She put the heels of her hands over her eyes and her voice altered. “Oh, God, the boys, Edie, the boys. How am I going to tell them this? Then she cried as though all control was gone; the barriers were down and it was as if she were was on her own and her heart was broken.
Edith reached a hand across the table and put it over Julia’s.
Inspector Greene coughed and glanced out the window as if he really could not deal with this degree of raw emotion.
“I’ll ring the school–they’re at that scout camp, aren’t they, at their boarding school?”
“No, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. The scoutmaster, Mr. Pritchard, will help me. He’ll know what to do. Would you come with me, Edith, though, please…to the…to identify Giles?”
“Of course.” Most likely, she would not be actually allowed into the mortuary with Julia, but they would have to face this a bit at a time.
At the sound of Julia’s calmer tone, Inspector Greene obviously thought that enough time had been lost. “We need to talk to you about your husband’s guns, Mrs. Etherington.”
“I know very little about them, Inspector. I know the 12-bore shotgun he cleans and keeps in the gunroom and takes out when he’s shooting. There’s a service revolver as well.”
She looked at Inspector Greene. “It was an accident, though, wasn’t it? An accident with the shotgun. I know you have to ask questions, but what else could it possibly be? He was an experienced man with a gun, but I know things happen sometimes, with the safest pair of hands. One of our old gamekeepers was telling me about something he’d done to himself once, to his leg, cleaning out the gun, no safety catch on…”
There was an excitement, an edge of panic in her voice. She keeps on talking because she doesn’t want to hear any different.
“It wasn’t the shotgun. It’s too early to give you much more detail. But I can tell you that he wasn’t shot with the gun he was carrying.”
“No.” Julia’s voice was quite loud and she repeated the word twice more, again shaking her head.
Edith could almost see the thoughts rushing through Julia’s mind. It wasn’t an accident then. Someone else had shot Giles. Someone else. Where was that person now?
Julia got up and walked to the window, her hands oddly clasped in front of her body, clenched together tightly.
Minutes passed and eventually Inspector Greene told her a police car would take them to the station.
Though Edith’s nerve ends were jangling with heightened awareness, she still started when the door opened and Bea, wild-eyed and distraught came in. Her brown jodhpurs and knitted yellow jumper were streaked with mud. Her brown plaits had partly come undone and tear tracks were visible on her cheeks.
She was followed by Lottie who said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Etherington. Bea wanted to come down–wanted to see you.”
“That’s all right.”
The presence of her daughter brought Julia back to them. Edith had a flash back to war days, of the urgency to put away the self in the face of other’s distress. Put away the self–yes, it was possible. That the self came back with a vengeance, was only something you learned with experience, of course.
Bea allowed her mother to give her a hug, in itself unusual. But, then, the child pulled away.
The Inspector looked directly at the child. Edith had never before heard him use the gentle tone he used now.
“Someone shot your father, Bea. Maybe there’s something you can tell us? Something you saw?”
She shook her head and then her whole body shook as though she was having a febrile convulsion. It was so extreme that Edith, for a moment wondered if that was actually what was happening. Then the girl began to sob and Edith realised that what she was seeing was distress and possibly fear, not a convulsion.
The inspector looked now at the two women before turning back to Bea. “It’s all right, my dear. We’ll leave it for now. Maybe when the shock has worn off a bit, we’ll have a talk?”
Beatrice had stopped shaking, but looked blankly at the inspector.
Lottie persuaded Bea to go back upstairs. She was kind with her, but also strong. Did Julia ever mind someone else being able to connect more easily with her child than she herself could?
“I’ll telephone Archie.” Edith managed to get to the hall and the telephone receiver while Julia fetched her coat and hat and probably applied something to her face.
The journey to the police station in the back of the official car was time out of real life. Edith didn’t try to make conversation and Julia sat rigid, her gaze away from her friend, directed out the window at the passing Yorkshire countryside.
Edith couldn’t see any signs of rouge or lipstick when she returned to the reception area of the police station where she had indeed been asked to wait.
She reminded Edith, just for a moment, of how she had looked in VAD days, curiously young. Her skin had the look of the milk Hannah fetched from farmer Woods, who sold it fresh from the cows. It was thick milk, vanilla yellow and rich. Julia’s skin had a sheen to it too. Her eyes were expressionless. There were no tears.
A police car would take them home too, back to the Etheringtons. Edith prayed Archie would be back at the house before them. He was a doctor and he would know the procedure, wouldn’t he? Things would have to be done. Maybe having a few things to do, practical things, might bring Julia back from this place she was at.
Archie had been and gone once again. He had seen Bea and talked to her, but according to Lottie, with again, absolutely no response.
“Could you stay over, just for tonight?” Immediately, Julia interrupted herself. “No, it’s too much to ask. You have been through enough…”
Edith stopped her with a hand on the arm. “Of course. I’ll go home, get a few bits and pieces, tell Archie, sort one or two things out in the surgery…”
Relatives and friends had called; some had been dissuaded from coming further than the hall; distraught relatives had repeated the same phrases over and over again.
