by Ruth Rendell
‘Come down!’ Marvell shouted.
‘Oh God!’ Patrick gave a sort of groan and collapsed against the rungs, swaying precariously.
Someone shouted: ‘He’s going to fall,’ but Patrick didn’t fall. He began to slide down, prone against the ladder, and his shoes caught on each rung as he descended, tap, tap, flap, until he fell into Marvell’s arms.
‘Are you all right?’ Marvell and Greenleaf asked together and Marvell shied at the wasp that came spiraling down towards Patrick’s head. ‘They’ve gone. Are you all right?’
Patrick said nothing but shuddered and put up his hand to cover his cheek. Behind him Greenleaf heard Freda Carnaby whimpering like a puppy, but nobody else made a sound. In the rainbow glimmer they stood silent and peering like a crowd at a bullfight who have seen a hated matador come to grief. The hostility was almost tangible and there was no sound but the steady buzz of the wasps.
‘Come along.’ Greenleaf heard his own voice pealing like a bell. ‘Let’s get him into the house.’ But Patrick shook off his arm and blundered into the dining room.
They gathered round him in the lounge, all except Marvell who had gone to the kitchen to make coffee. Patrick crouched in an armchair holding his handkerchief against his face. He had been stung in several places, under the left eye, on the left wrist and forearm and on the right arm in what Greenleaf called the cubital fossa.
‘Lucky it wasn’t a good deal worse,’ Edward said peevishly.
Patrick’s eye was already beginning to swell and close. He scowled at Edward and said rudely:
‘Get lost!’
‘Please don’t quarrel.’ No one knew how Freda had insinuated herself into her position on the footstool at Patrick’s knees, nor exactly when she had taken his hand. ‘It’s bad enough as it is.’
‘Oh, really,’ Tamsin said. ‘Such a fuss! Excuse me, will you? It might be a good idea for my husband to get some air.’
For the second time that night Denholm Smith-King looked first at his watch, then at his wife. ‘Well, we’ll be getting along. You won’t want us.’
Marvell had come in with the coffee things but Tamsin didn’t argue. She lifted her cheek impatiently for Joan to kiss.
‘Coffee, Nancy? Oliver?’ She by-passed the Carnabys exactly as if they were pieces of furniture. Oliver rejected the cup coldly, sitting on the edge of his chair.
‘Perhaps we’d better go too.’ Nancy looked hopelessly from angry face to angry face. ‘Have you got any bi-carb? It’s wonderful for wasp stings. I remember when my sister …’
‘Come along, Nancy,’ Oliver said. He took Nancy’s arm and pulled her roughly. It looked as if he was going to leave without another word, but he stopped at the door and took Tamsin’s hand. Their eyes met, Tamsin’s wary, his, unless Greenleaf was imagining things, full of pleading disappointment. Then when Nancy kissed her, he followed suit, touching her cheek with the sexless peck that was common politeness in Linchester.
When they had gone, taking the Gavestons with them, and the Willises and the Millers had departed by the garden gate, Greenleaf went over to Patrick. He examined his eye and asked him how he felt.
‘Lousy.’
Greenleaf poured him a cup of coffee.
‘Had I better send for Dr. Howard, Max?’ Tamsin didn’t look anxious or excited or uneasy any more. She just looked annoyed.
‘I don’t think so.’ Howard, he knew for a fact, wasn’t on the week-end rota. A substitute would come and—who could tell?—that substitute might be himself. ‘There’s not much you can do. Perhaps an anti-histamine. I’ll go over home and fetch something.’
Bernice and Marvell went with him, but he came back alone. The Carnabys were still there. Tamsin had left the front doors open for him and as he crossed the hall he heard no voices. They were all sitting in silence, each apparently nursing private resentment. Freda had moved a little away from Patrick and had helped herself to coffee.
As if taking her cue from his arrival, Tamsin said sharply: ‘Isn’t it time you went?’ She spoke to Edward but she was looking at Freda. ‘When you’ve quite finished, of course.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t mean to be de trap.’ Edward blushed but he brought out his painfully acquired French defiantly. Freda lingered woodenly. Then Patrick gave her a little push, a sharp sadistic push that left a red mark on her arm.
