The old buzzard was not coming. His devotion to my mother’s frequent calls was one of the beautiful things in life. But beauty must fade, and this was the night to do it.
Finally, I could not wait any longer. I put my hand in my pocket, gripped the bottle and headed for the stairs.
Mrs. Fletcher met me at the top, flitting round like a bird whose worm has been stolen.
“Oh, she’s terrible, just terrible tonight.”
I pushed past her and went into the room.
“Where’s Dr. Snavely,” Mother wanted to know, as though I had somehow hidden him.
“Still at the hospital with Morris Murcheson.”
“Oh, come now, no one really expects me to believe that. That old faker doesn’t have a heart to attack. They’re probably both over at the Chesterton Club playing cards right now.”
“Would you like to call over there and find out?” I asked boldly, fingering the bottle in my pocket.
“Absolutely not! I will not give him the satisfaction of thinking I’m calling all over the county for him.”
She looked at me indignantly, and pouted, “Doesn’t he realize how serious my condition could be?”
“Mother, for God’s sakes. I’m sure he’ll be here first thing in the morning.”
She impaled me with a glance.
“I could be dead by morning. I could be dead now for all he knows. Or cares.”
I could see this was getting nowhere.
I signaled to Mrs. Fletcher that it was time for Mother’s milk. I was un-remarkably calm and controlled. And Mother sensed it.
Tears appeared in her eyes. Her body relaxed. There was no fight now.
“It’s so terrible to get old,” she whined pathetically. “So terrible. And you’ve been such a comfort to me. So unselfish.”
She reached out and took me in her arms, kissing and caressing my face, holding me close to her body. I felt sorry for her. Genuinely sorry. But it was only the knowledge that she would never inflict this on me again that made it bearable.
“Here we are,” chirped Mrs. Fletcher brightly, coming into the room. I thought she was referring to the glass of milk in her hand, until I saw the desiccated Ghost of Medicine Past file in behind her.
“About time,” Mother snapped at him. “Hope we didn’t interrupt a winning streak.”
Snavely smiled cheerily and set his bag on a chair.
I grabbed the milk and nudged Mrs. Fletcher from the room.
Dr. Snavely’s arrival had caught me off guard. I realized how reckless I had been. In the end, it would probably work to my advantage. He could say at the funeral he had thought it was another minor illness. Another false alarm. Maybe he hadn’t taken her complaints seriously enough.
I took the milk back to the kitchen on the pretext of keeping it hot. Mrs. Fletcher returned to the safety of the sitting room and her copy of Locked Doors.
I watched carefully as I dropped each pellet into the glass. If one had killed a child, all twelve should do nicely for Mother.
I watched as they sank slowly below the white surface, dissolving slowly until the spoon detected nothing at the bottom.
I checked again. No telltale sediment. Nothing on the sides. No taste. No smell. And soon, no Mother.
A door banged loudly upstairs. Mother had made short work of Dr. Snavely.
“Well,” he said, arching his scrawny white eyebrows as I met him on the stairs, “she’s having a few extra beats. Nothing serious, mind you. Probably just excitement, but I’ll leave instructions with Mrs. Fletcher just in case.”
“Thanks, that will make me feel a lot better. She just didn’t seem like herself today.”
He looked back at me in momentary disbelief, and then scrambled down the wooden stairs with the nurse in full retreat.
I looked at the glass again. It looked perfectly harmless. There was a stillness in the house, now, broken only by the whispered voices in the foyer.
Mother was still fuming in her bed. “In the morning, I want you to call over to the hospital and see if Dr. Snavely was there or not. I will not be made a fool of.”
“Yes, mother,” I murmured, setting the glass beside the bed.
I started straightening out the blankets and fluffing up the pillows. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her take the glass in hand and bring it closer.
“I might have died,” she said, resting it in her hands for a moment.
I was trying not to look directly at the glass.
“I might have died waiting for that man,” she repeated incredulously. The glass inched closer to her mouth.
“Now don’t think about it. Just try and get a good night’s sleep,” I said, nervously trying to soothe her.
She put the glass down without drinking. “How can I get a good night’s sleep knowing that a man I have trusted for years could care so little for my well-being.”
I thought I was going to start screaming at her. She couldn’t do this to me now.
She brought the glass back up to her lips and stopped short, looking into it.
My heart stopped beating.
“It’s not warm enough. Cold milk promotes indigestion.”
But she put the glass to her lips and drained the contents. As the white liquid disappeared I felt only relief. Total relief.
