CRIMINAL JUSTICE

3

One Little Hour

© René Weis

On 2 January 1922 a whole mailbag sent from Marseilles is waiting for Edith at Carlton & Prior. She at once regrets ‘slating him’ during this trip for not being a better correspondent. She dispatches a note to this effect in which she further reassures him that his letters are safe in her keeping, and she destroys all letters sent her. His are no exception. The only one she has kept is the ‘Dear Edith’ letter. The fact is that Bywaters meant this letter to put Avis’s mind at rest as much as Percy’s about Edith and himself. He still cares about Avis and is already toying with the idea of breaking away from the wife. Bywaters now wonders in his latest letter whether or not he will be able to see Edith. She quickly replies that it must be up to him. Moreover Thompson, she tells him, knows that he is coming back on 7 January and will therefore watch her every step. To disarm his suspicions a far as she can she has ‘surrendered to him unconditionally now’. To her husband’s question, after making love to her, as to whether she is happy now, she has lied and replied: ‘Yes quite!’

If it secures her peace of mind she’ll endure these marital abuses as long as necessary. In the meantime she derives strength, she tells him suggestively, from the certainty of loving a man on whom she can lean. She mentions that she had a New Year’s card addressed to her from Osborne House, that she is enjoying R. W. Chambers’s erotic novel The Common Law, that ‘the man Lacosta in Trail of 98’ by Robert B. Service ‘was so vile I didn’t think of him at all’ and that she was relieved to hear that he didn’t like photographs of himself any better than she of herself. Here are the two photographs; he carried the one of her on his person:

She is sceptical about his relating a fortune teller’s advice, setting the time for her elopement with him ‘around March’. It used to be early in the New Year, Edith notes, not without sarcasm. She prefers to know the truth rather than be kept waiting in an ‘expectant feeling of buoyancy for a myth’. Methodically she addresses issues raised in his letters point by point, including his interest in boxing. Like ‘most women’, she claims, she has always found it disgusting. For love for him she ‘tried to look upon it as something strong and big’ and to share his enthusiasm for the forthcoming encounter in the Albert Hall between Carpentier and Cook.

Bywaters arrives at Gravesend on Saturday, but Edith is in Highbury all day for a family occasion and cannot meet him. She must wait patiently until Monday.

Monday 9 January: When Edith Thompson crosses the threshold at Carlton & Prior a few minutes before 9 a.m., her only thought is of the imminent meeting with young Bywaters. As it happens, when her shift at the firm starts at 9 a.m., she has exactly one year left to live. Every second, minute, hour, and week is now debited from a finite and formidably circumscribed total. At the moment Edith is very much alive, and at 4.45 p.m. she is in Bywaters’s arms. He has brought her sweets, chocolates, Turkish Delight and violets which she puts in her handbag. She then urgently tells him of her pregnancy and how she tried to stop it by a contraption, possibly with a sterilised wire: ‘I cried all the time, but after it was done I felt easier, and after you have finished it for me I shall feel easier still.’ It seems that Bywaters balks at the thought of assisting in this dangerous and very messy gynaecological venture. He derives little assurance from her promising that ‘the next real one I have perhaps I’ll be able to keep for always.’ His slowness to respond stings her into a furious outburst, of which she quickly repents. It is not only because of this that the evening fails to keep its promise. Freddy seems unable to generate the same ardour for their relationship as she; the ‘palship of two halves’, as she loves to see it, is supposed to consist of a mutuality that almost literally negates the separateness of two beings. As they part in Ilford at 7 p.m. after the ride in from Fenchurch, she is less than affectionate. At home, shortly before 9 p.m., while Percy is already upstairs, Edith puts the violets in water; she will be wearing them to work tomorrow, where she plans to keep then on her desk next to the ‘hear-no-evil’ monkey which Freddy had given her as a keepsake. After a restless night a subdued Edit Thompson is determined to sort things out with Freddy, who has already sent her a G.M.M.C. [‘Good Morning Ma Chérie’] wire from the Morea in Tilbury. She writes him a quick note, stressing the sheer necessity of terminating this pregnancy. The note is passed to him in the lunch hour. They meet again in the evening and do so for the rest of the week.

Saturday 14 January 1922: Edith has taken this half-day off work and successfully dupes Percy about the afternoon, when she will go dancing with Freddy. Early in November she told Freddy that she had declined an invitation by him to a dance during the summer ‘because I want to wait for that time – that first dance until it will be a real pleasure, without any pain’. Then, on 6 December, when Avis rehearsed the arrangements for a non-stop dance, Edith had to come to her rescue, because she could not bring herself to admit in front of Thompson that Freddy was to partner her. The morning of Saturday is entirely theirs. On her way into Liverpool Street Edith admires the way the night’s heavy snowfall has shrouded even the grim commuter points of Stratford and the ugly belt of Victorian cottages at Bethnal Green in a mantle of silence. It is mild out of doors and still snowing. The snow is to continue unabated till Sunday morning, when, on Edith’s and Percy’s wedding anniversary, the metropolis and Essex and Kent will be a single white expanse.

They meet up in the City. Freddy has promised her the special thrills of a louche bar, ‘a “low common place” for a woman to go’. Wherever this may be, the lovers enjoy a harmless morning there, drinking and eating sweets. The man in the confectioner’s thinks that Edith, who is busy buying while Freddy foots the bill, is ‘terrible’. He is speaking in jest, prompted perhaps by Bywaters calling her ‘fast’. As she warns jokingly, she really will be ‘terrible’ once he has ‘a lot of money for me to spend’.

The somewhat furtive visit to the bar is followed by a snowball battle at which young Bywaters excels. This lovers’ idyll of breaches of social decorum and romping about in the streets of the snowbound city sums up the morning of 14 January 1922 as Edith remembers it. In the early afternoon the lovers are heading for the dance at either the Waldorf, or the Shoreditch Town Hall. Dancing for Edith is a way of life. No sooner does she feel the pulse of a waltz, foxtrot, or Charleston than her feet itch and her legs move almost involuntarily. Her gracefulness on the dance floor has remained undiminished through the years. Although long ago she stopped teaching at the Cripplegate and at Warren’s Academy, she still glides into every new dance variation with uncanny ease.

What the sea is to Freddy, the dance floor is to her. A popular waltz from 1922 was ‘When Shall We Meet Again’, with words by Raymond B. Egan and music by Richard A. Whiting. Edith would have known it well and probably danced to its lilting melancholy tune. Its wistful lyrics render her loneliness and the sorrow of repeated partings from a lover sailing the oceans of the world:

The fairest sky or the brightest eye
May cloud with the word ‘au revoir’,
A tear may seek out the fairest cheek
To stain when a friendship is o’er,
Each night brings someone a goodbye kiss,
Each night some sweetheart is wond’ring this:

When shall we meet again
After this ‘Au revoir’ dear,
Will you still love me then
Or will our dream be o’er dear?
Will you cast the new love aside for me
Or just smile to think you once sigh’d for me?
All will be answer’d when
We two shall meet again – gain.

And who knows why lips that love must sigh
The heart-aching word of ‘farewell’?
In ev’ry breast this unbidden guest
The grief of a parting may dwell.
Who knows the wherefore, the why or when,
Who knows if ever we’ll meet again?

'When Shall We Meet Again' (1922 waltz, extract) words by Raymond B. Egan and music by Richard A. Whiting.

On Sunday 15 January 1922, it is six years since Edith walked as a bride out of No. 231. She is recollecting today what she felt then. Percy’s clinging to the memory of the wedding anniversary like a drowning man does not make it easier for her. The fact that he still occasionally assumes that her contempt will yield to his bludgeoning has become her emotional safety-valve. It is easier to betray someone who mistreats you than a consistently kind and considerate man.

Thursday 19 January is Freddy’s last night in England. Immediately after work, the lovers meet up and hurry to one of their favourite haunts. It is pitch dark already, and the slushy streets are lashed by sleet and gusts of rain. On their way Edith and Freddy pass the gloomy cathedral rearing its lit twin towers up against the elements. Safely sheltered at last, they have a ‘real lovely’ time, as she notes, quoting him. He reassures her that he loves only her, but admits that he still has ‘something – something in connection with Australia’. She is puzzled, furious and jealous about this. Although she has read the Australian woman’s letters and therefore knows that his involvement with her is not very deep, Edith realises the extent to which he will always consider himself free from bondage. As he is not due out to Australia, she can hold fire and preserve her composure. Why though, she wonders, has he chosen to tell her about a rival on this night of all others. The answer must be that she is pressing him to a point where he is not willing to go. There are other women in Bywaters’s world. To bring Mrs Thompson back down to earth he attempts to expose her to the ‘realities’ of life. Perhaps for this reason she becomes frantic in the course of the evening to a degree he cannot fathom: ‘The feeling I had and still have about you going darlint I can’t explain – not even to myself – first of all I feel that I shall want you & shall need you to lean on & you won’t be there & and then darlint – the ‘drifting feeling’ that I told you about before –…’

It is 11.30 p.m. when they part at Liverpool Street, and he is concerned about her getting home safely on such a dreadful night. In the jolting carriage, Edith is temporarily overwhelmed, as painful longings rise like lumps in her throat. In Ilford she is escorted home by a gentlemanly late visitor to the theatre, who travelled in the same train. Lying next to Percy, wound up by the intensity of the past few hours, she cannot sleep and is still awake when the alarm goes off.

Wearily she retraces her steps to the City on this dismal morning of Friday 20 January. She feels sickly, but attributes this to the drink and her sleepless night. A pulling, retching sensation tears away in her stomach. By 10.30 a.m. she is ‘awfully ill’ and for the next hour and a half she is fighting off ‘terrible pains’ which flood all over her. At about noon she faints. The showroom staff immediately gather about her and bring her round with smelling salts and a fortifying brandy. But Edith passes out again and then a third time. The doctor is summoned to the premises. He examines her briefly, tells them to loosen her dress and let her breathe more easily and to keep her warm with a hot-water bottle. They prop her up on a sofa and Lily looks after her. The doctor returns at 3.30 p.m., but finds her condition not improved. His diagnosis must be that this is female trouble, compounded by ‘flu, particularly because the outbreak of influenza in London and in the country at large is this month reaching epidemic proportions. But the ‘flu is to hit both the Thompsons shortly, so it can be discarded here.

Eventually the Carlton & Prior doorman runs Edith home to Ilford. She is lying flat in the big ‘motor’, while he negotiates his way east on the Whitechapel Road. She drags herself upstairs, undresses and lies down. For the next three hours she is fighting her own body. At about 7 p.m. she miscarries: ‘something awful happened, darlint I don’t know for certain what it was, but I can guess, can you, write & tell me’. The shock of her shredding pains, and this appalling mess of tissue and blood leave her numb. Mercifully her husband is not due back till much later tonight – and he will anyway call in first in the Crescent. By the time he arrives in Kensington Gardens she will have had time to dispose of part of the mess. She will explain to him that her periods are worse than ever, and that she must sleep on her own tonight. He is used to her prostrating indisposition, which regularly leaves her bed-bound for up to two days, swallowing aspirins by the dozen. Tonight, as Percy solicitously greets his wife, he notices how a hollow pallor has settled all over her. For once he will voluntarily use the little bedroom. This is the first time Edith has been pregnant. Hence her hesitation about the precise nature and detail of what happened:

I’ve never had any experience in such matters and I never discuss them with members of my sex as so many girls do therefore I suppose I’m rather ignorant on such subjects ….

The following day Edith feels ‘a bit better, but not much’. The physiological stress of the miscarriage on her frame and the loss of blood leave her drained and prostrate all night. The risk of infection is high, but she remains unaffected. She is a strongly constituted woman who is only rarely sick. During the last two and a half months she has put on weight, which she attributes to her unhappiness. It is her sound health which pulls her through, though from now on she will be more often ailing; and a doctor is eventually going to warn her against pernicious anaemia. Edith spends most of Saturday in bed. Percy fusses and wants to call a doctor. He reminds her of their tickets for the gala dinner at the Hotel Cecil in the Strand tonight. Painfully his wife rises, and dresses to go out. The thought of the doctor coming and telling her in Percy’s presence that she has lost a baby is unbearable. In any case, she claims to be afraid that she would not be capable of withholding the truth, because ‘someone else not you would have taken both the blame & pride for the thing they did not do’. She now admits to being ‘a teeny bit disappointed’.

The evening of Saturday poses a number of questions. The most important one is whether twenty-four hours after a miscarriage, Edith Thompson could have ‘really enjoyed myself, meeting heaps of people I knew & hadn’t seen – some for 2 years’? The evening to which she alludes includes dinner and variety. The ‘artistes’ are a popular husband and wife team, ‘Jack & Evelyn’, whose comedy act is labelled ‘Mixed Pickles’ and is reputedly full of local and topical allusions (They are friends of Mr Carlton’s). Tonight they improvise on the well-known music-hall hit ‘Three Little Words’, a performance which Edith professes to have loved.

The event was the annual dinner of the FURNITURE AND ALLIED TRADES’ MUSICAL SOCIETY.

The Stage of 26 January 1922 describes it thus:

‘The members of this society assembled in force at the Hotel Cecil on Saturday evening, the occasion of their seventh annual dinner. During the repast there was lively music by a quartet of lady musicians, under the direction of Mrs Fred Wildon, and later much pleasure resulted from the attractive concert, arranged by R. C. Botwright. Fred Wildon made everyone laugh heartily with his irresponsible fooling and Will Deller’s items were happy in their effect. Evelyn Clifford and John Humphreys found admirers in plenty for their blend of humour and harmony; and Evelyn Hardy played cornet solos in fine style. Others to interest and delight the audience were Norman Williams, John Norris, W. Allesbrooke Hinda, and Fred Froud, the last-named providing the accompaniments.’

Whether or not Edith really did enjoy herself, Freddy certainly appears to have believed what she told him. As he was implicated in the abortion (the letters do not say exactly how), he would be even more furious with her for going out this evening and will point out how dangerous it was in her condition to act this way.

On Sunday London is invaded by a very thick fog which by noon has shrouded whole parts of the city in complete darkness. The streaky grey pea-souper crawls in under doors and through the windowpanes. The metropolis is paralysed. At 8.30 p.m. Percy retires to bed. Edith stays up, seated in her armchair in front of the fire, thinking of Bywaters and of their uncertain future. At 10.30 p.m. she turns in, calling the evening ‘an opportunity missed’ on the path of their ‘glorious adventure’. From this reference to J. Stuart Blackton’s remarkable colour film, it appears that she saw The Glorious Adventure with Bywaters shortly before he left, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In this film, which was the first experimental picture to use colour, the action takes place during the Great Fire of London. Lady Diana Cooper, once tipped to become Princess of Wales, stars as a distressed maiden who, after many romantic tribulations, is reunited with her lover. Before the year is out Lady Diana will have been interviewed, along with an illustrious contemporary, Dame Nellie ‘Peach’ Melba, about the young woman from Ilford lying in Holloway Prison.

On Monday Edith is back at Carlton & Prior. She replies at once to a note and letter from Freddy and relates to him the events of the weekend. At 5 p.m. she travels to East Ham Station where, so Freddy’s note tells her, a parcel is waiting for her. It contains a present of books and a comb to wear in her hair. It is too early in the evening to head back to Ilford immediately, and she cannot very well drop in on her parents carrying a present from Bywaters. If she arrives early, Thompson will guess that she is not working as late as she has claimed – in order to justify her catching the 6.45 p.m. from Fenchurch Street. As fate will have it though, Edith narrowly misses Mrs Bristow, her parents’ next door neighbour at No., 229 and nearly bumps into Cossy, another neighbour, as she hurries up East Ham High Street to the Broadway.

On Wednesday 25 January Edith writes to Freddy thanking him for his telegram and telling him of the bitter cold weather in London. How she wishes he were here to hold her in the train! She asks for a slide for the back of her hair to match her new comb and enquires about his progress with R. W. Chambers’s The Common Law. Could he remember to send her a long discussion of the book, and particularly of the heroine’s giving in? Bywaters had once said to Edith, on the same subject, ‘But you would if I asked & wanted you to.’ Between this sentence and the next paragraph Edith is rung by Avis to tell her that Mrs Graydon

was taken ill last night with ‘flu & temperature 105 – the doctor is afraid of pneumonia – so I’m just going down to Manor Park. It is 12.30 now.

The next few evening she spends looking after her mother. She remembers to send Bywaters the customary telegram for their ‘birthday’ on 27 January, and then prepares for a weekend of nursing the usually indomitable Mrs Graydon.

By chance a brief eye-witness account of life on board the Morea came to light in 2023. It is dated 25 January 1922, the day Edith wrote to Freddy. It is a postcard featuring the Morea and refers to the rough seas encountered by her in the English Channel and in the Bay of Biscay before docking in ‘Gib’ (Gibraltar). It is no more than a curio but the addressee Enid’s ‘uncle Willie’ would have got to know the Morea’s bluff, fair-haired ship’s laundry steward on her voyage to India. To the fearless Freddy the idea of mentioning storms at sea in a letter home to his sweetheart probably never even occurred.

In the week starting Monday 6 February Percy is off work. He has a bad cold, but nevertheless collects his wife at Carlton & Prior at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. She has no idea that is coming for her and is out of the showroom when he enters and meets Miss Prior. As he apologises for being early, she assures him that he is not, since Carlton & Prior have ‘not worked after 5 since last year’. It has been barely a fortnight since Edith’s elaborate stratagems to elude both her parents and Thompson on her return from East Ham Station. Percy enters her office and notices the bronze ‘hear-no-evil’ monkey on her desk. He does not comment on it but merely remarks to his wife that according to Miss Prior, she has not been working after 5 p.m. She dismisses this as best she can, perhaps shrugging it off with a weary and obvious-sounding explanation.

At night Edith suggests to her husband that he move into the little room so that she will not be infected. ‘No, you never catch my colds, I always catch yours’, is his rather peeved reply. So they spend the night together, he coughing, sneezing and retching, she enduring and cursing him. The night which follows, Wednesday 8 February, witnesses a further marital row ‘over that same old subject’. The last thing she desires at the moment is sex, whether with Percy or anyone else. The nightmare memory of 20 January is still too vividly imprinted on her mind, and her sexuality now seems dangerous and burdensome. Percy has had a full day at home to brood. He remembers the monkey and the work hours, and that on both counts she lied to him. Percy’s pressing her for sex, despite his poor health and depression, is not, one surmises, unconnected to his visit yesterday to Carlton & Prior. As soon as she refuses to surrender herself, he adduces Bywaters’s name: it is all his fault that she has altered, he claims. She turns on him with a furious protest that, if he ever blames Bywaters again ‘for any difference in her’, she will ‘leave the house that minute and this is not an idle threat’. But he is undeterred and asks for Freddy’s address. She scornfully gives it to him and he writes in his notebook. Then he enquires about the Christmas greetings he sent her. Edith snaps back that she kept it, to which he replies:

Why, you never do keep letters from people.
Edith: I kept it for bravado, I knew you’d miss it and know I had kept it and one of these days ask me for it.
Percy: Have you anything belonging to him – anything mind you?

She knows that the question refers to the monkey and brazenly replies ‘I have nothing whatever belonging to him.’ She recalls how much Bywaters detests lies. She had lied to him once and he had written ‘It was a lie, and Peidi I hate them’. Therefore in the letter that recounts this incident, she quickly reassures him that, when you think about it, what she told Percy was not really an untruth: the monkey after all belongs to both her and her lover. Even if it is a lie, she claims not to care: ‘I’d tell heaps and heaps to help you.’ Thompson continues his barrage of accusations, but she bites her lip and remains silent. Eventually the ill-fated couple go to sleep. At 2 a.m. Percy wakes, restless and suffering from the continued effects of the cold. His eyes look glassy and he needs water. He appeals to his wife for help, and she gets it for him, asking what the matter is. He tells her that an acquaintance of his in town gave him ‘a prescription for a draught for insomnia.’ He has taken it and it has made him sick. He indeed looks dreadful and his wife is worried. At first she suspects that he is trying to frighten her, as he has repeatedly used his hypochondria to exercise emotional pressure, and will do so again before long. At the same time his fit, she will claim, offers her an opportunity, corroborated by the husband himself, to voice grave concern about his health. This is what she impresses on Freddy: what could be more natural than Thompson dying of an overdose from a drug which he was known liberally to indulge in and which had once before made him ill – as various witnesses could testify. Unfortunately she cannot find the prescription for it, as the chemist has kept it. Such silly and transparent plots on paper make little impression on the young sailor who spends this night on the Morea, deep in the Arabian Sea halfway to Bombay.

The next day the Daily Sketch reports developments in a news item which first caught Edith’s attention in January when it appeared under the headline ‘Poisoned Curate’ and referred to the impending inquest on the Reverend Horace George Bolding, found dead on 4 January. The story of Horace and Ada Bolding is as unsettling in some respects as that of Edith and Percy Thompson. It also is a tale of adultery and death, of lodgers and despairing spouses. In this case the adulterers are the younger woman, Mrs Ada Bolding, and the older Dr Preston Wallis – Edith’s own former physician and neighbour in the Crescent. Wallis, who was a ship’s surgeon, had made good partly by marrying the elder daughter of a head doctor at Guy’s Hospital. Fifty years on Avis Graydon remembered her well, ‘a perfect lady, tall, near six foot’. Then, shortly after the outbreak of war, Wallis employed a Mrs Ada Bolding, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse. Her husband was a young and ambitious curate who wished to read Theology at Oxford. What exactly happened in the surgery and the house in 1914 remains a mystery. The fact is that Mrs Wallis moved out and away from a husband who no longer loved her. It is possible that she left because she suspected the other woman of carrying on a relationship with him. A heart-rending letter from Mrs Wallis to the doctor for Christmas 1914 makes no mention of this, but tells him of her hurt at spending the first Christmas in eighteen years without him and asks why he has not even written to her.

In 1916 Ada Bolding, who lived with her husband in Manor Park, moved into the doctor’s house. This happened at a time when Horace Bolding was up at Oxford where Wallis was now paying his fees. He and Mrs Bolding were now regularly seen driving through Shakespeare Crescent in the doctor’s car. She had almost certainly become his mistress. Before long, the arrival of a baby was announced, and Wallis sold his house to the two Boldings who also shopped at the same grocer’s. In 1921 Bolding, aged thirty-nine, was appointed curate of Lingfield Parish Church. Dr Wallis moved with them as a lodger. On the night of 4 January 1922 the Rev. Horace Bolding died of hyoscine poisoning. He was known locally as a ‘happy, jovial’ and ‘a regular sport’. The inquest returned an open verdict, but the most probable conclusion is the one advanced by Avis Graydon and clearly the one popularly held: ‘and whether he had seen things going on that shouldn’t have been going on and didn’t like it, I don’t know, but he took poison. He killed himself’. The night he died his wife and her little boy were up in London. Both she and Wallis were cleared of suspicion of murder. The full irony of Edith Thompson poring over this and forwarding the sensational newspaper cutting to Freddy would only emerge months later when the headlines of the same Daily Sketch for weeks on end were of ‘Thompson and Bywaters’.

In the evening of Thursday Thompson’s sister Maggie calls at 41 Kensington Gardens to see how Percy is recovering. Her brother treats her in lurid detail to an account of the previous night. The following day, Friday 10 February, Edith is lunching with Avis and tells her of Percy’s sudden illness in the early hours of Thursday morning. She tries hard – she claims in the letter written to Bywaters after lunch – to appear truly agitated, ‘as if it frightened & worried me as I thought perhaps it might be useful at some future time that I had told somebody’. In the same letter Edith hints how easy it would be to get rid of her husband: ‘How about cigarettes?’ – after all, Thompson had invalided himself out of military service by smoking. Or what of hyoscine poisoning? Might that not do the trick? These questions, silly as they may seem now, will sound ominous in a court of law. This night Edith has a dream:

… I received a letter by hand by Avis & the envelope was addressed in Harry Renton’s writing; only inside was a letter from you.
It wasn’t your writing darling; it was a large round hand just like a schoolboy’s. I read & read for a long time not recognising from whom it came until I came to the word Peidi & then I called out ‘Why it is from my own boy’. I don’t know if I did really, but I did in the dream.
Even now I cant determine in my own mind whether you sent the letters to him to send on to me, or whether he got hold of it somehow.

This anxiety dream articulates the extent to which Edith dreads the circuitous route their relationship is taking. It now actively involves her most intimate friends, Avis and Harry, in the primary tool of deceit: the clandestine correspondence.

Over the weekend Edith completes her reading of R. W. Chambers’s The Business of Life which she will discuss with Freddy once he has read it. She finds it ‘very like in detail [Chambers’s] The Common Law but in the one question it is exactly the opposite’. It also appeals to her because ‘it seemed to me more human in many ways’. The tawdry romance and marriage of the sullied buck James Deboro, landed aristocrat and New England fainéant, and the ravishingly lovely Jacqueline Nevers of the world of New York small commerce ends in a happy and married erotic encounter in bed. The flavour of it is gleaned from this short quotation of its last lines:

His eyes closed. She lay there, in her frail Chinese robe, curled up beside him in the moonlight, her splendid hair framing a face as pale as the flower that had fallen from her half-closed hand. And at first she thought he was asleep.
Then, in the moonlight, her eyes opened divinely, met his, lingered unafraid, and were slowly veiled again. Neither stirred until, at last, her arms stole up around his neck and her lips whispered his name as though it were a holy name, loved, honoured, and adored.

Here it seems is all the romance that Edith imagines she and Freddy could have if only they spent a few nights together. Instead, she has caught Thompson’s cold and her joints ache. Percy, contrite, offers to spoil her. On Sunday he serves her breakfast in bed. She finds this amusing and vaguely contemptible. It has been a bad week, and a feeling of ‘don’t care, can’t bother to fight’ has left her dispirited. Edith’s brother Bill is at anchor in Bombay at the same time as Freddy. The two boys, former team mates, now play football on opposite sides, the P & O’s crew against the White Star line. They talk and shower together, which makes Edith wonder and worry whether they ever talk of her, or whether things happen in Bombay and other ports that she ought to know about. Looking at Freddy’s picture she addresses it, ‘talking’ to him about her longings for a shared home with him. He would return then from a voyage, and she would throw herself into his arms; and they could embrace each other in total surrender ‘for ever’, which they cannot do in the public street or the crowded interior of a railway station.

In the meantime he has sent her a reassuring note to the effect that he has secured what is needed to solve their problems. She expresses delight at this: ‘all I kept thinking of was your success – and my ultimate success I hope’. For now she wishes she could sleep out the time till his return since she can do nothing here yet, unless he sends her drugs. Writing this on Monday 20 February, Edith also considers the prospects for their relationship, once they have committed the deed. What, she asks Freddy, is he going to think of her in a few years’ time when they are together:

Darlingest boy, this thing that I am going to do for both of us will it ever – at all, make any difference between us, darlint, do you understand what I mean. Will you ever think any less of me – not now, I know darlint – but later on – perhaps some years hence – do you think you will feel any different – because of this thing that I shall do.

