“Ethel?”
“Yes, madame.”
“He gave me more morphine, didn’t he.”
“Oh, yes, madame; you were groaning in pain.”
“Well, I don’t appreciate having been rendered unconscious for almost — good heavens, how long is it, nearly two days now — however well intentioned the physician. I want to get up.”
“Oh, no, madame! Doctor strictly forbids it!”
“Ethel, I have a call of nature!”
Ethel produced a hideous enamel pan from under the bed. Louisa looked at it. She was expected to straddle it, as she had had to do yesterday, she remembered now. For not the first time, by far, she envied Arthur for his ability to project urine to a distance. She said, “I suppose the doctor isn’t a woman.” She slowly pulled back the bedclothes and tried to move her legs to the edge of the bed. “Aaaarghhh!”
“Madame, madame—”
“Hush, Ethel! I’m not going to sit ever again on some cheap enamel object that looks as if it was made for scooping goldfish out of a pond! Give me your hand.” She gripped Ethel’s hand so tightly that Ethel made a face. “Now I’m going to hop to the WC. You’re going to hold on to me so I don’t fall and smash the other side of my face. Ready? Off we go…”
She had done a lot of hopping as a little girl, but she had not then been feeling the after-effect of morphine. It was as if she had a ten-pound weight tied to her good foot. Still, she managed to get to an armchair, on which she leaned until she’d recovered her balance and her breath, and then she hopped on and at last got to the lavatory door. “I can make it from here alone. Don’t leave.” She started to close the door, then looked out. “I want to send a telegram, so get a form. And Mr. Doyle’s itinerary. And a boy to carry the telegram to wherever they send them from. Or perhaps the hotel has its own office. Find out.” She half-closed the door again, then opened it. “And order me some breakfast. I’m ravenous. Tea, toast, a three-minute egg, some jam but not that horrible gooseberry stuff. And a cup of tea for you as well if you want some.”
Half an hour later, enthroned in a huge pile of pillows and dressed in a clean nightgown and an ecru satin bedjacket of which she was particularly fond (an almost military cut — rather a joke, even to lace epaulettes), she was finishing her breakfast and studying her right ankle, which she had left poking out of the bedcovers. It was as black-and-blue as her face but far more swollen. “Elephantiasis,” she said aloud. There was nobody to say it to: she had sent Ethel out for the newspapers—“All of them!”—because she had remembered that poor woman who had been murdered. She sighed. “You really are a clumsy juggins, Louisa.” She tried to move her foot a fraction of an inch side to side. “Aaarghh!” She reread Arthur’s two telegrams for the sixth or seventh time and thought how really sweet he was. What did he mean about the underwear, she wondered.
When Ethel came back with the newspapers, she said that the doctor and Mr. Carver were coming up. Louisa swore — or as nearly swore as she dared in front of Ethel — and tried to object but failed. She decided that the best thing was to seem busy, even to be busy; she had Ethel bring the cards from the mostly hideous flowers she could now see all around the room, and a pencil and paper for making a list.
Some of the flowers seemed to be from people she knew in the hotel — Henry Irving; the remarkable Mrs. Simmons; even her nephew, Mr. Newcome; Carver — but others were from people she had never met: “the wait staff and kitchen workers of the New Britannic,” somebody named Mrs. Alonzo Gappert, several enthusiastic lovers of Sherlock Holmes (who, she suspected, really wanted an introduction to her husband). There was a small bouquet from Marie Corelli, the novelist, whom she remembered smiling at after Mrs. Simmons had said something disparaging; she also remembered Arthur’s giving some sort of look when the name was mentioned at Reception. Well, she had this to say for the woman: hers and Newcome’s were the most tasteful flower arrangements of the lot. Both were fairly small, subtly colored — far superior to the two dozen blood-red roses of Carver’s or the three-foot-tall monstrosity of lilies and ferns from one of the Holmesians.
As she wrote her thank-you notes, she thought of poor Arthur, far away somewhere; of that dead woman, disfigured — is that what the word meant, that her face had been like Louisa’s own, bruised and discolored? — murdered, left in an alley; of her children, whom she missed and wanted with her: how lovely it would be to snuggle into the bed under the flowered ceiling, a child on either side of her, a pile of children’s books, their warm, scented small bodies—
“Mr. Carver and Dr. Strauss, madame.”
Carver was obnoxious — Uriah Heep crossed with Mary Shelley’s creature — as she saw the instant he oozed around her doorframe, as if he had no more skeleton than a leech. He said he’d come to make sure she was recovering, but what he really wanted was her signature on a “little paper” that absolved the hotel of any fault for her fall. He had a fountain pen ready in his hand. She remembered a bit of her mother’s advice: Never sign anything if they bring their own pen. It was much better than her mother’s advice about sex had been.
“No, Mr. Carver, I won’t sign. I’m afraid I’m not compos because of the drugs your doctor has given me. How would that look if it ever came to law?”
He went away, to be replaced by the doctor, a large man with a beard, his suit mostly unpressed, a gold chain crossing his waistcoat as if anchoring one side to the other, a general look of failure, and a German accent. He told her his name was Strauss; he tried to give her more morphine, which she rejected; and he said he wanted her to be seen by somebody named Galt, who took care of “old Mr. Carver upstairs.” Galt was recommended as an expert on sprains—“old people, they fall a lot”—and she said she’d see, although privately she thought that the doctor ought to be the expert on sprains, not somebody upstairs. What good was he?
“Not a new word in a one of them!” Louisa cried. She pushed the newspapers off her bed. She was testy because without morphine her ankle hurt, just as the doctor had said it would, and besides the pain itself she hated his being right about it. “There wasn’t a single new word about that woman in today’s papers. Nothing new at all — not a syllable! That isn’t right, Ethel. It isn’t normal. The police are supposed to find clues, witnesses, all of that! And the newspapers are supposed to report it. And it’s as if nobody’s doing anything!” She thought of the young woman in the lobby, that brilliant smile. “It’s as if she never existed! As if she’d been…” She searched for what she meant, couldn’t quite yet face the word erased.
“She was a fallen woman, madame.”
“Was she? How do we know? Did the newspapers say how they knew? ‘A lady of the pavement.’ What an expression! Who writes these things? Who makes these judgments?” She pushed herself up again, groaned, and motioned for Ethel. “I had a newspaper that had a sketch of that poor woman in it. I want a copy of that sketch.”
“Oh, dear me, madame.”
“I want…I want…I don’t know what I want! Yes, I do — I want that woman not to have been murdered!” She stared into the distance. “I want a telephone.”
“There are telephone boxes off the lobby, madame.”
“And I can’t get down to the lobby! Oh, blast!” That was a curse word of Arthur’s that he had told her would pass muster in good company. “Drat!” So was that. “Oh, dammit to hell!” That was not.
“Madame!”
“I want to know who wrote that article for that newspaper — it was the Express, I’m sure it was the Express—that had the sketch with it. He must have known something. As soon as I’m able, I shall use the telephone to talk to him.” She let herself fall back, then propped herself up again. “Although he’ll be perfectly awful. Some poorly shaven drunkard in a collarless shirt and a bowler hat, I daresay. Smoking a cigar. With his feet up on his desk and holes in the soles of his shoes. Smelling of onions. And it’s men like this whom we allow to write things like ‘lady of the pavement.’ It’s men who do that, Ethel, vulgarians like this cigar-smoking brute who wrote the piece in the Express. I must talk to him. Next time you go downstairs, Ethel, tell Reception that I particularly want a copy of two days ago’s New York Express, and they’re to send it up the instant they have it!”