Don't Look Now (16 page)

They are living in the past, Shelagh thought, in a moment of time that does not exist any more. The nurse would never eat the buttered scones she had anticipated, glowing from her walk, and her mother, when she glanced into the mirror later, would see an older, more haggard face beneath the piled-up coiffure. It was as if grief, coming so unexpectedly, had sharpened intuition, and she could see the nurse already installed by the bedside of her next patient, some querulous invalid, unlike her father, who teased and made jokes, while her mother, dressed suitably in black and white (black alone she would consider too severe), replied to the letters of condolence, those from the more important people first.

Then they both became aware of her, standing at the top of the stairs.

'He's dead,' Shelagh said.

Their upturned faces stared at her in disbelief, as his had done, but without the horror, without the accusation, and as the nurse, recovering first, brushed past her up the stairs, she saw her mother's carefully preserved and still lovely face disintegrate, crumple, like a plastic mask.

You must not blame yourself. There was nothing you could have done. It was bound to happen, sooner or later.... Yes, thought Shelagh, but why not later rather than sooner, because when one's father dies there is so much that has been left unsaid. Had I known, that last hour sitting there, talking and laughing about trivial things, that there was a clot forming like a time-bomb close to his heart, ready to explode, I would surely have behaved differently, held on to him, at least thanked him for all my nineteen years of happiness and love. Not flipped over the photographs in the album, mocking bygone fashions, nor yawned halfway through, so that, sensing boredom, he let the album drop to the floor and murmured, 'Don't bother about me, pet, I'll have a kip.'

It's always the same when you come face to face with death, the nurse told her, you feel you could have done more. It used to worry me a lot when I was training. And of course with a close relative it's worse. You've had a great shock, you must try and pull yourself together for your mother's sake.... My mother's sake? My mother would not mind if I walked out of the house this moment, Shelagh was on the point of saying, because then she would have all the attention, all the sympathy, people would say how wonderfully she was bearing up, whereas with me in the house sympathy will be divided. Even Doctor Dray, when he finally arrived in the wake of his partner, patted her on the shoulder before her mother and said, 'He was very proud of you, my dear, he was always telling me so.' So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time. Let me run upstairs for you ... Let me answer the telephone ... Shall I put on the kettle? An excess of courtesy, like mandarins in kimonos bowing, and at the same time an attempt at self-justification for not having been there when the explosion happened.

The nurse (to the doctor's partner): 'I would never have gone for a walk if I hadn't been quite sure he was comfortable. And I believed that both Mrs Money and her daughter were in the house. Yes, I had given him the tablets ...' etc., etc.

She is in the witness-box, on trial, thought Shelagh, but so are we all.

Her mother (also to the doctor's partner): 'It had entirely slipped my memory that Nurse was going out. There has been so much to think of, so much anxiety, and I thought it would relax me to pay a quick visit to the hairdresser, and he had seemed so much better, really his old self. I would never have dreamt of leaving the house, leaving his room, if I had thought for one moment ...'

'Isn't that the trouble?' Shelagh burst in. 'We never do think, any of us. You didn't, Nurse didn't, Doctor Dray didn't, and above all I didn't, because I'm the only one who saw what happened, and I shall never forget the look on his face as long as I live.'

She stormed along the passage to her own room, sobbing hysterically in a way she had not done for years--the last time was when the post-van smashed into her first car when it was parked in the entrance drive, all that twisted metal, the lovely plaything ruined. That will teach them a lesson, she told herself, that will shake them out of this business of trying to behave so well, of being noble in the face of death, of making out that it's a merciful release and everything is really for the best. None of them really minding, caring, that someone has gone forever. But forever ...

Later that evening, everyone gone to bed, death being so exhausting to all but the departed, Shelagh crept along the landing to her father's room and found the photograph album, tactfully tidied away on a corner table by the nurse, and carried it back with her to her own bedroom. Earlier, during the afternoon, the photographs had been without significance, familiar as old Christmas cards hoarded in a drawer, but now they were a kind of obituary, like stills flashed in tribute on a television screen.

