A Little Death (14 page)

I wish Mrs. Mattie could have seen that house the way it looked on the morning of Miss Georgina’s wedding, she’d have been so proud of it. Mr. James had some of his servants come down from London and they were all rushing about, so I took the chance to have a walk through the house on my own. I went down the nursery corridor. I wasn’t thinking to stop by Miss Georgina’s room, particularly, only I wondered if a familiar face among so many strangers would help her if she was nervous. Anyway, the door to her room was open and there she was, all alone, sitting in front of the dresser and looking into the mirror. She had a book on her lap with a red cover and she was scrubbing at it with a scrap of silk to get some red for her cheeks. All brides are lovely, or that’s what they say, but Miss Georgina would have taken your breath away. At that moment, when she saw me in the mirror, she looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her.

She said: ‘I’m glad you came, Ada.’ She said it as if she was expecting me, although she hadn’t called me. Then she said, ‘dear Ada,’ and held out her hand to me. I’d thought she might be a bit frightened or nervous, but her hand was still as a stone and she looked straight into my eyes and didn’t even blink. It felt as if I was in a dream, or being hypnotised or something, and I could swear I was on tiptoe going across that carpet towards her. She took my hand in both of hers: ‘Do you want to come and live with me in London, Ada?’

‘Oh, yes, it’s all arranged, Miss Georgina, I’m to come.’

‘Do you promise you’ll never leave me, Ada?’ I just shook my head, I couldn’t trust myself to speak. ‘I must have your solemn promise.’

It sounds daft, but I think I would have done anything she asked me at that moment, so I said, ‘I promise.’

‘Good. Wish me luck, Ada.’

‘Good luck, Miss Georgina.’

Then off she went to be married.

As for me, I had one last thing I wanted to do before I left. What I’d promised myself to do was, I was waiting on the veranda for Mr. James’s chauffeur to bring the car, and I’d put my hat and coat on the rail so they’d keep nice and clean, then I went round the corner to the rabbit hutches and undid the latch on every single one. Ever so slowly, the rabbits came out, and I was worried sick in case Mr. Lomax should look out of the window and see what I’d done. They huddled up on the veranda, they were all trembling, noses sniff-sniff-sniffing. Then suddenly one of them gave a jump and they all went lollopy-lollop down the steps and across the lawn to the woods.

Jimmy wasn’t much of a one for bed, which was a shame because I rather enjoyed it once I got the knack of it. At first I couldn’t imagine what Jimmy was doing. I thought he must be trying to suffocate me. It would have been easier if he’d explained, but of course he couldn’t. I’ve always thought it strange that people can do something so intimate to each other but never be able to talk about it. Teddy used to maintain that gentlemen found it difficult with ladies, because they never had any to practise on, only tarts, but I shouldn’t think Jimmy had had much practice even with tarts. Teddy did, though. Do you know, he told me once that I was the only proper lady he’d ever had—I was the only one he hadn’t paid. But I wouldn’t have minded a present from ‘Uncle’—a nice fur coat, perhaps, a bracelet, why not? Jimmy wasn’t suspicious, but of course I should never have got anything past Jones or Ada, my maid. Women have such nasty minds, servants especially. Ada’s frightful and she’s got no business to be, we’ve always looked after her, she’s never had to worry about a thing, and she repays us by disapproving. It was she who told Jimmy about Teddy, I’m sure of that.

