automatic, saying, 'This is Doctor Dray speaking. I shall not be available until five o'clock. Your message will be recorded. Please start now…', and there was a ticking sound, just as when one rang to know the time and the voice said, 'At the third stroke it will be two, forty-two, and twenty seconds…'
Shelagh flung down the receiver and began to search the telephone directory feverishly for the number of Doctor Dray's partner, a young man lately joined the practice-she did not know him-and this time a live voice answered, a woman. There was the sound of a child crying in the distance and a radio blaring, and she heard the woman shout impatiently at the child to be quiet.
'This is Shelagh Money speaking, of Whitegates, Great Marsden. Please ask the doctor to come at once, I think my father has just died. The nurse is out and I'm alone in the house. I can't get Doctor Dray.'
She heard her own voice break, and the woman's reply, swift, sympathetic, 'I'll contact my husband immediately', made further explanation impossible. She couldn't speak, but turned away blindly from the telephone and ran up the stairs again into the bedroom. He was lying as she had left him, the expression of horror still on his face, and she went and knelt beside him and kissed his hand, the tears pouring down her cheeks. 'Why?' she asked herself. 'What happened? What did I do?' Because when he cried out, using her pet name Jinnie, it was not as if he had been seized with sudden pain on waking from sleep. It did not seem like that at all, but more as though his cry was one of accusation, that she had done something so appalling that it suspended all belief. 'Oh no… Oh, Jinnie… Oh my God…!' Then trying to ward her off as she ran to his side, and dying instantly.
I can't bear it, I can't bear it, she thought, what did I do? She got up, still blinded by tears, and went and stood by the open window and looked back over her shoulder to the bed, but it was no longer the same. He was not staring at her any more. He was still. He had gone. The moment of truth had vanished for ever, and she would never know. What had happened was Then, was already past, in some other dimension of time, and the present was Now, part of a future he could not share. This present, this future, was all blank to him, like the empty spaces in the photograph album beside the bed, waiting to be filled. Even, she thought, if he had read my mind, which he often did, he would not have cared. He knew I wanted to play those parts with the Theatre Group, he encouraged me, he was delighted. It was not as though I were planning to go off at any moment and leave him…. Why the expression of horror, of disbelief? Why? Why?
She stared out of the window, and the carpet of autumn leaves scattered here and there on the lawn was suddenly blown in a gust of wind up into the air like birds and tossed in all directions, only to drift apart, and tumble, and fall. The leaves that had once budded tight and close upon the parent tree, to glisten thick and green throughout the summer, had no more life. The tree disowned them, and they had become the sport of any idle wind that chanced to blow. Even the burnished gold was reflected sunlight, lost when the sun had set, so that in shadow they became crinkled, barren, dry.
Shelagh heard the sound of a car coming down the drive, and she went out of the room and stood at the top of the stairs. It was not the doctor, though, it was her mother. She came through the front door to the hall, peeling off her gloves, her hair bunched high on her head, gleaming and crisp from the drier. Unconscious of her daughter's eyes she hovered a moment before the mirror, patting a stray curl into place. Then she took her lipstick from her bag and made up her mouth. A door banging in the direction of the kitchen made her turn her head.
'That you, Nurse?' she called. 'How about tea? We can all have it upstairs.'
She looked back into the mirror, cocking her head, then dab- bed off the surplus lipstick with a tissue.
The nurse appeared from the kitchen. She looked different out of uniform. She had borrowed Shelagh's dufflecoat for her walk, and her hair, usually so trim, was dishevelled.
'Such a lovely afternoon,' she said. I’ve been for quite a tramp across the fields. It was so refreshing. Blown all the cobwebs away. Yes, let's have tea, by all means. How's my patient?'
They are living in the past, Shelagh thought, in a moment of time that does not exist any more. The nurse would never eat the buttered scones she had anticipated, glowing from her walk, and her mother, when she glanced into the mirror later, would see an older, more haggard face beneath the piled-up coiffure. It was as if grief, coming so unexpectedly, had sharpened intuition, and she could see the nurse already installed by the bedside of her next patient, some querulous invalid, unlike her father, who teased and made jokes, while her mother, dressed suitably in black and white (black alone she would consider too severe), replied to the letters of condolence, those from the more important people first.
