One Foot in the Grave

by Peter Dickinson

  “You might think you had a really good reason.”

  “Oh, I do hope so. I like Lord Hawkside. I wonder why he won’t let Marianne come to Wildfire Hall.”

  (Because he doesn’t own it anymore. That was what he lost in the wager with Sir Napier Fence, that false friend, who is of course hand in glove with the Comtesse, who—yes, she was blackmailed by Sir Napier into nobbling Lord Hawkside’s horses before the coach race, because Sir Napier knows that she’s not even Lord Hawkside’s sister. Had there been any hints of this? If so, Maisie hadn’t included them in her retellings. Now, why was Sir Napier going to all this trouble and making a play for Marianne as well, despite her obvious poverty? Because … because when Lord Hawkside married … no, when Marianne married, then Mr. Jethro would produce the secret papers referred to in old Lord Hawkside’s will, which proved that she was the true. …)

  “What’s the story called, Maisie? I’ve forgotten.”

  “The Owner of Wildfire.”

  “Ah.”

  “Shall I tell you what’s happened so far?”

  “Please.”

  For the moment the desert was not so dreary. There was a mirage. Bath, and Pall Mall, and the brooding mansion on the moors, all wavered into faint being. It was more amusing to watch them, despite their unreality, than to peer through their image at the true bleakness beyond. Pibble listened with care, and was gratified when Marianne met and recognized Old Frost, Lord Hawkside’s former groom, sacked for theft and now begging in the streets. He would know about how the wager had been rigged.

  “I’m sure Old Frost never stole anything,” said Maisie.

  “I expect the Comtesse framed him,” said Pibble.

  “Oh, do you think so? Why? She’s got to have a reason.”

  That was the point. That was what gave the mirage its apparent solidity and at the same time proclaimed its unreality. Everybody had reasons for everything they did. Even Lord Hawkside’s puzzling fits of moodiness would be explained in the end as coming from purely practical causes, which could be put right by an adjustment of the machine. When it was all worked out, the plot would have the rightness of a solved crossword, and about as much meaning.

  “Do you tell Dr. Follick all this?” he asked.

  “I used to. Then I stopped.”

  Made fun of her, no doubt. Or did he? What did Toby, with his passion for clinical gadgetry, make of his unclinical, non-robotic nurse? On Pibble’s visits to the surgery he had made no attempt to work her into his act, which he could easily have done—the conjurer’s assistant, beautiful but dumb. In fact, down there Maisie seemed like a different person, unobtrusive, competent, almost brisk. “Of course she adores him,” Jenny had once said. “He likes being adored. If he had a dog it would be a red setter, a real sop hound. She’s a bit like one, isn’t she? I’m a terrier—yap, yap.” They had gone on to consider the doggy equivalents of the other nurses, and Pibble hadn’t registered till now how perceptive she’d been about Maisie. There was nothing to prevent Maisie being a good nurse, just as red setters—all flop and sentiment at home—are presumably competent gun dogs.

  His interruption seemed to have blocked the flow of the story. He watched her drifting round the room, pushing the chairs about, apparently quite absentmindedly, but in fact returning them to their normal positions, then counting out his pills from the drug locker concealed behind the wall mirror—a typical Flycatchers arrangement, meant to hide even from the sick the paraphernalia of their sickness and the obscenities of age. If Tosca had really made a list … yes, she would be near the top of it. Not as beautiful as Debora or Pauline, not as pretty, even, as Jenny, but somehow closer than any of them to the fantasies of lust. How old—how past it—did you have to be to consider such a question quite objectively? Perhaps the time never came. Pity …

  Tiredness swept over him once more. He pushed the tray away and let himself slide a little down the pillows. Maisie, who had been looking out at the cedar, apparently lost in a dream of Regency intrigue, noticed the movement at once, brought him his pills and the tumbler of water, helped him to cope without choking or slobbering, and eased him down to the horizontal. She picked up the tray with the same decisiveness, but then just stood there looking down at him. He was already floating off toward the nonsense world of dream, but she remained part of the scenery, changed, though, to belong to the altering context. He felt the sudden shock of dream alarm that precedes and signals the nightmare. Her eyes weren’t human at all. Her hair flamed round the white passionless face. She took a seemingly endless breath.

