CRIMINAL JUSTICE

2

The Darlingest Boy

© René Weis

On Friday 31 December 1920 a party, including the Thompsons, was gathering at 231 Shakespeare Crescent to see in the New Year. At some point one of the male guests inadvertently called Mrs Thompson by her first name. Her husband instantly took exception to this on the grounds of its impropriety. The guest apologised. A livid and humiliated Edith might well have put Thompson in his place had it not been for the occasion, and because she loathed the thought of a scene in her parents’ home. While this was happening the Malwa, on the very last leg of her homebound journey from Bombay, was plying her way through the estuary towards Tilbury. As she was waiting in Tilbury in mid-stream, one of the Malwa’s writers, Bywaters, inexplicably jumped ship. The company’s penalty for this was instant suspension, as he well knew. He rushed through the docks and made the last London train into Fenchurch. He finally reached No. 231 well after midnight, when the party was dwindling and the Thompsons had already returned to Ilford. The Graydons put him up for the night and renewed their offer of taking him in when he enquired about it.

The question that needs to be addressed pertains to Freddy’s motive for jeopardising his job so recklessly. Was it to be with Avis, or simply his friends the Graydons; or was he missing Edith Thompson? The latter has always seemed more likely, in spite of the absence of corroborative evidence. In her vast correspondence with Bywaters Edith offers precise days and dates for their mutual declarations of love and subsequent sexual encounters. These postdate December 1920 / January 1921 by at least six months. But it would appear nevertheless that they had already begun to trespass on the path of clandestine love as early as autumn 1920, if not even earlier. When the official police file on ‘Thompson & Bywaters’, MEOP 3 / 1582, was opened to the public on 1 January 1986, it was found to contain some material never published before, including six hitherto unknown telegram scripts. The first two in particular are of crucial importance, because of their dates:

1. Bywaters. Stewards Dept., 22nd September, 1920 SS Malwa, Tilbury Dk
‘Chief away today cannot come’

2. 13 April, 1921
F. Bywaters, 11 Westow St, Upper Norwood
‘Keep contents of mackintosh safe’
PEIDI

Freddy certainly was in England on 22 September 1920 and he would shortly be sending Avis a birthday card for 24 September. As yet no declaration of love had passed between him and Edith Thompson (this would not happen for another nine months). So one suspects that their sudden intimacy took both of them by surprise. Early in the summer, while Freddy was sharing No. 231 with the Graydons, it had appeared that he and Avis were well matched. Whatever happened – whether Freddy summoned up all his courage one day and asked Edith rather than Avis for lunch and found to his amazement that she consented – no one will ever know. At this stage, 22 September 1920, the relationship could still be defused as a slightly improper flirt. No one needed to get hurt. For Christmas Edith sent Freddy an unsolicited card. He took this, as indeed it was, to be a signal of reciprocity. The very first casualty of ‘Thompson & Bywaters’ would be Freddy’s job with the P & O on New Year’s Eve of 1920.

The date of the second telegram is puzzling. The official log of the P & O shows that the Orvieto, with Bywaters on board, sailed from Tilbury to Brisbane via Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney at 2.45 p.m. on 26 February 1921, and returned home at 6.12 p.m. on 4 June. Bywaters’s re-employment by the P & O was largely thanks to the good offices of Percy Thompson, who had intervened on his behalf with the purser of the P & O’s Orvieto. This latter happened to be their tenants’ son, Frank William Lester, who was home on shore leave in the winter of 1921. Percy introduced Freddy to Frank William when they were both visiting 41 Kensington Gardens: Freddy his friends Edith and Percy Thompson, and Frank William his parents and his sister Norah. As a result of their chat, Lester set up an interview for Freddy at the Tilbury offices of the P & O the following morning. Freddy was hired as a baggage steward and in due course he and Frank William Lester would sail out to Australia together on the Orvieto.

At the time of this meeting in llford, in January and February 1921, Freddy was again lodging with the Graydons in Manor Park. One may wonder therefore whether Edith’s ‘contents of mackintosh’ may not refer to something that she had slipped into Freddy’s coat while he and she overlapped at her parents’ home. Was she having second thoughts about the prospect of an affair and was she worried about being found out? The fact that she signed off with their secret name ‘Peidi’ may suggest that the ‘contents’ were a long letter. What else would require secrecy and subterfuge.

Freddy’s record on the next six voyages would be unimpeachable: VG (very good) for both ‘Ability’ and ‘Conduct’. The 26 February is demonstrably the date of departure. Moreover, Freddy had not stayed at 11 Westow Street at all during January and February. The only logical conclusion to draw is that the telegram was sent to Upper Norwood to be forwarded to Bywaters by his mother or sister. They were unaware of the identity concealed by the nickname Peidi, and the message, enigmatic though it is, seemed fairly innocuous. As yet Edith did not dare write a full letter to Bywaters directly, notwithstanding the earlier note and Christmas card. He was already in Australia when the telegram was posted, and would have received it whilst there. Edith Thompson was falling in love. So was Freddy Bywaters, but not with her only.

It was on this voyage, during the eight days of the Orvieto’s docking in Sydney that he renewed an Australian acquaintance which quickly turned into a romance. Edith was to take a poor view of the Australian girl, as she did also of Molly, an Ilford girl whom Bywaters had been courting prior to his family leaving the area. Edith Thompson, her sister, Molly and the Australian girl had all fallen for young Bywaters’s charm. He relished it.

The Orvieto was well east of Suez on the way to Colombo when in London Clemence Dane’s futuristic A Bill of Divorcement opened at the St Martin’s Theatre. Set in 1932, after an imaginary change in the divorce law, it plots the tribulations of Margaret Fairfield, happily remarried at the beginning of the play after divorcing her lunatic first husband. His recovery from insanity and the return to his former wife claiming her and their daughter back confronts Margaret with a cruel dilemma: she has to choose between her new-found love and happiness and her duty and pity. Abandoning her second husband she tells him: ‘For all this, I will always love you.’ Although Clemence Dane essentially presents her audience with an open-ended fiction, balanced between liberal and orthodox view of marriage, bondage and pity, the play drew huge audiences and critical praise for its risqué, mature approach. Edith thought of herself as very much a part of the tout Londres and avidly patronised the magical heartland of the London theatre. The St Martin’s Theatre off Seven Dials was a theatre she knew well, and the play in particular must have struck her as aptly timed to coincide with the budding of her romance with the young sailor.

The further relevance of A Bill of Divorcement is that is reflected the relaxing of the post-war austerity. It had been over a year since the official end of the war for Britain. The age of the endless Flapper parties, of bobs, shingle bobs, short skirts and open-shouldered dresses had dawned. The next five or six years are the 1920s of Lady Diana Cooper, David, Prince of Wales, Beverley Nichols, Evelyn Waugh and Nellie ‘Peach’ Melba, Stanley Holloway and Melville Gideon, and of Eric Liddell. The same years mark the age of the ruthless use of political power by press barons like Northcliffe, Beaverbrook and Rothermere as well as the ascendancy in the political arena of judicial figures like Lord Birkenhead.

If on the one hand the flappers were agitating for full suffrage and shocking the nation by their loose morals, on the other hand the press, the Daily Mail in particular, quite unashamedly proposed the selective exportation of hundreds of thousands of British women to the understocked reaches of the Empire. The ‘surplus woman’ was perceived to be a liability; she would threaten marriages by her ready availability, and had already shown a willingness to supplant the men by taking their jobs during the war. Also she was bound to vote Labour! The Daily Mail’s alternative was to turn her into a saleable commodity in the service of the Empire. The immense contribution made to the winning of the war by innumerable women in the factories at home, and serving in countless numbers in the field as VADs and with the Red Cross, was disregarded now. Ex-servicemen on return immediately repossessed the jobs held by women. Even this could not hide the country’s plunge towards high male unemployment which, in 1921, had passed two million. Successive governments of the 1920s, beleaguered and bedevilled by social, economic and political disaster, would blame them on scapegoats. Among these, women were a favourite. It was as if the surplus woman had single-handedly created the surplus rather than the catastrophic casualty rate at the front.

In the same period that D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love was officially deemed morally threatening or dismissable as ‘unfortunate’, high praise was bestowed on Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget and the hugely successful If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson. The latter is the tragi-comic tale of Mark Sabre, a man of honour who, after the war, sacrifices his reputation to protect the good name of a young pregnant woman and her dead lover. The novel articulated a mild protest at the speed with which the contemporary world was forgetting the crucified youth of only a few years before. In the words of one reviewer, the book was distinguished by its ‘high ethical quality … power and beauty’ and was perhaps ‘the year’s most arresting achievement in fiction.’ The verdict of posterity has been different, and Hutchinson’s novel is seen as at best a period piece, on a level with the war novels by W. J. Locke and other popular writers of war fiction. The suspicion of the hero’s adultery with a girl name Effie – who eventually commits suicide – haunts the second half of the novel. Little wonder that Edith found it interesting, even if she also sensed its imperfections, as ‘none of the characters strike me as live men and women’.

If Winter Comes, Fox Trot (Melville Gideon) 'Queen's' Dance Orchestra, directed by Jack Hylton, 1922

Adultery, prejudice, bigamy, self-sacrifice and sexually obsessive passions inform two hugely successful plays which Edith Thompson saw at about this time: The Garden of Allah, adapted by Robert Hichens and Mary Anderson from Hichens’s own novel of that name; and particular E. Temple Thurston’s The Wandering Jew at the New (now Albery) Theatre on St Martin’s Lane. This latter ran from September 1920 to August 1921. Matheson Lang, one of Edith’s favourite actors, took the lead as the Jew in various incarnations. From his fated beginnings as the ‘Accursed Man’ – that is the legendary Jew who spat in Christ’s face on his way to Calvary – the play traces the gradual conversion of the Jew through the first crusade, followed by thirteenth-century Palermo and the Middle Ages in Spain, when he has become a healer and Gladstonian converter of girls ‘from harlotry’. It is for the sake of one such young woman that he dies a martyr.

