Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Celia Fremlin Etiquette for Dying

At what point, exactly, did the embarrassment — the sheer, cringing embarrassment of the thing — change over into fear? And then from fear into outright terror, and the recognition of approaching tragedy?

Twisting the bedside lamp to a sharper angle, Agnes leaned closer, watching the uneasy twitching of her husband’s eyelids over his closed eyes. In the dim greenish light the lines were sharply etched in the face sunk against the pillows, and he looked suddenly, terrifyingly old. But of course illness — serious illness — can do that to a person, even within a few hours.

How many hours? Glancing at Lady Olivia’s bedside clock — for it was to their hostess’ bedroom that Bert had been carried, amid a muted turmoil of well-bred dismay, after his collapse at the dinner table just as the salmon paupiettes were being served — glancing at the clock. Agnes noted, with a sort of slow incredulity, that it was still only a little after nine. Less than an hour had passed since Bert, glass of whiskey still in his hand, had brought to a standstill in mid-sentence the amusing anecdote he had been relating to his neighbor, the local M.P.’s wife, and had quietly slewed sideways in his chair and come crashing to the floor, dragging with him a great swath of shining linen tablecloth. With a dreadful clattering of Georgian china and priceless glass, he had subsided into a crumpled heap on the carpet, limbs twitching.

How could he! This (to her subsequent shame) had been Agnes’ first and totally spontaneous reaction to the catastrophe. How could he! — and in front of all these important people too! Lady Olivia’s antique dinner service, her precious glass! Fury — a whole raging, bottled-up decade of it — boiled up in Agnes during those microseconds of scandalized silence before the clamor began: the blinding, impotent fury of a wife whose husband has disgraced her, has once again, and in the most public and unforgivable way possible, humiliated her — humiliated himself — in front of their friends.

No, not even friends. Friends, perhaps, could forgive these things, even within a week or two laugh at them. “Do you remember that awful night when old Bert...?” — but Lady Olivia and her entourage were not friends, not in this sense. They were too important to be friends, and too rich. All those smoothly successful men, those straight-backed women aglitter with diamonds — they weren’t friends, but people whose favor must be sought, whose approval must be gained: tycoons, diplomats, television personalities. The catastrophe could not have been more awful.

Because, of course, they would all have assumed that Bert was drunk. Agnes herself assumed it. All those whiskies before dinner, and then those soft-footed waiters padding round the table, filling his glass again, and yet again, even before the hors d’oeuvres were finished, knowing her husband’s weakness, especially under stress.

Agnes had been watching every sip he took, counting every glass, ever since they’d arrived at the house. Even before they filed into the great dining room, her nerves were already at snapping point on his account; and when at last the crash came, the ghastly glittering slither of silver and precious glass, she had found herself praying, before she could stop herself, Please God, let him be dead! Please God, let him not be merely drunk! To die at an elegant dinner table — that is socially forgivable; but drunkenness, never.

He wasn’t dead, of course; but nevertheless, everyone behaved beautifully, as of course they would in that kind of household. Without even a flicker of a glance toward her ruined dinner service or her smashed crystal goblets, Lady Olivia had calmed her guests, had had the victim carried solicitously and instantly upstairs to her own bedroom, and herself had telephoned the doctor.

“Suddenly taken ill,” was the phrase she used, in tones of ringing concern, clearly audible through the great dining-room door; and neither by word nor by intonation had she given the faintest indication of being aware that the patient had simply passed out.

Such is breeding. Slinking shamefacedly upstairs behind her disgraced and unconscious husband, Agnes could not but be vaguely grateful for it. Though she could scarcely breathe for shame at the thought of what Lady Olivia must really be thinking, it was a relief that Lady Olivia could be counted on not to say it.

Brandy? Dinner sent up on a tray? Even a cup of tea? Agnes shook her head, still speechless with shame; and presently Lady Olivia, her duty by the two disgraced guests correctly, even graciously, performed, swept elegantly from the room.

What poise! What savoir faire! Crouched guiltily by her husband’s bedside, Agnes could not help feeling a stab of unwilling admiration. By now the mess would have been unobtrusively cleared up, and the dinner party would be in full swing again, with Lady Olivia effortlessly setting her guests at ease, passing it all off as if this sort of thing happened every day.

Well, that’s aristocracy for you, Agnes reflected wryly. Bred into the bones it was, over hundreds of years, this unflappable presence of mind, this imperturbable façade in the teeth of absolutely anything. Poor Bert, with all his passionate social climbing, he would never make it, never. It took a thousand years; and Bert, at forty-three, had been at the job for barely ten.

And anyway, just look at him! Couldn’t even hold his liquor, let alone display these other, more regal, forms of self-command!

And it was now, looking down at her husband’s still face in the green-shaded lamplight, that Agnes became conscious of her first qualm of fear.

Because this didn’t look like drunkenness — not the kind of drunkenness she had grown used to over the years. Where were the hiccups, where was the heavy, stertorous breathing, the throwing-up over someone else’s carpet? The awful insufferable humiliations rose up out of the past — and suddenly they seemed like mere pinpricks in the context of this new and unfamiliar dread. She would have given anything now to see a return of the familiar, disgusting symptoms; how willingly would she have rushed at this very moment, in all the old familiar panic, for towel and basin to save Lady Olivia’s heirloom bedspread!

But there was no need. Not this time. Already he had gone beyond this sort of thing. In the greenish light she looked again at her husband’s face, and it appeared waxen, and very still. Even the twitching of the eyelids had ceased, and he lay as if dead, only the faint jerky rise and fall of the sheets showing that he was still breathing. Breathing too rapidly, too unevenly, as if his lungs and heart were already faltering in their rhythm.

