Free Bury Her Deep by Catriona McPherson Page B

for the first time I had really rattled her.
    ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But I can’t say I approve. After all, even if you are able to take it so unaccountably in your stride, who’s to say who’s next?’
    ‘Well, I’m glad to have your understanding, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘I only wish it was mutual. And though I’m sorry to have your disapproval, there I think I can say we’re more in step.’ And with that she rose and went towards her irons, leaving me gasping at her rudeness. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Gilver. I know you’re a friend of Mr Tait’s and he’s a good man, been a good friend to Luckenlaw since he came here, and his wife was a lovely girl we had all known from her cradle, but  . . .’ She tested the temperature of one of the largest irons – and although I know that spitting on it is just the way it is done, I could not help but feel there was a bit of a message for me there too – and selected a garment from the top of the crumpled pile in the basket on the floor.
    ‘It’s perfectly plain to me,’ I said, liberated from any call on my own politeness by her extraordinary behaviour, ‘that the only reason for you to deny it, in the face of a witness’ – here I did that little thought-dance which is the mental equivalent of crossing one’s fingers behind one’s back; after all there was a witness – ‘is that you know who it was and you are protecting him.’
    ‘And why would I be doing that then?’ she said, scathing enough to sound quite insolent.
    ‘I can’t imagine,’ I retorted. ‘If it were me, no matter whether it were my husband, son or brother, I should not shield him.’
    ‘I don’t have any sons,’ said Mrs Hemingborough. ‘Nor any brothers.’
    The unspoken thought hung between us, but it was ludicrous enough to make me blush and she give a short, sneering laugh; for why would her husband bother to rush around in the night just to catch his own wife who was on her way home to him anyway.
    ‘I do not accuse your  . . . anyone in particular, Mrs Hemingborough,’ I said, trying to sound haughty. ‘I only say I think you know who it was and are refusing to name him.’
    Mrs Hemingborough had got the shirt stretched out flat to her satisfaction on the padded table and she looked at me, her meaning plain: she wanted me to leave and let her get on with her busy day.
    ‘Is that what you think, then?’ she said. ‘Aye well, you play bonny.’
    This was a little saying I knew well and one which had always irritated me, cutting one off at the knees as it does and rendering any further protestations quite useless. It has no equivalent in the King’s English, the nearest thing being when Nanny Palmer would say, ‘Heavens, we are in a temper’ in that maddening, cosy way of hers when one’s entire world had collapsed and one had ceased to practise any restraint in the face of it. I remember this happening once in my nursery over the matter of whether a poached egg could be eaten off a slice of toast with a knife and fork or must be mashed up in a cup with bread squares and fed to one with a spoon. ‘Heavens,’ Nanny Palmer had said over the din of my howls, ‘we are in a temper’ and feeling foolish, I had shut up.
    It is a peculiarly British response to distress, I think. At least, I remember holidaying in Florence once, watching a fat bambina of three or so work herself up into just the same state, although one doubts it was over poached eggs and bread squares, and all of the grown-ups around her cooed and consoled, sent for cool cloths to lay on her cross little face, and generally commiserated with her over the tragedy that is this our life, some of them even wiping away a tear or two of their own as they did so.
    ‘That child should be smacked on the bottom and sent to bed with no supper,’ Hugh had hissed through his teeth, as though expecting me to step in and effect this for him.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It must be rather nice to have a