Edith Thompson saw this play several times: its melodramatic, sentimental charge and outstanding cast were enough to warrant the expense. Money in any case was never meant to stop with her, she once complained to Bywaters. From classical melodrama in the West End to vaudeville and pierrotic entertainment at the Ilford Hippodrome and the East Ham Palace, everything was on offer in the metropolis; and Edith Thompson spent money on it as freely as her more illustrious contemporaries.

While the weathermen were forecasting the hottest summer since records began, Edith and Percy decided to take their holidays on the Isle of Wight to overlap with their friends the Vellenders’ stay there. They invited Avis to join them. It was now near the beginning of June, and the party placed their bookings in Shanklin with Osborne House, advertised as facing the pier on the Esplanade ‘Near Chine; Board – Residence; Separate tables; Catering a Speciality. Terms Moderate. Apply Proprietress’. Electricity throughout the house and in every room was another selling point. The boarding terms would be about 73 shillings and 6 pence (£3.76p) a week.

Freddy Bywaters returned to Tilbury on Saturday 4 June 1921. He called on the Graydons at once. It so happens that the Thompsons were visiting. Bywaters casually expressed a wish to take a holiday. Thompson at once extended an invitation to him to join the party, since he knew that Avis was sweet on Bywaters and he, it seemed, on her. A foursome, he suggested, made better sense than a party of three. It is quite possible that Avis had already tactfully suggested to her brother-in-law that Freddy might like to come. But it is much more probable that Edith put it to Freddy to ask, and to Thompson to invite under the pretext of Avis’s manifest crush on Bywaters. The invitation to Bywaters for Shanklin was accepted.

It was an animated party that met up at Victoria station on Saturday 11 June and purchased their third-class return fares for the 11.35 a.m. train from Victoria to Shanklin. As there was enough time between connections at Portsmouth to explore the Southsea pier and waterfront briefly, the quartet took a stroll down to the beach.

In mid-afternoon the Isle of Wight railway deposited the four Londoners at Shanklin station, from where a shuttle operated into the town centre and down to the Esplanade at the foot of the cliff. The Shanklin that welcomed the people from Manor Park and Ilford still boasted its Edwardian resort elegance.

It was vastly more affluent than the present town, which breathes an air of living fossilisation. It offered a variety of vibrant day and night entertainments. Thus, on Monday of the week following the Thompsons’ arrival here, the Playhouse featured Elsie Jarris in The Merry Madcap and the tenth episode of The Son of Tarzan. Then, at the same theatre, on Thursday and till Saturday, Avery Hopwood’s Fair and Warmer, the play ‘that made the weather famous’, would star May Alison. Furthermore, on Sunday there would be a band concert in Rylstone Gardens conducted by Mr W. Adams who would also appear on Keats Green on Wednesday evening and again on Friday night, 17 June. If one adds to this the weekly Wednesday night dance on the lawn at the Marine Hotel and the nightly concert parties in the Town Hall on the High Street and in the Summer Theatre on the Esplanade, one can readily imagine the energy of Shanklin in 1921. The visitors were to sample all these; and since they adored dancing and popular songs, they would patronise the Town Hall and Summer Theatre especially. Entertainments here included soprano artistes like Dorothy Grace, humorists and mimics like Winifred Fairie, comediennes and dancers such as Edith Price as well as revue numbers and ‘light comedy songs’.

The cockney quartet was much taken with Osborne House. Its rooms were spacious and comfortable, and the married couple’s windows opened onto the front, affording an excellent view of the pier. Immediately to the north-east stood the fashionable Royal Spa Hotel and next to it rose the column of the hydraulic lift to the top of the cliff on Keats Green.

The famous Shanklin Chine lies to the south-west and connects with the Rylstone Pleasure Gardens. As the party were gathering for drinks on the verandah of Osborne House this Saturday evening, the air was warm and tangily scented from the surf. Had they come six weeks earlier, they would have smelt the blossoming of the garlic flowers wafting across from the nearby heights on the road to Ventnor.

The visitors’ first two days were spent mostly relaxing in the sun on the shingly beach down from the hotel. Avis and Freddy braved the chilly waters with gusto, while Edith watched their nautical frolics with a measure of indulgence. Percy excused himself from swimming, ‘on account of his weak heart’. In the evening, the men split and explored the pubs of Shanklin. Percy took his drink badly but would not be left behind by Freddy and Norman. Thompson’s return from his first night with the boys, when he needed to be helped upstairs by Edith saying ‘you better stay in bed’, set the tone for several of these outings. Avis found it acutely embarrassing, as did her sister: it was never mentioned in public, but everyone knew that Percy could ‘hardly stand’.

On Tuesday 14 June the London visitors decided to book a round the island charabanc tour for the following day. The fare for the eighty-seven mile round trip was a pound. That evening, Freddy and Edith were left on their own briefly at some point. They kissed for the first time. He held her so tight that her arms and wrists bruised, while she started running her fingers through his hair. For her he had become the ‘great lover’, for him she was the formerly unobtainable girl from Manor Park whom he dreamed about as a little boy. It would be an easy day to remember. As she joined Percy in bed that night, Edith probably determined there and then that she and Freddy would not again be separated; she would lull Percy into a false sense of security through a show of wifely affection under which guise she would urge him to invite Bywaters back to 41 Kensington Gardens.

On Wednesday 15 June 1921 the party from London were having an early breakfast on the verandah. The light of the sun danced hard and scintillating on the see as in a shimmering Seurat painting. It would be a hot day. Everyone dressed lightly. By 10.25 a.m. the charabanc was slowly steering its way through the Shanklin High Street towards its first stop on Ventnor Pier. Then it proceeded on to St Catherine’s through a pine-scented and leafy tunnel road which cuts across St Catherine’s point from the Undercliff. As the charabanc chugged along this matchless stretch of the route, its female passengers removed their hats and shook out their hair in the blissful cool reprieve. It appears that Edith Thompson forgot to put hers back on again, for she was to have a very sore, sun-burnt neck that night.

It was probably during the afternoon here that Avis took a remarkably idyllic photograph of Edith, Percy and Freddy reclining on the pebbles at Alum Bay. Edith is wearing a short voile dress, embroidered with an Oriental fern pattern. With her left leg crossed under her right she is leaning Thompson’s way who faces the camera and squints slightly, as does his wife, because of the fierce sun. Freddy is curled up towards her, his face brushing against her right thigh. His eyes are closed while Edith’s right hand, holding a cigarette, rests in his hair. What is so extraordinary is the photograph’s look of combined innocence and intimacy. The erotic charge of Bywaters’s cheek pressing gently against Edith Thompson’s thigh is unmistakable. That both Thompson and the photographer, Avis, missed it almost beggars belief, but then they were totally unsuspecting.

So far it had been very warm. Friday was announced as hotter still. It was to be the Thompsons’ last full day here and, for different reasons, everyone in the party expressed regrets about it. It now emerged that Bywaters was unable to stay a second week. He was meant to but had changed his mind.

As the Vellenders were also leaving, Avis would be left on her own for another week of the holiday: the 1921 census for Sunday 19 June 1921 places her in a boarding house (‘Esher House’) a few doors north of Osborne House, on the Sandown side of the pier. Avis, who had hugely enjoyed having Freddy as her swimming pal, was saddened by Bywaters’s premature departure. She would be hurt even more on her return to London. Reticent, kind and honest Avis Graydon never realised on the island that the seeds had been sown under her innocent eyes of an event that would radically alter the course of her life.

For their last night the Thompsons opted for the entertainment at the Summer Theatre just down from Osborne House. Edith wore her peach sports coat. The entertainment ran the gamut or the emotional scale, from wistful and schmaltzy to joyous and buoyant. Then a song with words by Leslie Cooke and music by Evelyn Sharpe made Edith sit up. She had always loved it. Now, on this night, it seemed to her to distil the essence of her relationship with young Bywaters. This remarkable and popular song was ‘One little Hour’. The pertinence of its simple lyrics to the participants in this story is immediately evident:

One little hour of happiness divine
One posy from the garden of your heart;
One dream alone – that Heav’n had made you mine:
And then to part!
And then to part!

One little hour of joy – a life’s regret!
A world of thorns for one elusive flow’r
And after all to treasure dearly yet
That little hour!
One little hour

One golden hour! for that eternal pain!
Yet could you stand to-day where once you stood
And ask me if for you I’d live again
That little hour – I would.

One Little Hour, sung by the tenor John Turner

The indulgent romanticism of the song – the 1920s recording above may well have been known to Edith Thompson – and its lilting melancholic line perfectly articulated Edith’s sense of herself as a profoundly romantic and wounded heroine. If only she were given the chance to live the life of one of the glamorous women in the fiction which she read! Her existence could not possibly remain circumscribed by the routines of eating, sleeping, loving and living with Percy Thompson. For ‘one little hour’ of total abandon she could accept almost any penalty, even a ‘world of thorns’. Quite how she viewed her love with Frederick Bywaters is suggested by these words addressed to him on Monday 2 October 1922:

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 have before and I never shall again.

While the song was playing Freddy Bywaters looked glum and remained silent. They were on their own when Edith leaned forward and asked ‘What’s the matter?’ – ‘You know what’s the matter, I love you’. She reciprocated his declaration of love. In bed later she perhaps put it to Percy how nice their break had been and how particularly jolly the idea of Freddy staying with them was. They needed the money, and he was ever such a pal to Avis and to all of them.

On the return journey, the threesome of Edith, Percy, and Freddy agreed that Freddy would stay in the little room at 41 Kensington Gardens for a trial period of a week, free of charge. If he liked it, and if the Thompsons and Lesters found it a workable arrangement, then he was to become a paying guest. The agreed terms were roughly 25 shillings (£1.25p) a week. For a month this would be a fairly modest rent of just over £5. But it seemed huge compared to the mere 30/– paid by the entire Lester family. Between them the Thompsons grossed nearly £50 a month. They hardly needed Freddy’s meagre contribution, even if it were supplemented by food payments and shopping contributions. As far as he was concerned, quite apart from his infatuation with the mistress of the house, living in Ilford was far more convenient for the docks and the shipping offices in the City than Upper Norwood. Freddy now became landlocked. For nearly three months he expressed little desire to sail again, notwithstanding his excellent record on the last voyage which would have secured him a berth easily.

