18

Celia felt very selfish when she put down the receiver after breakfast. It was the first time she had ever refused doing anything for Maria. She adored the baby. There was nothing she liked better than going over to Richmond and spending a day with the baby. But Pappy’s publisher friend at the Garrick had made such a point of her going to see him on this particular day, taking the stories and the drawings, and it would be very discourteous to put him off.

Not that he would mind, not that it would really matter. He was a busy man, and it was just doing her a kindness, because she was Pappy’s daughter, that he bothered to see her at all. Only it would be rude not to go. How unfortunate that Maria should have been left without the nurse on this day of all days. Even if Celia had not made that appointment with the publisher it would be difficult to go over to Richmond. Pappy was not well. He had not been well for nearly a week. He kept complaining of pains. One moment in his head, one moment behind his knee, and the next moment in the small of his back. The doctor said that now he no longer sang he smoked too much. But would smoking too much give a person pains? Pappy had not been down to the Club now for several days. He pottered about at home in his dressing gown, and he hated being left alone, even for a few minutes.

“My darling,” he would call, “my darling, where are you?”

“In the morning-room, Pappy,” and she would cover up the story she was writing with a piece of blotting paper, and hide the pencil drawing underneath a book, because writing and drawing were to her private, rather furtive things. If you were suddenly discovered in the midst of them it was like being found in the act of prayer, or the door bursting open in the bathroom.

“Were you working, my darling? I won’t interrupt.” Pappy would settle himself in the chair by the fire with books and newspapers and letters, but the very fact of his presence did something to the room. She could not concentrate. Instead of being in a world of escape, she was back again once more in a world of reality. She was only Pappy’s daughter writing fairy tales. She felt self-conscious, cramped. She bit the end of her pencil, trying to recapture the lost mood. Every now and again Pappy coughed, or moved, and he rustled the pages of The Times.

“I don’t disturb you, do I, my darling?”

“No, Pappy.”

And she would lean forward over the table, making a pretence of working, and then after about five minutes or so she would stand up, and stretch, and say, “Well, really, I think that’s all for the moment,” and gather her things together, and put them away in a drawer.

“Finished?” said Pappy with relief, dropping The Times.

“Yes,” she answered.

“I’ve been wondering about those pills that Pleydon gave me,” said Pappy. “I don’t think they’re suiting me at all. The pains in my head have been much worse the last two days. I wonder if I should have my eyes tested again. It may be my eyes all the time.”

“We must go to see an oculist.”

“That’s what I thought. We will go to someone good. We will find out the name of someone really first-class, my darling.”

His eyes followed her as she moved about the room.

“What should I have done,” he said, “if you had wanted to be an actress like Maria? Sometimes I wake up in the night and I ask myself, what should I have done?”

“How silly,” said Celia. “It’s as silly as if I woke up and wondered what I should have done if you had ever married again, and the pair of us had lived here being bullied by a stranger.”

“Impossible, my darling,” said Pappy, shaking his head, “impossible. I read an article in some paper the other day about the mute swan. The mute swan mates for life. When the female dies the swan lives disconsolate; he takes no other. I thought to myself as I read it: Ah—that’s me. I am the mute swan.”

He must have forgotten about Australia, thought Celia, and South Africa, and that time we visited America; there were always women swarming around him like moths, he was not really very mute. Still, she knew what he meant.

“Your little stories and your clever drawings don’t take you away from me,” said Pappy, “but had you been an actress… I tremble to think what would have become of me. I should be in Denville Hall.”

“No, you would not,” said Celia. “You would be living with me in some sumptuous flat, and I should make more money than Maria.”

“Dross,” said Pappy, “filthy dross. What is lucre to you and me? Thank God I have not saved a penny… My darling, you must show your little stories to Harrison and the drawings too. I trust Harrison. His judgment is sound, and the stuff he publishes is good. Not one of the fancy boys. Besides, he will tell the truth to me, he won’t beat about the bush. It was I who put him up for the Garrick.”