I took the empty glass and watched her lie back and close her eyes. This is how I would find her in the morning. Sleeping peacefully. Forever.
I reached over and turned out the light beside the bed. “Oh!”
It was Mother’s voice. I snapped the light back on. She was sitting upright in bed. Gasping. Wheezing.
Something was wrong. Her face was red and swollen. She was grunting and flailing her arms toward me.
I looked at the glass. What had happened?
She was trying to scream but all that came out was breathy gurgling. She grabbed my arm.
The veins around her eyes protruded out. The eyes themselves were bulging and bloodshot. Copious yellow mucus spilled from her mouth. The matted white curls on her head seemed alive and writhing.
Her grip tightened. The other arm shot out suddenly, catching the lamp beside the bed, sending it crashing to the floor.
The door flew open. Dr. Snavely was inside.
“Get some adrenalin from my bag,” he yelled.
I tried to speak but my tongue would not work.
The nurse hurried into the room with a hypodermic. The old man grabbed it and jabbed it into Mother’s hip.
Her other hand was at the front of my shirt.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” he was shouting at both of us. “I’m going to send her into the hospital tonight. Don’t worry. She’s going to be all right.
Somehow I knew she would.
“What did you give her?” he asked, looking curiously at the glass in my hand. The glass I had planned to put in the garbage disposal.
I heard myself give an answer, but it was like I was hearing someone else’s voice. I could feel the glass leave my hand. I could feel her grip easing. Something was said around me.
Then I knew. It was just like “the penicillin shot.”
But it couldn’t be.
It was impossible.
Who ever heard of anyone being allergic to poison?
Boxing Day Bonus
Ring Out, Wild Bells - D. B. Wyndham Lewis
D. B. Wyndham Lewis is a name almost unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Yet he was for years one of England’s most celebrated wits and satirists.
He came from a prominent Welsh family and was headed for a career in Law when he decided to try writing. His first book was a successful biography of Francois Villon, the famous French rogue and poet.
“Ring Out, Wild Bells” shows his patients-taking-over-the-lunatic-asylum view of life. Here he takes aim at the English country house school of crime fiction and hits it right between the eyes.
Later in life he characterized himself as “a man who deplores the decline of culture, m
anners and civilization which has been going on since the Thirteenth Century, and at an accelerated pace since the Eighteenth.” However Wyndham Lewis’s writing leads one to believe that, if he thought civilization had been raped over the past seven centuries, he was one of those who was secretly enjoying it.
His most famous collection is Welcome to All This (1930. ) He and another Englishman, Charles Bennett, collaborated on an original story about ordinary people caught in an assassination plot which they later adapted for Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, remade 1956 )
Nothing could be more festive than the breakfast-room at Merryweather Hall this noontide of 29th December. On the hearth a huge crackling fire bade defiance to the rain which lashed the tall french windows. The panelled walls were gay with holly and mistletoe and paper decorations of every hue. On the long sideboard were displayed eggs in conjunction with ham, bacon, and sausages, also boiled and scrambled; kedgeree, devilled kidneys, chops, grilled herrings, sole, and haddock, cold turkey, cold goose, cold grouse, cold game pie, cold ham, cold beef, brawn, potted shrimps, a huge Stilton, fruit of every kind, rolls, toast, tea, and coffee, all simmering on silver heaters or tempting the healthy appetite from huge crested salvers. Brooding over all this with an evil leer, the butler, Mr. Banks, looked up to see a youngish guest with drawn and yellow face, shuddering violently.
“Breakfast, sir?” asked Banks, rubbing his hands.
The guest, a Mr. Reginald Parable, nodded and held out his palm. Banks shook into it two tablets from a small bottle.
“They’re all in the library,” said Banks, pouring half a tumbler of water. “Cor, what they look like—well,” said Banks, chuckling, “it’s just too bad.”
Mr. Parable finished breakfast in one swallow and went along to the library. In every arm-chair, and lying against each other on every settee, eyes closed, faces worn with misery, each wearing a paper cap from a cracker, lay Squire Merryweather’s guests. The squire believed in a real old-fashioned Christmas, and for five days now his guests had tottered, stiff with eating, from table to chair, only to be roused by the jovial squire with a festive roar ten minutes later.
The countryside was under water; and as nobody could go out from morning to night, Squire Merryweather could, and did, devise every kind of merrie old-time entertainment for his raving guests.
Thunderous distant chuckles as Mr. Parable wavered into the only unoccupied corner of a huge leather settee announced that the squire had been consulting his secret store of books of merriment once more. And even as Mr. Parable hastily turned to feign epilepsy in his corner, Squire Merryweather bustled in.
