The nurse (to the doctor's partner): "I would never have gone for a walk if I hadn't been quite sure he was comfortable. And I believed that both Mrs. Money and her daughter were in the house. Yes, I had given him the tablets..." etc., etc.
She is in the witness box, on trial, thought Shelagh, but so are we all.
Her mother (also to the doctor's partner): "It had entirely slipped my memory that Nurse was going out. There has been so much to think of, so much anxiety, and I thought it would relax me to pay a quick visit to the hairdresser, and he had seemed so much better, really his old self. I would never have dreamed of leaving the house, leaving his room, if I had thought for one moment..."
"Isn't that the trouble?" Shelagh burst in. "We never do think, any of us. You didn't, Nurse didn't, Doctor Dray didn't, and above all I didn't, because I'm the only one who saw what happened, and I shall never forget the look on his face as long as I live."
She stormed along the passage to her own room, sobbing hysterically in a way she had not done for years--the last time was when the post-van smashed into her first car when it was parked in the entrance drive, all that twisted metal, the lovely plaything ruined. That will teach them a lesson, she told herself, that will shake them out of this business of trying to behave so well, of being noble in the face of death, of making out that it's a merciful release and everything is really for the best. None of them really minding, caring, that someone has gone forever. But forever...
Later that evening, everyone gone to bed, death being so exhausting to all but the departed, Shelagh crept along the landing to her father's room and found the photograph album, tactfully tidied away on a corner table by the nurse, and carried it back with her to her own bedroom. Earlier, during the afternoon, the photographs had been without significance, familiar as old Christmas cards hoarded in a drawer, but now they were a kind of obituary, like stills flashed in tribute on a television screen.
The befrilled baby on a rug, mouth agape, his parents playing croquet. An uncle, killed in the First World War. Her father again, no longer a baby on a rug but in breeches, holding a cricket bat too big for him. Homes of grandparents long dead. Children on beaches. Picnics on moors. Then Dartmouth, photographs of ships. Rows of lined-up boys, youths, men. As a child it had been her pride to point to him at once. "There you are, that's you," the smallest boy at the end of the line, then in the next photograph slimmer and standing in the second row, then growing quite tall and suddenly handsome, a child no longer, and she would turn the pages rapidly because the photographs would be of places, not of people--Malta, Alexandria, Portsmouth, Greenwich. Dogs that had been his which she had not known. "There's dear old Punch..." (Punch, he used to tell her, always knew when his ship was due home, and waited at an upstairs window.) Naval officers riding donkeys... playing tennis... running races, all this before the war, and it had made her think, "unconscious of their doom, the little victims play," because on the next page it became suddenly sad, the ship he had loved blown up, and so many of those laughing young men lost. "Poor old Monkey White, he would have been an admiral had he lived." She tried to imagine the grinning face of Monkey White in the photo turned into an admiral, bald headed, perhaps, stout, and something inside her was glad that he had died, although her father said he was a loss to the Service. More officers, more ships, and the great day when Mountbatten visited the ship, her father in command, meeting him as he was piped aboard. The courtyard at Buckingham Palace. Standing rather self-consciously before the press photographer, displaying medals.
"Not long now before we come to you," her father used to say as he turned the page to the full-blown and never-to-him-admitted rather silly photograph of her mother in evening dress which he so much admired, wearing her soulful look that Shelagh knew well. It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.
The naval wedding, her mother smiling in triumph--Shelagh knew that look too, she wore it when she got her way about anything, which she generally did--and her father's smile, so different, not triumphant, merely happy. The frumpish bridesmaids wearing dresses that made them fatter than they were--she must have chosen them on purpose not to be outdone--and the best man, her father's friend Nick, not nearly so good-looking as her father. He was better in one of the earlier groups on the ship, but here he looked supercilious, bored.
The honeymoon, the first house, and then her own appearance, the childhood photographs that were part of her life; on her father's knee, on his shoulders, and right through childhood and adolescence until last Christmas. It could be my obituary too, she thought, we've shared this book together, and it ends with his snapshot of me standing in the snow and mine of him, smiling at me through the study window.
In a moment she would cry again, which was self-pity; if she cried it must not be for herself but for him. When was it, that afternoon, that he had sensed her boredom and pushed the album aside? It was while they were discussing hobbies. He had told her she was physically lazy, didn't take enough exercise.
"I get all the exercise I need in the theater," she said, "pretending to be other people."
"It's not the same," he said. "You should get away from people sometimes, imaginary and real. I tell you what. When I'm up and about again and in the clear we'll go over to Ireland and fish, the three of us. It would do your mum a power of good, and I haven't fished for years."
Ireland? Fish? Her instinct was selfish, one of dismay. It would interfere with her theater-group plans. She must joke him out of it.
"Mum would hate every minute," she said. "She would much rather go to the south of France to stay with Aunt Bella." (Bella was her mother's sister. Had a villa at Cap d'Ail.)
"I dare say," he smiled, "but that wouldn't be my idea of convalescence. Have you forgotten I'm half Irish? Your grandfather came from County Antrim."
