Matilda tore the letter, letting the breeze scatter the pieces. She undressed, pulling on her swimsuit, goose pimples on her legs. Sitting on the rock she reached in her bag for the pills, spilled them into her hand. She knocked the neck of the bottle against the rock, crammed her mouth full of pills, choking them down with the wine. The jagged glass cut her mouth. She poured in more pills, more wine.

The tide was just right, on the turn, the sea waiting. Matilda stood up.

‘Folly?’ she called, feeling dizzy, ‘belongs to us both?’ She fell on her knees, crawling down the beach on all fours. ‘Gus?’ She retched, keeping the pills down with an effort. ‘We all belong to you,’ she whispered, reaching the water. ‘I’m coming.’

A gull swooped down to snatch a roll from the rock, followed by others, screaming, fighting, white wings beating, yellow eyes glinting, beaks snatching.

The sea caught Matilda as she began to swim out. She did not wish to get her hair wet.

It’s late in the year for swimming. She pushed her arms out mechanically, turning the grey water pink with the blood from her mouth. A memory came tentatively. She had read or heard that people shit as they die. In distress she pulled off her swimsuit, getting her hair wet as she did so. She let the thing drift away.

At least I shall die with my body clean. She swam more slowly now. I should see my past life flash before my eyes. Her wounded mouth smiled. A memory which had so long eluded her came uselessly back. John/Piers in Trafalgar Square, his bowler, his umbrella. Whose party had he taken her to? Some place in Bloomsbury. I got drunk, she remembered, swimming very slowly now, never been drunk before. He had taken her into a bedroom. She had smelled his hair oil from Trumpers.

She had pushed it out of her mind. ‘Hugh,’ she called in the cold tide, ‘Hugh, I want to tell you –’ John/Piers next honours list had pushed her onto a bed, pulled up her skirt, hadn’t even pulled off her knickers.

‘This will be a new sensation.’ That voice of his.

‘Death you are new too,’ she said to the tide.

The fishing boat found the body floating by the lighthouse.

‘Looks as though she’s laughing,’ the younger man said.

‘Cut her mouth on the rocks,’ said his father. ‘Haul it in. Cover it with a bit of tarpaulin, ’tisn’t decent, not as though she were young.’

‘Buggered up a day’s fishing, this.’

THE END

Also available from Vintage

MARY WESLEY

Not That Sort of Girl

‘Mistress of the dark side of upper-class mores’

Observer