Something in Disguise (36 page)

‘Not much of a Christmas Eve.’

‘Can’t be helped. Here you are, old girl.’

‘I’m dreadfully thirsty.’

‘Always is after one’s been sick.’

‘Could you get me a glass of water? Oh – and what did the doctor say?’

He was tucking the eiderdown round her legs and did not immediately reply.

‘Herbert?’

‘What? Of course I’ll get you some water.’ He went off to the bathroom and seemed a long time there.

‘Don’t drink too much at once or you’ll have it up again.’

‘What did the doctor say?’ she asked again when she had had a few sips.

‘Said I was to put you to bed, keep you warm, and he’ll be along first thing in the morning.’

‘Not tonight?’

But he repeated, ‘First thing in the morning.’

‘Herbert, I don’t want to fuss, but I think I
am
rather ill.’

‘If you must know, it’s my fault for giving you such a stiff whisky. A drink like that on an empty stomach – I’m prepared to bet you didn’t have a proper lunch, did
you now? Thought not. A drink like that on an empty stomach, and yours has been in a delicate state lately – see what I mean?’

He had been fidgeting with things on the bedside table, now he straightened himself and passed a hand over his hair which she knew he did when he was embarrassed.

‘I think we ought to get you into bed. Do you want me to – er – ?’

‘No thank you darling, I’m sure I can manage.’ She wasn’t at all sure, but she didn’t want to embarrass him, besides she felt so squalid and miserable after being
so sick that she wouldn’t really want anyone to help her.

‘Right. I’ll pop down and make your hot drink.’

‘Did the doctor say whether –’

‘Yes, yes, he recommended it. Settle your stomach and warm you up. I’ll have one with you.’

As he was leaving the room she called, ‘If you see Claude, his food’s on the top shelf in the larder. I couldn’t find him anywhere earlier when I did the dogs. He must be
ravenous.’

‘Right.’

‘And Herbert?’

She had wanted to tell him how kind he was being, but he had already gone. After a moment or two, she sat up and slowly pulled her jersey off over her head, but this simply made her feel so cold
that she could not face taking off any more clothes. She reached for her bed-jacket, and then her woollen dressing-gown. When they were both on, she felt warmer, but more tired, and lay down to
have a little rest until Herbert came up with her drink. He had had nothing to eat, poor dear, so she hoped he was getting himself something.

She became awake quite suddenly: one moment her head was on the block and the guillotine knife was coming down with its inexorable force, and the next moment her eyes were open, the alarm clock
was ticking away and she was herself, in bed with the bedside lamp on. She remembered that she had been ill, and that Herbert was fetching her a drink – she must have dozed off. As she sat
up, she realized that she still felt pretty awful, and looked to see whether she had any water left.

Then she got a bad shock. The alarm clock said twenty to four. She found herself staring, wondering how on earth it could say that – that would be – that meant that she had been
asleep for
hours
! She was still wearing her dressing-gown. Except for the clock ticking, the room was very quiet – much of it shadowy with only one lamp on, but it looked as though her
door was ajar. Herbert might have brought up her hot milk, found her asleep and not liked to disturb her. Then where was the milk? Herbert might have brought up her drink, found her asleep and
taken it away again. But then where was Herbert? Herbert might have brought up her hot milk, found her asleep and not liked to disturb her
so
he had taken the drink and gone to sleep in
another room. He’d left the door ajar in case she needed him. This final conclusion seemed sensible and likely, and she wondered why it did not make her feel less anxious, but it
didn’t. She did not want to go and look in all the rooms for Herbert in case when she found him she woke him up, which she knew would make him very cross indeed. But on the other hand, she
did need to know that he was
there
– where he was, she meant, of course. It would be too awful if he had just got tired of her being ill and simply gone off somewhere as he had been
doing rather a lot lately. Other considerations took over. Her stomach, which felt as though it had been repeatedly kicked, warned her that another attack of diarrhoea was imminent; she’d
have to get up. She got to the bathroom all right, but it was horribly cold there, and she found that she had to walk very slowly because the ground seemed feathery and uneven as though she was
walking in a dream. This feeling was increased when she pulled aside the passage curtain and looked out on to the drive and lawn and shrubs. It had been snowing heavily: everything was thick with
it and, even in the dark, luminous. Very large flakes were still slowly slipping down and casually coming to rest. It crossed her mind that she was actually dreaming. In a dream she would go
– no, float – downstairs to something amazing. Obviously it wasn’t a dream; none the less she was going downstairs, that was the thing to do. She pulled her dressing-gown up round
her throat, clutched the banisters with one hand and started down.