"I've not forgotten," she said, "but Grandfather's been dead for years, and lies buried in a Suffolk churchyard. So much for your Irish blood. You haven't any friends over there, have you?"
He did not answer immediately, and then he said, "There's poor old Nick."
Poor old Nick... Poor old Monkey White... Poor old Punch... She was momentarily confused between friends and dogs she had never known.
"Do you mean your best man at the wedding?" she frowned. "Somehow I thought he was dead."
"Dead to the world," he said shortly. "He was badly smashed up in a car crash some years ago, and lost an eye. Lived like a recluse ever since."
"How sad. Is that why he never sends you a Christmas card?"
"Partly... Poor old Nick. Gallant as they come, but mad as a hatter. A borderline case. I couldn't recommend him for promotion, and I'm afraid he bore me a grudge ever afterwards."
"That's hardly surprising, then. I'd feel the same if I'd been somebody's close friend and they turned me down."
He shook his head. "Friendship and duty are two separate things," he said, "and I put duty first. You are another generation, you wouldn't understand. I was right in what I did, I'm sure of that, but it wasn't very pleasant at the time. A chip on the shoulder can turn a man sour. I'd hate to think myself responsible for what he may have got mixed up in."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Never mind," he said, "none of your business. Anyway, it's over and done with long ago. But I sometimes wish..."
"What do you wish, darling?"
"That I could shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck."
They turned over a few more pages of the album, and it was soon afterwards that she yawned, glancing idly about the room, and he sensed her boredom and said he would have a kip. No one could die of a heart attack because his daughter was bored... But supposing he had had a nightmare in which she had figured? Supposing he had thought himself back in that sinking ship du
ring the war, with poor old Monkey White, and Nick, and all those drowning men, and somehow she had been with him in the water? Everything became jumbled up in dreams, it was a known thing. And all the time that clot getting bigger, like an excess of oil in the workings of a clock. At any moment the hands would falter, the clock stop ticking.
Somebody tapped at her bedroom door. "Yes?" she called.
It was the nurse. Still professional, despite her dressing gown.
"Just wondered if you were all right," she whispered. "I saw your light under the door."
"Thanks. I'm O.K."
"Your mother's fast asleep. I gave her a sedative. She was fussing about tomorrow being Saturday, and the difficulty of getting an announcement in The Times and Telegraph before Monday. She's being so plucky."
Was there hidden reproach in her voice because Shelagh had not thought of taking charge of these things herself? Surely tomorrow would have done? Aloud she said, "Can nightmares kill?"
"What do you mean, dear?"
"Could my father have had a terrible nightmare and died of shock?"
The nurse advanced to the bed and straightened the eiderdown. "Now, I told you earlier, and the doctors said the same, it would have happened anyway. You really must not keep on going over it in your mind. It doesn't help. Let me get you a sedative too."
"I don't want a sedative."
"You know, dear, forgive me, but you're being just a little bit childish. Grief is natural, but to worry about him in this way is the last thing your father would have wanted. It's all over now. He's at peace."
"How do you know he's at peace?" Shelagh exploded. "How do you know he's not hovering beside us at this minute in an astral body absolutely furious that he's dead, and saying to me, 'That bloody nurse gave me too many pills'?"
Oh no, she thought, I didn't mean that, people are too vulnerable, too naked. The poor woman, shaken out of professional calm, sagged in her dressing gown, drooped before her eyes, and in a tremulous voice said, "What a terribly unkind thing to say! You know I did no such thing."
Impulsively Shelagh leaped out of bed and put her arms round the nurse's shoulders.
"Forgive me," she pleaded, "of course you didn't. And he liked you very much. You were a wonderful nurse to him. What I meant was"--she searched in her mind for some explanation--"what I meant was that we don't know what happens when a person dies. They might be waiting in some queue at St. Peter's gate with all the other people who have died that day, or else pushing into some awful purgatorial nightclub with the ones who were destined for hell, or just drifting in a kind of fog until the fog clears and everything becomes clear. All right, I will have a sedative, you have one too, then we'll both be fresh for the morning. And please don't think any more about what I said."
The trouble is, she thought, after she had taken her sedative and gone back to bed, words leave a wound, the wound leaves a scar. The nurse will never give out pills to patients again without a doubt somewhere at the back of her mind as to whether she is doing the right thing. Like the question mark in her father's conscience about not passing poor old Nick for promotion and so giving him his chip on the shoulder. It was bad to die with something on your conscience. One ought to have some warning, so that one could send a telegram to anyone who might have been wronged, saying, "Forgive me," and then the wrong would be canceled, blotted out. This was why, in the old days, people flocked round a dying person's bed, hoping, not to be left something in the will, but for mutual forgiveness, a cessation of ill feeling, a smoothing out of right and wrong. In fact, a sort of love.
