The Poison Cupboard

by John Burke

  ‘It’s rather important. Gilbert Drysdale’s grandfather.’

  ‘Later, I think, Miss Jones.’

  ‘I’ve had a telephone call to say that he has been taken suddenly ill again.’

  Mr. Cartwright sighed. He looked away from Miss Jones, through the window and across the school field. His attention was distracted by the sight of a master walking across the grass.

  ‘You might give my compliments to Mr. Smethwick,’ he said, ‘and ask him to study Item — er — ten of the School Regulations. I mentioned this business of wearing a diagonal path across the field only the other morning at prayers. If the staff can’t set a good example . . .’ He shrugged despairingly, as one whose load had been rendered just that much too heavy, and then turned back to the inspector. ‘Now, where were we?’

  ‘Mr. Drysdale is ill,’ said Miss Jones.

  He did not spare her a glance, but said distantly: ‘The old man is always having these bouts.’

  ‘This time they say —’

  ‘Surely you can cope, Miss Jones?’

  ‘Yes, I can cope.’

  She went out. She could go and find Gilbert Drysdale and send him home — and then, later in the day, that deceptively retentive memory would purr into wakefulness, and Mr. Cartwright would ask what had been done about the boy. She would tell him. And the long arms would scoop up the sleeves of his gown, would be raised imploringly towards her. ‘But the boy shouldn’t have gone without seeing me first. You know I make it an absolute rule that no child must leave the school without first seeing the headmaster. The headmaster is responsible to the parents . . .’ Yes, already she could hear the reproaches. And then, if she were to reply ‘But you told me . . .’ there would come the sincere, puzzled frown. ‘I told you, Miss Jones? I’m sure I gave no instructions that the boy should be allowed to go.’ He would wait, triumphant. Of course he had given no instructions. He had committed himself to nothing definite: it was not in his nature to do so. If she were to refuse to be defeated, and continue pressing him — ‘Did you mean, then, that the boy should not have gone home when his grandfather was ill?’ — the virtuous puzzlement would shade into reproach. No answer would be forthcoming; only a sad shaking of that impressive head. Of course nothing of that sort had been said either.

  Miss Jones came to a halt in the corridor, breathing hard. She must not allow herself to become neurotic. She must not take things to heart. She was getting as bad as some of the older members of the staff-room.

  Where would Gilbert Drysdale be at this time of day?

  She knew nearly all the form periods off by heart, and after a moment’s hesitation she went towards the biology lab.

  There was no doubt that the sensible thing to do was to tell the master in charge of the class that Gil was to go home. The sensible, human, reasonable thing. Let him get off at once to his grandfather, and when Mr. Cartwright’s blandly evasive disapproval was manifested, argue it out with him point by point.

  But why should she have to bear the brunt of it: why should she have to face that sly, derogatory inquisition and the subsequent pontifications? A fit of rebellion came upon her. This time the game would be played strictly according to the rules, and he could carry the consequences.

  After all, there couldn’t really be much wrong with old Mr. Drysdale. He was always having these spells — the headmaster was right in that respect — and it would do Gilbert no harm to wait.

  She went into the lab, and emerged a minute later with Gilbert. They went together towards the study, but on the corner near her office she stopped.

  ‘He’s got someone with him,’ she said, ‘but he shouldn’t be long. I’ve told him your grandfather isn’t well. But he’d like to see you before you go home. Just sit on the chair outside the door.’

  She stood on the corner until he had settled on the chair, and then she went back to her office to type out the second of the day’s circulars to the staff about current misdemeanours in the cloakroom supervision.

  Gil listened to the buzz of voices from a nearby classroom. He moved restlessly. He longed to be on his way home. There had been similar messages before, but he had never got used to them. Each time, he had wanted to dash out of the building and get on his bike and get moving. Waiting to see the Head was a waste of time. Yet at the same time he wanted, in a way, to see old Cartwright: he wanted him to come out and say something reassuring in that smarmy deep voice of his. They all imitated that voice and knew it was ‘put on’, and rarely paid any attention to what it said; but there was something nice about having it directed at you, at you personally, when you weren’t feeling too good.

