EDMUND

Jimmy was supposed to be in Manchester. He’d booked a hotel room for the night, the police checked on that. Georgie would never have dared to do it if she’d known he was going to come back. Nobody knew Jimmy even had a key to the back door. Mrs Seddon said he’d told her not to bolt it in case Ada came back late. ‘He’d gone out of his way to tell me not to,’ was what she said in court. The front door was always bolted, of course, and Ada had gone to see her family … The business with the hotel room was odd, though. Because it was a small hotel, not his usual type of place at all. And he’d have worried about that, about the owner losing business because he didn’t turn up. I wondered if he might have sent the hotel some money for the room, but they swore they hadn’t received anything. That’s what I can’t understand, because it wasn’t his way of doing things at all. It was a mystery how he’d got back as well, because Herbert didn’t drive him and if he went on the train no one saw him, nor did any of the taxi drivers at the station. There was no question that he’d been to Manchester, because he’d attended a meeting there. None of the men he’d talked to thought there was anything odd in his behaviour and some of them were old acquaintances. Perhaps someone gave him a lift back to London – he could have driven himself, but if he’d borrowed a car that never came to light either.

It must have been one o’clock in the morning, half past, I don’t know. I hadn’t been long asleep, anyway. I was woken by the sound of Jimmy’s footsteps in the corridor outside. When he opened the door of my bedroom I didn’t see him as much as hear him, but I knew who was there. The room was pitch dark, then he opened the door and stood there in the light for just a second – a blink – I heard him breathe once, then he closed it again and the footsteps went away. I didn’t move, didn’t go after him, didn’t beg him, forgive us, forgive me … I lay there for two hours and did not move one inch. And Georgie lay naked next to me, with the sheet thrown off and the skin on her back white like a pearl, fast asleep.

Georgie’d been difficult all day – she never said so, but she was missing Teddy, missing the things they did together. She mightn’t have wanted him any more, but she was bored without him. She was so restless, I took her upstairs – we were in my bedroom, which was as usual, but then she wanted to stay. ‘I don’t want to go back to my room, Edmund.’ Like a child. ‘I want to stay here with you. Like we used to.’ I told her she couldn’t, but she wouldn’t listen, told me she wanted me to read to her, so I did. Blind Corner, by Dornford Yates. I began to read and she went off to sleep almost immediately. I got out of the bed and into an armchair. I read until I’d finished the book and then I had nothing else to do, so I got back into the bed and tried to sleep, but I didn’t do very well. I didn’t like Georgie being there. I could never bear to be near her afterwards.

I tried to pretend I hadn’t seen Jimmy, that he was part of a dream, but I knew he wasn’t. My stomach was heaving and I wanted to get up and vomit, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even pull up the sheets to cover my head and that was what I wanted to do most of all – hide. Hide and never be seen again.

Would it have made a difference if we’d gone to Jimmy together, the two of us? I thought of that, us standing naked like Adam and Eve, with bare feet on the carpet while he stood in his hat and overcoat and looked at us. For some reason, I imagined he would tread on our feet and break them with his shoes, and that horrified me. I heard him go into the bathroom – not Georgie’s, there was another one that he and I shared. I heard him vomit … That was a funny thing – Georgie’s lawyer, Osbert Spencer, said to us, ‘Don’t mention two bathrooms, they’ll think there’s something wrong with you, all this washing and bathing. You must just call it the bathroom.’ I didn’t tell Spencer about hearing Jimmy in the bathroom, because I couldn’t tell him why he was being ill. I said I’d heard nothing, seen nothing. At first I was all for telling him, but Georgie wouldn’t hear of it and after a while I came to see it was too dangerous, too damning. She said, ‘They’ll never believe I didn’t kill Jimmy if you tell the truth,’ and she was right.

Jimmy stayed in the bathroom for a long time. I don’t know if I nodded off or went into a trance, or what it was, but when I heard his feet in the corridor I sort of jumped back into myself and remembered what I was doing there, and what Georgie was doing. I heard Jimmy open the outer door and go on to the landing, and I didn’t know where he’d gone to, but I thought: Now. I’ll prepare myself now. I’ll get dressed and work out what I must say to him. But I didn’t do it. I lay on that bed and whimpered like a whipped child. I couldn’t do it.

