A VERY GENTLE DEATH

 
 

 I once saw the statistics for domestic murders. I don’t remember them now, but I do recall thinking at the time that if we took them seriously none of us would ever go through that seemingly welcoming front door.

Mary Bartleigh had probably never read those figures; when her husband Stanley came home in the evening she no doubt greeted him with a kiss and a wifely home-cooked meal while he shed the cares of the day.

I was their doctor. It took Stanley some time to accept a ‘lady doctor’, but after I had solved the mystery of his gall bladder he took to me, albeit a bit sensitive when it came to anything he regarded as ‘private’. Not that I’m one of these glamorous young things you see on TV medical shows. I’m stoutish and almost due for retirement, and I’ve never married – which either says something for my dedication to medicine or else my personality. I won’t hazard my own opinion on that.

Mary and Stanley were a nice little couple. The sort you imagine have never had a passionate interlude in their lives, but have grown together like a grafted fruit tree. They called each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, which was sad, because they had only had one child, and she had died before she was seven.

Stanley had been a clerk in the front office of a factory making, as far as I could discover, nuts and bolts of all shapes and sizes. Mary was proud of him; he had been with the company since he was fifteen, and fifty years later was a staff member respected by all, though perhaps not by the youngsters, who tended to do a few months before moving on to greener pastures.

They probably regarded him with the sort of appalled fascination one might display on finding a live dinosaur. I could sympathise with them to an extent; what a way to spend fifty working years!

I could detect no guile in Stanley and Mary. Honest to a fault. So when Mary arrived one day in my consulting rooms with a devious little plot in which she had created a part for me, I was surprised. Well, rather more than surprised. As she spoke, earnest, unsmiling, I regarded her with astonishment. She was suggesting that we should play a trick on Stanley – a harmless trick, but so out of keeping with their sober, respectable life-style that I watched her with intense interest. Her eyes, in that frank, open face, never quite met mine; her hands, which usually lay at peace in her lap, twitched and twisted with a life of their own.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said at last. ‘You want me to come and visit you…’

‘Yes,’ she said, almost eagerly. ‘Yes – but really to have a look at Stanley. Just to see if he seems – well – normal, to you.’

‘From which I gather that you think there’s something abnormal about him?’

She blinked a little, hesitated. ‘Well – I’d rather not say. I’d rather you came and looked – just chat to him, you know. Observe!’

‘And why am I supposed to be visiting you?’

She pulled up her skirt just far enough to reveal a nasty-looking boil on the inside of one knee. ‘I thought you might want me to keep off it for a day or two,’ she said innocently. ‘It seemed an opportunity.’

I was thoroughly intrigued. ‘I’ll give you something for that and call to see you tomorrow morning. Will he be there?’

‘Oh yes. I’ll make sure of that.’

And indeed he was, fussing about with cushions for her back, a soft pillow under the infected knee. He looked up at me anxiously. ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it, doctor? It looks very angry.’

Her own diagnosis had been good. Keeping off the leg was a sensible idea. I did what was necessary, and arranged to deal more radically with it if it didn’t ‘answer’. Mary was grateful but a trifle embarrassed. Stanley was attentive to an extent that would have made me scream if I had been his wife. As I cleaned the knee I kept my diagnostic eye on him for any obvious changes since I had last examined him; but I could not have said there was anything noticeable. His colour was good, neither pale nor ruddy; he was not unduly breathless when he got to his feet after kneeling to pick up Mary’s knitting where it had fallen behind a chair.

Neither did he seem mentally confused. He answered my questions sensibly, was as gentle and affectionate as always to Mary, gave no indication of approaching senility or strange aberrations. His hands shook, if anything, less than mine!

When I finished I turned to him. ‘How long is it since I gave you the once-over? Time for another check-up, surely?’ He thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Then why don’t you both come in to see me a couple of days? I can deal with the knee if it hasn’t improved, and have a look at you.’

So they came. But I could find nothing to concern me in Stanley’s state of health. For a man of his age he was in fine fettle. Mary came back the next day.

