Before the Fact (23 page)

Johnnie had told her what clothes of his she could take. She looked them out, added them to the pile, and looked into Johnnie’s wardrobe. She decided that he could be very well rid of an elderly mauve suit which she had never very much liked and which she was quite sure Johnnie had not worn for at least two years. She took it off its hanger, and felt in the pockets.

There was an equally elderly handkerchief in the breast pocket, and nothing else at all but a little cheap black notebook in one of the side pockets of the coat. Lina opened it idly, to see whether Johnnie would want it preserved or whether it could be thrown away. Most of the pages were blank, but a few at the beginning were filled with writing, Johnnie’s writing, in pencil. The first one was headed: “Arterio-sclerosis.”

Lina was interested. Arterio-sclerosis was the disease, she knew, which had caused her father’s death. Arterio-sclerosis combined with mild angina pectoris. She read on.

As she read, the coat which she was still holding dropped from her hand on to the floor. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

So far the entries were obviously extracts copied from some medical work. The few that followed, written in a more hasty hand, seemed to be jottings added from time to time in Johnnie’s own words.

After that there was a page of figures. Lina did not do more than run her eyes over them. They seemed to consist of calculations of the income to be derived from fifty thousand pounds at various rates of interest. Evidently they referred to the time when Johnnie was trying to persuade her to sell out her government stock and invest her capital in more adventurous schemes.

She frowned her puzzlement, flicking through the pages again. Why should Johnnie have gone to the labour of studying these diseases after her father died, even to the extent of copying out notes about them? She did not remember that he had shown such interest in the medical details at the time. And what on earth did those extraordinary observations at the end mean?

She felt oddly disturbed. There was something almost sinister about those two “ha, ha’s” in such a connection. It almost seemed as if Johnnie had been rejoicing over her father’s death.

As she added the mauve suit to the bundle on the floor and set about collecting Johnnie’s other remnants, her mind was busy recalling the details of her father’s death nearly three years ago.

They were still quite clear to her.

General McLaidlaw had died, tragically, on Christmas night, after dinner, while the men were still in the dining room. He had seemed quite well during the meal, and had eaten the usual Christmas dinner, and, in the usual way again, probably a little too much of it. A very special sherry had been got up from the cellar, and a still more special hock, and the General had had his full share of them. It was remembered afterwards that Mrs. McLaidlaw had reminded him, not without anxiety, that his doctor had warned him to be very sparing in his use of alcohol in any form, but the General had robustly damned the eyes of all doctors and retorted that Christmas came but once a year.

And after dinner there had been a very, very special port.

The doctor had had no doubts about the cause of death. He had not put his conclusion so bluntly to the family, but its gist was that the General had drunk a great deal too much. The decanter of port was, in fact, almost empty; and Cecil said he had had only one glass, while Johnnie had been sure that he had not drunk more than two. The General must have had something like four. The doctor had been just a little surprised, not that the General should have drunk four glasses of port but at their effect upon him. He had not considered his condition so dangerous, or he would have forbidden him alcohol altogether. But there the General was, patently dead of apoplexy, and all the doctor could do about it then was to sign the death certificate to that effect.

Johnnie had been very much upset.

The General
had
drunk a lot of port, and Johnnie was upset to think that he might perhaps have stopped him and never did. And the General had got excited too, talking about old times in his regiment when he was a giddy lieutenant and the pranks they used to play in the mess on guest nights. But the fault was equally Cecil’s. Cecil might have stopped him too, and never did.

Actually, however, Cecil had not been in the room when the General died. He had gone out about five minutes earlier, to get something for the General from the library. Johnnie had come to him there and told him that the General had had a stroke, and what ought to be done about it? When the two of them got back to the dining room the General was dead.

Johnnie had been very much upset.

Still sitting on the bed, Lina read through the pages again. Johnnie must have been interested, as well as upset. The notes at the end seemed to be jottings of what the General had been doing to bring on his attack. Johnnie must have hurriedly written them down, to tell the doctor. But why those horrible “ha, ha’s”? And what did “Try it, anyhow” mean?

Lina knew about the three-chair trick. It was a favourite trick of Johnnie’s, requiring a good deal of strength and fitness. You put your head on the seat of one chair, your heels on another, with a third underneath your back; then, supporting yourself on your heels and your head, you took the middle chair away from under you, passed it over your body, and slipped it underneath again on the other side.

“Got it! The three-chair trick.”

That could only mean one thing. Johnnie had suddenly realized what had caused the General’s stroke. He had been trying to do the three-chair trick, and it had been too much for him.

But it would have been madness to do such a thing – madness! He had been warned not to take any great exertion. The three-chair trick was a tremendous exertion. Johnnie used to say it was the biggest physical strain he knew.

Of course the General had had a good deal to drink. And having knocked it off to a great extent during the previous year or two, it might have gone to his head. That could have made him forget the doctor’s warning and try the three-chair trick.

But it was inconceivable that Johnnie could have let him do it. Johnnie knew all about his condition. Everyone knew. It had been common knowledge for a year or more that the General, though not in a state which could possibly be called dangerous, had yet to begin to take care. Johnnie could not possibly have let the old man do such an insane thing.

