‘I knew you would, Gilbert.’
‘Because you know me?’
‘Yes.’
Still I did not turn. I spoke, as it were, to her portrait.
‘Where is … he?’
‘Talking to my father.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘There are so many … details. So many arrangements.’
‘I’m sure there must be.’
‘There has been a change of plan.’
My heart jumped. Was it possible? At the last minute had she stepped back from the brink? A change of plan!
‘Has there?’
‘We would like you to join us for lunch at home.’
I swallowed hard.
‘Would you mind very much if I did not. I have some shopping to do.’
Her voice became a painful whisper.
‘As you wish,’ she said.
‘Do we have time for a walk in the park?’
‘I’m afraid not … there’s no time for anything.’
I looked at her.
‘Gilbert,’ she went on, ‘you mustn’t. You mustn’t overrate my virtues.’
‘I don’t … I don’t.’
It was as if she was on a secret mission the nature of which, whether serious or bizarre or mysterious, was quite closed to
me. We turned our backs on her portrait, and at the foot of the wide staircase we parted, she to her father and future husband,
I to the Army and Navy Stores, where I bought two calabash pipes, and then on to an electric bioscope theatre.
‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ I said aloud in the darkness, but by the time I returned to Lamorna I knew, deep down, I
would not attend their wedding, and I did not.
It is impossible, I now realise, to see it as anything other than premeditated; and the most careful premeditation at that.
I have considered it, mulled it over from every conceivable aspect, or at least from every aspect that I can conceive. Could
sudden anger have led to it? Or the onset of despair? And if so where did the despair deepen into such a decision? Was there
perhaps a half-hour of unimaginable tension when it did not matter what dreadful crime was committed as long as the desired
end was achieved?
No. No!
To do such a thing required precise planning, stealth and concealment, and everything planned to happen in the most intimate
setting. For this to succeed there must be no hint to one’s partner of what is being contemplated or coming.
There can be no question of mad impulse or rush of blood. The blood that planned this must have been cold.
Her voice shaking, her feet occasionally banging the floorboards in distress, Laura Knight told me the facts. Then, when she
had calmed down somewhat, over the tea served at Mrs Jory’s insistence, she started to fill in the details of the day. After
the service, in St John’s, Westminster, in which Florence looked ‘quite exceptionally lovely’, there was the reception for
the guests, an extravagant affair at which Munnings spoke with considerable generosity of spirit and some skill and, reading
between Laura’s lines, rare self-restraint. In their rather stiff way the Carter-Woods were, Laura said, pleased at the union
of their daughter and the much-talked-of artist, or at least managed to seem so. Indeed the whole day, in Laura’s opinion,
had gone ‘well from the start, you couldn’t say otherwise’.
I did not ask Laura why or how she came to be staying at the same hotel as A.J. and Blote. The same hotel! That still strikes
me as decidedly strange, but then, set beside so much that is appalling, such strangeness pales into nothing.
Laura said she retired to her room in good spirits – in such good spirits that she drew, for half an hour, the curtains, washstand
and water jug. Then, while thinking of going to bed, there was a violent knocking on her door. She opened it to see A.J.,
hollow-eyed and incoherent. She followed him along the corridor and up two flights of stairs.
Florence was lying at the foot of their bed on the carpet. At first Laura thought there had been a terrible fight, that A.J.
had throttled her. She was breathing very hard, making a choking and gurgling sound as if being strangled. Her face was grotesquely
distorted, the muscles in her neck taut. Then Laura knew it was poison. There was no need for
chapter and verse, she had encountered cyanide before, in her younger days in Paris. She had seen its effects. It was poison,
she was sure of that, as she fell to her knees at Florence’s side.
‘I was wondering,’ Gilbert whispered, his voice more uncertain than he had ever heard it, ‘do you by any chance have any books,
any reference books, that is, on poisons?’
The librarian looked over his glasses, and whispered back.
‘Poisons? Yes, that would be in the second Reading Room, if you—’
‘And their … effects.’
‘Of course, sir, this way.’
‘I’m sorry to bother you.’
