At Death's Door Read online

  “It’s certainly unlike the others. Because he hadn’t gone in for autobiography before, had he? Or if he had, I didn’t recognize it.”

  “Not direct autobiography like that. One or two of his other . . . women friends claimed to recognize themselves, but they were put in plots that had nothing to do with Ben’s own life.”

  “Anyway, that’s the book that’s of particular interest to me.”

  “Of course it is. Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  Caroline’s day was low-key but busy. Becky had a fit of petulance and unreasonableness before lunch, as she sometimes did if she was at home and Roderick was not. Roderick was at a day-long conference of local headmasters. Caroline had a lunch of scrambled egg and fruit with Becky and Mrs. Sprigg, and when they had finished, she asked if Ben was up to receiving a visitor.

  “Well, he’s a bit drowsy, but it doesn’t make all that much difference, does it? Who is it?”

  “His daughter, actually. Illegitimate. He’s never seen her before. Of course he won’t know who she is.”

  “He won’t, and that’s a fact,” said Mrs. Sprigg. Clearly she was interested and would get a lot more detail out of Caroline before many days were passed.

  Caroline let her go upstairs to the old man, then went to the study, knocked, and put her head around.

  “I wondered if you’d like to come up and say hello to Ben,” she said.

  Cordelia looked apprehensive, then smiled bravely.

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  “It seemed only right,” said Caroline as they went upstairs. “Isobel, Roderick’s sister, never goes to see him when she comes. But she hated him when he was— Well, so in its way that’s right, too.”

  Caroline opened the door of the shady bedroom. Mrs. Sprigg had made him clean and tidy, but already dribble was forming at the corner of his mouth. Cordelia gazed sadly at the sunken eyes, the bare skin and bone of the cheeks. It was more like looking at a skull than at a face.

  “Memento mori,” she whispered to Caroline.

  “This is Cordelia, Father,” said Caroline, bringing her forward to the bed, “come to pay you a visit.”

  “Cordelia . . .” said a faint, distant voice.

  “She and her boyfriend are camping in the garden. It’s lucky the weather’s changed for the better, isn’t it?”

  There was a long pause, broken only by the ticking of the clock, and then the voice said: “. . . for the better . . .”

  Cordelia took his hand very tenderly, then said, not really knowing what to say: “How are you feeling today . . . Father?”

  There was no flicker of the eyelids. Merely another long pause.

  “Father . . .” said the ancient voice.

  “He’s tired,” said Mrs. Sprigg.

  Caroline nodded, smiled at the old man, then led Cordelia from the bedroom.

  “I hope that wasn’t too upsetting?”

  “No. I’m glad to have seen him. Is he always like that?”

  “That was a bit below average. He has his good days. Then he usually dictates wills.”

  “Is that what the tape recorder was doing there?”

  “Yes. Sometimes he doesn’t remember to turn it on. He never remembers to turn it off. He leaves things he once had to relatives we know nothing about, friends who’ve been dead for years, people we’ve never heard of. As I say, those are the good days; at least it means that something is going on in his mind.”

  “Sad,” said Cordelia. “And that’s the man whose novel I’m reading.” They had come downstairs, and she paused at the door of the study. “Thank you for taking me to see him. I appreciate that.”

  In the afternoon Becky usually had a sleep. It was a time of respite for Caroline, and as a rule she wrote letters or did anything requiring concentration. When Becky woke, Caroline took her out into the garden and did some energetic weeding. Becky watched, clutching a necklace of beads she was fond of, telling them over as if they were a rosary.

  At a little after five Cordelia emerged from the house, rubbing her eyes but looking very happy.

  “It’s been a fantastic day,” she said, coming over, “but I think I’ve taken in as much as I can for the moment. I’ll walk and meet Pat and tell him about it. Evenings are our best times. We talk things over.”

  Caroline smiled, thinking it rather touching. Cordelia sat on the edge of the lawn beside her.