‘He thinks I’m shopping,’ she said nervously. She faced me. ‘You didn’t find anything, did you?’

‘No. He’s in excellent condition.’ I sat down and regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Now, what’s all this about?’

Her shoulders were drooping slightly, as if the stuffing had gone out of her, just a little. ‘I worry,’ she said at last.

‘What about?’

‘About Stanley. About the future. About what would happen to him if I – if anything happened to me.’

‘But you’re both in good health,’ I protested. ‘You’ll have years together.’

‘That’s something no one can be sure of,’ she said bleakly, and stood up to go. I was at a loss to know what to do. She had virtually asked for help, but until she told me more precisely what the problem was, I couldn’t see any way to assist.

I was naturally alarmed when, a week or so later, Mary rang very early one morning. She began to apologise for waking me, but I cut through that. No one rings a doctor at five-thirty in the morning for nothing. ‘What is it, Mary?’

‘It’s Stanley, doctor. I can’t waken him. I think he’s…’ Her voice cracked, but there was no panic.

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes! Call the ambulance.’

But the ambulance wasn’t needed. It took no time to determine that Stanley had been dead for some hours. Mary was dry-eyed, controlled; but when at my suggestion she made a pot of tea and carried a cup to me her hand was shaking, slightly but unmistakably.

‘You never suspected?’ I said. ‘He didn’t convulse or cry out? No unusual symptoms?’

She shook her head. ‘I was sleeping in there.’ She pointed to the open door of the spare room. ‘I do sometimes if it’s hot. Stanley didn’t mind.’ She took out her handkerchief then and blew her nose, a dry, respectable little sound, her only concession to the stress of the moment. ‘What do you think happened? He was all right last night.’

I went to the bedroom and stared down at the departed Stanley. He seemed very peaceful, no intimations of an anguished passing. He appeared simply to be asleep, lying towards the middle of the marriage bed which they had for so long occupied together. I was rather glad for her sake that she had not been in it at the moment of departure. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t issue a death certificate. I’m afraid there’ll have to be an autopsy.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. She took it well. ‘Poor Stanley!’

I offered to contact a neighbour or a counsellor of some kind, just someone to be there; but Mary was unexpectedly stubborn.

‘We kept ourselves to ourselves in life,’ she said firmly. ‘We’ll do the same now – in death.’ She had great dignity. I remember thinking that I must keep an eye on her in the weeks ahead; a weeping widow bends to the storm – the stoics have a sad way of cracking wide open.

That evening, after a peculiarly hectic day, I decided quite suddenly to drive home past Mary’s house. If the lounge room light was off, I told myself, I would drive on; otherwise I would stop by and make sure she was coping.

The light was on. As I walked across the tiny front lawn the door opened and a young woman came out. She was fair-haired and wore one of those rather silly leather skirts with a zip up the front. I was surprised to see her, but pleased that Mary had had a visitor. She, looking up in the early twilight, jumped when she saw me. We nodded politely.

‘Mrs Bartleigh in?’ I said, and the girl nodded again, hurrying away into the gloom.

‘Well,’ I said in typically doctorish mode as Mary let me in, ‘how are we tonight?’

We sat down. Mary was very pale, clutching a handkerchief in one white-knuckled fist. ‘I’m all right.’

‘You’ve had a visitor. That’s good!’

She didn’t answer, staring somewhere beyond me. Shock, I thought. It’s just hitting her. Then, in a flat voice, she suddenly said, ‘After all these years. It doesn’t seem right!’

‘Is there something I can help you with, Mary? Something that’s bothering you?’

She looked directly at me then, right into my eyes, as if she would have liked to search into my innermost thoughts. ‘He was a good man,’ she said, as if I had doubted it. ‘He was always a good man.’

‘He was indeed.’ She relaxed a little then, managed to talk for a few minutes; but she wanted me to go. So I went, telling her she must call me, any time, day or night, if she was in any kind of need. And rather hoping she wouldn’t.

