by Ngaio Marsh
“Long time,” he said. He used as few words as possible because with every one he uttered it was as if he squandered a measure of his dwindling capital. Nurse Kettle placed herself where he could see and hear her easily and said, “Doctor Mark says the Colonel will be here quite soon. He’s been fishing.”
“Luck?”
“I don’t know. He’ll tell you.”
“Old ’n.”
“Ah,” said Nurse Kettle comfortably, “they won’t catch him in a hurry.”
The wraith of a chuckle drifted up from the bed and was followed by an anxious sigh. She looked closely at the face that seemed during that day to have receded from its own bones.
“All right?” she asked.
The lacklustre eyes searched hers. “Papers?” the voice asked.
“I found them just where you said. They’re on the table over there.”
“Here.”
“If it makes you feel more comfortable.” She moved into the shadows at the far end of the great room and returned carrying a package, tied and sealed, which she put on his bedside table.
“Memoirs,” he whispered.
“Fancy,” said Nurse Kettle. “There must be a deal of work in them. I think it’s lovely to be an author. And now I’m going to leave you to have a little rest.”
She bent down and looked at him. He stared back anxiously. She nodded and smiled and then moved away and took up an illustrated paper. For a time there were no sounds in the great bedroom but the breathing of the patient and the rustle of a turned page.
The door opened. Nurse Kettle stood up and put her hands behind her back as Mark Lacklander came into the room. He was followed by Colonel Cartarette.
“All right, Nurse?” Mark asked quietly.
“Pretty much,” she murmured. “Fretting. He’ll be glad to see the Colonel.”
“I’ll just have a word with him first.”
He walked down the room to the enormous bed. His grandfather stared anxiously up at him and Mark, taking the restless old hand in his, said at once, “Here’s the Colonel, Grandfather. You’re quite ready for him, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Now.”
“Right.” Mark kept his fingers on his grandfather’s wrist. Colonel Cartarette straightened his shoulders and joined him.
“Hullo, Cartarette,” said Sir Harold so loudly and clearly that Nurse Kettle made a little exclamation. “Nice of you to come.”
“Hullo, sir,” said the Colonel, who was by twenty-five years the younger. “Sorry you’re feeling so cheap. Mark says you want to see me.”
“Yes.” The eyes turned towards the bedside table. “Those things,” he said. “Take them, will you? Now.”
“They’re the memoirs,” Mark said.
“Do you want me to read them?” Cartarette asked, stooping over the bed.
“If you will.” There was a pause. Mark put the package into Colonel Cartarette’s hands. The old man’s eyes watched in what seemed to be an agony of interest.
“I think,” Mark said, “that Grandfather hopes you will edit the memoirs, sir.”
“I’ll… Of course,” the Colonel said after an infinitesimal pause. “I’ll be delighted; if you think you can trust me.”
“Trust you. Implicitly. Implicitly. One other thing. Do you mind, Mark?”
“Of course not, Grandfather. Nurse, shall we have a word?”
Nurse Kettle followed Mark out of the room. They stood together on a dark landing at the head of a wide stairway.
“I don’t think,” Mark said, “that it will be much longer.”
“Wonderful, though, how he’s perked up for the Colonel.”
“He’d set his will on it. I think,” Mark said, “that he will now relinquish his life.”
Nurse Kettle agreed. “Funny how they can hang on and funny how they will give up.”
In the hall below a door opened and light flooded up the stairs. Mark looked over the banister and saw the enormously broad figure of his grandmother. Her hand flashed as it closed on the stair rail. She began heavily to ascend. He could hear her labored breathing.
“Steady does it, Gar,” he said.
Lady Lacklander paused and looked up. “Ha!” she said. “It’s the doctor, is it?” Mark grinned at the sardonic overtone.
She arrived on the landing. The train of her old velvet dinner dress followed her, and the diamonds which every evening she absent-mindedly stuck about her enormous bosom burned and winked as it rose and fell.
“Good evening, Miss Kettle,” she panted. “Good of you to come and help my poor old boy. How is he, Mark? Has Maurice Cartarette arrived? Why are you both closeted together out here?”
“The Colonel’s here, Gar. Grandfather wanted to have a word privately with him, so Nurse and I left them together.”
“Something about those damned memoirs,” said Lady Lacklander vexedly. “I suppose, in that case, I’d better not go in.”
“I don’t think they’ll be long.”
There was a large Jacobean chair on the landing. He pulled it forward. She let herself down into it, shuffled her astonishingly small feet out of a pair of old slippers and looked critically at them.
“Your father,” she said, “has gone to sleep in the drawing-room muttering that he would like to see Maurice.” She shifted her great bulk towards Nurse Kettle. “Now, before you settle to your watch, you kind soul,” she said, “you won’t mind saving my mammoth legs a journey. Jog down to the drawing-room, rouse my lethargic son, tell him the Colonel’s here and make him give you a drink and a sandwich. Um?”
