Collected Stories

Last Wishes

In the neighbourhood Mrs Abercrombie was a talking point. Strangers who asked at Miss Dobbs’ Post Office and Village Stores or at the Royal Oak were told that the wide entrance gates on the Castle Cary road were the gates to Rews Manor, where Mrs Abercrombie lived in the past, with servants. No one from the village except old Dr Ripley and a window-cleaner had seen her since 1947, the year of her husband’s death. According to Dr Ripley, she’d become a hypochondriac.

But even if she had, and in spite of her desire to live as a recluse, Mrs Abercrombie continued to foster the grandeur that made Rews Manor, nowadays, seem old-fashioned. Strangers were told that the interior of the house had to be seen to be believed. The staircase alone, in white rose-veined marble, was reckoned to be worth thousands; the faded carpets had come from Persia; all the furniture had been in the Abercrombie family for four or five generations. On every second Sunday in the summer the garden was open to visitors and the admission charges went to the Nurses.

Once a week Plunkett, the most important of Mrs Abercrombie’s servants, being her butler, drove into the village and bought stamps and cigarettes in the post office and stores. It was a gesture more than anything else, Miss Dobbs considered, because the bulk of the Rews Manor shopping was done in one or other of the nearby towns. Plunkett was about fifty, a man with a sandy appearance who drove a pre-war Wolseley and had a pleasant, easy-going smile. The window-cleaner reported that there was a Mrs Plunkett, a uniformed housemaid, but old Dr Ripley said the uniformed maid was a person called Tindall. There were five servants at Rews Manor, Dr Ripley said, if you counted the two gardeners, Mr Apse and Miss Bell, and all of them were happy. He often repeated that Mrs Abercrombie’s servants were happy, as though making a point: they were pleasant people to know, he said, because of their contentment. Those who had met Plunkett in the village agreed, and strangers who had come across Mr Apse and Miss Bell in the gardens of Rews Manor found them pleasant also, and often envied them their dispositions.

In the village it was told how there’d always been Abercrombies at Rews Manor, how the present Mrs Abercrombie’s husband had lived there alone when he’d inherited it – until he married at forty-one, having previously not intended to marry at all because he suffered from a blood disease that had killed his father and his grandfather early in their lives. It was told how the marriage had been a brief and a happy one, and how there’d been no children. Mrs Abercrombie’s husband had died within five years and had been buried in the grounds of Rews Manor, near the azaleas.

‘So beautifully kept, the garden,’ visitors to the neighbourhood would marvel. ‘That gravel in front, not a stone out of place! Those lawns and rose-bushes!’ And then, intrigued by the old-fashioned quality of the place, they’d hear the story of this woman whose husband had inopportunely died, who existed now only in the world of her house and gardens, who lived in the past because she did not care for the present. People wove fantasies around this house and its people; to those who were outside it, it touched on fantasy itself. It was real because it was there and you could see it, because you could see the man called Plunkett buying stamps in the post office, but its reality was strange, as exotic as a coloured orchid. In the 1960s and 1970s, when life often had a grey look, the story of Rews Manor cheered people up, both those who told it and those who listened. It created images in minds and it affected imaginations. The holidaymakers who walked through the beautifully kept garden, through beds of begonias and roses, among blue hydrangeas and potentilla and witch-hazel and fuchsia, were grateful. They were grateful for the garden and for the story that went with it, and later they told the story themselves, with conjectured variations.

At closer quarters, Rews Manor was very much a world of its own. In 1947, at the time of Mr Abercrombie’s death, Mr Apse, the gardener, worked under the eighty-year-old Mr Marriott, and when Mr Marriott died Mrs Abercrombie promoted Mr Apse and advertised for an assistant. There seemed no reason why a woman should not be as suitable as a man and so Miss Bell, being the only applicant, was given the post. Plunkett had also been advertised for when his predecessor, Stubbins, had become too old to carry on. The housemaid, Tindall, had been employed a few years after the arrival of Plunkett, as had Mrs Pope, who cooked.

The servants all lived in, Mr Apse where he had always lived, in a room over the garage, Miss Bell next door to him. The other three had rooms in a wing of the house which servants, in the days when servants were more the thing, had entirely occupied. They met for meals in the kitchen and sometimes they would sit there in the evenings. The room which once had been the servants’ sitting-room had a dreariness about it: in 1956 Plunkett moved the television set into the kitchen.

Mr Apse was sixty-three now and Miss Bell was forty-five. Mrs Pope was fifty-nine, Tindall forty-three. Plunkett, reckoned in the village to be about fifty, was in fact precisely that. Plunkett, who had authority over the indoor servants and over Mr Apse and Miss Bell when they were in the kitchen, had at the time of Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement held a position in a nouveau-riche household in Warwickshire. He might slowly have climbed the ladder and found himself, when death or age had made a gap for him, in charge of its servants. He might have married and had children. He might have found himself for the rest of his life in the butler’s bungalow, tucked out of sight on the grounds, growing vegetables in his spare time. But for Plunkett these prospects hadn’t seemed quite right. He didn’t want to marry, nor did he wish to father children. He wanted to continue being a servant because being a servant made him happy, yet the stuffiness of some households was more than he could bear and he didn’t like having to wait for years before being in charge. He looked around, and as soon as he set foot in Rews Manor he knew it was exactly what he wanted, a small world in which he had only himself to blame if the food and wine weren’t more than up to scratch. He assisted Mrs Abercrombie in her choosing of Mrs Pope as cook, recognizing in Mrs Pope the long-latent talents of a woman who sought the opportunity to make food her religion. He also assisted in the employing of Tindall, a fact he had often recalled since, on the nights he spent in her bed.

