A Lovely Day to Die

by Celia Fremlin

  Why couldn’t Miss Fosdyke be like that? Eighty-seven and helpless—why the hell couldn’t she?

  “Miss Fosdyke, you must have a telephone!” Valerie repeated, a note of desperation creeping into her voice as she launched into these unknown waters beyond the cosy boundaries of the Geriatric Course. “Surely you can see that you must? I mean, in your situation—suppose you needed a doctor?”

  “Nobody of my age needs a doctor,” Miss Fosdyke retorted crisply. “Look at my case notes there, you can see for yourself the things I’ve got. Incurable, all of them. There’s not a doctor in the world who can cure a single one of them, so why should I have to be bothered with a doctor who can’t?”

  Obstinate. Difficult. Blind to their own interests. Naturally, the course had dealt with these attributes of the aging process, but in such bland, non-judgmental terms that when you finally came upon the real thing, it was only just recognizable.

  But recognizable, nevertheless. Be friendly, but firm, and don’t become involved in argument. Smilingly, Valerie put Miss Fosdyke down for a free telephone, and left the flat, all optimism and bright words.

  “Hope you’ll soon be feeling better, Miss Fosdyke,” she called cheerfully as she made her way out, and then on her long lithe young legs she almost ran down the corridor in order not hear the old thing’s riposte: “Better? Don’t be silly, dear, I’ll be feeling worse. I’ll go on feeling worse until I’m dead. Everyone does at my age. Don’t they teach you anything but lies at that training place of yours?”

  *

  “What a morning!” Valerie confided, half laughing and half sighing with relief, to her lunch companions in the staff canteen. “There was this poor old thing, you see, getting on for ninety, who was supposed to be applying for a free telephone, and do you know what she said ..?”

  And while the others leaned forward, all agog for a funny story to brighten the day’s work, Valerie set herself to making the anecdote as amusing as she knew how, recalling Miss Fosdyke’s exact words, in all their incongruous absurdity: “No, no telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous.”

  Too dangerous! What could the old thing mean? Ribald suggestions about breathy male voices late at night ricocheted round the table; anecdotes of personal experiences almost took the conversation away from Miss Fosdyke and her bizarre attitude, and it was only with difficulty that Valerie brought it back.

  At eighty-seven!—she should be so lucky!—this was the general reaction of the others. Of course, the girls admitted, one did read occasionally of old women being assaulted as well as robbed—look at that great-grandmother found stripped and murdered behind her own sweet-shop counter only a few months ago. And then a few years back there had been that old girl in an Islington basement defending her honour with a carving knife. Still, you couldn’t say it was common.

  “At eighty-seven!” they kept repeating, wonderingly, giggling a little at the absurdity of it. Consciously and gloriously exposed to all the dangers of being young and beautiful, they could well afford to smile pityingly, to shrug, and to forget.

  *

  It was nearly three months after the telephone had been installed that Miss Fosdyke first heard the heavy masculine breathing. It was late on a Sunday night—around midnight, as is usual with this type of anonymous caller—and it so happened that Miss Fosdyke was not in bed yet; she was dozing uneasily in her big chair, too tired after her hard day to face the slow and exhausting business of undressing and preparing for bed.

  For it had been a hard day, as Sundays so often were for the inhabitants of the Sheltered Housing block. Sunday was the day when relatives of all ages, bearing flowers and potted plants in proportion to their guilt, came billowing in through the swing doors to spend an afternoon of stunned boredom with their dear ones; or alternatively, to escort the said dear ones, on their crutches and in their wheel chairs, to spend a few hours in the tiny, miserable outside world.

  Just how tiny and miserable it was, Emmeline Fosdyke knew very well, because once every six weeks her old friend Gladys would come with her husband (arthritic himself, these days) to take Emmeline to tea in their tall, dark, bickering home—hoisting her over their awkward front doorstep, sitting her down in front of a plate of stale scones and a cup of stewed tea, and expecting her to be envious. Envious not of their happiness, for they had none, but simply of their marriage. Surely any marriage, however horrible, merits the envy of a spinster of eighty-seven.