I asked Teddy once if he was at our wedding and he said he was. I don’t remember him, but he could have been because he was in business with Jimmy in those days. All the people at our wedding were Jimmy’s, because
I didn’t have any except Edmund and Louisa. I hated it, all those people touching me and kissing me. I felt coated with their breath. I wanted to run away and jump into a bath and scrub it all off, but Jimmy kept steering me through this ghastly crowd of baying faces with his hand clamped on my elbow. I felt as if I was covered in bruises from all those people pawing at me. And Dennys looked so extraordinary, with so much food, I’d never seen so much food… Edmund told me that, after everyone had gone, Father collected up all the leftovers for him and the gardener to eat. It was Edmund who gave me away—Father took himself off to the gardener’s house and stayed there until it was over. Jimmy went there to say good-bye to him before we left. It was so much easier to go about when one had the right clothes. People still looked, but because one was well turned out, not because one was some sort of freak, and I found I rather liked that. We went to the Isle of Wight. I realised on the honeymoon that Jimmy and I didn’t have much in common. Really, my brother Edmund was the only man I knew apart from Jimmy and we never had any shortage of things to say to each other. We used to lie on the bed and talk and talk until we fell asleep in our clothes, and Ada would tiptoe in and cover us with blankets, but I had no experience of talking to any other man. Jimmy’s conversation was like a prize-winning composition. He would tell me things about politics and the economy—it was like a lecture, a series of facts, and then he would ask me what I thought of it. It was ridiculous—how could I have an opinion? Until I was married I’d never read a newspaper in my life. My father took one, but he wouldn’t have let me touch it even if I’d wanted to. Jimmy wanted to educate me, which was tiresome. He wanted me to think about all these weighty matters and form opinions,
but I wasn’t really interested. Why should I be? It all seemed so little to do with me that I couldn’t even
guess
at what I was meant to say. The things I actually
thought
—the things I would have said aloud if I’d been with Edmund—about the landscape and the houses and the people, those didn’t seem to be the things that Jimmy wanted to talk about. I was sure most husbands and wives didn’t talk in
subjects
the way Jimmy did, but I didn’t know any other people, so really I had no idea how they went about it. I’d never been anywhere in my life, never done anything, and there we were, stuck in this stuffy hotel with these stuffy people on this stuffy little island, and I didn’t know what to do. I remembered Edmund’s advice about copying other people, but they were all so dull that I thought: if I have to behave like that I’ll bore myself to death. And then I thought, why
should
I do what other people do? It’s tedious and, besides, I’m not like other people, so why pretend that I am? If I’d known such a word existed, I would have said, ‘Oh, bugger it!’ That’s how I felt.

But a honeymoon is supposed to be the time when you get to know someone. I didn’t feel I knew Jimmy any better afterwards than on the day we met. I remember one day, I was alone in the hotel room, waiting for him to come back from somewhere. There was a beautiful Oriental rug there, and I decided I’d do what Cleopatra did and roll myself up in it. I’d read that she’d done this so that her guards could smuggle her into the Imperial Palace and unroll her in front of Caesar. Well, I thought that would be quite amusing, so I got some soot from the grate and painted my eyes to look like the Egyptian people one sees in pictures, then I took off all my clothes and lay down on one end of the rug and wrapped myself up in it. Well, Jimmy came back and I said ‘Hello-o!’ He looked right round the room before
he saw me on the floor with my head sticking out of this roll of carpet.

‘What are you doing on the floor, Georgina? Have you had an accident?’

I said, ‘I’m Cleopatra, can’t you tell?’

‘Cleopatra?’

‘A present for Caesar. You’re supposed to unroll the carpet, Jimmy.’

‘Unroll it?’ He was staring at me as if I was mad. ‘Supposing somebody comes in?’ As if anybody would just saunter into one’s hotel room without knocking.

Well, I thought, I might as well unroll myself, that’ll surprise him. So I did. I lay on the floor, completely naked, and blew an imaginary trumpet, ‘Ta-daah!’

‘For God’s sake, put some clothes on.’

I was thoroughly fed up with him so I said, ‘If you don’t stop being so stuffy, I’ll walk right out on to the balcony like this.’ It was mid-afternoon and I’d closed the curtains, but I ran across the room and yanked them open before Jimmy could stop me. ‘There! That’ll give them all something to talk about.’ I honestly thought Jimmy was going to have apoplexy. He grabbed the curtains and pulled them shut so hard that the pole came down. One of the curtains landed on top of him like a cloth over a birdcage. He was staggering around bumping into things, but I couldn’t help him because I was lying on the bed, crying with laughter. He was making enough noise to wake the dead, so it wasn’t long before the manager came banging on the door. Jimmy ripped the curtain off his head, scooped me up from the bed and practically
threw
me into the bathroom, with my clothes after me. When I looked in the glass I saw that the soot had smudged and I looked more like a chimney-sweep than the queen of Egypt— no wonder Jimmy couldn’t recognise me. Of course, I
absolutely screamed with laughter. Poor Jimmy was trying to explain to the manager about the curtain and my howling away in the bathroom can’t have helped at all.

He was livid about the whole escapade. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Georgina. You’re behaving as if you’re drunk.’

I said, ‘Perhaps I should try it. At least it might be more entertaining.’

He looked so hurt I almost wanted to hit him. He said, ‘Perhaps you’ll be kind enough not to talk about this in future.’ But he brought it up again when we were at dinner. ‘You won’t mention it to Edmund, will you?’

‘Mention what?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘You said I wasn’t to. Anyway, why on earth would Edmund want to hear about it?’

