‘He won’t be in the living room,’ I said. ‘And you must. Even if it weren’t for me you should have to, but I certainly can’t go on my own.’
‘He will be,’ said Buttercup crossly. ‘You wait and see. He’ll be in the middle of the floor with the lid open and candles all around, and I shall faint.’
I suppose one should have felt pity; after all she had been in New York all the years of the war and had not got used to the idea, and sometimes the sight, of men dead and dying all around, but I had been no more stout of heart my first day at the hospital, indeed my knees had knocked so badly that my starched apron crackled even when I was standing still, but I had made myself face it, had got used to it in the end, and felt nothing but exasperation for Buttercup baulking at one peaceful corpse tidily in its coffin with, if we were lucky, the lid well nailed down.
‘Don’t people die in America?’ I said, crossly. ‘Go and get your hat and I’ll start the motor car.’
Buttercup picked up a magazine and opened it on her lap.
‘You must, Buttercup. You and Cad must both look after her now.’
She perked up at this.
‘Fine. I’ve been twice, so it must be Cad’s turn. Take him.’ She pulled the bell rope before I could begin to protest at how wrong this would be and, ignoring my glares, asked the maid who answered to find Mr de Cassilis and send him to her.
I was right, of course. A bedroom window to the left of the door was thrown wide with its blind drawn down and fly netting tacked across the opening and this was the most we saw of Robert Dudgeon throughout the visit. Cadwallader moreover did not notice even this much, which was just as well since he was grumbling almost as pitifully as Buttercup.
‘I was going to go for a drink with Osborne,’ he said again as we knocked and waited on the doorstep. ‘Several drinks, from what he seemed to be suggesting. And what on earth am I to say?’ This in a whisper as we heard footsteps approaching. I was tempted to ask again whether people died in America, but the door opened before I had a chance and one of the women I had taken to be Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters stood aside to let us enter.
‘Come away in, sir, madam,’ she said. ‘It’s that good of you to come. Chrissie’ll be no end touched. Come away in.’
She ushered us into the living room, which was still full of the women we had seen the day before, and with Miss Joey Brown added to their number, her father clearly having persuaded her in the end.
Mrs Dudgeon sat as before in a hard chair, the two by the fire empty, and I caught my breath at the sight of her. Perhaps, after all, the endless daily toll of the war had coarsened us, taken us too far from Buttercup’s fearful recoil, and I was the ghoulish one, calmly expecting that within a day the widow would rally and would be thinking of funeral invitations and refreshments. In fact, Mrs Dudgeon looked so much worse, so more stricken and agitated, than she had the previous day that I was almost sure something else must have happened. Her face was white and dry-looking, with lines which must always have been there but which I had not noticed before dividing her brow in two, more lines joining her nostrils to the down-turned ends of her mouth. Her eyes were red and pinched, their sockets deeply visible and eyelids puckered like badly laundered linen bunched at its seam. In all she looked ten years older.
‘Here’s Mr and Mrs de Cassilis to see you, Chris,’ said the woman who had shown us in. Sorting that out took a minute or two, the more so since there was no easy way to account for its being me and not horrid selfish Buttercup who was here, but when we had cleared it up Mrs Dudgeon spoke.
‘I just want, need, to be on my own,’ she said, causing a maelstrom of shushing and clucking amongst the women, as they tried simultaneously to reprimand her, comfort her and cover their embarrassment, all without looking me or Cad in the eye. Cad, however, took a line which led us to safer waters.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And you are quite right to say so – you mustn’t bottle things up – but others know best. This is a time for family.’
Mrs Dudgeon frowned at him momentarily, but seemed to decide not to bother pursuing it and went back to twisting her handkerchief and rocking gently in her chair, mouthing the word ‘alone’.
‘Aye well,’ said one of the women, with a hint of bluster which I could not quite interpret, ‘Izzy has her hands full with eight and wee Izzy’s jist a bairn herself for all she’s a rare help to her mammy.’ Cad had begun by nodding along to this but was obviously mystified by the end and did not respond. I was sure he would soon become as bilingual as the rest of us but for the moment he was lost. And to be fair to him, although I understood the words and the accent and could parse it beautifully – the ‘rerr hilp tae urr mammy’ was as the King’s English to me after all my years at Gilverton – I could not tie it to any preceding remark or fit it otherwise into the current context. I smiled vaguely and let it pass.
In doing so, of course, I was forgetting one of my hard-learned detecting maxims, which is that people always mean something when they speak. When it appears otherwise, I have missed the point. The difficulty is, of course, that to scent, track and run to ground every chance remark which puzzles one at first would not only be tiring, and not usually worth the effort, but it would put one beyond the pale in any social setting; would in fact turn every desultory chat and half-hearted passing of the time of day into a rerun of the Spanish Inquisition. Besides, it is only with hindsight that I can see how germane this would come to be. How could I have guessed it at the time?
In the excruciating silence, the sisters – could they really all be sisters? There were half a dozen including Mrs Dudgeon and, unlike the tribe next door, they were hardly a matched set – were fussing around with much muttering and sidelong glances towards us and towards the table where teacups and plates of shortbread were laid out.
‘Whisky?’ I heard one of them whisper, after a while.
‘Sandwich, mebbes?’ someone else breathed.
The difficulty was, of course, Cadwallader, for while tea and biscuits might do very well for all the females who would doubtless troop in and out to sit a while, the presence of a man, and a gentleman at that, demanded meat and drink.
‘Tea, Mrs Gilver?’ offered the woman who had answered the door, and then turning to Cad she inquired, ‘And something for yourself?’
At that moment, Joey Brown stood up suddenly from her perch on the creepie stool and came forward. I turned to her, feeling thankful that there would be a way out of the awkwardness if she had brought a bottle from her father’s establishment and was about to offer it, but she said nothing.
‘Have you a bottle open, Chris?’ said one of the women, rummaging in the sideboard. Mrs Dudgeon said nothing, but Miss Brown once again took a step forward. It was all getting most discomfiting, and I wished heartily that Joey Brown would overcome her gaucheness and get on with it if she did have a bottle about her somewhere, or that Cad would begin to register something, anything, of what was going on and defuse it. One thing to be thankful for, I thought, was that Mrs Dudgeon was oblivious and, since she was, I decided I could weigh in without causing her any embarrassment, so I murmured to the woman wielding the teapot:
‘There was some cherry brandy, I believe. Perhaps in the scullery?’
At last, however, Cad solved the problem himself by saying in a maniacally hearty voice as he saw me being passed a cup: ‘Ah tea! Wonderful. Tea, tea, tea. I’m getting quite British, you know, when it comes to a cup of tea.’ The companions smirked and I blushed for him but at least the catering was decided. Miss Brown sank back down on to her stool.