A Little Death by Laura Wilson

you.’
    He left the room. I couldn’t move or speak. His anger made the air shake, and I saw again and again the flash of Freddie’s red hair between the branches of the trees while I crouched silently amongst the brambles… I watched him go. I couldn’t change it. Father thought I was being cunning, but I wasn’t. Freddie died because I didn’t go after him and Father hated me.
    Edmund came to see me, of course. I sometimes think that he is the only person in the world to whom I haven’t been a disappointment. I never told him what Father had said—how could I? I knew Father wanted him, but I had to keep him for mine. I suppose you could say I made him choose sides. But that wasn’t difficult, because Edmund had always been rather afraid ofFather, certainly more than I had, and I don’t think Father ever knew how to make him feel at ease. But the two of us had the most gorgeous times when he was on holiday from school. Apart from my mornings with Miss Blacker—she was a retired schoolmistress from the village my father engaged to teach me, but I don’t suppose she’d been much of a teacher even in her heyday and I certainly didn’t learn a great deal—Edmund and I spent every moment together. I made Ada help me pin up some sheets to make a sort of tent in my room, and we sat inside it and played games. I remember my bed used to get terrifically uncomfortable, counters and cards and crumbs all over it, more bumps and lumps every time you turned over. Ada used to come up in the evening to say good-night and shoo Edmund off to his room, but he’d always come creeping back when she’d gone.
    In the beginning, we used to walk down to the village, but I stopped doing that after a while because there were too many people. I preferred it when it was just us. Edmund had a funny way of speaking at that time, I suppose they all did it at school: Everything was either jolly awful or awfully jolly. I used to tease him about it, but he never minded. Every evening at eight o’clock he used to go downstairs to have dinner with my father in the dining room. I love twilight in the summer, it’s the time when I used to stand at my bedroom window and wait for Edmund to finish his dinner and come back up to me. I used to watch the shadows growing longer and longer across the grass, and the wood getting darker and darker until you couldn’t make out the individual trees any more, all the different greens greying in the dusk and then black. I must say you don’t get
quite
the same effect looking down the Exhibition Road, but it’s still my favourite time of day.
    On summer evenings I make Edmund wait until the sun’s gone right down before he switches on the electric light.
    Edmund came up to my room one night after dinner and explained to me that our father was a drunkard. Ada must have known about it, but she didn’t tell me. She wasn’t a tale-bearer in those days. Quite right too. Really, that woman’s character has deteriorated beyond belief. Edmund was just about to go up to university and he’d been in London all week having a terrific lot of hoopla with lawyers about money. That night, he said to me, ‘You’ll have to go away from here.’
    I thought he’d gone mad. ‘Don’t be silly, where would I go?’
    ‘Georgie, you can’t stay here. Father drinks. There are bottles all over his study. That’s why he never lets Ada go in there. Besides, he hates us.’
    ‘He hates everyone, doesn’t he?’
    ‘He likes Thomas.’ Thomas was the gardener, the only servant we had left apart from Ada.
    ‘Why would he like Thomas and not you?’
    ‘Simple. I’m alive—we’re alive—and Mother and Freddie are dead.’
    ‘Thomas is alive.’
    ‘Yes, but he doesn’t count. And Father drinking brandy all the time makes it much worse. He’ll never be cured of it, he doesn’t want to be. He trusts Thomas. He thinks everyone else is against him. And now, Thomas is going and he blames us for that.’
    ‘Well,