She went straight to Herbert’s study because she saw that the light was on there. It was one of those glaring lights, a naked bulb topped by a shallow glass shade – it did nothing to
soften, let alone conceal what she found.

Herbert was dead. He seemed to have opened a window just before he died as his hand was still clenched upon the casement catch, and he lay with his arm, its shoulder, and his head upon it, half
out of the window. It looked a very odd position, but then she realized that in fact he was jammed there; as he had fallen, the width of his shoulders had stuck in the narrow window frame. The rest
of him was sprawled over the low stone window seat and the floor. Snow had fallen against the open casement window and his head and clung there, making his white hair look like dirty ivory, and he
was so cold to touch that she knew he was dead. She noticed all this without feeling anything, but it seemed to her that everything was happening so slowly, like people said about films and things,
that for all she knew she might have run into the room, seen all this and any minute now would give a shriek – it was just that she hadn’t got to the shriek. She never got to it. There
was more to notice in the same slow, minute and passionless manner. The fire had gone out, but in the hearth lay a document – stiff paper, red ribbon and seal – that she recognized as
the will that had arrived from Mr Hardcastle and been witnessed by Mrs Green – this, no yesterday, morning. The paper had been slightly burned – quite burned at one corner – and
it lay just below the grate as though where it had ceased to burn it had dropped from the fire. She tried to remember where she had left the will. Elizabeth had telephoned just after Mrs Green had
done her bit on it, and she had put it on top of Herbert’s bureau to dry while talking to Elizabeth. Then, she had forgotten it. On the edge of the bookshelf by the top of the bureau was a
wide tumbler about a third full of what looked like Horlicks. Milk was spattered about the shelf and even as far as the bureau, and she knew what that meant. Oliver had suggested giving Claude milk
goggles for Christmas as he seemed to blind himself with spray when engaged upon drinking. It was Claude who had had the Horlicks. She tasted it but it was not at all nice cold, and was anyway no
good for quenching thirst. By the Horlicks were her cigarettes and she took one and lit it. It reassured, at the same time as faintly nauseating her. The room was icy. Even the telephone felt cold
to touch. She dialled the operator but there was no more or different sound. She tried two or three times but nothing happened: the line, she decided, was dead. Like Herbert. The cigarette was
making her feel very sick. Herbert was
dead
. He must have had a heart attack or stroke, or something like that, and had been trying to get some air and she had been too far away to help him.
She felt she ought to try and get him out of the window because it looked so uncomfortable, but when she tried to pull him in by the shoulders he did not move at all – was quite horribly
rigid. So she simply brushed the snow off him, and that was when she saw the marks of Claude’s paws on his collar. She stopped bothering with the snow after she had uncovered the part of
Herbert’s face that had been shrouded by it. His eyes were open and his expression made her feel uncomfortable to the point of fear. He looked as though he had been stopped in the middle of
some violent resentment, and that, in turn, made her feel that at any moment his resentment might suddenly resume . . .

She was frightfully thirsty. Whatever she ought to do – and she had not thought what that might be – she needed to drink something first, and she decided to make some tea. She must
have got very cold without noticing, as one of her feet seemed to have gone to sleep; when she started to walk she simply could not feel where the floor was, and so, in fact, she literally stumbled
over Claude.