Mrs Pope had cooked in a YWCA until she answered the advertisement. The raw materials she was provided with had offered her little opportunity for the culinary experiments she would have liked to attempt. For twenty years she had remained in the kitchens of the YWCA because her husband, now dead, had been the janitor. In the flat attached to the place she had brought up two children, a boy and a girl, both of them now married. She’d wanted to move to somewhere nicer when Winnie, the girl, had married a traveller in stationery, but her husband had refused point-blank, claiming that the YWCA had become his home. When he died, she hadn’t hesitated.

Miss Bell had been a teacher of geography, but had been advised for health considerations to take on outdoor work. Having always enjoyed gardening and knowing quite a bit about it, she’d answered Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement in The Times. She’d become used to living in, in a succession of boarding-schools, so that living in somewhere else suited her quite well. Mr Apse was a silent individual, which suited her also. For long hours they would work side by side in the vegetable garden or among the blue hydrangeas and the azaleas that formed a shrubbery around the house, neither of them saying anything at all.

Tindall had worked as a packer in a frozen-foods factory. There’d been trouble in her life in that the man she’d been engaged to when she was twenty-two, another employee in the factory, had made her pregnant and had then, without warning, disappeared. He was a man called Bert Fask, considerate in every possible way, quiet and seemingly reliable. Everyone said she was lucky to be engaged to Bert Fask and she had imagined quite a happy future. ‘Don’t matter a thing,’ he said when she told him she was pregnant, and he fixed it that they could get married six months sooner than they’d intended. Then he disappeared. She’d later heard that he’d done the same thing with other girls, and when it became clear that he didn’t intend to return she began to feel bitter. Her only consolation was the baby, which she still intended to have even though she didn’t know how on earth she was going to manage. She loved her unborn child and she longed for its birth so that she herself could feel loved again. But the child, two months premature, lived for only sixteen hours. That blow was a terrible one, and it was when endeavouring to get over it that she’d come across Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement, on a page of a newspaper that a greengrocer had wrapped a beetroot in. That chance led her to a contentment she hadn’t known before, to a happiness that was different only in detail from the happinesses of the other servants.

On the morning July 12th 1974, a Friday, Tindall knocked on Mrs Abercrombie’s bedroom door at her usual time of eight forty-five. She carried into the room Mrs Abercrombie’s breakfast tray and the morning mail, and placed the tray on the Queen Anne table just inside the door. She pulled back the bedroom’s six curtains. ‘A cloudy day,’ she said.

Mrs Abercrombie, who had been reading Butler’s Lives of the Saints, extinguished her bedside light. She remarked that the wireless the night before had predicted that the weather would be unsettled: rain would do the garden good.

Tindall carried the tray to the bed, placed it on the mahogany bed-table and settled the bed-table into position. Mrs Abercrombie picked up her letters. Tindall left the room.

Letters were usually bills, which were later passed to Plunkett to deal with. Plunkett had a housekeeping account, into which a sum of money was automatically transferred once a month. Mrs Abercrombie’s personal requirements were purchased from this same account, negligible since she had ceased to buy clothes. It was Tindall who noticed when she needed a lipstick refill or lavender-water or more hairpins. Tindall made a list and handed it to Plunkett. For years Mrs Abercrombie herself hadn’t had the bother of having to remember, or having to sign a cheque.

This morning there was the monthly account from the International Stores and one from the South Western Electricity Board. The pale brown envelopes were identification enough: she put them aside unopened. The third envelope contained a letter from her solicitors about her will.

In the kitchen, over breakfast, the talk turned to white raspberries. Mr Apse said that in the old days white raspberries had been specially cultivated in the garden. Tindall, who had never heard of white raspberries before, remarked that the very idea of them gave her the creeps. ‘More flavour really, ‘Miss Bell said quietly.

Plunkett, engrossed in the Daily Telegraph, did not say anything. Mrs Pope said she’d never had white raspberries and would like to try them. She’d be more than grateful, she added, if Mr Apse could see his way to putting in a few canes. But Mr Apse had relapsed into his more familiar mood of silence. He was a big man, slow of movement, with a brown bald head and tufts of grey hair about his ears. He ate bacon and mushrooms and an egg in a slow and careful manner, occasionally between mouthfuls drinking tea. Miss Bell nodded at Mrs Pope, an indication that Mr Apse had heard the request about the raspberries and would act upon it.

‘Like slugs they sound,’ Tindall said.

Miss Bell, who had small tortoiseshell glasses and was small herself, with a weather-beaten face, said that they did not taste like slugs. Her father had grown white raspberries, her mother had made a delicious dish with them, mixing them with loganberries and baking them with a meringue top. Mrs Pope nodded. She’d read a recipe like that once, in Mrs Beeton it might have been; she’d like to try it out.

