by Rebecca Tope
Except he had already seemed pretty relaxed. Thea’s first impression of him as a man who relished life felt rock solid. She would never have charged him with self-pity, despite the terrible story about his daughter, and his own limitations, and Philippe’s unfeeling accusations. With difficulty she recalled what Harriet had told her. There was a lady friend called Edwina. Why hadn’t she, or the daughter, not helped to settle the matter of his funeral already? Did they refuse to discuss anything to do with death and dying, as many people did? Were they relentlessly, mindlessly, jolly when all the poor man wanted was to clarify the arrangements for something that was sure to happen eventually? Did they laugh it all away and change the subject? What did they think about the living will and its implication that Donny would wish to die at home, with their full cooperation? Had he perhaps gone so far as to appeal to them for assistance in committing suicide, when he felt the time had come, only to meet with frozen faces and a determined change of subject?
The questions came and went, the answers all pending further contact with the man himself. Thea found them absorbing, in a way she had not felt absorbed for some time past. Death had touched her many times in the last three years, until it seemed it was following her around, stalking her like a persistent admirer. Repeatedly she had promised herself that it would not happen again, only to be foiled. And now, here it was again in a different guise, intriguing in a new way. A man who both did and did not want to die, who did and did not want to live. It felt like being shown a window onto something rare and vital, where she might be able to contribute, thanks to her ability to face up to more reality than most people could.
She went to bed, eagerly looking forward to her next encounter with the sick old man.
Chapter Three
Next morning, she was awake at eight, after a solid nine hours’ sleep. Hepzie stirred lazily when her mistress threw back the light duvet and went to look out of the window. Her room was next to the main bedroom, both of them overlooking the front garden. The Manor boasted no fewer than five bedrooms, as well as an attic where servants had once slept.
Outside, a middle-aged woman was blithely cutting roses from the bushes which grew along the inside of the hedge. She carried an old-fashioned trug on her arm, and wore a long cotton skirt. ‘Good God, it’s a ghost,’ Thea muttered. The fact that the spaniel had given no hint of the invasion only fortified this idea. Boldly, she threw the window wide open.
‘Hey!’ she called. ‘What are you doing?’
The woman turned, too far away to see her face properly. She put up a hand to shield her eyes from the morning sun and squinted up at the window. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry – I didn’t want to disturb you. It is rather early, I know.’
‘Does Harriet let you take her flowers?’
‘Of course. You didn’t think I was stealing them, did you?’
Not a ghost, Thea concluded, with a stab of disappointment. And apparently not a thief either. ‘Are they for the church?’ she asked, trying to inject some logic into the situation.
‘What? Oh no, of course not. Don’t be daft.’
‘Wait there,’ Thea ordered. ‘I’m coming down.’
She had not brought a dressing gown with her, but Harriet had thoughtfully provided one, which hung on the back of the door. It was pale blue and far too big, but she donned it anyway. Almost tripping on its trailing belt and the skittering spaniel, she got downstairs unscathed and flung open the front door. It was already warm, she noted, with satisfaction, all the clouds of the previous day quite dispelled.
‘So, who are you?’ she asked, trying to sound friendly.
‘Jemima Hobson. Daughter of Donny Davis. I gather he came to see you yesterday. Rather a cheek, if you ask me, but he seemed to think you didn’t mind.’
‘Oh! Pleased to meet you.’ She did not offer a hand to shake. There were roses and dressing gowns and a dog in the way. ‘No, I didn’t mind a bit. Do you live in Cranham?’
‘Actually, no. We’ve got a market garden place four or five miles away.’
‘But it’s so early,’ Thea groaned, brushing tangled hair out of her eyes.
‘Come on. It’s after eight. The sun’s been up since about five. I can’t bear to waste it this time of year. It all flies by so fast and you never know when we might be in for a month of rain.’ There was a restless, worried air to her, which echoed Donny’s remark about Jemima always being in a tizz.
‘True,’ said Thea, recognising her own thoughts of the past few days. She also remembered the people she had found herself amongst the previous June, and their similar habit of rising uncomfortably early. ‘I still think eight’s quite soon enough to get up.’
‘It may be for you – I have to fit so much in, I can’t lie around in bed. Dad sent me for the roses. Harriet won’t mind, I promise you.’
‘Is he up as well, then?’
‘Not yet, no. I generally go in about half past, to get his breakfast and help him get going. It’s not so bad this time of year, but in the winter he can take half an hour just to dress himself.’
‘Doesn’t he have somebody official – like a home help or something?’
Jemima Hobson gave her a look. ‘No, he doesn’t. He won’t consider it.’ She sighed impatiently, and then seemed to inwardly reproach herself. ‘You can see his point, I suppose. They’d send a different girl every time, who’d only want to get it all done as fast as possible and on to the next place. Even the cheerful ones are a pain in the backside. We had all that with my sister. I don’t think either of us could bear it all over again.’
‘He told me about your sister. I’m so sorry. It sounded awful.’
‘Yes, it was beastly. We miss her much more than we ever expected to, which probably sounds silly. I mean – you don’t think about it beforehand, do you? You can’t imagine what missing someone will be like.’
