Ella was out a long time. She had left to meet Felix Dunsford at six. I refused to take part in the discussion which started at ten as to why she was still out. One after the other, at five-minute intervals, the Cosways remarked that four hours was a very long time to spend in the White Rose, Mrs Cosway adding that she couldn't understand why anyone would go in there at all. I alone, it seemed, supposed that a good part of it had been spent elsewhere, most likely at The Studio.
We were watching television when Ella came in. Or the television was on and Mrs Cosway was watching it. Without looking round, she said sourly, ‘You have missed the only good programme we've had this year.’
‘No doubt you had something better to amuse you,’ said Winifred.
‘I had something different.’
Ella looked pensive. She was unusually silent, though she kept glancing at me and I expected to be asked to come to her room with her. Since her campaign of making me her friend had begun, she also increasingly made me her confidante. The revelations about the will had been followed a day or two later by a detailed account of her affair with the married man and there had been a drive around the villages, undertaken, I think, to point out to me the ‘close’ of modern houses where he lived. But that evening the invitation I expected never came and it was the end of the week and August before she asked me in a mysterious voice, loaded with suspense, to come and sit in the garden with her. Apparently she had run out of rosé for she brought out a tray with coffee in a pot and two cups and set it on the table under the mulberry tree. The gardener was mowing one of the distant grassy areas, an endless task in summer when the lawns are extensive and one has only a small hand-mower.
‘I know it's your favourite,’ Ella said. ‘I got it specially,’ and it was true I had expressed a preference for coffee over tea. ‘We won't be disturbed down here.’
The garden was tended twice a week by a morose and silent man called Cox, a relative of Mrs Waltham the postmistress, and so it had a far less neglected look than the house. His services of course were paid for out of the trust, as were mine. With dreadfully inadequate tools, he kept the grass mown and the hedges trimmed and if there were no flowers to be seen, perhaps the colour they would have brought was not to be associated with Lydstep Old Hall. It was a close, humid day without much sun, the sky overcast but not really threatening rain or any change in the dull weather. Coffee in the garden was a good idea but not the place Ella had chosen. In August mulberry trees drop their moist dark purple fruits, which, when they flop on to a hard surface, look like coagulating blood. Even on grass the stains are unpleasant and there were plenty of these round the table. My own jeans and shirt were black and liable to come to no harm but Ella wore her stripy frock and I dreaded the effect on her of a mulberry splitting open on her skirt.
Balkan Sobranie cigarettes were produced and our cups filled. ‘We ought to keep silkworms,’ said Ella with one of her giggles. ‘All these mulberry leaves just go to waste. I wonder if there's any profit in it. We could do with an increase to our income.’ I had no opinion to offer on silk production, so only smiled. ‘I've got something to tell you,’ she went on unsurprisingly. ‘I wonder what you'll think of me. Of course, being Scandinavian, you won't be shocked.’
I don't much like being lumped together with Danes, Norwegians and Finns as if we were all a single tribe, looking and feeling the same, holding to the same principles or lack of them, spending our time reading Hans Andersen and going to plays by Ibsen, all gloomy and suicidal alcoholics and all of us leading sexual lives like characters in I Am Curious – Yellow, a daring film of the time. But I said nothing.
‘Well, here goes then.’ She looked up at me, then away. ‘I've slept with him. We didn't waste much time, did we? Oh, not that first time, not that evening I came home and Mother said I'd missed some TV programme, not then. Two days later, actually. That first evening – well, we didn't go all the way. You'll say I shouldn't be telling you this.’ I interrupted to assure her I wouldn't. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘It's funny but it's easier telling you things like this because English isn't your mother tongue, is it? So I don't feel words have the – well, the resonance they'd have with Zorah, say – God forbid! – or Winifred. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Of course,’ I said, hoping very much that her assessment of my grasp of the English language would not lead her into clinical detail or a run-down on what he said to her and she said to him.
‘Because we are friends, aren't we, Kerstin? We can tell each other things we wouldn't tell other people?’
I was strangely moved by this. She was thirty-seven but she talked like a fifteen-year-old and an insecure one at that. ‘You can be sure I won't tell anyone, Ella,’ I said. And I meant it and stuck to it – while this was possible. Neither of us could have foreseen what was to come when the diary became an important piece of evidence and I would have to speak and tell everything I knew. But not for the life of me could I think of anything more to say to her or ask her. I could smile, I could look attentive and drink my coffee – and a great deal better than Ida's it was.
‘He's a very good lover,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.
That comment has always embarrassed me, as do all such words as ‘performance’ and ‘technique’ in this connection. They seem to reduce lovemaking to a stage production or display and to herald that clinical detail I feared. Perhaps something in my expression warned her of my distaste, for she quickly changed tack, saying, ‘He wants me to spend the whole weekend with him. I'd have to lie to Mother and Ida if not to Winifred, I couldn't tell them what I was really doing. And Felix feels the same. He wants us to be discreet. For the sake of my reputation, I suppose. To protect me.’
Or to protect himself, I thought. Not for the sake of his reputation but to leave his freedom unthreatened.
‘Then he said something funny. He said, “I don't want you to go out with me, I want you to stay in with me.” Wasn't that funny? I could sneak out after dark on Sunday night and no one would see, he said.’
‘You could, I suppose.’
