church with its steep sloping graveyard stood at the top of the street. Miss Taylor looked over the wall at the graveyard as they passed it. She was not sure now if his words had been frivolous or serious or both; for, even in their younger days — especially during that month of July 1907 at the farmhouse — she had never really known what to make of him, and had sometimes felt afraid.
She looked at the graveyard and he looked at her. He noted dispassionately that her jaw beneath the shade of the hat was more square than it had ever been. As a young woman she had been round-faced and soft; her voice had been extremely quiet, like the voice of an invalid. In middle age she had begun to reveal, in appearance, angular qualities; her voice was deeper; her jaw-line nearly masculine. He was interested in these factors; he supposed he approved of them; he liked Jean. She stopped and leaned over the low stone wall looking at the gravestones.
‘This graveyard is a kind of evidence,’ she said, ‘that other people exist.’
‘How do you mean?’ he said.
She was not sure. Having said it, she was not sure why. The more she wondered what she had meant the less she knew.
He tried to climb over the wall, and failed. It was a low wall, but still he was not up to it. ‘I am going on fifty,’ he said to her without embarrassment, not even with a covering smile, and she remembered how, at the farmhouse in 1907, when he had chanced to comment that they were both past their prime, he being twenty-eight and she thirty-one, she had felt hurt and embarrassed till she realized he meant no harm by it, meaning only to point a fact. And she, catching this habit and tone, had been able to state quite levelly, ‘We are not social equals,’ before the month was over.
He brushed the dust of the graveyard wall from his trousers. ‘I am going on fifty. I should like to look at the gravestones. Let’s go in by the gate.’
And so they had walked among the graves, stooping to read the names on the stones.
‘They are, I quite see, they are,’ he said, ‘an indication of the existence of others, for there are the names and times carved in stone. Not a proof, but at least a large testimony.’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘the gravestones might be hallucinations. But I think not.’
‘There is that to be considered,’ he said, so courteously that she became angry.
‘But the graves are at least reassuring,’ she said, ‘for why bother to bury people if they don’t exist?’
‘Yes, oh precisely,’ he said.
They ambled up the short drive to the house where Lettie, who sat writing at the library window, glanced towards them and then away again. As they entered, Lisa Brooke with her flaming bobbed head came out. ‘Hallo, you two,’ she said, looking sweetly at Jean Taylor. Alec went straight to his room while Miss Taylor went in search of Charmian. On the way, various people encountered and said ‘Hallo’ to her. This party was composed of a progressive set; they would think nothing of her walk with Alec that summer of 1928 even though some remembered the farmhouse affair of 1907 which had been a little scandal in those days. Only a brigadier, a misfit in the party who had been invited because the host wanted his advice on dairy herds, and who had passed the couple on their walk, later inquired of Lettie in Miss Taylor’s hearing, ‘Who was that lady I passed with Alec? Has she just arrived?’ And Lettie, loathing Jean as she did, but wishing to be broad-minded, replied, ‘Oh, she’s Charmian’s maid.’
‘Say what you like about that sort of thing, the other domestics won’t like it,’ commented the brigadier, which was, after all, true.
And yet, Jean Taylor reflected as she sat with Alec in the Maud Long Ward, perhaps it was not all mockery. He may have half-meant the question.
‘Be serious,’ she said, looking down at her twisted arthritic hands.
Alec Warner looked at his watch.
‘Must you be going?’ she said.
‘Not for another ten minutes. But it’ll take me three quarters of an hour across the parks. I have to keep fairly strictly to my times, you know. I am going on eighty.’
‘I’m relieved it’s not you, Alec — the telephone calls …’
‘My dear, this has come from Lettie’s imagination, surely that is obvious.’
‘Oh no. The man has twice left a message with Godfrey. “Tell Dame Lettie,” he said, “to remember she must die.”‘
‘Godfrey heard it too?’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose, in that case, it must be a lunatic. How did Godfrey take it? Did he get a fright?’
‘Dame Lettie didn’t say.’
‘Oh, do find out what their reactions were. I hope the police don’t catch the fellow too soon. One might get some interesting reactions.’ He rose to leave.
‘Oh, Alec — before you go — there was something else I wanted to ask you.
He sat down again and replaced his hat on her locker.
‘Do you know Mrs Sidebottome?’
‘Tempest? Ronald’s wife. Sister-in-law of Lisa Brooke. Now in her seventy-fifth year. I first met her on a boat entering the Bay of Biscay in 1930. She was—’
‘That’s right. She is on the Management Committee of this hospital. The sister in charge of this ward is unsuitable. We all here desire her to be transferred to another ward. Do you want me to go into details?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You wish me to talk to Tempest.’
‘Yes. Make it plain that the nurse in question is simply overworked. There was a fuss about her some time ago, but nothing came of it.’
