Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Taylor Elizabeth

Author:Taylor, Elizabeth [Taylor, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, Fiction, Novel
ISBN: 9780748131006
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 1971-01-07T02:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

FULL summer; and Mrs Arbuthnot left the Claremont. It was going downhill, she said. Trippery people coming at random. It was not the place she had once known. ‘We used to have bridge,’ she said wistfully. ‘A dowager countess stayed here.’ In truth, Mrs Arbuthnot had become incontinent, and in the nicest possible way, which in the circumstances could not be very nice, had been asked to make some other arrangement.

She was vague about her destination, mentioning a quiet hotel on the outskirts of London, which was in reality a nursing-home for elderly people, where she was to share a small bedroom, and so finish up her days. Her indefatigable sisters had found it for her, and much humiliation she had borne while they were doing so.

‘Shall have some peace at least,’ she said, surveying the Cromwell Road traffic from one of the chairs at: the top of the steps, waiting for her sisters to fetch her. Her cases stood in the vestibule. She had tears in her eyes.

‘May I visit you there?’ Mrs Palfrey asked on an impulse. She had come out to say good-bye, and help if she could.

Mrs Arbuthnot turned stiffly, but looked at Mrs Palfrey’s feet and not her face. ‘I can’t think that either of us would gain from that,’ she said.

She was filled with agony, and she spat it out where she could. What she had been through, no one should ever know – those middle-of-the-night dreams of relieving herself, of finding after long searching a Ladies’ room in some mazy hotel – oh, the release of it! Only to wake up and find the bed saturated, and herself stiff and helpless. It could not go on, she knew. It had happened three times. A kind Irish chambermaid had tried to cover up for her; but the housekeeper found out in the end. Now someone must be paid to dry up after her; soon, not only that, but put on her shoes, get her up from her chair.

Mrs Post paused on her way out. She was wearing, in spite of the warm afternoon, her mock (and as far as Mrs Arbuthnot was concerned, her mocked at) fur coat of grey shaded stripes. If I were going to copy any kind of fur, Mrs Arbuthnot thought, consoling herself, it would not be squirrel.

‘Do let me have your address,’ said Mrs Post. ‘I can write you a newsy little letter now and again about all the goings-on here.’ She made the Claremont seem the very hub of life.

‘I will send it to you,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘If I find the hotel to my liking – enough to stay there, that is.’ She would never see or hear anything from any of them again. Her mind was made up to that.

Mrs Palfrey, still looking stern from the rudeness she had suffered, said good-bye in a formal voice and went back inside to write a letter to her daughter. There was an indefinable melancholy about Mrs Arbuthnot’s departure.

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