“It’s a tumor she has, poor thing.”
I looked at her more carefully and I noticed that she had a bandage round her head, just below her eyes.
It lay quite flat across the bridge of her nose, and one saw hardly anything of her face except that strip of whiteness.
As soon as she had gone, the keeper rose.
“Now I’ll leave you to yourself.”
I don’t know whether I made some gesture, but instead of going he halted behind my chair.
The sensation of someone posted at my back made me uncomfortable.
The sun was getting low and the whole room was flooded with a pleasant, mellow light.
Two hornets were buzzing overhead, against the skylight.
I was so sleepy I could hardly keep my eyes open.
Without looking round, I asked the keeper how long he’d been at the Home.
“Five years.” The answer came so pat that one could have thought he’d been expecting my question. That started him off, and he became quite chatty.
If anyone had told him ten years ago that he’d end his days as doorkeeper at a home at Marengo, he’d never have believed it.
He was sixty-four, he said, and hailed from Paris.
When he said that, I broke in.
“Ah, you don’t come from here?”
I remembered then that, before taking me to the warden, he’d told me something about Mother. He had said she’d have to be buried mighty quickly because of the heat in these parts, especially down in the plain. “At Paris they keep the body for three days, sometimes four.” After that he had mentioned that he’d spent the best part of his life in Paris, and could never manage to forget it.
“Here,” he had said, “things have to go with a rush, like. You’ve hardly time to get used to the idea that someone’s dead, before you’re hauled off to the funeral.”
“That’s enough,” his wife had put in.
“You didn’t ought to say such things to the poor young gentleman.”
The old fellow had blushed and begun to apologize.
I told him it was quite all right.
As a matter of fact, I found it rather interesting, what he’d been telling me; I hadn’t thought of that before.
Now he went on to say that he’d entered the Home as an ordinary inmate.
But he was still quite hale and hearty, and when the keeper’s job fell vacant, he offered to take it on.
I pointed out that, even so, he was really an inmate like the others, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
He was “an official, like.”
I’d been struck before by his habit of saying “they” or, less often, “them old folks,” when referring to inmates no older than himself.
Still, I could see his point of view.
As doorkeeper he had a certain standing, and some authority over the rest of them.
Just then the nurse returned.
Night had fallen very quickly; all of a sudden, it seemed, the sky went black above the skylight.
The keeper switched on the lamps, and I was almost blinded by the blaze of light.
He suggested I should go to the refectory for dinner, but I wasn’t hungry.
Then he proposed bringing me a mug of cafe au lait.
As I am very partial to cafe au lait I said, “Thanks,” and a few minutes later he came back with a tray.
I drank the coffee, and then I wanted a cigarette.
But I wasn’t sure if I should smoke, under the circumstances—in Mother’s presence.
I thought it over; really, it didn’t seem to matter, so I offered the keeper a cigarette, and we both smoked.
After a while he started talking again.
“You know, your mother’s friends will be coming soon, to keep vigil with you beside the body. We always have a ‘vigil’ here, when anyone dies.
I’d better go and get some chairs and a pot of black coffee.”
The glare off the white walls was making my eyes smart, and I asked him if he couldn’t turn off one of the lamps.
“Nothing doing,” he said. They’d arranged the lights like that; either one had them all on or none at all.
After that I didn’t pay much more attention to him.
He went out, brought some chairs, and set them out round the coffin.
On one he placed a coffeepot and ten or a dozen cups.
Then he sat down facing me, on the far side of Mother.
The nurse was at the other end of the room, with her back to me.
I couldn’t see what she was doing, but by the way her arms moved I guessed that she was knitting.