A Little Death (23 page)

I truly don’t think I could have stayed inside that house one moment longer. It wasn’t just the stench, but the atmosphere was
so
—well, I suppose it was knowing that my father had died there and thinking of him lying in that filth, in terrible pain… I couldn’t rid my mind of the picture of him beside Thomas, waiting for death to come while those desperate animals were clawing at the doors in search of food.

I nearly broke my neck on the front porch on the way out, looking for Georgie. For several months before my father died I’d hardly seen her at all—I couldn’t bear the strangers racketing round the house and never any peace, so I cleared out. I was going to put up at my club, but Louisa found out and invited me to stay there, with her and Davy and the baby, because Caroline was just a tot in those days. I stayed with them for three or four months in the end. I kept offering to move out—it wasn’t fair to them to stay so long—but they wouldn’t hear of it. Louisa was always so kind. When I told her
how much I hated the way Georgie was behaving, she said, ‘She’s unhappy about losing the baby. You shouldn’t be angry with her, Edmund.’ It had never occurred to me that Georgie might have actually wanted a baby until Louisa said that. I tried to imagine Georgie with a baby, but I couldn’t make it fit at all, somehow. But all women want babies, or I suppose they must, or they wouldn’t keep on having them.

Louisa certainly seemed to want her baby. She was a marvellous mother. I used to go up to the nursery with her to see Caroline sometimes, and Louisa would always take her in her arms and kiss her. I’d say, ‘She’s a lucky baby to have a mother like you,’ and Louisa would laugh at me, but I meant it.

Seeing Louisa every day should have made me the happiest man alive and some of the time it did, as long as I could forget the rest of it. It sounds childish, but sometimes when the car brought me back from the office, I used to pretend that Louisa was my wife, not Davy’s, and that Caroline was my daughter. I didn’t tell her about that, but we did talk about a lot of other things—well, I suppose I talked, mostly, but Louisa was always quite happy to listen. We talked about the summers at Dennys and about Roland… I used to wonder if she liked to hear me talk because it reminded her of him. I wouldn’t have minded if that was the case, because being with her made me feel nearer to Roland, too. But when she looked at me, straight into my face, in that quiet, serene way of hers, I felt like the lowest being on the earth. Because how can you forget that you’ve betrayed the person you love most in the world when they look you in the eye? Even if they don’t know what you’ve done,
you
know it and you know that you can’t undo it.

I went round to the back of the house to look for
Georgie. I couldn’t find her anywhere. The flower beds were choked with weeds and the yard was in a filthy state, but the hedge was still there, massively overgrown, with the little hut behind it that used to be the servants’ toilet. Georgie and I were fascinated by it as young children because we were never allowed to go near it. You couldn’t see the entrance to the hut any more, or even its shape, it was just a great mound of creeper—something rather smelly with a greenish-white blossom—which had grown so much that it was smothering all the trees within range and there were waist-high stinging nettles everywhere.

I found Georgie standing in the shadow of the hut in the middle of a clump of nettles. She had her handkerchief pressed against her face and she looked as if she’d been crying. She said, ‘This was where Freddie died.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It’s true. They all went into the house and waited until he was dead, then they fetched the policeman.’ She ran straight towards me and grabbed hold of my arms. ‘They let him die, Edmund!’

‘Georgie, you don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Yes I do. I do know! He wasn’t dead when I saw him. He was breathing. But
they
left him out here— Mrs. Mattie and Nurse and all of them. It was them, their fault! They ran away and waited for him to die.’

She was sobbing. I’d told myself—promised myself— that I would not touch her, but when she ran towards me I had to, I had to hold her in my arms until she stopped weeping. That was all I did, I didn’t kiss her or do anything, I just put my arms round her. I don’t remember ever being told that Freddie’s body was found outside the hut and I suppose I might have expected to feel something of an emotional sort, standing on the place where he was found. But I couldn’t imagine it at
all and there was nothing there except Georgie and a lot of nettles.

Georgie said, ‘I want to go back to the car.’ ‘Come on, then.’ I had a hip flask with me and a bottle from The Hand and Flower. Brandy. Father’s favourite. Georgie waited while I broke one of the kitchen windows and hopped over the sill to get a couple of glasses.

