“And besides,” she told Jeff over supper, “I really want to know about the pistol. I’m inquisitive.”
“I’m not,” he said wearily. “I just want it out of my hair. Do I have to ring this woman tonight?”
“It’s a bit late. Tomorrow…Look, I’ll do it, if you want. And if she says yes, I’ll take Uncle Albert up there and sort out
about the pistol with her. I’ll do you a couple of lines for you to sign, giving me authority. I’d better look up the law
relating to gifts…”
“My impression is that Uncle Albert doesn’t actually think it belongs to him. None of that matters, anyway, provided he finishes
up happy about it. Do you think you can do it in a day?”
“If I can’t I’m not going. It’s unlucky sleeping apart, I’ve decided. Bad things happen. You’ll be all right for a day?”
“I’ll be fine. When you’re here, I keep wanting to break off. In fact, one good solid day, when I can really concentrate,
would be a help. I’ve got the stuff on disk, but it’s all over the shop and pretty technical. See if you can fix Matlock for
the day after tomorrow, then I’ll spend tomorrow sorting out what I need—that’s just a question of time—and I’ll have two
days to get it into a shape Sir Vidal can understand. That’s going to be the tricky bit.”
“I’m worried about him wanting to take you over, sort of absorb you, the way Billy tried. These guys think you’re a gizmo,
Jeff. There’s plenty of gizmos out there, but you’re the best, and they want you for themselves.”
“I had a thought on the train. Suppose I went freelance, and you packed it in with Barlow and Ames and ran the business side…”
“…and get to come with you to Paris and Bermuda as part of the package…”
“It’ll just as likely be Flint, Michigan.”
“Not if I’m running the business side, it won’t.”
“There’s that. Right. I’ll take the car back Friday, and clear my desk. But first I’m going to screw Billy.”
“T
he most extraordinary thing. Ma! You’ll never guess. I was just finishing doing the flowers last evening when Simon Stadding
rang—he really doesn’t sound at all well, poor man. I wonder if he ever thinks about Anne now. Oh dear, never mind. Anyway
all he would tell me was that there was this woman called Pilcher, in Maidstone, wanting to get hold of me. You remember I
rang him to ask if anyone in the Association lived in Maidstone and he said no, but apparently he’d forgotten that that was
where Sergeant Fred’s great-nephew—you remember Sergeant Fred, of course—that was where this great-nephew lives who looks
after Sergeant Fred’s affairs. Light dawned, you could say. So of course I rang the woman straight away. I thought she’d be
asking for money, so I was pretty sharp with her to start with and I didn’t say anything about Sergeant Fred. I just tackled
her straight off about the pistol and told her we’d got to have it back. She was remarkably cool about it, I must say—she’s
some kind of solicitor, she says, but she’s not wearing her solicitor’s hat about this—solicitor’s wig. I suppose I mean—no
I don’t—that’s barristers—but she absolutely refused to say anything about the pistol except that it wasn’t hers and she shouldn’t
have taken it to the show, and she’d pass a message on to whoever it did belong to, only it didn’t of course because it belongs
to you, but you know what I mean. And then she rather took the wind out of my sails by saying that what She was calling about
was that Sergeant Fred has suddenly decided he wants to come and see you, and we hummed and hawed about that for a bit but
I thought if it means we’re going to get the pistol back, and apparently she’s prepared to drive him up, with her husband
because it’s a long way, though we did talk about them staying the night—he’s spry as a flea, she says, but his mind’s a bit
off so he’s never quite sure what’s what—the other way round from you, I told her—I hope you don’t mind—so Mrs. Pilcher says
he may have forgotten all about it by tomorrow, but she doesn’t think so because he seems to have a thoroughgoing bee in his
bonnet about something—she says he was trying to come up here on his own, after she’d gone, and they had to stop him—I must
say I rather took to her in spite of her sounding so keep-your-distance about everything. She’d taken Sergeant Fred for a
drive this afternoon, she said, and she sounds rather fond of him, so her heart’s in the right place. I’d’ve come up last
night and told you only supper was ready and kidneys are Jack’s favourite and you know how easily those cream sauces crack—wasn’t
it good though? She’s terrific at the tricky things, only she can’t be bothered to get the easy ones right, and really there’d
be something indecent about having two cooks…anyway. I’ve been thinking. I bet what’s bothering Sergeant Fred is that he’s
got the pistols, somehow, heaven knows how. I mean if it had been—what was that funny crook’s name Da was so fond of? Terry
something. Vass?”
