Free At Death's Door by Robert Barnard

into the conversation from the sidelines, but it caught Myra on the raw.
    â€œDoes she? Does she? Then why is she doing this to me ?”
    Myra, having ignored her for the last ten minutes, turned on Caroline the smoldering force of her personality. Caroline had the impression that this was the first time in the conversation that she was not acting.
    â€œKeep calm, Myra,” said Granville Ashe. “This will all work itself out if we can just talk it over coolly.”
    Myra ignored him. She turned back to Roderick.
    â€œYou are clear, aren’t you, what she intends to do to me? She is writing that book to crucify me.”
    Roderick decided that Ashe was sensible in trying to play it cool. Whether Myra would ever accept any other way but high drama was another matter.
    â€œI don’t think that’s entirely the case,” he said carefully. “I know Cordelia admires you intensely as an actress. A great part of the book—the intended book—will be taken up with your stage career.”
    â€œAnd the rest will be mudslinging. Which part of the book do you think the tabloids will be interested in? My brilliant performance in Strindberg?”
    â€œNo, of course not. Is that what you are mainly worried about? The popular press?”
    Myra scowled, her first ugly expression of the evening.
    â€œIt doesn’t make me happy. We have the worst press in the world, and the thing they hate most is anyone with any sort of intellectual pretensions or anyone with any sort of talent at all. They revel in the sort of thing Cordelia is planning to serve up to them. Remember Joan Crawford’s daughter, Bette Davis’s daughter—the press had a field day.”
    â€œYou used—” Roderick began, and then stopped.
    â€œYou were going to say,” said Myra unpleasantly, “that I used the popular press against your father. Quite right. I did. I had no other weapon.”
    The idea that Cordelia was not too lavishly endowed with weapons, either, was too obvious to need expression. Certainly nobody dared express it.
    â€œIn any case,” said Roderick, “it’s fairly clear that you can stop the book if you want to. The libel laws are not so very different now from what they were in 1964.”
    â€œYou forget: I didn’t stop The V —your father’s horrible book. I merely managed to get certain passages changed or omitted. The book came out, and it did me immense damage. It was to preempt the damage it would do that I took the whole story to the gutter press.”
    That seemed to Caroline like taking a can of petrol to a raging fire. Once again she didn’t say so. Conversation with Myra seemed predicated on not saying some very obvious things.
    â€œWell, well,” said Roderick, “I don’t know that it really helps to rake over old coals. Though that’s what the popular papers will do if they get wind of Cordelia’s book. I must confess I like the idea of it more than you do. For Father’s sake and for ours. And I don’t think it will do Cordelia as much good as she thinks to get things out into the open.”
    Myra had begun to smile and lean forward during this speech, scenting an ally. At the last words she drew back.
    â€œWhat things?”
    Roderick immediately regretted his words.
    â€œI don’t know. They’ve confided nothing to me, I assure you. Tales of her upbringing? Your . . . husbands, and so on?”
    Myra made an impatient gesture, brushing off her husbands as if they were nothing. As perhaps they were.
    â€œI can’t see why she should hold them against me. Most of them were perfectly kind to her. Except Louis, of course. Louis was a sadist, in every possible sense of the word. But I was only married to Louis about a year. I soon showed him I wasn’t the victim kind.”
    There was silence around the table. Then Caroline decided this time to say the obvious.
    â€œA year can