Authors: Susan Howatch
Everything changed. Past, present, future—all were tossed in the melting-pot, and when they emerged again the past had been rewritten, the present was transformed and the future was redesigned.
“This is what you wanted, wasn’t it, Miss Harrison?” said Nicholas to her. “You wanted so much to talk to Alice one more time.”
Aunt’s claw tightened around my hand. I thought at first it was an involuntary spasm but it wasn’t. The spasm didn’t subside. She was using all her strength to hold my hand and utter another word.
Frantically I said to Nicholas: “I didn’t hear that. What did she say?”
“ ‘Forgive.’ ”
“You’re saying you forgive me?” I said to Aunt. “You forgive me for not being the sort of child you wanted?”
Aunt became more agitated. Her breathing was shallower, and one side of her face was now contorted.
“I think, Alice,” said Nicholas at last, “that it’s you who’s being asked to do the forgiving.”
“Oh my God …” I tore off my glasses with a sob and chucked them down on the bed. “Why, you silly old woman, what’s there to forgive? You took me in and looked after me and—” I broke off as I realised Aunt was trying to interrupt. Again she said: “Forgive,” and this time I recognised the word straight away.
At last I saw what was required. Clutching her hand tightly I said in my firmest voice: “Of course I forgive you. I forgive you because I love you. It’s all right. Everything’s all right, and you don’t have to worry any more.”
At once the strength flooded through her. She whispered clearly, so clearly that misunderstanding was impossible: “Best of girls. Such a blessing. How lucky I was.”
Then as the power of speech was abruptly withdrawn, I sensed her slip away, at peace at last, into the uncharted sea which separated her from death.
II
Val
had moved to feel Aunt’s pulse. Wiping my eyes again I said dully: “Is she dead?”
“No.” She laid Aunt’s hand carefully back on the sheet. “The pulse is rapid but that’s to be expected after all the exertion. There probably won’t be any serious change for a while, but her own doctor should take a look at her.” Unexpectedly she put her arms around me, and in the second before I started crying again I saw Nicholas slump down exhausted on the nearest chair.
Drawing away from Val I stumbled to the bathroom where I found my make-up was a mess, ravaged beyond repair. I washed it off and to my surprise found that my hand was steady. A great calmness had descended on me. Aloud I said to Aunt: “Bon voyage,” and in my mind’s eye I saw that dark sea stretching to the bright light beyond the rim of the horizon. In the near-death experiences I had read about in the papers, there was always a bright light at the end of the darkness. Aunt had said that was a hallucination caused by lack of oxygen to the brain, but it had long since occurred to me how odd it was that so many people should have such similar hallucinations. I’d thought hallucinations were as diverse as dreams.
When I returned to Aunt’s bedroom I said: “I’ll be okay now. I’ll sit with her till it’s over.”
Val said: “It may still take some time. If you want me to call a nurse—”
“I’d rather wait alone.”
“But you’ll phone her doctor? I really think—” She broke off as Nicholas put a hand on her arm.
“Alice is all right,” he said. “Alice can now make the decisions which have to be made.”
My voice said: “Alice is healed.” I passed the back of my hand over my hot forehead and marvelled that I hadn’t understood before. “I was the patient, wasn’t I?” I said. “You always knew there’d be nothing much you could do for Aunt, but you realised there was a lot you could do for me.”
Nicholas merely said: “Healing’s an ongoing process. We all need healing all the time, but each healing makes us fitter for the journey.” He stroked Aunt’s hair for the last time and said goodbye to her. Then, clumsy with weariness, he staggered downstairs to the hall.
III
Val said gently:
“I know he didn’t cure your aunt but he did help her. Now she can let go and die in peace.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply there was no healing there too. Of course it was a miracle that she managed to speak—”
“Oh, that wasn’t a miracle. It was an unusual thing to happen and makes me wonder if the loss of speech was due more to the shock of the last stroke than to brain damage, but I’ve seen other patients speak in unlikely circumstances if the motivation is strong. No, the real miracle—and Nick hates that word!—was that you and she were able to complete the unfinished business.”
“Val!” shouted Nicholas from the hall.
