Deathline

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  ‘Oh.’ This did stop him momentarily in his tracks. ‘How long have you been here?’ He was looking at the suitcase and grocery bags she had dumped in the hall.

  ‘Fifteen minutes? Long enough to be glad I got here when I did. She’s been living on bananas since her cleaner came last week.’

  ‘Then we’d better not stay gossiping here but get her out of the loo so I can check her over.’

  There was nothing for it but to follow him as he headed up the stairs, bag in hand, calling as he went, ‘Mrs Tresikker, it’s Hugh Braddock.’

  Ten minutes later, he closed his bag. ‘You’re a survivor, that’s all: like it or not, Beatrice Tresikker. I’ll see myself out, Miss Wesley, and drop the key back through the letter box. I’m sorry if I startled you.’ He had been aware of her simmering irritation. ‘I thought you were burglars.’

  ‘Oh.’ She had not thought of this and it made her crosser than ever. ‘But what about treatment? What do I do?’

  ‘Bed rest. The pills for pain as before. She knows. And you seem to know the ropes.’

  She thought it grudgingly said, and followed him to the stairhead to ask, ‘And when will you come again?’

  ‘No need. She’ll mend. She’s a great mender, Mrs Tresikker. It’s not a broken hip, just a chipped bone. Nothing to be done but bear it. And now if you’ll excuse me, Miss Wesley, I’ve a partner down with flu and ten more patients to see before surgery.’

  ‘Westley,’ she said, but he was running down the stairs and did not hear, or at least did not answer.

  ‘What a rude man.’ She returned to the bedroom as the front door slammed below.

  ‘Yes, isn’t he? In the good old days we’d have given him a glass of sherry. They are gone for ever, so let’s just have it ourselves.’ But she looked much better, Helen noticed, for the doctor’s brusque ministrations.

  ‘The trouble is, I lose my temper,’ said the old lady surprisingly as Helen poured sherry. ‘Can’t stand stupidity, never could. Braddock may be rude, but he’s not stupid. But those carers he sent in. Well! And I won’t be called “love” either. So they didn’t come back.’

  ‘So what do I call you? If I’m going to stay.’

  ‘I hope you are. You’re not stupid either. Anyone can see that. Having a crisis or something? Yes?’

  ‘Yes. It would suit me very well to stay. At least over Christmas and the millennium. Get you stocked up and sorted out, and then we can think about it?’

  ‘Fine with me.’ Beatrice Tresikker had drunk half her sherry and looked mildly pinker. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘These last months that I’ve been stuck in the house because of this wretched pain, I’ve thought I wanted to die. Told Braddock so, but he wouldn’t help – said he can’t, plague take him. But do you know, when I was lying here all weekend trying to work out how to fill the water jug, I found I want to live. Things to do. Well, there’s the book.’ Her eyes moved to the table covered in folders. ‘Can you type?’

  ‘Yes. What’s the book?’

  ‘I call it A Final Account. One I’ve got to settle. With myself as much as anything. The name Tresikker mean anything to you?’

  ‘No. Should it?’

  ‘I think so. He was a poet. Before the war. Good, he was. But he… what did he do? Wasted it, lost it, they swept him under the carpet. It’s a long story.’ She was beginning to slump down among the pillows.

  ‘We need our lunch,’ said Helen. ‘Soup and toast do you?’

  Three

  By tacit consent, they ate separately, Helen downstairs at the kitchen table with her still unread Independent. ‘You look worn out,’ she said, upstairs again to fetch the tray. ‘Let me settle you for a nap. Loo first?’

  ‘Please.’ They had worked out a technique and it was easier this time.

  While her patient was immured, Helen gave the bed a shake and promised it clean sheets in the morning. She must find the airing cupboard, get her bearings generally. Helping Beatrice Tresikker back from the bathroom, she showed her a little old-fashioned hand bell she had found in a kitchen cupboard. ‘I’m going to unpack and have a bit of a tidy,’ she said. ‘I’ll shut your door so I don’t disturb you; just ring that if you need me. Easier than shouting.’