Georgie grabbed them and said, ‘Let’s get drunk.’ She made a toast: ‘Here’s to keeping up family traditions.’ Then we sat in the car and got drunk. There’s no other way to describe it, because that’s what we did, quite deliberately. I think Georgie started to feel the effects before I did, because she was giggling and singing to herself. Then she suddenly said, ‘Edmund, I’ve simply got to take off my stockings.’ She’d torn them running through the nettles and her legs were quite badly stung. I didn’t want to watch her take her stockings off, so I said I’d go and fetch a dock leaf, but by that time I wasn’t very steady and for some reason, well, mainly it was because I didn’t want to go back to the car, I ended up with a dock leaf and a lot of grass and flowers as well. I remember reaching right into the middle of a bush for some big white roses—in fact, I scratched my wrist rather badly, although I hardly noticed it at the time. I heard Georgie singing ‘O, O, Antonio, he’s gone away, Left me alone-io, all on my own-io’ at the top of her voice, and then she started shouting ‘Edmund, come back! Where are you? Don’t leave me all on my own-io! You don’t have one scrap of love for me, Edmund, not one ounce…’ I stood in the bushes for a few minutes where she couldn’t see me, but she only shouted louder. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass, so I thought I’d better go and see what she was up to.

I found her swigging brandy from the flask, sitting with her bare legs stuck out in front of her. The sun was going down and they looked like ivory in the fading light. She was laughing. ‘Sorry, Edmund, I dropped the glasses.’ I didn’t want to look at her. It wasn’t her legs that were disturbing to me, somehow, but her feet. I suppose because a car was the wrong place for bare feet, they looked very undressed, next to the brake and the steering wheel, and the effect was rather unsettling. I pitched all the roses and other stuff into her lap and sat down sideways on the driver’s seat with my back to her, and I lit a cigarette. She said, ‘Won’t you take some of these flowers, Edmund? I only want the dock.’

I didn’t turn round, I only said, ‘Throw them out of the window, then.’ We just sat there in silence after that, me with my back to her, passing the bottle back and forth. I turned round after a while and I saw she’d wound the flowers into a sort of garland and put it on her head. It made me smile and I think perhaps I leaned over to touch it: ‘Flora.’

She said, ‘If Jimmy were here, we wouldn’t be doing this.’ As if we were two children making mischief. Then she said, ‘I’m not frightened. I thought I would be, but I’m not.’ I didn’t know what she meant, I thought she must mean frightened of the dark, because the light was completely gone.

I said, ‘You’re never frightened.’

She laughed. ‘No, I’m not, am I?’

When the bottle was empty, she grabbed it and jumped out of the car. She ran towards the house on her bare feet, dancing, leaping in the air, scything the bottle from side to side and whirling in circles. She was wearing a black dress and all I could see in the dark were flashes of her white face and legs. Her eyes were like slits, black slits. Then she stopped dancing and hurled
the bottle at the house as hard as she could. It was too dark to see where it landed, but I heard a window shatter. ‘I hope it rots. I hope it burns down.’ Then she ran back and hurled herself into the passenger seat. ‘Start the car. Now! Start it now!’ I was fumbling so much in the dark that I almost broke my thumb on the starting handle. Georgie had the garland she’d made in her lap and she was ripping it to pieces. ‘Take me away,’ she kept saying. ‘Take me away.’

We made it out of the main gates, but I hadn’t driven more than a hundred yards down the road when she grabbed my arm and nearly landed us in a ditch. ‘Edmund, stop. I can’t bear it. Stop the car. Stop it now!’ She was white, shaking, weeping—I’d never seen her like that and it frightened me. By the time I’d got control of the wheel again and pulled up, her face was buried in my waistcoat and she was sobbing like a child. The thought of returning to Dennys made my heart sink, but I said, ‘Do you want to go back?’ because I thought that must be it.

She said, ‘We’re never going back. Edmund, I don’t care what happens. We are never going back.’ I stroked her head. I could see that there were still some bits of flowers and leaves on her clothes and hair, so I started picking them off and I don’t know if she misunderstood what I was doing, or if it was her, or me, or what it was, but after a while she kissed me… you must remember the circumstances, and that we’d both had a great deal to drink. When Georgie kissed me, I had Louisa’s face in my mind. I wished she were Louisa with all my heart.

