The Malcontenta (22 page)

She shrugged and her voice became more businesslike, matter-of-fact. ‘You could imagine the verb in the past tense,
And I was in Arcady,
as if the person in the tomb was speaking to us from the past, you know,
Think of me; I used to live here too, just like you.
On the other hand, the verb could be in the present tense, in which case it isn’t the dead person talking, but death itself.
Remember, even in Arcady, I am here.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Brock nodded. ‘You
are
good at this. But why does it upset you?’

She said nothing for a while, and he watched her stubborn profile staring fixedly at the snow at her feet.

‘I’m going to die,’ she whispered at last.

He was stunned. ‘What do you mean?’

She struggled to compose herself. ‘Everyone’s going to die, of course, we all know that. Only we don’t, not really. We just don’t believe it’s ever really going to happen. But I know it’s going to happen to me. I’ve been picked.’

‘Picked?’ Brock was conscious of how tense and still their bodies were.

‘When I was a girl, a teenager,’ she whispered, and she suddenly sounded very weary, ‘I remember reading about a village in Spain during the Civil War. Was it in Hemingway? I don’t know, I was reading him about then, I think … Anyway, this village was high up on the side of a mountain, and there was a sheer cliff on one side of the village square. When one side won control of the village, all the people who had supported the other side were picked out, and one by one they were carried to the edge of the cliff and thrown over.’

She paused as if watching the scene projected on to the white surface of the ground.

‘I was horrified, imagining what it must have been like, waiting for your turn, watching the others lifted up, struggling and begging and screaming, and then disappearing over the edge. And then seeing the eyes turning on you, realizing it’s
you
now, feeling their hands on
you,
carrying
you
towards the void.’

Grace stopped for breath, trembling, and Brock waited, silently.

Another deep breath, like an immense sigh. ‘I have cancer, David. That’s it. I have cancer.’ ‘Oh, Grace, I’m …’

‘They first detected it last June. A tumour in my side. I had chemotherapy through the summer and it seemed to work. I lost all my hair and felt like a wet rag, but I was in the clear. I knew it was going to be all right. I came here a couple of times to help with the recuperation.

‘Then last month I went for a check-up. My hair had been growing back and I had more energy, though I still kept feeling exhausted. In a way I enjoyed that. It reminded me of what I had overcome, and made me feel that my body was recovering. But they discovered that the cancer had survived after all, and it had spread all over, deep, malignant. And I began to realize, from what they said and the way they said it, that it wasn’t going to be all right after all.’

She half turned her head and looked into his eyes. ‘I shan’t be here for summer. I shall be gone, into the void.’

Brock turned away, unable for a moment to meet her gaze. ‘Grace … I’m so sorry.’

‘The thing that really brought it home to me, that really made me feel so terrified, was the way Winston and the boys took it. Winston is my husband.’

She took another deep breath. ‘We have two boys - Richard, who’s eighteen, and Arthur, who’s sixteen. Anyway, they were very sympathetic and caring and everything, just like the first time. Only … I began to see that they were taking it in their stride. They’d already had a dress rehearsal, thinking they were going to lose me, and now they knew how to deal with it. It was as if they just went straight to the recovery stage, as if they’d already gone through denial, grieving and all the rest, and didn’t need to do it again.

‘For me it was the complete opposite of the first time, when I’d been distracted from worrying about myself by worrying about how they would cope without me. That first time I’d told Winston he mustn’t feel guilty about marrying again when I was gone, because I didn’t see how he’d manage on his own. He told me not to say things like that, but now I realize that he did think about it, and now I don’t think I like it any more. Oh, it’s not that he wants me to die or anything. I’m sure he’d do anything to save me, if he could - it was he who suggested I come here. It’s just that in his mind he’s already moved ahead to when he’ll be a single man again, and I think he doesn’t find the idea all that unbearable. I find it difficult to face my women friends now, especially the single ones, without wondering if their being so solicitous has something to do with the fact that there’ll be an attractive spare man in my house in a month or two who’ll need helping out.’

