Collected Stories

Beyond the Pale

We always went to Ireland in June.

Ever since the four of us began to go on holidays together, in 1965 it must have been, we had spent the first fortnight of the month at Glencorn Lodge in Co. Antrim. Perfection, as Dekko put it once, and none of us disagreed. It’s a Georgian house by the sea, not far from the village of Ardbeag. It’s quite majestic in its rather elegant way, a garden running to the very edge of a cliff, a long rhododendron drive – or avenue, as they say in Ireland. The English couple who bought the house in the early sixties, the Malseeds, have had to build on quite a bit but it’s all been discreetly done, the Georgian style preserved throughout. Figs grow in the sheltered gardens, and apricots, and peaches in the greenhouses which old Mr Saxton presides over. He’s Mrs Malseed’s father actually. They brought him with them from Surrey, and their Dalmatians, Charger and Snooze.

It was Strafe who found Glencorn for us. He’d come across an advertisement in the Lady in the days when the Malseeds still felt the need to advertise. ‘How about this?’ he said one evening at the end of the second rubber, and then read out the details. We had gone away together the summer before, to a hotel that had been recommended on the Costa del Sol, but it hadn’t been a success because the food was so appalling. ‘We could try this Irish one,’ Dekko suggested cautiously, which is what eventually we did.

The four of us have been playing bridge together for ages, Dekko, Strafe, Cynthia and myself. They call me Milly, though strictly speaking my name is Dorothy Milson. Dekko picked up his nickname at school, Dekko Deakin sounding rather good, I dare say. He and Strafe were in fact at school together, which must be why we all call Strafe by his surname: Major R.B. Strafe he is, the initials standing for Robert Buchanan. We’re of an age, the four of us, all in the early fifties: the prime of life, so Dekko insists. We live quite close to Leatherhead, where the Malseeds were before they decided to make the change from Surrey to Co. Antrim. Quite a coincidence, we always think.

‘How very nice,’ Mrs Malseed said, smiling her welcome again this year. Some instinct seems to tell her when guests are about to arrive, for she’s rarely not waiting in the large, low-ceilinged hall that always smells of flowers. She dresses beautifully, differently every day, and changing of course in the evening. Her blouse on this occasion was scarlet and silver, in stripes, her skirt black. This choice gave her a brisk look, which was fitting because being so busy she often has to be a little on the brisk side. She has smooth grey hair which she once told me she entirely looks after herself, and she almost always wears a black velvet band in it. Her face is well made up, and for one who arranges so many vases of flowers and otherwise has to use her hands she manages to keep them marvellously in condition. Her fingernails are varnished a soft pink, and a small gold bangle always adorns her right wrist, a wedding present from her husband.

‘Arthur, take the party’s luggage,’ she commanded the old porter, who doubles as odd – job man. ‘Rose, Geranium, Hydrangea, Fuchsia.’ She referred to the titles of the rooms reserved for us: in winter, when no one much comes to Glencorn Lodge, pleasant little details like that are seen to. Mrs Malseed herself painted the flower-plaques that are attached to the doors of the hotel instead of numbers; her husband sees to redecoration and repairs.

‘Well, well, well,’ Mr Malseed said now, entering the hall through the door that leads to the kitchen regions. ‘A hundred thousand welcomes,’ he greeted us in the Irish manner. He’s rather shorter than Mrs Malseed, who’s handsomely tall. He wears Donegal tweed suits and is brown as a berry, including his head, which is bald. His dark brown eyes twinkle at you, making you feel rather more than just another hotel guest. They run the place like a country house, really.

‘Good trip?’ Mr Malseed inquired.

‘Super,’ Dekko said. ‘Not a worry all the way.’

‘Splendid.’

‘The wretched boat sailed an hour early one day last week,’ Mrs Malseed said.’Quite a little band were left stranded at Stranraer.’

Strafe Jaughed. Typical of that steamship company, he said. ‘Catching the tide, I dare say?’

‘They caught a rocket from me,’ Mrs Malseed replied goodhumouredly. ‘I couple of old dears were due with us on Tuesday and had to spend the night in some awful Scottish lodging-house. It nearly finished them.’

Everyone laughed, and Γ could feel the others thinking that our holiday had truly begun. Nothing had changed at Glencorn Lodge, all was well with its Irish world. Kitty from the dining-room came out to greet us, spotless in her uniform. ‘Ach, you’re looking younger,’ she said, paying the compliment to all four of us, causing everyone in the hall to laugh again. Kitty’s a bit of a card.

Arthur led the way to the rooms called Rose, Geranium, Hydrangea and Fuchsia, carrying as much of our luggage as he could manage and returning for the remainder. Arthur has a beaten, fisherman’s face and short grey hair. He wears a green baize apron, and a white shirt with an imitation-silk scarf tucked into it at the neck. The scarf, in different swirling greens which blend nicely with the green of his apron, is an idea of Mrs Malseed’s and one appreciates the effort, if not at a uniform, at least at tidiness.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said to Arthur in my room, smiling and finding him a coin.

We played a couple of rubbers after dinner as usual, but not of course going on for as long as we might have because we were still quite tired after the journey. In the lounge there was a French family, two girls and their parents, and a honeymoon couple – or so we had speculated during dinner – and a man on his own. There had been other people at dinner of course, because in June Glencorn Lodge is always full: from where we sat in the window we could see some of them strolling about the lawns, a few taking the cliff path down to the seashore. In the morning we’d do the same: we’d walk along the sands to Ardbeag and have coffee in the hotel there, back in time for lunch. In the afternoon we’d drive somewhere.

I knew all that because over the years this kind of pattern had developed, We had our walks and our drives, tweed to buy in Cushendall, Strafe’s and Dekko’s fishing day when Cynthia and I just sat on the beach, our visit to the Giant’s Causeway and one to Donegal perhaps, though that meant an early start and taking pot-luck for dinner somewhere. We’d come to adore Co. Antrim, its glens and coastline, Rathlin Island and Tievebulliagh. Since first we got to know it, in 1965, we’d all four fallen hopelessly in love with every variation of this remarkable landscape. People in England thought us mad of course: they see so much of the troubles on television that it’s naturally difficult for them to realize that most places are just as they’ve always been. Yet coming as we did, taking the road along the coast, dawdling through Ballygally, it was impossible to believe that somewhere else the unpleasantness was going on. We’d never seen a thing, nor even heard people talking about incidents that might have taken place. It’s true that after a particularly nasty carry-on a few winters ago we did consider finding somewhere else, in Scotland perhaps, or Wales. But as Strafe put it at the time, we felt we owed a certain loyalty to the Malseeds and indeed to everyone we’d come to know found about, people who’d always been glad to welcome us back. It seemed silly to lose our heads, and when we returned the following summer we knew immediately we’d been right. Dekko said that nothing could be further away from all the violence than Glencorn Lodge, and though his remark could hardly be taken literally I think we all knew what he meant.

