There was a faint sound from the front door, then a fist pounded vigorously on it. Marigold looked in the glass to make sure her make-up was properly matt, rehearsed a smile and slipped a charm-bracelet on to her wrist: it was extra important on an occasion like this to be seen absolutely at one’s best. As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution. A country GP’s visit was hardly on that scale, but the principle held.
Ushered in by Shorty with prolonged and parodied ceremony, the doctor shook hands and sat down on a green-padded chair of uncertain period. Despite his heavy whiskers and inch-wide bracket-shaped moustache, he looked to Marigold about fifteen. Actually he was more than twice that, though he would have confessed, if he had not been so serious-minded and if there had been anybody available to confess it to, that nothing could touch a visit to Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage for making old age seem as remote as interstellar travel.
‘What’s been the trouble, Mrs Pyke?’
‘What has been and is the trouble is that I’m losing my poor little mind, Dr Mainwaring.’
‘That seems most unlikely.’
‘It’s to do with my memory, and letters. I’ve been forgetting ones I receive and also ones I write. That’s much worse, the ones I write. I telephoned your surgery because I found I’d written two letters to the same person, and I was just going to send them off, and I saw them together and so I opened them, and I found they were both answering the same letter from her and they were the same, my letters were, almost word for word.’
The doctor asked for details and got them in full measure. Eventually he said,
‘I see. Is this lady a close friend of yours?’
‘I’ve never been clever at all, I haven’t got a good brain and it’s no use caring now, but I’ve always been able to sort of keep up with things. It’s been my life, keeping up with things, especially the last few years, and if I can’t do that I can’t do anything; there’d be nothing for me to do, and I couldn’t bear that. I’d have to go away somewhere; I couldn’t let them, you know, all of them see it. I couldn’t bear it.’
‘I appreciate that.’ Dr Mainwaring recognized his patient’s departure from her habitual style, but was just as good at hiding the pity the departure made him feel as he was at hiding the irritation the habitual style made him feel. ‘It’s important that you answer my question, Mrs Pyke. The lady you were writing to – are you very close friends? Old friends?’
‘Not specially. We’ve known each other a long time, but never very well.’
‘Now: remember we’re talking in confidence. Would you call her one of the most interesting people you know?’
‘No, I don’t think I would. But she’s most frightfully sweetle-peetles.’
Acquainted as he was with Marigold’s lingo, the doctor only just managed not to scream or to pitch forward on to the tasteful orange-and-buff carpet (once an ornament of her home in Beauchamp Place). If challenged, he would have said that, among the very few generalizations medical practice had suggested to him, there was a fairly obvious one about people in genuine fear (as now) casting aside all affectation: mention X-rays and barium meals, his partner had put it to him the previous week with his immediate agreement, and they stop watching themselves. Here, he thought he saw, was an exception, and hurriedly comforted himself with what he knew to be popularizing notions of how it was the exceptional that was the truly instructive. At the same moment he caught a passing sight of the cat-oriented coverlet, viewed before but never fully assimilated, and himself experienced a twinge of genuine fear compounded with incredulity. Feeling rather as if he had somebody’s hand clapped over his mouth, he said,
‘So you … may have known her a longish … time without ever in fact knowing her very well. I think my general reaction would … be this.’
This proved to be a long monologue on how everybody tended to forget things that did not really concern them, how the tendency tended to increase with age, how another tendency saw to it that, well, older people found it harder to concentrate, how the two tendencies between them could cause lapses of memory, how in such cases (he went carefully here) there was no reason to expect any significant deterioration, and how he would prescribe some pills which would reduce anxiety and so enable the situation to appear in better perspective. It sounded good and contained no flat lies.
Before the doctor had finished, Shorty came in with coffee and biscuits on a bent silver tray. He stayed a little longer than was altogether necessary, constantly glancing at Marigold in a way the doctor saw as indicating concern and Marigold herself as pretended concern hiding utter indifference, but in fact amounted to pretended concern hiding hostile curiosity: if there was anything wrong with her more than being a snobbish old bitch eaten up with her own importance, he wanted to be one of the first to know about it. He soon saw, however, that Marigold was not going to proclaim that leprosy had just been diagnosed in her or that she was near death from an ingrowing toenail, and neither was the doctor; Adela, later, might have something to tell.
‘While I’m here I might as well have a word with you, Mr Shortell,’ said Dr Mainwaring.
‘Nothing the matter with me, doc, bar anno domini, and from all I hear there’s not much to be done about that.’
‘Just the same, I think I’d better see you for a minute before I go.’
‘You’re the boss. I’ll be in the kitchen.’
Shorty took himself off. The doctor finished his monologue by saying,
‘Well, Mrs Pyke, I want you to remember what I’ve said and think it over, and take the pills regularly – that’s important. I hope I’ve managed to reassure you a little.’