  Especially when, as in this case, the marriage is based on the long-ago capture by one dear old friend of the other dear old friend’s fiancé—a soldier boy of the First World War he’d been then, very dashing and handsome in his khaki battle dress, though you’d never have guessed it now. Emmeline remembered as if it was yesterday that blue-and-gold October afternoon, the last afternoon of his leave, when she had lost him.

  “He says you’re frigid!” Gladys had whispered gleefully, brushing the golden leaves from her skirt, all lit up with having performed a forbidden act and destroyed a friend’s happiness all in one crowded afternoon. “He says you’re no good!”

  Details had followed—surprisingly intimate for that day and age, but unforgettable. They had served, anyway, to ensure that Emmeline remained a spinster. After this, how could she expose herself, ever again, to the scorn of any other man?

  Only later, emboldened partly by age and partly by a changing climate of opinion, had Emmeline found herself wondering how responsive Gladys herself had proved to be over the subsequent sixty-five years? Naturally, Emmeline had never asked, nor would Gladys ever have answered. But maybe Gladys’ tight, bitter mouth, and the grey defeated features of the once carefree soldier boy were answer enough.

  The visit on this particular Sunday had been more than usually exhausting. To start with there had been seedcake for tea instead of the usual scones, and the seeds had got in behind Emmeline’s dentures, causing her excruciating embarrassment and discomfort; and on top of this, Gladys’ budgerigar, who had been saying “Percy wants a grape” at intervals of five or six minutes for the last eleven years, had died the previous Wednesday, and this left a gap in the conversation which was hard to fill.

  And so, what with the seedcake, and the car journey, and the boredom, and all the physical effort involved, Emmeline arrived back at the Sheltered Housing Unit in a state of complete exhaustion; she didn’t feel up to anything more than sitting in her armchair waiting for it to be bedtime.

  *

  She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She’d learned long ago that when you are old, sleep has to be budgeted just as carefully as money; if you use up too much of it during the day, there’ll be none left for the night. So she’d intended just to sit there, awake but thinking of nothing in particular, until the hands of her watch pointed to quarter to ten and it would be time to start preparing for bed.

  But it is hard to think of nothing in particular after eighty-seven years. Out of all those jumbled decades heaped up behind, something will worm itself to the surface; and thus it was that as Emmeline’s head sank farther and farther toward her chest, and her eyelids began to close, a formless, half-forgotten anxiety began nibbling and needling at the fringes of her brain—something from long, long ago, over and done with really, and yet still with the power to goad.

  Must hurry, must hurry, must get out of here—this was the burden that nagged at her last wisps of consciousness. Urgency pounded behind her closed eyes—a sense of trains to catch, or doors to bolt, of decisions to make. And now there seemed to be voices approaching—shouts—cars drawing up—luggage only half packed.

  Slumped in her deep chair, Emmeline Fosdyke’s sleeping limbs twitched ever so slightly to the ancient crisis; the slow blood pumped into her flaccid muscles a tiny extra supply of oxygen to carry the muscles through the dream chase along streets long since bulldozed; her breath came infinitesimally quicker, her old lungs expanded to some minuscule degree at the need for running, running, running through a long-dead winter dawn…

 
It was the telephone that woke her. Stunned by the suddenness of it, and by its stupefying clamour erupting into her dreams, Emmeline sat for a few moments in a state of total bewilderment. Who? Where? And then, gradually, it came back to her.

  It was all right. It was here. It was now. She, Emmeline Fosdyke, eighty-seven years old, sitting comfortably in her own chair in her own room on a peaceful Sunday evening. She was home. She was safe—safe back from that awful outing to Gladys’ house, and with a full six weeks before she need think about going there again. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Nothing, certainly, to get her heart beating in this uncomfortable way, thundering in her eardrums, pulsing behind her eyes.