“Voss.”
“That’s right. If it had been him…but Sergeant Fred? Anyway, he’s got the pistols, and someone must have been messing around
firing them and not cleaning them properly, which is a shame because you know what a fuss Da always made about that—and then
this woman got hold of one of them—I mean if she’d had the other one and the box she’d have taken them all along to the show,
wouldn’t she?
So now it’s all come out and Mrs. Pilcher says his memory’s not too good so perhaps he’d just forgotten about them, but now
he’s decided that he’d better get them off his conscience by bringing them back. Don’t you think that’s what’s happened, Ma?”
“Possibly,” whispered Rachel. This was one of her no-saliva days. She couldn’t have argued, even if she had wished to.
“So if that’s what’s going on,” said Flora, “wouldn’t it be easier all round if I just popped down to Hastings and saw Sergeant
Fred and told him all was forgiven and forgotten and he could give me the pistols to bring back to you. I’ll be going to London
anyway for the Mc-Nulty bash—think of those two staying married for fifty years! Like one of those wars people used to have
which just went on and on till that’s all anyone knows about them—do you have the faintest notion what the Thirty Years War
was about?—instead of Mrs. Pilcher having to bring the old boy all the way up here. You do agree, don’t you?”
“Won’t know who you are.”
“But I’ll tell him, Ma. I’ll get Mrs. Pilcher to come too. And I’m sorry, Ma, but if you get him all this way and he sees
you like this, perhaps he won’t… I mean, when he used to know you…”
“Knows the house. Knows pistol belongs here.”
“But honestly, Ma…”
“Drink.”
“I’m sorry. Try not to talk. Here you are, then. Ready?”
The effort at speech had exacerbated the drought in Rachel’s mouth to a pitch beyond discomfort, not exactly pain, but still
with the true ferocity of pain. And now Flora, overconfident in the convenience of the invalid cup, tried to pour too fast.
Rachel forced her lips to reject the spout just in time to stop herself choking, a hideous experience, convulsing the insensate
body while the mind endured, helpless and aware of the ease with which one could suffocate on one’s own vomit. Taken by surprise,
Flora poured a generous slop of barley water over Rachel’s chest.
“Oh, sorry, Ma.”
She put the cup down and mopped with a towel at the spillage, using a vigorous rubbing motion, as if drying a spaniel. Rachel’s
head joggled helplessly to and fro. The second attempt was more successful.
“Better? No, don’t try to talk, Ma.”
“Ask her to bring Sergeant Fred.”
“Oh, but, Ma…”
“No. Listen. Knows what he wants. Doesn’t matter how…”
Rachel willed the obscenity out.
“…gaga he is. He knows.”
Flora shrugged. Most people would have described her as strong-willed. She had that manner and usually got away with it. They
would also, probably, have thought Rachel diffident, but even now both still accepted, as they always had, that it would be
Rachel who had her way.
She must have smiled without deliberately causing her lips to move (unusual these days) because Flora responded with a laugh.
Rachel was aware of feeling peculiarly close to her daughter, the closeness of affection and habit, but not, alas, what she
understood by love. Not for the first time she wondered whether Flora had any conscious understanding of how she had been
cheated, almost from the beginning. She had been given warmth, interest, help and comfort when needed, all unstinted. But
true, deep love from her parents—the real things, irreplaceable, no other product would do—love such as Jocelyn had felt for
Anne and Rachel for Dick—no. Somehow Rachel kept her smile in place, though now weeping inwardly and raging that her stupid
arms couldn’t stir, couldn’t even ache with the physical impulse to stir, reach out, embrace this sixty-four-year-old woman
and at last start to atone for all those years of love withheld.
“Darling,” she whispered. “I haven’t—”
She stopped herself in time and closed her eyes.
Loved you enough
, she had been going to say, but Flora wouldn’t have understood, would have protested, distressed. It was too late to explain
now, much too late.
“That’s right, Ma. You have a good rest, and I’ll come up later and tell you what the woman says.”
