“Well, that can’t be helped,” Pip said reasonably. “And look. The conspiracy, such as it is, is protective of someone and not damaging to another. So it was the right decision. On one side, protective, and on the other, unable to make anything worse. It didn’t make Michael any more dead.”
“Oh, Pip. Pip.”
“I’m sorry—that was rather crudely put. But please, please, let’s try not to romanticise it. Let’s hold onto the facts. Those facts.”
“Yes.”
They returned outside. Edith leaned against the balustrade and Pip stood beside her.
“I’ve been having the most vivid dreams,” Edith told him. “Exhausting dreams. Things from the past, the deep past, some of them. Things I feel as if I’m witnessing, that feel true.”
“Like?”
“Even though I wasn’t there. Ursa and Jo for instance, the accident.” She shivered. “As if I was in the car with them. The lorry on the wrong side of the road. Ursa swerving away and then—”
“Don’t.”
“It’s so real, it feels so real. I’ve been through a long period of things not seeming as real as that. It feels new; the sharpness of it.”
“It’s because Alastair’s here.”
“I know. I know; you’re right.”
“It will all settle down again on Monday when everyone’s gone.”
“I’m dreading Monday.”
“Please don’t cry. Please don’t. It’s your birthday.”
“I was fine earlier. I was happy. I walked home from church feeling anxious, but then I saw you all in the kitchen and decided everything was going to be fine.”
“It will be.”
“I feel as if something has started that can’t be stopped.”
“What on earth, why would you feel that?”
“I should be happy. But I feel this . . . this terrible dread.”
“I can stay on for a couple of days if you like. And Mog will be here. Mog will be here with you for probably a whole year—think of that. You’re going to love it.”
She dried her eyes. “I know. You’re right.”
Pip squeezed her hand. “What on earth is it? I wish you’d tell me.”
“I’m stirred up, that’s all.”
“I think we all are.”
She turned to look at him. “Really? Are we? Are we together in this?”
“Of course. And it will settle. Things will go back to their lovely quiet ploddy state very soon.”
“But I keep seeing this image, Pip. You will think me very foolish. I think I’m very foolish. I’d be the first to say so. It’s a glider, gliding behind the plane, and when the string or whatever is cut, when the line is released, the glider swoops down and crashes and breaks and bounces along and it’s all silent, no sound at all.”
“You’re feeling the strain.”
“I keep seeing this. It comes into my head. It’s not even a dream. I can’t wake up from it, Pip.”
“It will pass. These things always pass.”
“It’s how I feel about Monday. I won’t be able to . . . I don’t think I can carry on.”
“Mog will be here though.”
Fresh tears fell.
“What on earth is it? Is there anything I can do?”
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“I told someone.”
“You told someone what?”
“I told Susan Marriott. About Michael.”
“About Michael what?”
“About Michael. About the loch.”
“About the loch.”
“Yes. The loch, Ursula, the day. The accident.”
“Oh god.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“Oh no. You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t. About Ursula?”
“Yes. Everything.”
“I can’t believe it. After all this time. What on earth made you do that?” His voice was heroically unexcited. “I can’t believe it. Why would you?”
“I don’t know. I had to. I’m sorry. I tried to take it back. I rang her and said I’d been idiotic. I’m not sure what she thinks of me now, and what she believes. Our friendship has come to an end. But I trust her. I do trust her.”
“Right.”
“You’re angry with me.”
“I think it was a mistake.”
“Also, I’m becoming a Catholic.”
“What? Where did that come from?”
“I have no one to talk to, Pip.”
“And that has anything to do with anything because?”
“I’m so sorry about Susan. You’re angry. We’ll talk about it another time.”
“Another time?” He laughed mirthlessly, and leaned down, hands on the balustrade. “Oh shit.”
“Susan’s a Catholic,” Edith explained. “No—that’s not the reason. But I needed to know from her what would happen if I told the priest.”
“About Ursula killing Michael.”
