Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  ‘Ah. That I will never be,’ said Kate.

  ‘And nor will I,’ said Enid.

  19 Delilah

  WALTER WAS DEAD. The hospital was awake. Kate slept. She awoke to find thin Janet performing, as gently as she could, those necessary tasks on which we have decided not to dwell. Suffice it to say that for a proud woman the humiliation didn’t lessen as day succeeded day.

  Not thin Janet. Janet was the fat one. This one was . . . thin . . . it had gone. Kate felt the mists swirling in her head. As she awoke more fully she remembered the task that she’d set herself. The murder. Go through the alphabet. Thin Alison? Thin Andrea? It seemed a much more fearsome thing, the murder, now that all the decorative trimmings had been ripped away. Someone, almost certainly one of her three sons, had murdered Graham for a very serious reason.

  Thin . . . Brenda? Carrie? (There’s tension in Timothy, I can tell. I wasn’t wrong about Carrie.) Thin Clare? (Poor Clare. Matronly now. He’ll never marry her now.) Thin Constance? Thin Daphne? (Oh, Daphne, I do miss you. Imagine that!) Thin Deirdre? Thin Denise?

  To be reduced to this!

  She remembered that she’d decided that she didn’t want to continue with her investigations.

  Thin What’s-her-name was speaking.

  ‘Ladies,’ said thin What’s-her-name, ‘we’re going to have a new friend coming in for you in a minute. Delilah.’

  Thin Delilah? Thin Edith?

  ‘Delilah’s had a nasty little attack, and she’s heavily sedated, but when she comes round I want you to be really friendly to her.’

  ‘I’ll be friendly, of course,’ said Angela Critchley. ‘I’m absolutely fed up with all these stray women being dumped in my room, and I shall sort it out with the management, but in the meantime I shall be hospitality itself. There is such a thing as style.’

  ‘Good,’ said thin . . . Elizabeth? (Was she right to eliminate Elizabeth from suspicion?’)

  ‘I’ve never been the complaining type,’ said Lily Stannidge. ‘I’ve met women who are and I can’t abide them. But if I find that someone called Delilah has been invited to the captain’s cocktail party and I haven’t, there’ll be ructions. I promise you, there’ll be ructions.’

  Thin Fanny? (Sounds inconvenient.) Thin Felicity? (Wonder what happened to Felicity.)

  Why did people murder? Possible motives for murder – envy, jealousy, hatred . . .

  Thin Gaynor? Thin Gertie?

  . . . sadism, masochism (kill the people you really love in order to make yourself miserable), madness . . .

  Gloria? Hannah? Hettie?

  . . . greed, lust, love, sexual pleasure (sado-eroticism?) . . .

  Hilda? Isobel? Jane?

  . . . self-defence, self-righteousness, moral crusade (insanity?) . . .

  Gone too far. Begins with H. Sure of it. Trust your judgement. Thin Henrietta? Thin Hayley?

  Mist. Blankness. Oh, Kate, oh, Kate, how can you hope to solve a murder when you can’t even remember thin Helen’s name?

  Thin Helen! Oh, the relief. Oh, the blessed relief. And her instinct had been right. And her instinct also told her that she’d left out one possible cause for murder, and that the one she had left out would be the . . .

  Why was she continuing to think about the murder? She’d decided not to.

  Surely her sons would need a better motive for murder – or did she mean a worse motive – than envy or jealousy or hatred? They weren’t men made for murder. They would have to be driven to it.

  Stop it, Kate. Stop thinking about it.

  Squeak squeak. Delilah was arriving. I’d pop home myself and get a can of WD40, if only I could. Squeak bloody squeak.

  None of them was mad. None of them would murder for sexual pleasure or out of some kind of twisted moral feeling. Surely not?

  What about self-defence? It was hard to see how that was relevant, but . . .

  Her brain was refusing to switch off. It had a mind of its own! It wasn’t under her control. This thought terrified her. But what was she thinking this thought with? Her brain. Her brain was telling her that her brain was independent of her. She didn’t have to believe it, though. But where would her disbelief come from? Her brain!

