My father died in June 1927, a year before Jimmy. I can’t pretend I didn’t feel relief. But it shows character if you don’t make a fuss, or that’s what they say, so there was absolutely no difficulty there, for once. It was as if I’d somehow beaten the old man by outliving him, in spite of the bloody war. That seems a dreadful thing to enter one’s mind, but it was what I thought.
Jimmy didn’t go to the funeral. He said he couldn’t get away from the business. He simply told us he wouldn’t be able to go and we didn’t argue. But I was rather sorry about it, because Father had liked Jimmy more than he’d liked Georgie or me.
Father was buried in the village churchyard. Some of the local people, the older ones, were there, but not many. Because my father wasn’t a man who was liked, he wasn’t the sort of chap who’d pass the time of day or anything like that – in fact, there’d been trouble in the village because he’d started wandering about in the evenings, behaving rather oddly – there were a few children who’d complained that he’d thrown stones at them and once he pushed a young girl into a ditch, and there was another occasion when he’d found a young woman walking home in the dusk and started abusing her because she was out by herself. A local man told me that after that incident the village policeman, Constable Whatmough, had spoken to Thomas and told him to keep an eye on my father, in case he did anything else – and Thomas had answered that the girl deserved it. My chap said that Thomas said women and children shouldn’t go rambling all over the place in the dark or they’d get what was coming to them. Quite extraordinary, when you think that the poor girl was only walking down the lane.
I was in the churchyard, having a look at the headstones after the funeral, and I came across a small grave with a plain stone that said Frederick Fairbanks Lomax 1894-1899. It was the first time I’d seen Freddie’s grave. That was all it said, the name and dates. There were no flowers, but it looked tidy. When I told Ada that my father had died, we’d fallen to talking about the old times at Dennys and I’d asked her about Freddie’s funeral. She told me: ‘Your father wanted Master Freddie in the earth and covered up as fast as he could. It was all hurried off, Master Edmund, hurried off and no one was to talk about it.’ When I asked her why, she said, ‘It was too much for him, poor man, after your mother. I don’t think he ever forgave her for dying and leaving him like that, and then Master Freddie on top … it was too much.’
I said, ‘What do you think it was, an accident – Freddie, I mean?’
‘I don’t know, Master Edmund. I never did understand it and I don’t suppose I ever shall.’ Well, I was still in the dark about the whys and wherefores, but it was a relief to hear Ada mention Freddie’s name, even if she did it with pursed lips. Because most of the time he seemed to be an invisible object that one had to skirt around in the conversation and one never quite knew what shape it was, if you see what I mean. Only that one had to avoid touching it at all costs. As a child, I was afraid that if I thought about Freddie for too long, I’d sort of become contaminated and other people would know it, and then they wouldn’t speak to me. I started to try and explain all this to Ada, but I can’t have made a very good job of it because she said, ‘Don’t upset yourself, Master Edmund. Master Freddie’s at peace now and it won’t do no good to disturb him.’ Well, that wasn’t what I meant at all, but it was obviously hopeless trying to explain, so I took myself off.
There was no mystery about my father’s death, but the manner of it was rather odd. No one had seen him for a week, and then a man from the village knocked on the door at Dennys and there was no response, so in the end Constable Whatmough was fetched, and he broke into the house and found my father and Thomas lying at the foot of the stairs, both quite dead. The doctor thought that they must have slipped and fallen down the stairs together, one trying to save the other, perhaps. Thomas had his neck broken – he died immediately – but my father’s leg and hip were badly smashed up and the doctor said he could have gone on for quite a few days. He couldn’t have pulled himself along for any distance to get help, because he was in a very frail state, quite apart from the broken bones, so he must have had a fairly grim time of it. The doctor told me this in private. I didn’t mention it to Georgie.
Thomas was buried in the village churchyard too – next to my father, as it turned out. I don’t think I’d have fancied lying next to Thomas for all eternity, but a man can’t choose unless he’s reserved a place in advance. It was the natural place for Thomas, of course, because he’d been born in the village and lived there all his life, but I was rather surprised that my father hadn’t elected to be buried with my mother in London.
There was a pub in the village called The Hand and Flower, and Georgie and I stayed in a couple of rooms there. Constable Whatmough gave me the keys to Dennys after the funeral. That was an awful thing, because we knew that the house must belong to me under the terms of the will, but when I asked Georgie what to do, she said, ‘Throw the keys into the village pond.’
‘I wish I could.’
‘Well, I don’t see why you can’t. Anyway, I don’t care what you do, just so long as I never have to set eyes on it again.’
I knew that was her attitude, which was why I was flabbergasted when she agreed to come to the funeral in the first place. Jimmy told her she ought to go, and she said, ‘Well, I will.’ She’d seemed terribly offhand about coming along, but we drove the whole way down in silence and I could tell she was nervous as hell. The two of us stood on the porch at Dennys trying to get our courage up. The whole veranda was completely tied up with ivy and Virginia creeper, which was probably what was holding it together. There was a pile of smashed-up tiles in the drive that had fallen off the roof and most of the windows seemed to be boarded up. The wooden steps to the front door were completely rotten, and I think they must have had an accident getting the coffins out of the house, because two of them had completely caved in and there were bits of wood and moss everywhere. When Georgie saw the holes, she said, ‘Well, I suppose we should be grateful he left by the front door.’ All the time, she held on to my hand, wouldn’t let it go.
