Free Lettice & Victoria by Susanna Johnston Page A

silent and remained so until he left with no warning and looking haunted.
    Victoria asked Archie if everything was in order. ‘Of course. He’s dreadfully sensitive, you know. I think, another time, you would do well to admire his looks. As I often say, he is a plant that needs watering every day.’
    ‘Did I not water enough then? I tried to hug him when he arrived but he shied away.’
    ‘My child. You did nothing wrong whatsoever. He was overcome with pleasure. Now. Tell me how things are. How is your mother-in-law?’
    An enticing and seductive evening passed, Archie’s firebrand conversation occasionally interrupted by the wafting in and out of Harold. He never settled or joined them as they atebut was not violent or destructive at any stage. Archie gazed at him with tolerant adoration and some awe as he came and went.
    Victoria was none the wiser and was glad that she had only arranged to stay for one night. The oddity of Harold’s behaviour had been, at times, hard to handle.

Chapter 1
    E dgar returned from his ink round feeling unwell. He took to his bed and complained that it was nothing worse than a weakness in the limbs but, within days, he was taken to hospital having moaned and turned a yellowish colour in the middle of one night. Victoria sent him away in an ambulance for she was due to give birth at any time. Before arranging her own transport to the hospital, she rang Lettice.
    ‘You poor pet.’ Her mother-in-law, roused from sleep, managed to sound alive. ‘What an added worry at this traumatic time. It must be the catching type of jaundice, since darling Edgar, as you know, has never been tempted by excess.
Grâce à Dieu.
’
    At the hospital a nurse said that Edgar was suffering from something called an enlarged heart. Strange, Victoria thought, that he should suffer physically from a complaint never to have affected him in the emotional sense.
    As he died, Victoria was lifted onto a truckle bed andtrundled to the delivery room. Edgar drew his last breath as his daughter, Maudie, took her first.
    Victoria had never been as happy.
    Lettice, distraught, ran along the corridor from the cubicle where she had kissed the corpse, to the Maternity Wing where she kissed, with equal fervour, the corpse’s widow and child.
    Edgar’s sister, Alice, peeped in. ‘You poor thing. It’s awful to talk like this but I feel I must explain something. The first day in a baby’s life is by far the most important in its development. They pick up waves of sorrow. It sounds silly to people who haven’t studied my subject but I promise you, and I am in my second year, you must try to forget what is happening down the passage and concentrate like mad on the poor little baby.’
    Victoria beamed and Alice spread the news of her courage.
    She stayed in hospital for a week – missing Edgar’s funeral.

Chapter 2
    L ettice photographed the coffin from every angle squinting into the top of a square Rolex camera. At a cold lunch at The Old Keep following the funeral, she told Archie that she had taken to photography by accident; that a darling old friend had left the beloved Rolex behind after staying with her and had died before she had time to return it to him by post. ‘I began at once and modelled myself on that fascinating woman who photographed our very own Alfred, Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Man.’
    ‘Wight,’ Archie said. ‘Quite Wight.’
    Later she compiled an album, which she gave to Victoria for her birthday. It included one picture of the coffin – close up and smothered in wild flowers and shrivelled ferns. Under it she had written the caption ‘Edgar’s coffin. Our flowers.’
    The artistic son and his wife had hastened back from France for the funeral but were too distracted by their free-range child to concentrate on the purpose of their journey, and thecommunity in France had wired to say that the system was collapsing without the three Bobbies so they departed immediately after the church