On Sunday, after spending the night at No. 41, he visited home and saw his family. They were delighted to see him, but disappointed about his decision to stay with the Thompsons. Mrs Bywaters cared little for her son’s attachment to the ‘uppity’ folk from the Crescent, and particularly the snooty woman who had made good, Mrs Thompson. But Fred was not to be dissuaded. The room at the back of the first floor of the tiny, crookedly semi-detached cottage at the corner of Westow Street and Paddock Passage, was his for keeps. He would hold on to it as a base while sampling the splendours of the Thompsons’ green and leafy suburban comforts. The contrast between the Victorian dereliction of Westow Street and the spacious gardens and villas of the Belgrave Road would have swayed others, even if there had not been a woman at the still point of these ever-closing concentric circles.

The following day, Monday 20 June, Freddy had agreed to collect Edith at 168 Aldersgate to go for lunch at the King’s Hall in the Holborn Restaurant. As he headed up towards Carlton & Prior to meet her, he saw her affectionately chatting with Harry Renton outside. She hadn’t seen Harry since leaving for the island. Poor faithful Harry Renton: Edith loved fooling around with him. Harry knew that she would never be his now, but her proximity and the sound of her laughter cheered his heart. So did her kindness to him after the war. Whether Edith hugged Harry and excused herself for having to rush, or whether it was merely a peck on the cheek, Freddy saw it and did not like it. He nearly made a scene over what Edith termed ‘a trivial incident’. As yet though little could disturb their idyll as they settled down for lunch in the Holborn restaurant which would, from now on, be one of their favourite haunts. On Wednesday Freddy took Edith for a quick lunch to Evans’s in St Paul’s Churchyard.

She told him of her engagement for tea at the Waldorf that afternoon. He protested and attempted to dissuade her: was she going with Percy, or Harry or someone else such as Carlton, all of whom he now resented? She refused to yield and asked that he walk her back to the shop. He entered the showroom at Carlton & Prior for the very first time and was introduced to Carlton himself as the Thompsons’ lodger. The men shook hands. They would not meet again till December 1922.

At about 2 p.m. Bywaters met his mother in St Paul’s Churchyard. Every Wednesday she was up in the City to buy material. In the course of that afternoon Freddy rang City 6457, the Carlton & Prior number, to speak to Miss Graydon. He persisted in his to her, unreasonable desire to stop her going to the Waldorf. She refused point-blank. Bywaters was miffed and angry. He returned to Westow Street for the night and left Edith to make an excuse for his unexplained absence. On Thursday the lovers did not communicate, and again he returned to Norwood in the night. Then, on Friday, they lunched together at the Holborn.

It turned into an extensive tête-à-tête. Suddenly Edith opened up to the young man fully and told him ‘things that no one else knew’. Her longings and sense of entrapment with Percy all gushed out. Yesterday she had felt that her hold on Freddy was tenuous. She had nearly panicked and feared that she had missed a unique chance to pour out her suffering to the youth. Now he was back with her. He had to be told everything. There can be little doubt that Bywaters listened with a certain astonishment to all this; and mingled with it was pride in the fact that this older and attractive woman would single him out as lover and champion. He held her hands and promised to return to No. 41 that evening. Neither he nor she had forgotten that the following day Avis was due back from the island, while the Thompsons were on the Carlton & Prior annual outing in Eastcote. Freddy would meet Avis. Edith made him promise to be gentle with her, but clear. He would certainly impress on Avis the extent to which their relationship needed to remain circumscribed, at least for the time being.

For the all-day excursion to the Ship Inn at Eastcote, on Saturday 25 June 1921, the rendezvous was at Carlton & Prior’s. From here the party proceeded to Aldersgate and boarded the Metropolitan line to Uxbridge. This yearly event for the entire firm was organised by Herbert Carlton. Lily and Norman Vellender naturally took part in the outing. Carlton’s son Charlie also patronised these trips to Eastcote. Like his father he was ‘a ladies’ man’, and the prospect of the relaxed company of thirty-one nubile young women was irresistible. The weather could not be faulted, as the temperature was hitting the mid-nineties by noon. The particular attraction of the Ship Inn was its extensive grounds and its T-shaped pavilion. It to this that the party resorted for sandwiches and drinks before the afternoon games, of which Percy was a trusted and skilful organiser, but in which he did not participate otherwise.

In the meantime Avis was returning on her own from the Isle of Wight. Freddy was meeting her. On the Tube from Victoria to East Ham he broke to her the news that they could not be lovers for the time being. This ‘understanding’ did not wholly surprise Avis. When Freddy left the island early, she had felt the pangs of loss already, and the last week had been desolate for her. The recent memory of their shared swims in the sea remained vivid, and her disappointment was proportionately greater.

Sunday came and with it the end of Freddy’s ‘probationary’ period at 41 Kensington Gardens. As of Monday he would be a paying lodger. Did Percy Thompson know that that day was Freddy’s nineteenth birthday?

Monday 27 June 1921: The Lesters are away this week. They are taking their annual holiday to interleave with the Thompsons’ which ensures that each of the two resident households has the place to themselves for at least part of the time. Edith, unbeknown to her husband, arranged to take off Monday 27 June quite some time ago, possibly even before the Isle of Wight break. Whatever her reason for not going to town before Percy – as is her wont – she starts this hot summer day in the sun-flooded scullery by washing the accumulated dishes, cutlery and crockery from yesterday and this morning. Freddy is upstairs. She will take him his breakfast. It is his birthday after all, and she has bought him a present. As she climbs the staircase, she knows that the time has come. Freddy welcomes her and starts pressing her to undress. She resists, partly out of genuine modesty, and partly not to cheapen herself. An argument ensues and she bursts into tears, ‘Let me be a pal to you’, he urges her on. ‘Let me help you if I can.’ She again tells him how unhappy she is and that she prefers suicide to living with Percy. She has never loved him and cannot possibly continue living in this dead relationship. Freddy is stroking her and holding her tight to comfort her. She promises to put off suicide for five years. This will be their pact, and today is Day One of Year One of Thompson and Bywaters. She will in months to come interpret this with frightening literalism.

When Freddy’s hands start wandering down her body they encounter no further resistance. He undresses her with a deft knowingness that startles her. Then he slips out of his pyjamas and they lie together and start making love. Edith and Freddy are surprised by the ease with which their inhibitions are shed. This ‘naturalness’ becomes so precious to her that many months later she will berate him for calling her his ‘idol’. Edith does not reach orgasm this time, nor during any other of their encounters except the very last one. Nevertheless she full enjoys this erotic experience. His strength, as he squeezes her arms, wrist and legs, leaves her again bruised. She will tease him about it. As he slides inside her she reassures him that she is safe. None of these early encounters leave her pregnant. The bearing of this on the credibility of her monitoring of her menstrual cycle will emerge in due course. After their initial passion is spent, Freddy offers to rub Edith’s back to take away ‘that stiffness’ from her Eastcote exertions. Feeling the movement of his hands on her body, now totally surrendered to him for any explorations he desires, she feels soothed and at peace.

Over the next few days more encounters between the lovers take place, and on the afternoon of Friday 1 July Edith and Freddy abscond. They see a film, Romance, at the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus, to celebrate the fact that it is three weeks to the day since they declared their love to each other in Shanklin. This adaptation of E. B. Sheldon’s hugely successful play of 1913 about the tragic loves of an operatic diva commenced its exclusive London run on Monday 20 June. As in the stage version, so in the film, Doris Keane starred.

Of particular interest was the Prologue, ‘Lovers of the Ages’, by Robb Lawson of Broken Blossoms fame. The intention was to generate the right atmosphere for the setting of the film. An extended cast of well known players impersonated ‘famous historical lovers’, and Paul Ruby, attired in Romance costume, offered recitals from the operas in the play.

It is nearly 6 p.m. when Mrs Thompson and young Bywaters leave the theatre. Mercifully this is the evening when Percy stays up late in the City for his Friday night drink.

The week starting Monday 4 July 1921 is one of the warmest ever recorded in England. Unbeknown to Percy, Edith has taken the entire week off to be with Freddy. Carlton had granted her request to be away from 10 – 20 June, for the Shanklin holiday, and again from Friday 1 July to Monday 11 July.  She is now indispensable to the firm and can do no wrong, as far as he is concerned. Every morning of this gloriously sunny week Edith pretends to leave for work, when in fact she spends every day in the company and arms of Bywaters. These two weeks, from 27 June to 10 July, are the lovers’ halcyon days. Short of a holiday together for just the two of them – one of Edith’s favourite fantasies – the privacy afforded them by the empty house has been ideal for their mutual discovery of one another.

Sunday 10 July is the hottest July day since 1881. All of No. 231 is invited for Sunday dinner. Newenham will bring his camera – he loves photography and is renowned in the family for his skill and his ability to capture moods and expressions on celluloid. At lunch Edith is wearing one of her favourite summer dresses with three-quarter-length sleeves and an Oriental panel. Over it she has slipped a tunic blouse with a long sash trailing down in pleats.

The men are dressed in light suits and open collars. After lunch the party moves out of the morning room into the garden. It is oppressively sweltering here and everyone retires into the shade. The four pictures extant from the next ten minutes, from 1.40 p.m. to 1.50 p.m., tell a fascinating story.

In the first one Newenham catches Edith pointing at something at the top of the house, while Thompson and Bywaters stand on either side of her. The trio is facing north-east. The sun hits the backs of their heads. The photographer has moved into the middle of the garden. It is interesting to note that in the picture Bywaters, unlike Thompson, seems strained. Newenham’s next direction is for the three of them to be seated and relax. Freddy picks up his novel and sits on the right of the wicker sofa. Percy sits on the left. He is holding a copy of the Sunday Pictorial and is gazing at its back page. Mrs Thompson is seated in the middle between the two men. The photographer specifically asks that no one look at the camera. Edith alone conveys a stilted impression as she fixes on a point at the bottom of the garden, with her hands folded in her lap. Her legs are exposed halfway up to her knees.

It is now Percy’s turn to take a photograph and he yields his place and newspaper to Newenham. Freddy leans away from Edith rather more, while she remains stoically seated in suspended motion.