She sighed. ‘Doesn’t that sound dreadful? I even imagine them asking me if I’ll leave him to one of them in my will. It isn’t really jealousy exactly. I feel as if I were sitting in a train in the station, and Winston and the boys are alongside me in another train, and we can talk to each other through the open windows, just as if we were all together. But pretty soon our trains will leave the station and continue their journeys, and we all know that the tracks will separate and go off in different directions. I have a terrible sense of panic, of loss, that I won’t be with them any more, that they will go their way without me. Maybe that’s what jealousy is, really, the thing that makes it hurt so much. It’s also fear. I’m absolutely terrified, David. It wasn’t like this the first time at all. I was brave, or at least I seemed to be able to act bravely. Perhaps I was just in shock. Now I seem to have completely lost my nerve. And the calmer and more considerate they become, the more I panic. That’s why I had to get away from them for a while.’

It occurred to Brock that, for someone who had spent half his life investigating sudden death, supposedly an expert in the subject, he had absolutely nothing useful to say to her.

‘Grace, I feel so stupid suggesting we come out here …’ He waved his arm at the sarcophagus.

‘No,’ she put her hand on his arm. ‘I’m glad you suggested it. It isn’t morbid. I really want to come to terms with it. That’s why I was in the temple yesterday. I wanted to try to understand what had been in Alex Petrou’s mind.’

Brock had originally planned to turn the conversation to this. It was the reason why he had suggested their walk. Now he no longer wanted to pursue it with her. Yet it took them on to slightly easier ground, away from the impossibly oppressive facts of Grace’s story. ‘Do you feel he could have known what he might be facing?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to decide. Did he know? He had such style! He made everyone else seem timid, tongue-tied, rather provincial, as if he belonged to a wider, more expansive, more exciting world. I’ve been trying to imagine, if he had known that he was at risk in some way, would he have behaved differently? Or would he have gone on being the same, risking everything, daring the fates?’

‘You felt he was a risk-taker?’

‘Oh yes, I’m sure he was! I remember some old dears driving back to the clinic one day and arriving in a terrible state because they’d met Alex on the road on his motor bike. He drove like a bat out of hell - that was his expression. He’d picked it up from someone and it appealed to him. “I am the bat out of hell,” he would say. He’d had several speeding tickets.’

‘Well … maybe that’s the best way to go.’ Brock muttered the words before he could stop himself, then immediately bit his tongue. But Grace didn’t appear to have heard. She was staring past his shoulder, eyes wide, her expression rather as he had seen it first in the lower chamber of the temple.

Brock turned in the direction of her stare and saw a dark, hooded figure standing motionless, watching them, about thirty yards away towards the high hedges which surrounded the north lawn of the house. They remained immobile, the three of them, for a long second, and then the figure turned abruptly and disappeared behind the nearest hedge.

‘Stay here,’ Brock said. He ran as fast as he could towards the other end of the hedge, jumping over flower-beds and clumps of dead foliage. He threw himself around the end of the hedge and slithered to a stop. There was no sign of anyone else. Chest heaving from the sudden exertion in his heavy boots and coat, he trotted along the hedge, back towards the spot where the figure had been standing. Before he reached the place, he saw the footprints and recognized the diamond heel pattern. The track came a few paces down the line of the hedge, then crossed back through a gap and headed towards the clearing where he’d left Grace.

‘Shit!’ he muttered, and pushed through the gap, his eyes fixed on the footprints. They detoured round a cluster of bushes, and looking up he caught a glimpse of the dark figure through an opening in the shrubbery ahead. Whoever it was had reached Grace, was standing over her, and Brock could see her pale face turned upwards.

He decided to cut directly through to them rather than follow the path, and found himself floundering up to his thighs in deceptively deep mounds of pristine snow. The two motionless figures seemed unaware of his approach as he struggled towards them. Finally, Grace nodded and turned her face towards Brock, and he realized she had known he was coming but had been listening to something the other figure had been saying. It, too, turned, and Brock saw a peaked cap projecting under the hood of the black parka, and beneath the cap a male face.

‘David! You’ll give yourself a heart attack,’ Grace said, with genuine concern.

It took him an embarrassingly long time to bring his heaving lungs under sufficient control to speak. ‘Who …? Who …?’

‘This is Geoffrey Parsons, David. He’s the Estates Manager.’

