Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  “Good to see the Colonel looking so grand. I’d hate to see him stuck in one of these things.”

  For his part Jocelyn would have preferred to miss out on these meetings. The war was over, and he was in any case almost wholly uninterested in the past. He went, really, because the men wanted him there, but that was something he would have refused to acknowledge. He did it, he said, because he needed to talk to the men and check whether there was any way in which he could help them, write references, arrange job interviews, cajole, bully, plead, argue, on their be-half. “What’s the point of having been to a bloody expensive school where they didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing if you didn’t pick up a bunch of friends in high places whose arms you can twist in a good cause?”

  There was no way now that Rachel could explain any of this, so she simply smiled, accepting that Jocelyn had done well to regain his fitness, and sipped her coffee with relish. Before she had finished there was a knock on the door.

  “Come in, Mrs. Thomas,” Dilys called. “We’re just finishing our breakfast.”

  She stood out of the way as Flora came bustling in, permed, pink cheeked, scarlet lipped, bright eyed.

  “Morning, Ma,” she said, bending for a peck at Rachel’s cheek. She was wearing that boring scent again. Why bother, if you finish up smelling like last year’s potpourri?

  “How are you this morning, Ma? Sorry about the eggs. You’d have thought somebody who can manage a perfectly respectable faisan nor-mande would have the right idea about scrambled eggs. Da would have dropped them out of the window. And thrown the toast after them. Dick’s coming to lunch. He wants to talk to you.”

  Rachel reacted slowly, though she was well used to her daughter’s sudden transitions of subject. No need for a foray about the eggs, then, she’d been thinking with some disappointment.

  “Dick?” she whispered.

  “That’s right. It’ll be nice for you to see him, won’t it? He says he’s been busy. Now, don’t be naughty, Ma—Devon is a long way.”

  As far, in fact, as the detestable Helen could take him. But busy? Flapdoodle.

  “What about?”

  “He’s got someone to see in York, apparently.”

  More flapdoodle, and judging by the “apparently” Flora thought so too. M5, M42, MI, AI—Matlock wasn’t more than a few miles out of his way, but he wanted something all the same. Money, probably. How bad a mess was he in this time?

  “All right,” she whispered.

  2

  “Hi, Ma. You’re not looking so dusty.”

  He bent and kissed her with a passable imitation of affection. She smiled. He had of course come in without knocking, but nothing demeaning had been going on. She’d had her elevenses early, and then Dilys had cleaned her up and done her hair and makeup with cheerful enjoyment, taking pride in her patient’s appearance, much like that of a breeder preparing a favorite pony for a show. She had slipped out as soon as the visitor was in the room.

  “Specs,” whispered Rachel. “On the table.”

  He shoved them into place and she looked at her son with all the old muddle of feelings. It was extremely tiresome, she thought yet again, how when almost everything else was gone the emotions still raged on—worse, perhaps, now that there was no input from the limbs to distract them with trivia. All Rachel’s rational self despised her son, but the rest of her, that other self beyond reason, persisted in adoring…adoring what? There had been a child, yes, but…Surely, surely, surely, somewhere inside the middle-aged boor by her bed…

  Why did he have to look, speak, laugh, carry himself so like his father when any stranger, suppose one could have met both men at the same age, would have seen at once that Jocelyn was honest timber and Dick was plastic trash? It was detestable. Dick would be sixty next year. He exercised himself at best casually, smoked, drank too much, ate with a boy’s greed, but he hadn’t run to fat. He hadn’t drilled or born arms since the JTC, but he stood and moved like a soldier. Look closely and you saw that the pinkness of the skin wasn’t the flush of health. Look into the blue eyes…

  Jocelyn had glanced up from his book, keeping his place with his thumb, and said quietly, “I think we’d better face it. Dick’s no good.”

  This had been apropos of nothing. Four days earlier Dick had driven back to Cirencester for his last term at the agricultural college. They had barely mentioned him since. Rachel was at her worktable, masking negatives for enlargement.

