edges of her muscular hands on Commander Syce’s lumbar muscles, and said: ‘There goes the Colonel for the evening rise. You wouldn’t have stood that amount of punishment two days ago, would you?’
‘No,’ a submerged voice said, ‘I suppose not.’
‘Well! So that’s all I get for my trouble.’
‘No, no! Look here, look here!’ he gabbled, twisting his head in an attempt to see her. ‘Good heavens! What are you saying?’
‘All right. I know. I was only pulling your leg. There!’ she said. ‘That’s all for today and I fancy it won’t be long now before I wash my hands of you altogether.’
‘Of course I can’t expect to impose on your kindness any longer.’
Nurse Kettle was clearing up. She appeared not to hear this remark and presently bustled away to wash her hands. When she returned Syce was sitting on the edge of his improvised bed. He wore slacks, a shirt, a scarf and a dressing-gown.
‘Jolly D.,’ said Nurse Kettle. ‘Done it all yourself.’
‘I hope you will give me the pleasure of joining me for a drink before you go.’
‘On duty?’
‘Isn’t it off duty, now?’
‘Well,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘I’ll have a drink with you but I hope it won’t mean that when I’ve gone on me way rejoicing you’re going to have half a dozen more with yourself.’
Commander Syce turned red and muttered something about a fellah having nothing better to do.
‘Get along,’ said Nurse Kettle, ‘find something better. The idea!’
They had their drinks, looking at each other with an air of comradeship. Commander Syce, using a walking-stick and holding himself at an unusual angle, got out an album of photographs taken when he was on the active list in the navy. Nurse Kettle adored photographs and was genuinely interested in a long sequence of naval vessels, odd groups of officers and views of seaports. Presently she turned a page and discovered quite a dashing watercolour of a corvette and then an illustrated menu with lively little caricatures in the margin. These she greatly admired and observing a terrified and defiant expression on the face of her host, ejaculated: ‘You never did these yourself! You did! Well, aren’t you the clever one!’
Without answering he produced a small portfolio which he silently thrust at her. It contained many more sketches. Although Nurse Kettle knew nothing about pictures, she did, she maintained, know what she liked. And she liked these very much indeed. They were direct statements of facts and she awarded them direct statements of approval and was about to shut the portfolio when a sketch that had faced the wrong way round caught her attention. She turned it over. It was of a woman lying on a chaise-longue smoking a cigarette in a jade holder. A bougainvillaea flowered in the background.
‘Why,’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. ‘Why, that’s Mrs Cartarette!’
If Syce had made some kind of movement to snatch the sketch from her he checked himself before it was completed. He said very rapidly: ‘Party. Met her Far East. Shore leave. Forgotten all about it.’
‘That would be before they were married, wouldn’t it?’ Nurse Kettle remarked with perfect simplicity. She shut the portfolio, said: ‘You know, I believe you could make my picture-map of Swevenings.’ And told him of her great desire for one. When she got up and collected her belongings he, too, rose, but with an ejaculation of distress.
‘I see I haven’t made a job of you yet,’ she remarked. ‘Same time tomorrow suit you?’
‘Admirably,’ he said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ He gave her one of his rare painful smiles and watched her as she walked down the path towards his spinney. It was now a quarter to nine.
VI
Nurse Kettle had left her bicycle in the village where she was spending the evening with the Women’s Institute. She therefore took the River Path. Dusk had fallen over the valley of the Chyne and as she descended into it her own footfall sounded unnaturally loud on the firm turf. Thump, thump, thump she went, down the hillside. Once, she stopped dead, tilted her head and listened. From behind her at Uplands, came the not-unfamiliar sound of a twang followed by a sharp penetrating blow. She smiled to herself and walked on. Only desultory rural sounds disturbed the quiet of nightfall. She could actually hear the cool voice of the stream.
She did not cross Bottom Bridge but followed a rough path along the right bank of the Chyne, past a group of alders and another of willows. This second group, extending in a sickle-shaped mass from the water’s edge into Bottom Meadow rose up vapourishly in the dusk. She could smell willow-leaves and wet soil. As sometimes happens when we are solitary, she had the sensation of being observed but she was not a fanciful woman and soon dismissed this feeling.
‘It’s turned much cooler,’ she thought.
A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog.
She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river and found the body of Colonel Cartarette with his spaniel Skip beside it, mourning him.
Nurse Kettle was acquainted with death. She did not need Skip’s lament to tell her that the curled figure resting its head on a turf of river grass was dead. She knelt beside it and pushed her hand under the tweed jacket and silk shirt. ‘Cooling,’ she thought. A tweed hat with fisherman’s flies in the band lay over the face. Someone, she thought, might almost have dropped it there. She lifted it and remained quite still with it suspended in her hand. The Colonel’s temple had been broken as if his head had come under a waxworker’s hammer. The spaniel threw back his head and howled again.
‘Oh, do be quiet!’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. She replaced the hat and stood up, knocking her head against a branch. The birds that spent the night in the willows stirred again and some of them flew out with a sharp whirring sound. The Chyne gurgled and plopped and somewhere up in Nunspardon woods an owl hooted. ‘He has been murdered,’ thought Nurse Kettle.
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