He caught Theo’s glance. “Well, for heaven’s sake, I couldn’t suddenly cancel a business dinner party, could I? It’s—anyway, Ma, could we please come to some sort of decision? Now? Because once we have, I can get on and—”
“I’ve come to a decision,” she said, and came back to her chair, to sit in it rather straight, with her hands crossed in her lap. “I won’t have him put in a home.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Gordon said disgustedly, and threw himself farther back in his own chair, and crossed his legs with a snapping energy that he could only just control. “Sometimes you talk as though you’re getting senile too! What do you—?”
“And you’ve made another decision to go with that one,” Theo said softly.
“Yes.” Harriet looked down at her hands on her lap. “If it doesn’t—if I can’t arrange it, then I’ll think again about your suggestion, both of you. But I must try first.”
“Try what?” Gordon asked, and his voice was heavy with controlled irritation.
“William Ross-Craigie,” she said, and for the first time looked directly at Gordon. “At Whyborne. This is his sort of case, and if he’ll take him, I want him to go there.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Gordon cried after a moment of stunned silence. “Have you the remotest idea how much that’d cost? Come on, Ma, be your normal intelligent self, do me a favor! Where does that sort of money come from?”
“He’s got some of his own—not a great deal, but some. And I’ve a certain amount I could use. And—perhaps you would care to contribute, Gordon. He is your grandfather, after all.”
Gordon stared at her, his face blank with astonishment. Then he shook his head, and stood up and began to move a little stiffly about the room.
“Now, look, Ma, I don’t want to sound like some sort of ogre, but could we perhaps talk a little common sense about all this? My grandfather is a very old man. I won’t ask you to consider at this point the fact that he’s also a disagreeable and difficult old man. I’ll just say—he’s old, is no longer in full command of his faculties, and from my own observations, is getting very little pleasure from his own life. Would you agree with me so far?”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was quite flat and calm.
“All right then. Now, he’s had a coronary, and the chances are he’ll have more and, let’s face it, die of it. He’s got the disease that will end his life. It has to end sometime! Now where’s the sense in trying to treat that disease? Where’s the logic of it? Sure, Ross-Craigie could probably get rid of the problem—but what for? To leave a disagreeable difficult old man who isn’t enjoying his life all that much, and who is one hell of a burden—no, Ma, I will say it—is one hell of a burden, to go on living! How long for? Where’s the sense of it?”
“And if it were you, Gordon? You who had a disease like this? Would you want the people around you to add up the accounts as you’re doing?” she asked in the same flat voice.
“But I’m young!” he cried. “I’m not thirty yet! That’s the whole point of what I’m saying. God damn it, the man’s almost eighty! Why waste money sending him to Whyborne? Why should every penny he’s saved all these years be frittered down that drain? Why should your money be used up in such a stupid fashion?”
He was still walking about the room, and both Theo and Harriet followed him with their eyes as he went on, almost as though he were talking to himself rather than to them.
“I’ve got Giles to think of—and the next ones, whenever I decide there’ll be next ones, and I can’t go pouring money that by rights belongs to them into the life of a useless old man! And I don’t see how you can suggest wasting your money that by rights belongs—where’s the sense in it? It’s bad enough to see you wasting your time here, earning a fraction of what you should, instead of making sure there’ll be something to keep you going later on, without suggesting—”
He stopped quite sharply, and stared at Harriet, and she stared back, feeling the coldness inside her climbing and filling her throat with knowledge and the understanding that had been clamoring to escape all day.
“And what about Patty?” Gordon began to bluster. “I don’t see her here being asked to contribute! Why not? She’s earning too–and she seems to be being kept by that ghastly Shoeman, so if anyone has any spare cash it’ll be her, not me, with a family of my own to support! So much for her so-called liberation ideas! Fine until she has to take a bit of responsibility—”
Looking at him, feeling the coldness and stillness inside her, she could see what she had never really noticed before, or perhaps had noticed but had refused to recognize. She was good at not recognizing things she didn’t want to, she thought bleakly, watching his face as he went on and on, explaining, justifying, refusing and excusing. He and George—the same person. The same narrow inturned sort of person. Measuring every tiny value against every potential loss, and coolly calculating the answers.
“Gordon, you really needn’t go on,” she said with a sudden loud crispness, and he stopped in midbreath and looked at her, while Theo sat with his head drooped forward, his hands linked across his front, and not moving at all. “You can stop right there. I won’t ask you for any help with the cost of this. I’m not going to steal from you anything that belongs to you. But I don’t share your conviction that George’s money is yours by right, any more than that the little I have belongs to you.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Not in so many words. But you made it very clear that you think that way, so …” she shrugged.
“Look, Ma, is it so terrible to want to see you make some sort of financial arrangements for your own future? You’re almost fifty, damn it! Still young, but not that young! By the time you retire, I’ll still have a young family—and even if you worked and earned until you were seventy, I’d still have family at university, wouldn’t I? So I’m taking the long view—is that so wicked? Of course I don’t wish the old man dead, but I don’t see any sense in spending money on—”
“It would cost money to put him in a home, Gordon,” Theo’s voice cut in quietly. “Perhaps as much as a thousand pounds a year. You would have been content to see money spent that way?”
