Children of the Archbishop (18 page)

And soon there was somebody else as well. The night nurse had left the room for a moment, but she took a long time and when she came back she had Dr. Trump with her. This really was extraordinary. Because Sweetie had never seen Dr. Trump in the Infirmary before. And she had never even imagined that he had to help as well when a tooth was being pulled out. But second teeth she knew were awfully firm and perhaps they got stuck sometimes.

There was now a new sound in the Infirmary, a faint, high, hissing sound like a far away kettle boiling. And a new smell. Another petrolly kind of smell, only sharper. And the shadow on the wall was fixing something over the little girl's nose. It was a box. A box with a tube to it. Which was rather thoughtless
really. Because if he held it there much longer the little girl wouldn't be able to breathe.

Then, interesting though it was, Sweetie dozed off because she was so sleepy. And when she woke up again everything was different. At the end of the bed Dr. Trump was down on his knees in that long dressing-gown of his as though he were praying. The doctor was putting things away in his bag again. But what the night nurse was doing was the strangest thing that Sweetie had ever seen. She had got hold of the sheet and was lifting it up over the red-haired girl's face. Right up so that her face was completely covered.

“She'll smother if they leave it there,” Sweetie thought. “She won't be able to breathe.”

Sweetie never knew whether she had really seen them carry the red-haired girl, still with her face covered up, out of the ward and away to some other part of the Hospital. Either she had seen it or dreamed it. Dreamed it probably, because she was
very
sleepy by now.

But a little later on she certainly asked for a drink of water. And the night nurse seemed surprised to find that she was still awake.

“Have you been awake long?” she asked suspiciously.

And because she sounded so suspicious, Sweetie lied to her.

“I've just woke up,” she said. “I was thirsty.”

That seemed to satisfy the night nurse. She went away again and Sweetie lay there thinking. It had been a long drink of water that she had taken and she felt thoroughly wide-awake again. It was while she was awake that she heard the night nurse say something to Mrs. Gurnett. She didn't hear all of it, but she heard enough.

“… not that they ever notice anything,” was what she said. “Half the ward could die and the other half wouldn't know anything about it.”

Then Sweetie knew what had happened. And with the knowledge she didn't even attempt to go to sleep again. She was too excited. She knew about dying. And she understood it. So that was the way it happened. And because that was the way, she was careful to push the bedclothes down, right down, so that they couldn't possibly ride up over her face if she did go to sleep.

Dr. Trump's own plans for marriage might easily have come to nothing. But in the end, it was Miss Warple who precipitated matters.

Ever since that Sunday afternoon at Dame Eleanor's when he had first met his Bishop on equal social terms, Dr. Trump had been a regular visitor to the Warples. That he was welcome was obvious. But so also was practically everybody else. For, Bishop Warple was possessed of a positively ferocious cordiality. Small as the Bishop was, his left arm had a way of sidling round the back of any newcomer while his right arm was still engaged in the preliminary handshake. Total strangers, indeed, sometimes recoiled from its intensity. Nevertheless, it was irresistible. And, in the result, guests came pouring into the bleak red-walled drawing-room with its snapshots of Lebanon and Galilee and the more studied, cabinet-groups showing Walter Warple in his college days as oarsman, cricketer, fencer, cyclist, footballer, hockey player; even as tennis champion, complete with a narrow-handled racquet, shaped like a long, thin gourd.

On Wednesday—particularly on what the Bishop always referred to as his midweek—the salon was always packed solid like a waiting-room. Young, adolescent-looking curates, battered despondent ministers from East-End parishes, swarthy missionaries home on furlough, lay deaconesses, church helpers—the whole miscellaneous company of ecclesiastical well-wishers—were all there.

More than once, in fact, Dr. Trump had wondered whether he was possibly cheapening himself a little by going among them so indiscriminately. He had not liked it, for instance, when a shabby toothless old vicar from somewhere down Hoxton way had said to him: “You properly settled in at the Hospital? Ought to be very snug there: Mallow was.” “Snugness,” Dr. Trump had been forced to reply, “is not my aim in life. I … I am a worker!” But just imagine having to say such a thing. Fancy having to defend oneself to someone who looked like a rather gruesome verger.

