Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  “Ah. Thank you.”

  Jenny waited, sensing that there was more. As the nurse opened the door the whisper came again.

  “Anything you can find out.”

  2

  Uncle Albert dozed most of the way home. Jenny spent much of the journey thinking about what had happened, not outside and around her, but within. There had been a moment when everything had changed. Perhaps the change had imperceptibly been preparing for a long while, but this afternoon there had been an identifiable point at which it had taken place, when she had held Mrs. Matson’s near-dead fingers in her own. It was as though there had been a knot in the cord of her being only, a simple half hitch which, if anyone had known about it and helped her with it at the time of its tying, might have been freed. But over the years it had been strained so tight that the strands had almost lost their differentiation and it had become a dense little nut in the run of the cord, impossible ever to ease or tease apart. The rest of the cord ran smoothly enough over its pulleys, and long before she was a woman Jenny had become so used to the existence of the knot that without any awareness of doing so she had learnt to adjust her use of the mechanism so that only in exceptional circumstances did it snag. But the cost of being all the time ready for those potential judderings, of not allowing herself to seem to be shaken or troubled by them, had been considerable—an outward wariness and chill, a detachment, a sort of void or buffer zone between that outward and her true inward, a concentration on things rather than people—she belonged to no informal feminine networks, had no bosom friends—especially on things that were stable and controlled, that seemed to her to have confidence in their own selfhood and thus make no demands on her and pose no threats. (That, perhaps, was why she so loved the little house she shared with Jeff, and why Mrs. Matson’s photographs spoke so strongly to her.)

  But Jeff, and her marriage to and passion for him, didn’t come under that heading. They were fluid, dynamic, unpredictable. There were patterns in them that happened to persist, like eddies below a weir, convolutions with much the same structure as the knot, but these could never be traced to any calculable cause, and some minor change in the flow of the stream might at any moment dissolve them completely, re-create them elsewhere or perhaps abolish them forever. Not even the passion could be taken for granted.

  So perhaps it was this experience over the past seventeen months that had allowed the fibres of the knot first to soften and then to ease from their taut interlocking so that now with the very minor effort on Jenny’s part of reaching out and grasping a skeletal hand, the knot itself should have at last slipped free and gone.

  How else was she to explain to herself her betrayal of Uncle Albert’s confidence? Mrs. Matson was, and would remain, a stranger, unreachable in the prison of her carcase. Yes, her condition was very sad, and yes, she seemed to cope with it with courage and decency, in a manner that Jenny believed she herself would never be able to cope, should that befall her. But she had no claim on Jenny.

  Uncle Albert on the other hand, she knew and liked and admired. Moreover he was family. Family was important to her. Though her own had been an apparent disaster, they had lived together in a series of houses through the almost two decades that had made Jenny what she was. They were part of each other, in a relationship for which there isn’t a word, so “love” has to do. The worst horror of her mother’s drinking had been that Jenny had continued to “love” her. Her suicide had solved intolerable problems for all of them, but Jenny had sobbed with fierce and genuine grief at the bleak funeral. Now she and her brother and sister communicated only perfunctorily, and never made a point of going somewhere for the purpose of meeting, but when something happened to bring them together the old currents instantly flowed between them, and they parted with a sense of renewal and unvoiced celebration.

  Jeff had none of that, apart from Uncle Albert. His childhood had been yet more bereft than Jenny’s. His mother had walked out when he was seven. His father, though fairly well off, had placed him in a foster home. His great-aunt, Uncle Albert’s sister, had wanted to have him live with her, but his father had rancorously refused permission. The great-aunt was now dead, so there was only Uncle Albert, who must for that reason be cherished and cared for. Jenny didn’t merely accept this as a duty, she both thought and felt it.

  But despite that she hadn’t hesitated to tell Mrs. Matson part of a secret that was sufficiently important to him to be worth the humiliation of publicly pleading his own failing memory. Indeed she was now planning, as soon as she had the chance, to look in his bottom drawer for the Cambi Road Association address lists to see if somebody called Terry Voss was still alive—and wondering, even, if there was any excuse for not telling Jeff about all this in case he should, very reasonably, ask her not to.

  The answer, if you could call it that, she decided, was that Mrs. Matson was not after all a stranger. There had been an exchange between them. Something had flowed, and Jenny had been the beneficiary. Years ago, at college, she had known a young man whose legs had been badly damaged in a bicycling accident and who needed a stick to walk. The other noticeable oddity about him was that he was never there on Sunday. He was quietly amiable, and so tended to get included in the activities of the group to which Jenny loosely belonged, but when pressure was put on him to make up the numbers, if the event was planned for a Sunday he always refused. One evening when they were sitting around talking about what they individually believed in he told them why.

