Good Behaviour (29 page)

I knew she was right. Papa would spare her anything.

‘I’ll get Dr Coffey.’ I had to speak more loudly against his dreadful breathing. Then I remembered I had no car. ‘Tommy can
go for him,’ I said. ‘I’ll wake him.’ I turned away from Papa. I was at the doorway when I felt the change behind me – a stillness,
filling the room to its walls. I turned back and looked at Rose. I didn’t want to look at Papa. ‘He’s better, isn’t he. His
breathing’s better … ’

‘He’s gone.’ Rose’s voice was half its size. She stood there far away from him, gripping the bed rail. Then, as though it
were an immediate necessity, she rushed across to the window opposite his bed, rattling back the curtains, pushing up the
lower sash, and reaching up the strong length of her arms to tear down the top sash. It was as if she were opening a way to
nowhere and waiting for something to pass. If Papa had a spirit she was giving it freedom. I knew it was an ignorant Roman
Catholic superstition, and I felt it a gross impertinence. I wished I could think of something to keep her in her proper place.
But all I could think of was that she should be the one to tell Mummie.

‘I’ll tell her with her morning tea,’ Rose said firmly, ‘when I have him looking nice.’ She looked away from me as though
I were of no account, and almost eagerly, I thought, at Papa. I wondered what she was going to do to him now that he was so
completely her doll. I had to be grateful for her competence; for her recovery from the creature that had lain across the
kitchen table, torn this way and that way before my eyes. Now her ability was a raft on empty waters. I needn’t think about
what she would have to do for Papa.

Out again in the dark corridor, alone with the thought of my cold bed, I felt a sick shivering go through me. I thought what
a crash there would be if I fell, and I almost wished for a disturbance that would bring me some pity. But there was no such
thing. Only good behaviour about Death. So I sat down on the floor before I fell down and waited for the weakness to pass
over. Sitting there I felt my grief for Papa and my lost love for Richard as joining together. Only Papa had known that we
were lovers. Now half my despair was my own secret. No one could take it from me, or lessen it, or tell of it. My great body
had been blessed by love. True. It was true. Some merciless shaft had been ready to pierce me with denial. I must run from
it, and keep that truth whole for myself. I could hear Rose stirring busily, sure-footed, behind Papa’s door, and the idea
that soon she might be going to the bathroom for water got me onto my feet.

As I stood up I thought of that pot of tea sitting on the kitchen stove and my wish for it felt guilty in all the tragic circumstances.
But, the more unseemly I thought it, the stronger came my wish for a cup of hot tea, perhaps a slice of bread and butter,
and my hotwater-bottle – how had I forgotten that? They were three necessities, and I was glad of them. There was someone
I could help, if it was only myself. But I was relieved to think that there would be nobody there to watch me drinking tea
and buttering a slice of bread.

Mummie was rigorously set on perfect behaviour. She was eating some breakfast when I came into the diningroom. She put down
her knife to write something on the back of an opened-out envelope. ‘There’s such a lot to be done.’ She spoke in her ordinary
voice. ‘So many things to remember. One has to be businesslike.’ She wrote something down. ‘
And
put out the spirit-lamp,’ she said, ‘when you’ve had enough breakfast.’

Eggs and bacon and coffee, the dogs’ porridge and the winter sun coming in on long slanting prongs through the high windows
– except that the world had stopped, things were going on much as usual.

‘What must we do this morning?’

I had to break the indecent noise of shovelling down eggs and bacon; my swallowing had an immense sound.

‘I,’ she repeated, ‘I have sent Tommy for Dr Coffey. Rose says that is the first thing to be done. After that he can go on
to Kildeclan and get your friend the solicitor to help me about—’ she looked round the table, unable to say ‘funeral’ or
‘coffin.’ Instead she said: ‘Rather a pity about the car. But you mustn’t blame yourself. Really not.’

‘She wouldn’t start, Mummie. It was freezing.’

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it might have made no difference. One never knows, does one?’ She wrote something down on the envelope.
‘They said someone was waiting to see me.’ She pressed the little mother-of-pearl bell on the table, and when Breda answered
it (all importance and restraint), she said: ‘What did I want? Who is waiting?’

‘The steward, madam.’