  Mr. Cartwright remained within his room.

  Ten minutes went by. Another five, and the bell would go for next lesson.

  Four or five times before, Gil had had this choking feeling. It seemed worse today. His grandfather might be really ill this time . . . might not be able to do a thing for himself . . . might be calling out . . . might die before he, Gil, got home.

  The door of the study opened. Mr. Cartwright, talking in an insistent sort of way, came out with another man.

  Gil said: ‘Sir.’

  ‘Come and see me at break time,’ said the headmaster without pausing.

  ‘But I was told — Miss Jones said — it’s about my grandfather, sir.’

  Mr. Cartwright blinked. He looked for one instant as though he were about to make some effort to understand, then he glanced at his companion, looked beyond him up the corridor, and said testily: ‘Break time is the time to come and see the headmaster.’

  It was like drawing a line under the answer of a sum, thought Gil queerly; and at the back of his mind a remoter self was aware that he was playing with similes again. He thought confusedly of Charlotte; then tried not to think of her. He stared after the headmaster, who was walking away, deep in conversation.

  He felt strange, lonely, cheated.

  Like drawing a line under a sum, that’s what it was: you drew the line and that was the end and you could forget about it and go on to the next thing.

  Some people could.

  He went along to the cloakroom. He had a sudden urgent need to go to the lavatory.

  Afterwards, weak inside, he went out to the shed, dragged his bike out from the tangle of tilted machinery, and rode home.

  His grandfather was dead. He was too late.

  Chapter Six

  Mrs. Swanton made all the funeral arrangements.

  ‘It’s the least we can do,’ she said.

  She worked with a controlled fury that was utterly unlike her. It was only on the morning of the funeral day that her legs gave out and she had to sit down, staring at something which nobody else could see.

  Charlotte felt cold. She seemed to hear within herself an echo of what was going on in Mrs. Swanton’s mind. Mrs. Drysdale had been a school friend of hers, and was dead; and now Drysdale, too, had gone. Mrs. Swanton had taken on the burden of the arrangements for this day, had taken Gilbert back into the Swanton house, had seen the solicitor — all in order to stop herself thinking, to stop herself turning round and looking for her contemporaries and finding they were fewer and fewer . . . even, perhaps, that there were none of them left.

  It would be all right in a few days. Mrs. Swanton was not old, and, as Laura curtly informed her, she was in perfectly good health. But for the moment she was acutely conscious of the shadow that had crept closer. It might, once this day was over, recede; but it would come again, it would edge nearer, until it was fully upon her.

  ‘Unfortunate,’ was Laura’s comment on Mr. Drysdale’s unexpected death.

  Laura was annoyed. Someone had died who ought not to have died, and that put her in a bad temper. ‘One chance in a thousand,’ she said. ‘One in ten thousand. A fluke.’ While Mrs. Swanton was making preparations and saying over and over again, ‘Well, I’ll see it’s all done properly — it’ll be done the way Lucy would have wanted it,’ and one of her well-meaning friends was bobbing in an
d out with such condolences as ‘We all have to come to it . . . he did look after that boy, he did his best, poor old dear . . . at any rate it was quick, it’s best that way, I hope I go like that,’ Laura was explaining to anyone who would listen that it was not a thing any doctor would have expected to happen. The tying and injecting had been expertly done, the leg was coming along excellently . . . and then a clot had flown off and gone to the lung. It had been quick. Mr. Drysdale had been talking to the milkman when it happened. He had stopped talking, muttered something, tried to turn round as though to look for something in the house, coughed up blood, and died.

  ‘Of course there’s always the risk,’ said Laura to Charlotte, using Charlotte, as before, merely as an audience. ‘But no one would have predicted it.’

