Dick Francis - Wild Horses

Valentine and Dorothea had bought a four-roomed single-storey house, taking two rooms each as bedroom and sitting-room, constructing an extra bathroom so that they had their privacy, and sharing one large kitchen furnished with a dining table. Living that way had, they had both told me, been an ideal solution to their widowed state, a separate togetherness that gave them both company and retreat.

Everything looked quiet there when I parked outside on the road and walked up the concrete path to the front door. Dorothea opened it before I could ring the bell, and she’d been crying.

I said awkwardly, ‘Valentine... ?’

She shook her head miserably. ‘He’s still alive, the poor poor old love. Come in, dear. He won’t know you, but come and see him.’

I followed her into Valentine’s bedroom, where she said she had been sitting in a wing chair near the window so that she could see the road and visitors arriving.

Valentine, yellowly pale, lay unmoving on the bed, his heavy slow breath noisy, regular and implacably terminal.

‘He hasn’t woken or said anything since you went yesterday,’ Dorothea said. ‘We don’t need to whisper in here, you know, we’re not disturbing him. Robbie Gill came at lunchtime, not that I had any lunch, can’t eat, somehow. Anyway, Robbie says Valentine is breathing with difficulty because fluid is collecting in his lungs, and he’s slipping away now and will go either tonight or tomorrow, and to be ready. How can I be ready?’

‘What does he mean by ready?’

‘Oh, just in my feelings, I think. He said to let him know tomorrow morning how things are. He more or less asked me not to phone him in the middle of the night. He said if Valentine dies, just to phone him at home at seven. He isn’t really heartless, you know. He still thinks it would be easier on me if Valentine were in hospital, but I know the old boy’s happier here. He’s peaceful, you can see it. I just know he is.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She insisted on making me a cup of tea and I didn’t dissuade her because I thought she needed one herself. I followed her into the brightly painted blue and yellow kitchen and sat at the table while she set out pretty china cups and a sugar bowl. We could hear Valentine breathing, the slow rasping almost a groan, though Nurse Davis, Dorothea said, had been an absolute brick, injecting painkiller so that her brother couldn’t possibly suffer, not even in some deep brain recess below the coma.

‘Kind,’ I said.

‘She’s fond of Valentine.’

I drank the hot weak liquid, not liking it much.

‘It’s an extraordinary thing,’ Dorothea said, sitting opposite me and sipping, ‘you know what you said about Valentine wanting a priest?’

I nodded.

‘Well, I told you he couldn’t have meant it, but then, I would never have believed it, this morning a neighbour of ours — Betty from across the road, you’ve met her, dear — she came to see how he was and she said, did he get his priest all right? Well! I just stared at her, and she said, didn’t I know that Valentine had been rambling on about some priest our mother had had to give her absolution before she died, and she said he’d asked her to fetch that priest. She said, what priest? I mean, she told me she never knew either of us ever saw a priest and I told her of course we hadn’t, hardly even with our mother, but she said Valentine was talking as if he were very young indeed and he was saying he liked to listen to bells in church. Delirious, she said he was. She couldn’t make sense of it. What do you think?’

I said slowly, ‘People often go back to their childhood, don’t they, when they’re very old.’

‘I mean, do you think I should get Valentine a priest? I don’t know any. What should I do?’

I looked at her tired lined face, at the the worry and the grief. I felt the exhaustion that had brought her to this indecision as if it had been my own.

I said, ‘The doctor will know of a priest, if you want one.’

‘But it wouldn’t be any good! Valentine wouldn’t know. He can’t hear anything.’

‘I don’t think it matters that Valentine can’t hear. I think that if you don’t get a priest you’ll wonder for the rest of your life whether you should have done. So yes, either the doctor or I will find one for you at once, if you like.’

Tears ran weakly down her cheeks as she nodded agreement. She was clearly grateful not to have had to make the decision herself. I went into Valentine’s sitting-room and used the phone there, and went back to report to Dorothea that a man from a local church would arrive quite soon.

‘Stay with me?’ she begged. ‘I mean... he may not be pleased to be called out by a lapsed non-practising Catholic’

He hadn’t been, as it happened. I’d exhorted him as persuasively as I knew how; so without hesitation I agreed to stay with Dorothea, if only to see properly done what I’d done improperly.

We waited barely half an hour, long enough only for evening to draw in, with Dorothea switching on the lights. Then the real priest, a tubby, slightly grubby-looking middle-aged man hopelessly lacking in charisma, parked his car behind my own and walked up the concrete path unenthusiastically.

Dorothea let him in and brought him into Valentine’s bedroom where he wasted little time or emotion. From a bag reminiscent of the doctor’s he produced a purple stole which he hung round his neck, a rich colour against the faded black of his coat and the white band round his throat. He produced a small container, opened it, dipped in his thumb and then made a small cross on Valentine’s forehead, saying, ‘By this holy anointing oil... ’

‘Oh!’ Dorothea protested impulsively, as he began. ‘Can you say it in Latin? I mean, with our mother it was always in Latin. Valentine would want it in Latin.’

He looked as if he might refuse, but instead shrugged his shoulders, found a small book in his bag and read from that instead.

‘ Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam aeternam. Amen .’

May almighty God have mercy upon you, forgive you your sins, and bring you to everlasting life.

‘ Dotminus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat... ’

Our Lord Jesus Christ absolves you...

He said the words without passion, a task undertaken for strangers, giving blanket absolution for he knew not what sins. He droned on and on, finally repeating, more or less, the words I’d used, the real thing now but without the commitment I’d felt.

‘ Ego te absolvo ab omnibus censuris, et peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen .’

He made the sign of the cross over Valentine, who went on breathing without tremor, then he paused briefly before removing the purple stole and replacing it, with the book and the oil, in his bag.

‘Is that all?’ asked Dorothea blankly.

The priest said, ‘My daughter, in the authority vested in me I have absolved him from all blame, from all his sins. He has received absolution. I can do no more.’

I went with him to the front door and gave him a generous donation for his church funds. He thanked me tiredly, and he’d gone before I thought of asking him about a funeral service — a requiem mass — within a week.

Dorothea had found no comfort in his visit.

‘He didn’t care about Valentine,’ she said.

‘He doesn’t know him.’

‘I wish he hadn’t come.’

‘Don’t feel like that,’ I said. ‘Valentine has truly received what he wanted.’

‘But he doesn’t know .’

‘I’m absolutely certain,’ I told her with conviction, ‘that Valentine is at peace.’

She nodded relievedly. She thought so herself, with or without benefit of religion. I gave her the phone number of the Bedford Lodge Hotel, and my room number, and told her I would return at any time if she couldn’t cope.