One Foot in the Grave

by Peter Dickinson

  “No.”

  She spread her short-fingered hands above the bed, showing him them.

  “I was never finished. Look. I’m a Friday car.”

  “Ur?”

  “The ones the workmen leave bits out of because they want to knock off for the weekend. That’s me. I’ve never shown you my feet, have I? They’re ridiculous.”

  “You told me about your shoes. Don’t worry, my dear. I think there are quite a lot of us about—afraid to touch, don’t like to be touched.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes. And we usually find each other, I think.”

  “Lady Treadgold says you’re going to marry me.”

  “Ur. Not sure about that. Too convenient? You nurse me, I shield you …”

  “Oh, Jimmy, there’s more to it than that!”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I really do!”

  “Um. I’d like to think so … but there is that too, uh?”

  “I suppose so … well?”

  “Later. Feet. What size are Maisie’s?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Maisie’s feet. I want to talk about whether we’re going to get married.”

  “Please.”

  “Fives, very slim, and they make me green with envy. Now—”

  “Shoes wet?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When she came in.”

  “Yes, soaked. Now, about—”

  “Carrying a pistol?”

  “How did you know? I was in her room, using her dryer. I always do because she’s got a lot of fancy kit for her own hair and I help her with that, you see. She came through the door like a ghost and stood there, holding this gun as if she had no idea what it was. I was amazed when I saw it wasn’t a toy. I asked her where she’d got it, and she said there’d been a duel on the castle roof. I couldn’t think what she was talking about, but I was frightened, so I told her to give me the gun. Do you know, she curtsied? But she gave it to me, and a key as well, and just stood there. I took her cloak off her, and that was frightening too. She began smiling, but she went very pale and trembled at the same time. I put her cloak on and ran down to the staff door because I thought it might be that key, and it was. My first idea was to throw the gun into the bushes somewhere, but when I got out I heard the tower door slamming in the wind, and I thought that might be what she meant by the castle, so I went and had a look. I went right up the stairs. The roof was open too, and I found him there.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes. I turned him over to check. Then I stopped and thought for a bit. There were some gloves in the pocket of the cloak, so I put them on, and I wiped the gun on the cloak and tucked it in under the body on the far side. I bolted the roof door when I went out, but I couldn’t find the key to the bottom door. I thought the longer it was before anybody found the body, the harder it’d be to pin it on Maisie. Do you know, when I got back she was standing just where I’d left her, still smiling in that funny actressy way, just as if I hadn’t been gone any time at all. I had to slap her face to wake her up. She couldn’t remember anything. I told her she’d been helping me wash my hair and her shoes were wet because she’d spilt some of the water over them. I told her to take them down to the drying room, and her cloak—there’d be plenty of others there because it had been raining or snowing all day—and then I came rushing along to look after you because I knew you timed all my movements. I had to skip my poor old veg to be on time.

  “I see.”

  “But listen, Jimmy. I’m not going to have you shopping Maisie, not at any price. You understand that? Not at any price.”

  “Um … try not to … tell me—don’t be angry—important … this other girl you knew—Penny—Maisie like that?”

  “No! No, of course not!”

  “Not at all? She looks …”

  “Yes, she does, but … blokes are always having a go at her, naturally, and I expect sometimes … we don’t talk about it, but I expect she’s sometimes … I mean, if it’s the right bloke she probably enjoys it in a vague sort of way. I don’t know. Really, I think the only people she’s ever been properly in love with are the heroes in her toshy books.”

  “Tosca.”

  “No! Honestly not, Jimmy. He’d tried before, about six weeks ago. She was very upset. I’m quite sure about that, because she’s really used to it—men trying to get off with her, I mean—and usually it doesn’t bother her. But this time she seemed to be having one of her fits. She was very muddled. I couldn’t make out who she was talking about for a bit. I thought it was old Follicle who’d had a go at her. She adores him, of course, but not like that—more as if he were her father—but then I worked out who she meant. Really, Jimmy, she wouldn’t touch Tosca with a barge pole!”