He lay just by the swing baize door to the kitchen quarters, and he, too, was dead. He was not stiff but his fur had that impersonal feel to it that was retrospectively unnerving. Poor Claude!
As she was getting to her feet, she saw the pool of vomit. She turned on another passage light: all along the passage near the wall were the marks of Claude’s final misery. He must have come
in through the open study window, drunk the Horlicks –

What she thought then was so monstrous that she felt the distinct urge to lose consciousness – in vain. It was as if she had suddenly looked behind her and caught the glimpse of a hideous
cloven foot in the door: her mind made some frenzied but too faint resistance and then fell back against the force of some horrid explanatory and voluble crowd. The Horlicks had been made for her.
She had been feeling very ill. A whisky had also been made for her earlier. For months, drinks of various kinds had been made for her. She had been so ill this evening that she had thought she was
going to die. Claude was dead. Her children were away. She had been mysteriously ill for ages. He had had two other wives. They had both died. He had made her buy this house and had changed from
seeming to care deeply for her to seeming sometimes actually to hate her. If she had drunk the Horlicks she would be lying dead. She might have been very sick, but she would still have died. An
agony of horror that anyone in the world could be like that; she did not feel personal about it: simply, she would never have believed that there could be such a person unless it had been proved
– as it now seemed to be – in relation to her. Claude must have suffered, she now knew, great pain before he died instead of her. She knelt down again to take him up in her arms: Alice
had loved him and he deserved proper obsequies. (Alice!) But he had watched her, afraid, in pain, knowing all the time what was to become of her, indeed, arranging her eventual death – for
what? She stumbled with Claude in her arms to the kitchen where she laid him in the cardboard box in which he had often slept. His eyes were open: they were going dull and she tried to shut them,
but they would not stay. She put on a kettle and began to make tea without thinking at all. She would drink the tea very slowly, and time would pass, and in the end it would be morning and the
doctor would come . . .

After the tea she got up from the kitchen table: if the doctor was coming (but perhaps, that, too, had been a lie?) there were things she must do. It meant going back into the study, and she
discovered that she dreaded this. It was as though she was more afraid of the stiff, wicked thing jammed in the window than she had ever been of the living creature whose cover had been that of
being a bit of a bore – but none the less a straightforward, kindly man . . . There were things she
must
do.

So, shivering, wretchedly ill (she paid another visit to a freezing lavatory) she none the less carefully put away her will (he must have read it and had a fit of rage at its contents) and then
dealt with the tumbler of Horlicks. When she tipped it away, she saw that there seemed to be a good deal of sediment in the bottom of the glass and that was when she wondered weakly what poison he
had used. She washed out the tumbler very carefully, wondering whether she was going to die in any case, or whether she had been sick enough to escape. She would also have to bury Claude.
Everything took ages because she could hardly walk. She opened the heavy front door: the snow had stopped, but it lay about five inches deep in the drive and that meant that there would be drifts.
In any case, she found that under the snow the ground was iron-hard from previous frost and that she could not dig it with the study coal shovel. This made her cry, and once she had begun, she
could not stop at all.

She wanted everything to be tidied away before the doctor came: she did not want poor, gentle Alice to have to know what her father had been. This idea – that had occurred when she had
been putting Claude in the box – had grown to the exclusion of any other, and she kept explaining to herself why it would be terrible for Alice to have her father posthumously dubbed a
murderer. She might realize that her
own
mother had probably been poisoned: ‘slowly fading health’ which was how that poor lady’s demise had been mentioned had now an
ominous sound to it. And then there was her step-mother, whose mysterious ailments had also culminated in death. If Alice were told anything, she could hardly fail to guess a great deal more; more,
certainly, May felt, than she could bear. So of course it was awful that the ground should be so hard. Indeed, after a rest in the kitchen (she had turned out the light and shut the door of
Herbert’s study) she put on a coat over her dressing gown and carried Claude out for a second attempt. And this was where, at six in the morning, Alice had found her.

The call came through at five in the morning on Christmas Day, and to Elizabeth it seemed hardly to have finished one ring before John had turned on the weak and yellow
electric light and was propped up in bed on one elbow listening to the operator.