“I must go.” She pressed her card into my hand. “Call me if you change your mind about the nurse—or if you simply want to talk.”
I thanked her and led the way downstairs. I couldn’t find the words to thank Nicholas but I clasped his hand tightly in gratitude.
All he said was: “We’ll talk later,” and within seconds he was gone.
IV
I sat by
Aunt’s bed as the night ebbed and Big Ben marked the quarter-hours. I was still thinking of Nicholas. Apart from Aunt, who in the beginning at least had only cared for me out of a sense of duty, he was the only person who had ever acted as if I had some value as a human being. I thought of the vast numbers of people he must know, the numerous claims on his time, his busy life in the heart of London. Yet he hadn’t hesitated to set aside part of his evening to help someone who constantly found herself written off as a fat nonentity.
That reminded me of how badly I did at interviews and that in turn made me peer fearfully into the future. I was going to lose my home and there would be hardly any money left to inherit. I’d have to get a live-in job—probably in some institution so desperate for help that they would even employ a fat nonentity who hadn’t had a full-time job for a while. However, I knew I’d be fortunate to have free accommodation, no matter how dreary the circumstances, so I said to Aunt: “I’ll manage. I’ll be all right.”
Aunt’s breathing changed before dawn. I almost called the doctor but I thought he might be angry, summoned from his bed when there was nothing he could do, so I never picked up the phone. Instead I held Aunt’s hand. I wasn’t frightened. Death was coming as a friend. He was wanted, welcomed. Aunt was ready now.
The breathing became much stranger, so I knew the end was near. That type of breathing had some special name; I’d read about it somewhere, probably in the medical column of a magazine or newspaper. Aunt had always taken
The Times
, but newspapers nowadays were so expensive that I had decided even the
Daily Mail
was an extravagance I couldn’t afford.
Death came—and to my surprise Aunt looked different afterwards. She had been corpse-like for so long that I’d assumed no further change in her appearance would be possible, but although I still felt her presence in the room I saw the body had been abandoned. That was now just an arrangement of matter which had somehow lost its familiarity.
There were no tears—and no sleep either; I didn’t feel tired any more. I felt as if I were on some drug-induced high, very peculiar it was, but wasn’t morphine produced naturally in the brain in certain circumstances? I thought I had seen that too reported in some medical column. I liked medical matters. If I hadn’t been so stupid I would have wanted to become a doctor—like Val, working alongside Nicholas at St. Benet’s-by-the-Wall.
At eight I phoned Aunt’s doctor, and while I waited for him to arrive I called Val to tell her what had happened. She was very kind. After she had said all that needed to be said she added: “Nick’s always out of town on weekends, but I’ll phone his colleague, Father Lewis Hall, and I’m sure he’ll want to get in touch with you.”
I’d forgotten it was Saturday and that the Guild churches of the City would be closed for the weekend. I wondered where Nicholas went. I pictured him in a beautiful country house with his elegant wife. What would he do with himself on weekends? Work in the garden? Play cricket on some village green? Read novels? Take the children on outings? (Of course there would be children.) I found I couldn’t imagine him having anything so ordinary as a family life. And there was no point in day-dreaming about him anyway. I started to think of Aunt again.
Going to her desk I removed the will, which I had found after the first stroke, and broke the seal of the envelope. I knew she would have
left everything to me, but I wanted to find out if she had left instructions for her funeral. She had. That militant non-believer who despised clergymen had written in a note attached to the legal document: “I hereby give instructions that my body is to be cremated after a
short
service conducted according to the rites of the Church of England. Every English person, regardless of religious belief, should observe the tribal custom of being buried by the English church. This is what being a member of Our Great Island Race is all about. (Churchill understood this perfectly.) NOTE: The readings must be taken
only
from St. John’s Gospel, a work of extraordinary literary merit, and there is to be
no singing.
(Without a first-class choir singing is pointless.) Under no circumstances whatsoever should that ghastly but popular passage from the writings of Canon Henry Scott Holland be read, and under no circumstances whatsoever must anyone give some nauseating speech about how wonderful I was. The clergyman must refer to me throughout as Miss Harrison, not as Beatrice or—God forbid—Bea.”
