The Slaves of Solitude (31 page)

At the hospital casualty entrance Mr. Thwaites was snatched away from her in the blackness, and she was put into a waiting-room – much like a railway waiting-room – in which a feeble
electric light illuminated chairs and a meaningless table.

Half an hour later she was walking along vast ether-smelling corridors, and was taken into a ward, palatially large (how well she knew this smell of ether in these palaces of pain!), in the
middle of which, behind screens, Mr. Thwaites was groaning. ‘
Oh! . . . Oh! . . . Oh! . .
.’

He did not look at her any more, but only groaned at the ceiling.

There was really nothing to do. The sister, who was, thank God, ‘nice’, told her that he would soon be going into the theatre, and that there was no point in staying.

She touched his hand again, saying, ‘Well, goodbye, Mr. Thwaites. You’re going to the theatre soon. You’ll soon be out of pain,’ but, groaning at the ceiling, he did not
look at her, or even seem to hear her.

She left, blundered about in the blackness of Reading to the station, caught a lucky train, and, wondering whether Mr. Thwaites was about to die, was taken homewards.

4

Mr. Thwaites was to die.

After Miss Roach left him Mr. Thwaites was not taken immediately to the theatre, for there was a hitch in the arrangements owing to shortage of staff and other war-time conditions – the
war, of course, having taken fully as much interest in hospitals as it had in shops and in all other places and things.

In the long wait Mr. Thwaites’ groans grew louder and louder, so much so that a patient the other side of the ward, a coarse man, and also dying, cried out, ‘Oh, shut up over there,
will you! Shut up!’ The coarse, dying man, who had been dozing off, had the impression that it was the middle of the night and that Mr. Thwaites had no right to make such a noise at such a
time. Such unhappy miscalculations and incidents are not uncommon in public wards.

But, whether Mr. Thwaites heard this or not, he did not shut up. And in his groaning there could be heard something of the same thing that Miss Roach had in the ambulance observed in his eyes
– intense mystification at what was happening to him, along with intense concentration upon the pain inside him. As a man who had hardly ever had a day’s illness in his life, a man
without knowledge of pain, a man whose hobby in life had, in fact, been nothing other than that of giving pain to others, his groans seemed to ring with a kind of querying, querulous, and amazed
sense of affront.

At last they came and took him away to the theatre, and the coarse man opposite cried out, ‘Jolly good thing too!’

5

After the operation he was brought back to the ward and did not fully recover consciousness until about seven in the morning. Then, in a state of delirium, all he wanted
was a cup of tea.

Though Mr. Thwaites was in a bad way, at this time he was not in a bad enough way for him to be given what he wanted, and he was unable to get a cup of tea.

He wanted nothing but a cup of tea, and he imagined that he was on a railway station trying to get it. He said he had a train to catch, and argued over the buffet counter, bluffing at certain
times, pleading at others.

Then he saw that it was because he could not pay for his tea that they would not give it to him, and he begged the nurses who came near him to give him his purse. So persistent was he that at
last they got his purse from his clothes and let him play with it.

‘Yea? Verily? Tea?’ he said to the nurses, as they tried to soothe him. ‘Yea? Verily? Verily? Tea?’

And the young nurses replied ‘Yea, Verily’, and giggled and winked at each other over the dying man, as young nurses will in public wards of hospitals.

By eleven o’clock that morning it was realised by those in charge that he had no chance of living. He was therefore given what he wanted, and made more ‘comfortable’ in the
charming hospital phrase – ‘uncomfortable’ being, presumably, the word with which the hospital would have described the prolonged groaning torment which had preceded this happier
state.

As Mr. Thwaites sank he went on murmuring ‘Yea. Verily . . .’ and he mentioned Miss Roach. ‘Dame Roach?’ he said, in a hopeful tone, ‘Dame Roach?’ And then,
as if at last satisfied, ‘Dame Roach!’ These, actually, were his last words.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the familiar stertorous breathing from behind the screens resounded through the listening ward (in which tea was being served) and reached an apparently
never-to-be-reached climax with appalling abruptness. Mr. Thwaites was dead.