  “I was helping Jenny wash her hair,” she whispered. “That’s what I was doing. Helping Jenny wash her hair.”

  5

  He slept after lunch. On “good” days, of which this was apparently one, he lay for a little more than half an hour in a dreamless dark, from which he usually half-surfaced into a comfortable in-and-out doze, full of a tangle of thought and memory and dream. When Jenny spent her rest period with him, this would prolong itself into rambling talk, often till teatime.

  Today he woke almost fully, knowing that he had slept longer and deeper than usual and that Jenny wasn’t there. Of course, it was her day off. But what … ? There was something else. Shock. Just before he had gone to sleep he had … that’s why he had slept like that—shock, not tiredness. He wasn’t really tired. It was a “good” day, and he’d been thinking effectively. None of that now. Rest time. He ought to be dozing in and out of dream. …

  He let his mind begin to jumble through ancient detritus, but kept finding among the dusty relics something new and strange, connected with Jenny, or Mike Crewe, or the body on the tower. One part of him yearned to assemble these new pieces into a collection, to compare shapes, fit them together into whatever whole or wholes they ought to compose; this longing was overruled by a reluctance which disguised itself as tedium, though it was deeper than that. Occasionally, as if by accident, two or three fragments would coalesce into a shape which was almost … but then his mind would shy away, pick up an ancient toy worn beyond any recognition of origin, and play violently with that until the alarm and menace of that almost died away again.

  The process was thoroughly unpleasant, and could not last. Soon he would be forced awake by the pressure of worry and then he would have to start to think. Unless … deliberately he tried to will back the desolation which had engulfed him when Mrs. Finsky had taken his lunch away. At least there was no thinking in that morass. But it wouldn’t come. After all, this was a “good” day. A desert.

  Suddenly, the desert was inhabited, not by a stranger seen trekking toward him out of the distance, enabling him to prepare a mask and a reason, but by an ambush. A voice at the door, a rattle of metal on timber. Lady Treadgold. Crippen.

  Residents at Flycatchers did not often visit each other in their rooms. This was not a rule, but a code of manners. It was in the TV lounge and the bridge room and the morning room and the dining hall and the bar that encounters took place, alliances were formed, feuds fought. One went down there prepared for meetings, wearing the armor of almost-health. It was not good manners to play other roles than the stoic. But in one’s own room one unbuckled and was as feeble, ill, old, as one chose. Naturally, one did not care to be seen in such a state, with the door of the mausoleum ajar and the odors of death seeping into the air.

  Of course Lady Treadgold knew this, so came rattling into the room already talking. Her head was cocked sideways and a little forward, just the gesture she used when she rebid her own feeble suit, knowing that her partner had every right to play the hand.

  “. . . so they were all against me,” she said, banging her walking frame forward for emphasis and hobbling after it. “I told them if only Mr. Pibble was here he’d say I’d done the right thing. McQueen wouldn’t have it. So in the end I had to come and ask you. You don’t mind?”

  “Come in. Would you like a chair? Shall I r
ing?”

  “No, no, no, my dear man. I shall do quite well on my scaffolding. Now listen. They were vulnerable, we were not. McQueen, on my right, dealt. I picked up one spade, eight hearts—eight, Mr. Pibble, but only the queen and tiddlers. …”

  Jabbering technicalities, Lady Treadgold rotated herself and her frame until she presented only her monolithic rear to the bed. She manipulated the gadget at the side of the frame which unfolded a sort of canvas seat across it, so that it became what she called her “scaffolding,” a support against which she could prop herself without the pain of sitting. Colonel McQueen had once told Pibble that she could sit perfectly well if she wanted to, but that she preferred to stand because it gave her a better view of her opponents’ hands. Pibble, before his adventure, had sometimes spent the empty hours between tea and supper watching the regular game in the bridge room. He seldom played—the stakes were too high for him, the conventions too new and complex, his own attention span too short; but Lady Treadgold used the bystanders as part of her armory, appealing to them to confirm the sanity of her crazier forays and taking their approval for granted before they had time to answer. Now he did his best to concentrate on her story and, as he did so, became aware of an oddness about it.