  ‘You think of everything,’ said Beatrice Tresikker. ‘I’m not much of a hostess, I’m afraid, but at least the spare bed’s made up. Be sure and find everything you need, only please don’t …’ Her eyes were beginning to close. She jerked herself awake. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Something you don’t want me to do.’ Helen had noticed that the old lady sometimes started a sentence and lost her way in it, and had promised herself that she would have a word with Dr Braddock about this, if he ever came back.

  ‘Can’t remember. Don’t work too hard, I expect. You look tired … Been having a hard time, haven’t you? Get a rest …’ Her eyes were closing again.

  Helen put the tray on the table in the hall and shut the bedroom door gently behind her. She paused for a minute, tempted to explore at once, but habit was too strong for her and she took the tray down, stacked the dishes and armed herself with the cleanest duster from the big cupboard beside the larder.

  It was rather daunting to find the closet in the front spare room full of Mrs Tresikker’s ancient evening wear, purple and crimson and dull gold, all smelling mustily of old, old scent. Surely somewhere in the house there must be an empty cupboard where these could hang until she persuaded the old lady to give them away? But the closet in the bedroom behind Mrs Tresikker’s turned out to hold what looked like several generations of cotton dresses in muted greys and mauves and dusky pinks, also smelling faintly of perfumes long ago.

  Hopefully opening another door at the end of the hall, Helen found a spiral stair, and remembered that extraordinary turret. It must be up above the extension that housed the larder, broom cupboard and downstairs lavatory. She felt like someone out of The Arabian Nights as she climbed the twisting stairs, which were far dustier than anything she had seen so far.

  And at the top, what a room. It seemed to consist entirely of windows and bookcases. A wide divan bed under the left-hand window was heaped with brilliant cushions; a leather-topped desk covered in books commanded the view from the central window, while a low mahogany chest of drawers stood in front of the third. A curtained recess beside the door provided the only hanging space, and it was bulging with a man’s clothes, explaining, she thought, the faint suggestion of cigarettes that hung about the room. The air was dead in here, as if it had not been opened up for years. She moved instinctively to throw up the sash of the big central window, then stood there, dumbstruck, gazing at the view. This was why the turret had been built. The extra feet of height gave the windows clearance above the line of hills beyond the town, over fields and woods to a distant silver line that must be the sea.

  This was Mr Tresikker’s room, of course, the poet who had been swept under the carpet. What an odd phrase to use of one’s husband. And what had happened to him? The books on the desk were almost all of poetry: Eliot and Yeats, Byron and Shelley and Keats; a battered old Oxford Book of Metaphysical Verse. Nothing, so far as she could see, by Tresikker. But on the centre of the desk lay a folder with the initials P. T. ornately inscribed in old-fashioned pen and ink. She must not open it. She knew now that she ought not to be here. This was a shrine, not a room, and she was doing just what Beatrice Tresikker had started to forbid. It was obvious now that no one had been up here since the old lady had become bedridden. How long ago? Anyway, short of a total clear out, there was nowhere here to hang anything. She would just have to manage in her own room as best she could. Lucky she had brought so little.

  The window must not have been open for years. It was a struggle to close it again and when she finally succeeded, it went down with an eldritch shriek that startled the quiet house. Hurrying guiltily back down the spiral stair she was sorry but not surprised to hear Mrs Tresikker’s bell violently ringing. Opening the bed
room door, she saw the old lady sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking and scarlet with rage.

  ‘I told you not to! Bloody nosy parker!’ And then a stream of language, much of which Helen did not even try to understand. ‘Get out!’ she shouted at last. ‘Go to hell and don’t come back!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It sounded hopelessly inadequate. ‘But you didn’t tell me not to, you know. I think perhaps you started to and then forgot what you were going to say.’

  ‘Blame it on me, would you? Pretend I’m off my head? Bloody, sanctimonious, interfering …’ and another string of expletives that Helen tried not to hear. Her first instinct was to turn and run, leaving the old lady alone to simmer down, but she did not dare risk it. If Beatrice Tresikker were to work herself up to a stroke she would never forgive herself. She stood there silently and let it wash over her then, when the old woman paused at last for breath, she said, quite quietly, ‘Please stop. I’ve said I’m sorry. I really didn’t know. I won’t do it again. And you’re doing yourself harm.’