‘Right,’ said Thea, thinking about her dead husband and what a feeble phrase ‘missing him’ was when applied to the reality of the pain his loss caused. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
‘Cecilia was seven years younger than me, and I adored her,’ said Jemima matter-of-factly. ‘From the first day she was born, I behaved as if she was mine. My mother had breast cancer in her early forties and was always tired and depressed, so I took the baby on. I hated going to school and leaving her. She was the centre of my life. And her bad heart just made it more important that I look after her properly.’
Thea had forgotten that she was standing outside in a voluminous blue dressing gown, talking to a woman she had never met before. She was hooked into the story of the Davis family, visualising how it must have been for them, wanting to know more. Here was the person who could answer some of the profound questions from the day before as well, if Thea could manage to phrase them tactfully.
‘It’s all so sad,’ she said, sincerely. ‘What happened to your mother?’
‘Nothing, really,’ Jemima grimaced. ‘She never quite got over the trauma and embarrassment and physical damage the cancer involved. She survived it physically, against the odds, and she’s still alive, but bit by bit she just got tireder and more depressed until it turned into senility, even though she’s not seventy-five yet. She just gave up when Cecilia died. She’s in a nursing home in Cirencester, more or less out of it. We don’t seem to have much time for her any more.’ She frowned. ‘That sounds bad, I suppose, but it’s the truth. Dad hardly even mentions her these days. She didn’t know me last time I visited. I’m not sure I can face going through that again, quite frankly.’
The story had lurched from sad to seriously lowering. Thea understood that Donny’s wife’s experience had been repeated in his younger daughter’s, in that they had both been subjected to extreme medical interventions designed to save their lives. The whole family must for years and years have been immersed in hospitals and medication and fear for the future. It happened to thousands of people, of course: the visits to the specialist a regular dramatic event in their li
ves, the repeated rounds of tests and X-rays and trials of the latest drugs. It became their sole topic of conversation, obsessively discussing symptoms in hushed voices. To their friends and neighbours they became ‘Sally with the bowel cancer’ or ‘Henry with the heart bypass’. Illness became a way of life, survival the sole goal, even if they did nothing more than sit in front of the telly all day.
She felt prompted to do something to lighten the mood before the whole day was spoilt.
‘There were just you two girls, then, were there?’
‘Oh, no. We’ve got a brother as well. He came between me and Cecilia. Silas, he’s called. He’s in Nigeria at the moment, doing something terribly noble with handicapped children.’
Thea grinned. She liked this busy restless woman. She liked the whole family, from what she’d learnt thus far – even the defeated mother and do-gooder brother. She liked their refusal to kowtow to the conventional norms of patienthood – especially where Donny was concerned. ‘Well, your father has a good spirit,’ she said unselfconsciously.
Jemima took a perfect yellow rose from the trug and sniffed it, her gaze on the Lodge two hundred yards away as if it was tugging at her. ‘That’s a nice way of putting it,’ she said thickly. ‘It takes a stranger to say something like that. To me he’s rather a nuisance most of the time.’
‘You’ve certainly got your hands full,’ Thea sympathised.
‘I’m not complaining. Families are prone to get complicated, after all. I’d rather have it like this than sit around all day with nothing to do. At least my own kids are behaving themselves, for the moment.’
‘You make me feel awfully lazy,’ Thea confessed. ‘But I did do something for your dad,’ she remembered. ‘I hope it wasn’t out of order, but I approached an alternative undertaker on his behalf. He said yesterday that he wanted to settle the details of his funeral, and did I know anybody, and as it happens—’ Belatedly she noticed the expression on Jemima Hobson’s face. ‘What? What’s the matter?’
‘Out of order isn’t even close,’ the woman snarled. ‘What in the world did you think you were doing? He doesn’t need to discuss his funeral, for God’s sake.’
‘Um …’ flailed Thea helplessly. ‘But he did say …’ Rapidly thinking back, she understood that she had been dreadfully precipitate. Donny had done little more than express a polite interest when Thea had told him about Drew. With shamefully little encouragement, she had gone flying to the phone moments after he’d left. Now it began to look as if she’d made a big mistake.
Jemima groaned aloud. ‘After all my efforts, you go and wreck everything on the first day you meet him. Didn’t it occur to you that things might not be as they seem on the surface? I can’t believe anybody could be so blunderingly insensitive as to do something like that. We all spend every waking moment trying to steer him away from anything morbid, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Thea protested. ‘What’s so terrible about it? Drew’s utterly approachable and friendly. He’s not going to force anything onto Donny. We can cancel the whole thing if necessary.’ Besides, she wanted to add, there will have to be a funeral at some point.
‘Listen,’ Jemima said in a low hard voice. ‘We’re not happy with the way Dad’s been thinking. He’s started talking about assisted suicide and living wills. He’s scared stiff of ending up in hospital, dying slowly after weeks of being kept alive with tubes and machines and all that business. It’s getting to be an obsession with him. If you introduce some touchy-feely undertaker, who’ll tell him he can be reincarnated as a lovely cherry tree, he’ll just get worse. Don’t you see?’
