her. It didn’t comfort her that he said it because she didn’t in the least mind dying. She had a belief that after death she would meet again the man who had himself died so abruptly, that the interrupted marriage would somehow continue. For twenty-seven years this hope had been the consolation that kept her going. That and the fact that she had provided a home for Mr Apse and Miss Bell, and Mrs Pope and Tindall and Plunkett, all of whom had grown older with her and had shared with her the beauty of her husband’s house.
‘I shall not get up today,’ she murmured on the morning of July 12th. She did not, and in fact did not ever again get up.
They were thrown into confusion. They stood in the kitchen looking at one another, only Plunkett looking elsewhere, at the Aga that for so long now had been Mrs Pope’s delight. No one had expected Mrs Abercrombie to die, having been repeatedly assured by Dr Ripley that there was nothing the matter with her. The way she lived, so carefully and so well looked after, there had seemed no reason why she shouldn’t last for another twenty years at the very least, into her eighties. In bed at night, on the occasions when he didn’t visit Tindall’s bed, Plunkett had worked out that if Mrs Abercrombie lived until she was eighty, Miss Bell would be sixty-four and Mrs Pope seventy-eight. Tindall, at sixty-two, would presumably be beyond the age of desire, as he himself would no doubt be, at sixty-nine. Mr Apse, so grizzled and healthy did he sometimes seem, might still be able to be useful in the garden, at eighty-two. It seemed absurd to Plunkett on the morning of July 12th that Mrs Abercrombie had died twenty years too soon. It also seemed unfair.
It seemed particularly unfair because, according to the letter which Mrs Abercrombie had that morning received from her solicitors, she had been in the process of altering her will. Mrs Abercrombie had once revealed to Plunkett that it had been her husband’s wish, in view of the fact that there were no children, that Rews Manor should eventually pass into the possession of a body which was engaged in the study of rare grasses. It was a subject that had interested him and which he had studied in considerable detail himself. ‘There’ll be legacies of course,’ Mrs Abercrombie had reassured Plunkett, ‘for all of you.’ She’d smiled when she’d said that and Plunkett had bowed and murmured in a way that, years ago, he’d picked up from Hollywood films that featured English butlers.
But in the last few weeks Mrs Abercrombie had apparently had second thoughts. Reading between the lines of the letter from her solicitors, it was clear to Plunkett that she’d come to consider that legacies for her servants weren’t enough.
‘Grass,’ he said in the kitchen. ‘They’ll be studying grass here.’
The others knew what he was talking about. They, like he, believing that Mrs Abercrombie would live for a long time yet, had never paused to visualize Rews Manor in that far-off future. They did so now, since the future was bewilderingly at hand. Contemporary life closed in upon the house and garden that had belonged to the past. They saw the house without its furniture since such furniture would be unsuitable in a centre for the studying of grasses. They saw, in a vague way, men in shirtsleeves, smoking pipes and carrying papers. Tindall saw grasses laid out for examination on a long trestle table in the hall. Mr Apse saw roses uprooted from the garden, the blue hydrangeas disposed of, and small seed-beds, neatly laid out, for the cultivation of special grass. Miss Bell had a vision of men with a bulldozer, but she could not establish their activity with more precision. Mrs Pope saw caterers’ packs on the kitchen table and in the cold room and the store cupboards: transparent plastic bags containing powdered potatoes in enormous quantities, fourteen-pound tins of instant coffee, dried mushrooms and dried all-purpose soup. Plunkett saw a laboratory in the drawing-room.
‘I must telephone Dr Ripley,’ Plunkett said, and the others thought, but did not say it, that it was too late for Dr Ripley to be of use.
‘You have to,’ Plunkett said, ‘when a person dies.’
He left the kitchen, and Mrs Pope began to make coffee. The others sat down at the table, even though it was half past eleven in the morning. There were other houses, Tindall said to herself, other country houses where life would be quiet and more agreeable than life in a frozen-foods firm. And yet other houses would not have him coming to her bedroom, for she could never imagine his suggesting that they should go somewhere together. That wasn’t his way; it would be too binding, too formal, like a proposal of marriage. And she wouldn’t have cared to be Mrs Plunkett, for she didn’t in the least love him.
‘Poor thing,’ Mrs Pope said, pouring her boiling water on to the coffee she had ground, and for a moment Tindall thought the reference was to her.
‘Yes,’ Miss Bell whispered, ‘poor old thing.’ She spoke in a kind way, but her words, sincerely meant, did not sound so in the kitchen. Somewhere in the atmosphere that the death had engendered there was resentment, a reflection of the bitterness it had engendered in Plunkett. There was a feeling that Mrs Abercrombie, so considerate in her lifetime, had let them down by dying. Even while she called her a poor old thing, Miss Bell wondered what she should do now. Many employers might consider the idea of a woman gardener eccentric, and certainly other men, more set in their ways than Mr Apse, mightn’t welcome a female assistant.
Mrs Pope thought along similar lines. You became used to a place, she was reflecting as she poured the coffee into cups, and there’d be few other places where you could cook so grandly for a single palate, where you were appreciated every day of your life. ‘Bloody inedible,’ she’d heard a girl exclaim in a corridor of the YWCA, referring to carefully poached haddock in a cream sauce.
‘The doctor’ll be here at twelve,’ Plunkett sombrely announced, re-entering the kitchen from the back hall. ‘I left a message; I didn’t say she’d died.’
He sat down at the table and waited while Mrs Pope filled his coffee-cup. Tindall placed the jug of hot milk beside him and for a moment the image of her fingers on the flowered surface of the china caused him to remember the caressing of those fingers the night before. He added two lumps of sugar and poured the milk. He felt quite urgent about Tindall, which he never usually did at half past eleven on a morning after. He put it down to the upset of the death, and the fact that he was idle when normally on a Friday morning he’d be going through the stores with Mrs Pope.
‘Doctor’ll sign a death warrant,’ Mrs Pope said. ‘There’ll be the funeral.’
Plunkett nodded. Mrs Abercrombie had a cousin in Lincolnshire and another in London, two old men who once, twelve years ago, had spent a weekend in Rews Manor. Mrs Abercrombie hadn’t corresponded with them after that, not caring for them, Plunkett imagined. The chances were they were dead by now.
‘No one much to tell,’ Mrs Pope said, and Miss Bell mentioned the two cousins. He’d see if they were alive,
