James would have preferred to talk to Camilla alone, but found her ensconced with Martha by the fire in the drawing room. He pulled a Chippendale chair toward the settee where the cousins sat and prepared to be rude.
“I am sorry,” he said, sitting down. “I know this is none of my business, but I feel that since we’re all still here, we’ve agreed to tolerate a certain amount of rudeness, don’t you think? If we wanted manners, we wouldn’t be doing this.”
Camilla reached to the floor and retrieved a mostly empty bottle of wine and held it out unsteadily to James, who declined. “I think you must be right. We’ve all chosen manners for years and years. And that’s all to the good—”
“It really isn’t,” Martha cut in.
“It is, though. It is. There are reasons why one doesn’t discuss the unpleasant things. It’s because they’re unpleasant,” Camilla said, with the air of someone making a groundbreaking pronouncement. She was very drunk indeed.
“Can’t stand unpleasant things myself,” said James, aware that he sounded inane but also that he was being honest. “Or talking about them, at least. Thinking about them either, come to think.”
“Good heavens, both of you,” said Martha.
“No, no. It’s just—we just had a war—”
“Very unpleasant!” said Camilla.
“Chock-full of unpleasantness,” agreed James. “It does me in when I think too hard about it all or when I’m reminded too abruptly of it. But then the not thinking about it becomes the actual unpleasantness, you know?”
“I do not,” said Camilla solemnly. “Wine.”
“I understand,” said Martha, who appeared to be the more sober of the two women. “One spends so much effort not thinking about a thing that it becomes a sort of obsession.”
“Like Victorians and ankles,” said Camilla. “It becomes a sort of perversion. Or is it a fetish?”
“Yes, exactly!” said James. “One forgets that the thing one’s so concerned about is just ankles. And I wonder if some things in 1927 are just—”
“Ankles?” asked Camilla, wide-eyed.
“Well, mundane, I suppose. Or straightforward, at least.” James was afraid he was speaking in circles, so he took the photographs out of his coat pocket and handed them to the ladies, carefully watching their faces for recognition. One was a photograph of Camilla in an old-fashioned bathing costume. Another was a photograph of Rose in a grimy coverall. Both were from the summer of 1927. Neither woman spoke.
“Of these two women,” James said, very quietly, “there’s only one who could possibly be pregnant. Lilah was born at most two months after these photographs were taken. I know tall women can conceal pregnancy, but not in a bathing costume.”
Camilla and Martha looked at one another, but neither spoke. “As I said, I know it’s none of my concern,” James went on. “And you certainly don’t owe me any explanation. If you tell me to leave it alone, I will. But did Rose go off to hospital to have Lilah?”
It added up, James thought. Rose could have died giving birth or—and he knew he was being too optimistic, but sometimes there were happy outcomes and it was all right to hold on to that hope—she might have turned the baby over to her sister and gone somewhere new to start fresh, perhaps using the money she had recently inherited and presumably withdrawn from her bank account.
If Rose had managed to conceal the pregnancy from her sister, cousin, and father—and James had known of stranger things happening—she might have gone to the hospital on the morning of August first without any explanation. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched to suppose that someone might call the police in those circumstances. Gladys Button and the chauffeur might be totally unrelated.
“No,” said Martha. “Rose didn’t go off to have Lilah. But I did.”