  “So there I was,” she snapped, her stony blue eyes popping in the brick-red face. “Five hearts, doubled on my right. What would you have done?”

  (Kicked the table over? Had a fit and fallen frothing to the floor? Challenged McQueen to fisticuffs?)

  “Bid six hearts?” guessed Pibble, who had lost track halfway through.

  She cackled as she settled onto her frame.

  “Naughty, naughty. I won’t say it didn’t cross my mind. No, I redoubled.”

  “For a rescue?”

  “My dear man! Nobody rescues me! They all passed.”

  “What happened?”

  “Guess.”

  (Three down? Five? Seven? It had happened—but there was that oddness.)

  “You made it.”

  “I did. I crashed the king and ace of hearts, ran the rest of the trumps, threw McQueen in with his ace of diamonds, which he’d been too mean to get rid of, and forced him to lead into dummy’s club tenace!”

  (Yes. There it was. She’d come all this way not to appeal about something which had gone wrong but to crow over something that had gone right. So she hadn’t come for that at all.)

  “Well done. I wish I’d been there to see you do it.”

  “I wish you’d been there to see McQueen’s face, especially when I pointed out they had six diamonds cold.”

  “It’s nice to know that life is going on without me.”

  “Life! You can’t call it life, Mr. Pibble. Not compared with what you’ve been up to. I want to know all about that. It’s ridiculous, there must be at least a dozen policemen hanging around, looking as though they expected one of us to leap out of our wheelchairs and shoot them, but they don’t seem any further on, do they?”

  “I’m afraid I really don’t know much about it.”

  “But you found George’s body, didn’t you? Nurse says you’d spotted something was up and went out to check. I’d have done the same in your place—never could keep my nose out of mischief. Now, don’t tell me you haven’t told them about George; that’s not very public-spirited of you, Mr. Pibble, though of course blackmailers deserve everything they get.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Still, murders are murders.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Now, don’t interrupt. It tires you to talk and it’s never tired me. In any case I can see you aren’t going to admit anything; this idiotic passion for secrecy. Not that I really disagree with it—life wouldn’t be very interesting if there weren’t any secrets to sniff out—but I spotted George was a blackmailer the minute I clapped eyes on him. He had blackmailer’s ears. There was a young feller used to hang around the Cri in Monte—lounge lizards we called them then, of course—sucked poor Didi Towcester dry over a diary he stole from her dressing table. Didi was not particular whom she shared her bed with, remember—oh, my dear man, forgive me if you were one of them—but Towcester had this idiotic faith in her. It sometimes strikes me that the aristocracy were deliberately breeding for stupidity, as though it was a good point, like a mastiff’s jaw … yes, George had exactly the same shape of ears. He was a blackmailer all right.”

  “Who …”

  “Oh, everybody. That rather attractive outsider who calls himself Wilson, for instance. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed him—he never comes into the public rooms if he can help it. He’s a criminal too. I must admit, Mr. Pibble, that I’ve always had a soft spot for criminals ever since that gang tunneled their way into Trubshott’s all those years ago. It still gives me the weeniest frisson of joy to think of all my old friends with their emeralds and bonds and guilty secrets tucked away in Horace Trubshott’s vaults because they said to themselves Horace is such a solid man—a bore of bores is all they really meant. I’ve known girls who’ve gone to bed with Horace because it seemed the only way to stop him talking about his bank, and all the time anyone could burrow into it and sneak off with … did you know that’s where the Ilford rubies were? Typical of Freddie Ilford to get that far without understanding that once he’d collected the insurance the rubies were a millstone round his neck because he had to hide them; far better to get them properly stolen in the first place. … Ah, yes, I’ve no doubt George knew something about the soi-disant Mr. Wilson, and I’ve no doubt he used it.”

  “George? Did he try …?”