‘Oh, yes. Tell Foley I’m ready to see him now. In the hall.’ She got up and walked out of the room with brisk intention. She
must have forgotten the envelope and pencil beside her plate. On my way to give myself a second cup of coffee I looked at
it to see what plans she had outlined for the day. The envelope was covered with doodling scribbles and isolated words, making
no kind of sense or guide. Really rather silly.

When I went through the hall to call the dogs in to their breakfast Rose, not Mummie, was in consultation, not with Foley
but with Mr Kiely. She had the kitchen scribbling pad on the table and I could see it was written over by her in tidy lists
of necessities, marked: 1, 2, 3 – very different from Mummie’s envelope. I read: 1. Near Mr Hubert.
Not
the vault. 2. Millinery department, Switzers, Grafton Street. Send three black felt hats on appro. 3. Wreath from the staff.

‘Good morning.’ Mr Kiely looked very brisk in his smart little overcoat. ‘I heard the sad news about the Major so I came along
to see if I could help about the … arrangements.’ It was a relief to hear someone speaking in an ordinary voice – the first
I had heard that morning, except for Mummie’s. His
businesslike tone conveyed a discreet denial of our contacts of the night before. Perhaps I had imagined things, I was so
sick and blinded then.

‘Thank you so much,’ I said. ‘It would be a great help.’

Rose picked her pad up off the table and came a little closer: ‘Madam is so grateful to Mr Kiely for his prompt attention
–’ she spoke very grandly – ‘and I have this list for him of her wishes in all matters.’ Mr Kiely looked from Rose to me.

‘Maybe you had better come to my office and telephone?’ he suggested. It was as if he had told Rose to stand aside. He took
the list gently out of her hand, and read it aloud to me. His action made nonsense of her presence, and this pleased me. I
stood beside him, looking down the list, while I made further suggestions.

Rose left us, going quietly away, as a servant should, but returning, within a few minutes, shepherding, shadowing, almost
compelling Mummie towards us down the cold distances of the hall. She stood behind Mummie, as if to support her, or to supply
a tactful hint, or a helpful reminder, should they be needed.

Mummie gave Mr Kiely the tips of her tiny, straightened fingers and bowed her head briefly at his condolence. ‘Rose thought
there were some other questions to decide about tomorrow.’

‘It can’t be tomorrow, Mummie,’ I said. ‘There won’t be time.’

‘Perhaps, Aroon, Mr Kiely and I had better discuss this. Shall we go into the library, Mr Kiely?’ She turned away, expecting
him to follow, and he turned towards me.

‘I made arrangements for the garage to collect your car –’

‘My car. How kind,’ Mummie corrected and commended him.

‘– and to send the account in to my office.’ Mr Kiely was still speaking to me.

‘If only the car had been here last night.’ Mummie spoke as though each word were drawn out of her by pincers. ‘However,’
she added, ‘we mustn’t think about that.’

I was stunned by the assumption that Papa might have lived but for my idiot incompetence or neglect over the car. If I had
gone for Dr Coffey as Rose came howling into the kitchen, Papa would still have died in less than an hour. There was a pause
until Mummie said: ‘Rose, would you come with us and bring our list?’ Rose threw me a polite, pitying look as she shut the
library door.

Because they had shut me out I was still standing in the hall, raging with my grievance, when Dr Coffey arrived.

‘My dear child, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference if I’d been with him all night.’ Instead of being in his usual
flurry to get away to his next patient, he seemed to have all the day’s leisure to hear what I had to say.

‘I know she was giving him whisky,’ I insisted. I had to say it. ‘I told you before, didn’t I? That’s what killed him. Wasn’t
it?’

‘Whatever she gave him,’ Dr Coffey said, ‘made no difference. And if he died happy, what about it?’

‘He didn’t die happy. His breathing – if you’d been there … ’

‘He was unconscious, my dear child.’ He took my hands strongly in his. ‘We all did our best for him. God rest his soul, he
was a grand man.’

‘And will you please tell them the car made no difference?’

‘I will, of course. It’s only the truth. Try and put the whisky
out of your mind too. It was death from natural causes, and Rose was a great nurse to him.’

‘Oh, I know. She was sitting up warming his bad foot when I came in last night, this morning, whenever it was.’

‘Death from natural causes,’ Dr Coffey repeated with more certainty. He said no more about Rose. My admission of her devotion
seemed to stop him.