“Yes, of course, Lady Lacklander,” said Nurse Kettle and descended briskly. “Wanted to get rid of me,” she thought, “but it was tactfully done.”
“Nice woman, Kettle,” Lady Lacklander grunted. “She knows I wanted to be rid of her. Mark, what is it that’s making your grandfather unhappy?”
“Is he unhappy, Gar?”
“Don’t hedge. He’s worried to death…” She stopped short. Her jewelled hands twitched in her lap. “He’s troubled in his mind,” she said, “and for the second occasion in our married life I’m at a loss to know why. Is it something to do with Maurice and the memoirs?”
“Apparently. He wants the Colonel to edit them.”
“The first occasion,” Lady Lacklander muttered, “was twenty years ago and it made me perfectly miserable. And now, when the time has come for us to part company… and it has come, child, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, darling, I think so. He’s very tired.”
“I know. And I’m not. I’m seventy-five and grotesquely fat, but I have a zest for life. There are still,” Lady Lacklander said with a change in her rather wheezy voice, “there are still things to be tidied up. George, for example.”
“What’s my poor papa doing that needs a tidying hand?” Mark asked gently.
“Your poor papa,” she said, “is fifty and a widower and a Lacklander. Three ominous circumstances.”
“Which can’t be altered, even by you.”
“They can, however, be… Maurice! What is it?”
Colonel Cartarette had opened the door and stood on the threshold with the packages still under his arm.
“Can you come, Mark? Quickly.”
Mark went past him into the bedroom. Lady Lacklander had risen and followed with more celerity than he would have thought possible. Colonel Cartarette stopped her in the doorway.
“My dear,” he said, “wait a moment.”
“Not a second,” she said strongly. “Let me in, Maurice.”
A bell rang persistently in the hall below. Nurse Kettle, followed by a tall man in evening clothes, came hurrying up the stairs.
Colonel Cartarette stood on the landing and watched them go in.
Lady Lacklander was already at her husband’s bedside. Mark supported him with his right arm and with his left hand kept his thumb on a bell-push that lay on the bed. Sir Harold’s mouth was open and he was fetching his breath in a series of half-yawns. There wa
s a movement under the bedclothes that seemed to be made by a continuous flexion and extension of his leg. Lady Lacklander stood massively beside him and took both his hands between hers.
“I’m here, Hal,” she said.
Nurse Kettle had appeared with a glass in her hand.
“Brandy,” she said. “Old-fashioned but good.”
Mark held it to his grandfather’s open mouth. “Try,” he said. “It’ll help. Try.”
The mouth closed over the rim.
“He’s got a little,” Mark said. “I’ll give an injection.”
Nurse Kettle took his place. Mark turned away and found himself face-to-face with his father.
“Can I do anything?” George Lacklander asked.
“Only wait here, if you will, Father.”
“Here’s George, Hal,” Lady Lacklander said. “We’re all here with you, my dear.”
From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter, “Vic — Vic… Vic,” as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.
“What is it?” Lady Lacklander asked. “What is it, Hal?”
“Somebody called Vic?” Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.
“There is nobody called Vic,” said George Lacklander and sounded impatient. “For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?”
“In a moment,” Mark said from the far end of the room.
“Vic…”
“The vicar?” Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. “Do you want the vicar to come, Hal?”
His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.
Mark came back with the syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle moved away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.
“What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?” she asked. “Is it the vicar?”
With a distinctness that astonished them he whispered, “After all, you never know,” and with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.
On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine. He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.
Sir Harold had left everything in apple-pie order, and his son anticipated little trouble. As he turned over the pages of his father’s diaries, it occurred to him that as a family they richly deserved their too-much-publicized nicknames of “Lucky Lacklanders.” How lucky, for instance, that the eighth baronet, an immensely wealthy man, had developed a passion for precious stones and invested in them to such an extent that they constituted a vast realizable fortune in themselves. How lucky that their famous racing stables were so phenomenally successful. How uniquely and fantastically lucky they had been in that no fewer than three times in the past century a Lacklander had won the most famous of all sweepstakes. It was true, of course, that he himself might be said to have had a piece of ill-fortune when his wife had died in giving birth to Mark, but as he remembered her, and he had to confess he no longer remembered her at all distinctly, she had been a disappointingly dull woman. Nothing like… But here he checked himself smartly and swept up his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He was disconcerted when at this precise moment the butler came in to say that Colonel Cartarette had called and would like to see him. In a vague way the visit suggested a judgment. He took up a firm position on the hearthrug.
“Hullo, Maurice,” he said when the Colonel came in. “Glad to see you.” He looked self-consciously into the Colonel’s face and with a changed voice said, “Anything wrong?”