If only she could make a ‘clean – fresh start’ with her lover, emancipated from lies and subterfuge! What is troubling her, the reason why she is hesitating, is not ‘fear of any consequence of the action’, but because he might despise her or take his love away from her. When one considers that the drug in question is quinine, and Bywaters will give it to her in the full knowledge that if administered, it cannot do any real harm, it becomes clear that the romance is drifting further and further from reality.

This week is the week in which a summons is issued by the Director of Public Prosecutions to Horatio Bottomley MP, on charges of embezzlement; and, on Saturday, when Edith is commuting into the City to work, Landru dies in a public street in Versailles on the guillotine scaffold. She has no time for such horrors. Although she is now toying with the idea of inflicting violent death and professes having considered its consequences, she does not ever associate her fantasies with the reality of it. Her thoughts this morning are of the mail, the boy who on this day leaves Bombay, and the uncomfortable suspense of waiting for her period which is overdue. Above all, tonight she will be seeing the music-hall troupe ‘The Co-Optimists’ at the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. She has ‘heard them raved about’ and is full of expectation.

The show is subtitled ‘A Midsummer Night’s Scream’. The star performers are Stanley Holloway (born in Edith’s Manor Park), the composers Melville Gideon and Laddie Cliff, David Burnaby and ‘everybody’s favourite’, Phyllis Monkman.

The evening’s entertainment is divided between songs and burlesques. The songs include Melville Gideon’s mock ballad of the tropics ‘Amapoo’, Gilbert Child’s ‘Roast Beef of old England’, Laddie Cliff’s negro-minstrelsy and dancing numbers, and songs like ‘The Success of Dance’, and a rendering of John Ireland’s ‘Sea Fever’. Stanley Holloway, ‘rollicking baritone’ and master of Cockney monologues – he was born in Manor Park – excels in ballads and parodies, notably of McNeile’s successful Wyndham play Bulldog Drummond. For popular entertainment the Co-Optimists are as good as any. But Edith is ‘awfully disappointed in them’ and does not relish their sunny outlook on life. She is not in any case feeling too good. A pulling sensation is invading her.

On Sunday 26 February she is prostrate in bed. Her period has come, and she seems back to normal. But the pains and bleeding, she surmises, are worse than they used to be before 20 January. She has retired to the little room and will spend the next couple of nights there: the ‘only effect I feel of anything is a languidly lazy sort of feeling – no energy – just pale & limp’. For good measure her cold returns. In spite of both afflictions she is determined to go into Carlton & Prior tomorrow, otherwise she’ll miss Freddy’s letters – and they would be bound to forward her mail to 41 Kensington Gardens.

Monday is another ‘birthday’ and Edith Thompson hurriedly writes a note to Bywaters to say how sorely tempted she was to buy herself a birthday present from him: ‘You know all & everything I wish you darlingest & myself …’ she starts, and then alludes to the birthday present she has in mind: ‘they looked so lovely everywhere you go you see them now …’ Her sole comfort, she professes, is in his letters. He expresses concern for her, saying that he ‘felt’ that she had been ill; and he again blames her for foolishly jeopardising her health by not staying put in bed. He remains unimpressed by her attending the gala dinner at the Cecil on 21 January. Moreover he wishes that she had acknowledged his cable of 24 January, while he in turn undertakes to remember to address all her queries in the future: ‘I must let you know of all those things that you ask me & I have forgotten’. He gloomily hints that he may be losing her love. She will hasten to reassure him on that.

Shrove Tuesday is mild and wet. Princess Mary’s wedding on this day is almost a public holiday – the Kensington Avenue schools have been closed. Not feeling well, Edith commutes home early. To keep her company she buys W. J. Locke’s The Red Planet, which she finds disappointing: ‘it is a war story and I’m not very keen’. Freddy has read it and recommended it to her, but under the mistaken impression that it was The Rough Road, another Great War yarn by Locke. As if things weren’t bad enough Mrs Graydon takes another turn for the worse, and Edith will spend Ash Wednesday and Thursday looking after her.

It may be the following evening, Friday 3 March, that she goes dancing in Shoreditch:

Twelve of us, mostly Stamford Hill people [Edith’s aunt and uncle, the Laxtons and, probably, friends of theirs] & Reg & Bess went to a private dance in Shoreditch Town Hall last week, he came too. Darlint I enjoyed it – do you know it hardly seems possible that I could to me & I’m sure it does not to you. I enjoyed it dancing with Reg. & Mr Philpot – they are both good dancers & now he wants us to make arrangements for 8 of us to go to the Nonstop March 16, 22.

On Saturday she receives the doctor’s bill for the call on 7 November at Carlton & Prior. The charge of 10 shillings and sixpence (52 ½p) rattles her, and she immediately considers the likely cost of 20 January which is bound to be much higher still. In the afternoon Edith calls in at Percy’s office in Bishopsgate. For the next three hours she pores over his books and sorts them out for him. She has been doing this for ten years.

At 5 p.m. the Thompsons meet up with the parents and Avis, and together they travel south to visit the Mannings for dinner and a whist drive. The Mannings are close friends and will share the Graydons’ joys and sorrows up to the outbreak of World War II. Their acquaintance dates back to the time when Mr Graydon taught Tom and Janie Manning and Janie’s sister Beatty to dance. When Avis Graydon was asked about them in 1973, she explained:

Oh now, they’re people, they advertised for someone to teach elderly people to dance. My father answered this advertisement. They lived at Brixton. He was, mmmm, had his own business, a bottle-maker, all bottles – sauce bottles, mint bottles, all that kind of thing mmmm, he used to blow glass, we went to his factory and saw him blowing glass, all this lovely coloured glass he used to make. My father answered this advertisement; and he got a letter back to say would he go to Tott … maybe to Tulse Hill, would he go for an interview? and these people were, well, they weren’t so old as all that, but I suppose they thought they were old to get married. Father taught Mrs Manning, Janie, and, now what was Mr Manning’s name, Tom, taught them to dance. Then their two sisters wanted to learn, Mr, now what was the, what was their name … he was a baker in Brixton in a very good way. He was very short, and she was over 6 foot. Taught them to dance. Then there was the younger sister, Mrs Davis, and her husband was the head waiter in the House of Commons. And we used to go there and had some very nice evenings, you see, and …  they had a room that ran right the way the length of the house, very old-fashioned house, three storey houses you know. And … they would get a lot of friends in, we would have a nice little social dance, should be …. now, I wrote to them, I wrote to Janie. No, Mr Manning died.

In the course of the evening Beatty asks Percy whether he and Edith can make the following Saturday for dinner at their place. Percy is happy to agree to the invitation. Back in the Crescent Edith mentions the subject of the proposed visit, and Thompson does not dissent. By Tuesday, however, he assures her that ‘he wasn’t going’; he will not, he now lectures her, let her make arrangements to go anywhere ‘without first consulting him, and obtaining his consent’. If she is angered by his contrary behaviour, she coldly controls herself and, the following morning, sends Beatty a politely apologetic card cancelling their Saturday dinner arrangement. The reason for Percy’s change of mind will emerge later.

On Tuesday 7 March Avis is due at the Thompsons’ for tea and dinner. She is early and the Lesters let her in. She joins them in their sitting room. Mr Lester is there and unwell. Premature senility has overtaken the invalid. While Avis and Mrs Lester are ‘toasting some Sally Luns in front of their fire’, he suddenly remarks:

I don’t know who the lady of the house is, but she is a very beautiful woman, and such a good woman to her husband.

Edith is immensely tickled by this and, naughtily, asks Bywaters whether she ought to feel ‘honoured or otherwise’.

The weather is filthy this evening, and on her way into work on Wednesday morning Edith encounters the elements at their most fearful, as gales of up to 108 miles an hour are pelting travellers and lashing into the train’s windows. All cross-Channel traffic is cancelled which worries her, for it means that the mail might be delayed. She is intrigued by the Daily Sketch cover on this day, showing Freda Kempton, the dancer found dead in her Paddington flat in mysterious circumstances. The police suspect cocaine poisoning and the use also of cyanide of potassium. She cuts out the relevant paragraphs to forward them to Bywaters, along with more detailed notes from Friday’s (10 March) edition of the Daily Sketch, headed ‘Dancing Girl’s Mystery Death, Story of Dope, Drugged Drink, Night Club & Chinese Café.’ Edith’s comment, in a 2300-word-long letter, written between Friday 10 March and Monday 13th 1922, is that the ‘Kempton cutting may be interesting if it is to be same method’. This particular letter, Exhibit 20 in court, characteristically veers from a day-to-day account of her London life to a series of dark hints about getting rid of her husband. These are in turn laced with a series of disconcerting references to the study of fictional characters in Hichens’s novel The Slave:

I didn’t know what to make of that girl – yes I think she is possible – perhaps and apart from being happy with her body – he was quite happy seeing her with those jewels. They were two similar natures – what pleased him – pleased her – not English at all, either of them.

After further disquisitions on the ‘rigmarole’ in the novel and complaining about the fact that Bywaters does not properly address her many questions, she reverts to the ‘business’ in hand: ‘what about Dr Wallis’s case … you said it was interesting but you didn’t discuss it with me’. She promises to get a furnished flat in the meantime, while they wait for an unfurnished one to turn up, then turns her attention to fiction once again: ‘Yes, I can imagine her real – but Aubrey – I could shake him – no go – no initiative of his own …’

Another news item in Wednesday’s paper is to bear on Edith’s fate in a curious if all too credible manner: a man called Ronald True is charged with the murder of Olive Young, a young prostitute. His trial and sentence, and the Home Secretary’s decision to reprieve, will be directly instrumental in the tightening of the law on ‘excusable’ homicide in the second half of 1922. For Mrs Thompson today the most frustrating piece of domestic news is her husband’s announcement that next week his firm is moving from Bishopsgate to new offices in Peek House at No. 20 Eastcheap. Percy will therefore start using Fenchurch Street instead of Liverpool Street. So much for her trysts with Freddy in Fenchurch Street, she notes caustically. She might, she hopes, nevertheless just snatch an hour with Freddy in Fenchurch Street on the Saturday of his return. This reminds her of his saying ‘Never run away, face things and argue and beat everybody’. She claims to be miffed by this, and he should know: when has she ever bolted? He’ll have to kiss all that hurt away! Doesn’t he know that she only lives for the day when they will be united forever, ‘or “one little hour” – our kind of hour, not the sing kind’. And in that ‘hour’ there will be enough time for her to soothe his anger by ruffling his hair ‘lots of times until you have to melt – and smile at me – then you’ll take me in both your arms and hold me so tight I can’t breathe, and kiss me all over until I have to say “Stop, stop at once”’.

The following morning, Friday 10 March, a note from him awaits her. He is due back early, a mere week from today. He asks whether he can meet her at Carlton & Prior after 5.30 p.m. or, if not, at Fenchurch Street. She replies that, depending on how busy they are, she cannot undertake to be at work after 5.30 p.m. If he wires that he can meet her, she would prefer Fenchurch. In the lunch hour she boards a 25 bus to Victoria Station to buy Toblerone to send with the tissue paper she bought for him. But her shop is out of stock, and she returns via Holborn Station, where she alights to settle the piano account in Southampton Row.

On her way back near the Holborn Restaurant she runs into Mr Derry, an ‘acquaintance’ from the White Horse pub opposite Ilford railway station. Derry, whom Edith characterises as ‘the little man’, knows her well enough to press her for lunch in the Holborn. She excuses herself at first, but then consents to going into the hotel’s buffet with him, where she consumes a Guinness with port in it, followed by two more ports and a pound of French almonds. Derry does not offer her chocolates – he knows ‘from previous experiences’ that Mrs Thompson doesn’t like chocolates. Whether this is said ironically or whether it alludes to a particular incident at the White Horse is immaterial. What is significant is that little Derry, Mel and others evidently feel perfectly at ease in courting the smart Edith Thompson. She is a girl full of game, and she talks little of her husband, who is in any case not the young man whom she is seeing, and seen with, in the City. Her lively company and many interests make for great conversation and generate an erotic charge to which the men keenly respond. She in turn enjoys their admiration and desire.

She arrives back at work feeling heady, as she has drunk on an empty stomach. At 3 p.m. she receives a call from her brother Bill to tell her that he is back from Bombay and that he looks forward to seeing her tonight in the Crescent. When she finally meets Bill, she anxiously expects him to communicate something about Freddy and Bombay – if only the result of the football match that they played. But Bill, whose face looks thin from the rigours of the voyage, never mentions a word about either, which makes her wonder again how much he knows and whether her lover and he had a disagreement.

On the same day, in Whitehall, an ambitious civil servant is promoted. His name is Sir John Anderson. He is appointed Permanent Undersecretary of State for the Home Department to replace Sir Edward Troup, himself a colleague of the former legal adviser to the Home Office, Sir Ernley Blackwell. Troup and particularly Blackwell brought Casement to the scaffold, and Blackwell’s and Anderson’s paths will eventually cross those of Thompson and Bywaters.

On Saturday the Thompsons were meant to have dinner with Beatty Davies, had Percy not changed his mind and refused to go. With the whole afternoon ahead of her and with the weather at its most clement for weeks, Edith heads for Ilford

and had a general clean up everywhere. The sun was shining in the windows beautifully – it was a typically English spring day and I did so want to be in the park with you darlint.

Thompson finally returns home at 5.30 p.m. Edith is no fool, but she cannot be bothered even to wish to monitor his movements. He almost certainly is ‘seeing’ another lady, about whom Edith and Avis will later tease him.
On Sunday the Thompsons dine with Bessie and Reg, and on Monday Edith completes her long letter to Bywaters, urging him once again to bring her whatever is required:

I’d like to see you at the top – feel that I’d helped you there – perhaps darlint in my heart right deep down I don’t want to stop in a hat shop always – if things are different.

On Tuesday she is again writing, this time an apologetic note for claiming on Monday to have sent two parcels, when really she only sent one: ‘Je suis faché[e] darlint’, she says and ‘consumed with impatience’. Only two more full days to go, and then he will be holding her in his arms. Furthermore the planned non-stop for Thursday is cancelled, because Reggie has gone to Derbyshire and Avis’s partner is sick with ‘flu. Edith is pleased with this development, because she would hate to be worn out on Friday when seeing Freddy.

On the cover of her paper today is a picture of the widow of the former London County Council chairman Sir Edward White. Alice, Lady White, has been murdered in the Spencer Hotel in Portman Street. The killer has been apprehended almost immediately. He is a young dim-witted laundry boy called Henry Jacoby. By next Monday evening he will be charged, and on Tuesday will appear at Marylebone police court. Jacoby’s paths and Edith Thompson’s do not intersect directly, but the same spider’s web will close around them and the same officials will participate in its weaving.

It is a cold and cloudy Friday when Edith and Freddy embrace each other in Fenchurch Street in the evening of 17 March. He tells her of her present which he cannot give her now, because she is returning to Ilford. He will send the pearls and Oriental cloth to Carlton & Prior tomorrow and with it the quinine, at that time readily available and commonly used by sailors as a febrifuge. Edith has two brothers in the merchant navy and several acquaintances who regularly go east to India and China. She knows as well as Freddy that it is virtually impossible to kill anyone with an overdose of quinine, quite apart from the fact that the tonic cannot easily be administered. Out of curiosity she will taste the quinine shortly after Bywaters’s departure to render a credible account of its taste in tea.

On the first Friday home, young Bywaters accompanies Edith to Ilford. The lovers meet again on Saturday for lunch. Edith is keen for Freddy to get on with Chambers’s The Business of Life which they will be discussing in lengthy epistles at the end of April and early in May. On this night the Thompsons, the Graydons and Avis are guests at Mrs Birnage’s party, and on Sunday there is still more socialising, when the Thompsons are invited to dinner in Stamford Hill. As Freddy is home for a fortnight only, the lovers meet regularly at lunchtime, for tea at Fuller’s and on her way home – although they have to be more circumspect now that her husband is also using Fenchurch Street. On either Monday or Tuesday Edith receives her big present, which includes a box of Turkish Delight. It is delicious. She selects a piece to keep and send to him in a fortnight’s time, specially ‘tendered’ by giving it ‘fresh water with salt in every morning’. In her note thanking him, she feels down and out, like ‘a desert’, dried up by her life with Percy. Only her books, she feels, keep her afloat

aren’t books a consolation and solace? We ourselves die and live in the books we read …

Time passes, and while Freddy visits the Crescent a couple of times, it is not till the Monday of the second week of his leave that the lovers get together for an extended tryst. It happens to be a 27th and therefore a ‘birthday’. Edith takes the afternoon off and probably goes shopping with Freddy. On Tuesday she forwards a number of books that she feels are ‘worth reading’ to Bywaters. It is on this day that Freddy is asked by Edith to hand over, for the second time, the Australian girl’s letters. She wishes to keep them till after his return from Australia – which is where the Morea’s summer schedule is to take her. Edith has not forgotten the reference to the other woman in January.

While she is writing him the note about her ‘doubt about Australia’, an organ passes outside Carlton & Prior, playing ‘Margie’, one of their favourite songs.

'Margie' (1921), sung by Eddie Cantor

For the moment Bywaters obliges and surrenders the correspondence, thinking her petty and jealous. Edith’s reply to this charge is to assert that the releasing of the letters into her custody is a love test; and since Freddy passed so graciously, she loves him ‘more and more every time I thought about it’. The letters, she hastens to assure him, are safe with her. She seals up the envelope, puts them away and claims not to have looked at them

except a small slip of paper I found in one of the small pockets. I did read that – and then put it with the others – did you know it was there darlint – it was about a chase – a paperchase I think and a request not to be wakened early.

Whatever the hint she is giving Bywaters here refers to – and there is a possible sexual innuendo in the ‘paperchase’ and the desire not to be wakened early – the main point is that the letters must have been fairly restrained and struck Edith Thompson as such. Strange as it may seem in retrospect, these letters were not produced in court, nor have they surfaced since. On Wednesday, before leaving Edith in Ilford that night, Bywaters slips her a hurt letter about her ‘doubt’. She slides it into her underwear and will sleep on it, as no opportunity avails itself for her to read it. Just before kissing her goodbye, Freddy asks her not to think of him. That way their parting will be easier for her. She pretends to try, but expresses the hope that he will do likewise!

Thursday 30 March: This is Freddy’s last day of shore leave. Edith rises at 5.45 a.m. to read his letter. Outside it is wet and very cold. Hail and sleet showers are forecast. Undaunted, Edith decides on her dress for tonight. While Percy is still sleeping upstairs, his wife sorts out her pearls, earrings, bracelets, undergarments and perfumes, mentally rehearsing her bit about the theatre; for a visit to the theatre is her excuse for being out this evening. The night will be exciting and she is thrilled at the thought of giving Freddy a big present, a gold watch. That the theatre subterfuge involves somebody else is virtually certain. A third party is required as an alibi, and Thompson’s oblique reference to Reg and Bessie on Saturday 1 April points to the likely identity of this party. It is conceivable that Edith and Bywaters stay at Bessie’s; Edith having told Percy that she is accompanying her girlfriend to the theatre because Reg is away. She can then have acquired a programme from Bessie to attest her veracity. Reg is away in Derbyshire for the entire week and is not due back till after Sunday.

While she prepares to leave for home, Bywaters parts from his family in Upper Norwood under a cloud. There have been continual disagreements during his shore leave between Freddy and his mother. Their topic of rowing is now always Mrs Thompson. A brief meeting arranged between the two women by Edith, to discuss a hat which she sent to Mrs Bywaters and which the latter found unsuitable, left them with a profound dislike for each other; Mrs Bywaters now decidedly resents the stuck-up woman from Manor Park for her assumed nice manners and her intentions on her son. The row between son and mother smoulders on. Before long it will explode and create a temporary rift in the family. No reference is made to this subject at lunch as the lovers consider their plans for the evening. It is nearly April, yet outside it feels like the depth of winter, as snowflakes repeatedly whirl about. In the afternoon, while Edith is at work, Bywaters encounters his sister. He totally ignores her, since earlier she had sided with his mother. It is this which strikes the spark needed to ignite the stored resentments. Edith only learns of this incident after his departure.

What exactly happens and where the lovers go after 5.15 p.m. remains speculation. Two facts can be established, however, which in themselves articulate the story as much as is required. One, the lovers have drinks somewhere. Two, they share a passionate sexual encounter. This is how Edith Thompson describes what happened:

Darlint you’re not and never will be satisfied with half and I don’t ever want to give half – all every ounce of me that lives to you … you say you’re sorry for some things that happened. Yes! I suppose I am in a way but darlint, I feel I don’t do enough. I want to show you how large my love is and when it is something you want and you do want it just at that moment don’t you – I want to give it to you – I want to stifle all my own feelings for you.
Darlingest boy you said to me ‘Say no, Peidi, say NO’ on Thursday didn’t you – but at that very moment you didn’t wish me to say ‘No’ did you? You felt you wanted all me in exchange for all you. I knew this – felt this – and wouldn’t say ‘No’ for that very reason.
Half an hour afterwards or perhaps ten minutes afterwards you’d really have wanted me to say ‘No’ but not at that especial moment.
Darlint, I feel that I never want to withhold anything from you – if you really want it and one of these days you are going to teach me to give all and everything quite voluntarily aren’t you? Please darlint.

This encounter clearly takes place indoors in view particularly of the Arctic conditions prevailing on the day. Freddy’s begging her to stop the consummation from running its course may reflect his fear of launching another pregnancy. It also indicates the extent to which she is an active sexual partner, not quite as passive as the ‘little girl’ pose – which she occasionally likes to strike – would lead one to believe. Her inability to achieve a climax, ‘to give all and everything voluntarily’, worries him and she rushes to assure him that with his guidance she will reach orgasm. The lovers probably wait for Bessie to return before setting out on the walk back to 41 Kensington Gardens, which may account for the lateness of the hour, when they are wandering through the streets of Ilford. It is shortly before midnight when the idea of checking into a hotel appears to have occurred to them. They do not seriously consider it though, and content themselves with noting that there is nowhere in Ilford for quick overnight encounters. If there had been, Edith reflects:

before we had arrived at the Hotel, I should have thought about things and so would you and I can hear you say just when we reach the door ‘Peidi, you’re going home’ pour moi – just this once darlint & I should have gone.

In this striking bow in the direction of respectability, Edith acknowledges the limits imposed upon her by sex, class and character.

Freddy leaves her at the corner of Kensington Avenue Gardens. As he strolls back he carries strapped to his wrist the splendid new watch that she has given him as a present, to add to the three books that she had earlier bought him as reading matter: Hichens’s Felix, and the novels The Shulamite and The Woman Deborah by Claude and Alice Askew.

It is a quarter past midnight when Edith Thompson lets herself into her house. Arriving upstairs she finds Percy out. In fact, unlike her, Percy  was at a play with his shorthand typist ‘assistant’ in his office at O J Parker’s, Florence Alice Tucknott.

The play is The Bat at the St James’s Theatre, King Street, featuring Nora Swinburne and Claude Rains. In evidence later Miss Tucknott recalled that ‘after the play was over about 11.30 pm he saw me on a bus at the corner of Regent Street, where he left me’.

Edith is getting into bed when she hears a car draw up outside. Minutes later Percy enters the bedroom, ‘looking … with that injured air of mystery in his face’. He bends down to kiss her and she withdraws, but not quickly enough for him to miss the smell of alcohol wafting on her breath: ‘Phew – drink’, he notes laconically and with disgust. While he is undressing to join her in bed, he tells her that he took the 11.55 from Liverpool Street and then a taxi from the station. Percy is holding a theatre programme but, to his wife’s surprise, neither tells her what he has been to see, nor does he enquire what she saw or how the evening went. All he does is voice mild surprise at her presence in the house, when he didn’t meet her on the train. Edith is disconcerted, the more so since she knows that there is no 11.55 p.m. train from Liverpool Street to Ilford. Percy must have been on the 11.30 p.m. He may therefore have noticed something if indeed he has spent the last half hour walking the streets between the station and Kensington Gardens. Edith foolishly imputes to Percy a stupidity he lacks. Her belief that Thompson failed to notice that she had theatre tickets on Bywaters’s last night on shore in January and again tonight is mistaken. Percy knows only too well, as she is to find out on Saturday. Now, at 1 a.m. on Friday even Percy cannot bear the thought of another row.

Meanwhile Bywaters is walking up Gipsy Hill in Norwood. His mother is waiting up for him. After all her son is due to sail to Bombay tomorrow; and she will not stand by while he grossly insults his sister by ignoring her. This is so unlike him that it must be attributable to the pernicious influence of that older woman. Within seconds of his arrival voices are raised, and then a fully-fledged row flares up in the tiny house in Westow Street.

Freddy’s kid brother and younger sister Florrie are of course on the premises and overhear every word. Florrie, who is eighteen, fully realises what the fight downstairs is all about. She takes offence at Fred’s bullying and his demanding that the mother retract her abuse of Edith Thompson. When Mrs Bywaters furiously reminds him of his duties to his sisters, he snaps back: ‘My sisters! They only want me for what they can get out of me’. This hits home. Florence Bywaters recalls angrily later in writing to him that all he has ever brought her is ‘some powder’, which he will be welcome to retrieve. He owes her 3 shillings and sixpence for the laundry anyway, collars included. As it is Florrie who takes her brother’s dirty linen to the local laundry every Monday, she doubly resents the charge that she is sponging off him.

Eventually Freddy retires to bed in his room at the back of the house. His mother, determined to have her way, sits down and writes him a letter which she will pass to him later in the morning. He will reply to it in kind.

Early on Friday morning, while Edith is commuting into the City, Freddy heads for Tilbury. As soon as he gets there he cables her a telegram: ‘G.M.M.C. always stop – don’t worry.’ She knows he is due to set sail for Tilbury at about 2 p.m. and begins to wonder what he feels like: is he ‘hopeful & not too downhearted’, and what exactly does it mean to him when the ship begins to move and he realises that ‘you’ll not [b] on England or anybody connected with you & England for two whole months.’ These are her thoughts, as she sits brooding in Aldersgate in the early afternoon. Outside it is snowing again.

After work Edith heads for Liverpool Street, where she has tea in the buffet and reads the paper. It is 8.15 p.m. when she finally arrives in the Crescent on her weekly visit. The place is buoyant. Almost as soon as Edith is inside, her mother offers her a cigarette. The following dialogue then takes place:

Edith: Where did you get these? They look posh.
Mother: Never mind, I had them given me.
Edith: Well I don’t suppose you bought them – where did you get them?
Mother: Fred Bywaters gave them to me.
Edith: Has he been down here?
Dad: Yes, he’s been 3 or 4 times.
Edith: O, I [am] sorry I missed him. Next time he comes remember me to him & say if he lets me know when he’s coming to 231 I’ll come too.
Dad: He’s sailed now, went out today. By the way, have you had a row with him?
Edith: Have I, no, the last time we met we were pals.
Dad: Has Percy had a row with him?
Edith: Yes – he did.
Dad: And is it over yet? I thought it was when Percy came back to say goodbye just before Xmas.
Edith: No, it’s not over and not likely to be – but still I’m sorry. I didn’t see Freddy. I should like to have done very much.
Dad: Yes, I’[m] sure you would & I’m sure he would like to see you.
Mother: What do you think of the fags?
Edith: Not much, they are scented & I don’t care for such posh ones.