‘You are not, and I know exactly where it is. Someone else was asking about this only a few weeks ago.’
He was in the Morrab Library again, the place where not many months before, in a state of high excitement, thinking he might
well be the man most in her mind, he had scanned the dictionary for the meaning of ‘Blote’ and then the art shelves for a
facsimile of Botticelli’s Venus. Once again the librarian was most helpful. Once again Gilbert sat in the same dark corner,
guiltily covering the book, but this time as he pulled up his chair he was a shaken man.
Around him, old men dotted the seats, single with their thoughts and their sticks.
He had seen the approach of death before: he had held Sammy’s hand as he shivered and sweated. And he had seen violent deaths,
but shocking though they were that was part and parcel of his life as an army officer. For that kind of death he was, in a
sense, prepared if not trained. Apart, however, from seeing Mrs Paynter’s dog and the painting
The Death of Chatterton
he knew next to nothing of the after-effects of taking poison, and his knowledge of his ignorance led him back to the Morrab
Library. He had to know. He had to know everything, and everything he read there in the library suggested that the reality
of a poisoning was far less pleasant and far less peaceful than the graceful, even elegant position of Chatterton’s body in
the painting by Henry Wallis led one to suppose.
As he braced himself to look for the entry on cyanide he wondered how on earth Florence had obtained the poison in the first
place. He tried to envisage her in the act of purchasing it. With a chill, he realised he could. She would purchase it in
a most matter-of-fact manner. But did she know, know in a specific way, what she was going to experience? Did she have any
detailed idea of her proposed end?
Cyanide. Heavy though the book was, it fell conveniently open on the page.
Cyanide, he read, starves the body of oxygen, so the result of swallowing it would be much the same as suffocation or even
hanging (Gilbert swallowed and nodded). This would go some way towards explaining Florence’s red and swollen face, as described
by Laura, and her noisy, strangled gasping for breath.
In her final moments she would find her heart beating faster in an effort to force the blood round her system,
with her brain pounding from an increased pulse. As her chest heaved rapidly in the fight for breath her limbs would become
numb. There would be a roaring, as of wind and waves, in her head.
At the thought of such pain running through her body Gilbert closed his eyes, hoping by doing so to see Venus delicately floating
on the shell, coming steadily towards him on water so calm there seemed not the merest breath of wind to ruffle it. This did
not work. He opened his eyes to the roaring, which soon gave way to blackness and unconsciousness.
How soon the blackness came depended on the individual. It was a difficult task to describe the time it took to pass from
unconsciousness to death. After death, however, the stages were clear. After death all her muscles would relax, including
her involuntary muscles, so that her bowels and bladder would be voided. To one entering the victim’s room at this juncture
the strong smell of faeces and urine would be immediately evident.
Her body would be cyanosed, with all parts of her flesh now bearing a deep purple sheen, as on a damson. Her tongue would
be swollen and extended, her eyes open and staring, showing broken blood vessels or
pettachia
, a vital clue for those looking for strangulation.
These
words
, Gilbert gulped.
Pettachia
was not a word Gilbert had before encountered. The word stopped him reading. He tried to push back his chair quietly. It
squeaked loudly. Head bowed he walked a few paces away from the open book. His brain hammering, he once again asked himself
why would a woman so beautiful and so sought-after plan to kill herself on her wedding night and in such a horrible way? Worse
still, why would she choose to do so in the bed she would share for the first time with her newly married husband?
Gilbert put his hands over his face to block out the pictures. What did Florence imagine would happen in that bed that justified
such a self-inflicted end, and was not to inflict this on herself also, in a sense, to inflict it on Alfred? What blow could
be more damaging to the partner left alive? Did it not all smack of revenge?
When his eyes cleared Gilbert resumed his seat. He read on. The next section upset him, if that were possible, even more.
With his stomach a hard painful knot, he read that within twenty-four hours of death Florence’s skin would shrink, giving
the impression to the onlooker – onlooker! Who could look on while this hideousness happened? – that her hair and her nails
were continuing to grow after death.