I was wondering if Jimmy had left the house, where he’d gone to and whether he’d come back. I suppose I thought he was going to come back because I was trying to prepare myself to talk to him, and eventually he did – I heard him go into his dressing-room and shut the door. It was getting light, so I got out of bed and stood by the window and smoked cigarettes. I didn’t know if Georgie was shamming sleep, I thought perhaps she was, but I didn’t go near her to find out. Afterwards, she said she wasn’t and we had an argument, but I didn’t really believe her until Spencer asked her about sleeping draughts and things, and it came out that she’d been taking three or four times the amount Dr Durrant had prescribed for her. Spencer asked her if she realised she was taking an abnormally high dose and she said, ‘Well, it was a normal dose for me. I took it every night.’ Old Durrant must have wondered why she kept asking for more, but he never was much of a doctor and in any case, Georgie had him wound round her little finger so tightly that he’d have given her a pipe of opium if she’d asked for it.

I suppose I guessed what Jimmy was doing. He must have gone into Georgie’s bathroom to get the drugs, but I didn’t hear him. That must have been because I was on the window side of the room, away from the door. But it was so quiet – the house, the garden, the road outside, everything was very quiet, very still. And Jimmy … Why didn’t I try to stop him? Why didn’t I talk to him, say that I’d leave, I’d go abroad, I’d never see either of them again, that it was my fault – say something, anything, to try to stop him. Haven’t I thought about it every day since? But I don’t know the answer, I still don’t know. At the time, all I could think about was how none of it would have happened if I’d been allowed to die instead of Roland, because I went through life ruining it for other people, spoiling everything I touched … and while I was berating myself, there was a man dying in the next room and I had done nothing to prevent it.

Eventually, I heard a sort of thump, just one, coming from Jimmy’s dressing-room. I thought Georgie must have heard that, because it was quite a loud crash – and after a few minutes I thought I’d better go and see what it was.

I think Jimmy was dead when I found him. I mean, I don’t think there was any hope of getting him back. I suppose I didn’t think too much about that, because if they’d brought him round and he’d become an imbecile or damaged himself in some way … one wouldn’t want to live if one were in that sort of state, especially not a man like Jimmy. And that he knew, I suppose. About Georgie and me. Actually, there’s no suppose about it. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that he knew. It was in my mind every moment that I was in that room, waiting for something to happen. But it wasn’t the whole thing – because I can’t honestly say I was thinking about Georgie, either. There wasn’t really any one thing; I wish I could say there was, then I might feel that I’d acted with some principle, not run around in a great sort of hare-brained panic, which was what I did.

Jimmy was lying on the floor in the middle of the room. I saw immediately that he must have been in the garden, because the bottoms of his trousers were wet and he had grass on his shoes. There was a table where he kept a tray with some whisky on it – he liked to drink whisky and water while he was getting dressed in the evening – and there was a decanter and a water jug … there was a note underneath the dressing-table and his pen. He must have fallen down while he was holding them. I think I went to him first, I looked at him or touched him or something, before I read the note.

It said, on the top of the paper, ‘Edmund’ and then:

I have always believed that I did my best when I had no advantage of birth or wealth, but it is not enough. I am at fault. I misjudged you because I considered you to be an honourable man and a gentleman, but you and she have broken every law of man and nature. I cannot bear to think of what you have done. If it were only Teddy Booth I could have excused it, but never this. I have taken 120 grains of Veronal. When I have completed this letter I shall take chloral hydrate to finish the job. I feel now as if I were a little drunk, but it is not unpleasant. I am not afraid. May God have mercy on you both.

He’d signed it with his full name, James Arthur Gresham. There was a postscript asking if I would see to some business – he’d given his word and wanted me to keep it. Then at the bottom he’d written: There will be people who will say that I brought her to this, but what did I do to you?

