Designs on Life (20 page)

“Why, Evelyn!” Mrs. Gosse exclaimed. “What a lovely surprise! I never dared to expect you.”

“And how very, very naughty of you not to have let us know what happened straight away,” Evelyn Hassall said, stooping to kiss the old wrinkled forehead, sallow against the snowy white of the pillows. “To leave it to that daily of yours to tell us— which it took her a fortnight to think of doing. We only had her letter this morning.”

“Ah, Mrs. Jimson, so well-meaning, but she shouldn’t have bothered you.” Mrs. Gosse smiled up at her niece as she stood by the bedside, holding a bunch of jonquils and some magazines. “But it’s sweet of you to have come. I know what a busy life you lead.”

“Well, really! The hospital people should have phoned me at once.”

Mrs. Gosse was touched by the concern in Evelyn’s voice. Yet the truth was that the old woman was a little surprised by it. It was two years since Evelyn had been over to see her, and as Evelyn and Oliver lived only fifty miles away, a distance which, if they happened to feel, say, like dropping in for lunch some Sunday, was nothing nowadays, Mrs. Gosse had slipped into the habit of believing that her niece and her husband did not really want to be bothered too much about her.

That occasion, two years ago, when Evelyn, as now, had come over bearing gifts, had been Mrs. Gosse’s eightieth birthday party, a lovely party. Her stepdaughter Judith, with her two little girls, had been there, and of course darling Andrew had still been alive then. He had had his coronary about six months later, though he had been a year younger than his wife and no one had ever dreamt that he would die before her. Evelyn and Oliver had not been able to come to the funeral, because they had been away on a Caribbean cruise, but they had sent a beautiful wreath. The strong scent of the jonquils that Evelyn now laid on the bedside locker, saying that she supposed a nurse would bring a vase for them if she rang, made Mrs. Gosse suddenly remember that wreath. And that made her think of death. Naturally she had been thinking of death a good deal since her accident, and sometimes it had been with a dreamy sort of fascination, but more often it had been with a quietly stubborn resistance. She did not want to die yet.

Evelyn sat down on the chair by the bed and undid the collar of her fur coat. She was a pretty woman in a pallid, fluffy-haired way, not much over forty, though she looked rather more, because behind the pink and white softness of her face there was a certain hardness of the bone, a tightness of the muscles.

“Now, tell me what really happened,” she said. “Mrs. Jimson isn’t the most literate of letter-writers.”

“Well, dear, really nothing much happened,” Mrs. Gosse replied. “I fell, that was all. I was on the way to the kitchen to get my breakfast, and you know those three steps in the passage —I just tripped there and fell. And I don’t really remember much about it, because apparently I fainted—and d’you know, I’ve never, I really mean never, fainted in my life before. Then when I came to, I was here. So I hardly know anything about it. But I’ve been told Mrs. Jimson came in at her usual time and found me and got Dr. Bryant at once, and he got an ambulance and sent me here. And it turned out that what I’ve got is a fractured femur and I’m going to be stuck here for quite a time. But really I’m very lucky, because I understand that a good many people of my age would simply have got pneumonia and died. And they’re so kind to me here—nuns, you know, mostly Irish— I’ve never been called ‘darlin’’ so often in my life before!”

“Well, it just shows I’ve always been right, doesn’t it?” Evelyn said. “You shouldn’t be living alone. I hope Oliver and I can persuade you to be more reasonable about that now.”

Actually Mrs. Gosse could not remember when Evelyn had protested at her living alone. Judith, Andrew’s daughter, had tried hard after Andrew’s death to persuade her stepmother to go to live with her and her husband, Ronald. But Ronald, who was in the oil business, had just been posted to Venezuela, and Mrs. Gosse had not been able to see herself, at eighty, pulling up all her roots and going to live in such a strange and distant place. Besides, loving as Judith and Ronald had always been to her and dearly as she loved their children, Mrs. Gosse had always had a dread of becoming a liability to others, particularly to those for whom she cared the most.

“Anyway, when they let you out, of course you’ll come to us,” Evelyn went on. “No, don’t argue about it. You couldn’t possibly go home. You must come and stay with us for as long as you need to.”

“That’s very kind of you, dear,” Mrs. Gosse said. “It’s a very tempting suggestion. I suppose I’ll find it rather difficult to manage on my own for a time. I’ll think it over.”

