by Francis - TO THE HILT

Not good news, I thought. Helicopters were extreme.

I went down to join him, though not with happy haste.

'Where the hell have you been?' he demanded, as soon as I was within earshot. 'We've been trying to phone you for hours.'

'Good morning,' I said.

'Oh, shut up. Why do you think you've got that portable phone?'

'Not for lugging around on the mountains. What's happened?'

'Well…' he hesitated.

'You'd better tell me.'

'It's Sir Ivan. He's had another heart attack.'

'No! How bad?'

'He's dead.'

I stood motionless, just staring at him.

I said stupidly, 'He can't be dead. He was better.'

'I'm sorry.'

I hadn't thought I would care so much but I found I cared very much indeed. I'd grown fond of the old guy in the past three weeks without realising the depth of my feeling.

'When?' I said. As if it mattered.

'Some time late yesterday. I don't know exactly. Your mother phoned Himself before six this morning. She said you'd given her your number but she'd phoned you from five onwards and you didn't answer.'

I said blankly, 'I'd better phone her at once.'

'Himself said to tell you that Sir Ivan's daughter is now re-routing all calls, and she wouldn't let him get back to your mother. He says she has taken complete charge and is being unreasonable. So he told me to find you by helicopter and fly you direct to Edinburgh to catch the first flight south. He said you could do without arguing with Patsy Benchmark.'

He was right.

We went into the bothy. Jed seemed struck dumb by the painting but agreed to take care of it again, wrapped in its sheet. We loaded it into the jeep; also my pipes and other belongings. I collected a few travelling things into the duffle bag. We locked the bothy door.

'Jed,' I said awkwardly, aware of how much I owed him.

'Get going.'

We didn't need, I supposed, to say more. He waved me away into the helicopter and watched until it was circling in the air before setting off homewards in the jeep.

My mother wept.

I held her tight while she shook with near-silent sobs, the grief deep and terrible.

I wondered if she had ever cried in the dark for my father, privately broken up under the public composure. I'd been too young then to be of understanding comfort to her, and also I'd been too immersed in my own feelings.

This time, when I arrived at Park Crescent, she turned to me on every level, and there was no doubt at all that her emotions were intense and overwhelming.

From life-long habit, though, after the first revealing half-hour, she stiffened her whole body, damped all movements, powdered her face and presented, at least to the world if no longer to me, the outward semblance of serenity.

Ivan was not in the house.

When she could talk, she told me that at bedtime the previous evening she'd heard Ivan cry out, and she'd found him lying on the stairs.

'Such pain…'

'Don't talk,' I said.

She told me at intervals.

She had been in her nightclothes, and he in his. She didn't know why he had been downstairs. There was no need for him to go down to the kitchen for anything. He had water and a glass beside his bed, and there was the tray of other drinks in his study. He hadn't told her why he was coming upstairs. He seemed to be out of breath, as if he'd been hurrying, but why should he have been hurrying , it was after ten o'clock?

He had said her name, 'Viv… Vivienne…'

I squeezed my mother's hand.

She said, 'I loved him.'

'I know.'

A long pause. She had been very frightened. They had given Wilfred the night off because Ivan had been so much better. They had said they wouldn't need him much longer. He had left the box of heart-attack remedies at hand on Ivan's bedside table and my mother had run to fetch them. She had put one of the tiny nitroglycerine tablets under Ivan's tongue, and although he had tried to cling to her she had run to the telephone and had miraculously reached Keith Robbis-ton at his home, and he had said he would send an ambulance immediately.

She had put a second pill under Ivan's tongue, and then a third.

They hadn't stopped the pain.

She had sat on the stairs, holding him. When the front door bell had rung she had had to go down to answer it as there was no one else in the house. The ambulancemen had been very quick. They had carried a stretcher upstairs and had given him an injection and oxygen, and had put him on the stretcher and had fastened straps round him and carried him down.

She was wearing only her nightdress.

The men were kind to her. They said that they were taking him just along the road to the London Clinic, as he had been a patient there and Dr Robbiston had arranged it. They were a private firm. They gave my mother a card.

'A card ,' she said blankly.

She had gone down the stairs with Ivan, holding his hand.

Keith Robbiston had arrived.

He had waited while she put some clothes on, and he had driven her to the Clinic.

A long, long pause.

'I wasn't with him when he died,' she said.

I squeezed her hand.

'Keith said they did everything possible.'

'I'm sure they did.'

'He died before they could get him to the operating theatre.'

I simply held her.

'What am I going to do?'

It was the unanswerable cry, I guessed, of all the bereaved. It wasn't until the next day, Monday, that Patsy swept in. She wasn't pleased to see me but seemed to realise my presence was inevitable.

She was brisk, decisive, the manager. Her grief for her father, and to be charitable one had to believe her own description of her feelings as 'distraught' (that excellent but over-used word) were chiefly expressed by a white tissue clutched valiantly ready for stemming tears.

'Darling Father,' she announced, 'will be cremated…' she applied the tissue gently to her nose, '… on Thursday at Cockfosters crematorium, where they have a slot at ten o'clock owing to someone else's postponement. It's so difficult to arrange this sort of thing, you would be appalled… but I agreed to that, so I hope, Vivienne, that you don't mind the early hour? And of course I've asked everyone to come here afterwards, and I've booked a caterer for drinks and a buffet lunch…'

She went on talking about the arrangements and the announcements in the papers and the seating in the chapel, and she'd notified the Jockey Club and invited Ivan's colleagues to the wake; and it seemed she had done most of all this that morning, while I had been seeing to breakfast. I had to admit to relief not to be doing it all myself, and my mother, who seemed mesmerised, simply said, 'Thank you, Patsy,' over and over.

'Do you want flowers?' Patsy demanded of her. 'I've put "no flowers" in the announcement to the papers. Just a wreath from you on the coffin, don't you think? And one from me, of course. Do you want me to arrange it? I've asked the caterers to bring flowers here for the buffet table, of course… And I'll just go down now and talk to Lois about cleaning the silver…'

My mother looked exhausted when Patsy left.

'She loved him,' she said weakly, as if defending her.

I nodded. 'All the activity is her way of showing it.'

'I don't know how you understand her, when she's always so beastly to you.'

I shrugged. No amount of understanding would make her a friend.

We struggled through the next few days somehow. I cooked for my mother; Edna tossed her head. When my mother asked forlornly if I thought she should wear a black hat to the funeral, because she couldn't face shopping, I went out and bought her one, and pinned a big white silk rose to its sweeping brim so that she looked good enough to paint, though I just refrained from saying so.