t you? You said you were too tired, you thought it would wait until morning. Were you too tired to pick up a phone?”
“No.”
“Do you have to be coaxed?” Sands said coldly.
“I... I intended to wait and come back this morning to question the girl. If I found that she had taken the morphine herself with the help of Ida I wouldn’t have reported it at all. I don’t like the laws governing attempted suicides and I was prepared to try and help the girl myself without reference to the police and without having her committed to an institution.”
“You sound as if you thought that one up all by yourself. But you didn’t. It’s been done before and will be done again. Who’s Ida?”
“A maid.”
“Why should she help the girl kill herself? Love or money?”
“A dash of both,” Loring said grimly. “Ida has spiritual contacts with tea leaves and the tea leaves revealed that Kelsey Heath was going to die. To a person of Ida’s class the teacup is as omniscient as the newspaper is to the class above Ida’s. If the death was inevitable, why not help it along and preserve your contacts?”
“Is Ida fat?” Sands said.
Loring frowned at him. “Why? Yes, she is.”
“I think I’ve met her, at a distance.”
He took out his notebook and wrote a concise report of the poisoning and Loring’s part in it. He did not ask Loring to sign a formal statement of the facts. Loring noticed the omission.
“What do you intend to do about me?” he asked.
“Not a thing,” Sands said, “closing the book and replacing it in his pocket. Yet.”
“You have to report me.”
“Do I?”
“I’d rather you did it right away.”
“You seem anxious,” Sands said. “Don’t you like being a psychiatrist?”
“I don’t know what...”
“Watch those emotional conflicts,” Sands said and closed the door behind him. From Kelsey’s room came the busy sounds of men at work. Waste of time to go in, he thought. The men knew more than he did about what to do. He hesitated, not wanting to go downstairs and listen to Alice Heath and her brother and her father and Philip James. They would all claim to be in bed and asleep when the girl was killed in the middle of the night.
“Hssst!”
Sands turned his head quickly.
“Hssst!”
The whistle came from the back of the hall. Sands could see nothing but a whitish shape. He walked toward it.
“Yes?” he said.
“Hush.”
When he came to the end of the hall the white shape emerged as a fat girl in a uniform. She was, leaning against the banister of the back stairs sucking her finger. She took her finger out of her mouth and wiped it on her apron. Then she looked up again and smiled slyly at Sands.
“Hello,” she said softly.
“Hello.”
“I’m Ida.”
“Well, hello, Ida,” Sands said.
“I found her.”
“Well?”
“Sure.”
“How nice,” Sands said, thinking that monosyllables were a pleasant change but they didn’t get you anywhere. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Why, sure,” Ida said.
Chapter 9
When Mr. Heath woke up in the morning the sun was pushing in at his window like a big bold blonde.
He opened his eyes and lay suspended between the two worlds of sleeping and waking, a man floating in air with nothing to clutch at. There was no returning to the safe world of sleep. It had been shattered by the sun, it had exploded like a bomb, and he was going up, up, up... A scream formed inside his throat — “No! No! No!” — the protest of a corpse thrust into life again.
But it was only a little scream after all, barely a whisper, the plea of a man who recognized the uselessness of his pleading. His ears and eyes denied this new world but his mind crept toward it, painfully, gradually, and he began to be aware of himself, almost as if he were watching the birth of a grown man and the screams were screams of pain as he squeezed out of the womb. Yet when the birth was over he was complete. He had a body and a name, he had a house to live in and two daughters and a son, and once he had had a wife.
His hands fumbled out of the blankets and he reached over to touch her.
“Isobel?”
She was not there. He wasn’t surprised that she wasn’t there, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had been. Anything was possible in this strange world. There was no harm in saying, “Isobel?” to make sure, because there was no one else there to make time relative for him. His mind knew no years or hours, only Isobels and Kelseys and Maurices.
“No! No!” The scream was nearly gone from his throat, it had fled before its own futility.
Because here he was, awake and living, here was the body, the house, the sun, the curtains blowing in and Cut as if they were breathing-. Like an oxygen tent — in and out, in and out. That was how they made Isobel breathe in the end, they had pumped oxygen in and out of her all night, and in the morning Alice had come into his room and said, “She just died, Father.”
“Father...”
Here was Alice, standing beside his bed. She had come to tell him all over again. That was a little surprising if you knew Alice, but not very surprising. Perhaps Alice had lost her place in time, as he had, or had come to realize that it wasn’t very important after all.
“Father, are you awake?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m awake. I know. You don’t have to tell me again. You’ve just lost your place, Alice.”
“Wake up, Father,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
“I know what it is.”
“You... you heard the noise?”
“No. No noise,” he said. “It was very quiet.”
“Kelsey is dead.”
She sat down on the bed as if she were going to try and comfort him with her touch. But her hands remained motionless in her lap. “I’m sorry I had to wake you, Father, but she didn’t die — naturally.”
“Kelsey?” He blinked at her, trying to blink away the mist in front of his eyes. Alice looked funny through the mist, as if she had grown fur which blurred her outlines. “You’re sure?”
He knew what a silly question that was. Alice was always sure of everything. You could depend on Alice for facts, but for nothing else, nothing else at all.
“She was killed,” Alice said. “The police are here and they say she was killed. They want to talk to you.”
“Now? Before breakfast?”
“I’ve asked Maurice to bring you your coffee up here.”
Ah, that was better. Once you had your coffee you knew where you were. You became adjusted to this world of waking, you were prepared for anything. Kelsey was dead. After coffee he would think about that, he would get used to the idea. You simply had to subtract one daughter and familiarize yourself with the remaining sum. Merely a problem in arithmettic.
“Thank you, Alice,” he said.
She recognized her dismissal and rose from the bed. “Is there anything I could get you?”
“No, thank you.”
“Father,” she said, but the moment for weeping, for mingling tears, for the touch of hands in love and understanding and sorrow — that moment was gone. She turned to the door, her head drooping a little to one side in a gesture of hopelessness and submission. The moment had gone, no use trying to bring it back. There was only the faintest echo in her mind of the questions she had asked as a child: “Why are we like this? Why must we be? Why can’t we change?”