of what she saw. What would I give, I thought, for a respectable appearance at this moment.
'Please,' I repeated.
'She may be ill. Which is her room?'
'You have blood on your face,' she observed.
'It's only a cut… please tell me…' I gripped her arm.
'Look, show me her room, then if she's all right and perfectly healthy I will go away without any trouble. But I think she may need help very badly. Please believe me…'
'Very well,' she said reluctantly.
'We will go and see. It is just round here… and round here.'
We arrived at Elinor's door. I knocked hard. There was no answer. I bent down to the low keyhole. The key was in the lock on her side, and I could not see in.
'Open it,' I urged the woman, who was still eyeing me dubiously.
'Open it, and see if she's all right.'
She put her hand on the knob and turned. But the door didn't budge. It was locked.
I banged on the door again. There was no reply.
'Now please listen,' I said urgently.
'As the door is locked on the inside, Elinor Tarren is in there. She doesn't answer because she can't. She needs a doctor very urgently indeed. Can you get hold of one at once?'
The woman nodded, looking at me gravely through the pince nez. I wasn't sure that she believed me, but apparently she did.
'Tell the doctor she has been poisoned with phenobarbitone and gin.
About forty minutes ago. And please, please hurry. Are there any more keys to this door? '
'You can't push out the key that's already there. We've tried on other doors, on other occasions. You will have to break the lock. I will go and telephone.' She retreated sedately along the corridor, still breathtakingly calm in the face of a wild looking man with blood on his forehead and the news that one of her students was halfway to the coroner. A tough-minded university lecturer.
The Victorians who had built the place had not intended importunate men friends to batter down the girls' doors. They were a solid job.
But in view of the thin woman's calm assumption that breaking in was within my powers, I didn't care to fail. I broke the lock with my heel, in the end. The wood gave way on the jamb inside the room, and the door opened with a crash.
In spite of the noise I had made, no students had appeared in the corridor. There was still no one about. I went into Elinor's room, switched on the light, and swung the door back into its frame behind me.
She was lying sprawled on top of her blue bedspread fast asleep, the silver hair falling in a smooth swathe beside her head. She looked peaceful and beautiful. She had begun to undress, which was why, I supposed, she had locked her door, and she was wearing only a bra and briefs under a simple slip. All these garments were white with pink rosebuds and ribbons. Pretty. Belinda would have liked them. But in these circumstances they were too poignant, too defenceless. They increased my grinding worry.
The suit which Elinor had worn at Humber's had been dropped in two places on the floor. One stocking hung over the back of a chair: the other was on the floor just beneath her slack hand. A clean pair of stockings lay on the dressing table, and a blue woollen dress on a hanger was hooked on to the outside of the wardrobe. She had been changing for the evening.
If she hadn't heard me kicking the door in she wouldn't wake by being touched, but I tried. I shook her arm. She didn't stir. Her pulse was normal, her breathing regular, her face as delicately coloured as always. Nothing looked wrong with her. I found it frightening.
How much longer, I wondered anxiously, was the doctor going to be? The door had been stubborn or I had been weak, whichever way you looked at it and it must have been more than ten minutes since the thin woman had gone to telephone.
As if on cue the door swung open and a tidy solid- looking middle-aged man in a grey suit stood there taking in the scene. He was alone. He carried a suitcase in one hand and a fire hatchet in the other. Coming in, he looked at the splintered wood, pushed the door shut, and put the axe down on Elinor's desk.
'That's saved time, anyway,' he said briskly. He looked me up and down without enthusiasm and gestured to me to get out of the way. Then he cast a closer glance at Elinor with her tucked up slip and her long bare legs, and said to me sharply, suspiciously, 'Did you touch her clothes?'
'No,' I said bitterly.
'I shook her arm. And felt her pulse. She was lying like that when I came in.'
Something, perhaps it was only my obvious weariness, made him give me a suddenly professional, impartial survey.
'All right,' he said, and bent down to Elinor.
I waited behind him while he examined her, and when he turned round I noticed he had decorously pulled down her rumpled slip so that it reached smoothly to her knees.
Thenobarbitone and gin,' he said.
'Are you sure?'
'Yes.'
'Self-administered?' He started opening his case.
'No. Definitely not.'
'This place is usually teeming with women,' he said inconsequentially.
'But apparently they're all at some meeting or another.' He gave me another intent look.
'Are you fit to help?'
'Yes.'
He hesitated.
'Are you sure?'
'Tell me what to do.'
'Very well. Find me a good-sized jug and a bucket or large basin. I'll get her started first, and you can tell me how this happened later.'
He took a hypodermic syringe from his case, filled it, and gave Elinor an injection into the vein on the inside of her elbow. I found a jug and a basin in the built-in fitment.
'You've been here before,' he observed, eyes again suspicious.
'Once,' I said: and for Elinor's sake added, 'I am employed by her father. It's nothing personal.'
'Oh. All right then.' He withdrew the needle, dismantled the syringe, and quickly washed his hands.
'How many tablets did she take, do you know?'
'It wasn't tablets. Powder. A teaspoonful, at least. Maybe more.'
He looked alarmed, but said, 'That much would be bitter. She'd taste it.'
'Gin and Campari… it's bitter anyway.'
'Yes. All right. I'm going to wash out her stomach. Most of the drug must have been absorbed already, but if she had as much as that… well, it's still worth trying.'
He directed me to fill the jug with tepid water, while he carefully slid a thickish tube down inside Elinor's throat. He surprised me by putting his ear to the long protruding end of it when it was in position, and he explained briefly that with an unconscious patient who couldn't swallow one had to make sure the tube had gone into the stomach and not into the lungs.
'If you can hear them breathe, you're in the wrong place,' he said.
He put a funnel in the end of the tube, held out his hand for the jug, and carefully poured in the water. When what seemed to me a fantastic amount had disappeared down the tube he stopped pouring, passed me the jug to put down, and directed me to push the basin near his foot.
Then, removing the funnel, he suddenly lowered the end of the tube over the side of the bed and into the basin. The water flowed out again, together with all the contents of Elinor's stomach.
'Hm,' he said calmly.
'She had something to eat first. Cake, I should say. That helps.'
I couldn't match his detachment.