Then they both became aware of her, standing at the top of the stairs.
'He's dead,' Shelagh said.
Their upturned faces stared at her in disbelief, as his had done, but without the horror, without the accusation, and as the nurse, recovering first, brushed past her up the stairs, she saw her mother's carefully preserved and still lovely face disintegrate, crumple, like a plastic mask.
You must not blame yourself. There was nothing you could have done. It was bound to happen, sooner or later…. Yes, thought Shelagh, but why not later rather than sooner, because when one's father dies there is so much that has been left unsaid. Had I known, that last hour sitting there, talking and laughing about trivial things, that there was a clot forming like a time-bomb close to his heart, ready to explode, I would surely have behaved differently, held on to him, at least thanked him for all my nineteen years of happiness and love. Not flipped over the photographs in the album, mocking bygone fashions, nor yawned halfway through, so that, sensing boredom, he let the album drop to the floor and murmured, 'Don't bother about me, pet, I'll have a kip.'
It's always the same when you come face to face with death, the nurse told her, you feel you could have done more. It used to worry me a lot when I was training. And of course with a close relative it's worse. You've had a great shock, you must try and pull yourself together for your mother's sake…. My mother's sake? My mother would not mind if I walked out of the house this moment, Shelagh was on the point of saying, because then she would have all the attention, all the sympathy, people would say how wonderfully she was bearing up, whereas with me in the house sympathy will be divided. Even Doctor Dray, when he finally arrived in the wake of his partner, patted her on the shoulder before her mother and said, 'He was very proud of you, my dear, he was always telling me so.' So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time. Let me run upstairs for you… Let me answer the telephone… Shall I put on the kettle? An excess of courtesy, like mandarins in kimonos bowing, and at the same time an attempt at self-justification for not having been there when the explosion happened.
The nurse (to the doctor's partner): 'I would never have gone for a walk if I hadn't been quite sure he was comfortable. And I believed that both Mrs Money and her daughter were in the house. Yes, I had given him the tablets…' etc., etc.
She is in the witness-box, on trial, thought Shelagh, but so are we all.
Her mother (also to the doctor's partner): 'It had entirely slipped my memory that Nurse was going out. There has been so much to think of, so much anxiety, and I thought it would relax me to pay a quick visit to the hairdresser, and he had seemed so much better, really his old self. I would never have dreamt of leaving the house, leaving his room, if I had thought for one moment…'
'Isn't that the trouble?' Shelagh burst in. 'We never do think, any of us. You didn't, Nurse didn't, Doctor Dray didn't, and above all I didn't, because I'm the only one who saw what happened, and I shall never forget the look on his face as long as I live.'
She stormed along the passage to her own room, sobbing hysterically in a way she had not done for years- the last time was when the post-van smashed into her first car when it was parked in the entrance drive, all that twisted metal, the lovely plaything ruined. That will teach them a lesson, she told herself, that will shake them out of this business of trying to behave so well, of being noble in the face of death, of making out that it's a merciful release and everything is really for the best. None of them really minding, caring, that someone has gone forever. But forever…
Later that evening, everyone gone to bed, death being so exhausting to all but the departed, Shelagh crept along the landing to her father's room and found the photograph album, tactfully tidied away on a corner table by the nurse, and carried it back with her to her own bedroom. Earlier, during the afternoon, the photographs had been without significance, familiar as old Christmas cards hoarded in a drawer, but now they were a kind of obituary, like stills flashed in tribute on a television screen.
The befrilled baby on a rug, mouth agape, his parents playing croquet. An uncle, killed in the first world war. Her father again, no longer a baby on a rug but in breeches, holding a cricket-bat too big for him. Homes of grandparents long dead. Children on beaches. Picnics on moors. Then Dartmouth, photographs of ships. Rows of
