The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets.

by Catherine Gaskin

  He hung up, and for a moment that young body in its stiff white coat sagged. Then the rap of the pen on the blotter was violent. ‘Damn!’

  It was as if his last expletive suddenly had broken through my own numbed reflexes. The letters that had been spelled out so many times translated themselves into the typed symbols on a card I carried with me always. I got up and went to the doorway. ‘You said ABRHDU? That was what you said?’

  He turned with weary impatience. ‘Look. I’m sorry, we are busy. I’ll explain it all to you later ...’

  ‘You need a blood donor of that group.’ I was shuffling the few credit cards I had in my wallet – the wallet that now, like everything else I had, seemed to live in the pockets of the anorak instead of a handbag. ‘Here’s my donor’s card. I’m registered with St Giles’s in London.’

  He sprang to his feet and grabbed the piece of pasteboard from me. ‘God Almighty ...’ Then he looked at me sharply. ‘You related to this ... to Lord Askew?’

  I looked at him very directly, and then shook my head. ‘No – just coincidence that I’m here.’

  ‘God Almighty ...’ he said again, and now his voice was like a whisper. ‘You’re sure about this? I mean absolutely sure?’

  I was getting angry. ‘As sure as St Giles’s is. I’ve been called three times for emergencies. I give blood routinely a few times a year. If you doubt them ...’

  He let out a sort of whistle. ‘No, I don’t doubt them. Look, I’ll just have to do my own group and cross-match on you. It won’t take long. I just can’t take the chance of a mistake. You know what happens if you’re an incompatible donor?’

  ‘Yes, I know. It will be rejected.’

  ‘He’ll destroy the transfused blood, and there’ll be a severe reaction. He could die. O.K. Well, let’s get going.’

  He took the routine blood sample in a room off in another wing. ‘O.K. Go back to where you were, and when I’ve checked it, I’ll be along. Don’t leave the hospital ... O.K. I’m sorry. One gets so used to people being stupid about these things. General health O.K.? Nothing I should know about? I haven’t got time to test for syphilis. How long since you donated blood at St Giles’s?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘O.K. I’ll take their word for it.’

  When I got back to the seat beside the Condesa her angry, hurtful hand gripped my arm. ‘What is happening? What have you to do with him?’

  I explained as well as I could; I told her about the years of donating blood in London. She didn’t believe it. ‘Why can’t I give him my blood? I’d give him all of it. All!’

  ‘He can’t take it, Condesa. He’s of a very rare blood group. It’s useless to him. Rejection ...’

  ‘Rejection!’ Her voice sunk away on a low wail, the sound of ancient mourning and grief. She bent her head, but she did not weep.

  The young doctor came back; there was a few moments delay while he talked with the older man in Askew’s room. Then he came back to the door and beckoned me.

  Askew’s bed was now surrounded by screens, but I could see the oxygen tank, the mask being used. It would normally have been a small ward for two people. The other bed was empty. The older doctor nodded to me.

  ‘You know all about the procedure. I understand you donate blood regularly.’ I nodded. I peeled off the anorak again, rolled up my sleeve, kicked off my shoes, and lay down on the empty bed. I automatically clenched my fist to give them the vein sharp and clear, and felt the prick of the needle. The tubing was attached to the bottle and the suction set going.

  After that it was a matter of waiting, and trying to relax my muscles deliberately, not to strain too hard to hear what was going on at the screened-off bed. The voices were low. ‘Morphine ... saline drip ... venous tourniquet.’ A half-litre bottle was taken from me. They put the next in place. It all seemed to take a long time.

  I had never gone beyond this point before. I didn’t care. The sounds from a few feet away told me Askew still continued to vomit up blood. The bottle of my own blood was now suspended on a stand above him; I continued to pump more blood into the waiting vessel next to my bed. The voices at the other bed seemed lower. ‘One hundred and forty. ...’ Was that the pulse? I turned my head, and I saw the blood pressure was being monitored constantly. ‘Sixty,’ the sister said.