“Please lower your voice.”
“You needed to know that it would stay in the confessional.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She didn’t know. About—about something like this.”
“What if Susan decides it’s her duty to tell someone? Or can’t help herself confiding in a friend, and then they feel they have to report it? What about Ursula? I thought Ursula came first.”
“I think I wanted to be punished. I think I wanted Susan to ring the police. At the moment I told her, I mean. But she surprised me completely. I told her what happened and she said that she would have done exactly the same.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“It started in hospital,” Edith said. “Wanting someone to tell. Lying there on my own a lot. Don’t look like that. I don’t blame Henry for not coming. Henry’s Henry and that’s that. It wasn’t that. Lying in hospital, knowing I might die, all I could think about was Michael and how we handled things.”
“We all think about it, all the time, believe me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with Mog that hasn’t come back to it in some way. Seriously.”
“It was wrong, Pip.”
“There wasn’t any choice,” Pip said. “You didn’t feel like you had any choice. We all get that. We understand it.”
“Will you tell? Tell the others, what I’ve done?”
“I won’t tell the others anything. Sometimes keeping quiet is the best policy. If we keep quiet it may all blow over and be nothing.”
***
By six o’clock that evening, Joan’s plans had all reached fruition. Out in the flower garden, a trestle table spread with a red gingham cloth was laden with the kind of food that a television cook thinks children like, and plastic jugs heavy with ice had been filled with fresh juices, a pastel-fruit array of them, jugs topped by fly-nets weighted by polished pebbles. The weedy profusion of the flower garden was at its most successful point of the growing year, its most convincingly apparently designed, the weeds forming a soft green backdrop to flowers in drifts. The white lilac was out, late flowering after a cold spring, and the backs of the borders glowed shell pink with plate-sized blackhearted poppies. Waterproof-backed rugs had been spread around, and books, toys and musical instruments had been left sitting in strategic piles. A nanny hired for the occasion had prepared the cut-potato printing, a pass-the-parcel package, the paddling pool for hook-a-duck. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a man’s pale blue shirt knotted at the front, sunglasses ready on the top of her head, and seemed the most relaxed of anyone: relaxed and voluble and patently used to being in charge.
Over the stile, beside the most photogenic of Peattie’s threatened meadows, cushions had been positioned encircling the fire pit. I dug out this fire pit, lined it with stones and created the stone slab seating around the edge, for my 19th-birthday party. Henry wasn’t impressed, or so I heard via Vita, who reported that the word vandalism had been mentioned. We disagreed, Hen
ry and I, about heritage and fun—the two seemed often to be at odds with one another. Henry had argued that he was merely the custodian. “You’re not just a custodian,” I’d told him. “This is your life. This is your house. You can do what you like with it. What would you like to do with it? Do some of it.” (Henry looking appropriately blank.)
Inside the great hall, Gail the coat attendant was reading a magazine, seated at a table upon which stood rows of glasses of steadily warming and flattening champagne. Joan had already been in, irritably, to complain that she had pre-poured, instead of keeping the bottles in the ice beneath the table until needed, as instructed. White fairy lights led the way along the passage towards the picture gallery, and the ropes of heavier coloured globes Mog and Rebecca had fixed up marked the children’s route, through the gothic studded door (wedged open tonight with a warming iron) and down the stairs into the flower garden. Gail was supposed to telephone the nanny in the garden on her mobile—Joan had provided the phones—to come and fetch those who were known to be or appeared to be under the age of 13. Some of these children, refusing to comply, had decamped en masse to the ballroom. Joan’s decision not to use it for the evening proved the right one; there’s something persistently cheerless about its great size and grandeur, its murals and gilt. A gang of small girls, clad every one as fairies or princesses in slightly too-large-dressing-up clothes, was running and sliding in white ankle socks and making the most of the echo.