  “Oh, dear. I can’t help hoping. But…”

  “Maybe if I’d been home during the war…”

  “No. It was always there. He was a lovely little boy, but in some of the photographs… You couldn’t be expected to see it at the time, but you can now. Do you want me to show you?”

  “No point. I’m sorry, Ray. It’s worse for you.”

  “Don’t let’s talk about it.”

  “Anyway, we have to do the best for him we can. Maybe he’ll find a woman who’ll make something of him.”

  “Let’s hope,” Rachel had said.

  She’d had her wish, but in the manner of some moralising fairy tale, in which the princess gets all the gifts her parents asked for, but which then turn out to be the last thing they wanted. For all her many-faceted dislikability Helen had had both the wit and will to make something of Dick, kept him out of both gaol and bankruptcy, organised a life for him, seen to it that he had a job, and held on to it, made not merely something but perhaps the most that could be made out of such material.

  Yet, despite such knowledge, even now as she gazed up at him Rachel remembered an eight-year-old wolfing the lardy cake she had found for him in Matlock. Lardy cake had been as good as unobtainable in wartime. He hadn’t remembered to say thank you, hadn’t understood the achievement, but her body had brimmed with satisfied love at the sight of his pleasure. So now. Though the visit was sure to be uncomfortable and might well be painful, as she looked at him her main emotion was happiness that he had, for whatever reason, come back to her.

  “Well, what have you been up to?” she whispered, making the effort to talk in full sentences, as if for a stranger.

  He grinned.

  “Sweating and suffering, if you want to know,” he said. “This stupid beef scare’s still playing havoc with the business. Farmers haven’t got any money to pay for the stuff, and haven’t got any cows to feed it to supposing they had. Not to mention they’re pointing the finger at us for starting it. Of course we were cutting the odd corner, but who wasn’t? Anyway the rug’s been pulled from under us with a vengeance, and unless something happens PDQ to turn the ship round we’re all going down the tube. No fun at all.”

  “So you’re going to York?”

  “Just scratching around. Not much chance of it coming to anything, but it’s better than sitting on my backside waiting for the roof to fall in.”

  “How are the children?”

  “Little monsters. Belinda’s got another on the way. She’s due to pop next month. Helen must’ve put all that in our Christmas card, didn’t she?”

  No shame, none at all. In most years the only communication Rachel received from her son was the annual news roundup that Helen composed on her PC and sent out with the Christmas cards, often signing the card on Dick’s behalf. Not that Helen would have allowed any greater contact, but suppose Dick had married a wife who felt drawn to the family rather than repelled by it, he would still have let her do all the work.

  Now, though, came a small surprise.

  “I’ve brought you some photos, Ma. Toby’s a camera nut, like you, and he sent us a sheaf of the things from last time they were down. Want to see?”

  “Please.”

  Toby was an affable, dull planning official, married to Dick’s other daughter, Harriet. (Charley, Belinda’s husband, was a Devonshire GP.) Dick shifted his chair to lean over the bed and show her the photographs, mumbling names as he went. Rachel could hear that the process irritated him but that he was trying for as yet undisclosed purposes t
o please her, presumably to put into her mind that she had these descendants to whom she still owed duties. She barely listened, concentrating on the images.

  Winter scenes. Michelin tots—woolly hats and snow suits—poking sticks into bonfires, confronting one of Helen’s Shetlands at a fence…

  “Wait. Back one. Who…?”

  “That’s Stan again. He’s supposed to take after me.”

  “Yes.”

  The pang was appalling. Rachel gazed at the small figure absorbed in stamping an icy puddle into splinters. She had a photograph—black and white, of course—of Dick at that age, wearing the then standard tweed coat, leggings and furry cap, but standing in the identical pose to study something on the ground before him. This was the self-same child. Suppose in the winter of 1905 someone had captured the image yet again, Jocelyn aged two and a half, wrapped against the cold, absorbed in some fragment of the universe that lay at his feet…Ah, which way would this child go?

