She looked at him intently. Christopher and Edward had always shared a resemblance, though Christopher had always been the poor facsimile of his brother. But the similarities were enough for her to see Edward in his face, and for a second she wanted to reach out and touch him.
‘I have to tell you something.’
Georgia knew what was coming before he even uttered a word. She could see it in his eyes. Guilt, sadness, shame. A shame that had been eating away at him for decades.
‘Edward did not rape Clarissa,’ he said finally.
She sank her top two teeth into her bottom lip and for a moment she could taste blood. She had wanted to hear that admission for over fifty years, but now that it had come, they seemed the saddest and most futile words in the world.
Regret almost suffocated her. She closed her eyes and had to sink down on to the sofa.
‘She would never have let him go to jail, you know,’ said Christopher quickly. ‘She certainly never wanted it to end up the way it did.’
‘How generous of her,’ growled Georgia. She was not sure she could bear the sight of him any longer.
‘She was wrong and she was foolish. We both were.’
‘Oh, I could think of a lot stronger words to describe your wife, Christopher. She was evil, although I will say one thing: she was a lot cleverer than I ever gave her credit for. It was really quite a plan, wasn’t it, and it all worked out so beautifully for you.’
She looked up and could see that he was crying.
‘How much did you know, Christopher? How culpable were you?’
‘Enough,’ he said, his voice so quiet she could barely hear it. ‘I’d been dating Clarissa for a few weeks before my twenty-first. We first met at your party and kept in touch. You could say I had a bit of a schoolboy crush on her. She took me to a hotel in the City after just a couple of weeks and we spent the night together. I don’t how experienced she was as a lover, but she blew me away. She was very physical and quite the temptress, and I would have done anything for her, even though I suspected she was a little bit in love with Edward.’
‘Did anyone know about your relationship?’
‘No. She wanted to keep it a secret. I think she was hedging her bets.’
‘So you planned the rape claim together.’ She could hear her own voice, cold, unrecognisable, as if she was listening to someone else.
‘No.’ He spoke with such plainness that she believed him.
‘About a week before the party at Stapleford, we had another night in a hotel. She spent most of the time trying to convince me that I should assert my position in the family a bit more. I hadn’t been to university and by thi
s point I had already put in three years at the bank. But I wasn’t taken seriously, whereas Edward was being groomed for a very senior role as soon as he finished at Oxford. Clarissa convinced me that it wasn’t right, and I believed her. I came away from that night feeling resentment against my brother, and just wishing that he would get out of my life, get out of the bank, where he had immediately overshadowed me.’
He brushed a tear off his papery cheek and continued.
‘As you know, Clarissa came to my twenty-first. We slipped off and had sex in the wine cellar. The next thing I knew, we were all in the middle of this drama. She was claiming rape. Edward was adamant that he was innocent.
‘I managed to get a couple of minutes alone with her to ask her what the hell was going on, and she told me not to breathe a word about the fact that we had had sex. She was smart and knew the way it was all going to pan out – no police would be involved, but Edward would be taken out of the picture until the scandal died down.’
‘So she let you believe that Edward had raped her?’
‘I didn’t know what to believe. Within a week it had been arranged that Edward was going to Singapore. The Hamiltons agreed not to press charges. After all, the last thing they wanted was for word to get out that Clarissa was a rape victim. She would never have found anyone to marry her.’
‘When did she tell you the truth?’
‘A few weeks after Edward left for the Far East. When she admitted that she had staged the rape, I was angry, confused. Clarissa was adamant that she had done it for my benefit, although I suspect she was also furious that Edward had asked you to marry him. But I couldn’t deny that the situation had worked out in my favour. I was suddenly the golden boy, the favoured son, and Edward was the proverbial black sheep.’
‘Until he died.’
They stood there in silence.
‘She wept for two days when she heard the news.’
‘I’ve wept for a lifetime,’ said Georgia coldly.