A Habit of Dying

by D J Wiseman

  ‘We met briefly last night,’ he smiled, holding out a hand.

  Lydia might have smiled back but she could not remember. Again she felt the tingle in her cheeks as their hands met. His were big and dry and warm, hers suddenly small and clammy. ‘I must get on, get myself changed before dinner’, she blustered and turned away to scuttle up the stairs to her room, leaving Stephen and the proprietor to their reminiscences.

  The bath that she ran was plenty deep enough but as she settled in, it felt too narrow to stay for an enjoyable soak. Could it be that she was too wide, rather than the bath too narrow? Lydia pondered that unwelcome thought for a few moments, contemplating the excess inches that she carried on her hips. No, she was sure it was the bath at fault in this case, even allowing for the inches. And they were her inches, nobody else’s to see or criticise. Like her hair and the absence of make-up, the inches were another line of defence, a reason for nobody to take any interest, and without interest there was no need for any reaction to that interest. She might as well be a spinster herself, like the elusive ‘B’.

  It struck her how difficult it had been to find any memorials to aged spinsters, never mind ones which fitted the description she was working from. ‘Loving Mother’, ‘Sadly Missed Nan’, ‘Beloved Wife’ and their like were everywhere. ‘Beautiful Daughter’ was predictably reserved for the young. How unfair life was, even the wrinkled and decrepit had been somebody’s beautiful daughter at one time. Maybe the aged spinsters had no-one to bury them, no one to compose a loving thought for their headstone. A simple plaque might be the best that could be expected, quickly overgrown with grass. B’s grave might never have been marked, an idea Lydia had all along sought to suppress. Was that how it would be when her own time came, an unmarked grave or scattered ashes, with no one to remember her as ‘A Dearly Loved Lady’? Lydia regarded the prospect briefly, not wholly with indifference. If she survived her brother, then who would there be to bury her with anything like interest, not to mention affection or loss. There was no sister, no parent, her nieces were growing distant, and certainly there was no man. Which brought her back to Stephen Kellaway and the unsettling effect that he had had on her.

  After a leisurely start to the day, and a little less breakfast than previously, Lydia set off with her already familiar new map and her notepad stuffed in her bag, along with a little fold-up umbrella. As she emerged from the drive, Stephen Kellaway appeared from the path to her right.

  ‘Good morning. How are you this morning?’

  ‘Oh, hello Mr Kellaway,’ Lydia began with a little more confidence than the previous evening.

  ‘If it’s all right with you, please call me Stephen.’

  This put Lydia back in her unsettled state. She had half surprised herself by remembering his surname, and thought she’d taken control by using it with assurance.

  ‘Stephen, yes. I am well thank you,’ and thinking it only polite to add her own enquiry, ‘and you, Mr Kel . . , er, Stephen, have you been out walking already?’

  ‘Just a few steps up the hill. I’m just popping back to my room to collect my backpack and then I intend to walk round the water down to the village. And you, are you headed far?’

  Lydia’s heart did an uncomfortable somersault as it tried to be both excited at the prospect of this man’s company and deflated at losing the planned solitude of the walk. The result was Lydia swallowing hard, thinking of lying, thinking of changing her plans, thinking of waiting for him or walking quickly so that he would not catch up. But ‘Oh’ was all that she managed to actually say.

  ‘Enjoy your walk, we may see each other later,’ and with that he was walking away up the drive to the hotel entrance, patting the black and white collie on the way.

  Momentarily paralysed, she stood staring after him before she gathered her thoughts and set off along the farm track opposite the drive. After a short time it began to climb steeply, seemingly taking her away from the lake. The gradient clawed at the backs of her legs and doubting her route, she stopped to check the map. From her higher vantage point she could see the expanse of the lake before her, cupped between Burnbank and Darling Fells, fringed with woodland. She could not resist a look back to the hotel where a figure she knew to be Stephen Kellaway was walking down the drive. Would she wait until he caught up with her or walk on? In either case he would certainly be faster than she would be. She waited a little longer to check his route. He was not following her, he was taking the opposite way round, taking the road to the village. And again there were conflicting sensations in her chest. Relief and disappointment combined into one unfamiliar feeling.