I put the note and the pen into the pocket of my dressing gown and then I thought: Nobody must see the room like this, so I picked up the tray with the whisky and so on, and took it into the bathroom. There was a glass on it, a tumbler, which had some chalky stuff in it, like white powder. I thought that must be the Veronal, where it hadn’t dissolved, so I rinsed it out and dried it with one of the towels, and then I rinsed and dried the water jug. I was bringing the tray back when I realised that it might look suspicious if anyone thought I had moved things about, so I took some gloves from the chest on the landing and put them on. I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I don’t know what I thought Dr Durrant would make of it, just that it was some awful mistake Jimmy had made, or that was what I hoped he’d think. I was worried that the servants would come and find Jimmy, and that they’d find me, and all sorts of things would be thought, and said, and … what appalled me most of all was the thought of anyone reading the note.

When I caught sight of Jimmy again, I felt that I couldn’t bear to leave him lying on the floor – it seemed just such a – dreadful indignity, really, after everything that had gone before … so I tried to pick him up, but he was so heavy that I almost dropped him. That was something old Osbert Spencer made a great fuss about in court, because it was obvious that someone must have put Jimmy into the chair. I mean, I’d done my best but his clothing was rucked up from dragging him along the carpet, and Spencer kept arguing that Georgie couldn’t have lifted Jimmy because he was so much larger that she wouldn’t have been able to get him off the ground. Well, I know she couldn’t, even if it was the insane strength of passion or the passionate strength of desperation or whatever the prosecution were trying to claim it was – Jimmy was six feet tall and he must have weighed sixteen stone at least; it was only because I knew there would be the most terrible crash if I dropped him that I managed to hang on to him at all. I bent over him and picked him up with my arms under his so that he was in a sort of sitting position with his back to me, resting against my knees. There was only one chair in Jimmy’s dressing-room and I pulled him along backwards towards it with my arms clasped round his chest, which was jolly difficult, because he had a big, thick chest. Once I got him there I sort of wedged myself in between the chair and the wall, and tried to pull him up into it, but I couldn’t reach properly, and Jimmy kept bumping against the chair and the chair kept bashing into my legs, and the shoulders of his jacket kept riding up round his ears and catching against the edge of the seat. In the end I stood in front of him and sort of hauled him up, so that he was sitting in the chair. I was bending over him, trying to adjust his clothing, when his head, his entire head, lolled towards me – it sort of swung and he looked straight at me. His eyeballs were so large and much rounder than when he was alive, like two eggs in waterglass … I wanted to close his eyes, but I didn’t see how the lids could be made to fit over them … I couldn’t bring myself to touch his eyes or his face. I tried to do it by shutting my own eyes, but standing so near him and not being able to see made it worse. Then, when I reached my hand towards where I thought his eyes were, his head moved again, it sort of bumped into my arm and I just had to stop – well, that was partly why I’d gone behind him to move him. I thought the chair might slide backwards and make marks on the wall, and somebody might guess … but more, well, not more, really the reason I did it – the point was that I didn’t want to look into his face. I had sort of seen that his eyes were open when I bent down to him the first time, but he was half on his side, you see, and I couldn’t see his face properly. I was worried that he would fall out of the chair, so I pulled it across the room and tried to wedge it under the dressing-table. The arms – the arms of the chair, that is – were too high to go underneath the table and I had to try to push the chair so that its arms were resting on the top of it. That was why the chair had to be tucked right underneath, so that his stomach could sort of hold him there – I thought he might slip down otherwise, but if his stomach was touching the edge of the table he’d be … well, he’d be safe.

I was getting my breath back when I noticed the cut flowers on the window-sill. Jimmy liked buttonholes, he wore one every day. He always went out and chose a flower for himself. He only ever picked one, but that day he’d taken five or six. As if he couldn’t decide. Something about that did occur to me afterwards, when it was mentioned in court – that perhaps Jimmy went into the garden because he thought he’d seen something that couldn’t be true, and he imagined that if he did something normal, something he did every day, he would come back to the house and find it wasn’t so. But usually he picked only one flower, so the more he picked, the more he must have known that it was true, that there was no getting away from it. I suppose that sounds like one of those tin-pot psychologists, but it is easier to pretend, sometimes. Then you don’t have to face up to whatever it is or have an argument about it, or do anything, really. I suppose I tucked the flower into Jimmy’s buttonhole because I thought he would have wanted it.

