Chapter 36: The Envelope
Victor Blackwood came home on the Sunday at four in the afternoon.
I had the envelope in my apron pocket from half past eleven that morning, which is five and a half hours of a paper corner against your ribs.
I waited in the passage between the estate office and the gun room, because it is the only route from the side door that does not pass the morning room.
I want to be clear that I ambushed him. I had thought it out on the Saturday, I had chosen that corridor deliberately, and I had rehearsed the first sentence eleven or twelve times.
He came through with a bag over his shoulder and stopped when he saw me, and this time he did not look tired. He looked braced.
“Lily.”
“Dr. Moreno asked me to put this in your hand.”
He took it. He turned it over and saw that there was nothing on the front.
Then he did the thing I had not expected, which was to open it there and read it standing up, all four pages, taking his time.
Nine minutes. I stood against the panelling for nine minutes and neither of us said anything.
He asked good questions. I want that in the record too, because I have been unfair to him elsewhere in this account.
“What is an oximeter.”
I told him.
“Does it hurt him.”
It is the first question a parent asks and the only one that is always asked in the present tense.
“No. It is a soft strap around the foot. He will pull at it for two nights and then ignore it.”
“Five nights running.”
“Five consecutive. Two with you here and two with you away.”
He looked up at that.
“Why?”
And there it was, and I had eight seconds to decide, and I decided to tell him the truth in the smallest possible number of words.
“Because seventeen of his nineteen episodes happened on nights you were not in the house.”
He did not react at all. That is not a figure of speech. His face did nothing whatsoever, and behind him through the passage window two men were carrying a trestle across the lawn.
“Since March?”
“Since March.”
“And you have known that for how long?”
“Three days.”
“And Moreno?”
“Two.”
He read the fourth page again, the one with the boxes on it.
Then he folded it back into three and said, “Leave it with me. I’ll have Ellis look at the wording.”
I said it was a medical consent, not a contract.
“Everything in this house is a contract at the moment,” he said.
It was true. It was also the whole of the injury, and he said it in the tone of a man stating a regrettable fact about the weather.
I said Dr. Moreno needed it back by Wednesday.
“Then he’ll have it by Wednesday.”
Constance came along the passage with a jug of something for the blue room and did not pretend she had not been listening.
“Victor,” she said. “Sign the girl’s form.”
“I’m going to.”
“Sign it tonight.”
“Mother.”
“She is not asking you for money and she is not asking you to accuse anybody. She is asking you to let a doctor put a strap on your son’s foot.”
I have never been defended like that, before or since, and I have thought about it a great deal.
Victor said he would look at it properly on Tuesday, and he went upstairs with the envelope in his hand.
Constance stood with me in the passage with the jug.
“He will do it,” she said. “He does everything on Tuesdays. It is not indifference, it is his father in him.”
I said thank you, and it came out badly, because I had not said thank you to anybody in that house for a fortnight and my voice had got out of the habit.
“I will see that it goes to Ellis and comes straight back,” she said. “Do you have another copy?”
I did. I had photographed all four pages in the boot room the night before, and I had printed them in the estate office on the Saturday, because I have never in my life given away the only copy of anything.
“Give it to me,” she said. “Then if Ellis loses a page, we are not starting again.”
So I went upstairs and got it and put it in her hand.
She thanked me and went off with the jug.
It was a completely ordinary thing to do. It was the correct, careful, sensible thing to do, and I had thought of it first, and she had only agreed with me.
Here is the arithmetic, which I did not do until January.
At twenty past eleven that morning, Dr. Elias Moreno had told me to give that document to nobody but Victor Blackwood.
By five past five that afternoon it was in three sets of hands, and I had put it into two of them myself.