The befrilled baby on a rug, mouth agape, his parents playing croquet. An uncle, killed in the first world war. Her father again, no longer a baby on a rug but in breeches, holding a cricket-bat too big for him. Homes of grandparents long dead. Children on beaches. Picnics on moors. Then Dartmouth, photographs of ships. Rows of lined-up boys, youths, men. As a child it had been her pride to point to him at once. 'There you are, that's you', the smallest boy at the end of the line, then in the next photograph slimmer and standing in the second row, then growing quite tall and suddenly handsome, a child no longer, and she would turn the pages rapidly because the photographs would be of places, not of people--Malta, Alexandria, Portsmouth, Greenwich. Dogs that had been his which she had not known. 'There's dear old Punch ...' (Punch, he used to tell her, always knew when his ship was due home, and waited at an upstairs window.) Naval officers riding donkeys ... playing tennis ... running races, all this before the war, and it had made her think, 'unconscious of their doom, the little victims play', because on the next page it became suddenly sad, the ship he had loved blown up, and so many of those laughing young men lost. 'Poor old Monkey White, he would have been an admiral had he lived.' She tried to imagine the grinning face of Monkey White in the photo turned into an admiral, bald-headed, perhaps, stout, and something inside her was glad that he had died, although her father said he was a loss to the Service. More officers, more ships, and the great day when Mountbatten visited the ship, her father in command, meeting him as he was piped aboard. The courtyard at Buckingham Palace. Standing rather self-consciously before the press photographer, displaying medals.

'Not long now before we come to you,' her father used to say as he turned the page to the full-blown and never-to-him-admitted rather silly photograph of her mother in evening dress which he so much admired, wearing her soulful look that Shelagh knew well. It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.

The naval wedding, her mother smiling in triumph Shelagh knew that look too, she wore it when she got her way about anything, which she generally did--and her father's smile, so different, not triumphant, merely happy. The frumpish bridesmaids wearing dresses that made them fatter than they were-- she must have chosen them on purpose not to be outdone--and the best man, her father's friend Nick, not nearly so good-looking as her father. He was better in one of the earlier groups on the ship, but here he looked supercilious, bored.

The honeymoon, the first house, and then her own appearance, the childhood photographs that were part of her life; on her father's knee, on his shoulders, and right through childhood and adolescence until last Christmas. It could be my obituary too, she thought, we've shared this book together, and it ends with his snapshot of me standing in the snow and mine of him, smiling at me through the study window.

In a moment she would cry again, which was self-pity; if she cried it must not be for herself but for him. When was it, that afternoon, that he had sensed her boredom and pushed the album aside? It was while they were discussing hobbies. He had told her she was physically lazy, didn't take enough exercise.

'I get all the exercise I need in the theatre,' she said, 'pretending to be other people.'

'It's not the same,' he said. 'You should get away from people sometimes, imaginary and real. I tell you what. When I'm up and about again and in the clear we'll go over to Ireland and fish, the three of us. It would do your Mum a power of good, and I haven't fished for years.'

Ireland? Fish? Her instinct was selfish, one of dismay. It would interfere with her Theatre Group plans. She must joke him out of it.

'Mum would hate every minute,' she said. 'She would much rather go to the south of France to stay with Aunt Bella.' (Bella was her mother's sister. Had a villa at Cap d'Ail.)

'I dare say,' he smiled, 'but that wouldn't be my idea of convalescence. Have you forgotten I'm half-Irish? Your grandfather came from County Antrim.'

'I've not forgotten,' she said, 'but grandfather's been dead for years, and lies buried in a Suffolk churchyard. So much for your Irish blood. You haven't any friends over there, have you?'

He did not answer immediately, and then he said, 'There's poor old Nick.'

Poor old Nick ... Poor old Monkey White ... Poor old Punch ... She was momentarily confused between friends and dogs she had never known.

'Do you mean your best man at the wedding?' she frowned. 'Somehow I thought he was dead.'

'Dead to the world,' he said shortly. 'He was badly smashed up in a car crash some years ago, and lost an eye. Lived like a recluse ever since.'

'How sad. Is that why he never sends you a Christmas card?'

'Partly ... Poor old Nick. Gallant as they come, but mad as a hatter. A border-line case. I couldn't recommend him for promotion, and I'm afraid he bore me a grudge ever afterwards.'