Thus suddenly – having been given less than forty-eight hours’ notice of any sort, and in the bloom of his carefree and powerful dotage – this cruel, harsh, stupid,
inconsiderate, unthinking man, this lifelong nagger and ragger of servants and old women, this confused yet confusing bully and braggart in small places, died. The boarding-house tempest had blown
itself out, all at once magically subsided.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

1

‘Y
ES
.
I thought very soon after his fall that something bad was on the way.
’

And Miss Roach, instead of rising from her separate table in the dining-room and going over and confronting Miss Kugelmann, had elected quietly to leave the room, go upstairs for her hat and
coat, and take yet another walk in the blackness!

It had been a bewildering day, concerned with death in a double way for Miss Roach, and Mrs. Payne’s telephone had been much used.

At first the hospital had said that Mr. Thwaites was doing as well as could be expected: then at midday they were less hopeful, and at five in the evening the Rosamund Tea Rooms was informed of
his death.

Just before dinner Miss Roach was called to the telephone to talk about her aunt with Mrs. Spender. In the course of this conversation Mrs. Spender informed Miss Roach that on her aunt’s
death she would benefit by the will roughly to the extent of five hundred pounds. Miss Roach had always known that her aunt was going to leave her ‘something’, but this amazed her.

‘Five hundred pounds!’ she exclaimed, and Mrs. Payne, who was in the room, must have heard this, for when Miss Roach had finished telephoning she said humorously, ‘Is somebody
giving you five hundred pounds?’ and Miss Roach had to reply, ‘Yes. So it seems!’

She had hardly had time to think about the possible effects, if any, of this sum of money on her future life (and anyway her aunt had not yet died and she didn’t want her to die) when the
gong for dinner was hit.

When they were all seated, all wondered who was going to begin it. Normally such a thing would have been left to Mr. Thwaites himself, but the circumstances prevented precisely this, and at last
Miss Steele undertook the task.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s very terrible about Mr. Thwaites, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Roach. ‘Terrible.’ And Mrs. Barratt said ‘Yes. Appalling.’ And Vicki said ‘Yes. Terrible. Absolutely terrible.’

 ‘I mean it was so sudden, wasn’t it?’ said Miss Steele.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Barratt. ‘So appallingly sudden. I never had any idea there was anything really serious until I heard he’d  been taken away in the ambulance. Did
any of you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Vicki. ‘I had an idea, as a matter of fact.’

‘Really?’ said Mrs. Barratt, and then Vicki had said it.

‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘I thought very soon after his fall that something bad was on the way.’

And then Miss Roach, instead of obeying her initial impulse and rising and confronting Miss Kugelmann, had quietly left the room, gone upstairs for her hat and coat, and gone out for yet another
walk in the blackness.

2

‘
Yes. I thought very soon after his fall that something bad was on the way
.’

She must keep calm! She must compose herself! She had managed to leave the room in a calm manner, and now she must remain calm.

Perhaps the woman had not meant it. Perhaps she had meant that, coincidental, with his fall, merely coincidentally, she had observed something amiss in Mr. Thwaites. Perhaps Vicki was entirely
innocent of the faintest innuendo. Perhaps she, Miss Roach, had the wicked, distorted mind.

Nonsense! Of course she had meant it!
‘Very soon after his fall.’ The very tone, the grave, unctuous tone in which she had uttered the words, proved that she meant it. That
tone took it unctuously and serenely for granted that the fall had caused the illness, which had caused the death. And the fall, of course, had been caused by the Push. And Miss Roach, already an
‘English Miss’, a prude, a spinster consumed with jealousy, a sex-ridden maker of advances to boys in their teens, was now a murderess!

Oh dear God, she had thought it was all over, but here it was, all over again. She had thought this woman had done her worst, that Mr. Thwaites had done his worst, that the climax of Mr.
Thwaites’ death was the extra, gratuitous, and final climax, but instead of that, here it all was, back again.

If she hadn’t meant it, why had she mentioned the fall at all? Anyone must have known that she was sorry for pushing the old man over just before his death, and only hell-inspired spite
could have caused her to refer to it. What hell-inspired spite was it, that dwelt in this woman?

