The Windermere Witness by Rebecca Tope

darkened, and his eyes were different. She watched him as the actual irreversible truth of Markie’s death hit him for the first time. She watched inner defences crumble, and waves of horror replace the all-too-easy anger and intellectualising. She watched him blunder across the room, push back a curtain and stare blindly out at the uncaring lake and mountains outside, now dotted with lights as night took hold. He was shaking, his teeth chattering. Simmy considered fetching Eleanor to deal with him, but remembered the child, who might come as well and be traumatised by the sight of a man collapsing in front of her.
    Murkily, she wondered what the last words between father and son might have been. Had they been exactly the sort of thing you would never forgive yourself for? From what she had seen of Baxter, that felt all too likely. He would be haunted by them for the rest of his life, blocked by the impossibility of putting it right. She made a brief resolution never to say anything to anybody that would linger poisonously if that person died unexpectedly.
    The man had his back to her, the shoulders sagging in the expensive wedding suit. He was pathetic and she was tempted to go to him and let him sob on her breast, if that was what he needed. She glimpsed the dissolution of a whole castle of plans and assumptions, projected far into the future.
    And then a new thought hit her, bringing with it amazement that it had not occurred before. ‘His mother?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Markie’s mother?’ Shouldn’t George be huddled together with the one other person in the world with equal reason to be in emotional meltdown?
    ‘What?’ His voice was thick. ‘What did you say?’
    She knew he had heard the first time, so did not repeat the question. It was not her business. If he wanted to ignore it, that was his right. She was occupied in trying to recall what Melanie had said about Markie’s parentage. Another woman, another household, running parallel to that containing Eleanor and Bridget, in the very house where Simmy now lived. So what had happened? Where was that other woman now?
    He turned towards her, his face grey. ‘She married a man with a bigger yacht than mine.’ It was plainly an old joke, habitually told in bluff male company, with therueful laugh that would go with the acceptance of female gold-digging as a fact of life. ‘But it didn’t last. She’s in very reduced circumstances these days, working in a public school somewhere down south. Positioning herself to snap up one of the well-heeled dads, I shouldn’t wonder.’
    Simmy nodded wordlessly, redrawing her image of a quiet little woman settled in a remote Lakeland cottage with her little boy, like something out of
The Forsyte Saga
. Instead it morphed into a mixture of James Bond and Evelyn Waugh. A jet-set couple, carelessly creating a child between other relationships, the mother virtually forgetting about him, or so the implication appeared to be.

Chapter Five
    Her sherry long since finished, she began to think about going home. Eleanor had blithely undertaken to drive her back, but that now felt like an unreliable promise. Baxter would have to babysit, and he might not be regarded as fit for that task. Neither was he likely to act as chauffeur in his current condition. Old associations of being stranded at children’s parties when her mother forgot to collect her at the appointed hour came back to her, along with a wholly irrational resentment. If it came to the crunch, she could probably walk home. Troutbeck was surely less than four miles from Eleanor’s house, even going back the way they had come. It would be shorter if there was a more direct route, but that was unlikely to be a proper road. And she did require an actual road; attempting a steep muddy footpath in the dark was not enticing, especially as she was still hazy about the precise geography.
    Eleanor swept back into the room like a force of nature.‘God, I’m sorry,’ she