At this Mrs Graydon professes to be quite indignant and says, ‘If they’d been given to you you’d like them,’ to which her daughter, smiling, replies, ‘Would I?’ It is not long after this that Percy enters. Mrs Graydon offers him a cigarette. He look at it and says ‘Ambre! Oh they are doped cigarettes’ –

Mother: What do you mean by doped?
Percy: The tobacco is grown on opium fields.

Listening to this, Edith feels herself chuckling deep inside her and wishes Freddy were there to share the ‘joke’ with her. The thought of poor Mrs Graydon unwittingly smoking doped cigarettes may not be an egregiously funny prank, but it is entirely in keeping with the boy’s sense of humour. Freddy’s guilelessness is evident in Mrs Graydon’s innocent remark to Avis that ‘by the way he [Fred] spoke … he must have seen Edie’. She is only now puzzled by this since Edith has let it be known that she would have loved to see Freddy. No more is said about it, and the Thompsons eventually set off home through a cold winter night. The snow still shrouds the streets in white, and further showers are expected during the night and for tomorrow, the day before the Oxford and Cambridge boat race.

On Saturday 1 April 1922, Bywaters is writing an angry letter to his mother:

I am writing to you though at the cost of my dignity, to remind you of the foul, unjust and spiteful allegations you made against one, whom you do not know.

The letter continues in this outraged vein (‘I ask you, I tell you, and warn you …’) , but mellows towards the end:

Mum, do please try and realise that I am not Frankie [Bywaters’s little brother].
If you do want to answer Mum, please think about what you say or do.

Your ever affectionate Son
F.E.F.

Edith Thompson’s comment on reading these last two paragraphs in a copy of the letter is that ‘this is more like the boy I know – not like the shell’. His mother receives the letter when allegedly she is already suffering a ‘nervous breakdown together with blood-poisoning’. The contents and tone of her son’s epistle do little to raise her spirits. Her son’s folly, in turning against her for the sake of that woman deeply enmeshed in a marital crisis, pains her deeply; naturally her love of him is not separated from jealousy of Mrs Thompson.

On Saturday afternoon Edith and Avis go on a shopping spree in Ilford. Freddy is foremost in Avis’s mind and dominates the sisters’ conversation. Edith notes that Avis seems to be quite friendly with Freddy whom she has seen almost every morning at the station. Wouldn’t it be much cheaper in fares, Avis wonders, is he were again to stay with them in East Ham? Then they would see more of him, and that would be nice. But perhaps money is no problem for him: he is wearing – she tells Edith – a diamond ring on his engagement finger in spite of the fact that ships’ writers do not ‘make more than £5 per trip’. Avis is wrong on this – Bywaters makes nearly that much in a week.

In reply to Edith’s disingenuous question as to whether Bywaters is engaged, her sister replies: ‘Probably. He was always knocking about with some girl or other before he knew me, and now he doesn’t see me and he probably does the same’. A somewhat chastened Edith is further humiliated when she leans that her sister and her lover have met up for a drink at Avis’s prompting; she can see nothing wrong in going round to Freddy’s, presumably at the P & O offices, for a drink since they are ‘pals … if nothing else’. During their shopping in a grey and snowbound Ilford on a spring afternoon, Avis continues talking of Freddy, confiding in her sister just how much she feels for the young sailor and that, perhaps, if he is allowed to sow his wild oats, he might eventually return to her. Her intuition is not far wrong.

The sisters return to No. 41 for tea and Avis innocently remarks that ‘the last time I came Bess & Reg were here’. Percy at once makes some veiled reference to Bessie which puts Edith on her guard. After her sister’s early departure at 7.30 p.m., to ‘keep an appointment’, she asks her husband to explain further his remarks about Reg and Bessie:

A remark you passed at tea-time about Bess, what do you mean by it I want to know.
Percy: You want to know do you – well you shant, you can just imagine how much I know & how much I don’t & I hope you’ll feel uncomfortable about it.

This remark immediately triggers a huge row between the Thompsons. Edith loses her temper and lets Percy have a mouthful, regretting it as soon as it is out. Her final outburst is ‘Go to Hell!’ Thompson retaliates by calling her the ‘vilest tempered girl living’ and adds with pointed sarcasm: ‘you used not to be, but you’re under a very good tutor now, it seems’. This clinches it, and she rushes upstairs. She retires to bed early, hating the man downstairs and angry with herself for giving way. Why was she foolish enough to enquire after Reg and Bess when Percy must have been bluffing? He clearly sensed that something was wrong on Thursday and that the other couple were vaguely connected with it. But does he really know any more than that? Edith’s cold comfort today is that Cambridge has won the race and earned her 5 shillings. Most men, including Freddy, support Oxford, she surmises, but ‘I’m Cambridge’.

The Thompsons’ Sunday is a dreary affair, distinguished solely by ‘banging doors & sour silent faces’ which, Edith fears, will turn her prematurely grey. Their visit that evening for dinner in the Crescent fails to reconcile them to each other. During their discussion of the rates in Ilford, Thompson insists that he will not pay up. Avis suggests that ‘If you don’t pay they’ll take you to prison’, to which he replies ‘No they won’t, I’ll see to that.’

Avis: Well, they’ll take your wife.
Percy: A good thing too.

His wife certainly hears it and so do the Graydons. Nevertheless they have no intimation of how bad things are between their daughter and son-in-law.

On Monday, while Edith Thompson pores over a letter from Bywaters, a solicitor and retired Army major, Herbert Rowse Armstrong of Hay-on-Wye, goes on trial in Hereford for suspected arsenic poisoning. The defence is spearheaded by the renowned Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett. The presiding judge is a justice called Darling, affectionately known as the ‘wit of the bench’ for his recurrent remarks in court, distastefully intended to amuse his compeers in the judiciary. Mr Justice Darling will surface again in this narrative on the occasion of one of his ‘jokes’.

Tuesday 4 April: It is snowing ‘in thick lumps’, and London is muffled by a mantle of snow. At Carlton & Prior trade is virtually at a standstill as the streets become inaccessible to vehicles and Aldersgate is almost deserted. Edith wishes Browning could now be in this cold-locked England, to witness what today’s April is really like:

What poet was it who wrote ‘Oh to be in England now Spring is here?’ I wish he were alive & feeling miserable as I, on this nice English Spring Day.

Just before continuing her writing to Freddy again, Edith attends to a lady customer whom she has not met in five years. In this period the customer has married, had two children, and suffered the death of one child and her husband. Edith Graydon on the other hand, according to this lady, is not looking any older and is certainly unchanged. If the lady were to guess that the elegant Miss Graydon actually envies her her dead husband, she might be more cautious about complimenting her on her looks. We may safely assume that at Carlton & Prior Miss Graydon never lets on about her loathing of Percy.

The following day she is feeling poorly and arrives for work at 11 a.m. Several consecutive fainting fits leave her momentarily incapacitated, and she professes to Bywaters that she is worried about a new pregnancy, started within the past three weeks. After telling him this news, she rushes to the GPO to post her letter. On the way back, she meets Harry Renton. They decide to lunch together at the Manchester. Edith can only spare one hour at the most, as she did not get in this morning till late. She always enjoys the gentle Harry’s company, and the only interference today with her pleasure is that ‘a wretched man sat near me who absolutely reeked of scent’. The smell is ‘beastly’, and repels her particularly because the user is male rather than female. Their conversation concerns Harry’s flat in Moscow Court; Harry has been advised to move out of the metropolis, else his shoulder wound might bring on consumption. Does she know of anyone who might want to buy it? he asks Edith. What a perfect lovers’ nest it would be, she remarks to herself.

At dinner this evening the Thompsons are entertaining Avis. She leaves for home at 11.30 p.m. and Percy offers to walk her to the tram. Edith wants to accompany them, but Thompson emphatically forbids it. He will try and quiz Avis about Bessie and Edith, and on whether or not they went out to the theatre together. Edith suspects that Thompson will enquire about Freddy and whether Avis saw him. Whatever her sister replies, she will keep silent to Edith about Percy’s queries, and Edith will not dare ask.

Thursday reminds Edith of Freddy’s last day of shore leave, exactly a week ago. The difference between the experience of the two days throws into stark relief her present isolation and misery. At Carlton & Prior during the day she can cope and has Lily to confide in. But at night the depression worsens and is compounded by starting a fever, with her teeth aching and her head and neck stiffening. Inwardly she cries, as all night she tries her utmost to hold on to the thought of Freddy. But like an insubstantial vision he continuously evades her and gradually recedes from her altogether. Her tears, real or imaginary, plead with him, but to no avail. It is 5 a.m. on Friday when she feels herself drifting into sleep and faintly hears the clock strike the hour. At the same time over at 66 Albion Grove in Barnsbury, Lily Vellender also experiences the visitations of a nightmare. Her earlier conversation with Edith clearly left an impression on her. She guesses that her friend is struggling with moral chaos. The end can only be disastrous. In Lily’s dream the Birnages come to Carlton & Prior to warn Miss Graydon that her husband is going to murder her, as he found out that she spent a night away from home with ‘a fair man’. This suggest that Lily knows that her friend Edith and the attractive Fred went out and made love a week ago. She will relate her dream to Edith, not without apprehension.

On Friday Edith is badly wound up from a restless night. Her feeling of exhaustion is aggravated by a chance meeting with Freddy’s sister, who ignores her but not before giving her a contemptuous glare. It makes Edith feel that ‘the whole world was up against me and it wasn’t really much good living’. The only thing for it is to put it all on paper in a letter. Accordingly, on Saturday, she launches into a mammoth 3000-word letter which she completes on Monday. Then she returns to Ilford to prepare dinner for her father and Percy. It is Palm Sunday weekend. The two men have agreed to cut some glass for the frames of Percy’s glasshouse. While they are engaged in this, Percy runs a sliver into a finger. Mr Graydon promptly removes the splinter and the matter ends there. It is not so much as mentioned when later, in the afternoon, Avis and her mother join the rest of the family at 41 Kensington Gardens for tea. For Edith this is a busy afternoon. Little can she have guessed that the glass splinter – of which she probably knows nothing – will assume the importance of a sinister landmark in the imagination of her brother-in-law. The real coda to the splinter incident is that in the middle of the following week Percy complains to Mrs Graydon about his finger being sore from the sliver. Mrs Graydon prepares a bowl of hot boracic water and invites him to steep the finger in it. Shortly after, the remainder of the glass splinter, a tiny particle, appears. Eight months later Richard Halliday Thompson will publicly interpret this entirely innocuous incident as evidence of a cumulative plot to administer poison and broken glass. In his version, it will be Mrs Thompson, Percy’s invalid mother, who allegedly treated the infected finger:

He came several times to his mother complaining of the pain, for which he could get no relief.
My mother poultice it, and it only healed when a long, thin sliver of glass worked out.

It is still unsettlingly cold when Edith commutes into work on the Monday of Easter week. On the platform in Ilford she meets Molly, Freddy’s former flame; and she observes with a certain relish that Molly’s ‘face and lips are rouged terribly and thick black lines [are] pencilled under her eyes – and her face is fearfully thin fallen in under the cheekbones’. Premature ageing from working in the West End will be the allotted fate for some, Edith suggests, because they are not able to cope with the stress. Molly’s crestfallen looks are not Edith Thompson’s only reason for feeling good today. When she arrives at Carlton & Prior she finds a long letter from Freddy waiting for her. This letter, his first communication since the Gibraltar telegram of Tuesday 4 April, is accompanied by a copy of his letter to his mother already quoted, and by the letter which his mother originally sent him. Freddy’s letter replies primarily to Edith’s of last Tuesday, when she told him of her return from their Thursday night out, Avis’s visit and her subsequent comments on Bywaters, Reg and Bessie and the ‘doped’ cigarettes. He furthermore responds to the note she slipped him after they parted, and of course he also refers to their lovemaking on that last night of shore leave. He is ‘sorry’ for ‘some things that happened’, probably their sexual encounter. In his earlier letter he has already told her about the row with his mother and sister. Now he does not touch on this topic. Instead he compliments her on the watch which is keeping good time and tells her that he plans to wear it always. She eagerly replies that he might keep it on in his sleep, just as she now wears something of his, day and night: can he guess what it is? He enquires further whether she marked the passage on photos in Felix because of the two pictures of her which he now owns. As it happens, he likes her photos, although she professes to hate them, ‘especially that one that I look so fat in.’ She tells him that he may keep the other one, which he will – it is reproduced on the cover of this book. While Edith relishes Freddy’s letter, she probably blushes to the roots of her hair when she reads Mrs Bywaters’s note to Fred, telling him bluntly that ‘that woman’ simply is ‘no good’. How, Edith groans, dare Mrs Bywaters take it upon herself to judge her – she, Edith, would never presume to judge anyone. In spite of her anger and frustration Edith is shocked by the severity of Freddy’s reply: ‘I ask you, I tell you, and warn you, not to interfere in any manner or form, with me or my private affairs.’ In moments of self-doubt as now, she always reaches back to her respectable upbringing, which unreservedly forbids this tone of voice to a parent.

Before completing the letter and posting it, Edith adds a note starting, ‘Don’t keep this piece.’ It relates how she tried to poison Percy’s tea by putting quinine into it. He, she alleges, commented to his mother on the tea tasting bitter, ‘as if something had been put into it.’ He also is said to have told ‘his people’ that ‘he fought and fought with himself to keep consciousness’ and said: ‘I’ll never die, except naturally – I’m like a cat with nine lives.’ Too bad about the taste, Edith remarks; she’ll just have to resort to light bulbs again; ‘I’m going to try the glass again occasionally – when it is safe. I’ve got an electric light globe this time.’

That this piece of fantasy could ever be construed as part of a premeditated murder plot defies belief. Bywaters knew it was fiction and that she had herself tasted the quinine in the tea to be able to give an accurate account of Percy’s complaint. In court the jury were told that ‘the passage is full of crime’. Yes, as long as it is understood that ‘crime’ means ‘imaginary crime.’ It is never easy to separate fact and fiction in Edith Thompson’s extensive and intense correspondence, and though outside evidence is available to distinguish one from the other, the more intimately acquainted the reader becomes with the correspondence, the more complex its rash interweaving of fact and fiction is bound to appear. In most of our lives such a blurring is not uncommon. It is not always harmless. But it is seldom the matter of life and death into which it developed here.

When Bywaters was cross-examined on the tea tasting bitter to Thompson, the prosecution asked him: ‘To whom did it taste bitter?’ and he replied: ‘Mrs Thompson’. The unlikelihood of this being true when measured solely against the written evidence – which specifically uses ‘he’ – provided the prosecution with much needed ammunition to implicate the wife. That Freddy knew that she was lying to tie him to her more closely, and that she was a highly strung neurotic woman who wished to be transported out of Ilford suburbia to romance and abandon – such a truth could not easily be articulated in the public atmosphere of the Old Bailey. Above all, facing each other across the well of the court, the lovers bravely guarded their ultimate secret: that all along they knew each other’s weaknesses and loved in spite of them.

It is getting on for 7 p.m. when Edith finally leaves Carlton & Prior. The shop has been very busy all day as Easter is imminent, and continues in its hectic pre-holiday rhythm till 11 p.m. Thursday 13 April, when Carlton & Prior closes. In anticipation of the break Edith dashes off a quick letter to Freddy on Wednesday to tell him that the four days ahead would seem like four hours in his company, whereas Percy will make them into four years. If only Freddy could now hold her tightly, instead of her having only his picture to ‘live on’.

Easter 1922: The four days of Easter do not, as feared by Edith, turn into a prolonged nightmare. Instead the Thompsons and the Graydons enjoy the break to the utmost.

At 1 p.m. on Maundy Thursday Edith, Lily and several other friends from Carlton & Prior go to the Waldorf for lunch. They stay for the thé dansant, even though Edith only manages a single foxtrot, she claims, because her heart is not in it. They leave to meet up with Avis at 6.30 p.m. for a late shopping raid in the West End. After buying Avis ‘a costume’, the women split up and the two sisters return home to Ilford, where Avis spends the night.

Good Friday 1922, 9.30 a.m., 41 Kensington Garden: spring cleaning gets under way. This good ‘old fashioned English housewife’s occupation’, as Edith Thompson calls it, takes up all of her day. Her husband and her lodgers are not much in evidence as she sweeps through the premises with doors and windows wide open. Then, shortly before 6 p.m., she goes to wash and dress before accompanying her husband over to the Crescent.

After dinner Mr Graydon treats them all to a Sunday League Concert at the East Ham Palace.

In the words of the East Ham Mail, ‘The League have made some interesting arrangements for Easter, when the prices of admission will remain the same, but, we understand, the stalls will be bookable in advance, a convenience of which many will doubtless take full advantage. The bookings for Good Friday are already very heavy, the attraction being a return visit from the famous ‘Bow Bells’ Concert Party. A rare treat is promised for those fortunate enough to secure admission on this occasion.’

The rest of the evening is spent together, and Edith and her husband are put up for the night at No. 231. The next night, Saturday night at the Ilford Hippodrome, is on Edith.

The show includes Tom Edwards, a minor music hall star and former Adeler & Sutton pierrot, who appears with a girl in a nurse’s uniform singing ‘He makes me all fussed up’.¹ Should this be ‘She gets me all fussed up’, a song by Lew Brown (lyrics) & James F. Hanley (music), from c. 1916?Freddy may have introduced the Graydon girls to this song, or he may teasingly have tried it on Avis, perhaps on the island. Avis certainly remarks on the connection between the song and Bywaters to her sister, who recognises the allusion. Edwards continues his act with his famous ventriloquial ‘Nursing the Baby’ skit and with several virtuoso patter numbers. If the delights of Tom Edwards and others contribute to the enjoyment of the show for Edith, the presence of Freddy’s ex-girlfriend Molly in the row behind, sitting with another girl and boy, annoys her. Her conversation, according to Mrs Thompson, sounds very affected. Is she just putting it on to humiliate her, Edith wonders? She certainly thinks it might be and likes to make sure that Freddy knows.

The two women share the big bed whenever Avis is up overnight and invariably have a cup of tea together in bed in the mornings. As this is Easter Sunday, and as Edith has done the spring cleaning, Percy is spoiling her and her sister by waiting on them. The Graydon parents are expected for dinner, and Avis and her sister are kept busy most of the day, cooking, baking and washing up. The only notable piece of news is a nugatory argument about the price of Cuticura. Avis claims that when she bought it – for a friend – it cost tenpence halfpenny. Her mother disagrees because she got some for Fred Bywaters, and it came to a shilling, with which Edith concurs. Percy’s somewhat wistful contribution to this discussion is to remark that ‘you all in turn seem to have bought it for him’.

Easter Monday is of course a holiday. In the morning, while Edith is resting in front of the fire, Avis is assisting Percy in ‘knocking apart a grand piano case’ in the garden. Thompson suddenly hits his finger and asks Avis, ‘Will you go up to my room, to my medicine chest, and get me a bottle of New Skin?’ The cabinet is in fact located in the little room which Percy calls ‘mine’, because he is sleeping there while Avis is staying. As she opens it, she sees a large half-pint bottle of tincture of opium, then freely available. She comes down with the New Skin and approaches her sister in the morning room: ‘There is a bottle of opium in Percy’s medicine chest. Nip up and get it.’ Edith obliges while her sister puts New Skin on Percy’s finger. After she has returned the New Skin to the cabinet, she asks Edith:

Have you taken that bottle of opium as I asked you?
Edith: Yes.
Avis: Where is it?
Edith: On the side there – in the sideboard.
Avis: I will do away with this, so there can be no more trouble.

Avis takes the bottle to the scullery and pours its contents down the sink. The bottle itself she throws into the fire in the back room where her sister is seated. Avis’s reference to ‘trouble’ and her strong reaction to finding a bottle of opium seem to imply that she and Edith may well have talked in bed this weekend of marriage problems and that the wife has attributed them to either her husband’s drink or use of drugs, or both. It is interesting to compare this incident with Edith’s own inventive account of it to Bywaters a few days later:

By the way – what is ‘Aromatic tincture of opium’ – Avis drew my attention to a bottle of this sealed in the medicine chest in your room.
I took possession of it and when he missed it and asked me for it – I refused to give it him – he refuses to tell me where he got it and for what reason he wants it – so I shall keep it till I hear from you.
I used the ‘light bulb’ three times but the third time – he found a piece – so I’ve given it up – until you come home.

This passage neatly illustrates the cross-plotting of fact and fiction in the correspondence. The thought of Percy discovering a piece of a light bulb in his porridge or dinner is almost comic, were it not for the consequences. Edith must have been puzzled by the opium tincture in Percy’s cabinet, and she will of course have wondered whether he intended to use it and how. It may have been a draught of opium tincture which brought on the fit during the night of 8 February when she noticed that his eyes looked ‘glassy’ and that he had appeared genuinely sick – and that Edith did tell Avis about, ‘as if it frightened and worried me as I thought perhaps it might be useful at some future time’. In the evening the people from Manor Park and the Birnages, with whom they have had tea, see another show at the Hippodrome.
During the night Edith dreams a dream of sex, guilt and fear. Freddy has taken her out, and they have returned together to No. 41. He insists on coming in, and they make love:

Eventually you and I slept in your little bed – in the morning I woke early and went into the big room and found Harold [Edith’s youngest brother] was sleeping with him – you were unbolting the front door in your pyjamas to get out quickly when he came down the stairs, so you went into Mrs Lester’s room. She didn’t like it a bit and you thought you had better make a clean breast of it and came up to him and told him what had happened – there was a fight – I don’t remember how it went – in [sic] Dad and Mother were there with him and they had been discussing things and wouldn’t let me stop there I don’t know what became of me or you.

The dream imagery is fuelled by Edith’s sharing a bed this weekend with Avis, and her desire to spend the night with young Bywaters can be detected perhaps in the wife’s yielding her place in the marriage bed to the youngest brother, a contemporary of Freddy’s. Harold’s presence in the dream and his imaginary sharing of Thompson’s bed underlines the extent to which Edith feels her marriage to be unnatural, a feeling expressed in her unconscious mind in a homosexual counterpoint to Bywaters and herself: the young sailor and Mrs Thompson on the one hand, and the young man almost exactly Fred’s age and Percy Thompson on the other. Edith is haunted by the memory of her last evening with Freddy, when they so desperately wished to spend the night together and could not. As in the dream, they made love that night; but they could not retire to the privacy of a bedroom afterwards, as once they did when he was staying at No. 41. The pleasure of the dream is marred by nightmare visions of a jealous husband, suspicious lodger and upright parents who would be expected to side with marriage against adultery.

On Tuesday 18 April, her first day back at work, Edith receives a mysterious parcel, ‘a large gold foil egg filled with chocolate about 2lbs by the weight’. It has been posted anonymously in EC2 and appears to originate from the same source as the parcel sent her for Christmas. Edith suspects that the sender is one of her admirers, perhaps Mel or Derry. It is about this time that Edith completes Hichens’s The Fruitful Vine, ‘a very interesting book’ which, she surmises, in some of its details could ‘lead to hours and hours of discussion’. She will be sending Freddy the book along with Bella Donna on Thursday. They will go through it together in their correspondence character by character, paragraph by paragraph, and particularly ‘the one act’. A full summary of the plot, and of the moral issues posed by The Fruitful Vine is offered later and measured against Mrs Thompson’s striking essay on the book in a letter of Friday 18 August.

On Thursday Edith receives a doctor’s bill at 168. She happens to be at the door when it arrives and therefore takes it in herself. It is one of the finest days so far this year, and she is anticipating a chance to nip out into the open and breathe the vernal air. It may help to release the irritation that is building up inside her. Much as she welcomes it, premenstrual tension always leaves her exhausted and frustrated, like her periods themselves.

At 11.30 a.m. the following day, Friday, Mr Carlton hands Edith Freddy’s letter, pretending to mistake it for one of her brother’s. The letter does not propel her into an enthusiastic response, particularly because she feels offended by his question: ‘the last time we met, we were pals, weren’t we chère?’ Why does he have to ask the obvious, unless he is beginning to harbour further doubts? Her reaction, as ever, is to resort to a long letter. On Saturday evening, in return for the Easter Monday tea, the Thompsons attend a ‘very posh’ dinner party at the Birnages: ‘full course dinner and she cooked everything herself – I think she is awfully clever’. She enjoys it, but on Sunday is prostrate with a painful face-ache. Whether this is an inflammatory illness caught from her lover – as she wonders – or the result of severe migraine accompanying her period is not material, although the latter seems more probable. Throughout the day she is swallowing aspirin, twenty-four in all in six doses of four, before trying to sleep on ‘a pillow of thermagene’. Her period is imminent but refuses to come.

Feeling better, but faint and despondent, Edith commutes into the City, in the hope of finding a letter from Suez waiting for her. But she is disappointed in this. Adding a brief account of her experience of the weekend to Freddy’s epistle, she disconsolately mails it on her way to Fenchurch Street. Her period has arrived. She anxiously notes that she is not ‘ill as I should have been, altho’ I was a little – but not as usual.’ If this is repeated next month, she will want him to advise her on what action to take. It will be under a week before his return to London: ‘I still have the herbs’, she assures him. No reference will be made to these abortion-inducing herbs at the trial, even though the letters in question will be used in evidence.

For the next few days Edith is fighting off fainting fits as she gets in and out of bed. Her discomfort is compounded by the weather switching to cold again. By Thursday she has a sore throat and her voice is going. On Friday the youth Henry Jacoby is sentenced to death at the Old Bailey. The jury strongly recommends him to mercy. Later in the evening Avis visits her sister who has been too unwell to pay her weekly call in the Crescent and gone straight home to Ilford. The Thompsons, Avis learns, have abandoned the idea of a summer holiday in Llandudno, because it will be ‘too expensive’. Instead they have opted for Bournemouth, for a fortnight from 8 July. Would Avis like to join them, Percy asks. Both the sisters are surprised by his question, and when Avis asks, ‘well, what about Edie? what does she say?’ he replies, ‘I’m asking you. It doesn’t matter about her. I’m asking you.’ Recalling the incident in these words fifty years on, Avis Graydon suspected that her sister and brother-in-law ‘might have had a bust-up and he thought, you know, that if I came I might have a dampening feeling on her, and she would respond a bit more. You see, I knew so little of their married life’. More than half a century separates the sisters’ remarkably concurring reactions to Percy’s invitation: ‘The suggestion was nothing to do with me … I’m glad – because if things are still the same and we do go – a third party helps to make you forget.’