In the Daily Telegraph Plunkett read that there was a strike of television technicians and a strike of petrol hauliers. The sugar shortage was to continue and there was likely to be a shortage of bread. He sighed without making a sound. Staring at print he didn’t feel like reading, he recalled the warmth of Tindall’s body the night before. He glanced round the edge of the newspaper at her: there was a brightness in her eyes, which was always there the morning after he’d visited her in bed. She’d wept twice during the four hours he’d spent: tears of fulfilment he’d learnt they were, but all the same he could never prevent himself from comforting her. Few words passed between them when they came together in the night; his comforting consisted of stroking her hair and kissing her damp cheeks. She had narrow cheeks, and jet-black hair which she wore done up in a knot during the day but which tumbled all over the pillows when she was in bed. Her body was bony, which he appreciated. He didn’t know about the tragedy in her life because she’d never told him; in his eyes she was a good and efficient servant and a generous woman, very different from the sorrowful creature who’d come looking for employment twenty years ago. She had never once hinted at marriage, leaving him to deduce that for her their arrangement was as satisfactory as it was for him.

‘Moussaka for dinner,’ Mrs Pope said, rising from the breakfast table. ‘She asked for it special.’

‘No wonder, after your last one,’ Miss Bell murmured. The food at the schools where she’d taught geography had always been appalling: grey-coloured mince and soup that smelt, huge sausage-rolls for Sunday tea, cold scrambled egg.

‘Secret is, cook it gently,’ Mrs Pope said, piling dishes into the sink. ‘That’s all there’s to it if you ask me.’

‘Oh no, no,’ Miss Bell murmured, implying that there was a great deal more to moussaka than that. She carried her own dishes to the sink. Mrs Pope had a way with moussaka, she added in her same quiet way, which was why Mrs Abercrombie had asked for it again.

Tindall chewed her last corner of toast and marmalade. She felt just slightly sore, pleasantly so, as she always did after a visit from Plunkett. Quite remarkable he sometimes was in the middle of the night, yet who’d have thought he’d know a thing about any of it?

Mr Apse left the kitchen and Miss Bell followed him. Tindall carried her dishes to the sink and assisted Mrs Pope with the washing up. At the table Plunkett lit his first cigarette of the day, lingering over a last cup of tea.

As she did every morning after breakfast, Mrs Abercrombie recalled her husband’s death. It had taken place on a fine day in March, a day with a frost in the early morning and afterwards becoming sunny, though still cold. He’d had a touch of flu but was almost better; Dr Ripley had suggested his getting up in time for lunch. But by lunchtime he was dead, with the awful suddenness that had marked the deaths of his father and his grandfather, nothing to do with flu at all. She’d come into their bedroom, with the clothes she’d aired for him to get up into.

Mrs Abercrombie was sixty-one now; she’d been thirty-four at the time of the death. Her life for twenty-seven years had been a memorial to her brief marriage, but death had not cast unduly gloomy shadows, for after the passion of her sorrow there was some joy at least in her sentimental memories. Her own death preoccupied her now: she was going to die because with every day that passed she felt more weary. She felt herself slipping away and even experienced slight pains in her body, as if some ailment had developed in order to hurry her along. She’d told Dr Ripley, wondering if her gallstones were playing up, but Dr Ripley said there was nothing the matter with 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. We assume your wish to be, the letter read, that after your death your servants should remain in Rews Manor, retaining the house as it is and keeping the gardens open to the public. That this should be so until such time as Mr Plunkett should have reached retirement age, i.e. sixty-five years or, in the event of Mr Plunkett’s previous death, that this arrangement should continue until the year 1990. At either time, the house and gardens should be disposed of as in your current will and the servants remaining should receive the legacies as previously laid down. We would be grateful if you would confirm at your convenience that we are correct in this interpretation of your wishes: in which case we will draw up at once the necessary papers. But her convenience had never come because she had left it all too late. With the typewritten sheet in his hand, Plunkett had felt a shiver of bitterness. He’d felt it again, with anger, when he’d looked at her dead face.

‘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, Plunkett said.

It was while saying that, and realizing as he said it the pointlessness of summoning these two ancient men to a funeral, that he had his idea: why should not Mrs Abercrombie’s last wishes be honoured, even if she hadn’t managed to make them legal? The idea occurred quickly and vividly to him, and immediately he regretted his telephoning of Dr Ripley. But as soon as he regretted it he realized that the telephoning had been essential. Dr Ripley was a line of communication with the outside world and had been one for so long that it would seem strange to other people if a woman, designated a hypochondriac, failed to demand as regularly as before the attentions of her doctor. It would seem stranger still to Dr Ripley.

Yet there was no reason why Mrs Abercrombie should not be quietly buried beside the husband she had loved, where she was scheduled to be buried anyway. There was no reason that Plunkett could see why the household should not then proceed as it had in the past. The curtains of the drawing room would be drawn when next the window-cleaner came, Dr Ripley would play his part because he’d have no option.

‘I see no harm in it,’ Plunkett said.

‘In what?’ Mrs Pope inquired, and then, speaking slowly to break the shock of his idea, he told them. He told them about the letter Mrs Abercrombie had received that morning from her solicitors. He took it from an inside pocket and showed it to them. They at first thought it strange that he should be carrying Mrs Abercrombie’s correspondence on his person, but as the letter passed among them, they understood.

‘Oh no,’ Miss Bell murmured, her small brown face screwed up in distaste. Mrs Pope shook her head and said she couldn’t be a party to deception. Mr Apse did not say anything. Tindall half shook her head.