Then Freddy rises and takes the camera. Edith moves into his place, Thompson into hers, and Newenham stays put. He discards the paper and leans back against the cushions pretending to be asleep. Edith sits with her legs tightly closed, and her right arm propped up by a cushion. Of the four extant photographs, this one best highlights the mounting tensions between them. Thompson has defensively crossed his legs and arms, and stares straight into the camera. A look of defiance lingers in his pose and eyes. There is no hint of a smile or of a gesture towards the camera. Edith studiously avoids catching Bywaters’s eye and looks in the opposite direction from the camera. Is she concerned about giving Percy too much of a clue if he surprises her smiling at the camera? Or is she keen to avoid appearing too cosy in a family shot with Thompson and her brother?

The next two weeks of July pass uneventfully. The Lesters return, and so day-time encounters between Freddy and Edith on the premises of No. 41 are now out of the question. On Wednesday 27 July, a month after they became lovers, Edith and Freddy travel out to Chorleywood for the day, and on Saturday 30 July the lovers pay a day-long visit to Kew. The privacy afforded them by the Gardens at Kew impresses on both of them, and on her in particular, the impossible situation at No. 41. Percy remains in the dark, but he has noticed his wife’s increasing reluctance to tolerate his company. His lodger and friend Bywaters acts strangely these days and shows no willingness to ship out. Percy feels his privacy invaded and is annoyed by Bwaters’s dancing attendance on every one of his wife’s whims. Percy has never thought of washing up as part of a man’s duty; Freddy’s willingness to hover about her to dry up and even to clear the dishes simply cannot be allowed to continue, nor must she go on acknowledging his help with an insolent gratefulness. He resolves to talk it over with her. It is only hours now to the first real confrontation between the husband and the lovers.

While Percy is bracing himself for a talk with his wife, the lovers are returning to Ilford equally resentful. A frosty dinner inevitably ends with Thompson asking his wife how she spent the day. He still does not imagine that she and Bywaters could have been out together. Within minutes a row is in full swing. The Lesters cannot help hearing it, as the Thompsons’ voices are raised. Bywaters remains silent. Then he probably wanders off into the garden. The following day, Sunday, is spent in mutually watchful antagonism. Thompson knows nothing factual about Edith and Fred, but has been stung by his wife’s defensiveness about their lodger. Another quarrel erupts as Edith refuses to pander to the proprietorial habits of her husband. Again Bywaters is present. Again he ignores it as far as he can. All three pass a miserable Sunday, made bearable only by a further truce. Percy’s suspicions are pure conjecture so far, but not for much longer.

Monday 1 August: It is Bank Holiday Monday. Edith, Percy and Freddy are sitting out in the garden after lunch. The scene is similar to that of 10 July. Edith is reclining on the wicker sofa, sewing with a basket on her lap. Freddy is reading a book and Percy is either pottering about in the garden or reading the Sunday papers. It is about mid-afternoon, when Edith remarks that she needs a pin. The comment is not addressed specifically to her husband, though it is up to him, she intimates, to respond to her request. He ignores it while Freddy rises with ‘I will go and get you one’. During the time that he is inside the house rummaging in the drawers in the Thompsons’ bedroom, Percy turns on his wife and starts berating her. Just as Bywaters re-emerges into the garden, he snaps ‘you like to have someone always tacked on to you to run all your little requests’. Edith remains stubbornly silent. She may look daggers but speaks none for the moment. Freddy’s reappearance temporarily halts Thompson’s abuse. The atmosphere in the garden is taut, but all three are privately determined to exercise restraint, as Avis Graydon is due shortly for tea. As 4 p.m. approaches Edith rises, packs her sewing into the basket and with the men reluctantly in tow moves through the french windows into the morning room. She starts laying out the silver tea service and then proceeds into the kitchen to prepare the tea. But Avis, very unusually, does not appear.

It is getting on for 4.30 p.m. There is no sign of the sister. Edith proposes that they wait for her. Freddy agrees. Thompson emphatically dissents and starts complaining. Bywaters gets up and steps outside into the garden. He can hear the voices inside. Much as he now despises Thompson, he does not wish to interfere; and Edith has asked him to keep a low profile, because she wants him to stay put at No. 41, to ‘protect’ her. Feeling poorly treated by his wife and now stood up by her sister, Percy begins to insult Edith, her family in general and her sister in particular. It is a rash and foolish thing to do, one moreover out of character with Thompson’s usual behaviour. He had always been welcomed by the Graydons and was acutely conscious of their superior social standing. He may not have quite meant what he said but Edith reacts sharply. She cannot allow her little sister to be insulted, particularly since she has taken her lover from her. Once stung into white anger, she gives as good as she gets. Avis has failed to turn up, the Lesters are away for the day. No holds are barred. She is screaming at Thompson when he hits her several times and, grabbing her, throws her across the room. As she stumbles, she knocks over a chair and falls against the table. It is this racket which leads Bywaters to charge into the room and to step literally between husband and wife. She is crying and screaming, and Thompson is hollering; he tells Bywaters to keep out of it and to get out. He doesn’t budge and tells Percy to lay off. Edith stays dazed for a second and then bolts upstairs.

The two men do not fight, even though Bywaters physically impedes Thompson’s movement towards his wife. Percy is cowed by Bywaters’s smouldering but unmistakable anger as he interposes himself. This confrontation leaves Percy profoundly humiliated and hurt: he trusted Freddy and now he is proved a fool, though he is as yet ignorant of the adultery. As if to add insult to injury, while Thompson threatens Bywaters with throwing him out, the latter not only appears unperturbed, but tells him to leave Edith alone and not to knock her about any more; unless he wants to have to deal with him. Percy now demands that Freddy leave, which he shrugs off, agreeing to do so after talking to Edith. She in the meantime is upstairs, bruised and crying with anger and frustration. Freddy decides to go for a stroll. He needs a breath of fresh air. Edith probably watches him leave from the upstairs window.

At about 7 p.m. the Lesters return. Freddy is still out and shortly afterwards Edith leaves the house, followed before long by an angry Thompson. Where the three of them spend the next four hours is unclear, although a public house is the most likely venue for this conjugal crisis meeting. The scenario of the three of them sitting together and discussing separation, while Thompson suspects Bywaters merely to be a reckless meddler, is bizarre. To Percy’s confident and comically magnanimous ‘We will come to an agreement and have a separation’, Edith caustically replies: ‘You always tell me that when I mention the subject, and later, when it actually comes, you refuse to grant it me’; and again, ‘Yes, I should like that, but you make a statement and then whine back to me and retract that statement; you have done that before.’ Even as the three of them return to the house in the summer night, the day’s events seem to each of them like a nightmare. Percy is shattered by the upheaval, Edith is sore from her bruises, and Freddy now regrets telling Percy about how he should behave to his wife.

Tuesday morning, 2 August, 7.30 a.m.: Edith is assisting Mrs Lester with breakfast and prepares to take it upstairs to her husband. Asked whether he is unwell, she replies: ‘He is all right, but will not have his meals in the same room as Freddy.’ She is down pretty quickly, followed shortly by Freddy with whom she has breakfast in the morning room. The weather is unsettled which suits their sombre mood. When Edith leaves for work, Freddy returns to his room. By 9 a.m. Percy in turn has left for the station, followed shortly by Bywaters. When Edith returns from work in the evening, she shows Mrs Lester her arm. It is ‘black from the shoulder to the elbow’. Mrs Lester: ‘Oh my, what did that?’, to which Edith replies, ‘Percy did it last night. Freddy and he had a ‘bust up’ and I went between them and he threw me across the room.’ Edith is to remember this day as the first day when she had to face the prospect of Freddy’s departure.

Wednesday and Thursday reinforce the futility of Bywaters’s hanging on at No. 41. He will leave on Friday and return to Westow Street. Thursday night is the last one the lovers will spend under the same roof. It will be very difficult for them to keep a tryst in the house in the future, unless the Lesters are off the premises – which is unlikely since Mr Lester is ailing and will get worse.

Friday 5 August: Percy is still not dining or breakfasting in the same room as Bywaters. The lovers are on their own therefore in the morning room. Only Mrs Lester’s presence in the kitchen prevents a tearful outburst from Edith, as she realises that Freddy will not be sleeping here again. When she walks out of the door he will go upstairs, pack his few belongings and leave No. 41 for good. In exactly a year she will be writing to him from Carlton & Prior and recalling how ‘the bestest pal a girl ever had’ left her ‘all by myself at 41 for good’.

Having said his goodbyes to Mrs Lester, Bywaters leaves the house. As Friday is the weekly visiting day at No. 231 he has undertaken to take Edith back to the Crescent from work. To avoid colliding with Thompson they will commute east from Fenchurch to Manor Park, and then walk across from Station Road to the Browning Road through Morris Avenue. At the bottom of the avenue, within shouting distance of the Graydons’ home and a mere fifty yards from the Avenue Hotel, Freddy and Edith kiss passionately. She is pleading with him to stay with her. Eventually they part and she notices that they are standing at the exact intersection of the Browning Road and Morris Avenue. She points this out to him and invites him to cherish the memory of this place as a milestone in their ‘great’ and suffering love: ‘one of the treasured spots in our memory’.

This is the first night that the Thompsons spend without Bywaters at 41 Kensington Gardens. Before long ‘high words’ are exchanged in the bedroom. These arguments will continue throughout the week, usually in the privacy of the bedchamber – if one can call it privacy, since members of the Lester family on either side are only too eager to overhear. The overt cause of these rows is money. Edith resents her husband demanding Bywaters’s departure from a house purchased primarily with her earnings and savings. In the meantime Freddy is explaining to his mother that he left Ilford because, as result of Thompson’s meanness, the husband and wife get on very badly. She advises him to keep out, and tells him that Mrs Thompson can easily get a separation if she wishes.