‘Cynthia’s tired,’ I said because she’d been stifling yawns. ‘I think we should call it a day.’

‘Oh, not at all,’ Cynthia protested. ‘No, please.’

But Dekko agreed with me that she was tired, and Strafe said he didn’t mind stopping now. He suggested a nightcap, as he always does, and as we always do also, Cynthia and I declined. Dekko said he’d like a Cointreau.

The conversation drifted about. Dekko told us an Irish joke about a drunk who couldn’t find his way out of a telephone box, and then Strafe remembered an incident at school concerning his and Dekko’s housemaster, A.D. Cowley-Stubbs, and the house wag, Thrive Major. A.D. Cowley-Stubbs had been known as Cows and often featured in our after-bridge reminiscing. So did Thrive Major.

‘Perhaps I am sleepy,’ Cynthia said. ‘I don’t think I closed my eyes once last night.’

She never does on a sea crossing. Personally I’m out like a light the moment my head touches the pillow; I often think it must be the salt in the air because normally I’m an uneasy sleeper at the best of times.

‘You run along, old girl,’ Strafe advised.

‘Brekky at nine,’ Dekko said.

Cynthia said good-night and went, and we didn’t remark on her tiredness because as a kind of unwritten rule we never comment on one another. We’re four people who play bridge. The companionship it offers, and the holidays we have together, are all part of that. We share everything: the cost of petrol, the cups of coffee or drinks we have; we even each make a contribution towards the use of Strafe’s car because it’s always his we go on holiday in, a Rover it was on this occasion.

‘Funny, being here on your own,’ Strafe said, glancing across what the Malseeds call the After-Dinner Lounge at the man who didn’t have a companion. He was a red-haired man of about thirty, not wearing a tie, his collar open at the neck and folded back over the jacket of his blue serge suit. He was uncouth-looking, though it’s a hard thing to say, not at all the kind of person one usually sees at Glencorn Lodge. He sat in the After-Dinner Lounge as he had in the dining-room, lost in some concentration of his own, as if calculating sums in his mind. There had been a folded newspaper on his table in the dining-room. It now reposed tidily on the arm of his chair, still unopened.

‘Commercial gent,’ Dekko said. ‘Fertilizers.’

‘Good heavens, never. You wouldn’t get a rep in here.’

I took no part in the argument. The lone man didn’t much interest me, but I felt that Strafe was probably right: if there was anything dubious about the man’s credentials he might have found it difficult to secure a room. In the hall of Glencorn Lodge there’s a notice which reads: We prefer not to feature in hotel guides, and we would be grateful to our guests if they did not seek to include Glencorn Lodge in the Good Food Guide, the Good Hotel Guide, the Michelin, Egon Ronay or any others. We have not advertised Glencorn since our early days, and prefer our recommendations to be by word of mouth.

‘Ah, thank you,’ Strafe said when Kitty brought his whisky and Dekko’s Cointreau. ‘Sure you won’t have something?’ he said to me, although he knew I never did.

Strafe is on the stout side, I suppose you could say, with a gingery moustache and gingery hair, hardly touched at all by grey. He left the Army years ago, I suppose because of me in a sense, because he didn’t want to be posted abroad again. He’s in the Ministry of Defence now.

I’m still quite pretty in my way, though nothing like as striking as Mrs Malseed, for I’ve never been that kind of woman. I’ve put on weight, and wouldn’t have allowed myself to do so if Strafe hadn’t kept saying he can’t stand a bag of bones. I’m careful about my hair and, unlike Mrs Malseed, I have it very regularly seen to because if I don’t it gets a salt-and-pepper look, which I hate. My husband, Terence, who died of food-poisoning when we were still quite young, used to say I wouldn’t lose a single look in middle age, and to some extent that’s true. We were still putting off having children when he died, which is why I haven’t any. Then I met Strafe, which meant I didn’t marry again.

Strafe is married himself, to Cynthia. She’s small and ineffectual, I suppose you’d say without being untruthful or unkind. Not that Cynthia and I don’t get on or anything like that, in fact we get on extremely well. It’s Strafe and Cynthia who don’t seem quite to hit it off, and I often think how much happier all round it would have been if Cynthia had married someone completely different, someone like Dekko in a way, except that that mightn’t quite have worked out either. The Strafes have two sons, both very like their father, both of them in the Army. And the very sad thing is they think nothing of poor Cynthia.

‘Who’s that chap?’ Dekko asked Mr Malseed, who’d come over to wish us good-night.

‘Awfully sorry about that, Mr Deakin. My fault entirely, a booking that came over the phone.’

‘Good heavens, not at all,’ Strafe protested, and Dekko looked horrified in case it should be thought he was objecting to the locals. ‘Splendid-looking fellow,’ he said, overdoing it.

Mr Malseed murmured that the man had only booked in for a single night, and I smiled the whole thing away, reassuring him with a nod. It’s one of the pleasantest of the traditions at Glencorn Lodge that every evening Mr Malseed makes the rounds of his guests just to say good-night. It’s because of little touches like that that I, too, wished Dekko hadn’t questioned Mr Malseed about the man because it’s the kind of thing one doesn’t do at Glencorn Lodge. But Dekko is a law unto himself, very tall and gangling, always immaculately suited, a beaky face beneath mousy hair in which flecks of grey add a certain distinction. Dekko has money of his own and though he takes out girls who are half his age he has never managed to get around to marriage. The uncharitable might say he has a rather gormless laugh; certainly it’s sometimes on the loud side.

We watched while Mr Malseed bade the lone man good-night. The man didn’t respond, but just sat gazing. It was ill-mannered, but this lack of courtesy didn’t appear to be intentional: the man was clearly in a mood of some kind, miles away.

‘Well, I’ll go up,’ I said. ‘Good-night, you two.’

‘Cheery-bye, Milly,’ Dekko said. ‘Brekky at nine, remember.’

‘Good-night, Milly,’ Strafe said.

