A Little Death (27 page)

It said, on the top of the paper, ‘Edmund’ and then:
I have always believed that I did my best when I had no advantage of birth or wealth, but it is not enough. I am at fault. I misjudged you because I considered you to be an honourable man and a gentleman, but you and she have broken every law of man and nature. I cannot bear to think of what you have done. If it were only Teddy Booth I could have excused it, but never this. I have taken 120 grains of Veronal. When I have completed this letter I shall take chloral hydrate to finish the job. I feel now as if I were a little drunk, but it is not unpleasant. I am not afraid. May God have mercy on you both.

He’d signed it with his full name, James Arthur Gresham. There was a postscript asking if I would see to some business—he’d given his word and wanted me to keep it. Then at the bottom he’d written:
There will be people who will say that I brought her to this, but what did I do to you?

I put the note and the pen into the pocket of my dressing gown and then I thought: Nobody must see the room like this, so I picked up the tray with the whisky and so on, and took it into the bathroom. There was a glass on it, a tumbler, which had some chalky stuff in it, like white powder. I thought that must be the Veronal, where it hadn’t dissolved, so I rinsed it out and dried it with one of the towels, and then I rinsed and dried the water jug. I was bringing the tray back when I realised that it might look suspicious if anyone thought I had moved things about, so I took some gloves from the chest on the landing and put them on. I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I don’t know what I thought Dr. Durrant would make of it, just that it was some awful mistake Jimmy had made, or that was what I hoped he’d think. I was worried that the servants would come and find
Jimmy, and that they’d find me, and all sorts of things would be
thought
, and
said
, and… what appalled me most of all was the thought of anyone reading the note.

When I caught sight of Jimmy again, I felt that I couldn’t bear to leave him lying on the floor—it seemed just such a—dreadful indignity, really, after everything that had gone before… so I tried to pick him up, but he was so heavy that I almost dropped him. That was something old Osbert Spencer made a great fuss about in court, because it was obvious that someone must have put Jimmy into the chair. I mean, I’d done my best but his clothing was rucked up from dragging him along the carpet, and Spencer kept arguing that Georgie couldn’t have lifted Jimmy because he was so much larger that she wouldn’t have been able to get him off the ground. Well, I
know
she couldn’t, even if it was the insane strength of passion or the passionate strength of desperation or whatever the prosecution were trying to claim it was—Jimmy was six feet tall and he must have weighed sixteen stone at least; it was only because I knew there would be the most terrible crash if I dropped him that I managed to hang on to him at all. I bent over him and picked him up with my arms under his so that he was in a sort of sitting position with his back to me, resting against my knees. There was only one chair in Jimmy’s dressing room and I pulled him along backwards towards it with my arms clasped round his chest, which was jolly difficult, because he had a big, thick chest. Once I got him there I sort of wedged myself in between the chair and the wall, and tried to pull him up into it, but I couldn’t reach properly, and Jimmy kept bumping against the chair and the chair kept bashing into my legs, and the shoulders of his jacket kept riding up round his ears and catching
against the edge of the seat. In the end I stood in front of him and sort of hauled him up, so that he was sitting in the chair. I was bending over him, trying to adjust his clothing, when his head,
his entire head
, lolled towards me—it sort of swung and he looked straight at me. His eyeballs were so large and much rounder than when he was alive, like two eggs in waterglass… I wanted to close his eyes, but I didn’t see how the lids could be made to fit over them… I couldn’t bring myself to touch his eyes or his face. I tried to do it by shutting my own eyes, but standing so near him and not being able to see made it worse. Then, when I reached my hand towards where I thought his eyes were, his head moved again, it sort of bumped into my arm and I just had to stop—well, that was partly why I’d gone behind him to move him. I thought the chair might slide backwards and make marks on the wall, and somebody might guess… but more, well, not
more
, really the
reason
I did it—the point was that I didn’t want to look into his face. I had sort of seen that his eyes were open when I bent down to him the first time, but he was half on his side, you see, and I couldn’t see his face properly. I was worried that he would fall out of the chair, so I pulled it across the room and tried to wedge it under the dressing table. The arms—the arms of the chair, that is—were too high to go underneath the table and I had to try to push the chair so that its arms were resting on the top of it. That was why the chair had to be tucked right underneath, so that his stomach could sort of hold him there—I thought he might slip down otherwise, but if his stomach was touching the edge of the table he’d be… well, he’d be safe.