‘Run along, there’s a good girl,’ he said and she rose obediently, pulling her skirt down over her knees.
‘Night,’ Patrick said abruptly. He pushed past Edward, ignoring the muttered ‘We know when we’re not wanted.’ At the door he said to Greenleaf, ‘You’ll come up?’ and the doctor nodded.
When he entered the balcony room behind Tamsin, Patrick was already in bed and he lay with his arms outside the sheets, the stings covered by blue pyjama sleeves.
By now his face was almost unrecognisable. The cheek had swollen and closed the eye. He looked, Greenleaf thought, rather as if he had mumps.
Queenie was stretched beside him, her feet at the foot of the bed, her jowls within the palm of his hand.
‘You’ll be too hot with him there,’ the doctor said.
‘It’s not a him, it’s a bitch.’ Tamsin put her hand on Queenie’s collar and for a moment Patrick’s good eye blazed. ‘Oh, all right, but I shan’t sleep. I feel like hell.’
Greenleaf opened the windows to the balcony. The air felt cool, almost insolently fresh and invigorating after the hot evening. There were no curtains here to sway and alarm a sleeper, only the white hygienic blinds.
‘Do you want something to make you sleep?’ Prudently Greenleaf had brought his bag back with him. But Tamsin moved over to the dressing-table with its long built-in counter of black glass and creamy wood textured like watered silk. She opened one of the drawers and felt inside.
‘He’s got these,’ she said. ‘He had bad insomnia last year and Dr. Howard gave them to him.’
Greenleaf took the bottle from her. Inside were six blue capsules. Sodium Amytal, two hundred milligrammes.
‘He can have one.’ He unscrewed the cap and rattled a capsule into the palm of his hand.
‘One’s no good,’ Patrick said. He held his cheek to lessen the pain talking caused him, and Tamsin, white and fluttering against her own reflection in the black glass wardrobe doors, nodded earnestly. ‘He always had to have two,’ she said.
‘One,’ Greenleaf was taking no chances. He opened his bag and took out a phial. ‘The anti-histamine will help you to sleep. You’ll sleep like a log.’
Patrick took them all at once, drinking from the glass Tamsin held out to him. ‘Thanks,’ he said. Tamsin waited until the doctor had fastened his bag and replaced the capsules in the immaculately tidy drawer. Then she switched off the light and they went downstairs.
‘Please don’t say Thank you for a lovely party,’ she said when she and Greenleaf were in the hall.
Greenleaf chuckled. ‘I won’t,’ he said.
The swans had gone to bed long ago in the reeds on the edge of the pond. From the woods between Linchester and Marvell’s house something cried out, a fox perhaps or just an owl. It could have been either for all Greenleaf knew. His short stocky body cast a long shadow in the moonlight as he crossed The Green to the house called Shalom. He was suddenly very tired.
Marvell, on the other hand, was wide awake. He walked home through the woods slowly, reaching out from time to time to touch the moist lichened tree trunks in the dark. There were sounds in the forest, strange crunching whispering sounds which would have alarmed the doctor. Marvell had known them since boyhood, the tread of the fox—this was only a few miles north of Quorn country—the soft movement of dry leaves as a grass snake shifted them. It was very dark but the darkness was not absolute. Each trunk was a grey signpost to him; leaves touched his face and although the air was sultry they were cold and clean against his cheek. As he came out into Long Lane he heard in the distance the cry of the nightjar and he sighed.
When he
had let himself into the house he lit one of the oil lamps and went as he always did before going to bed from room to room to look at his treasures. The porcelain gleamed, catching up what little light there was. He held the lamp for a moment against the mezzotint of Rievaulx. It recalled to him his own work on another Cistercian abbey and, setting the lamp by the window, he sat down with his manuscript, not to write—it was too late for that—but to read what he had written that day.
Red and white by the window. The snowflake fronds of the Russian Vine and beside it hanging like drops of crimson wax, Berberidopis, blood-red, absurdly named. The moonlight and the lamplight met and something seemed to pierce his heart.