For the next fortnight Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters meet regularly in the lunch hour and every Friday evening till 9 September. She is sleeping badly and is haunted by nightmares. From being an indifferent husband, the man next to her has in her mind become an ogre. On Thursday 11 August Edith returns to Bywaters a cache of letters sent him by the Australian girl. She extracted these from him as a proof of his affection. She may well have read them, for when asked later whether they were love letters, she replied that they were ‘hardly’ that. They were more like ‘personal letters’. Her reason for getting rid of them is that she has nowhere to keep them except in her newly bought cash box at Carlton & Prior. This she wants to use for her letters only, just in case someone might find them – which would be too awful. She and Freddy meet again the following day, exactly a week after their passionate embrace at the corner of Morris Avenue. Then, on Friday 9 August Percy for good reason surmises that his wife and Bywaters have been together. Percy is catching on. He will never quite believe though that his wife and Bywaters have already committed adultery. But he does suspect now that they are romantically attached. In the evening he confronts her with it. She indignantly denies everything. The following morning, at about 8 a.m., Edith posts a short letter to Freddy from Ilford: ‘Come & see me Monday lunch time, please darlint. He suspects. PEIDI’.

By Sunday Edith has recovered some of her balance. At last she is sleeping calmly again. On Monday Freddy meets her and does his best to reassure her. They will be more careful in the future, that’s all. His buoyancy and confidence always buck her up, but she is aware of how restless he is becoming. He is eager now to get on a ship again. The rest of August marks a truce for the Thompsons. The first week after Bywaters’s departure they barely spoke other than with raised voices at night. Now tempers are cooling and Percy’s suspicions may even have the effect of restraining him. He knows that he cannot take his wife for granted any more. On 27 August Edith writes to Bywaters to mark their second ‘anniversary’ since 27 June. There will be many such moments for the lovers, in her imagination at least.

The lovers continue meeting intermittently, but they communicate regularly. On Monday 5 September Edith sends a telegram to 11 Westow Street that ‘Peidi sends herself to other half no chance to write’, and on Wednesday 7 September she again cables a message to 11 Westow Street: ‘Yes I do know. PEIDI’. What the telegram refers to is unclear. It is, however, on this day that Freddy secures a position as writer on the P & O’s Morea, a medium-sized passenger liner. Edith Thompson will become very fond of the Morea. Bywaters has landed the berth on the liner at very short notice and will have to be ready to sail on Friday.

For Edith the day of his departure, Friday 9 September, marks a watershed. There is no one now to turn to, unless she can write to him. She is a girl of immense imaginative ability. If she writes at length to Freddy, she can make him experience her life in London in the mind’s eye, provided she offers the right kind of detail and sounds the correct note. Naturally such a correspondence will also act as a reminder of her existence and of her love for him.

The seventy letters and telegrams that have survived of her relationship with Bywaters are minor gems. Her range in them is impressive, her confidence startling. Some of her letters are wholly concerned with literary criticism of a sort, such as endings in fiction, the overlap between novels and life, and the presentation of character in the works of novelists such as Hichens, Chambers and Hutchinson. On other occasions she expands on her sexual revulsion from her husband and her longings for Freddy. She describes how she dreams about joining him in bed and making love; and then how he bolts downstairs to escape from her husband at the top of the landing. She records her periods to underline the intimacy of their relationship, and then pretends to be shocked when her lover takes her up on it. She offers contradictory accounts of her miscarriage(s), and follows them with meticulous descriptions of visits to the theatre, cinema and music-hall. She discusses scores of people, real and fictional, mostly, but not always, forgiving rather than censuring. She can fight like a polecat when Bywaters is dismissive of her in his replies, and at the same time be as innocent as a schoolgirl before one of his escapades. She is at her best in the recording of the quotidian happenings in her life, involving her lover in the fêtes at the Seamen’s Orphanage in Wanstead Park and the Eastcote outing, as well as the routines, trials and excitements at Carlton & Prior. Most of these letters have survived. Only for this first trip on the Morea have the records perished. In court Edith refused to admit that she had written to her lover then. He recalled it though and acknowledged that he had replied. So did she in a long letter written in the winter of 1921:

I seem to be able to talk to you always & for ever, but you, I don’t know, you don’t seem the same as when you were away before [9 September to 29 October 1921], you did talk to me a lot that trip, but this time you don’t seem to at all.

Freddy studiously kept all the letters that were sent him, particularly Edith Thompson’s. Even he, popular with the ladies and used to their attentions, had not before been the recipient of such ardour and eloquence. The reason that suggests itself for their disappearance may be connected with the fact that he kept all his letters in a sailor’s ditty box. It is possible that a new box was acquired for the second voyage of the Morea – the first trip was a great rush and happened very suddenly. The original lot may therefore well have been separated from the others, kept mostly on board ship and some at home. Where they are now no one knows. The police never set eyes in them, and have no record of them. They would have been eager to use them, as the prosecution was anxious to establish and prove an early date for the adultery, preferably to demonstrate conclusively that it had happened under the husband’s hospitable roof. This early part of Edith Thompson’s letters must have dealt with the summer events extensively, reflecting, interpreting, resuscitating, projecting and pleading. One day they may turn up, but though Freddy Bywaters knew where they were he took his secret with him.

On this warm Friday evening of September a downcast Mrs Thompson is replying to her parents’ questions about young Bywaters, Percy and herself. The huge coverage given in her daily paper to the return to England of Charlie Chaplin does little to raise her morale. Within the next few weeks, she will embark on the curious existence of living a double life: on the one hand that of the busy and competent businesswoman in the City of London; on the other hand the fantasy world of the cornered romantic heroine, keeping a home fire burning and in her mind following the young sailor plying the oceans of the world. She now closely reads the P & O shipping routes in the paper and knows his whereabouts at each step of the voyage. Every port of call is an address for a letter.

On Saturday 24 September Avis celebrates her twenty-sixth birthday. Last year Freddy sent greetings to her. This time he forgets and Avis is hurt. The autumn of 1921 remains one of the warmest on record. It is in early October that Edith sees D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East, premièred in London at the Empire Theatre on Wednesday 7 September 1921. The lead is taken by Lillian Gish, supported by Richard Barthelmes as the devoted admirer, and a memorable performance by Lowell Sherman as the philandering villain who traps the innocent Anna Moore (Gish) into a mock marriage and abandons her when she is pregnant.

For the three and a half months of its run at the Empire, the film plays to a packed house. In its riveting melodramatic finale and in its conclusion in a bitter-sweet white wedding, Edith Thompson feels herself uniquely addressed. Above all, however, one imagines her responding to Gish’s rendering of wounded womanhood and the discovery, seemingly too late, of true love. In one of the letters presumed lost, Edith writes to Freddy at length about Way Down East, and how much she wishes he had shared the film with her.

Saturday 29 October 1921 is a dry and mild day. The Morea is docking at Tilbury. At 41 Kensington Gardens Edith is restless in anticipation. She prepares lunch for Percy and herself. Then, on some pretext or other, she excuses herself to go across to No. 231 on her own. Freddy has told her that he will be there. She can barely contain her excitement as she passes the corner of Morris Avenue and turns into the Crescent. The entire Graydon family is present when the lovers shake hands: That was all you and I could do, just imagine shaking hands, when we are all & everything to each other, two halves not yet united.

Their greetings of ‘hallo Edie’ and ‘hallo Freddy’ seem unexceptional to the family. But to the lovers their artifice is a betrayal. The afternoon passes in animated conversation. Parting at 5.30 p.m. is hard. If only they could now just go off together on their own, instead of which she must return to 41 Kensington Gardens to cook for her husband, while Freddy stays behind in the Crescent. She cries on the way back – even he claims to have found their meeting trying and felt as if he ‘wanted to die’.

With Bywaters back in England Edith predictably finds Sunday ‘too awful to bear’ and can only get through it by blunting her mind:

my mind and thoughts I had to make frozen, I daren’t think, not about anything. I should have run away, I know I should, I felt quite sure.

The thought of Monday keeps her going. As soon as she arrives at 168 Aldersgate she is informed that a parcel is waiting for her. She knows who it is from and excitedly unwraps it. It contains Oriental silks, and several sets of beads, one of which, the ‘lilac one’, she immediately fancies. All her friends at work gather to admire them – only Lily knows who sent them and what this might mean. They tease Edith about the present and ask to be left them in her will. There is also a letter from Bywaters telling her how dreadful he found Saturday, but she must cheer up: ‘What I am saying [is] don’t let this make you too miserable chère.’ Edith spends her lunch hour replying to Bywaters and sends the letter by hand through Rose Jacobs, who assists in the showroom. She is dispatched to deliver the note to a gentleman matching a particular description, either across the road at Fuller’s, or else in the porch of Aldersgate Station.

At 5 p.m. Edith finishes work, and five minutes later she is kissing and hugging her lover in frantic abandon. He is so taken aback by this enraptured reaction to his embrace that his bewilderment shows and amuses her. The lovers have about an hour and a half between leaving the shop and boarding the 6.45 p.m. to Ilford at Fenchurch Street. Now at last they can talk of their ‘real’ lives. She is very depressed and is, she claims, cheered only by the prospect of Thursday, when they will go out dancing together.

It rains all Monday night and all of Tuesday. The Thames floods. On Thursday 3 November the lovers take off for the day. Edith is wearing the silks which Freddy brought her. As a reminder of him she promises to wear them every day, like his lilac beads which are also much in evidence on her. It is cold and drizzling and ground frost is forecast for the night. Where the lovers go, or whereabouts they make love, is impossible to establish. Nor can Percy’s movements for this day and evening be accounted for. Perhaps he went to the theatre or attended a masonic evening. But what is not in question is the lovers’ actual encounter and the husband’s at last realising that his wife and former lodger are deeply involved.

From this day to Friday 20 January 1922 it is exactly seventy-nine days. These two days are collocated here because they mark the inception and termination of Edith Thompson’s first pregnancy, which fell eleven days short of three months. The question of her pregnancies is crucial to the letters, the trial and the stories which emerged in the direct aftermath of the events of 9 January 1923.

That on this day Edith dispenses with precautions, even though their meeting was planned well in advanced, stretched credulity – as does the fact that Bywaters does not use a contraceptive. Nevertheless both he and she later acknowledged that they loved without protection. (It is for this reason that she will not allow Thompson to touch her for thirty-two days from 3 November).

When she is finally back with Percy in their bedroom, he has startling news for her: he saw her and her sailor boy at the station. This inevitably leads to recriminations about Bywaters, and Thompson bursts out with ‘he is no man or else he would ask my permission to take you out.’ Edith makes a mental note of this to tell Freddy about it. Since Thompson has hinted that he will go to Carlton & Prior the following day, Edith sends Freddy a telegram warning him off: ‘Don’t come 168 wait Fenchurch.’ The lovers meet at 5.15p.m. at Fenchurch Street. Freddy soothes Edith’s fears and rashly undertakes to visit 41 Kensington Garden to put it to Thompson, as a friend, that and his wife ought to separate.

