Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  “I’m worried about him wanting to take you over, sort of absorb you, the way Billy tried. These guys think you’re a gizmo, Jeff. There’s plenty of gizmos out there, but you’re the best, and they want you for themselves.”

  “I had a thought on the train. Suppose I went freelance, and you packed it in with Barlow and Ames and ran the business side…”

  “…and get to come with you to Paris and Bermuda as part of the package…”

  “It’ll just as likely be Flint, Michigan.”

  “Not if I’m running the business side, it won’t.”

  “There’s that. Right. I’ll take the car back Friday, and clear my desk. But first I’m going to screw Billy.”

  RACHEL

  1

  “The most extraordinary thing. Ma! You’ll never guess. I was just finishing doing the flowers last evening when Simon Stadding rang—he really doesn’t sound at all well, poor man. I wonder if he ever thinks about Anne now. Oh dear, never mind. Anyway all he would tell me was that there was this woman called Pilcher, in Maidstone, wanting to get hold of me. You remember I rang him to ask if anyone in the Association lived in Maidstone and he said no, but apparently he’d forgotten that that was where Sergeant Fred’s great-nephew—you remember Sergeant Fred, of course—that was where this great-nephew lives who looks after Sergeant Fred’s affairs. Light dawned, you could say. So of course I rang the woman straight away. I thought she’d be asking for money, so I was pretty sharp with her to start with and I didn’t say anything about Sergeant Fred. I just tackled her straight off about the pistol and told her we’d got to have it back. She was remarkably cool about it, I must say—she’s some kind of solicitor, she says, but she’s not wearing her solicitor’s hat about this—solicitor’s wig. I suppose I mean—no I don’t—that’s barristers—but she absolutely refused to say anything about the pistol except that it wasn’t hers and she shouldn’t have taken it to the show, and she’d pass a message on to whoever it did belong to, only it didn’t of course because it belongs to you, but you know what I mean. And then she rather took the wind out of my sails by saying that what She was calling about was that Sergeant Fred has suddenly decided he wants to come and see you, and we hummed and hawed about that for a bit but I thought if it means we’re going to get the pistol back, and apparently she’s prepared to drive him up, with her husband because it’s a long way, though we did talk about them staying the night—he’s spry as a flea, she says, but his mind’s a bit off so he’s never quite sure what’s what—the other way round from you, I told her—I hope you don’t mind—so Mrs. Pilcher says he may have forgotten all about it by tomorrow, but she doesn’t think so because he seems to have a thoroughgoing bee in his bonnet about something—she says he was trying to come up here on his own, after she’d gone, and they had to stop him—I must say I rather took to her in spite of her sounding so keep-your-distance about everything. She’d taken Sergeant Fred for a drive this afternoon, she said, and she sounds rather fond of him, so her heart’s in the right place. I’d’ve come up last night and told you only supper was ready and kidneys are Jack’s favourite and you know how easily those cream sauces crack—wasn’t it good though? She’s terrific at the tricky things, only she can’t be bothered to get the easy ones right, and really there’d be something indecent about having two cooks…anyway. I’ve been thinking. I bet what’s bothering Sergeant Fred is that he’s got the pistols, somehow, heaven knows how. I mean if it had been—what was that funny crook’s name Da was so fond of? Terry something. Vass?”

  “Voss.”

  “That’s right. If it had been him…but Sergeant Fred? Anyway, he’s got the pistols, and someone must have been messing around firing them and not cleaning them properly, which is a shame because you know what a fuss Da always made about that—and then this woman got hold of one of them—I mean if she’d had the other one and the box she’d have taken them all along to the show, wouldn’t she?

  So now it’s all come out and Mrs. Pilcher says his memory’s not too good so perhaps he’d just forgotten about them, but now he’s decided that he’d better get them off his conscience by bringing them back. Don’t you think that’s what’s happened, Ma?”

  “Possibly,” whispered Rachel. This was one of her no-saliva days. She couldn’t have argued, even if she had wished to.