  “Very, very like,” she whispered.

  “He’s a grand little wretch too,” said Dick. “Look, that’s him again.”

  But this picture was not of her lost son, only of a rather similar infant. That was part of the treachery of the frozen image. By insisting on the pure truth of the isolated instant it denied the shift and dither of reality. Jocelyn, anchored in his certainties, could never accept this.

  “Why must you take such a lot of the things?” he would grumble.

  “Can’t you make sure you’ve got what you want before you press the button?”

  (It wasn’t the cost he grudged, or the loss of her time, but the sense of sheer waste, waste for waste’s sake.)

  “It isn’t like that, darling. I can take two pictures of something—a boulder or a tree trunk—one after the other, with the same settings and everything, but they’ll never be quite the same, not when you know how to look.”

  “It’s the same rock, isn’t it? And anyway we aren’t just talking about a couple of pictures. You take a spool of film and rough-print it—how much of it do you bother to print up? One picture in eight? Ten?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And how many of those do you put in an album? Same again, and that’s a generous estimate. They’re all just as real as each other, Ray, but only about one in eighty of them makes it into your version of reality.”

  “You’re shifting the argument, darling. And anyway the film’s all there in the attic. If I wanted I could go back and make an album of every picture I took of you on Dinah at Meerut.”

  He had laughed at the memory, but for his next birthday she had in secret got out the old film, stored in acid-free paper, labelled and put away on their return to England almost twenty years earlier. She had needed to contact the celluloid onto fresh film, but from those negatives had printed up forty-three reasonable shots of Jocelyn on his favourite pony during that marvellous fortnight when the regiment had so very nearly won the All-India, and night after night they had danced till the stars faded, and he had proposed to her loping beside her window as her train steamed out. It had been the second best present she had ever given him.

  Dick started to put the photographs away.

  “May I keep the one of Stan?” she whispered.

  “Sure you can. This one?”

  “No. Breaking the ice.”

  “Right, here you are then. I thought you might get a kick out of them.”

  There was a smugness in his tone, as if he had conferred a major benefit on her and could now expect her to reciprocate. She postponed the moment.

  “How is Helen?”

  “Firing on all cylinders, including some she’d never told me about. God, what a woman for a crisis! She’s found herself a job, dogsbody in a locum agency, but they’d better watch out. Six months and she’ll be running the show.”

  “You’ve lost your job?”

  “Sharp as ever, Ma! But no, I’m still hanging on, though I can see which way the wind’s blowing. It’s always been a family firm, and I’m the only senior bod left who isn’t one of the clan. If they’ve got to choose between me and some useless little twerp who married the boss’s niece, you know darn well who it’s going to be.”

  “Diffcult. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, Ma. Something will turn up. It’s just a matter of having enough irons in the fire and tiding things over meanwhile. By the way talking of irons, do you know where Da’s pistols are? The Laduries?”

  The suddenness of it was like a physical blow. Dick didn’t seem to notice the pause. Perhaps, since she always needed to summon the resources for speech, it hadn’t been markedly longer than usual.

  “In the bank, I think. Why?”

  “They’re really mine, you know. He left them to me in his will.”

  “He changed it.”

  “Yes, but that was after his stroke, when he was a bit gaga, poor old boy. I bet I could have contested it at the time, but it wouldn’t have been worth the rumpus.”

  It was astounding that he didn’t perceive her fury. Surely her eyes at least must blaze, blaze shockingly. The downright falsehood, compounded by the perfunctory sympathy. If she could have moved a muscle she would have struck him. As it was, her anger supplied the energies for a longer answer.

  “His first stroke. The same time he set up the trusts. Was he gaga then, Dick?”

  “That was old Bickner. He did a pretty good job on the trusts, and I’m very grateful.”

  “Jocelyn told Bickner exactly what he wanted.”

  “Well, that’s as may be, but—”

  She could stand no more and cut him short.