The Strafes always occupy different rooms on holidays, and at home also. This time he was in Geranium and she in Fuchsia. I was in Rose, and in a little while Strafe would come to see me. He stays with her out of kindness, because he fears for her on her own. He’s a sentimental, good-hearted man, easily moved to tears: he simply cannot bear the thought of Cynthia with no one to talk to in the evenings, with no one to make her life around. ‘And besides,’ he often says when he’s being jocular, ‘it would break up our bridge four.’ Naturally we never discuss her shortcomings or in any way analyse the marriage. The unwritten rule that exists among the four of us seems to extend as far as that.

He slipped into my room after he’d had another drink or two, and I was waiting for him as he likes me to wait, in bed but not quite undressed. He has never said so, but I know that that is something Cynthia would not understand in him, or ever attempt to comply with. Terence, of course, would not have understood either; poor old Terence would have been shocked. Actually it’s all rather sweet, Strafe and his little ways.

‘I love you, dear,’ I whispered to him in the darkness, but just then he didn’t wish to speak of love and referred instead to my body.

If Cynthia hadn’t decided to remain in the hotel the next morning instead of accompanying us on our walk to Ardbeag everything might have been different. As it happened, when she said at breakfast she thought she’d just potter about the garden and sit with her book out of the wind somewhere, I can’t say I was displeased. For a moment I hoped Dekko might say he’d stay with her, allowing Strafe and myself to go off on our own, but Dekko-who doesn’t go in for saying what you want him to say – didn’t. ‘Poor old sausage,’ he said instead, examining Cynthia with a solicitude that suggested she was close to the grave, rather than just a little lowered by the change of life or whatever it was.

‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ Cynthia assured him. ‘Honestly.’

‘Cynthia likes to mooch, you know,’ Strafe pointed out, which of course is only the truth. She reads too much, I always think. You often see her putting down a book with the most melancholy look in her eyes, which can’t be good for her. She’s an imaginative woman, I suppose you would say, and of course her habit of reading so much is often useful on our holidays: over the years she has read her way through dozens of Irish guidebooks. ‘That’s where the garrison pushed the natives over the cliffs,’ she once remarked on a drive. ‘Those rocks are known as the Maidens,’ she remarked on another occasion. She has led us to places of interest which we had no idea existed: Garron Tower on Garron Point, the mausoleum at Bonamargy, the Devil’s Backbone. As well as which, Cynthia is extremely knowledgeable about all matters relating to Irish history. Again she has read endlessly: biographies and autobiographies, long accounts of the centuries of battling and politics there’ve been. There’s hardly a town or village we ever pass through that hasn’t some significance for Cynthia, although I’m afraid her impressive fund of information doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves. Not that Cynthia ever minds; it doesn’t seem to worry her when no one listens. My own opinion is that she’d have made a much better job of her relationship with Strafe and her sons if she could have somehow developed a bit more character.

We left her in the garden and proceeded down the cliff path to the shingle beneath. I was wearing slacks and a blouse, with the arms of a cardigan looped round my neck in case it turned chilly: the outfit was new, specially bought for the holiday, in shades of tangerine. Strafe never cares how he dresses and of course she doesn’t keep him up to the mark: that morning, as far as I remember, he wore rather shapeless corduroy trousers, the kind men sometimes garden in, and a navy-blue fisherman’s jersey. Dekko as usual was a fashion plate: a pale-green linen suit with pleated jacket pockets, a maroon shirt open at the neck, revealing a medallion on a fine gold chain. We didn’t converse as we crossed the rather difficult shingle, but when we reached the sand Dekko began to talk about some girl or other, someone called Juliet who had apparently proposed marriage to him just before we’d left Surrey. He’d told her, so he said, that he’d think about it while on holiday and he wondered now about dispatching a telegram from Ardbeag saying, Still thinking. Strafe, who has a simple sense of humour, considered this hugely funny and spent most of the walk persuading Dekko that the telegram must certainly be sent, and other telegrams later on, all with the same message. Dekko kept laughing, throwing his head back in a way that always reminds me of an Australian bird I once saw in a nature film on television. I could see this was going to become one of those jokes that would accompany us all through the holiday, a man’s thing really, but of course I didn’t mind. The girl called Juliet was, nearly thirty years younger than Dekko. I supposed she knew what she was doing.

Since the subject of telegrams had come up, Strafe recalled the occasion when Thrive Major had sent one to A.D. Cowley-Stubbs: Darling regret three months gone love Beulah. Carefully timed, it had arrived during one of Cows’ Thursday evening coffee sessions. Beulah was a maid who had been sacked the previous term, and old Cows had something of a reputation as a misogynist. When he read the message he apparently went white and collapsed into an armchair. Warrington P.J. managed to read it too, and after that the fat was in the fire. The consequences went on rather, but I never minded listening when Strafe and Dekko drifted back to their schooldays. I just wish I’d known Strafe then, before either of us had gone and got married.

We had our coffee at Ardbeag, the telegram was sent off, and then Strafe and Dekko wanted to see a man called Henry O’Reilly whom we’d met on previous holidays, who organizes mackerel-fishing trips. I waited on my own, picking out postcards in the village shop that sells almost everything, and then I wandered down towards the shore. I knew that they would be having a drink with the boatman because a year had passed since they’d seen him last. They joined me after about twenty minutes, Dekko apologizing but Strafe not seeming to be aware that I’d had to wait because Strafe is not a man who notices little things. It was almost one o’clock when we reached Glencorn Lodge and were told by Mr Malseed that Cynthia needed looking after.

The hotel, in fact, was in a turmoil. I have never seen anyone as ashen-faced as Mr Malseed; his wife, in a forget-me-not dress, was limp. It wasn’t explained to us immediately what had happened,, because in the middle of telling us that Cynthia needed looking after Mr Malseed was summoned to the telephone. I could see through the half-open door of their little office a glass of whiskey or brandy on the desk and Mrs Malseed’s bangled arm reaching out for it. Not for ages did we realize that it all had to do with the lone man whom we’d speculated about the night before.

‘He just wanted to talk to me,’ Cynthia kept repeating hysterically in the hall. ‘He sat with me by the magnolias.’

I made her lie down. Strafe and I stood on either side of her bed as she lay there with her shoes off, her rather unattractively cut plain pink dress crumpled and actually damp from her tears. I wanted to make her take it off and to slip under the bedclothes in her petticoat but somehow it seemed all wrong, in the circumstances, for Strafe’s wife to do anything so intimate in my presence.

