A Habit of Dying

by D J Wiseman

  ‘That was a nice surprise, so I thought I’d give you one.’

  ‘Hello, Stephen, yes, thank you. I wasn’t sure about just calling.’

  ‘Please do, anytime,’ then a slight pause before he added, ‘I’m usually here on my own, and if I’m not then it doesn’t matter.’ He had understood her hesitation. ‘It must be something important. The unfortunate Susan?’

  ‘Yes. Susan. I sent you the other things about her death, but I got her marriage details today.’

  ‘Informative?’

  ‘You could say that. When she married James Watson she was a widow. Or at least, she said she was a widow.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But I’ve double and treble checked and I can’t find anything about Andrew dying. I’ve written out a few ideas, but wanted to talk them through.’

  She rehearsed her list with him and they discussed all the possibilities. Stephen added one small refinement, suggesting that Andrew might not be dead, but only ‘officially’ dead having been missing for a certain length of time, but he was not sure how the process worked. He thought probably that even then there would need to be some indication the missing person had died. And he was fairly sure a death certificate would have been issued. From the problem of Andrew, the conversation turned to Susan.

  ‘I have to admit, she does look more unfortunate at every turn,’ Lydia conceded.

  ‘Statistically I suspect that she may have been uniquely unfortunate. Which makes me think you might look at it the way that you started out, the way that you showed me, look at the probabilities. So make a judgement as to which of all the reasons you cannot find Andrew is the most likely, then take that and see what you can do about it. Or just take the one that you can do something about and then find it or eliminate it. It’s a bit thin, but all I can think of.’

  ‘I suppose so, I would guess that the most likely thing is that the index is wrong in some way, the record is there, but I just can’t see it.’

  ‘There is one other possibility, but I haven’t liked to suggest it.’

  ‘Suggest away, I’m almost past caring.’

  ‘Alright, but if you don’t like it then say so. I know quite a few people, that is, have contacts with people who might be in a better position to find out things.’ He tried to be as tentative and vague as he could, acutely aware how protective Lydia still was about her Joslins. He had been invited into that world once but had no intention of presuming the invitation was still open.

  Lydia was wary of his idea. ‘The police, you mean?’

  ‘Not exactly, maybe someone who knows someone at the Home Office. But I won’t if you think not, entirely up to you.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ then quickly as an afterthought, ‘Thank you, I should have said. Ok, why not.’

  ‘You could think of it as just another resource that you’re tapping in to.’

  ‘I could.’

  Suddenly the summer was gone. The rain swept in from the sea in torrents along Marine Parade and hurled itself at the windows of the café on Worthing Pier. Dorothy and Lydia had decided to venture out for lunch despite the forecast of ‘blustery showers’, but now they looked out at a bleak white-capped Channel crashing up the shingle, only to draw back, clawing the pebbles down again by the ton, and they thought it might have been better to have stayed indoors.

  ‘You’re not walking so well, Dorothy.’

  ‘No, dear, old age catching up with me.’

  ‘Have you seen the doctor about it?’ Lydia asked, although it was no surprise to hear that Dorothy had not. ‘They can do some great things these days, even getting a hip replaced is commonplace. It could change your life.’

  ‘Maybe one day, we’ll see how it goes. But you look well, dear.’

  ‘I am well, I am very well.’

  The small talk continued, about everything and nothing, Lydia keen to tell of her discoveries yet unsure of how they would be received. She had brought all the albums with her and left them at Dorothy’s. It was the day that she had originally hoped for and then come to resist, as the end of her journey down the Joslin line had approached. Now she had arrived at her destination, or as good as, so far as Dorothy was concerned, and she had few regrets. The albums had run their course, there was nothing more to be gained from them, no purpose in her keeping them. The same was true of the journal, but she had not brought it with her, there might yet be a reason to refer to it. She was not sure if she would ever give it to Dorothy, she had no real claim on it and would never make any sense of it. Lydia could easily have written to her, simply sent her the family details as she knew them and left Dorothy to draw her own conclusions if she wished. For all she’d been supportive, encouraging Lydia to find more at each step, Lydia was not even sure Dorothy had looked at the diagrams she had sent her, or understood them if she had. Besides, there was the problem of Susan, Dorothy’s second cousin by one remove, and Susan’s story was not quite concluded. She felt the need to prepare Dorothy for what might emerge.

  ‘Dorothy, remember when you said to me that you didn’t want me to look into anything concerning your father, that you thought it was better to leave things as they were?’

  Dorothy looked up quickly from her cheese omelette. Was she anxious for knowledge or anxious to remain innocent? Lydia could not tell.

  ‘Yes, I remember. I thought a lot about that afterwards, thought whether I would want to know. I hadn’t had to think about it for years. None of it makes any difference, does it? Nothing would change, whether we know or not, and the truth might be worse than not knowing. Who knows the truth after all these years?’ Dorothy caught something in Lydia’s expression, ‘No, dear, I don’t mean what you have done, all these names and dates, all that’s amazing, I mean who knows the truth, there are so many versions of the truth don’t you think?’