“Well, yes,” the Colonel said. “A hell of a lot actually. I’m sorry to bother you, George, so soon after your trouble and all that, but the truth is I’m so damned worried that I feel I’ve got to share my responsibility with you.”
“Me!” Sir George ejaculated, apparently with relief and a kind of astonishment. The Colonel took two envelopes from his pocket and laid them on the desk. Sir George saw that they were addressed in his father’s writing.
“Read the letter first,” the Colonel said, indicating the smaller of the two envelopes. George gave him a wondering look. He screwed in his eyeglass, drew a single sheet of paper from the envelope, and began to read. As he did so, his mouth fell gently open and his expression grew increasingly blank. Once he looked up at the troubled Colonel as if to ask a question but seemed to change his mind and fell again to reading.
At last the paper dropped from his fingers and his monocle from his eye to his waistcoat.
“I don’t,” he said, “understand a word of it.”
“You will,” the Colonel said, “when you have looked at this.” He drew a thin sheaf of manuscript out of the larger envelope and placed it before George Lacklander. “It will take you ten minutes to read. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.”
“My dear fellow! Do sit down. What am I thinking of. A cigar! A drink.”
“No thank you, George. I’ll smoke a cigarette. No, don’t move. I’ve got one.”
George gave him a wondering look, replaced his eyeglass and began to read again. As he did so, his face went through as many changes of expression as those depicted in strip-advertisements. He was a rubicund man, but the fresh colour drained out of his face. His mouth lost its firmness and his eyes their assurance. When he raised a sheet of manuscript, it quivered in his grasp.
Once, before he had read to the end, he did speak. “But it’s not true,” he said. “We’ve always known what happened. It was well known.” He touched his lips with his fingers and read on to the end. When the last page had fallen on the others, Colonel Cartarette gathered them up and put them into their envelope.
“I’m damned sorry, George,” he said. “God knows I didn’t want to land you with all this.”
“I can’t see, now, why you’ve done it. Why bring it to me? Why do anything but throw it at the back of the fire?”
Cartarette said sombrely, “I see you haven’t listened to me. I told you. I’ve thought it over very carefully. He’s left the decision with me and I’ve decided I must publish…” he held up the long envelope… “this. I must, George. Any other course would be impossible.”
“But have you thought what it will do to us? Have you thought? It… it’s unthinkable. You’re an old friend, Maurice. My father trusted you with this business because he thought of you as a friend. In a way,” George added, struggling with an idea that was a little too big for him, “in a way he’s bequeathed you our destiny.”
“A most unwelcome legacy if it were so, but of course it’s not. You’re putting it altogether too high. I know, believe me, George, I know, how painful and distressing this will be to you all, but I think the public will take a more charitable view than you might suppose.”
“And since when,” George demanded with a greater command of rhetoric than might have been expected of him, “since when have the Lacklanders stood cap-in-hand, waiting upon the charity of the public?”
Colonel Cartarette’s response to this was a helpless gesture. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid that that sentiment has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing.”
“Don’t be so bloody supercilious.”
“All right, George, all right.”
“The more I think of this the worse it gets. Look here, Maurice, if for no other reason, in common decency…”
&nbs
p; “I’ve tried to take common decency as my criterion.”
“It’ll kill my mother.”
“It will distress her very deeply, I know. I’ve thought of her, too.”
“And Mark? Ruin! A young man! My son! Starting on his career.”
“There was another young man, an only son, who was starting on his career.”
“He’s dead!” George cried out. “He can’t suffer. He’s dead.”
“And his name? And his father?”
“I can’t chop logic with you. I’m a simple sort of bloke with, I daresay, very unfashionable standards. I believe in the loyalty of friends and in the old families sticking together.”
“At whatever the cost to other friends and other old families? Come off it, George,” said the Colonel.
The colour flooded back into George’s face until it was empurpled. He said in an unrecognizable voice, “Give me my father’s manuscript. Give me that envelope. I demand it.”
“I can’t, old boy. Good God, do you suppose that if I could chuck it away or burn it with anything like a clear conscience I wouldn’t do it? I tell you I hate this job.”
He returned the envelope to the breast pocket of his coat. “You’re free, of course,” he said, “to talk this over with Lady Lacklander and Mark. Your father made no reservations about that. By the way, I’ve brought a copy of his letter in case you decide to tell them about it. Here it is.” The Colonel produced a third envelope, laid it on the desk and moved towards the door. “And George,” he said, “I beg you to believe I am sorry. I’m deeply sorry. If I could see any other way, I’d thankfully take it. What?”
George Lacklander had made an inarticulate noise. He now pointed a heavy finger at the Colonel.
“After this,” he said, “I needn’t tell you that any question of an understanding between your girl and my boy is at an end.”
The Colonel was so quiet for so long that both men became aware of the ticking of a clock on the chimney breast.