Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  “It isn’t Jerry. It’s me being stuck with a filthy mess which isn’t anything to do with me, except I’ve been landed with it… No, I could cope with that. And Jerry himself couldn’t have been nicer. I mean he didn’t try to tell me the docket didn’t exist, or it didn’t mean what I thought it meant, and he was furious with Trevor for being so idle and incompetent, but he must have been ill for a while before anyone realised, including himself, and now he’s dying… Oh Jesus! I don’t know why this is getting to me so badly. People keep dying all the time, don’t they? It’s all right, darling—I can cope. It was just I had a sudden picture of him lying in hospital with all these tubes in him…It’s some kind of marrow cancer you have to catch early, and they didn’t. Jerry didn’t make a big deal of it, actually. I mean he said it was ghastly for everyone, of course, but it didn’t affect the principle of the thing, which is to do the best we can for old Mr. McNair. Jerry says he doesn’t think the docket would have made all that amount of difference, it’s just what Mr. McNair has fastened on because he’s known all along he was right about it. But what really lost us the case was that the manufacturer’d got hold of a much better expert than we had. I don’t mean he knew more about it, but he put on a much better show, and so did their QC, so we’d have lost the case anyway. But suppose Mr. McNair was told about the docket now, he’s not going to get the case reopened. All he can do is sue us for the money he lost. But he couldn’t stop his insurance company coming after us too—I told you about that—and the way these things are set up they’d have first claim on all assets and there wouldn’t be anything left for Mr. McNair, and he’d still have his costs to pay and they’d be a packet. So actually it might be kinder not to let him know.”

  “A bit specious?”

  “No. I mean, I think Jerry genuinely thinks that, and he’s probably right, except that in the meanwhile Mr. McNair is going crazy with the knowledge that he gave Trevor the docket and no one believes him. And then—Jerry didn’t make a big thing of this, apart from telling me that it was only fair to warn me that it was bound to come out that it was me who started the thing off, and it was an unfair world but people really weren’t that keen on hiring someone who’d pulled the rug out from under their firm in however good a cause—but he didn’t say anything about the firm going down the tube, or Trevor having a rather hopeless wife and three young children, or Millie with her mother to look after, or Selina’s bloke walking out on her and the kids—but of course he knew I’d know all that—it’s a very friendly office, and that’s mainly Jerry’s doing. He really is everyday decent…so all I could do was sit and listen and say helpful things and try not to think about Trevor lying in hospital…”

  “Sister Jenny. With his mess to clear up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then go into the wood and scream? If you’d given me a bit of warning I could have arranged for some pigs.”

  Later, lying on his back at some unknown hour, he said in a dreamy voice, “You were being persecuted by a dimwit. When I called from Paris.”

  From time to time since he’d come home it had crossed Jenny’s mind that she should tell him about Mr. Matson’s visit, but she hadn’t, and she understood why, without having to think it out. This last—how long? Less than forty-eight hours—had been extraordinary. Nothing, not their first physical explorations of their passion for each other, not the boost of renewal on the honeymoon, had been like this hunger, endlessly satisfied, endlessly aching back into life, her whole body like a soft, faint bruise, delighting to be touched. Their need for each other was their only need, though their world, their assumptions, their lifestyle, everything, melted away around them. The stuff they had so far been talking about and dealing with, Jeff’s trouble with Billy, hers over Jerry, had been part of the melting, part of what allowed them to seal themselves into this capsule and watch the process with indifference. Only in the capsule could Jenny have brought herself to tell anyone, even Jeff, about Norma, and done it with such ease and such relief.

  Mr. Matson’s visit was different. It concerned Jeff alone, she had been merely an agent, an intruder, who had made the first mistake and then compounded it. The event wasn’t, somehow, part of the melting process.

  “I needed a drink,” she said.

  “Everything is explained. And forgiven, where appropriate.”

  “I may need to hold you to that.”

  Adjusting her head on his chest she told him what had happened.