“Morning,” said a weak voice, that of Lord Lymph.
“Wake all these people up,” said the squire.
When everybody was awake the squire said: “Colonel Rollick has five daughters, Gertrude, Mabel, Pamela, Edith, and Hilda. Mabel is half the age that Gertrude and Edith were when Hilda and Mabel were respectively twice and one-and-a-half times as old as Pamela will be on 8th May 1940. Wait a minute—that’s right, 8th May. Every time the colonel takes his five daughters to town for the day it costs him three pounds fifteen and eight-pence-halfpenny in railway fares, first return. One Christmas night Colonel Rollick says to his guests: ‘Let’s play rectangles.’ ‘I don’t know how it’s played,’ says old Mrs. Cheeryton, who happens to be present. ‘Why,’ says the colonel, ‘like this: we get the Ague-Browns to drop in, and form ourselves into four units, the square on the hypotenuse of which is equal to the sum of the squares on the—’”
At this point a lovely, lazy, deep-voiced blonde, Mrs. Wallaby-Threep, roused herself sufficiently to produce a dainty pearl-handled revolver from her corsage and fire at Squire Merryweather twice, missing him each time.
“Eh? Who spoke?” asked the squire abruptly, without raising his eyes from Ye Merrie Christmasse Puzzle-Booke.
“Tiny Tim,” replied Mrs. Wallaby-Threep, taking one more shot. This time, however, she missed as before.
“You probably took too much of a pull on the trigger,” murmured the rector with a deprecating smile. The squire was patron of the living and he felt a duty towards his guests.
“I’ll get him yet,” said Mrs. Wallaby-Threep.
“Charades!” shouted Squire Merryweather suddenly, waving a sprig of holly in his right hand.
“Again?” said a querulous Old Etonian voice. It was that of Mr. Egbert Frankleigh, the famous gentleman-novelist, who wanted to tell more stories. Since Christmas Eve there had been five story-telling sessions, each guest supplying some tale of romance, adventure, mystery, or plain boredom. After every story the squire had applauded loudly and called for wassail, frumenty, old English dances, and merry-making—even after two very peculiar stories about obsessional neuroses told by two sombre young Oxford men, Mr. Ebbing and Mr. Crafter, both of whom took hashish with Avocado pears, wore black suede shoes, and practised Mithraism.
“Charades!” roared Squire Merryweather, tucking his book under his arm and rubbing his hands with a roar of laughter. “Hurrah! Come along, everybody. Jump to it, boys and girls! This is going to be fun! Two of you, quick!”
A choking snore from poor old Lady Emily Wainscot, who was quite worn out (she died the following week, greatly regretted), was the only reply. Fourteen pairs of lack-luster-ringed-with-blue eyes stared at him in haggard silence.
“Eh? What?” asked the squire, more bewildered than hurt.
“You said charades, sir?” said Mr. Ebbing. “We shall be delighted to assist!”
Booming like a happy bull, the squire flung an arm round each of the two young men and danced them out of the room.
“Me for the hay,” said Mrs. Wallaby-Threep, snuggling into a cushion and closing her eyes. The rest of the company were not slow to follow suit. Very soon all were asleep, and snoring yelps and groans filled the library of Merryweather Hall.
* * *
It was bright, sunshiny daylight when the banging of the gong by the second footman roused the squire’s guests from nearly twenty-four hours of deep, refreshing sleep. The sardonic Banks stood before them. He seemed angry, and addressed himself to Lord Lymph.
“I just found the squire’s body in a wardrobe trunk, my lord.”
“In a trunk, Banks?”
“That’s all right,” said Lady Ura Treate, yawning. “It’s an old Oxford trick. Body in a trunk. All these neurotics do it. Where are those two sweet chaps, Banks?”
“They’ve hopped it, my lady.”
“Well, that’s all right, Banks,” said Freddie Slouche. “Body in trunk. Country-house mystery. Quite normal.”
As he spoke, the guests, chattering happily, were already streaming out to order the packing and see to their cars. In a few moments only Banks and Mr. Parable were left in the room. Banks seemed aggrieved.
“It’s all pretty dam fine, Mr. Whoosis, but who gets it in the neck when the cops get down? Who’ll be under suspicion as per usual? Who always is? The butler! Me!”
“Just an occupational risk,” said Mr. Parable, politely.
“It would be if I wasn’t a bit smart,” said Banks.
Mr. Parable nodded and hurried out as the servants began looting the hall.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Thomas Godfrey (Ed) Page 57