Almost incredibly the following day, in the early afternoon of Saturday 5 November, Bywaters calls on the Thompsons. Mrs Lester lets him in. He stays for two hours and confronts Thompson. He tells him that he is a man, and that he does not require anyone’s permission to take Mrs Thompson out: ‘Why do you not come to an amicable agreement, either have a separation or you can get a divorce.’ Edith is present during part of this meeting. Thompson hums and haws: ‘Yes – No – I don’t see it concerns you … Well, I have got her and will keep her.’ In the end Bywaters extracts a promise from her husband that he will not ‘knock’ Edith about any more: ‘You are making Edie’s life a hell. You know she is not happy with you.’ When he leaves, Thompson has agreed ‘that he would not beat her’ again. After he has gone Edith tells Mrs Lester that Freddy and her husband have made up. 41 Kensington Gardens must feel a strange place after Bywaters’s departure. Furthermore, the Thompsons know that Bywaters is proceeding straight to the Crescent, where they are due for dinner tonight. The Graydons by now know that Freddy and Percy are at odds, but remain ignorant of the true reason for their quarrel and of its seriousness.

Monday 7 November: On her way into work Edith stops in the Barbican and sends a telegram to Bywaters on the Morea to wait for her in Fenchurch at 5.15 p.m. She does not expect him in the lunch hour. Then, at some point during the day, something happens to her and the doctor is called. Most likely it is a prolonged faint. The doctor in attendance will charge 10 shillings and sixpence, and Edith, on receiving the bill on Saturday 4 March 1922, will be stunned by the amount. What renders this particular incident relevant is that Edith clearly sees a connection between it and the miscarriage of 20 January 1922. Whatever the details of the crisis, Freddy is given a full and graphic account of it that night, and she will expect him to remember it. In the country at large, this week is ‘poppy week’. The lovers meet every day, as Thursday 10 November closes in all too quickly. Thursday is Bywaters’s last full day in England for this year, and Edith is wearing his silks and beads. Whether they manage to spend the evening together or have to confine themselves to the two hours between 5 and 7 p.m. is not recorded. What is known is that they revert to their ‘compact’ repeatedly:r a suicide agreement in five years’ time, from their first kiss on the Isle of Wight, if they are not eternally united by then.

The day following their last meeting this year is Remembrance Day. It is also the day that the Morea sails for Bombay. At a quarter past two in the afternoon, while the vessel is floating down the estuary towards the open sea, Edith is sitting in her office in the City, brooding over the past few days. Did Freddy not for her sake jump ship and lose his job? Her husband would not have dared; and this moreover happened at the same time that Percy was rowing with a good man-friend of hers for calling her by her first name! Whereas Thompson out of fear had had himself discharged from the army, young Bywaters had sailed the ocean to India in a military convoy at the height of the German submarine offensive. It is not just Percy who cuts a poor figure compared to Freddy, but others also of Edith’s admirers, such as the mysterious ‘Mel’. He rings her twice at Carlton & Prior on this Remembrance Day of 1921, but each time she is out. He is an Ilford man who works in the City and attends dance lessons in the Cripplegate Institute. He knows all the protagonists involved here, including Bywaters and Avis. Before long he and Edith will have an interesting dinner together, and he will press her about Bywaters.

Before moving on, it may be worth pausing over Mel, because he worked for a company called Henley’s W. T. Telegraph Works Co. Ltd. Electric Cable Manufacturers. Their offices were located at 14 Bloomfield St. EC2, around the corner from Carlton & Prior on Aldersgate Street. A close friend of Avis’s also worked at Henley’s at the time. This was Margaret Kate Cumner, née Margaret Kate Boot on 22 December 1895. She married Sidney Cumner in St Barnabas, Manor Park, in 1920. More than 50 years later Margaret Cumner was the first person mentioned by Avis Graydon in her 1973 will (Avis died in 1977) and was left a substantial legacy. Mrs Cumner herself died in 1993, the same year as Freddy Bywaters’s sister Florence. Such is the long-range reach of this story.

What has only recently come to light is that Avis Graydon too may have worked at Henley’s at the time, hence presumably her lifelong friendship with Margaret Boot-Cumner. The source for this is none other than the future film director Alfred Hitchcock, also an employee at Henley’s at that time. Like Mel, Hitchcock too attended dance classes at the Cripplegate Institute, instructed by Edith Thompson’s father. He contributed pieces to the company’s in-house magazine, ‘The Henley Telegraph’, before he left the firm in April 1921. While at Henley’s he was taught to dance by Edith Thompson’s father who was assisted by Avis and, occasionally, by Edith too. The post-Great-War link between Hitchcock and Edith’s family would be revived years later when, after her conversion to Catholicism in 1924, on the second anniversary of the murder of Percy Thompson, Avis and Hitchcock’s sister, as church wardens of the East Ham Catholic community, became close friends. And so Avis, inevitably, again met the by then famous director himself. In the words of Hitchcock’s official biographer John Russell Taylor, writing in the Times in April 2005:

When I had completed my biography I had to twist his arm even to read the typescript. When he did, he came up with just one request for omission. It was the story about his being taught to dance by the father of Edith Thompson, his favourite English murderess. Whatever for, I asked; it’s such a wonderfully bizarre idea. He explained that when he had his first job, for an electric-wire company, there was a company social club at which the young gentlemen were taught to dance by senior gentlemen, and the young ladies by senior ladies. (It would have been improper for them to learn with each other.) The man who taught Hitch, a Mr Graydon, had two daughters, one of whom worked in the same office, so Hitch knew her well, the other just around the corner, so Hitch saw quite a lot of her, too. A few years later the second daughter, now married, became famous as Edith Thompson, the last woman for many years to be hanged. Years later still Hitch’s sister, like him a devout Roman Catholic, met the other sister, still Miss Graydon, at some kind of church function. They became friendly, and the next time Hitch was in London he was reintroduced to Miss Graydon over the teacups. It became a little ritual of his sister’s, and the lady started sending him birthday and Christmas cards.

Now whenever he saw her, said Hitch, he found himself considering. The connection with a famous murderess never came up, and he presumed this must be the great secret of her life. “I look into her eyes, and I am sure I can see her asking: does he or doesn’t he know? Now obviously she is going to read your book, and if that story is in it she will know for sure that I do. John, would you want to break an old lady’s heart?”

Who would have expected him to be so solicitous over the wellbeing of someone he hardly even knew? So, of course, I took it out. But there is a coda. During the proof stage of the book I got a call from Hitch. “You know that story? Well, you can put it back in. I just heard that she died.”

The sleeting, snowy weather continues. On Thursday 17 November 1921 a woman shops at Carlton & Prior who, Edith ruefully notes, lost her husbands ‘not through the war: 2 were drowned and one committed suicide and some people I know cant lose one. How unfair everything is’. At least tonight she is seeing a variety show at the Ilford Hippodrome. This ‘Pierrotic Extravaganza’ is opened by two men with a 1921 hit, ‘Feather Your Nest’, by Kendis, Brockman, and Howard Johnson.

Edith adores it. Its lyrics now speak to her directly and are matched perfectly by a wistful tune

Oh sweetheart mine, it’s wedding time,
The whole world seems to say,
The summer days are fading,
Into love land let us stray;
Birds sing merrily,
High up in each tree,
And, sweetheart, they sing messages,
Just for you and me.

Your heart is beating peacefully
When friends are fond and true,
The world is filled with gladness
When the one you love loves you;
Mountains or the sea over we may roam,
The path that leads to love, sweet love,
Leads to home sweet home.

The birds are humming ‘Go feather your nest’,
Tomorrow’s coming, so feather your nest,
It’s time for mating, no use hesitating,
The parson is waiting, he knows just whether it’s best;
In a home for two, love, together we’ll rest,
Where only true love can weather the test.
Don’t be delaying, the organ is playing,
The whole world is saying ‘Go feather your nest’.

'Feather your Nest' (1921), sung Albert Campbell and Henry Burr

The costumes, scenic and lime-light effect, and individual performances impress the audience with their inventiveness. ‘Land of Hope & Glory’ is stirringly sung, and a skit called ‘How to Make Love’ contains the line which Edith Thompson remembers: ‘”Marriage is the inclination of a crazy man to board a lazy woman, for the rest of his natural life.” Rather cutting I think, but there is came from a man.’ The show concludes with the initiation of Jack Gallagher into the Suicide Club which ‘provides much mirth’. As Edith walks home to her house with her husband, she is puzzled by the fact that she enjoyed the evening, particularly the dance numbers. Her suicide pact tonight seems almost as absurd as Gallagher’s parody of it. She will shortly write to Bywaters: ‘don’t let us. I’d like to live.’

Friday 18 November is Derby Day, and Edith has money on the tipped favourite Font Line. It is ‘that loose end sort of day’ which precedes the weekend, and that means a full dose of Percy. She has not been asked out anywhere tonight, so she will have to make do with the weekly visit at No. 231. As she enters her parents’ home, she finds Avis on her own. Her parents have gone to Highbury to attend to Mrs Liles, Edith’s dying grandmother. She is laid up in the home of her daughter and son-in-law. Suffering from bronchitis syncope and unable to fend off the severe cold which came with the winter, Deborah Liles, aged eighty-one, is at death’s door.

She is asking after her nephews and nieces. Avis will call on her over the weekend. She cannot accompany her parents tonight because she spends the early part of Friday evening teaching ballroom dancing. During the lesson Mel has enquired about her sister and leaked the information to Avis that a friend of hers and Edith had been seen walking together. Avis tells her sister this tonight and that Mel has not revealed who the ‘friend’ was. Edith volunteers no answer, and Avis does not press the point since, as her sister suspects, she is sure to know that Bywaters is the man in question. It is not hard to imagine Avis’s feelings of hurt and betrayal.