Celia had sent some of her drawings and stories to this James Harrison, following on a lunch he had had with Pappy, and today she was to take any others she could find and be at his office at four o’clock that afternoon. She was worried, though. She wondered what Pappy would do while she was gone.

“I can have a shut-eye, my darling, from two to four,” said Pappy, “and then if I feel up to it I can take a little walk. Pleydon said it would not hurt me to walk.”

“I don’t like your walking alone,” said Celia. “You are so vague, you are always thinking of something else. And there’s that wretched crossroad where the buses go so fast.”

“If it were the summer I could go to Lord’s and watch the cricket,” said Pappy. “I always enjoy watching cricket. I like sitting in that covered stand, next to the pavilion. Looking back, you know, I think I made a mistake in not sending Niall to Eton. He might have been a cricketer. It would have given me great pleasure to have watched Niall playing cricket for Eton.”

He was always talking nowadays, thought Celia, of the things he might have done. The houses they should have lived in, the countries they could have visited. It was a pity, he had said only that morning, that he had never taken up swimming really seriously. With his physique, he told Celia, he could easily have swum the Channel. He should have chucked singing directly Mama died, and gone in for long-distance swimming. He could have beaten all the experts. He might have swum the Channel twice, from either side. “But why, Pappy?” she asked. “Surely it’s much more satisfactory to have done what you have done?”

He shook his head. “My ignorance is profound,” he said, “about so many things. Take astronomy. I know nothing about astronomy. Why all those stars? Why, I ask myself?” And there and then she had to ring up Bumpus and find out whether there was a book on stars, a new book, a large book full of plates, and whether Bumpus could send it up in time for lunch by special messenger.

“This will keep me amused, my darling, while you are seeing Harrison,” said Pappy. “There is one planet, I never can remember which, Jupiter, I think, that has two moons. They circle about the planet night and day. A wonderful thought. Jupiter, alone amid the darkness, with two moons.”

She left him quite happy and contented, propped up in two chairs in the morning-room for his afternoon shut-eye, with the volume on stars beside him on the table. The maid was instructed to look in on him once or twice, in case he should need anything; and, of course, to go to him upon the instant should he ring the bell.

As she took a bus down the Wellington Road as far as Marylebone, where she found a taxi, Celia wondered if Maria had been able to manage Caroline, and her conscience smote her again for having failed Maria in emergency.

“I am tied to the house,” Maria had said, “literally tied to the house the live-long day, because of Caroline.”

“Only for this once,” Celia protested. “That nurse is really very good. She never asks to go out.”

“It’s the thin edge of the wedge,” said Maria. “Now she has started she will always be doing it. It’s a great responsibility, being a mother.” It was her grumpy, spoiled voice. She did not really mean it. Celia knew the voice so well. In two minutes she would have forgotten all about having asked Celia for the day, and would be planning something else. If only Maria lived a little closer, Celia could have shared the responsibility of Caroline. It would only mean two children to look after instead of one. Because Pappy was a child. He needed humoring, and coaxing, and taking care of in much the same way as a child.

She even found herself using a special voice to him these days, a gentle, half-teasing banter, a kind of “Come now, what’s the matter?” sort of voice. And if he picked at his food and grumbled, she pretended to take no notice. It was just a child’s trick to draw attention. But when he ate well she was careful to remark upon the fact and smile encouragement. “Oh, good, you’ve managed a whole wing of chicken. That does please me. Would you fancy a tiny scrap more?”

It was strange how a person came full circle. How a man was once a baby and a boy, and then a lover and a father, and now a child again. It was strange that once she had been a little girl, climbing onto Pappy’s knee, burying her head in his shoulder, clinging to him for protection, and he had been young, and strong, and like a god. And now it was all over, the purpose of his life. The strength had ebbed away. The man who had lived, and loved, and given the beauty of his voice to millions, was weary, and crabbed, and fretful, following with his eyes the daughter he had once protected and carried in his arms. Yes, Pappy had come full circle. He was back again, on the road where he had begun. But why? To what end? Would anybody ever know?

