‘Well, John,’ she said, ‘this is a bad business. I’d as soon expect the heavens to fall as to see you ill in bed. Tell me what’s happened.’
Somewhat sheepishly John told her. He was looking rather better now, and his voice was stronger. To get him into bed had obviously been the right thing.
Rona listened, her lips compressed. Then she felt his pulse. Frances was sent for a thermometer from Angela’s room, and Rona carried out what seemed to me a thoroughly professional though rapid examination.
‘Humph!’ was all she said when it was finished.
John looked at her still more sheepishly. ‘I don’t know whether you could get me anything to relieve the pain, Rona. It comes in spasms, and it’s – well, it’s pretty bad.’
Rona nodded. ‘It’s more than biliousness, John. I think you must have eaten something that’s poisoned you. Glen –’ She broke off and seemed to be thinking hard, the toe of one shoe tapping on the floor. ‘No we can’t get Glen. I’m going to wash out your stomach myself.’
John began to protest in a half-hearted sort of way, but Rona, having made up her mind, was out of the room at once. I could not help feeling relieved at the way she had taken things in hand. There was but one doctor within a dozen miles, and as it was now surgery time, the probability was that he would not be able to come within the next hour.
John exchanged a rueful glance with me, and I wandered idly out into the passage.
Rona was telephoning below, in her usual calm yet somehow compelling way, and I could hear her explaining to the maid at the other end exactly what she wanted. Rona did all her brother’s dispensing, so that she knew the position of each jar in the surgery.
‘Listen carefully, Alice. I want you to find some things out of the surgery for me and bring them over here at once. It’s urgent, you understand.’ I heard her detailing the stomach pump, and drugs such as bismuth, morphia tablets, magnesii oxidum and ferri hydroxidum (which I hoped the maid understood), and making the other write each item down on the pad beside the telephone.
Mitzi Bergmann appeared as Rona was hanging up the receiver, and asked if there was anything she could do.
‘You can,’ Rona replied briskly. ‘Fill every hot-water bottle in the house, and bring them to me. And you, Frances,’ she added, catching sight of my wife, ‘ask Angela where the brandy’s kept, and bring me the bottle.’
I intercepted her before she reached the head of the stairs, out of earshot from John’s room.
‘You’re going to give him morphia?’ I asked in a low voice.
‘Just a small injection, to relieve the pain. Angela has a hypodermic syringe.’
‘It’s all right?’ I asked doubtfully. ‘I mean, you’re not a qualified practitioner, Rona.’
She looked at me with an impatience unusual to her.
‘Damn qualifications. I can administer a shot of morphia as well as any qualified doctor.’
‘You think it’s serious, then?’
She looked at me again, rather queerly. ‘I don’t know. But it might be, my friend. Damnably serious.’
4
Perhaps (I thought) women have a tendency to exaggerate. Certainly Rona has a very slight tendency at times toward the dramatically impressive. At any rate her brother, when at last he arrived over an hour later, took a very much less serious view.
Rona had certainly given poor John a strenuous time. She had dosed him with a compound from her bottles, given him the promised shot of morphia, then plied the stomach pump on him (during which process I preferred to leave the bedroom), and finally surrounded him with hot-water bottles and made him swallow a large dose of brandy – which I should imagine he was by then not unwilling to do.
By all these strenuous methods Glen Brougham was no more than mildly amused. Having made his examination, he pooh-poohed the diagnosis of food poisoning which his sister had voiced, confirmed a suspicion of an incipient gastric ulcer and pronounced the case one of epidemic diarrhoea, of which there had been several instances in the village during the summer. He assured Frances and me that there was no danger and no need for us to stay any longer.
‘Oughtn’t he to have a nurse?’ Frances asked.
‘No need,’ Glen replied laconically. ‘He can afford one if he wants the luxury, but Mitzi and Angela can look after him well enough.’ Glen was the Waterhouses’ and our friend as well as our doctor – one of my oldest friends in fact, for I had been brought up in Anneypenny with Glen and Rona – and he was therefore able to be rather unprofessionally outspoken. Glen always had been rather unprofessional, for that matter.