Shelagh had acted on impulse. She knew she always would. It was part of her character, and had to be accepted by family and friends. It was not until she was on her way, though, driving north from Dublin in the hired car, that her journey, hastily improvised, took on its real meaning. She was here on a mission, a sacred trust. She was carrying a message from beyond the grave. It was absolutely secret, though, and no one must know about it, for she was sure that if she had told anyone questions would have been asked, arguments raised. So, after the funeral, complete silence about her plans. Her mother, as Shelagh guessed she would, had decided to fly to Aunt Bella at Cap d'Ail.
"I feel I must get right away," she had said to her daughter. "You may not realize it, but Dad's illness was a fearful strain. I've lost half a stone. I feel that all I want to do is to close my eyes and lie on Bella's sun-drenched balcony, and try to forget the misery of the past weeks."
It was like an advertisement for some luxury soap. Pamper yourself. A naked woman deep in a bath of bubbling foam. In point of fact, the first shock over, her mother looked better already, and Shelagh knew that the sun-drenched balcony would soon fill up with Aunt Bella's very mixed bunch of friends--socialites, bogus artists, boring old homos, what her father used to call "phony riffraff," but they amused her mother. "What about you? Why don't you come too?"--the suggestion halfhearted but nevertheless made.
Shelagh shook her head. "Rehearsals start next week. I thought, before going to London, I'd push off alone in the car somewhere. No sort of plan. Just drive."
"Why not take a friend?"
"Anyone would get on my nerves at the moment. I'm better alone."
No further contact between them on anything more than the practical level. Neither said to the other, "How unhappy are you really? Is this the end of the road for me, for you? What does the future hold?" Instead there were discussions about the gardener and his wife coming to live in, visits from lawyers left until after her mother returned from Cap d'Ail, letters to be forwarded, etc., etc... Without emotion, like two secretaries, they sat side by side reading and replying to the letters of condolence. You take A to K. I'll take L to Z. And more or less the same message to each: "Deeply touched... Your sympathy so helpful..." It was like sending out the Christmas cards every December, but the wording was different.
Looking through her father's old address book, she came across the name Barry. Commander Nicolas Barry, D.S.O., R.N. (Retd.), Ballyfane, Lough Torrah, Eire. Both name and address had a line through them, which generally meant that the person had died. She glanced at her mother.
"I wonder why that old friend of Dad's, Commander Barry, hasn't written?" she asked casually. "He isn't dead, is he?"
"Who?" Her mother looked vague. "Oh, you mean Nick? I don't think he's dead. He was in some frightful car crash years ago. But they were out of touch before that. He hasn't written to us for years."
"I wonder why."
"I don't know. They had some row, I never heard what about. Did you see this very sweet letter from Admiral Arbuthnot? We were all together in Alexandria."
"Yes, I saw it. What was he like? Not the Admiral--Nick."
Her mother leaned back in her chair, considering the matter.
"Frankly, I never could quite make him out," she said. "He'd either be all over one and the greatest fun, especially at parties, or ignoring everybody and making sarcastic remarks. He had a wild streak in him. I remember him coming to stay soon after Dad and I were married--he was best man, you know, at the wedding--and he turned all the furniture upside down in the drawing room and got very tight. Such a silly thing to do. I was livid."
"Did Dad mind?"
"I don't think so, I can't remember. They knew each other so well, served together, been at Dartmouth as boys. Then Nick left the Navy and went back to live in Ireland, and they somehow drifted apart. I had the impression actually that he had the sack, but I never liked to ask. You know what an oyster Dad was about Service matters."
"Yes..."
(Poor old Nick. A chip on the shoulder. I'd like to shake him by the hand again and wish him luck...)
She saw her mother off at the airport a few days afterwards, and made her own plans for departure to Dublin. The night before she left, searching among her father's papers, she found a scrap of paper with a list of dates and the name Nick alongside with a question mark, but no word of explanation as to what the dates referred to. June 5, 195
1. June 25, 1953. June 12, 1954. October 17, 1954. April 24, 1955. August 13, 1955. The list bore no relevance to the rest of the papers in the file, and must have been slipped in there by accident. She copied them down, and put them in an envelope inside her tourist guide.
Well, that was that, and here she was, on the road to... to do what? To apologize, in her deceased father's name, to a retired naval commander passed over for promotion? Wild in his youth? The greatest fun at parties? The image conjured up was not one to whip the appetite, and she began to picture a middle-aged buffer with a hyena laugh who put booby traps on the top of every door. Perhaps he had tried it on the First Sea Lord and received the boot for his pains. A car accident turned him into a recluse, an embittered one-time clown (but gallant, her father said, which meant what--plunging into oil-infested waters to rescue drowning sailors in the war?) who sat gnawing his fingernails in some old Georgian mansion or mock castle, drinking Irish whiskey and regretting all those apple-pie beds.
Some seventy-odd miles from Dublin on a balmy October afternoon, though, with the countryside becoming greener, lusher, yet somehow sparsely inhabited, the glint of water more frequent away to the west, and suddenly a myriad pools and lakes with tongues of land thrusting between them, the prospect of ringing the bell of a Georgian mansion faded. Here were no high walls encircling stately demesnes, only wet fields beyond the road, and surely no means of access to the silver-splintered lakes beyond.