Wraggett went away, and Mrs Digby-Hunter felt pleased. The little speech she had made to him was one she had heard her husband making on other occasions. ‘We rap the occasional knuckle,’ he said to prospective parents. ‘Quite simply, we stand no nonsense.’
She was glad that it had come so easily to her to quote her husband, once again to come up to scratch as a wife. Boys who were malingering must naturally receive the occasional rap on the knuckles and her husband, over seventeen years, had proved that his ways were best. She remembered one time a woman coming and taking her son away on the grounds that the pace was too strenuous for him. As it happened, she had opened the door in answer to the woman’s summons and had heard the woman say she’d had a letter from her son and thought it better that he should be taken away. It turned out that the child had written hysterically. He had said that Milton Grange was run by lunatics and criminals. Mrs Digby-Hunter, hearing that, had smiled and had quietly inquired if she herself resembled either a lunatic or a criminal. The woman shook her head, but the boy, who had been placed in Milton Grange so that he might pass on to the King’s School in Canterbury, was taken away. ‘To stagnate’, her husband had predicted and she, knitting another pullover for him, had without much difficulty agreed.
Mrs Digby-Hunter selected a raspberry-and-honey cream. She returned the chocolate-box to the grass beneath her deck-chair and closed her eyes.
‘What’s the matter, son?’ inquired Sergeant Wall on his way back to his weeding.
Wraggett said he had a pain at the back of his neck. He couldn’t keep his head still, he said; he kept seeing double; he felt sick in the stomach. ‘God almighty,’ said Sergeant Wall. He led the boy back to the kitchen, which was the only interior part of Milton Grange that he knew. ‘Here,’ he said to the two maids, who were still sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. ‘Here,’ said Sergeant Wall, ‘have a look at this.’
Wraggett sat down and took off his spectacles. As though seeking to control its wobbling motion, he attempted to shake his head, but the effort, so Barbara and Dympna afterwards said, appeared to be too much for him. His shoulders slipped forward, the side of his face struck the scrubbed surface of the kitchen table, and when the three of them settled him back on his chair in order to give him water in a cup they discovered that he was dead.
When Mrs Digby-Hunter entered the kitchen half an hour later she blinked her eyes several times because the glaring sunshine had affected them. Trick the sausages,’ she automatically commanded, for today being a Tuesday it would be sausages for tea, a fact of which both Barbara and Dympna would, as always, have to be reminded. She was then aware that something was the matter.
She blinked again. The kitchen contained people other than Barbara and Dympna. Mr Beade, a man who rarely addressed her, was standing by the Aga. Sergeant Wall was endeavouring to comfort Barbara, who was noisily weeping.
‘What’s the matter, Barbara?’ inquired Mrs Digby-Hunter, and she noticed as she spoke that Mr Beade turned more of his back to her. There was a smell of tobacco smoke in the air: Dympna, to Mrs Digby-Hunter’s astonishment, was smoking a cigarette.
‘There’s been a tragedy, Mrs Digby-Hunter,’ said Sergeant Wall. ‘Young Wraggett.’
‘What’s the matter with Wraggett?’
‘He’s dead,’ said Dympna. She released smoke through her nose, staring hard at Mrs Digby-Hunter. Barbara, who had looked up on hearing Mrs Digby-Hunter’s voice, sobbed more quietly, gazing also, through tears, at Mrs Digby-Hunter.
‘Dead?’ As she spoke, her husband entered the kitchen. He addressed Mr Beade, who turned to face him. He said he had put the body of Wraggett on a bed in a bedroom that was never used. There was no doubt about it, he said, the boy was dead.
‘Dead?’ said Mrs Digby-Hunter again.
Mr Beade was mumbling by the Aga, asking her husband where Wraggett’s parents lived. Barbara was wiping the tears from her face with a handkerchief. Beside her, Sergeant Wall, upright and serious, stood like a statue. ‘In Worcestershire,’ Mrs Digby-Hunter’s husband said. A village called Pine.’ She was aware that the two maids were still looking at her. She wanted to tell Dympna to stop smoking at once, but the words wouldn’t come from her. She was asleep in the garden, she thought: Wraggett had come and stood by her chair, she had offered him a chocolate, now she was dreaming that he was dead, it was all ridiculous. Her husband’s voice was quiet, still talking about the village called Pine and about Wraggett’s mother and father.
Mr Beade asked a question that she couldn’t hear: her husband replied that he didn’t think they were that kind of people. He had sent for the school doctor, he told Mr Beade, since the cause of death had naturally to be ascertained as soon as possible.
‘A heart attack,’ said Mr Beade.
‘Dead?’ said Mrs Digby-Hunter for the fourth time.
Dympna held towards Barbara her packet of cigarettes. Barbara accepted one, and the eyes of the two girls ceased their observation of Mrs Digby-Hunter’s face. Dympna struck a match. Wraggett had been all right earlier, Mr Beade said. Her husband’s lips were pursed in a way that was familiar to her; there was anxiety in his eyes.
The kitchen was flagged, large grey flags that made it cool in summer and which sometimes sweated in damp weather. The boys’ crockery, of hardened primrose-coloured plastic, was piled on a dresser and on a side table. Through huge, barred windows Mrs Digby-Hunter could see shrubs and a brick wall and an expanse of gravel. Everything was familiar and yet seemed not to be. ‘So sudden,’ her husband said. ‘So wretchedly out of the blue.’ He added that after the doctor had given the cause of death he himself would motor over to the village in Worcestershire and break the awful news to the parents.
She moved, and felt again the eyes of the maids following her. She would sack them, she thought, when all this was over. She filled a kettle at the sink, running water into it from the hot tap. Mr Beade remained where he was standing when she approached the Aga, appearing to be unaware that he was in her way. Her husband moved. She wanted to say that soon, at least, there’d be a cup of tea, but again the words failed to come from her. She heard Sergeant Wall asking her husband if there was anything he could do, and then her husband’s voice said that he’d like Sergeant Wall to remain in the house until the doctor arrived so that he could repeat to the doctor what Wraggett had said about suddenly feeling unwell. Mr Beade spoke again, muttering to her husband that Wraggett in any case would never have passed into Lancing. ‘I shouldn’t mention that,’ her husband said.
She sat down to wait for the kettle to boil, and Sergeant Wall and the girls sat down also, on chairs near to where they were standing, between the two windows. Her husband spoke in a low voice to Mr Beade, instructing him, it seemed: she couldn’t hear the words he spoke. And then, without warning, Barbara cried out loudly. She threw her burning cigarette on the floor and jumped up from her chair. Tears were on her face, her teeth were