We managed to get the front door of the house open and immediately there was this vile smell which sort of assaulted you. I honestly think it was worse than the trenches, because the foul air was trapped with no breeze to blow it away. The hall floor had been decorated with a pattern of coloured tiles, but you couldn’t see it because it was crusted with muck and straw, packed down hard as if the place was some sort of farmyard, and the few remaining sticks of furniture were battered almost to pieces. There were various rooms off the hall and I noticed flies buzzing around outside two of the doors, where the smell was particularly strong. I went as close as I could stomach and the upper panels of the doors had been hacked out, so I had a look inside. It was the most pitiful sight. They’d been keeping animals in these rooms, rabbits in one and poultry in another, and they must have been passing hay and food for them through the holes in the doors. The poor creatures had all starved to death and there were corpses everywhere, covered in droppings and alive with flies. The instant I saw that I knew I had to get out before I vomited, but when I turned to look for Georgie she’d disappeared.
I truly don’t think I could have stayed inside that house one moment longer. It wasn’t just the stench, but the atmosphere was so – well, I suppose it was knowing that my father had died there and thinking of him lying in that filth, in terrible pain … I couldn’t rid my mind of the picture of him beside Thomas, waiting for death to come while those desperate animals were clawing at the doors in search of food.
I nearly broke my neck on the front porch on the way out, looking for Georgie. For several months before my father died I’d hardly seen her at all – I couldn’t bear the strangers racketing round the house and never any peace, so I cleared out. I was going to put up at my club, but Louisa found out and invited me to stay there, with her and Davy and the baby, because Caroline was just a tot in those days. I stayed with them for three or four months in the end. I kept offering to move out – it wasn’t fair to them to stay so long – but they wouldn’t hear of it. Louisa was always so kind. When I told her how much I hated the way Georgie was behaving, she said, ‘She’s unhappy about losing the baby. You shouldn’t be angry with her, Edmund.’ It had never occurred to me that Georgie might have actually wanted a baby until Louisa said that. I tried to imagine Georgie with a baby, but I couldn’t make it fit at all, somehow. But all women want babies, or I suppose they must, or they wouldn’t keep on having them.
Louisa certainly seemed to want her baby. She was a marvellous mother. I used to go up to the nursery with her to see Caroline sometimes, and Louisa would always take her in her arms and kiss her. I’d say, ‘She’s a lucky baby to have a mother like you,’ and Louisa would laugh at me, but I meant it.
Seeing Louisa every day should have made me the happiest man alive and some of the time it did, as long as I could forget the rest of it. It sounds childish, but sometimes when the car brought me back from the office, I used to pretend that Louisa was my wife, not Davy’s, and that Caroline was my daughter. I didn’t tell her about that, but we did talk about a lot of other things – well, I suppose I talked, mostly, but Louisa was always quite happy to listen. We talked about the summers at Dennys and about Roland … I used to wonder if she liked to hear me talk because it reminded her of him. I wouldn’t have minded if that was the case, because being with her made me feel nearer to Roland, too. But when she looked at me, straight into my face, in that quiet, serene way of hers, I felt like the lowest being on the earth. Because how can you forget that you’ve betrayed the person you love most in the world when they look you in the eye? Even if they don’t know what you’ve done, you know it and you know that you can’t undo it.
I went round to the back of the house to look for Georgie. I couldn’t find her anywhere. The flower beds were choked with weeds and the yard was in a filthy state, but the hedge was still there, massively overgrown, with the little hut behind it that used to be the servants’ toilet. Georgie and I were fascinated by it as young children because we were never allowed to go near it. You couldn’t see the entrance to the hut any more, or even its shape, it was just a great mound of creeper – something rather smelly with a greenish-white blossom – which had grown so much that it was smothering all the trees within range and there were waist-high stinging nettles everywhere.
I found Georgie standing in the shadow of the hut in the middle of a clump of nettles. She had her handkerchief pressed against her face and she looked as if she’d been crying. She said, ‘This was where Freddie died.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘It’s true. They all went into the house and waited until he was dead, then they fetched the policeman.’ She ran straight towards me and grabbed hold of my arms. ‘They let him die, Edmund!’
‘Georgie, you don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘Yes I do. I do know! He wasn’t dead when I saw him. He was breathing. But they left him out here – Mrs Mattie and Nurse and all of them. It was them, their fault! They ran away and waited for him to die.’
She was sobbing. I’d told myself – promised myself – that I would not touch her, but when she ran towards me I had to, I had to hold her in my arms until she stopped weeping. That was all I did, I didn’t kiss her or do anything, I just put my arms round her. I don’t remember ever being told that Freddie’s body was found outside the hut and I suppose I might have expected to feel something of an emotional sort, standing on the place where he was found. But I couldn’t imagine it at all and there was nothing there except Georgie and a lot of nettles.