It was pitch-dark, so there was no chance of anyone seeing us—we couldn’t even see each other. We sat for a long time in the dark, holding hands. Georgie said, ‘Will you come back to Hope House now, for good?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’s just us now, isn’t it? I love you, Edmund.’

And then I said the stupidest thing I could have said. If I hadn’t been half cut, if I’d thought before I’d spoken, the words would never have left my mouth. Because I couldn’t see her, I felt less… well, I suppose it was as if she couldn’t hear me. But I said it. ‘I love you, too.’

The spring after Mr. Lomax’s death, I met William again. I did! I was walking down the street in Finchley—it was my afternoon off and I wasn’t going anywhere much, just minding my own business—when I suddenly heard this voice: ‘Good afternoon.’ And there he was.

‘William Ferguson!’

‘Ada Pepper!’

I said, ‘How do you know it’s still Pepper?’ I went to put my hands behind my back, but William beat me to it—I wasn’t wearing any gloves, as luck would have it.

He said, ‘Isn’t it?’ So of course, I had to say it was.

I can remember every single word of the conversation we had. The minute I looked up and saw William’s face, I was lost. He was still a very handsome man, with a way about him; I noticed that even quite young girls were giving him looks as he went by. I’d been that angry with him, but all the things I’d meant to say to him about what a so-and-so he was, I never said one of them. They all flew out of my head the moment I set eyes on him. He said, ‘You been waiting for me, then?’ Typical! Then he said, ‘You got a boy?’ just like the young ones used to say at the time. I had to laugh. He said, ‘You come with me, I’ll see you right.’ And before I knew it he was taking me off for a cup of tea and a bun. So there I was, walking down the street with my arm in
his, and if my feet were touching the pavement, well—I couldn’t feel a thing.

It was the dirtiest, most horrible tea-shop I have ever been in, the rudest waitress with nails as black as my shoe, and I have never felt happier in all my life. This girl in a filthy apron came slouching towards us: ‘What do you want?’

When we’d given the order, William whispered to me, ‘Do you think she’s going out the back to dig for the tea-cakes?’ and I had a terrible job not to laugh right then with her not three feet away. She crashed down the pot so that the tea slopped out on the cloth and then came the plates, crash! wallop! all spinning about. She’d just gone slap, slap, slap with the margarine on the bread—honestly, my sister Winnie making the tea for her kiddies would have done it more carefully.

Well, I’d poured out our tea and we each had our slice of bread on our plate, when the waitress came back and stood over us again.

‘Plain cakes or fancy cakes?’

William looked at me, very serious: ‘Oh, I think the occasion calls for fancy cakes, don’t you, Miss Pepper?’

I knew I couldn’t look at him or I’d be in dead trouble, but I never had time to draw breath because this girl bellows ‘Gentleman wants fancy cakes’ in a voice you could have heard in Yorkshire. Then she goes stumping off and comes back with a plate. Slam! down it goes on the table. ‘Fancy cakes is extra.’ Then she goes, ‘There’s three there. You can have one each. You’ve got a choice.’ Well, those cakes had certainly seen better days; and one of them looked as if she’d trod on it. If I’d been on my own I’d have sent them straight back, but when I looked at the plate, the idea of paying extra for that lot seemed so barmy that it started me off laughing again. I had a quick glance at William, but he
wasn’t any better than I was. I heard him say ‘thank you’ to the waitress, but I couldn’t trust myself to look at him. I was looking down into my lap, trying to get myself under control, but then of course I had to go and drop my napkin, and we both bent down to pick it up and almost banged heads.

There was a huge black beetle under the table and William said, ‘Oh look, there’s Lon Chaney. He’s waiting for Miss Grace and Charm to come off her shift.’ Well, that was the last straw; I nearly burst. I had tears rolling down my cheeks, the lot. William said to me, ‘You always were a terrible giggler.’ And it was true, I was. Ellen and I were always laughing, but I’d forgotten.

How can I explain what that feels like, the years just falling away like that? I felt that I was seventeen again and, when I looked at William, I could feel my heart swell up inside my chest I was so happy. When he was counting out the money for the bill, he whispered ‘Fancy cakes is extra’ and of course, that set me off again, and we both had to dash outside and down the street in case anyone in the shop saw us.