Miss Winter did not ent on my unications with her solicitor, though I am certain she was informed, just as I am certain the dots I requested would never have beeo me without her sent. I wondered whether she might sider it cheating, whether this was the “jumping about iory” she so disapproved of, but on the day I received the set of letters from Mr. Lomax a my request for help to the genealogist, she said not a word but only picked up her story where she had left it, as though none of these postal exges of information were happening.
Charlie was the sed loss. The third if you t Isabelle, though to all practical purposes we had lost her two years before, and so she hardly ts.
John was more affected by Charlie’s disappearahan by Hester’s. Charlie might have been a recluse, an etric, a hermit, but he was the master of the house. Four times a year, at the sixth or seventh time of asking, he would scrawl his mark on a paper and the bank would release funds to keep the household tig over. And now he was gone. What would bee of the household? What would they do for money?
John had a few dreadful days. He insisted on ing up the nursery quarters—“It’ll make us all ill otherwise”—and when he could bear the smell no longer, he sat oeps outside, drawing in the air like a man saved from drowning. In the eveniook long baths, using up a whole bar of soap, scrubbing his skin till it glowed pink. He even soaped the inside of his nostrils.
And he cooked. We’d noticed how the Missus lost track of herself halfway through preparing a meal. The vegetables would boil to a mush, then burn otom of the pan. The house was never without the smell of carbonized food. Then one day we found John i. The hands that we knew dirty, pulling potatoes from the ground, were now rinsing the yellow-skinned vegetables in water, peeling them, rattling pan lids at the stove. We ate good meat or fish with plenty of vegetables, drank strong, hot tea. The Missus sat in her chair in the er of the kit, with no apparent sehat these used to be her tasks. After the washing up, when night fell, the two of them sat talking over the kit table. His s were always the same. What would they do? How could they survive? What would bee of us all?
‘Don’t worry, he’ll e out,“ the Missus said.
e out? John sighed and shook his head. He’d heard this before. “He’s not there, Missus. He’s gone, have you fotten already?”
‘Gone!“ She shook her head and laughed as if he’d made a joke.
At the moment she first learhe fact of Charlie’s departure, it had brushed her sciousness momentarily but had not found a place to settle there. The passages, corridors and stairwells in her mind, that ected her thoughts but also held them apart, had been undermined. Pig up one end of a trail of thought, she followed it through holes in walls, slipped into tuhat opened beh her feet, came to vague, semipuzzled halts: Wasn’t there something… ? Hadn’t she been… ? Thinking of Charlie locked in the nursery, crazed with grief for love of his dead sister, she fell through a trapdoor in time, without even realizing it, into the thought of his father, newly bereaved, locked in the library to grieve for his lost wife.
‘I know how to get him out of there,“ she said with a wink. ”I’ll take the infant to him. That’ll do the trick. In fact, I’ll go and look in on the baby now.“
John didn’t explain tain that Isabelle had died, for it would only bring on grief-stri surprise and a
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