The Daffodil Sky (16 page)

Miss Constance, older by seven or eight years, had the plumpness of an irate goose that does not care to be disturbed. Her day did not begin until ten o'clock, when Spratchley brought breakfast to her bedroom on a tray. When she sat up in bed Spratchley came forward, coughing in gentle asthmatical politeness, with a pink woollen wrap for her shoulders. He held it while she tied its ribbons about her neck. Then he brought her oval ebony mirror, with her ebony brush and comb, and held the mirror steadily in front of her face while she brushed and combed her hair—hair that was like a crest of grey-white goose-feathers, ruffled at first with the irritation of sleep, then smoothed and humanised and softened as she brushed it down.

Spratchley knew better than to speak while she did these things, but sometimes, involuntarily, he coughed
again. The flabby creases of her neck hung down like those of an old dog and her lips sagged loosely as if in the interrupted act of sharply drawing breath. Then Spratchley took away the brush and comb and replaced them with her powder and her lipstick. After she had used them, dusting herself with a huge swansdown powder-puff, her face wore a mask of pale grey-mauve pollen and her lips wore a short oval of crimson carefully scalloped so that the upper lip looked firm.

Then she would say: ‘It's chilly, Spratchley. What is that row Jackie is making? Shut the window. I didn't sleep a wink,' and Spratchley would close the windows and sometimes, if she asked for it, even draw the curtains against the strong mid-morning sun.

‘Now what have you got for me?' she snapped, with a commanding expectation as if she suspected for a moment that he had brought her anything other than an orange, her Turkish cigarettes and a pot of milkless tea.

Spratchley always poured her tea and then, while she drank it, peeled her orange, laying it carefully about the plate in its prepared divisions. As the heat of the tea floated aromatically up into her face, followed by the scent of the orange, she squirmed her shoulders against the pillows with luxuriation, aware of the first pleasure of wakefulness. After she had eaten the orange—and sometimes in winter there was a little mound of castor sugar with which she could sweetly frost each quarter—she smoked her first cigarette, which Spratchley lit for her. And suddenly, after the first smoke cloud had risen, the room was all life for her—it quivered with the scent of her powder, the aroma of tea and orange, the delicious
Turkish odour of her cigarette and, in a way she never troubled to define, with the gently coughing presence of Spratchley.

She always drank three cups of tea and as she began the second Spratchley sat down by the bed and prepared to read to her aloud from the newspapers.

She drank her tea with noiseless deliberation, pulling quietly at her cigarette, while Spratchley read out descriptions, perhaps, of strange women who allowed their husbands to bring home their mistresses to live under the same roof with them or of married couples who, in fits of irresponsibility or boredom, changed partners on holiday for a night or two, as it were experimentally.

Sometimes scandal caught Spratchley unawares, leaving his mouth open in hesitation.

‘Well, what is it, Spratchley? What are you gibbing for?'

‘There's a piece here, miss——'

‘Well, read it, man, read it. What do you suppose I am?'

Under the dry drone of Spratchley's readings the day woke fully and a tenderness, a kind of cocoon of bemusement, descended on her slowly and softly, leaving her content.

Downstairs, at last, Spratchley took off his white house-jacket, rolled up his sleeves and tied on the green baize apron that would make him ready for the world of Miss Jackie, trundling a wheelbarrow noisily over paths of crazy paving, whistling among her passions.

‘I'm going to change the layout of the path, Spratchley. It's not wide enough. I want to bring it down in a wider
sweep, in front of the rhodies and then out here and along by the pollies.'

‘Yes, miss.'

‘I'm sure it will be better, don't you?'

‘Yes, miss.'

‘I've got some of the paving stones up and I've marked where I want them to go. Will you start laying at that end?'

‘Yes, miss.'

In the robust, energetic, whistling, passionate world of Miss Jackie he worked till noon. The sisters liked to have lunch at two. At twelve o'clock he took off the green baize apron and put on a white apron and began preparing vegetables. In his white house-jacket he had a bony stiffness of body that made him appear to stand to attention while serving Miss Constance's tea. In the apron of green baize he was not rigid. His limbs unbent from cragginess and became supple, his hands large and easy as they used the spade.