There was one reason, however, why Dr. Trump continued his
visits. And that was because, after the cocoa tray and the cake-tiers had been cleared away, the Bishop always asked him to stay behind for a cosy, informal chat. Then everything was changed. It all became quite, quite delightful. There were usually just the three of them: the Bishop himself, Dr. Trump—and Miss Warple, at once girlish and birdlike, perched on the fancy-beadwork pouffe.

No Mrs. Warple: that was significant. But Mother was an invalid: this much had been conveyed to Dr. Trump at an earlier meeting. Mrs. Warple lived mysteriously in the perpetual purdah of her bedroom. And the soirées, the conversaziones, the little informal get-togethers had to jog along without her. Indeed, it was the continued absence of Mrs. Warple that had thrown such a heavy load on to the shoulders of her daughter. It was Miss Warple who had to snap quietly at the maid for not putting a mat under the hot-water jug, and was compelled to break off suddenly from conversations because she had just noticed that a curate, a vicar, a missionary, a boys' club secretary was without his cocoa or his fairy-cake.

To-night had promised to be just such another evening. Dr. Trump had been looking forward to it all the week, fairly licking his lips for more revelations of episcopal intrigue at Lambeth, more disclosures of archidiaconal plot and counter-plot. But it was obvious to Dr. Trump as soon as he arrived, that the Bishop was far from being at his best. Earlier in the week Bishop Warple had caught a chill at an unveiling ceremony. And he had now withdrawn almost entirely from the world, enclosing himself in a thick impenetrable cocoon of peppermint and eucalyptus. He was completely impervious to society already, and it was apparent that by to-morrow he was in for a real stinker of a common cold.

Shortly after ten o'clock therefore, as soon as the last of the casuals—a saturnine, Dracula-like prison chaplain from Brixton—had moved moodily off into the darkness, Bishop Warple announced loudly and abruptly that he was going to bed.

Dr. Trump rose obediently. But Miss Warple intervened.

“Go on telling me about your House Captain plan,” she pleaded. “You know we were interrupted.”

And so, after the Bishop had left them, carrying with him his inhaler, his screwed-up handkerchief, and his tin of lozenges, Dr. Trump found himself sitting there, directly under the hockey group, alone with Fellicity Warple.

Because Miss Warple was so keenly, extraordinarily interested in school discipline she instinctively moved over on to the couch beside him. It was a long, unyielding sort of couch and there was a good eighteen inches or more separating them. To Dr. Trump's relief Miss Warple made no attempt to close the gap. On the contrary, she sat round sideways so that she could see him while he was talking. But in a way this was worse. For she had such a strangely penetrating look in her eyes, an intense gimlet stare, that it was like sharing a settee with a basilisk. And Dr. Trump found himself faltering beneath it. He grew nervous. He changed the subject first to sacred music and then to infant diet, then to girls' sports. But it made no difference: Miss Warple was equally interested in all of them.

And then, to his astonishment, he discovered that she had not been listening at all. With those hard avian eyes focused somewhere right inside his skull, she suddenly addressed him.

“Dr. Trump,” she said shrilly. “You'll have to go.”

The remark was so unexpected, so uncalled for, that Dr. Trump drew back as though he had been stung. Then he took firm hold of himself. He would not, he determined, allow himself to be rushed, stampeded, ejected in this way. Therefore, he rose slowly and with dignity, disentangling his long legs like a snake uncoiling.

“I was actually upon the point of departure,” he said coldly. “In fact I … I am already going. Good evening.”

But it was evident that more than an over-stayed welcome lay behind it all. For Miss Warple continued as shrilly as ever.

“And you mustn't come here any more. Ever.”

Her voice rose to a high flute-like scream as she pronounced the last word, and Dr. Trump felt a wave of icy coldness pass across his stomach. This was no ordinary behaviour. It was hysteria, even madness possibly. Terrible thoughts began to race through his brain. Perhaps, if it were madness, it was inherited. Perhaps at this moment in a barred room upstairs, Mrs. Warple …

But this was no moment for idle conjecture. There was only one thing for it: to get out of the house quietly before the attack became too violent.

