‘Forgetful?’
‘Leave the certificate behind you, sir, as if in error.’
‘But it has to be handed in, Plunkett. Look here, there’s no disgrace involved, or negligence or anything else. You haven’t been drinking, have you?’
‘It’s a decision we came to in the kitchen, Doctor. We’re all agreed.’
‘But for heaven’s sake, man –’
‘Mrs Abercrombie’s wish was that her body should be buried in the shrubbery, beside her husband’s. That can be quietly done. Your good name would continue, Doctor, without a stain. Whether or not you take on further patients is your own affair.’
Dr Ripley sat down. He stared through wire-rimmed spectacles at a man he had always considered pleasant. Yet this same man was now clearly implying that he was more of an undertaker than a doctor.
‘What I am saying, sir, is that Rews Manor shall continue as Mrs Abercrombie wished it to. What I am saying is that you and we shall enter into the small conspiracy that Mrs Abercrombie is guiding us towards.’
‘Guiding?’
‘Since her death she has been making herself felt all over the house. Read that, sir.’
He handed Dr Ripley the letter from Mrs Abercrombie’s solicitors, which Dr Ripley slowly read and handed back. Plunkett said:
‘It would be disgraceful to go against the wishes of the recently dead, especially those of a person like Mrs Abercrombie, who was kindness itself – to all of us, and to you, sir.’
‘You’re suggesting that her death should be suppressed, Plunkett? So that you and the others may remain here?’
‘So that you may not face charges, sir.’
‘But, for the Lord’s sake, man, I’d face no charges. I’ve done nothing at all.’
‘A doctor can be in trouble for doing nothing, when he should be doing everything, when he should be prolonging life instead of saying his patients are imagining things.’
‘But Mrs Abercrombie did –’
‘In the kitchen we’re all agreed, sir. We remember, Doctor. We remember Miss Bell’s hand a few years ago, that she nearly died of. Criminal neglect, they said in the out-patients’. Another thing, we remember the time we had to get your car out of the ditch.’
‘I skidded. There was ice –’
‘I have seen you drunk, Doctor,’ Plunkett said, ‘at half past ten in the morning.’
Dr Ripley stared harder at Plunkett, believing him now to be insane. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then, recovering from his bewilderment, he spoke quietly and slowly. There was a perfectly good explanation for the skid on the icy snow of the drive: he’d braked to avoid a blackbird that was limping about in front of him. He’d never in his life been drunk at half past ten in the morning.
‘You know as well as I do,’ Plunkett continued, as though he were deaf or as though the doctor hadn’t spoken, ‘you know as well as I do that Mrs Abercrombie wouldn’t rest if she was responsible for getting you into the Sunday papers.’
In the kitchen they did not reply when Miss Bell said she’d pack and go. They didn’t look at her, and she knew they were thinking that she wouldn’t be able to keep her word. They were thinking she was hysterical and frightened, and that the weight of so eccentric a secret would prove too much for her.
‘It’s just that Mrs Abercrombie wanted to change her will, dear,’ Mrs Pope said.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Apse.
They spoke gently, in soft tones like Miss Bell’s own. They looked at her in a gentle way, and Tindall smiled at her, gently also. They’d be going against Mrs Abercrombie as soon as she was dead, Tindall said, speaking as softly as the others had spoken. They must abide by what had been in Mrs Abercrombie’s heart, Mr Apse said.
Again Miss Bell wondered what she would do when she left the garden, and wondered then if she had the right to plunge these people into unhappiness. With their faces so gently disposed before her, and with Plunkett out of the room, she saw for the first time their point of view. She said to herself that Plunkett would return to normal, since all her other knowledge of him seemed to prove that he was not a wicked man. Certainly there was no wickedness in Mrs Pope or Mr Apse, or in Tindall; and was it really so terrible, she found herself wondering then, to take from Mrs Abercombie what she had wished to give? Did it make sense to quibble now when you had never quibbled over Dr Ripley’s diagnosis of hypochondria?
Miss Bell imagined the mound in the shrubbery beside the other mound, and meals in the kitchen, the same as ever, and visitors in the garden on a Sunday, and the admission charges still passed on to the Nurses. She imagined, as often she had, growing quite old in the setting she had come to love.
‘A quiet little funeral,’ Mrs Pope said. ‘She’d have wanted that.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Apse said.
In her quiet voice, not looking at anyone, Miss Bell apologized for making a fuss.
To Dr Ripley’s surprise, Plunkett took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. He blew out smoke. He said:
‘Neglected gallstones: don’t wriggle out of it, Doctor.’ His voice was cool and ungracious. He regarded Dr Ripley contemptuously. ‘What about Bell’s hand? That woman near died as well.’
For a moment Dr Ripley felt incapable of a reply. He remembered the scratch on Miss Bell’s hand, a perfectly clean little wound. He’d put some iodine on it and a sticking-plaster dressing. He’d told her on no account to go poking it into her flower-beds, but of course she’d taken no notice.
‘Miss Bell was extremely foolish,’ he said at length, speaking quietly. ‘She should have returned to me the moment the complication began.’
‘You weren’t to be found, Doctor. You were in the bar of the Clarence Hotel or down in the Royal Oak, or the Rogues’ Arms –’
‘I am not a drunkard, Plunkett. I was not negligent in the matter of Miss Bell’s hand. Nor was I negligent over Mrs Abercrombie. Mrs Abercrombie suffered in no way whatsoever from gallstone trouble. Her heart was a little tired; she had a will to die and she died.’
‘That isn’t true, Doctor. She had a will to live, as this letter proves. She had a will to get matters sorted out –’
‘If I were you, Plunkett, I’d go and lie down for a while.’
Dr Ripley spoke firmly. The astonishment that the butler had caused in him had vanished, leaving him unflustered and professional. His eyes behind their spectacles stared steadily into Plunkett’s. He didn’t seem at all beyond the work he did.
‘Your car skidded,’ Plunkett said, though without his previous confidence. ‘You were whistled to the gills on Christmas booze that day –’
‘That’s offensive and untrue, Plunkett.’
‘All I’m saying, sir, is that it’d be better for all concerned –’
‘I’d be obliged if you didn’t speak to me in that manner, Plunkett.’
To Plunkett’s horror, Dr Ripley began to go. He placed his empty sherry glass on the table beside the decanter. He buttoned his jacket.
‘Please, sir,’ Plunkett said, changing his tone a little and hastening towards the sherry decanter. ‘Have another glassful, sir.’
Dr Ripley ignored the invitation. ‘I would just like to speak to the others,’ he said, ‘before I go.’
‘Of course. Of course, sir.’
It was, Dr Ripley recognized afterwards, curiosity that caused him to make that request. Were the others in the same state as Plunkett? Had they, too, changed in a matter of hours from being agreeable people to being creatures you could neither like nor respect nor even take seriously? Would they, too, accuse him to his face of negligence and drunkenness?
In the kitchen the others rose to their feet when he entered.
‘Doctor’s here to have a word,’ Plunkett said. He added that Dr Ripley had come to see their point of view, a statement that Dr Ripley didn’t contradict immediately. He said instead that he was sorry that Mrs Abercrombie had died.