‘So what brings you back down here?’ she said. She had been fishing in the bib pocket of her dungarees and now she drew out a pair of secateurs and set to on the nearest rose bush. She was not exactly deadheading, since the blooms she snipped off were not at all faded. But neither was she gathering flowers for the house in any way that made sense, since the heads were let fall to the ground and then kicked away.
Alec waved his hand to get my attention and then gestured to Aunt Lilah in a very urgent-seeming way. I shook my head vehemently, determined that I would not grill this wandered (or drunk) old lady for secrets while her niece and protector was out of the way.
‘We came to talk about Fleur,’ I said and ignored Alec’s scowl. That was as far as I would go.
‘Oh, Fleur!’ said Lilah. She moved on to a second bush and attacked it with zeal.
‘Should you be doing that?’ I asked mildly.
‘She’s gone,’ said Lilah. ‘She left long, long ago.’ Then she held her secateurs up high in the air and snipped them together a few times before putting them back in her pocket and turning round. ‘She killed her father, you know.’ This was delivered in the blithe tone of someone imparting news that a friend had moved to town, or got a puppy, then she took off around the corner of the path, leaving us in dumb silence. After a moment the sound of snipping started up again. Slowly, Alec and I followed her.
‘Fleur killed her father?’ I said. ‘The Major?’
‘That’s him,’ said Lilah. ‘Johnny Lipscott. Yes, he died.’
‘But Fleur was a baby,’ I said.
‘Yes, a little baby girl,’ Lilah said.
‘And the Major died in Africa in the war,’ said Alec.
‘Oh, you knew that too?’ said Lilah, glancing round. ‘Yes, he did. Terribly dangerous place, Africa. You wouldn’t catch me there even for the elephants.’ In the distance the glockenspiel sounded its trill of notes. ‘Breakfast!’ she cried gaily, and again put her secateurs away. ‘Hope there’s some kedge.’ She left the way she had come.
‘What a very unsettling person,’ said Alec. ‘And what on earth did she mean?’
‘Let’s go and ask Mrs Lipscott,’ I said. ‘It does make sense of one thing though – why it should be “ironic” that Fleur took a shine to the Major’s hunting lodge.’
‘But he died in battle,’ said Alec. ‘That’s not the kind of thing you can make mistakes about.’
‘What if he was missing, or if his body was misidentified and he made it home and lay low and years later…’
‘I’ve been in the army, Dandy. If they list someone as dead, he’s dead. Let’s go and see what his widow has to say.’
They were in the little breakfast room with the Chinese wallpaper of yellow pears and blue doves, and there was indeed kedgeree into which Batty Aunt Lilah was tucking with enormous relish.
‘Coffee, eggs and things…’ said Mrs Lipscott waving a vague hand. ‘Are you staying, Dandy? Would you like your old room? And you, Mr Osborne?’ She blinked. ‘I haven’t quite accounted for you yet, I must say, but you’re very welcome, naturally.’
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite her. Again her hand fluttered at her throat, nicely dressed in pearls now above a very pale pink jersey of soft wool. She was right about the crying, though: her face was sodden and crumpled and looked ten years older than it had when we arrived, no matter the soft pink wool and pearls chosen to help it.
‘Batty Aunt Lilah just told us something quite surprising,’ I said. Lilah dropped her fork with a clatter, but Mrs Lipscott leaned over and patted her arm, giving her a warm smile.
‘Don’t worry, Aunt,’ she said. ‘You could never say anything that would make me cross with you, my darling.’
‘Try this,’ said Alec, rather grimly. He had not even taken so much as a cup of coffee, I noticed. ‘She told us that Fleur killed the Major.’
‘I’m going to finish this in my room,’ said Lilah, picking up her plate and her cup of milk and beetling off at top speed.
‘I’m not angry with you, my batty old aunt,’ Mrs Lipscott shouted after her. Then she turned back to Alec and me. ‘And so now you see how I can be sure she didn’t kill Elf or Charles or Leigh or this new one either.’
‘I don’t know about you, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘but I don’t see that at all. Perhaps, Mrs Lipscott, you would care to explain.’
‘You’re terribly earnest for an Osborne,’ she said. ‘I was at a hunt ball with your father once – before he married your mother – and he was much more fun.’ She gave her dimpled smile a good airing in Alec’s direction but, when it was met with a blank look, she sighed and held up her hands in a gesture of defeat.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Here’s what happened. When Aurora was due to be born in ’84 the Major was in India and he wanted to go to Egypt to join in the fun, but he came back for the birth of his son and organised bonfires on all the headlands and a huge party for the staff and the village, and of course no son came along. The bonfires were dismantled and the staff were told to go back to work and the Major returned to India. In ’87 when Pearl was born the whole thing happened again. He sailed home, built bonfires, organised parties and then took one look at her and went to Plymouth to get on a ship. Now in 1898 when I told him a third child was on its way, he refused to come back. He stayed put in East Africa where he was stationed, saying if it was the longed-for son at last he’d come home and if it was another benighted daughter he was off to fight the Boers in the South. He was long past the age where he had to keep his commission by this time, you understand, so it was his path to choose.’
She paused and looked at us as though expecting comments. Since the only one I could think of was that if he had not kept storming back off to the army in a huff at every daughter there would have been a higher count of babies in total and he would no doubt have got his son in the end, I said nothing.
‘So I sent word that it was another darling beautiful little baby girl and he promptly departed for the war and got himself killed there. After that the four of us and – and after Lilah came, the five of us – were just as snug as an infestation of bugs in a rug and all was delight and merriment.’
‘After your grief subsided, of course,’ said Alec, not liking – as a soldier himself – to hear that the Major was not mourned by the women he gave his life protecting.
‘Oh well, you know,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘Anyway, Fleur was always the most fanciful little thing in the world, wasn’t she, Dandy? And when she was getting quite big and almost finished with lessons she started thinking about coming out and getting engaged and getting married and all that and she became quite sorrowful at the thought of having no father to give her away. She started imagining it must have been dreadful for me to have no husband and I said that she shouldn’t think that for a moment and that I would rather have her than my silly husband and some silly son. I wasn’t thinking. She asked what I meant. And I told her. All I had in my mind was that if she heard what a ridiculous man her father was she would stop missing him and stop fancying that I missed him. Of course that’s not how she took it at all. I remember it as though it were yesterday: her standing poker-straight and as white as a sheet in my bedroom and staring at me with those beautiful eyes. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that I killed my father by being born?” “No!” I shouted. “An Orangeman with a bayonet killed your father by sticking him in the tummy.” But there was no consoling her.’
‘And that’s when she started her wild years?’ I said.
‘The Bugatti, Charles Leigh – who was very fast – frocks so short you’d think she’d forgotten to put one on. All those horrid parties with everyone smoking nasty things and being sick. She had decided she was a wicked girl and so she thought she’d jolly well behave like one.’