  “I’ve found the most fascinating things,” she said, “and learned an awful lot. You do have all my mother’s letters to him there—first the loving ones, then the . . . the others. The last was written when she heard he was writing a book about their affair. It’s marvelous—one long screed of vituperation. I can hear her saying it onstage—hear the way she would calculate the lulls and the climaxes, hear where there would be a pregnant pause. Though actually there is hardly any punctuation in it at all, as if full stops and commas would only interrupt the pure flow of vitriol. It was superb. I must take it to Maudsley and get it photocopied.”

  “I don’t think there’s any photocopying machine in the village,” said Caroline. “Best to put all the things you want copied together, and then Roderick can get it done at his school.” She stood up and rubbed her aching back. “Safer that way, and cheaper, too.”

  “That sounds ideal. I’d like the manuscript of The Vixen done, too, and we’d need to be careful with that. One day that will be valuable.”

  “Valuable? Oh, yes, I suppose an American university will buy it eventually.”

  “No, what I meant was, when Mother dies, you can put out the book as it originally was. Before the lawyers got on to it. Because it’s got some marvelous things in it. There’s a scene where he takes her to dinner at Boulestin’s and she takes offense at something he says and works herself up to a tremendous scene. In the published version this becomes a quite insignificant little quarrel in the Piccadilly Lyons Corner House. It doesn’t make the same impact at all.”

  “Well,” said Caroline briskly, “I don’t suppose we’ll be around when your mother dies to do anything about it. And, as I say, I’d be quite happy if the book was never reprinted.”

  “So would Mother.” Cordelia giggled. “The thing is, you can tell from the letters that the original version was the true one. There’s a letter from my mother justifying herself after that scene in the restaurant. I’ll have to have all the letters photocopied, I suppose. You can chart the whole progress of the affair from them. . . . I calculate I was conceived during their third night together.”

  Caroline was a little shocked, but she shook off the emotion and laughed.

  “Not all that many people can be as precise as that.”

  “Mother was playing Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest in Glasgow. She came down to London on the overnight sleeper and spent the Sunday night with him. He’d been up there three weeks before, and then they didn’t see each other for a month after that. . . . It’s funny: they’re always pestering her to play Lady Bracknell now.”

  “Not really funny,” Caroline pointed out. “Twenty-seven years have passed.”

  “I don’t think Myra sees it like that. In fact, she always gets very frosty when her agent brings the topic up. But it would rather give point to the line about all women growing to be like their mothers, wouldn’t it? In fact, what she wants to do again is her Cleopatra.”

  They walked toward the house, Caroline with Becky by the hand. Cordelia said sadly:

  “I suppose Cleopatra really is her role. She knows her strengths. I had a real hang-up about men, you know, till quite recently. So many had come into and gone out of my life—our life—while I was growing up. It was Pat cured me of that. . . . Funny, I used to think as a child how fantastic it would be if my father and mother met up again and got married. When I was a teenager, I used to read all his books and dream that would happen. Eventually I thought: But there’s no reason why that would last any longer than my mother’s other affairs.”

  “Your father,” s
aid Caroline carefully, “was not exactly a faithful man. You shouldn’t idealize him.”

  “I don’t. Not any longer. But I bet he was a lot of fun. Anyway, as I say, one thing I want to get is a photocopy of the whole of the original version of The Vixen. That way I’ll know everything there is to know about my father and my mother, and their affair.”

  “From his point of view,” Caroline pointed out. “Has your mother changed her mind about the affair, and about Ben?”

  Cordelia laughed.

  “Not a bit. She still spits fire when his name comes up.”

  “Then she’s hardly going to want you to print any of this—her letters to Ben or the original book she objected to twenty-five years ago.”

  “I’m sure she won’t want me to.”

  Something in her tone made Caroline look at her closely.

  “Then you’d hardly hurt her by trying to publish them, would you?”