Her long tresses … her long fingers.
A day or so later rigor mortis disappears and her body begins to decompose, turning into fluids and gases.
Decomposition.
By the end of a week, and Gilbert realised it was exactly a week now since the day of their wedding, her body would have changed
colour to green and purple, the skin so loose it could, with ease, be rubbed off. Another week, and the gases forming in the
gut made the stomach swell and swell until stretched balloon-tight, fit almost to bursting.
He had seen such horses, with long teeth and open mouths and bursting stomachs.
He dreaded a fourth dream, a new portrait of Florence and Merrilegs.
By the third or fourth week her body had decayed so much that her hair and her nails, her long hair and her long nails, could
easily be pulled out, and her oval face was green and purple and bloated.
Gilbert shut the book and rose unsteadily. He stumbled out of the library, blinking in the sunlight and the tilting
seagulls. He held tightly on to the handlebars of his bicycle, feeling that the more firmly he held on to the bicycle the
more firmly he held on to life, to the earth. Out on Mounts Bay the sun reflected sharply off the sea. He cycled along. He
passed Stanhope Forbes’s school and looked up at the three huts. He climbed Paul Hill. His mouth felt dry, his legs felt weak.
After a mile or so of bicycling, his energy and his teeth-gritting determination would pump his legs up the slopes no more.
By the gate where he often stopped to admire the view of the sea he retched into the tall nettles.
That evening, for the first time, Alfred and Florence were to come down for dinner. Mrs Jory, of course, knew nothing of the
wedding night. As far as Gilbert knew, only he and Laura and Harold Knight did, and even they knew only of the final act of
the drama, not what events or motives led to it. They could speculate all they liked, and Gilbert and Laura did, but Florence’s
face would tell them far more.
‘Mr and Mrs Munnings,’ Mrs Jory told Gilbert proudly over his early breakfast, would be arriving in the late morning. Best
to keep well out of the way, Gilbert thought, while they moved in their possessions, or what few would fit into such a small
set. And while they moved in he would not come back for lunch but stay over in Boskenna. After all, presumably the last thing
they would want at this stage would be any kind of reception?
‘Such a pleasure they’re coming here, isn’t it?’ Mrs Jory said, with as close to a purr as she could manage. Then added:
‘And so soon after the wedding, I’m so proud they changed their minds, aren’t you?’
She rolled her eyes and puffed out her bosom.
‘Aren’t you?’ she repeated.
Yes and no, Gilbert thought, nodding into his tea. Whose
decision was it to live in the hotel? Alfred’s or Florence’s? Perhaps, for entirely different reasons, they now both wanted
the setting of a hotel, neutral ground on which they could be served, a place with the distractions of daily comings and goings.
As Gilbert changed nervously for dinner he could hear the new occupants moving around beyond the adjoining wall. He heard
chairs and furniture being readjusted, the sound of wardrobes opening and not closing properly, of suits and dresses being
put on coat hangers. Florence and Alfred were, after all, both so well dressed. Through the wall he could also smell, or did
he imagine it, oil paint and turps; and, or did he imagine this too, the scent on her dresses, the same scent that sat beside
him on the train and stood behind him in the gallery.
He listened. He sat very still on his narrow bed and listened. There were mumbles, a low exchange or two, another coat hanger
rattling the panel of the wardrobe, an abrupt laugh but no distinguishable words, which suggested Alfred had somewhat modulated
his volume levels. His feet, however, continued to clip the floorboards. Hers made far less noise, as if she chose the carpet
instead.
In his attendant silence Gilbert looked at Sammy’s birds’ eggs, even turning a few over with as light a brush as possible.
What clothes would she wear at dinner? he asked the eggs. How would she look? Would she be terribly damaged? How would she
behave? For her to be at the same table with Alfred and Gilbert would be but no, that was to suppose he himself was in some
sense special or chosen. He put away the eggs, with the exercise book safely beneath it, and hoped he would not hear their
bed when they both were in it.