Joan was in the hall, her smile looking fixed. A number of guests had failed to be funnelled along the passage and had clotted there, ignoring Joan’s brightly bossy invocations, urging them to move further on, further in, and carried on regardless, chatting and clogging. When Joan turned defeated to leave, her muttered “for god’s own sake” wasn’t quite as discreet as she’d hoped.
Izzy and friends had lit a fire. They had been supplied with skewers and marshmallows by her mother, and potatoes for baking ready-wrapped in foil. There were tupperware boxes of potato fillings and salad, and butter wrapped up with a freezer block, and a basket with paper plates and napkins and cutlery. Shrink-wrapped tubes of interlocking plastic waited to be assembled into wine glasses, and instructions had been penned on a pink file card, detailing which of the fridges they were to go to for the allotted white wine and beer. A music system had been rigged up to work from a battery pack, and in the broadleaf trees surrounding, Ottilie and Mog had installed many little glass jars bearing tea-light candles, wired into the branches. The summeriness of all this was somewhat at odds with the poor light levels and chill. There was worry about the weather. A persistent lead-grey hat of cloud, ragged already in the distance with its delivery of rain, had settled over the valley in the late afternoon.
***
By eight o’clock the rain began to fall, first with a wet sudden spotting like paint flicked from a brush, and then in a sky-opening, sheeting bucketing roar, a slow roll of thunder accompanying it. Children fled the garden in groups under picnic rugs held up by their corners, a system put in place under the nanny’s orders. Izzy and friends retreated under the trees, impromptu cocktails in hand. The bottles of white wine and beer, lying post-it-note-adorned on their shelves, languished unopened, thanks to friends from the surrounding villages who had turned up in numbers with off-licence bags of spirits and mixers.
Sandy the fiddler had embarked on a programme of dance tunes in the main part of the picture gallery, which had been cleared of its bigger furnishings; they’d been pushed and dragged into the narrower section towards the hall, and the smaller pieces of furniture had been removed altogether. Now, with its rugs rolled up, this broad space with its springy wood floor was as good a place to have a ceilidh as any in the world. The dancing had begun, and four sets of eight weaved around each other in practised serpentine tracks, turning and turning again.
Joan came to stand beside Edith. “Your friend called. Susan. To say she isn’t coming because she doesn’t feel very well.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
In the drawing room two uniformed waiters, elegant in black and white with red cummerbunds and rosebud buttonholes that had been provided by Joan, were restocking the drinks tables and circulating with trays of finger food, portions of delicious things in miniature and tiny filo-pastry parcels. The tables were laid with blue plaid cloths, and garlands of the same fabric had been strung festively across the ceiling and along the cornices, bunched and clasped with bouquets of gilded leaves. The plaid was the same fabric that had been used for Edith’s going-away outfit after her wedding, 52 years ago on this day. Credit must be given to Joan for Edith’s being moved, genuinely so, by this, her heart touched by the scale of the effort and its kindness. The tapers in the great silver candelabra had been lit, and twinkle lights delineated the edges of windows and doors. Everything glowed more diffusely in the watery grey light the rainstorm had brought.
Edith saw that Thomas had arrived, looking very slight in his old suit. He raised a hand to her across the room, his expression indeterminate.
The drawing room looked very different that night: not only in styling but in shape. Its size had been doubled by opening up the false wall, one made up of quadruple wallpapered doors that folded back into an adjoining, secondary drawing room that was used only rarely because it was draughty and its fireplace smoked. Joan had papered its dowdy walls, which had been oil-painted a pale yellow at some point in the past and had acquired a hospital look. The paper revealed itself as the same blue plaid, which had been stretched tight and fixed with studs. It was decorated with many old mirrors from other rooms, their glass panels draped with more fairy lights and garlands of dried white hydrangea. The food had been laid out there on a row of white-clothed tables. Big pans of kedgeree (being cooked up even now by Mrs Welsh, under Euan’s instruction) were to be served there at midnight—hours earlier than the dawn breakfasts of old—as a soaker-up of alcohol and a signal that the party was over.