  Cordelia’s fingers were fumbling nervously with each other, but she looked Caroline straight in the eye.

  “You’ve been very kind to me—to us. I don’t want to feel I got here under false pretenses, so I think you ought to know. I loathe my mother. I hate her more than anyone on earth.”

  Chapter 4

  OF COURSE WHEN BECKY had been put to bed—sleeping almost at once, with those noises that were at once ludicrous and pathetic—Caroline and Roderick could talk about nothing else.

  “Her actual words were ‘I loathe her,’ ” said Caroline, a worried frown on her face. “And as far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly clear what sort of a book it is she’s writing. It’s some form of fighting back. That may be understandable, but it makes me very uneasy. For a start it seems to put us in a very false position. Or am I being prim and overpersnickety?”

  Roderick shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I don’t know. . . . I see now what puzzled me on the phone: the coolness with which she talked about her mother. It didn’t go with her writing a book about her. But we let her come here in good faith. . . . Of course, looked at in one way, we have no moral obligation toward Myra Mason. There is no conceivable bond that we’ve violated by showing Cordelia the papers. In fact, any bond there is is with Cordelia: she is my half sister.”

  “Ye-es,” conceded Caroline. “But one you’ve never seen in your life before now. And I must say I’ve always felt a lot of sympathy with Myra.”

  “I know, though I’m not sure the sympathy would survive a meeting with her,” said Roderick. “But basically I agree: To have helped a daughter write a devastating biography of her mother is not a pretty position to be in. On the other hand, the question arises: How much will she be able to publish?”

  “That’s true,” said Caroline. “I suppose we would have the right of veto on the letters?”

  “I think so. And if Myra could suppress parts of The Vixen on grounds of libel back in 1964, presumably she could do the same today. On the other hand, it may be that Cordelia could get away with paraphrase and description.”

  “If she was cunning, she could still deal some savage blows if the material is as she describes it,” said Caroline thoughtfully. “We have to remember she is a writer.”

  “Very much a dilettantish one,” objected Roderick.

  “But your father’s child. And apparently with her mother’s capacity for sustained hatred.”

  Roderick groaned. He went over to the sideboard and poured them two strong whiskeys. Then they sat in the twilit room, companionably thinking the thing through.

  “We can’t contact Myra,” said Roderick. “And if we did, we know what her answer would be: The child is to see nothing. But it’s our decision, when all’s said and done: Are we going to continue giving her access to Father’s stuff?”

  Caroline screwed up her face.

  “One feels in a way she has a right to know. Children do, these days—like adopted children having the right to find out who their real parents are. People admit it’s a natural curiosity to have. That doesn’t mean she has a right to publish.”

  “Certainly not. Somehow we have to make that clear to her: It’s not just a question of what she can legally publish, it’s a question of what we would wish to see published. I think I’ll have to have a word with her.”

  “This whole legal business confuses me,” said Caroline. “If she gets derogatory opinions of Myra from other people onstage, can she publish them? If she tells about her childhood, about the lovers Myra had then, can she publish that? Granted that the aim is to expose and humiliate her mother—and I can’t see any other possible reason for the book—then presumably she will want to drag out all the dirt. The question is, what she can legally say and what she’ll be stopped from saying.”

  “You can be sure the publishers will be down on anything potentially libelous like a ton of bricks. There’s nothing more cowardly than publishers. The fuss over The Vixen showed that, and that will be as nothing compared to the fuss over this. But that’s not really our concern. As I say, I can’t see that we have any particular obligation to Myra Mason. I confess, on our one meeting I didn’t like her at all. But that doesn’t mean I want material we own used to throw mud all over her. . . . I’m very unhappy about all this. We seem, quite innocently, to have got ourselves into a situation which it’s impossible to escape from and where it’s difficult to see where the honorable course lies.”