‘It was what she clearly wished,’ Plunkett explained. ‘She had no intention of dying until she’d made this stipulation.’

‘Death waits for no one’s wishes,’ Mr Apse pointed out in a ponderous voice.

‘All we are doing,’ Plunkett said, ‘is to make it wait.’

‘But there’s Dr Ripley,’ Tindall said, and Mrs Pope added that a doctor couldn’t ever lend himself to anything shady. It surprised Mrs Pope that Plunkett had made such an extraordinary suggestion, just as it surprised Miss Bell. Tindall and Mr Apse were surprised also, but more at themselves for thinking that what Plunkett was suggesting was only a postponement of the facts, not a suppression.

‘But, Plunkett, what exactly are you wanting to do?’ Mrs Pope cried out, suddenly shrill.

‘She must be buried as she said. She spoke to us all of it, that she wished to be laid down by Mr Abercrombie in the garden.’

‘But you have to inform the authorities,’ Miss Bell whispered, and Mrs Pope, still shrill, said there had to be a coffin and a funeral.

‘I’d make a coffin,’ Plunkett replied swiftly. ‘There’s the timber left over from the drawing-room floorboards. Beautiful oak, plenty of it.’

They knew he could. They’d seen him making other things, a step-ladder and bird-boxes, and shelves for the store-room.

‘I was with her one day,’ Plunkett said, not telling the truth now. ‘We were standing in the garage looking at the timber. “You could make a coffin out of that,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever made a coffin, Plunkett.” Those were her exact words. Then she turned and went away: I knew what she meant.’

They believed this lie because to their knowledge he had never lied before. They believed that Mrs Abercrombie had spoken of a coffin, but Miss Bell and Mrs Pope considered that she had only spoken in passing, without significance. Mr Apse and Tindall, wishing to believe that the old woman had been giving a hint to Plunkett, saw no reason to doubt that she had.

‘I really couldn’t,’ Miss Bell said, ‘be a party to anything like that.’

For the first time in their association Plunkett disliked Miss Bell. He’d always thought her a little field-mouse of a thing, all brown creases he imagined her body would be, like her face. Mrs Abercrombie had asked him what he’d thought when Miss Bell had answered the advertisement for an assistant gardener. ‘She’s been a teacher,’ Mrs Abercrombie had said, handing him Miss Bell’s letter, in which it was stated that Miss Bell was qualified to teach geography but had been medically advised to seek outdoor work. ‘No harm in seeing her,’ he’d said, and had promised to give Mrs Abercrombie his own opinion after he’d opened the hall door to the applicant and received her into the hall.

‘You would not be here, Miss Bell,’ he said now, ‘if I hadn’t urged Mrs Abercrombie that it wasn’t peculiar to employ a woman in the garden. She was dead against it.’

‘But that’s no reason to go against the law,’ Mrs Pope cried, shrill again. ‘Just because she took a woman into the garden doesn’t mean anything.’

‘You would not be here yourself, Mrs Pope. She was extremely reluctant to have a woman whose only experience in the cooking line was in a hostel. It was I who had an instinct about your letter, Mrs Pope.’

‘There’s still Dr Ripley,’ Miss Bell said, feeling that all the protestation and argument were anyway in vain because Dr Ripley was shortly due in the house and would put an end to all this absurdity. Dr Ripley would issue a death certificate and would probably himself inform a firm of undertakers. The death of Mrs Abercrombie had temporarily affected Plunkett, Miss Bell considered. She’d once read in the Daily Telegraph of a woman who’d wished to keep the dead body of her husband under glass.

‘Of course there’s Dr Ripley,’ Mrs Pope said. She spoke sharply and with a trace of disdain in her voice. If Mrs Abercrombie had let them down by dying before her time, then Plunkett was letting them down even more. Plunkett had always been in charge, taking decisions about everything, never at a loss. It was ironic that he should be the one to lose his head now.

‘It is Dr Ripley I’m thinking about,’ Plunkett said. ‘People will say he neglected her.’

There was a silence then in the kitchen. Mrs Pope had begun to lick her lips, a habit with her when she was about to speak. She changed her mind and somehow, because of what had been said about Dr Ripley, found herself less angry. Everyone liked the old doctor, even though they’d often agreed in the kitchen that he was beyond it.

When Plunkett said that Dr Ripley might have neglected Mrs Abercrombie, guilt nibbled at Miss Bell. There was a time two years ago when she’d cut her hand on a piece of metal embedded in soil. She’d gone to Dr Ripley with it and although he’d chatted to her and been extremely kind his treatment hadn’t been successful. A week later her whole arm had swelled up and Plunkett had insisted on driving her to the out-patients’ department of a hospital. She was lucky to keep the arm, an Indian doctor had pronounced, adding that someone had been careless.

Mrs Pope recalled the affair of Miss Bell’s hand, and Mr Apse recalled the occasion, and so did Tindall. In the snow once Dr Ripley’s old Vauxhall had skidded on the drive and Mr Apse had had to put gravel under the back wheels to get it out of the ditch. It had puzzled Mr Apse that the skid had occurred because, as far as he could see, there’d been no cause for Dr Ripley to apply his brakes. It had occurred to him afterwards that the doctor hadn’t quite known what he was doing.