  Charlotte listened without taking in the sense of what was being said. She wished she could have gone to Gil and comforted him — talked to him, listened to him, or just sat with him. But Mrs. Swanton was the only one who could go near him.

  For Gil the funeral was huge and terrifying. It was a dreadful thing that caught him up and thrust him along. He could not catch hold of the familiar everyday things and cling to them. Something inexorable dragged people into the house, drove them up to the church and the cemetery, and at last allowed them to disperse.

  He was surrounded, yet alone. People around him were kind: they acted as a buffer, encircling him and facing outwards, staving off worry, trying to insulate him. But they were strangers. He was horribly separate from them all. In a way it might have been better if he had not been so well protected; if he had been allowed to assert that this whole business involved himself and his grandfather and nobody else (except perhaps God? — he was shy of thinking of that). But he could not bring himself to protest.

  He had always known that this day must come. Grandfather must die. But now that it had come and he had been forced to accept it, he felt sick and empty. Somehow, in his imagination, this day was to have been final. His grandfather’s death was to have been the end. He had never tried to visualise what might lie beyond. Now, here he was, still alive: he would go on living, and he had never thought about that until now.

  ‘Of course, there’s no point in keeping the house,’ Mrs. Swanton said to him. ‘You can’t live there on your own.’

  ‘I want it,’ he said numbly.

  As might have been expected, Doctor Swanton wasted no time. She asked the obvious, unanswerable question: ‘And the rent? Where will that come from?’

  He shook his head in misery.

  ‘You couldn’t manage there without anyone to look after you, Gilbert,’ said Mrs. Swanton soothingly.

  It had always been a shabby little house and he had never loved it. He had admired the Swanton house, and once — how long ago it was! — he had thought of what Doctor Swanton had suggested to him about living here if . . . oh, if a lot of things . . .

  Now he felt that he could not bear to leave the house. It must be preserved just as it was. The yellowed photographs, the out-of-date calendars, and all the bits and pieces his grandfather had accumulated must stay where they were. If the house were no longer his, there would be no shelter; no home.

  ‘Still,’ Mrs. Swanton was saying, ‘there’s no need to go into all that now. In a few days’ time —’

  ‘I think it’s as well to get these things settled,’ said Doctor Swanton.

  ‘I expect we can sell the furniture to someone —’

  ‘No,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘But Gilbert, if you come to live here, there won’t be room for it all. You can bring one or two things you particularly want to keep, and the money you get for the rest will come in very useful.’

  To come and live here . . .

  Doctor Swanton was staring at him. ‘Well?’ she said in a stiff sort of voice. ‘Do you want to come here — for good?’

  She seemed to think it was terribly important. To Gil, it was not a choice at all. He knew they were right: he could not keep the house and he could not keep all the furniture.

  He would come here because there was nowhere else to go. He had nobody else in the world now but these people.

  Chapter Seven

  Charlotte got off the bus at Tapton Harbour.

  The driver and conductor were the only other two on the bus. They climbed down and went to sit outside the pub, sprawling on the bench and looking out over the golden pebbles that made the ranges a blur of evening brilliance.

  Charlotte went to the river bank and looked across. Walter was on his way towards the ferry from the other side. He waved to her, and she waved back.

  Behind her the driver and conductor laughed, but when she looked round they were staring at the bus. It would stand here, at the end of its run, for ten minutes before going back.

  She watched Walter as he was rowed across by the ferryman. It made her feel rather foolish, standing there and smiling, while he grinned back, the two of them not liking to shout to one another across the water.

  Then he was scrambling up the green-slimed ladder to the bank. He put his hand possessively on her arm.

  ‘Hello, Lottie.’

  His friends, he had told her last time, called him Wally. She said: ‘Hello, Walter.’

  This evening he was wearing an open-necked shirt, green sports coat, and flannels. It was the first time he had worn civilian clothes instead of his uniform, and Charlotte was not sure that she liked the change. He looked so trim and appealingly cocky in his uniform; now he was rather cheap, in some way she could not define.

