A Little Death (5 page)

I have actually considered whether Freddie might not have been somebody else’s child. Somebody other than my father, that is. I don’t have anything that one could call evidence—just the lack of photographs, I suppose, and the way he looked… I don’t say my father knew this or suspected it, although he may have done, but it has crossed my mind on more than one occasion. Because of what happened, you see, what happened later… People are very stupid on the whole, they want to have black and white, everything to be black and white. That’s good, that’s bad, that’s right, that’s wrong, you love someone or you hate them. But you can’t, you can’t turn it on and off like a tap. You continue to love, even though you know it’s wrong or you have been harmed by that person—one goes on loving because one simply can’t help it. I don’t think my father could have stopped loving my mother, whatever happened, any more than I could have stopped loving him.

Edmund thinks our father was an ogre, but I don’t agree. It was simply that he loved my mother very much, far more than he loved us. I think he had very extreme emotions and what he felt for her was a sort of worship. It was unfortunate that we—Edmund and I— both looked very like her and I think that was why he sent us away. Edmund would have gone off to school in any event, but there I was and worse, of course, being a girl… which is why I was parcelled up and sent off to Dennys, and Freddie with me. The servants told us that Father was working dreadfully hard and that was
why he could never come to see us, but I think the truth was that he couldn’t bear to have us near him.

I often wonder, if things had been different, would my life have been happy like Louisa’s? One can’t help but admire that certainty—well, there’s got to be something and you can hardly expect me to say I admire her dress sense. But that firmness, that steadfastness… That’s what we’re meant to have, people like us, that’s what makes us happy. But of course the more one knows, or suspects, the less likely one is to have happiness. Only ignorant people can be happy. I suppose that is why I have never discussed my doubts about Freddie with Edmund. Or our father. And I have never spoken to Edmund about our father, either. I didn’t want to make him unhappy. Besides, there’s no point in sitting here wondering about it all. It’s too late now. Far too late.

This is why I say people are stupid, they could never understand this: when I was young, to please my father was the most important thing in my entire life. Because I adored him, you see. My mother had his love, but she didn’t have to do anything except be herself; and I wasn’t her, I couldn’t become her. My father was a very big man: big body, loud voice, and a loud laugh. Always greeting people, kissing cheeks, and shaking hands. Black hair on his hands, on his wrists. Once I kissed the palm of his hand. I remember to this day how it looked: short fingers and his palm was square. It was warm. He was a superb horseman, completely fearless, and he wanted all his children to be good riders. I enjoyed the lessons on the pony, but Edmund hated them. Father was always shouting at him, ‘What do you think your legs are for? Use them!’ Our pony knew jolly well that Edmund was afraid of it; it used to cart him off to the nearest hedge and stand there eating up all the
leaves until the man came to rescue them. And then Father would say, ‘If you can’t use your legs to ride, you can use them to walk,’ and send him back to the house in disgrace. But I loved riding. It was a good way of stealing a march on Nurse, because she was frightened of horses and that was seen as a great weakness in my family, fear of animals or not being sensible about them. Of course, nowadays they’d say it was all to do with sex—you love the horse because you’re too young for a man. And perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I should have stuck with horses. Can’t imagine anyone murdering a horse, can you? Not a
crime passionnel
, at any rate. Unless it came last in the 3.30 at Doncaster with your shirt on it. Anyway, I’ve always preferred car racing.

We fought in silence for the most part, Nurse and I. She was rough with me, clumsy, putting on my clothes. Tugging, yanking, twisting, cramming, and I would be as uncooperative as I possibly could. Teddy Booth said to me once: ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who can be an irresistible force and an immovable object at the same time.’ He wasn’t trying to get my clothes
on
, of course. Nurse used to brush my hair and wrench it back so hard she turned me into a Chinaman. I used to watch our reflections in the looking glass, fighting each other, and I would feel as if it wasn’t me at all, but a scene I was watching for amusement, like a Punch and Judy show. Oh, yes it is; oh, no, it isn’t.

