To the Hilt Read Online Free PDF Page A

age than in most families because of my long training in care of her, a training that had been in abeyance since she’d married Ivan, but which now resurfaced naturally and with redoubled force across her kitchen table.
    I said, “James James Morrison Morrison Wetherby George Dupree...”
    She laughed, and went on, “Took great care of his mother, though he was only three.”
    I nodded. “James James said to his mother, ‘Mother,’ he said, said he, ‘You must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me.’ ”
    “Oh, Alexander. ” A whole lifetime of restraint quivered in her voice, but the dammed-up feelings didn’t break.
    “Just tell me,” I said.
    A pause. Then she said, “He’s so depressed.”
    “Er... clinically depressed?”
    “I don’t know what that means. But I don’t know how to deal with it. He lies in bed most of the time. He won’t get dressed. He hardly eats. I want him to go back into the Clinic but he won’t do that either, he says he doesn’t like it there, and Dr. Robbiston doesn’t seem to be able to prescribe anything that will pull him out of it.”
    “Well... has he a good reason for being depressed? Is his heart in a bad state?”
    “They said there wasn’t any need for bypasses or a pacemaker. They used one of those balloon things on one of his arteries, that’s all. And he has to take pills, of course.”
    “Is he afraid he’s going to die?”
    My mother wrinkled her smooth forehead. “He just tells me not to worry.”
    “Shall I... um ... go up and say hello?”
    She glanced at the big kitchen clock, high on the wall above an enormous cooker. Five to nine.
    “His nurse is with him now,” she said. “A male nurse. He doesn’t really need a nurse, but he won’t let him go. Wilfred—the nurse—and I don’t like him, he’s too obsequious—he sleeps on our top floor here in those old attics, and Ivan has had an intercom installed so that he can call him if he has chest pains in the night.”
    “And does he have chest pains in the night?”
    My mother said with perplexity, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But he did, of course, when he had the attack. He woke up with it at four in the morning, but at the time he thought it was only bad indigestion.”
    “Did he wake you?”
    She shook her head. She and Ivan had always slept in adjoining but separate bedrooms. Not from absence of love; they simply preferred it.
    She said, “I went in to say good morning to him and give him the papers, as I always do, and he was sweating and pressing his chest with his fist.”
    “You should have got a message to me at once,” I said. “Jed would have driven over with it. You shouldn’t have had to deal with all this by yourself.”
    “Patsy came ...”
    Patsy was Ivan’s daughter. Sly eyes. Her chief and obsessive concern was to prevent Ivan leaving his fortune and his brewery to my mother and not to herself. Ivan’s assurances got nowhere: and Patsy’s feelings for me, as my mother’s potential heir, would have curdled sulfuric acid. I always smiled at her sweetly.
    “What did Patsy do?” I asked.
    “Ivan was in the Clinic when she came here. She used the telephone.” My mother stopped for effect.
    “Who did she want?” I prompted helpfully.
    Amusement glimmered in my mother’s dark eyes. “She telephoned Oliver Grantchester.”
    Oliver Grantchester was Ivan’s lawyer.
    “How blatant was she?” I asked.
    “Oh, straight to the jugular, darling.” Patsy called everyone darling. She would murder, I surmised, with a “Sorry, darling” while she slid the stiletto into the heart. “She told Oliver,” smiled my mother, “that if Ivan tried to change his will, she would contest it.”
    “And she meant you to hear.”
    “If she hadn’t wanted me to, she could have called him from anywhere else. And naturally she was sugar candy all over the Clinic. The loving daughter. She’s good at it.”
    “And she said there was no need