  “So if that’s what’s going on,” said Flora, “wouldn’t it be easier all round if I just popped down to Hastings and saw Sergeant Fred and told him all was forgiven and forgotten and he could give me the pistols to bring back to you. I’ll be going to London anyway for the Mc-Nulty bash—think of those two staying married for fifty years! Like one of those wars people used to have which just went on and on till that’s all anyone knows about them—do you have the faintest notion what the Thirty Years War was about?—instead of Mrs. Pilcher having to bring the old boy all the way up here. You do agree, don’t you?”

  “Won’t know who you are.”

  “But I’ll tell him, Ma. I’ll get Mrs. Pilcher to come too. And I’m sorry, Ma, but if you get him all this way and he sees you like this, perhaps he won’t… I mean, when he used to know you…”

  “Knows the house. Knows pistol belongs here.”

  “But honestly, Ma…”

  “Drink.”

  “I’m sorry. Try not to talk. Here you are, then. Ready?”

  The effort at speech had exacerbated the drought in Rachel’s mouth to a pitch beyond discomfort, not exactly pain, but still with the true ferocity of pain. And now Flora, overconfident in the convenience of the invalid cup, tried to pour too fast. Rachel forced her lips to reject the spout just in time to stop herself choking, a hideous experience, convulsing the insensate body while the mind endured, helpless and aware of the ease with which one could suffocate on one’s own vomit. Taken by surprise, Flora poured a generous slop of barley water over Rachel’s chest.

  “Oh, sorry, Ma.”

  She put the cup down and mopped with a towel at the spillage, using a vigorous rubbing motion, as if drying a spaniel. Rachel’s head joggled helplessly to and fro. The second attempt was more successful.

  “Better? No, don’t try to talk, Ma.”

  “Ask her to bring Sergeant Fred.”

  “Oh, but, Ma…”

  “No. Listen. Knows what he wants. Doesn’t matter how…”

  Rachel willed the obscenity out.

  “…gaga he is. He knows.”

  Flora shrugged. Most people would have described her as strong-willed. She had that manner and usually got away with it. They would also, probably, have thought Rachel diffident, but even now both still accepted, as they always had, that it would be Rachel who had her way.

  She must have smiled without deliberately causing her lips to move (unusual these days) because Flora responded with a laugh. Rachel was aware of feeling peculiarly close to her daughter, the closeness of affection and habit, but not, alas, what she understood by love. Not for the first time she wondered whether Flora had any conscious understanding of how she had been cheated, almost from the beginning. She had been given warmth, interest, help and comfort when needed, all unstinted. But true, deep love from her parents—the real things, irreplaceable, no other product would do—love such as Jocelyn had felt for Anne and Rachel for Dick—no. Somehow Rachel kept her smile in place, though now weeping inwardly and raging that her stupid arms couldn’t stir, couldn’t even ache with the physical impulse to stir, reach out, embrace this sixty-four-year-old woman and at last start to atone for all those years of love withheld.

  “Darling,” she whispered. “I haven’t—”

  She stopped herself in time and closed her eyes. Loved you enough, she had been going to say, but Flora wouldn’t have understood, would have protested, distressed. It was too late to explain now, much too late.

  “That’s right, Ma. You have a good rest, and I’ll come up later and tell you what the woman says.”

  Rachel felt the brush of a kiss on her forehead, heard t
he movement of door handle and door, and then Flora’s rattling syllables receding along the corridor as she moved towards Dilys’s sitting room, already explaining herself. Rachel couldn’t distinguish the words, and Dilys’s softer answers from inside the room, but amid the diversions the gist was plain from the intonation: Mrs. Pilcher’s call; Sergeant Fred—who he was and why he mattered; his wish to visit Rachel; Rachel’s wish to see him; half-admiring exasperation at the determination of these two old things to meet again; passing mention of the accident with the barley water; and so on. Then both voices moving back towards Rachel’s door, the actual words becoming audible as the door opened.

  “…could ask Pat to come and give you a hand for the night, I suppose.”

  “I think I can manage, Mrs. Thomas, really I do. It doesn’t sound like the old man’s going to be a lot of trouble.”

  “Well, let’s just see…”

  (Flora now moving away and speaking over her shoulder.)

  “…and as soon as I know which day it’ll be I’ll check with Pat whether she’ll be free.”

  The door closed. Rachel heard Dilys sigh.