‘I couldn’t stop him,’ Cynthia said, the rims of her eyes crimson by now, her nose beginning to run again. ‘From half past ten till well after twelve. He had to talk to someone, he said.’

I could sense that Strafe was thinking precisely the same as I was: that the red-haired man had insinuated himself into Cynthia’s company by talking about himself and had then put a hand on her knee. Instead of simply standing up and going away Cynthia would have stayed where she was, embarrassed or tongue-tied, at any rate unable to cope. And when the moment came she would have turned hysterical. I could picture her screaming in the garden, running across the lawn to the hotel, and then the pandemonium in the hall. I could sense Strafe picturing that also.

‘My God, it’s terrible,’ Cynthia said.

‘I think she should sleep,’ I said quietly to Strafe. ‘Try to sleep, dear,’ I said to her, but she shook her head, tossing her jumble of hair about on the pillow.

‘Milly’s right,’ Strafe urged. ‘You’ll feel much better after a little rest. We’ll bring you a cup of tea later on.’

‘My God!’ she cried again. ‘My God, how could I sleep?’

I went away to borrow a couple of mild sleeping pills from Dekko, who is never without them, relying on the things too much in my opinion. He was tidying himself in his room, but found the pills immediately. Strangely enough, Dekko’s always sound in a crisis.

I gave them to her with water and she took them without asking what they were. She was in a kind of daze, one moment making a fuss and weeping, the next just peering ahead of her, as if frightened. In a way she was like someone who’d just had a bad nightmare and hadn’t yet completely returned to reality. I remarked as much to Strafe while we made our way down to lunch, and he said he quite agreed.

‘Poor old Cynth!’ Dekko said when we’d all ordered lobster bisque and entrecôte béarnaise. ‘Poor old sausage.’

You could see that the little waitress, a new girl this year, was bubbling over with excitement; but Kitty, serving the other half of the dining-room, was grim, which was most unusual. Everyone was talking in hushed tones and when Dekko said, ‘Poor old Cynth!’ a couple of heads were turned in our direction because he can never keep his voice down. The little vases of roses with which Mrs Malseed must have decorated each table before the fracas had occurred seemed strangely out of place in the atmosphere which had developed.

The waitress had just taken away our soup plates when Mr Malseed hurried into the dining-room and came straight to our table. The lobster bisque surprisingly hadn’t been quite up to scratch, and in passing I couldn’t help wondering if the fuss had caused the kitchen to go to pieces also.

‘I wonder if I might have a word, Major Strafe,’ Mr Malseed said, and Strafe rose at once and accompanied him from the dining-room. A total silence had fallen, everyone in the dining-room pretending to be intent on eating. I had an odd feeling that we had perhaps got it all wrong, that because we’d been out for our walk when it had happened all the other guests knew more of the details than Strafe and Dekko and I did. I began to wonder if poor Cynthia had been raped.

Afterwards Strafe told us what occurred in the Malseeds’ office, how Mrs Malseed had been sitting there, slumped, as he put it, and how two policemen had questioned him. ‘Look, what on earth’s all this about?’ he had demanded rather sharply.

‘It concerns this incident that’s taken place, sir,’ one of the policemen explained in an unhurried voice, ‘On account of your wife –’

‘My wife’s lying down. She must not be questioned or in any way disturbed.’

‘Ach, we’d never do that, sir.’

Strafe does a good Co. Antrim brogue and in relating all this to us he couldn’t resist making full use of it. The two policemen were in uniform and their natural slowness of intellect was rendered more noticeable by the lugubrious air the tragedy had inspired in the hotel. For tragedy was what it was: after talking to Cynthia for nearly two hours the lone man had walked down to the rocks and been drowned.

When Strafe finished speaking I placed my knife and fork together on my plate, unable to eat another mouthful. The facts appeared to be that the man, having left Cynthia by the magnolias, had clambered down the cliff to a place no one ever went to, on the other side of the hotel from the sands we had walked along to Ardbeag. No one had seen him except Cynthia, who from the cliff-top had apparently witnessed his battering by the treacherous waves. The tide had been coming in, but by the time old Arthur and Mr Malseed reached the rocks it had begun to turn, leaving behind it the fully dressed corpse. Mr Malseed’s impression was that the man had lost his footing on the seaweed and accidentally stumbled into the depths, for the rocks were so slippery it was difficult to carry the corpse more than a matter of yards. But at least it had been placed out of view, while Mr Malseed hurried back to the hotel to telephone for assistance. He told Strafe that Cynthia had been most confused, insisting that the man had walked out among the rocks and then into the sea, knowing what he was doing.

Listening to it all, I no longer felt sorry for Cynthia. It was typical of her that she should so sillily have involved us in all this. Why on earth had she sat in the garden with a man of that kind instead of standing up and making a fuss the moment he’d begun to paw her? If she’d acted intelligently the whole unfortunate episode could clearly have been avoided. Since it hadn’t, there was no point whatsoever in insisting that the man had committed suicide when at that distance no one could possibly be sure.

‘It really does astonish me,’ I said at the lunch table, unable to prevent myself from breaking our unwritten rule. ‘Whatever came over her?’

‘It can’t be good for the hotel,’ Dekko commented, and I as glad to see Strafe giving him a little glance of irritation.

‘It’s hardly the point,’ I said coolly.

‘What I meant was, hotels occasionally hush things like this up.’

‘Well, they haven’t this time.’ It seemed an age since I had waited for them in Ardbeag, since we had been so happily laughing over the effect of Dekko’s telegram. He’d included his address in it so that the girl could send a message back, and as we’d returned to the hotel along the seashore there’d been much speculation between the two men about the form this would take.

‘I suppose what Cynthia’s thinking,’ Strafe said, ‘is that after he’d tried something on with her he became depressed.’

‘Oh, but he could just as easily have lost his footing. He’d have been on edge anyway, worried in case she reported him.’

‘Dreadful kind of death,’ Dekko said. His tone suggested that that was that, that the subject should now be closed, and so it was.

After lunch we went to our rooms, as we always do at Glencorn Lodge, to rest for an hour. I took my slacks and blouse off, hoping that Strafe would knock on my door, but he didn’t and of course that was understandable. Oddly enough I found myself thinking of Dekko, picturing his long form stretched out in the room called Hydrangea, his beaky face in profile on his pillow. The precise nature of Dekko’s relationship with these girls he picks up has always privately intrigued me: was it really possible that somewhere in London there was a girl called Juliet who was prepared to marry him for his not inconsiderable money?

