Scared to Death

by Anne Morice

  “Yes,” he agreed, “and isn’t it all a damn nuisance?”

  “I suppose you could take the money and give it away anonymously?”

  “I’ve thought of that, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t work. For one thing, it’s going to look funny, me living in a bedsitter in Paddington, and having no car and that, when I’m supposed to be loaded. They’d set the psychiatrists on to me and I wouldn’t be able to afford them.”

  I had learnt enough about human nature to be aware that, whatever appearances may suggest, no one has it easy all the time, but while driving home at last I reflected that this was the first occasion I had met anyone who lay awake at night on account of being lumbered with a hundred thousand pounds. Looking back on it though, what does now strike me as curious is that, for all the elusive, insubstantial quality in Ferdy’s personality, making him seem almost one dimensional at times, I never for an instant doubted his sincerity.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Peter Goodchild, who was not a housemaster, lived with his wife and two daughters in a flat above the new music block, which had been built two years earlier with an endowment fund raised largely through his own efforts. Thus, as Tara seldom tired of pointing out, they lived over the shop and a shop, moreover, which had been constructed virtually by their own blood, sweat and tears.

  I was admitted to these premises by Leila, the elder daughter, a sallow-faced girl of about fifteen, with eyes made of black velvet and long dark hair nipped into two tightly coiled plaits. She was wearing an embroidered silk tunic over faded blue jeans, gold thonged sandals and about fifty-nine assorted bracelets.

  Having tossed off the remark that she was engaged in writing a play based on a little known episode in the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which she judged to be exactly suited to my prodigious talents, she ushered me into the sitting room, which also provided a nice example of the meeting of East and West. There were a lot of highly coloured cotton rugs, or blankets, hanging on the walls, along with Rajput miniatures and heavily carved wooden plaques, but also some impressionist prints and art nouveau posters mixed up with them, and an assortment of musical instruments, including a piano and a sitar. Most of the seating accommodation consisted of large tooled leather poufs and a most spectacular oriental touch was provided by the hostess, seated in the lotus position on a divan spread with a green and gold sari, bare footed and wearing an ankle length embroidered silk tunic from the same stable as Leila’s.

  Supplying the necessary balance in this respect was another woman, older and unmistakeably British, sitting in the most un-lotus position imaginable on the nearest approach the room contained to an upright armchair. She was plain and severe looking, with features not unlike her sister’s, but without her florid complexion and petulant expression, and I had no difficulty in recognising her as the celebrated water colourist, matron and heiress, Miss A. Dilloway.

  Tara was enchanted with herself for organising this coup, Alice rather less so. I had fallen into the fatuous error, partly through hearsay, of assuming that because she was outwardly a dimmer, less forceful replica of Edna, she must be equally stupid and vain. Evidently, this was not the case for, far from echoing Tara’s stream of congratulations to all and sundry on bringing the two of us together, so that I might actually meet the creator of the painting I had admired so much, Alice responded with an impatient snort and the observation that she wasn’t too keen on having her leg pulled.

  “Who is pulling your leg, my dear Alice? Don’t be such a duffer, please! Our friend here has been saying she is sick as mud that she cannot buy a ticket for herself in this raffle. I assure you.”

  “Then she’s a bigger fool than I take her for,” Alice replied tartly. “You know I would never have had the nerve to exhibit at all, if you hadn’t bullied me into it, and the kindest thing you can say of my paintings is that I’m only a beginner, didn’t take it up until I retired. It gives me pleasure, but I wouldn’t pretend that it’s art.”

  “Well, this is all bosh, my dear. If it were not, why should I have bought two of your pictures? I am not so made of money, you know.”

  “No, you’re not, but you have other assets and we both know that you bought them simply to save me from becoming discouraged and giving up my little hobby. Now, be honest, Tara! Isn’t that the truth of the matter?”

  “No, certainly not, it is a packet of lies and I hope you are not too modest to let Tessa see your pictures and judge for herself?”

  “Oh, she can see them if she chooses,” Alice said indifferently.

  “Good! Then take her to the dining room, pronto, please! While you are there Leila and I will be rustling up some tea.”

  “I am sure you haven’t the least desire to look at them,” Alice said when they had gone, thereby placing me in a delicate situation, from which she was kind enough to extricate me in the next breath by adding:

  “But I’m afraid you must, because otherwise Tara won’t give either of us a minute’s peace.”

  They were two pallid little landscapes, very much in the style of the one I had seen at the exhibition. The first showed a village street of rather eccentric proportions and the second a meadow, with some unidentifiable animals standing about in a listless fashion, as though they had been shot and rather carelessly stuffed. They could, at a pinch, have been horses and I paused rather longer before this one, my mind going back to a certain race meeting six weeks ago.

  “You see what I mean?” Alice asked in her caustic way.

  “It’s more than I could do,” I replied truthfully and then, convinced by this time that her diffidence was not assumed, I added:

  “And, anyway, I don’t see it matters how bad they are, so long as doing them gives you pleasure.”

  “I agree with you, it shouldn’t really matter at all, but the trouble with Tara is that all her geese are swans and have to behave like swans, for their own good. She’s such a dear, but it does embarrass me when she will foist my wretched daubs on other people.”