  “Those clothes. Douglas Fairbanks. Hero in her book.”

  “Oh! And the way she curtsied to me! And that smile when I took her cloak off! Listen, Jimmy, I’ve just thought of something else. This morning, when we were looking at the tower and talking about cloaks catching in the roses …”

  “Bat’s wing …”

  “That’s right. When I was undoing the cloak she said something in a funny voice, like a man’s. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was about looking like a bat’s wing from above. … You mean, George Tosca found out—or thought he’d found out—what she really liked, and tried to lay it on for her, but he got it wrong? He wasn’t the hero, he was the villain, and she was the heroine and she shot him with his own gun!”

  “No.”

  Pibble’s eyelids dragged themselves down across his eyes; no power on earth could have heaved them open. But the Old Guard was still marching, still trailing its leaden pikes, though rank after rank slept as they trudged. He felt his lips move, whispering his last thought as he gave himself to darkness.

  “The shoes don’t fit.”

  10

  Ah, Major Pibble.”

  “Sir.”

  “You were a policeman, I see.”

  “Sir.”

  “How have you spent your war?”

  “Enemy aliens, to begin with, sir. Then mostly liaison with Civilian Police and Department J.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  The unknown colonel, a small, fungusy man, his voice weary with decisions, glanced through Pibble’s file. Dismal little underground office. Illumination designed for headaches. Nine telephones on desk.

  “Going back to the force, Major?”

  “Sir.”

  “Well, we’ve got you for a month, and I’ve got a that-sized job. Semi-sensitive. General done himself in. Rooms in Albany. Straight suicide, your civvy colleagues say—his batman had left him. …”

  The dead voice softened to a note of query, expecting a response.

  “Homo, sir?”

  “Right. One of a cozy little club. Household names, some of them. Our problem is, this fellow was writing his memoirs. Made an ass of himself somewhere in Italy, due to be bowler-hatted, only his pansy friends got him posted to a cushy job in London District, plenty of time to do a bit of writing, uh?”

  “You want me to go through the papers, sir.”

  “Good man. It’s a two-edged problem, Pibble. First, is there anything in there which would get anyone who counts into a mess? You’ll be surprised who some of them are. We may have to take protective action. Second, and this really matters rather more, who are the others? I don’t know whether you realize it, but the war’s nothing like as over as we think it is, and these people are security risks. …”

  Why? Why now? What unnoticed scuffling among the memory banks had brought this forgotten episode to the surface as he lay half-dozing in the artificial dusk of his room? All practical logic demanded that he should have been adding what Jenny had told him to the near-completed jigsaw, all emotional logic that he should have been we
ighing the enticingness of marriage to Jenny against the absurdity and disgust of such a union. Instead he was sitting in a tall room, in that backwater above Piccadilly. Soft maroon leather on the chairs, two Corots and a Fragonard, apparently genuine, a curious faint odor like the remains of incense. And he was glancing through an apparently endless pile of letters exchanged with a female second cousin about the precise names of childhood ponies and servants and the dates of Scottish holidays. There was even a map of the secret pathways among the laurels around a Yorkshire mansion. All the other boxes contained similar letters, to and from many other correspondents. Not one of them referred to a date later than the general’s tenth birthday. It was as though his life had stopped there.