  Except, of course, the telephone, which was still ringing. Ringing, ringing, as if it would never stop. Who could possibly be telephoning her on a Sunday evening as late as—oh dear, what was the time? With eyes still blurred by sleep, Emmeline peered at her watch and saw, with a little sense of shock, that it was past midnight.

  Midnight! She must have been dozing here for hours! That meant that even with a sleeping pill, she’d never—

  And still the telephone kept on ringing; and now, her mind slowly coming into focus, it dawned on Miss Fosdyke that she would have to answer it.

  “Hello?” she half whispered, her old voice husky and tremulous with sleep. Then from force of habit she said, “This is Emmeline Fosdyke, 497 6402. Who ..?”

  There was no answer. Only the slow measured sound of someone breathing—breathing loudly, and with deliberate intention; the sounds pounded against her ear like the slow reverberation of the sea. In, out. In, out.

  For several seconds Miss Fosdyke simply sat there, speechless, the hand that clutched the instrument growing slowly damp with sweat, and her mind reeling with indecision. During her long decades of solitary bed-sitter life, she’d had calls of this nature quite a number of times, and she knew very well there was no infallible method for dealing with them. If you simply hung up without a word, then they were liable to ring again later in the night; if, on the other hand, you did speak, then they were as likely as not to launch forth immediately into a long rambling monologue of obscene suggestions. It was a nerve-racking situation for an old woman all on her own in an empty flat and late at night.

  Miss Fosdyke decided to take the bull by the horns.

  “Listen,” she said, trying to speak quietly and control the quivering of her voice. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling me, but I think I ought to tell you that I’m—”

  That I’m what? All on my own? Eighty-seven years old? Crippled with arthritis? About to call the police?

  That would be a laugh! Anyone who has been an elderly spinster for as long as Emmeline Fosdyke knows well enough what to expect from officialdom if she complains of molestation. No, no policemen, thank you. Not any more. Not ever again.

  But no matter. Her first few words seemed to have done the trick this time. With a tiny click the receiver at the other end was replaced softly, and Emmeline leaned back with a sigh of relief, even with a certain sense of pride in what she had accomplished. Funny how these sort of calls always came when you were least prepared for them—late at night, like this one, or even in the small hours, rousing you from your deepest sleep.

  Like that awful time five years ago—or was it six?—when she’d been living all alone in that dark dismal flat off the Holloway Road. Even now she still trembled when she thought about that night, and how it might have ended. And then there was that other time, only a few years earlier, when she’d just moved into that bed-sitter in Wandsworth. There, too, the telephone had only recently been installed, just as it had been here …

  Well, I told her, didn’t I? That prissy, know-it-all little chit of a welfare worker—no one can say that I didn’t warn her! I told her a telephone was dangerous, but of course she had to know better, she with her potty little three-year Training Course which she thinks qualifies her to be right about everything for evermore!

  Training Course indeed!—as if life itself wasn’t a training course much tougher and more exacting than anything the Welfare could think up, if it sat on its bloody committees yakketty-yakking for a thousand years!

  Nearly one o’clock now. Emmeline still had not dared to undress, or to make any of her usual preparations for the night. Even though it was more than half an hour since she’d hung up on her mysterious caller, she still could not relax. Of course, it was more than possible that nothing further would happen, that the wretched fellow had given up, turned his attentions elsewhere. Still, you couldn’t be sure. It was best to be prepared.

  And so, her light switched off as an extra precaution, and a blanket wrapped round her against the encroaching chill of the deepening night, Emmeline sat wide awake in the velvet darkness, waiting.

  It was very quiet here in this great block of flats at this unaccustomed hour. Not a footstep, not a cough, not so much as the creaking of a door. Even the caretaker must be asleep by now, down in his boiler room in the depths of the building.

  Emmeline had never been awake and listening at such an hour before. Her mind went back to earlier night calls when the sounds outside had grown sharper, louder. Did she hear them again?

  Emmeline was trembling now, from head to foot. She’d never get out of it this time, never! Ten years ago—even five—she’d at least have been mobile, able to slip through a doorway, to get away from the house, and if necessary stay away for days, or even for weeks.