  So far, Alice had scarcely uttered a word that bore out her reputation, so I set her another test:

  “I was so sorry to hear about Mrs. Mortimer.”

  “Were you?” she replied, keeping the record intact. “Why was that?”

  “Well . . . I can’t pretend to have been very fond of her, or anything, but I had known her for an awfully long time; ever since Camilla and I were twelve years old, in fact,” then realising that this was somewhat inadequate grounds for professing grief, I went on:

  “Also I was sitting with her for a short while only the day before she died and it was rather distressing.”

  “Yes, it must have been.”

  “I don’t mean only because she was so ill. As a matter of fact, there’d been a slight improvement at that point and everyone thought she had a fair chance of recovering.”

  “Then what was distressing about it?”

  “Well, you see, she had one of her lucid periods while I was with her and she was trying so hard to tell me something urgent, I could sense that she was; something she was frightened about, or that was the impression I got, but she couldn’t speak and when she tried to write some words on a pad she was so weak that it was impossible to decipher them. What makes me sad is that she should have died with that awful secret locked up inside her, and nobody was ever able to find out what it was and give her comfort.”

  “You seem to know a good deal more about my sister’s last hours than I do,” Alice remarked stiffly.

  “Well, as I say, no one realised those would be her last hours. They thought she was improving. It was pure chance that I happened to be there at the time.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t think chance had much to do with it. I think you were called in, weren’t you? Requested to go? And by Miss Prettyman, no doubt?”

  After a slight hesitation, due mainly to the fact that this was the first time for years that I had heard Tilly referred to by that name, I said:

  “No, the suggestion came from Camilla
, actually.”

  “It amounts to the same thing. Camilla was the mouth-piece. She very often is, but that’s not important. The fact remains that you were called in, whereas I was kept out; if not by force, as near as makes no matter.”

  “Oh, surely not?”

  “Oh yes, indeed! That is the truth of the matter, Miss Crichton, although I wouldn’t expect you to believe me. I daresay you have been brainwashed, along with everyone else.”

  “Brainwashed? By Til . . . Miss Prettyman?”

  “Yes, my dear, by Miss Prettyman.”

  “But what on earth for? I mean, why should she bother to do that?”

  Alice turned away and walked over to the window, which overlooked some playing fields and beyond them, a quiet, willow shaded stretch of the river. There was something contemplative in her attitude, which gave me the sinking feeling that she was studying the scene with a view to painting it at some future time, but when she spoke again it was on a brisk, faintly sardonic note:

  “You remind me of one of my patients, Eileen somebody or other she was called. Nice quiet girl, no trouble to anyone, except that she used to waste the nurses’ time. She had this trick, gift you might prefer to call it, of getting them to talk about themselves and there they’d be perched on her bed, pouring it all out, and the rest of the ward in an uproar, for all they cared. She was only in for a week or two, for which I was thankful, but a few years later I found myself standing next to her in a theatre queue. I wouldn’t have recognised her, but she remembered me at once and she told me more about my staff nurse than I’d learnt in five years daily contact.”

  I did not consider that any comment was expected of me, so made none and Alice continued:

  “It may surprise you to learn that Edna and I were the most devoted of sisters until about ten years ago?”

  “Were you? What broke it up?”

  “She was a year or two older than me, but I was acknowledged to be the clever one of the family and Edna never resented that. After all, she was the pretty one, and she was pretty too, in those days. Even though I was in a lower form at school, she used to get me to help her with her homework and when we grew up it had become second nature to her to ask my advice on every subject under the sun, even her boy friends. I didn’t have many of them, didn’t want them either, and I think she valued my detachment, as well as respecting my opinions. There was never any jealousy on either side.”

  Alice paused here, in the manner of one reviewing the past and considering whether her present assessment of it was correct, and I repeated my question:

  “Why did things change? Was it because of her marriage?”

  “Not her first marriage, no. Curiously enough, things went on just the same after that. Jack, that was her first husband, and I hit it off very well and he didn’t seem to mind at all that she wanted to include me in so many of their activities. We even used to go on holiday together. They didn’t have any children, of course. That might have made a difference, but then again it might not. I think Jack and I both knew, dearly though we loved her, that Edna could be impatient and impetuous at times and apt to become self-pitying over the most trifling grievances. I think she might have made a poor job of bringing up children, if she’d been left to it on her own. That we shall never know, but still, as I say, our threesome lasted all through her first marriage and when Jack died I was the only one she could bear to have near her. She was very sorry for herself then, couldn’t believe that God could be so cruel, and as a result she became more dependent on me than ever. It got to the point where her demands were beginning to interfere with my work and, not only that, I couldn’t help seeing that I was doing her more harm than good by constantly propping her up, until she was incapable of standing on her own feet. It seems funny, looking back on it and remembering what a job I had persuading her to go on that cruise. I almost had to carry her on board; and three weeks later, when she came home, she hardly bothered to let me know.”

  “Having met husband number two under the Grecian stars?”