The taxi drew up outside the building in the narrow street in Bloomsbury, and Celia, nervous suddenly, uncertain, paid off the driver and, going inside the building, asked at a door marked “Enquiries” for Mr. Harrison. A girl smiled over pince-nez, and said Mr. Harrison was expecting her. It was always surprising, and warming too, when people whom one did not know were kind. Like the girl with pince-nez. Or bus drivers. Or the fishmonger on the telephone. It made, Celia thought, such a difference to the day.

And Mr. Harrison, when she was shown into the room, rose from his desk at once to greet her, and walked towards her with a smile on his face. She had thought he might be hard and brisk, with a clear-cut, decisive manner, like a schoolmaster. But he was fatherly and kind. He pulled forward an armchair for her to sit in, and everything was made easy for her at once, because he began to talk about Maria.

“She has not given up the stage, I hope,” he said. “It would be a very great loss to all her admirers if she did that.”

Celia explained about the baby, and he nodded; he understood, he said he had a nephew who knew Charles.

“Your brother has written the music for this new revue, hasn’t he?” he said, and so from Maria they passed to Niall, and all that Niall had achieved during the past years in Paris, and Celia had to explain the muddled relationship between them all, that she was half-sister to each, and that Niall and Maria were nothing to do with one another. “They are very close, though,” she said. “They understand each other perfectly.”

“You are a very talented family, very talented indeed,” said Mr. Harrison. He paused after he said this, and he reached for some papers on his desk, and Celia saw her own handwriting on the stories, and the drawings beneath another sheaf of paper.

“Do you remember your mother well?” he said abruptly, reaching for his spectacles, and Celia felt nervous for no reason—he seemed suddenly like the schoolmaster she had feared.

“Yes,” she said. “I was between ten and eleven when she died. We have none of us forgotten her. But we don’t talk about her much.”

“I saw her dance many times,” said Mr. Harrison. “She had a quality about her that was entirely individual, and that no one, as far as I know, has ever been able to describe. It was not ballet. That was the extraordinary thing. There was no grouping, no set figures. Yet she told a story as she danced, and the dance was the story, and the pathos of the whole world would come suddenly with one movement, with the folding of her hands. She relied on nothing and on no one, not even the music; the music was secondary to the movement. She danced alone. That was the beauty of it, you know. She danced alone.” He took off his spectacles and polished them. He seemed quite moved. Celia waited for him to continue. She did not know what to say.

“And you?” he said. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t dance?”

Celia smiled nervously. He seemed almost angry with her for some reason. “Oh, no,” she said, “I can’t dance at all. I’m frightfully clumsy, and I’ve always been too fat. I can do ordinary foxtrots, of course, if I get asked to parties, but Niall says I’m heavy and trip against his feet. Niall dances beautifully, and so does Maria.”

“Then how is it,” said Mr. Harrison, “that you are able to draw like this?” He took one of her drawings from the sheaf of papers on the desk, and held it in front of her, in accusation. It was not one that Celia liked very much. It was the one where the child was running from the four winds, and he held his hands up to his ears, so that he could not hear the four winds call him. She had tried to make the child stumble as he ran, and she had never thought the stumble was effective. Besides, the background was too vague. The trees were dark, but not dark enough. And, anyway, she had finished it in a hurry because of Pappy calling to her, and the mood had gone when she had tried to do something to the trees the following day.

“The little boy is not dancing,” said Celia. “He is meant to be running away. He is frightened. It explains it, in the story that goes with it. But there are other drawings, better than that.”

“I know perfectly well he is not dancing,” said Mr. Harrison. “I know he is running away. For how long have you been drawing? Two years? Three years?”

