by Nina Bawden
“That’s what they all said,” she said angrily. “Just a lot of nonsense. Doctors! Just a lot of silly know-nothings, that’s what they are. And his mother, if you’ll excuse my saying so … acting no better. Psychology they call it!”
“You aren’t suggesting that someone was trying to poison the child?” I said.
She said uneasily, “Well, someone did, didn’t they? But I didn’t mean that. I only meant someone had put it into his poor little head in the first place. If he’d been making it up, it would have started gradual like. He’d have known it wasn’t true at first and that it was only a game. Then he might have started to believe it. But it didn’t start like that. It was just after Christmas: he’d been in bed with sickness and a bad stomach, and then after he got up, he came down into my kitchen as white as paint and said to me, ‘Dorry, do you mind if I have my dinner with you? Because I think someone’s trying to kill me.’ He wouldn’t say anything else. I told him not to be a silly boy but he didn’t take any notice. Really frightened, he was. I thought at the time someone had been having a joke with him, though who could think it was funny to scare a child out of his wits is something I can’t tell you. I only know what happened. I spoke to his mother and she seemed a bit upset and took him to a doctor. When she came back, she said they’d decided not to take any notice of him, and that, if I didn’t mind, perhaps he could have his meals with me until he’d forgotten about it. I didn’t mind, why should I? But he didn’t forget about it. Every meal-time he’d say, ‘You cooked this, didn’t you, Dorry?’ And if I hadn’t … sometimes his mother did a bit of cooking … he wouldn’t eat it. Wouldn’t eat what his own mother had made, mind you! I thought he’d be best away at school … Master Henry thought so too … but his mother didn’t see it that way. Said he was too delicate; that he had fits or something. Though I’ve never seen any signs of fits, and I’d have thought he’d have been better at school even if he did catch a cold or two, than in a house where he thought everyone was trying to put something in his food. Poor little lamb …”
She stood there, breathing indignantly. I think she had wanted to say all this to someone for a long time, but hadn’t been able to.
I said, “When he was ill after Christmas, was it just an ordinary upset? Eating too many rich things?”
She looked puzzled. “I don’t rightly know,” she said. “I didn’t have much to do with him. He’d been in and out of the kitchen ever since he came, of course, but he spent most of the time out on the farm with Master Henry. Not like afterwards. When he was ill, his mother looked after him mostly. She did say he was awfully sick, and had pains in his inside, and Dr. Lewis came down and poked him about and said could I remember what he’d been eating. I sent him about his business pretty sharp. My food was good and wholesome, I said, and no one had ever complained before. As far as I knew he’d had just what everyone else had had. I wasn’t here on Boxing Day, so what he had then I can’t say. I went to my sister on Christmas night and stayed there the next day.”
Dorry looked at me and went brick red. “Look here, sir,” she said, “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like this by rights, but I’ve been that worried, and you’ve been so kind with Master Sebastian that I felt I could take the liberty.”
“It’s no liberty, Dorry,” I said. “We should all be very grateful to you.”
She didn’t smile, she just looked grim. I don’t think she cared for compliments much.
Just then the telephone rang in the hall, and Dorry left the room to answer it.
“No, he’s not here,” I heard her say. “Who is it, please?”
Then her voice changed. She said, “Oh, I see. I’ll try and find him, Dr. Lewis.”
I got up and went out into the hall and took the telephone from her.
Dr. Lewis wouldn’t tell me what it was all about at first, but when I said it would take about twenty minutes to fetch Henry he changed his mind. He had a rather irritating Welsh voice, and he was long-winded and technical. I didn’t understand quite all he said but I took in enough. After I’d put the receiver back in its cradle, I stood and looked at it for a moment. I was aware of Dorry beside me, waiting, and I tried to smile at her.
“It’s all right, Dorry,” I said. “I’ll go and find him myself.”