  “Now then, dearie, we’ve been at it again, wearing ourselves out chatting, Mrs. Thomas says. You’re each as bad as the other, I’m beginning to think. And she spilt your drinkie over you too, she says. Let’s have a look. Dearie me, we’re all sticky, like a kid who’s been at the treacle tin. I don’t know. Looks like I’ll have to give you your bath all over again. And a clean nightie… We’re all right, aren’t we, dearie? We didn’t choke or anything?“

  “Nearly.”

  “Well, a miss is as good as a mile, I always say. She’s a very good soul, Mrs. Thomas, and I’d be the last to deny it, but I’ll go down on my knees and thank my creator that I didn’t have the training of her as a nurse.”

  Rachel would have laughed aloud, had the mechanism still existed. Years ago, on a nanny’s afternoon out, she had watched Flora change one of the children’s nappies, talking over her shoulder as she did so, and finishing with a bewildered child wearing a vast but unreliable package of terry cloth wrapped loosely round its midriff.

  Still with closed eyes she lay, but for once didn’t listen to Dilys chattering away as she worked. She was aware of being in a strange state. Normally, despite the unresponsiveness of her body, not a minute went by, except in dreams, when she wasn’t fully conscious of its prisoning reality. This morning there seemed to be a looseness in the connection. She could feel, in the sense that the signals came from the inert limbs, but she was unable to interpret the signals. By the movement of her head she could tell that her torso had been gently lifted so that the sodden nightie could be eased free, but after that, for a while, the eerie disembodiment seemed so complete that if she had known the password she could have slid out of this place, out of this time, out of the inert flesh, away…

  No. She mustn’t do that yet. There was work to be done, tidying and sorting, before she could allow herself to leave. She opened her eyes and found her vision blocked by blurred yellow cloud-stuff, which she discovered to be a clean nightie which had draped itself in front of her as her raised left arm was fed into the sleeve. Then, gently, she was rolled to one side to let the nightie be eased beneath her, rolled back to have her right arm inserted, before the garment was fastened down the front and the bedclothes drawn up.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “It’s a pleasure,” said Dilys. “And now, what’ll we do with ourselves? Listen to our book for a bit?”

  “No. Albums.”

  “Oh, good, ever so interesting, I find them. Drinkie before you tell me? We’re a bit dry today, aren’t we?”

  Typical of her attention, Rachel thought, that she could distinguish between one sere whisper and another. She sipped gratefully, then explained which volumes she wanted. Ostensibly she was looking for pictures that might interest Sergeant Fred, so that Dilys could mark them, ready for his visit. It would have been logical to begin with the early part of the war, before the regiment had sailed for Singapore. Sergeant Fred had barely yet become a friend then, but there were a few faces he might remember. Then there was a whole volume devoted to the Cambi Road Association, and there’d be pictures of the children at various ages. But instead of any of those Rachel chose the final one devoted to Jocelyn. Though the previous album had been less than half full, she had started a fresh one for the funeral.

  The rector had been in the parish less than a month. Rachel had done no more than shake hands with him after his first service, until he had called to express his condolences over Jocelyn’s death, and discuss arrangements for the funeral. Rachel hadn’t taken to him. He had a soft but at the same time domineering manner, and though all he said was impeccably correct she detected no real feeling behind it. He had taken so long to answer her request that she’d thought he was going to refuse.

  “Very well,” he had said at last. “I will say a few words by way of explanation before the service starts.”

  “Oh, thank you. Honestly, I don’t think anyone is going to think it peculiar. They’re so used to me and my cameras.”

  “That would not have been the problem, Mrs. Matson. You will find that I am not greatly influenced by what people think.”

  And yet he’s lasted twenty-three years in the parish, never putting a foot wrong, but still not much liked by anyone. Sad.

  “Ready?” said Dilys. “Oh, my goodness, it’s…Sorry, dearie, I didn’t mean to be rude, but…And you can’t have taken this one! That’s you, there, isn’t it?”

  Impossible that she should have been able to recognise Rachel, standing at the foot of the open grave, all in black, her face hidden by not only the veil, and the shadow from the hideous black hat, but also by the bulk of the camera aimed down at the descending coffin.