He stood up and checked his hair and his tie. He checked his watch, then went downstairs to await their arrival. It was
not a long wait. Gilbert rose to his feet as she came into the dining-room just ahead of Alfred. Dressed in a silk blouse
and blue skirt she walked, very upright and poised, with her hand held out in greeting.
‘Gilbert.’
The hand he felt in his was steady too, steady and warm. Her skin was as clear and pale as it had ever been, but healthily
so. There was nothing he could see in her bearing or her manner to suggest she had so recently been so close to death. Her
hair shone, her eyes were clear, there was no sign of … what was the word … no
pettachia
in sight.
In those split seconds, seconds in which he seemed to live more than in many whole months, with his hand in hers, his mind
jammed. Are you feeling better? You look so well. Forgive me for asking, but what did you say to each other when you recovered
consciousness, what did you say to each other the next hour, and the next morning, and the next night? How long are you planning
to stay here? Sitting next to Alfred, did you read Browning on the train down from London? Are you keeping the studio near
the mill? Will you come and see the painting hut I have found for you? Did you come here to the hotel to be next to me? Because
you could both appeal to me as a friend, but give me your own side of the story?
Gilbert need not have worried. Alfred, the picture of rosy good living, gripped his hand and elbow.
‘So, what’s been going on, Ev, and what’s for dinner?’
They could have been old friends or officers meeting up for a weekly dinner in a familiar club, which in one sense they were.
‘Oh the usual, you know. This and that, this and that.’
Gilbert helped Florence with her seat, bending forward slightly to slide it under her, with his face close to her
shoulder. He breathed in, and again, to be sure he wasn’t imagining the scent. Yes, it was the same.
‘Paynter pushing you too hard, asking too much as usual?’
‘No, it’s been rather slack at Boskenna, to tell you the truth.’
‘Anyway,’ Florence said, ‘it’s wonderful to see you.’
‘Slack? Don’t believe you!’
‘Do tell me about this new house,’ Florence went on, ‘we saw it this afternoon.’
‘Coming on fast, isn’t it?’ Munnings said. ‘Marvellous for seascapes, if it’s seascapes you’re after.’
‘Is it for you?’ Florence asked. ‘The house?’
‘Me? No, no … It hasn’t been sold yet.’
‘I told you, Alfred.’
‘Are you interested in it?’ Gilbert asked.
‘Might be, might be. Doubt it, don’t see me settling here, so read us the menu, Blote, there’s the girl.’
Florence picked up the menu. A touch of colour came up her throat.
‘And since you’re in charge of everything, Ev, on the walk we were on just now, never seen so many pieces of paper and orange
peel and matchboxes just strewn all over the place … see it’s cleared up, will you?’
Alfred laughed his only-joking laugh and smacked Gilbert’s shoulder.
‘Good to see you, really is, good to have a bit of civilised company.’
‘Are you keeping on the studio?’ Gilbert asked.
‘Yes, and the horses. All as before. I’ll work down there.’
‘Soup,’ Florence began, ‘cold lamb, mint sauce, rhubarb and cream.’
‘What sort of soup?’
‘It doesn’t say.’
‘I’ll ask Mrs Jory,’ Gilbert said.
‘Felt like some roast pork,’ Alfred said, drumming the tablecloth with his fingers.
‘Do tell her, she’ll happily provide that tomorrow. She’s only too keen to please.’
Florence turned to Gilbert and spoke in a voice only for him.
‘You’ve heard Joey is to leave?’
‘No, no, I had not …’
‘There’s no appeal, I’m afraid, Papa is adamant.’
‘That’s very sad,’ Gilbert said. ‘I’ll miss him dreadfully, I really will.’
‘Never very interested, though, was he?’ Alfred said briskly, leaning forward. ‘Not really, bit of a dabbler, wasn’t he, preferred
the seabed.’
‘Not originally,’ Florence said.
‘And his other beds,’ Alfred grinned, flicking out his table napkin.
‘What … other beds?’ She looked sharply at her husband.
‘No, Ev, never very interested once he’d met Dolly next door. And … what’s her name, Prudence. Hammer and tongs, I heard.’