Suspension of Mercy Read Free

long life, and she was ready for the end when it came.
    Mrs. Lilybanks turned down her bed, which Mrs. Hawkins had made up for her that afternoon, went into the bathroom and took her two pills, a ritual before retiring, then she went downstairs, holding firmly to the banister as she descended. She turned on some more lights, sliding her hand along unfamiliar walls until she found them, took her torch and went out into the small and now unkempt front garden and picked a few pansies. She put them in a small plain glass and carried them upstairs and put them on her night table. Then she brushed her teeth, which were still her own teeth, complete in front, though six molars had been drawn. She had had her bath earlier in the day at her Ipswich hotel.
    But she did not get to sleep immediately. She thought of her daughter Martha in Australia, of her granddaughter Prissie, in London now, probably saying to a lot of her young friends, who would be sitting around her flat on the floor, drinking red wine, “Well, I got Grannie bedded down in the country today. Whew! Don’t you think she’s out of her ever-loving mind? An old thing like that all alone in the country?” Because Prissie secretly approved of what her Grannie had decided to do, and wanted her friends to approve of it, too, or maybe to defend her Grannie in case her friends disapproved. “Mrs. Hawkins is coming over every afternoon, Prissie, even Sundays for a cup of tea. And after I’m gone, the cottage is yours, you know,” Mrs. Lilybanks had said that afternoon. Mrs. Lilybanks smiled now in the darkness. She wasn’t worried about loneliness. Friendly people were never lonely, she thought, and she had been in many strange places in the world, so she felt she knew. Mrs. Hawkins said she wanted to introduce her to a couple of her former employers in the neighborhood. Mrs. Lilybanks had been quite touched by that. The couple next door was young, Mr. Spark had told her, and hadn’t been here very long. Mrs. Lilybanks thought that in a few days she’d ask them over for tea. She’d have to go to Framlingham this week to buy odds and ends like potholders and curtain rods. That meant a taxi to Roncy Noll and a bus from there. Frannegan, they had called Framlingham in the old days in Suffolk, and perhaps the farm people still did . . .
    M RS. L ILYBANKS HAD HAD HER TEA-BREAK and a short rest on the living-room sofa and was up again putting away things in the kitchen, when Alicia Bartleby came over the next morning at eleven. Alicia was carrying a plate that held a quarter of an orange-iced cake under a paper napkin.
    After she had introduced herself, Alicia said, “I wish I could say I made the cake, but I didn’t. But it’s from a nice place in Ipswich.”
    Mrs. Lilybanks asked her to sit down and said she couldn’t be more pleased to meet her new neighbor so soon, because she had been wondering when she would.
    Alicia didn’t want to sit down. “I’d love to see around the house, if you don’t mind my seeing it before you’ve settled in. I’ve never been here before.”
    “No? Why of course I don’t mind.” Mrs. Lilybanks moved toward the stairs. “I’d have thought you looked at this house when you bought yours.”
    Alicia’s face spread in a wide smile. “They told us there was more to do here—plumbing and things—so we thought we’d take a house that wasn’t so much outlay. My husband and I have to watch our pennies. Turn them.”
    The house had three rooms downstairs and three up, plus a new bathroom. The furniture was Mrs. Lilybanks’ from her London flat, she said, and from the look of it, plus its abundance, Alicia drew the conclusion that Mrs. Lilybanks was quite well off.
    “You’re going to be here by yourself?” Alicia asked.
    “Oh, yes. I don’t mind being alone. In fact, I like it,” Mrs. Lilybanks said cheerfully. “It’s been fifteen years since I last had a house in the country—in Surrey—with my husband, so I thought