  Once through the farmyard at the crest of the rise, the stony path descended as steeply as it had risen, back down towards the lake and the cool Holme Wood that borders its western side. Then she was walking on the flat, her view of the water again obscured by the hedgerows. It was easy going and, under the brightest of blue skies, Lydia began to relish the day ahead. Lunch at the village inn had been recommended, the walk was relaxing, the scenery spectacular. And there was the possible bonus of adding to her list of candidates for ‘B’. Not that she really held out much hope, Loweswater was right on the outer edge of her area, and if she’d not been staying so close by, then most likely she wouldn’t have included it. But it was only a twenty minute drive to Cockermouth, so not entirely out of the question. These thoughts were running through her mind when a voice from close behind interrupted them.

  ‘Hello, again.’

  Startled, Lydia turned, knowing before she did so that only one person in the world could use that phrase to her this morning. Stephen was about ten yards away, emerging from a little-used path between two bushes.

  ‘Oh, hello. I thought you might have gone a different way.’ The sensation in her chest was more muted this time.

  ‘No, I have always preferred the anti-clockwise route, don’t know why, just seems more natural. Which is a little silly, as whichever way you go the sights and sounds are very much the same.’

  ‘It’s just that I thought I saw you on the road.’ Lydia did not want to give him the idea that she might have actually watched him.

  ‘Little path across the fields. Strictly speaking not a public path, and it can get rather wet underfoot close to the water. It just means that you don’t climb up to the farm and then down again.’

  They had both stopped walking and stood right at the very edge of the wood. Lydia was sure that if she set off again then he would accompany her, but if she stayed where she was then he might just go on without her.

  As if to read her mind Stephen said, ‘I’m sure that you planned to walk alone today, as had I, so if you like, I will head off. But if you would like some company then we could continue together. I certainly would not be offended if you were to choose to walk alone.’

  His direct manner of speaking, delivered in his soft and even voice left her both disarmed and confused. He had a way of leaving doors wide open when he finished speaking. Now she had a choice to make. How long since someone offered her even such a trivial choice as this. If she waited and said nothing he would walk on alone, if she said yes, let’s walk together, would he take it the wrong way? If she said no, she preferred her solitude, would it be true?

  ‘That’s ok, I do completely understand,’ he said as she dithered, and made to leave her side.

  ‘No, it would be fine to have some company, it would be nice,’ and then as if to cement her decision she added, ‘thank you, Stephen.’

  So they walked through the woods together, she at first full of anxiety that she could think of nothing to say while he strolled easily beside her, or in front or behind according to the width of the path. After a mile or so she grew more comfortable with silence, so that when they stopped to enjoy their surroundings at a little pebble beach she was almost at ease with herself. Stephen tossed a few pebbles into the lake, skimming them and counting the bounces, saying how he could never resist the temptation of rekindling childhood memories. He point
ed out a farmhouse high above on the opposite side of the lake, telling her how that house had looked upon the water for more than four hundred years, and asking how that made one think, did it not? Which chimed immediately with Lydia’s own sense of history and place, though it made her think less about the house and the four hundred years than it did of this easy-going stranger she found herself with.

  It took well over an hour for them to complete the first half of the walk. While Stephen collected a menu for lunch and bought some drinks, Lydia sat at a table in the pub garden. She was enjoying the day, the change of scene, and even the company. She had almost forgotten that she had a little work to do in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard and wondered how best to explain without going into detail. But whereas before her walk she would have fretted over revealing her ridiculous enterprise, now it did not disturb her. If it all came out then so what? It struck her that neither Stephen nor she had indulged in any of the small talk usually associated with such casual acquaintance, no questions of occupation or age or children and certainly not of marriage, no urgent need to find common ground to enhance conversation. In fact they had spoken little, and after her initial anxiety it had been a companionable silence, a silence that did not cry out to be broken. Which did not mean that Lydia was not curious about this languid man, she most certainly was, but there seemed no urgency in discovery.