‘It’s a terrible thing for a doctor to be disgraced,’ Plunkett said. ‘She thought the world of him, you know.’

The confusion in the kitchen was now considerable. The shock of the death still lingered and with it, though less than before, the feeling of resentment. There was the varying reaction to Plunkett’s proposal that Mrs Abercrombie’s remains should be quietly disposed of. There was concern for Dr Ripley, and a mounting uneasiness that caused the concern to give way to a more complicated emotion: it wasn’t simply that the negligence of Dr Ripley had brought about a patient’s death, it seemed that his negligence must be shared, since they had known he wasn’t up to it and had not spoken out.

‘Her death will cause unhappiness all round,’ Plunkett said. ‘Which she didn’t wish at all. He’d be struck off.’

Dr Ripley had attended Miss Bell on a previous occasion, a few months after her arrival in Rews Manor. She’d come out in spots which Dr Ripley had diagnosed as German measles. He had been called in when Tindall had influenza in 1960. He’d been considerate and efficient about a tiresome complaint of Mrs Pope’s.

The two images of Dr Ripley hovered in the kitchen: a man firm of purpose and skilful in his heyday, moustached and smart but always sympathetic, a saviour who had become a medical menace.

‘She died of gallstones,’ Plunkett said, ‘which for eight or nine years she suffered from, a fact he always denied. She’d be still alive if he’d treated her.’

‘We don’t know it was gallstones,’ Miss Bell protested quietly.

‘We would have to say. We would have to say that she complained of gallstones.’ Plunkett looked severe. ‘If he puts down pneumonia on the death certificate we would have to disagree. After all,’ he continued, his severity increasing with each word, ‘he could kill other people too.’

He looked from one face to another and saw that the mind behind each was lost in the confusion he had created. He, though, could see his way through the murk of it. Out of the necessary chaos he could already see the order he desired, and it seemed to him now that everything else he had ever experienced paled beside the excitement of the idea he’d been visited by.

‘We must bargain with Dr Ripley,’ he said, ‘for his own sake. She would not have wished him to be punished for his negligence, any more than she would wish us to suffer through her unnecessary death. We must put it all to Dr Ripley. He must sign a death certificate in her room this morning and forget to hand it in. I would be satisfied with that.’

‘Forget?’ Miss Bell repeated, aghast and totally astonished.

‘Or leave it behind here and forget that he has left it behind. Any elderly behaviour like that, it’s all of a piece. I’m sure there’s no law that says she can’t be quietly put away in the garden, and the poor old chap’ll be long since dead before anyone thinks to ask a question. We would have saved his bacon for him and be looked after ourselves, just as she wished. No one would bother about any of it in a few years’ time, and we’d have done no wrong by burying her where she wished to be. Only the old chap would be a bit amiss by keeping quiet about a death, but he’d be safely out of business by then.’

Mr Apse remembered a lifetime’s association with the garden of Rews Manor, and Mrs Pope recalled the cheerless kitchens of the YWCA, and Miss Bell saw herself kneeling in a flower-bed on an autumn evening, taking begonia tubers from the earth. There could be no other garden for Mr Apse, and for Miss Bell no other garden either, and no other kitchen for Mrs Pope. Plunkett might propose to her, Tindall said to herself, just in order to go on sharing beds with her, but the marriage would not be happy because it was not what they wanted.

‘There’s the will,’ Miss Bell said, whispering so low that her words were almost incomprehensible. ‘There’s the will she has signed.’

‘In time,’ Plunkett said, ‘the will shall naturally come into its own. That is what she intended. We should all be properly looked after, and then the grass merchants will take over, as laid down. When the place is no longer of use to us.’ He added that he felt he had been visited, that the idea had quite definitely come from outside himself rather than from within. Regretful in death, he said, Mrs Abercrombie had expressed herself to him because she was cross with herself, because she was worried for her servants and for the old doctor.

‘He let her die of neglected gallstones,’ Plunkett repeated with firm conviction. ‘A most obvious complaint.’

In the hall the doorbell rang, a clanging sound, for the bell was of an old-fashioned kind.

‘Well?’ Plunkett said, looking from one face to another.

‘We don’t know that it was gallstones,’ Miss Bell protested again. ‘She only mentioned gallstones. Dr Ripley said –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Bell!’

He glared at Miss Bell with dislike in his face. They’d been through all that, he said: gallstones or something else, what did it matter? The woman was dead.

‘It’s perfectly clear to all of us, Miss Bell, that Mrs Abercrombie would not have wished her death to cause all this fuss. That’s the only point I’m making. In my opinion, apparently not shared by you, Mrs Abercrombie was a woman of remarkable sensitivity. And kindness, Miss Bell. Do you really believe that she would have wished to inflict this misery on a harmless old doctor?’ He paused, staring at Miss Bell, aware that the dislike in his face was upsetting her. ‘Do you really believe she wished to deprive us of our home? Do you believe that Mrs Abercrombie was unkind?’

Miss Bell did not say anything, and in the silence the doorbell pealed again. Mrs Pope was aware that her head had begun to ache. Mr Apse took his pipe from his pocket and put it on the table. He cut slivers from a plug of tobacco and rubbed them together in the palm of his left hand. Tindall watched him, thinking that she had never seen him preparing his pipe in the kitchen before.