I slept and briefly dreamed. Thrive Major and Warrington P.J. were running the post office in Ardbeag, sending telegrams to everyone they could think of, including Dekko’s friend Juliet. Cynthia had been found dead beside the magnolias and people were waiting for Hercule Poirot to arrive. ‘Promise me you didn’t do it,’ I whispered to Strafe, but when Strafe replied it was to say that Cynthia’s body reminded him of a bag of old chicken bones.

Strafe and Dekko and I met for tea in the tea-lounge. Strafe had looked in to see if Cynthia had woken, but apparently she hadn’t. The police officers had left the hotel, Dekko said, because he’d noticed their car wasn’t parked at the front any more. None of the three of us said, but I think we presumed, that the man’s body had been removed from the rocks during the quietness of the afternoon. From where we sat I caught a glimpse of Mrs Malseed passing quite briskly through the Seeming almost herself again. Certainly our holiday would be affected, but it might not be totally ruined. All that remained to hope for was Cynthia’s recovery, and then everyone could set about forgetting the unpleasantness. The nicest thing would be if a jolly young couple turned up and occupied the man’s room, exorcising the incident, as newcomers would.

The family from France – the two little girls and their parents – were chattering away in the tea-lounge, and an elderly trio who’d arrived that morning were speaking in American accents. The honeymoon couple appeared, looking rather shy, and began to whisper and giggle in a corner. People who occupied the table next to ours in the dining-room, a Wing-Commander Orfell and his wife, from Guildford, nodded and smiled as they passed. Everyone was making an effort, and I knew it would help matters further if Cynthia felt up to a rubber or two before dinner. That life should continue as normally as possible was essential for Glencorn Lodge, the example already set by Mrs Malseed.

Because of our interrupted lunch I felt quite hungry, and the Malseeds pride themselves on their teas. The chef, Mr McBride, whom of course we’ve met, has the lightest touch I know with sponge-cakes and little curranty scones. I was, in fact, buttering a scone when Strafe said:

‘Here she is.’

And there indeed she was. By the look of her she had simply pushed herself off her bed and come straight down. Her pink dress was even more crumpled than it had been. She hadn’t so much as run a comb through her hair, her face was puffy and unpowdered. For a moment I really thought she was walking in her sleep.

Strafe and Dekko stood up. ‘Feeling better, dear?’ Strafe said, but she didn’t answer.

‘Sit down, Cynth,’ Dekko urged, pushing back a chair to make room for her.

‘He told me a story I can never forget. I’ve dreamed about it all over again.’ Cynthia swayed in front of us, not even attempting to sit down. To tell the truth, she sounded inane.

‘Story, dear?’ Strafe inquired, humouring her.

She said it was the story of two children who had apparently ridden bicycles through the streets of Belfast, out into Co. Antrim. The bicycles were dilapidated, she said; she didn’t know if they were stolen or not. She didn’t know about the children’s homes because the man hadn’t spoken of them, but she claimed to know instinctively that they had ridden away from poverty and unhappiness. ‘From the clatter and the quarrelling,’ Cynthia said. ‘Two children who later fell in love.’

‘Horrid old dream,’ Strafe said. ‘Horrid for you, dear.’

She shook her head, and then sat down. I poured another cup of tea. ‘I had the oddest dream myself,’ I said. ‘Thrive Major was running the post office in Ardbeag.’

Strafe smiled and Dekko gave his laugh, but Cynthia didn’t in any way acknowledge what I’d said.

‘A fragile thing the girl was, with depths of mystery in her wide brown eyes. Red-haired of course he was himself, thin as a rake in those days. Glencorn Lodge was derelict then.’

‘You’ve had a bit of a shock, old thing,’ Dekko said.

Strafe agreed, kindly adding, ‘Look, dear, if the chap actually interfered with you –’

‘Why on earth should he do that?’ Her voice was shrill in the tea-lounge, edged with a note of hysteria. I glanced at Strafe, who was frowning into his teacup. Dekko began to say something, but broke off before his meaning emerged. Rather more calmly Cynthia said:

‘It was summer when they came here. Honeysuckle he described. And mother of thyme. He didn’t know the name of either.’

No one attempted any kind of reply, not that it was necessary, for Cynthia just continued.

‘At school there were the facts of geography and arithmetic. And the legends of scholars and of heroes, of Queen Maeve and Finn MacCool. There was the coming of St Patrick to a heathen people. History was full of kings and high-kings, and Silken Thomas and Wolfe Tone, the Flight of the Earls, the Siege of Limerick.’

When Cynthia said that, it was impossible not to believe that the unfortunate events of the morning had touched her with some kind of madness. It seemed astonishing that she had walked into the tea-lounge without having combed her hair, and that she’d stood there swaying before sitting down, that out of the blue she had started on about two children. None of it made an iota of sense, and surely she could see that the nasty experience she’d suffered should not be dwelt upon? I offered her the plate of scones, hoping that if she began to eat she would stop talking, but she took no notice of my gesture.

‘Look, dear,’ Strafe said, ‘there’s not one of us who knows what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m talking about a children’s story, I’m talking about a girl and a boy who visited this place we visit also. He hadn’t been here for years, but he returned last night, making one final effort to understand. And then he walked out into the sea.’

She had taken a piece of her dress and was agitatedly crumpling it between the finger and thumb of her left hand. It was dreadful really, having her so grubby-looking. For some odd reason I suddenly thought of her cooking, how she wasn’t in the least interested in it or in anything about the house. She certainly hadn’t succeeded in making a home for Strafe.

‘They rode those worn-out bicycles through a hot afternoon. Can you feel all that? A newly surfaced road, the snap of chippings beneath their tyres, the smell of tar? Dust from a passing car, the city they left behind?’

‘Cynthia dear,’ I said, ‘drink your tea, and why not have a scone?’

‘They swam and sunbathed on the beach you walked along today. They went to a spring for water. There were no magnolias then. There was no garden, no neat little cliff paths to the beach. Surely you can see it clearly?’

‘No,’ Strafe said. ‘No, we really cannot, dear.’

‘This place that is an idyll for us was an idyll for them too: the trees, the ferns, the wild roses near the water spring, the very sea and sun they shared. There was a cottage lost in the middle of the woods: they sometimes looked for that. They played a game, a kind of hide-and-seek. People in a white farmhouse gave them milk.’