“Oh, longer than that,” said Celia. “The fact is, I have always drawn. I’ve been drawing all my life. It’s the only thing I can do.”

“The only thing?” said Mr. Harrison. “My dear child, what more do you want? Aren’t you satisfied with that?”

He came and stood beside the fireplace, looking down at her.

“I talked just now about your mother,” he said, “and a certain quality she possessed. I have not seen that quality before or since, in any other form of art, until this week. Now I have seen it again. In these drawings of yours. Never mind the stories. I don’t care a pin about the stories. They are effective, and charming, and will do very well. But these rough drawings of yours are in a class by themselves.”

Celia stared up at him, bewildered. How very odd. The drawings had not been difficult to do. But she had taken hours and hours over the stories. What a fearful waste that Mr. Harrison did not think much of the stories.

“You mean,” she said, “you think the drawings are the best?”

“I have just told you,” he said, patiently. “They’re in a class by themselves. I don’t know anyone today who does that sort of work at all. I am very excited about them, and I hope you are too. You have a great future ahead of you.”

It was very kind and very nice, thought Celia, to make such a to-do about her drawings. It would hardly have happened had he not been a friend of Pappy’s, and a member of the Garrick, and an old admirer of Mama’s.

“Thank you,” she said, “thank you very much.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I have done nothing except look at your drawings, and shown them to an expert who agreed with my opinion. Now, come on. Have you brought any more with you? What are those things you are carrying in your bag?”

“Well, they are more stories,” Celia apologized. “There are only two or three drawings, not awfully good. These stories may be better, though, than the ones you have seen.”

He waved them away. He was bored stiff with the stories.

“Let’s have a look at the drawings,” he said.

He examined them carefully, one by one; he took them to his desk, under the light. He might have been a scientist with a microscope.

“Yes,” he said, “these last were done in a hurry, weren’t they? You have not taken so much trouble.”

“Pappy hasn’t been well,” said Celia. “I’ve been rather bothered about Pappy.”

“The point is,” said Mr. Harrison, “we have not quite enough drawings yet for the book I have in mind. You must do some more work. How long does it take you to finish one of these? Three days, four days?”

“It depends,” said Celia. “I can’t really work to plan. Because of Pappy.” Mr. Harrison brushed Pappy aside, as he had brushed away the stories.

“Don’t you worry about your father,” he said. “I’ll talk to him. He knows what work means. He’s been through it himself.”

Celia said nothing. It was difficult to explain to Mr. Harrison what it was like at home.

“You see,” she said, “I am really in charge. I order the meals and things. And Pappy is not very strong these days. You must have noticed that. I don’t get a great deal of time.”

“You must make time,” said Mr. Harrison. “You can’t treat a talent like yours as though it did not matter. I won’t allow it.”

He was like a schoolmaster after all. It was just as she had feared. He was now going to make a fuss about her drawings, and write to Pappy, and worry Pappy, and say that time must be set aside for her to work, and everything would become a performance, and a ritual, and be difficult. Drawing would become a burden instead of an escape.

It was nice of Mr. Harrison to take so much trouble, but she wished now she had not come. “Well,” she said, getting up from her chair, “it’s been most terribly nice of you to take all this trouble, but…”

“Where are you going? What are you doing?” he said. “We have not discussed your contract yet, we have not talked business.”

It was after half-past five before she got away. She had to have tea, and meet two other men, and they made her sign some terrifying form like a death-warrant, promising to give any work that she might do to Mr. Harrison. He insisted, and so did the other men, that the stories were no good without the drawings, and they wanted the other drawings as soon as possible, in four or five weeks’ time. She knew she could never do it, she felt trapped. She wondered what would happen if she failed them, now that she had signed the contract. Would they sue her?