I was about to open the door to leave Jimmy’s room when I turned round – to make sure he was still there, I suppose. I could see the back of his head and shoulders in front of the leaded windows, with the lozenge shapes of glass and the first sunlight coming towards them, and as I was closing the door I suddenly caught sight of Jimmy’s reflection in the glass, he seemed to be staring straight at me. When I went back to my room, and took off my dressing gown and lay down again, I couldn’t get his eyes out of my mind and I kept thinking: What if he moves, or slides down, or what if he isn’t dead at all, what if he comes to? I suppose eventually I must have stirred or something, because Georgie turned over and opened her eyes, and said, ‘What is it, Jimmy?’

I pushed her shoulder to awaken her. ‘Wake up Georgie, wake up.’

‘Oh, Jimmy, go away.’

‘Jimmy’s had an accident, Georgie.’

She just mumbled something, she wasn’t properly conscious.

‘Jimmy’s dead, Georgie.’

‘Manchester, not dead.’

I kept repeating this, shaking her, but she couldn’t seem to wake up properly. After a while I started to understand what she was saying, but it was stupid things about thinking people were dead when they were really in Manchester. Well, then I lost my head – I shook her, I slapped her, I even threw a glass of water at her. She was actually quite groggy, but at the time I just thought she was being difficult, so I kept on and on until she sat up and started trying to fight me off.

‘Jimmy really is dead, Georgie. We have to do something.’

‘Did you try talking to him?’

I said, ‘Well of course I did,’ even though I hadn’t, because there wasn’t any need, but I suddenly realised that the servants would soon come up and I was desperate to put Georgie in the picture and get it all straightened out.

She kept saying, ‘Oh, he can’t be.’

So in the end I said, ‘I’ll show you.’ She didn’t want to come and see, and I had quite a struggle to make her, but in the end I got her out into the hall. There was a long time when we were both standing outside Jimmy’s dressing-room door, arguing in whispers.

‘This is completely absurd. He isn’t even in the house.’

‘He’s in there!’

‘He’s in Manchester, Edmund.’

‘Georgie, this isn’t a game.’

‘No, it’s ridiculous.’

‘Well, if it’s so ridiculous, what are you afraid of? Why don’t you just open the door?’

‘I’m not afraid. I just don’t want to. Stop shouting at me, Edmund. I want to go back to bed.’

‘I’m not shouting. You’re damn well going to open that door.’

She wouldn’t, so in the end I grabbed hold of her hand and put it on the doorknob and turned it with my hand over hers. That hurt her and she gave a little scream, more of a yelp, really, and then I gave her a push and we both sort of collapsed into the room. The mind plays queer tricks and, for some reason, I expected Jimmy to be facing us in the chair, with the eyes wide open and the arms and legs strapped to the chair like an American execution. I said to Georgie, ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch anything.’

She was standing in the centre of the room, behind Jimmy. She was quite still, I mean she didn’t go forward to him or touch him or anything, she just looked at the back of his head and then she said, ‘He is dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. I think it was your sleeping medicine.’

She didn’t ask me how I knew or anything; she just said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

When we were back in my room, she said, ‘He found out, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ I showed her Jimmy’s note.

‘Burn it.’

‘Do you think we should?’ I don’t know why I said that. Of course I knew we had to get rid of it immediately, but I just couldn’t think straight.

‘Burn it! Or do you want to show it to old Durrant?’

I said, ‘It doesn’t say your name.’

‘For God’s sake, Edmund, it doesn’t need to. Who else could it be? Elspeth? Durrant will take one look at this and go straight to the police. Do you think that’s what Jimmy wanted? For everyone to know? You idiot, do you think he’d want everyone to know why he killed himself?’

I said to her, ‘Don’t speak to me like that, don’t call me an idiot,’ but she just snatched Jimmy’s letter out of my hand.