Parsons offered his hand and Brock was obliged to pull his glove off and shake it.

‘What were you doing, lurking over there?’ he asked truculently.

‘I saw you, but I didn’t want to interrupt …’ Parsons sounded anxious. And looking at him close up, at the wisps of sandy hair falling untidily across his eyes, and listening to his weak voice, Brock felt foolish at having expended so much effort pursuing him.

‘What about yesterday? You followed us up to the temple, didn’t you?’

Parsons nodded. ‘I’ve been wanting to ask Mrs Carrington something. Sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you.’ He smiled wanly at Grace, then nervously at Brock, and turned and walked away.

‘What did he want?’ Brock asked.

‘He’s worried about his girlfriend, Rose. Wanted to know if she had been speaking to me. She works here too, and we got quite friendly the last time I was here.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps I should speak to her, try to find out what’s wrong. It’s the last thing I want to do, but of course he doesn’t know about …’ She looked up at Brock sharply. ‘You won’t say anything to anyone, David, will you? I didn’t mean to tell anyone.’

‘Of course not. Can I help in any way - with Rose, I mean?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not even sure that he wants me to approach her. He’s so tense. I wonder if her problem is
him:

Brock met Rose the following morning, although the circumstances were such that her problems were not uppermost in his mind. She was acting as assistant to Stephen Beamish-Newell for Brock’s first acupuncture session, the thought of which had been making him feel unreasonably apprehensive.

‘Any side-effects from the fasting, David?’

Beamish-Newell had sat Brock on the edge of the couch, really a kind of trolley, waist high, and was now taking his blood pressure before beginning the treatment. The room was one of a series of small, sparsely furnished rooms which ran down one side of the corridor in the basement and were linked by connecting doors with frosted-glass panels.

‘No, I seem to have coped with it all right, after the first shock.’ Brock suddenly thought about Ben Bromley’s meat pie, and his stomach gave a small gurgle. He looked up at Rose, standing waiting in the corner, and she shot him an automatic smile of encouragement. There was a stainless-steel trolley beside her, and on it were rubber gloves, some folded hand-towels and a block of sponge into which a number of acupuncture needles had been stuck. Whether it was the thought of the meat pie or the sight of the needles or the combination of the two, Brock felt suddenly nauseous. He took a deep breath and tried to think of something else while Beamish-Newell took his pulse.

‘All right, good. Lie face down on the couch now, David, and we’ll get you started.’ The doctor went over to a small basin and washed his hands.

The large cast-iron radiator beneath the tiny window was oversized for the small room, and with the doors closed it was even more oppressively hot than elsewhere in the house. Brock lay on his front, folded his arms under his head and tried not to think about pierced eyeballs.

He felt something soft dab at a spot on his upper left hip, then a pause, and then a slight tingling sensation in his flesh.

‘You’ll be finishing your fast tonight, David.’ Another soft dab, this time on the right side. ‘The grosser poisons should pretty well have drained from your system. Takes time for them to leach out completely, but you’ll soon notice the difference. Hope you’ve been drinking plenty of water?’

No reply.

‘David?’

Silence.

‘Haven’t fallen asleep on us, have you?’

Beamish-Newell moved to Brock’s head and touched his cheek, then pulled his eyelid back. ‘Passed out.’

The doctor swore quietly under his breath and checked Brock’s pulse. Rose wet a cloth under the cold tap and offered it to him. He nodded but didn’t take it, and she came forward and wiped Brock’s face. He didn’t stir.

‘Come on!’ Beamish-Newell slapped the back of Brock’s hand and waited. Nothing.

After five minutes the doctor withdrew the two needles he had inserted. After ten he shook his head impatiently and told Rose to keep a close eye on the totally unresponsive figure on the couch while he got started on the other patients in the adjoining rooms. While she waited Rose turned down the valve on the radiator, and then stood up on a chair and with difficulty tugged open the little window under the vault. She chatted to Brock reassuringly as she did so. ‘Sure it’s awful hot in here. Isn’t it just? It’s no wonder you passed out. I had someone pass out in the sauna just last week. Heat can take you that way. No warning, especially if you’re short of fluids. Could that be the way of it, do you think?’