they were the spitting image of Lewis’s but I never really believed it.’
‘She only said it to keep me happy,’ says Lewis. ‘They both had her face, and she thought I’d mind. I probably would have, in those days. I was still an emotional child when we had our kids.’
‘Why did you give the children you had with Kevin the same names?’ I ask Flora.
‘Georgina’s death …’ she starts to say.
‘What? What about it?’
She seems to have frozen. We wait for nearly ten seconds. Then she turns to Lewis. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘You.’
She sounds like a small child. You do it, Daddy.
Lewis rubs his temples with the flats of his hands. ‘Me,’ he says in a low voice. ‘All right. You want my version? Flora’s never heard my version before, not in my words. Why would she? She already knows the story, so I’ve never needed to tell her, but she seems to want to hear it now. She won’t like it much, but okay. You sure you don’t want to take over?’ he asks her.
She shakes her head.
Lewis looks at me. ‘You won’t like it either. Georgina didn’t die of natural causes. Gerard and Rosemary no doubt told you it was a cot death. It wasn’t. It was neither natural nor unavoidable. Georgina died because Flora made two bad decisions. One: to have Georgina sleep in our bed. Thomas never did, Emily didn’t … but Georgina was premature and Flora was neurotic about her. For no reason that I could fathom, she wanted Georgina in bed next to her every night. Insisted it would be better for her. Fine – she was the mother, and I assumed she knew what she was talking about. I moved into the spare room. Couldn’t sleep properly with a snuffling baby that close.
‘One night, I came home to find Flora halfway down a bottle of white wine. I was surprised. She didn’t normally drink, but she’d had a tough day with all three kids being difficult in some way. Still, I told her to take it easy. She said she was fine, she’d only had a couple of glasses. I told her that was more than enough and she swore at me – said it was none of my fucking business. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to me like that.
‘We had a big row. I went up to my office – my office at home – slammed the door and worked for the rest of the evening. Flora gave the children their baths. That was supposed to be my job, but that night I didn’t care. I was too angry. I heard Flora putting Thomas and Emily to bed, heard them asking why Daddy wasn’t joining in. Then she must have taken Georgina and gone to bed because I didn’t hear anything else. At about ten thirty, I realised I hadn’t eaten and was starving. Flora hadn’t brought me up any supper, which I took to mean that she was still angry with me. I looked in the fridge and the oven – nothing. So I went out. Drove into Huntingdon, got myself a curry. Came home, went to bed in the spare room. I was still pretty angry, and wondering what I’d do if Flora didn’t apologise first thing in the morning. There was no way I was putting up with treatment like that. I went to sleep.’
He seems to be steeling himself to continue. Finally he says, ‘A few hours later, I was woken by screaming from Flora. I ran to our bedroom and found Georgina lying there, dead. In our bed. She was blue. Not breathing. It was the worst moment of my life.’
‘I killed her,’ Flora says, her voice no more than a whisper. ‘I didn’t murder her deliberately. What I did was worse, because I didn’t want her to die but I still caused it to happen: the opposite of what I wanted. Even though I’d drunk that wine, I still put Georgina down by my side, as I always did. Normally it was fine.’
‘And this one night it wasn’t,’ says Lewis. ‘Flora rolled on top of her and suffocated her.’
‘So now you know.’ Flora looks at me. ‘I’m a woman who got drunk and killed her baby.’
‘That’s why you cut your parents out of your life,’ I say, starting to understand.
‘Not just them,’ says Flora. ‘Everybody. Lewis, Thomas, Emily. You.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lewis didn’t want our marriage to end. Even after what I’d