I put on my coat and eased my feet into my wet shoes. I found myself cursing for not bringing a spare pair, and I rooted about in the boot cupboard for a pair of Henry’s before I remembered that his feet were about two sizes smaller than mine. So I squelched in my sopping shoes down the lane to the farm.
Henry had made quite a sizeable pile of logs, but he was still working the saw, watching it, absorbed, as if his life depended on it. When I came up he glanced at me abstractedly.
I said, “There’s been a call from the hospital.”
He screwed up his face at me and looked inquiring.
I shouted, “For God’s sake stop the blasted thing.”
He did something and the saw slowed down and stopped. He faced me, and it seemed to me that he was bracing himself to hear something that he had been expecting.
“They’ve done the p.m.,” I said. “They found carbon monoxide in the blood.”
He looked dazed. “Carbon monoxide?” he repeated.
I nodded. He seemed to be struggling with himself.
“That’s poison, isn’t it?” he said.
“Damn you, of course it’s poison,” I said. “Don’t you see?”
“But she died from exposure,” he said. “How could she have got to the quarry? And she was alive when she was there. Her fingers were holding bits of twig and earth. She couldn’t have got hold of them if she was dead.” His mouth was twitching with disgust.
I said, “She may not have had a lethal dose. Just enough to make her dizzy and faint.”
“So she might have fallen down the quarry and felt too ill to get out?” he said, looking at me as if he didn’t really see me at all.
“That’s about the size of it,” I said. “It depends on how much she had, of course. Lewis said that some of the stuff would have been eliminated before she died. It disappears from the blood quite fast if you’re alive.”
He said, “The car. She took the car.”
There was a bench behind me, stacked with bags of pig meal. I sat down. I felt suddenly that I needed, to.
Henry was looking at the grey sky. He looked like a sleep-walker. He said:
“There might have been a defect in the exhaust pipe. That does happen sometimes. I read about a case in the paper …”
Henry’s voice was getting on my nerves. He sounded so slow and fumbling and stupid. I shouted at him.
“For God’s sake,” I said, “for God’s sake.”
He looked at me, startled. “I say, old chap, did I say something wrong?” he said. “I was only saying about the exhaust pipe … it’s quite possible …”
I got up.
“Yes,” I said. “The exhaust pipe. You’d better tell it to the police. It’s one line, I suppose.”
Chapter Six
I sat on the end of Sebastian’s bed. He looked small and brittle, and there was a yellow line round his mouth, but he didn’t look frightened any more.
He said, “They’ve taken her away, haven’t they?”
“Yes,” I said.
He gave a long sigh, and swirled the milk round in his mug.
I said, “You’ve got to drink up your milk. Otherwise I shall have to go away.”
He gave me a shy smile. “If I drink up my milk,” he said, “will you tell me something?”
“I expect so,” I said.
He drank up his milk and put the mug on the table by his bed. Then he said:
“Did they cut her open?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What did they do that for?”
“They wanted to find out why she died,” I said. He looked puzzled, and I added, “Something went wrong with the car, and she breathed in some gas that made her dizzy so that she c
ouldn’t get home.”
“Oh,” he said, and he gave me an odd look. “Someone could have made her smell the gas, couldn’t they?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, and, mercifully, he seemed satisfied. He wriggled back against the pillows and said:
“Will you read me some Arthur Ransome, please?”
I said, “Will you tell me something first? Were you afraid of Aunt Venetia?”
He glanced at me quickly and his mouth quivered a little. “No,” he said, “I’m not afraid of anyone.”
I tried another line. “Look, old chap,” I said. “You remember you told me someone was trying to poison you. It wasn’t a game, was it?”
He flushed indignantly. “Of course it wasn’t a game,” he said. “I wouldn’t play a silly game like that. There’s no fun in not eating things. I used to play that I was going to be kidnapped, and that was a game. It was a jolly good game.”
“Did you find out for yourself, then?” I asked. “Or did someone else tell you that you weren’t to eat anything, except things that Dorry had cooked?”
He looked sullen. His mouth shut in a thin, obstinate line.
