‘Let’s go,’ said Étienne, touching her elbow. And then, in a whisper: ‘Don’t get sucked in.’
‘Whadde say?’ slurred Trude.
‘Nothing,’ said Bettina. ‘Thanks for coming.’ And she gripped Trude by the face and kissed her hard, forcing her tongue into her mouth. She pulled away and Trude was staring up at her, mouth slack and eyes glazed.
‘Bettina. Oh my—’
‘Good night and thanks for coming.’ She grabbed Trude by the shoulders, spun her around, slapped her rear and shoved her lurching down the hall. ‘That’ll show her,’ she said to Étienne, taking his arm and turning in the opposite direction. ‘The awful tease.’
‘Bien joué,’ he said.
‘I can’t believe I just did that.’
‘I think she liked it.’
‘Oh, she did. But it won’t come to anything. She likes to keep people dangling. She’s very insecure, you know.’
‘It’s very sad. You deserve a good fuck.’
‘I do! I’m in the prime of my life and it’s my birthday, Etts. My birthday! How depressing.’
‘You know what is almost as good as having sex?’ he said, wrapping an arm around her. ‘Eating cake. Let’s go and eat cake. And if you ask me nicely, I will rub your feet.’
The valet, Darlton, rushed through the door, almost crashing into them, his eyes huge with panic. Bettina disentangled herself from Étienne.
‘Where’s Mister Dawes?’ said Darlton.
‘I don’t know. What do you want him for?’
‘There’s been an incident, Mrs Dawes.’ He straightened his shoulders and breathed deeply. His face was the hue of rice pudding. ‘Something terrible has happened.’
‘What? What’s happened?’
‘I need to find Mister Dawes.’
‘Tell me!’
‘Someone’s shot themselves in the wood. A man. Someone from this party.’
‘What? Who?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Mrs Dawes. I need to find—’
She pushed past him, slamming open the door. The pianist had stopped playing and now sat on the stool with wide-open legs and a slumped back, a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. A group of men she didn’t recognise were murmuring together with solemn faces. One of them had blood up his white shirt. ‘Who was it?’ she asked the blood-streaked man, a feeling like muddy centipedes in her stomach.
‘Do you know where your husband is?’
‘Goddammit!’ she yelled. ‘I’m the woman of this house, not some – some hysterical silly girl! You can bloody well talk to me.’
‘Tell her,’ said Étienne.
‘And who are you?’
‘Never mind who he is. I’m here and this is my house and I demand an explanation. Who was it?’
The blood was a sickening bright red against the starched white of the shirt. Quite a sickening bright red.
The man looked up, relieved, because suddenly Bart was there, rushing in with wide eyes, his shirt tails hanging out of his trousers – yes, the husband was here, the big man. What a joke.
‘Who was it?’ he asked the bloody man. ‘I heard a bang earlier. I thought it was a firework. Was it a gunshot? Who was it?’
The bloody man glanced at Bettina.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ she shouted. ‘I’m not going to swoon to the floor!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. It was loaded, that sorry. He took Bart by the arm and led him away from the group.
Bettina stared at Étienne, her hands spread in a gesture of furious bewilderment. ‘I can’t believe this.’ She started to cry – how humiliating! I’m the woman of this house, not some hysterical silly girl – and look at her: behaving exactly like a hysterical silly girl. The men looked down at the floor. She watched the bloody man whispering to Bart through a blur of tears. She turned around and looked at the partygoers, still in their clusters. ‘You can all go now!’ she yelled. ‘Party’s over.’
‘They might need to be questioned by the police,’ said one of the men.
She stared at his moustache. It was trim and blond with one solitary ginger hair growing long and wiry just at the edge of his lip. How had he neglected to notice it? How on earth could a sane person not notice it? She wanted to hit him. Her stomach was crawling. Centipedes and beetles and soil-crumbed worms.
‘Bettina, darling.’ It was Bart. Touching her arm gently, his voice soft. She couldn’t take her eyes away from that stupid ginger hair. ‘Sweetheart, come with me.’ He was pulling on her arm. She closed her eyes and let herself be led. Bart wrapped his arm around her waist. He was shivering.
They walked up the stairs together, arm in arm.
‘It was Jonathan, wasn’t it?’ she said.
Chapter 13
June 1926, St Mark’s Church, Sussex
One mustn’t show the burden, of course. One must keep a stiff upper lip, what? Shoulder your load, button your lip, show the fillies how it’s done, what? Fucking stupid farce. Imagine it the other way round – Jonathan carrying his coffin. There’d be the issue of the arm. He’d only be able to carry on the one side. Would he bring it up with the chaplain first? ‘Apologies, Father, but I need to go on the right side.’ An awkward glancing around, a defiant crunch of the brow – don’t pity me.
Bart fucking well hated funerals. He could remember Tabitha’s – though he seldom let himself. The day had passed like radio static. He’d been in shock and his mind had played awful tricks on him – he’d known she was dead but he kept wondering where his little sister had got to. Like his mind was split in two. Mostly he remembered the weeks afterwards – the household sinking into an awful pit, a sort of sucking pit, where nothing grew properly any more, not even the potted plants, and the air seemed to taste of salt and wood dust. The servants ghosted around with puckered little mouths and darting eyes, his mother and father visibly aged and shrank, their hands moving cutlery around with a sort of desperate precision as they sat for their meals, their nightclothes seeming like shrouds as they stood together in dim hallways at unusual times of the night.
St Mark’s had granted the Wyn Thomas family a special dispensation, allowing Jonathan to be buried in consecrated ground. Because it was the war that’d killed him really. That’s what the pastor said. What he didn’t mention was Monty’s generous contributions to the church. Bart knew of two boys who’d killed themselves after the war, and both were buried in the shadow-tangled wasteland at the rectum end of the graveyard. Both were poor.
The day was bright and blue-skied, the grass dewy. Slippery. He concentrated on his feet as he walked, he concentrated on his burden. Bettina was walking behind with her mother and father. She had a lock of Jonathan’s hair in her fist. She hadn’t let go of it all morning. Magpies hopped around on the grass. Two for joy. Bart wondered what it was about the war that made men want to die afterwards. The killing of other men? That would do it, wouldn’t it? The shattered nerves? Maybe they’d raped or been raped? Étienne had friends, queer friends, who’d fought in the war. One had seen his lover’s face blown off by a grenade. Bart imagined cowering in a trench, cold and shivering with swollen feet and lice in his hair. Étienne beside him, covered in soot and mud and unshaven, but smiling with dimples, a halo of sunlight surrounding his head – no, that was hammy; take away the halo. He stands up to go and ask another fellow for a match and suddenly there’s a whistling overhead and half of Étienne’s face explodes. Brains splashing, blood ribboning, chunks of skull spitting out like shrapnel. His lover flopping to the floor by his feet with only half a head. One dimple.