  ‘Shall we have the time-honoured argument over who pays for lunch, Lydia?’

  ‘No, Stephen, we will not. I will pay for mine, and you will pay for yours,’ she replied, a little more firmly than she had meant. She had been ready for his offer to pay, but not in the way that he had done so.

  ‘Fair enough, Dutch it is. Quite right too.’

  Lydia rummaged in her bag and passed him a note while he found some coins to give her the exact change. While this was precisely what she had said, it left her a little uncomfortable. She had expected him to counter with at least an ‘Are you sure?’, instead of which he had simply agreed and that was the end of the matter.

  ‘Will you take the walk straight back?’ she said, somehow needing to approach the question of her graveyard detour.

  ‘Probably sit here for a bit, and then, yes, a gentle stroll back. There’s a path down by the water for much of the way, although the road is fairly quiet. Did you have something else in mind?’

  ‘Well, I would like to spend a while at the church.’

  ‘Religion or architecture? Or maybe both?’

  ‘Oh no, not religion, I’m not religious. No offence to you, if you are, I mean.’ Again she had been wrong footed by his directness and by her own perverse wish to keep her motive secret.

  ‘Nor me, so no offence.’ He said it with a weariness that hinted of faith lost, rather than faith never held. ’I might join you, if you don’t mind. In all these years I have never been inside the place.’

  ‘No, no, that would be fine, er, nice.’

  Now there would be no getting away from it, she could hardly walk round the churchyard studying the memorials, maybe noting some down, then not go in the church itself, without offering some explanation as to what she was doing. And if she lied or told half the truth, then that would only invite another question and another lie.

  It was no more than a few steps from the Kirkstile Inn to St Bartholomew’s and whatever she might find it would not take long. Modern graves had been placed in a small extension to the main area and for the most part they were arranged in chronological order. A matter of minutes Lydia imagined. While she started her inspection, Stephen tried the door of the church, but it was locked. By the time he had wandered round the exterior without finding anything to take his interest, Lydia was almost done. One name had been noted, one that she was feeling quietly optimistic about. ‘Beatrice Jinifer Wright, 1903-1984, Benefactor of this Place, Much Loved and Much Missed Friend’. To Lydia’s mind it was as near as any inscription she’d read had come to saying ‘spinster’. And everything else worked beautifully, not that she allowed herself to get carried away and think that this Beatrice must be the one she was looking for.

  Stephen rejoined her as she was approaching the gate.

  ‘Well, not much of interest here, at least not for the casual observer,’ he suggested.

  ‘Nothing in the church to draw the eye?’

  ‘Locked. And you, did anything draw your eye?’

  ‘Yes, well maybe. Something of interest, but it might be nothing.’

  ‘Not a wasted trip then.’

  ‘No, not wasted, and even if there had been nothing at all, it wouldn’t have felt wasted.’

  ‘Indeed not. Apart from what you are doing with your notepad, you are also here to enjoy the place, so no, not wasted.’

  So, thought Lydia, he is not going to ask me what I am up to, he’s probably just not that interested, no curiosity in him. But as soon as the thought came, so she took it back. Perhaps his apparent lack of interest might be simply reserve, an old-fashioned politeness, a reluctance to go where he was not invited. Her story, the whole reason for her being there, was entirely contained within her head, wavering daily from conviction to far-fetched fantasy. Inviting him to share that story would not make it any less than it already was, he could only laugh. Not that he was likely to, far too polite. Maybe too considerate also. If he thought her foolish, saw huge flaws in her theories, he was after all just a stranger she happened to have met and would never see again. To share it with another, put her ideas and logic into words, that would also test it out for herself, would it not?

  ‘Have you ever had any interest in genealogy, family history and the like?’ she ventured as they climbed up from the village.