‘Angela!’ exclaimed Rona. ‘No, if Angela will let me, I’ll nurse John myself. I look on him,’ she added with a rather forced smile, ‘as my patient, you see.’
Glen guffawed. ‘I believe you still think your diagnosis was the right one.’
Rona shrugged her shoulders and turned away.
Unsnubbed, Glen spoke to us. ‘The old idiot deserved to have a tummy-ache, and I told him so. I made him up a bottle of medicine this morning – one tablespoonful to be taken every four hours – wrote the label myself as plain as I’m speaking to you now: and what does he do? Goes and swigs off half the bottle at a go. Says he had a pain and thought it would take it away. What can you expect with a chap like that?’
‘Then that’s what made him so bad?’ Frances cried.
But Glen shook his head. ‘No, couldn’t be. There was nothing to hurt – luckily!’
‘What was the medicine?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just a mild sedative. Bismuth, and a spot of morphia.’
‘Morphia!’ exclaimed Frances. ‘But you gave him morphia too, Rona. You don’t think…?’
‘No, no,’ Rona answered impatiently. ‘That couldn’t have done him any harm. There was no morphia to speak of in the medicine.’ But she looked exceedingly worried all the same.
There was rather an awkward little silence.
‘Well, I’ll run up and say good night to John,’ Frances remarked suddenly, and she did so, literally.
‘No respect for the profession, your wife,’ Glen commented humorously, ‘Never asked the patient’s doctor’s permission, you see.’
We chatted desultorily during the five minutes that Frances was upstairs. Rona still looked worried and preoccupied; Glen was more concerned in wondering whether Angela would sufficiently recover from her prostration to offer us a drink before we went. It was past nine o’clock, and he had had a hard day and no food.
Angela, however, did not appear, and the three of us left the house drinkless, Rona staying behind to keep an eye on the invalid. Glen walked down the lane with us but refused Frances’ invitation to come in and share our belated dinner. He was expecting another message and would have time for only a couple of mouthfuls at home.
Frances came into my dressing-room as I was brushing my hair.
‘Douglas,’ she said, ‘Rona’s worried.’
‘I know she is.’ Privately I thought we could very well leave things to Glen, but the sex loyalty which afflicts even the most reasonable of women would have driven Frances to combat this if I had said so out loud.
She did not need the provocation, however, for she went on at once. ‘I’d sooner trust to Rona than Glen.’
Her tone was both defensive and pugnacious, so unusual a combination with Frances that I looked round in surprise.
‘Frances, what’s in your mind?’
‘I believe Rona’s afraid there was something wrong with that medicine.’
‘But she makes up the medicines herself.’
‘She didn’t today. She was catching the nine-forty to Torminster, I know, because she asked me to go in with her. Besides, didn’t you hear Glen say he made it up himself?… I wouldn’t let Glen make up a bottle of medicine for me,’ Frances added defiantly. ‘He’s far too casual.’
<
br /> ‘My dear girl, what on earth are you hinting at?’
‘Why, that Glen made some stupid mistake or other and put the wrong drugs in. Anyhow’ – Frances suddenly whisked into view an object which she had been holding behind her back – ‘anyhow, here it is.’
I stared at the half-empty medicine bottle.
Then I laughed. ‘Well, prevention’s better than cure. You mean to make sure that John doesn’t get another dose?’
‘I mean more than that,’ Frances said soberly. ‘I’m all for standing by one’s friends and that sort of thing, but doctors oughtn’t to make careless mistakes. Can’t we have this stuff analysed or something?’
5
We were thus in the affair, as it were, from the beginning.