At two o'clock he served lunch, putting on the white house-jacket just before he rang the gong. Miss Constance, already in afternoon dress, her hair set in crimped sharp waves, sat at one end of the oblong dining table, Miss Jackie in trousers and leather coat, with bobbed unbrushed hair, at the other. Miss Jackie did not like gravy on her vegetables; she preferred bread and cheese to sweet things. Miss Constance was fond of mustard, made rather thinly and freshly for every meal and set before her, dead centre, in a silver pot. She drank nothing with her meals except a large cup of weak white coffee when the pudding came, but Miss Jackie drank bottled beer poured froth-high into a
pewter tankard, consuming it noisily, in long gulps, making a heavy clatter each time the tankard was set down.

They took it for granted that Spratchley knew and would take care of these little differences in their taste for things.

In the afternoon Miss Jackie, who had perhaps been up since five o'clock in summer-time, rested for a time on her bed so that she would be fresh to work again among her passions, in the evening, until supper-time. It was Miss Constance's turn to enjoy the garden, sitting in a swing canopy, in shade that would be kind to a complexion that had by now received, like a bluer, pinker mask of muslin, its third or fourth coat of powder. In privacy and shade she would relish once again the flavour of the pieces Spratchley had first read to her from the newspaper. She did not know what Spratchley did with himself during these hours of the day. She supposed he was occupied with, as she put it, ‘bits and pieces.' But, as she said, ‘I never ask. I never interfere.' Spratchley, in fact, would be polishing the stairs or the hall or the dining-room; cleaning silver or washing windows; releasing blocked pipes and flues; repairing gutters after or against the threat of thunderstorms. Each spring he painted the outside of the house, creosoted the gimcrack beams with their distant impression of baronial grandeur and retrained, under Miss Jackie's instruction, the roses and japonica that covered the walls. In summer he bottled and preserved the fruits Miss Jackie grew and in autumn he filled outhouses with the harvest of onions, apples and potatoes.

Every afternoon at four o'clock he took Miss Jackie's
tea to her room. She liked it strong and black and in a breakfast cup. Miss Constance did not like her own, with lemon, until five. Miss Jackie, lying on the outside of the bed with a dressing-gown over her trousers, always needed to be woken by his gentle rusty coughing. Spratchley poured tea for her, watched her regain wakefulness under the first cup very much as he watched Miss Constance in the morning, and then waited for what she had to say.

‘You get on with the path and I'll do the edging. We ought to get it finished by supper-time. Have we got manure? Bring up three or four barrowloads if we have. It will do the pollies good.'

Divided between Miss Jackie, among the polyantha roses, and Miss Constance, greedily absorbed in the evening papers brought up by the newsboy from the station two miles away, Spratchley cooked and served supper at nine. After supper he could be heard scrubbing the scullery or sweeping the yard outside the kitchen or chopping kindling in the outhouse across the yard.

‘Spratchley!' they would call to him then. ‘Jackie!—have you seen Spratchley about? Connie!—for heaven's sake where is Spratchley?—' and their long cooing wails for him would explore, owl-like, the summer night air—‘Spratchley! Coo-ee! Spratchley!'

At eleven o'clock Miss Constance went to bed and, luxuriously propped by pillows, smoked a final cigarette and enjoyed a glass of whisky and water brought up by Spratchley on a tray. Miss Jackie preferred warm milk, with arrowroot wafers and the evening paper, in the lounge. Spratchley stood for a short time with each of them, hovering with what might have been asthmatical
coughs of hesitation while Miss Constance tasted the formula of whisky and water and Miss Jackie sipped at the low warmth of her milk, dipping into it finally, like a child, two thin arrowroot wafers, before sucking them wetly and noisily away.

Then Spratchley, thin, with a slight hunch of the shoulders that came, perhaps, from so often holding his hands together just below his chest, and a final series of small scraping coughs that might have been mere clearings of the throat for words that never came, said good night. Miss Constance and Miss Jackie, absorbed in whisky and milk and final words to read, said good night too, not quite perfunctorily but almost, each assuming that Spratchley and daylight, both inevitable, would eventually wake them.