‘I’ll run up and see the Major,’ he said, just as if this were one of his frequent visits. I almost expected there might be
a brace of woodcock in his car. It was just the weather for them, I thought. As I stood and shivered in the familiar cold
of the hall, the dogs came dispassionately towards me. They seemed unattractive and dispirited. I was just in time to prevent
one of them from peeing on the baize hall-door curtain, their favourite cold-weather lavatory. They conveyed to me a clear
picture of myself: the unmarried daughter who doesn’t play bridge, letting out the dogs for evermore. Mummie and Rose would
be in power over me, over Temple Alice, until I was old, or middle-aged at best, beyond even the remembrance of time past.
They may starve me too – the idea filled me with panic. Mummie doesn’t eat and Rose won’t cook for me alone. They will enjoy
starving me. It will be called economy. Daughters at home are supposed to do the flowers. Mummie does the flowers …

Mr Kiely came out presently. Somebody shut the door behind him. It would be Rose, and she would overlook us through one of
the windows on either side of the hall door, a fox behind glass. As though he realised this he hurried past me to his car.
‘Everything sorted out now, I think.’

I could not be ignored again. I must know, so that I need not ask Rose for the plans.

‘Thursday. Two o’clock. I’ll ring the
Times
and the
Irish
Times
, and I’ll send off the other telegrams … Switzers … flowers – what about your own flowers?’

So they had forgotten to put me on the list to the florist. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘not chrysanthemums.’

‘Not chrysanthemums,’ he wrote it down. ‘I’ll see to it they send something good.’

Later in the morning when our car came back, its presence invoked and concentrated a sad hostility. Too late now, all the
eyes seemed to be saying. Heads turned from me accusingly, pityingly. As the day crawled on, hushed and cold, I felt more
wronged, grieved, and unwanted than ever before. My sorrow for Papa and my agony over Richard were hooked and linked. I could
see no possible end to unhappiness. Besides, I was wolfishly hungry all the hours before luncheon. And, when luncheon came,
I could feel Mummie’s eyes sad and unbelieving, on my plate. It was fish. Delicious. Rose brought Mummie a creamed egg in
a minute earthenware pot. Waiting in the diningroom was Breda’s business, but today things had no proper order, servants whispered
and revelled in the sad change.

‘Try and eat it, madam; it’s only the bantam hen’s.’ Rose looked accusingly at my half-empty plate. ‘I knew you’d never manage
to swallow the Major’s fish.’ I felt like a cannibal, a hungry cannibal, and very unloveable. They looked at me in satisfied
derision as I finished what was on my plate.

‘I couldn’t let anything pass my lips,’ Rose said, ‘but a cup of tea. Light tea.’

Next day telegrams came. Relays of boys brought them in sheaves from the post office. Rose piled them together on the writing
table in the library, sombrely pleased at the multiplicity of the tributes. Mummie looked at the heap of telegrams with a
sort of blind disgust: ‘One must open them, I suppose.’

‘Would you like me to do it?’ A share of the love and sympathy was mine, and opening envelopes is always nice.

‘No, thank you.’ She sat down at the writing table. Then I heard her say in a sharp, decisive voice: ‘Most certainly
NOT
– the very last person I wish to see.’

‘You needn’t see anyone, need you? Everyone must understand.’

‘He won’t. He means to stay. Read it.’ She handed me the telegram.

‘“Coming to you for funeral. Wobbly.”’

Wobbly – Richard’s father. Papa’s friend. I felt myself going red with longing to see him.

‘The silliest friend your father ever had.’ She spoke patiently. ‘His wound –’ even now she didn’t say Papa’s wooden leg –
‘his wound was all because of some mad wartime escapade of Wobbly’s.
And
he loaded Mrs Brock onto us. Then Hubert … ’ She put the back of her hand up to her mouth. She was on the brink of not behaving
beautifully, but saved herself just in time. ‘I shall simply wire:
DON’T COME
.’ She wrote it down. ‘Get that to the post office for me.’

It was the first and only thing she had asked me to do, and it meant for me the loss of a last contact. In the dark of the
post office, as I copied her message onto a form, it occurred to me how easy to substitute
DO
for
DON’T
, but I overruled the temptation. They would find out. As it happened it made no difference. Late that afternoon another telegram
arrived, saying:
PLEASE MEET BOAT TRAIN LIMERICK JUNCTION THURSDAY MORNING. WOBBLY
.