The autopsy report came through. Apart from the fact that Stanley had taken a double dose of sleeping tablets, there was nothing out of the ordinary. He had gone to bed, gone to sleep – gone! Nothing sinister, nothing particularly conclusive; his heart had stopped beating. I asked Mary if he habitually took the tablets.

‘Just a half, with hot milk.’

‘He must have had two.’

‘Oh, that’s not likely. He used to say half got him to sleep, and once asleep he stayed asleep.’

‘So why would he have taken two?’

She shrugged. ‘He was getting forgetful, you know. Perhaps he forgot he’d already taken it.’ She glanced at me. ‘Do they think that was why he died?’

‘No. Though it might explain why he didn’t make a fuss and wake you up.’ She relaxed, nodding. I hesitated. ‘Have you any family or friends, Mary? To visit. You shouldn’t be on your own.’

‘The lady next door’s been very kind. And there’ll be some cousins coming from Melbourne for the funeral. Good of them – to come so far. They really hardly knew Father.’

There was little more I could do for her. She seemed to exist in a cocoon, a shell, which was what she apparently wanted at this time. I dropped into the chapel for the funeral, sitting at the back, seeing the quiet little female cousins and a couple of elderly males; and, just behind Mary, was the young woman who had left the house as I was going in. I wondered who she was. The lady next door? She looked too young.

I didn’t see Mary for a couple of weeks. She knew where I was if she wanted me, and she wasn’t the only new widow on my books. But I had a short note from her: ‘I shall always remember what you did for me. I couldn’t have managed it on my own.’ It was surprisingly fulsome from such a quiet little lady.

A couple of days later I had a call from her. She was running a slight fever and wondered if I would come to see her. Country practice, you know. I hear that city doctors don’t do much in the way of house calls these days. I drove there on my way to lunch, thinking it would take five minutes. I was wrong. Clearly, what she really wanted was someone to talk to.

She insisted on climbing out of bed to make a cup of coffee for me, and I sat as she got back in and pulled the cover decorously up around her chest. But what she wanted to say was still obscure.

‘I hope you’re not on your own all the time,’ I began. ‘You need to meet people.’ She nodded without enthusiasm. ‘What about the young lady I saw that evening? Does she still call round?’

Mary rolled the edges of the quilt in her fingers, not looking at me. ‘Not any more,’ she said at last.

‘Trouble?’ I said curiously, watching her.

‘She was never really my friend,’ she said in a small voice. ‘More Stanley’s.’ And all at once she was talking in a steady stream, unstoppable, and I sat quietly and let the words flow.

‘Stanley was such a dear man. Undemanding, you know. Thoughtful.’ She gave a faint smile. ‘We had many good years. But he had one great sorrow in his life – the death of our daughter Katie. He never really got over it, even though it happened nearly forty years ago. He used to imagine how big she would be. "Look, Mother," he’d say, "that little girl over there is just about the size Katie would be now".’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes it was very hard. But somehow he couldn’t imagine her going past about twenty-one. Perhaps he couldn’t face the idea of her marrying – growing up, you know, going away from us into her own home, living her own life. So for the last twenty years or so he’s imagined her as a young woman, stuck at about nineteen or twenty, I suppose.’ She looked up at me. ‘He was quite normal in every other way.’

‘I’m sure he was.’

‘And there was never anything, well, nasty – you know? You read about it, don’t you? He was a big innocent, really. Not a bad impulse in him anywhere.’

‘That was quite obvious to anyone who knew him.’

She took a long, slow breath. ‘And then he met this girl. Cathy, her name was. That caught him straight away, being like Katie. He picked up something she dropped in a shopping mall, and somehow – she clung. I don’t quite know how it happened, but he invited her here for tea one day – he must have seen her again…’ She looked confused for a moment. ‘Well, whatever it was, she began coming regularly to tea, twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. Stanley was rapt. But I didn’t like her.’