Finally, she tore herself away, shaking hands twice over, and forgetting, in her haste, to say good-bye to the girl with the pince-nez in Enquiries who had smiled. There was not a taxi to be seen. She had to walk almost as far as Euston before she found a taxi, and then it was close on six o’clock, and getting dark. The first thing she noticed when she reached home was that the garage door was open. And the car was not inside. Pappy had not driven the car for several weeks. Not since he had been unwell. Either she had driven him, or he had taken a taxi. She ran up the steps to the house, her heart beating, fumbling for her latchkey. She opened the door and ran inside, calling for the maid.

“Where is Mr. Delaney?” she said. “What has happened?”

The maid looked scared and nervous. “He’s gone out, miss,” she said. “We couldn’t stop him. And we did not know where you were, to let you know.”

“How do you mean, he has gone out?”

“He must have fallen asleep, miss, after you went. I went in twice, and he was quite still in his chair, and peaceful. And then, about five o’clock it was, we heard him come out into the hall. I came up from the kitchen, thinking he might want something, and he looked very strange, miss, not like himself at all, very red about the face and his eyes all queer and staring. I was quite frightened.”

“ ‘I’m going down to the theater,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea it was so late.’ ”

“I think he must have been dreaming, miss. He brushed past me, and went down the steps to the garage. I heard him start up the car. There was nothing I could do. We’ve been waiting here, miss, until you came back. Perhaps Miss Celia will know where he has gone, we said.”

Celia did not stop to listen to any more. She went into the morning-room. The chair was pushed back from the fire, as Pappy had left it. The book about the stars was on the table. It was not even open. There was no clue to tell her where he had gone. No clue at all.

She rang up the Garrick Club. No, said the hall porter, Mr. Delaney had not been to the Club today. She telephoned Dr. Pleydon. Dr. Pleydon was not in. He was not expected before half-past seven. Celia went back to the hall and questioned the maid again.

“What did he say?” she asked. “What were his exact words?”

The maid repeated what she had said before.

“Mr. Delaney said, ‘I’m going down to the theater. I had no idea it was so late.’ ”

The theater. What theater? Into what dim, dusty labyrinth of the mind was Pappy wandering? Celia telephoned for a taxi, and went down again to London, and on the way she tried to explain to the taxi driver what she wished to do. “The car is a Sunbeam,” she said, “and I think my father will have tried to park it outside the stage-door of a theater. But I don’t know what theater. It might be almost any theater.”

“Bit of a twister, isn’t it?” said the man. “You say any theater. West End or Hammersmith? What I mean is, there are all sorts, aren’t there? Music-Hall, variety, Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand…”

“The Adelphi,” said Celia, “go to the Adelphi.”

Was it not at the Adelphi that they had played, that last season, Pappy and Mama? That last London winter season, before Mama died?

The taxi twisted and turned in the stream of traffic, and the driver did not pick his way as he should have done, he took her the longest and most crowded way, right through the center of Piccadilly Circus, right through the humming heart of London. He cut across no by-streets, but went swinging down the Haymarket, and round Trafalgar Square into the Strand, and when they drew abreast of the Adelphi he stopped the taxi with a jerk and looked back at Celia through the window, saying, “Drawn a blank here, anyway. The theater’s closed.” He was right. The doors were closed and barred, and there were no bills posted on the walls. “That’s right,” the driver said, “the show came off last week, didn’t it? A musical.”

“I think I will get out, anyway,” said Celia. “I’ll walk round to the stage-door. Perhaps you would wait for me in the street behind.”

“It’s going to cost you something,” said the driver, “trying all the theatres in this way. Why not call in the police?”

But she did not listen to him. She was feeling the barred doors of the closed theater. They were firmly locked, of course. She turned away and walked up the street at the side, and into the alleyway, dark and sinister, where Bill Terriss had been murdered. There was no one there at all. The posters of the last play, torn and defaced, stared at her from beside the stage-door. A cat came towards her from the shadows. It arched its back, and mewed against her legs, and then prowled away again into the darkness.

