by Ngaio Marsh
When he arrived at the top it was to discover Nurse Kettle seated by the roadside in gloomy contemplation of her bicycle which stood upside down on its saddle and handlebars.
‘Hallo, Commander,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘I’ve got a puncture.’
‘Evening. Really? Bore for you,’ Syce shot out at her.
‘I can’t make up me great mind to push her the three miles to Chyning so I’m going to have a shot at running repairs. Pumping’s no good,’ said Nurse Kettle.
She had opened a tool kit and was looking dubiously at its contents. Syce hung off and on, and watched her make a pass with a lever at her tyre.
‘Not like that,’ he shouted when he could no longer endure it. ‘Great grief, you’ll get nowhere that fashion.’
‘I believe you.’
‘And in any case, you’ll want a bucket of water to find the puncture.’ She looked helplessly at him. ‘Here!’ he mumbled. ‘Give it here.’
He righted the bicycle and with a further, completely inaudible remark began to wheel it down his drive. Nurse Kettle gathered up her tool kit and followed. A look strangely compounded of compassion and amusement had settled on her face.
Commander Syce wheeled the bicycle into a gardener’s shed and without the slightest attempt at any further conversation set about the removal of the tyre. Nurse Kettle hitched herself up on a bench and watched him. Presently she began to talk.
‘I am obliged to you. I’ve had a bit of a day. Epidemic in the village, odd cases all over the place and then this happens. There! Aren’t you neat-fingered. I looked in at Nunspardon this evening,’ she continued. ‘Lady Lacklander’s got a Toe and Dr Mark arranged for me to do the fomentations.’
Commander Syce made an inarticulate noise.
‘If you ask me the new baronet’s feeling his responsibilities. Came in just as I was leaving. Very bad colour and jumpy,’ Nurse Kettle gossiped cosily. She swung her short legs and interrupted herself from time to time to admire Syce’s handiwork. ‘Pity!’ she thought. ‘Shaky hands. Alcoholic skin. Nice chap, too. Pity!’
He repaired the puncture and replaced the tube and tyre. When he had finished and made as if to stand up, he gave a sharp cry of pain, clapped his hands to the small of his back and sank down again on his knees.
‘Hal-lo!’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. ‘What’s all this? ’Bago?’
Commander Syce swore under his breath. Between clenched teeth he implored her to go away. ‘Most frightfully sorry,’ he groaned. ‘Ask you to excuse me. Ach!’
It was now that Nurse Kettle showed the quality that caused people to prefer her to grander and more up-to-date nurses. She exuded dependability, resourcefulness and authority. Even the common and pitilessly breezy flavour of her remarks was comfortable. To Commander Syce’s conjurations to leave him alone followed in the extremity of his pain by furious oaths, she paid no attention. She went down on all-fours beside him, enticed and aided him towards the bench, encouraged him to use it and her own person as aids to rising and finally had him, though almost bent double, on his feet. She helped him into his house and lowered him down on a sofa in a dismal drawing-room.
‘Down-a-bumps,’ she said. Sweating and gasping, he reclined there and glared at her. ‘Now, what are we going to do about you, I wonder? Did I or did I not see a rug in the hall? Wait a bit.’
She went out and came back with a rug. She called him ‘dear’ and, taking his pain seriously, covered him up, went out again and returned with a glass of water. ‘Making myself at home, I suppose you’re thinking. Here’s a couple of aspirins to go on with,’ said Nurse Kettle.
He took them without looking at her. ‘Please don’t trouble,’ he groaned. ‘Thank you. Under my own steam.’ She gave him a look and went out again.
In her absence, he attempted to get up but was galvanized with a monstrous jab of lumbago and subsided in agony. He began to think she had gone for good and to wonder how he was to support life while the attack lasted, when he heard her moving about in some remote part of the house. In a moment she came in with two hot-water bags.
‘At this stage,’ she said, ‘heat’s the ticket.’
‘Where did you get those things?’
‘Borrowed ‘em from the Cartarettes.’
‘My God!’
She laid them against his back.
‘Dr Mark’s coming to look at you,’ she said.
‘My God!’
