The Poison Cupboard

by John Burke

  Laura put the book down, She did not appear to have been listening, yet, in her face, there was a disquieting reflection of what Charlotte had seen there once before — in the train, as the door had opened and the wind plucked at her.

  But that had been a dream — a dozing, distorted dream.

  Downstairs a door slammed.

  ‘Gilbert is back,’ said Laura. ‘We must go down and have lunch, and leave Charlotte to have hers.’

  She nodded, smiling quite affably, as though what she had just heard made everything plain: everything was settled.

  At the door she said: ‘I’ll send you another bottle of medicine up this afternoon.’

  ‘How much more of that horrid stuff do I have to take?’

  ‘Not much more,’ said Laura. She held the door open for her mother to go through. ‘This should be the last. Perhaps we’ll try something a bit different, and see if that will settle it.’

  Chapter Five

  He had been asked if he understood the meaning of the oath, and he had said yes. The judge had leaned forward and studied him, asking if he fully appreciated the distinction between right and wrong.

  ‘Read the oath through.’

  He had read it through, and it made sense. The judge had asked him one or two more questions, with an expression not unlike that of Mr. Cartwright at his most solemn. But he made you feel steady, in a way Mr. Cartwright never did: he made you sure that he knew what you were doing and what everyone else in this room was doing, and he expected you to play fair.

  ‘Very well. Let the witness be sworn, and we will hear his evidence.’

  The oath taken, Gil waited. He was not trembling, but his throat was dry and he hoped he would not sound too funny when he had to answer the next lot of questions. It was as bad as going into class with an excuse for not having done your homework — a good excuse, you thought, but one that old Badger might undermine and work away at until you couldn’t remember what story you had started out with.

  The tall man in the gown — again like Badger — tugged at a sleeve and smiled up at him.

  ‘Now, Gilbert, you remember what happened in Doctor Swanton’s consulting-room on the afternoon of the 4th of August?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Will you tell the court in your own words exactly whar happened?’

  Twelve faces stared at him. Gil looked away, but there were other rows of people watching him. He looked at the judge.

  ‘Aunt Laura . . . Doctor Swanton,’ he said, ‘had broken a bottle in the morning, and the stuff in it —’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’ asked counsel. ‘Can you say what was in the bottle?’

  ‘Doctor Swanton said —’

  ‘Better if you can tell us without having to quote somebody else,’ said counsel, with an encouraging smile. That smile — leading you on, drawing you towards trouble, into saying things that would all add up to what you didn’t want to let yourself understand. ‘Was there a label on the bottle?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gil. ‘It was an old bottle, sort of dark so that you couldn’t see into it. And the label said . . . it had a big ‘T’ and a little ‘r’, and then ‘Belladonna’.’

  ‘Belladonna,’ repeated the tall man, with another little flourish of his gown. You expected him to produce a piece of chalk and write the word on a blackboard. ‘Belladonna. You are absolutely sure of that?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ said Gil.

  ‘All right, then. What did you say happened to this bottle?’

  ‘She knocked the stopper into the sink.’

  ‘Doctor Swanton did?’

  ‘Yes. And it broke.’

  ‘It was an accident?’

  ‘Of course. I mean . . . well, she just banged a small medicine bottle on the bench, and the stopper fell into the sink.’

  ‘Which stopper are you referring to?’

  ‘The stopper of the big bottle — the one with ‘Belladonna’ written on it.’

  ‘You saw no sign of her trying to arrange for the stopper to break? Was it usual for her to place fragile things such as a glass stopper in an unsafe position and then jar the bench so that —’

  ‘My lord, I object.’

  Gil, the spell broken, looked from one gowned man to another. He was thankful for a brief rest. Let them argue with one another for a minute. He could not imagine what the trouble was.

  ‘I agree,’ the judge was saying. ‘You must not lead the witness in that way, Mr. Taplow. Nor must you ask him, even in such a roundabout way, to express an opinion.’

  ‘I am obliged to your lordship.’

  The guns were trained on Gil again. Now! Drysdale! this interesting drama about your French homework being so unhappily mislaid. . . .

  ‘After the stopper had been broken, what did the accused do?’

  Gil looked across at the dock. The accused. The prisoner. It brought the reality sharply home to him. Murder, arrest, prison . . . death. He could not speak. They would be after him if he spoke out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Because it would sound so odd. They would suspect him, blame him; and in a way, wouldn’t they be right? He had wavered. He had made a muddle of things. It was partly his fault.

  Yet Aunt Laura did not look cross. She looked much the same as usual, as though she didn’t mind at all, with the usual faintly sarcastic twist to her mouth. She returned his gaze calmly.

  ‘Come, now, will you tell the court what happened when the stopper had been broken?’

  There was nothing to do but tell. Gil described the pouring of the belladonna into another bottle that morning; he agreed that it had not been labelled at once, and that instead of being replaced in the poison cupboard it had been left on the bench when the two of them went out.

  ‘That was unusual, was it not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘In your experience, during the time you had spent with the accused —’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gil wretchedly. ‘I was only just beginning to learn where things were kept. I wasn’t supposed to touch anything.’