Lina thought she knew what must have happened. They had been talking about the three-chair trick, and then Johnnie had gone to help Cecil look for the General’s spectacle case in the library, and during his absence the old man must have tried it. Probably Johnnie had heard him fall before he reached the library and hurried back.

But if he had told the doctor what he suspected, the other had never passed it on to the rest of the family. It was the first time Lina had heard of the three-chair trick in connection with her father’s death.

She got up and slipped the little notebook into a drawer in Johnnie’s chest of drawers. At first she thought she would ask him if her father had really done this preposterous thing – had practically killed himself like that. Then she decided that it would serve no purpose after all. Lina always preferred to remain ignorant of a possibly unpleasant fact than be forced to acknowledge it.

Mechanically, for her thoughts still persisted in playing round the notebook, she began to do up the bundle for the jumble sale.

“Not much hope of tennis this afternoon. Hell’s bells!” Johnnie, standing at the window with his hands in his pockets and contemplating the drizzle outside, breathed on the glass and drew a cross in the result with the end of his nose.

Lina looked up from the stocking she was darning. “Johnnie, did Cecil ever find Father’s spectacles in the library the night he died?”

“Good heavens, monkeyface, I don’t know. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

Lina went on with her darning. Johnnie began to walk restlessly about the room.

Her head bent over her work, Lina asked:

“Why did he want his spectacles, in any case?”

“I don’t know. Oh, to read a newspaper cutting I wanted to show him, I believe. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I just wish it had been you who went to look for the spectacles, not Cecil. That’s all.”

“Why on earth do you wish that, you extraordinary little monkeyface?”

“I don’t know. I just do. Then it would have been Cecil who was with him when he had that stroke, not you.”

“But Cecil couldn’t have done any more for him than I could.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“That’s about the fourth time this week you’ve asked me something like that,” Johnnie said idly.

Lina started ever so slightly. “Is it?” She uttered a nervous little laugh. “How silly of me. I seem to have been thinking about Father lately, for some reason or other.”

“Well, it’s all more than three years ago now.”

“Yes,” Lina agreed, with an odd feeling of relief. “Nearly four.” Four years is a long time. Somehow, things that happened nearly four years ago are not nearly so important as things that happened last week.

But she really must not give way again to this nervous prompting to ask Johnnie details about her father’s death.

It was true that Lina had been thinking a lot about her father, and her father’s death, during the last week. She had tried hard not to do so, but all the time it was there in her mind, refusing to be thrust into oblivion.

That little black notebook was haunting her.

On the very first afternoon she had removed it from the drawer in Johnnie’s room to a drawer in her own dressing table. A dozen times since then she had pored over it, with the fascination of repulsion. But for those “ha, ha’s” she would have asked Johnnie about it with directness. But they prevented her, those appalling little written-down chuckles. She could not bear to confront Johnnie with them, and listen to his glibly lying explanation. For of course Johnnie would lie.

Why was she so sure that Johnnie would lie?

Lina put the stocking back in the basket, took up another, and spread out her hand in the foot. It was the hundredth time she had asked herself this question. For the hundredth time she refused to answer it honestly. Johnnie would lie because to lie in the face of embarrassment was Johnnie’s nature. She would not ask herself why Johnnie might be embarrassed.

Lina knew that the General’s spectacles had not been in the library at all. She remembered that they had been found, the next day, in a drawer of the dining-room sideboard, of all unlikely places. She remembered that quite clearly.

Yet she had asked Johnnie if Cecil did find them in the library.

It was absurd to have asked a thing like that.

It was absurd to ask anything at all: to keep giving way to this morbid feeling that she
must
speak to Johnnie about the details of her father’s death, and force him to speak to her about them: to keep hoping that he would lie, so that she could make herself believe his lies, and yet hoping that he would not lie, so that she could believe that he never had lied.

It was most absurd of all to go on brooding like this, just because Johnnie had written down a few interesting facts about her father’s diseases ... to go on brooding until the preposterous fancies which she absolutely refused even to form in her conscious moments came crowding on her, fully and grotesquely grown, in her dreams.

She dropped her hands and stared at Johnnie.

The epitome of boredom, he was picking out on one finger on the piano a popular fox trot,
Guilty.

Two nights later the Aysgarths were dining at Whinnies. Lady Fortnum had a small house party for the week-end, and after dinner the men had been trying who could put a half-crown furthest on the floor with one foot off the ground.

“Johnnie,” Lina said suddenly, “do your trick with three chairs.”

“That?” Johnnie smiled at her. “Oh, I haven’t done that for years.”

“Try it,” Lina persisted.

Johnnie shook his head. “Getting too old for that sort of thing. Besides, muscles have got soft. Why, I haven’t done that trick since – oh, since before your father died.”

Lina was packing.

Blindly, haphazard, almost hysterically she threw her clothes into a big suitcase, just enough things to last for a week or two. Johnnie had gone out, and she could relax at last.