Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (23 page)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mr Osmond said. ‘Mrs Palfrey is now beyond the reach of interlopers. Mrs Palfrey has been taken from us.’

‘You mean she’s dead?’

‘Mrs Palfrey – your so-called grandmother – has been taken to hospital. This afternoon. We fear a broken hip. We are led to understand a broken hip. A bad thing at our age, I believe.’

Mr Osmond had hung about the vestibule ever since Mrs Palfrey had been carried from it, her eyes closed, though she was not asleep – to the waiting ambulance.

Mr Wilkins, the manager, had been furious at the sight of a stretcher-case being carried down his steps. He was getting a little tired of these old people, with their stingy tipping, no wine at table, hogging the television at peak hours, cluttering up the place and boring everybody. His dream was Conference trade, drinking businessmen, a board in the hall saying ‘I.G.I. Pompadour Suite. 11 a.m.’ He aspired to that.

‘She was unconscious, being carried away,’ Mr Osmond told
le vrai
Desmond.

Mrs Palfrey had in fact shut her eyes against suffering pain in public, being carried across the pavement: people pausing to watch, and no Ludo to help her.. she quickly turned her thoughts from him.

‘Where can I inquire about my grandmother?’ asked Desmond impatiently; but only Mrs Burton appeared, no receptionist.

‘I’ve told you,’ Mr Osmond said. ‘We just can’t swallow that one. There’s no resemblance. None. No resemblance at all; don’t you agree with me, Mrs Burton?’

‘Who to?’

‘To Mrs Palfrey’s grandson.’

‘
That
gorgeous boy? No, none. Should there be?’

‘He’s supposed to
be
him. Gives the name.’

Mrs Burton went off into brief peals of laughter, then remembered the sadness of the day. She drifted instead towards a drink.

Artfully, Mr Osmond said to this impostor grandson, ‘Well, if you really
are
who you
say
you are, why not get on the telephone to the hospital? Saint Laurence’s. You’re kin, you say. They should tell you. Miss What’s-her-name will get the number for you.’ He looked round. ‘She should be here any minute. From wherever she is.’

‘I’ll ring up from home thank you,’ Desmond said. And he would have to, he supposed; inform his mother -pass
that
buck, but it seemed to him that the urgency of the visit had diminished.

Mrs Palfrey’s letter to her daughter about the proposal of marriage had caused, in Scotland, not just a ripple of surprise and grudging admiration, as Mrs Palfrey had naughtily intended; but consternation. Someone was after Mummy’s money and, as Mummy was becoming gaga, Desmond had been instructed to find out exactly what was happening. Feeling, on this occasion, an interested party, he had arrived (but in his
own time) at the Claremont. Grannie in hospital suited him admirably. A broken hip must delay nuptials, and he could now, and for the near future go on devoting himself to his writing.

He thanked Mr Osmond for his information and left, and Mr Osmond stared after him and thought how much less callously her real grandson would have reacted. Which was only natural. But a poor actor this one, a most unconvincing – and, for that matter – not very insistent impostor. Strange, Mr Osmond mused.

‘Any news?’ Mrs Post whispered, touching his sleeve in her agitation.

‘Only that Mrs Palfrey will need all the protection we can give her when she returns. Already rogues are impersonating her kin.’

‘She may
not
return,’Mrs Post thought – her mind full of memorial services. To see Mrs Palfrey, of all people, being carried down those public steps, in broad daylight, across the common pavement, with people staring (as Mrs Palfrey in her great pain, feeling blood creeping down from her brow again, had realised they would) – that had upset them all. It was like watching a famous statue topple over. Prone, and broken, she was hardly Mrs Palfrey.

Mrs Burton was returning from the hairdresser just as it happened, had hurried up the steps with arms outstretched, had kneeled by Mrs Palfrey and put an elbow round her shoulders, had dabbed gently at blood on her forehead with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. She had protested when Summers and Mr Wilkins came out
to carry Mrs Palfrey inside, had said – and was joined in this by Mr Osmond – that it was dangerous to move her until the ambulance arrived; that a rug and a cup of sweet tea would do more good, and to tie her legs together with a scarf.

But Mr Wilkins wanted Mrs Palfrey out of sight. Old ladies falling about. He thought he had had enough. ‘She will be comfier in the vestibule,’ he said. And, good God! it was bad enough to have her
there.
Someone had telephoned for an ambulance, but they might not see
that
for another half an hour.

‘Well, here’s a gallimaufry!’ said Mr Osmond to Antonio, who spooned
blanquette de veau
on to his plate. He liked the word, and used it for any sort of stew, sometimes ordered stew especially because he felt like saying it.

‘Blanquette de veau,’
Antonio said.

Mr Osmond set his lips together and breathed slowly down his nose, as if this were his way of keeping his patience. Mrs Post was right. Antonio was getting above himself.

The meat was stringy, the sauce gluey. He glanced at the Colonel’s table. He was tackling a cutlet, had chosen better.

The place was busy this evening. A couple of men were sitting at Mrs Palfrey’s table. The surface had been smoothed. He saw that Mrs Post had laid her knife and fork together on her uneaten stew. They had no appetite
this evening. Only the Colonel ate on, as if nothing had happened, and it might be forgiven on grounds of such a short acquaintance.

Mr Osmond’s heart felt literally heavy and lowered. Somewhere near his loins it ticked sluggishly away. Why should it bother? Mr Osmond wondered. All his life it had obligingly gone on pulsating; sometimes, of late, in fits and starts. Mr Osmond tried a little more veal then he, too, put his knife and fork together and sat back. Oh, well, he thought, we’re all saddled with our hearts. It was a strange old pumping outfit God had thought up on that last day – so Victorian, it seemed.