Saturday 19 November 1921: Business at Carlton & Prior is picking up rapidly, and the firm has decided to open from 9 to 12.30 on Saturday morning. Edith does not applaud the idea entirely – Saturday 14 January 1922, when Bywaters is home, will now be a half working-day – but it does reduce the amount of time she has to spend in her husband’s company; and it is going to earn her more money. Percy, whose Saturday off this is, is not happy at the thought of his wife monopolised by her work and grumbles: ‘No home comfort whatever, you’ll have to stop at home, no other man’s wife wants to gad the town every day. They all find enough interest in their home.’ As soon as she arrives at work, she takes Freddy’s picture out of her desk for a daily, ritualised ‘good morning’ address. She keeps his photograph in her ‘WHERE IS IT’ book. An ‘irresistible feeling’ suddenly overcomes her to run her fingers through his hair. She loves doing that, she confesses, ‘it feels so lovely’. Most men, she reflects, don’t like it, even hate it, but he is vastly different from most men and, unlike her husband, has a full head of very thick and curly hair. It is nearly noon when she sits down and very quickly writes Bywaters a few lines, before returning to Ilford. At about tea-time, Edith puts it to Thompson that she needs a maid. He concurs but will not agree to having ‘Ethel’: ‘my people won’t like it’. The ‘people ‘ are the Chamberses of Mansfield Road, Ethel’s former employers. In any case, Percy tells Edith, he finds her ‘fearfully strung up’ and ‘morbid’ these days. (Edith will eventually get her way, although when Ethel arrives at Paddington from St Ives, on Wednesday 4 October 1922, her prospective employer will have been dead for fourteen hours.)

Tonight Percy approaches his wife in bed. As he tries to touch her she pulls away, determined to resist any sexual contact for a month from 3 November. In the past she would eventually have surrendered to her husband’s desires, but not now. He starts to plead with her and asks why she is no longer happy with him; they used to be happy. She protests that she is not unhappy, merely indifferent. Secretly, however, she wonders that she had once been content with her lot, ‘before I knew what real happiness could be like, before I loved you darlint’. Pressed again, she tells him that she doesn’t love him anymore. He is ‘astounded’ and begs her to forgive and forget everything that he has done or said in the past. Couldn’t they ‘start fresh and try and be happy again and just me and him’ so that when the anniversary of their wedding comes, on 15 January 1922, ‘we shall be just as happy and contented as we were on that day 7 years [she means 6] ago’. Edith remains unmoved, but feels ‘awful’. She promises, for the sake of peace, to do her share to make Percy happy and contented. This calms him down, while she resentfully tolerates his arms around her body.

On Monday there is more mail from Bywaters waiting for Edith at Carlton & Prior. She decides to take the lunch hour off and stay in to reply to the entire bulk of four, three from Tilbury and the one from Dover this morning. Two of the Tilbury letters came in a single long envelope, with a curiously distorted ‘E’ on it, ‘to curb other people’s curiosity’. Edith dislikes it and asks him to refrain from thus making fools of both of them.

The letters are despondent and self-flagellating. Bywaters blames himself for leaving her in the lurch: ‘I’ve run away and left you’; and he gratifies her self-esteem by fondly reminiscing about spots of time precious to them both. He liked Maria, a ‘real live book’, as did she. He mentions the three-year appointed waiting period and she, replying, suggests that three months at a time is all she can contemplate. He asks her for a photograph, and she professes to be ‘really sorry’, for she never makes ‘a good one darlint, not even a natural one, when I pose, and I don’t know that I will have one taken, even to please you’. In the end she gives in. What troubles her is the way he once sneered at a photo sent him on the Orvieto by a lady, either Molly or the Australian girl. Now that Edith fears that she has become ‘fatter in the face’ out of grief, the time is hardly right for a photograph. Freddy’s enquiry about ‘hair torture’ meets with a concession – she will have her hair done. The cheeky greeting card which he enclosed makes her laugh, but she prefers not to receive another one like it, because such cards belie his true character. As for her desires, Freddy boldly advises her what to do when she wants him. Whatever this is, in her reply she concurs and jokingly offers even to bruise herself ‘as you used and then take myself to Court for cruelty to myself’.

He enquires about books, and she explains that she is about to start Robert Service’s Trail of 98, but cannot read it today, because Avis has rung and asked that she visit Highbury; and she is finding W. B. Maxwell’s The Guarded Flame arduous: he writes, she claims, ‘very strange books – some are very sensual – but in a learned kind of way. I can’t explain any better than that.’

Next Freddy relates an incident about ‘a lady and the mail bag’, which caused him grievous indignation. It appears that the ‘lady’ is a native North African – the incident in question probably happened in Marseilles – and therefore Freddy describes her in terms of her colour: ‘coffee and milk’. He blames her mistake on her race, and Edith protests firstly about the expression, and then about the dismissive attitude towards women revealed by Freddy’s letter:

coffee and milk coming from you to me – from you to anyone else – perhaps yes and after all is she any worse for being a native – anyway I don’t know and I don’t think you do and then you say ‘If it had been one of the male sex’. Why ‘it’ darlint, I thought you were beginning to think just a little more of us than you used.

Bywaters goes on to promise Edith ‘something at some future date, when both you and I are ready’. He means giving her a baby. He concludes by noting that for the last three hours he has ‘been pushed to blazes’. This is one of his favourite expressions and she is tickled by it, as she can just imagine him saying it.

After work Edith leaves for Lucerne Road to visit Grandma Liles. She last saw the old lady in the summer, before her terminal illness left her emaciated and senile.

Two days later, on Wednesday 23 November, Mrs Liles dies. The Graydons, the Laxtons and the Walkinshaws go into mourning. The funeral is scheduled for Saturday. As the family gather in the shivering cold of a north London cemetery, a thick and icy fog is developing and threatens to engulf the metropolis. Trains and suburban traffic are affected by huge delays, as the points freeze together. What bothers Edith Thompson more than the pea-souper is the painful chilblain on the back of her heel, which her shoe cuts right in half. This does not prevent her, however, from visiting the theatre mid-week with tickets given her by Lillie Laxton, now in mourning for her mother.

The play is Woman to Woman at the Globe on Shaftesbury Avenue. It stars the American actress Wilette Kershaw, who performs with ‘an immense amount of nervous intensity and skill’. Edith will in a few months’ time see her again in the Hawaiian melodrama The Bird of Paradise. What distinguishes Woman to Woman, a sentimental Great War play, is the way it refuses morally to polarise adultery and legitimacy. Instead it places the emphasis on forgiveness growing from female intuition and maternal instinct. Edith professes to have loved it, ‘as much as “Romance” altho the plot is not the same’.

On Thursday 1 December Edith is taking a country buyer to a business lunch at Cook’s in St Paul’s Churchyard. They pass the Chapter House, and he eagerly turns to the elegant book-keeper from Carlton & Prior: ‘Would you care for a glass of wine here, its quite a nice place.’ – ‘No thanks, really I’d rather not.’ She had come here with Freddy in the summer before he went out on the Morea in September, and the places which they used to frequent are sacred to her: places like the Holborn, the Queen Anne Restaurant and the Strand, particularly ‘those corner seats’. In the Chapter House they had spent a memorable evening one Friday, when she explained how her life could be happy, if she lived with ‘only 2 people besides myself’. Today her answer to the same question about her happiness would be ‘with only 2 people, 2 halves, one whole, darlint, just you & me, say “yes, it’s right,” & it will be so’.

That night in bed Percy again trespasses on forbidden territory. He senses the extent to which his wife is withdrawn and alienated from him. But he has been trying hard recently to be more understanding of her and asks whether she is ‘happier’. She coolly replies that she assumes that she is as happy as she’ll ever be. He is not bothering her yet, but his next suggestion ruffles her composure. He thinks that they would be happier if they ‘had a baby’. Edith shies away with a panic-stricken ‘No, a thousand times No’. Even if she gives in to him, she will certainly not dispense with contraception – which is what he is asking of her. In any case she has good reason to believe that she is already pregnant by her lover. But she can’t even bear the thought of Percy assuming that he is the father of a baby he did not engender. Percy is again begging her and questioning her, but she remains resolved. Finally she huddles up as close as she can against the wall, turning her back to him. He doesn’t try to ‘worry’ her – the last time he did that was Saturday 19 November. But he does put his arms around her, and his hands touch her. What previously she accepted as the inevitable now disgusts her as ‘horrid’. There is a residual undercurrent of guilt about her failings in her wifely duty – her parents seem so content by comparison that it nearly scares her. She cannot bring herself to confide in them the shame of her failed marriage.

Feeling ‘very blue’ on Friday morning, Edith writes to Bywaters telling him about the preceding night and gleefully, if also caustically, remarks that he wishes to learn to dance. He could then take her out to ‘some nice ones’. Edith’s comment on this is ‘”ain’t we got fun”, while you are away!’ Again she notes that her periods have not yet returned and that she must be pregnant.

At 5 p.m. she goes to the Waldorf for the thé dansant and dinner. As she leaves, it is very foggy, and all the trains are running late. She therefore hails a taxicab in the Aldwych and gets to ‘Mother’s at 10. 20 p.m.’ Percy knows she is there, but will not come and collect her. This may be because she went dancing without him, or because of her reticence in bed yesterday. Her parents are clearly surprised at the husband’s failure to come for his wife, in view of the lateness of the hour and the thick fog. Edith senses the parents’ disapproval and feels humiliated. Another notch against Percy.

Ain't We got Fun (1921), probably the most popular foxtrot of the 1920s (Whiting, Egan, Kahn)

On Saturday Edith receives two letters in a single envelope, posted from Port Said. They sound apologetic and lack ardour. In her reply she crossly demands to know whether he still feels the same about her. If he does, then why are his letters so stiff and wooden? What she wants him to do is to engage not just in writing, but in talking, ‘the real talking I was looking forward to.’ She is always, she notes, talking to him; nor is it for her merely a chore. On the contrary, it is her all and everything and in a way recreates him for her as though he were present as a live interlocutor. What partly redeems his letters though is, she claims, his using the expression ‘I do love ‘em, etc.’ It reminds her of the wonderful Shanklin days, which seem like days of innocence now.