She turned back again down the alleyway into the street. The taxi was waiting for her at the corner. The driver had lit a cigarette, and sat with his arms folded, watching her. “Any luck?” he said.

“No,” said Celia, “go on waiting for me, please.”

He muttered something and she hurried away once more, along another street, and then another, and all the buildings were the same, dark, blank, and impersonal, and she knew now, of course, that it was not the Adelphi that she wanted at all, but Covent Garden.

There was a policeman standing by the Opera House. He flashed his lamp at her as she came across and tried the door of the waiting Sunbeam.

“Are you looking for someone?” he said.

“I am looking for my father,” said Celia. “He is not very well, and this is his car. I’m afraid something may have happened to him.”

“Are you Miss Delaney?” said the policeman.

“Yes,” said Celia, and she was suddenly afraid.

“I was warned to wait here for you, miss,” said the policeman, his manner quiet and kind. “The Inspector thought one of the family might be along. I’m afraid your father has been taken ill. Loss of memory, they think. They’ve taken him in an ambulance to the Charing Cross Hospital.”

“Thank you,” said Celia, “thank you. I understand.”

She was calm and steady now, and the feeling of panic had gone from her. Pappy had been found. Pappy was no longer wandering in the streets, lost and lonely, with the dead. He was safe. He was in the Charing Cross Hospital.

“I’ll take you round there in the car, miss,” said the policeman. “He left the key. He must have been only gone from the car a few minutes when he fell down.”

“He fell down?” said Celia.

“Yes, miss. The stage-door-keeper at the Opera House was standing just across there, by the open door, and saw him fall. He went to him at once. He recognized Mr. Delaney. Then he called for me, and I got the Inspector, and we phoned through for the ambulance. Loss of memory, that’s what they think it is. But they’ll tell you at the Hospital.”

“I have a taxi waiting around the corner by the Adelphi,” said Celia. “I’d better pay him off before we go to the Hospital.”

“That’s all right, miss,” said the policeman. “It’s all on the way.”

For the second time in the day she was struck by the kindness of people. Even the taxi driver, who at first had seemed sullen and unfriendly, was sympathetic when she handed him his fare.

“I’m sorry if you’ve had bad news,” he said. “Would you like me to come and wait outside the Hospital?”

“No,” said Celia, “it’s quite all right. Thank you so much. Good night.”

As she went into the Hospital it was as though the afternoon repeated itself in a strange fashion. Once again she had to go to a room marked “Enquiries,” and once again the woman there behind the desk wore pince-nez. But this time she was dressed as a nurse. And she did not smile. She listened, and nodded, and spoke into a telephone.

“That’s all right,” she said; “they’re expecting you.” And she rang a bell, and Celia followed another nurse into a lift.

There were many floors, and many corridors, and many nurses, and somewhere in this great building, Celia thought, Pappy lies waiting for me, and he will be alone, and he won’t understand. He will think that I have done the thing that I have promised never to do. That I have gone away, and left him, and that he does not belong anywhere, anymore.

They came at last, not to a public ward as she had feared, but to a private room. Pappy was lying on the bed with his eyes closed.

“He is dead, of course,” she thought. “He has been dead for quite a long time. He must have died as soon as he stepped out of the car, and looked across at the stage-door of Covent Garden.”

There was a doctor in the room, and a sister, and another nurse. The doctor wore a white coat. He carried a stethoscope round his neck.

“You are Miss Delaney?” he said. And he looked surprised, a little puzzled. Celia realized then that they must have been expecting Maria. They did not know about her. They had not thought there would be another daughter. “Yes,” she said, “I’m the youngest. I live at home with my father.”

“I’m afraid you must be prepared for a shock,” said the doctor.

“Yes,” said Celia. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“No,” said the doctor, “but he’s had a very severe stroke. He’s very ill indeed.”

They went and stood together by the bed. They had wrapped Pappy in one of the hospital nightshirts, and it was somehow shocking and rather terrible to see Pappy dressed in this way, not in his own pajamas, not in his own bed. His breathing was heavy and queer.