On Saturday, voiceless apart from a ‘very high squeak’ which amuses everyone, Edith is writing to Bywaters about her suspected pregnancy and commends him for his behaviour towards a girl whom he has met – on shore presumably – and liked, because she ‘doesn’t swear’. Well then, she wonders, what of her own swearing? She does, after all, occasionally use words like ‘damn’ and a few stronger words sometimes – or ‘don’t these words constitute swearing as you hear it?’ Then she turns to the fiction which he discussed, particularly Felix. Bywaters has professed to be disappointed in the ending, when the young man abandons his older drug-addicted mistress Valeria Ismey in a carriage on Victoria Station, bound for Paris, to attend instead to his very sick mother. Bywaters ‘expected him to do a lot for Valeria’ and he did not. Edith disagrees and claims that Felix, whose life passion is reading the novels of Balzac, never had it in him to be a pillar for anyone – witness his encounter with Ismey and Victoria:

‘Let me pass please, I am her husband’. It was Mr Ismey who spoke – clearly, with a sort of cold defiance and pride. Felix looked round and saw a tall figure getting into the carriage. Under the ray of the lamp he met the eyes whose deep melancholy had once made him wonder. He did not wonder now. Mrs Ismey saw her husband. She shrank back in the corner of the seat, pressed her head against the cushions, opened her white lips and cursed him.
‘Thank God, you are here!’, Felix whispered.
‘Help me!’
But Mr Ismey took him by the arm.
‘Go away’, he said, with a sort of pititful sternness. ‘Go away. This is no matter for a boy. You can do nothing here’.

Felix is even by Hichens’s standards overly injected with heavy erotic innuendos and its language is remarkably candid. If the lovers appear to be at cross purposes in this literary critical exercise, the reason is that Bywaters repeatedly attempts to advance the interpretation of character that he feels is expected of him, a point over which his mistress will forcefully remonstrate with him when he reads The Fruitful Vine. In the same letter to her he notes that the quinine he gave her was enough to kill an elephant – why then is Thompson still about, he seems to ask. Her reply to this is that it tastes bitter and that she prefers Freddy not to reproach her with it. She leaves the letter at that.

On Monday 1 May 1922 Edith Thompson has a riveting letter from her lover, which makes her cry, because among others he professes to be despondent at her lack of progress with glass and powder. She admits that her helplessness is putting her to shame, but undertakes to love him even more for it later, when they are happily living united. Then he asks her about a character in The Shulamite, a novel by Alice and Claude Askew, which, along with The Woman Deborah she demanded he read for ‘discussion’ across the ocean.

As a novel The Shulamite suffers from an oversimplified, melodramatic plot. At the same time it abounds with impressive caricatures, atmosphere and unadulterated racism. The story is set in the South African veldt after the Boer war. A young and handsome English gold prospector, Robert Waring, joins the farm of the old Boer Simeon Krillet who is married to a beautiful and darkly passionate childwife, Deborah. She is the Shulamite. Her parents had traded her for securities to the vicious old man who whips himself into a sensual frenzy through ritualised readings of the Canticles. The girl is profoundly repelled by her lascivious and abusive father-husband and turns to Waring in despair. He undertakes to protect her and confides this to his diary, which the old man promptly discovers in Waring’s temporary absence and construes as evidence of adultery. He decides on a spectacular execution of the faithless wife, by tying her to a tree to shoot her the moment her alleged lover appears in view on his return from his errand. But Krillet is betrayed by one of the ‘kaffir’ girls whom he abuses nightly and Waring shoots him. The plot thickens when Waring departs for England, failing to make love to Deborah because of his commitment to his fiancée Joan. He marries Joan, thereby provoking the shulamite into blackmailing him for murdering old Krillet. The story ends unhappily and leaves behind a sense of pain and loss, of misplaced pride and failure of recognition. After his wife’s and child’s death, Waring returns to claim the shulamite, who in the meantime has heroically battled against the vile and huge ‘tantes’, sisters and relatives of Simeon, bent on exacting at least one execution, if not two, from the old man’s death; and hoping, in the process, to retrieve his fabled pot of gold. The shulamite’s self-sacrifice saves Waring from the gallows and leaves her stern and impoverished, seeing him vanish on the horizon:

Deborah Krillet stood on the stoep of the lonely farm, shading he eyes from the sun-glow, watching a speck on the plain, a moving speck. Soon it would pass out of sight and become lost in the unknown.

What intrigues Edith in the novel, apart from its sentimentality, is its gripping portrayal of passion and the geographical movement of the plot, since like Deborah, she loves a man who protects her and is always travelling in far distant lands. Above all, Edith’s attitude towards her marriage – the enforced physical intimacy with an unloved partner – finds a voice, if a hugely exaggerated one, in Deborah’s merciless oration to Waring over her husband’s coffin:

‘I believe’, she went on slowly, ‘that you were sent here that all should happen as it has. He was hard and cruel, and old; it was not fair that he should live and I should die; also – you are not a woman, so will not understand – but his kindness was worse than his whip.’ She trembled a little and the firm mouth quivered.
‘My dear,’ – Robert Waring forgot the English girl Joan, forgot everything in the world except the woman facing him, this child-woman with her fierce virtue that refused love except to love, – ‘don’t think of the past; forget it all, forget it.’ His voice shook as he spoke; she was such a revelation of a woman.
‘Can I’ – she looked at him steadily – ‘forget that he bought me like a chattel and treated me like a toy, loved me because I pleased his eye? There are some sins against herself a woman never forgets, and the love of such a man as Simeon Krillet is one. Days of shame and nights of hell. Do you realise that he plucked my youth from me with coarse fingers? Oh God, how I have suffered! and because I was his wife I had to smile and seem content. O have been through all this, endured it silently, and yet you wonder that I have the nerve to dress the man for his grave. If only you knew how he has crushed my soul! You were sorry for my bruised flesh, and I thought then how little a man understands a woman.’ She stopped speaking and brushed away the first tear he had seen her shed.

Commenting on this passage, Edith adds two interesting qualifications. Firstly, that ‘the feeling of repugnance’ engendered by such a relationship not only extends to the partner but produces a commensurate self-loathing. The victim of such forced sexuality turns against herself for her inability to defeat the prostitution of her entire being. Secondly, the male and female joint authors (as she surmises) are necessarily at odds in scenes like this one, mutually checking each other. If anything, Edith appears to be saying the horrors of the scenes with Krillet are understated. Few people would compare Percy Thompson to the execrable Simeon Krillet, and even Edith Thompson refrains from directly suggesting that. Even so, in their imaginative projections of their ‘real’ world, the two lovers are losing their grip on the necessary perspective required by sanity. In the same breath, Mrs Thompson discusses her regretted failure to kill her husband, a novel of near-adultery and murder, and the fact that the stationers are out of paper and that she therefore has to write part of her letter on unattractive notepaper.

Spring has come at last and temperatures rise throughout this week. On Thursday 4 May the Thompsons along with the Birnages go to see the troupe known as ‘Les Rouges et Noirs’ at the Queen’s theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.

All the members of the crew are ex-soldiers from the First Army who started as a succès d’estime, but quickly established themselves in vaudeville. They specialise in male and female impersonations which Edith for one enjoys hugely – ‘these were splendid – very clever and very funny – I did laugh such a lot – it was really dancing through the hours’ – and are best known for their original songs and individual performers. Perhaps the visit to the theatre follows on from the agreement between Percy and Sidney on Thompson’s acting for a commission as an agent for the Sun Life Insurance Co. The Birnages are friendly with all the Thompsons and the Graydons; and Sidney enjoys Mrs Thompson’s company particularly. He is something of a maverick and, like others, senses that Percy’s wife is restless. If catastrophe had not overtaken the protagonists of this story, there might well have been further complications between Edith and some of her male admirers.

Friday 5 May is a perfect summer day. On her arrival at Carlton & Prior this morning Edith learns that Miss Prior’s brother-in-law has suddenly died and ‘that she needs someone to go up West to buy mourning clothes’. As Miss Graydon is Miss Prior’s ‘stamp’ and has excellent taste, she is asked to oblige, which she does readily. The prospect of expensive West End shops is irresistible. Also Edith wishes to complete some of her own purchases for her summer wear. In the end she buys Miss Prior a dark costume, a silk frock and a cloth frock, a jumper, shoes, stockings and gloves. For herself she gets a cream gaberdine and pleated skirt, to wear with a sports coat. She is mightily pleased with her own shopping and the dress for Miss Prior, who is herself most appreciative. When Edith suggests that they match the clothes to one of their several widows’ hats on the premises, everyone superstitiously shies away from the idea. Doesn’t she know that it brings bad luck? Edith gaily dismisses their fears, dresses in black and promptly tries on all the widows’ hats in the shop, reflecting that if this spells ill luck for everyone else, it might just do the reverse for her. Teasingly she tells Freddy that her workmates ‘all think terrible things are going to happen to me now’.

At lunchtime Sidney Birnage calls Edith to take her out to lunch again. She leaves him at 2 p.m., no doubt faintly intrigued by his interest in her and determined not to encourage it too far. When therefore she is advising with Lily on the new designs downstairs at about 4 p.m. and is told that a gentleman – who turns out to be Birnage – is expecting her upstairs in the showroom to go for tea, she is distinctly unenthusiastic. She takes him to Fuller’s and plays it cool. It would not do for her to jeopardise their friendship with the Birnages because of the husband’s overly zealous attentions. Reading the paper this morning and particularly the Daily Sketch’s feature on ‘Battle of Calves & Ankles’, Edith notices with mild dismay that Parisian designers are promoting a return to the longer fashions. She will of course follow suit, but Freddy is not going to like it: he prefers her in short skirts, open-necked blouses and tight-fitting sweaters.

The week-end is forecast to be very warm. After a cheery morning at work Edith rushes back to Ilford for lunch and then to wait for her mother who will assist her in hanging some clean curtains in the house. The curtains in the Thompsons’ bedroom in particular need changing. To get into the large bay window Mrs Graydon and Edith try to move the dressing table further towards the centre of the room by pushing it. A careless gesture suffices to dislocate the large cheval-glass from its pivot and to smash the mirror into ‘a thousand pieces’. Edith notes that ‘This is supposed to mean bad luck for 7 years – I am wondering if it is for us (you and I) or her. What do you think?’ For two days running now she has defiantly sneered at omens, superstitions and fate. Why not? She thinks of herself as a sensible and rational girl, gifted with an eye for fashion and accounting, and earning the largest salary in her set. Undeterred, Edith enjoys the week-end relaxing in the garden in Ilford.

Monday 8 May 1922 is the hottest day of the year so far. At Carlton & Prior Bywaters’s mail is waiting for Edith Thompson. She has no opportunity to read it alone. In the lunch hour she therefore hurries down to St Paul’s to board a bus to Hyde Park Corner. She occupies a back seat on the open top and then abandons herself to the delights of the letter, light clothes, sun and the London cityscape. Freddy is telling her about ‘a boy and a girl and a chocolate incident’ which makes him smile and think ‘a lot’. She wants to know why, suspecting that it is connected with her love of sweets. On her return to Carlton & Prior or perhaps even on a bench in Hyde Park, Edith writes a reply and tells him of her liking for Montelimar as well as Turkish Delight. Freddy does not care for Waring in The Shulamite, which pleases her, because she fears that he might identify with the vagrant lover. Deborah catches both their imaginations for being ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’. Edith therefore ‘admires’ her, even though she cannot ‘love’ her. Fred enquires ‘whether Avis liked the books or not’, a question to which Edith does not know the answer, even though she assures him that Avis could not muster the intellectual acumen to practise literary criticism. If she is slightly annoyed by his enquiry after the sister, she controls it well. Freddy’s dislike of the buckish Desboro in Chambers’s The Business of Life puzzles her, and she proposes to argue with him about it at the appropriate time. The sooner Freddy reads The Fruitful Vine, the better for both of them. Edith posts her reply to Bywaters on her way to Ilford, while he is halfway across the Arabian Sea.

On Tuesday 9 May Edith purchases Hichens’s Bella Donna and immediately finds it engrossing. A further claim on her attention is the Daily Sketch’s announcement under ‘Test for Derby Horses Today’ that Scamp will be out ‘for the first time this season’. Freddy has recommended her to back him for the Derby, and she puts 5 shillings each way and gets odds of 20 to 1. Tomorrow he will fail badly at a mile and the Daily Sketch will call him a ‘non-stayer’. As it is, Edith has already lost the 30 shillings she made from another horse called Paragon in the ‘City & Sub’.

Shortly before arriving at Liverpool Street on Wednesday morning, Edith has reached the middle of Chapter 7 of Bella Donna, the exact moment when Dr Isaacson, the medical Jewish sleuth of the novel, alights on the following passage in a textbook on poisons:

It must be ever remembered that digitalin is a cumulative poison, and that the same dose, harmless if taken once, yet frequently repeated becomes deadly.

Is this any use, Edith asks Freddy, meaning for the killing of her husband? She might be talking casually about an insecticide, for all the matter-of-factness of her question. Then she turns to his letter received in the morning and immediately remonstrates with him for his comment on the Co-Optimist song which exalts the virtue of being only ‘practically true’ to her partner. If that is how he feels, she prefers not to have him at all. He enquires whether or not she has heard anything so far from his mother or sister – an apology to Mrs Thompson has been demanded – and whether Edith is still there waiting for him. She vehemently protests her loyalty and berates him for even doubting her and asking questions when he meant to state facts. She feels contrite for accusing him of being a bully: ‘I’m not bullying you, I’m deciding for you chère’ is Freddy’s reply, and she readily concurs. He should do all the deciding for her. That way she has a shoulder to lean on. Then, in a characteristic fashion, Edith turns to the fiction: ‘Now I’ll talk a bit about the books.’ The books in question are Beyond the Shadow and The Way of These Women respectively. What particularly puzzles Edith about the former is that is ‘hardly a possible story’. (The mind boggles at the thought that the other novels she read were deemed by her to be life-enhancing by virtue of their perceived realism.) With reference to the cast-off heroine Marian, and her few moments of happiness in Beyond the Shadow, Edith slightly misquotes Tennyson’s lines from In Memoriam, that ‘It is better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ Her most interesting instructions to Bywaters on reading certain works of fiction come with regard to R. W. Chambers:

I agree with you about Chambers endings darlint but the endings are not the story. The end is written to please nine out of ten people who read his books … Forget the ends, lose yourself in the characters and the story and, in your own mind make your own end. Its lovely to do that darlint – try it.

Then she goes to lunch in St Paul’s Churchyard. On the way she happens to bump into Mrs Bywaters, carrying a large bunch of red roses, in the company of ‘that tall man’ whom both she and Freddy have noticed before. Unable to ignore her, Edith leans over the roses with ‘Let me smell, how are you?’ and passes on quickly. No sooner is she back at 168 than she adds a coda to her letter of the morning: ‘Supposing I were to meet your mother in the street darlint, what should I do? What would you want me to do? Answer this, please, particularly.’ One or two days after, she confesses that the question is disingenuous, as it supposes something to take place which has already happened. In Edith Thompson’s letters the boundaries between fact and fiction are constantly shifting.

On Thursday the British climate exacts revenge on the early summer birds. Overnight the temperature drops dramatically from the 90s Fahrenheit to the 80s to 52: ‘What a country to live in’, notes Edith. At lunchtime she squeezes in ten minutes to talk to Freddy, telling him how dull, depressed and ‘cold in the body inside’ she feels. But a bit of excitement is generated in the afternoon by George Carpentier’s visit under police escort to Paget’s, the sports shop over the road from 168. George Carpentier is the charismatic French boxer whom Jack Dempsey defeated not long ago with a knock-out punch. Tonight at the Olympia is a different affair. Carpentier’s opponent is Kid Lewis, who goes down in the 150th second exactly, during an ‘incident’. Young Paget, speaking to the women of No. 168 with the authority of a man who has met the champ himself, notes that the fight ‘was a frost and very unfair’. The press generally concurred, because Carpentier seemed to strike the decisive blow a fraction of a second after the two boxers were made to break by the referee. Lewis was therefore caught off guard. Edith loathes boxing but Freddy loves it, so she dutifully reports these details to him.

The biting cold of Thursday is relenting and Friday is milder and cloudy. Edith takes her tussore ‘to be made up’ and also has a new navy costume made at the same time. She is complimented at the tailor’s on the quality of the tussore which pleases her no end, as she prides herself on never buying cheaply or badly. The long coat which accompanies the costume will not meet with Bywaters’s approval, but she pleads her case by noting that the cream skirt was bought to please him, the coat her.

From Friday’s Daily Sketch Edith cuts out a feature headed ‘Holiday – Then Death Pact. Passionate Farewell Letters in Seaside Drama. Woman’s Sacrifice’. The correspondence of the lovers in question, George William Hibbert, aged thirty-eight and Maud, twenty-three, the much younger wife of his younger brother, leaves an impression of tender affection and bottomless despair. The double suicide attempt in a gas-filled room in Brighton ends with the man dead and the wife unconscious. Edith immediately identifies with the couple. She fails to comment on the extent to which their situations differ: the Brighton lovers were reportedly so distressed by their treachery to the husband and brother that they preferred death to destroying him.

On Sunday 14 May the Thompsons are entertaining Bill for tea. They are sitting out in the garden and he raises the topic of opium; if he knew where to plant poppy, he says, he would get some. The conversation becomes animated, since the issue of opium is a very hot one. The only word in fact which Edith ‘deletes’ in all her correspondence is this word. The law may not have been solely to blame: sexual reticence is also a factor here, if somewhat contingently, because of the known links between sexual fulfilment and opium consumption. Edith professes to want to change to a different topic, but fails to do so since Percy is conspicuously interested in keeping it going. Later in the day the Thompsons learn that Mr Lester has died. The Lesters at once draw the blinds on their side of the house, both at the front and at the back. The Thompsons briefly consider going into mourning on their side too, but then decide otherwise. Their practical assistance will be that much more welcome than the mere gesture of darkening the house. Edith in fact will prove indispensable to the two Lesters with arrangements for the funeral, clothes, hats and even bills. She has a letter to Freddy to finish, and there is possibly more mail waiting for her at 168.

Her sanguine expectations are fulfilled on Monday. Freddy complains about his ‘ancle’ – which, as she points out, is ‘spelt with a ‘k’: it looks so funny with a “c”’. The football damages it repeatedly. Why bother playing then, she asks. If he nurses it carefully it will be back to normal by the time he gets home, and then he will be able to teach her to play tennis after all. She warms to the prospect of their visit to Tunbridge Wells suggested by him. She has been there once only and adored it. But what, she remonstrates with him, is she to make of his silly questions about her love for him; ‘and you are mine Peidi, aren’t you? I shall always try to keep you’. Why does he doubt her love for him? When they meet this time she wants him not just to say ‘how are you “chère”’ – which is surely ‘prosaic’ – but to kiss and hold her wherever they meet and whoever may see them. Her insistence on this reflects her increasing fears about underlying hesitations in his letters to her, as though the more he is withdrawing from her the more he urges her to keep faith.

Walking near St Paul’s Churchyard on Wednesday in the company of Harry Renton, Edith catches a glimpse of Mrs Bywaters and ‘purposely’ keeps behind. The following day, with a mere week to go now till Freddy’s return, she sends a parcel for him to await his arrival in Plymouth. In it are Hichens’s Bella Donna and The Fruitful Vine which he is instructed to read in that order, the former whilst on shore, the latter after they are again parted. Also enclosed are a small parcel of tissues and a bar of Toblerone to be eaten on Thursday 25 May, his first day home, at the same time that she will be eating the twin piece of Toblerone to be with him in her imagination. The temporary buoyancy of Edith’s mood stems partly from her anticipation of Freddy’s imminent return, and partly from the fact that Miss Prior is due to leave for Paris on Friday 19 May. She’ll be gone for at least a week. Her absence will be felt in the shop like a cloud lifting. For good measure, the unseasonable weather is yielding to warm summery winds. The next three weeks will witness soaring and record temperatures for London, easily matching the heatwave of 1921.

As if to mark the occasion of Miss Prior’s departure, on Saturday 20 May Mr Carlton runs his favourite buyer home in ‘a real posh car’, no less attractive in her eyes for being borrowed from a friend of his. If Miss Prior knew of it, Edith muses, she might want to sack her. But she will not tell, and neither will Carlton. Home in Ilford Edith completes her shopping for Sunday’s dinner party, when she is entertaining her family. In the evening her brother Billie takes his sweetheart Miss Ashley to meet his parents at No. 231. ‘What about that then’, Edith asks, and what ought she to make of Bill’s remark that Miss Ashley is ‘very mean’. She may be joking. At the same time as the Graydons are given a chance to form an opinion of their own about Billie’s girl, a P & O liner bound for Bombay, the Egypt, collides off the French coast with a French vessel the Seine en route to Le Havre. The Egypt has sailed from Tilbury on Friday and goes down quickly with ninety-five people left on board. The first news bulletins of this latest maritime disaster merely report the sinking of a P & O liner. For a moment it must have seemed that it could be any P & O vessel, including the Morea.

Sunday 21 May: At 41 Kensington Gardens Edith is cooking a chicken. It is, remarkably, her first attempt at poultry. While she is preparing the stuffing, the bread sauce and the rest of the meal, including the gooseberry pie, she is thinking of her lover and wishing it was him she was cooking for. At about 2.30 p.m., while the Thompsons and their guests are relaxing in the garden, Reg and Bessie appear unexpectedly with the car. The weather is glorious and the Thompsons and Avis eagerly accept the invitation to go for a long ride into the country. In the course of the afternoon Bessie asks after Freddy and breaks the news of the shipwreck without giving the name of the vessel at first. How far their ride on this day takes them cannot be determined. But it is pushing 9.30 p.m. when the party finally arrives back at base on Kensington Gardens. The light is fading, and the windless evening air floats over the streets off the Belgrave Road.

After a warm night, temperatures on Monday morning steadily climb. By noon they have reached 88 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and London is reported to be ‘in short sleeves everywhere’. Edith receives a long letter from Freddy at Carlton & Prior, but cannot read it for sheer pressure of work. Miss Prior’s absence in Paris leaves her with ‘tons to do’. She has to choose between reading his letters or letting him have a few lines of greeting at Plymouth. She decides to write and tells Bywaters that she will see him on Friday; only four more days to go. She teases him about his suspected dislike of her appearance today. She is wearing her foulard frock because of the heat. When he takes her out she will obligingly wear her black frock with the white beads again that he likes. If her money lasts, she promises, she might even buy another frock just for him to take her out to dinner in. Finally, should she take Wednesday 31 May off? It will be Derby Day, and they can either go there or keep a tryst elsewhere, just the two of them. Could he think about it?

Tuesday 23 May marks the opening of the Chelsea Flower Show. The heat is overwhelming, at one point hitting 127 F in the sun in Greater London. Business is less hectic and Edith can indulge in the luxury of reading and replying to her lover’s letter. His comments on Molly please her, although she is quick to dissociate herself from their more censorious import; after giving Freddy a damning picture of poor Molly all tarted up and putting on airs, she retreats so as not to seem mean-minded. Bywaters informs her of his schedule for the next trip, which will take him to Australia, and he expresses regret for his lack of conversation with her on ‘books and things’. She gladly notes his penance and claims to be resigned to her lot of loving an undemonstrative man. Finally, if he feels, as he claims, like being confined in a shell, shouldn’t he remember that hers ‘is a real live cage with a keeper as well … to whom I have to account every day, every hour, every minute really’.

About her ‘new’ novel, Bella Donna, she remarks that he ‘may learn something from it to help us’ and then she quotes ominously from Chapter 15 of the book: ‘The fate of every man have we bound about his neck’. This pronouncement is inscribed on the lintel of the entrance of Mahmoud Baroudi’s private apartments which are pervaded by an aura of luxurious, floating sensuality. Edith is intrigued by the spurious wisdom of the sentence and asks about it:

Have we darlint? Have we the fate of one – or we two halves. I dont know – I daren’t think … it’s like making sand pies at the sea-side … they always topple over.

Having written this, and after adding that she is full of excitement about his imminent return home, she signs off and rushes out to post it.

The heatwave continues unabated. The night of Wednesday 24 May is one of the hottest on record. At 5 a.m. on Thursday morning the air ignites and a tremendous thunderstorm explodes over London. For nearly two hours the metropolis presents the spectacle of a growling and impenetrable curtain of sheeted waters. By the time commuter traffic gets under way, it is warm again, but all the signs are that another downpour is likely. Edith is safely entrenched at Carlton & Prior when it breaks with ‘almost tropical intensity’. Hailstones as large as walnuts and torrential rain flush shoppers out of the London shopping precincts. What a day for the lovers to keep their appointed communion, through the simultaneous eating of a bar of Toblerone chocolate.

Friday 26 May has come at last. In the evening the lovers meet at Fenchurch Street station. He is home for two weeks exactly, before a long cruise of more than three months to Australia. The last Monday in May marks the conviction and sentencing at the Old Bailey of Horatio Bottomley, and on Wednesday 31 May, Derby Day, which the lovers have allotted themselves for an all-day tryst, Major H. R. Armstrong is hanged in Gloucester Gaol at 8 a.m. When he dies Edith is still getting ready in Ilford. There can be little doubt that she and Bywaters make love this day and she reassures him about it, by claiming to be pregnant again anyway.

The glorious weather holds and the Whitsun weekend promises to be perfect. But the lovers are separated for its duration.

On Friday 2 June Edith is on a Carlton & Prior firm’s outing in Horley in Surrey, near what is now Gatwick Airport. A visual record of that day and games survives in a number of striking photographs.

It is on this weekend that Percy has one of his periodic ‘heart attacks’. Here is how Mrs Lester recalls the incident in a statement of 13 November 1922:

‘I remember on a Sunday morning about 10.30 am in June 1922, I think. I went out into the back garden and just outside the back door I saw Mr Percy Thompson lying down on the stonework with his head resting on a cushion. Mrs Thompson was sitting on the stone floor beside him, holding him. I said to her ‘Hullo, what’s the matter, another attack?’ She said ‘Yes’. – ‘Have you given him anything?’ She said ‘No’. I said ‘Give him some soda water’. I came into the house and got a syphon of soda water and gave her a glass full to give him. He remained on the ground for about an hour during which time he only groaned. He did not speak and appeared in a semi-conscious condition. I did not notice any difference in the colour of his face. I helped Mrs Thompson to get him on his feet on to a basket couch in the back garden, where he remained until the afternoon, when his sister, who I have been told is a widow, and his brother Richard Thompson, came round to see him. About an hour before they came, Mrs Thompson left the house and returned after about 10 minutes. Before she left she asked me if I had any spirits in the house. After helping him on the couch I did not go near him and therefore did not notice any difference in the colour of his face. He did not speak to me about it. I have seen him on three or four occasions previously when he has had attacks which he always told me was heart affection. These to my mind were minor attacks; he generally sat in a chair when he had them and did not lose consciousness. I cannot fix any date or month when these took place. I have not seen or heard of him having any attacks since June 1922.’

On 13 November 1922 Percy’s brother Richard will in turn remember this occasion, his memory prompted by suspicions of poison and glass:

‘I remember Whit Sunday, 4 June 1922, when Mrs Thompson came round to my house about half past one, and said ‘Percy is very bad, have you any brandy?’ My wife who answered the door said ‘No, but one of us will come round’. My sister, Mrs Wilson, who was then here on a visit, left the house shortly afterwards to go to 41 Kensington Gardens, and I followed a little later. I saw my brother Percy lying on a couch in the garden. I noted the mottled complexion on his face, there being a number of blue patches thereon and his eyes were extremely bloodshot. He was in a dazed condition and did not speak, although I spoke to him. About half an hour later I said ‘What has caused this’. He said ‘I got up feeling not very well, but taking no notice of it, went on doing a little gardening when I fell down and remember no more until I saw you’. Whilst talking to him, he had another attack which lasted for about half an hour. During this period the whole of the muscles of his face and neck were working, and his face became distorted. He gradually subsided into a calm but dazed condition. I saw him no further that day until the following Tuesday, 6 June 1922, when I said to him ‘Have you had medical advice?’ He said ‘I don’t think it is necessary as Edie (the prisoner) knows what to do.’ I have not seen him in an attack since this one. I cannot fix the date or month of any of the former attacks. The other three attacks during the past 12 months have been very similar to the one I have described with the exception that they have not lasted so long. His complexion on these occasions have been what I would describe, like mottled soap.’

