A Little Death (25 page)

The first I knew of it was a message to say that there had been an accident at Winnie’s and someone should be there with her. Mr. James couldn’t have been kinder, straight away he said to me, ‘There’s no question about it. You must go there at once and stay with your sister for the night.’

Well, I had no idea what I was going to find, but Winnie’s neighbour Mrs. Elliot was out waiting for me. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It was fearful. The twins came charging in here and I thought the house was on fire because I couldn’t get one word of sense out of either of them. So in I go and there’s Winnie, stood there as calm as you like, Frank on the lino and blood all over the place.’ Well, the hospital put enough stitches into Frank’s face and chest to make a trousseau and he had the scars till the day he died, but the queer thing was, he would never admit it was Winnie that did it. I ask you! He told them at the hospital that a man had attacked him, said he was after his money. Of course, the neighbour went and told the whole street it was Winnie, but none of them would ever say it to Frank’s face because they knew he’d have half killed them. Besides, she’d given him this one scar that run right down the side of his face from his eyebrow to his mouth and it made him look so fierce that no one dared to cross him.

Anyway, that night I slept at Winnie’s. As I say, she was calm enough, so after we’d been down to see Frank at the hospital and I’d tidied the house and got a bit of food in, I came home. All the way on the bus I was thinking: Thank goodness I’m not about to marry one like that.

It was about eleven o’clock when I got back to Hope House and Mrs. Seddon was sat up waiting for me in the kitchen. I said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t,’ because I thought that it was ever so kind to wait up like that.

But she said, ‘You must go in and see Mr. Lomax at once. I’ll be waiting for you here.’ I thought I must have done something wrong, or why would Master Edmund be summoning me to see him? Because he always came to me if he wanted anything doing, just the same as when he was a boy.

Well, I went into the drawing room and there was Master Edmund, standing in front of the fireplace. I’ll never forget walking across that room. Master Edmund was looking down at his shoes. When I came close, he turned his back and pretended to move something in the grate, although there was no fire, being summer. He said, ‘Please sit down, Ada,’ but he never turned round. I remember how he was stood as clear as if I had a photograph; I could see his profile, with his head bent down and the grey in his hair, which was just starting to come at the side. He drew the back of his hand across his mouth, with his black sleeve and white cuff, and the gold ring shining on the little finger. ‘I am afraid that Mr. Gresham is dead.’

You’d think I must have said
something
, wouldn’t you? Asked a question or something? But I never. It was Mrs. Seddon who told me the details, not Master Edmund. The only words he said to me was to tell me Mr. James was dead. He never turned his face to look at me properly, he just gave a little cough, then he was out of the room. It had a door on either side of the fireplace and he shot through one of them like a cat in a rainstorm. I was just left sitting there on this great big velvet chair, listening to his feet going off down the corridor. Master Edmund had told me to sit down and there
wasn’t a hard chair, so I had to sit somewhere. Then I thought: Well, I can’t sit here all night, so I went off back to the kitchen. Mrs. Seddon was waiting for me and we went into my special room beside the kitchen. She’d made up a tray with some tea on it and I think there were some biscuits or cake or something. I sat down at my desk. There was all my account books and whatnot in front of me, and I nearly found myself pulling out my pen as if we were going to go through the orders for the week, because it didn’t seem as if it was real, what I’d been told. Mrs. Seddon told me as much as she knew, but I couldn’t follow it. Anyone who’d overheard me would have thought I was a simpleton because I kept asking the same questions, I couldn’t seem to understand it.

I asked her ‘Where is he?’ I meant, where was Mr. James’s body, because I thought he’d gone up to Manchester. I didn’t understand when Mrs. Seddon said he’d been found upstairs and I was even more confused when she said they’d taken him away to do an examination. ‘What sort of examination would that be?’

She said, ‘Well, I don’t really know, the police said it was to find out if he’d taken these pills.’

‘What pills?’

‘I don’t know, but they said he might have taken some pills and that’s why he died.’

‘Was it poison?’

‘Some sort of medicine, I think they said.’

‘But he doesn’t take any medicine, not that I know of.’

‘Well, they said it came from the doctor and Mr. James might have had more than he ought.’