  ‘I see. The medicines were handled entirely by the doctor herself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At all times?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She never asked you to put any substance in a bottle for her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even, perhaps, to fill a bottle up with water?’

  ‘No. All she did was give me the bottles when they were ready to go off to the bus or to be delivered to patients.’

  ‘Did you ever write the labels for her?’

  Here it came. They were close to it.

  ‘Not often,’ he said.

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Only once,’ he said.

  ‘When was that?’

  Closer to danger he drew. Although he had talked with that solicitor, and he had been told he would be all right if he just said everything straight out, he had not known what it would be like to face this inquisitor. An inquisitor, that’s what he was.

  It was the afternoon of the 4th of August.

  ‘Aunt Laura — the doctor — was getting some medicines ready for me to deliver. And she . . .’

  It was no use trying to put it off. But he wanted to get his breath. He was near the edge: he would have to plunge in, but he must delay it, must have time to summon up the courage to dive down at that cold surface and be engulfed.

  ‘Yes?’ said counsel gently.

  The water’s warm. Come in.

  ‘She got some medicine ready for Mrs. Swanton.’

  ‘Mrs. Swanton? There were two Mrs. Swantons in the house, were there not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which one was the medicine for?’

  ‘Well . . . I thought it must be the one upstairs — the one who married . . . my aunt’s brother.’

  Counsel said: ‘Your father, that would be?’

  ‘That’s what my aunt told me,’ admitted Gil in a low voice.

  ‘
There was no other Mrs. Swanton it might have been for?’

  ‘Only the doctor’s mother. She was Mrs. Swanton, too.’

  ‘And it couldn’t have been for her?’

  ‘She wasn’t ill. She hadn’t had any medicine before.’

  ‘But the younger Mrs. Swanton had been taking medicine before?’

  ‘Medicine and pills,’ said Gil. ‘She was in bed.’

  ‘Now, when the accused was preparing this medicine —’

  ‘She got it ready in the morning,’ said Gil, ‘like I told you before.’

  ‘So you did. Thank you. The medicine had been prepared at the same time as the bottle of belladonna was smashed. Or, rather, the stopper was smashed, and the remaining contents of the bottle were poured into a medicine bottle identical with the one in which Mrs. Swanton’s medicine had been prepared. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Both bottles were still . . . where were the bottles, Gilbert?’

  ‘We’d left both of them on the bench in the morning. When we came in, in the afternoon, after dinner — lunch . . .’

  He saw the two bottles. Two ordinary medicine bottles, both filled with a greenish fluid — both looking the same to him, more or less — horrible stuff, so you could easily imagine how bitter it must be.

  Aunt Laura was saying: ‘We must remember not to mix those up, Gilbert.’

  Somehow everything from then on was in slow motion. It took him an age to say:

  ‘Yes, Aunt Laura.’

  She took a gummed label out of the wooden compartment in the tray, and uncapped her pen.

  ‘Write it for me, will you? Just put ‘Mrs. Swanton’ on it.’

  ‘Do you have to write on it even when it’s only going upstairs?’

  ‘Professional caution, Gilbert. You must always write on the label.’

  He took her pen from her. The printing at the top of the label said: ‘One tablespoonful four times a day.’ He put it down on the desk and wrote the two words below it.

  ‘One tablespoon should be enough,’ said Aunt Laura abstractedly.

  She pushed one of the two bottles towards him.

  He licked the label and put it on, smoothing out a wrinkle.

  Then she said, still in that measured way: ‘Good heavens. That’s the wrong one. I’m sure it is.’ She uncorked the other bottle, and sniffed it. ‘Yes. What a good thing I noticed in time.’

  She was gathering up her bag, picking up her appointments book.

  He stared at the two bottles on the bench. Poison for Mrs. Swanton. Poison that would remove her — take her right out of the way, so that when his father came home he would come here, because there was no other home. He would come here and not go away again.

  That sort of woman . . .

  ‘Don’t forget, will you?’ Aunt Laura was saying as she went to the door. ‘Alter that label over. Write a big label with ‘Poison’ on it, and stick it on. And then take the proper bottle up to Mrs. Swanton.’

  Gil did not move.

  ‘The proper bottle, mind,’ said Aunt Laura. ‘We don’t want any mistakes, do we?’

  ‘No,’ said Gil.

  She did not even glance at him as she went out.

  Everything she had said to him in recent days and weeks came crowding back into his mind. It built up a choking pressure. He knew beyond a doubt that Aunt Laura wouldn’t care if he didn’t change the labels over. If something went wrong — if it happened — it would suit her as well as it would suit him. There would be the two of them and his father, then, just as she had always talked about it. And of course old Mrs. Swanton; but she was all right, she didn’t count.

  If it happened, Aunt Laura would be the doctor who had to attend the young Mrs. Swanton, wouldn’t she? Aunt Laura would do what had to be done — signing certificates, or whatever it was. Somehow she would manage it. She would cover up any mistake made with the bottles.

  She had left it all to him. He was alone now.

  If it could only happen that he could forget about the bottles. Really forget. Not have to decide anything — just have it wiped from his mind, so that it was all right for him to pick up the bottle of poison and take it upstairs to Mrs. Swanton.