But really there was nothing to think over. It was obvious that even when Mrs. Gosse could move about her ward with her two aluminium crutches and go to the bathroom by herself, she could not possibly have looked after herself in her own flat, with only Mrs. Jimson coming in to help her in the mornings. It was inevitable that she should accept Evelyn’s invitation. So when at last Mrs. Gosse left the hospital, it was in an ambulance that was to carry her to the Hassalls’ home.

Mrs. Gosse was rather dismayed by the ambulance. She had imagined that she was well enough to make the journey by car. But Evelyn reminded her that her spare bedroom was on the first floor and that as Mrs. Gosse would not be able to manage the stairs, she would have to be carried up them on a stretcher. Regretfully, Mrs. Gosse thought of her own flat, in which she would quite soon have been able to hobble out into the garden to look at the crocuses coming out under the beech trees and to sit on the bench there in any early spring sunshine that might brighten an occasional day, and to pick big yellow bunches of forsythia for the vases in the sitting-room. In the Hassalls’ house she would be cooped up in one room until she could go up and down the stairs, and who knew how many weeks that would be? However, it was a very attractive room with pale grey walls and a dark red carpet and pearly white cupboards and some nice photographs of Greece on the walls and a beautiful little bathroom opening out of it.

Oliver carried Mrs. Gosse’s luggage up for her. He was a short, rotund man of fifty, a stockbroker, with plump jowls and a bald head, sparsely fringed with dark hair. His eyes were dark, rather protuberant, and looked oddly intense in the pink placidity of his face.

“You see, there’s a lovely view from here,” he said, waving at the window. “Nothing between you and the downs. You’ll enjoy that, won’t you? We thought of that when we asked you to come.”

“How kind you both are, how very kind to me,” Mrs. Gosse said, and just then would have been immensely pleased if she had been able to think of something more to say to make up to the Hassalls for the fact that in the past somehow she had never thought of them as particularly kind people. But no doubt there would be opportunities later to show her gratitude. She only added that she was feeling rather tired and would like to go to bed.

“And you’re longing for a cup of tea, aren’t you?” Oliver said, and hurried out so that Evelyn could help Mrs. Gosse to undress and get into the bed in which the electric blanket had thoughtfully been turned on, waiting for her.

The next three weeks were very pleasant. It was true that Mrs. Gosse found them rather quiet. She missed the bustle of the nurses round her and the visits of her bridge-playing circle and of faithful Mrs. Jimson. Evelyn sat with her aunt when she could and Oliver generally paid her a visit when he got home from the City, but Evelyn lived a busy life, filled with voluntary work and committee meetings, and Oliver was usually tired in the evenings. And unfortunately the one thing that the Hassalls’ spare bedroom lacked was a telephone. Mrs. Gosse loved chatting with her friends on the telephone, and now that she was too far away from them for them to be able to drop in to see her, she would have liked to be able to ring them up and settle down for a nice long comfortable gossip. Always, of course, finding out from the exchange how much the call had cost and paying the sum to Evelyn, for Mrs. Gosse would no more have thought of telephoning at the Hassalls’ expense than of allowing them to pay for the stamps on the numerous letters that she wrote to her friends and which Evelyn took to the post for her.

It was the fact that none of these letters was answered that was the first thing that began to worry Mrs. Gosse. She could not understand it. Her friends were not neglectful people. Always, when she or any of them had gone away on a holiday, they had sent one another picture postcards. At Christmas, even when they were meeting every few days, they sent each other greetings. And those who, because of their infirmities or domestic problems of one sort or another, had not been able to visit her in the hospital, had written to her. But now there was silence. It seemed odd. She began to get querulous about it and one day actually asked Evelyn if she was sure that she had remembered to post the letters.

Evelyn laughed and said, “Of course, darling. I don’t forget things.”

“But I haven’t had any answers,” Mrs. Gosse said. “I don’t understand it.”

“You’re too impatient,” Evelyn said. “Very few people answer letters by return. I know I never do.”

“But you’re quite, quite sure you did post my letters, are you?”

“Quite, quite sure.”

Mrs. Gosse accepted it. Yet a nagging worry remained. She began to feel cut off from the world in a way that slightly scared her. But that, of course, was absurd. There was nothing for her to be afraid of. It was just that her relative helplessness and the long hours that she sometimes had to spend quite alone were beginning to get on her nerves.