  Why now? The wish to know became urgent. Irritably he flogged the dead donkey of his mind. Lady Treadgold’s system, then … laurel map, the papers, the general, the Queers’ Club, sexual aberrations, Jenny? Tchah! Nothing like it. The laurel map, the papers, the fungusy colonel, the last posting before demob, the sense of change impending, Jenny again? No. The laurel map, the papers, the smell in the room, incense, burning paper, burning­ the evidence, Wilson? No …

  At last he gave up by making the conscious decision to attempt to think about something else. Jenny. Am I mad? The episode in the linen cupboard, central but strangely banal. Us, Pibble had said, but it wasn’t quite honest. He was (had been) merely timid all his life, not horrified—and even so, was conscious of a distant kinship with other souls whose timidity took more extreme forms. …

  Cadogan Square, the ponderous respectability of that unweatherable brick. Sir Somebody’s daughter missing from first-floor flat. (Harrods decor: Regency stripe on the walls, buff-colored tassel fringes on the lampshades.) Sir Somebody’s nephew, tenant of attic flat in same house, six and a half feet tall, gawky as a mantis, flop of black hair; routine questions, nudge of doubt, search. Girl on bed, not dead but almost, encased in homemade armor with hinged flaps through which a timid finger could explore and that was all. No charges. “They’ll probably marry,” Dickie Foyle had said.

  Foyle! “Rum how he keeps cropping up, isn’t it?” Mike. Totems. That was the connection—obsessions—the pansy general’s with his nursery Eden, Pibble’s with his ruined hero. And the rest of life wasted to nonexistence. Ridiculous! Suppose Mike were to discover, now, that Pibble had been lying, a victim of half-senile fantasies, all he would feel would be disappointment, and perhaps pity. His life would not be in any way changed, so why should Pibble’s be? That was all over, long ago. Over. Over.

  Motionless under the light bedclothes, Pibble sensed through all his being a surge of moral energy. It seemed to tingle along clogged arteries, as well as through his mind. He was going to give up Foyle. The sensation was brief, and faded.

  Like giving up smoking, he thought. Yes, very like, in that it probably wouldn’t really happen—certainly not without relapses—but still the decision had been made, and that was that. Henceforth he would know, even in mid-wallow, that Foyle was an excuse, a crutch which could be thrown away. No one had cheated Pibble. He had lived a life of richness and variety, and his many failures had turned out lucky ones. He was like that seventh son who, lolling along the unobstructed path to hell, still manages to fall over his own feet and so stumble into heaven.

  Though the moral impulse had dwindled like a wave down a beach, its effect remained. It had wetted the sand, so that what before had been dry and random drift could now be shaped and built with. He decided to think about Jenny, objectively.

  What would be best for her? Correct examination answer: a man of her own age, sensitive and lively, who could gentle out her knotted horrors and let her become … become what? More herself, or less? Different, anyway. And she was all right now, surely. The image of her was strong in his mind, the easy, humming happiness, a balance achieved against the odds, like that of a toy gyroscope, humming on its wire. Yes, all right now … but in ten years’ time? Jenny at forty, brisk but twitchy, mistress perhaps of a hundred beds, on which lay a hundred poor old vegetables. And at home, what? What home? He could envisage only a clean and colorless space, half a life quite cauterized. By then the toy would be beginning to precess toward its eventual fall.

  But suppose he, Pibble, were to perform for himself the necessary miracle—make the shadow go back ten paces down the steps of the temple—and become … oh, no, not that imaginary young man, but a person again, for a few years something other than an object of pity or disgust, could he then help her? Would she be worse or better for his company?

  Supper came. Mrs. Finsky snapped him into wakefulness, and he ate with pleasure. For a while after that he listened to the radio, but a talk on Australian business ethics brought on a bout of Foyle-brooding (it sounded as if Dickie would have been quite at home among those twang-voweled venturers) and he drove it away by returning to Jenny. He had reached no conclusion when heels clicked on the parquet beyond the door. The door itself gave its rich whimper, and Maisie was floating across the room toward him.

  “I’ve come to put you to sleep,” she said, childlishly solemn.

  His mind seemed to slip its clutch and not quite recover. Subconsciously he had been expecting Jenny, to renew and reaffirm his picture of her, not as a poor neurotic girl but as someone who had a perfect right to be exactly what she was; so to be confronted by this other creature, who perhaps did not have that right but certainly needed help of a quite different sort. …

  “Jenny?” he croaked.

