He’s worried to death …’ She stopped short. Her jewelled hands twitched in her lap. ‘He’s troubled in his mind,’ she said, ‘and for the second occasion in our married life I’m at a loss to know why. Is it something to do with Maurice and the memoirs?’
‘Apparently. He wants the Colonel to edit them.’
‘The first occasion,’ Lady Lacklander muttered, ‘was twenty years ago and it made me perfectly miserable. And now, when the time has come for us to part company … and it has come, child, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes, darling, I think so. He’s very tired.’
‘I know. And I’m not, I’m seventy-five and grotesquely fat, but I have a zest for life. There are still,’ Lady Lacklander said with a change in her rather wheezy voice, ‘there are still things to be tidied up. George, for example.’
‘What’s my poor papa doing that needs a tidying hand?’ Mark asked gently.
‘Your poor papa,’ she said, ‘is fifty and a widower and a Lacklander. Three ominous circumstances.’
‘Which can’t be altered, even by you.’
‘They can, however be … Maurice! What is it?’
Colonel Cartarette had opened the door and stood on the threshold with the packages still under his arm.
‘Can you come, Mark? Quickly.’
Mark went past him into the bedroom. Lady Lacklander had risen and followed with more celerity than he would have thought possible. Colonel Cartarette stopped her in the doorway.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘wait a moment.’
‘Not a second,’ she said strongly. ‘Let me in, Maurice.’
A bell rang persistently in the hall below. Nurse Kettle, followed by a tall man in evening clothes, came hurrying up the stairs.
Colonel Cartarette stood on the landing and watched them go in.
Lady Lacklander was already at her husband’s bedside. Mark supported him with his right arm and with his left hand kept his thumb on a bell-push that lay on the bed. Sir Harold’s mouth was open and he was fetching his breath in a series of half-yawns. There was a movement under the bedclothes that seemed to be made by a continuous flexion and extension of his leg. Lady Lacklander stood massively beside him and took both his hands between hers.
I’m here, Hal,’ she said.
Nurse Kettle had appeared with a glass in her hand.
‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘Old-fashioned but good.’
Mark held it to his grandfather’s open mouth. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘It’ll help. Try.’
The mouth closed over the rim.
‘He’s got a little,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll give an injection.’
Nurse Kettle took his place. Mark turned away and found himself face-to-face with his father.
‘Can I do anything?’ George Lacklander asked.
‘Only wait here, if you will, Father.’
‘Here’s George, Hal,’ Lady Lacklander said. ‘We’re all here with you, my dear.’
From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter. ‘Vic – Vic … Vic,’ as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.
‘What is it?’ Lady Lacklander asked. ‘What is it, Hal?’
‘Somebody called Vic?’ Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.
‘There is nobody called Vic,’ said George Lacklander, and sounded impatient. ‘For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?’
‘In a moment,’ Mark said from the far end of the room.
‘Vic …’
‘The Vicar?’ Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. ‘Do you want the Vicar to come, Hal?’
His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.
Mark came back with a syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle turned away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.
‘What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?’ she asked. ‘Is it the Vicar?’
With a distinctness that astonished them, he whispered: ‘After all, you never know.’ And with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.
II
On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine.
He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.
Sir Harold had left everything in apple-pie order and his son anticipated little trouble. As he turned over the pages of his father’s diaries it occurred to him that as a family they richly deserved their too-much-publicized nickname of ‘Lucky Lacklanders.’ How lucky, for instance, that the eighth baronet, an immensely wealthy man, had developed a passion for precious stones and invested in them to such an extent that they constituted a vast realizable fortune in themselves. How lucky that their famous racing stables were so phenomenally successful. How uniquely and fantastically lucky they had been in that no fewer than three times in the past century a Lacklander had won the most famous of all sweepstakes. It was true, of course, that he himself might be said to have had a piece of ill-fortune when his wife had died in giving birth to Mark but as he remembered her, and he had to confess he no longer remembered her at all distinctly, she had been a disappointingly dull woman. Nothing like … But here he checked himself smartly and swept up his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He was disconcerted when at this precise moment the butler came in to say that Colonel Cartarette had called and would like to see him. In a vague way the visit suggested a judgment. He took up a firm position on the hearthrug.
‘Hallo, Maurice,’ he said when the Colonel came in. ‘Glad to see you.’ He looked self-consciously into the Colonel’s face and with a changed voice said: ‘Anything wrong?’
‘Well, yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘A hell of a lot actually. I’m sorry to bother you, George, so soon after your trouble and all that but the truth is I’m so damned worried that I feel I’ve got to share my responsibility with you.’
‘Me!’