Rachel felt the brush of a kiss on her forehead, heard the movement of door handle and door, and then Flora’s rattling syllables
receding along the corridor as she moved towards Dilys’s sitting room, already explaining herself. Rachel couldn’t distinguish
the words, and Dilys’s softer answers from inside the room, but amid the diversions the gist was plain from the intonation:
Mrs. Pilcher’s call; Sergeant Fred—who he was and why he mattered; his wish to visit Rachel; Rachel’s wish to see him; half-admiring
exasperation at the determination of these two old things to meet again; passing mention of the accident with the barley water;
and so on. Then both voices moving back towards Rachel’s door, the actual words becoming audible as the door opened.
“…could ask Pat to come and give you a hand for the night, I suppose.”
“I think I can manage, Mrs. Thomas, really I do. It doesn’t sound like the old man’s going to be a lot of trouble.”
“Well, let’s just see…”
(Flora now moving away and speaking over her shoulder.)
“…and as soon as I know which day it’ll be I’ll check with Pat whether she’ll be free.”
The door closed. Rachel heard Dilys sigh.
“Now then, dearie, we’ve been at it again, wearing ourselves out chatting, Mrs. Thomas says. You’re each as bad as the other,
I’m beginning to think. And she spilt your drinkie over you too, she says. Let’s have a look. Dearie me, we’re all sticky,
like a kid who’s been at the treacle tin. I don’t know. Looks like I’ll have to give you your bath all over again. And a clean
nightie… We’re all right, aren’t we, dearie? We didn’t choke or anything?“
“Nearly.”
“Well, a miss is as good as a mile, I always say. She’s a very good soul, Mrs. Thomas, and I’d be the last to deny it, but
I’ll go down on my knees and thank my creator that I didn’t have the training of her as a nurse.”
Rachel would have laughed aloud, had the mechanism still existed. Years ago, on a nanny’s afternoon out, she had watched Flora
change one of the children’s nappies, talking over her shoulder as she did so, and finishing with a bewildered child wearing
a vast but unreliable package of terry cloth wrapped loosely round its midriff.
Still with closed eyes she lay, but for once didn’t listen to Dilys chattering away as she worked. She was aware of being
in a strange state. Normally, despite the unresponsiveness of her body, not a minute went by, except in dreams, when she wasn’t
fully conscious of its prisoning reality. This morning there seemed to be a looseness in the connection. She could feel, in
the sense that the signals came from the inert limbs, but she was unable to interpret the signals. By the movement of her
head she could tell that her torso had been gently lifted so that the sodden nightie could be eased free, but after that,
for a while, the eerie disembodiment seemed so complete that if she had known the password she could have slid out of this
place, out of this time, out of the inert flesh, away…
No. She mustn’t do that yet. There was work to be done, tidying and sorting, before she could allow herself to leave. She
opened her eyes and found her vision blocked by blurred yellow cloud-stuff, which she discovered to be a clean nightie which
had draped itself in front of her as her raised left arm was fed into the sleeve. Then, gently, she was rolled to one side
to let the nightie be eased beneath her, rolled back to have her right arm inserted, before the garment was fastened down
the front and the bedclothes drawn up.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It’s a pleasure,” said Dilys. “And now, what’ll we do with ourselves? Listen to our book for a bit?”
“No. Albums.”
“Oh, good, ever so interesting, I find them. Drinkie before you tell me? We’re a bit dry today, aren’t we?”
Typical of her attention, Rachel thought, that she could distinguish between one sere whisper and another. She sipped gratefully,
then explained which volumes she wanted. Ostensibly she was looking for pictures that might interest Sergeant Fred, so that
Dilys could mark them, ready for his visit. It would have been logical to begin with the early part of the war, before the
regiment had sailed for Singapore. Sergeant Fred had barely yet become a friend then, but there were a few faces he might
remember. Then there was a whole volume devoted to the Cambi Road Association, and there’d be pictures of the children at
various ages. But instead of any of those Rachel chose the final one devoted to Jocelyn. Though the previous album had been
less than half full, she had started a fresh one for the funeral.
The rector had been in the parish less than a month. Rachel had done no more than shake hands with him after his first service,
until he had called to express his condolences over Jocelyn’s death, and discuss arrangements for the funeral. Rachel hadn’t
taken to him. He had a soft but at the same time domineering manner, and though all he said was impeccably correct she detected
no real feeling behind it. He had taken so long to answer her request that she’d thought he was going to refuse.