  “Of course he did. Why else do you think I’m telling you all this? He’d hardly been here a week before he offered to take me out for a drive in Wilson’s car. I took him up, of course—no point in not amusing yourself, is there? I could see those weaselly little eyes glancing at me, thinking, I’ll get the old girl between the sheets and she’ll tell me what she didn’t ought—and I would, too. It’s one of those mistakes you don’t learn by. You tell yourself you’ll have your fun and you’ll give nothing for it, but you let them have everything they want in the end; it’s because … when I had my looks, it was me they wanted. The awful thing is you can’t help trying to make it seem like that still, by giving them what they do want. … Poor George Tosca. No, I shouldn’t say that. I mean, it might sound disgusting, but he wouldn’t have worried. That type, what they enjoy is power, and you can have as much power over an old bag like me as you can over a pretty young innocent. More. Don’t worry, Mr. Pibble, it never happened. I’ve given it all up, but George wasn’t to know that. Now that I can’t bend or wriggle—not much point in lying there like a log with a hole in it. … Yes, Mr. Pibble, he tried me. …”

  She fell suddenly silent, swaying a little on her frame. Her eyes, blue as bathroom tiles, stared at Pibble without seeing him. The pearls on her powder-pink twin set changed their hue with a steady rhythm as her deep breaths altered the impact of light on them. Her face was set like an image on a terracotta urn, weathered, enduring, pagan. To the best of Pibble’s memory she had never spoken to him, or to anyone else in his hearing, about any other subjects than bridge or food. She was a terrible old woman, but he felt drawn to her, and only faintly jealous of the fires that still fumed through her half-eroded clay.

  “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” she said angrily.

  “Ur? Yes. If he was … who else? Colonel McQueen. …”

  Anger became a snort of contemptuous laughter.

  “Hopeless! My dear man, hopeless! You could no more blackmail poor Weeny than you could blackmail you! He’s never done anything. Think of it—two and a half million to play with when he was twenty-one, and all he could do was join an infantry regiment! Mary Wookey decided to take him on—had to hypnotize him into proposing, I shouldn’t wonder. She had an eye like a basilisk, little Mary; showed him one thing he could do, and let him do it for a f
ew years. Result, eight daughters, all as plain as hake. Even Mary gave up then, told him to learn bridge, not that that got him totally off the other; poor Weeny, I’ve seen him go quite white with lechery watching that nurse of Follick’s, the carroty one with the extraordinary face, but of course being Weeny, he won’t have dared try …”

  “I thought in the war …”

  “Oh, yes, the war,” said Lady Treadgold impatiently, as if referring to a village fete which she hadn’t troubled to attend. “He got a D.S.O. and some other medals, didn’t he? Yugoslavia or somewhere. Nothing for George Tosca there—too young to realize that anything that happened in the war might still matter. Too stupid, too—cunning but stupid—just like a woman that way. Do you remember Nora Scarston-Smith, for instance …”

  “I helped investigate her murder. She was Nora Bessmuller by then.”

  “My dear man! My dear man! I had no idea! How too delicious. You mean to say you sent my nephew Tommy to the gallows! How incredibly bizarre!”

  “I was only one of a team, rather junior,” said Pibble, but she hadn’t heard him. She was laughing silently, swaying on her frame and flinging out pudgy, ringed hands to balance against each lurch. Her head was thrown back and her mouth was wide open, so that he could see right in among the blackened teeth. Suddenly he perceived what she had been before she had become this other creature, some fifty years ago, a strident frivol, rich, pretty, hard as the Lalique mascot on the bonnet of her Bugatti tourer, laughing like that in a brownish snapshot of a Riviera picnic party. He remembered Bessmuller. Striped trousers, black jacket, round face sweaty with strain, the man’s accent thickening as he paced his many-mirrored drawing room and tried to explain to Dickie Foyle (impassive, sitting on the arm of a deep chair and swinging one leg gently to and fro) the shock of what he had found in the swimming pool in his basement. Bessmuller, adviser to governments, millionaire of his own making—it had been the great man’s naiveté that had made a fairly commonplace piece of butchery belong in the fantasy world of pure horror. That he should have not grasped, even after a year of marriage, what kind of person his showpiece wife in fact was. That the world was run by men who knew so little about the world. Now Pibble could not have put a face to the young idiot they hanged; the scene in the swimming pool was a blotchy vagueness of green and scarlet; but he could still have counted the sweat beads along Bessmuller’s upper lip and got the number right.