‘Oh, absolutely; you’ve been quite marvellous. I feel so differently about the whole thing. It’s frightfully kind of you to take all this trouble over a silly old woman.’
Dr Mainwaring saw that he had indeed reassured his patient a little.
Sixteen
Adela was next. She told the doctor she was feeling about the same as usual and at once went on to inquire about Marigold.
‘No great cause for concern there, Miss Bastable. You could help by discussing the situation with her and generally helping her to calm down. But as regards your own—’
‘It means so much to her, do you see, this business of staying in touch with everyone. Her correspondence – it’s like a City firm. She gets letters by every post. You must do something to help her, Dr Mainwaring.’
‘Well, I hope I’ve—’
‘But I’m sure she’s got a lot of confidence in you. We all have, of course. Do please look in on Professor Zeyer, won’t you? I think you’ll see a great change in him. For the better, I mean.’
They stood in Adela’s north-facing bedroom, round which the doctor looked while she went into considerable detail about George. Apart from some tea-mugs of royal or regional connection, unused ashtrays, eroded postcards and other presumable mementoes, he half noticed, as he had on previous visits, a great many photographs, in frames or pinned to a cork backing. Apart from one of the lesser-known London hospitals and a house in some non-European locale, the subjects were chiefly women, chiefly in the dress of one or another bygone era. On a cursory inspection, portrayals of the occupant of the room were nowhere to be seen, very likely as a result of self-effacement.
‘That sounds most encouraging,’ said the doctor when he had the chance to. ‘But I don’t want you to over-exert yourself. You must remember your own—’
‘Oh, there’s no real exertion involved. My brother gives Mr Shortell and me a hand to get Professor Zeyer upstairs again. It’s funny how his bad leg seems to sort of come and go. My brother’s leg.’
It would have taken a better-informed and even more attentive listener than the doctor to hear that Adela was unsardonic
ally aware of the regular shifts in the condition of her brother’s leg: bad whenever bringing George downstairs was on the cards, wondrously improved when it came to getting him back upstairs.
‘I’ll talk to your brother too, of course. But you must tell me about yourself, Miss Bastable. Any increase in pain? Any unusual discomfort?’
‘Oh, not really, no. I’m as strong as a horse.’
Seventeen
George was next. He was full of enthusiasm about his return to work. The doctor listened approvingly, but felt he had to say,
‘You should remember that, even with all this assistance, you’re still exerting yourself considerably when you move about.’
‘You mean I’m in danger of another stroke.’
‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if I said any different, Professor Zeyer. There are two points, really. One is that any sort of strain must be avoided within reason. The other is, if you follow that advice you’re in no more danger than anybody else with your medical history.’
‘Take it easy, in fact.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ll remember,’ said George, not at all daunted by what he had heard. Work counted more than mobility, more than anything; Adela had not yet had time to get him his new typewriter, but he had already drafted his Mihailovi´c letter in his mind, and a few days’ delay would make no difference to a quarterly journal.
Bernard was next. To him, the doctor said,
‘As before, Mr Bastable?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Brownjohn’s a good man.’
‘Unbelievable name, that. I do very much wonder how he came by it – I should say, how his ancestor came by it. Gossip in the village, do you think?’
‘I expect so. We’ll be in touch.’
Shorty was last. In deference to the doctor, he had so far that day drunk only one small tumbler of that other doctor’s potation, although it was nearly noon. He said,
‘Well, any hope of a death in the family?’
‘Everybody’s doing as well as can be expected.’
‘Oh, terrific.’
‘Let’s take a look at that liver of yours.’
‘What for? It hasn’t been playing me up.’
‘By the time you notice there’s something wrong there’ll already have been permanent damage. You don’t want to end up like Mr Bastable.’
‘True, O king.’
Upstairs, Shorty took his trousers and underpants down and lay on his bed while the doctor kneaded the relevant part of his abdomen.
‘How much do you drink a day?’
‘About a bottle.’ There were in existence, after all, bottles that would hold the true amount.
‘Not a bottle of spirits?’
‘No fear. Kind of wine.’
‘Well, there is some enlargement, but it doesn’t seem to have increased since last time, and if you stick to one bottle of wine a day and eat plenty of meat and fish and chicken, you should be all right.’
‘Message received and understood.’
The doctor went back to Marigold for a final word, and Shorty was not far behind, ostensibly to collect the coffee-tray, so he had a good view when, in the course of seeing the doctor to the door, she fell flat on her back as abruptly as if she had been shot. The two men, each with every appearance of solicitude, helped her to her feet. She seemed shaken but unhurt.
‘I trod on something …’
‘There.’ Shorty picked up a tennis ball, much discoloured and not easy to see in the hall with its single undersized window, even at midday. The ball was also damp and considerably lacerated.
Bernard appeared from the sitting-room, no doubt drawn to the scene by the sound of Marigold’s fall. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’
‘Nasty toss she took,’ said Shorty. ‘Towser’s flaming ball.’