Jimmy said, ‘Oh, I don’t suppose he would.’ I thought that was rather odd of him, because Edmund and I have always had an unspoken rule that we didn’t discuss Jimmy, just as we don’t talk about Father. Jimmy wasn’t to know that, I suppose. Poor Jimmy. I never did try any fun with him after that. He didn’t understand it. At the beginning, I thought perhaps he’d had to work too hard for what he’d got to treat anything lightly… but I came to realise that he didn’t possess a sense of humour. When Edmund and I would come out with our games and catch-phrases and all the rest of it, he’d watch our lips as if we were speaking a foreign language and he wanted to understand what the words meant. I used to call it his ‘yellow dog expression’. That was because of a big dog Edmund and I saw on the Heath once. It had been let off the leash and was having a whale of a time digging a hole. Its master kept telling it to stop, and up came its head out of the hole looking so confused—all its instincts were telling it to
go after the rabbit and its training was telling it to obey the man. Jimmy would get exactly the same look on his face when the two of us got going. I used to say, ‘Who let the dog in?’

Then he’d smile and look as if I’d caught him out: ‘Oh, dear, was I doing it again?’

I remember vividly the day we came back from our honeymoon and I saw Hope House for the first time. The sun was setting and we were in the car, with Herbert driving us up the road and round the corner, and there it was, this monstrous building. Jimmy turned to me and said, ‘I built it for you.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

I must have sounded like a lady mayoress who’s just been handed a bouquet of wilted violets, because he said, ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Well, it’s terribly grand.’ Of course, the awful thing was that I
didn’t
like it and I always had this dreadful feeling of being burdened because it was such a magnificent gesture, rather like the Taj Mahal except that one wasn’t dead. One should have been terribly grateful, but I was actually jolly glad when we had to leave. Ada wasn’t. She thought it was a great come-down, moving here, I was left in no doubt about that. She’s never been the same towards me since. I’m sure she holds me responsible and, of course, she’s quite right because I
am
responsible, although perhaps not quite in the way she thinks. Of course, I’ve never actually
denied
killing Jimmy, except in court, but it’s a question of loyalty. It went without saying that servants were loyal when I was a girl, but not anymore. If you want loyalty nowadays, buy yourself a spaniel, that’s my advice.

The war started soon after that. The Great War. That was my war, really, mine and Edmund’s. Those were my men, marching away, my brother, my cousin, then
Herbert the chauffeur, the gardeners, and every single man I knew except my husband—Jimmy was too old. I didn’t meet Teddy properly until after the war. I didn’t have anyone in this last one—well, Edmund tootled off to Harrods and bought a military sabre from the cutlery department, but the Local Defence lot wouldn’t have him, which was beastly of them, although they did let him do a spot of fire-watching to make up for it.

Edmund’s letters from France never told me anything. They were rather peculiar—all ‘keep smiling’ and ‘mustn’t grumble’—more like a character in a play than a real person. Sometimes it wasn’t even a letter that you got, but a thing like a luggage label, with sentences printed on it: ‘I am quite well’, ‘I have been admitted into hospital’ and other things like that. The soldier crossed out the sentences that he didn’t want and signed his name at the bottom. They used to call them ‘whizz-bangs’. At first I was jealous of Edmund being in France. I thought it was like the knights who won their spurs in the marvellous adventures we’d read together when we were young. I used to write to him saying how much I envied him for the fun he must be having. I loved sending him parcels, all the clever things you could buy… once I sent him a special officers’ tea-set with two bone china cups in a tiny leather box and, another time, a miniature folding bookshelf. But of course it turned out to be no fun at all, just slaughter. When Edmund came home on leave he still kept smiling, just like his letters said, but his eyes looked dreadfully sad. I don’t mean self-pity, but that the war made a terrible impression on him and he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it. We went to see Louisa and her bandage-folders, we dined and went to the shows, I even took him to see all the potatoes that Jimmy had grown in the garden, but I couldn’t manage to raise him out of
this sadness. I could see he was making the most terrific effort to be jolly, that was the frightful thing, but he just couldn’t seem to come out of it. He wouldn’t really talk about anything and he would stare at odd things, a point on the tablecloth beside his plate or the label on the decanter. I knew that he wasn’t seeing them or listening to what I was saying, but often I had the feeling that he might be about to cry and I knew I had to prevent that from happening. So I was like a side-show, really, until the moment had passed. I don’t know why this happened, but it did, fairly often. You see, I’d invariably known what the things were that Edmund was afraid of, like the pony and having to have his dinner downstairs with Father. I’d always understood it before, but not this time. None of us did who weren’t in France, because it was so dreadful that no one who’d actually been there wanted you to know. Even though they were so near to us, it was as if we weren’t real to them. Only the trenches were real.