Actually, however, I do not date that first evening of John’s illness as the beginning. In my own mind I always put the beginning at a little dinner party which the Waterhouses had given about a week earlier. That was the first time, for instance, that I heard any mention of the gastric ulcer. In any case, whether the link is a real one or not, there is certainly a link of irony; for the conversation took a somewhat morbid turn after dinner was over, and what could be more ironical than a man’s discussing murder and sudden death only a few days before his own?
chapter two
Conversation Piece
It is a queer feeling to reconstruct the intimate past and bring the dead to life again in all the trivial details of everyday life; but I must try to do so if I am to fill in a full background for the picture which I have set myself to paint. And perhaps all the details were not so trivial either. Or alternatively, if they were genuinely trivial, efforts were to be made later to give them a sinister ring. In either case I will set them down just as they happened.
The Waterhouses had six guests that evening. In addition to Frances and myself there were Glen and Rona Brougham, brother and sister; Harold Cheam; and Daisy Goff, whom everyone had been trying for years to pair off with Harold, including Daisy herself.
We were late, I remember, and only just had time to swallow our cocktails, with the uncomfortable feeling that dinner was being held back especially for us. It is a curious thing that the less distance one has to go, the more likely one is to be late. It was only three minutes on foot from our front door to the gates of Oswald’s Gable, but I think that each time we dined there, and that was fairly often, we ran it fine. The Waterhouses generally ran it fine when they came to us, too; but that may have been due to Angela, one of those women who seem to find it impossible to be punctual for anything. She has her invalidism to excuse her, of course, and she never fails to make use of it; but to my mind there is never any excuse for being late, even when I am the culprit.
Nothing very much remains in my memory of the dinner itself, nor of what we men talked about after the women had left the table. But of a conversation in the drawing-room later (Angela Waterhouse retained the old-fashioned word, and certainly the big, rather formal room deserved it) I have the most vivid recollection.
We had split somehow into two groups. Angela had a new batch of records down from London, and she had collected Daisy to help her listen to them and Brougham to put the records on the machine for her. Angela was always rather good at collecting people against their wills; for I am sure that neither Daisy or Brougham wanted in the least to hear the kind of music which Angela professed to admire. Frances, however, did want to hear it, and joined the others to do so. Their group was scattered over the main part of the room, Angela on her couch near the fire, and the others near her. Waterhouse himself, Rona Brougham, Harold Cheam, and I were gathered round the smaller fireplace in the short arm of the L-shaped room, out of sight of all the others except Brougham at the gramophone, where we could talk without disturbing the listeners.
The August evening was not particularly chilly, but a fire was usually to be found throughout the summer in the Waterhouses’ drawing-room except on the very hottest nights, and often enough two. Angela averred that a fire was necessary to her; and her husband, after a life spent mostly in hot countries, had no objection. Not that he would have voiced it if he had. Where his wife’s whims were concerned it was John Waterhouse’s habit quietly to give way.
How our talk got onto capital punishment I can’t say. We were all old friends, and among old friends talk has a way of drifting over totally unrelated subjects, through the oddest of links; but probably Waterhouse had led it there, not without malice, in the hope of teasing Rona a little. For Rona held strong views on this matter, as indeed she did on most matters. But if this were so, Waterhouse ought to have known quite well that he would fail, for Rona is quite unteasable. To be teasable, one must mind what people say. Rona never minded.
Rona, indeed, is an exceptional woman. In appearance she is striking, with her wavy black hair parted in the centre above a very white, high forehead, her rather broad face, her full but upright figure, and the air of reposeful dignity which always envelops her. Rona is one of the few people I know who are thoroughly efficient and yet placid. The chief niche that she occupies in our village community, however, is that of our local intellectual. We are proud of Rona. She has been up at Oxford and done exceedingly well there; she had held high office in a feminist society in London; and she has to our knowledge been approached by more than one commercial firm with an offer of a responsible post at a high salary. When on the death of old Mr Brougham she threw up all these activities and came back to Anneypenny to keep house for her brother, we were ready to welcome her but we could not help feeling that she was wasting herself; she would have done us more credit, we felt, by staying in London.