Mrs Burton with her newly bouffant hair came in late, twinkled her fingers, as if brushing crumbs off them, at Colonel Mildmay, passing his table. He was eating cheese and biscuits now, and half rose and smiled, his mouth full of cracker.

She’s got her eye on him, Mr Osmond thought grimly. It might prove interesting to watch the Colonel’s evasive actions. But not very, he decided.

The men at Mrs Palfrey’s table were scattering cigarette ash all over the cloth, and Mrs Post, good soul that she was, was glaring at them.

Mr Osmond, sickened by the cold and wrinkled food on his plate, got up and left the room, forfeiting his icecream. He went back to the vestibule and hung about there, as it seemed to him to be the place where news -if any – might arrive: but none did.

L
UDO waited in the hospital corridor. Other people standing about had bunches of chrysanthemums, and stared before them, as if dazed, at the closed doors of the ward.

Having saved up the fifty pounds he owed to Mrs Palfrey, Ludo had given in his notice at the Plaka Taverna and now was set for resuming – in fact completing – his novel in Harrods Banking Hall.

The walls of the hospital corridor were a chipped dark-green so high up, and then a dingy cream. The smell of antiseptics and of chrysanthemums was ungenial. He was apprehensive.

Bounding eagerly through the swing doors of the Claremont, he had been met with the set face of Mr Osmond, who stood there bracing himself for bad news.

Mrs Post appeared immediately and was joined by Mrs Burton, who described the scene of Mrs Palfrey’s fall most vividly to Ludo: how her – Mrs Burton’s -handkerchief had been soaked with blood, and how she had tried to dissuade the manager from moving Mrs Palfrey.

Mr Wilkins heard this and came forward in fury. How these old fools hung about the place these days, getting in the way of reception, of luggage being brought in and out.

‘The porter and I knew what we were doing,’ he told Ludo in a low, but firm voice. ‘We are both ex-Army.’

‘The Catering Corps,’ Mr Osmond murmured to Mrs Post. ‘What the devil’s that got to do with it?’

‘Your mother has been informed,’ Mr Wilkins went on. ‘It is in her hands now. I am surprised you had not already heard. It occurred yesterday.’

‘I was away from home.’

‘That will account for it then. I am only sorry that you had to hear of it in this way.’ He tilted his head back to indicate the old people grouped behind him. ‘Their imaginations get the better of them.’ He had lowered his voice even more, and he smiled as if he were talking about naughty children.

The account of Mrs Palfrey’s fall had certainly been graphic, and this was why Ludo felt such dread as he stood waiting in the hospital corridor. The scene as Mrs Burton had described it had suddenly reminded him of the old Soviet film
Potemkin –
that sequence of the steps at Odessa; of the old lady, in particular, falling, with blood on her face, her spectacles smashed.

A nurse now opened the double glass doors at the end of the passage, and the little crowd, with Ludo at the back, shuffled forwards, leaving a trail of petals.

Mrs Palfrey was half-way down the ward, her bandaged head turned wearily aside, for she expected no one. When she sensed someone coming towards her and then saw Ludo standing beside her, her face changed, her lips trembled, mumbled in a clumsy way: she turned over the hand which lay on the coverlet, as if it
were the only sort of welcome she could manage.

He drew up a chair and sat beside her. Her breathing was difficult, so he talked to her, went softly on, telling her whatever came into his head – about the Plaka, and his mother, gave her messages from her old friends at the Glaremont, invented one from the manager. ‘They said they would like to visit you,’ he said. But Mrs Palfrey, feeling pursued still by Mr Osmond, turned her head on the pillow and whispered, ‘Only you.’

‘Your daughter? Is she coming?’

‘I had a message. She telephoned to say she will come. On the night train on Monday. They have a week-end house-party, for the shooting.’

Ludo nodded, thinking, What a bitch!

‘And your grandson?
Le vrai
Desmond?’

‘Not yet.’

Running out of things to say, Ludo looked about him.

Opposite Mrs Palfrey, an old lady sat out of bed, in her dressing-gown. Only because of her being in
this
ward, did Ludo know that she was not a man: nearly bald she was, no suggestion of her sex about her, even the dressing-gown was grey and corded. She was playing with some children’s bricks on a little table before her, laboriously building them up, then naughtily knocking them down and scrambling them about.

Mrs Palfrey, following Ludo’s glance, said, ‘I didn’t want to die amongst people of that kind. I wanted to be private.’

‘You aren’t going to die,’ Ludo said quickly.

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Mrs Palfrey said apologeti
cally. Perhaps when Elizabeth comes, she’ll see to it that I have a room of my own.’

‘I’ll
see to it,’ Ludo said.

‘Oh, I should love it if you could. Monday seems so far away. I should like my own night-gowns, too. And my book of poetry. I lie here trying to remember poems, to take my mind off things; but they’re all gone – nearly all gone.’

‘Don’t talk any more. You’ll tire yourself.’

He covered her hand with his, and they sat in silence; she, with her eyes closed, and he staring at the clock above the door and wondering how long before he could get away.

When at last the bell rang, a stir went round the room, people began to give last messages, repeating what they had already said. They patted pillows and made promises, and a general air of relief and jollity prevailed.

Ludo stood up. He put the envelope with the fifty pounds in it into Mrs Palfrey’s hand. ‘That’s yours. Don’t lose it. I’ll come again.’

He was gone; one of the first out, down the petalled corridor as fast as he could walk, to arrange with someone, if he could, about the private ward before it was too late.

‘Pneumonia has set in,’ said Mr Osmond, returning from the telephone. He sat down and looked across at Mrs Post. ‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’