A Little Death (22 page)

When we were done, I thought she might be angry and blame me, but she didn’t, she lay back and smiled, and said, ‘You liked that, didn’t you? We should have done that a long time ago.’ Well, of course I did enjoy it, partly because of the sexual side, the fact that one was able to function in a normal way as much as anything else, but also because while it was happening I wasn’t thinking of anything else. I can’t make clever explanations, never could, but while I was there with her the faces outside, the men’s faces and Roland, the fear, the reproach—the whole bloody lot—it wasn’t there anymore.

Georgie came back to my room the next evening and the next, and it became a pattern: she came into the bed, and sometimes we only played cards and talked, but at other times we—we did the physical thing with each other. Then, when I could get up and about, I had the habit of going to my room for a rest in the afternoon, and she would come and join me. I was quite deliberate with myself that I would not think about it at any other time, because I wanted to keep it quite separate, as if it had no connection with the rest of my life or Georgina’s. It was only when Georgie went to Teddy Booth that I fully realised what a dreadful thing I’d done, to have debauched my own sister, or why would she have gone to another man? Because I know damn well that she was the seducer, not Teddy. He brought her home one night from a party and Georgie told me straight out
that she was going away with him for the weekend. I suddenly saw how depraved she’d become, as if she simply didn’t care what anyone thought, she was standing there announcing this in front of the servants with this hideous black-and-white paint smeared all over her face like a common streetwalker. We almost came to blows—heaven knows what Ada must have thought, because she witnessed the whole thing. Well, she took Georgie upstairs and put her to bed, and when the coast was clear I tiptoed across the landing and knocked on the bedroom door. ‘Georgie, I have to talk to you.’ Dead silence. I tried the handle but the door was locked. ‘Georgie, you can’t let Booth take you away like that. What about Jimmy?’

Then I heard her voice on the other side of the door, very low: ‘Jimmy doesn’t care about me anymore. Don’t you know that?’

‘Then what about me?’ She didn’t answer immediately and I thought she’d gone away. ‘Georgie, don’t be so bloody childish. What about me?’

Then she said, ‘I’m sorry, Edmund.’

‘Well, if you’re sorry, what are you doing it for? Just tell Booth it’s off, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry, Edmund, I can’t.’

‘Why not? Why can’t you? Booth won’t mind. You don’t think he cares about you, do you?’

‘No, I suppose he doesn’t.’

‘Then why are you doing this?’

‘I told you, I have to. Good-night, Edmund.’ That was the proof of it, you see, she couldn’t help herself. Once she’d had one man who wasn’t her husband, of course she would want another—after all, what decent woman would throw herself at a man the way she set herself at Teddy? I felt as if I’d taken the stopper out of a bottle and it could never be put back, because you
can’t have innocence back when it’s gone forever. It was all part of the bloody great mess I’d made of everything… it disgusted me, all of it, the way she behaved with Teddy… how brazen she’d become. As if she could just… just make up her own rules and everyone else could go hang.

I have never told Edmund that it was his child. I thought that it must be like a Cyclops or some sort of monster and the doctor might be able to tell, that he might say it was the child of degenerates—although Edmund and I are not degenerates and what we did wasn’t degenerate. But to talk about that sort of thing makes it seem coarse and sordid, which it wasn’t. It was perfect. And it was the most wonderful fun keeping the secret. First there was a great to-do because we had all the furniture in Edmund’s bedroom moved. Edmund was funny about sleeping with his back or even his side to the window, he wanted to face it head on so the bed had to be turned round, and then there was a wardrobe with a mirrored door opposite the bed and he would wake up in the night and think there was someone in the room, so it had to go. It was just like when we were young and used to do things together. I would bring flowers from the garden and arrange them in his room and he would teach me to smoke. He just did it to amuse himself, really, because I never got the knack of it at all. We used to open all the windows wide so that Ada wouldn’t smell it, but she always did, and she used to tut and sigh and flap the curtains like anything. I have never smoked in public in my life, I might add. I’ve never got used to the sight of women smoking all over the place. I couldn’t bear that, during the last war, seeing
all those girls walking about in trousers with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. All those horrible square shoulders and sensible shoes and nasty, greasy rolls of hair, as if they were pretending to be men. It was such a relief when the dresses came back and proper evening clothes, and everyone started looking like themselves again.

Anyway, Ada made a dreadful fuss about the smoke and Edmund worried awfully about upsetting her, so in the end I said, ‘I know how to solve the problem, it’s our house and we simply shan’t let her in, then she won’t know.’ So that was it, we said we wouldn’t have her or any of the servants in the room, we made them leave trays outside the door and then I’d dash out and pick up Edmund’s dinner when no one was looking.

It sounds strange to say this now, but the whole business of the baby was a very great shock to me. Not only the pain, but I had never been entirely sure about how babies actually happened—of course, I was married so I knew one didn’t get a baby by shaking hands, but I certainly didn’t understand how they were born. I suppose people like Ada must have known about these things, but
we
didn’t. I mean, I doubt if Louisa knew any more than I did and she had a real baby. I suppose Jimmy wasn’t able to make one—he can’t have been able to because I certainly didn’t know what to do to stop one coming and with Teddy, well, there already was a baby, that was rather the point. Of course, Teddy never asked about any of that, but then men don’t need to worry, do they? Still, I suppose women are not required to die in wars. Or at least they never used to be, but I suppose the air raids changed all that. Not that I minded air raids, I thought they were rather exciting. I thought it might have been a good death for us, a direct
hit. If Edmund was there and it was quick, I shouldn’t have cared a bit.

There’s a poem by A. E. Housman that Edmund read to me, that says something about the name dying before the man. That’s what’s happened to me, you know. When I die, if anybody notices, they’ll say, ‘Oh, her, wasn’t she the one who did her husband in all those years ago and got away with it?’ The older ones, that is. The younger ones won’t even know my name.

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.