It is not surprising that on the Tuesday after the Bank Holiday, Edith breaks from work at her earliest opportunity to be with Freddy at Fenchurch Street. They take off for part of the evening. When quizzed about her absence later on her return home, Edith tells Percy that she saw Mr Carlton off to Westcliff at Fenchurch, and that she there met and conversed with a mutual acquaintance of theirs called Booth. However, not only will Booth deny to Percy that any encounter took place between him and Edith, but it appears that another friend of Thompson’s saw the wife and a fair-haired young man together at the station.

While the people from Manor Park and Ilford pursue their ordinary and extraordinary lives on this sunny evening, in the corridors of Whitehall a last ditch attempt is made to save a young life. A deputation of two jurors and several MPs have unsuccessfully tried all day to meet with the Home Secretary and the King. The life in question is Henry Jacoby’s, now starting his last night at Pentonville. The jury has strongly recommended the slow-witted boy to mercy. This plea for mitigation has been ignored. The only official that the party are finally given leave to see is Sir Ernley Blackwell. He turns them away. During the day Jacoby is confirmed in the chapel at Pentonville by the Bishop of Stepney, who will later extend his charity to Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters. The hangman, Ellis, the country’s most experienced executioner, is rumoured to have expressed disgust at the thought of hanging the feeble-minded boy. But the following morning, at 8.55, after a warm June night, he enters the death cell at Pentonville and supports the shaking boy on to the scaffold before kicking the lever.

When Edith enters Carlton & Prior on Wednesday 7 June Henry Julius Jacoby is already dead. At 12.34 pm in the London Central Telegraph Office she sends a wire to the Morea, Tilbury Docks, telling Freddy that she will not go to 231 tonight: ‘Have already said not going 231 see you and talk six’. Dressed in her black frock with the pearl beads, Edith flies into her lover’s arms in Fenchurch Street. Unbeknown to them they are spotted by a Miss McDonald, who lives near the Graydons in the Crescent. She is friends with Edith and Avis, and knows Freddy. Tomorrow she will tell Avis who is to reproach her sister for being out with Bywaters while she, Avis, was deeply saddened by his departure. Edith’s half-hearted attempt at denial will be at once exposed by a detailed description of her frock. Shamefacedly she will admit to the younger sister that she met Freddy, but will wriggle out of this corner by explaining that Freddy saw her to Katz’s, her hairdresser near Broad Street. She now has a fringed bob cut – the heat of the past few weeks and the trends in fashion have persuaded Edith to opt for short hair – which suits her well. In the meantime Percy has made his way to No. 231. His wife is not there and he is alarmed to learn from the family that Bywaters is ‘taking a pal out’ tonight. Thompson does not let on in front of the Graydons quite how badly he feels about that – they in any case do not harbour any suspicion about the identity of the ‘pal’ and even Percy cannot be sure. She will have to come clean tonight. He now also knows that Freddy is due to leave Friday. If his wife means to see Bywaters on Thursday night, he will put his foot down.

Thursday 8 June is a hot summer day. Mrs Edith Thompson has been instructed by her husband to return home without fail shortly after Carlton & Prior close and that he will be there to meet her. She has agreed to this without so much as batting an eyelid. But, for the first time perhaps, Edith has openly disobeyed Percy, fully aware of the fact that she will tonight have to outface and outscream him. This time she will do as she likes, whether he objects or not. At some point during the day she pens a note to her lover. She will slip it to him in due course, after they have talked about its content: a second abortion. Assuming this pregnancy to be a genuine one – and some doubts must attach to such a proposition – it will not proceed beyond eighty days; by Saturday 17 June she will have terminated it. Tonight her lover is taking her out to dinner and they can talk. Perhaps they also make love. She tells him that she is expecting and wishes to abort. Would he please desist from pleading with her to keep it? He agrees not to be sorry, nor to be angry with her. In her note she intimates the same confusion:

I want to leave every little thing to you darlingest boy, I know you will decide and do what is best for two halves, only I should like to know all your thoughts & plans darlint, just to help me bear up & love, to exist thro. this life, until it is time for us to be joined together … It is fearfully hard to decide, thats why I want you to pour moi & whatever you say or do I shall accept without fear or doubt or question, & think all the time, even if it seems wrong to me, that you know it will, at some indefinite period be, best for us.

The tone and also the content of this note recall the earlier one of Saturday 7 January 1922 when Edith described her attempt at aborting and hoped that Freddy would complete it for her. Then she had begged him not to ‘be cross about it’ and held out the prospect of keeping ‘the next real one’ perhaps ‘for always’. What concerns her primarily about the unborn life within her is the physical and sentimental traumas that it brings with it. That abortion ought to pose moral dilemmas does not appear to worry either of the lovers much.

Freddy eventually takes her home to Ilford. It is pushing midnight. When she reaches her bedroom, Percy is reclining melodramatically on the ottoman at the foot of the bed. Presumably he is clutching his chest as he tells her that he is dying and wants to because of her; his heart is giving way and he’ll suffer a heart attack. She has been at this juncture before, and she has just come from a passionate valedictory encounter with her young lover. Hardened and repelled by six years of Thompson’s hypochondriacal antics, Edith retaliates with hysterical laughter. Her failure to respond to his threats propels Percy into a rage, and storming about he loudly berates her for making his life a hell. She snaps back that he ought to agree to a separation and that that would take care of his problems; she would be gone like a shot. Percy replies that he knows that that is what she wants, but that he will not give her a divorce, because it would make things ‘far too easy’ for both her and especially Bywaters. Thompson is now bitterly lashing out at her: the fact that on Thursday 30 March they were out together – yes! he knows! – and her seeing Bywaters on Tuesday at Fenchurch, he knows all about that too. Both she and Bywaters are liars and he is making her worse. Furthermore he, Percy, will put a stop to Freddy’s correspondence coming back for her at 168: ‘It’s useless for you to deny he writes to you – because I know he does’. Doesn’t Edith remember, Percy asks more gently now, how she had told him that she had written to Bywaters asking him not to see her ‘this time’? She remains implacably silent on this point, but will remark to Freddy that this promise had referred specifically to his last stay in England, not this one. The unhappy husband is fighting a losing battle, as he now begins to realise. While he is pondering this and hurting as only the rejected and humiliated in love can, she lies awake next to him, shaken, angry, and terrified in case the boy’s letters fall into the husband’s hands. This is a practical proposition, and she will handle it accordingly. It is unimaginable though that she does not feel the horror of the conjugal split, the pity of dividing up her lovely possessions, and the shame of becoming a divorcée, when her parents and grandparents had been such proud and upright people.

On Friday 9 June at 1.49 p.m. Bywaters sails in the Morea for Australia. He will be gone for fifteen weeks, till Saturday 23 September. His four previous voyages have never taken more than eight weeks at a time. Edith will spend the whole summer without him and compensate for her enforced celibacy by writing him some twenty-four letters of varying length. More than ever in these conversation pieces she ‘talks’ to him and intimately involves him in her life. Because 27 June is looming near, she gets off to a propitious start; it is both Freddy’s birthday, and it marks the first anniversary of their romance’s blossoming. Moreover it is almost a year to the day that they left for the Isle of Wight where so much happened that they would forever cherish. It is this doubling up of memories and of recreating his presence that endows these letters with their very remarkable sense of a life-enhancing imagination engaged in retracing its own past from moment to moment. Few people can ever have been as assiduously devoted to the momentary life as Edith Thompson.

Panic-stricken by her husband’s threat to discontinue her mail at Carlton & Prior, she invents a pretext to leave the premises shortly after clocking in, and from the City, at 9.35 a.m., she sends a cable: ‘To – Bywaters, Steamer Morea, Tilbury Docks / Send everything Fisher care G.P.O call Monday’. From now on until two days before Freddy’s return in September, all of his mail will go to the GPO in King Edward Street. When the Thompsons meet on this evening at 231 Shakespeare Crescent, they have buried the hatchet, but only temporarily. Perhaps it is Avis’s remark about Miss McDonald seeing Edith and Freddy on Wednesday evening which, on the way home to Ilford, makes tempers flare up again. By the time they have reached No. 41 Edith has determined that she cannot possibly spend the night with her husband. She will sleep in the little room instead. Percy won’t have any of it. When she makes a move to cross the landing from the marital bedroom past the Lesters’ to the small back room, he obstructs her. A scuffle ensues and Percy forces his way past the wife into the room and on to the bed. Rather than returning to the large bedroom Edith takes refuge in the strategically located bathroom. It locks from the inside and it allows her to monitor Percy’s movements in the room next door and across the landing. When, half an hour later, Percy goes downstairs, she at once darts into the little room and locks the door behind her. Settled at last for the night in the same room where just under a year ago she and Freddy made love for the first time, she more than ever yearns to be free.

Over breakfast on Saturday the air at 41 Kensington Gardens is heavy with reproach. Thompson tells his wife that he is ‘going to break’ her in somehow and that she has always had too much her own way. Is he not a model husband? In any case he wants the bedroom to be cleaned out on Thursdays in future (this is presumably intended as a punishment for her faithless behaviour on several Thursday evenings). He is going to be master, and she will be his mistress alone, ‘not half a dozen mens’’. She takes all this in, mostly in silence, as she usually does, to avoid a direct confrontation. Whether or not she has notice of her father’s intention to visit in the evening and stay over for the night, the fact is that on Saturday night Mr Graydon asks her to put him up. She suggests that he share the big bed with Percy, but he emphatically rejects this proposition: ‘so sooner than make another fuss – I gave in’.

The presence of Mr Graydon at 41 this evening raises an interesting problem, since it coincides with what has become her most famous fantasy-crossing from reality into fiction and back. According to her letter of Monday and Tuesday, 12 and 13 June, an enraged Thompson has told her father and everyone else at 231 Shakespeare Crescent that Freddy and she have been seeing each other. Allegedly her father is outraged that Bywaters should come between husband and wife and has promised to talk to his wayward daughter: ‘what a scandal if it should get in the papers’. All this information Edith claims to have gathered from Avis whom she alleges to have warned that she would fight back against any imputations levelled against her: after all she didn’t go whining to her ‘people’ when Thompson misbehaved. In the end her father, Edith notes, says nothing to her when he comes to stay on Saturday night.

Whatever really happens this weekend, Bywaters appears not to credit Mrs Thompson’s version of events. Replying to her from Port Said, he invites her to talk to her father about him. He suspects that Edith is lying because, unbeknown to her, at a time when she said her father was very antagonistic to the adulterous interloper, Mr Graydon had, exceptionally, written Bywaters a letter. The letter, dated 13 June 1922, relates to the progress of the Graydons’ youngest son, Harold. He is temporarily established at the Elito Café at 85 Acland Street, St Kilda, Melbourne, and is free from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Hence, Mr Graydon notes, he should easily be able to collect his bag from the Morea when she docks at Melbourne on 10, 11 and 12 August. Can Fred kindly drop Harold a line to that effect from Fremantle? The letter concludes with the customary good wishes, a neutral ‘Well, I don’t think I’ve much more news to tell you’ and is signed ‘W. E. Graydon’. Receiving this simultaneously with Edith’s letter, Bywaters may well wonder what, if anything, really has taken place. He may also find it hard to imagine that Avis can with equanimity comment on his carrying on with her married sister as Edith reports when, in the same letter, Edith describes her as badly upset by Freddy’s departure. Moreover, when Avis is examined in court on this point by Curtis-Bennett – whom she has presumably alerted to the importance of this passage in her sister’s letters – she will vehemently deny that anything like her father’s indignant outburst has happened, or that Thompson descended on No. 231 in any manner, let alone as reported. It seems in retrospect to be the case that her father’s presence at Kensington Gardens over the weekend confronted Edith with childhood fears about being a bad girl.

On Monday morning Edith composes a long letter to Bywaters and then takes it to the GPO. When she asks to collect Miss P. Fisher’s mail, the man at the counter refuses to release it unless she can prove that she is Miss Fisher. Edith thinks this ‘a devil of a mess’, but never one to let circumstances defeat her she eventually decides to have some personal cards printed. Later in the day, when she finds herself in the basement of Carlton & Prior with Rose Jacobs, she asks her: ‘Would you mind writing a letter for me and address it to Miss Fisher c/o Carlton & Prior, 168 Aldersgate Street.’ Rose is the showroom factotum and closely monitors the adulterous steps of Miss Graydon. For her the intrigue thickens considerably as she sits down and at Edith’s dictation writes: ‘Dear Miss Fisher, I beg to call your attention to our next Committee Meeting which will be held on Friday … and your presence will be required. Yours truly, R. James.’ Miss Graydon seals the note in an envelope and keeps it on her. It will provide proof, if needed, that she is indeed Miss Fisher.

On Tuesday morning Edith successfully collects Miss Fisher’s mail from the GPO. It includes the watch which she gave Freddy as a present. It is running ten minutes fast, she claims – meaning ‘slow’, as she points out. She takes it back to have it mended and promises to forward it to Sydney in due course. He also encloses a cheque for her to cash and put money on the Hunt Cup for both of them. His enquiry about their winnings from the Oaks race at Epsom on 2 June meets with a disappointing answer: the money has not been paid out, and there is little hope now that it will be. Oddly, she notes, he completely forgets to mention the letter she slipped him on Thursday about the pregnancy. Could he please address himself to that? He will, but in such a way as to leave her shaking with rage.

In the evening Edith and Percy pay one of their rare visits to the Thompsons at 49 Seymour Gardens. Edith is in a good mood, because her new costume has been delivered and looks splendid. But even the light of an English summer evening cannot dispel the gloom and doom of Richard Halliday Thompson. Edith soon feels crotchety. For two hours she is treated to the Thompsons’ indulging their ailments. It is, as she remarks mischievously, ‘exhilarating especially when you feel blue’. Then Percy pointedly asks why his nephew Graham never visits at No. 41. Edith snappily interrupts: ‘Why do you ask for him to come round when you know he’s not allowed to.’ Immediately the entire Thompson clan gang up on her. They assure her that it is inconceivable that either Kenneth or Lily would forbid Graham to speak to her. She retorts that she can believe that about the boy’s father, but will not be duped into believing the same about the mother – the row between the two women is still smouldering, more than two years on from the Thompsons’ departure from 65 Mansfield Road. Percy is hurt by his wife’s unashamed disowning of his sister. When they depart, they are both bad-tempered again. Edith particularly resents the Thompsons’ intrusive presence, because on this night it is exactly a year since Freddy first kissed her on the Isle of Wight. In her mind she is holding him in her arms before going to sleep. This week, indeed this month of June, is full of memories which crowd her mind and almost challenge her sense of the present.

Commuting into work on Wednesday 14 June Edith is taken ill. She really must see a doctor, she decides: ‘I don’t like doing these silly things in public places’. If she is indeed pregnant, she must have aborted between 14 June and Saturday 17 June, because by the time she visits the surgery on Saturday she has lost ‘an awful lot of blood’. In the office she hears that the mother of one of the boys at Carlton & Prior has died of ptomaine poisoning from a tin of salmon, after only a three-day illness. How does one catch it? she wants to know. She feels ‘very blue … an inactive sort of drifting feeling’. Soon he will be at the other end of the world. If he were here now they could spend time together so easily: Carlton & Prior have just decided to stop work at 5 p.m., because business is slowing down during the summer.

In the lunch hour Edith enters the bank just down from Carlton & Prior to cash his cheque. She is asked whether she is Mrs Bywaters:

Edith: No.
Clerk: Did you endorse the back?
Edith: No.
Clerk: Just write your name on this paper please.

She obliges and is then asked whether she holds any authority from F. Bywaters to cash the cheque. She produces his letter and they pay out. But she could have done without the aggravation. After telling him of this she seals the envelope and then suddenly recalls the racing results of the Ascot ad particularly the Royal Hunt Cup run on this day and hastily scribbles them on the blank sealed envelope with a brief ‘accountant’s’ warning about their increasing losses at horse racing. She then puts the blank envelope into a new one, addresses it and posts it to Marseilles.

Thursday morning is cloudy and distinctly cool. Edith is at her desk writing three short paragraphs to her lover. ‘This time last year’ … that recurrent phrase. This is the Isle of Wight week in the Thompson and Bywaters calendar. She will be writing to him every day. A year ago she won the sweepstake for the Gold Cup. This year she has lost a pound. Freddy is getting into Marseilles tonight. How she wishes she were out there with him. After work she goes west to purchase a new frock for the Eastcote outing on Saturday 24 June. The frock she buys comes from the same shop which she visited once before and where she saw a splendid ‘White & Jade Frock’. She enquires after it now. They still have it and get it for her: ‘it was lovely & so was the price – 12 guineas so it had to stay in the shop’. This economic detail, nugatory in itself, has a distinct bearing on allegations levelled against Mrs Thompson later by her brother-in-law: particularly that her tastes were so extravagant and insatiably self-indulgent that she could only gratify them with the help of immoral earnings.

Looking into another shop-window and about to move on, Edith notices that Freddy’s sister Lilian and her fiancé Stanley Willey are standing next to her, also scrutinising the window. They must, she concludes, be trousseau-hunting. They probably were because Lilian Helen Bywaters married Stanley Willey on 26 July 1922 in Upper Norwood.

Friday 16 June, 5 p.m.: recalling perhaps the glorious weather a year ago outside Osborne House, Edith wishes she could ‘see into the future’. Then, she hopes, she can make up to her lover for all the unhappiness that she has already caused him:

There are 2 halves in this world who want nothing on earth but to be joined together and circumstances persistently keep them apart.

It is the anniversary of his first declaration of love, that last Friday in Shanklin. They had looked forward to a return to London, where they would become lovers and live together. Instead he is now at anchor off Marseilles bound for the Antipodes, while she is preparing to return to the Crescent and Percy Thompson.

On Saturday Edith pays her visit to the doctor at last. The verbal exchange which takes place, and is reproduced in Edith’s next letter to Bywaters, is almost certainly authentic, but not very informative about the true circumstances of her ‘pregnancy’ and ‘abortion’. The doctor starts by asking her ‘lots of questions’ and then suggests that he examine her. She refuses and he asks: ‘are you enceinte?’, to which her reply is ‘No, I think not.’ She explains the symptoms to him though – early morning faints for example – and he concludes that she suffers from ‘chronic anaemia’ which might trigger pernicious ‘anaemia’, if she is not careful. ‘What exactly is” pernicious anaemia”?’, she asks, and he informs her that ‘all your blood every drop turns to water’. It is not common among the young he stresses, but frequently occurs in older people. It only affects younger people as a rule ‘when they have had an accident and lost a lot of blood; have you had one?’ Caught out by this well directed question, Edith hesitates and then says ‘No – because it wasn’t really an accident and I didn’t want to tell him everything – he might have wanted to see my husband.’ To cure her serious anaemia the doctor prescribes Burgundy wine with every meal – ‘4 glasses a day’ – and also medicine and pills to induce her periods to return. From these fragments of dialogue it appears that the doctor suspects either an abortion or a miscarriage, particularly since his patient is singularly reticent. What this account confirms is that if Edith Thompson aborted a second time, it was not in a backstreet parlour, but on her own.

Mr Graydon again visits on Saturday evening, and he stays the night for the second time in two weeks on a weekend night. The warm Sunday passes without further incident. Monday comes: ‘Its Monday now darlint, that day you came up and took me to lunch at the King’s Hall do you remember?’ , Edith writes as soon as she gets into Carlton & Prior, continuing the letter she was writing on Thursday and Friday. Everything is very quiet at work, and Mr Carlton is on holiday till Thursday, when he will organize the outing to Eastcote. Edith moans to Freddy about her forthcoming holiday to Bournemouth, so unlike what she hoped for: swimming with Freddy in Cornwall and learning to play tennis properly.

Finally, just before attending to a customer, perhaps, or some business, she wonders whether he might meet Harold (as indeed he will, according to Mr Graydon’s earlier note). If so, could he ‘knock a bit of sense into him’ for her sake? The Graydons are concerned by Harold’s letters and particularly by the fact that he has written to Doris Grafton, a local girl, for her to come out and join him to get married: ‘he is sending over her passage money’. Edith’s comment is that, because there is ‘a lot more of rot like that – darlint I’m sure he’s not normal sometimes’.

On Tuesday morning Edith is back at her desk giving more details of the weekend, particularly her visit to the doctor’s. Then she hurries to the GPO for the Marseilles mail. What she finds there leaves her dumb. He has merely dropped her a note informing her of his putting off as more extended letter from Port Said. This is the second postponement and she is getting agitated and is hurt by the casual tone of his ‘Don’t be too disappointed; and ‘try to be brave’. In her own indignant and recriminatory words:

You can’t possibly know what it feels like to want and wait each day – every little hour – for something – something that means ‘life’ to you and then not to get it … You force me to conclude that the life you lead away from England is all absorbing that you haven’t got time nor inclination to remember England or anything England holds.

Her outrage is understandable, but for Bywaters she is becoming uncomfortably dependent. Her ardour, compounded by the multiple complications that will follow on from an elopement or a divorce suit, have further strengthened Bywaters’s resolve to put an end to their affair. He does not wish to hurt her, but he wants her to calm down and settle back into normality. At the same time his thoughts are already returning to Avis. They did see each other during his last leave and he rediscovered her charm and the worth of her simple integrity. Edith fires off her missive to Bywaters at once. Her spirits are bolstered somewhat by one of the firm’s buyers, the twenty-nine-year-old (and married) Reginald Arthur Dunsford, offering her a lift in the car on the following day, Wednesday, to cheer the return to London of the Prince of Wales, after his eight-month voyage in the Far East. Dunsford proposes to hoist her up onto the roof of the car to give her a prime view of the procession. Edith enthusiastically agrees to go. Home at No. 41, Edith tells Percy of Wednesday’s expditon to the ‘West’. He professes to be ‘terribly shocked’: how would she get on the car roof? She retorts that the plan is for her ‘to climb up by a rope ladder at the side of the motor’. This wholly absurd answer still soothes the husband’s jealousy at the thought of any man feeling his wife’s waist, let alone grabbing her and lifting her up.

Wednesday 21 June is warm and summery. All of London eagerly awaits the arrival at 3.30 p.m. in Paddington from Plymouth of the Prince of Wales. In the early afternoon a group of men and women from Carlton & Prior crowd into Dunsford’s car to drive up to Marble Arch or Piccadilly. The royal cortège arrives as scheduled. It passes through Sussex Garden and Cambridge Terrace, then over into Edgware Road. It crosses Oxford Street at Marble Ach, then bears down Eastern Drive and turns left into Piccadilly before reaching St James Street and the Mall. The procession arrives at the palace between 4.15 and 4.30 p.m. and the Prince, reunited at last with his family, acknowledges the massive show of loyal affection from his subjects. Edith sees ‘everything beautifully it was rather fun’. Can she guess that in just over three months from now her name will be known to almost all the people thronging these streets. The same papers that she reads will give exclusive coverage of her life story, and she will become infamous as part of ‘Thompson & Bywaters’. Even her Prince will read about her.

On Thursday Edith sends an apology to Bywaters for her intemperate outburst on Tuesday. If only she had been more patient and not posted the letter at once, she would have had an opportunity to tear it up, or at least to explain it. Business this morning is slack, and Mr Carlton is up to plan the Eastcote outing in concert with his senior staff. The royal return is the subject of lively discussions. But the nation’s celebratory mood on this day is dampened by the assassination at the hands of the IRA of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. The funeral is fixed for Monday 26 June.

The weekend is approaching. Edith quickly drops Freddy a line to remind him of the fact that it is a year, ‘by the day not the date’, since he took her to lunch at the Holborn. She remembers that she still has his watch. As he has so far failed to acknowledge her queries about it, she has decided not to forward it. She will retain it till he returns in September. Tonight is the Wanstead Garden fête and this, as well as Eastcote, should help her to overcome the tedium of the weekend. She will tell him all about both events on Monday.

It is cool on Friday evening and there is some cloud. The garden party and fête in aid of the Seamen’s Orphanage at Wanstead is one of the big local occasions, when everyone gathers in a spirit of fun to raise money. The Thompsons patronise this particular happening, because of their families’ traditional links with the sea, and now particularly through the Birnages’ prominent participation in the organising of it. The stately orphanage with its extensive gardens still stands in its walled enclosure on Hermon Hill, as the Wanstead Hospital, The grounds have shrunk from the pressure of new buildings but the old fairground area is easily recognized still. Here is how Edith described the evening:

It was rather fun on Thursday [Friday] at the Garden Party – They had swings & roundabouts & Flip Flaps, cocoa nut shies, Aunt Sallies – Hoopla and all that sort of thing I went in for them all & on them all & shocked a lot of people I think. I didnt care tho’ & going home Mr. Birnage said he’d like some fried Fish and potatoes – I’d got rather a posh frock on – wht. georgette & trd. with rows & rows of jade ribbon velvet & my white fur & a large wht. hat, but all that didnt deter me from going into a fried fish shop in Snaresbrook and buying the fish & chips.
Getting it home was the worst part – it absolutely smelt the bus out: I didnt mind – it was rather fun: only I wished you had been with me: I think 2 halves together would have enjoyed themselves – better than 1 half by herself.

Saturday 24 June is a mild and dry day. The Eastcote excursion provides Edith with her first chance to show off her new frock of ‘pale mauve voile embroidered in grey on the bodice & on the skirt & a sash of darker mauve ribbon’. The sash and the fashionable ‘organdie’ frock were clearly remembered by Myrtle Aldridge, who took part in the outing. Sixty-three years later, she described Edith’s dress to the author: ‘I remember the colouring … that mauve, a light lilac-coloured dress, organdie I think it was, organdie with white embroideries, sort of stitching and white coat and hat, white shoes … and a dark mauve sash … oh yes I remember that … she was very smart, she loved clothes, she knew how to dress.”

In a letter to the Radio Times eleven years earlier (12 September 1974), Myrtle had recalled those far-off outings to Horley and Eastcote with even sharper clarity: ‘Mrs Edith Thompson really let herself go and thoroughly enjoyed these occasions, as we all did. I remember her vividly in pale mauve organdie dress, white coat, hat, shoes, looking very attractive as always and joining in – not very tunefully – with the singing of ‘I never knew I could love anybody honey like I’m lovin’ you.’ I can never hear that song without remembering her. We were indeed a light-hearted crew, Percy Thompson helping to organise the games, and so on.