  This way lay madness. She began to consider her sons as potential murderers in order to stop thinking about her brain.

  She accepted, in that moment, that she had to continue with her investigation, now that she had come this far.

  She’d known her sons as foetuses and infants and children and adolescents and young men and middle-aged men and now as men who were becoming old. This was the great advantage she had over Inspector Crouch.

  She’d known them and not known them. She didn’t know them well enough to rule any of them out with utter certainty, and that was even more frightening than your brain declaring independence.

  ‘Where the fuck am I?’

  Delilah! She’d forgotten all about Delilah!

  ‘Bleedin’ ’ell-fire. What’s going on?’

  ‘You’re in the Spa Hotel, Buxton,’ said Angela Critchley, ‘and you’re in my room, and I’ll thank you to mind your language.’

  ‘Spa Hotel, Buxton? What the fuck am I doing in the Spa Hotel, Buxton?’

  ‘You aren’t.’ Lily Stannidge must have been leaning across towards Delilah’s bed. Her whisper was so low that she hoped Angela Critchley wouldn’t hear it. Kate could hear it, but then her hearing was remarkable, and she was nearer to Lily. ‘She’s a loony. She thinks she’s in the Spa Hotel, Buxton.’

  ‘Bleedin’ ’ell.’

  ‘I should run along to the purser if you’re not satisfied.’

  ‘The purser?’

  ‘Yes. His office is on B Deck.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ exclaimed Delilah. ‘I’m in a fucking funny farm.’

  ‘Language, please!’ implored Angela Critchley.

  ‘Yes, I really don’t like your language, I have to say,’ agreed Lily Stannidge.

  ‘Is she a loony too, over there?’

  ‘She’s exhausted,’ said Angela Critchley. ‘It was a difficult birth. Not to worry, though. Mother and child are doing well.’

  ‘Birth! She looks a hundred!’

  There’s no need to exaggerate, thought Kate. After all, I’m still two days short of a hundred, if my calculations are correct.

  ‘She’s ga-ga,’ said Lily. ‘She just lies there. Never goes on any of the shore excursions. Can’t see the point of coming on a cruise, really.’

  ‘I’m not having this,’ said Delilah. ‘How do I get out of here?’

  ‘There’s a bell for room service,’ said Angela Critchley.

  ‘Room service! Christ!’

  Why don’t they all shut up? Don’t they know I have urgent work to do?

  Could any of her sons have killed Graham for her sake? And what would you call such a motive? Mercy? Release? To release one, for example, from abuse. Maybe she’d missed out all sorts of categories of motive.

  ‘Yes?’ said thin Helen. (I can still remember her name! Good.) ‘You rang your bell?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Delilah. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re in hospital.’

  ‘Jesus! Have I had one of me turns?’

  ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’

  ‘I haven’t, have I? Oh shit. When can I go home?’

  ‘Doctor Ramgobi will see you as soon as he can. He’s very busy.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus wept. What a fucking carry-on.’

  ‘Please, Delilah,’ said thin Helen. ‘They don’t like bad language in Ward 3C.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Delilah. ‘Oh! “They don’t like bad language in Ward 3C”, don’t they?’

  Nigel. She’d gone round and round in circles, thinking about him. Maurice, too. Round she went now, again and again. Then a new thought struck her about Timothy.

  Timothy would know how to commit a murder, from having invented so many. The blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy was a well-known phenomenon of the ele
ctronic age. Some people thought that other people killed because they saw so much crime on TV and were able to kill in fantasy in video games and . . . what was it called? . . . interactive television. Surely it wasn’t improbable that impressionable people did blur the boundaries? Maybe there was a special risk factor for the writers of detective stories. Timothy in the dock, his lawyer arguing on a defence of diminished responsibility. ‘He thought he was in one of his books.’ That might be going too far, but to invent murders might diminish the horror and make the reality more possible, that wasn’t entirely unconvincing. But, please, let it not be Timothy.

  Perhaps, after all, it had been an unbalanced American corn farmer or a ruined investor in Otago or a wronged wife. She didn’t know how they would have been able to frame the three brothers so accurately, but it might have been possible. She couldn’t really blame Inspector Crouch for having been so thorough. Oh, how she wished it were so. Damn that instinct of hers, which said it was one of her sons.