The new arrivals, having circled and admired the double drawing room, having tasted the miniature tarts laid out appetisingly on their platters, the prawn toast triangles, the quail eggs, the buttery mouthfuls of shortbread (that Joan had stayed up till the early hours making, having ditched Ursula’s singed, Christmassy efforts), now made their way, drinks in hand, back to the picture gallery. The dance had been lit by a succession of warmly tinted bulbs, which made the faces of the participants glow as rosy as a pink dusk.
Thomas came across, extricating himself from ex-parishioners, to wish Edith a happy birthday. He produced a box about six inches square, wrapped in newsprint and tied up with string. He and Edith went into the hall together, away from the noise, and Edith opened the box. Inside there was a snow globe, a very old-looking one of heavy glass. The house inside the dome might almost have been Peattie, surrounded by idealised hills. When she upended and then returned the globe to the upright, the snow drifted down around the house in slow, twirling flakes. Edith found she had tears in her eyes. She said that she was feeling overheated, and went out onto the terrace, saying to Thomas that she’d come and find him in a little while. The rain had turned into a sort of tepid wet mist. Out on the terrace, she mimed her overheatedness, flapping at the top hem of her dress to allow the air to pass in. Her dress, she said to Euan, who was looking at her doing this, was a lovely thing but rather too warm; it was a thick velvet, and a lovely sea green, and it had been Henry’s favourite, a long time ago. She’d worn it hoping it would take them back to an old day, reuniting them for a moment in remembering a happy evening they’d spent once: she’d worn the dress, and Sebastian had been safely tucked up in bed at home. But Henry had seemed to be put out by her wearing it. He’d seemed annoyed.
***
The terrace was lined with ashtrays tonight along its balustrade, and wine tables had been placed along it at intervals, bearing drinks and snacks for those who, as Joan knew from experience, would come out here for a smoke earlyish in the proceedings, find congenial company among other e
xiles and fail to return indoors. Enamel buckets dressed with ivy and filled with crushed ice bore bottles of fizzy wine and water; whisky bottles and tumblers had been placed alongside. Among the likely members of the smoking sub-group were some of Henry’s oldest friends, and he was keen to provide for them. Some of these people he hadn’t seen since Sebastian died. They, the longest-lost, adjourned to the study with him when the rain came, promising themselves a private catch-up out of the fray, but finding, once installed there, that conversation proved elusive. When the past presents so much that’s forbidden, that’s non-traversable, the present becomes just as intangible. So little could be talked about that stayed clear of Sebastian and the years of social withdrawal that had followed. Which is how it came to pass that half a dozen septuagenarians who hadn’t come together for over 35 years were discussing land prices and local politics with slightly too much heartiness.
Once the rain shower had slowed to a drizzle, Izzy and some of the friends (the ones Joan had invited) emerged damply from tree shelter and came into the house, Izzy turning heads in a white column of a dress that draped from a halter-neck to her bare brown feet, her hair coiled in plaits around her head. She and her party brought an unforced jollity, brought the scent of outdoors and summer rain into the drawing room with them. They took bottles of wine from the trough beneath the table and, producing one of the plastic columns of glasses, went and occupied the window seat. Mog and Rebecca, each dressed in black, joined them there. Ottilie, wearing a grey silk patterned darker with leaves, could be seen moving among the older generation of guests who’d seated themselves in the newly renovated side of the drawing room, away from the worst of the crush and the noise. She had part-closed the folding doors to ensure greater quiet, ignoring Joan’s demand that she put them back as they were.
“This isn’t about the photograph,” Ottilie told her.
“What photograph? What are you talking about?”
“The one in your head. The one House and Garden would take.”
Joan stepped forward as if she’d push one of the doors back anyway, but Ottilie was there first and with a steely look took hold of the partition firmly in two hands. Joan wasn’t about to engage in a physical struggle. Once her sister had retreated Ottilie went to sit for a while beside Christian’s parents, chatting to them and fetching drinks for their neighbours.
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