  After his accident, he said, he’d been confined to a wheelchair and told he would never walk again. His parents had been determined he should, and had tried a series of increasingly weird treatments. Eventually a faith healer had visited them, and had sat alone with Dominic and talked what he described as a lot of stupid guff about spirit and matter and cosmic currents. He had been bored and embarrassed, and longing for the man to leave. He had then been aware of feeling curiously warm, from inside, but without the need to sweat. The warmth had appeared to flow down into his legs, and after a bit the healer had put his hands in his and told him to stand up, which he had done, and then walked across the room, with the healer doing no more than hold his hands to give him confidence, and not supporting him in any way. Though he wasn’t completely healed he hadn’t needed the wheelchair again.

  So now, every Sunday, Dominic made a difficult cross-country journey to be with the cult to which his healer belonged and attend their ceremonies. “I’m not going to tell you what we believe,” he said. “You’d think it was a lot of stupid guff, like I did. But when I’m among the Companions I can walk as well as you can. I have to believe.”

  Jenny felt that something very like that had happened to her as she’d stood by Mrs. Matson’s bed and held her hand. She’d been uncrippled. It didn’t matter how or why. It had happened, and she was therefore committed. If this included doing what Mrs. Matson had asked and finding out what she could and passing it on, she must, regardless of rationality, do it.

  They reached Hastings after ten o’clock. Jenny helped Uncle Albert, very stiff and shaky, out of the car. He leaned heavily on her shoulder for the few paces to the door. She rang the night bell. It was a while before they heard footsteps. A nurse she didn’t know opened the door.

  “So you’ve come home to us, Albert?” she said. “Quite the night owl you’re getting. We thought you’d be hungry, so there’s a tray for you in your room. Had a good trip, then? I’ll take him now, miss, unless you want to come in. Come along, Albert.”

  “Hold it,” he said firmly, and turned to Jenny.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said, “and you’ve done me proud. And I’ll tell you this. You made a much better job of it than that other girl would’ve. What’s her name…?”

  “Your niece in America, you’re talking about?” said the nurse. “Penny, isn’t she?”

  “That’s right, Penny. She’d’ve got us lost ten times over, for a start. So I’ll say thank you, young lady, and good night.”

  �
��Good night, Uncle Albert. I enjoyed it.”

  He let himself be led into the hallway, but before the door closed halted again and turned.

  “And ask that husband of yours when he’s coming to see me,” he called.

  RACHEL

  1

  The footsteps, faint on the carpet, receded. The door opened and closed. An odd young woman, Rachel thought, stranger in the flesh than she’d seemed on television. It would have been a challenge to capture that quality through the lens, the features soft but strong, self-possession with considerable tension, disciplined will constraining something wilder…

  Voices in the passage, the tone of farewells. The door again. Dilys.

  “Well, well, quite a day we’ve had of it, haven’t we, dearie? And what a grand old gentleman, coming all this way at his age, and still holding himself like a soldier. Now, we need seeing to, I dare say—we’ll have drunk a bit with all that chat. And then I’ll set your bed flat, so we can have a bit of a rest.”

  “Soon. Album first. One he brought in. Something in it…”

  “Right you are…This one? ‘People,’ it says on the back. Then here’s our specs. Start at the beginning, shall I?”

  Dilys settled the album onto the stand and leafed slowly through, commenting here and there.

  “Now that’s what I call a well set up lass…Shouldn’t care to meet them in a dark alley…”

  Already almost exhausted, Rachel gazed vaguely at the passing images. Faces and postures. Strangers, friends, family, that didn’t matter, wasn’t what they’d been chosen for. The photographs were in this series of albums because when she’d begun to compile them in the second long winter of her widowhood, each had seemed to be, as it were, a passing remark—nothing so solemn as a statement—on what it meant to be a human being.

  “Look at that hairdo! And those shoes! You should’ve heard what my Nan said when I showed up on her doorstep got up like that! I thought she wasn’t going to let me over the mat—”

  “Stop. That one.”

  “Teds…we had’em too. Welsh Teds. There was a Welsh word for them, even—Tedwboi, was it? Not that I knew more than a dozen words in Welsh myself. What was the point in Bangor? And now my other niece and her hubby—never mind he’s from Norfolk—they talk Welsh at home, and the kids too…Ready?”

  “Wait. Please.”

  Rachel willed her mind into focus and studied the half-hidden face. Bewildering that she must have seen it twice in the flesh, and then at least four times more in this image—looking through the rough prints, printing it up, and then selecting and reprinting it for the album, and had not then made the essential connection. Only now this ambush.

  How long had the intervals been? She could actually remember taking the photograph, pretending to focus on the outfielder so as not to distract her quarry out of their speakingly self-conscious poses, that special uncertain swagger…1955, she guessed. Dick had captained a team against Fish Stadding’s Walthamstow youth club (of course Jocelyn had had to do the actual work of getting eleven players together). Rachel had gone along to be with them both—Dick consented to be so little at home…

  It had been the group, not any of the individuals, that had caught her eye. No reason she should have recognised one of them, meeting him two years later. Jocelyn had died in’59, so it would have been’61 or’62 when she was working on this album. Only four or five years, then, since she’d truly seen him, watched and studied him for an hour or so…And she must have looked carefully at the photograph when she was deciding whether to include it. Perhaps she’d still been mesmerised by the group, not to pick him out. Yet now, another thirty-five years on, instantly, on a page half glimpsed as it was turned.