I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what medicine that could be,’ because I’d never known Mr. James take so much as a tonic. His doctor was Dr. Durrant, same as Miss
Georgina. He’d paid plenty of visits to Hope House to see her when she was poorly, but I’d never known him be called to Mr. James. I said, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this.’ Because I couldn’t think straight at all and none of it made sense to me, what Mrs. Seddon was saying.

‘It was Master Edmund found him. Half past six in the morning. Mr. James was in his dressing room. Master Edmund went to pay a call of nature and when he came past the door it was open, so he looked inside and there was Mr. James, sat bolt upright in his chair, fully dressed with a rose in his buttonhole, stone dead.’

‘What was he doing with a buttonhole at half past six?’ Mr. James used to go out every morning in the summer and cut a bloom for himself, but he always did it after breakfast.

‘I don’t know, but one of the girls saw a bunch of roses on the side, quite fresh, so somebody must have picked them, but if it was Mr. James, nobody saw him do it.’

‘How come he was sitting in a chair?’

‘Well, Mr. Herbert told me it was sort of wedged under the table where he puts his hair brushes.’

‘He must have been looking out at the garden.’ Because that room had one of the nicest views and the garden was a real picture in summer with all the flowers out. ‘Does Miss Georgina know?’

‘Oh, yes. But don’t worry, Miss Pepper, the doctor gave her something.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies,’ and then I thought: Oh, it didn’t sound respectful the way I said that, but it came out before I could stop it. I asked Mrs. Seddon when the police would find out about the medicines, but she didn’t know that. As I say, I couldn’t really take it in what she was saying. All I knew was, when I’d left to go to Winnie
’s, Mr. James was as right as rain. I’d seen him myself, talked to him and everything, and he was fine. Now here was Master Edmund saying he was dead and no one knew why. I told Mrs. Seddon, ‘I’m going to bed.’ I’d heard enough and, to be honest, I just wanted to be left on my own. I said, ‘Don’t worry about the tray, I’ll take it in the morning,’ and she didn’t make a fuss, she let me do it my own way.

But I didn’t sleep a wink. I had all this stuff going round and round in my mind all night. I didn’t even know
what
I was thinking about half the time, it was things I didn’t want to think, all tangled up. And then I was thinking about William—what was I going to tell him? I thought, I must write him a letter, I must tell him, and I was lying there trying to work out what to say, but I’d get one sentence started and never finish it because then I’d see Mr. James jammed in his chair, dead, with his eyes wide open and staring at the garden. I didn’t know if his eyes
were
open, I suppose I just thought that people always died with their eyes open; I don’t know if that’s true, but then you put pennies on the eyelids… It was all things like that, they kept coming back to me again and again, so I got dressed and went to Mr. James’s dressing room. It was locked up, but I had my keys and I went in. The first thing I saw was the roses. Nobody’d thought to put them in water and they were just lying on the side. It seemed a shame to let them die, so I put them in the basin in Miss Georgina’s bathroom and I sat there on the side of the bath looking at them. I must have sat there two, three hours, but they never perked up so I took them downstairs and threw them out. I can’t tell you what I was thinking—I can, though, some of it, it was about the children. The ones they never had. I would have loved
children. Poor little things. And Mr. James. Poor, poor Mr. James.

I don’t like to think about it, but I was in a bad way after Mr. James died. I never got the chance to speak to Miss Georgina or Master Edmund—they shut themselves up in their rooms mostly, especially her. I don’t think she came downstairs once in three weeks. We had to bring the food up on a tray and leave it outside on the landing. No one was to go into their rooms—they’d leave the tray outside again when they’d eaten, just like when they were children, just the same. If they wanted anything doing, they’d write a note and push it under the door. Do this, fetch that. Not even signed.

Master Edmund went into the office most days— there was a lot for him to sort out in the business—but when he came back he was straight up the stairs so fast that you could barely see him. It was a sort of a suite of rooms they had, you see, him and Miss Georgina and Mr. James, and there were big doors that closed it off from the main staircase and then it had a little private hallway of its own. Anyway, Master Edmund would dash off up there and we wouldn’t see him again until next morning, and then only for his coat and hat. I remember on one of those days I was coming out of Mr. James’s study, which was across from the doors to their part, just when Master Edmund was going up the big staircase. I know he saw me, but he never said a word, only bolted like a scared rabbit. It reminded me of when he was a boy. If he’d done something wrong, which was hardly ever, but nobody’s perfect, are they? But if he’d upset something or been where he shouldn’t—and that was usually because
Madam
had told him to—he wouldn’t come near me for days. He was always a bit timid that way, Master Edmund. Didn’t like trouble.
She’d
pretend she’d done nothing wrong, stare right
back at you with eyes as hard as marbles, but not Master Edmund, he’d always run away from it. I’ll never forget how unhappy he looked when I saw him that day.

