Free At Death's Door by Robert Barnard Page A

be a long time to a child.”
    Myra ignored her.
    â€œNo. It’s me she’s getting at. Something I did. . . .” A reminiscent expression suggested she was surveying a whole range of incidents to discover which it could be. But after a moment the warm social manner, a Candida sort of role, was assumed again. “Oh, dear, it’s so easy to do things and then find other people have taken them entirely wrongly , isn’t it?” She smiled at Roderick and did that little shrugging gesture that preceded a change of subject. “No doubt I’ll soon find out. As you say, maybe we can come to some sort of a modus vivendi. Tell me about yourselves. And about poor old Ben. How long has he been . . . in his present state?”
    It seemed to Roderick that they were shifting from one prickly subject to another.
    â€œOh, quite a while. Ten years or more, though not so bad at first, of course. It came on quite suddenly.”
    â€œSuddenly? I thought these things were usually gradual?”
    â€œPerhaps I used the wrong word. Maybe it was our noticing it that was sudden. We were all on holiday in the south of France, at my father-in-law’s villa. Ben had just finished one of his travel books, the one on the Dolomites.”
    â€œGodly Heights ?”
    â€œYou’ve read it?”
    â€œOh, yes. The fact that I detested him didn’t stop me reading his books.”
    You read it to see if there were any references to yourself, thought Caroline.
    â€œAnyway, when he came to us, we noticed that he wasn’t functioning as he always had done: wasn’t taking in what we said, couldn’t remember what he’d done the day before, would make decisions and then wander round distressed because he couldn’t remember what they were. He was half-conscious of what was happening, which made it worse. Sometimes we found him crying. We broughthim back to England, hoping the more familiar scene would jog him back to his usual alertness.”
    â€œAnd it didn’t?” Myra’s voice surely had an undertone of satisfaction.
    â€œNo,” said Roderick simply. “We found he couldn’t cope. He wouldn’t go out, or down to the village, in case he made a fool of himself. He couldn’t understand his business affairs—and he had always prided himself on that. I remember I had to read the proofs of Godly Heights. Quite soon we had to move in and take over the care of him.”
    â€œSuch a burden. In addition to everything else.” Myra addressed the remark to Roderick, though it might more justly have been directed to Caroline.
    â€œDoes he need much nursing?” Granville Ashe asked Caroline, perhaps to cover Myra’s rudeness, perhaps to assert that they both existed.
    â€œOh, I have help. The royalties from the books provide that. And he is very passive—never troublesome or aggressive, as one might have expected.”
    â€œWould one have expected that?” Myra asked the ceiling. “Ben was always essentially an observer. A silken, soft-spoken observer. . . . It’s terrible to think of him with nothing to observe. . . . You know, I’ve often regretted the fuss over The Vixen. In an odd way it poisoned the relationship with Cordelia.”
    Roderick did not believe that. The relationship with Cordelia had been poisoned by things that Myra had done to Cordelia. Now Myra was reinventing the past to cast herself in the role of helpless victim. He wondered whether she had ever once considered the relationship in terms of the child’s needs, expectations, hopes. Yet for all her selfishness and self-dramatization, Roderick could not help seeing something pitiful in Myra. There is always something pathetic about egotists, for life can never give them all the things they expect for themselves.
    â€œBecky is getting restive,” whispered Caroline.
    Myra, in her rapid changes of mood and pose,