Moths seeing the light, came at once to the lattice and a coal-black one—Marvell recognised it as The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy—fluttered in at the open casement. It was followed by a larger, greyish-white one, its wings hung with filaments, swans-down in miniature. For a second Marvell watched them seek the lamp. Then, fearful lest they burn their wings, he gathered them up, making a loose cage of his hands, and thrust them out of the window.
They spiralled away from yellow into silvery light. He looked and looked again. There was someone in the garden. A shape, itself moth-like, was moving in the orchard. He brushed the black and white wing dust from his hands and leaned out to see who was paying him a visit at midnight.
7
On Sunday morning Greenleaf got up at eight, did some exercises which he told his patients confidently would reduce their waist measurements from thirty-four to twenty-nine, and had a bath. By nine he had looked at The Observer and taken a cup of coffee up to Bernice. Then he sat down to write to his two sons who were away at school.
It was unlikely that anyone would call him out today. He had done his Sunday stint on the Chantflower doctors’ rota, the previous week-end, and he intended to have a lazy day. Bernice appeared at about ten and they had a leisurely breakfast, talking about the boys and about the new car which ought to arrive in time to fetch them home for the holidays. After awhile they took their coffee into the garden. They were near enough to the house to hear the phone but when it rang Greenleaf let Bernice answer it, knowing it wouldn’t be for him.
But instead of settling down to a good gossip Bernice came back quickly, looking puzzled. This was odd, for Bernice seldom hurried.
‘It’s Tamsin, darling,’ she said. ‘She wants you.’
‘Me?’
‘She’s in a state, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. All she said was I want Max.’
Greenleaf took the call on the morning room phone.
‘Max? It’s Tamsin.’ For almost the first time since he had met her Tamsin wasn’t using her affected drawl. ‘I know I shouldn’t be ringing you about this but I can’t get hold of Dr. Howard.’ She paused and he heard her inhale as if on a cigarette. ‘Max, I can’t wake Patrick. He’s awfully cold and I’ve shaken him but … he doesn’t wake.’
‘When was this?’
‘Just now, this minute. I overslept and I’ve only just got up.’
‘I’ll be right over,’ Greenleaf said.
She murmured, ‘Too kind!’ and he heard the receiver drop.
Taking up his bag, he went by the short cut, the diameter of The Circle across the grass. On the face of it it seemed obvious what had happened. In pain from his stings Patrick had taken an extra one of the capsules. I ought to have taken the damned things away with me, Greenleaf said to himself. But still, it wasn’t for him to baby another man’s patients. Howard had prescribed them, they were safe enough unless … Unless! Surely Patrick wouldn’t have been fool enough to take two more? Greenleaf quickened his pace and broke into a trot. Patrick was a young man, apparently healthy, but still, three … And the anti-histamine. Suppose he had taken the whole bottleful?
She was waiting for him on the doorstep when he ran up the Hallows drive and she hadn’t bothered to dress. Because she never made up her face and always wore her hair straight she hadn’t the bleak unkempt look of most of the women who called him out on an emergency. She wore a simple expensive dressing-gown of candy-striped cotton, pink and white with a small spotless white bow at the neck, and there were silver chain sandals on her feet. She looked alarmed and because of her fear, very young.
‘Oh, Max, I didn’t know what to do.’
‘Still asleep, is he?’
Greenleaf went upstairs quickly, talking to her over his shoulder.
‘He’s so white and still and—and heavy somehow.’
‘All right. Don’t come up. Make some coffee. Make it very strong and black.’
She went away to the kitchen and Greenleaf entered the bedroom. Patrick was lying on his back, his head at an odd angle. His face was still puffy and the arms which were stretched over the counterpane, faintly swollen and white, not red any more. Greenleaf knew that colour, the yellowish ivory of parchment, and that waxen texture.
He took one of the wrists and remembered what Tamsin had said about the heavy feeling. Then, having slipped one hand under the bedclothes, he lifted Patrick’s eyelids and closed them again. He sighed deeply. Feeling Patrick’s pulse and heart had been just a farce. He had known when he came into the room. The dead look so very dead, as if they have never been alive.