  “He’s lying,” said Jeff when she’d finished. “Aunt Clarisse looked after Albert’s affairs until she had her heart attack. That’s when I took over, when I had to move him to Marlings…It sounds to me as if he knew about Uncle Albert all along.”

  “Oh…I suppose he might have. He did ham it up a bit when he made the connection. And he was lying earlier on, telling me he’d got the other pistol. But I think a lot of the other stuff was true, or nearly.”

  “It doesn’t matter, actually. The only thing that matters is whether he can prove he’s the rightful owner. If he can then I suppose we’ve got to hand the thing over. But I won’t say no to the money he’s offering if it’ll help tide Uncle Albert over for a few months.”

  “You don’t think Mr. Matson’s father could have given it to him as a keepsake?”

  “Splitting the pair up? And in any case, Uncle Albert would have had it hanging on the wall and told everyone about it, instead of…No, I don’t buy it. Hell, Uncle Albert isn’t going to like it. But I’ll ring this man tomorrow and tell him…”

  “I think it is tomorrow. We’re wasting time. Come here.”

  But the seal on the capsule was broken, and the late night trucks fumed past on the Ashford Road, and love was no longer any more than love.

  DILYS

  1

  Soundlessly she opened the door and slipped into the room. She liked to find a patient still asleep, so that she could stand by the bed in the dimness and study the altered face. It spoke to her of things the waking mask didn’t, mostly just the peacefulness of being free for a little from the dreary indignities of waiting to die, but sometimes more than that. Sometimes there was a sort of translucency through whose mist she seemed to be able to make out what the face had been twenty, forty, sixty years before—as a child’s even. At other times she saw no more than discontents and rages at the betrayal that had so cynically abrogated the freedom and respect and command that had once seemed written into the contract.

  Dilys thought no worse of a patient for that; such feelings were human, and therefore proper; even those whose spirits grovelled and whimpered and pleaded had her respect. But there were others who, though their minds might be almost wholly gone, seemed still to register that there were no ears to hear the whimpers, no eyes to perceive the abasement, no court to consider the pleas. In their faces as they slept she believed she could see that these old things were heroines and heroes, and she felt proud in their pride. Her job, her mission, was to make sure that until the moment they carried it into darkness that flame still burned.

  She had never had a lover. As a girl she had let herself be kissed and fumbled with a bit, because that had been the way of things, but she’d found it an uncomfortable pastime, arousing sensations that didn’t seem to belong to the Dilys she knew and understood. She had not been handsome enough to provoke real eagerness and so had had little trouble in persuading the fellow to desist, and before she was thirty had recognised, with some relief, that unless a crazy took it into his head to rape her, she would die a virgin.

  She had sometimes been asked, since she had what people thought a motherly look, whether she minded not having had children. Not wishing to appear heartless, she had answered that she supposed so, but in truth, as far as she could see or feel, she had missed nothing she wanted. In her training she had done a routine course in the obstetric wards and—again because it had been expected of her—she had cooed and admired like a good ’un, but inwardly she had never been able to think of babies as
anything more than the main symptom of a common female complaint which she had luckily been spared.

  These weren’t coherent, verbalised beliefs, but unformulated feelings, and of course she had never talked about them to anyone, being sure that her life would be considered arid and repressed. It wasn’t. She found her work utterly fulfilling. When, in the ripeness of time, a patient died, she didn’t grieve. If anything, she glowed. A life had run its full course. Over the years she had seen a lot of television which she wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with, because patients often liked a companion to whom they could comment about the programmes they chose. It helped keep them perky, which was one of her main objectives. Ladies liked soaps and gentlemen liked sport. That was how she’d come to see a programme about a sprint relay team, and the gentleman in question, Admiral Poskett, had suddenly cackled and said, “That’s what you are, Dilys. You’re my last lap coach.” He’d been right. When the coach had talked about the satisfaction of seeing his team run at their peak he had put into words many of Dilys’s own feelings as she closed the eyes and laid the body straight. She had helped her patient live those last months and die that death as well as they could be lived and died.