I have never understood how Mr. James come to make a mistake like that with those medicines. Perhaps he thought he was taking something else, although he’d only to read the label—and Mr. James was the type who would always read a label. He was upset about Miss Georgina and Mr. Booth, of course, and that was one thing I did wonder about, because Mr. James did like everything to be perfect. And it must have made it that much worse, all the servants knowing about it.

The impertinence of the police was something I could not believe, the way they came snooping all over and asking questions. They got the whole place in an uproar, talking to the girls—well, I made sure none of them said anything they shouldn’t, I wasn’t having that, coming spying into respectable people’s houses asking things which were none of their business. When they asked me about Miss Georgina and Mr. Booth, I told them I didn’t know nothing about it. It was the older man who asked me, not the other with him, the boy, or I’d have told him to wash his mouth out. Mr. James wasn’t cold in his grave and them saying those things. Well, he was barely in his grave at all, the way they insisted on messing him about before we were let to bury him.

Six o’clock in the morning, that’s when the police came. I was getting dressed. As soon as I heard the car I went to my window, and I could just see the gravel on the drive and the foot of the steps, so I knew who it was. The minute I went out of my room, one of the maids came running up to me: ‘Oh, Miss Pepper, the police are here! They’ve asked to come in!’
I told the girl, ‘Bring them into the house before anyone sees them.’ So she ran off—not that it would do any good, because the car was slap outside the house where anyone could see it that cared to look. I heard later that the police had been told to keep the arrest as quiet as possible, because it was all over the papers about Mr. James being dead in suspicious circumstances. I suppose it was good of them, although their superiors might have reminded them to use the tradesmen’s entrance while they were about it.

After the girl went off again, I just sat down for a moment to be by myself. I knew the police must have come for something important and you’d have thought my heart would be going nineteen to the dozen, but it wasn’t. My hands were steady and when I got a sight of my face in the mirror it was set like a stone, so I knew I wouldn’t give way, whatever happened. I went down and there were the policemen standing at the bottom of the front staircase. Four of them, three men and one woman, all in uniform except for one of the men. When I saw the woman policeman I thought: They’ve come to take Miss Georgina. Mind you, this woman, the way she was looking around, you’d have thought she was on a sixpenny tour of the house with a tea at the end. I stood at the top of the stairs and I said, ‘My name is Pepper. I am the housekeeper. May I help you?’

The one without a uniform, I’d seen him before, his name was Mr. Black and he was in charge. The others told me their names, too, but I don’t recollect them. This Mr. Black or Inspector Black or whatever his name was, he said, ‘Is Mrs. Gresham here? Mrs. Georgina Gresham?’

‘Mrs. Gresham is asleep.’

‘Please wake her up, Miss Pepper. I have a warrant
for her arrest.’ Even though I’d suspected it, when I heard those words everything about me went numb.

You might say it was funny, really, because then I said to him what policemen always say on the films: ‘I think you had better come with me.’

I left them in my little room, all standing in a row with their dirty great feet on my nice blue rug. I shut the door tight and went into the kitchen and said to Mrs. Seddon, ‘I’m going up to wake Miss Georgina. If those coppers go snooping around, you send a girl up and let me know.’ Then I went upstairs. I can’t pretend my heart wasn’t going then; in fact, I think I’d have gone over if I hadn’t had hold of the banister. I took a tray for Miss Georgina because I thought I’d have to wake her up, but I found them both standing by the window in Master Edmund’s room, looking down at the police car. I remember feeling surprised that Master Edmund was already dressed because it was so early. Miss Georgina was wearing a silk wrap. If they heard me come in, they never looked round. Their hands were resting together on the windowsill, hers over his—I could see the shine of her wedding ring in the sun.