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.‘Finding her there on the boat.You thinking I’d been aboard…I was the obvious person.’‘Yes!’ she affirmed fiercely.‘You were, you were!’ She jerked her arm so violently that she spilt her wine.I took her glass and, putting it on the table, went to the cloakroom to find a cloth and dampen it with water.She dabbed at her sweater, breathing heavily, clenching her lips.I fetched a glass of water which she drank greedily.When we had been quiet for some time, she repeated reproachfully, ‘It had to be you.It had to be.’Her eyes flicked towards me, and I quickly agreed, ‘Yes.It had to be me.’Gathering some comfort at last, she prepared to go on.‘I fell apart for a while,’ she said shakily.‘The whole thing seemed so ghastly, so totally un—’ the word eluded her ‘so un-saveable.You know how something can happen which is so ghastly that there’s nothing you can do to make it right again.Once it’s happened, it’s happened.However much you may wish it different, there’s no undoing it, ever, ever.Except this was twice as ghastly as anything I could ever have imagined.But then I thought— Then I thought—’ She straightened up in her seat and some of the life came back into her voice.‘Perhaps I can undo some of this.Usually I pretend that difficult things aren’t happening, don’t I? I just push them out of my mind.’ She held up a staying hand as if I were about to disagree.‘Oh, I do, I know I do! All my life…always.But this time – well, I could make things right again, couldn’t I? Oh, not totally, of course.But almost right.For you anyway.For us.And Hugh—’ She opened her eyes wide.‘It thrilled me.I mean – I felt glad.Glad that I had thought of it.Glad I was going to do it.I was absolutely determined, you see.Determined not to be weak and pathetic.Determined to carry it through to the very end.’The phone was ringing but neither of us made a move to answer it and eventually it stopped.Ginny was still lost in her story.‘I imagined you’d rushed off in a state of shock.Rushed back to London.It seemed to me that I had plenty of time – time to do the thing properly.So I planned it! I thought it through! I sat in the bottom of the cockpit where no one could see me, and I thought about every detail.I was determined, you see, not to forget anything.’ Her mouth fell.‘It wasn’t possible, of course – not to make any mistakes.But I didn’t realise that then.’ Suddenly her control deserted her and she clamped a hand to her eyes.Just as abruptly she pulled her hand away again and went on, as though any loss of momentum might sabotage her chances of finishing.‘I knew there was blood – I’d seen it,’ she began at speed.‘I knew I’d need something to wrap her up in, to stop the blood and keep it from— So I looked in the cockpit lockers and found some plastic sheeting and a rope.Then I braced myself to go below.The strange thing was that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.Partly because I’d geared myself up for it.Partly because I’d made up my mind that I wasn’t going to let it bother me.Mind over matter,’ she exclaimed with a hint of pride, ‘like doctors and operations.’ She paused for breath before racing on.‘I didn’t look at her, though.I half shut my eyes.And I kept talking to myself, blabbering away, which seemed to help, God only knows why.The hardest thing was getting the plastic all the way round her.Not getting any blood on the outside—’ She jerked to a halt and cried in sudden anguish, ‘God, you don’t want to hear all this, do you! You don’t want all the ghastly details!’Part of me wanted to hear everything, but it was a part of me I didn’t trust.‘Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to,’ I said.‘Nothing I don’t want to,’ she repeated with irony, blinking back the hovering tears.‘The awful thing was – half of me was proud of what I was doing! So methodical.So efficient.Not forgetting a single thing!’ And she gave a sad empty laugh.Blowing her nose, she continued with attempted toughness, ‘So! I put her in the plastic, I wrapped the rope round several times, I knotted it.Then I cleaned up as best I could.I was already planning to come back the next day and scrub the floor, scrub every inch of the boat.With bleach – I knew bleach was the only thing.But there wasn’t anything more I could do that night, not until dark, so I sat in the companionway and waited.That was the worst, waiting.The darkness seemed to take for ever.’ The pretended toughness had vanished.Large splashy tears dropped silently onto her sweater and dripped off her nose.She had run out of tissues so I went and fetched some more.She blew her nose and wiped her eyes ferociously, as though this might be enough to stem the flood.‘It was hard.Moving her.’ The effort of speaking was very great and between gasps her voice was all over the place.‘I used a rope – a halyard or something – to hoist her up.I tried using a winch but the rope got into a terrible mess.It took me ages to unravel it.So in the end I just put the rope over the boom and hauled that way.God, it was hard – hard.But somehow, somehow…I got her up.I got her onto the deck and…’ She trailed off and with a low moan leant forward and sank her head into her hands.I put an arm round her shoulders, I murmured vague words of comfort, but I hardly knew what I was saying, the images that crowded my mind were so overpowering.I saw Ginny pulling the body onto the side deck and forcing it under the guardrails, I saw it hanging out over the edge of the boat before it finally broke free and slid into the blackness, I heard it hit the water with a low splash, I saw it bobbing up and floating away on the tide.I saw all this and began to realise what a massive undertaking it must have been for Ginny
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