He made warm milk, put in a tot of rum and emptied several of the morphine vials into it. Then he sat Nancy up and wrapped a bed jacket around her thin shoulders. “Drink up,” he said, excessively cheerful. “This will make you feel much better.”
He didn’t spot Viola, woken by the inhuman noises her mother was making, standing sleepily in the doorway of the bedroom in bare feet and cotton pyjamas.
Instead of falling into the deep sleep that Teddy had hoped would be the precursor of death, Nancy grew suddenly much more agitated, throwing herself around in the bed, tearing at the bedspread, her nightdress, her hair, as if she was trying to rid herself of a burning demon. He added more morphine to the milk that remained in the beaker but her thrashing arms sent it flying across the room. She started screaming, an unholy noise, unstoppable, her wide-open mouth a black maw, as if she finally had become the demon that was in her brain. In desperation Teddy grabbed a pillow and pressed it against her face, at first tentatively and then more firmly, unable to bear the idea that at the end, the very end, she should be denied peace, denied the ceasing upon the midnight with no pain. He pressed down hard on the pillow. This is what it meant to kill someone. Hand-to-hand combat. Until death us do part.
She was still. He removed the pillow. The fight was out of her, or perhaps the morphine had worked, but she lay still. He felt her pulse. Stopped. His own heart was thundering. Her face was peaceful, the pain and animal distress had fallen away. She was Nancy again. She was herself.
Viola padded silently back to bed. “The true nightmares occur when we are awake,” according to the narrator of Every Third Thought, her last novel. (“Her best yet,” Good Housekeeping.)
And what would happen to that little girl upstairs if you were arrested and stood trial?” Dr. Webster said. She had any number of aunts she could live with, Teddy thought. Any one of them would probably do a better job than he would. “If something happens to you as well,” Nancy had said to him, “then I think Viola should go and live with Gertie.” (“Not that anything is going to happen to you, of course!”)
Out of all the aunts available Gertie seemed almost the oddest choice—Millie taking first place in the race for unsuitability. “Why Gertie?” he asked.
“She’s sensible and practical and patient,” Nancy said, ticking off Gertie’s virtues on her fingers. “But at the same time she’s adventurous and not frightened by things. She’ll be able to teach Viola how to be brave.” Viola wasn’t brave, they both knew that, but neither of them ever said it.
What right did Teddy have to talk about bravery, he thought, pouring both himself and Dr. Webster another whisky.
“I’ll make out the death certificate,” the GP said. “You should probably telephone an undertaker, or I’ll do it for you if you’d prefer?”
“No,” Teddy said. “I’ll do it.”
After the doctor had left, Teddy went upstairs to Viola’s room. She was still fast asleep. He couldn’t bring himself to wake her in order to give her the worst news she would probably ever hear. He stroked her forehead, slightly damp, and kissed it lightly. “I love you,” he said. They should have been his last words to Nancy, but he had been too taken up in the awful final struggle to say anything to her. Viola stirred and muttered something, but didn’t wake.
2012
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace
The Queen was sailing slowly down the Thames.
“The Queen,” Viola said. “She’s on the television.” She was keeping her interpretation of events simple—the flotilla on the river, the rain, the admirable perseverance of monarchy. “You can’t really see the television though, can you?” She talked very loudly and slowly to Teddy as if he was a particularly stupid child. She was sitting next to his bed in one of the care home’s high-backed armchairs. It always disturbed her to sit in this chair. It was meant for the elderly and she dreaded being counted amongst that number now that she was old enough to qualify for Saga holidays and lunch clubs in church halls, old enough to wear beige anoraks and pull-on “slacks.” (As if.) She was old enough to move into Fanning Court. God forbid.
Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father’s brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image.