He went out to meet Tamsin. She was coming up the stairs with the dog behind her.
‘Tamsin, come in here.’ He opened the door to the room where last night they had looked at the picture. One of the beds had been slept in and the covers were thrown back. ‘Would you like to sit down?’
‘Can’t you wake him either?’
‘I’m afraid …’ He was a friend and he put his arm about her shoulders. ‘You must be prepared for a shock.’ She looked up at him. He had never noticed how large her eyes were nor of what a curious shade of transparent amber. ‘I’m very much afraid Patrick is dead.’
She neither cried nor cried out. There was no change of colour in the smooth brown skin. Resting back against the bed-head, she remained as still as if she too were dead. She seemed to be thinking. It was as if, Greenleaf thought, all her past life with Patrick was being re-lived momentarily within her brain. At last she shuddered and bowed her head.
‘What was it?’ He had to bend towards her to catch the words. The cause, I mean. What did he die of?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The wasp stings?’
Greenleaf shook his head.
‘I don’t want to trouble you now,’ he said gently, ‘but those capsules, the sodium amytal, where are they?’
Tamsin got up like a woman in a dream.
‘In the drawer. I’ll get them.’
He followed her back into the other bedroom. She looked at Patrick, still without crying, and Greenleaf expected her to kiss the pallid forehead. They usually did. When instead she turned away and went to the dressing table he drew the sheet up over Patrick’s face.
‘There are still five in the bottle,’ she said, and held it out to him. Greenleaf was very surprised. He felt a creeping unease.
‘I’ll get on to Dr. Howard,’ he said.
Howard was out playing golf. Mrs. Howard would ring the club and her husband would come straight over. When Greenleaf walked into the dining room Tamsin was kneeling on the floor with her arms round the neck of the Weimaraner. She was crying.
‘Oh, Queenie! Oh, Queenie!’
The room was untouched since the night before. The drinks were still on the sideboard and out on the patio some of the food remained: heat-curled bread, melting cream, a shrivelled sandwich on a doily. On the birthday table Marvell’s roses lay among the other gifts, pearled with Sunday’s dew. Greenleaf poured some brandy into a glass and handed it to Tamsin.
‘How long has he been dead?’ she asked.
‘A good while,’ Greenleaf said. ‘Hours. Perhaps ten or twelve hours. Of course you looked in on him before you went to bed.’
She had stopped crying. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t w
ant to upset you.’
‘That’s all right, Max. I’d like to talk about it.’
‘You didn’t sleep in the same room?’
‘Not when one of us was ill,’ Tamsin said quickly. ‘I thought if he were restless it would be better for me to go in the back. Restless!’ She passed her hand across her brow. ‘Too dreadful, Max!’ She went on rather as if she were giving evidence, using clipped sentences. ‘I tried to clear up the mess in the garden but I was too tired. Then I looked in on Patrick. It must have been about midnight. He was sleeping then. I know he was, he was breathing. Well, and I didn’t wake up till eleven. I rushed into Patrick because I couldn’t hear a sound. Queenie had come up on my bed during the night.’ Her hand fumbled for the dog’s neck and she pushed her fingers into the plushy fur. ‘I couldn’t wake him so I phoned Dr. Howard. You know the rest.’
Patrick had died, Greenleeaf thought, as he had lived, precisely, tidily, without dirt or disorder. Not for him the sloppy squalor that attended so many deathbeds. From mild discomfort he had slipped into sleep, from sleep into death.
‘Tamsin,’ he said slowly and kindly, ‘have you got any other sleeping pills in the house? Have you got any of your own?’
‘Oh, no. No, I know we haven’t Patrick just had those six left and I never need anything to make me sleep.’ She added unnecessarily: ‘I sleep like a log.’
‘Had he a weak heart? Did you ever hear of any heart trouble?’
‘I don’t think so. We’d been married for seven years, you know, but I’ve known Patrick since he was a little boy. I don’t know if you knew we were cousins? His father and mine were brothers.’
‘No serious illnesses?’