I was getting my breath back when I noticed the cut flowers on the windowsill. Jimmy liked buttonholes, he wore one every day. He always went out and chose a
flower for himself. He only ever picked one, but that day he’d taken five or six. As if he couldn’t decide. Something about that did occur to me afterwards, when it was mentioned in court—that perhaps Jimmy went into the garden because he thought he’d seen something that couldn’t be true, and he imagined that if he did something normal, something he did every day, he would come back to the house and find it wasn’t so. But usually he picked only one flower, so the more he picked, the more he must have known that it
was
true, that there was no getting away from it. I suppose that sounds like one of those tin-pot psychologists, but it
is
easier to pretend, sometimes. Then you don’t have to face up to whatever it is or have an argument about it, or do anything, really. I suppose I tucked the flower into Jimmy’s buttonhole because I thought he would have wanted it.

I was about to open the door to leave Jimmy’s room when I turned round—to make sure he was still there, I suppose. I could see the back of his head and shoulders in front of the leaded windows, with the lozenge shapes of glass and the first sunlight coming towards them, and as I was closing the door I suddenly caught sight of Jimmy’s reflection in the glass, he seemed to be staring straight at me. When I went back to my room, and took off my dressing gown and lay down again, I couldn’t get his eyes out of my mind and I kept thinking: What if he moves, or slides down, or what if he isn’t dead at all, what if he comes to? I suppose eventually I must have stirred or something, because Georgie turned over and opened her eyes, and said, ‘What is it, Jimmy?’

I pushed her shoulder to awaken her. ‘Wake up Georgie, wake
up.
’

‘Oh, Jimmy, go away.’

‘Jimmy’s had an accident, Georgie.’

She just mumbled something, she wasn’t properly conscious.

‘Jimmy’s dead, Georgie.’

‘Manchester, not dead.’

I kept repeating this, shaking her, but she couldn’t seem to wake up properly. After a while I started to understand what she was saying, but it was stupid things about thinking people were dead when they were really in Manchester. Well, then I lost my head—I shook her, I slapped her, I even threw a glass of water at her. She was actually quite groggy, but at the time I just thought she was being difficult, so I kept on and on until she sat up and started trying to fight me off.

‘Jimmy really is dead, Georgie. We have to do something.’

‘Did you try talking to him?’

I said, ‘Well of course I did,’ even though I hadn’t, because there wasn’t any need, but I suddenly realised that the servants would soon come up and I was desperate to put Georgie in the picture and get it all straightened out.

She kept saying, ‘Oh, he can’t be.’

So in the end I said, ‘I’ll show you.’ She didn’t want to come and see, and I had quite a struggle to make her, but in the end I got her out into the hall. There was a long time when we were both standing outside Jimmy’s dressing-room door, arguing in whispers.

‘This is completely absurd. He isn’t even in the house.’

‘He’s in there!’

‘He’s in
Manchester
, Edmund.’

‘Georgie, this isn’t a game.’

‘No, it’s ridiculous.’

‘Well, if it’s so ridiculous, what are you afraid of? Why don’t you just open the door?’

‘I’m not afraid. I just don’t want to. Stop shouting at me, Edmund. I want to go back to bed.’

‘I’m not shouting. You’re damn well going to open that door.’

She wouldn’t, so in the end I grabbed hold of her hand and put it on the doorknob and turned it with my hand over hers. That hurt her and she gave a little scream, more of a yelp, really, and then I gave her a push and we both sort of collapsed into the room. The mind plays queer tricks and, for some reason, I expected Jimmy to be
facing
us in the chair, with the eyes wide open and the arms and legs strapped to the chair like an American execution. I said to Georgie, ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch anything.’

She was standing in the centre of the room, behind Jimmy. She was quite still, I mean she didn’t go forward to him or touch him or anything, she just looked at the back of his head and then she said, ‘He
is
dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. I think it was your sleeping medicine.’