As to her views, which are advanced, there are some of us who deplore them and more who are puzzled by them; but most of us, I imagine, have an uneasy conviction that if Rona holds them there must be something in them.
2
I must repeat that Rona is an exceptional woman. Unlike most people, for instance, who hold strong views, Rona never seems to have any wish to convert others to them. It is not easy to persuade her even to state them at all; though those of us who know her really well can usually persuade her into argument, Waterhouse perhaps better than most. Again, most of the people who hold strong views on capital punishment are those who wish to abolish it. Rona, however, thought otherwise.
‘But, John, why keep them alive?’ she asked in her gentle, even voice, when Waterhouse had finished dangling the series of provocatively humanitarian assertions in front of her. ‘We don’t really want them. They are no good to us.
Why not put them out of the way?’
‘Hang the lot, in fact?’ suggested Harold Cheam.
‘Oh, I mean humanely, of course. Hanging’s barbarous; though I suppose it has its uses as a deterrent. But to be humane doesn’t require one to be sentimental; so just give me one solid, practical reason, John, for keeping them alive.’
‘Yes, come on, John,’ Harold urged. ‘I can think of plenty of reasons myself. It’s a serious matter, and I think we ought to convert Rona.’ He looked at the other two with the funny little half-smile that just quirked the corners of his mouth, obviously hoping to be asked his reasons. That little half-smile and the word ‘serious’ are the two things that I particularly associate with Harold. One would meet him walking sedately, as he always did, down the village street, his tall figure erect as a flagpole, and he would tell you that three hymn-books were missing from the church and he was looking into the matter for the vicar, adding with the little half-smile that it was a pretty serious thing; so that one never quite knew whether Harold really thought it serious or not. Not that Harold was a fool by any means, but he did enjoy niggling little importances; and he enjoyed talking still more. It is all nonsense to pretend that only women gossip.
Rona obliged him.
‘All right then, Harold,’ she said, also with a little smile.
‘You tell me the reasons.’ There
are smiles and smiles. Harold’s has a deprecatory tinge; Rona’s, for all I know, may be completely innocent. But Rona’s little smile always makes me a shade uneasy. It gives me the feeling that she knows exactly what I am going to say next, and is gently smiling at it in advance.
Harold, however, does not seem to be affected by it. At least he is never timid of arguing with Rona, or even of breaking into an argument that she is having with someone else. When Rona is arguing I personally am content to sit and listen.
Harold quirked the corners of his mouth. ‘Why keep them alive, Rona? But why not? I thought you judged everyone by his or her use to the community rather than by their private ethics? Well, a murderer may be a model citizen, except for the one unfortunate lapse. And you’d have him put out of the way, and his value to the community destroyed, just because he once lost his head – perhaps only for a few seconds. I call that most unpractical.’
‘A point to you, my boy,’ observed Waterhouse. He was the oldest of our little circle and would sometimes assume the airs of a patriarch. He was, as a fact, fifty-two. Harold and I are much of an age, in the middle forties, and Brougham two or three years younger. The women averaged thirty-three or -four, except Daisy, who was, I believed, twenty-eight.
‘Oh, murderers,’ said Rona. ‘I wasn’t thinking so much of them. I was thinking of the habitual criminals, the useless nuisances. Or criminal lunatics. And of course it isn’t so much a matter of capital punishment as of elimination.’
‘Elimination?’ said Harold doubtfully. ‘Well, that’s a pretty serious thing, you know.’
There was a little pause, while Waterhouse puffed lazily at his pipe and seemed to be listening to the Bax symphony which was coming from the other part of the room. He was a big, burly man, with hair that was beginning to fall out and what had not fallen turning grey, and a rather large, rather red face which did not seem to accord at all with a Bax symphony. At the moment his face wore a half-quizzical, half-tolerant expression; but whether this was for his companions or for Bax there was no saying.
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