an appeal. One had to employ cunning with a man like Eric. She took a fresh sheet and began again, stopping once to look over her shoulder at a potential noise.
I am thinking only of your poor mother put away in a home, & your poor old father, enfeebled and rapidly failing in health, when I…
She finished the letter, addressed and sealed it, and called Gwen to catch the six o’clock post. Then she remembered Gwen had left.
Dame Lettie laid the letter helplessly on the hall table and pulled herself together so far as to think of supper and to switch on the news.
She prepared her supper of steamed fish, ate it and washed up. She listened to the wireless till half-past nine. Then she turned it off and went into the hall where she stood for about five minutes, listening. Eventually, various sounds took place, coming successively from the kitchen quarters, the dining-room on her right, and upstairs.
She spent the next forty-five minutes in a thorough search of the house and the garden, front and back. Then she locked and bolted the front door and the back door. She locked every room and took away the keys. Finally she climbed slowly up to bed, stopping every few steps to regain her breath and to listen. Certainly, there was somebody on the roof.
She locked her bedroom door behind her and tilted a chair under the door-knob. Certainly, there was someone down there in the garden. She must get in touch with the Member tomorrow. He had not replied to her previous letter which she had posted on Monday, or was it Tuesday? Well, there had been time for a reply. Corruption in the police force was a serious matter. There would have to be a question in the House. One was entitled to one’s protection. She put her hand out to feel the heavy walking-stick securely propped by her bed. She fell asleep at last. She woke suddenly with the noise in her ears, and after all, was amazed by the reality of this.
She switched on the light. It was five past two. A man was standing over by her dressing-table, the drawers of which were open and disarranged. He had turned round to face her. Her bedroom door was open. There was a light in the passage and she heard someone else padding along it. She screamed, grabbed her stick, and was attempting to rise from her bed when a man’s voice from the passage outside said, ‘That’s enough, let’s go.’ The man by the dressing-table hesitated nervily for a moment, then swiftly he was by Lettie’s side. She opened wide her mouth and her yellow and brown eyes. He wrenched the stick from the old woman’s hand and, with the blunt end of it, battered her to death. It was her eighty-first year.
FOURTEEN
Four days passed before the milkman reported an accumulation of four pints of milk on Dame Lettie’s doorstep, and the police entered her house to find the body, half in, half out of her bed.
Meanwhile Godfrey did not wonder, even vaguely, why he had not heard from Lettie. Now that her telephone was disconnected he seldom heard from her. In any case, he had other things to think about that morning. Alec Warner had been to see him with that extraordinary, disturbing, impudent, yet life-giving message from Taylor. He had, of course, ordered Warner out of the house. Alec had seemed to expect this and had departed with easy promptitude to Godfrey’s ‘Get out’, like an actor who had rehearsed the part. He had, however, left a slip of paper behind him, bearing a series of dates and place-names. Godfrey examined the document and felt unaccountably healthier than he had been for some months. He went out and bought himself a whisky and soda while he decided what to do. And, over his drink, he despised Guy Leet yet liked the thought of him, since he was associated with his new sense of well-being. He had another whisky, and chuckled to himself to think of Guy bent double over his two sticks. An ugly fellow; always had been, the little rotter.
Guy Leet sat in his room at the Old Stable, Stedrost, Surrey, laboriously writing his memoirs which were being published by instalments in a magazine. The laboriousness of the task resided in the physical, not the mental effort. His fingers worked slowly, clutched round the large barrel of his fountain-pen. His fingers were good for perhaps another year — if you could call these twisted, knobble-knuckled members good. He glanced reproachfully at them from time to time — perhaps good for another year, depending on the severity of the intervening winter. How primitive, Guy thought, life becomes in old age, when one may be surrounded by familiar comforts and yet more vulnerable to the action of nature than any young explorer at the Pole. And how simply the physical laws assert themselves, frustrating all one’s purposes. Guy suffered from an internal disorder of the knee-joints which caused one leg to collapse across the other whenever he put his weight on it. But although he frequently remarked, ‘The law of gravity, the beast,’ he was actually quite cheerful most of the time. He also suffered from a muscular rheumatism of the neck which caused his head to be perpetually thrust forward and askew. However, he adapted his eyesight and body as best he could to these defects, looking at everything sideways and getting about with the aid of his servant and his car, or on two sticks. He had in his service a pious, soft-spoken, tip-toeing unmarried middle-aged Irishman for whom Guy felt much affection, and whom he called Tony to his face and Creeping Jesus behind his back.
Tony came in with his morning coffee and the mail, which always arrived late. Tony placed two letters beside the paperknife. He placed the coffee before Guy. He stroked the fronts of his trousers, wriggled and beamed. He was doing a Perpetual Novena for Guy’s conversion, even though Guy had told him, ‘The more you pray for me, Tony, the more I’m a hardened sinner. Or would be, if I had half a chance.’
He opened the larger envelope. Proofs of the latest instalment of his memoirs. ‘Here, Tony,’ he said, ‘check these proofs.’
‘Ah, ye know I can’t read without me glasses.’
‘That’s a euphemism, Tony.’ For Tony’s reading capacity was not too good, though he managed when necessary by following each word with his finger.
‘Indeed, sir, ‘tis a pity.’ Tony disappeared.
Guy opened the other letter and gave a smile which might have appeared sinister to one who did not realize that this was only another consequence of his neck being twisted. The letter was from Alec Warner.
Dear Guy,
I’m afraid I sent Percy Mannering the last instalment of your
Mannering in replying to thank me for sending him the article, tells me he is coming down to see you, no doubt to talk things over. I hope he will not prove too difficult and that you will make all allowances.
Now, dear fellow, you will, I know, assist me by taking the old fellow’s pulse and temperature as soon as it can conveniently be done after he has discussed the article with you. Preferably, of course, during the discussion, but this may prove difficult. Any further observations as to his colour, speech (clarity of, etc.) and general bearing during the little discussion will be most welcome, as you know.
Mannering will be with you tomorrow, i.e. the day on which you will, I expect, receive this letter — at about 3.40 p.m. I have supplied him with train times and all necessary directions.
My dear Fellow,
I am, most gratefully,
Alec Warner
Guy put the letter back into its envelope. He telephoned to the nursing