  Alice smiled: “That about sums it up. She was quite girlish and romantic again. I doubt if Mr. Mortimer saw things in exactly the same light, but then I’m told that both his former wives had been vain, frivolous creatures, so perhaps he wasn’t disappointed in her. Can’t have been, since he left her every penny he had. All the same, she was never his wife in the true sense. It was Miss Prettyman who ran the show, just as she always had. And, not content with that, she had to oust me as well.”

  “Meaning that your sister transferred her loyalty?”

  “Loyalty, affection, dependence, the lot; and all in a matter of months. I wouldn’t have minded, at any rate not so badly, if it had been for Edna’s good, but of course it wasn’t. Instead of putting a curb on her weaknesses, Miss Prettyman did her utmost to foster them. She soft soaped her from morning till night, indulged her in every selfish whim that came into her head and never allowed her to do a hand’s turn. And, of course, when Mr. Mortimer died it was all up. Miss Prettyman had thoroughly succeeded in setting Edna against me by then, so she had it all her own way. It was the death of her too, in my opinion.”

  “Oh, surely that’s exaggerating a bit, Miss Dilloway? I can understand your resentment, but after all she was seriously overweight and with high blood pressure, and . . .”

  “Yes, and why was that, I’d like to know? Lolling about all day, never moving a yard on her own two feet, eating little snacks between meals and drinking little nips of champagne whenever she felt depressed or out of sorts. Who wouldn’t be overweight? Who wouldn’t have high blood pressure?”

  Leila appeared in the doorway:

  “Mummie’s going to have high blood pressure if you don’t both come and drink your tea,” she informed us. “She says it’s getting stewed to old rags. I don’t know where she picks up these colourful expressions,” she added, giving my arm a squeeze as she propelled me from the room. “I sometimes suspect her of sneaking down to the Lower School library for an orgy of Dornford Yates.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hearts and hopes were high in the old Methodist Chapel that night, for news had reached us that Mr. Winter was taking up his option to bring the play into London, as soon as a suitable theatre became available, and plans were already in hand for the provincial tour.

  None of this had been beyond our expectations, for we had played to packed chapels ever since opening and all seats for the last three performances had been sold a week in advance. There could be no doubt either that the audiences had enjoyed themselves, but, sadly, even this combination provided no guarantee of security in the chancy world we inhabited and it was a relief to know that for the next few months, at least, we should be sailing through calm waters.

  One small cold draught continued to whistle round some of the dressing rooms, in so far as it was rumoured that there were to be some minor cast changes, but Toby informed me in confidence that he believed that nepotism was still a force in the theatre and that, whatever my shortcomings, I need have no fear that the axe would fall on me.

  “Well, thanks awfully,” I said, “I’m most appreciative. I imagine that’s the kind of thing Shakespeare used to say to Burbage. And talking of these historical figures, Toby, which you are rather more up in than me, do you consider it at all probable that most of the people Richelieu was surrounded by in his lifetime regarded him as a sweet old gentleman, devoted to children and dogs?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t envisage any possibility that all the eminence grise stuff came later? Put about after his death by jealous rivals, wishing to discredit him for posterity?”

  “No.”

  “Are you really applying yourself to these questions, Toby?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not, and yet it is a fact that neither people nor events are always what they seem.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of necessity, one sees them mostly from a single point of view, and not always a first hand one at th
at. Quite often one takes things about them on trust and, where required to, trims one’s personal experience to fit the general picture.”

  “It is the only thing one can do, I suppose.”

  “Without stopping to ask oneself if personal experience really matches up with pre-conceived notions.”

  “Very true! Are we speaking in specific terms, by the way, or just wandering down some little path into abstractville?”

  “I am speaking specifically of two people.”

  “That’s taking on rather a lot, isn’t it, at this hour of the morning?”

  “It can’t be helped. They go together like a horse and carriage and you can’t have one without the other. The question is this: is one right and the other wrong, or are they both half right and half wrong?”

  “I find it terribly difficult to judge,” he admitted, “from the evidence so far before me. It might help, I don’t say it would, but it might help if I knew who we were talking about.”

  “A saint and a villain and I don’t know which is which.”

  Toby sighed: “I hate riddles. I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  “No, stay for just five more minutes. I know I’m not making sense, but it’s only because all my pre-conceived ideas have suddenly been turned upside down and I haven’t got used to it yet. Ever since I first came to stay here, I’ve had two well known, self-evident truths thrust under my nose. One was that Tilly was an angel from heaven, unselfish, uncomplaining and steady as a rock. . . .”

  “And the other?”

  “That Alice was her exact opposite. A disappointed, disagreeable, quarrelsome old gorgon, who went about stirring up trouble in every quarter.”

  “And who is now daring to question these well-known, self-evident truths?”

  “Well, Tara Goodchild for one, I suspect, if we were to ask her. So far as I know, she’s scarcely aware of Tilly’s existence, except as a sort of appendage to Edna, and probably tarred with her brush. Edna, as we all know, was that worst of philistines, the rich woman who wouldn’t contribute a penny for the arts. On the other hand, she obviously regards Alice, who until recently has never had a penny to contribute towards anything, with high favour. . . .”