She never spoke to me, always to Freddie. ‘We’re going for a walk now, Master Alfred,’ or something like that, so I’d know that it was time to fetch my coat. And really, the day was so much regulated, always the same thing at the same time, breakfast or bath or whatever it was, there didn’t need to be a lot of conversation about it. Freddie was really too young to talk to properly, but
when Edmund was home from school I would speak to him. I rather got into the way of speaking to people through Edmund—we used to roam around by ourselves and if we went into the village or one of the farms, I’d say, ‘Ask the farmer if we can look at the lambs,’ or whatever it was I wanted to do, and he always would.

We did go to the village sometimes, but we were very much ‘the big house’. I don’t recall playing with any of the local children or anything like that; I don’t think it occurred to us that there was even that possibility. Or to them, probably. But Edmund knew far more of the villagers than I did. I suppose being a boy he went about more and he was interested in the cricket—there used to be a big cricket match every summer and we’d go, and they’d always give us the best place to sit and bring out lemonade. When Edmund was older—fifteen, sixteen— he played himself, but I never saw him. I’d stopped going out by then, I never went anywhere because my clothes were so queer and I didn’t want people to stare at me.

Whenever I think of Dennys, it’s in the cricket season. Summer. Even going back to Dennys as we did after so many years, when it was all in ruins, couldn’t destroy that memory. To this day, I can almost feel the heat of the sun and I can see us all, sitting on the grass, laughing. Edmund, Freddie and I, and my two cousins, Roland and Louisa. Uncle Jack’s children. Uncle Jack and my father never really hit it off, something to do with Uncle Jack thinking my father wasn’t running the business properly. I suspect that Uncle Jack was one of those people who think they could run the world perfectly if only someone would put them in charge of it. I don’t think he had as much money as my father did and certainly no country house, which was why Roland and
Louisa always came to stay with us for the summer. Until my father started drinking, that is. Uncle Jack wouldn’t let them near us after that, even though Roland and Edmund were at the same school.

Roland and Louisa both had fair hair and blue eyes like Aunt Sophia, but Roland was quite extraordinarily handsome, even as a young boy. He had those sort of blazing good looks one only sees in story-book heroes: golden hair, bright-blue eyes, and his skin was a beautiful honey colour. His face never turned pink in the sun as Louisa’s did, it sunburned in a way that made him glow. Of course, Louisa was perfectly reasonable looking, rather nice if you happen to like women who look like Bedlington terriers, but you didn’t look at her, you just looked at Roland. He was a year older than Edmund and we all admired him tremendously, although he wasn’t particularly funny or clever. He was kind, though. I don’t remember him ever saying a bad thing about anybody and even when we were very young I thought he lived in a different world from mine, not complicated and everybody nice to him. Rather like Louisa. I don’t suppose he ever imagined it could be otherwise. I suspect he hadn’t much imagination at all, really. He didn’t come to my wedding: ‘Too difficult,’ or that’s what he told Edmund. Louisa did, though, and she came to stay with us afterwards, too, in spite of Uncle Jack disapproving. That’s what I meant about firmness. It’s the extraordinary thing about Louisa. She looks, and she certainly dresses, as if she wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but if she thinks something’s right, she’ll stick to it, no matter what. If you didn’t know her you’d have her down as the type of woman who’ll agree with any man, no matter what asinine thing he says, just because he
is
a man. But you’d be quite wrong. Louisa’s as stubborn as a mule if she’s convinced about something:
you can say what you like, she won’t budge an inch. After my trial, she insisted on parading me through every single shop in London. I’d say to her: ‘What’s the point in my going shopping? I’ve got no money.’

‘You mustn’t hide yourself, Georgie. It’s not fair. You have as much right to go about as anyone.’ It was all very well for her, she wasn’t the one providing the freak show. One woman actually spat at me. Middle-class woman, quite drab. Fur coat looked as if it had been trodden on by a dray horse. She came right up to me and spat. In the middle of Liberty’s. Louisa was furious: ‘How rude, how vulgar’ and so on and so on. I only just managed to stop her going after this woman and remonstrating with her. Of course, everyone in the shop saw it. They’d all realised who I was and were practically baying for blood. All women, of course. Superannuated old haddocks.