“If he must die,” said Celia, “I would want him to die at home. He has always been afraid of hospitals. He would not want it to happen here.”

They looked at her strangely, the doctor and the nurse, and she wondered if they thought her very rude, very churlish, in saying this; because they were taking a lot of trouble to help Pappy, they had put him here in this bed, and were looking after him.

“I appreciate that,” said the doctor. “We are all a little bit afraid of hospitals. But your father isn’t necessarily going to die, Miss Delaney. His heart is steady. And so is his pulse. He has a magnificent constitution. The point is, that with a case like this it is virtually impossible to forecast what may happen. He might go on like this, with very little change, for weeks, for months.”

“Will he be in pain?” said Celia. “That’s the only thing that matters. Will he be in pain?”

“No,” said the doctor, “no, there should be no pain. But he will be quite helpless. You understand that. He would have to be nursed, day and night, professionally. You have facilities for that at home?”

“Yes,” said Celia, “yes, of course.”

She said this to reassure the doctor, and in a clear, detached, far-sighted fashion she thought how she could turn Maria’s old room into a room for the nurse, and the nurse and she could share the business of looking after Pappy together. The servants would be distressed, because of the extra work, they might even threaten to leave, but then something would have to be arranged. Truda might come perhaps for a few weeks, she might even persuade André to come back again for a little while, and, anyway, that new young housemaid was very willing.

Her mind went running on into the future, and she thought how it might be possible when the warmer weather came to drag Pappy’s bed into the old drawing room on the first floor that they never used. New curtains would be needed, but they would not be difficult to find, and it would be more cheerful in that room, and quieter too.

The doctor was handing her something in a glass.

“What do you want me to do?” she said. “What’s this?”

“Drink it down,” he said quietly. “You’ve had a very great shock, you know.” She swallowed down the stuff in the glass, and it did not make her feel better at all. It was bitter, and queer, and her legs were suddenly very weak and stumbly, like cotton wool, and she was tired.

“I would like to ring up my sister,” she said.

“Of course,” said the doctor, and he led the way out into the corridor and she was aware of the terrible, clean, impersonal smell of hospitals, a smell that belonged to no one, that was part of the building, and the unshaded lights, and the bare, scrubbed walls and floors, and had nothing to do with the nurse who walked beside her, or the doctor swinging his stethoscope, or Pappy unconscious in the room where she had left him, or the other sick people lying dumbly in their beds.

The doctor took her to a little room and switched on a light.

“You can telephone from here,” he said. “You know the number?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, thank you.”

He went out, and stood waiting in the passage. And she called the number of Maria’s house at Richmond. But it was not Maria who answered. It was Gladys, the parlormaid.

“Mrs. Wyndham isn’t back yet,” she said. “She went out this afternoon taking baby with her, and we haven’t seen anything of her since she went, just after two.”

The voice was surprised, a little aggrieved. The voice suggested that the least Mrs. Wyndham might have done was to warn her staff that she expected to be out so long. Celia pressed her hands against her eyes.

“All right,” she said, “it does not matter. I’ll ring Mrs. Wyndham later.”

She put back the receiver and lifted it again. She asked for the number of Niall’s room at the theater. She went on ringing. And surely, she thought with sudden hopelessness and a new kind of dead despair, they can’t both be out and away, now at this minute in my life, when I need both of them so much? Surely one of them will come, surely one of them will help me? Because I don’t want to go home alone. I don’t want to be in the house alone, without Pappy.

The telephone went on ringing. “I’m sorry,” the operator said, “there is no reply.”

His voice was chill and distant, he was a number at a switchboard, he was not one of the people who were kind.

Celia turned out the light of the little telephone room, and fumbled for the handle of the door. She could not find it. Her hands moved over the hard, smooth surface of the door. In sudden panic she began to beat against it.