She didn’t ask me how I knew or anything; she just said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

When we were back in my room, she said, ‘He found out, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ I showed her Jimmy’s note.

‘Burn it.’

‘Do you think we should?’ I don’t know why I said that. Of course I knew we had to get rid of it immediately, but I just couldn’t think straight.

‘Burn it! Or do you want to show it to old Durrant?’

I said, ‘It doesn’t say your name.’

‘For God’s sake, Edmund, it doesn’t need to. Who else could it be? Elspeth? Durrant will take one look at this and go straight to the police. Do you think that’s what Jimmy wanted? For everyone to know? You idiot,
do you think he’d want everyone to know why he killed himself?’

I said to her, ‘Don’t speak to me like that, don’t call me an idiot,’ but she just snatched Jimmy’s letter out of my hand.

My cigarette lighter was on the mantelpiece and she picked it up and set fire to the paper. Then she said, ‘Where are the medicine bottles?’ When I said I hadn’t seen any bottles in Jimmy’s dressing room, she said, ‘Try the bloody bathroom, then.’ I’d never heard her swear before and I was shocked. Not so much that she knew the word, because anyone can overhear a bad word, but that she used it with such familiarity, as if she’d said it before, or thought it. But at the same time I was quite… well, quite
relieved
, if you want to know the truth, that she was taking over the situation. Acting like an older sister, not a younger one. When I didn’t move, she went out to her own bathroom and came back with two empty medicine bottles and one of the little boxes they used for the Veronal powders. I hadn’t seen them because I’d used the other bathroom when I rinsed the jug and glass. She said, ‘I’m going to take these into my room and throw them into the wastepaper basket under my dressing table.’ The police found them later and of course they had Jimmy’s fingerprints on them as well as Georgie’s, and that caused another great fuss at the trial because we’d forgotten about the Veronal papers—the chemist wrapped up a certain amount of powder in a little paper and that was one dose—and they were still in the wastepaper basket in the other bathroom. I suppose I must have seen them when I’d rinsed the glass and jug, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they were important. Osbert Spencer suggested that Jimmy had taken the powders and the sleeping draught in the bathroom and then gone into
Georgie’s bedroom and put the empty bottles and the box into her wastepaper basket, and she didn’t hear him because of the sleeping powder
she’d
taken. Anyway, Spencer was delighted with the effect it produced, because it put the other chap in a corner and he tried to argue that Georgie knew that Jimmy’d taken the powders and didn’t do anything about it, but the judge told him that it was a disgraceful and unchristian suggestion, or something like that, and of course that put them off the whole thing.

The newspapers had a field day when Georgina said she thought Jimmy’d taken the stuff by mistake. The humorists made a great thing out of the narcotics, jokes about how to have a perfectly harmonious marriage by being asleep all the time. But Georgie had a difficult time over the chloral hydrate, because even in the peppermint syrup she took, it still tastes pretty frightful, and nobody would swallow it of their own accord unless they absolutely had to, so it would be practically impossible to make a mistake. Even Georgie agreed about the taste and she was used to it. Then the prosecution lawyer, Anthony Keeble-Price, suggested to Georgie that she’d told Jimmy the syrup of chloral was some sort of tonic and that was how she’d got him to drink it, but before Georgie could deny it the judge jumped in and pretty well ordered him to shut up.

After Georgie’d thrown the bottles into the wastepaper basket, she said, ‘Are we going to leave Jimmy for the servants to find?’ I didn’t know what to answer. I couldn’t think what to do at all. Georgie kept glancing at the clock and saying, ‘It’s either you or the maids, Edmund.’

I said, ‘What about you, why can’t you be the one to find him?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Edmund.’

‘He’s your husband, Georgie, not mine.’

She said, ‘That’s why I can’t be anywhere near when he’s found, you fool!’ Well, I didn’t like that, calling me a fool, especially when she’d called me an idiot a few moments before, so I came back at her, and back and forth we went until I suddenly thought, my God, we’re bickering like a pair of brats. I couldn’t stop my hands shaking. I kept lighting cigarettes, thinking that would do the trick, but it didn’t help. In the end I said I’d be the one to find Jimmy because it wouldn’t be fair to the maids.