For the second time I offered Cynthia the plate of scones and for the second time she pointedly ignored me. Her cup of tea hadn’t been touched. Dekko took a scone and cheerfully said:

‘All’s well that’s over.’

But Cynthia appeared to have drifted back into a daze, and I wondered again if it could really be possible that the experience had unhinged her. Unable to help myself, I saw her being led away from the hotel, helped into the back of a blue van, something like an ambulance. She was talking about the children again, how they had planned to marry and keep a sweetshop.

‘Take it easy, dear,’ Strafe said, which I followed up by suggesting for the second time that she should make an effort to drink her tea.

‘Has it to do with the streets they came from? Or the history they learnt, he from his Christian Brothers, she from her nuns? History is unfinished in this island; long since it has come to a stop in Surrey.’

Dekko said, and I really had to hand it to him:

‘Cynth, we have to put it behind us.’

It didn’t do any good. Cynthia just went rambling on, speaking again of the girl being taught by nuns, and the boy by Christian Brothers. She began to recite the history they might have learnt, the way she sometimes did when we were driving through an area that had historical connections. ‘Can you imagine,’ she embarrassingly asked, Our very favourite places bitter with disaffection, with plotting and revenge? Can you imagine the treacherous murder of Shane O’Neill the Proud?’

Dekko made a little sideways gesture of his head, politely marvelling. Strafe seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. Confusion ran through Irish history, Cynthia said, like convolvulus in a hedgerow. On 24 May 1487, a boy of ten called Lambert Simnel, brought to Dublin by a priest from Oxford, was declared Edward VI of all England and Ireland, crowned with a golden circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. On 24 May 1798, here in Antrim, Presbyterian farmers fought for a common cause with their Catholic labourers. She paused and looked at Strafe. Chaos and contradiction, she informed him, were hidden everywhere beneath nice-sounding names. ‘The Battle of the Yellow Ford,’ she suddenly chanted in a singsong way that sounded thoroughly, peculiar, ‘the Statutes of Kilkenny. The Battle of Glenmama, the Convention of Drumceat. The Act of Settlement, the Renunciation Act. The Act of Union, the Toleration Act. Just so much history it sounds like now, yet people starved or died while other people watched. A language was lost, a faith forbidden. Famine followed revolt, plantation followed that. But it was people who were struck into the soil of other people’s land, not forests of new trees; and it was greed and treachery that spread as a disease among them all. No wonder unease clings to these shreds of history and shots ring out in answer to the mockery of drums. No wonder the air is nervy with suspicion.’

There was an extremely awkward silence when she ceased to speak. Dekko nodded, doing his best to be companionable. Strafe nodded also. I simply examined the pattern of roses on our teatime china, not knowing what else to do. Eventually Dekko said: ‘What an awful lot you know, Cynth!’

‘Cynthia’s always been interested,’ Strafe said. ‘Always ‘had a first-rate memory.’

‘Those children of the streets are part of the battles and the Acts,’ she went on, seeming quite unaware that her talk was literally almost crazy. ‘They’re part of the blood that flowed around those nice-sounding names.’ She paused, and for a moment seemed disinclined to continue. Then she said:

‘The second time they came here the house was being rebuilt. There were concrete-mixers, and lorries drawn up on the grass, noise and scaffolding everywhere. They watched all through another afternoon and then they went their different ways: their childhood was over, lost with their idyll. He became a dockyard clerk. She went to London, to work in a betting shop.’

‘My dear,’ Strafe said very gently, ‘it’s interesting, everything you say, but it really hardly concerns us.’

‘No, of course not.’ Quite emphatically Cynthia shook her head, appearing wholly to agree. ‘They were degenerate, awful creatures. They must have been.’

‘No one’s saying that, my dear.’

‘Their story should have ended there, he in the docklands of Belfast, she recording bets. Their complicated childhood love should just have dissipated, as such love often does. But somehow nothing was as neat as that.’

Dekko, in an effort to lighten the conversation, mentioned a boy called Gollsol who’d been at school with Strafe and himself, who’d formed a romantic attachment for the daughter of one of the groundsmen and had later actually married her. There was a silence for a moment, then Cynthia, without emotion, said:

‘You none of you care. You sit there not caring that two people are dead.’

‘Two people, Cynthia?’ I said.

‘For God’s sake, I’m telling you!’ she cried. ‘That girl was murdered in a room in Maida Vale.’

Although there is something between Strafe and myself, I do try my best to be at peace about it. I go to church and take communion, and I know Strafe occasionally does too, though not as often as perhaps he might. Cynthia has no interest in that side of life, and it rankled with me now to hear her blaspheming so casually, and so casually speaking about death in Maida Vale on top of all this stuff about history and children. Strafe was shaking his head, clearly believing that Cynthia didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘Cynthia dear,’ I began, ‘are you sure you’re not muddling something up here? You’ve been upset, you’ve had a nightmare: don’t you think your imagination, or something you’ve been reading –’

‘Bombs don’t go off on their own. Death doesn’t just happen to occur in Deny and Belfast, in London and Amsterdam and Dublin, in Berlin and Jerusalem. There are people who are murderers: that is what this children’s story is about.’

A silence fell, no one knowing what to say. It didn’t matter of course because without any prompting Cynthia continued.

‘We drink our gin with Angostura bitters, there’s lamb or chicken Kiev. Old Kitty’s kind to us in the dining-room and old Arthur in the hall. Flowers are everywhere, we have our special table.’

‘Please let us take you to your room now,’ Strafe begged, and as he spoke I reached out a hand in friendship and placed it on her arm. ‘Come on, old thing,’ Dekko said.

‘The limbless are left on the streets, blood spatters the car-parks. Brits Out it says on a rockface, but we know it doesn’t mean us.’

I spoke quietly then, measuring my words, measuring the pause between each so that its effect might be registered. I felt the statement had to be made, whether it was my place to make it or not. I said:

‘You are very confused, Cynthia.’

The French family left the tea-lounge. The two Dalmatians, Charger and Snooze, ambled in and sniffed and went away again. Kitty came to clear the French family’s tea. things. I could hear her speaking to the honeymoon couple, saying the weather forecast was good.

‘Cynthia,’ Strafe said, standing up, ‘we’ve been very patient with you but this is now becoming silly.’

I nodded just a little. ‘I really think,’ I softly said, but Cynthia didn’t permit me to go on.