My cigarette lighter was on the mantelpiece and she picked it up and set fire to the paper. Then she said, ‘Where are the medicine bottles?’ When I said I hadn’t seen any bottles in Jimmy’s dressing-room, she said, ‘Try the bloody bathroom, then.’ I’d never heard her swear before and I was shocked. Not so much that she knew the word, because anyone can overhear a bad word, but that she used it with such familiarity, as if she’d said it before, or thought it. But at the same time I was quite … well, quite relieved, if you want to know the truth, that she was taking over the situation. Acting like an older sister, not a younger one. When I didn’t move, she went out to her own bathroom and came back with two empty medicine bottles and one of the little boxes they used for the Veronal powders. I hadn’t seen them because I’d used the other bathroom when I rinsed the jug and glass. She said, ‘I’m going to take these into my room and throw them into the wastepaper basket under my dressing-table.’ The police found them later and of course they had Jimmy’s fingerprints on them as well as Georgie’s, and that caused another great fuss at the trial because we’d forgotten about the Veronal papers – the chemist wrapped up a certain amount of powder in a little paper and that was one dose – and they were still in the wastepaper basket in the other bathroom. I suppose I must have seen them when I’d rinsed the glass and jug, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they were important. Osbert Spencer suggested that Jimmy had taken the powders and the sleeping draught in the bathroom and then gone into Georgie’s bedroom and put the empty bottles and the box into her wastepaper basket, and she didn’t hear him because of the sleeping powder she’d taken. Anyway, Spencer was delighted with the effect it produced, because it put the other chap in a corner and he tried to argue that Georgie knew that Jimmy’d taken the powders and didn’t do anything about it, but the judge told him that it was a disgraceful and unchristian suggestion, or something like that, and of course that put them off the whole thing.

The newspapers had a field day when Georgina said she thought Jimmy’d taken the stuff by mistake. The humorists made a great thing out of the narcotics, jokes about how to have a perfectly harmonious marriage by being asleep all the time. But Georgie had a difficult time over the chloral hydrate, because even in the peppermint syrup she took, it still tastes pretty frightful, and nobody would swallow it of their own accord unless they absolutely had to, so it would be practically impossible to make a mistake. Even Georgie agreed about the taste and she was used to it. Then the prosecution lawyer, Anthony Keeble-Price, suggested to Georgie that she’d told Jimmy the syrup of chloral was some sort of tonic and that was how she’d got him to drink it, but before Georgie could deny it the judge jumped in and pretty well ordered him to shut up.

After Georgie’d thrown the bottles into the wastepaper basket, she said, ‘Are we going to leave Jimmy for the servants to find?’ I didn’t know what to answer. I couldn’t think what to do at all. Georgie kept glancing at the clock and saying, ‘It’s either you or the maids, Edmund.’

I said, ‘What about you, why can’t you be the one to find him?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Edmund.’

‘He’s your husband, Georgie, not mine.’

She said, ‘That’s why I can’t be anywhere near when he’s found, you fool!’ Well, I didn’t like that, calling me a fool, especially when she’d called me an idiot a few moments before, so I came back at her, and back and forth we went until I suddenly thought, my God, we’re bickering like a pair of brats. I couldn’t stop my hands shaking. I kept lighting cigarettes, thinking that would do the trick, but it didn’t help. In the end I said I’d be the one to find Jimmy because it wouldn’t be fair to the maids.

Georgie said, ‘I’ll take another powder.’ She meant the Veronal, because she had them hidden everywhere, like a squirrel with nuts. She said, ‘Take one of my powders and pour it down the sink, and then leave the paper by your bed, then you can pretend that you took it. Say you couldn’t sleep. You’ll have to call Durrant and he might ask if you heard anything. You can tell him you had your old trouble and took something for it.’ She meant from the war, because Durrant knew about that. I felt rotten lying about it, to Durrant and to the police. Small lies are always worse, I don’t know why. Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, I suppose.

Georgie rearranged the bedclothes to look as if I had been sleeping on my own and went off to her room. I put the gloves back in the chest of drawers, then I got dressed and waited on the landing until the maid came down. The moment she saw me she knew there was something up and I told her not to let anyone go into any of our rooms until I’d spoken to the doctor. That was all I said. Then I telephoned Durrant and told him there’d been an accident. I was dreading talking to him, but it was far easier than I’d imagined. I told him I’d found Jimmy just before I telephoned. When he asked me about Georgie, I told him she was still asleep and that I hadn’t liked to waken her in case I was wrong about Jimmy. Actually, that was rather a mistake. If Georgie had been there, awake, and if Durrant had seen her crying and all the rest of it, I’m sure he would have signed the death certificate without a second thought.

