“I don’t think we have one.”
“A glass of brandy then, maybe?” James said. “I think we have some somewhere. We can revive him with it.”
Well, I hadn’t seen that technique onCasualtyand some might say enough alcohol had already been consumed for one night, but I wanted to be out of the room and away from them as much as anything. I headed for the kitchen and started looking for supplies. I knew we didn’t have anything as sensible as a first aid kit, but somewhere in this house we did have plasters, antiseptic, painkillers, maybe a bandage or two, and perhaps something we had bought years ago and forgotten about that would now come into its own. And James was right: We had brandy.
I returned a few minutes later with gauze, Vaseline, aspirin, a bottle of Courvoisier, and a blanket as well to find James rising from the chaise longue. He jumped when he saw me but recovered himself.
“He’s gone,” James said, somberly. “I was checking for breath.”
I gazed down at Lennie, his eyes closed, his body motionless, his skin waxy. He looked very peaceful.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
James nodded.
“No,” I said. He couldn’t be dead. Only a few minutes before, James had told me he might not even need to go to hospital. He’d had his eyes open. He’d tried to speak. I’d only been gone a few minutes. He couldn’t have gone from that to this in such a short time.
I knelt down beside him, searching for signs of life. I couldn’t find anything: no breath, no pulse. His neck was all loose, maybe because it was relaxed now, in death, or maybe he’d damaged the bones or the windpipe.
“Oh, Lennie,” I whispered.I’d killed him.I looked at James. I was close to tears.
“Don’t start,” he said. “We need to sort this out. I’ve got work in the morning.”
“You’re going to work tomorrow?” I was surprised.
“Of course I am. We have to behave as if everything is normal.”
“But what are we going to do? We can’t leave him here. Mrs. Billings is due in the morning. Shall I cancel her?”
“No, don’t cancel her;everything has to be normal. Do you want to go to prison?”
Of course I didn’t, but, “I won’t go to prison if it was an accident,” I said. “He just stepped out in front of us. I didn’t have time to react.”
“How are you going to explain the fact that, instead of calling the emergency services, you put him in the car and drove him home?” James asked.
“That was you.”
“And you.”
James looked around the room as if he was going to tidy him into a cupboard or something. “We’ll have to bury him,” he said.
I shook my head; I didn’t have the strength, physically or psychologically.
James ran his hands through his hair. “Eric Billings digs in the garden, so that’s no good, not unless we want him coming up with the potatoes next year. We’ll bury him in the copse; no one goes there,” he said. Then, “Better idea, we’ll put him in the graveyard… No, we’ll put him in the mausoleum. Of course, the mausoleum!”
“But it’s for family!”
“Then, welcome to the family, my man,” James said. Then to me: “Go and get changed.”
I thought about telling James I’d changed my mind and that, on reflection, yes, I did want to go to prison, more than I wanted todispose of Lennie’s body in the middle of the night. At least then I would sleep again one day. But I’d done whatever James told me to for years—at least when I was in sight of him—and it was a hard habit to break.
I ate what he told me to, I wore what he told me to, I went where he told me to, and now I buried what he told me to.
I stepped out of my stilettos and went to get changed.
***
We hoofed the body out of the back of the house, through the garden, through the little copse that separated the main house from the burial area, and into the graveyard that contained the mausoleum, tripping over stones and sinking into holes as we went.