Georgie said, ‘I want to go back to the car.’
‘Come on, then.’ I had a hip flask with me and a bottle from The Hand and Flower. Brandy. Father’s favourite. Georgie waited while I broke one of the kitchen windows and hopped over the sill to get a couple of glasses.
Georgie grabbed them and said, ‘Let’s get drunk.’ She made a toast: ‘Here’s to keeping up family traditions.’ Then we sat in the car and got drunk. There’s no other way to describe it, because that’s what we did, quite deliberately. I think Georgie started to feel the effects before I did, because she was giggling and singing to herself. Then she suddenly said, ‘Edmund, I’ve simply got to take off my stockings.’ She’d torn them running through the nettles and her legs were quite badly stung. I didn’t want to watch her take her stockings off, so I said I’d go and fetch a dock leaf, but by that time I wasn’t very steady and for some reason, well, mainly it was because I didn’t want to go back to the car, I ended up with a dock leaf and a lot of grass and flowers as well. I remember reaching right into the middle of a bush for some big white roses – in fact, I scratched my wrist rather badly, although I hardly noticed it at the time. I heard Georgie singing ‘O, O, Antonio, he’s gone away, Left me alone-io, all on my own-io’ at the top of her voice, and then she started shouting ‘Edmund, come back! Where are you? Don’t leave me all on my own-io! You don’t have one scrap of love for me, Edmund, not one ounce …’ I stood in the bushes for a few minutes where she couldn’t see me, but she only shouted louder. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass, so I thought I’d better go and see what she was up to.
I found her swigging brandy from the flask, sitting with her bare legs stuck out in front of her. The sun was going down and they looked like ivory in the fading light. She was laughing. ‘Sorry, Edmund, I dropped the glasses.’ I didn’t want to look at her. It wasn’t her legs that were disturbing to me, somehow, but her feet. I suppose because a car was the wrong place for bare feet, they looked very undressed, next to the brake and the steering wheel, and the effect was rather unsettling. I pitched all the roses and other stuff into her lap and sat down sideways on the driver’s seat with my back to her, and I lit a cigarette. She said, ‘Won’t you take some of these flowers, Edmund? I only want the dock.’
I didn’t turn round, I only said, ‘Throw them out of the window, then.’ We just sat there in silence after that, me with my back to her, passing the bottle back and forth. I turned round after a while and I saw she’d wound the flowers into a sort of garland and put it on her head. It made me smile and I think perhaps I leaned over to touch it: ‘Flora.’
She said, ‘If Jimmy were here, we wouldn’t be doing this.’ As if we were two children making mischief. Then she said, ‘I’m not frightened. I thought I would be, but I’m not.’ I didn’t know what she meant, I thought she must mean frightened of the dark, because the light was completely gone.
I said, ‘You’re never frightened.’
She laughed. ‘No, I’m not, am I?’
When the bottle was empty, she grabbed it and jumped out of the car. She ran towards the house on her bare feet, dancing, leaping in the air, scything the bottle from side to side and whirling in circles. She was wearing a black dress and all I could see in the dark were flashes of her white face and legs. Her eyes were like slits, black slits. Then she stopped dancing and hurled the bottle at the house as hard as she could. It was too dark to see where it landed, but I heard a window shatter. ‘I hope it rots. I hope it burns down.’ Then she ran back and hurled herself into the passenger seat. ‘Start the car. Now! Start it now!’ I was fumbling so much in the dark that I almost broke my thumb on the starting handle. Georgie had the garland she’d made in her lap and she was ripping it to pieces. ‘Take me away,’ she kept saying. ‘Take me away.’
We made it out of the main gates, but I hadn’t driven more than a hundred yards down the road when she grabbed my arm and nearly landed us in a ditch. ‘Edmund, stop. I can’t bear it. Stop the car. Stop it now!’ She was white, shaking, weeping – I’d never seen her like that and it frightened me. By the time I’d got control of the wheel again and pulled up, her face was buried in my waistcoat and she was sobbing like a child. The thought of returning to Dennys made my heart sink, but I said, ‘Do you want to go back?’ because I thought that must be it.
She said, ‘We’re never going back. Edmund, I don’t care what happens. We are never going back.’ I stroked her head. I could see that there were still some bits of flowers and leaves on her clothes and hair, so I started picking them off and I don’t know if she misunderstood what I was doing, or if it was her, or me, or what it was, but after a while she kissed me … you must remember the circumstances, and that we’d both had a great deal to drink. When Georgie kissed me, I had Louisa’s face in my mind. I wished she were Louisa with all my heart.
It was pitch dark, so there was no chance of anyone seeing us – we couldn’t even see each other. We sat for a long time in the dark, holding hands. Georgie said, ‘Will you come back to Hope House now, for good?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’s just us now, isn’t it? I love you, Edmund.’
And then I said the stupidest thing I could have said. If I hadn’t been half cut, if I’d thought before I’d spoken, the words would never have left my mouth. Because I couldn’t see her, I felt less … well, I suppose it was as if she couldn’t hear me. But I said it. ‘I love you, too.’