Thea dug her heels in. ‘Not really. His attitude seems quite logical to me. But I admit I have been interfering where I shouldn’t. It never occurred to me it would cause trouble with his family.’
Jemima snorted. ‘You’ve been swayed by all the media hype and emotional appeals for changes to the law on suicide. It’s a million miles from the reality for actual individual people. If you ask me, it was better when suicide was illegal. People just had to put up with what fate dealt them in those days.’
‘I suppose you’re against divorce as well, for the same reasons?’
‘That’s a completely different issue, and you know it. I’m talking about all these idiots thinking they can have an easy painless death at the flick of a switch.’
‘I agree with you, more or less,’ Thea said, deflating much of the other woman’s animosity. ‘But I don’t agree that it helps to avoid the subject. Your father can cope with hearing your views, from what I’ve seen of him.’
‘He probably can. But I can’t. Have you ever talked to your own father about how and when he’ll die, and who’s going to help him?’
‘My father died last year. But no, we never had a conversation remotely like that.’
‘It’s as if an iron hand clutches your throat and stops the words coming out. You can think them, and practise saying them, but when it comes to the point, it just doesn’t happen. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s much better to keep everything superficial, take it a day at a time, and smell the flowers.’ She put the rose to her nose again to illustrate the point.
‘And that’s the general consensus in the family, is it?’
‘Not entirely. Edwina’s a bit of a problem. Dad got her to make some impossible promises, but I think he understands that she can’t hope to fulfil them.’
Until that moment Thea had forgotten the man in the woods – Philippe, the doctor who thought dying was easy. Had she stumbled into the midst of a whole community with passionate views about euthanasia? Was there some large factor in the argument that she had failed to grasp? Already she was losing sight of Donny himself and what she had believed he wanted.
‘Look,’ Jemima began again on a mellower note. ‘I know how Dad can be when you first meet him. I’ve seen it happen before. He’s always been a charmer, getting everybody onto his side, although I admit I’ve never known it to work quite so fast before. This undertaker bloke – can you head him off? I promise you it wouldn’t be a good idea. He’s not going to get any business out of us. If you must know, we’ve always assumed that both my parents will be buried in the churchyard here. It’s been a foregone conclusion for years now. Dad really likes the church, even if he isn’t remotely religious.’
‘Is Cecilia there?’
‘No, no. Sissy’s husband insisted on a cremation. Her ashes were scattered on Lundy Island. Don’t ask,’ she added, seeing Thea’s mouth start to open. ‘It’s a long and irrelevant story.’
Husband? had been the question Thea intended to ask. She had assumed from what she’d heard that Cecilia had been single, a cherished unmarried sister, far too poorly to venture into matrimony.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said with a touch of bitterness, referring back to the earlier query. ‘Drew won’t barge in where he’s not wanted. He’s had enough of disagreements over graves as it is. There was a major row only a few months ago in Broad Campden—’
But Jemima wasn’t interested in Drew Slocombe’s problems, and Thea could hardly blame her, with all the family complexities she already had to deal with. ‘That thing you said, about his spirit,’ she began. ‘It’s all to do with that, do you see? He shouldn’t be worrying about dying and becoming dependent. It wouldn’t alter how we remember him and the brilliant father he was to us.’
It would, though, Thea thought to herself. They were never going to forget the final months or years of helplessness, if that’s what it came to. Jemima herself had already called him a nuisance, and it was obvious that things were only going to get worse.
‘It really isn’t my business,’ she said. ‘I realise I overstepped the mark in calling Drew so quickly and I’m sorry. I think Harriet wants me to do as much as I can to take some of the weight off your shoulders. I’m more than happy to do that, if you’ll let me. In fact, if I don’t, then I wouldn’t be earning my pay. The geckoes are hardly a full-time commitment.’
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‘I doubt if anything would prevent him from making his daily trek up here. We all think it’s the main thing that keeps him going. He looks forward to it all morning, and thinks about it afterwards. Just don’t go taking him too seriously – all right?’
She could easily phone Drew and tell him he would not be needed after all. Would he be disappointed or pleased to avoid the pressure? Probably he would not be very surprised. Thinking it through again, she winced at how stupidly headlong she had been. No wonder Jemima had been so angry with her – she’d have felt the same if the situation had been reversed. But then she thought of Donny himself. Surely he must have felt almost desperate to broach the subject as he did, with a complete stranger. Whatever gave him the idea that she could help, anyway? Unless he’d already heard that she was acquainted with Drew Slocombe – that might explain an approach that seemed more and more unlikely as she thought it over.
She assumed he would come again that afternoon, for his black coffee and intense conversation, and she could ask him what lay behind his request. At the same time, having met his daughter, Thea was very much less eager to see him than she had been. She was being drawn into something too important to be mishandled, forced to give it her whole attention and avoid saying the wrong thing. Jemima had warned her not to take it too seriously, as if understanding that this was exactly what Thea would do. But it was apparently what Donny wanted above all else. Perhaps, she concluded, it would be better to phone Drew after Donny’s next visit. She would be clearer then about what would be the best thing to do.