‘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.