‘You’re mad!’ Miss Bell suddenly cried. ‘The whole thing has affected you, Plunkett. It’s ridiculous what you’re saying.’ The blood had gone to her face and neck, and showed in dark blotches beneath her weathered skin. Her eyes, usually so tranquil, shone fierily in her anger. She didn’t move, but continued to stand at the corner of the kitchen table, just behind Mr Apse, who was looking up at her, astonished.

‘How can we possibly do such a thing?’ Miss Bell shrieked. ‘It’s a disgusting, filthy kind of thing to suggest. Her body’s still warm and you can stand, there saying that everything should be falsified. You don’t care tuppence for Dr Ripley, it’s not Dr Ripley who matters to you. They could hang him for murder –’

‘I did not say Dr Ripley would be hanged.’

‘You implied it. You implied the most terrible things.’

The power left her voice as she uttered the last three words. Her eyes closed for a moment and when she opened them again she was weeping.

‘Now, now, my dear,’ Mrs Pope said, going to her and putting a hand on her arm.

‘I am only thinking of Mrs Abercrombie’s wishes,’ Plunkett said, unmoved and still severe. ‘Her wishes didn’t say the old doctor should be hounded.’

Mrs Pope continued to murmur consolation. She sat Miss Bell down at the table. Tindall went to a drawer in the dresser and took from it a number of household tissues which she placed in front of Miss Bell. Mr Apse pressed the shredded tobacco into his pipe.

‘I see no reason at all not to have a private household funeral,’ Plunkett said. He spoke slowly, emphasizing the repetition in his statement, summing everything up. What right had the stupid little creature to create a ridiculous fuss when the other three would easily now have left everything in his hands? It wasn’t she who mattered, or she who had the casting vote: it was old Ripley, still standing on the doorstep.

‘No,’ Miss Bell whispered. ‘No, no.’

It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare to be crouched over the kitchen table, with Mrs Pope’s hand on her shoulder and tissues laid out in front of her. It was a nightmare to think that Mr Apse wouldn’t have cared what they did with Mrs Abercrombie, that Tindall wouldn’t have cared, that Mrs Pope was coming round to Plunkett’s horrible suggestions. It was a nightmare to think of the doctor being blackmailed by Plunkett’s oily tongue. Plunkett was like an animal, some creature out of which a devil of hell had come.

‘Best maybe to have a chat with the doctor,’ Miss Bell heard Mrs Pope’s voice say, and heard the agreement of Tindall, soothing, like a murmur. She was aware of Mr Apse nodding his head. Plunkett said:

‘I think that’s fair.’

‘No. No, no,’ Miss Bell cried.

‘Then what is fair, Miss Bell?’ Mrs Pope, quite sharply, asked.

‘Mrs Abercrombie is dead. It must be reported.’

‘That’s the doctor’s job,’ Plunkett pointed out. ‘It don’t concern us.’

‘The doctor’ll know,’ Tindall said, considering it odd that Plunkett had all of a sudden used bad grammar, a lapse she had never before heard from him.

Without saying anything else, Plunkett left the kitchen.

Dr Ripley, who had pulled the bell four times, was pulling it again when Plunkett opened the hall door. The butler, Dr Ripley thought, was looking dishevelled and somewhat flushed. Blood pressure, he automatically said to himself, while commenting on the weather.

‘She died,’ Plunkett said. ‘I wanted to tell you in person, Doctor.’

They stood for a moment while Plunkett explained the circumstances, giving the time of death as nine thirty or thereabouts.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘Poor dear.’

He mounted the stairs, with Plunkett behind him. Never again would he do so, he said to himself, since he, too, knew that the house was to pass into the possession of an organization which studied grasses. In the bedroom he examined the body and noted that death was due to simple heart failure, a brief little attack, he reckoned, judging by her countenance and the unflustered arrangement of her body. He sighed over the corpse, although he was used to corpses. It seemed a lifetime, and indeed it was, since he had attended her for a throat infection when she was a bride.

‘Heart,’ Dr Ripley said on the landing outside the bedroom. ‘She was very beautiful, you know. In her day, Plunkett.’

Plunkett nodded. He stood aside to allow the doctor to precede him downstairs.

‘She’ll be happy,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘Being still in love with her husband.’

Again Plunkett nodded, even though the doctor couldn’t see him. ‘We wondered what best to do,’ he said.

‘Do?’

‘You’ll be issuing a certificate?’

‘Well yes, of course.’

‘It was that we were wondering about. The others and myself.’

‘Wondering?’

‘I’d like a chat with you, Doctor.’

Dr Ripley, who hadn’t turned his head while having this conversation, reached the hall. Plunkett stepped round him and led the way to the drawing-room.

‘A glass of sherry?’ Plunkett suggested.

‘Well, that’s most kind of you, Plunkett. In the circumstances –’

‘I think she’d have wished you to have one, sir.’

‘Yes, maybe she would.’

Plunkett poured from a decanter and handed Dr Ripley the glass. He waited for the doctor to sip before he spoke.

‘She sent a message to you, Doctor. Late last night she rang her bell and asked for me. She said she had a feeling she might die in the night. “If I do,” she said, “I don’t want him blamed.” ’

‘Blamed? Who blamed? I don’t understand you, Plunkett.’