Edith had heard one of the twin sisters, Georgina perhaps, say in a heartbroken voice that Giles had survived the war for this to happen and how it was cruel.
* * *
It was, unbelievably, already seven o’clock in the evening. A perfect summer evening, apart from the midges coming out now to persecute anyone trying to take in the cool evening air. Restless, Julia had wanted to walk in the garden, and Edith went with her. The flower borders were just past their best, beginning to droop; the hot summer had sapped the life and the green, and for a sweet second Edith imagined a cool, golden autumn day. Her arm itched and she slapped at it with her other arm and she had goose-bumps from the now cold air,. realised she was becoming chilled.
Julia shivered too, and pulled her hand-knitted, green cardigan close around her body.
“Do you want to go in?” Edith asked.
“Please.”
She stopped, looked at Edith, her jaw quivered, the bottom of her face distorting for a minute and Edith’s heart ached for her friend. Whatever Julia had been about to say was lost.
She walked fast, back up the terrace and into the sitting room, pulling the French windows too with an urgency to shut out the world now, it seemed. “I’ll have to go up to Bea,” she said.
They had all gone for now, apart from the staff, two of whom lived in. They were alone. It had seemed at one point as though the mayhem of the day would never subside. Apart from the police and Archie, the house had seemed so full of relatives. Edith had been uncertain about whether to go or stay, but every time she made the slightest gesture towards leaving the room, Julia’s eyes had met hers.
They sat up late and eventually gave into the temptation of a drink. “But I‘d better be careful,” Julia said. “I have a feeling tomorrow will be hellish.”
Edith felt helpless. Every time she attempted to say something, her words sounded wrong–stilted.
Every five minutes, it seemed, Julia went upstairs to check on Bea until, eventually at te
n o’clock, she came down and looked the slightest bit easier.
“She’s asleep. It’s a respite. Until she wakes in the morning and it all comes back.”
“When will the boys be home?”
“I think about lunch-time. Angus is going to fetch them,” Angus was Giles’s brother-in-law; one of those men easily overshadowed by the more stridently masculine, but who came into their own when a crisis occurred.
She’d been so impressed by everything he had said–not much and done–just what was needed.
“I think that’s what will help her you know. Siblings, older brothers, they speak the same language somehow.” Edith said and stopped, conscious of herself and her own brother and the time when their relationship had skeetered off the tracks, Was Julia having the same thoughts?
“I struggle with Bea, Edith.”
The words were raw and Edith, uncomfortable, hoped Julia would not regret them in the morning, wouldn’t regret mentioning her difficulties with her daughter.
“She’s a daddy’s girl, of course,” She touched her face in a curious gesture, as if checking that she was still flesh and bone, still there. “Was…was a daddy’s girl.”
She cleared her throat and Edith saw her shut her eyes tightly for a couple of seconds.
“I don’t mean just the father-daughter normal, protective on one side, worship thing on the other… I mean an affinity. I think they were alike and she, being a girl, that worked. If it had been one of the boys, it would have caused problems.”
“How do you mean an affinity? Liking the same things, being out and about in the countryside, that sort of thing?” Edith asked.
“No, more…cut from the same cloth. It’s a terrible thing to say, Edith, especially at the moment; but I think I mean, selfish…no, that’s not fair, too strong. I mean seeing the world in simple terms and in black and white, somehow, through a self-absorbed prism. Single-minded.”
How much damage Giles’s affair had done. Julia hadn’t always seen him like that, not at all. She had loved him in that wholehearted way you could really only break once. Giles had broken it, for what was probably only been a trivial dalliance too, on his part. Now, even Julia’s memories were sullied. Or maybe she was being stupid. She’d never married, so what did she know? Maybe it didn’t work like that–after all, Julia and Giles had had years together and three children.
Julia looked so tired, the adrenaline of the day or whatever it was that had sustained her, drained away. But, she said, “I feel as if I will never sleep again, Edith.”
“Take something. Archie left you those powders. Why don’t you try to get a few hours peace anyway?”
Julia looked at her.
It wasn’t difficult to read her thoughts. “I know it’ll be all here in the morning. Julia. But, I think you’ll be better able to face it if you’ve had a reasonable night’s sleep.”
Ironically, Edith herself had a bad night, like the nights she used to have in the weeks before she ended up in St. Bride’s.
Don’t be stupid. It’s nothing like that.
It was hardly surprising she seemed to wake every hour or so. What had happened the day before was shocking. A bad night didn’t mean she was on the slippery slope. She was going to have to stop thinking like this, stop turning every nuance of her well-being and behaviour into a catastrophe. She was not having another breakdown, whatever a breakdown actually was.
Her tablets had been reduced and she was now seeing Dr. Uxbridge once a fortnight. That was helpful. Sometimes she hardly knew what was said in the sessions; she almost always felt better after seeing him, and at times, she found herself saving up significant things to discuss with him.
At other times she thought about the reason this type of treatment, this talking, had come about. To help shell-shocked war victims and felt guilt. Sometimes, she worried beforehand about running out of things to say, but then the hour came and went and it seemed she had, after all, filled it.