When Louisa was staying with us during the Great War, Roland came to visit her a couple of times. Of course, the uniform was the perfect thing for him, it made him more handsome than ever. I could invent a delightful romance between the two of us, but it never happened. It’s quite funny, really, now I come to think about it, because Roland would have been a far more plausible lover for me than poor old Teddy, but of course he was dead by the time I needed him. I love my love with an ‘I’ because he is
I
mplausible. Not implausible to Jimmy, of course, only to the judge, old Mr. Justice What’sit. Because poor old Teddy wasn’t the co-respondent type at all. Too fat, for one thing. For quite a number of things, now I think about it. I was fond of him, though. Jimmy, too. It was said at my trial that I didn’t care about Jimmy, but that wasn’t true. They said I married him for his money, but I cared more
about him than all those others who were friendly to his face, but called him a Johnny-come-lately the moment his back was turned because his money wasn’t inherited. When Jimmy was away and Teddy gave parties at our house, those people would all turn up. You see, Teddy’s father had a title, so they would come, even though they knew it was Jimmy’s house and I was Jimmy’s wife. They would laugh at the house because he’d designed it himself out of history books—‘Oh darling, what a
divine
staircase, it’s all
perfectly outre’
— but they’d drink the place dry and burn his furniture with their cigarettes. Jimmy was worth ten of any of them. Society is a great fraud, it’s all rubbish, and society people are rubbish. All except Teddy. Teddy saved me. He saved us all. Except poor Jimmy, of course.

But I remember Roland at Dennys so clearly—always in the summer. I suppose that as one gets older one always imagines that the weather was better in one’s childhood, but whenever I think back there’s one particular summer I remember, because the weather was blazingly hot. It was such a happy time. At the beginning, I should say. A happy time at the beginning. Before it happened. Because it was that summer, you see. The summer when Freddie was killed.

Edmund had gone off on a jaunt with some of the boys from his school, so I had Roland and Louisa to myself. Freddie was there too, of course. There are parts of that day—when he died—that I remember vividly: sensations, the sunshine, and the smell of the earth in the wood… but other things… afterwards, I tried and tried, I wanted to have a record in my mind of the whole day, to keep it, but they were just… lost. We’d been in the woods, you see, playing hide-and-seek, and Freddie was with us then, for some of the time. I saw him running through the trees. I was crouching or
kneeling down in the middle of some bushes. I realised I’d chosen a bad place to hide, a small space with all the branches digging into me. I was trying to work out how I could escape without being seen, when he suddenly ran past me. Then he tripped over a stick or something. I was angry with him because he started howling and I thought the noise would make the others come and then they’d find me. I didn’t move. I knew he hadn’t seen me. After a while he picked himself up and I thought he must have gone off to find Nurse. That was the last I saw of him, the blur of his hair through the trees.

We carried on playing for a while and Freddie can’t have come back, because when we came out through the shrubbery it was just the three of us, Roland and Louisa and I. I can’t remember anyone saying ‘Where’s Freddie?’ or ‘Shouldn’t Freddie be here?’ or anything like that. I was glad the others hadn’t asked where he was, because I thought I should have helped him, and instead I’d stayed hidden because I didn’t want to spoil the game. We sat on the lawn and we were waiting for one of the maids to bring lemonade. I lay down flat on my back on the grass, and I was looking up at the sky and imagining I was in it, surrounded by blue with pillows of cloud underneath me to float me along. I remember I said: ‘It feels like flying.’

Roland said, ‘How do you know? You can’t fly.’ I said, ‘I can,’ and of course it started a row. We all lay down flat on our backs in a line and there we were, squinting up into the sky and arguing, when suddenly someone screamed. The scream went on and on, and I could hear footsteps coming across the grass, nearer and nearer, and a big dark shape appeared over us and we couldn’t see because it was blocking out all the sun. I think the others must have got up, but I was still lying there and when I turned my head sideways all I could
see was this enormous boot, standing on my hair. I shouted out and started tugging at my pigtail, but I couldn’t get it free. I kept on shouting, but this great big body up above me was flapping its arms up and down and twisting on one spot like a scarecrow, and screaming so loudly that no one could hear me. The others were pulling at me, all their heads and hands and knees swarming all over me until I thought I was going to choke. They pulled so hard I thought my head was going to fall off. I heard Roland shouting, ‘Off! Get off!’ and then we were all yelling, the noise was quite deafening, and I had absolutely no idea who this giant was who was treading on my hair and wouldn’t move.