‘He was at the Cartarettes and if you ask me there’s going to be some news from that quarter before any of us are much older. At least,’ Nurse Kettle added rather vexedly, ‘I would have said so, if it hadn’t been for them all looking a bit put out.’ To his horror she began to take off his shoes.
‘With a yo-heave-ho,’ said Nurse Kettle out of compliment to the navy. ‘Aspirin doing its stuff?’
‘I – I think so. I do beg –’
‘I suppose your bedroom’s upstairs?’
‘I do BEG –’
‘We’ll see what the doctor says, but I’d suggest you doss down in the housekeeper’s room to save the stairs. I mean to say,’ Nurse Kettle added with a hearty laugh, ‘always provided there’s no housekeeper.’
She looked into his face so good-humouredly and with such an air of believing him to be glad of her help that he found himself accepting it.
‘Like a cup of tea?’ She asked.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Well, it won’t be anything stronger unless the doctor says so.’
He reddened, caught her eye and grinned.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘that’s better.’
‘I’m really ashamed to trouble you so much.’
‘I might have said the same about my bike, mightn’t I? There’s the doctor.’
She bustled out again and came back with Mark Lacklander.
Mark, who was a good deal paler than his patient, took a crisp line with Syce’s expostulations.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I dare say I’m entirely extraneous. This isn’t a professional visit if you’d rather not.’
‘Great grief, my dear chap, I don’t mean that. Only too grateful but … I mean … busy man … right itself …’
‘Well, suppose I take a look-see,’ Mark suggested. ‘We won’t move you.’
The examination was brief. ‘If the lumbago doesn’t clear up we can do something a bit more drastic,’ Mark said, ‘but in the meantime Nurse Kettle’ll get you to bed …’
‘Good God!’
‘… and look in again tomorrow morning. So will I. you’ll need one or two things. I’ll ring up the hospital and get them sent out at once. All right?’
‘Thank you. Thank you. You don’t,’ said Syce to his own surprise, ‘look terribly fit yourself. Sorry to have dragged you in.’
‘That’s all right. We’ll bring your bed in here and put it near the telephone. Ring up if you’re in difficulties. By the way, Mrs Cartarette offered –’
‘No!’ shouted Commander Syce, and turned purple.
‘… to send in meals,’ Mark added. ‘But of course you may be up and about again tomorrow. In the meantime I think we can safely leave you to Nurse Kettle. Goodnight.’
When he had gone Nurse Kettle said cheerfully: ‘You’ll have to put up with me, it seems, if you don’t want lovely ladies all round you. Now we’ll get you washed up and settled for the night.’
Half an hour later when he was propped up in bed with a cup of hot milk and a plate of bread-and-butter, and a lamp within easy reach, Nurse Kettle looked down at him with her quizzical air.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I shall now, as they say, love you and leave you. Be good and if you can’t be good be careful.’
‘Thank you,’ gabbled Commander Syce, nervously. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
She had plodded over to the door before his voice arrested her. ‘I – ah … I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that you are familiar with Aubrey’s Brief Lives, are you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Who was he when
he was at home?’
‘He wrote a Brief Life of a man called Sir Jonas Moore. It begins: ‘Sciatica he cured it, by boyling his buttocks.’ I’m glad, at least, you don’t propose to try that remedy.’
‘Well!’ cried Nurse Kettle delightedly. ‘You are coming out of your shell to be sure. Nighty-bye.’
III
During the next three days Nurse Kettle, pedalling about her duties, had occasion to notice, and she was sharp in such matters, that something untoward was going on in the district. Wherever she went, whether it was to attend upon Lady Lacklander’s toe, or upon the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, or upon Commander Syce’s strangely persistent lumbago, she felt a kind of heightened tension in the behaviour of her patients and also in the behaviour of young Dr Mark Lacklander. Rose Cartarette, when she encountered her in the garden, was white and jumpy, the Colonel looked strained and Mrs Cartarette singularly excited.
‘Kettle,’ Lady Lacklander said, on Wednesday, wincing a little as she endured the approach of a fomentation to her toe, ‘have you got the cure for a bad conscience?’