On Sunday 4 December 1921 the Thompsons, the Graydons and the Walkinshaws have all gathered in Stamford Hill at 5 Rostrevor Avenue as guests of Auntie Lillie and Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack, or John Ambrose Henry Laxton, is manager of the Furniture Record Publishers and works at 14 City Road, WC1.

The little gabled villa, with its deep garden at the back, remains intact today, apart from the tawdry layer of stucco it acquired in later years. It turns out to be a real family dinner, perhaps the first one since grandmother’s death. Everyone enjoys the occasion, and the Walkinshaws invite the whole family to Highbury for a belated New Year’s celebration on 7 January 1922, which coincides with Bywaters’s return to Tilbury. Edith makes a despondent mental note of this while accepting the invitation.

It is on Monday of this week that his wife gives way to Percy in bed. Writing to Freddy in the morning, she moans: ‘Peidi does want you now.’ Moreover she is reading a very ‘risqué ’novel by Hichens of sexual abuse and spiritual degeneracy, Felix. The book exudes a sickening aura of licence from its shallow presentation of adultery between an older drug-addicted society woman and a young aspiring writer. The intimation of carnal and perverted knowledge, associated with Parisian opium dens and the sorrows of addiction, give the work a veneer of both moral sobriety and aphrodisiacal suggestiveness. Edith notes that the book is ‘weird – horrible and filthy – yet I am very interested’. She confesses that she feels let down by her love – he won’t ‘talk’ – and it is over a month since they made love. The self-imposed moratorium on married sex has expired. Last time, it is true, she abstained completely from her husband. But then Bywaters was still ‘talking’.

On Tuesday evening Avis is visiting at 41 Kensington Gardens. Percy good-humouredly tells her that he has decided to learn to dance after all. Can she instruct him? Edith has refused, impatiently saying ‘my days of dragging round beginners are over’. Avis does not mind and offers to give her brother-in-law his first dance lesson the following Tuesday.

On Thursday Edith is collecting her photos for Bywaters. Her own verdict is that they are awful and that she hopes that ‘they are so rotten you’ll send them all back’.

On Friday she again patronises the Waldorf for the thé dansant in the Palm Court. Then she returns to the Crescent, and this time her husband dutifully collects her. In the wake of their seemingly re-established sex life, Percy is proving attentive, not to say uxurious.

Saturday 10 December: It is early morning in the kitchen of No. 41. Mrs Lester has prepared the porridge. During a brief moment of inattentiveness from her tenant, Edith furtively slips a drug into her bowl. It has a bitter taste, noticeable particularly in sugared porridge. As fate would have it, Percy takes the wrong bowl and eats the porridge before she can intervene. This morning therefore poor Percy has porridge with abortifacient powder in it. He fails to comment on the taste. A similar accident will result in his drinking drugged tea by mistake, and on that occasion he will notice the taste and complain. At the trial the porridge and tea incidents achieved notoriety as corroborative proof of homicidal intent, when even then it was clear that abortion was the real issue at stake. It is an indictment of the skewed moral climate of the time that the woman in the dock did not dare admit in public that she had been trying to abort. The shame of that for herself and her family would have been too unbearable. It almost appeared preferable to be tried as a murderess.

By 9 a.m., at her desk in Carlton & Prior, Edith is chucklingly telling Freddy about her morning escapade. She wants ‘bucking up’ badly though. How can she reach out to him? She has today gone as far as to bruise her left wrist on either side with her right thumb and finger – just as Freddy had done but ‘it doesn’t do any good, it doesn’t feel like you’. Anyway, tonight she is going to dine out with the gossipy Mel at the Café Marguerite on Oxford Street.

Over dinner Mel jumps the question of Bywaters on her and Edith reconstructs their conversation for Freddy’s benefit:

Mel: Isn’t your sister jealous of you?
Edith: My sister – why should she be?
Mel: It seems to me that you see more of her fiancé than she does herself.
Edith: How’s that and what do you know about it anyway?
Mel: Well I saw you going down Ilford Hill the other evening and he was holding your arm – did you go to a dance together?
Edith: Oh shut up and talk about something else.

But Mel has her on the ropes. He will not let go. Repeatedly he reverts to Bywaters, prodding and trying to get it across to her that perhaps he is something of an unconventional chap himself. Edith does not really take offence at his suggestive conversation. She only notes that she ‘had gone there for forget and instead of forgetting I was remembering all the time’.

Sunday night on 11 December brings about another sexual confrontation between Edith and Percy Thompson, the fourth one she records since Bywaters’s departure for India. The husband can see no reason why, now that their sex life has returned at least to a certain intimacy, he cannot presume on his rights. A ‘heated argument’ ensues. The following dialogue is a partly reconstructed version from her reported speech as in the letter to Port Said of Saturday 10 to 12 December 1921:

Edith: Not now, please.
Percy: Why not?! Why are you so different from what you used to be? Why have you changed since he left in August? Have you transferred your affections from me to him?
Edith: No, for heaven’s sake, shut up about Freddy. He has nothing to do with it. I just don’t feel like it tonight. Can’t you accept that?
Percy: You know perfectly well that we have not been right together since he left. You are my wife after all, if you know what that means.
Edith: Leave me alone; and leave Freddy out of this!
Percy: Has he written to you?
Edith: No!
Percy: That’s another lie … You are cunning the pair of you. You knew perfectly well that Saturday in October that he was coming back. That’s why you went to the Crescent to see your mother about the curtains and to find out whether Bill was back. I assure you that this time when he gets home you two won’t fool me. Every other man’s wife does not hang out with all and sundry in town. If it isn’t him, it’s everybody else. And I KNOW he writes to you at Carlton & Prior’s. Don’t pretend that he doesn’t. I’ll put a stop to that, believe me.

At this Edith bites her lip and determines to get the doorman Jim, who delivers the post at Carlton & Prior, on her side, to keep her life-line of Bywaters’s letters open. Perhaps for her peace of mind she allows herself to be possessed tonight. She decides to give in from now on. Ought she to have lulled Thompson cynically into a false sense of security, she wonders, by letting him use her body like a prostitute’s? That way he would never have suspected that anything was wrong.

It is still dark on Monday morning when Edith commutes into work. She eagerly expects to hear from Bywaters, at anchor in Bombay at this moment. But all she gets is a note of greetings and an apology for being unable to write to her. Her disappointment turns to anger, and she reverts to her lecture on talking rather than writing. I, she explains, also find it hard at times to write you, particularly to write you a talking letter:

but I just say to myself he’s here with me, looking at me and listening to what I am saying and it seems to help darlint, couldn’t you try and do this?! I feel awfully sad and lonely and think how much you would be cheering me up but perhaps you’ll think I’m selfish about it all and I suppose I am, but remember when you are thinking badly or hardly of me your letters are the only thing I have in the world and darlint, I haven’t even all those.

For the next fortnight there will be no opportunity for Edith to talk to her lover or he to her, as Wednesday 14 December is the last day for Christmas mail posting. On the following Saturday Edith’s mother is forty-nine years old. For the family at No. 231 December has retained its early magic, including, as it does, two birthdays, the parents’ wedding anniversary and Christmas. Now more than ever the Graydons can call themselves comparatively ‘affluent’. The entire family is in full-time employment and doing better every day, no one more so than the eldest daughter. If the parents have noticed that the Thompsons’ marriage is exhibiting signs of disharmony, they harbour not the slightest suspicion of the extent to which husband and wife are estranged. Mrs Graydon senses that Edith and Freddy like each other, but she still hopes that the youngster will eventually become engaged to Avis. It is shortly after her mother’s birthday that Edith receives a note from Bywaters, addressed to her at 41 Kensington Gardens:

Bombay
1st December 1921
Dear Edie

Do you remember last Xmas you wrote to me wishing me all the best, I never wrote to you so this year I’m going to make sure of it. I want to wish you all that you can wish yourself. I know all those wishes of yours will run into a deuce of a lot of money. Such items as fur coats, cars and champagne, will be very prominent on the list – anyhow, good health and I hope you get it. Have a very real good time, the best that is possible. I shall be about 2 days this side of Suez. Never mind I will have a drink with you. Once more the very best at Xmas and always.

Yours very sincerely,
FREDDY

Its address, opening words, content and signature form part of a clumsy attempt to disguise their ‘real’ correspondence. Percy sees the note, as he was meant to, and will bring it up before long.

On Christmas Day, Edith celebrates her twenty-eighth birthday. Percy and she are entertaining the family and various aunts and uncles. As a present she has been given a 22lb. turkey and ‘many large boxes of chocolate’. The dinner party is a huge success, and even Percy is enjoying himself with some zest. Much has happened to Edith since her last birthday. Now she is an ‘adulteress’ who regularly cheats her husband. She has even wished him dead. She is almost certainly pregnant. As she casts her eyes about her – at the property and the comforts accumulated over the last two years; her own home in Ilford; her regular visits to dances and the theatre; her freedom from indigence of any kind – she knows that she will inevitably have to choose between these and her lover. The life inside her, she has already determined, must not be born, because it would tie her down completely and irrevocably, and Percy would see the baby as a vindication of their marriage.

On Friday 30 December Edith acknowledges a woman friend’s present for her birthday. In a largish hand she thanks ‘M’ for a camisole she sent her, and then adds mysteriously, perhaps attributing to ‘M’ an ability to secure personal happiness that she lacks, ‘I wish I were as clever as you.’

It is New Year’s Eve. Like last year the Thompsons are again in the Crescent. Amidst all the revels Edith ‘wondered if you were wondering the same as I. What will the New Year give two halves – to you and I’. Her father used to ‘call’ at the Savoy on this evening. He may have done so earlier. He is now certainly present at the party, proud of his family and the quality of entertainment they can afford. Among the invited guests are all their close friends, including the grand Birnages. In the early hours of the morning of 1 January 1922 Mr and Mrs Thompson can be seen walking back the distance from Manor Park to Ilford. Later in the day they will be preparing a big New Year’s dinner for the entire family from the Crescent.

This first day of January is the mildest in fifty years, and is taken to augur well for the year ahead. The evening passes quickly, and it is gone midnight when the guests depart. As it is the Thompsons’ treat, Edith is clearing and washing up afterwards on her own. It is two o’clock in the morning by the time she joins her husband in bed. In a mere five hours she will be up to commute into work.