Sweating visibly he began to move rapidly towards the door. But Miss Warple was there before him. Stretching her arms out to their full width, she leant against the panels as though crucified. Her small flat bosom was rising and falling, and two hectic spots showed against the paleness of her cheeks.

“Not ever,” she repeated.

Dr. Trump realised now that at all costs he must remain calm. If he were to lose control of himself even for a moment they would both be gibbering and grimacing at each other. Therefore, he parried.

“Just as you say,” he replied. “Just as you say.”

“Then you admit it?” she demanded.

“Admit what?” he asked, still trying to edge inconspicuously in the direction of the door-handle.

“That they're talking about us,” she replied. “Everybody's talking. You know they are.”

The answer was snapped back at him so viciously that he instinctively stepped back again. So it
was
madness. Complete and fully developed. It was voices that the poor girl thought that she was hearing. Now more than ever was it necessary to humour her.

“Quite so,” he answered. “Quite so.”

“So I'm going to put an end to it, if you won't,” she said.

“But first we must know who they are, mustn't we?” he explained soothingly.

Miss Warple's eyes hardened.

“Dame Eleanor.
And
Canon Larkin,” she told him. “
And
Mummy.
And
Daddy. It's everybody! They're talking about us all the time.”

She sank down in a chair as she was speaking and began crying. The thin features were puckered-up and drawn, and the tears ran down in twin rivulets on either side of the sharp nose. Dr. Trump glanced from Miss Warple to the door, back to Miss Warple, and finally to the door again.

And it was here that he made his first mistake. For instead of making a dash for it now that Miss Warple was no longer standing in the way, he moved slowly and with dignity, talking as he went.

“I entirely fail to comprehend your meaning,” he said with gravity. “I … I cannot conceive why our names should have been coupled.”

A fresh sob rose up from the couch.

“Then they're wrong,” Miss Warple moaned. “You … you don't like me.”

“Oh but I do, I assure you,” Dr. Trump replied, still backing. “I value our friendship most highly.”

The Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock in the hall struck 10.15. The clock had been a parting presentation from the Bishop's old parishioners in Birmingham. A lot of money had been spent on it, and the bell-notes had a silvery mellowness about
them that suggested riches and position and security. The music entered Dr. Trump's soul and lodged there. Remembering the wretched
ting, ting, ting
, of his own timepiece at the Hospital, a strange mood of madness entered into him. His ego enlarged like a balloon and he saw himself as someone of power and importance, a man of destiny who could afford to trample even bishops' daughters underfoot. The emotion, however, was complicated by an entirely different feeling when he remembered how secure it would make him with Dame Eleanor if he married into the Bishop's family. But really the idea was unthinkable. Only this morning when shaving he had found himself thinking about Margaret again. And how could any man propose to a spinster whose head was buried in a sofa cushion?

And it was here that Dr. Trump made his second mistake. Curbing his ruthlessness, he returned to his mood of dignified benevolence.

“Hadn't we better shake hands and be friends?” he asked suavely.

Miss Warple struggled to her feet. Now that she was standing up again, she looked terrible, as though she had been crying for months on end. Her eyes were pink-rimmed and sunken, and her mouth quivered.

“Leave me alone,” was all she asked. “Can't you just leave me alone, now that it's all over.”

“But don't you want me to be your friend?”

“And is that all that you want to be?”

“Isn't it sufficient?”

Miss Warple did not reply. Instead the tears welled up again and the moan restarted.

Dr. Trump had never before been in such close, such intimate contact with a young woman in tears, and he was astonished to find that he was suddenly consumed by a great and overwhelming pity. A moment later this was transformed into a devouring sense of guilt to think that he should have been responsible for so much misery. And this, in turn, resolved itself into the fierce conviction that somehow or other—how, he still could not imagine—he must comfort her. The wild words that she had spoken had gone sailing past him like the wind. After all, he was older than she was, and a man: he could afford to be magnanimous.