Memento Mori

‘I think,’ said Olive, defending her lapse as best she could, ‘he’ll be seventy quite soon — early next year, I think.’

‘Find out exactly, dear,’ said Warner. ‘Meantime he is not one of us. We’ll come to him next year.

‘She thinks you may be the culprit,’ said Olive. ‘Are you?’

‘I doubt it,’ he said wearily. He had received a letter from Dame Lettie asking the same question.

‘How you talk,’ she said. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have put it past you.’

‘Mrs Anthony,’ she said, ‘had a row with Mrs Pettigrew this morning and is threatening to leave. Charmian accused Mrs Pettigrew of trying to poison her.’

‘That’s very hot news,’ he said. ‘Godfrey has been here today, I gather?’

‘Oh yes. He was rather odd today. Something’s put him off his stroke.’

‘Not interested in suspenders today?’

‘No, but he was trying hard. He said his doctor doesn’t want him to go out and about so much. I didn’t know whether to take that as a hint, or —’Mrs Pettigrew — have you thought of her?’

‘Oh goodness,’ said Olive, ‘I haven’t.’ She smiled widely and placed a hand over her mouth.

‘Try to find out,’ he said.

‘Oh dear,’ said Olive, ‘no more flyers for poor old Eric. I can see it coming. Do you think Mrs Pettigrew has it in her?’

‘I do,’ said Alec, writing his notes.

‘There’s a bit in the paper in the kitchen,’ said Olive, ‘about a preacher preaching on his hundredth birthday.’

‘What paper?’

‘The Mirror.’

‘My press-cutting agency covers the Mirror. It’s only the out-of-the-way papers they sometimes overlook. But thanks all the same. Always tell me of anything like that, just in case. Keep on the look- out.’

‘O.K.,’ said Olive, and sipped her drink, watching the old veined hand moving its pen steadily, in tiny writing, over the page.

He looked up. ‘How frequently would you say,’ he said, ‘he passes water?’

‘Oh goodness, it didn’t say anything about that in the Mirror.’

‘You know I mean Godfrey Colston.’

‘Well, he was here about two hours and he went twice. Of course he had two cups of tea.’

‘Is twice the average when he comes here?’

‘I can’t remember. I think —’

‘You must try to remember everything exactly, my dear,’ said Alec. ‘You must watch, my dear, and pray. It is the only way to be a scholar, to watch and to pray.’

‘Me a scholar, goodness. He had patches of red on the cheekbones today, more so than usual.’

‘Thank you,’ said Alec, and made a note. ‘Notice everything, Olive,’ he looked up and said, ‘for only you can observe him in relation to yourself. When I meet him, you understand, he is a different personality.’

‘I’ll bet,’ she said, and laughed.

He did not laugh. ‘Be sure to find out all you can on his next visit in case he deserts you for Mrs Pettigrew. When do you expect to see him again?’

‘Friday, I suppose.’

‘There is someone,’ he said ‘tapping at the window behind me.’

‘Is there? It must be Granpa, he always does that.’ She rose to go to the door.

Alec said quickly, ‘Tell me, does he tap on the window of his own accord or have you asked him to announce himself in that way?’

‘He does it of his own accord. He always has tapped at the window.’

‘Why? Do you know?’

‘No — no idea.’

Alec bent once more with his pen over his book, and recorded the facts which he would later analyse down to their last, stubborn elements.

Olive fetched in Percy Mannering who, on entering the room, addressed Alec Warner without preliminaries, waving in front of him a monthly magazine of a literary nature, on the cover of which was stamped in bold lettering ‘Kensington Public Libraries’.

‘Guy Leet,’ roared Percy, ‘that moron has published part of his memoirs in which he refers to Ernest Dowson as “that weak-kneed wailer of Gallic weariness afflicted with an all too-agonized afflatus”. He is fantastically wrong about Dowson. Ernest Dowson was the spiritual and aesthetic child of Swinburne, Tennyson, and Verlaine.