In the room that had been the maids’ room Mrs Digby-Hunter wept as her mind went back through the years of her marriage and then, still weeping, she left the room and descended the back stairs to the kitchen. To her husband she said that it was all her fault; she said she was Sorry. She had knitted and put down bulbs, she said, and in the end a boy had died. Two girls had hated her because in her easy-going way she had held her peace, not wanting to know. Loyalty and devotion, said Mrs Digby-Hunter, and now a boy was dead, and her husband with a sack over his head would be taken from Milton Grange and later would have sessions with a prison psychiatrist. It was all her fault. She would say so to the reporters when they came. She would explain and take the blame, she would come up to scratch as a wife.
Her husband and Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade looked at Mrs Digby-Hunter. She stood in the centre of the kitchen, one hand on the table, a stout woman in a blue-and-pink dress, weeping. The tragedy had temporarily unhinged her, Sergeant Wall thought, and Mr Beade in irritation thought that if she could see herself she’d go somewhere else, and her husband thought that it was typical of her to be tiresomely stupid at a time like this.
She went on talking: you couldn’t blame them for hating her, she said, for she might have prevented death and hadn’t bothered herself. In a bedroom in Wales she should have wept, she said, or packed a suitcase and gone away. Her voice continued in the kitchen, the words pouring from it, repetitiously and in a hurry. The three men sighed and looked away, all of them thinking the same thing now, that she made no sense at all, with her talk about putting down bulbs and coming up to scratch.
Raymond Bamber and Mrs Fitch
For fifteen years, ever since he was twenty-seven, Raymond Bamber had attended the Tamberleys’ autumn cocktail party. It was a function to which the Tamberleys inclined to invite their acquaintances rather than their friends, so that every year the faces changed a bit: no one except Raymond had been going along to the house in Eaton Square for as long as fifteen years. Raymond, the Tamberleys felt, was a special case, for they had known him since he was a boy, having been close friends of his father’s.
Raymond was a tall man, six foot two inches, with spectacles and a small moustache. He was neat in all he did, and he lived what he himself referred to as a tidy life.
‘I come here every year,’ said Raymond at the Tamberleys’, to a woman he had not met before, a woman who was tall too, with a white lean face and lips that were noticeably scarlet. ‘It is an occasion for me. almost, like Christmas or Easter. To some extent, I guide my life by the Tamberleys’ autumn party, remembering on each occasion what has happened in the year gone by.’
‘My name is Mrs Fitch,’ said the woman, poking a hand out for a drink. ‘Is that vermouth and gin?’ she inquired of the Tamberleys’ Maltese maid, and the maid agreed that it was. ‘Good,’ said Mrs Fitch.
‘Raymond, Raymond,’ cried the voice of Mrs Tamberley as Mrs Tamberley materialized suddenly beside them. ‘How’s Nanny Wilkinson?’
‘She died,’ murmured Raymond.
‘Of course she did,’ exclaimed Mrs Tamberley. ‘How silly of me!’
‘Oh no –’
‘You put that sweet notice in The Times. His old nurse,’ explained Mrs Tamberley to Mrs Fitch. ‘Poor Nanny Wilkinson,’ she said, and smiled and bustled off.
‘What was all that?’ asked Mrs Fitch.
‘It’s one of the things that happened to me during the year. The other was –’
‘What’s your name, anyway?’ the woman interrupted. ‘I don’t think I ever caught it.’
Raymond told her his name. He saw that she was wearing a black dress with touches of white on it. Her shoulders were bare and bony; she had, Raymond said to himself, an aquiline face.
‘The other thing was that an uncle died and left me a business in his will. That happened, actually, before the death of Nanny Wilkinson and to tell you the truth, Mrs Fitch, I just didn’t know what to do. “What could I do with a business?” I said to myself. So I made my way to Streatham where the old lady lived. “Run a business, Raymond? You couldn’t run a bath,” she said.’ Raymond laughed, and Mrs Fitch smiled frostily, looking about her for another drink. ‘It rankled, that, as you may imagine. Why couldn’t I run a business? I thought. And then, less than a week later, I heard that she had died in Streatham. I went to her funeral, and discovered that she’d left me a prayer-book in her will. All that happened in the last year. You see, Mrs Fitch?’
Mrs Fitch, her eyes on her husband, who was talking to a woman in yellow in a distant corner of the room, said vaguely:
‘What about the business?’
‘I sold the business. I live alone, Mrs Fitch, in a flat in Bayswater; I’m forty-two. I’m telling you that simply because I felt that I could never manage anything like taking on a business so suddenly. That’s what I thought when I had considered the matter carefully. No good being emotional, I said to myself.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch. She watched the woman move quite close to her husband and engage him in speech that had all the air of confidential talk. The woman wasn’t young, Mrs Fitch noticed, but had succeeded in giving the impression of youth. She was probably forty-four, she reckoned; she looked thirty.
So Mrs Tamberley had seen the notice in The Times, Raymond thought. He had worded it simply and had stated in a straightforward manner the service that Nanny Wilkinson had given over the years to his family. He had felt it her due, a notice in The Times, and there was of course only he who might do it. He remembered her sitting regally in his nursery teaching him his tidiness. Orderliness was the most important thing in life, she said, after a belief in the Almighty.
‘Get me a drink, dear,’ said Mrs Fitch suddenly, holding out an empty glass and causing Raymond to note that this woman was consuming the Tamberleys’ liquor at a faster rate than he.
‘Gin and vermouth,’ ordered Mrs Fitch. ‘Dry,’ she added. ‘Not that red stuff.’
Raymond smiled and took her glass, while Mrs Fitch observed that her husband was listening with rapt care to what the woman in yellow was saying to him. In the taxi-cab on the way to the Tamberleys’, he had remarked as usual that he was fatigued after his day’s work. ‘An early night,’ he had suggested. And now he was listening carefully to a female: he wouldn’t leave this party for another two hours at least.
‘It was quite a blow to me,’ said Raymond, handing Mrs Fitch a glass of gin and vermouth, ‘hearing that she was dead. Having known her, you see, all my life –’
‘Who’s dead now?’ asked Mrs Fitch, still watching her husband.
‘Sorry,’ said Raymond. ‘How silly of me! No, I meant, you see, this old lady whom I had known as Nanny Wilkinson. I was saying it was a blow to me when she died, although of course I didn’t see much of her these last few years. But the memories are there, if you see what I mean; and you cannot of course erase them.’