off the mirrors. He wanted it to be Edwin. He could bear it to be Edwin. In Edwin’s own words, he could have faced it. Edwin might possibly have been capable of killing Moira, I thought: an unplanned killing, shoving her head into the potting compost because the open bag of it gave him the idea. I didn’t think he had the driving force, the imagination or the guts to have attempted the rest.
When I didn’t contradict him, Malcolm began saying, ‘If Edwin comes…’ and it was easier to leave it that way.
Time crept on. It was cold. By two-thirty, to stoke our internal fires, we were eating rich dark fruit cake and drinking claret. (Heresy, Malcolm said. We should have had the claret with the pate and the champagne with the cake. As at weddings? I asked. God damn you, he said.)
I didn’t feel much like laughing. It was a vigil to which there could be no good end. Malcolm knew as well as I did that he might be going to learn something he fervently didn’t want to know. He didn’t deep down want anyone to come. And I wanted it profoundly.
By three-thirty, he was restless. ‘You don’t really mean to go through all this again tomorrow, do you?’
I watched the drive. No change, as before. ‘The Ritz might give us a packed lunch.’
‘And Monday? Not Monday as well.’ He’d agreed on three days before we’d started. The actuality was proving too much.
‘We’ll give up on Monday when it gets dark,’ I said.
‘You’re so bloody persistent.’
I watched the mirrors. Come, I thought. Come.
‘Joyce might have forgotten the phone calls,’ Malcolm said.
‘She wouldn’t forget.’
‘Edwin might have been out.’
‘That’s more likely.’
A light-coloured car rolled up the drive, suddenly there.
No attempt at concealment. No creeping about, looking suspicious. AH confidence. Not a thought given to entrapment.
I sat still, breathing deeply.
She stood up out of the car, tall and strong. She went round to the passenger side, opened the door, and lifted out a brown cardboard box which she held in front of her, with both arms round it, as one holds groceries. I’d expected her to go straight round to the kitchen door, but she didn’t do that, she walked a few steps into the central chasm, looking up and around her as if with awe.
Malcolm noticed my extreme concentration, rose to his feet and put himself between me and the mirrors so that he could see what 1 was looking at. I thought he would be stunned and miserably silent, but he was not in the least.
‘Oh, no,’ he said with annoyance. ‘What’s she doing here?’
Before I could stop him, he shot straight out of the playroom and said, ‘Serena, do go away, you’re spoiling the whole thing.*
I was on his heels, furious with him. Serena whirled round when she heard his voice. She saw him appear in the passage. I glimpsed her face, wide-eyed and scared. She took a step backwards, and tripped on a fold of the black plastic floor covering, and let go of the box. She tried to catch it… touched it… knocked it forward.
I saw the panic on her face. I had an instantaneous understanding of what she’d brought.
I yanked Malcolm back with an arm round his neck, twisting and flinging us both to find shelter behind the wall of the staircase.
We were both still falling when the world blew apart.
Nineteen
I lay short of the playroom door trying to breathe. My lungs felt collapsed. My head rang from the appalling noise, and the smell of the explosive remained as a taste as if my mouth were full of it.
Malcolm, on his stomach a few feet away, was unconscious.
The air was thick with dust and seemed to be still reverberating, though it was probably my concussion. I felt pulped. I felt utterly without strength. I felt very lucky indeed.
The house around us was still standing. We weren’t under tons of new rubble. The tough old load-bearing walls that had survived the first bomb had survived the second - which hadn’t anyway been the size of a suitcase.
My chest gave a heave, and breath came back. I moved, struggled to get up, tried things out. I felt bruised and unwell, but there were no broken bones; no blood. I rolled to my knees and went on them to Malcolm. He was alive, he was breathing, he was not bleeding from ears or nose: at that moment, it was enough.