A Little Death (26 page)

For a minute I thought they didn’t understand, they thought it was Master Edmund the police wanted, but then Miss Georgina said, ‘Don’t worry, Ada, I’ll come down.’ I thought: She’s been expecting this.

When I went back downstairs, the police were sitting there, drinking tea as if they owned the place. I told them that Mrs. Gresham was dressing and she’d be down when she was ready. Inspector Black was all for sending the policewoman up there, but I told him that wouldn’t be necessary and he had enough decency not to press it. I noticed the woman looked disappointed. Hoping for a sniff around Miss Georgina’s dressing room, more than likely.

From the way Miss Georgina behaved, you’d have thought she was going to a garden party, not being charged with murder. She said to me, ‘I want you to fetch me the black crepe.’ I knew the costume she meant, it was a Patou, very thin and floaty with a pale-pink sash for the waist and a ruffle at the shoulder, with a hat and gloves to match. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t suitable for a dirty police station. I suppose she had an idea there’d be photographers—there is a snap, somewhere, of her going into the police station and she does look wonderful. If it wasn’t for the fact of the woman policeman beside her, you’d have thought she was going to Buckingham Palace.

Poor Miss Jones was outside the door, crying her eyes out, but Miss Georgina made her do her hair three times over before she was satisfied. Then Miss Georgina got her hat adjusted how she liked it, and she turned round to me and she said, ‘Do you remember your promise, Ada?’ I thought of William when she said that, but I said yes all the same. Even though I wanted to be with William, I’d given Miss Georgina my word that I wouldn’t leave her and when you give your word you can’t go back from it.

Then Miss Georgina said to me, ‘You can tell them I’m ready now. Just tell Mr. Edmund to come in, will you, before you go?’ When I left, she was puffing herself with perfume. Well, those policemen were fairly fidgeting about. Mr. Black said they’d go and wait in the hall, and they barged straight past me without so much as a by-your-leave. I thought: Well, wherever you’re going, I’m right behind, because I wasn’t having him and his merry men cavorting all over the house. But they went right to the front doors and stood in front of them in a line. I looked at the woman and she looked like she was at the pictures waiting for the programme to start. I
thought: She can’t wait to get home and tell all the folks about this.

But when Miss Georgina came down it
was
like a film. Miss Georgina and Master Edmund came down the stairs together, arm in arm. I heard one of the policemen have a gasp, ‘Aaaah…’ like that. Miss Georgina put her hand out to Mr. Black and said, ‘Well, good-morning. Such an early hour!’ I thought: Maybe they aren’t allowed to do that, shake hands, because he didn’t seem to want to take her hand, but then when Master Edmund put his hand out, Mr. Black took it. The way Miss Georgina and Master Edmund greeted these policemen, they might have been a duke and duchess, and Mr. Black looked so awkward, I’m sure he’d rather have died on the spot than say those criminal words to her that he had to say. I heard recently that he’d written a book about his time in the police, and all the famous murderers he’d arrested and so on. I don’t know if he put Miss Georgina in the book—if he did, he more than likely painted himself to be the hero of the hour, but I was there and I can tell you he looked like a little boy that’s been caught with a stolen apple up his jersey.

Miss Georgina said to them, ‘Well, gentlemen, shall we go?’ and after that Mr. Black managed to say his little piece about arresting her for the suspicion of murdering Mr. James and the rest of it. Then they took her away in the car. I stood on the steps and watched it go. Miss Georgina turned and waved. I thought it was for Master Edmund, because he’d been right behind me when we went down to the car, but when I turned round he was gone, so I suppose she must have been waving at me.

I wrote to William that night. I said I couldn’t leave Miss Georgina in her trouble, however it fell out—
which, of course, I didn’t know when I wrote the letter, what was going to happen. I put that if things had turned out different I would have said ‘yes’ to him gladly and then I put that it would be for the best if we did not meet again. But what I put at the end—‘I love you and will think of you always’—I meant with all my heart.

I started writing that letter at ten o’clock that night and I didn’t get finished until past three in the morning. It was only a little short thing and I dare say someone with education would have had it done in half the time, but it must be difficult even for a clever person to find the right words for a letter like that, and I hadn’t written a letter since I used to send to Mother and Charlie in the old days. But I thought, it’s not fair to keep William in the dark, I must finish this and get it sent.

I’ve still got the letter William wrote me in reply to mine. I keep it in my purse. Not with a ribbon or anything, but just folded up neatly. I should think it’s a bit faded after twenty-odd years—I daren’t open it up in case it comes apart. But I don’t need to read it, I know it off by heart, what it says:

I would have been a good wife to him, I know I would.

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 anymore, 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. Afterward, 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.