  ‘I was a dancer.’

  Out of the blue, Delilah began to talk. Kate welcomed the interruption.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it now. Me legs are like pillars of Stilton now. Horrid, they are. Liked me grub too much. But once they was admired by all the leading figures in Dewsbury. Chamber of Commerce. Round Table. Inner wheel. Bankers, wankers, we had them all in the Barcelona.’

  Delilah gave a great sigh and returned, Kate hoped, to happier times. She found Delilah’s effect on the gentility of the ward delightful. She wished she’d been there in Hilda’s day. That would have been a pantomime.

  Of course. There was another motive for murder. Well, there might be lots more but this was the one she’d been seeking. This was the one. Her instinct told her so.

  It took Kate a long time, hour after hour of careful, often agonising thinking. All three sons came, in turn, to visit her, held her hand, utterly unconscious of what was going through her brain. It was bizarre. She applied this motive, which her instinct told her was the one, to all three. Was there any possible scenario that could cause each of them to murder Graham for this reason? It was laborious work, broken occasionally by Delilah.

  ‘All of them came to the Barcelona, and they all said, “Show us your tits, Delilah.”’

  ‘Oh, how vulgar!’ exclaimed Angela Critchley. ‘I hope you sent them packing with a flea in their ear.’

  ‘No, I showed them me tits.’

  ‘Really, Delilah,’ said Lily Stannidge. ‘What do you think this is? The Oriana? This is Swan Hellenic.’

  ‘I wouldn’t show you me tits now. You wouldn’t thank me.’

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t.’

  Fat Janet hurried in. It seemed that both Lily Stannidge and Angela Critchley had rung their bells. Fat Janet remonstrated with Delilah.

  ‘We don’t like too much talk in the afternoons in Ward 3C, Delilah,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! Oh! “We don’t like too much talk in the afternoons in Ward 3C”, don’t we?’ mocked Delilah.

  Over those long hours Kate found all sorts of possible reasons why her sons might have murdered the man known as Graham Eldridge. Most of them were far-fetched. Most of them she dismissed. They just weren’t urgent enough, big enough, awful enough, to lead a man to murder.

  One scenario was, though. It seemed far-fetched too, but it was big enough, and, boy, it was awful enough. She didn’t want to think about it, so awful was it.

  Some time during the long afternoon she had the idea of looking at the murder from the point of view of her perspective on Graham. She knew that she was bound to have to face unpleasant truths about one of her sons, but what did she want to find out about Graham? There was one thing that she longed to find out, one important factor that, if found to be true, would give her great pleasure. So she decided to hypothesise on the basis that it was true.

  Again, it wasn’t difficult to think of possible scenarios that fulfilled the condition. Again, one of them seemed to carry that bit more conviction than the others. It certainly was weighty enough to murder for.

  It was the one that she didn’t want to think about. It was too dreadful to contemplate. And yet, one read about such things.

  The mists weren’t far away, the primordial slime was all about her, she was dying, she didn’t want to think about anything so terrible, but she had to. You can’t unknow what you know. You can’t unthink what you have thought.

  Even Delilah seemed a long way away now, as though under water, saying, ‘You probably think I’m as rough as a bear’s arse, but in my day I was considered a stunner by men that was particular. Have you any idea what the Barcelona Club in Dewsbury was like?’

  Marginally better than the Dewsbury Club in Barcelona, thought Kate, hard though she was trying not to listen and get involved, now that she was on the trail.

  ‘Classy. Glamorous. I mean, not every venue I played was of that standard. The Mona Lisa Club in Newport was a dump. If you’d called the Nefertiti in Droitwich a dump, the manager’d have kissed you. It was a shite-hole.’

  ‘Oh, really!’

  ‘Yes, really. You may be outraged, but if you’d gone to the Nefertiti yourself, you’d have said, “This place is a shite-hole.”’

  ‘I can assure you that I’d never go near it, let alone in it.’

  ‘You’re not a bad judge.’

  ‘But if I had I would never have said . . . those words.’