  ‘No, it’s not really something I’ve ever considered. I have an interest in history, or rather the sense of history in places, in events in ordinary people’s lives. I suppose that would touch on family history, or do you mean strictly the ‘who begat who’?

  ‘I wondered because of the way you spoke about that house this morning, and your interest in the church. And yes, ‘who begat who’ is a part of it, but there’s a lot more to it than that.’

  ‘Well, the church was no more than idle curiosity I’m afraid, something to fill a few minutes while you were busy with your notepad. I had rather assumed that you were looking for an ancestor.’

  If Lydia was going to tell him her story, she would not have a better opening than this.

  ‘An ancestor, yes, but not one of mine. And funny you should say that because the person I am looking may not have been anyone’s ancestor.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser. Will you tell me about it?’

  Just below the house he had pointed out in the morning they paused by a gate. Between them and the lake an emerald pasture sloped gently to the water’s edge. A half dozen horses grazed, the sound of their cropping the grass drifting on the breeze to the two observers.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘We have the afternoon, will that be long enough?’

  So, almost to her surprise, Lydia told the story of the box of albums, of how she came to have them, what she would do with them. She told of her investigations, the frustrations, the visit to Longlands. She told him about the journal, about the feeling of intruding in something private. She even told him of her suspicions of the unknown outcome, and of how she came to be walking down a lane in Cumbria telling a perfect stranger about her foolish obsession. Not everything came out in the exact sequence it had happened, and she could not instantly recall every detail or tally of the abortive census searches. But the few items that she was fairly sure about, the Myers family, Longlands, Cockermouth, Pink2, she related in detail. She had finished her tale before she remembered the postcards, unconnected to anything else she could find and yet a real physical link between the places of the story, between Braintree, Cumbria and Oxford. And while she spoke, Lydia had a growing belief in her story, the more she put it into words the less ridiculous and fanciful it felt. It was the first time that she had assembled
and recited the whole thing, even though she had picked over the detail endlessly in her head, and it was plausible, her box of albums could all be linked, they could be different parts of one whole. Stephen appeared to listen intently throughout, once or twice interrupting her to clarify a particular point.

  The little hotel was in sight by the time Lydia fell silent. They walked on another dozen steps before Stephen observed, ‘Well, that’s quite a puzzle you have set yourself. But a fascinating one, nonetheless.’

  ‘ To be honest, you are the only person I’ve told. I think I’ve used you as a sounding board, to try it all out in words and see if they made sense.’

  ‘And now that you have, what do you think of it all?’

  ‘I feel ok about it. It sounded better than I thought it might. It doesn’t seem completely foolish now.’

  ‘I will take that as a compliment, that you risked looking foolish by telling me. But tell me, why do you think that the journal is real? I mean, that its contents are not fiction?’

  ‘Oh did I not say? If it is fiction then it is a most elaborate hoax or an amazing coincidence. First, I was, well, pushed in that direction, not by the words so much as their physical appearance. The writing varies enormously and in places the sheer anger of the words is right there, etched into the paper where the writer pressed so hard. And there are sections that I can’t make out at all, so scrawled is the writing. I think that no fiction would be written like that, even if it were a draft or something like that.’

  ‘Ok, I can accept that, it’s a good conclusion. Or at least, a reasonable inference that you take from the evidence.’ He spoke with mock formality, as if correcting a junior, but his open smile told Lydia that he was mocking himself not her.

  ‘No, there’s more. There’s the little bits of paper that fluttered out of the pages,’ Lydia was back into her stride again. ‘Near the end there is a passage about how he has written a plan and a list in a notepad and to keep it secret he has torn the pages off and destroyed them once he is sure he has it memorised. Look.’ Lydia took her notepad from her bag and turning to an unused page near the end, ripped it from its spiral binding. ‘See, there are little pieces that fall away as you do that. Well, right there at that page in the journal, right in the binding, there were little fragments like that.’ She offered a few specks of paper to him in the palm of her hand.