  Not that she was ever impatient for the death. It was the living that counted. Once she had connived with a doctor to allow a patient to escape from endless pain. Once she had, effectively, permitted a strong-willed old man to starve himself to death. But once she had fought by every means she could against a family and doctor who wanted to make an end, when Dilys herself was sure that the patient, stone blind, four-fifths deaf, and in pain, still raged against the necessity. It was fourteen years since Dilys had lost that fight, and she still minded.

  This morning, before she was fully into the room, Dilys knew that for the third morning running Mrs. Matson was already awake after a bad night. Her nose told her. She didn’t find the inevitable reeks of old age offensive—how could she, after all these years?—but she didn’t let habit blank them out. They were useful. To her, there was an obvious difference between the odours produced by someone contentedly wetting and soiling themselves in their sleep, and those that arose in the miseries of wakefulness. There was a particular sourness among the mix of smells—acids or something, but no one would have done the research. It was the sort of thing nurses knew and doctors weren’t around to notice. She was already tutting as she opened the curtains.

  “We’ve not been sleeping, have we? You should’ve let me give you that pill—drinkie before I see to you?”

  She eased the withered body up and tilted the glass against lips that were dry as paper, giving them time to sip and sip. There was a microphone suspended above the pillow that amplified every whisper into Dilys’s room. Other patients would have called for a drink several times in the night.

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Matson whispered. “Pills make me stupid next day.”

  “There’s that,” said Dilys. “Now let’s tidy you up. Brooding about Mr. Matson, still, were we?”

  “Not brooding. Thinking.”

  “Brooding’s just thinking and not getting anywhere, so you may as well stop, only you can’t.”

  “Got somewhere. Perhaps. At last. When you’ve finished. Filing cabinet. Top drawer, near back. Cambi Road. C.A.M….”

  “I remember, dearie—that address list, came a few weeks back, you were telling me where to put it only Mrs. Thomas came in and she said she knew.”

  “Yes. Bring the list.”

  “Soon as I’ve done. Amazing they’ve kept it going this long, getting out a proper address list every year, and all. My dad’s lot—I told you he was in Shangar, didn’t I?—they used to have get-togethers for a bit…”

  She rattled purposefully on, as she always did when she was cleaning up, to distract her patient’s attention from the shameful need—they all minded, and rightly so—at the same time with another part of her mind attending to her task, not allowing it to become an automatic process. You could miss little signs…yes, tsk, that was a bedsore trying to start—it’d be those acids again—nothing like that for weeks now…and the trip all the way to London, seven hours in the coach, ’54 that would have been, just finishing at Caernarvon General. Of the thirty-odd in the coach there’d been eight who, like Dad, were still on full disability, and more than a dozen others on half—and not one of them over fifty, including one poor fellow barely ten years older than Dilys herself—which was why they’d taken a real nurse along with them to look after the crocks. Sad as sad it might have been, but they’d sung the whole way to London and the whole way back—“Like a moving chapel,” someone had said, what with a reverend from Llanfairfechan in the party, and hymns as well as the camp songs—they’d made Dilys stop her ears for the rude ones…But well before Dad had died, even, there hadn’t been any of that any more, local fund-raisings for a bit, and a Roneoed newsletter, and then only a few gaunt-faced men among the others on the Armistice Day parade.

  “There we are, dearie. All done, and we’ll be comfortable. Now I’ll go and see what they’ve done about our breakfast, shall I?”

  “List first, please.”

  “My, we’re in a hurry. All right, then.”

  The corridor was a long space lit by skylights, narrowed from its original generous width by a set of bookshelves that ran along the wall backing onto Mrs. Matson’s room, which had been the old nursery. The door of Dilys’s bedroom was directly opposite Mrs. Matson’s, with her bathroom and sitting room beyond. All the books on the shelves were photograph albums, identically bound in green cloth with green leather backs. Mrs. Matson had learnt book binding in order to make them the way she wanted. At the end of the book-shelves stood a four-drawer filing cabinet, with the card-index to the albums on top of it.