  ‘Let’s get off the road,’ he said.

  His fingers were warm on her arm. This evening he was quite sure of himself. He had arranged to meet her here, she had come, and the rest of the programme was clearly mapped out in his head.

  They went past the bus and turned down a sandy path between two houses. Beyond lay a stretch of fine shingle and then the rough, sparse grass leading to the deep hollows in which sea water was collected and diverted after each high tide.

  They would be sheltered there, out of sight.

  Walter was trying to make her walk quickly. Charlotte held back. She had come willingly, with an excitement that matched his own, but now there was something disheartening about the hard brightness of the shingle ahead, and the desolate plain beyond it. She was aware of Walter glancing at her thin yellow frock and her bare legs.

  She glanced back. The bus had not yet left.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Gilbert had appeared at the mouth of the gap through which they had just come. He looked back over his shoulder, then leaned on an uneven length of fencing in front of one of the houses.

  He had been down, she guessed at once, for a last look at his old home. Or perhaps not a last look. Perhaps he would come again, reminding himself, trying to hold on to that which he ought to relinquish.

  She uttered an exclamation that was like a sob.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Walter petulantly.

  She pulled herself suddenly free, and began to walk towards Gil.

  Walter was startled. She had gone a few yards before he began to follow her, trotting after her.

  ‘Hey . . . what the hell?’

  Gil heard the sound, and turned his head slowly.

  Charlotte called: ‘Hello, Gil.’

  His expression was like a slap across her face. It seemed to reach out, to insult her. There was such undisguised loathing in it that she faltered.

  A hand was on her arm again.

  ‘Look here, what’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Walter, I must just speak to him. I can’t —’

  ‘Doesn’t look as though he’s keen on it,’ said Walter. ‘Come on — we haven’t got all night. More’s the pity,’ he added with a harsh attempt at jocularity.

  ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  His fingers were digging into her forearm. Her flesh seemed to shrink from him. She saw Gil staring, his mouth twisted.

>   Then she broke loose and began to run towards him. He disappeared, and on the other side of the houses she heard the bus beginning to thud rhythmically.

  ‘Lottie!’

  She caught up with Gil by the two steps up into the bus. There was no one inside but the conductor. Gil jumped in, not pausing. Charlotte turned on the step as the bus began to move. Walter’s upturned face was ludicrous. He was shouting something, but she could not hear a word. She tried to shout back — ‘Sorry, I’ll explain later, it’s all right.’

  She did not know how she would explain. She was not at all sure that she could, and not sure that it would be all right.

  Gilbert went to the front seat and sat down in the middle of it, taking up so much room that she could not sit beside him. She staggered as the bus turned the corner on to the main road away from Tapton Harbour, and sank into the seat on the other side of the aisle.

  Gilbert stared straight ahead at the back of the driver’s neck.

  Charlotte said: ‘I didn’t know you’d be down here this evening, Gil. We could have come down together.’

  It was a silly remark. He did not make a move.

  She tried again. ‘It’s nice to have you back in the house. I do hope . . .’

  But what was the good of trying to tell him what she hoped? He was not prepared to listen. His profile was set and unyielding. The two of them sat right up at the front of the bus, and there was a greater emptiness between them than in all the unoccupied seats behind them.

  The conductor came along, grinning to himself. Charlotte took out enough money for two fares, but by the time she had it in her hand she saw that Gilbert was holding out a return.

  She remembered that she, too, had bought a return, and that before descending from the bus on the journey down she had crumpled it up and thrown it away.

  If the conductor remembered that, he did not give any sign. He took the money from her, smirking into her face, and gave her a single ticket. When he had gone away again, the space between Charlotte and Gilbert seemed wider than before.

  They finished the journey in silence. At Brookchurch they got off and walked side by side to the front door of the house, without exchanging a word. Indoors, Gilbert left her at once.