  What a curious wisdom she had, thought Lydia, this unworldly old lady, living out her spinster life in her mother’s house. She wondered where the knowledge, the insight into worldly affairs had come from. There were indeed many versions of the truth, but, as Lydia realised, all too often her own hobby, her passion for finding solutions, demanded there be only one.

  ‘No, no, Dorothy, I haven’t looked at your father at all, not once. I only know what you’ve told me.’

  ‘Good. Now I know that, I’m relieved. I thought you might be about to tell me something.’

  ‘There are some other things though, some things that I’m still not really sure about, and one thing that I am pretty sure of. Not so much a discovery, more a conclusion. It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t alter a single thing. But in a way I find it a little bit sad.’

  ‘What’s that, dear?’

  ‘You don’t have to remember all the stuff I’ve sent you, but remember that Albert Joslin is your great grandfather? He’s the one in that first big picture, the one of the family in the blazing hot summer of 1911, the one that started all this off. He’s got all his family around him, I’ve always called him ‘Papa’ because that is how his daughter Alethia identified him in the caption.’

  ‘Yes, I think I know who you mean. I’ve looked at the copy you sent me several times. My grandfather Joseph is in that picture too.’

  ‘Yes he is. Well, of all that family, Albert, his five children and all his grandchildren and great grandchildren, I think you may be the last Joslin. That is, the last Joslin with Papa’s blood in your veins.’

  Dorothy looked out through the rain spattered window, along the length of the parade as it appeared and disappeared in the squalls. She looked for a long time, no expression apparent on her face, before she said half to herself, half to Lydia, ‘I don’t feel sad, I don’t think you should. It’s just life, it’s no sadder than my mother not having any grandchildren. I always thought I was the end of the line anyway. Like you, you’re the end of your line, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I have my brother, he has children.’

  ‘Not yours though.’

  When they had
splashed their way back to Dorothy’s home, hung their wet things in the little bathroom at the back and steamed a little in front of the electric fire, Dorothy remembered Lydia had said there were other things to tell her about.

  ‘It’s about your second cousin Susan and her husband Andrew. He was a relative too, but more distant. I found out that he wrote the diary I mentioned once and it has some strange things in it. And from that we found some other things about Susan which are also a bit strange. Or they might be.’

  ‘We? Who’s we?’ Dorothy instantly rounded on the inconsistency.

  ‘I have a friend who’s been really helpful when I’ve been stuck trying to sort it all out.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was just you and me who knew about all this.’ Almost imperceptibly Dorothy had stiffened, her tone a fraction cooler towards Lydia than a moment before. It had never occurred to Lydia that Dorothy would mind about Stephen or anybody else knowing about her family. She felt a rush of guilt as if she had broken some great confidence.

  ‘Dorothy, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think, I mean all these names and dates, they’re just that really, just names and dates, they’re open to anyone, there are millions and millions of them and millions of people all over the world looking at them.’

  ‘I expect there are, but you’ve put them all together to make my family. I don’t suppose it makes any difference. It was a bit of a surprise to think that there was someone else looking at all this, someone I didn’t know, a stranger. I thought it was just you.’

  ‘I should have told you, I’m sorry,’ then almost to her surprise she heard herself saying, ‘He’s a lovely man, and he’s very discreet. There’s no one else.’ Lydia crossed her fingers in the habit from childhood, in case she was not telling the truth. Jacqueline might know, someone in some department might know if Stephen had needed to explain himself when he’d made his private enquiries. All this time she had thought it was her project, her enquiry, that Dorothy was not really engaged. In fact, Lydia had come to think of the Joslins as being her family more than Dorothy’s, and now here was Dorothy laying claim to them, protecting their privacy.

  ‘What’s his name, dear?’ Dorothy had forgiven her.

  ‘Stephen.’

  ‘And you trust him. I can see that.’

  Lydia nodded.

  ‘And you and this Stephen have discovered some strange things. What kind of strange things?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it Dorothy, I don’t know yet if they are strange. What I wanted to ask you was whether you would want to know anything anyway. A bit like knowing, or not knowing, about your father.’

  ‘Something bad, is it?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘Isn’t there enough bad in the world already, dear?’

  Suddenly Lydia felt as if she were seeking permission to make her enquiries, which was not the way she’d meant things to go. She had no intention of giving Dorothy a veto, not now, not anytime. She shifted tack a little.

  ‘Probably, but we won’t be adding to it. It’s either there or it isn’t. I just wanted to know if I should tell you anything that might come out. In case you didn’t want to know.’

  ‘I’ll think about it, dear.’

