Scales of Justice

The door opened. Nurse Kettle stood up and put her hands behind her back as Mark Lacklander came into the room. He was followed by Colonel Cartarette.

‘All right, Nurse?’ Mark asked quietly.

‘Pretty much,’ she murmured. ‘Fretting. He’ll be glad to see the Colonel.’

‘I’ll just have a word with him first.’

He walked down the room to the enormous bed. His grandfather stared anxiously up at him and Mark, taking the restless old hand in his, said at once: ‘Here’s the Colonel, Grandfather. You’re quite ready for him, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Now.’

‘Right.’ Mark kept his fingers on his grandfather’s wrist. Colonel Cartarette straightened his shoulders and joined him.

‘Hallo, Cartarette,’ said Sir Harold so loudly and clearly that Nurse Kettle made a little exclamation. ‘Nice of you to come.’

‘Hallo, sir,’ said the Colonel who was by twenty-five years the younger. ‘Sorry you’re feeling so cheap. Mark says you want to see me.’

‘Yes.’ The eyes turned towards the bedside table. ‘Those things,’ he said. ‘Take them, will you? Now.’

‘They’re the memoirs,’ Mark said.

‘Do you want me to read them?’ Cartarette asked, stooping over the bed.

‘If you will.’ There was a pause. Mark put the package into Colonel Cartarette’s hands. The old man’s eyes watched in what seemed to be an agony of interest.

‘I think,’ Mark said, ‘that Grandfather hopes you will edit the memoirs, sir.’

‘I’ll … Of course,’ the Colonel said after an infinitesimal pause. ‘I’ll be delighted; if you think you can trust me.’

‘Trust you. Implicitly. Implicitly. One other thing. Do you mind, Mark?’

‘Of course not, Grandfather. Nurse, shall we have a word?’

Nurse Kettle followed Mark out of the room. They stood together on a dark landing at the head of a wide stairway.

‘I don’t think,’ Mark said, ‘that it will be much longer.’

‘Wonderful, though, how he’s perked up for the Colonel.’

‘He’d set his will on it. I think,’ Mark said, ‘that he will now relinquish his life.’

Nurse Kettle agreed: ‘Funny how they can hang on and funny how they will give up.’

In the hall below a door opened and light flooded up the stairs. Mark looked over the banister and saw the enormously broad figure of his grandmother. Her hand flashed as it closed on the stair rail. She began heavily to ascend. He could hear her laboured breathing.

‘Steady does it, Gar,’ he said.

Lady Lacklander paused and looked up. ‘Ha!’ she said, ‘it’s the Doctor, is it?’ Mark grinned at the sardonic overtone.

She arrived on the landing. The train of her old velvet dinner-dress followed her and the diamonds which every evening she absentmindedly stuck about her enormous bosom burned and winked as it rose and fell.

‘Good evening, Kettle,’ she panted. ‘Good of you to come and help my poor old boy. How is he, Mark? Has, Maurice Cartarette arrived? Why are you both closeted together out here?’

‘The Colonel’s here, Gar. Grandfather wanted to have a word privately with him, so Nurse and I left them together.’

‘Something about those damned memoirs,’ said Lady Lacklander vexedly. ‘I suppose, in that case, I’d better not go in.’

‘I don’t think they’ll be long.’

There was a large Jacobean chair on the landing. He pulled it forward. She let herself down into it, shuffled her astonishingly small feet out of a pair of old slippers and looked critically at them.

‘Your father,’ she said, ‘has gone to sleep in the drawing-room muttering that he would like to see Maurice.’ She shifted her great bulk towards Nurse Kettle. ‘Now, before you settle to your watch, you kind soul,’ she said, ‘you won’t mind saving my mammoth legs a journey. Jog down to the drawing-room, rouse my lethargic son, tell him the Colonel’s here and make him give you a drink and a sandwich. Um?’

‘Yes, of course, Lady Lacklander,’ said Nurse Kettle, and descended briskly. ‘Wanted to get rid of me, she thought, ‘but it was tactfully done.’

‘Nice woman, Kettle,’ Lady Lacklander grunted. ‘She knows I wanted to be rid of her. Mark, what is it that’s making your grandfather unhappy?’

‘Is he unhappy, Gar?’

‘Don’t hedge. He’s worried to death …’ She stopped short. Her jewelled hands twitched in her lap. ‘He’s troubled in his mind,’ she said, ‘and for the second occasion in our married life I’m at a loss to know why. Is it something to do with Maurice and the memoirs?’

‘Apparently. He wants the Colonel to edit them.’

‘The first occasion,’ Lady Lacklander muttered, ‘was twenty years ago and it made me perfectly miserable. And now, when the time has come for us to part company … and it has come, child, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, darling, I think so. He’s very tired.’

‘I know. And I’m not, I’m seventy-five and grotesquely fat, but I have a zest for life. There are still,’ Lady Lacklander said with a change in her rather wheezy voice, ‘there are still things to be tidied up. George, for example.’

‘What’s my poor papa doing that needs a tidying hand?’ Mark asked gently.

‘Your poor papa,’ she said, ‘is fifty and a widower and a Lacklander. Three ominous circumstances.’

‘Which can’t be altered, even by you.’

‘They can, however be … Maurice! What is it?’

Colonel Cartarette had opened the door and stood on the threshold with the packages still under his arm.

‘Can you come, Mark? Quickly.’

Mark went past him into the bedroom. Lady Lacklander had risen and followed with more celerity than he would have thought possible. Colonel Cartarette stopped her in the doorway.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘wait a moment.’

‘Not a second,’ she said strongly. ‘Let me in, Maurice.’

A bell rang persistently in the hall below. Nurse Kettle, followed by a tall man in evening clothes, came hurrying up the stairs.