She wished desperately that the doctor would come. Dare she make a fuss about it — ring the bell at the bedhead — bother someone? Was it done to ring for your hostess’ servants, even if someone was dying?

Turning the lamp away from Bert’s face, she leaned over and tried once again to rouse him.

“Bert!” she said, quite loudly, “Bert, wake up! It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right, Lady Olivia isn’t angry, she—”

But it was no good. She shook him, spoke loudly into his ear; but there was no drunken, inconsequential mumbling in response, no clumsy groping of half-conscious hands. The hand she held in hers was limp and cool, it reminded her of lilies. White lilies, and the proximity of death.

Death! How could such a thing be possible? Bert dying? Greedy, self-indulgent, go-getting Bert? Impossible! Death just wasn’t his thing!

When would the doctor arrive? An hour now since he’d been summoned — surely he’d have realized that it was an emergency? A man of forty-three collapsing suddenly — why it might be anything!

Heart attack? Stroke? Raking through her sparse medical knowledge, Agnes tried to recall those last minutes before the catastrophe. Had Bert looked odd in any way? Ill? Had he been behaving strangely? Certainly, in the drawing room before dinner, he had looked nervous and agitated.

From her observation point at the far end of the room, Agnes had watched him arguing heatedly with a slim supercilious young man — a television star, as she learned later — and losing the argument. Not that she’d been able to hear from the distance what either of them was saying, but she could tell by the insolent set of Bert’s shoulders, by the arrogant gesture with which he thrust his empty glass at a passing waiter, that he had been worsted.

But not ill, no. Just at a disadvantage, and out of his depth in this company, and too proud, as always, to admit it to himself.

And at dinner? — the abortive beginnings of dinner, that is, which were all that either he or she was destined to enjoy. From across the huge mahogany table she had watched him, with wifely anxiety, launching into conversation with Mrs. Beltravers, wife of the Conservative M.P., watched him boasting, as usual, describing how he’d used his influence to quash the Council’s plans for a Remand Home just next to the Arts Centre — was he sure, Agnes remembered wondering, that this had been a Labour project and not a Conservative one? Not that it mattered — you could see from Mrs. Beltravers’ glazed expression that the affairs of her husband’s constituency bored her into the ground.

And at least Bert was eating, Agnes remembered noting. That’ll settle all those whiskies, she had reflected with satisfaction, watching him polishing off a plate piled high with assorted hors d’oeuvres. Duck pâté, jellied oysters, prawn darioles — wasn’t it rather a faux pas, Agnes remembered wondering uneasily, to be eating the lot like this, as if he’d been starving for a week?

But now, sitting at his bedside in a growing turmoil of anxiety, Agnes had few thoughts to spare for the etiquette of the thing; ideas far more sinister were beginning to take possession of her.

Duck pâté! You could get food poisoning from duck pâté. And from shellfish too. She’d heard of people collapsing like that, suddenly, from food poisoning, though of course it was more usual for the symptoms to appear after an hour or so. On the other hand, if it was food poisoning, you’d expect the other guests to be affected too. The chance that Bert alone—

Chance? It was only now that Agnes became clearly conscious of the direction in which her uneasy thoughts were leading. She felt herself gripped by a violent trembling; sweat broke out on her forehead and on the palms of her hands; her stomach seemed to be tying itself in knots within her.

Murder! Deliberately administered poison! Poisoned pâté — or poisoned oysters? Poisoned anything, in fact, from that lavish table, groaning with exotic and unfamiliar foods. And Bert — poor gullible Bert, who for all his social pretensions knew no better than she did how these weird things ought to taste — poor Bert (and she could sympathize with this) would have swallowed anything, no matter how bitter or unpalatable, rather than show his unfamiliarity with such delicacies.

And if someone, knowing him well, aware of his hidden social ineptitude, and of his pride, and choosing to take advantage of this knowledge— But who? Who, of all this glittering throng, could be Bert’s enemy?

Most of them — that was the answer. A man like Bert, pushing his way ruthlessly to the top, thrusting aside everything and everyone that stands in his way — such a man is going to make enemies. Somewhere along the way, had he pushed too hard? — trampled too blindly over feelings whose intensity he was unaware of? Stirred up against himself a hornet’s nest of revenge and hate? Was this then, in the end, what Bert had earned for himself by all his struggles, all his social climbing, all his single-minded self-aggrandizement? Murder, death by poisoning?

The sheer horror of the thing seemed to take Agnes’ breath away; her head swam; her heart pounded in her cars. The effrontery of it too! The dreadful, coldblooded simplicity of the method! A little pharmaceutical knowledge, a little insight into Bert’s vainglory and his precarious self-conceit, and the thing was in the bag. A verdict of accidental food poisoning would be a near certainty.

Especially, of course, if two of the guests were known to have come down with it, one being lucky enough to have survived. As Agnes, the blood pounding in her brain, slumped sideways in her chair and slipped unconscious to the floor, Bert slid swiftly from under the blankets and hurried to her side.

The carefully chosen green light already made her features look close to death, just as his had looked; but this time the illusion was fast becoming reality. For some minutes — maybe half an hour — he sat with his finger on her failing pulse, his ears intent on the harsh, uneven rattle of her breath. When both had finally ceased, he got to his feet and hurried quietly along the corridor to the head of the great curving staircase.

Peering, half hidden by shadows, over the oak bannisters, he was able to watch Lady Olivia ushering her guests from the dining room into the great hall; and when she managed, unnoticed by anyone, to flash a swift glance up in his direction, he gave her the thumbs-up sign.

It had all gone off like a dream.