‘Someone told him about her. Someone mentioned her name, and he couldn’t believe it. She sat alone in Maida Vale, putting together the mechanisms of her bombs: this girl who had laughed on the seashore, whom he had loved.’

‘Cynthia,’ Strafe began, but he wasn’t permitted to continue either. Hopelessly, he just sat down again.

‘Whenever he heard of bombs exploding he thought of her, and couldn’t understand. He wept when he said that; her violence haunted him, he said. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t sleep at night. His mind filled up with images of her, their awkward childhood kisses, her fingers working neatly now. He saw her with a carrier-bag, hurrying it through a crowd, leaving it where it could cause most death. In front of the mouldering old house that had once been Glencorn Lodge they’d made a fire and cooked their food. They’d lain for ages on the grass. They’d cycled home to their city streets.’

It suddenly dawned on me that Cynthia was knitting this whole fantasy out of nothing. It all worked backwards from the moment when she’d had the misfortune to witness the man’s death in the sea. A few minutes before he’d been chatting quite normally to her, he’d probably even mentioned a holiday in his childhood and some girl there’d been: all of it would have been natural in the circumstances, possibly even the holiday had taken place at Glencorn. He’d said goodbye and then unfortunately he’d had his accident. Watching from the cliff edge, something had cracked in poor Cynthia’s brain, she having always been a prey to melancholy. I suppose it must be hard having two sons who don’t think much of you, and a marriage not offering you a great deal, bridge and holidays probably the best part of it. For some odd reason of her own she’d created her fantasy about a child turning into a terrorist. The violence of the man’s death had clearly filled her imagination with Irish violence, so regularly seen on television. If we’d been on holiday in Suffolk I wondered how it would have seemed to the poor creature.

I could feel Strafe and Dekko beginning to put all that together also, beginning to realize that the whole story of the red-haired man and the girl was clearly Cynthia’s invention. ‘Poor creature,’ I wanted to say, but did not do so.

‘For months he searched for her, pushing his way among the people of London, the people who were her victims. When he found her she just looked at him, as if the past hadn’t even existed. She didn’t smile, as if incapable of smiling. He wanted to take her away, back to where they came from, but she didn’t reply when he suggested that. Bitterness was like a disease in her, and when he left her he felt the bitterness in himself.’

Again Strafe and Dekko nodded, and I could feel Strafe thinking that there really was no point in protesting further. All we could hope for was that the end of the saga was in sight.

‘He remained in London, working on the railways. But in the same way as before he was haunted by the person she’d become, and the haunting was more awful now. He bought a gun from a man he’d been told about and kept it hidden in a shoe-box in his rented room. Now and again he took it out and looked at it, then put it back. He hated the violence that possessed her, yet he was full of it himself: he knew he couldn’t betray her with anything but death. Humanity had left both of them when he visited her again in Maida Vale.’

To my enormous relief and, I could feel, to Strafe’s and Dekko’s too, Mr and Mrs Malseed appeared beside us. Like his wife, Mr Malseed had considerably recovered. He spoke in an even voice, clearly wishing to dispose of the matter. It was just the diversion we needed.

‘I must apologize, Mrs Strafe,’ he said. ‘I cannot say how sorry we are that you were bothered by that man.’

‘My wife is still a little dicky,’ Strafe explained, ‘but after a decent night’s rest I think we can say she’ll be as right as rain again.’

‘I only wish, Mrs Strafe, you had made contact with my wife or myself when he first approached you.’ There was a spark of irritation in Mr Malseed’s eyes, but his voice was still controlled. ‘I mean, the unpleasantness you suffered might just have been averted.’

‘Nothing would have been averted, Mr Malseed, and Certainly not the horror we are left with. Can you see her as the girl she became, seated at a chipped white table, her wires and fuses spread around her? What were, her thoughts in that room, Mr Malseed? What happens in the mind of anyone who wishes to destroy? In a back street he bought his gun for too much money. When did it first occur to him to kill her?’

‘We really are a bit at sea,’ Mr Malseed replied without the slightest hesitation. He humoured Cynthia by displaying no surprise, by speaking very quietly.

‘All I am saying, Mr Malseed, is that we should root our heads out of the sand and wonder about two people who are beyond the pale.’

‘My dear,’ Strafe said, ‘Mr Malseed is a busy man.’

Still quietly, still perfectly in control of every intonation, without a single glance around the tea-lounge to ascertain where his guests’ attention was, Mr Malseed said:

‘There is unrest here, Mrs Strafe, but we do our best to live with it.’

‘All I am saying is that perhaps there can be regret when two children end like this.’

Mr Malseed did not reply. His wife did her best to smile away the awkwardness. Strafe murmured privately to Cynthia, no doubt beseeching her to come to her senses. Again I imagined a blue van drawn up in front of Glencorn Lodge, for it was quite understandable now that an imaginative woman should go mad, affected by the ugliness of death. The garbled speculation about the man and the girl, the jumble in the poor thing’s mind – a children’s story as she called it— all somehow hung together when you realized they didn’t have to make any sense whatsoever.

‘Murderers are beyond the pale, Mr Malseed, and England has always had its pales. The one in Ireland began in 1395.’

‘Dear,’ I said, ‘what has happened has nothing whatsoever to do with calling people murderers and placing them beyond some pale or other. You witnessed a most unpleasant accident, dear, and it’s only to be expected that you’ve become just a little lost. The man had a chat with you when you were sitting by the magnolias and then the shock of seeing him slip on the seaweed –’

‘He didn’t slip on the seaweed,’ she suddenly screamed. ‘My God, he didn’t slip on the seaweed.’

Strafe closed his eyes. The other guests in the tea-lounge had fallen silent ages ago, openly listening. Arthur was standing near the door and was listening also. Kitty was waiting to, clear away our tea things, but didn’t like to because of what was happening.

‘I must request you to take Mrs Strafe to her room, Major,’ Mr Malseed said. ‘And I must make it clear that we cannot tolerate further upset in Glencorn Lodge.’

Strafe reached for her arm, but Cynthia took no notice.

‘An Irish joke,’ she said, and then she stared at Mr and Mrs Malseed, her eyes passing over each feature of their faces. She stared at Dekko and Strafe, and last of all at me. She said eventually:

‘An Irish joke, an unbecoming tale: of course it can’t be true. Ridiculous, that a man returned here. Ridiculous, that he walked again by the seashore and through the woods, hoping to understand where a woman’s cruelty had come from.’