Durrant asked me if he could look in on Georgie – this was before he’d seen Jimmy’s body – and I thought it was a bit queer, but I could hardly stop him. He trotted off to her room and when he came back he said it was best to leave her to sleep. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have been surprised that Durrant wasn’t more worried about Georgie, that she hadn’t taken an overdose as well, but it came out at the trial that he’d just been handing out these powders and things to all his patients as if they were cigarettes, with only the vaguest idea of their strength. He retired after the trial – I think they pretty well told him he had to, but he must have been nearly seventy, so I don’t suppose it was such a terrible blow. I’d thought he’d just put ‘heart failure’ or something on the certificate and that would be the end of it, but he refused to sign the wretched thing. He kept saying it was a long time since he’d attended Jimmy and asking about symptoms and all sorts of things, and I didn’t have any answers for him. I tried to hint to him about suicide, thinking he’d be bound to do the decent thing and not report it, but that put him into a great pother and he insisted I telephone the police, otherwise he said he’d have to fetch them himself. He kept saying he had Georgie’s reputation as well as his own to think of, and talking about scandal and the letter of the law – I should think he must have wished he’d just signed and shut up when he got into court and the lawyers tore him to pieces, but of course he didn’t know it would go that far. None of us did.

Two policemen arrived and Durrant bustled downstairs and told them that Georgie was asleep and they must wait in the drawing-room. They had a perfectly ridiculous conversation – I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it myself and I think if I’d been in less of a state of shock I would have laughed. After all, Durrant had made all this song and dance about calling the police, and now he was telling them they couldn’t see the body.

‘We must see this gentleman, Sir, if he is deceased. You mentioned someone asleep, Sir, who might that be?’

‘Mrs Gresham, the deceased’s wife.’ This was Durrant.

‘Well, hadn’t she better be told, Sir?’

‘No, I don’t want her disturbed.’

‘Would this be on medical grounds, Sir?’

‘I don’t want her upset.’

‘Well, Sir, she’ll have to know sooner or later.’

And that started Durrant off on ‘Allow me to be the best judge of that’ and there was no stopping him.

The policemen obviously thought he was quite mad. One of them took me aside and said, ‘Is there somebody deceased in the house, Sir, or not?’

‘Oh, yes, upstairs, just as the doctor says.’

‘We’ll have to see for ourselves, Sir, if you don’t mind.’

I thought Durrant was going to try to stop them going up the stairs by physical force, but he must have thought better of it.

Georgie stayed in her room while the policemen were upstairs. They told me that there would have to be a postmortem examination and arranged for Jimmy’s body to be taken away. They collected up quite a lot of things from Jimmy’s study and the dressing-room, and took them. When I saw them examining the dressing-room, I suddenly realised that the doorknob had Georgie’s finger-marks all over it. The prosecution lawyer, Anthony Keeble-Price, suggested she’d forgotten to wipe them off, because of course there was all this other palaver about the whisky. They couldn’t understand why the decanter was empty, you see, because they analysed the contents of Jimmy’s stomach and there wasn’t any alcohol in it, or in the vomit, and one of the maids had said that she’d filled up the decanter during the day, so they assumed that someone must have drunk it. Keeble-Price said Georgie’d been in Jimmy’s dressing-room with him, and she’d drunk the whisky and then washed the glass and the tray and everything so that no one would know. It never occurred to him that someone might be mad enough to pour good Scotch down the sink, but of course that was my own stupid fault. Actually, Old Spencer gave me quite a laugh with that point – he told the court that Georgie’s fingerprints were bound to be on the dressing-room door, because ‘those of you who rejoice in a felicitous state of matrimony will allow it quite natural for a wife to enter her husband’s dressing-room at such times when his valet is not present’. Priceless! Knocked the jury completely for six – you could tell they didn’t have the first clue what he was talking about.

The police managed to get rid of Dr Durrant in the end, and they went back to the drawing-room and sat there until Georgie came down. It was quite a wait they had, too: over an hour before she appeared. Durrant had left something for Georgie to take to pep her up a bit – Lord knows what it was, but it certainly made her eyes shine; she was fidgeting about in her chair and chattering away to these policemen as if she’d known them all her life. She wasn’t herself at all, although they weren’t to know that, and I think her behaviour made them suspicious, because she didn’t seem in the least upset about Jimmy.