  ‘Why not, if I like?’ asked Beatrice Tresikker, suddenly reasonable. ‘I’ve been wanting to die, ever since I’ve been so helpless, so hurting, but nobody would help. Bloody pro-life do-gooders. Are you one of them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Helen said slowly. ‘I haven’t thought about it much.’ Which was not true. She remembered that moment by the dark Thames, only yesterday. And there had been times, too, when she thought that if her mother had asked her to, she might have helped her find a way out of the life that she found entirely wretched.

  ‘Well, think now,’ said Beatrice Tresikker. ‘Because that’s part of any deal, any arrangement you and I might make. If you’re still prepared to, after finding out what an old harridan I am.’

  Somewhere between boast and apology, it was not quite a question, but Helen chose to answer it. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘As soon as I saw the room I knew I ought not to be there. I really am sorry.’ So many questions. Which did she dare ask? ‘Was it long ago?’ she ventured.

  ‘That he left me? Years and endless years. For a long time he came and went, called me his lodestar, his heart’s centre, said he must go away but would always come back. And he loved the house, that room, that view, he could write there. I kept it always ready for him. When things didn’t work out for him, he came back to me, and I comforted him. But he had to follow his muse. He sent me postcards – from Spain, from Mexico, from India … He was writing a philosophical epic; he used to scribble a few lines on the postcards. I’ve got them all, of course. And then they stopped coming. He stopped coming … It took me a while to realize. But if he’d died, I’d have heard, surely?’

  How to put the question tactfully? Helen took the plunge. ‘Had he published much? I have to admit that I don’t know the name.’

  ‘Before your time … He was older than me, had a great success in the thirties, when he came down from Cambridge … Lots of good friends… Older, mostly … The Woolfs took him under their wing a bit…He had poems in all the right places, but no collection… Everybody loved him… He made you feel you were the most important person in the world … And then the war came, everything changed, and afterwards they all turned against him, ganged up on him. Writers can be very cruel to each other… red in tooth and claw…’ She was dwindling off into sleep, worn out by her fit of rage. Helen pulled the duvet up around her shoulders and crept out of the room to unpack, wondering a great deal about the vanished poet.

  It was getting dark already. Too late now to go and check out the shops, and besides, she did not much like the idea of leaving Beatrice Tresikker alone after that outburst. Instead, she went downstairs and applied her mind to the kitchen, and lists. The house really was out of everything, and she wished passionately that she had a car. Even with taxis, she was going to be hard pushed to get things under control before Christmas. Especially as she really did not wish to leave Beatrice Tresikker alone for long. The bell, tinkled rather feebly this time, confirmed this instinct.

  ‘You’ve not gone?’ Beatrice Tresikker greeted her. ‘I was afraid you might have.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t! I bet you need the loo.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  There is something very friendly about helping and being helped. ‘I was foul,’ said Beatrice, back in bed. ‘I’m sorry. It gets to be too much for me, sometimes, all the misery, and no one to talk to. And then I get someone, and look what I do! It would have served me right if you’d gone.’

  ‘But I’m staying,’ said Helen. ‘Do you fancy a glass of sherry now, and then early supper and bed?’

  ‘I certainly do. I seem to want to sleep all the time.’

  ‘It’s what you need, I’m sure.’ And to talk, she thought, pouring the sherry. ‘Tell me more about your husband. How did you meet him?’

  ‘So long ago.’ She reached out a shaking hand for her glass. ‘He came on a lecture tour when I was at Vassar. Well, poetry reading, really. He read the first bits of his epic. I thought it was tremendous.’ She stopped, gazing back at that vanished past.

  ‘Vassar! You’re American?’ It explained that faint hint of an accent.

