‘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.