  Not now, though. This time she would be helpless, a sitting duck. And as this thought went through her mind, she became aware, through the humming of her hearing aid, of a new sound, a sound quite distinct and unmistakable, the sharp click of the latch as her door handle was being quietly turned.

  Softly, expertly, making no noise at all, Emmeline Fosdyke reached into the darkness for the long sharp carving knife that always lay in readiness.

  *

  It was a shame, really, having to do this to them, after having been so nice to them on the phone, after having given them her name and everything, and encouraging them to think that her tense husky whisper was the voice of a nervous young girl. It was a real shame; but then, what else could she do?

  In the deep darkness, the unknown male lips coarse and urgent against her own, she would have her brief moment of glory, a strange miraculous moment when it really seemed that the anonymous, ill-smelling mackintosh of some stranger was indeed a khaki battle-dress of long ago; that the blind clutchings in the darkness were the tender caresses of her first love. For those few wild incredible seconds, in the meaningless grip of some greasy, grunting stranger, she would be young again, in love again, under the poignant blueness of a wartime summer sky.

  During those mad brief moments she could allow hard masculine fingers to fumble with her cardigan in the darkness, and with the buttons of her blouse, scrabbling their way nearer and nearer … A shame it was, a crying shame, that at exactly that moment, just before the eager questing fingers had discovered the sagging, empty loops of skin and had recoiled in horror—that was the moment when she had to stab the poor nameless fellow, if possible to the heart.

  Had to. It was self-defence. Even the law would have agreed about that, had the law ever caught up with her.

  She’d had to do it—had to stab them all, swiftly and surely, before they’d had a chance to discover how old she was. And that she was no good.

  ETIQUETTE FOR DYING

  AT WHAT POINT, exactly, did the embarrassment—the sheer, cringing embarrassment of the thing—change over into fear? And then the fear into outright terror, and the recognition of approaching tragedy?

  Twisting the bedside lamp to a sharper angle, Agnes leaned closer, watching the uneasy twitching of her husband’s eyelids over his closed eyes. In the dim greenish light the lines appeared sharply etched in the face sunk against the pillows, and he looked suddenly, terrifyingly old. But of course illness—serious illness—can do that to a person, even within a fe
w hours.

  How many hours? Glancing at Lady Olivia’s bedside clock—for it was to their hostess’s bedroom that Bert had been carried, amid a muted turmoil of well-bred dismay, after his collapse at the dinner table just as the veal paupiettes were being served—glancing at the clock, Agnes noted, with a sort of slow incredulity, that it was still only a little after nine. Less than an hour had passed since Bert, glass of white wine still in his hand, had brought to a standstill in mid-sentence the amusing anecdote he had been relating to his neighbour, the local M.P.’s wife, and had quietly slewed sideways in his chair and come crashing to the floor, dragging with him a great swathe of shining linen tablecloth. With a dreadful clattering of Georgian china and priceless glass, he had subsided into a crumpled heap on the carpet, limbs twitching.

  How could he? This (to her subsequent shame) had been her first and totally spontaneous reaction to the catastrophe. How could he!—and in front of all these important people, too! Lady Olivia’s antique dinner service, her precious glass! Fury, a whole raging, bottled-up decade of it, boiled up in Agnes during those microseconds of scandalized silence before the clamour began: the blinding, impotent fury of a wife whose husband has disgraced her, has once again, and in the most public and unforgivable way possible, humiliated her—humiliated himself—in front of their friends.

  No, not even friends. Friends, perhaps, could forgive these things, even within a week or two laugh at them. “Do you remember that awful night when old Bert ..?” But Lady Olivia and her entourage were not friends, not in this sense. They were too important to be friends, and too rich. All those smoothly successful men, those straight-backed women a-glitter with diamonds—they weren’t friends, but people whose favour must be sought, whose approval must be gained: tycoons, diplomats, television personalities. The catastrophe could not have been more awful.