‘I asked her that myself. “Who blamed?” I said, and she said: “Dr Ripley.” ’

Plunkett watched while a mouthful of sherry was consumed. He moved to the decanter and carried it to Dr Ripley’s glass. Mrs Abercrombie had had a heart attack, Dr Ripley said. He couldn’t have saved her even if he’d been called in time.

‘Naturally, we didn’t send for you last night, sir, even though she said that. On account of your attitude, Doctor.’

‘Attitude?’

‘You considered her a hypochondriac, sir.’

‘Mrs Abercrombie was.’

‘No, sir. She was a sick woman.’

Dr Ripley finished his second glass of sherry and crossed the drawing-room to the decanter. He poured some more, filling the glass to the brim.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Plunkett.’

It the kitchen they did not speak. Mrs Pope made more coffee and put pieces of shortbread on a plate. No one ate the shortbread, and Miss Bell shook her head when Mrs Pope began to refill her coffee-cup.

‘Bovril, dear?’ Mrs Pope suggested, but Miss Bell rejected Bovril also.

The garden had an atmosphere, different scents came out at different times of year, varying also from season to season. It was in the garden that she’d realized how unhappy she’d been, for eleven years, teaching geography. Yet even if the garden were Paradise itself you couldn’t just bury a dead woman in it and pretend she hadn’t died. Every day of your life you’d pass the mound, your whole existence would be a lie.

‘I’ll go away,’ Miss Bell said shakily, in a whisper. ‘I’ll pack and go. I promise you, I’ll never tell a thing.’

To Dr Ripley’s astonishment, Mrs Abercrombie’s butler accused him of negligence and added that it would have been Mrs Abercrombie’s desire to hush the matter up. He said that Mrs Abercrombie would never have wished to disgrace an old man.

‘What I’m suggesting,’ Plunkett said, ‘is that you give the cause of death to suit yourself and then become forgetful.’

‘Forgetful?’

‘Leave the certificate behind you, sir, as if in error.’

‘But it has to be handed in, Plunkett. Look here, there’s no disgrace involved, or negligence or anything else. You haven’t been drinking, have you?’

‘It’s a decision we came to in the kitchen, Doctor. We’re all agreed.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, man –’

‘Mrs Abercrombie’s wish was that her body should be buried in the shrubbery, beside her husband’s. That can be quietly done. Your good name would continue, Doctor, without a stain. Whether or not you take on further patients is your own affair.’

Dr Ripley sat down. He stared through wire-rimmed spectacles at a man he had always considered pleasant. Yet this same man was now clearly implying that he was more of an undertaker than a doctor.

‘What I am saying, sir, is that Rews Manor shall continue as Mrs Abercrombie wished it to. What I am saying is that you and we shall enter into the small conspiracy that Mrs Abercrombie is guiding us towards.’

‘Guiding?’

‘Since her death she has been making herself felt all over the house. Read that, sir.’

He handed Dr Ripley the letter from Mrs Abercrombie’s solicitors, which Dr Ripley slowly read and handed back. Plunkett said:

‘It would be disgraceful to go against the wishes of the recently dead, especially those of a person like Mrs Abercrombie, who was kindness itself – to all of us, and to you, sir.’

‘You’re suggesting that her death should be suppressed, Plunkett? So that you and the others may remain here?’

‘So that you may not face charges, sir.’

‘But, for the Lord’s sake, man, I’d face no charges. I’ve done nothing at all.’

‘A doctor can be in trouble for doing nothing, when he should be doing everything, when he should be prolonging life instead of saying his patients are imagining things.’

‘But Mrs Abercrombie did –’

‘In the kitchen we’re all agreed, sir. We remember, Doctor. We remember Miss Bell’s hand a few years ago, that she nearly died of. Criminal neglect, they said in the out-patients’. Another thing, we remember the time we had to get your car out of the ditch.’

‘I skidded. There was ice –’

‘I have seen you drunk, Doctor,’ Plunkett said, ‘at half past ten in the morning.’

Dr Ripley stared harder at Plunkett, believing him now to be insane. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then, recovering from his bewilderment, he spoke quietly and slowly. There was a perfectly good explanation for the skid on the icy snow of the drive: he’d braked to avoid a blackbird that was limping about in front of him. He’d never in his life been drunk at half past ten in the morning.

‘You know as well as I do,’ Plunkett continued, as though he were deaf or as though the doctor hadn’t spoken, ‘you know as well as I do that Mrs Abercrombie wouldn’t rest if she was responsible for getting you into the Sunday papers.’

In the kitchen they did not reply when Miss Bell said she’d pack and go. They didn’t look at her, and she knew they were thinking that she wouldn’t be able to keep her word. They were thinking she was hysterical and frightened, and that the weight of so eccentric a secret would prove too much for her.

‘It’s just that Mrs Abercrombie wanted to change her will, dear,’ Mrs Pope said.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Apse.

They spoke gently, in soft tones like Miss Bell’s own. They looked at her in a gentle way, and Tindall smiled at her, gently also. They’d be going against Mrs Abercrombie as soon as she was dead, Tindall said, speaking as softly as the others had spoken. They must abide by what had been in Mrs Abercrombie’s heart, Mr Apse said.