‘This talk is most offensive,’ Mr Malseed protested, his calmness slipping just a little. The ashen look that had earlier been in his face returned. I could see he was beside himself with rage. ‘You are trying to bring something to our doorstep which most certainly does not belong there.’

‘On your doorstep they talked about a sweetshop: Cadbury’s bars and different-flavoured creams, nut-milk toffee, Aero and Crunchie.’

‘For God’s sake pull yourself together,’ I clearly heard Strafe whispering, and Mrs Malseed attempted to smile. ‘Come along now, Mrs Strafe,’ she said, making a gesture. ‘Just to please us, dear. Kitty wants to clear away the dishes. Kitty!’ she called out, endeavouring to bring matters down to earth.

Kitty crossed the lounge with her tray and gathered up the cups and saucers. The Malseeds, naturally still anxious, hovered. No one was surprised when Cynthia began all over again, by crazily asking Kitty what she thought of us.

‘I think, dear,’ Mrs Malseed began, ‘Kitty’s quite busy really.’

‘Stop this at once,’ Strafe quietly ordered.

‘For fourteen years, Kitty, you’ve served us with food and cleared away the teacups we’ve drunk from. For fourteen years we’ve played our bridge and walked about the garden. We’ve gone for drives, we’ve bought our tweed, we’ve bathed as those children did.’

‘Stop it,’ Strafe said again, a little louder. Bewildered and getting red in the face, Kitty hastily bundled china on to her. tray. I made a sign at Strafe because for some reason I felt that the end was really in sight. I wanted him to retain his patience, but what Cynthia said next was almost unbelievable.

‘In Surrey we while away the time, we clip our hedges. On a bridge night there’s coffee at nine o’clock, with macaroons or petits fours. Last thing of all we watch the late-night News, packing away our cards and scoring-pads, our sharpened pencils. There’s been an incident in Armagh, one soldier’s had his head shot off, another’s run amok. Our lovely Glens of Antrim, we all four think, our coastal drives: we hope that nothing disturbs the peace. We think of Mr Malseed, still busy in Glencorn Lodge, and Mrs Malseed finishing her flower-plaques for the rooms of the completed annexe.’

‘Will you for God’s sake shut up?’ Strafe suddenly shouted. I could see him struggling with himself, but it didn’t do any good., He called Cynthia a bloody spectacle, sitting there talking rubbish. I don’t believe she even heard him.

‘Through honey-tinted glasses we love you and we love your island, Kitty. We love the lilt of your racy history, we love your earls and heroes. Yet we made a sensible pale here once, as civilized people create a garden, pretty as a picture.’

Strafe’s outburst had been quite noisy and I could sense him being ashamed of it. He muttered that he was sorry, but Cynthia simply took advantage of his generosity, continuing about a pale.

‘Beyond it lie the bleak untouchables, best kept as dots on the horizon, too terrible to contemplate. How can we be blamed if we make neither head nor tail of anything, Kitty, your past and your present, those battles and Acts of Parliament? We people of Surrey: how can we know? Yet I stupidly thought, you see, that the tragedy of two children could at least be understood. He didn’t discover where her cruelty had come from because perhaps you never can: evil breeds evil in a mysterious way. That’s the story the red-haired stranger passed on to me, the story you huddle away from.’

Poor Strafe was pulling at Cynthia, pleading with her, still saying he was sorry.

‘Mrs Strafe,’ Mr Malseed tried to say, but got no further. To my horror Cynthia abruptly pointed at me.

‘That woman,’ she said, ‘is my husband’s mistress, a fact I am supposed to be unaware of, Kitty.’

‘My God!’ strafe said.

‘My husband is perverted in his sexual desires. His friend, who shared his schooldays, has never quite recovered from that time. I myself am a pathetic creature who has closed her eyes to a husband’s infidelity and his mistress’s viciousness. I am dragged into the days of Thrive Major and A.D, Cowley-Stubbs: mechanically I smile. I hardly exist, Kitty.’

There was a most unpleasant silence, and then Strafe said:

‘None of that’s true. For God’s sake, Cynthia,’ he suddenly shouted, ‘go and lie down.’

Cynthia shook her head and continued to address the waitress. She’d had a rest, she told her. ‘But it didn’t do any good, Kitty, because hell has invaded the paradise of Glencorn, as so often it has invaded your island. And we, who have so often brought it, pretend it isn’t there. Who cares about children made into murderers?’

Strafe shouted again. ‘You fleshless ugly bitch!’ he cried. ‘You bloody old fool!’ He was on his feet, trying to get her on to hers. The blood was thumping in his bronzed face, his eyes had a fury in them I’d never seen before. ‘Fleshless!’ he shouted at her, not caring that so many people were listening. He closed his eyes in misery and in shame again, and I wanted to reach out and take his hand but of course I could not. You could see the Malseeds didn’t blame him, you could see them thinking that everything was ruined for us. I wanted to shout at Cynthia too, to batter the silliness out of her, but of course I could not do that. I could feel the tears behind my eyes, and I couldn’t help noticing that Dekko’s hands were shaking. He’s quite sensitive behind his joky manner, and had quite obviously taken to heart her statement that he had never recovered from his schooldays. Nor had it been pleasant, hearing myself described as vicious.

‘No one cares,’ Cynthia said in the same unbalanced way, as if she hadn’t just been called ugly and a bitch. ‘No one cares, and on our journey home we shall all four be silent. Yet is the truth about ourselves at least a beginning? Will we wonder in the end about the hell that frightens us?’

Strafe still looked wretched, his face deliberately turned away from us. Mrs Malseed gave a little sigh and raised the fingers of her left hand to her cheek, as if something tickled it. Her husband breathed heavily. Dekko seemed on the point of tears.

Cynthia stumbled off, leaving a silence behind her. Before it was broken I knew she was right when she said we would just go home, away from this country we had come to love. And I knew as well that neither here nor at home would she be led to a blue van that was not quite an ambulance. Strafe would stay with her because Strafe is made like that, honourable in his own particular way. I felt a pain where perhaps my heart is, and again I wanted to cry. Why couldn’t it have been she who had gone down to the rocks and slipped on the seaweed or just walked into the sea, it didn’t matter which? Her awful rigmarole hung about us as the last of the tea things were gathered up – the earls who’d fled, the famine and the people planted. The children were there too, grown up into murdering riff-raff.