  People came and went. For a few seconds I heard the Condesa’s voice in the corridor, angry, frantic. They closed the door. Time passed me. I didn’t know time any more. There was a blankness, a kind of coldness creeping over me. The second half-litre bottle was taken away. Someone came over to me – took temperature, blood pressure, pulse.

  ‘Are you able for some more?’ Now I recognised a voice that I knew – though in the dizziness that seized me his face was a blur. I struggled to remember the name, but couldn’t – it was the man who had taken care of Gerald that night when I had waited in the same place.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘go on. I’m all right.’

  I watched the blood mount in the third bottle they attached to me. It was getting much colder. The shapes began to fade before me. And through it came the voices and the movements from around the next bed. The bottle was almost full, and they were taking it away, to suspend on the stand above the other bed. I seemed now to be struggling for breath; it was very cold. The needle and tube connecting me to the receiving bottle was disconnected. Another blanket was pulled over me.

  I was only dimly aware that someone was pulling at my tights, and I struggled and was hurt unnecessarily. The needle bit deep into my buttock.

  I tried to cry out, to beg, but my voice came only as a whisper through the cold and the faintness. ‘Go on! For God’s sake, go on! I’ve got more blood ...’

  The voice I recognised said gently in my ear, ‘You’ve got no more to give. If we take more now, you’ll die. Go to sleep now. You’ve done your best.’

  I found the strength to stretch out a hand and pull at his sleeve. ‘But if he doesn’t have more he’ll die ...’

  The face moved away. Before the drowsiness took possession of me utterly, before the last remnant of spirit I had to fight the drug departed, I heard the soft, measured tone from the other bed. ‘Blood pressure fifty, Doctor.’

  He was going to die. I wondered, through his shock and weakness, while those doctors had battled for his life with my blood, had he been aware of my presence in the room. I supposed the instant of recognition had come when I had confessed the vision of the phantom white hound which had greeted my arrival at Thirlbeck, and he had matched that with his own experience all those years ago. I realised, as I faded towards unconsciousness, that the real gift I had given him was not just the chance of life, but the release from the guilt he had carried through those years for the death of his wife and son. Two Birketts, at least, had seen that sight. The release, and the shock of recognition that Vanessa’s child was also his, had started the fatal haemorrhage. The proof, the bond of this same rare blood group we both were cursed with, lay in the bottle still suspended above his bed. I hoped he had known it was my blood, and that I had tried to give it back to him.

  They seemed to have forgotten my presence. The screen had been moved aside to let them work more freely. I saw his face between those white-coated bodies. It was colourless, and very still, the lips blue-tinged, as if he no longer responded to their feverish efforts for him. The coldness that must have been in his body was in mine also, but it was for him a fatal coldness. ‘Pressure forty-seven.’ Time passed, and I held out against the effects of the drug, somehow believing that while I kept my senses, he would keep his life. Then that activity seemed to cease around his bed. The doctors stepped back, and the nurses took over. They remembered me, and saw that my eyes were still open. They replaced the screens, and the last thing I saw was the empty bottle being unhooked from the stand.

  He was dead. My father, Robert Birkett, eighteenth Earl of Askew, was dead. And all the blood my body had been able to give to him had not been enough to keep him
alive. I closed my eyes.

  II

  I woke in a room by myself, a room with a single bed, and a window that looked out towards the car park. Almost at once a nurse came, and there was the routine of temperature and pulse, blood pressure. She wrote something on a chart, and I noticed that the shadows were growing longer outside. It must now be late afternoon. The nurse went, and the sister came at once.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ It wasn’t a social enquiry.

  ‘All right. Can I go now?’

  ‘No, of course you can’t. You don’t seem to realise – you’ve given up just about as much blood as anyone can and still be alive. You’ve got to rest, and wait for it to make up a bit. You can probably leave here tomorrow, but it’ll take weeks before you’re quite fit again. We’ve been trying to locate that donor in Carlisle but he’s a sales representative who travels around this area, and his wife isn’t quite sure which town he’s in today. You really should have a transfusion. Not so easy with your blood group, as you know.’