  “Tom Dawnay,” croaked Rachel. “Local paper. Old friend.”

  So good a friend that he hadn’t submitted the picture for use in the Inquirer, who would certainly have printed it. Indeed, it might well have made the national press. It was an image of surreal force, even when stripped of the layers of personal meaning that it had for Rachel. On the left a dark slab, the backs of the mourners, corrugated with heads above and fringed with legs below. Then a strip of sunlit grass, with receding gravestones, then the single black column of the widow, rapt in her rite. The camera that had taken the picture was outside the rite, looking at it, but the camera in the window’s hands was integral, essential to its completeness. Rachel had almost never included photographs by anybody else in her albums, but she had put Tom’s here, at the start, because she felt it would resonate through the volume, so that only the most insensitive peruser wouldn’t sense, looking at the rest of the photographs, that particular presence, those particular emotions, there behind the viewfinder.

  She grunted to tell Dilys to leaf on. Apart from that first picture the album was in chronological order: a line of neighbours, friends, cousins, crossing the graveyard towards the church, the picture taken with a wide-angle lens and the negative cropped to produce a frieze-like strip punctuated by verticals, black and grey, people and tombstones; Maxwell in his chauffeur’s uniform pulling Dinah Tremlett in her old Bath chair; the children lined up at the porch, Flora pregnant with Ferdie and on the edge of tears, Jack dapper at her elbow and properly solemn, Dick trying to look so and faking it, Anne…It was for the image of Anne that Rachel had included this otherwise banal funeral group. Physically she took after Rachel, almost pretty in a fine-boned but still slightly horsy fashion. She had been a lively, amenable child, but around the age of eleven had begun to withdraw, to conceal her pleasures and troubles, to seem to wish to become less part of the family. That was what made the picture of her so instantly shocking, the ferocity of dry-eyed grief that was still half rage, though it was almost two years now since the business about Simon Stadding that had precipitated Jocelyn’s first stroke. She had at first refused to come to the funeral, but Jack had gone to Bristol of his own accord an
d persuaded her.

  “Mrs. Thomas hasn’t changed that much,” said Dilys. “Nor Mr. Thomas, come to that, given he’s lost a bit of hair. And wasn’t Mr. Dick a well set up lad? Image of his father too. No wonder you’re fond of him.”

  She moved to turn the page. Rachel didn’t stop her. No mention of Anne. She must have noticed. Tact, presumably, not to comment on such a glimpse of the raw innards of a wounded family.

  Inside the church. The other camera, largest aperture, ultrafast film, then delicate development and printing—the results misty greys, sometimes with focal moments: the jet black of the silhouetted coffin and bearers against the open west door; the coffin at the altar, with candles; the congregation standing for a hymn, Rachel’s own place empty, a gap in the pattern of open mouths; Sergeant Fred against the north window (Rachel had almost grovelled to achieve the angle) standing at the eagle lectern to bark the lesson with toneless precision. (extraordinary—still after almost forty years extraordinary—to think that if Jocelyn had died two years sooner it might have been Fish Stadding reading that lesson. Had Simon or Leila ever heard from him? There’s been no way to ask. There was still none. He’d be dead by now, surely.) The last picture she’d taken inside the church was of the front of the coffin in close-up as it had passed her place on its way down the aisle, with the near-side bearer also in close-up, a strong, unreadable face.

  Then a gap in the sequence, filled only by a cutting from the Inquirer, Tom Dawnay’s published picture of the coffin emerging from the porch with Rachel on Dick’s arm behind it. (She had handed her cameras to Jack to bring out.) The gap continued for the period she had had to stand, barely holding herself together, accepting the unavoidable condolences. Ten or so blurred awful minutes, the same phrases over and over till they lost all meaning, and Jocelyn dead, dead, dead. No meaning in anything, ever again. Her only solid memory of that phase was of Leila Stadding’s face, grief and anger like Anne’s but so differently borne; the mouth working almost as if in epilepsy as she tried to speak, but then she had turned away and shoved herself past whoever had been waiting behind her. Rachel hadn’t expected any of the family to come, but had hoped that Simon might. He hadn’t, Leila’s elder son, Bob, had brought her, according to Flora.