Sarah Caudwell - The Sibyl in Her Grave

So it sounded as if Daphne’s anxieties had been as misplaced as I thought.

I usually wake up at about seven, but this morning I was woken earlier than that by the sound of someone ringing my doorbell. Not just ringing and stopping and going away again, like the postman leaving a parcel, but going on ringing, as if they didn’t mean to stop until I’d answered. I looked out of my bedroom window and saw that it was Daphne, so I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down to let her in.

She was in such a state of agitation, and stammering so badly, poor girl, that I could make no sense at all of what she was trying to say. All I could gather was that something was seriously wrong — or at least that she thought there was — and she wanted me to come straight back with her to the Rectory. So without being sure there was any real urgency, but not liking to take a chance on it, I put on my raincoat over my dressing gown and ran back with her across the churchyard.

She’d left the front door open. We went straight in, and through the hallway to the black drawing room.

The first thing I noticed was the smell — it was the first thing anyone would have noticed. A perfectly disgusting smell, acrid and sweet at the same time, mainly, I suppose, of bird droppings, but as if someone had tried to sweeten it with something else — incense or camphor or something like that. The second thing I noticed was the vulture, perched on the back of one of the chaises longues. The third was Isabella, lolling on another of them, dressed in the caftan she’d worn on my first visit, with her little black eyes staring at me without blinking, out of her white pudding face. I almost apologised for my intrusion.

“She’s been sitting there like that since I came down this morning,” said Daphne. “She doesn’t seem to hear what I say to her. There’s something wrong with her.”

I knew straightaway what was wrong with her, and I could hardly believe that Daphne still hadn’t realised. I tried taking her pulse, and the other things they tell one to do in first-aid classes, but I already knew she was dead. The vulture knew it too, and was looking at Isabella in a way I didn’t much care for.

I didn’t think I was the right person to break the news — I asked Daphne who her aunt’s doctor was.

“Aunt Isabella doesn’t believe in doctors,” she said, looking more frightened than ever. “She says that Nature has a cure for everything if you know how to look for it.”

I said that nonetheless her aunt must have professional attention, and sent her off in the end to fetch Dr. Selkirk. He’s not the doctor I’d normally call-a bad-tempered little Scotsman, semiretired, with a bee in his bonnet about keeping fit, and not much in the way of a bedside manner — but he was the one who lived nearest. I knew at that hour of the morning he was more likely to answer the doorbell than the telephone, and I thought that with any luck she could bring him back to the Rectory in ten minutes or so.

If I’d gone myself, I could have probably persuaded him more quickly, but I couldn’t leave poor Daphne on her own with a corpse, and we couldn’t both go. I’ve lived in Egypt and Syria, and I’ve seen what buzzards can do. So someone had to stay and discourage the vulture.

I don’t know quite how long I waited for them — it seemed a good deal more than the mauvais quart d’heure I’d bargained for. Isabella still seemed to be staring at me with her little black-currant eyes, and from time to time the horrible Roderigo spread his wings and screeched at me. Having only my nightclothes on under my raincoat made me feel ridiculously defenceless, and I wished I’d something more effective than my bare hands to ward him off with if he tried to challenge me for his breakfast.

The worst thing of all, though, was still the smell — it wasn’t simply disgusting but somehow narcotic, so that I felt dizzy as well as sick from it. I wondered if Isabella and her visitor had been smoking marijuana — I suppose it would be quite an effective way to heighten the atmosphere for a séance, or whatever one’s supposed to call it. It’s some years since I smoked any, and I don’t remember the effects being so unpleasant — but that was in Paris and in better company.

There were no ashtrays, though, and no traces of smoke in the room, so perhaps I was wrong about that. There weren’t any dirty glasses, either, which struck me as rather odd. Whatever else one might say about Isabella, I wouldn’t have thought she’d have sat all evening with a visitor without offering him a drink, and having one herself. Anyway, there were two empty champagne bottles in the wastepaper basket.

And Daphne had been sent straight to bed when she got home the night before, so she couldn’t have washed them then, and she certainly wouldn’t have stopped to do it after she found Isabella in the morning.

Well, of course, it wasn’t really at all odd — it simply meant that Isabella had washed the glasses herself, and then come back and sat down again on the chaise longue. That’s not at all an odd thing to do — it’s what I’d have done myself. Just not what I’d have expected Isabella to do — I’d have bet almost any sum you like to mention that she’d have left them for Daphne. Which shows how one can misjudge people. Or perhaps she’d just taken them through to the kitchen, and left them there to be washed.

It occurred to me, thinking of the kitchen, that I might find something there that I could use to ward off Roderigo. So I went quickly in there, leaving the door open so that I could keep an eye on him, and found just what I wanted — a long-handled broom, which made me feel much braver. But no dirty glasses anywhere, so Isabella must have washed them up after all. And yet somehow I still just couldn’t imagine her doing it, so I decided that it must have been her visitor — the man in the black Mercedes.

Dr. Selkirk, when he at last arrived, declined to examine the patient in the presence of the vulture. At the cost of several savage pecks, Daphne managed to remove the bird to the conservatory. After that, we waited at the far end of the room while the doctor carried out his examination.

“Heart,” he said, when he’d finished. “What did she expect, carrying all that weight?” He seldom misses a chance to point out the dangers of obesity.

“Will she have to go to hospital?” asked poor Daphne.

“It’s not the hospital she’s needing,” said Selkirk, with his usual tact. “It’s the undertaker’s. She’s dead, lassie — been dead for hours.”

And poor Daphne threw herself down on the floor and howled.

You’ll understand by this time why it’s been a trying day. It’s now nearly midnight, and I thought when I came to bed that I’d go straight to sleep. But I found I couldn’t, and decided to write to you instead.

The funeral’s on Friday, and with Daphne having no close family I somehow feel responsible for seeing that it all goes properly. There are all sorts of things that I could quite reasonably be lying awake and worrying about — like how to make Daphne presentable for it, and what to give people to eat, and whether we can find anyone to say a few words about how nice Isabella was.

What seems to be stopping me from sleeping, though, isn’t any of those things but a perfectly idiotic question of no importance at all, which is nagging away at me like a clue in the crossword that one hasn’t managed to get the answer to. As soon as I close my eyes, the absurd question which comes into my head and starts buzzing round there is, “Do men with Mercedes cars usually wash their own glasses?”

Yours with very much love,

Reg