  To Charlotte.

  He had not let himself think of her by that name for a long time.

  It did not conjure up the disturbing picture he had expected. That memory was not as strong and upsetting as it had been.

  But it was better, anyway, to think of her as Mrs. Swanton. ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ anybody . . . that was unreal. They were adults. Give them a name, the name they used among themselves (imagine calling Mr. Cartwright Bertie, which they said was his name) and you brought them down to your own level. You made them real and alive. Charlotte was someone he knew.

  Someone he had known.

  He went towards the bench and looked at his own writing on the label. Mrs. Swanton.

  A door opened along the passage, and he heard the other Mrs. Swanton, the old one, singing to herself in a chirping undertone that sometimes rose into a tuneless squeakiness that got nowhere.

  He thought that in another minute she would come fussing along the passage, blinking at things, coming in to move a chair an inch one way or the other, making out that she was tidying up after Laura, who never left a thing out of place.

  Never. Except those two bottles on the bench.

  The footsteps shuffled closer. He reached slowly out towards the bottles.

  Mrs. Swanton almost bumped into him as he went towards the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, Gilbert —’

  ‘Won’t be a moment,’ he said.

  He did not look back. A moment later he entered Charlotte’s room. He averted his eyes from her, and put the bottle on the table.

  And there was a photograph of his father — the sort of photograph he had thought about and wanted to see.

  ‘That’s nice of you, Gil, bringing my medicine. Or is it? Horrible stuff.’

  He looked at her, and then quickly, again, at his father’s photograph. He knew it was his father. He was glad, now, of the decision he had made.

  ‘Isn’t it awful,’ she said, plucking at his attention. ‘Lying here like this — all because of some silly trouble with my waterworks.’

  She no longer disturbed him; not as she had once done.

  He reached the door.

  She said: ‘Aren’t you staying for just a minute?’

  She was wearing a pink nightgown with some frills on the shoulders.

  ‘I’ve got an awful lot to do,’ he said.

  ‘Do sit down. Just for a minute.’

  ‘I think I’d better —’

  ‘I insist.’ She reached for the bottle and the spoon. ‘We haven’t had a chat for ages, have we?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t be so awkward, Gil. Do sit down.’

  He stood where he was, watching as she measured a full spoon of medicine and tipped it reluctantly back. Her mouth opened and she showed her teeth, making one of those exaggerated faces of hers.

  ‘Ugh. It gets worse.’

  He turned and went, carrying the picture of her in his head — carrying it clearly into this courtroom where they were asking him questions that seemed to have something to do with her and yet at the same time to be all wrong.

  The judge had asked him all that stuff about the difference between right and wrong. Well, he did. He knew. All his doubts had gone, just like that. He had known, suddenly, where he stood.

  But the man who had been questioning him didn’t want to know about that. The man in the black gown only wanted him to say things about Aunt Laura and things he had seen. What they kept calling facts. Not what anyone said to him, and not what he thought. Those weren’t evidence. But without them, the whole truth wasn’t the truth at all.

  Now there was another man standing up and asking still more questions. This one started out right away as though he didn’t believe Gil and wasn’t going t
o believe him.

  ‘You said that you only wrote a label for a medicine bottle once, and that that was on the afternoon of the 4th of August?’

  ‘Yes.’ Why go on about it?

  ‘Did you put the label on the bottle yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So that if the two bottles were mixed up, it was your fault?’

  ‘Aunt Laura pushed the bottle at me.’

  ‘You did not do it after she had gone?’

  ‘No. She was there. She said —’

  ‘You did not, having discovered that there was a mistake — if, as you say, there was a mistake — alter the label over to the right bottle.’

  ‘There wasn’t time.’

  ‘How do you mean, there wasn’t time? Were you in a hurry to do something else?’

  The man kept on about the bottles, until the place was full of them. Shelves of bottles, cupboards of them. Take one down, put one back. Some of the questions were the same as those the first man had asked, but put in a different way. The first man had seemed to be asking Gil to help him. This one was trying to get him to contradict himself, trying to make out that he was to blame for things. Had he mixed up the bottles by accident, or had he meant to? Had Doctor Swanton really and truly been there at all? Had there been any other witnesses? Was it not true that he, Gilbert Drysdale, had often played in the consulting-room alone, and taken down bottles and looked at them?

  ‘No.’ It was not true. He could say so, firmly.

  Then there was a question about his father. The first man had been quiet and sympathetic. This one was frowning at him, as though sure there were some dirty secrets to be dug out.

  And a question about his mother. One that he could not possibly answer — one that made him shake his head and say ‘No, no, I don’t know. I didn’t.’

  The prosecuting counsel raised an objection, and the judge began to lecture counsel for the defence. When he had finished, it was like that time when that new maths master got a confidential talk from the headmaster: one of those confidential talks that the whole school knew about. The maths bloke had been subdued after that, but not really much better: he had been more careful, more deadly in a quiet way, more spiteful.

  ‘Is it not true that you had often said to the prisoner that you would like to be in the house just with her and your father?’