Killed in the last war. Good thing, too. He’d have gone to the bad if he’d lived. I’m tired,’ said Aunt Ada, leaning back on her pillows and turning her head towards Miss Packard. ‘Take ’em away. You shouldn’t let strangers in to see me.’
‘I thought a nice little visit might cheer you up,’ said Miss Packard unperturbed.
Aunt Ada uttered a deep bass sound of ribald mirth.
‘All right,’ said Tuppence cheerfully. ‘We’ll go away again. I’ll leave the roses. You might change your mind about them. Come on, Tommy,’ said Tuppence. She turned towards the door.
‘Well, goodbye, Aunt Ada. I’m sorry you don’t remember me.’
Aunt Ada was silent until Tuppence had gone out of the door with Miss Packard and Tommy following her.
‘Come back, you,’ said Aunt Ada, raising her voice. ‘I know you perfectly. You’re Thomas. Red-haired you used to be. Carrots, that’s the colour your hair was. Come back. I’ll talk to you. I don’t want the woman. No good her pretending she’s your wife. I know better. Shouldn’t bring that type of woman in here. Come and sit down here in this chair and tell me about your dear mother. You go away,’ added Aunt Ada as a kind of postscript, waving her hand towards Tuppence who was hesitating in the doorway.
Tuppence retired immediately.
‘Quite in one of her moods today,’ said Miss Packard, unruffled, as they went down the stairs. ‘Sometimes, you know,’ she added, ‘she can be quite pleasant. You would hardly believe it.’
Tommy sat down in the chair indicated to him by Aunt Ada and remarked mildly that he couldn’t tell her much about his mother as she had been dead now for nearly forty years. Aunt Ada was unperturbed by this statement.
‘Fancy,’ she said, ‘is it as long as that? Well, time does pass quickly.’ She looked him over in a considering manner. ‘Why don’t you get married?’ she said. ‘Get some nice capable woman to look after you. You’re getting on, you know. Save you taking up with all these loose women and bringing them round and speaking as though they were your wife.’
‘I can see,’ said Tommy, ‘that I shall have to get Tuppence to bring her marriage lines along next time we come to see you.’
‘Made an honest woman of her, have you?’ said Aunt Ada.
‘We’ve been married over thirty years,’ said Tommy, ‘and we’ve got a son and a daughter, and they’re both married too.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Aunt Ada, shifting her ground with dexterity, ‘that nobody tells me anything. If you’d kept me properly up to date—’
Tommy did not argue the point. Tuppence had once laid upon him a serious injunction. ‘If anybody over the age of sixty-five finds fault with you,’ she said, ‘never argue. Never try to say you’re right. Apologize at once and say it was all your fault and you’re very sorry and you’ll never do it again.’
It occurred to Tommy at this moment with some force that that would certainly be the line to take with Aunt Ada, and indeed always had been.
‘I’m very sorry, Aunt Ada,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid, you know, one does tend to get forgetful as time goes on. It’s not everyone,’ he continued unblushingly, ‘who has your wonderful memory for the past.’
Aunt Ada smirked. There was no other word for it. ‘You have something there,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if I received you rather roughly, but I don’t care for being imposed upon. You never know in this place. They let in anyone to see you. Anyone at all. If I accepted everyone for what they said they were, they might be intending to rob and murder me in my bed.’
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Tommy.
‘You never know,’ said Aunt Ada. ‘The things you read in the paper. And the things people come and tell you. Not that I believe everything I’m told. But I keep a sharp look-out. Would you believe it, they brought a strange man in the other day—never seen him before. Called himself Dr Williams. Said Dr Murray was away on his holiday and this was his new partner. New partner! How was I to know he was his new partner? He just said he was, that’s all.’
‘Was he his new partner?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Aunt Ada, slightly annoyed at losing ground, ‘he actually was. But nobody could have known it for sure. There he was, drove up in a car, had that little kind of black box with him, which doctors carry to do blood pressure—and all that sort of thing. It’s like the magic box they all used to talk about so much. Who was it, Joanna Southcott’s?’
‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘I think that was rather different. A prophecy of some kind.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, my point is anyone could come into a place like this and say he was a doctor, and immediately all the nurses would smirk and giggle and say yes, Doctor, of course, Doctor, and more or less stand to attention, silly girls! And if the patient swore she didn’t know the man, they’d only say she was forgetful and forgot people. I never forget a face,’ said Aunt Ada firmly. ‘I never have. How is your Aunt Caroline? I haven’t heard from her for some time. Have you seen anything of her?’
Tommy said, rather apologetically, that his Aunt Caroline had been dead for fifteen years. Aunt Ada did not take this demise with any signs of sorrow. Aunt Caroline had after all not been her sister, but merely her first cousin.
‘Everyone seems to be dying,’ she said, with a certain relish. ‘No stamina. That’s what’s the matter with them. Weak heart, coronary thrombosis, high blood pressure, chronic bronchitis, rheumatoid arthritis—all the rest of it. Feeble folk, all of them. That’s how the doctors make their living. Giving them boxes and boxes and bottles and bottles of tablets. Yellow tablets, pink tablets, green tablets, even black tablets, I shouldn’t be surprised. Ugh! Brimstone and treacle they used to use in my grandmother’s day. I bet that was as good as anything. With the choice of getting well or having brimstone and treacle to drink, you chose getting well every time.’ She nodded her head in a satisfied manner. ‘Can’t really trust doctors, can you? Not when it’s a professional matter—some new fad—I’m told there’s a lot of poisoning going on here. To get hearts for the surgeons, so I’m told. Don’t think it’s true, myself. Miss Packard’s not the sort of woman who would stand for that.’
Downstairs Miss Packard, her manner slightly apologetic, indicated a room leading off the hall.
‘I’m so sorry about this, Mrs Beresford, but I expect you know how it is with elderly people. They take fancies or dislikes and persist in them.’
‘It must be very difficult running a place of this kind,’ said Tuppence.
‘Oh, not really,’ said Miss Packard. ‘I quite enjoy it, you know. And really, I’m quite fond of them all. One gets fond of people one has to look after, you know. I mean, they have their little ways and their fidgets, but they’re quite easy to manage, if you know how.’
Tuppence thought to herself that Miss Packard was one of those people who would know how.
‘They’re like children, really,’ said Miss Packard indulgently. ‘Only children are far more logical which makes it difficult sometimes with them. But these people are illogical, they want to be reassured by your telling them what they want
