The Forget-Me-Not Sonata(52)

‘No, because I buried three of them,’ she said and laughed at her own tasteless joke.

‘I hope the fourth buries you!’

‘Really,’ interrupted Diana in a gentle voice. ‘We were all very wrong about Louis and now he’s gone. I feel desperately sorry for him, poor young man. There’s nothing more painful than a broken heart.’

‘Quite,’ said Phyllida, delighted that the argument was delaying the game.

‘We shall all miss Isla dreadfully.’

‘Dreadfully,’ Phyllida repeated.

‘Don’t worry, Audrey will marry Cecil and that will give us all good reason to smile again,’ said Charlo.

‘Or you’ll marry the Colonel and that will give us all good reason to laugh again,’ Cynthia added with a wicked grin. But Charlo didn’t laugh. A frown swept across her powdered brow. There was something different about Colonel Blythe. A sentimental look in his eyes, a faraway expression, a softening of the voice and a sad tune he kept humming to himself. She dared hope that the change in him might have been inspired by her. But she wasn’t going to share her thoughts. They’d mock her if she revealed an uncharacteristic soppiness. ‘You may be laughing sooner than you think,’ she challenged. Cynthia stared at Charlo with her mouth agape.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said slowly. ‘You really are going to bury a fourth.’

‘No, no, I think I’ll have more fun with a living Colonel than a dead one,’ she mused, then added with unexpected gloom, ‘I don’t think the dead are much fun any more.’

But in the wake of Isla’s death no one could care less about Charlotte Osborne’s relationship with the Colonel. Hurlingham became a suburb of shadows as everyone shuffled about not knowing what to do with themselves, remembering with disbelief the sunny child whose cheeky grin and bouncy gait had dominated their world. How could someone so alive suddenly be so dead? They all thought of their own fragile lives and felt more transitory than ever. Their time would come and then what?

Louis and Isla’s imagined love affair became the stuff of legend – a modern day Romeo and Juliet, which the community feasted on with curiosity grown hungry from so much mourning. Men admired Louis for his heroism and women envied Isla’s fearlessness. Suddenly everyone seemed to know so much about their affair, how it had started, where they would meet, their dreams for the future and how, the very night Isla fell ill, they were planning to elope. The more the stories circulated the more outlandish they became, but no one was prepared to stop. In death Isla now belonged to everyone.

‘Nelly has been crying now for a month,’ Hilda complained. ‘Louis has gone and taken her heart with him. Really, I’ve never known so many tears shed over a man.’

Rose spent most afternoons beside the fire in her sitting room, shivering with a constant chill that resisted the warmth however boisterous the flames were, deriving comfort from her sisters’ regular visits which served to prevent her from sinking into a bottomless pit of self-pity.

‘Nelly’s got nothing to cry about,’ Edna snapped impatiently, tired of having to listen to her sister’s complaints about her daughter’s imaginary heartache. ‘How’s Audrey, Rose?’ she asked in a gentle voice. Rose shook her head while Hilda pursed her thin lips. She resented the fact that everyone was talking about Rose’s daughters with the sort of reverence reserved for the Saints. If Isla were alive she’d have caused the very foundations of their community to shake with disapproval, but she was now beyond disapproval and Audrey had been sprinkled with the same holy water. She stared furiously into her cup of tea.

‘She’s taken the whole thing very badly,’ said Rose bleakly. ‘She just sits in her bedroom gazing out of the window miserably or pacing the room in fury. Why she’s so furious, I have no idea. God,’ she added piously, ‘it must be directed at God. After all, it is God’s doing.’

‘And Cecil? Can’t he do something to revive her?’

‘She needs time to mourn,’ Rose replied, lowering her eyes for she was ashamed that all her hopes for her future happiness rested with them. ‘He’s a tower of strength. He comes around most evenings to see her, but she refuses to leave her room.’

‘Oh dear, that doesn’t augur well, does it?’ Hilda commented with a brittleness of tone that betrayed her jealousy.

‘I don’t think so, Hilda,’ said Rose. ‘He’s a sensitive young man and understands that she needs time to come to terms with Isla’s death before she can possibly focus her heart on him.’