Final Curtain (20 page)

‘
Mrs Alleyn. Dearest Mrs Alleyn, do please wake up
.'

Troy opened her eyes. Fenella, fully dressed, stood at her bedside. In the thin light of dawn her face looked cold and very white. Her hands opened and shut aimlessly. The corners of her mouth turned down like those of a child about to cry. ‘What now, for pity's sake?' cried Troy.

‘I thought I'd better come and tell you. Nobody else would. They're all frantic. Paul can't leave his mother, and Mummy's trying to stop Aunt Dessy having hysterics. I feel so ghastly, I had to talk to someone.'

‘But why? What is it? What's happened?'

‘Grandfather. When Barker went in with his tea. He found him. Lying there. Dead.'

There is no more wretched lot than that of the comparative stranger in a house of grief. The sense of loneliness, the feeling that one constantly trespasses on other people's sorrow, that they would thankfully be rid of one; all these circumstances reduce the unwilling intruder to a condition of perpetual apology that must remain unexpressed. If there is nothing useful to be done this misery is the more acute, and Troy was not altogether sorry that Fenella seemed to find some comfort in staying with her. She hurriedly made a fire on top of last night's embers, set Fenella, who shivered like a puppy, to blow it up while she herself bathed and dressed, and, when at last the child broke down, listened to a confused recital which harked back continually to the break between herself and her grandfather. ‘It's so awful that Paul and I should have made him miserable. We'll never be able to forgive ourselves—never,' Fenella sobbed.

‘Now, look here,' said Troy, ‘that just doesn't make sense. You and Paul did what you have every right to do.'

‘But we did it brutally. You can't say we didn't. We grieved him frightfully. He said so.'

Sir Henry had said so a great many times and with extreme emphasis. It was impossible to suggest that anger rather than grief had moved him. Troy went off on another tack. ‘He seemed to have got over it,' she said.

‘Last night!' Fenella wailed. ‘When I think of what we said about him last night. In the drawing-room after you'd gone up. Everybody except Mummy and Paul. Aunt Milly said he'd probably have an attack, and I said I didn't care if it was fatal. Actually! And he
did
feel it. He cut Aunt Pauline and Mummy and me and Paul out of his Will because of our engagement and the way we announced it. So he did feel it deeply.'

‘The Will,' thought Troy. ‘Good heavens, yes. The Will!' She said: ‘He was an old man, Fenella. I don't think, do you, that the future was exactly propitious? Isn't it perhaps not so very bad that he should go now when everything seemed to him to be perfectly arranged. He'd had his splendid party.'

‘And look how it ended.'

‘Oh, dear!' said Troy. ‘That. Well, yes.'

‘And it was probably the party that killed him,' Fenella continued. ‘That hot crayfish. It's what everybody thinks. Dr Withers had warned him. And nobody was there. He just went up to his room and died.'

‘Has Dr Withers—?'

‘Yes. He's been. Barker got Aunt Milly and she rang up. He says it was a severe attack of gastro-enteritis. He says it—it happened—it must have been—soon after he went up to bed. It's so awful when you think of all the frightful things we were saying about him down there in the drawing-room. All of us except Cedric, and he was simply gloating over us. Little beast, he's still gloating, if it comes to that.'

The gong rumbled distantly. ‘You go down to breakfast,' said Fenella. ‘I can't face it.'

‘That won't do at all. You can at least choke down some coffee.'

Fenella took Troy's arm in a nervous grip. ‘I think I like you so much,' she said, ‘because you're so unlike all of us. All right, I'll come.'

The Ancreds in sorrow were a formidable assembly. Pauline, Desdemona and Millamant, who were already in the dining-room, had all found black dresses to wear, and Troy was suddenly conscious that she had without thinking pulled on a scarlet sweater. She uttered those phrases of sympathy that are always inadequate. Desdemona silently gripped her hand and turned aside. Pauline dumbfounded her by bursting into tears and giving her an impulsive kiss. And it was strange to find an unsmiling and pallid Millamant. Thomas came in, looking bewildered. ‘Good morning,' he said to Troy. ‘Isn't it awful? I really can't realize it a bit, you know. Everybody seems to realize it. They're all crying and everything, but I don't. Poor Papa.' He looked at his sisters. ‘You're not eating anything,' he said. ‘What can I get you, Pauline?'

Pauline said: ‘Oh, Thomas!' and made an eloquent gesture. ‘I suppose,' Thomas continued, ‘that later on I shan't want to eat anything, but at the moment I am hungry.'

He sat down beside Troy. ‘It's lucky you finished the portrait, isn't it?' he said. ‘Poor Papa!'

‘
Tommy!
' breathed his sister.

‘Well, but it is,' he insisted gently. ‘Papa would have been pleased too.'

Paul came in, and, a moment later, Jenetta Ancred, wearing tweeds. It was a relief to Troy that, like Thomas, neither of them spoke in special voices.

Presently Millamant began to speak of the manner in which Barker had discovered Sir Henry. At eight o'clock, it appeared, he had gone in as usual with Sir Henry's cup of milk and water. As he approached the room he heard the cat Carabbas wailing inside, and when he opened the door it darted out and fled down the passage. Barker supposed that Sir Henry had forgotten to let his cat out, and wondered that Carabbas had not waked him.

He entered the room. It was still very dark. Barker was shortsighted, but he could make out the figure lying across the bed.