But worst of all, much worst of all – was there any dim conceivable truth or half-truth or quarter-truth in the allegation? Was it absolutely impossible for the fall to have been in some
obscure way connected with or to have started the illness? What was peritonitis, anyway? Was she to be haunted by the fear, until her dying day, that she, in the one moment of real fury she had
ever allowed herself in her life, had caused a death? That was what Vicki had put into her head – had meant to put into her head – and how was she ever going to get it out?

No, no! she must not give way. She must keep her promise to herself to keep calm. She was in a nervous state. It had all been too much for her recently. She was practically unhinged. She was
letting the woman drive her mad. Apparently that was what the woman wanted to do, and she was getting away with it.

But how could you keep calm if you had murdered an old man? How could you ever be calm again for the rest of your life?

She found herself by the station. Always, on these black occasions and wanderings, she found herself making for the railway. Was this some subconscious impulse to get away from the town, to take
a train anywhere, to return to London?

Where was she going now? Where was she going, in a general way? Now, surely, she could not spend more than one other night under that roof. But where did you go? Where did a murderess go and
live, where did she spend her remaining days repenting her murder?

She must pull herself together. This was pure lunacy. Any sane person, knowing what was going on in her head and regarding her objectively, would see that she was out of her mind.

Well, if she was a lunatic, there was one lunatic thing she could do. She could do it now, if she had enough courage. She decided she had.

3

Just before his dinner that evening, Dr. Mackie, who lived in a pleasant Georgian house half-way up the hill the other side of Thames Lockdon bridge, was in his
consulting-room and heard the bell ring.

The doctor – a thin, tall, spectacled man who looked like a schoolmaster, and behaved like an amiable one – was at the moment immersed in papers and figures in connection with his
income tax. These were complex, and at the moment the doctor was a fatigued, harassed man. The sound of the bell, therefore, caused him apprehension.

Half a minute later his silly fat new maid, whom he now despaired of training, came into the room without knocking and said there was a lady to see him.

‘Oh. Really?’ he said, rising and speaking in a low voice. ‘Who is it, do you know?’

‘No, I don’t know,’ said his silly fat new maid.

‘Well, will you go and ask who it is?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and went out.

The doctor realised that he was almost certainly for it, just before dinner, and he walked unhappily up and down the room. He heard some mumbling going on outside in the hall, and then his silly
fat new maid returned.

‘Please, sir,’ she said, ‘she says her name’s Miss Roach.’

She said this as though Miss Roach was only saying this, and didn’t really bear that name. That was typical of her silliness. The name of Miss Roach conveyed nothing to the doctor, but he
supposed he would have to see her.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Show her in, will you?’

A moment later Miss Roach came in, and he shook hands with her, and smiled, and said, ‘How do you do?’

He saw a slim woman, nearing or just past forty, with a nice face, and liquid brown, appealing eyes. Although greeting him pleasantly, she seemed to be ill at ease, and he wondered what on earth
it was all about and how long it was going to take.

He put her in a chair, and then sat opposite her, and then put on that kindly but defensive look which doctors wear during this familiar consulting-room pause.

‘Well—’ he said. ‘Can I – er –?’

‘I’m awfully sorry to have disturbed you like this,’ said Miss Roach. ‘It’s very good of you to see me.’

‘Not at all,’ said the doctor. ‘Just tell me.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll think it’s rather silly,’ said Miss Roach. ‘But it’s just something I’m  very anxious to ask you, that’s
all.’

The doctor now suspected that Miss Roach was afraid that she was going to have a baby, and gloomily foresaw a long interview.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Well – it’s about Mr. Thwaites. You know – down in Church Street. I think you were called in to him.’

‘Yes. That’s right,’ said the doctor, now mystified, but preferring Mr. Thwaites to babies.

‘Well, I’m afraid you’ll think it’s awfully silly, but it’s just something I want to know.’

He wished she wouldn’t go on about it being silly, but come out with it.

‘Yes. Never mind,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Well, it’s just this. I just want to know if it could be at all possible – conceivably possible – if he had had a fall – and he
did
have a fall the night
before he was taken ill – I can’t go into the details, it’s all really so silly – I live in the same house, you see . . .’