  Whenever Lydia had visited Dorothy, the return to her home always gave her a fresh eye for its shortcomings. Always she saw the parallels between the house in Orke Road with its mish-mash of dated contents and her own shabby belongings. Nor was the likeness confined to the objects, for it was all too easy to imagine herself in Dorothy’s place in thirty years or so. They were not the same, far from it, but they could end up the same way. It was unsettling, and compounded by the unsatisfactory nature of this last visit. Dorothy had caught her unawares with her sensitivities to Stephen’s involvement, but that horse was running now, and there was no stopping it. The trouble was too, that Lydia could half understand how she felt, and the guilt she’d experienced had not entirely dissipated. Somehow, she had been cast as the outsider taking advantage of a helpless woman, exploiting her family for her own selfish reasons. Lydia could not get out of her head that there might be a germ of truth in it. But she had handed Dorothy the albums, kept her promise on that, even though she still had the copies she had made of some of the photographs. The promised Joslin report would take all her notes, her research and the family tree and combine it all into one document. When it was complete she would neatly bind it and send it to Dorothy. The greater part of it could be done right now, but until the final chapter could be written Lydia held back from thinking about it. Meanwhile the cardboard box that had lived beside her desk for so long was gone. Only the journal remained with her and this she kept safely in its plastic folder in the bottom drawer of her desk.

  Probabilities, Stephen had said, and he was right, it was how she had worked on the Joslin puzzle right from the beginning, how she always worked in the absence of hard facts, whether on her own family with its apparently easily traced surname, or anyone else’s. If Andrew were dead, still a big ‘if ’ in Lydia’s mind, and if he’d been registered properly, and in the county, then a simple error or omission was the most likely reason for his absence from the index. A first step to verifying this would be to check the physical index held at the registry office. If he were not there then Lydia didn’t know which way she would turn next. At the back of her mind she hung on to the idea that he was not dead, that Susan had chosen to be a widow out of convenience, he had simply disappeared and his wife had not tried, or been able, to find him.

  No matter how hard she tried, Lydia could find no way into the events that had taken place after the last entry in the journal. There were plenty of clues to Andrew’s state of mind, clues to his intentions, clues that he was taking some form of medication, knowingly or otherwise, but the image of that final scene would not coalesce. Lydia pulled out the sheets of her typed version of the journal and turned to the thirty-first and last entry with its familiar final words.

  ‘I am at once calm and excited, nervous and elated. [It] just occurs to me as I write those words that it may simply be a migraine in waiting. Or the [vicious indigestion] that wrecks my snatches of sleep. All is ready and I have everything in [perfection] in my head. Rehearsed and rehearsed until I know it in my sleep, can walk with my eyes tight shut. This book has done its job, been the space needed. It seems certain that this will be the last entry, something I did not realise until I wrote it out now. Maybe a new book will be needed another day. Tomorrow is another world a new world a better world. Or it is oblivion. Which would be its own peculiar blessing. But action will cause reaction and something will happen. The leaf will be cast to the forest floor where it will lie anonymously turning to mould. Though a million feet were to walk right by it, none would pause to remark its presence. Even I would not be able to detect it. The future at once looks crystal clear and impenetrable. The calmness of the centre has flowed out to envelop me and all around is light and clarity but the horizon remains black and infinite. This I think is the world without her even though she sleeps a sleep through this last night. Check mate in the game. Mr Punch.’

  Whatever Andrew had in mind for Susan, his own future was uncertain. ‘A better world or oblivion,’ he had written. Better if he removed her from his world, oblivion if he failed? He sees a world without her, even though she is still sleeping in tonight’s world. With diamond clarity a stark thought came blindingly to Lydia, something that had never caught her eye, for all the times that she had read it. What if the leaf cast to the forest floor were not Susan, but Andrew? This last entry, perhaps more before it, was a suicide note. How could she not have considered that? Like Stephen’s unexpected third option that had so surprised her, this shift in the reading made her sag as if she had been physically winded. Recovering herself, she read again through the last half dozen entries. A plan to be rid of Susan, yes, but the means might as easily be self-destruction as murder. She had been so set on Andrew the tormented killer, the desperate, unbalanced man consumed with an unrequited lo
ve, so set on that, she had seen no other picture. Then Stephen, taking facts and statistics and yes, her own theory of probabilities, had sown the seeds of that other way, the too-often-unfortunate Susan, and she had needed little persuasion to take that up. Now the truth seemed obvious, he had tried to kill himself in such a way as to never be found. If the attempt had failed then he had simply disappeared, become one of those who live a half-life on the edge of society, unnoticed by anyone, a leaf on the forest floor. It all fitted perfectly and Lydia glowed in the rush of achievement, the familiar surge of pleasure which came with a puzzle solved.

  She turned again to Susan’s second marriage and her declared status. If Andrew had succeeded in ending his life but failed to conceal the fact, then Susan would have been a widow plain and simple. If he had succeeded on both counts then she would have been a widow by default and Lydia was not at all sure how such things were recorded. No doubt a legal process would have been gone through and some record would exist somewhere, but she had no idea where. If the plan had failed completely then Susan was a widow of convenience, and who could blame her for that? Andrew might be alive still, rotting in a psychiatric ward somewhere, although Lydia knew that to be unlikely. More chance that he was grubbing along in the gutters, being ‘cared for in the community’. She might even have seen him that very day, the dishevelled figure shuffling anxiously to and fro along Paradise Street by the Castle Mill stream where the flotsam and jetsam of the Thames gathers by the old weir. He’d stared right at her, fiercely clutching the plastic bag with his few possessions tightly to him, then let out a stream of foul abuse that may have been aimed at her, but may just as easily have been meant for some person not present.