It wasn't for me to ask her if she really wanted to be the female actor in this back-to-the-village-you scenario or what she thought was the point in the late 1960s of a single man keeping a by then quite permissible relationship with a single woman a dark secret. It looked as if this would develop into the kind of affair a man like Felix Dunsford has with women who have no money. Once he has begun the process of enslavement, he can stop even taking them to the pub. If they want a drink they can bring it with them. He won't mind providing a cup of tea. A man of this sort will go on for months or even years like that. With rich women it is quite different. They have luxurious homes for him to go to with ample drink laid on, they can pay for expensive hotels, weekends away, he won't even have to give them tea or waste heat and electricity on them. But Ella was one of the poor women – in more senses than one.
‘Zorah is cruising round the Aegean on someone's yacht,’ she told me, leaving the subject of Felix. ‘A man with a title, I can't remember his name. Mother is afraid she'll marry one of them and then she'll – well, stop the benefits.’
She might also stop squirrelling away Mrs Cosway's property, I thought but didn't say. Lighting yet another cigarette, Ella asked me what I thought of Dr Lombard. I said I didn't know, I hadn't thought much about him.
‘He's coming over this evening. You can study him. I'd love to know what you really think. It's all very well Mother worrying about Zorah remarrying. Winifred and I thought for years she'd marry Selwyn Lombard.’
‘Your mother, do you mean?’
‘Of course. Did you think I meant Zorah? The trouble is, or the good thing is, it turns out he's got a wife alive somewhere or did have a couple of years ago.’
We went in when Dr Lombard arrived and I was sent for. I don't know why I was, as he went into John's bedroom and once I had opened the door for him and closed it behind him, I was banished and told to help Ida with the dinner.
‘He's a good doctor,’ Ida said. Her attitude to him was very different from Ella's. ‘Prescribing that Largactil for John has made a great difference to all our lives. Before that you could say John ruled this household, we were all slaves to his whims and moods.’
This aroused in me an enormous distaste and disapproval, though I should have found it hard to say why. Perhaps it was better for John to be drugged into a kind of somnolent apathy, his eyes glazed, his feet stumbling and his hands shaking, than to be subject to fits and locking himself up in bathrooms. I said nothing, only listened while she continued to sing Lombard's praises and her mother's reliance on him until she had gone a long way towards convincing me that he and Mrs Cosway were lovers of long standing.
He came into the drawing room after a while, told me Mrs Cosway was ‘seeing to’ John and, calling me ‘young lady’, said she would not require my services that evening.
‘Give Dr Lombard a drink, would you, Kerstin?’ said Ida.
He chose that kind of sweet pale sherry which to me is the worst drink in the world, and sat sipping it, nursing the glass in his hands. I was at a loss with him, finding nothing to say and waiting in vain for him to speak. After a few minutes, he put the glass down and picked up the newspaper. Something he read made him laugh quite raucously. To my relief, Winifred came in and, almost immediately after her, Mrs Cosway. He struggled to his feet, took Winifred's left hand in his, smiling at her engagement ring, but her mother got a warm kiss on her cheek close to her mouth.
‘You left your doctor's bag in John's room, Selwyn. Don't forget and go home without it.’
Someone was using the phone in the dining room. I passed the door, which was slightly ajar, and heard Ella's voice say, ‘Will you take a message to him? Say it's Tamara.’
I had never heard the name before. It sounded Russian to me or from Central Asia. I was to hear it several times in the future. As I went on towards the kitchen, I looked back and saw Ella come out of the dining room.
‘I suppose you heard that.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘He hasn't got a phone and anyway I wouldn't want him to phone me here. I mean, anyone might answer the phone. So we have an arrangement. I phone the pub and ask them to give him a message. He says to say it's Tamara, then he'll know.’
Come to that, he would have known if she had said it was Ella.
‘I'll have dinner and then I'll go down there. That will give him a chance to have a few drinks and see his friends. I won't go into the pub. He'll go home a few minutes before I'm due. I'll think of something to tell Mother.’
I said, because I could stand no more, but I said it gently, ‘You're not committing adultery, Ella.’
She laughed uneasily and ran upstairs, coming down for dinner dressed up in pink flowered cotton and high-heeled shoes. Picking at her food, clockwatching, she was in a fever of impatience. I tried to put myself in Felix Dunsford's shoes, asking myself how I would feel as a man confronted by this combination of frenetic eagerness with a passionate desire to please. Ella would be a heavy burden. The moment Ida took away our dessert plates, she was on her feet, eyes on her watch.
‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’ said Dr Lombard.
‘Oh, just down to the village to see my friend Bridget.’
‘Having a party, is she?’
This was Winifred, speaking in a very dry voice. Ella gave her a venomous look but said nothing. Two minutes later we heard the car start up and move off down the drive.
‘What it is to be young,’ said Dr Lombard and told the quite famous story about Augustine's astonishment when he came upon St Ambrose reading to himself silently instead of aloud, something apparently very rare at the time. He got up, said he was an old man and needed his ‘beauty sleep’.
‘Now don't forget your bag,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘I told you it was in John's room.’ Having eaten and drunk very well, he was obviously unwilling to move far. ‘Kerstin will fetch it for you.’
I went, not too pleased at being sent on errands, but attempting a pleasant smile. After all, I was their employee. John was fast asleep, deeply and heavily asleep, spread-eagled on his back. I pulled the eiderdown over him, though he was quite adequately covered. What made me glance at the photograph? I took it to the window, where just enough light remained for me to see it. I had seen it before. I saw it, when I bothered to look, every time I assisted at John's going to bed. This time I looked at it with new eyes. There in the group was Zorah some years before she had had her nose reshaped. When she was a teenager it was a large hooked nose, a replica of the one which had been facing me across the dinner table.
There could be no doubt. I picked up the doctor's bag which belonged to her father and took it downstairs to give to him.