Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [177]
There was another silence. Dr Banks looked straight before him, tapping his long fingers softly together, his face composed in its habitual gravity of expression. ‘I could support the condition of high blood pressure,’ he said at last. ‘That is, if asked, I could confirm that Kemp received treatment from me for that condition – if asked, let us say, by this other physician your husband had been seeing. That would not be to certify cause of death, you understand. But in the event of a certificate being signed by someone else, it might lend credence. Yes, I should say pretty certainly it would lend credence.’ He got up on this and went to his desk, where he spent some time searching in a drawer and a further brief time writing. When he came back to them he held a slip of paper in his hand. ‘The doctor your husband may have consulted in my absence is this one,’ he said. ‘The address is written here too. He is flexible in his hours, I believe, and can be visited at any time.’
She had risen to take the paper from him and for a moment she clasped his hand and lowered her head over it and the tears came again. Different now, impeding her thanks. The doctor too knew the difference in the tears and this time used words of comfort to her as he supported her towards the door. ‘Kemp did not lack for friends,’ he said. ‘There will be those that you can turn to. And you have this fine son as your support. If there is anything more that I can do, I trust you will not hesitate to ask. You will understand that I cannot examine the poor fellow’s body or have anything more to do directly with the business. If any should ask why I was not called in, you may say I was indisposed. But it is unlikely.’ He smiled at them in farewell. ‘The proceedings are quite regular, the man whose name I have given you is a qualified medical practitioner.’
It was only when, long past midnight, they had run the qualified medical man to earth in his ramshackle and evil-smelling quarters above a tavern, that things began to fall into place in Erasmus’s mind. He had listened in silence while his mother bargained with the gaunt, unsteady fellow, whom they had roused, still reeking of spirits, from his sleep. Ten minutes’ talk and twenty-five guineas secured for William Kemp an official death from heart failure, the due period of mourning, burial in hallowed ground. From the widow and the son was lifted the spectre of scandal and disgrace. Five guineas more obtained the services of two silent, out-at-elbow ruffians and a covered litter. The merchant was brought home in the dimness of the new day, wrapped in a length of good-quality blue cotton baft from his warehouse.
She had bargained with that scoundrel – Erasmus could scarcely believe it. ‘Not for the sake of the guineas,’ she told him, ‘no price can be put on your father’s reputation. But these people expect it.’
It was her own unexpected knowledge of what people expected that he held against her – that and her resourcefulness when he himself had been floundering. And she had deceived him, she had kept him in the dark. He writhed inwardly when he remembered how she had apologized for him to the condescending Banks.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Mother?’ he asked her once. ‘Why didn’t you say what was in your mind to do?’
‘My poor Erasmus,’ she said, ‘I thought the less you knew the better. You had already lost your father that night.’
And with this – as he saw it – typical failure of logic on her part he had to be content. The worst of it was that despite his superior logic and the sense of rectitude to which he clung as if it were a mark of loyalty to his father, he knew in his heart that he had been given that night a lesson in the conduct of human affairs that he would never forget.
The feeling of having been somehow duped poisoned his grief in the days that followed. For of course his father too had deceived him. With sick incredulity he tried to imagine what his father had felt during the last