Haven't They Grown(80)

She shakes her head.

Lewis looks at me. ‘You won’t like it either. Georgina didn’t die of natural causes. Gerard and Rosemary no doubt told you it was a cot death. It wasn’t. It was neither natural nor unavoidable. Georgina died because Flora made two bad decisions. One: to have Georgina sleep in our bed. Thomas never did, Emily didn’t … but Georgina was premature and Flora was neurotic about her. For no reason that I could fathom, she wanted Georgina in bed next to her every night. Insisted it would be better for her. Fine – she was the mother, and I assumed she knew what she was talking about. I moved into the spare room. Couldn’t sleep properly with a snuffling baby that close.

‘One night, I came home to find Flora halfway down a bottle of white wine. I was surprised. She didn’t normally drink, but she’d had a tough day with all three kids being difficult in some way. Still, I told her to take it easy. She said she was fine, she’d only had a couple of glasses. I told her that was more than enough and she swore at me – said it was none of my fucking business. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to me like that.

‘We had a big row. I went up to my office – my office at home – slammed the door and worked for the rest of the evening. Flora gave the children their baths. That was supposed to be my job, but that night I didn’t care. I was too angry. I heard Flora putting Thomas and Emily to bed, heard them asking why Daddy wasn’t joining in. Then she must have taken Georgina and gone to bed because I didn’t hear anything else. At about ten thirty, I realised I hadn’t eaten and was starving. Flora hadn’t brought me up any supper, which I took to mean that she was still angry with me. I looked in the fridge and the oven – nothing. So I went out. Drove into Huntingdon, got myself a curry. Came home, went to bed in the spare room. I was still pretty angry, and wondering what I’d do if Flora didn’t apologise first thing in the morning. There was no way I was putting up with treatment like that. I went to sleep.’

He seems to be steeling himself to continue. Finally he says, ‘A few hours later, I was woken by screaming from Flora. I ran to our bedroom and found Georgina lying there, dead. In our bed. She was blue. Not breathing. It was the worst moment of my life.’

‘I killed her,’ Flora says, her voice no more than a whisper. ‘I didn’t murder her deliberately. What I did was worse, because I didn’t want her to die but I still caused it to happen: the opposite of what I wanted. Even though I’d drunk that wine, I still put Georgina down by my side, as I always did. Normally it was fine.’

‘And this one night it wasn’t,’ says Lewis. ‘Flora rolled on top of her and suffocated her.’

‘So now you know.’ Flora looks at me. ‘I’m a woman who got drunk and killed her baby.’

‘That’s why you cut your parents out of your life,’ I say, starting to understand.

‘Not just them,’ says Flora. ‘Everybody. Lewis, Thomas, Emily. You.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lewis didn’t want our marriage to end. Even after what I’d done. It was me. Lewis tried to help me. He was heroic. I didn’t want help, though. I wanted to pretend it had never happened – and that meant getting far, far away from anyone who had known or cared about Georgina. The other two children, and Lewis …’ Flora shakes her head. ‘They were my victims as much as she was. I’d deprived them of a sister, a daughter. I’d deprived my parents of a grandchild. I had to get away from all of them.’

‘And me?’

‘No!’ She says it as if having me in her life would have been the worst torment of all. ‘We’d been so close, Beth. You’d have sensed I was hiding something and dragged the truth out of me. And even if you hadn’t, don’t you understand? I couldn’t tolerate any continuity with my old life. The only way I could live at all was in a world that had never known Georgina. If I could have erased everyone’s memory … Obviously I couldn’t, but I made Lewis vow never to tell the others what had happened.’

‘By the others, do you mean Thomas and Emily?’ I ask.

Flora nods.

Lewis says, ‘It was bad enough that they’d lost their baby sister. Neither Flora nor I could stand the thought of them knowing the full truth: that their own mother’s negligence had killed her. And no one else could know the truth either, least of all the authorities. Flora might have gone to prison for all we knew. Then Thomas and Emily would have a mother behind bars, I’d have a wife who was a convict. No. Intolerable. Believe me, Beth, I was as keen to conceal the truth as Flora was.’

A tear rolls down Lewis’s cheek and he wipes it away. I’ve never seen him cry before. I don’t like it; it feels wrong.

‘It was much easier to say that we’d found Georgina dead and had no idea why she’d stopped breathing,’ he goes on. ‘Thomas and Emily were too young to connect that with the row they’d overheard the night before, me telling Flora to stop drinking.’

‘I couldn’t go to prison,’ says Flora. ‘That would have been the thing …’ She tails off.

‘What?’ I ask her.

‘I was too scared to take my own life, after Georgina died. I wanted to, more than anything – to never feel anything ever again. Couldn’t make myself go through with it. But if there was even a chance I’d go to prison I’d have done it.’