  And so they thrashed around, turning the matter over and over, until bedtime and beyond. It was a moral decision as important as any since Roderick had left the public school where he had taught and taken the headmastership of the little Sussex school for handicapped children. Then his commitment had been clear; now everything was shifting, ambiguous, blurred around the edges. It was inevitable that by the time they drifted into sleep no clear-cut decision had been made. All Roderick did was have a word with Cordelia when she arrived next morning.

  “Caroline did make it clear, didn’t she, that we’d want the final decision on what you can and cannot publish from Father’s material here?”

  He smiled as he said it, trying not to sound too headmasterly. Cordelia smiled back, her brilliant, disarming smile.

  “Of course. That goes without saying. Don’t worry.”

  Roderick felt a little like a nervous airline passenger being reassured by a hostess. But (like most plane passengers) he did not feel reassured.

  And so the days went by, and Cordelia continued to come up to work, sifting materials, comparing texts, in the dismal study. Little by little Roderick and Caroline began to relax. The heavens had not fallen. They worked in the garden, lay in the sun, and now and again they took Becky out for drives. In the mornings Mrs. Spriggs, to and from the sickroom, made it her business to screw gradually out of Caroline the facts of Cordelia’s parentage and the circumstances of her birth, so that anything the village had not learned from the commodore and his lady, they heard from Mrs. Spriggs. Caroline was fatalistic about this. She had no sense that Cordelia would feel hurt or embarrassed by the gossip, and Roderick’s father was beyond embarrassment. If there was one thing that was certain, it was that the village would talk.

  As it happened, it was with Pat that the matter was mulled over next, and Pat, in his half-fledged way, was franker than Cordelia had been. Roderick met up with him early one evening, about five days after Cordelia had made her revelation. He had walked into the village to fetch a few groceries, and on the way back he saw, turning on to the road from the cliff path, the unmistakable figure of Cordelia’s boyfriend: tall, thin, wiry body, with matchstick legs protruding from flapping shorts. He quickened his pace in the sinking sun and caught up with him as they neared the brow of a hill.

  “Had a good day?” he asked.

  Pat turned and smiled his slow, shy smile.

  “Not bad. Very lazy. I walked my feet off yesterday, so today I just swam a little and lay on the sand.”

  “Pity Cordelia can’t be with you more.”

  “Oh, she will be when she fini
shes going through that stuff. At the moment she’s quite happy.”

  “Yes, er . . .” Roderick cleared his throat.

  “But you’re not?” Pat had turned to smile again, this time apologetically. “I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, we realized you wouldn’t be. That’s why Cordelia took the first opportunity to come clean.”

  “Could we sit down for a moment?”

  They had come to a roadside bench. Pat nodded and said, “Sure.” He and Roderick sat, and Roderick tried to formulate his thoughts yet again.

  “You see, all we can imagine is that this book is designed to chuck mud at Myra Mason. Destroy the Dame Myra image. If she wants to do that, well, that’s Cordelia’s business. I can imagine she has a good many scores she wants to settle with her mother. My impression of Myra, on my one brief meeting many years ago, was of a powerful, egotistical person, somewhat hysterical—or at least one that needed a constant succession of scenes. We can see that Cordelia’s childhood was probably not an easy one. Still, it’s an ugly business, and one we don’t particularly want to be associated with. Am I sounding like Pontius Pilate?”

  “No, no.”

  “There’s another thing. There’s been a battle royal between my father and Myra Mason before. Twenty-odd years ago. Fought in the tabloid press and elsewhere. Most people in the literary and journalistic world have a fair idea of his present condition. It could look as if we’re reviving that old war and using his natural daughter to do it. . . . Oh, dear, I’m still sounding like Pontius Pilate, aren’t I? What I’m really trying to say is that I find the whole project repulsive.”

  Pat thought long, in his manner. “Yes, I can understand that. But in fact it’s a little more complex than you realize.”

  “You mean she was exaggerating her feeling about her mother?”