Read [Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter for Free Online Page A

to?”
    “August the twenty-seventh,” Bunny said, quick
as a flash.
    They turned blank looks on her. I remembered.
    “Mountbatten?” I said. One of their dwindling
band of heroes, cruelly murdered. I was charmed: only they would dare to make a memorial of a drawing-room
tea party. “Terrible thing, terrible.”
    I was soon disabused. She smiled her little smile at
me. “And don’t forget Warrenpoint: eighteen paras, and an earl, all on the one day.”
    “Jesus, Bunny,” Edward said.
    She was still looking at me, amused and glittering.
“Don’t mind him,” she said playfully, “he’s a West Brit,
self-made. I think we should name a street after it, like
the French do. The glorious twenty-seventh!”
    I glanced at her husband, guzzling his tea. Someone
had said he was a solicitor. He had a good twenty years
on her. Feeling my eye on him he looked up, and
smoothed a freckled hand on his scant sandy hair and
said cheerfully: “She’s off?”
    Bunny poured herself another cup of tea, smirking.
    “It’s dead men you’re talking about,” Edward muttered,
with the sour weariness of one doing his duty by
an argument that he has long ago lost.
    “There’s nothing wrong with this country,” Bunny
said, “that a lot more corpses like that won’t cure.” She
lifted her cup daintily. “Long live death! Is this your
own cake, Charlotte? Scrumptious.”
    I realised, with the unnerving clarity that always
comes to me with the fifth drink, that if there were to
be a sixth I would be thoroughly drunk.
    One of the twins suddenly yelped in pain.
“Mammy mammy he pinched me!”
    Michael looked at us from under sullen eyebrows,
crouched on the carpet like a sprinter waiting for the off. Bunny laughed. “Well pinch him back!” The girl’s
face crumpled, oozing thick tears. Her sister watched
her with interest.
    “Michael,” Edward rumbled, and showed him the
hurley stick. “Do you see this . . . ?”
    Ottilie left to make more tea, and I followed her.
Outside the kitchen windows the chestnut tree murmured
softly in its green dreaming. The afternoon had
begun to wane.
    “Quite a lady,” I said, “that Diana.”
    Ottilie shrugged, watching the kettle. “Bitch,” she
said mildly. “She only comes here to . . . ”
    “What?”
    “Never mind. To gloat. You heard her with Charlotte: you poor thing .” She made a simpering face. “Make
you sick.”
    The kettle, like a little lunatic bird, began to whistle
shrilly.
    “He’s not that bad,” I said, “is he, Edward?”
    She did not answer. We returned to the drawing-room.
A dreamy sort of silence had settled there. They
sat, staring at nothing, enchanted figures in a fairy tale.
Bunny glanced at us as we came in and a flicker of
interest lit her hard little eyes. She would be good at
ferreting out secrets. I moved away from Ottilie.
    “You’re quite at home, I see,” Bunny said.
    “People are kind,” I answered, and tried to laugh.
My legs were not working properly. Bunny lifted a
quizzical eyebrow. “That’s true,” she said. She was thinking. I lost interest in her. Edward knocked the
bottle against my glass. His face was ashen. His breath
hit me, a warm brown cloud. I looked at Charlotte, the
only dark among all these fair. She sat, back arched and
shoulders erect, slim arms extended across her lap, her
pale hands clasped, a gazelle. Poor thing. My heart wobbled.
The bruised light of late afternoon conjured other
days, their texture felt but they themselves unremembered.
I seemed about to weep. Edward cracked his
fingers and sat down to the scarred upright piano. He
played atrociously, swaying his shoulders and crooning.
Bunny tried to speak over the noise but no one listened.
Michael sat in the middle of the floor, playing sternly
with the toy car I had given him. I took Ottilie’s hands
in mine. She stared at me, beginning to laugh. We
danced, stately as a pair of tipsy duchesses, round and
round