  I turned my head on the pillow. ‘But it didn’t save him, did it? He’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry – yes. He just kept haemorrhaging as fast as we gave it to him. You mustn’t fret – you did more than anyone could expect.’

  ‘I’d like to go,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t go. You don’t seem to realise. You’ve had treatment for severe shock – oxygen, a dextran infusion, hypocortizone. If you tried to get up you’d probably faint. Give it twenty-four hours, Miss Roswell. We’ll see how you’re going then. Perhaps we’ll have located the donor by then ...’

  I didn’t answer her. I just lay there, and thought about my father – the father I had discovered in the last hours of his life, and who had discovered me. And I also thought of the other man who had made himself into my father in the hours and weeks after Vanessa had died – the man in his remote Mexican retreat who had given to me a most precious gift of intimacy, knowing, as he must have done, that I was not his child. He had gathered me to himself, as he had gathered all that huge Mexican family, knowing my need. Both men had loved Vanessa, but she and Jonathan had known whose child I was. I wondered at her own courage and independence that she had never revealed this to Askew, and I marvelled at the generosity of Jonathan Roswell that he had let me, in name, and finally in fact also, be known as his child. I knew quite surely what Askew would have wanted to do if he had known Vanessa was bearing his child, and she had known, with equal sureness, that it would have been a useless and empty thing. If they had married, they would not have remained long together. She had chosen the hardest, and the best way. And I knew also quite surely that she would have told all this to Jonathan Roswell. I now read things in his attitude which I had never seen before – his gentle protectiveness, the assumption that if we were lucky we would be friends – and we had become friends. I must have seemed to him like one of those Mexican niñas – only blonde and grown-up, and now, as I thought of it, with the colouring, if not the face, of Robert Birkett.

  So I had had, in the space of a few weeks, two fathers. And I thought, before my eyes closed again in sleep, that few people could have had that experience and been so lucky as to have made friends of both of them.

  A dim light flicked on in the growing dusk of that small room. The sister’s voice. ‘Lord Askew is here to see you, Miss Roswell.’

  I struggled half-upright on my elbows. ‘Lord Askew! Lord Askew! Lord Askew is dead!’

  And then Nat’s voice. ‘Hush, Jo. Things change, you know. They will insist on these things ...’ The sister was gone, and he was bending over me. ‘You all right, Jo? I wanted to come earlier, but they said you had to rest.’

  I looked up at him; he seemed different, and for a while I couldn’t make out why. Then I realised I hadn’t seen him dressed in a suit before. ‘Nat, you know all about it?’

  He pulled a chair over close to me. ‘I’ve talked with Gerald Stanton. I knew about the blood transfusion – the rare blood group. Not really a coincidence, is it, Jo? Stanton told me about your mother having been at Thirlbeck. You’re part of the family now, Jo. You and I are cousins sixteen times removed, or something stupid like that. Only I haven’t got the right kind of blood to give you. It’s strongly hereditary, a blood group, they tell me, but only in close relations. Sixteen times removed is too far. Dear Jo, I’d give it all to you – the way you tried to give it to him – but it isn’t the right kind.’ His roughened hand lay on mine. ‘Jo, you look so pale. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right. But I’m sorry about – about him. I wanted him to live. I think he wanted to live, Nat. He was going to do things ... we were talking about it ... He could have done so much for Thirlbeck – for you. He said he needed to live seven years to make the proper sort of trust fund, but he didn’t live seven hours beyond that. He guessed about me – before the blood thing came out. He knew, and I think he was glad. It might have helped him to know he had a child. He seemed so lonely ... and I was in the room when he died.’

  ‘Hush, Jo ... hush. You’re tiring yourself.’

  ‘There was so much to do. He would have made himself stay at Thirlbeck, and I could have helped him. Well, it’s over now.’