But on a morning in October Spratchley did not wake them. Miss Constance lay for more than half an hour in frowsy irritation at this lapse and then finally got up and put on her dressing-gown and went downstairs.

‘Spratchley! Spratchley!' she called. ‘Jackie!—oh! there you are—what on earth has got into Spratchley?'

Spratchley slept downstairs in a tiny ten by eight bedroom that had once been a stillroom leading off the kitchen. The two sisters had never thought it their business to enter this room. Now, puzzled and irritated but not anxious, they stood outside, calling:

‘Spratchley! Spratchley!' in cooing, possessive, owl-like voices.

It was Miss Jackie who thought she heard groanings in answer. When she opened the door the sudden sight of Spratchley's small iron bed, his clothes littered about the floor and of Spratchley himself, flat and cold-eyed
in the bed, with a yellowish lump of cottonwool oozing from one ear, shocked her into pity.

This pity for Spratchley took the form of a spasm of fright, clumsy and startling, as she knelt by the bed. She was not aware of the stupidity of her questions. ‘Is something the matter, Spratchley? Aren't you well? What is it, Spratchley?'

A glaze of pain on Spratchley's eyes gave her another spasm of fright. She saw him try to heave himself upward from the pillow. An asthmatical stutter for breath became a long choking wheeze, almost a whistle, excruciating as the scour of steel on glass.

She heard him try to say, ‘I can't, miss—I can't——' and then saw the under-whip of pain catch him unprepared, up through the lung, leaving him gasping.

It was Spratchley who said, when the doctor came: ‘Not the hospital, sir. Not the hospital. I don't want to go there. I don't want to go to that place, sir,' but she felt that the words were really her own. In her fright she could not express them and it was Miss Constance who echoed them aloud:

‘Is it necessary, the hospital? We have every comfort here. He can be looked after here.'

‘Not quite in the same way.'

‘You heard him beg not to be taken,' Miss Jackie said.

‘That's a natural feeling everybody has.'

‘Yes, but must he really? Against his will? Does he have to? When we could look after him equally——'

‘Pneumonia is always a long job,' the doctor said. ‘With all your penicillin it's still very tricky. You need persons with training. It can be very exhausting for
persons like yourselves with no training. The only possible solution would be a nurse——'

‘Then if that's the solution,' Miss Constance said, ‘he must have a nurse. We don't mind the expense of a nurse.'

‘I'm rather reluctant,' the doctor said.

‘If you had a possible nurse couldn't you send her over and try——?'

‘Very well,' the doctor said. ‘We will try the nurse.'

There had always been in the house a sort of casualness, a perfunctory ease of the kind that comes of long orthodox habit not broken by accident of affliction. The division of the labours of Spratchley did not require argument. It did not seem to demand the evidence of affections. It was perfectly simple as it was. Like Spratchley himself it had long been taken for granted.

The nurse, Farrer, arrived with a discordancy of brass, driving her own car. The sisters had long given up a car as a luxury pointless to two people who had etched a plan of life with perfection between the walls of their own garden. They did not call on people, a habit which, they discovered, had the satisfactory result of encouraging people, very largely, not to call on them. The few people who did call rang the old-fashioned spring bell at the front door and Spratchley, hurrying from any quarter of his world, however far away, always answered it.

Nurse Farrer rang the bell with muscular brevity and entered the house without waiting for an answer. She was already hanging up her coat in the cloakroom and was about to wash her hands in the basin there by the
time Miss Jackie had grasped with confusion that she ought to be answering the bell.

Miss Jackie was aware of a tall crisp healthy woman in her forties, with sensational shoulders. Her flesh had a smooth and tightened surface that shone with waxy reflections, as if recently starched. Her voice crackled.

‘Well, where are we? Where is our patient? Are we upstairs?'

‘No, nurse, downstairs. This way.'

After Nurse Farrer had looked at Spratchley's small congested room in a silence of surprised disfavour she went in and shut the door.

With sensations of unpleasant confusion Miss Jackie waited outside. She was like a person unaccustomed to sickness who feels a sudden rush of nausea. The shutting of the door, the cutting off of Spratchley and the nurse, the long ominous silence: they were like rebukes she had done nothing to deserve.