by Mary Wesley
Matilda tore the letter, letting the breeze scatter the pieces. She undressed, pulling on her swimsuit, goose pimples on her legs. Sitting on the rock she reached in her bag for the pills, spilled them into her hand. She knocked the neck of the bottle against the rock, crammed her mouth full of pills, choking them down with the wine. The jagged glass cut her mouth. She poured in more pills, more wine.
The tide was just right, on the turn, the sea waiting. Matilda stood up.
‘Folly?’ she called, feeling dizzy, ‘belongs to us both?’ She fell on her knees, crawling down the beach on all fours. ‘Gus?’ She retched, keeping the pills down with an effort. ‘We all belong to you,’ she whispered, reaching the water. ‘I’m coming.’
A gull swooped down to snatch a roll from the rock, followed by others, screaming, fighting, white wings beating, yellow eyes glinting, beaks snatching.
The sea caught Matilda as she began to swim out. She did not wish to get her hair wet.
It’s late in the year for swimming. She pushed her arms out mechanically, turning the grey water pink with the blood from her mouth. A memory came tentatively. She had read or heard that people shit as they die. In distress she pulled off her swimsuit, getting her hair wet as she did so. She let the thing drift away.
At least I shall die with my body clean. She swam more slowly now. I should see my past life flash before my eyes. Her wounded mouth smiled. A memory which had so long eluded her came uselessly back. John/Piers in Trafalgar Square, his bowler, his umbrella. Whose party had he taken her to? Some place in Bloomsbury. I got drunk, she remembered, swimming very slowly now, never been drunk before. He had taken her into a bedroom. She had smelled his hair oil from Trumpers.
She had pushed it out of her mind. ‘Hugh,’ she called in the cold tide, ‘Hugh, I want to tell you –’ John/Piers next honours list had pushed her onto a bed, pulled up her skirt, hadn’t even pulled off her knickers.
‘This will be a new sensation.’ That voice of his.
‘Death you are new too,’ she said to the tide.
The fishing boat found the body floating by the lighthouse.
‘Looks as though she’s laughing,’ the younger man said.
‘Cut her mouth on the rocks,’ said his father. ‘Haul it in. Cover it with a bit of tarpaulin, ’tisn’t decent, not as though she were young.’
‘Buggered up a day’s fishing, this.’
THE END
Also available from Vintage
MARY WESLEY
Not That Sort of Girl
‘Mistress of the dark side of upper-class mores’
Observer
When, on the night of their wedding, Ned asks his new wife Rose to promise that she will never leave him, Rose is quick to give her aristocratic husband her word: keeping it, however, proves far harder. For even on the day when she has promised to forsake all others, Rose’s heart is with the true love of her life, Mylo, the penniless but passionate Frenchman who, within five minutes of their meeting, declared his love and asked her to marry him.
Whilst Rose remains true to her promise never to leave Ned, not even the war, social conventions, nor the prying of her overly inquisitive and cheerfully immoral neighbours, can stop her and Mylo from meeting and loving one another.
‘An idiosyncratic mixture of love story and social comedy, full of jokes, sex and twists’
The Times
‘Spare, well-crafted prose and a mixture of racy gentility, humour and unconventionality’
Scotsman
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MARY WESLEY
A Sensible Life
‘A splendid novel’
Evening Standard
Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India. There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France. Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men.
Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs.
‘She writes with the knowledge and wisdom of serene old age and the emotional exuberance of glowing young womanhood’
Daily Telegraph
‘Made me both laugh out loud and cry’
Philip Howard, The Times
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MARY WESLEY
The Camomile Lawn
‘The Camomile Lawn provides equal doses of sex and repression in war-torn Britain with panache and pace’
The Times
It is August, 1939 and five cousins have gathered at their aunt’s house in Cornwall for their annual summer holiday and ritual ‘Terror Run’. There is nineteen-year-old Oliver, back from fighting in the Spanish Civil War and desperately in love with the beautiful but grasping Calypso; brother and sister Polly and Walter; and ten-year-old Sophie, orphaned at birth and unloved by her aunt and uncle. By the end of the evening war will have been declared and the lives of all five cousins will have been altered irrevocably.
The Camomile Lawn follows the cousins through the war and beyond, into adulthood and old age, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and friends. As each of them grows up they fight not just to survive but to remain true to themselves and to those they love.
‘A very good book indeed . . . Rich in detail, careful and subtle in observation, mature in judgement’
Susan Hill
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Epub ISBN: 9781446443316
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2006
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Copyright © Mary Wesley 1983
First published in Great Britain in 1983 by
Macmillan
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099499152