That seemed clear enough, but I wondered what the clergyman at the crematorium would think.
The doorbell rang to herald the arrival of Aunt’s doctor.
V
At eleven o’clock
that morning, after the undertakers had removed Aunt’s body and just as I was beginning to realise how much there was to do after someone died, the doorbell rang again and this time I found Nicholas’s colleague on the doorstep. He was the silver-haired clergyman who had read the lesson at the healing service, and at the time I had assumed he was just another decorous elderly gentleman in a clerical collar, but as soon as I saw him at close quarters I realised I’d been mistaken.
For a start, his silver hair was shaggy and allowed to taper into furry sideburns which gave him a rakish look. He also had yellow teeth (he reeked of nicotine) and sinister black eyes which conjured up images of gangsters. In a heroic effort to neutralise this villainous appearance he had encased himself in an exquisitely cut clerical suit, but this only made him look like an actor who had been hopelessly miscast.
“Miss Fletcher?” he said briskly. “I’m Lewis Hall, and I assist Nicholas Darrow at St. Benet’s. Is this a bad moment to call? If it is,
just say so and I’ll disappear—and don’t worry about giving me offence because I assure you I shan’t take it.”
I found this straight talk very refreshing. The detestable doctor had been unctuous to hide his relief that Aunt could now be struck off his list of patients.
“Thank you, Mr. Hall,” I said. “Do please come in.” As I showed him into the living-room I noticed again that he had a pronounced limp. Accepting my offer of tea, he bared his yellow teeth in a benign smile when I mentioned the word “cake.”
“I’m always very partial to elevenses,” he said.
I had made a large banana cake the previous day and although most of it had now gone there was still enough left for two generous slices. Mr. Hall took one bite of his slice and demanded: “Is this from Harrods?”
“No, I made it. I’m a cook. It’s what I do for a living.”
“I trust you have a top job at Buckingham Palace.”
As I smiled, grateful for his kindness, I suddenly realised that he too was treating me as if I were a real person instead of a fat freak. I began to feel less shy.
“But I must stop drooling over the cake,” he was saying briskly, “and start talking about you. First, let me offer you my sympathy. Even a long-awaited death can be extremely distressing when it finally comes. Second, let me offer you some assistance in dealing with all the things that have to be done. I understand there’s no family available.”
“Well, that’s most kind of you, but—”
“At St. Benet’s we have a team of people we call Befrienders—their main task is to listen to people in trouble, but occasionally it’s appropriate for them to take a more active role, particularly when someone’s bereaved and on her own. You talked to Francie, I believe, at the church yesterday?”
I said startled: “How did you know?”
“It’s in Nicholas’s case-notes—when you fainted she told him she’d spoken to you earlier. Now, we’ve often asked Francie to lend a helping hand in this sort of situation. You’d still be in control—she’ll do as much or as little as you want—and if she gets on your nerves you can tell her to get lost. But she could be useful.”
I found the proposal tempting. I remembered how willingly Francie had accepted my refusal to go up to the altar-rail for the laying-on of hands, how efficiently she had supplied me with Kleenex tissues, how tactfully she had avoided making a fuss.
“There are also spiritual matters as well as practical matters to
be considered,” resumed Mr. Hall purposefully after pausing to sink his teeth again into the cake. “Do you need a priest to conduct the funeral?”
“Clergyman,” I said automatically. “Aunt wasn’t a Catholic.”
He at once apologised, explaining that although he was from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England he respected the fact that the Church was a broad umbrella, sheltering Catholics and Protestants alike. “And was your aunt a churchgoer?” he enquired between swigs of tea.
“No,” I said, but I was so reassured by his willingness to tolerate Protestants that I decided to show him Aunt’s funeral instructions. He laughed at the reference to Scott Holland. “What a character your aunt must have been!” he commented amused, and I found myself beginning to talk to him of the past. In the end I even mentioned my awful mother up in Manchester and my vanished father who if he was still alive was probably being equally awful somewhere in Canada, and all the time Mr. Hall listened and nodded and watched me with those sinister black eyes which were now so bright with kindness, but at last it occurred to me that I must be taking up more time than he had allotted to the call, and I brought this rambling monologue to a swift conclusion.