He turned on the lights, and after one horrified glance, rushed down the corridor and beat on the door of Millamant's room. When she and Pauline answered together, he kept his head, remained outside, and, in an agitated whisper, asked Millamant if he might speak to her. She put on her dressing-gown and went out into the cold passage.

‘And I knew,' Pauline interjected at this point. ‘Something told me. I knew at once that something had happened.'

‘Naturally,' said Millamant. ‘Barker doesn't go on like that every morning.'

‘I knew it was The Great Visitor,' Pauline insisted firmly. ‘I knew.'

Millamant had gone with Barker to the room. She sent Barker to rouse Thomas and herself telephoned Dr Withers. He was out, but finally arrived in about an hour. It had been, he said, a severe attack of gastro-enteritis, probably brought on by his indiscretions at dinner. Sir Henry's heart had been unable to survive the attack and he had collapsed and died.

‘What I can't understand,' said Pauline, ‘is why he didn't ring. He always rang if he felt ill in the night. There was a special bell in the corridor, Dessy. The cord hung beside his bed.'

‘He tried,' said Thomas. ‘He must have grasped at it across the bed, we think, and fallen. It had come away from the cord. And I don't think, after all, I want very much to eat.'

Troy spent most of that last day between her room and the little theatre, lingering over her packing, which in any case was considerable. Carabbas, the cat, elected to spend the day in her room. Remembering where he had spent the night, she felt a little shudder at the touch of his fur. But they had become friendly, and after a time she was glad of his company. At first he watched her with some interest, occasionally sitting on such garments as she had laid out on the bed and floor. When she removed him he purred briefly, and at last, with a faint mew, touched her hand with his nose. It was hot. She noticed that his fur was staring. Was he, she wondered, actually distressed by the loss of his master? He grew restless and she opened the door. After a fixed look at her he went out, his tail drooping. She thought she heard him cry again on the stairs. She returned uneasily to her packing, broke off from time to time to wander restlessly about the room or stare out of the tower window at the rain-laced landscape. She came across a sketch-book and found herself absently making drawings of the Ancreds. Half an hour went past, and there they all were, like antics on the page, for her to show her husband. Guiltily she completed her packing.

Thomas had undertaken to send by rail such heavy baggage as the Yard car could not accommodate.

She was oppressed by the sensation of unreality. She felt more strongly than ever that she was held in suspension between two phases of experience. She was out of touch, not only with her surroundings, but with herself. While her hands folded and bestowed garment after garment, her thoughts ranged aimlessly between the events of the past twenty-four hours and those that were to come. ‘It is I,' she thought in dismay, ‘who will resemble the traveller who can speak of nothing but his fellow-passengers and the little events of his voyage, and it is Rory who will listen unhappily to anecdotes of these Ancreds whom he is never likely to meet.'

Lunch seemed to be an uncanny extension of breakfast. There, again, were the Ancreds, still using their special voices, still expressing so eloquently that sorrow whose authenticity Troy was not quite willing to discredit. She was half-aware of their conversation, catching only desultory pieces of information: Mr Rattisbon had been transferred to the rectory. Thomas had been dictating obituary notices over the telephone. The funeral would be held on Tuesday. The voices murmured on. Momentarily she was consulted, drawn in. A weekly paper had got wind of the portrait (‘Nigel Bathgate,' thought Troy), and would like to send down a photographer. She made suitable rejoinders and suggestions. Cedric, whose manner was fretfully subdued, brightened a little over this subject, and then, unaccountably, reverted to a kind of nervous acquiescence. The conversation drifted towards Miss Orrincourt, who had expressed her inability to make a public appearance and was having her meals in her own rooms. ‘I saw her breakfast-tray,' said Millamant with a ghost of her usual laugh. ‘Her appetite doesn't seem to have suffered.'

‘T'uh!' said the Ancreds softly.

‘Are we to be told,' Pauline asked, ‘how long she proposes to—?'

‘I should imagine,' said Desdemona, ‘no longer than it takes for the Will to become effective.'

‘Well, but I mean to say,' Cedric began, and they all turned their heads towards him. ‘If it's not
too
inappropriate and premature, one wonders rather, or doesn't one, if darling Sonia is in
quite
the same position
unmarried
as she would have been as the Old—as dearest Grandpapa's widow? Or not?'

An attentive stillness fell upon the table. It was broken by Thomas: ‘Yes—well, of course,' he said, looking blandly about him, ‘won't that depend on how the Will is made out. Whether her share is left to “Sonia Orrincourt,” you know, or to “my wife, Sonia,” and all that.'

Pauline and Desdemona stared for a moment at Thomas. Cedric smoothed his hair with two unsteady fingers. Fenella and Paul looked stolidly at their plates. Millamant, with a muffled attempt at easiness, said: ‘There's no need to jump
that
fence, surely, till we meet it.' Pauline and Desdemona exchanged glances. Millamant had used the sacred ‘we'.

‘I think it's pretty ghastly,' said Fenella abruptly, ‘to begin talking about Grandfather's Will when he's up there—lying there—' She broke off, biting her lip. Troy saw Paul reach for her hand. Jenetta Ancred, who had been silent throughout luncheon, gave her daughter a smile, half-deprecating, half-anxious. ‘How she dislikes it,' Troy thought, ‘when Fenella behaves like an Ancred.'