My eyes were half blind from the brilliant dazzle of the electric flares; my ears were singing from the assault of the noise; my mind ran deliriously with the shock of what I had witnessed.
I walked forward, drawn by the sight of that smoking pit. Now still and apparently in repose it was full of threat, yet even so I felt myself drawn inexorably to it. Soon I was standing at the edge, beside my mother. .My hand went up, as so often before, and folded itself into her fingers. She too was staring down in revulsion and disbelief.
Nicky was dead. His face had frozen in death as he screamed, and his arms and legs were twisted, a snapshot of his flailing as he was thrown into the pit by my father. He lay on his back. His hair had horripilated as he went through the electric field, and it stood up around his petrified face.
Clive Borden emitted a dreadful howl of misery, anger and despair, and leapt down into the pit. He threw himself on the ground, wrapped his arms around the body of his son, tried tenderly to pull the boy's limbs back to their normal position, cradled the boy's head with a hand, pressed his face against the boy's cheek, all the while shaking with terrible sobs coming from deep within him.
And my mother, as if realizing for the first time that I was there beside her, suddenly swept her arms around me, pressed my face into her skirt, then lifted me up. She walked quickly across the cellar, bearing me away from the scene of the disaster.
I was facing back over her shoulder, and as we went quickly out to the staircase my last sight was of my father. He was staring down into the pit, and his face bore such an expression of harsh satisfaction that more than two decades later I can still remember it only with a shudder of repulsion.
My father had known what would happen, he had allowed it to happen, he had made it happen. Everything about his stance and his expression said: I've proved my point .
I noticed also that Stimpson, the servant, was crouching on the floor, balancing himself with his hands. His head was bowed.
I've lost, or suppressed, all memories of what happened in the immediate aftermath. I only recall being at school during the following year, and then changing schools, making new friends, gradually growing up through childhood. There was a rush of normality around me, almost like a flood of embarrassed compensation for the appalling scene I had witnessed.
Nor can I remember when my father walked out on us. I know the date it happened, because I found it in the diary my mother kept in the last years of her life, but my own memory of that time is lost. Because of her diary I also know most of her feelings about the split-up, and a few of the circumstances. For my part I remember a general sense of his being there when I was small, an unnerving and unpredictable figure, thankfully at a remove from the lives of his two young daughters. I also remember life afterwards without him, a strong sense of his absence, a peace that Rosalie and I made the most of and which has continued ever since.
I was glad at first that he went. It was only when I was older that I began to miss him, as I do now. I believe he must be alive still, because otherwise we would have heard. Our estate is complicated to run, and my father is still responsible for that. There is a family trust, administered by solicitors in Derby, and they are apparently in touch with him. The house and land and title are still in his name. Many of the direct charges, such as taxation, are dealt with and paid by the trust, and money is still made available to Rosalie and me.
Our last direct contact with him was about five years ago, when he wrote a letter from South Africa. Passing through, he said, although he didn't say where from or where to. He is in his seventies now, probably hanging out somewhere with other British exiles, not letting on about his background. Harmless, a bit dotty, vague on details, an old Foreign Office hand. I can't forget him. No matter how much time passes, I always remember him as the cruel-faced man who threw a small boy into a machine he must have known would certainly kill him.
Clive Borden left the house the same night. I've no idea what happened to Nicky's body, although I have always assumed that Borden took it with him.
Because I was so young I accepted my parents’ authority as final and when they told me the police would not be interested in the boy's death, I believed them. In the event, they seemed to be right.
Years later, when I was old enough to realize how wrong it was, I tried to ask my mother what had happened. This was after my father had left home, and about two years before she died.
It felt to me as if the time had come to clear up the mysteries of the past, to put some of the darkness behind us. I also saw it as a sign of my own growing up. I wanted her to be frank with me and treat me like an adult. I knew she had received a letter from my father earlier that week, and it gave me an excuse to bring up the subject.
"Why did the police never come round to ask questions?" I said, when I had made it plain that I wanted to talk about that night.
She said, "We do never talk about that, Katherine."
"You mean that you never do," I said. "But why did Daddy leave home?"
"You would have to ask him that."
"You know I can't," I said. "You're the only one who knows. He did something wrong that night, but I'm not sure why, and I'm not even sure how. Are the police looking for him?"
"The police aren't involved in our lives."
"Why not?" I said. "Didn't Daddy kill that boy? Wasn't that murder?"
"It was all dealt with at the time. There is nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty about. We paid the price for what happened that night. Mr Borden suffered most, of course, but look what it has done to all our lives. I can tell you nothing you want to know. You saw for yourself what happened."
"I can't believe that's the end of it," I said.
"Katherine, you should know better than to ask these questions. You were there too. You're as guilty as the rest of us."
"I was only five years old!" I said. "How could that possibly make me guilty of something?"
"If you're in any doubt you could establish that by going to the police yourself."
My courage failed me in the face of her cold and unyielding demeanour. Mr and Mrs Stimpson still worked for us then, and later I asked Stimpson the same questions. Politely, stiffly, tersely, he denied all knowledge of anything that might have taken place.
My mother died when I was eighteen. Rosalie and I half-expected news of it to make our father return eventually from exile, but it did not. We stayed on in the house, and slowly it dawned on us that the place was ours. We reacted differently. Rosalie gradually freed herself of the place, and in the end she moved away. I began to be trapped by it, and I'm still here. A large part of what held me was the feeling of guilt I could not throw off, about what had happened down there in the cellar. Everything centred on those events, and in the end I realized I would have to do something about purging myself of what happened.
I finally plucked up my courage and went down to the cellar to discover if anything of what I had seen was still there.
I chose to do it on a day in summer, when friends were visiting from Sheffield and the house was full of the sounds of rock music and the talk and laughter of young people. I told no one what I was planning, and simply slipped away from a conversation in the garden and walked into the house. I was braced with three glasses of wine.
The lock on the door had been changed soon after the Borden visit, and when my mother died I had it changed again, although I had never actually ventured inside. Mr Stimpson and his wife were long gone, but they and the housekeepers who came after them used the cellar for storage. I had always been too nervous even to go to the top of the steps.