I went on, “When you were sick, at Christmas,” I said, “someone told you that there was something in what you had eaten.”
“I shan’t tell,” he muttered. “I promised I wouldn’t. You have to keep promises.”
“All right,” I said. He had told me what I wanted. “Where is this Arthur Ransome?”
His face brightened, and became a child’s face again. “Here it is,” he said, and gave me Swallows and Amazons.
I read till my voice was hoarse, but whenever I stopped, he kicked me with his feet and said, “Go on.”
At last Dorry appeared in the doorway and said he must go to sleep. She looked as if she had been crying, and for a moment I thought that Sebastian would say something about it, but he looked at her and said, more meekly than I had expected:
“All right, Dorry. Can I have the end of this chapter?”
She nodded, and went away.
I finished the chapter with relief, and said, “You must go to sleep now.”
I took away his pillows, and he lay down willingly enough, but when I put my hand to the light switch he said in a voice of pure terror:
“Please don’t put out the light.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, and came back to the bed. He was lying straight beneath the bedclothes, and his body was trembling.
“You’re all right now, you know,” I said. “You’re quite safe.”
He relaxed a little, and tried to smile at me.
“Cross your heart?” he said.
“Cross my heart.” I licked my finger and drew it across my throat, making the worst kind of face I knew. He giggled, and smiled again, without any restraint.
“All right,” he said.
“All the same,” I said. “I won’t turn it off till you’re asleep. Do you want Mummy to come and say good night?”
He shook his head, and I left him. I went to my room and changed my clothes. I felt very tired, and I wanted a drink more than anything in the world. I don’t drink much in the ordinary way; in fact the only time I drink seriously is before I go to bed, when I like brandy. Only now I hadn’t got my flask. I wondered when I should get it back. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted a drink; my mouth was dry and the thought of brandy brought little bubbles of saliva on to my tongue. I didn’t like to go downstairs and ask for a drink, so I went along to Venetia’s room.
It had been cleaned and swept and the curtains drawn back. The windows were black and cold-looking when I switched on the light. I knew where to look. Venetia had a flask like mine; we had always laughed about our secret drinking, and she had said that she always kept hers in her hat-box so that the maids wouldn’t be shocked by the evidence of her vicious habits.
The hat-box was on a shelf inside the wardrobe. I pulled it down and opened the lid. Under the hats, under a layer of tissue paper, I found the flask. I opened the top and sniffed at the brandy. The flask was half full, and I tipped it to my mouth and knocked it back. It was good, unusually good. And good brandy is hard to come by. I had managed to get a couple of bottles in France; I had meant one of them for Venetia, but I had left it behind in London. I had filled my flask from the other before I left. Then my pulse jumped to about twice the pace, and I looked more closely at the flask. Venetia had bought them together and they were identical, but I had dropped mine on a stone floor a little while after she had given it me, and dented it slightly in the side. The flask I was holding had a dent in the same place. I looked at it for a moment or two, and then I packed it away in the hat-box.
I went back to Sebastian. He was fast asleep; in his arms he clutched an array of tiny motor cars. I thought he oughtn’t to have them in bed, so I tried to take them away from him gently, but he stirred in his sleep and clutched them tighter. I hadn’t the heart to disturb him. For some reason or other a poem came into my head that I had long forgotten. It may have been that, or it may have been the brandy, but I suddenly felt warm, and rather sentimental about the little wretch. As I went out, I left the light on. I felt he should have it, if it gave him comfort.
When I went down Brigid was in the drawing-room alone. She said, “We’re not having a proper dinner to-night, Paul. Just sandwiches and coffee. I felt that … I mean none of us want much to eat, do we?”
She looked very tired, but in a way she seemed calmer, more content than I had ever seen her. I supposed that now Henry was hers she felt secure. She fussed over me, handing me sandwiches and pouring out coffee in a very matronly way.