  The more Kate tested the hypothesis, the more it seemed to fit the bill. It fitted in with something Nigel had said, in response to something Maurice had said, here, at her bedside, only a few days ago. It fitted in with a long silence that Kate had been reluctant to break, as she realised now. It fitted in with an absence that had puzzled her only slightly, but which seemed highly significant now. It fitted in with something that she hadn’t found. It fitted in with something Graham hadn’t told her. It fitted in with so many negatives that in the end it became a screaming positive.

  Doctor Ramgobi was screaming too. ‘This woman should have been taken to intensive care, nurse. She could have died.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  ‘Quiet, madam. Don’t excite yourself. We’ll get you there. Heads will roll over this, nurse. Heads will roll.’

  She could never prove it, of course, lying there in a hospital bed. She could never tell anybody about it, having lost the power of speech. She could never write about it, being paralysed. That, after all, was why it had at last been safe for her to pursue the matter.

  But even if she hadn’t been paralysed, and had been able to speak, and had been a policeman with all his powers of search, all his scientific aids, she might not have been able to prove it. Maybe she had misjudged Inspector Crouch. Maybe he had guessed it, but hadn’t been able to prove it. In any case, she realised that she hadn’t told him any of the significant facts, because she hadn’t realised that they were significant, although she might not have told him even if she had. No, she couldn’t take too much credit for being so much quicker than Inspector Crouch (if she was right).

  Squeak squeak. Removal of Delilah to intensive care. Squeak squeak.

  ‘I’ll be off now.’

  It was him! It was the murderer (if she was right). The shock swept through her body, like high-speed pins and needles. There just might be a way of finding out, but did she want to, after all? Quick. Decide. Yes. She had to, now that she had come this far. She had just one chance. The look in her eyes would have to be extremely eloquent.

  She opened her eyes very suddenly, opened them wide, stared straight into his soul. She hoped that he could see the accusation in her eyes, the contempt, the anger, the intelligence, the triumph. She hoped that it was a look that would allow no other interpretation, except her knowledge of his guilt.

  She held her eyes on his astonished face. His jaw dropped open as jaws did in the books. A flush ran up across his neck and right across his face. For a moment he was paralysed with shock, and they stared at each other, mother and son, both paralysed. She saw guil
t in his eyes, shame in his eyes, pleading in his eyes, misery in his eyes.

  She tried to wipe the accusation from her eyes, now that it had done its job. She tried to wipe the contempt and anger from her eyes, now that they had hit their target. She tried to show him the love she still felt for him.

  He turned abruptly, and walked away. She would never know if he had seen the love.

  20 Norman

  THE JOB WAS done, and Kate felt completely drained. She felt flat. She’d thought that she might feel at peace, but the enormity of the crime had shocked her, and she wanted to get away from it all, from the memory of the murderer’s face, from her horror at the depth of his shame.

  On, on with your life, Kate Copson. You were a mere eighty-one when we left you. Eighteen years to go.

  During the first of those years she kept the memory of Walter alive by writing a book about him. It was a simple tale, a story of three marriages and one great love. What a joy it was to relive her years with Walter, to bring him back to life in the little study overlooking the patio with the fig tree. How many cups of camomile tea he had placed gently on her old Georgian desk during the biscuit-tin years. It was a story about happiness, but it was also a story with a moral. How could it not be, for it was written by John Thomas Thomas’s daughter? It was a story about a man who changed, who grew. It was a rebuke to all those who say, ‘I can’t help the way I am.’ Kate called it The Smile Tycoon and subtitled it ‘The Story of a Good Man’.

  The title referred to a phrase Walter had used at Rhossili Cottage, when he’d come home exhausted after distributing second-hand toys to children’s homes.

  ‘I hope you aren’t doing any of this as a penance,’ she had said.

  ‘I do it for my own joy,’ Walter had replied. ‘I create smiles where there were none. I’m a smile tycoon.’

  The Smile Tycoon was largely ignored by the critics, but very popular with older readers, especially after Kate’s appearance on the Roly McTavish Show.

  ‘There’s a lot of sex in your book,’ the laconic Scottish chat-show host pointed out.