'I never knew I could love anybody honey like I'm lovin' you', sung by Eddie Cantor (1921)

After lunch the games consist of popular pastimes and are indulged in to the full. In Edith’s own account of it:

Darlint, your own pal is getting quite a sport.
On Saturday [24 June 1922] I was first in the Egg & Spoon race & first in the 100 yards Flat race & 3rd in the 50 yards Flat race.
Everybody tells me Im like a racehorse – can get up speed only on a long distance & my reply was ‘that if a thoroughbred did those things then I felt flattered.’
The[n] I was M.C. for the Lancers we stood up 10 Sets had some boys in from an adjoining cricket field. I sat on the top of the piano & made a megaphone of my hands & just yelled – nothing else – Mr Carlton said all that shouting was worth 2 long drinks afterwards so I had 2 double brandies & Sodas with him.

We had a very good day indeed: In fact I think I enjoyed the actual outing better than last year – until we got to Lpool St. coming home & then he started to make a fuss – says I take too much notice of Dunsford & he does of me & created quite a scene. I am really sick of this sort of thing – he gets jealous & sulks if I speak to any man now.

The following Monday marks a wet beginning of the Wimbledon fortnight on the magnificent new Centre Court. A stark contrast to the excitement of the tennis is provided by the sombre scene of the funeral procession of Sir Henry Wilson on its way to a ceremony at St Paul’s. Shortly before 1 p.m. Edith rushes to the GPO and sends a message to Bywaters on the Morea via Eastern Radio: ‘M H R 27 6 21 PEIDI’. But he may not receive these anniversary greetings in time, since the Morea is already out of radio range from Aden and not yet near enough to Bombay. She will send more greetings in another telegram tomorrow.

Tuesday 27 June 1922: Freddy Bywaters is twenty years old today. A fortnight ago, anticipating that they would be separated on this day, Edith sanguinely forecast that on his birthday he would be thinking of ‘a girl whose best pal you are in England’. She in turn will be focussing her whole being on him ‘all day every little minute’. The first thing she does after checking in this morning at Carlton & Prior is to pen him a frantic birthday note, for it is ‘the birthday of the Palship of 2 halves’. They became lovers a year ago. The memory of it resuscitates her flagging spirits. She posts the note at once, and receives his greetings at the same time. Later in the day she again sits down and addresses him once more:

Darlingest own Pal, I love you heaps & heaps more than yesterday and such a lot less than I shall tomorrow.

The last days of June are uneventful ones for Edith Thompson. Her only break is Miss Prior’s departure for her holidays on Wednesday. This means more work, as Miss Graydon customarily assumes the junior partner’s mantle in her absence. At the same time it grants Edith and her employer the freedom of each other’s unrestricted company; and the role of deputy manageress also means extra free days and early checking-out from work. The elation of Wednesday is dampened by an encounter in the lunch hour with Freddy’s mother in the City, who cuts her dead after Edith goes up to her, bows, smiles and says: ‘How do you do?’

On Thursday afternoon Edith enters the GPO to collect the Port Said mail. The officious little man who earlier fussed over whether or not she could prove her identity as Miss Fisher is on duty. He refuses to surrender Bywaters’s Port Said letter, though he lets her have his registered envelope to Miss Fisher. This contains a present of garters. The clerk informs Miss Fisher that, if she has a London address, she is not entitled to receive mail at the GPO. Miss Fisher denies living in London, but fails to convince him. Impatient with herself and not willing further to attempt to ‘overcome (or try to) his bad temper’, she gives up and will leave the letter till Monday, when she succeeds in retrieving it. She has waited twenty-four days for it and after reading the letter, she feels that it has hardly been worth the wait. He is preparing her for breaking off the relationship. He will continue, he says, writing to her ‘because it will help’, but at the same time he suggests that he will not write ‘from some ports – because I want to help you’. It is a deeply troubled Edith Thompson who at 4 p.m. leaves Carlton & Prior to return home.

Tuesday 4 July is a cool, cloudy and eventually wet day. On the platform at Ilford station Edith meets ‘Mr Derry’ and Molly talking and laughing together. As she passes them, she bows and says good morning.

But her outward indifference is a mask. All day long she will wonder what the two of them may have exchanged by way of gossip about her. Her letter to Bywaters, the first one since Tuesday night of last week, will help her forget any envious thoughts; and at 11.30 a.m. she is having a drink with Mr Carlton. The atmosphere at Carlton & Prior is warm and relaxed: morning drinks, 4 p.m. departures from work, whole and half days off, and plenty of company. On Tuesday evening Carlton offers his buyer Thursday off, as she has been invited (by an unknown party) to the Henley Regatta. At first Edith refuses the offer of a day at Henley. Now she accepts. Percy is not invited. But on Thursday 6 July gales reach up to sixty miles m.p.h. and the whole country is flooded by pouring rains. The party which gathers for lunch at Phyllis Court, ‘at the invitation of an MP, Mr Stanley Baldwin’, looks over a grim prospect of leaden skies and a slate-coloured river. It rains all afternoon and a miserable Edith Thompson arrives home at a quarter to seven.

The following day, on her way into Liverpool Street, she again runs into Derry who teasingly addresses her with ‘So you know that young lady [Molly] I was talking to the other morning’:

Edith: No, I don’t know her.
Derry: But she knows you & all about you
Edith: Oh, probably: lots of people know me & about me that I’d rather not know.
Derry: I believe you’re jealous.

This uneasy banter amuses Edith, she reasons with herself. Certainly the thought of her being jealous of Molly for talking to Derry is ridiculous: ‘Some men have such a high opinion of themselves and their charms that I’m afraid I cant climb up to them.’ She feels frustrated though that she is none the wiser after talking to Derry about what passed between Molly and him.

On Saturday 8 July the rains are abating, but the gales continue. At Wimbledon a delayed ladies’ final is won by Suzanne Lenglen, who overwhelms Molla Mallory of the USA: 6-2, 6-0. For Edith Thompson this day marks the return of her period for the first time since 23 April. Then she had an unusually light bleeding which had left her in little doubt about a second pregnancy. This time she does not feel faint, but aches all over. Even if she had been on duty, she could not have gone into work. In the evening she sees the doctor who advised her on 17 June. He is pleased because his medications have worked. If they were prescribed with a view to reactivating her menstrual cycle, they have certainly proved successful over a period of three weeks, the time it would take to build up and strengthen the body’s blood- supply with vitamin C and iron tablets.

On Monday 10 July the Australian Gerald Patterson becomes the men’s Wimbledon champion. Early this week Edith is writing to Bywaters again. As yet, she complains, she has not had Freddy’s promised letter from Aden. Shortly before noon Avis enters the premises of Carlton & Prior and finds her sister and Mr Carlton enjoying a brandy. He invites her to share their drink which she does, feeling ‘very flattered’. As soon as Avis is gone, Edith completes her letter to Fred. She has decided not to wait for the Aden post, but to send this one off in the lunch hour to make sure it gets to Fremantle in time. There is a sudden, poignant urgency about her concluding lines. She remembers him telling her that he wanted to ‘help’ her by not writing to her as often as he used to, and by not seeing her on his return to London. She almost panics now at the suggestion and starts to plead with him as best she knows:

I wonder what ‘my own pal’ is doing now & how he is feeling – when I try & contrast my feelings of going away this year to those of going away last year – I really wonder if Im living in the same world – I suppose I am – but its not the same world to me darlint – that world last year didnt contain a pal – just one only, to whom I need to not wear a mask – but this year does – altho he is still so very far away that I go on wearing that mask to everyone I meet – every day – I wonder if there ever will be a time when I shall appear as I really am – only you see me as I really am – the ‘pretence me’ is my ordinary every day wearing apparel the ‘real’ me is only visible for such a very short time when you’re in London. Darlingest Boy – I cant bear to think of you being in England and not seeing me – must we be so very strict & stern – cant you imagine what your only pal (no, not pal – Im talking to you darlint as the girl that loves you, Im talking to my veriest own lover not as & to a pal) will feel like knowing youre in London, & expecting to see you at every turn & really knowing deep down in her heart that she wont. Must you be so cruel darlint? See me once – for one whole day together for all that time & I wont mind if I dont see you any more the whole time you are in London I cant bear it if you go away without seeing me again – nearly 4 more months after September – that makes it January 1923 its too long to wait Darlint – too much to ask of any human being – especially is it too much to ask of you and I – we’re not ordinary human beings – we’re apart – different – we’ve never known pleasure – real pleasure I mean in anothers company – until we knew each other – weve had so few pleasures – & so many rebuffs – every one that is added now makes it harder.
Am I selfish? No, I don’t think its a selfish feeling cos its for both of us – Im fighting for our rights to break down that reserve that youre going to build up against yourself & between

PEIDI

On Thursday 13 July Edith collects Freddy’s letter from Aden at the GPO. It is very late coming, and she is puzzled by his despondent writing: ‘I want to be in England to look after you … I want you to look after me too.’ Has he been ill, she wonders, does he need ‘a pillow, the pillow that only Peidi can give you?’ Tomorrow she will be off work, shopping and packing for her fortnight’s holiday in Bournemouth. This is therefore her last chance to talk to Freddy: ‘a letter darlint is like food only you have food everyday to keep you alive and I have a letter every how many days?’ Then she launches into a discussion of Hichens’s Bella Donna, followed by a shorter excursion into The Fruitful Vine. Since this part of her letter was quoted in court, and in view of the novel’s importance for the case as a whole, a brief plot summary is needed to put into context both the bearing of the novel on the lovers’ relationship and the uses it was put to in court.

Hichens’s novel was published in 1909. Its eponymous protagonist ‘Bella Donna’ is a disgraced and ageing society belle named Mrs Ruby Chepstow who, at forty-two, succeeds in marrying a younger scion of wealthy aristocratic descent, the thirty-six-year-old Nigel Armine. Their union, secretly ratified at the Registry Office, is unsuccessfully opposed by Armine’s close friend Meyer Isaacson, a highly respected Jewish doctor. The newly weds depart for Egypt where he farms lands in the Fayyum. On the Mediterranean crossing they meet Mahmoud Baroudi, a Cairo-based buccaneer of ‘mixed Greek and Egyptian blood’ who dresses well, has mighty shoulders, a deep chest, a neck as ‘powerful as a bull’s’, black and curly hair, thick and rather pouting lips and wide ardent nostrils. He learns their address on the river Nile and arranges for Mrs Armine to be wooed secretly by having his Egyptian and Nubian servants sing for her at night at the bottom of the Armines’ river-fronting gardens. The enchantments of the East, to which the siren-like Bella Donna is susceptible, are unleashed against her in the most cunning way. Before going upriver on his own to attend to business, Armine accompanies his wife on a visit to Baroudi’s spectacular yacht, the Loulia. The motto of the Loulia is a line from the Koran: ‘The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.’ To Bella Donna its harshness ‘rather suggests a prison’ and makes her feel uneasy. Momentarily alone in Baroudi’s private apartments, she languorously reclines in the strongly scented air on the divan which, soft and yielding, ‘held and caressed her body, almost as if it were an affectionate living thing that knew of her present desire.’

Soothed and invaded by the drugs in the room, Bella Donna imagines herself in the role of an Eastern woman, supine and surrendering to the desires of a slave-master:

Slowly she closed her eyes in the Eastern house of Baroudi. Here Baroudi lay as she was lying, and smoked the keef, and ate the Hashish, and dreamed. He would never be the slave of a woman. She felt sure of that. But he might make a woman his slave … he might adore a slave with a cruel adoration. She felt cruelty in him, and it attracted her, lured her, it responded to something in her nature which understood, and respected, cruelty, and which secretly despised gentleness.

Five chapters later, after Nigel’s departure upriver, Bella Donna meets Baroudi in the ‘garden of oranges’. As she is about to leave, a darweesh enters with a basket of snakes and invites her to feel them:

She hesitated for a moment, then deliberately pulled off her gloves, put them on the divan, stood up, and plunged her right hand into the bag, at the same time shutting her eyes. She shut them to enjoy with the utmost keenness a sensation entirely new.

Her hand encountered a dry and writhing life, closed upon it firmly but gently, drew it out and towards her … It twisted itself in her hand, as if trying to escape, but as she held it firmly it presently became quieter, lifted itself … slowly she brought it nearer to her nearer, nearer, nearer, till it wavered out from her hand and attained her body.

The only way Bella Donna can see to achieve her ardent desire to be with Baroudi and at the same time maintain her English respectability and wealth is by gradually poisoning Nigel with lead. When Isaacson, who had earlier heard from Armine that he was feeling well and happy, learns of his now rapidly deteriorating condition, he at once departs for the East. Nigel is not readily persuaded by Isaacson that his wife is conspiring against his life. After showing his friend the door Nigel confronts Bella Donna who, in her frantic desire to join Baroudi, angrily admits everything. Then, rejected by her lover and no longer daring to return to the husband, she ‘disappeared into the darkness, going blindly towards the distant hills that keep the Arabian desert.’

It is hard to believe now that writing like this was praised in The Times as though it were the equivalent of a Graham Greene novel. It is true that some of the characterisation is intelligently drawn, and the novelist refrains from simplistic moral polarisation and allows scope for motivation. Its casual racism and anti-semitism accord with prejudices that were rife in the period, and one hardly expects Hichens’s novels to reject Kiplingesque sentiments. As a piece of Edwardian middle-brow fiction, Bella Donna ranks among the more explicit novels. The local colour derives its authenticity from Hichens’s own experience of Egypt. He would recover a similar sense of place in The Fruitful Vine, another novel exotically set in the south.

Even from this fragmentary summary of the plot of Bella Donna, its appeal to Edith Thompson can be identified with reasonable certainty: the novel’s escapist locations, its illicit sexuality, the age difference between Bella Donna and Armine, the inscrutably passionate and sexually devious Baroudi, the lilting rhythms of the East, the drugged pulse of life in the Delta of the Nile, and of course the poisoning of the husband. Edith read every Hichens novel that she could lay her hands on. Hichens and Locke were her favourite authors. However, Bella Donna was not her favourite novel – far from it. In May 1922 she had written to Freddy: ‘The book I’m reading, “Bella Donna”, is about Egypt – I’d think you would be interested in it – although I don’t think you would like the book – at least I hope you wouldn’t – I don’t.’ What interested Edith Thompson in Hichens’s novels was their erotic charge and the author’s fascination with the sirens of the demi-monde, whether in Bella Donna, The Fruitful Vine, or in Felix. The poison plot in Bella Donna, which is artificially foregrounded in her correspondence, is intended to keep up their shared pretence about a deed that neither of them contemplated carrying out. In court, however, the novel, and particularly the letter which refers to Bella Donna, will later provide copious fodder for the lovers’ prosecution.

On Saturday 15 July the Thompsons and Avis leave for Bournemouth. At about the same time the Morea departs for Fremantle from Adelaide. Edith has anticipated this holiday with apprehension, as she will not be able to withdraw inside her shell by commuting into the City and thus escape the caged feeling of home. She will try to be brave though and ‘dance thro. somehow’, although she is getting weary of all ‘this dancing and pretending’. As a mark of affection for the memory of last year she has left behind her ‘peach sports coat’ which she wore on the Isle of Wight.

The island and Osborne House were welcoming and exciting. Bournemouth on the other hand proves a ‘very stiff starchy place’, and the boarding house at which the Thompsons and Avis are lodgers for a fortnight is ‘terrible’. Edith, Avis and Percy stayed at ‘Park House’, 16 Derby Road, Bournemouth (50-per person/per week), from 15 July to 29 July 1922.² Kelly’s Directory gives the names of the houses in Derby Road (east side) 1922 as ‘from Southcote Rd to Manor Rd there are 2 (St Ives), 4, (Allandale), 6 (Allandale), 10 (Dovedale), 12 (Sweetbriars), 14 (apartments, Beaumont), 16 (‘Hill Misses’ boarding house, Park House’], 18 (Netherleigh), 20 (Ingledene), 24, then ‘here is Spencer Rd, here is Knyveton Rd’. In the tennis-playing picture of Edith and Percy the houses in Derby Road are glimpsed in the background. Edith and Percy are standing on either side of the net, with the net clearly visible on the left of Percy’s thigh, and a bench in the background. The trajectory of the net suggests that the court ran parallel to Derby Road. The  boarding house was run by Jane Hill and her sisters. Jane Hill later testified that ‘I slept with my two sisters in the adjoining room to theirs … They appeared a most affectionate couple’. She almost certainly meant that Edith and Percy were having sex and that she heard them.

Most of the twenty-seven boarders are, Edith writes, so staid that the company is as poor as the food – which is sparse. No drinks are allowed indoors and there are signs requesting ladies not to smoke in the house. The two sisters quickly decide that the place can do with some livening-up. In her own words:

We did some mad things – climbed a tree in front of a row of Boarding Houses & had our photos taken up it (Avis & I I mean) everyone in the Bdg. Hses were watching us from the windows & had donkey rides up & down the front: the people stopping in our Boarding Hse could hardly believe (they said) I’d been married as long as I had & I was the age I am: they said I only seemed a child I felt glad they thought this pour vous – altho I really felt very old & miserable & lonely all the time I was away.

Bournemouth is a very stiff starchy place – not a bit like the Island – Im very glad we didnt go there last year – that is one holiday I can look backward on & think I thoroughly enjoyed the holiday & myself in an impersonal way.

The first week of their holiday in this sedate resort passes uneventfully. The weather is dull and cool. The one piece of news is the marriage on Tuesday of Lord Louis Mountbatten to ‘England’s Richest Bride’, Miss Edwina Ashley. The Prince of Wales officiates as Mountbatten’s best man. The papers are full of the wedding.

It may be on this day that Edith writes to Carlton & Prior, both to send a postcard and to enquire after Rose Jacobs’s and the Dunsfords’ private addresses. Percy at once objects and accuses her of being deceitful, as she appears unable to communicate with Dunsford openly on a postcard seen by her workmates at 168. A ‘right royal battle’ ensues in the course of which Percy calls her ‘impudent’ and a lot of other things and that she ‘must have a very good tutor’ who teaches her cheating and bad temper. The row is over nothing; Edith wants to place bets in London on the races and prefers to do so discreetly through two trusted acquaintances. How misplaced her trust in Rose is, she will learn too late. After this marital confrontation Percy sulks for two days and pays a visit to a phrenologist at Boscome who tells him that he will live to be quite an old man.The Thompsons’ second week in Bournemouth coincides with Goodwood Week. On Monday Edith sends a wire to Rose to put a pound each way for her on Scamp for the Stewards’ Cup on Tuesday. The race is run on a glorious summer day. The winner is Tetrameter, and Edith professes to be fed up with Scamp for letting her down this way. The recovery of summer lures the Thompsons and Avis out for the odd game of tennis on the nearby courts; and on Thursday 27 July the threesome embark on a day-long cruise around the Isle of Wight.

As the boat ploughs out of Poole Bay, she must feel thrilled at the thought of revisiting the island, and perhaps catching another glimpse of Shanklin and Osborne House. Today will not hold the same happiness, but it will be a welcome change from the stuffiness of the mainland. The boat eventually docks on the pier in Ventnor, and the passengers disembark.

Strolling lightly along the front at Ventnor, the two women complain about the sedateness of Bournemouth and Boscombe, and the fact that a town of 90,000 inhabitants should have only seven licences granted it. One of the locals on the waterfront assures them that ‘There’s nothing like that about Ventnor – you can walk about naked if you like’. Edith laughingly replies: ‘That’s the place for us’, and then is recommended ‘a very nice Boarding Hse right on the front with 2 front laws very like Osborne Hse last year’. Already she imagines Bywaters and herself here in Ventnor, lodging in this cosy little family pension. Percy wants to take her to Cornwall next summer. She infinitely prefers Ventnor.

After their arrival back in Bournemouth, Edith surreptitiously writes Freddy a note, and posts it. The date she gives reveals where her thoughts lie: she dates 27.6.21 when she ought to write 27.7.22. She posts it in time for the 8 p.m. collection. The following day, 28 July, is the Thompsons’ last day in Bournemouth. At the other end of the world Freddy lies at anchor in Sydney. He is writing to her. It is a short letter and, one surmises, a dismissive one. Fred has a girl here in Sydney. Her presence makes it easier for him to forget about Mrs Thompson.

On Saturday morning, while Percy is packing or in the bathroom, Edith scribbles Bywaters a quick message to remind him and herself of the fact that a year ago they were in Kew. Her comfort is that at least now they are returning to London and the numerous opportunities for escape that the metropolis affords her. As she does not find an unobserved moment to post the card, she slides it into her clothes to send it on Monday from work.

Monday marks the start of Cowes Week. For Edith the week will be a hard one. It is nearly a year since the tensions at 41 Kensington Gardens exploded into an open row between the two men and resulted in Freddy’s expulsion from her home. On Tuesday 1 August Edith mourns the ‘other’ anniversary, the date of the break. This time last year it was a warm summer day, haunted only by the brief memory of a few glorious yesterdays of secret assignations and fervent romantic encounters. Today it is cool outside, and a patter of raindrops against the window panes signals the first of several showers over the City. She sits and broods as the day passes. At night she sleeps fitfully. Images of her lover intrude on her mind’s eye, as she tosses in bed next to her husband. In her sleep, dreams and nightmares surge up to disturb her rest. Nearly always these nightly visitations concern her lover who has now all but openly declared his intentions of leaving her:

One night I dreamed that you had married Avis – because she found out how much was between us (you & I) & threatened to tell everybody unless you married her – another night I dreamed I had been to a theatre with a man I knew – I had told you about him & you came home from sea unexpectedly & when you found me you just threw me over a very deep precipice & I was killed – sometimes Ive dreamed worse things than these & waked up in a fearful fright.

The awesome sense of premonition which these words intimate strikes a numbing chord in anyone reading Mrs Thompson’s letters in the inevitably retrospective knowledge of the final scene of the tragedy. Her claim to have ‘dreamed worse things than these’ sounds an eerily prophetic note. The sensation of falling will be her last one on earth.

On Friday 4 August Edith simply has to write to Freddy. A year ago was the day of their unforgettable embrace at the corner of Morris Avenue: does he remember it the way she does? As this is her first letter since their return from holiday, she relates to him her various adventures and reminds him of Avis’s birthday on 24 September. Could he please try not to forget this year? She encloses snippets from the ‘Russell case’ noting that ‘the evidence on enclosed slip struck me as being very similar to evidence I could give’. She enquires after one of the photos that she asked him to destroy last trip and asks whether now everything she says is instantly dismissed. The sole comfort afforded her at the moment is the prospect of his return journey from Sydney on Tuesday, and she concludes:

However perhaps this coming year will bring us the happiness we both desire more than anything in this world – & if it doesn’t? we’ll leave this world that we love so much – cling to so desperately.

On Tuesday the countdown from Sydney to London starts. She looks forward to his return, even though ‘you say you wont see me – but I shall hope & hope & hope …’ At the GPO today she receives a letter from Bombay and note from Colombo.

The letter contains a detailed discussion of The Fruitful Vine and was posted on 1 July. Since then he has not sent her anything. She is already writing to Aden to let him have mail that will await him on his return journey. Why then does he not reciprocate in kind? In the meantime she proposes to hold fire with her reply for another week, and it will not be till Friday 18 August when she finally posts him a 1000-word-long discussion of The Fruitful Vine.

At 2 p.m. Carlton & Prior break up. Working hours during the summer are flexible and business is slack in the wake of the holiday. Edith and probably Lily, Norman and Avis adjourn to the Waldorf for tea. Before entering the Palm Court proper the other girls excuse themselves for a moment. Edith is briefly left in the vestibule by herself when a gentleman comes up to her, raises his hat and says, ‘Good afternoon, are you Romance?’ She stares at him, thinks he must be mad (to make such a gross pass at her), turns away and sits on a couch. He follows her and apologetically says:

Im sorry if you’re not, but I have an appointment here with a lady with whom I’ve corresponded thro a ‘Personal Column’, she calls herself ‘Romance’ & she was to wear a black frock & a black lace hat.

Mrs Thompson is indeed wearing the black frock with the roses on it and the lace hat that Freddy likes. But she now ignores him and he backs off. Later, she notices that he shares a table with a girl in a black lace hat, ‘so I suppose he was speaking the truth.’ Freddy will think otherwise. Unlike her he will not think that it was ‘rather funny’ to be the object of a pick-up attempt.

It is on Thursday of this week, 10 August, that the murder of Sir Henry Wilson is avenged by the double hanging at Wandsworth of the two IRA men, Reginald Dunn and Joseph O’Sullivan. At 41 Kensington Gardens a truce obtains between husband and wife. On Saturday afternoon Avis Graydon visits for tea. They take it outside in the garden as it is a warm summer day. Somewhat cheekily Avis tells Percy that he had been sighted with a girl:

Avis: My friend Bessie Hughes saw you in Lyons in Bishopsgate the other Friday evening.
Percy: Oh did she, its quite possible.
Avis: Yes & you were with a short fat girl in a brown costume with a white stripe [This is Miss Tucknott].
Percy: Oh yes, I took her in to have something to eat as it was late after working at the office & it was my last night in town for a fortnight

Both sisters are delighted with this discovery and will go on ‘chipping’ Percy about the unprepossessing Miss Tucknott. He even assumes, Edith notes, that she might be jealous of his success with other women. In the immediate aftermath of the above exchange she pointedly teases Percy about her not being alone in deceit.

On Tuesday 15 August Edith is again writing to Freddy. This time she tells him that the Turkish delight which he brought her when he was home on leave last time was stale. Could he remonstrate with the ‘old chap’ from whom he bought it? Freddy will give her a blistering reply to this ungracious treatment of his gift. She has also read a couple of books and this time she has left no markings in them so that he can for himself, and without being directed, extract from them what is of interest to both of them. She has just acquired W. J. Locke’s popular World War I novel, The House of Baltazar, and is starting it about now. She won’t get very far at first and then events will overtake her. In the end she will finish it at Holloway. Still in the context of books, Edith notes ruefully that the two which Bywaters ordered for her in a bookshop in St Paul’s Churchyard never arrived. The girl at the desk claims that they were not ordered in the first place.

As this dreary and cloudy summer week draws to a close, and since she has had no further mail from her lover, Edith sits down at her desk once again and writes an entire letter about Hichens’s The Fruitful Vine. Bywaters discussed the novel in his Bombay letter, posted over a month ago. She has longed for more news of him and has waited. Now, in the absence of a further letter, she has decided to pen this piece of literary appreciation. As much as anything, this little essay provides a genuine insight into the workings of Edith Thompson’s highly-wrought imagination and her inability to separate herself from the world of fiction. The letter, it must be remembered, was not used in evidence. Yet its relevance to the use of the Bella Donna evidence is immediately apparent.