I didn’t quite see why we couldn’t have a proper dinner; I was very hungry. But the sandwiches had ham in them, and I hadn’t tasted ham for a long time, so I didn’t argue about it. I was in the middle of my fourth sandwich and beginning to feel that I could now show signs of proper feeling and say I couldn’t eat any more, when Henry came in.
He was white, and drawn round the mouth in a way that made him look much older. He said:
“The police are coming to-night.”
Brigid looked at him with her mouth open; she held the coffee pot suspended high above the tray.
“But, Henry,” she said, “not to-night. Surely not to-night.”
He didn’t say anything. He sat down and stared in front of him, his hands hanging loosely between his knees. Then he made an effort and smiled at her.
“Don’t worry, Biddy,” he said. “They only want to ask a few routine questions. I don’t suppose they will keep us long.”
No one said anything for a little while. Henry looked like a man dreaming. He took a sip of his coffee and then left it. Brigid kept darting anxious glances at him, but, oddly, she didn’t try to persuade him to eat. Once or twice she pushed the plate of sandwiches towards him with a timid, fluttering movement, but when he took no notice she gave it up and sat twisting her handkerchief in her hands, tying knots and untying them again. At last she said:
“What did happen to Venetia, Henry? About the stuff they found in her body? I didn’t understand …”
Henry didn’t answer, so I explained to her about the carbon monoxide. How they had found about thirty per cent saturation of the blood. It wasn’t a lethal dose, but if she had lived for some time after she had inhaled the gas a good deal of it would have been expelled from her blood before she died. After her death it would be eliminated much more slowly.
“Then the carbon monoxide couldn’t have killed her,” said Brigid. She flushed vividly then, as though she realised what she had said, and added hastily, “I mean, of course, it didn’t kill her, or she wouldn’t have been able to get as far as the quarry. Besides … hadn’t she tried to get out?”
Henry said, “I looked it up. There’s a medical book in the library … I’d never looked at it before. One of those encyclopedia things. My mother bought it; she used to read it sometimes and imagine she’d got all the diseases. I looked up car
bon monoxide poisoning and it said that about half the traces disappear from the blood during the first hour if the chap’s been taken into the fresh air. I reckoned that it must have taken Venetia about half an hour to walk to the quarry: the snow was pretty thick and it was hard going. Of course it would have taken longer if she was dizzy with the gas. So she must have had a good deal more of the stuff, than they found. About forty or even fifty per cent saturation of the blood. And that’s what I don’t understand. Because this book says that if you’ve had that much carbon monoxide you may not be dead, but you’re in a pretty bad way.” He looked at Brigid and me through his lashes, which were absurdly long. He looked like a puzzled child.
“So you see,” he said. “I don’t see how she could have walked to the quarry at all.”
I don’t think he realised what he was saying. Brigid said “Henry” in a frightened voice, but he just looked at her in a slow, bewildered way, his brows frowning.
“Henry,” said Brigid again. She went over to him and took his hand. “Henry darling,” she said, and her voice was shaking, “darling, you mustn’t say things like that. Or think like that. Those books aren’t accurate, and only doctors really understand that sort of thing.…” Her voice died away and she turned to me, desperate appeal in her eyes. “Paul,” she said, “tell him he mustn’t talk like this. The police …” I did my best for her.
“Henry, old chap,” I said, trying to sound amused, and easy in my mind. “You know it isn’t as simple as all that. That encyclopædia thing isn’t a medical book. I know it tells you what to do if you cut your finger, and it’s probably quite sound on that sort of thing. But the other stuff … the incurable diseases and the poisons … that isn’t meant to be watertight. The ordinary man sends for a doctor when really important things happen, so the spicy bits are just put in for sensational reading. I don’t expect the percentages that you’re worrying about are accurate at all. You leave it to the doctors, and stop worrying about it.”
He looked at me in a dim sort of way as though he hadn’t taken it in at all. I was pretty irritated with him, but I felt sorry for Brigid, so I went on, rather loudly: