Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [175]
‘Well, you have taken long enough,’ she said pettishly. ‘Is your father there? It is too late now in any case, I have given up all thoughts of it.’
When he failed to answer, she looked up at him sharply. Then her eyes widened and she started forward in her chair. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Where is your father?’
‘Something has happened,’ he said and his voice broke on it, not in grief yet – the death was all horror still – but in distress at not knowing how to tell her, not knowing how to speak of it to his mother, who had always had to be shielded, humoured. For a while he was silent, thinking of words to say. ‘Mother,’ he said at last, ‘you must prepare yourself–’
With a speed that took him by surprise she had flung down the cards and was out of her chair and standing close. Her head came lower than his chin but he felt no difference in height now, so fiercely did she look at him. ‘What is it?’ she said again. ‘Why don’t you speak?’ Her voice rose. ‘Has there been an accident?’
Still with an instinct of concealment or protection he said, ‘I locked the office door. No one can get in.’ It sounded like a boast. Then he felt the sharp clutch of her hands on his arms and he began to tell her but in his desire to be gradual he lost his way in the story; like a child, he grew enmeshed in the nightmare preliminaries, the clues that had led him to that hanging shape, the leaning flame, the half-opened door, the shadows that had seemed wrong, misshapen … ‘He was there, in the dark,’ he said, looking away from her in shame, his own, his father’s.
‘You say you locked the door? Did you bring away the keys?’
The sharpness of the question brought his eyes back to her. The patches of paint on her cheeks looked grotesque now, clownish, against the drained pallor of her face. But her eyes were regarding him closely and her mouth was compressed in a firm line.
‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘I have them with me.’
‘His own will be there with him, if he had locked the door. And the watchman?’
‘Watchman?’
‘Yes,’ she said with sudden angry impatience, ‘the watchman, the watchman. Gather your wits. We must be quick if we are to keep this hid. The watchman, does he have keys?’
‘Only to the storerooms below.’
‘We must have your father brought home tonight, but it cannot be done by any of our own people, it must all be done through Dr Banks. We must see him tonight, at once.’
‘But what use is that?’ He was bewildered. ‘I have told you he is dead,’ he said. ‘Would I have left him otherwise?’
‘For the certificate,’ she said, and he saw that her lips had begun trembling. ‘The doctor must sign to a cause of death. Do as I say, Erasmus. Go and see to the coach. William will be there still, he has been waiting all this while to take your father and me to the Mansion House. He will not have stabled the horses without permission.’ Her voice softened to a full tone of pity for him which he was never quite to forgive. ‘You must come with me,’ she said. ‘My poor boy, nothing will be required of you, but I must have someone … I must have a man with me at this hour of night. Go now. I will change my clothes meanwhile.’
Mutely, as if in a dream, he obeyed her. It was gone eleven when they drew up outside the doctor’s house, a large mansion in the newly opened and fashionable Bold Street. Henry Banks was now one of the leading physicians of the town but he had been doctor to the Kemps since the early days of his practice.
He received them almost at once in the small parlour he used as a consulting-room, apologizing for his evening attire of robe and skull-cap – he had been on the point of retiring for the night. He was a tall, high-shouldered man, deliberate and impressive in manner, with shrewd, equable eyes in a long face.
‘You will take something?’ he said, glancing from one to the other. He had recognized the hush of shock about them from the moment they entered the room. ‘A glass of cordial, perhaps, something to warm you? The nights are cold