'That's hardly surprising, then. I'd feel the same if I'd been somebody's close friend and they turned me down.'

He shook his head. 'Friendship and duty are two separate things,' he said, 'and I put duty first. You are another generation, you wouldn't understand. I was right in what I did, I'm sure of that, but it wasn't very pleasant at the time. A chip on the shoulder can turn a man sour. I'd hate to think myself responsible for what he may have got mixed up in.'

'What do you mean?' she asked.

'Never mind,' he said, 'none of your business. Anyway, it's over and done with long ago. But I sometimes wish ...'

'What do you wish, darling?'

'That I could shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.'

They turned over a few more pages of the album, and it was soon afterwards that she yawned, glancing idly about the room, and he sensed her boredom and said he would have a kip. No one could die of a heart attack because his daughter was bored.... But supposing he had had a nightmare in which she had figured? Supposing he had thought himself back in that sinking ship during the war, with poor old Monkey White, and Nick, and all those drowning men, and somehow she had been with him in the water? Everything became jumbled up in dreams, it was a known thing. And all the time that clot getting bigger, like an excess of oil in the workings of a clock. At any moment the hands would falter, the clock stop ticking.

Somebody tapped at her bedroom door. 'Yes?' she called.

It was the nurse. Still professional, despite her dressing-gown. 'Just wondered if you were all right,' she whispered. 'I saw your light under the door.'

'Thanks. I'm O.K.'

'Your mother's fast asleep. I gave her a sedative. She was fussing about tomorrow being Saturday, and the difficulty of getting an announcement in The Times and Telegraph before Monday. She's being so plucky.'

Was there hidden reproach in her voice because Shelagh had not thought of taking charge of these things herself? Surely tomorrow would have done? Aloud she said, 'Can nightmares kill?'

'What do you mean, dear?'

'Could my father have had a terrible nightmare and died of shock?'

The nurse advanced to the bed and straightened the eiderdown. 'Now, I told you earlier, and the doctors said the same, it would have happened anyway. You really must not keep on going over it in your mind. It doesn't help. Let me get you a sedative too.'

'I don't want a sedative.'

'You know, dear, forgive me, but you're being just a little bit childish. Grief is natural, but to worry about him in this way is the last thing your father would have wanted. It's all over now. He's at peace.'

'How do you know he's at peace?' Shelagh exploded. 'How do you know he's not hovering beside us at this minute in an astral body absolutely furious that he's dead, and saying to me, "That bloody nurse gave me too many pills"?'

Oh no, she thought, I didn't mean that, people are too vulnerable, too naked. The poor woman, shaken out of professional calm, sagged in her dressing-gown, drooped before her eyes, and in a tremulous voice said, 'What a terribly unkind thing to say! You know I did no such thing.'

Impulsively Shelagh leapt out of bed and put her arms round the nurse's shoulders.

'Forgive me,' she pleaded, 'of course you didn't. And he liked you very much. You were a wonderful nurse to him. What I meant was'--she searched in her mind for some explanation-- 'what I meant was that we don't know what happens when a person dies. They might be waiting in some queue at St Peter's gate with all the other people who have died that day, or else pushing into some awful purgatorial night-club with the ones who were destined for hell, or just drifting in a kind of fog until the fog clears and everything becomes clear. All right, I will have a sedative, you have one too, then we'll both be fresh for the morning. And please don't think any more about what I said.'

The trouble is, she thought, after she had taken her sedative and gone back to bed, words leave a wound, the wound leaves a scar. The nurse will never give out pills to patients again without a doubt somewhere at the back of her mind as to whether she is doing the right thing. Like the question-mark in her father's conscience about not passing poor old Nick for promotion and so giving him his chip on the shoulder. it was bad to die with something on your conscience. One ought to have some warning, so that one could send a telegram to anyone who might have been wronged, saying, 'Forgive me', and then the wrong would he cancelled, blotted out. This was why, in the old days, people flocked round a dying person's bed, hoping, not to be left something in the will, but for mutual forgiveness, a cessation of ill-feeling, a smoothing out of right and wrong. In fact, a sort of love.