The Fruitful Vine is set in contemporary Rome and adjacent locations. Its narrative focusses on the interlocking lives of three characters in particular: Sir Theodore Cannynge and his younger wife Dolores who, as a wealthy diplomat couple, are retired on ‘capital’ in Rome, and Cesare Carelli, a thirty-year-old Italian count who for twelve years entertained a tempestuous relationship with the Roman princess Lisetta Mancelli, now aged forty-three. The relationship has run its course as far as Cesare is concerned. The novel’s true protagonist is the ‘pervasively feminine and fastidious’ Dolores, known affectionately as the ‘gazelle’. She is twenty-nine years old, looks like twenty-six, and is beautiful as well as generous in spirit. Above all though, she is profoundly unhappy, because of her seeming inability to bear a child to her husband, now fifty, to whom she has been married for ten years. Theo adores children and increasingly turns to the child-blessed family of his friend Denzil. When the latter dies of cancer, Theo becomes the children’s foster-father and looks after the widow. Left alone, Dolores pines away in self-condemning sorrow. Eventually she reawakens to the world of the living and innocently slips into the world of Roman nightlife, where she inevitably meets Cesare, one of its luminaries. Various tribulations and further frustrations ensue. At one point Dolores exclaims in anguish: ‘It isn’t only that I want to have a child. I need to have a child.’ Otherwise she will forfeit Theo’s love forever. When Theo leaves for England and a (false) rumour spreads that he might be Mrs Denzil’s lover, Dolores consents to joining the ‘intensely masculine’ Cesare – who by now worships her – on his own in an inn near Rome. They spend all night together and Dolores conceives. But they have been followed to their hide-out by a dishonoured gambler who is also a relative of the princess and who posts her a letter about the adulterous encounter. He shoots himself under the lovers’ window to expose them during the police enquiry. Although Cesare and Dolores successfully elude the publicity consequent on the suicide, Princess Mancelli receives the letter and blackmails Dolores into not seeing Cesare again. But Dolores has already decided that she cannot engage in an adulterous relationship of the sort desired by Cesare. When she realises that she is pregnant, she feels the need to be with Theo. She and Theo become lovers again on Sicily. He believes that the baby which is due will be his. Dolores dies in childbirth and her last words to her husband are ‘Not for me.’ Ultimately she committed the adultery for his sake, even though the instrument of it was the dashing and passionate Cesare. It is then that Theo learns of the adultery from the princess’s letter which arrives shortly after the birth. When Cesare comes to claim his child, Theo fights him off, but surrenders the baby to a widowed friend who has lost both her children, Lady Sarah Ides. Only at the very end does Theo realise the depth of the love that was extended to him. It is too late. The baby is gone, the mother is dead:

As she went out of the room he sank down again on the sofa, and leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
‘Better than I!’ he repeated. ‘Better than I.’

The Fruitful Vine was Edith Thompson’s favourite work of fiction, because of the similarities which she detected between Dolores and herself. It is easy to dismiss it as a slushily sentimental narrative, of which there are hundreds during the period. Nevertheless its attentive portrayal of Dolores as a genteel and sexually aware woman generates an elaborate and legitimate eroticism in the novel. Furthermore, pregnancy and babies inevitably loomed larger in illicit encounters in the early years of the twentieth century than they do now. From her husband’s pressing her to have children, to her lover impregnating her twice, Edith Thompson encountered the consequences of sex at every juncture. Then again, the differences of age in the novel were thrown into relief for her in a way that they might not be to the casual or disinterested reader. Writing to Freddy in July, Edith remarked about an ‘age’ passage in The Fruitful Vine, as it might concern her and Bywaters. The particular passage in question occurs in Chapter 6:

Such a liaison had been existing between Princess Mancelli and Cesare Carelli. Yet the Princess was now forty-three and Carelli only just thirty, and when the affair had begun Carelli had been a boy of but eighteen.
In those early days, twelve years before, the Princess had been severely blamed, and, for a short time, had been in danger of losing her social prestige. People said, and thought, it was a shame to break up the life of a boy and impair his freedom. Many mothers were indignant on behalf of their budding daughters; and Cesare’s parents were furious, and made efforts to detach their son from a woman they chose to call ‘old’. Of course the Prince was an abominable husband. Everyone knew that. He was forever in Paris living an ‘impossible’ life. From the first he had treated his wife atrociously, and after remaining with her for a couple of years had practically deserted her, Nevertheless she had done very wrong in spoiling the boy’s life, and in keeping one of the best parties in Rome from matrimony.
Why did Rome forgive her? Because she had great force of will, as a grande dame, and accomplished mondaine, and knew how to be determined with discretion. And she genuinely adored Carelli, and never looked at anyone else. Rome loves romance.

Commenting in his reply on the princess, Freddy neatly equivocated by saying that he liked her, but that he also felt that Cesare had to leave her. Edith understood his meaning only too well, as her letter makes clear. From it, the extent of her dialogue with Freddy Bwaters and the particular patterns of its mingling of fact and fiction can be gleaned better than any paraphrase would suggest. The letter is quoted in its entirety:

I was reading the book & I could understand her so well – I should do the same – exactly for the man I love – but you must love him darlint – real & deep & true – because your honour is such a sacred thing – your only covering, that you would only lose it to an ‘anybody’ for a man you really loved.
You ask if it is sufficient reason that a good woman knows she is wanted, that she sins. Yes I think this right in a measure. A good woman who has no husband or lover – either had never had one or one that had died – would sin with a man whom she knew wanted her & she would willingly give herself – because she felt that she was wanted so much wanted enough darlint, but a good woman who had a husband or a lover who really loved him & whom she really loved – would never sin with another man – because she felt that other man wanted her. Have I explained the difference, darlingest boy, Ive tried to.
I dont like Theo myself – but I think he was a good man & would have been a fine man if he had had a child. He was terribly selfish darlint I know, but then every man is selfish in life as well as in fiction, to be selfish is part of their nature. Cesare I loved, I think he was fine – he certainly loved Dolores very very much – but it still didnt make her love him. You say you dont understand Dolores because she wrote when she came back ‘All that she told you is true, I sent her to tell you’. (Nurse Jennings)
What about Lady Sarah Ides didnt you like her?
About Dolores darlint – I dont agree with you at all about her not loving her husband. You think she loved Cesare – because she gave all – darlingest boy she didnt give herself in the true sense of the word. She loved her husband so much that she would do anything in the wide world – anything in her power – to give him pleasure. She felt for him – as well as for herself – she knew what his pleasure would be if she gave him a child – she also knew more than he did – she knew it was not thro her she didnt have a child – it was thro him – he was the Fruitless Vine & she the Fruitful & because of this she degraded herself in every way for him.
Darlint, if she hadnt loved him, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to have said ‘It is your fault Theo (that is what she called him isnt it), not mine & he would have probably loved her so much more & she would have been so much happier – instead of which she makes the supreme sacrifice – (darlint it is the supreme sacrifice to give yourself to someone you dont love) for her husband’s sake, to make him happy – as well as herself – it was a big thing to do darlint, tremendous & it is always the same darlint & will always be the same – nothing is too much to do for the man you love – nothing is too much to give – not even yourself.
I can feel with her & live with her darlint & I did – all the time I certainly think she wronged Cesare more than she did her husband & I think she realised she had & that is why she wrote that.
She wanted Cesare to see how much she had wronged him – how bad she really felt she had been towards him.
Had she loved him – she would never have said or written that – she would have gone anywhere with him – to the ends of the world – she wasnt a woman who was ruled by convention. He, Cesare was just a man who could help her to give her husband what he (& she) wanted most in this world & because Cesare loved her enough to want her & take her as she was – she used him – thats all there is about it darlint.

About the Mancelli darlint, you say you like her in one breath & in another you say you quite understand Cesare wanting to break away from her. These two sentences are absolutely opposite.
I think you said you liked the Mancelli – to please me – I think you thought ‘If I say I dont like her & could understand Cesare’s feelings in trying to get away from her ‘Peidi will be hurt – she will think of her position & mine in relation to the Mancellis & Cesare’s with regard to age, so I will say I like her.’ Oh I hated her – she was a beast a vampire – Oh I cannot bear her – darlint I should have been much more pleased if you had said you hated her.
I like ‘Carissima’ better than yours darlint – it sounds so like the ‘Great Lover’, so much like Cesare as I imagine him.

Just as the callousness of Bella Donna alienated Edith, so it never occurred to her to identify with the ‘vampire’ Mancelli. She liked Dolores. Bywaters had written ‘Forget her romance in connection with you.’ But what if she died and left him a baby – he could then ‘live in a memory and with a replica’. Increasingly the thought of babies was rising in her mind: the more Freddy withdrew, the more desperate the remedies of healing the rift became.

Summer has returned to London. On Tuesday 22 August Ben Travers’s new farce The Dippers opens at the Criterion Theatre. The fame of the dance numbers, and in particular Binnie Hale’s ‘Tango Queen’, will contribute substantially to the fortunes of the play, as much as the comic skills of Cyril Maude.

The Thompsons, the Laxtons, and an unidentified friend taking Avis Graydon’s ticket will see The Dippers on the night of 3 October. On Wednesday Edith reads the headline in the Daily Sketch that ‘Public Opinion saves woman from scaffold’. The Home Secretary reprieved Mrs Elsie Florence Yeldham who with her husband had jointly been sentenced to death for murdering one George Stanley Grimshaw in Epping Forest. The paper refers its readers to the tragic case of Mrs Rhoda Willis and notes that it has been fifteen years since a woman was last hanged in Britain. There is a reassuring quality to the article: the execution of female felons seems to have become a thing of the past.

A long-awaited letter from Fremantle reaches Edith on Thursday 24 August. It is slight, and she grumbles at his formulaic phrases. Particularly reprehensible is his squeezing a letter to her into the last few moments before casting anchor at various ports on the voyage: ‘We are getting into so & so tonight’, he writes, which to her spells apathy:

Don’t you ever feel that you’d like to write a few lines to me & then leave it & write again when you feel like it. Thats how I do darlint, & then when it comes to the last for posting, I havnt got to sit down & write as a duty.

Among other favourite novels listed at her suggestion, Freddy mentions three novels which he has recently read: Hichens’s vaguely supernatural Mrs Marsden – a novel about a widowed mother whose son is killed during World War I, and who tries to transcend the confines of matter to communicate with him through spiritualist séances – and Jeffrey Farnol’s Martin Conisby’s Revenge and The Chronicles of an Imp. His failure to mention Chambers’s The Common Law disquiets her, since she admires the book not least for its relevance to their relationship. As for her, she has just re-read W. J. Locke’s ‘very amusing’ novel Septimus and is now embarked on Eden Philpotts’s The Secret Woman, a Hardyesque romance in the style of Stella Gibbons:

it takes a lot of reading – its very dry & you know the ‘Secret Woman’ practically at the commencement – if you’ve got any sense.

As if the multiple complications of Edith’s love life were not enough, the Thompsons and the Lesters are heading for a showdown over tenancy. The Lesters agreed to move by the end of August, after the Thompsons’ original and unsuccessful attempt to evict them over two years ago when they purchased 41 Kensington Gardens. As the deadline approaches without any signs of the Lesters vacating the premises, Percy warns them about their obligations: if by December they should still be in residence, he will take the matter to court. The Thompsons’ solicitor has instructed his clients in this matter and assures them that in law the Lesters have absolutely no case: two and a half years is ample time to find another home although, as Edith realises, not a place as large and comfortable as half The Retreat for a mere 30 shillings a month. In retaliation Mrs Lester withdraws all the voluntary help that she usually gives to Mrs Thompson. During the day, she refuses to take in the deliveries of bread and milk, and tells the window cleaner only to do her side of the house. Most inconveniently of all is her point-blank refusal to take in the laundry or even open the door to Bill when he delivers a parcel for his sister; this means that Edith cannot order her groceries to be sent up to the house. Instead, this Friday evening and for the next two or three weeks she has to rush home after work to do all her shopping and to carry her potatoes herself, or at least to be there when they arrive. How, Edith wonders, can Mrs Lester be so petty after all that she did for Norah and her when they needed help after her father’s death? As a result of this added aggravation she and Percy momentarily draw closer to each other. In such domestic affairs as these the two Thompsons invariably pool their resources.

Sunday 27 August: Equipped with a piece of notepaper, Edith is sitting in the bathroom. It is another 27th and therefore a ‘birthday’. She always sends him greetings on the day, even if she is home, as she is on the Sunday, with Percy. The only place in the house where even her husband dare not follow her provides her with a haven for the few lines needed to voice her longing:

Fourteen whole months have gone by now, darlint, its so terribly long. Neither you nor I thought we should have to wait all that long time did we? Although I said I would wait 5 years – and I will darlint – its only 3 years and ten months now.

In the meantime the Morea is steadily plying the ocean, bound for England. At every port of call a letter awaits her writer and laundry steward Bywaters. On Tuesday 29 August Edith writes her second Port Said letter, to follow the birthday greetings note. She tells Freddy among others that ‘blouses are fashionable again, no more jumpers’. But she is saving her little green one, which he loves, for him to keep.

The end of this week is visited by heavy thunderstorms, and more trouble on Friday 1 September with the Lesters reinforces Edith’s conviction that she cannot cope without a maid. Even Percy is now relenting about a maid staying with them, and before long a maid called Ethel Vernon White will have accepted the offer to join Edith Thompson.

Sunday 3 September: Already the softer rays of the early morning sunlight announce the approach of autumn as unmistakably as the still mists over the waters in Valentine’s Park and on the flats of Wanstead. The Thompsons are giving a Sunday dinner party which includes the family from the Crescent and Bessie and Reg, as well as others who are due for afternoon tea. Everyone is in great form. The wife, always an excellent hostess, laughs with her guests. When the husband is momentarily put out by a good-humoured joke at his expense, she steps in with ‘Oh, don’t mind him.’ Bessie produces her camera and, out in the garden, she takes two remarkable pictures of her hostess, on her own and of the two Thompsons together. The first one of these shows a coy and tomboyish Edith in a light silk dress with scalloped edges. Her hair is bobbed now and around her neck she wears a loosely-fitted single strand of pearls. Photographer and subject seem to enjoy a conspiratorial relationship; the uninhibited pose and welcoming expression in Edith Thompson’s face bears witness to her trust in Bessie.

The contrast with the next photo is striking. It has Percy standing behind his wife, who is sitting on the edge of a deck chair. Whereas he faces the camera with a look of assertive if not proprietorial defiance, Edith’s smile resembles a forced grimace. Her eyes are not only vaguely focused, as though she wished to escape into herself away from the ineluctable imprinted communion of Percy and herself on celluloid. It is as if she were pleading with Bessie and her camera not to give her away. Both Bessie and Lily have spoken to Edith about Freddy Bywaters, and Bessie in particular has intimated a qualified disapproval. Her advice to Edith, that she should avoid Bywaters, or at least not seek him out, has been cold-shouldered: ‘It is not I who seek out his company, I can take care of myself perfectly well’. Since this incident of failed communication, Bessie has kept her peace. On this warm Sunday nothing is allowed to spoil the fun of the occasion.

On Wednesday 6 September Mrs Bywaters is up in town as is her wont. While shopping for material in the West End she posts a note addressed to ‘Miss P. Graydon, c/o Mssrs Carlton & Prior, 168 Aldersgate Street, EWC I’. It will reach its destination the following morning. Percy is out on this night and Avis is visiting at No. 41. She tells Edith that her parents are eagerly anticipating the Morea’s return home to hear from Freddy about the state of Harold’s affair with Doris Grafton and his questionable progress at the Café Elito in Melbourne:

Edith: But I understood he was not coming to England
Avis: Oh that was a lot of rot he was talking, I expect he has thought better of it since we all think we’d like to die at certain times but we all get over it and I suppose he has done the same by now.

Furthermore Avis has heard that the Morea’s next voyage is scheduled to take her to China and Japan. This sends a tremor down Edith’s spine, as she imagines the trip to the far reaches of the east taking longer than that to Australia. For once her acute sense of global geography has deserted her. Avis’s visit leaves her sister thoughtful and brooding. Can it be possible, she wonders, that her lover is paying court again to her sister, after dropping her fourteen months ago? Is he weary of her demands on him, or is he no longer convinced of her determination to separate from Percy?

On Thursday morning, Edith receives a note posted from the West End. The ‘P’ for ‘E’ (that is, ‘Peidi’ rather than ‘Edie’) alarms her, as she immediately apprehends from it that it must have originated with Bywaters. Its message is painfully clear:

If you wish to remain the friend of F. Bywaters, be careful. Do not attempt to see him or communicate with him, when he is in England.
Believe this to be a genuine warning from

A Wellwisher

The postmark says ‘W1, Sept. 6, 3.15 p.m.’ At once Mrs Thompson guesses what has happened: Freddy has invited a mate to take a dictated letter and sign it ‘A Wellwisher’. He has dated it 6 September as a pathetic decoy to make it appear that the note had been written in London rather than being sent, as it must have been, from Australia to his mother for her to post on her way up west. Edith feels humiliated by the fact that the much loathed Mrs Bywaters is delegated to send the document of dismissal to her; she is hurt and disillusioned not only by Freddy’s cowardice in working through such a transparent subterfuge, but by the elaborateness of what is in any case an uncharacteristic attempt at deceit. But she bridles her anger and hurt and with deliberation she retaliates:

I had rather a shock this morning – I am enclosing you the cause of it – just as I received it. Do you know anything about it? I don’t suppose you do darlint, but Im just asking. Im sure if you had reasons for not wanting to see me – you’d tell me and tell me the reasons – you couldn’t resort to letters of this description. I don’t think it can be from anyone I know – or from any relation of mine, because I am addressed as ‘p’ you will notice – & no one knows you call me anything but ‘Edie’. Also darlint I cant help noticing that it is posted in the West End on a Wednesday. Write and tell me what you think about it & if you have no use for the letter – destroy it – because I dont want it.

As long as he cannot bear to confront her with the threat of separation she will be able to handle him.

On Friday Edith completes the letter which returns his note. She tells him of the Lesters’ unpleasantness and apologises for boring him with such trifles: ‘I just tried to make you live in my life.’ At the same time, she informs him of the fact that his watch is ready, and enquires whether or not she ought to send it on to Plymouth along with the books. Could he let her know? The question of the watch is more than a little loaded, and Bywaters will rise to the bait while accusing her of baiting him. He is touched by her solicitous attitude about the watch and her wearing it:

I have had it put right and often wear it myself at 168 – the strap is so big it comes nearly up to my elbow – also I have had a gold buckle put on it – did you notice it was only R.G. [rolled gold] I didn’t when I bought it – or I should have had it altered at the time – however it is done now.

Edith intends to post the letter on Saturday and therefore leaves it at Carlton & Prior. But during the night she is woken by the all too familiar pulling sensation which spreads through her body. Much as her periods usually afflict her, this time is particularly excruciating, and she fails to make it into the office on Monday.

In the lunch hour on Tuesday, Edith is ‘speaking’ to Freddy again, contrasting this homecoming with the last one. She is now ‘just existing with an intense strung up feeling of seeing you and feeling you holding me in your two arms so tightly that it hurts’. She will abide by whatever he decides for them; and already she has regressed, so she intimates, to becoming the ‘dutiful wife’, whose spirit is ‘at last bent to the will of her husband’. What else does he expect? The last note she has from him dates from 28 July, and there are so many unanswered questions in her letters to him. The emotional elixir will work its magic, because Bywaters will react jealously to the prospect of Percy supplanting him in Edith Thompson’s realigned wifely duties. The only other item of news – and one which, harmless though it is, will give credence to the preposterous allegations levelled against Edith in due course – is that shortly after Bournemouth she bought herself an expensive fur coat: it cost 27 guineas and, as she has only £13 in saving, she borrowed £15 from the account and is repaying the debt at £1 a week. Also she has treated herself to new lace shoes. She can imagine Freddy making a face at the thought of lace shoes, but hopes that he will sympathise with her. Repeatedly she indicates in her correspondence how much importance they both attach to each other’s appearance, and clothes in particular. Freddy expresses vehement likes and dislikes about what she wears, from her garters and camisole to her shoes, hats and small green sweater, not to mention the pearls and beads which he brought her. His energy, drive and vanity contrast with her husband’s lethargy.

This last full week before Bywaters’s return to Gravesend marks a cold and wet early autumn spell. It is getting dark shortly after 7 p.m., and the sun does not rise till 6.30a.m. On Saturday 16 September Thompson gives his wife a ‘very solemn warning’ that Bywaters is due back the following weekend and will call in at No. 231:

Edith: I understood that Freddy Bywaters was not coming to England any more.
Percy: Oh that was all bluff – just an excuse to make it easier to take you out that night.

This time he will not be fooled, and certainly not by rumours circulated by Bywaters to various shared acquaintances and friends that he will not be back in England because of an emotional trauma. Neither the Graydons nor the Thompsons believe this to be the case, and Avis speaks for them all when she dismisses the suggestion as ‘a lot of rot’. Yet one particular incident might point in another direction and reveal a residual layer of ingenuousness.

In Sydney the Morea rode at anchor for just over a fortnight, from 24 July to 8 August. Even so Freddy missed the ship’s departure. This news reached No. 231 through one of Edith’s two sailor brothers. Whatever Bywaters’s excuse was, it was accepted as valid, and his rating remained uniformly V.G. He may have rejoined the vessel in Melbourne, travelling there by train, or he may have been allowed the break by the company for working on board ship during most of his last stay in London. Avis’s explanation, ‘Oh I suppose he was drunk’, is clearly wrong, as this would have resulted in instant suspension. Edith professes to be ‘very anxious to know’ what has happened. She rightly suspects that the Australian girl – who lives in Sydney – enters the picture, and that she may well have contributed to the cooling of Freddy’s ardour. For the time being though, she will hold back; if he is drifting away from her, then the worst strategy to pursue would be to alienate him further by a jealous scene.

The following day, Sunday, Edith Thompson amuses herself ‘making jam-chutney & mincemeat with the apples from the garden’. Lily and Norman visit in the afternoon, and Bessie and Reg may also join them for tea. They compliment her on her achievement, and Norman teasingly expresses a desire to borrow her as his cook. Later in the day she finishes The Firing Line by R. W. Chambers. She likes its villain, Louis Malcourt, and the book as a whole strikes her as very exciting. Why, she wonders, did Freddy not like it?

No mail reaches Edith on Monday or on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday 20 September, which is statement day at Carlton & Prior, she receives a long letter from Bywaters. It is here reconstructed point by point, along with her response to it: He will be in London on Saturday and will proceed straight to Westow Street rather than staying with the Graydons, or lodging on board ship. He has good reasons for doing so. How does he feel about that? Is she ‘glad or sorry?’ He appreciates that he deserved her first letter to Sydney, but fails to mention her second letter sent two days later to make up again. He expresses annoyance at her unguarded comments on the Turkish Delight being stale and has brought her neither Delight nor cigarettes this time. He has been perusing Chambers’s The Firing Line at about the same time as her, and he asks her whether she has read Dumas’s classic revenge yarn The Count of Monte Cristo – which to him, one imagines, takes on extra dimensions given his familiarity with Marseilles and the gloomy Château d’If perched like Alcatraz on its prison rock in the sound. He asks ‘can we be Pals only, Peidi, it will make it easier?’ to which she replies with a resounding ‘No’, because it would be ‘impossible physically and mentally’ – and she reminds him of an earlier occasion when she offered to remove herself from his life and he pleaded with her not to do so.

In a more conciliatory tone, he enquires about her sleeplessness, of which she has sorely complained. He suggests that she consult a doctor to which she replies that the only doctor who can help her is he: ‘I want you for my doctor – my pal – my lover – my everything – just all and the whole world would be changed’. He alludes to missing the ship in Sydney but remains vague about it. Of Sydney, and possibly to convey a spurious sense of innocence, he remarks: ‘I went home to my cousin’s every night – quite domesticated.’ She is not fooled and replies that it sounds like a sneer and that she does not like it.

In a more stoic vein, Freddy notes that ‘Time passes and with it some of the pain – Fate ordained our lot to be hard’. Her immediate response is that her pain gets ‘less and less bearable’ – it hurts ‘more and more, every hour really’. In the same breath he warns her that ‘other ways only involved the parting of you and I, Peidi, nobody deserves anything more than I do.’ The other ways envisaged here are those which involved the two of them in being more than just pals. Above all, he feels, he is ‘unnatural’ for fearing intimate contacts or relationships with women. This, he tells her, is his shipmates’ verdict on him. Edith immediately rallies round and commends him for being ‘not an ordinary sensual sort of creature made in the usual mould of men’. He then asks her ‘Peidi do you think you could live with a replica – you once said “No”’. She fails to understand the question, forgetting that in a letter of 23 August she assured him that she could ‘live in a memory and with a replica’, that is a baby and the remembrance of its mother – the word ‘replica’ for baby is used in The Fruitful Vine.

Still replying to one of her letters, Freddy accuses her of snobbery for wishing to patronise the Regent Palace Hotel. He even underlines his remonstration with her. She is stung to the quick. He also maintains that the man who ‘mistook’ her for Romance must have been a rascal. She agrees, but supposes that she was just the wrong assignation. Finally Freddy tells her how jealous he is of Percy Thompson. Her reply – in a very long letter of Thursday 21 September – will morally damage her case badly in the eyes of judge and jury:

Yes, darlint you are jealous of him – but I want you to be – he has the right by law to all that you have the right to by nature and love – yes darlint be jealous, so much that you will do something desperate.

Retrospectively, and with only the bare facts available, it is not difficult to see how the prosecution could twist such a sentence to make it fit into the wider fabric of a carefully orchestrated plot, devised by the woman to incite the man to murder her husband. In the infinitely more complex and haphazard flow of life, however, Edith’s almost joyous invitation to Freddy to be jealous and to act on it is a spontaneous gesture: its lack of deliberateness is attested to by the fact that it refers primarily to a point made by him in his letters. Its note of triumph reveals her pleasure at the thought of having successfully redirected Bywaters’s feelings. Before Wednesday she has had to live with the idea that he will leave her. Now he appears to wish to repossess her. She is ready and only too conscious of how well she has played her hand by being patient and plotting to keep him.

She can do little more than acknowledge his long letter on Wednesday and scribbles a quick reply posted shortly before 5 p.m. The real answer follows on Thursday, when she is replying in detail to his letter. For Friday’s meeting she planned to

get off early – rush to Ilford and do the shopping and rush up to meet you – having had my hair washed in the luncheon hour instead of at night – as I should have said and now all that is no use – so I shant have my hair washed – it must wait until the next Friday – that will mean an extra hour with you – do you mind me having a dirty head for a week darlint – its very very dirty. I’ve been hanging it out especially for now.

How she hates Australia ‘and everything connected with it’: It is 109 days since she last saw her lover! As regards the vexed question of the Turkish Delight, well she now feels sorry that she ever fussed about it; shouldn’t he soften his line a bit more in the knowledge that ‘to err is human, to forgive divine?’ Also, could he again send his mail to Carlton & Prior as before, because the GPO is just too hard to use? Finally, after dutifully replying to her letter, she confesses to the misdemeanour of holding back his watch in the hope that missing it would make him visit her if all else failed:

Yes I can make him – I wont send his watch – I’ll tell him if he wants it – he’s to come to 168 and fetch it.
Darlint, was it small? if it was, real big love must make people think of small things, because real, big love made

PEIDI

This long letter is not sent but will be passed to Bywaters by hand on Monday. On Friday morning at 9.28 a.m. she sends a telegram from the City: ‘Can you meet Peidi Broadway 4pm’. The meeting is intended for Saturday, as the ship is not due in Tilbury till then. To fill in the time Edith buys Avis’s birthday present on this day.