But, it wasn’t really thoughts of herself that kept her awake, that made her wake hot and restless and angry with the tangled bed-sheets. It was thoughts about Julia and Giles.
Stupid expression but they had been a golden couple back in the London days–a commissioned officer, a colonel and his girl, also doing her bit, a nurse, not a trained nurse, but someone nevertheless trying, maybe not as skilled but learning all the time and in the most extreme circumstances too.
Edith turned again in her bed, turned the pillow over. She was hot. She couldn’t stop thinking about Julia and Giles, and she hated something about the way her thoughts were shaping. She sounded to herself, in the secret depths of her mind, as though she was being sour and jealous. She wasn’t, not really. She loved Julia and had felt her pain deep in her own gut today, so why was she having these wicked thoughts now?
Thoughts were chasing each other around, conflicting. The golden couple had crumbled–that was the despicable one. The other thought was that they had thrown away what she would have given almost anything to have had with Alastair–a shot at making a life with someone after the war was over. Maybe something could have been retrieved from the waste and horror if the person had returned and the two of you could be together in peace.
She would never know, and it was a ridiculous burden to place on a couple—that they should have a happy marriage to make up for all those deprived of the opportunity. They’d had children too…Edith turned the pillow again. Maybe she would get up? No, she would wake someone up. She would just have to lie here.
Dr. Uxbridge had told her tormenting thoughts were only that–nothing was unacceptable if it just came into your mind and you left it at that. So, maybe she was not wicked to have thought these things.
She knew Julia in the way you did when you’d known someone since childhood or when you had been through something really bad together. So, she and Julia knew each other well–very well. Edith’s eyes felt gritty and she blinked several times.
It was true. Julia had been one of the few people she could bear near her when she had had her breakdown–it was a strange way of describing what had happened to her mind, at once serious and dismissive. Julia, Henry Wilkes, and Aunt Alicia–even Archie hadn’t been the right person to be near, somehow–too much was fraught in the air between them. But, Julia had been easy, comforting. Edith hadn’t felt ashamed and she hadn’t felt as though she had to be someone else, someone capable and sane, for instance.
And, today–she was the person Julia had called. The marriage had been in trouble, really big trouble around the time Edith had been in hospital. Julia had kept that to herself for a long time until she hadn’t been able to any more–so she was capable to of doing that. Then, there had been a car accident, where a distraught Julia had run into a tractor on one of the country lanes and could quite easily have been killed.
That seemed to have brought a halt to the marriage problems–or had it? There had been another woman and a small bit of Edith’s mind, the small corner that remained capable of thinking of others had been shocked by that. It had seemed cheap and somehow a betrayal of everything. She had looked at Giles like a returning hero and that made her cringe now. Surely, oh surely, she had seen enough to give the lie to ideas like the returning hero.
Had she been as susceptible, then, to propaganda as the stupid women who had handed out white feathers? Or those who thought it was really too bad form to speak of the battlefield or the wounded. They extolled the dead of course, and the deaths were cleaner, more straightforward. The soldiers who came back had brought mess and pain back with them.
No, her thoughts were running away with her.
Then, in her mind’s eye, she saw Bea and the green mud-spattered jumper and her hot, accusing eyes. She was a child. She’d lost her beloved father, and someone must be blamed.
Edith turned one more time and closed her eyes. She had a feeling that now sleep was going to come and so it did.
Chapter 3
“I bet you’re worn out.”
/> Archie was at the kitchen table, jacket off and sleeves of his white shirt rolled up.
It was a cooler, more overcast day and Edith was thankful for that. Yesterday had been hot, too hot, and that heat had been oppressive; it was stupid but it had made everything worse.
Edith felt a flash of affection for her brother. She and Archie had been to hell and back in some respects. She had cracked up under this roof and he’d not coped particularly well with it. They had seemed so distant at one point that Edith really didn’t see how they could continue living in the same house.
She suppressed a smile. How dramatic. But, that had been a dramatic time; everything had been stark–awful or wonderful. With hindsight, that the time following her discharge from St. Bride’s had been the worst possible time to make any life-changing decisions. Her thoughts about leaving the dales may have been, at least in part, just another example of her confused thinking. She and Archie would rattle along together for some time to come.
“Well, I wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea. Julia’s family, the in-laws, that is, have descended again and I took the opportunity to slip away.”
“Giles Etherington—it takes some time to absorb it— dead. Surely it must have been an accident?”
Edith shook her head. She hadn’t said anything to him yesterday; there had been no chance to talk when she had returned for her night things, and apparently the news wasn’t widespread yet.
“It definitely wasn’t a shooting accident, Archie. He was shot with a service revolver, nothing to do with the shotgun he was carrying.”
“Christ almighty!”
Archie turned to face her and whether or not it was a trick of the light, Edith thought he’d lost his colour.
“A service revolver, are you sure?”
“Archie, it’s what Inspector Greene said. Of course I’m sure.”
Archie got up, put his hands into his trouser pockets, and walked to the window. He looked out at the bit of kitchen garden visible from the window and wiped at the glass with a hand. “A service revolver,” he said. “I wonder at the significance of that, an officer, a service revolver, the war.”
Death at Dawn Page 2