The Death of Mrs. Westaway

“Ooh, aren’t we lucky,” the nurse said, whipping aside Hal’s curtains.

“Lucky?” Hal croaked. Her head ached and her throat was still almost too painful to talk.

“Visitors. And a lovely bunch of flowers. Do you want a hand putting on your dressing gown?”

Hal shook her head, wondering who the visitors might possibly be. It was probably the police again, although she felt as if she had run through the events at Trepassen more times than she could count, certainly more times than her aching throat had been able to take. Though would the police really be carrying flowers?

The nurse had gone, bustling away up the corridor to another patient, so Hal sat up in bed, pulled her T-shirt straight, raked her fingers through her hair, and tried to prepare herself for whoever might come through the curtains of her cubical.

Even so, she was not prepared for the two people who came nervously down the hallway. Abel and Mitzi, Abel carrying a bunch of flowers almost bigger than himself, and Mitzi bearing what looked like a homemade cake.

“Hello, Harriet,” Abel said, rather tentatively, and Hal saw his throat move as he swallowed awkwardly. “I hope—I hope this is okay, I could understand . . .”

He trailed off, and Mitzi stepped forwards, her pink face even pinker than usual.

“Frankly, Harriet, we can both quite understand if you don’t feel up to seeing anyone from Trepassen, so please don’t hesitate to say if you’d rather we went away. This is pure selfishness on my part—I was so anxious when I heard the news. Harding is at home with the children, and Abel kindly agreed to give me a lift—oh, no, Harriet, please don’t get up.”

Hal was struggling out of bed, putting her shaky legs to the floor, and then she was in Mitzi’s arms, enveloped in a hug so hard and close she felt breathless with the force of it.

“Oh, my darling,” Mitzi was saying over and over. “Oh, my darling, what an ordeal, I can’t tell you—that vile, horrible man—I can’t even—”

She broke off and sat back, wiping fiercely at her eyes with a corner of her Hermès scarf, and Abel stepped forwards.

He did not embrace her, or not exactly; he simply put a hand on either side of her shoulders, holding her gently, almost as if he feared she would break, looking at her with such sadness in his gray eyes that Hal felt a lump rise in her own throat.

“Oh, Harriet,” he said. “Can you forgive us?”

“Forgive you?” Hal tried to say, but the hoarseness in her throat broke up the words, and she had to swallow and try again before they understood her. “What should I forgive?”

“Everything,” Abel said heavily. He sat opposite the head of Hal’s bed on the hard little chair, and Mitzi perched on the foot of the bed. “For letting you sleepwalk into this. For turning a blind eye for twenty years. I knew in my heart of hearts that something was wrong, we all did. But he was so charming, so funny when he wanted to be.”

“None of you knew the truth, though?” Hal managed. It was a question, not a statement, and Abel shook his head.

“Mother knew. And . . . and I think so did Mrs. Warren, almost certainly.”

“Mrs. Warren?” Mitzi’s face was horrified. “She knew, and she said nothing?”

“She loved him,” Abel said simply. “And so did Mother, I think, in her own way. I suppose they felt . . .” He spread his hands. “What was done was done, after all. They couldn’t bring Maggie back. And they thought, perhaps—forgive me, Hal.” He took a breath. “I think perhaps they thought he had been . . . provoked. Beyond bearing. A crime of passion, in some way.”

“Mrs. Warren knew,” Hal said. Her throat hurt and she took a sip of the water beside her bed. “It’s why he killed her. She tried to warn me. But I didn’t understand. I thought it was a threat. I thought she tried to trip me up down the stairs and frighten me away, but it was—”

She stopped. What to say? It was Ezra? It was my father who did that, who set an opportunistic trap to stop me digging up my own past?

“And now she’s gone,” she finished. She felt numb with the futility of it. Maud, Maggie, even herself, she could understand. She could not forgive Ezra for what he had done, but she could understand it. He had killed out of rage and a kind of twisted love, and later to protect himself, to stop the truth from coming out. But Mrs. Warren . . . She thought of all the questions she still had—questions only Mrs. Warren could have answered—and she wanted to cry. Mrs. Warren’s face, that first day, came back to her—the image she had had of a child watching a cat stalk towards a group of unsuspecting pigeons, watching with a kind of horrified glee for the carnage that was to come. At the time she had thought the cat was Hal herself. Now she understood—the cat was Ezra. And Mrs. Warren had perhaps not expected what was to come—if she had, surely even she would have said something. But she saw the danger, and did nothing to stop it. The only person she had tried to warn was Hal herself.

Get out—if you know what’s good for you. While you still can . . .

“She was the only person left who knew the truth,” Hal said slowly. “And he knew . . . he knew that she was going to warn me. . . .”

She thought back through the years, counting the bodies, falling like dominoes from that first moment of anger in the boathouse. And the last domino, Hal herself. Except . . . she hadn’t fallen. He had.

“Abel . . . Mitzi . . .” She stopped, groping for what to say, and in the end the only phrase that came was the clichéd perennial response to the unbearable: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“And I for yours,” Mitzi said, and there was a kind of wisdom in her round, pink, horsey face that Hal would never have expected to find there, when they first met. An infinite compassion, beneath the self-satisfied façade. “He was your father.”

It was not Hal who flinched at the word, but Abel, putting his face in his hands as though he could not bear it, so that Hal wanted to reach out, and tell him that it was okay, that it would all be okay. Whoever, whatever her father was—had been—she’d had not one but two remarkable mothers, women who had fought for her and protected her, and she was lucky in that.

But she could not find the words.

“When you’re better”—Mitzi patted the sheet over her knees—“we’ll have to get Mr. Treswick to come and see you again, Harriet.”

“Mr. Treswick?”

“It seems . . . well, it seems as if Mrs. Westaway did know what she was doing when she drafted that will.”

“Mr. Treswick has looked into it,” Abel said. “In view of what we know now, the wording is quite clear and unambiguous. That legacy is meant for you, Hal. It always was. The house is yours.”

“What?”

The shock was so unexpected that the word slipped out, like an accusation, and then Hal could not think of anything more to say.

Abel was nodding.

“Mother knew you were her granddaughter. I think that’s very clear. And with the will . . . well, I think she wanted all of us to ask questions, start digging into the past. It’s what she meant, I think, by that line to Harding in her letter.”

“Après moi, le déluge,” Hal said softly. And she finally understood what Mrs. Westaway had set in motion with her will. There had been malice, yes, but also cowardice. The truth had been a horror that she could not bear to face while she was alive. Instead her grandmother had waited until she herself was beyond pain—and unleashed this catastrophe on the living.

For a moment Hal imagined her lying there, bed-bound, waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Warren, and planning the cataclysm that was to come. Had she rubbed her hands as she signed that will, full of a bitter glee? Or had it been done with a weary resignation and pity for the living?

They would never know.

“What puzzles me,” Abel was saying slowly, “is why the hell Ezra wouldn’t agree to that deed of variation you suggested. It was the perfect get-out for him—an acceptance that you weren’t Mother’s granddaughter. I think Mother must have counted on you being as voracious and bloody-minded as the rest of us, and forcing the truth to come out in court. She never expected you to renounce your legacy without a fight. You were more noble than she could have imagined, Hal.”