  “What about the Laduries? Why?”

  He shrugged, glanced out of the window, then back at her, smiling, confident in the cloak of candour. It didn’t fit.

  “Funny coincidence,” he said. “Here I was, coming to see you anyway… Do you ever watch a thing on the box called The Antiques Roadshow, Ma?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Helen makes a point of it, so I do too if I’m around. Last Sunday…You know how it goes. They have these experts, and they set up shop in the town hall somewhere, like Salisbury, and people bring their heirlooms in to ask about—pictures, furniture, knickknacks, whatever, and then some old biddy who’s had a Rembrandt hanging in the loo all these years pretty well has a heart attack when they tell her what it’s worth. Right? Well, this time one of the pros was doing arms and armour, and some young woman—never seen her in my life before—showed up with a pistol, just the one of them, but I knew it was one of the Laduries the moment I clapped eyes on it. It had the initials even, J.M. ‘Hey! That’s one of Da’s,’ I told Helen. And the fellow who looked at it really knew his stuff. He spotted it for a Ladurie at once, and got very excited. Said it ought to be in a museum, and all that, and it must be one of a pair, and if the woman had had the other one and the box and all the fittings it would’ve been worth getting on fifty thousand quid—more, if it had belonged to someone famous, which it easily might have, judging by the workmanship. He even got it right that it could’ve been made for one of Napoleon’s marshals. The trouble was she’d only got just the one, and it hadn’t been properly cleaned last time it was fired, which knocked the value down a bit, but even as it stood he said it might fetch a couple of thousand. Are you listening, Ma? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Rachel had closed her eyes, rather than gaze any longer into the countenance of Greed. Lardy cake, she thought. I might have guessed, even then.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Go on.”

  “There isn’t anything more. That’s it. The question is, How’s this woman got hold of one of my pistols? And where’s the other one, and the box and stuff?”

  “Not yours.”

  “Ours, then. When did you last see them? Where are they now? In the bank you said.”

  “Don’t know. I’m tired. Can’t think.”

  “But listen, Ma…”

  “Sorry, darling. Tell Dilys… nurse …
need her.”

  He drew breath to persist, but then gave in.

  “Oh, all right. I’m sorry, Ma, if I’ve upset you, but I’ve got to be on my way in any case. I’ll have a word with Flora about it. She’s got power of attorney, hasn’t she? See you soon.”

  He squeezed her hand—she could feel the touch but not the compression—and kissed her on the forehead, but didn’t think to remove her spectacles. Her fury was now mingled with shame as she listened to his footsteps crossing the room. The door opened. She heard both voices from the corridor, footsteps returning, a murmur from Dick and a thank-you from Dilys, the door closing behind her as she crossed to the bed.

  Good heavens, Rachel thought, Helen’s been teaching him manners. The notion was bitter.

  “How are we then, dearie? Mustn’t wear ourselves out, chatting away, must we! Done with our specs, then?”

  “No, leave them. Lock the door, please. Need you.”

  “Now what’s this about?” said Dilys, coming back and feeling Rachel’s pulse. “So we’ve got ourselves excited, haven’t we? Tsk, tsk.”

  “Do something for me. Important.”

  “Well, well, well, aren’t we being mysterious? Out with it, then.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, Dilys. Not Flora. Nobody.”

  “Cross my heart. It’s all right, dearie, it’s just my manner of talking. I can see you’re dead serious, and I shan’t let you down. There’s secrets I’ve heard over the years from patients of mine—not like you, dearie, because maybe they’d lost their grip a bit and you’re all there and no mistake—but anything they told me like that, it’ll go with me to my grave. It wouldn’t be right any other way, would it?”

  She spoke earnestly, with pride in her professional reticence—nothing that she’d ever taken an oath to, but she was a confidential nurse, and for her the word meant what it said.

  “Thank you,” said Rachel. “Bottom drawer of bureau. Take everything out. Pull drawer right out.”

  “Got you. My, isn’t this exciting!”