Lollie shook her head.
‘Mr Hardy wants to know if there’s anything of note in it,’ she said. Her voice was gravelly as though with exhaustion, very worrying in one known to have slept away the bulk of the last two days, and I determined to get her doctor to her when we returned from our outing. ‘Besides, there might be something in it about a funeral – instructions, I mean, or requests, or something. It’s best to get it over and done with.’
‘Didn’t you ever talk about funerals?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you know what he would have wanted, if you c-’
‘If I care?’ Lollie said. ‘I shouldn’t care, should I? And yet, it’s hard not to. And no, we never spoke of such things. Pip was twenty-six, why would we?’ I had not been imagining long, morbid discussions on their own account, of course, but rather thinking of Hugh and how he always spent the return trip from any funeral in high dudgeon about the mawkish unsuitability of the chosen hymns and the scandalous impropriety of anything – from florists’ wreaths to panelled coffins – that his father and father’s father and his father had ‘managed perfectly well to die without, Dandy’. What he would do when this much-vaunted new prayer book finally came out, I could not imagine; I had never seen anyone walk out of a funeral in protest before but I would not put it past him.
‘We only ever spoke of it once,’ Lollie went on. She was looking at herself in the glass as though she were some sort of puzzling find brought home from a nature walk; she pulled at her eyelids and stretched the skin on her cheeks this way and that. It was disconcerting to watch and I caught hold of her hands, as though to inspect her nails, really just to stop that dreadful, inquisitive mauling.
‘When was that, dear?’ I said.
‘When he went to Paris without me. It was the only night we spent apart after we were married. He made a joke of it; saying that if I were proved right, if the aeroplane went down – that’s why I didn’t go with him, you see – I would have carried the point and should feel free to bring his body back by boat.’ She smiled, remembering, and her skin looked tight and dry as she did so. ‘I shouldn’t think there are instructions, in the will,’ she said. ‘Pip was never one to make demands about things. Not at home anyway, or at his tailor’s or at his bank. He was the most easy-going man, really, Dandy. Everyone said so.’
I thought it best to remain silent.
‘He could get rather impassioned about his model boats,’ Lollie went on, ‘but even when one of those was broken through a servant’s carelessness he just shrugged it off. He was-’ She broke off. ‘Except he wasn’t,’ she said, with a harder note in her voice. ‘I keep slipping into the most fearful maudlin daydreams, Dandy. As if I’m under some kind of spell. I know very well what he was and so do you.’
‘Let’s go,’ I said, thinking that this robust mood would carry her out of the house and into her motorcar better than any other. ‘And don’t worry about the funeral. Two horses and “Lead, kindly light”. These things practically organise themselves.’
Faulds, sombre of face and – for once – silent of foot, let us out of the front door. John was waiting at the kerb. It was the first time I had seen him in his full livery: a high-collared tunic to match his breeches and a grey cap with a gleaming black peak, his face as impassive as a guardsman’s under its shadow. He opened the back door of a very new Rolls-Royce Phantom and between us we helped Lollie up into the seat. John leaned in and put a rug over her knees, then offered a hand to me to help me into the front. I thanked him, finding my voice a little shy, for it was an odd business to be handed into a car by a young man one has seen singing music-hall songs in his shirtsleeves, and an unaccustomed experience to sit beside him, no glass to close between the two of us.
Lollie, behind me, was looking out of the window at the quiet streets. There were nannies, off to Princes Street Gardens with their charges for an hour before luncheon, pairs of girls – the well-turned-out daughters of the New Town – making their way arm in arm to the jewellers’ and dress shops of George Street, pairs of matrons – their mothers – on their way to Marshall & Aitken, and upright old men marching to the New Club for the day. What there were not, though, were delivery boys on their bicycles, nor coalmen on their carts, sweeps with their barrows, not even the late postman on the parcel round.
‘How quiet it is today,’ Lollie said, with a wondering note in her voice, as we came around Charlotte Square. ‘The whole world seems to have stopped. Not only me.’
At the west end, a policeman mounted on a horse was standing backed into the doorway of Mather’s public house.
‘Trying to stop them gathering today,’ said John.
‘The publican won’t be very pleased,’ I said, ‘to have a great hulking police horse driving away his custom.’
‘There’ll not be much beer left now anyway, Miss Rossiter,’ John told me. ‘There’s been three nights since the last delivery and there was parties all over the night it begun.’
‘I heard them,’ I said, remembering the cheers and shouting drifting in the bedroom window in the small hours of Tuesday morning.
‘Any excuse for a booze-up,’ said John. ‘Best night out since Hogmanay.’ He winked at me. ‘Or so I heard, anyway.’ Here he dropped his voice even further in case Lollie could hear him. ‘Till the funeral, eh?’ He jerked his head towards his mistress. ‘Talk about having something to celebrate.’
‘Poor master,’ I said. ‘There are limits, John.’
‘He didnae think so,’ John retorted. ‘And I should know. I spent more time with him than anyone else, except Harry maybe.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘One could hardly drive him around and not get the measure of the man.’
‘Aye, I got his measure,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t feart for him, like some I could name. He was your typical mummy’s boy. Sleekit wee bully-boy. Nice as ninepence when anyone was watching and then a right so-and-so when he got the chance.’
‘Was he a right so-and-so to you personally?’ I asked. John nodded.
‘He used to make me sleep in the car,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t so bad in the summertime but once in the winter I near about froze to death.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How did he stop you going inside and sleeping in your bed? How could he?’
‘No, not at home,’ said John. ‘This was if he was away out somewhere and he would say to me to just wait in the car, then he just never came back and the night would go on and then in the end I’d realise that he wasnae gonny come back and he’d done it to me again, so I’d just have to doss down until the morning.’
‘Where was this?’ I said, wondering what these solitary outings of Pip’s might be.
‘Eh?’ said John. ‘Oh, you know, here and there. Nowhere special. I can’t remember where it was we were the last time it happened.’
His vagueness set a faint alarm bell ringing in me, but at that moment we drew up outside the offices of Murray and Ettrick in Coates Crescent and I had to concentrate on assisting Lollie. We were met at the door by Mr Ettrick himself, as I should have expected given the size of the estate; if Mr Murray had been there brushing flies from our path with banana leaves it would not have been too surprising.
‘All alone, Mrs Balfour?’ he said, his eyes passing over me without stopping and peering at the inside of the motorcar behind me. ‘I expected Mrs Lambert-Leslie to be with you.’
‘She’s on her way from Inverness,’ said Lollie, ‘but might take some time.’
Mr Ettrick shook his head and tutted, then ushered Lollie up the steps and through the glass doors with one hand in the small of her back and the other thrown wide as though to ward off any harm coming at her in a flanking manoeuvre. I supposed that a solicitor had to be solicitous, if anyone did, and she was a new widow and very fragile-looking, but still as I followed them – Miss Rossiter, of course, was not included in the ushering – the crease of concern between his brows and the way he stooped over her, as well as that arm shielding her from one knew not what, began to worry me.