Then one day she and Oliver had a rather curious conversation.

It was Mrs. Gosse herself who thoughtlessly began it. Oliver had come into her room to bring her coffee after a particularly delicious dinner that Evelyn had cooked. She was an excellent cook and she understood how much it meant to an invalid to have a meal served on a tray with shining silver and a pretty tray-cloth. That evening there had even been a few snowdrops in a little glass jug on the tray. Mrs. Gosse was touched by the thoughtfulness of it.

“You’re really so good to me, both of you,” she said to Oliver. “You’ll see, I shan’t forget it.”

Rather to her surprise, he answered with a self-conscious laugh. She had an odd feeling that she had just said something for which he had been waiting. But he said, “Now, now, we don’t want to talk about that sort of thing, do we?”

“But I mean it,” she said. “You do so much for me and I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t understand how grateful I am.”

“But there’s no need to talk about things like that yet, is there?” he said. “Why, goodness me, I expect you’ll outlive us all.”

“Outlive…?”

Mrs. Gosse was startled. She realised that he had thought, when she spoke of showing him and Evelyn that she would not forget their kindness, that she had been speaking of what she would leave them in her will. But in fact she had simply been thinking of making a present to Evelyn of a pearl and ruby brooch, inherited by Mrs. Gosse from her grandmother, a very charming thing and probably quite valuable, and which she was sure Evelyn would like. And Mrs. Gosse meant to think of something for Oliver too. He was an incessant smoker and there was that gold cigarette-case of Andrew’s. Perhaps Oliver would like that.

But she did not want to embarrass Oliver by letting him know how he had misunderstood her.

“Oh well,” she said, “we all come to it sooner or later. There’s no point in being afraid of thinking about it, is there?”

“Well, of course, I’ve always hoped that you’d remember Evelyn,” he said. “But as the money was all Uncle Andrew’s, it wouldn’t be surprising if you felt you had to leave your share of it to Judith.”

He was watching her as he spoke with disconcerting intent-ness.

Mrs. Gosse sipped her coffee.

“No, perhaps it wouldn’t,” she said. “Of course, I made my will thirty years ago and I’ve never thought of changing it. I remember when Andrew and I went along to our solicitor together and made our wills at the same time. Not that I’d anything of my own to leave then. It was just to save trouble later if ‘he should predecease me, as of course happened. We both agreed about the terms. They were very simple. Dearest Andrew, I would never think of doing anything that I thought he wouldn’t like.”

“No, no, of course not, of course not,” Oliver said, and his eyes seemed to fill with a hungry kind of curiosity, as if he were trying to determine whether the ambiguity of her reply was the result of deliberate evasiveness or merely of aged muddle-mind-edness. Then suddenly he went hurriedly out of the room and let the door shut behind him with a loudness that was almost a slam.

Mrs. Gosse put her coffee-cup down quickly on the bedside table because her hands had just started to tremble violently and she was afraid of slopping coffee on to the flower-patterned sheets. Clasping them together, she lay there rigid in the comfortable bed, trying to think clearly and not let confusion and a perhaps irrational panic overwhelm her.

She told herself that Oliver had never had much tact or refinement and that it was just like him, if he was curious about her will, to blurt it out as crudely as he had. And what more natural for him than to be curious? Yet there was a callousness in it, an indifference to her feelings, which offended Mrs. Gosse deeply. For the question of what would happen to her modest fortune when she died could be of no interest to Oliver and Evelyn unless they had already talked freely to one another about her death. And she was only eighty-two. Her mother had lived to ninety-three and her father to ninety-seven, and he had enjoyed a game of bowls on the very day of his death. And as longevity was said to run in families, surely it was a little impatient, to say the least, of Oliver and Evelyn to be wondering about her will.

Unless…

Unless they had been told something in the hospital about her health that had been kept from her. Was her heart, for instance, not as strong as she believed? Was there anything the matter with her arteries? Had they some reason for expecting her to die soon? And was that why they were looking after her so assiduously, and while they were at it, keeping her virtually a prisoner, denying her all other human contact, perhaps never posting the letters that she had written, giving her no access to a telephone, and now beginning, when she was all too conscious of her complete dependence on them, to suggest to her that she should make a will in their favour?