Again Miss Bell wondered what she would do when she left the garden, and wondered then if she had the right to plunge these people into unhappiness. With their faces so gently disposed before her, and with Plunkett out of the room, she saw for the first time their point of view. She said to herself that Plunkett would return to normal, since all her other knowledge of him seemed to prove that he was not a wicked man. Certainly there was no wickedness in Mrs Pope or Mr Apse, or in Tindall; and was it really so terrible, she found herself wondering then, to take from Mrs Abercombie what she had wished to give? Did it make sense to quibble now when you had never quibbled over Dr Ripley’s diagnosis of hypochondria?

Miss Bell imagined the mound in the shrubbery beside the other mound, and meals in the kitchen, the same as ever, and visitors in the garden on a Sunday, and the admission charges still passed on to the Nurses. She imagined, as often she had, growing quite old in the setting she had come to love.

‘A quiet little funeral,’ Mrs Pope said. ‘She’d have wanted that.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Apse said.

In her quiet voice, not looking at anyone, Miss Bell apologized for making a fuss.

To Dr Ripley’s surprise, Plunkett took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. He blew out smoke. He said:

‘Neglected gallstones: don’t wriggle out of it, Doctor.’ His voice was cool and ungracious. He regarded Dr Ripley contemptuously. ‘What about Bell’s hand? That woman near died as well.’

For a moment Dr Ripley felt incapable of a reply. He remembered the scratch on Miss Bell’s hand, a perfectly clean little wound. He’d put some iodine on it and a sticking-plaster dressing. He’d told her on no account to go poking it into her flower-beds, but of course she’d taken no notice.

‘Miss Bell was extremely foolish,’ he said at length, speaking quietly. ‘She should have returned to me the moment the complication began.’

‘You weren’t to be found, Doctor. You were in the bar of the Clarence Hotel or down in the Royal Oak, or the Rogues’ Arms –’

‘I am not a drunkard, Plunkett. I was not negligent in the matter of Miss Bell’s hand. Nor was I negligent over Mrs Abercrombie. Mrs Abercrombie suffered in no way whatsoever from gallstone trouble. Her heart was a little tired; she had a will to die and she died.’

‘That isn’t true, Doctor. She had a will to live, as this letter proves. She had a will to get matters sorted out –’

‘If I were you, Plunkett, I’d go and lie down for a while.’

Dr Ripley spoke firmly. The astonishment that the butler had caused in him had vanished, leaving him unflustered and professional. His eyes behind their spectacles stared steadily into Plunkett’s. He didn’t seem at all beyond the work he did.

‘Your car skidded,’ Plunkett said, though without his previous confidence. ‘You were whistled to the gills on Christmas booze that day –’

‘That’s offensive and untrue, Plunkett.’

‘All I’m saying, sir, is that it’d be better for all concerned –’

‘I’d be obliged if you didn’t speak to me in that manner, Plunkett.’

To Plunkett’s horror, Dr Ripley began to go. He placed his empty sherry glass on the table beside the decanter. He buttoned his jacket.

‘Please, sir,’ Plunkett said, changing his tone a little and hastening towards the sherry decanter. ‘Have another glassful, sir.’

Dr Ripley ignored the invitation. ‘I would just like to speak to the others,’ he said, ‘before I go.’

‘Of course. Of course, sir.’

It was, Dr Ripley recognized afterwards, curiosity that caused him to make that request. Were the others in the same state as Plunkett? Had they, too, changed in a matter of hours from being agreeable people to being creatures you could neither like nor respect nor even take seriously? Would they, too, accuse him to his face of negligence and drunkenness?

In the kitchen the others rose to their feet when he entered.

‘Doctor’s here to have a word,’ Plunkett said. He added that Dr Ripley had come to see their point of view, a statement that Dr Ripley didn’t contradict immediately. He said instead that he was sorry that Mrs Abercrombie had died.

‘Oh, so are we, sir,’ Mrs Pope cried. ‘We’re sorry and shaken, sir.’

But in the kitchen Dr Ripley didn’t feel their sorrow, any more than he had felt sorrow emanating from Plunkett in the drawing-room. In the kitchen there appeared to be fear in the eyes of quiet Mr Apse and in the eyes of Mrs Pope and the softly-spoken Miss Bell, and in the eyes of Tindall. It was fear, Dr Ripley suddenly realized, that had distorted Plunkett and continued to distort him, though differently now. Fear had bred greed in them, fear had made them desperate, and had turned them into fools.

‘Dr Ripley’ll see us through,’ Plunkett said.

When he told the truth, they didn’t say anything at all. Not even Plunkett spoke, and for a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the soft weeping of Miss Bell.

‘Her wishes were clear,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘She died when she knew she’d made them so, when she received the letter this morning. Her wishes would have been honoured in law, even though they weren’t in a will.’

They stood like statues in the kitchen. The weeping of Miss Bell ceased; there was no sound at all. They would none of them remain in the house now, Dr Ripley thought, because of their exposure one to another. In guilt and deception they had imagined they would remain, held together by their aberration. But now, with the memory of their greed and the irony of their error, there would be hatred and shame among them.

He wanted to comfort them, but could not. He wanted to say that they should forget what had taken place since Mrs Abercrombie’s death, that they should attempt to carry out her wishes. But he knew it was too late for any of that. He turned and went away, leaving them still standing like statues. It was strange, he thought as he made his way through the house, that a happiness which had been so rich should have trailed such a snare behind it. And yet it seemed cruelly fitting that the loss of so much should wreak such damage in pleasant, harmless people.