“But the National Health Service—”
“It’s getting more and more difficult to get elderly people cared for in NHS hospitals,” Theo said, and his voice was still quiet, but a heavy anger lay beneath it, and Gordon shifted uncomfortably. “The only likely service the state could offer in such a case is some limited home help and the like, but it would be your mother who would carry the load. She’d have to do the nursing, she’d have to worry about his care. And, of course, she’d probably have to give up her own work to do all that nursing and worrying. How do you feel about that?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Gordon exploded suddenly. “I don’t know. And I haven’t time to stand here talking about it interminably in this fashion. Look, Ma, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to go. It’s a long drive back, and Jean needs my help if—so do as you think best. You know my views, but do as you think best. I’ll cooperate in anything you want to do. Just let me know about the bills, and I’ll meet them to the best of my ability. All right? I can’t say fairer than that. I must go.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek briefly. “Ill call you at the cottage tomorrow, for news, all right? Take care, now—”
And he was gone, with a crisp nod at Theo, leaving them sitting silent and uncomfortable in the diminishing gray light of the common room with its scattered shabby armchairs and overhanging smell of long-brewed coffee and damp pipe tobacco.
“I’m sorry, Hattie,” Theo said at length.
“So am I. Very. I should have known, in a way. If I’d thought about it. He was the one who always made his sweets last longest, when he was small.” She smiled a little. “He used a pin to pull tiny bits of the inside out of chocolates, to make them last longer. Very ingenious.”
“Why didn’t you call Patty?” Theo asked abruptly aft
er a moment.
“Because she’s made her choices,” Harriet said, “Poor Patty! She did try, very hard, I think, but she couldn’t quite do it. I’m sad for Patty. But she’s made her choices. I’ll explain it all sometime.”
“She chose Ben?”
“Yes. She chose Ben.”
“So, apart from me, there’s no one left for you to lean on?”
She laughed gently at that. “A little melodramatic, Theo, my dear, aren’t you? I haven’t exactly been abandoned in any sudden sense, you know! Gordon and Patty—they’ve lived their own lives for many years now. I’m quite sure we’ll go on having the sort of friendly relationshp we’ve all three had all those years—nothing’s really changed, you know! But thank you, all the same.”
“Aren’t you angry with him, Harriet? I know I am! I’m not precisely a physical person, but it was all I could do to keep my hands off him! Of all the jumped-up, cocky young—”
“No, I’m not angry. Not with Gordon. I should have seen it long ago. Perhaps I did, in a way. It’s odd, you know, all that business in Trafalgar Square yesterday, the things they said.” She stopped and grimaced. “But you weren’t there. I forgot. You don’t know what was said.”
“It was very well reported this morning,” Theo said dryly. “I know a good deal about it. Was it very grim, from your point of view?”
There was a pause. “Yes. It wasn’t very—I got scared in the crowd. Frightened poor Catherine stupid. And then came home, to all this—”
He stood up and moved about the room, switching on the small table lights that were scattered about so that the window’s grayness dwindled and flickered into a dark blueness, and she blinked a little in the glare.
“Yes—home to all this. Harriet, I suppose I shouldn’t ask you. I—perhaps the reason I got so furious with Gordon was because he was simply voicing my own feelings, though with a few more fiscal overtones than I had produced. I think it’s unnecessary, shall we say, to seek the sort of treatment for George that you’re suggesting. Just tell me—why? Why do you want to send George to Whyborne? Why are you prepared to spend that sort of money on an old man’s disease? I just don’t see the logic in it, any more than Gordon did.”
She looked at him across the room, and shook her head slightly. She knew why now, knew why she had felt as she had all morning. It had come to her quite vividly, the answer she had been seeking, as she had listened to Gordon and watched him clutching eagerly at his own youth and future, watched him dismissing George’s and her own. But knowing it and being able to say it, even to Theo …
He seemed to hear her thinking, and stood there smiling at her in his familiar heavy fashion. “You can tell me anything, you know, Hattie. I’m Theo, remember? Not Oscar. You can tell me anything.”
“I—” she smiled too then, knowing it to be a glittering silly social smile that meant nothing but disguise. “I wanted him to die last night, when it started. When he had the attack I watched him and I hoped that he was dead. And this morning, when Sam—I was angry with him because he wasn’t dead. That’s why he’s got to go to Whyborne. Hasn’t he?”
14
“MY DEAR DR. BERRY! This is a very agreeable surprise! After we last spoke, I was sure that—well, I have no doubt you will understand why I should be so startled to see you this morning and will forgive me.”
“Good morning, Sir Daniel,” she said stiffly. “You know you owe me no apology. The reverse, in fact. I—er—I didn’t know I would see you here today. I came to see William—Dr. Ross-Craigie.”
He crinkled his eyes at her with great charm. “I do hope that doesn’t mean you don’t want to see me?”
