A Very Easy Death

Начало книги

AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the afternoon of Thursday, 24 October 1963, I was in Rome, in my room at the Hotel Minerva; I was to fly home the next day and I was putting papers away when the telephone rang. It was Bost calling me from Paris: ‘Your mother has had an accident,’ he said. I thought: she has been knocked down by a car; she was climbing laboriously from the roadway to the pavement, leaning on her stick, and a car knocked her down. ‘She had a fall in the bathroom: she has broken the neck of her femur,’ said Bost. He lived in the same building as my mother. About ten o’clock the evening before, he had been going up the stairs with Olga, and they noticed three people ahead of them – a woman and two policemen. ‘It’s the landing above the second floor,’ the woman was saying. Had something happened to Madame de Beauvoir? Yes. A fall. For two hours she had crawled across the floor before she could reach the telephone; she had asked a friend, Madame Tardieu, to have the door forced open. Bost and Olga followed them up to the flat. They found Maman lying on the floor in her red corduroy dressing-gown. Dr Lacroix, a woman doctor who was living in the house, diagnosed a fracture of the neck of the femur: Maman had been taken away by the emergency service of the Boucicaut hospital and she spent the night in the public ward. ‘But I’m taking her to the C nursing home,’ Bost told me. ‘That’s where Professor B operates – he’s one of the best bone surgeons. She was against it; she was afraid it would cost you too much. But I persuaded her in the end.’

Читать дальше →