  “Jenny’s got a headache. She says she’s got a headache.”

  Of course. Rather than bring on one of Maisie’s “fits” by saying that Pibble wanted to interrogate her, Jenny had simply asked her to do the night round, and left the problem to him.

  “I don’t feel sleepy,” he said. “You’re early, aren’t you? I want to talk to you.”

  “Not now. I’ll give you your sleep medicine.”

  “Maisie …”

  “I’ve got all the others to do.”

  “It won’t take long. You’ve plenty of time.”

  But she’d already turned to the drug cupboard. For a moment he saw her reflection in the mirror that concealed it as she stood and stared at herself as though she were a stranger. He remembered the ghost that had gazed at him out of the other mirror the night of the murder, the seemingly quite other existence. …

  She clicked the catch of the mirror and swung it down so that it became a shelf on which she could measure out the doses. The image of the doppelgänger stuck in his mind, the creature that walked while she slept.

  “How’s Lord Hawkside getting on?” he said.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “Marianne killed him.”

  “I thought. …”

  She turned, and he saw that the doppelgänger had come out of the mirror and was now sleepwalking toward him, carrying the little tray with the medicines on it.

  “Wake up, Maisie. You can wake up now.”

  No change. You can wake her up if you yell at her. No. That would bring someone in and spoil his chance. She settled the tray on the bedside table—three white pills, two mauve capsules and a green one; his glass of sleep medicine, or what looked like it; everything normal.

  “Tell me about your dream,” he said.

  “Not now.”

  “It’s dark. There’s a storm outside the castle windows. No furniture in the room—only one long chair and a stove. Lord Hawkside. …”

  He thought the hand holding the thermometer hesitated for an instant before she thrust it into his mouth and silenced him. He lay gazing up at her strange face, made stranger by foreshortening. Where had he seen it? Not in life, somehow. A book cover? A poster? Yes, a drawing of some sort … Beardsley? Something like that; in the background the hunchback domino and the grinning gross pageboy, and filling the foreground a few pure lines creating fold on fold of silk
that swept up toward the tiny, sick-simple face and the monstrous aureole of hair. Something—a flicker of doubt or worry?—stirred beneath the trance-held features.

  She finished taking his pulse and removed the thermometer. At once he started to speak in as leaden and unemphatic a tone as he could achieve.

  “She’s come through the storm to meet him. There is snow still on her cloak. He was watching her from the castle window. Her cloak blew round her like the wing of a bat …”

  “Cold,” she muttered.

  “The wind is very cold. Chips of snow sting her cheeks. She reaches the door. It’s dark inside. She shuts the wind out and climbs the stairs.”

  “Dust.”

  “Dust on the stairs, light shining in streaks through the slit windows. The first room’s cold and empty. But the second room’s warm, and he’s there.”

  “Smiling.”

  “Yes, he’s waiting for you, smiling. He’s very handsome in the streaky light. He’s wearing a frilly white shirt. Black breeches. Black boots. His gun is in its holster at his hip.”

  Her face rumpled into a frown. The smile vanished. He’d got something wrong. The gun?

  “Not now,” she said aloud. “I’ve come to put you to sleep, Mr. Pibble.”

  “Your dream, Maisie. Lord Hawkside and Marianne in the castle tower. He walks toward her, smiling, and undoes the clasp of her cloak. She’s smiling too.”

  And she was, an actressy grimace, just as Jenny had said.

  “Clothes,” she muttered. “Kisses.”

  “He undresses her slowly, with kisses and caresses. She lets him do whatever he wants …”

  “Do whatever he wants,” she said, much more firmly, in a totally strange voice.

  Pibble had begun to worry whether he was going to be able to keep the embarrassment out of his own voice as he traced her path through the erotic undergrowth, but now this other persona took over.

  “As soon as you lie down you will go to sleep,” it said. “As soon as you lie down you will go to sleep. You will sleep for exactly twenty minutes. You will be quite safe. No one will harm you.”