She glanced up at me quickly. ‘I’ve never said that before. But all the things that drew him to her were the things I didn’t like. She’d had a very hard life – so she said. Parents threw her out. She lived on the streets for a while, then got herself together, got a job, began to see a future. Stanley admired that. And she was sweet to him, sweet and a bit – pert.’ Mary was silent for a moment. ‘I felt left out.

‘Then one day – Stanley said he wanted to, well, sort of adopt her. Let her have a real family. Live with us if she wanted to. He asked if I’d mind if we called her Katie. That made me upset, angry.’ She clasped her hands together. ‘Katie was my daughter, not this – this… I told him we couldn’t, that he couldn’t replace Katie, but he wouldn’t listen. It was the only real difference we ever had. And besides – I had seen her face, sometimes when she didn’t know I was watching. When she was out of his sight all the lovey-dovey daughter stuff would disappear, and she would look around her, calculating, working out the value of our little bits and pieces, our home. I told him – no!’

I thought she had stopped. ‘I’m sorry. It must have been upsetting for you.’

She nodded slowly. ‘He went to his solicitor. He was going to change his will, include her somehow. Stanley always saw to things like that, money, tax, all that. But when he said he might alter his will I became very – frightened. Yes, I was frightened. I thought, what if he cuts me out? What if he leaves everything to both of us? I’d never get rid of her. I wondered if he was going mad, becoming senile.’

‘You sent for me!’ I said, comprehending.

‘I thought I might stop him. Or overturn it on account of his mental state. Something! He was obsessed. And I couldn’t see why. Not for the life of me.’

‘You could have seen the solicitor yourself. Told him of your fears.’

‘Perhaps. She came round for tea that evening. Afterwards I washed up, and she sat at his feet on a stool and made up to him. He showed her some photographs of himself as a boy, and then some of our Katie. "Look," he said, "She would have been like you if she’d lived".’ Mary’s usually placid eyes were full of anger. ‘But she wouldn’t. No child of mine would ever turn out like that! Only Stanley couldn’t see it. She was clever, I’ll give her that.’

‘Then I heard him say, "When’s your birthday, little Katie?" and she said in three weeks. "You’re going to have a real surprise on your birthday," he said, and I could hear the excitement in his voice. And I knew what it would be. The will!’

‘Are you sure it was the will?’

‘Quite sure. I knew him, doctor. I could see right through him.’

‘And that was the night he died? The will had not been changed?’

‘No. He had no time to change it.’

‘You must be thankful for that. Did she know what he was meaning to do?’

‘I think she may have guessed. But there was nothing she could do about it.’ We were silent together for a moment, deep in thought. ‘I’m tired, so tired,’ she said suddenly.

‘Then sleep.’ I tucked her up and left her.

I awoke suddenly, at dawn. ‘She killed him!’ I said aloud, and knew that I was right. But I had no time until the evening to think it through. I drove to Mary’s house, and as I turned into the street I saw the girl Cathy walking away.

‘How kind of you,’ Mary said when she opened the door. ‘Do sit down.’

I sat, but I could think of no way to open the subject decently. ‘Are you well?’

‘Yes, thank you, doctor.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Mary – you gave the sleeping tablets to Stanley in his hot milk, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said after a moment’s pause.

‘To stop him changing the will. What did you do then?’

‘The pillow. It was easier than I expected. But it wasn’t really the will. It was because – can you understand? – because it would have made him look such a fool. I couldn’t have borne that. Not to see him laughed at. Not after a lifetime of being so respected. People did respect him.’

‘I know. He was a fine person.’

‘What will you do now?’ She faced me.

‘I’m not sure.’ I felt depressed. ‘I’ll sleep on it.’

‘Yes – that will be best.’

She was found next morning (by the next-door neighbour who had been so kind). I was called to see her. It was sleeping pills, of course, this time enough to kill.

I’ve salved my conscience, to an extent. Why put her in the dock to open up sores she had tried to hide? I just wish I had asked what the girl Cathy had been doing there that evening, before I arrived. Was it my realisation of Mary’s guilt that killed her – or had Cathy been trying a bit of amateur blackmail for her birthday?

Either way, it was a very gentle death.

Word count: 3398