  Dilys didn’t have any doubts about finding the address list. Mrs. Matson knew where every file was, as well as every album. And yes, the Cambi Road file was exactly where she’d said. The list wasn’t in it.

  Dilys checked the files on either side in case Mrs. Thomas had put it into the wrong one, but it wasn’t there either. She went back and reported her failure.

  “Oh…but Flora…”

  “Now don’t you go getting upset, dearie. They’ll be having breakfast too, won’t they? I’ll look in and ask Mrs. Thomas, shall I? Perhaps she’s borrowed it for something.”

  “Please.”

  Dilys left smiling confidently, but shook her head as soon as she was clear of the room. This sort of thing wouldn’t do. She’d long ago learnt that the most important part of keeping her patients perky wasn’t any of the obvious things like making them as comfortable as poss, or seeing their food was what they liked, or jollying them along; it was allowing them to feel that they still had some control over their lives and their surroundings. Control is life, because it’s freedom. From the prison of her inert body Mrs. Matson could still reach out and have her say over what mattered to her. The files and photographs were specially important because she was the only one who knew her way around them and what they meant. Even when the list was found she would be upset, still, that it had not been in its place. We can’t have that, Dilys thought.

  She was still tutting to herself when she reached the stairwell. She paused, and looked at it with new eyes. It was so odd, and at the same time somehow familiar, though she had never quite been able to lay her finger on what the “somehow” consisted in. The well itself was a square space, the area of a large room, running the full height of the house, with a glass roof overhead. At each floor there was a sort of balustraded balcony the whole way round, with rooms and corridors opening off it. The oddness consisted in the staircase itself. Dilys had worked in large houses, and some of them had a central hallway and stairs something like this, but in those cases the stairs had been long, handsome flights, there to be looked at as much as walked on. These were a kind of shaft made of wooden pillars and rails, like the balustrades of the balconies, with short flights running down through a series of right angles to the floor below
. They looked as if they should have had a lift going up the middle of them, or had been made to fit into a square turret, only here they were standing right out in the open, like a scaffold tower or something. And yet the really funny thing about them was that they didn’t look wrong, they looked right.

  And now, this morning, Dilys knew why, because there’d been a photograph of them in the album Miss Anne had done for her schoolwork, and opposite a sketch she’d made of some iron stairs at a mill somewhere, and they were just the same. Dilys even understood why they had seemed familiar, because she’d worked in old Victorian hospitals where there’d been courtyards like the stairwell, with iron balconies round them, and a fire escape running down, the way these stairs did.

  It was surprising, she thought, as she started down them, how pleased it made you feel when things suddenly made sense when they hadn’t a little before, even when they didn’t matter to you a bit, like the whys and wherefores of this staircase didn’t. And when they did matter, my! That was why Mrs. Matson was so upset about the business about whatever it was in the box—a pistol, she’d let out at the end, one of Colonel Matson’s, and it had something to do with him being a Jap POW, and it hadn’t been there, by the sound of it, and that dratted list was missing too…It wasn’t just that they weren’t where they should have been, it was that it didn’t make sense… Let’s hope Mrs. Thomas knew about the list, at least…

  Mr. and Mrs. Thomas breakfasted in the morning room, which faced east and so was full of thin, spring sunshine. There was shiny silver and mahogany, and white table napkins, and smells of coffee and bacon, as well as last year’s lavender and this year’s hyacinths, not shop-bought but raised in batches in one of the greenhouses by Mr. Worple, a dozen at a time so there’d be a succession of them for the house. The wealth of Dilys’s different employers made no difference to her. If anything she respected those who needed to skimp to afford her more than those who could do so and barely notice, but what really mattered to her was their attitude to her patient, as merely a problem to which she was the solution, or as a real person with a right to the best that could be done. Anyway, she liked the Thomases.