‘That damned dog.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Mrs Pyke?’ asked Dr Mainwaring.
‘It’s old and disgusting and it ought to be put down. It’s always bullying my poor little cat.’
‘He means a lot to George,’ said Shorty.
A reflective look crossed Bernard’s heavy face.
Eighteen
One evening later that week, Shorty, Marigold and Adela were gathered in the sitting-room. Shorty was doing his best to read a paperback book that told, it seemed to him, of some men on a wartime mission to blow something up. His state of mind, normal for him at this time of day, lent the narrative an air of deep mystery. New characters kept on making unceremonious appearances, or, more exactly, he would find that he had been in a sense following their activities for several pages without having noticed their arrival, or, more exactly still, they would turn out, on consultation of the first couple of chapters, to have been about the place from the start. The prose style was tortuous, elliptic, allusive, full of strange poeticisms; the dialogue, after the same fashion, was stuffed with obscurities and non-sequiturs and, like the story itself, constantly referred to people, events, places and the rest that had never come up before, or, once again, had come up eight or eighty pages earlier. Every so often he would run across some detail that nearly convinced him he had read the whole thing before, perhaps more than once. But none of that bothered him in the least: he was not working for an exam, and to read as he did meant that he used up books very slowly and economically.
Marigold too, in her different way, was contentedly reading. Dr Mainwaring’s pills must already have started to take effect; at any rate, she had been pretty tranquil for the past forty-eight hours or so; there had been no recurrence, as far as she was aware, of loss of memory. What she was reading was her scrap-book, a compilation mainly of short items referring to persons far from squarely in the public eye, persons not always known to her in any direct fashion, persons who had less often done something than had something happen to them.
Only Adela, of the three, was less than at ease. A few minutes earlier, she had given up trying to watch the little Japanese television set: there was a young man singing and moving about a lot on one channel, cowboys on another, and what had turned out to be an incomprehensible drama of some sort on the third. It was incomprehensible to her partly because she could not with confidence differentiate any one character from any other, except in point of sex, and partly because, as had been clearly announced at the start of the transmission but too quickly or unemphatically to register with her, what she had seen was part of the fourth episode of a six-part serial.
She picked up her book, Sense and Sensibility, but did not open it. Bernard had gone to London that morning for an exhaustive medical examination by somebody called Mr Brownjohn, promising to telephone from Newmarket railway station when he had returned there and needed her to bring him home in her car. Probably about six o’clock, he had said; it was now nearly eight, and eight was dinner-time, as he well knew. Something must be wrong. She could not read: it was not enough of a distraction.
‘What can have happened?’ asked Adela.
‘Aw, hell, babe,’ said Shorty. ‘Guy gets held up some on the railroad, okay? So it don’t mean no bunch of bad hombres ain’t wrecked the train. Maybe he just don’t done gotten the time to call you-all from that old sheriff’s office, see what I mean, mm-hm?’
‘They must have sort of kept him in, decided they’d got to operate on him straight away or something.’
‘Look, Aleda, Adela, bad news travels fast. If there was any question of that, we’d have heard hours back.’
‘It’ll be those swine of railwaymen having a go-slow or a work-to-rule or whatever it is,’ said Marigold placidly. ‘Pack of rotten Reds.’
‘But he said he’d telephone.’
‘Like I said, Adela, even the Queen can’t telephone from a perishing railway carriage.’
‘She probably can, don’t you think? I was reading somewhere that people do from cars these days. All right, I see what
you mean … Listen.’
A motor vehicle could be heard approaching. Adela ran into the hall, Shorty following more slowly. Marigold turned a page of her scrap-book.
‘… got a taxi,’ said Bernard a moment later as he came into the room. He was wearing a dark suit and tie and looked like an eminent greengrocer.
‘But it can’t be out of order,’ said Adela warmly. ‘I thought of that and got the operator to ring me and it worked.’
‘Well, anyhow, I couldn’t get through. Not that it matters.’
‘How did it go, Bernard?’ asked Shorty.
‘Oh yes, how did it go?’
Bernard smiled, and not caustically at that. ‘Clean bill. For my age, that is, of course. Furthermore—’
‘Oh, Bernard, dear …’
Adela could not resist embracing her brother, who for once (she could not remember the last time) did not stiffen and hold himself away.
‘Good show, Bernard,’ said Shorty.
‘You must be frightfully relieved,’ said Marigold.
Shorty suppressed a grin. People who sound insincere all the time, he thought to himself, should not expect others to notice the difference when they try to sound insincere.
‘Furthermore,’ Bernard was going on, ‘the excellent Mr Brownjohn said he saw no reason why I shouldn’t start drinking again, in reasonable quantities. He seemed to think it would be positively beneficial. Something to do with the circulation.’
‘He of the brown john hath spoken great words of wisdom and good cheer,’ said Shorty. ‘What do you fancy, Bernard?’