Nurse Kettle did not resent being addressed in this restoration-comedy fashion by Lady Lacklander who had known her for some twenty years and used the form with an intimate and even an affectionate air much prized by Nurse Kettle.
‘Ah,’ said the latter, ‘there’s no mixture-as-before for that sort of trouble.’
‘No. How long,’ Lady Lacklander went on, ‘have you been looking after us in Swevenings, Kettle?’
‘Thirty years if you count five in the hospital at Chyning.’
‘Twenty-five years of fomentations, enemas, slappings and thumpings,’ mused Lady Lacklander. ‘And I suppose you’ve learnt quite a lot about us in that time. There’s nothing like illness to reveal character and there’s nothing like a love affair,’ she added unexpectedly, ‘to disguise it. This is agony,’ she ended mildly, referring to the fomentation.
‘Stick it if you can, dear,’ Nurse Kettle advised, and Lady Lacklander for her part did not object to being addressed as ‘dear’ by Nurse Kettle, who continued: ‘How do you mean I wonder about love disguising character?’
‘When people are in love,’ Lady Lacklander said, with a little scream as a new fomentation was applied, ‘they instinctively present themselves to each other in their most favourable light. They assume pleasing characteristics as unconsciously as a cock pheasant puts on his spring plumage. They display such virtues as magnanimity, charitableness and modesty and wait for them to be admired. They develop a positive genius for suppressing their least attractive points. They can’t help it, you know, Kettle. It’s just the behaviourism of courtship.’
‘Fancy.’
‘Now don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about because you most certainly do. You think straight and that’s more than anybody else seems to be capable of doing in Swevenings. You’re a gossip, of course,’ Lady Lacklander added, ‘but I don’t think you’re a malicious gossip, are you?’
‘Certainly not. The idea!’
‘No. Tell me, now, without any frills, what do you think of us.’
‘Meaning, I take it,’ Nurse Kettle returned, ‘the aristocracy?’
‘Meaning exactly that. Do you,’ asked Lady Lacklander with relish, ‘find us effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous?’
‘No,’ said Nurse Kettle stoutly, ‘I don’t.’
‘Some of us are, you know.’
Nurse Kettle squatted back on her haunches, retaining a firm grip on Lady Lacklander’s little heel. ‘It’s not the people so much as the idea,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Lady Lacklander, ‘you’re an Elizabethan, Kettle. You believe in degree. You’re a female Ulysses, old girl. But degree is now dependent upon behaviour, I’d have you know.’
Nurse Kettle gave a jolly laugh and said she didn’t know what that meant. Lady Lacklander rejoined that, among other things, it meant that if people fall below something called a certain standard they are asking for trouble. ‘I mean,’ Lady Lacklander went on, scowling with physical pain and mental concentration, ‘I mean we’d better behave ourselves in the admittedly few jobs that by right of heritage used to be ours. I mean, finally, that whether they think we’re rubbish or whether they think we’re not, people still expect that in certain situations we will give certain reactions. Don’t they, Kettle?’
Nurse Kettle said she supposed they did.
‘Not,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘that I give a damn what they think. But still.’
She remained wrapped in moody contemplation while Nurse Kettle completed the treatment and bandaged the toe.
‘In short,’ her formidable patient at last declaimed, ‘we can allow ourselves to be almost anything but shabbily behaved. That we’d better avoid. I’m extremely worried, Kettle.’ Nurse Kettle looked up inquiringly. Tell me, is there any gossip in the village about my grandson? Romantic gossip?’
‘A bit,’ Nurse Kettle said, and after a pause added: ‘It’d be lovely, wouldn’t it? She’s a sweet girl. And an heiress into the bargain.’
‘Umph.’
‘Which is not to be sneezed at nowadays, I suppose. They tell me everything goes to the daughter.’
‘Entailed.’ Lady Lacklander said: ‘Mark, of course, gets nothing until he succeeds. But it’s not that that bothers me.’
‘Whatever it is, if I were you I should consult Dr Mark, Lady Lacklander. An old head on young shoulders if ever I saw one.’
