Death in Summer

14

The ordeal, which has lasted a little longer than twenty-three hours, has left with Mrs. Iveson what she knows will always be there: Maidment white-faced in the sunshine when she asked him to look among the shrubs, the trembling of his hands when he returned; Thaddeus saying blame does no good; Zenobia confessing later that some time in that night she gave up hope.

We are left with no explanation and no sign of one, she writes the news to Sussex. Why any of it happened is the mystery we must live with, for I do not believe they will find the girl. If that boy had not gone to the place when he did Georgina would not be alive. That that was what the girl intended we must live with, too.

She does not think, she adds, that she can remain at Quincunx House. She shall, of course, until a new arrangement is made, but in the end the arrangement she suggested herself has been shown to be a failure. Thaddeus, though, does not accept my view and is adamant it were better I stayed. I press him — not that I want to go, but feel I should — and still he does not see it. So it is left. Stubbornness is a quality I have not noticed in him before.

The only flowers Thaddeus has ever sent Mrs. Ferry he sends on the day the letter that tells of this unresolved consequence is posted. Having forgotten about the funeral, he remembers the night before it is to take place and telephones first thing, relieved to find he is not too late. Cut flowers, not a wreath, he stipulates, bright colours, the brightest mixed together. When the time comes for the woman he was once attracted by to lie briefly in the crematorium chapel he thinks of her. ‘A generous spirit,’ he does not know the clergyman’s description is, but guesses that a favourite tune is played and that the chef who was at the Beech Trees is there. A few others are present too, her onetime husband arriving five minutes late, delayed by traffic on his journey down from Lytham St. Annes, his second wife waiting in the car, feeling that to be proper in the circumstances.

The week that brought Mrs. Ferry’s death and the ordeal of Georgina’s abduction comes to an end, and on the Sunday that finishes it Mrs. Iveson agrees to think further about her decision, and next morning agrees to stay. The days settle back into ordinariness then, as the summer heatwave continues. From Sussex come commiserations and exclamations of outrage in a shaky hand. Terrible things happen, it is declared; that is life today, enlightened times or not. A postscript adds that the cataract operation, twice postponed, is to take place at last, next month. And news goes back to Sussex of Georgina’s teething.

In time, the first green specks of Thaddeus’s winter parsley appear. Murder in Mock Street is taken from the drawing-room shelves, and then The Corpse on the Fourteenth Green. ‘My!’ Zenobia marvels on a weekend outing to Scarrow Hill, for the giant is taller than in her dream, and shocking in a way she failed to anticipate. Maidment wins with Cappoquin Boy. No change is reported from St. Bee’s.

Of course, we live in fear, Mrs. Iveson brings herself to confess, that again we are watched, that even now she comes by night to the garden, that again she will hurt us. I see her face, staring at me from where she stood that day, the sunlight glinting on her glasses.

But no one comes to the garden in the way Mrs. Iveson dreads, either by night or by day. Instead there are the first late-August signs of autumn there, a softness in the fading colours.