Sad Cypress (Hercule Poirot 22)

Nurse Hopkins said cheerfully and callously:

“Oh, dear me, no. He was unconscious for an hour before he passed away.”

Mary said slowly:

“I feel perhaps I ought to have come down and looked after him. After all, he was my father.”

Nurse Hopkins said with a trace of embarrassment:

“Now, just you listen to me, Mary: whether he was your father or not doesn’t enter into it. Children don’t care much about their parents in these days, from what I can see, and a good many parents don’t care for their children, either. Miss Lambert, at the secondary school, says that’s as it should be. According to her, family life is all wrong, and children should be brought up by the state. That’s as may be—just a glorified orphanage, it sounds to me—but, anyway, it’s a waste of breath to go back over the past and sentimentalize. We’ve got to get on with living—that’s our job and not too easy, either, sometimes!”

Mary said slowly:

“I expect you’re right. But I feel perhaps it was my fault we didn’t get on better.”

Nurse Hopkins said robustly:

“Nonsense.”

The word exploded like a bomb.

It quelled Mary. Nurse Hopkins turned to more practical matters.

“What are you going to do with the furniture? Store it? Or sell it?”

Mary said doubtfully:

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

Running a practical eye over it, Nurse Hopkins said:

“Some of it’s quite good and solid. You might store it and furnish a little flat of your own in London some day. Get rid of the rubbish. The chairs are good—so’s the table. And that’s a nice bureau—it’s the kind that’s out of fashion, but it’s solid mahogany, and they say Victorian stuff will come in again one day. I’d get rid of that great wardrobe, if I were you. Too big to fit in anywhere. Takes up half the bedroom as it is.”

They made a list between them of pieces to be kept or let go.

Mary said:

“The lawyer’s been very kind—Mr. Seddon, I mean. He advanced me some money, so that I could get started with my training fees and other expenses. It will be a month or so before the money can be definitely made over to me, so he said.”

Nurse Hopkins said:

“How do you like your work?”

“I think I shall like it very much. It’s rather strenuous at first. I come home tired to death.”

Nurse Hopkins said grimly:

“I thought I was going to die when I was a probationer at St. Luke’s. I felt I could never stick it for three years. But I did.”

They had sorted through the old man’s clothes. Now they came to a tin box full of papers.

Mary said:

“We must go through these, I suppose.”

They sat down one on each side of the table.

Nurse Hopkins grumbled as she started with a handful.