Read Online The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online

privately decides: she is savage.
    He tugs out a packet of cigarettes and offers her one. She refuses. He puts the cigarettes back in his pocket, but doesn’t sit down, as she expects him to. He stands, folds his arms, clears his throat, announces: ‘Mr Reese has been found drowned at Brighton.’
    Charlotte looks away from him, down at her hands. The knuckles are white, transparent she thinks, showing me the bone, the miraculous interior structure of me that will not decay when the flesh is gone. I must not allow myself to imagine the body of Jim on the sand. I must put the death aside and only fill my mind with this picture of hands – mine on his living body, touching, taking, soothing, his on my face and in my hair and on my breasts and at last in their ecstacy on the skin of the drums . . .
    â€˜We have positive identification of the body, and we are assuming suicide.’
    Suicide. Of course, suicide.
    Well, come to me, she thinks, the women who light their communal fires on perimeter railings, the hard and gentle women with their banners and their protestations, come and absolve me of my failure and my trust in a man. So she is quiet, imagining the gathering of this precious congregation. She still stares at her hands and doesn’t even move her head to look up at Bowden. He stands and waits. He unfolds his arms, puts them behind his back. I have, he thinks, enjoyed every syllable inflicted here. But he is waiting for the physical show of shock and grief. He needs these. He won’t be cheated of them. ‘Come on, you cunt!’ he wants to yell at her, ‘start crying!’
    But still he waits and waits. Far away in Charlotte’s mind, the bones of hundreds of women, still fleshed out and lit with life, begin to gather in clusters.
    *
    â€˜Poems, Duffy. Do you remember, she used to send us poems from boarding school?’
    â€˜Did she?’
    â€˜They were all about quite sentimental kinds of things, like dead baby birds.’
    â€˜Don’t think I read them.’
    â€˜Yes you did, Duffy.’
    â€˜Dead birds?’
    â€˜That kind of thing. A lot of death.’
    â€˜Trouble with my daughter, she’s always considered herself clever.’
    They are alone now. They are home. The bar of light glows over the white forehead of the Duke of Abercorn. Duffy has poured them strong drinks. It is the hour when Garrod would have entered the sitting room quietly, either to announce dinner or carrying their television suppers on identical trays. At Amelia’s feet, Admiral is sleeping. His flank trembles and twitches in his old dog’s dreaming. Amelia stares down at the dog. He is ancient, she notices suddenly, and smelly and weak. Age creeps on invisible, until one day . . .
    â€˜I’d like to die, Duffy.’
    She hasn’t wept. She has held herself as cold and straight as an icicle. Her behaviour has won her the admiration of Pitt and of WPC Willis, whose cups of tea Amelia has stubbornly refused. But now she is alone. The truth of what has happened enters valves and arteries and begins to surge and stream through her. She gulps whisky, as if to dilute the truths inside her. Duffy stares at her: Amelia de Palfrey, great-niece of the seventh Duke of Abercorn, and what a slim beauty once, in her white gloves, smelling of pear blossom and gardenias . . .
    â€˜Don’t talk bunkum like that, Amelia.’
    â€˜Though we ought to do something about flowers.’
    â€˜What flowers?’
    â€˜For Garrod. There should be a wreath. Something to lay on.’
    â€˜Don’t worry about it, old thing.’
    â€˜You’ll organise it.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜And one for me?’
    â€˜We can send one, Amelia, from us both.’
    â€˜I didn’t say from me. I said for me.’
    â€˜She dismays him now. Amelia de Paifrey. What an ideal wife she has made him over all the years. So good at choosing and