Death of a Wine Merchant by David Dickinson Page B

a better seat. Maybe he would watch Fiordiligi and Dorabella and their lovers from the luxury of his very own box.
     
    Emily Nash, daughter of Georgina and Willoughby Nash of Brympton Hall, was not a bad person. Certainly in the months leading up to her wedding she had behaved very well. Perhaps it would have been fairer to say she had behaved well most of the time. She may have been too romantic for her own good, Emily. She may have dreamed more often about glittering futures than was good for her. Her imagination may have run on champagne when it would have run better on old-fashioned Indian tea. But her impulses didn’t often win her over completely. Consider the case of her sick grandfather. This elderly gentleman had come to stay in his son’s house and fallen ill. After a couple of days his condition deteriorated and his relatives wondered if he would ever leave Brympton alive. A full-time nurse was hired to help look after him. When she disappeared Emily volunteered to take her place until a replacement could be found. The grandfather’s mindwas going. His memory might be sharp in the morning and disappear after lunch. He was losing control of his limbs and his faculties. For a while Emily told herself how brave, how considerate she was being, a junior version of Florence Nightingale in the Fens. Her parents were proud of her when they could drag their attention away from the old man who had come to their house to die. They found little time to praise their daughter who was helping him live through the last days.
    The replacement nurse was slow to arrive. Days passed. Emily’s mother helped out when she could but she had other duties to fulfil. Anyway, Georgina Nash reckoned, Emily was doing such a good job she hardly needed any help at all. For some people the mantle of heroine and martyr sits happiest when they are being praised and thanked by all around them. The praise and the thanks seemed to Emily to decrease as time went by. Sometimes her parents didn’t bother to thank her at all. She began to grow resentful, not towards her grandfather but towards her parents. She longed for her nursing days to finish so she could do something dramatic to celebrate her freedom.
    The replacement nurse finally arrived. Almost at the same time her friend Tristram called, fresh from his duties as Colville representative in East Anglia. Tristram happened to have brought a number of samples of the firm’s finest with him. Emily longed for her freedom, for a gesture of independence. It came as the sun was setting over the North Sea, lying in a grassy hollow behind the beach, the second bottle of champagne wedged in Tristram’s boot.
    Some weeks later she told her mother the results of her gesture of independence. She showed little remorse. If that first nurse hadn’t walked out, and if they hadn’t taken so long to find a replacement, Emily reasoned, then nothing like this would have happened. Georgina Nash thought about the girl’s options. She was deeply shocked but found it hard to be very cross with her daughter. Looking back, they shouldhave taken more trouble to find a replacement nurse for her father-in-law. Secretly she was thrilled at the prospect of a grandchild. It would roll away the years, having a little one in the Hall again, playing hide and seek as the child grew older, Willoughby and the grooms teaching him or her to ride, floating on the lake in a boat in high summer with the dragonflies dancing on the water.
    ‘I don’t suppose Tristram has offered to marry you,’ Georgina said to her daughter, thinking how very unpleasant it might be to have that young man as an intimate member of her family.
    ‘He said he wouldn’t,’ said Emily. ‘I mean, I like Tristram well enough, but I’m not sure I’d want to spend the rest of my life with him.’
    ‘Indeed,’ said her mother firmly. ‘Now, this is what we must do. I am going to put in train a great deal of social organization, dinner parties, dances,