  The pressure on my hand increased. ‘You’ve talked too much. We’ll find that donor, Jo, and you’ll have a transfusion. There must be some in a blood bank somewhere – surely in London. They could send it up.’

  ‘But I’m not in danger, Nat. Not the way he was. The blood replaces itself in time. You have to keep the emergency supplies for people who have accidents and burns – the ones who are bleeding. I’ll be all right.’ Then I fingered the dark material of his jacket. ’Why are you dressed like that, Nat? You look so strange.’

  He shook his head. ‘I never have liked suits. But well ... there are times when you feel you have to wear them. They’re ... Jo, they’re moving his body from here to the church in Kesmere this evening. I have to go. The Tolsons are going. It’s been hard on them. It was on the six o’clock news on the radio. Because of him being a V.C., and all that. All the stories will start up again ... poor devil. Well, he’s out of it now.’

  ‘Yes ... he’s out of it. And if he’d been given a chance he might have wanted to stay in it. I think he was just beginning to want it, Nat.’

  ‘Jo, don’t distress yourself. He hasn’t known any real peace or sense of accomplishment all his life. Could he have started now – feeling as he did about Thirlbeck? It might have been just another charade for him to play.’

  ‘He was going to try, Nat. He was going to try to make things as right as he could for you. Some time I’ll tell you – some time I’ll tell you everything that happened today.’

  He smiled. ‘I’d like to hear it. Yes, I would. I don’t know what sort of mess I’ve inherited. There are shocks enough, even if you know what’s coming. What I didn’t expect was the story Gerald Stanton told me, about what your mother and Tolson had been doing. The strange thing was that Askew had been here all these weeks, and not found out about the land still being his. If he’d behaved like an ordinary man – gone about a bit, talked to people, he pretty soon would have found out that he was still a big landowner. But once he got back here, he settled into the privacy of Thirlbeck just like his father. It must have been a wretched time for Tolson – wondering just which way Askew would find out that he still owned this farm and that farm, places he must have supposed were sold years ago.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, suddenly today I’ve become the landlord, and with a pile of death-duties to find, somehow. And young Thomas there is now Viscount Birkett. It’s crazy, isn’t it – this hereditary system? The only thing Thomas asked me was did we have to go and live in Thirlbeck, and I said no, we didn’t! That helped him. But Tolson, of course, has swept them up into that great maw of the family. Young Thomas is now heir to Thirlbeck. And you, Jo – well, for Tolson you’re something very special. You’re Robert Birkett’s own child, even if the rest of the world doesn’t know it. If there was justice –
which there isn’t – you’d be inheriting all the estate which isn’t entailed ...’

  He was quiet a moment, staring into the growing dusk outside. Then in the stillness we heard the Kesmere church clock striking. Nat got to his feet. ‘I’ll have to go, Jo. We’re keeping it all as quiet and simple as possible. No one but myself and the Tolsons know that he’s being taken to the Kesmere church this evening. The vicar’s been very helpful. He knows Askew hated publicity all his life. A private man should be buried in a private way, he says. Of course we’re bringing Askew back for burial in the private ground at Thirlbeck, but the service tomorrow has to be in Kesmere. No hope of keeping the public out of that. It’s their church, after all ...’

  He was scribbling something on a paper. ‘This is a phone number. The telephone company’s been ruddy marvellous. They’ve rigged up a new line and a new number so that we can call in and out of Thirlbeck without using the old number. Even the old one was unlisted – trust Tolson for that – but still a few people had it, and more would find a way of getting it. The newspapers have started ringing. They’ve even started ringing my house. Questions about La Española. You’ll see some crazy stories in tomorrow’s papers, stories about the wretched curse. A man can’t die a natural death but they’ll make something of it. I hope to God no one on the staff here remembers a Roswell renting the North Lodge, or, if they do, they keep their mouths shut about who was the blood donor. The papers would have a field day. Oh, hell – why now! Why just now?’

  ‘Why not now?’