She curled her toes inside her shoes in an effort to prevent herself from producing a facial grimace; she couldn’t remember ever disliking a person quite as much as she disliked this man, and for so little cause. Apart from a certain smoothness that wasn’t really to her taste, there was no real reason for such a reaction. He had, in fact, paid her the very genuine compliment of wanting her to work for his establishment, had offered her a great deal that was very tempting. It was she who had turned him down, she who had made herself a legitimate object of his dislike in refusing to be manipulated by him. So why should she feel as she did?
“Not at all.” She knew the smile she produced was a false one. “I had simply assumed that you spent all your time in London, at your newspaper, rather than here. And it’s just a professional matter I want to discuss with William.”
“Oh, I spend a great deal of time here at present—still setting up, you know! As the administrative head of the establishment, I have to be around, poking my nose in a great deal, until the place is running smoothly, and I can lay my burden on the shoulders of the full-time administrator we’ve appointed. However, I mustn’t talk about my problems! You want to see Dr. Ross-Craigie, and see him you certainly shall. Let me take you along to his laboratory and office.”
Harriet nodded toward the girl at the reception desk. “Someone’s already trying to find him for me, thank you. He knew I was coming, of course. I telephoned him yesterday.”
He smiled broadly at that “Well, actually, I know. He told me.” He looked at her with a faintly elephantine roguishness. “Forgive me for showing surprise at seeing you? I couldn’t resist it—you looked so startled to see me!”
He took her elbow in an intimate protective grip and nodded at the girl at the desk, who immediately put down the telephone she had been dialing and hurried to open a door at the far end of the foyer.
“So, shall we?—And we’ll go the long way round, if you don’t mind. I do so much want to show off our establishment to you. I’m really behaving just like a small boy with a new train set in his Christmas stocking. The reception area, here, now, you like it? We aimed at creating an atmosphere that was welcoming and unclinical. So many of the people who will pass through it will be desperately ill, so of course we would like them to have a favorable first impression.”
She looked around at the bleached-wood low-slung furniture, at the brown hessian covered walls and their brightly colored abstract paintings which were in fact recognizable pictures of horses and ships and nudes, at the heavy black-painted iron and rough-stone compositions that alternated on the low coffee tables with carefully arranged bowls of chrysanthemums and ears of barley and polished-copper beech leaves, and nodded.
“It’s very nice,” she said in a colorless voice, hating all she saw. Like the sort of coffee bar where they give you watery instant muck at exorbitant prices, and offer you minute slabs of soapy cheesecake as though they were conferring the accolade—horrible! she thought viciously, and let him guide her through the heavy door still obsequiously held by the horsily elegant receptionist, who stared at her superciliously through her incredibly long eyelashes, and made her feel extremely middle-aged and dowdy.
“Now, we come to the more businesslike part of the establishment. Here are the admin offices—general secretary, you know, and accounts, and purchasing and so on—” he said, leading her firmly along the deeply carpeted corridor, past more wall decorations, this time of the exaggerated collage sort, with pieces of metal and wood and leather projecting out at assorted angles. “I hope you notice the color schemes? The browns and golds of the foyer giving way to the shades of purple we use here in the corridor. Each office has its own individual scheme, tailored to the personality of the occupant. My own, I must confess, is a rather austere black and white—ah, now! Here we come to the really important area, from your point of view.”
He led her through a pair of transparent plastic double doors to a complex series of laboratories, all gleaming with chrome and ceramic and concealed lighting, filled with what she knew from her own yearning study of the catalogues to be equipment of the most recent and therefore most expensive design, into rest rooms and study rooms, conference rooms and libraries.
“We thought by providing three or four specialist libraries rather than one large one we would facilitate study for our
staff …” he murmured as she stared at the fully laden and carefully labeled shelves, at the microfilm equipment in the comer, at the projection apparatus for slides. “One doesn’t want to waste valuable scientific time simply for want of a few pounds intelligently spent, does one? Now, here we have something we’re very proud of—”
He led her into another room, banked with television screens, that had a broad console almost covering one wall, and he began to fiddle with switches. “I’m not absolutely sure how all this works, I must confess.”
One of the screens shivered, rolled and settled to show a view of a large laboratory, even more heavily equipped than those she had already seen. “Ah, I managed it! Splendid! That’s the main cancer research laboratory. The one you would have had,” he said, not looking at her. “This room is a great time-saver. Any one of the staff can come in here and see what’s going on in any part of the establishment. Visiting students can sit and watch work in progress. If one really understands all this equipment, it’s possible to get close-ups, to observe any corner of any laboratory or inpatient section—”
He flicked another switch, and a picture of a room with a bed, surrounded by a number of pieces of equipment, sprang onto another screen. “You see? We’ve tried to think of everything.”
“It looks like a most efficient spying system,” Harriet said with a touch of acerbity. “Heaven help the poor little technician who tried to put his feet up for a lazy half hour! He’d get short shrift, I imagine.”
“The equipment, of course, was never intended to be used in such a fashion,” he said, his urbanity thinning. “And I doubt it would ever need to be. I don’t intend we should employ staff who would ever want to—steal time in the way you describe. We shall be paying top salaries and shall select our staff—even the lowliest of porters or typists—with rigorous care—most rigorous, I assure you.”
A Time to Heal Page 20