  ‘Was American. I gave it up when I married Paul. When the war broke out. We were down here by then. I’d bought this house to give him some space, and be near the Woolfs. He loved giving parties, poetry readings, getting people together. And he could write in the turret room. It was perfect. No need to be married – Paul said it was old fashioned, barbaric. But then the war broke out and the embassy started badgering me, telling me to go home, so we solved the problem by nipping off to the registrar and making me British. It worked then. Citizenship at a stroke. Such a happy day; the Woolfs were our witnesses. And then it all went wrong.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Paul said he couldn’t fight, have any part in the war. Said it wasn’t a poet’s job. He stuck to it, too, through thick and thin. The authorities gave him a hard time. Harder, I always thought, because his friends had shot off to the States. Auden and Isherwood, comfortable as you please.’

  ‘I’m surprised you two didn’t go too. With your family there?’ She made it a question.

  ‘Family! We’d had enough of them. All my family had was money. No love. A great barn of a mansion on the upper Hudson River. Van Guelder, father was, a diamond family from Amsterdam, went to the States and got richer. Mother was from South Carolina, hated the whole business. Bored to tears up there, and when she had us twins it pushed her over the edge. She was off her head for a while.’

  ‘Twins?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? Twin girls. Not identical, thank God, but I was the inferior copy. Benedicta was a beauty, like Mother. I missed out all along the line.’

  ‘Benedicta?’

  ‘Father wanted a boy, better still, two. We were a bitter disappointment. When he saw what he’d got he fetched in a whole fleet of what you’d call carers these days and left us to them. Mother with nurses in one wing, us growing up, fighting like cats in the other, while he lived in the New York house and made more money. The thing was, Ben had Mother’s looks but I had Father’s brains. I made him send me to Vassar. He didn’t like me much, but he was a fair-minded man, mostly. He saw my point, when I made it. I was doing well there, enjoying it, when I met Paul.’ She handed her glass to Helen who refilled it.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Love at first sight. Crazy. Wonderful. I went up after the reading and told him how much I liked his poetry. He looked at me. I looked at him. That was it. Lord, it was mad. We were mad. It was 1938, the summer of my final year. I just cut and ran and went on the tour with him. Wonderful days. There really are times you know are the happiest days of your life. We knew. He was on his way west: Chicago, Minneapolis, the coast. Hotels booked all the way, of course. We just shared. The trains were more of a problem, but that’s where my money came in.’

  ‘What did your parents say?’

  ‘Mother didn’t give a damn. She was busy w
ith Ben’s engagement party. Ben had done the right thing, Ben always did. She had found herself a third generation financier from Boston and Mother was in trousseau heaven. All she said when I phoned her from Chicago was that I had better bring my poet to the engagement party. Father was a bit more difficult, but there wasn’t much he could do really. He’d always thought going to Vassar was idiotic, so why should he care that I didn’t finish? And he’d settled money on Ben and me years before, for tax reasons, so that was no problem. Oh, how we lived, Paul and I. I remember, in San Francisco …’ The glass was tilting in her hand and Helen got up and took it gently from her as she drifted off to sleep.

  She looked immensely old, skeleton bones showing through brown skin, but Helen also thought that she looked a little better, more relaxed. Had that furious outburst done her good? Here was another question for Dr Braddock, if he ever came back. Perhaps she should go and see him? If she stayed. She looked at her watch: seven o’clock. She picked up the glasses and went down to bless the microwave and make the kind of little supper of fish fillets and caper sauce that her mother had liked. Peas, also from the deep freeze, a spoon to make eating easier, and fresh bread and butter. She wished now that she had thought to look for fruit in Mr Patel’s crowded little shop, but remembered that she had tucked an unopened packet of dates into the top of her case, refusing to leave them for the Dobsons to eat. She put the fish into a slow oven for its few minutes of blending and ran upstairs to wake Mrs Tresikker.

  ‘You’re real?’ The old lady had been in a deep sleep. ‘I thought you were a dream. I dreamt I was angry with someone, but I’m not, am I?’

  ‘Of course you’re not, Mrs Tresikker.’

  ‘Oh, Beatrice, please. Easier now than later, don’t you think? And you’re … ?’

  ‘Helen,’ said Helen, and thought something had been tacitly settled. ‘Your supper’s ready, Beatrice. Loo first?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ There was a comfortable feeling between them of a rhythm establishing itself.