The week before Georgie’s arrest was dreadful. I didn’t know what to say to people in the office. I couldn’t even tell them about the funeral, because the police wouldn’t let us have Jimmy’s body. Georgie and I knew very well what the results of the post-mortem would be, but I think we were still hoping for a miracle – that they’d find he’d had a heart attack or something. But there wasn’t any doubt about it: apparently, choral hydrate has a very particular smell even when it’s inside the stomach, and you can’t mistake it for anything else. I don’t know if it was Durrant’s pep pills, but Georgie was very strange during that time. She wasn’t behaving like a mad person, not talking to herself or anything, but she insisted on having every single newspaper delivered and she spent the whole day lying on her bed, looking for anything about James and cutting it out with her nail scissors. If she found a newspaper that hadn’t run anything, she would tell Jones to return it to the shop and ask for the money back. When I came home in the evening she’d read me the cuttings, but it was as if she were reading a society column, not something about a man she’d been married to for nearly twenty years.

The servants brought up food on trays, but Georgie never ate it. I’d tell her to eat, but she wouldn’t even pick up her knife and fork. She’d say, ‘Oh, no, darling, I’ll have a cigarette instead.’ She’d never been particularly interested in smoking, but she’d take a cigarette from the box and I’d light it for her, and then she’d put it out almost immediately and ask for another five minutes later. I think she almost didn’t care about what was going to happen, as long as she could lounge on the bed in her pyjamas, with newspapers spread out all over the room, clothes draped everywhere, sherry glasses, ashtrays, chaos – she was in her element. I begged her to let Jones in, or at least Ada, to tidy up the place, but she absolutely refused. She wouldn’t even speak to them.

I asked Georgie at one point, ‘Did you love Jimmy?’

She wouldn’t give me a proper answer. ‘Don’t be boring, Edmund.’

I wasn’t sure what to take from that, so I said, ‘Why did you marry him?’

She laughed and said, ‘Well, I couldn’t marry you, could I?’

The night before the police came, she said, ‘Can I come to your room, Edmund? It doesn’t make any difference now.’

We both knew it must only be a matter of one or two days, so I said, ‘Suppose they find us together?’

‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ll be awake before they come.’ So I let her. I don’t think we slept much, just sat together and held hands.

It’s very strange, how things happen. When they came and took her away, they said I wasn’t allowed to see her until the following day and I just didn’t know what to do. It should have been the worst day of my life and in a way it was, during the daylight hours, anyway. But in the evening something quite wonderful happened. I was in the dining-room – I’d fairly well given up eating and was smoking myself silly instead, when the door opened and in walked Louisa. We’d had the most terrible rain storm and she was soaking wet, but she looked absolutely beautiful. She said, ‘I wouldn’t let Ada tell you I’d arrived. I thought you wouldn’t see me if you knew.’ Well, I couldn’t think of anything to say – I mean, there were all sorts of things I wanted to say. I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her, but of course I couldn’t do it so I put my jacket round her shoulders, and there she was, patting her hair with a towel, and she just looked up at me. She didn’t speak, but her hair had gone into wisps where she was rubbing it dry and I suddenly stopped thinking about Georgie and the whole, awful shambles of it, and all I could think of was what a miracle it was she was there.

I said, ‘Does Davy know you’re here?’

She said, ‘Davy’s in Scotland. Nobody knows where I am except you.’

We went through into the drawing-room, and she kicked off her shoes and sat on one of the sofas and drank brandy. ‘Edmund, I don’t know what to say. What a dreadful mistake. I’m sure it can be sorted out, but how dreadful for Georgie …’ Then she caught my eye and said, ‘It is a mistake, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I don’t understand why it’s happened.’

‘I suppose the police have to accuse somebody in cases like this. People always want someone to be guilty, don’t they? They can’t seem to believe that accidents can happen … I’m glad I don’t think like that, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose so. Louisa, may I ask you something?’

‘Anything you like. You might be disappointed if you want next year’s Derby winner, though.’

‘Would you talk to me about Freddie?’

‘Your brother Freddie?’

‘I’m beginning to think I’ve just imagined having a brother, because nobody ever mentions him.’

I thought Louisa was going to change the subject, but she said, ‘We used to call him Georgie’s shadow. He was always following her around, repeating things she said.’

‘I don’t remember that … Louisa, what happened on the day he died?’

