Anyway, how the devil should I protect myself against him? I can’t wear armour all day and have every meal analysed before I eat it.
How Janet would have revelled in this situation, with her Wee Free sense of sin and retribution! Cast thy haggis upon the waters, etc. No, I should not be mocking at poor Janet—after all, I’m half Scottish myself. And she did her best; brought me all that money and gave me children and made an excellent housekeeper.
Let me face it, there’s an ineradicable streak of cheapness in me. Men at the point of death shouldn’t indulge their levity. I wonder what they’ll do with the money when I’m dead. James will save it, Harold squander it; Becky will marry that worthless little buffoon: and Graham—how would he use it? They should each get £30,000 after death duties are paid, and that’s not counting my life assurance policies—another £8,000 to split up between them. Unless . . .
Good God, yes, that’s it! Forestall him. If I died before he could kill me—why didn’t that occur to me?—it would solve the whole problem. Justice would be done without making him a murderer. The high old Roman way out of difficulties. Fall on one’s sword—only I haven’t got a sword, and if I had I’m so light I should probably bounce off the point. Petronius, then. The hedonist’s method. Euthanasia. Yes, that’s the answer.
But don’t think of it in terms of expiation. It is simply to save him—I mean to pacify her shade. Expiation is a meaningless concept socially, however necessary it may be for the individual’s peace of mind.
Nothing, nothing can redress what happened to Millie. The squalor, the hæmorrhages, the appeals I never answered. Her despair, her death, for me they blot out forty years of good work. Crowds will flock to my funeral. They’ll eulogise the good physician. They’ll not know I was dead years before they put me in the ground.
Tired, tired. Can’t write much more. Wonder what Strangeways and Miss Massinger made of it all at dinner last night. I must do it soon. But I’m too tired to kill myself to-night. I suspect it may need more resolution than I’d thought.
Millie, Millie. First seen sitting on that wooden bench in a row of patients. Heart-shaped face. Slender, golden: a daffodil—common and unique. The sweetness. The trust, the absolute trust. Betrayed. An old man’s quavering, mawkish sentimentality. How Graham would jeer at it!
Nevertheless, Millie my only love, those brief months of ours were the one time when, outside my work, I have lived fully, positively, with all of myself, because I was totally involved in you. If that was an illusion, it’s worth a lifetime of sanity.
But I sent you away—from the best, least selfish of motives—but it meant slowly waking up, no, slowly returning into the sleep of habit, convention, self-regard. So I dwindled back to “normal,” shrank back again within the limits of what life had made me and people expected of me.
It was your nature, my love, to accept and to forgive. If you were alive, I would not even have to ask your forgiveness. But you are dead, and myself I cannot forgive. . . .
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Copyright © Nicholas Blake 1961
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First published in Great Britain in 1961 by Collins (The Crime Club)
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Nicholas Blake, The Worm of Death
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