It is just past noon when the Morea is steering her way through the Thames estuary. The weather is mild and an autumnal light laces the shores of Essex and Kent. The laundry steward doubles on such occasions as a jack of all trades. If everyone chips in, the entire crew will be home more quickly. The ship docks at 2.40 p.m. In the meantime Edith has returned to Ilford after the Saturday shift at Carlton & Prior. At 1 p.m. she prepares dinner for Percy and her father, who is coming up from East Ham. At 3 p.m., and after washing up, she leaves the house for Broadway near the Barking British Rail station, while the two men work in the garden. But Freddy fails to turn up, as the Morea is in late. After waiting for a while Edith makes for the Crescent and returns home by 6 p.m. Thompson at once argues with her for being so long, but she manages to shrug it off. Tonight Freddy will sleep in London again, and she won’t be able to see him till Monday.

On Sunday Avis Graydon is twenty-six years old. Freddy Bywaters sends her birthday greetings. This year he does not forget. The virginal Avis is after all, Bywaters has discovered, great fun to be with. As much as her sister, Avis awaits the arrival of the sailor boy, and while they all toast her and sing ‘Happy Birthday, dear Avis’, she misses the voice and the face which ever since 1920 have spelt the future for her.

Monday 25 September 1922: At 10.03 in the morning Edith sends a telegram to Freddy on the Morea in Tilbury, where it is received at 10.16 a.m.: ‘Must catch 5.49 Fenchurch Reply if can manage’.

It is 4.30 p.m. when Edith at last sees Bywaters standing outside Carlton & Prior. Turning to Lily Vellender she says: ‘Fred is outside, would you like to have a cup of coffee with him.’ Today of all days she would be kept busy! Lily, who by now knows all about Edith’s affair, joins Freddy and takes him across to Fuller’s for tea till Edith is free. She is still making polite conversation with Fred about his antipodean voyage, when Edith charges in with her hat and coat on. Their mutual and affectionate embrace is inhibited solely by the restricted space of Fuller’s and the tangible presence in the virtually empty premises of gossipy waitresses. Lily Vellender slips out almost unobserved. Her own somewhat colourful recollection of her brief encounter with Freddy is worth quoting:

I have not seen him [Freddy] since till Monday afternoon, about 4.50 pm, the 25 September 1922. On this date I was leaving business and, before doing so, Mrs Thompson said to me ‘There will be someone to surprise you outside’. Upon going out into the street, I saw Bywaters, who was alone standing just outside. I said ‘Good evening, fancy seeing you’. He replied ‘It isn’t fancy, it is reality’. After speaking about the weather, he said ‘Would you care to have a cup of coffee with me across the road’ (pointing to Fuller’s). I said ‘Yes’. We went together, and I remained with him about ten minutes. The conversation was about theatres, and picture palaces. He did not mention Mrs Thompson’s name. Mrs Thompson then came in when after saying ‘Good night’ to them both I left them sitting at a table together.

By 5.30 the lovers are walking down Aldersgate towards the Royal Exchange and on from there to Fenchurch Street. So far they have stuck to Freddy’s stipulation to be ‘pals only’. But as the commuter train pulls out of Fenchurch Street the lovers share a private compartment. After a split-second hesitation by the woman, they kiss passionately. He has again found her personality mesmeric.

Before they part in llford at 6.45 p.m., Edith slips Freddy the mammoth letter of Thursday. Exalted, she walks home in the dusk through the Belgrave Road. It’s nearly dark as she lets herself into 41 Kensington Gardens. Tonight she may even spare a friendly word for Mrs Lester. After all she has triumphed. In the meantime Bywaters is briskly crossing over from Ilford to Manor Park. He carries Edith’s letter and a message from her brother Harold for the family. They are delighted to see him, and no one more so than Avis. They talk of Australia, the sea, and of Harold and Billie.

It is 10.30 p.m. by the time he is on the move again towards East Ham Station, and eventually Victoria and Gipsy Hill. It is still before midnight when, settled in his tiny backroom at 11 Westow Street, he starts a letter to Edith. He has now read hers to him. How quickly everything has changed from the way he planned it. Her letter reminds him of her resilience in the face of a threatened separation, her forbearance and her generosity. He realises how much she needs his love; and perhaps he in turn awakens to the reality of a permanent physical separation from this fascinating woman. He therefore writes her the following letter:

Darling Peidi Mia
Tonight was impulse – natural – I couldn’t resist – I had to hold you darling little sweetheart of mine – darlint I was afraid – I thought you were going to refuse to kiss me – darlint little girl – I love you so much and the only way I can control myself is by not seeing you and I’m not going to do that. Darlint Peidi Mia – I must have you – I love you darlint – logic and what others call reason do not enter into our lives, and where two halves are concerned. I had no intention darling of doing that – it just happened thats all – I’m glad now chere – darlint when you suggested the occupied carriage, I didn’t want to go in it – did you think that perhaps I did – so that there would have been no opportunity for me, to break the conditions that I had stipulated – darlint I felt quite confident that I would be able to keep my feelings down – I was wrong Peidi. I was reckoning on will power over ordinary forces – but I was fighting what? not ordinary forces – nothing was fighting the whole of me. Peidi you are my magnet – I cannot resist darlint – you draw me to you now and always, I shall never be able to see you and remain impassive. Darlint Peidi Mia Idol mine – I love you – always – always Ma Chère. Last night when I read your questions I didn’t know how to answer them – I have now Peidi?
Darlint I don’t think I can talk about other things tonight – I want to hold you so tightly. I’m going to tonight in my sleep. Bon Nuit Ma Petite, cherchez bien pour votre
FREDDY

On Tuesday evening Freddy again meets Edith, at Fenchurch Street at 5.45 p.m. He has just learned that he has been promoted from laundry steward to storekeeper. The railway carriage to Ilford once again becomes their trysting place. Redeclared lovers now, their passion is fuelled by guilt and the fearful experience of nearly losing each other. When he parts from Edith in Ilford, Bywaters slips her the letter he wrote at midnight. Her reply, another letter by him of Sunday 1 October and one by her of Monday 2 October, are reproduced in full for their importance as the only immediate ‘evidence’ extant from the last week before the tragedy. Her first letter of Wednesday 27 September is damaged by hot wax from the seal she used – as she scribbled on the back of the envelope:

(On back) – I burnt this sealing it – PEIDI
[Stamps – Three 1 ½]

well let us accept it then – and bear the hard part as willingly as we enjoy the natural part. Darlint, I didn’t think you wanted to go into the other carriage – but I suggested it because I felt there would be less temptation there – not only for you but for me too – do you think it is less pleasure to me, for you to kiss me & hold me, than it is for you to do so? I think its more pleasure for me than it can possibly be to you – at least it always feels so & darlingest, if you had refrained from doing these things (not perhaps last night – but at some time before you went) I am not above compelling you to – darlint I could, couldn’t I, just the same as if the position was reversed – you could compel me to – because we have no will power. I felt that’s how it would be darlingest lover of mine – I was strong enough in spirit, until I was tempted in the flesh & the result – a mutual tumble fom the pedestal of ‘Pals only’ that we had erected as penance for ourselves. No darlint, it could never be now – I am sure that you see that now don’t you? intentions – such as we had – were forced unnatural – & darlingest we are essentially natural with each other – we always have been, since our first understanding. Why should we choose to be as every other person – when we’re not – is every other person such a model that you & I should copy them? Lets be ourselves – always darlingest there can never be any misunderstandings then – it doesn’t matter if its harder – you said it was our Fate against each other – we only have will power when we are in accord, not when we are in conflict – tell me if this is how you feel. As I said last night, with you darlint there can never be any pride to stand in the way – it melts in the flame of a great love – I finished with pride Oh a long time ago – do you remember? When I had to come to you in your little room – after washing up. I wonder if you understand how I feel about these things – I do try to explain but some words seem so useless. Please please lover of mine, dont use that word I dont like it – I feel that Im on a pedestal & I shall always have to strive to remain there & I don’t ever want to strive to do anything anything with or for you – that’s not being natural & when you use that word – thats just how I feel – not natural – nor myself. Would you have me feel like this just so that you could use a term that pleases you & you only? Tell me.
Do you remember me being asked if I had found ‘The Great Lover’? Darlingest lover of mine – I had & I’d found ‘The Great Pal’ too the best pal a girl ever had. One is as much to me as the other, there is no first and seconds they are equal.
I am glad you held me tightly when you went to sleep darlint I wanted comforting badly – I cried such a lot – no I wasn’t unhappy – I look a sight today.
Darlingest – what would have happened had I refused – when you asked me to kiss you? I wanted to know.
M.H.R. 27621 from
PEIDI

It is worth noting how strongly she reacts to the phrase ‘Idol’. The intensity of her passion now demands a physical consummation. It is what they both desire. The place for it is the train. Wednesday is the 27th – and therefore a ‘birthday’ (‘M.H.R.’) for both of them – and it signals their first sexual encounter since the early summer. She is just over sixteen days into her menstrual cycle. If they don’t make love on 27 September, they will on Thursday night, when they again travel home to Ilford on the 5.49 from Fenchurch Street.

The next five days are crucial. The movements during this period of the couple are documented here as intimately as possible.

Friday 29 September: At around noon Freddy meets Edith outside Carlton & Prior and whisks her off for lunch. They agree to meet again at Fuller’s at tea-time. He arrives there between 3 and 4 p.m. But she cannot get away quite yet. At 3.45 he appears in the porch of Carlton & Prior where Mr Carlton, who is downstairs in the basement, sees him as he looks up. At about 4.15 she hurriedly writes him a note in her office, having previously summoned Rose Jacobs into her presence. The note which she scribbles on a Carlton & Prior order form and misdates (30 September, instead of 29) reads: ‘Come in for me in ½ hour – PEIDI.’ Passing it to Rose she says: ‘Will you take this note over to Fullers. Mr Bywaters will be sitting just inside the door?’ Miss Jacobs crosses the road and dutifully hands over the note, an action witnessed by the observant Fuller’s waitress Edith Annie Brown. Then, at Edith’s prompting, Lily Vellender joins Bywaters at about 4.30 p.m. She tells him that Mrs Thompson will be ready any minute and returns to Carlton & Prior. When she gets back, Edith is ‘dressed ready to leave’ and calls down to Carlton to ask permission to go, which is granted. She rejoins Freddy at once and, after a coffee probably, they both leave. What happens between five o’clock and their parting in Ilford is not recorded. Edith is to visit No. 231 tonight, so she will not be catching the 5.49. As Percy rarely gets to the Crescent before 9 p.m., the lovers have nearly four hours to spend in each other’s company. She has taken Saturday off and tells him so. By the time she returns to Ilford accompanied by Percy, it is nearly midnight.

Saturday 30 September: When the Thompsons leave 41 Kensington Gardens at about 8.15 a.m., Bywaters is already on his way from Gipsy Hill, After parting from Percy at Liverpool Street, Edith is joined in the station by her lover. Together they board the nearest Ilford train. In Ilford they make straight for Wanstead Park which to both of them is a familiar venue straight from schooldays and, latterly, from several assignations here. This one will be different though. By the time they get there the mists have dispersed and the morning dew is drying in the pale light of the sun. Crossing over the bridge into the thickets, perhaps to the north of Perch Pond, the lovers assure themselves of total privacy. Then Edith, for the first time in her life perhaps, lets go completely, as Freddy starts to loosen her clothes. She may even take the initiative, as she archly calls herself his ‘little devil’ during their encounter. Whether this refers to her new-found sexual inventiveness or simply her boldness in teasing him is immaterial. At first he is too rough, and she attempts to hold him off and encourages him to be gentle. She has never reached a climax in his arms before. But today neither will be disappointed. The intensity of her orgasm, when it happens, surprises them both, and he asks her to explain the sensation to him.

It is during their love-making that she again raises the matter of the word ‘Idol’ and warns him that it might bar her from a natural sexual encounter with him. In this oblivious embrace the lovers feel that the park is truly theirs now: ‘our Park on Saturday’. It has protected them from the outside world by its thick growth which is already turning to a yellow brown. At about 10.15 Edith rises, dresses and alone heads for the small row of shops on the Belgrave Road, opposite Sackville Gardens. After getting some groceries from the fruit and vegetable shop, she walks up to 41 Kensington Gardens, where Mrs Lester meets her in the house. The two women probably merely exchange nods. Edith potters about in the kitchen and upstairs in the bedroom. By ten to eleven she is gone and rejoins Bywaters. For two more hours the lovers enjoy each other, and Edith tells Fred for the first time that this coming Tuesday night, his last night of shore leave, she has agreed to go to the theatre. She cannot possibly get out of it. But Monday’s visit to the dreary Thompsons of Seymour Gardens is a different matter, and she promises to do her utmost to make excuses. They both suspect that they will not be this close again for a long while unless she elopes with him. If she can get Monday night off, perhaps they can prevail on Bessie or Lily to let them have the privacy of a home for their last tryst. If Edith feels exposed, she is also proud, as is he, of her total sexual surrender. Somehow now their relationship has achieved a new level of intimacy and intensity.

Shortly after 1 p.m. Edith is back at No. 41 while her lover is travelling into the City and eventually home where he arrives at four. She starts to prepare dinner for Percy and herself. How wife and husband fare is hard to imagine. Most likely they chat over trivia and their forthcoming dinner at the Birnages. At five the Graydons and Avis meet up outside 74 Argyle Road in Ilford to visit their friends. The Birnages have extended their friendship not only to Mr and Mrs Thompson, but to her entire family. Sidney’s soft spot for Edith may have helped in this respect. Throughout the evening Edith Thompson remains self-absorbed, remembering the morning with her lover and longing to be with him.

On Sunday 1 October, at about 7 p.m., the Thompsons leave the house to join friends for the evening. They return at about 10.30. Who the friends are cannot be determined. Perhaps they are Reg and Bessie (neither of whom will give evidence in court, so that their movements remain more of a mystery than those of other characters in this story). While Edith is out with her husband and friends, her lover over in Norwood sits down to write to her. His letter is given here in full. It replies to her two letters of Thursday 21 September from which he quotes the phrases ‘the hope of all or the finish of all’, and her letter of Wednesday 27 September, in which she begs him not not to view her as his ‘Idol’. Both her letters were given by hand. Freddy’s letter also covers the events from Tuesday 26 September onwards and particularly the Saturday. His clumsy enquiry after Avis at a time like this need not come as a surprise, though it does not necessarily detract from the momentary sincerity of his love for Edith. This letter will be produced in evidence, like Edith’s reply:

Peidi Darlint
Sunday evening. Everybody is out and now I can talk to you. I wonder what you are doing now my own little girl. I hope that Bill [Edith’s brother] has not been the cause of further unpleasantness darlint. Darlint little girl do you remember saying ‘the hope for all.’ ‘Or the finish of all.’ Peidi the finish of all seems terrible even to contemplate. What darlint would it be in practice? Peidi Mia I love you more and more every day – it grows darlint and will keep on growing. Darlint in the park – our Park on Saturday, you were my ‘little devil’ – I was happy then Peidi – were you? I wasn’t thinking of other things – only you darlint – you was my entire world – I love you so much my Peidi – I mustnt ever think of losing you, darlint if I was a poet I could write volumes – but I [am] not – I suppose at the most Ive only spoken about 2 dozen words today I don’t try not to speak – but I have no wish to – Im not spoken to much so have no replies to make..
Darlint about the watch – I never really answered your question – I only said I wasnt cross. I cant understand you thinking that the watch would draw me to you – where you yourself wouldn’t – is that what you meant darlint or have I misunderstood you. The way you have written looks to me as though you think that I think more of the watch than I do of you – Tell me Peidi Mia that I misunderstood your meaning.
Darlint Peidi Mia – I do remember you coming to me in the little room and I think I understand what it cost you – a lot more than it could ever now. When I think about that I think how nearly we came to be parted for ever – if you had not forfeited your pride darlint I don’t think there would ever have been yesterday or tomorrow.
My darlint darlint little girl I love you more than I will ever be able to show you. Darlint you are the centre – the world goes on round you, but you ever remain my world – the other part some things are essential – others are on the outskirts and sometimes so far removed from my mind that they seem non existent. Darling Peidi Mia – I answered the question about the world ‘Idle’ [idol] on Saturday – I never mentioned it.
Yes darlint – I remember you being asked if you had found ‘The great lover.’ It was when you sang ‘A Tumble Down Nook.’
What have I found darlint? The darlingest little sweetheart in the whole world and ‘The Only Pal.’ Now darlint pal – Im anxious about Avis – I hope you have found out all there is to know of the other night – I want you to tell me. Supposing she did stay with some fellow and she tells you and asks you not to tell anybody – are you going to tell me Peidi?
Darlint I’m enclosing a slip for you for the books in case I am unable to get them myself – also will you get the ‘Tempting of Paul Chester’ Alice and Claude Askew. There is 13/- to pay on the others – but darlint I hope to be able to get them myself, also and principally I want to drink Beaune with you.
Good night now darlingest – dearest little sweetheart and big pal.

FREDDY

Monday 2 October: At 8.15 a.m. Edith and Percy depart for work together. Mrs Lester watches them go. She is now monitoring the couple’s movements, since it is this week that Ethel Vernon is scheduled to arrive. Mrs Lester can hardly bear the thought of it, as her sole hold over the Thompsons will then be eroded. She will have to move soon. Edith Thompson arrives at Carlton & Prior by about 9 a.m. and immediately rings 11 Westow Street. Mrs Bywaters, who is already downstairs in the shop, answers the phone. An unidentified woman’s voice asks for Freddy, who is summoned down from his bedroom to answer it. Fred does not address the voice by name. At about 11 he is getting ready to go to London. He will be meeting Edith outside Aldersgate at 12.30 to take her to lunch. It is cool and cloudy, so he is wearing his blue overcoat and a trilby hat. Before calling on her he will visit the P & O offices briefly, as he often does, to see some of his mates.

In the meantime Carlton & Prior are having a busy morning and the office and sales room needs to be continually manned. Miss Prior takes an early lunch break to interleave with Carlton’s and Edith’s. Notwithstanding the pressures of the morning, Edith has already written Bywaters half of a longish letter about the Friday and Saturday. As fate would have it, Percy Thompson appears at 168 just as she is about to join Bywaters. She rapidly excuses herself and sends him either away or upstairs to see Lily. She calls for Higgins, their porter. When he gets to her office at the end of the salesroom, she is on her own and is wrapping up a Carlton & Prior order form. The message inside is ‘Wait till one he is come. PEIDI’. After placing it into a white envelope, she hands it to him saying, ‘Take this and take it to Aldersgate Street station and give it to the gentleman who is wearing a blue overcoat and trilby hat’. Higgins duly delivers the message and recognises Bywaters as the same young man whom he saw in Edith’s company outside Carlton & Prior one evening in March. At nearly one o’clock Edith has successfully shaken off Thompson, but now Carlton is off for lunch and Miss Prior has not yet returned. Again Higgins is dispatched with a message:

Mr Carlton has gone out to lunch now & I must wait until he comes back – Miss P. is not back yet – do you mind waiting there – I am sorry to ask you to wait such a lot but it is awkward today – I had a terrible half hour.

It is 2.15 p.m. when she finally meets Freddy outside 168 and they hurry down Aldersgate to have lunch at the Queen Anne Restaurant in Cheapside. They can only afford an hour, barely enough for her to present him with a new tobacco pouch, and for him to pass her the letter which he wrote on Sunday. Freddy enquires after her movements this evening, and she confesses her failure to get out of dinner at the Thompsons’. What she fears most if she provokes a direct confrontation with Thompson is that he will carry out his threat to descend on her at Carlton & Prior and, in advertising her adultery, will destroy her livelihood and render her wholly dependent on his charity. Perhaps his earlier appearance in the lunch hour still lingers fresh in her memory. Bywaters is sympathetic, but despondent about the fact that she cannot see him on either of his last two evenings on shore. The silent reproach – which she is shortly to acknowledge in her letter to him – is that her protestations of love are belied by her conduct. She will therefore urge him, in writing and within an hour or so of leaving him in Aldersgate, to hurt her in return, by for example taking her sister out, to ‘do something tomorrow night will you? something to make you forget, I’ll be hurt I know, but I want you to hurt me – I do really … [see below]’

At about 3.15 Edith resumes work, and Freddy enters Fuller’s opposite. She at once reads his letter and replies to it by continuing the already started letter with ‘I tried so hard …’ This is Edith Thompson’s last extant letter to Bywaters before the murder. Its importance cannot be overestimated:

Darlingest lover of mine, thank you, thank you, oh thank you a thousand times for Friday [29 Sept 1922] – it was lovely – its always lovely to go out with you.

And then Saturday – yes I did feel happy – I didn’t think a teeny bit about anything in this world, except being with you – and all Saturday evening I was thinking about you – I was just with you in a big arm chair in front of a great big fire feeling all the time how much I had won – cos I have darlint, won such a lot – it feels such a great big thing to me sometimes – that I can’t breathe.

When you are away and I see girls with men walking along together – perhaps they are acknowledged sweethearts – they look so ordinary then I feel proud – so proud to think and feel that you are my lover and even tho’ not acknowledged I can still hold you – just with a tiny ‘hope’.

Darlint, we’ve said we’ll always be Pals haven’t we, shall we say we’ll always be lovers – even tho’ secret ones, or is it (this great big love) a thing we can’t control – dare we say that – I think I will dare. Yes I will, I’ll always love you – if you are dead – if you have left me even if you don’t still love me, I always shall you.

Your love to me is new, it is something different, it is my life and if things should go badly with us, I shall always have this past year to look back upon and feel that ‘Then I lived’ I never did before and I never shall again.

Darlingest lover, what happened last night? I don’t know myself I only know how I felt – no not really how I felt but how I could feel – if time and circumstances were different.

It seems like a great welling up of love – of feeling – of inertia, just as if I am wax in your hands – to do with as you will and I feel that if you do as you wish I shall be happy, its physical purely and I can’t really describe it – but you will understand darlint won’t you? You said you knew it would be like this one day – if it hadn’t would you have been disappointed. Darlingest when you are rough, I go dead – try not to be please.

The book is lovely – it’s going to be sad darlint tho’, why can’t life go on happy always?

I like Clarie – she is so natural so unworldly.

Why aren’t you an artist and I as she is – I feel when I am reading frightfully jealous of her – it’s a picture darlint, just how I did once picture that little flat in Chelsea – why can’t he go on loving her always – why are men different – I am right when I say that love to a man is a thing apart from his life – but to a woman it is her whole existence.

I tried so hard to find a way out tonight darlingest but he was suspicious and still is – I suppose we must make a study of this deceit for some time longer. I hate it. I hate every lie I have to tell to see you – because lies seem such small mean things to attain such an object as ours. We ought to be able to use great big things for great big love like ours. I’d love to be able to say ‘I’m going to see my lover tonight.’ If I did he would prevent me – there would be scenes and he would come to 168 and interfere and I couldn’t bear that – I could be beaten all over at home and still be defiant – but 168 it’s different. It’s my living – you wouldn’t let me live on him would you and I shouldn’t want to – darlint its funds that are our stumbling block – until we have those we can do nothing. Darlingest find me a job abroad. I’ll go tomorrow and not say I was going to a soul and not have one little regret. I said I wouldn’t think – that I’d try to forget – circumstances – Pal, help me to forget again – I have succeeded up to now – but its thinking of tonight [Monday] and tomorrow [Tuesday] when I can’t see you and feel you holding me.

Darlint – do something tomorrow night will you? something to make you forget. I’ll be hurt I know, but I want you to hurt me – I do really – the bargain now seems so one sided – so unfair – but how can I alter it?

About the watch – I didn’t think you thought more of that – how can I explain what I did feel? I felt that we had parted – you weren’t going to see me – I had given you something to remind you of me and I had purposely retained it. If I said ‘come for it’ you would – but only the once and it would be as a pal, because you would want me so badly at times – that the watch would help you not to feel so badly and if you hadn’t got it – the feeling would be so great – it would conquer you against your will.

Darlint do I flatter myself when I think you think more of the watch than of anything else. That wasn’t a present – that was something you asked me to give you – when we decided to be pals a sort of sealing of the compact. I couldn’t afford it then, but immediately I could I did. Do you remember when and where we were when you asked me for it? If you do tell me, if you don’t, forget I asked.

How I thought you would feel about the watch, I would feel about something I have.

It isn’t mine, but it belongs to us and unless we were differently situated than we are now, I would follow you everywhere – until you gave it to me back.

He’s still well – he’s going to gaze all day long at you in your temporary home – after Wednesday.

Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will – we only have 3 ¾ years left darlingest.

Try & help
PEIDI

It is after completing the last sentence of this letter that Edith leaves Carlton & Prior to rejoin Freddy at Fuller’s, where she has coffee with him. The waitress sees them sitting together. The lovers again commute home from Fenchurch Street and Freddy leaves her in Ilford, while he strides down the hill towards Shakespeare Crescent. It is about 7 p.m. when he gets there. The Graydons, Avis and Newenham are present and welcome Bywaters. In the course of the evening Freddy asks after some tobacco which Mr Graydon promised to get him, perhaps a special brand produced by the Imperial Tobacco Company. While he is thus engrossed in conversation in the company of the Graydons, Edith is reluctantly attending the meagre dinner party given by her brother-in-law. To think that instead of this she could be with Freddy! By the time Bywaters leaves the Crescent the Thompsons are already in bed. It is only now, on the District Line home, that Bywaters can relax and read her letters. As a rule the lovers do not read each other’s letters when they are together, because they view the letters as an extension of their conversation, of which every precious moment needs to be saved. The immediate bearing that the precise dating and timing of the letter has on the case derives from the uses to which its last two sentences will be put:

He’s still well – he’s going to gaze all day long at you in your temporary home – after Wednesday.

Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will – we only have 3 ¾ years left darlingest.
Try & help
PEIDI

The prosecution will first of all attempt to discredit Edith Thompson with the jury by pretending to misunderstand the meaning of ‘he’. This ‘he’ refers to the bronze ‘hear-no-evil’ monkey which was given to Freddy as a present and which he handed over to Edith. The ‘temporary home’ is a sketch of the Morea which she is having framed and expects to be able to collect on Wednesday and put on the desk in her office. The thought of ‘he’ meaning a ‘still well’ Percy Thompson – as the Crown will hint – is implausible, to say the least.

Secondly, it is important to date correctly the conversation cryptically referred to in the last sentence of Edith’s letter. As the letter as a whole was demonstrably written before Monday 5 p.m., and the second half of it between 3.15 p.m. and 5 p.m., the ‘talk’ in the tea room referred to can only mean the afternoon of Friday 19 September. The tea room on Friday was Fuller’s. Edith thanks Freddy emphatically earlier in the same letter ‘for Friday – it was lovely – its always lovely to go out with you’, so why should she not refer again to the same Friday and a conversation she and her lover had then about themselves? In court Edith will explain that ‘I’ll still risk and try’ refers to her running away with Bywaters and to ‘getting me a post abroad’. They certainly spoke of this on several occasions. An undated note which was written during the week from 25 September to 29 September states despondently: ‘Perhaps I shall get my appointment in Bombay this time – I hope so I failed before.’ But the interpretation which the prosecution will put on it is that it unmistakably refers to poisoning Percy Thompson; and the Crown will mistakenly assume that the tea room conversation occurred on Monday afternoon, the day before the murder and that it ought therefore to be causally linked to the tragedy.