‘My dear soul, my grandson is, as you have observed, in love. He is therefore, as I have tried to point out, extremely likely to take up a high-falutin attitude. Besides, he’s involved. No, I must take matters into my own hands, Kettle. Into my own hands. You go past Hammer on your way home, don’t you?’
Nurse Kettle said she did.
‘I’ve written a note to Colonel Cartarette. Drop it there like a good creature, will you?’
Nurse Kettle said she would and fetched it from Lady Lacklander’s writing-desk.
‘It’s a pity,’ Lady Lacklander muttered, as Nurse Kettle was about to leave her. ‘It’s a pity poor George is such an ass.’
IV
She considered that George gave only too clear a demonstration of being an ass when she caught a glimpse of him on the following evening. He was playing a round of golf with Mrs Cartarette. George, having attained the tricky age for Lacklanders, had fallen into a muddled, excited dotage upon Kitty Cartarette. She made him feel dangerous and this sensation enchanted him. She told him repeatedly how chivalrous he was and so cast a glow of knight-errantry over impulses that are not usually seen in that light. She allowed him only the most meagre rewards, doling out the lesser stimulants of courtship in positively homeopathic doses. Thus on the Nunspardon golf course, he was allowed to watch, criticize and correct her swing. If his interest in this exercise was far from being purely athletic, Mrs Cartarette gave only the slightest hint that she was aware of the fact and industriously swung and swung again while he fell back to observe, and advanced to adjust, her technique.
Lady Lacklander, tramping down River Path in the cool of the evening with a footman in attendance to carry her sketching impedimenta and her shooting-stick, observed her son and his pupil as it were in pantomime on the second tee. She noticed how George rocked on his feet, with his head on one side while Mrs Cartarette swung, as Lady Lacklander angrily noticed, everything that a woman could swing. Lady Lacklander looked at the two figures with distaste tempered by speculation. ‘Can George,’ she wondered, ‘have some notion of employing the strategy of indirect attack upon Maurice? But no, poor boy, he hasn’t got the brains.’
The two figures disappeared over the crest of the hill and Lady Lacklander plodded heavily on in great distress of mind. Because of her ulcerated toe she wore a pair of her late husband’s shooting-boots. On her head was a battered solar topee of immense antiquity which she found convenient as an eye-shade. For the rest, her vast person was clad in baggy
tweeds and a tent-like blouse. Her hands, as always, were encrusted with diamonds.
She and the footman reached Bottom Bridge, turned left and came to a halt before a group of alders and the prospect of a bend in the stream. The footman, under Lady Lacklander’s direction, set up her easel, filled her water-jar at the stream, placed her camp stool and put her shooting-stick beside it. When she fell back from her work in order to observe it as a whole, Lady Lacklander was in the habit of supporting her bulk upon the shooting-stick.
The footman left her. She would reappear in her own time at Nunspardon and change for dinner at nine o’clock. The footman would return and collect her impedimenta. She fixed her spectacles on her nose, directed at her subject the sort of glance Nurse Kettle often bestowed on a recalcitrant patient, and set to work, massive and purposeful before her easel.
It was at six-thirty that she established herself there, in the meadow on the left bank of the Chyne not far below Bottom Bridge.
At seven, Mr Danberry-Phinn, having assembled his paraphernalia for fishing, set off down Watt’s Hill. He did not continue to Bottom Bridge but turned left, and made for the upper reaches of the Chyne.
At seven, Mark Lacklander, having looked in on a patient in the village, set off on foot along Watt’s Lane. He carried his case of instruments, as he wished to lance the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, and his racket and shoes as he proposed to play tennis with Rose Cartarette. He also hoped to have an extremely serious talk with her father.
At seven, Nurse Kettle, having delivered Lady Lacklander’s note at Hammer, turned in at Commander Syce’s drive and free-wheeled to his front door.
At seven, Sir George Lacklander, finding himself favourably situated in a sheltered position behind a group of trees, embraced Mrs Cartarette with determination, fervour and an ulterior motive.
It was at this hour that the hopes, passions and fears that had slowly mounted in intensity since the death of Sir Harold Lacklander began to gather an emotional momentum and slide towards each other like so many downhill streams, influenced in their courses by accidents and detail, but destined for a common and profound agitation.