‘Well, my father told us that one of the servants had killed him, a young girl. He said she was insane. I remember thinking that it must have been the girl who took us to see Freddie, because she was shouting and spitting and obviously quite mad. She came up to us and grabbed Georgie and dragged her away. We all followed, and she went round a corner and there was poor Freddie lying on the grass, face down. I didn’t see properly. I saw some blood and then I couldn’t bring myself to look after that. I was looking at Georgie’s face all the time, because I didn’t want to look at Freddie, and she never took her eyes off him. She just stared, she didn’t even blink. She must have had the most dreadful nightmares.’

‘Did you have nightmares?’

‘Yes, a bit. We’d been playing hide-and-seek, and I used to dream about going to look for Freddie, and knowing I had to find him quickly before something terrible happened, and then finding him behind the hedge. I got over it, though. Children do. They forget things. Roland and I never talked about it. Father told us that we shouldn’t and I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we could talk about it, really.’

‘But we’re talking about it now, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, I suppose we are. You know, Edmund, I’ve often wondered – as an adult, I mean, not when I was a child – whether your father didn’t blame Georgie for Freddie’s death.’

‘For causing it, do you mean?’

‘No, not for that, but for not … looking after him. Making sure he stayed with us.’

‘He can’t have done. That was Nurse’s job, not Georgie’s.’

‘I just thought perhaps your father said something to her and she rather took it to heart. After all, she was only eight years old.’

‘Did Georgie tell you this?’

‘Of course not! Would you tell something like that, if it were you?’

‘Well, I might tell you, because I trust you.’

‘Yes, but Georgie doesn’t trust me. I don’t think she trusts anybody, does she? Edmund, I’m just guessing and it’s probably all nonsense, but didn’t you ever think there must have been some particular reason for her and your father to be at loggerheads? Those things don’t happen by accident. Georgie and your father, they were each as bad as the other. The type that gets an idea into his or her head and won’t let go of it, and when they come up against anything that refutes that idea they just pretend it doesn’t exist. Remember, Georgie was awfully isolated and if one has too much time to think about these sorts of things, one gets dreadfully sensitive and morbid.’

Then I asked her what I’d asked Georgie: ‘Why did you marry Davy?’

It was rather funny, because she gave me almost the same answer. ‘Well, you didn’t ask me, did you?’ At first I thought she must be making a joke, so I started laughing, but then I saw that she wasn’t laughing, so I stopped. She said, ‘I always hoped you might, but I could never quite believe that you would.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you and Georgie seemed so glamorous to me, but so sort of … rare, like orchids or something, that you can’t bring out into the open in case they die. I always felt so ordinary, I couldn’t imagine why on earth you’d want to marry me.’

‘If I’d asked you, would you have accepted?’

‘Yes.’

We were like two statues, she standing and I sitting. I couldn’t look at her and I had the feeling she wasn’t looking at me either. Then she said, ‘When Davy and I were married, I didn’t love him in the way I loved you. But I knew I could love him and I thought: I’ll do my best to make Davy happy – to make it a good marriage – and that’s what I did.’

‘Are you glad you married Davy?’

For a minute, I thought she wasn’t going to answer, that she was angry with me, but she said, ‘Yes, we’ve been very happy.’ Then she looked down at her feet and said, ‘I still love you, Edmund.’

‘And I love you.’

When I looked at her the look on her face was so like Roland’s that I wanted to weep. I didn’t, but I think I must have put my head in my hands, because Louisa sat down beside me and put her arm round my shoulder. ‘Darling Edmund,’ she said. ‘I said I’d tell you anything and I have. But you do understand, don’t you? We’ve got to be just the same, as if this conversation had never happened, and never talk about it, and perhaps, after a while, we’ll start to believe that we imagined the whole thing.’ I wonder if she does believe that, because she’s never mentioned any of this again and neither have I. Perhaps she thinks I’ve forgotten it, but I’ve wanted to remind her of it many, many times. We did talk about Freddie and the other things, and the words she said … she can’t pretend it didn’t happen, because it did, it did. She said she loved me and I’ll never forget that.

I remember that she stroked my forehead. I must have fallen asleep on the sofa, because when I woke up I was covered in a blanket and she was gone.