  “Thank you, Dilys. Rest now.”

  As far as possible she blanked her mind while Dilys lowered the bed, peeled back the covers and changed her pad. She was wet, of course, but to judge by the odours had stayed clean. Dilys had clearly been greatly impressed by Sergeant Fred.

  “Funny how different they all go,” she said. “Not that I’ve seen a lot of them like that, looking after themselves and everything, just the mind a bit wandery—they don’t need my kind of nursing, that sort. There was an old lady I looked after—stuck in a wheelchair she was, and mostly didn’t know nor care if she was coming or going, but the family used to take her along Sundays to visit her sister—in a home she was, and her mind gone too, but the two old things would sit together for a couple of hours on end just holding each other’s hand, and the family swore blind that they both knew whose hand they were holding, and they were the better for it after. But it wasn’t them I was thinking of. There was another old dear in this home—Lettice her name was—and she was spry enough but she was the sort who says the same thing over and over and over, like one of those dolls with a string in its back, only they’re all electronic now, I suppose. Anyway, everyone loved this Lettice, but for one or two of the snarky old crabs you always get in a home, biting everyone’s heads off ’cause of not being able to bear it, what they’ve come to, but Lettice was just the other way, she was so happy. And what made her happiest was helping anyone up the stairs, or down them. Opening doors for them and holding them and closing them after they’d been through was better than nothing, but stairs were the best. She’d hang around in the hall-way looking at the pictures, which she’d seen over and over and over, but as soon as anyone showed up she’d take a quick peek at them—she knew not to try and help the ones who could manage, but if they were using a frame or maybe just a stick, she’d be at their elbow…There, now, that’s a bit better. Last little drinkie?”

  “Please.”

  Rachel sipped gratefully.

  “Thank you. Flora?”

  “Mrs. Thomas said to say she was out saving the children, but she’ll look in later if you’re up to it. You want me to put your parcel back in its hidey hole before she comes?”

  “No. Leave it. In drawer. Not secret. Now.”

  “Right you are. And she’ll be wanting to hear all about the old gentleman too, won’t she? You have a good rest, and you’ll be feeling perky for her.”

  When Dilys had gone Rachel lay and gazed through the window. The rooks were raucous and active in the tree, but she was too exhausted to attend to them. Too exhausted for anything…

  No! It wouldn’t do. It was another excuse, another shying away, the latest of countless evasions over the years. The thing must be faced, now, and in detail. If it was there, the answer would lie somewhere in the details, just as the young man’s image had lain so long unnoticed in the album.

  Buried memory, unconsidered for decades, can’t simply be dug up, unpackaged and laid out for inspection. After such a span in the earth, though the shape may still be plain, the individual parts will at first be unrecognisable, compacted, clogged, corroded, some of them of stuff too transient to endure, others readable after careful cleaning. Fragments, though, persist almost unchanged—a coal fire in a half-lit room, the stealthy opening of a door in an empty house, squat fingers uncapping a bottle, the tweed of a greatcoat against her cheek in a dark car park, Jocelyn pausing at the study door, absorbing what she’d told him—from such morsels, with willed persistence, Rachel teased out most of the rest of it. All the essentials she was sure of, though parts she knew to be reconstructions—sequences of minor events, the actual words of a conversation—but even these didn’t merely ring true but were flecked here and there with the gleam of metals that burial doesn’t corrode.

  Twice Dilys came in and took her pulse, but Rachel closed her eyes, pretended to be asleep and waited until she heard her leave. By night-fall she had as much as she thought she was going to get.

  2

  Begin at the beginning. A mild, dank October day. Late morning. The telephone call. She took it in the hall.

  “Hello?”

  The clatter of coins being fed into a public telephone.

  “Ray?”

  “Oh, it’s you, darling. What’s up?”

&
nbsp; “Can’t tell you over the telephone. I’ll be late back—on the eleven-twelve. Don’t meet me. I’ll take a cab. Sorry.”

  “Bother. All right. Shall I keep supper?”

  “I’ll eat on the train.”

  “Is it something serious?”

  “Afraid so. Tell you when I see you. Look after yourself.”

  “You too, darling.”

  “Do my best.”

  She put the handset down, disappointed for herself because she wanted him home—yesterday’s lonely evening had been more than enough—and troubled for him, though mainly about his personal discomforts. The late train was always crowded, the dining car often full for two sittings. Though what was keeping him in London was obviously important and by the abruptness of his tone unpleasant, it would be part of his public world, and he would deal with it as such. He would tell her about it, as he’d said, but by then he would have decided exactly what to do about it, and so would not bring it home in the form of a disruptive worry.

  She sighed and went to the kitchen. Thursday was the Ransons’ afternoon off. Normally Mrs. Ranson would have set out the makings of a meal, simple enough for Rachel to cope with, before she and her husband went to the bowling club. Rachel told her not to bother. She’d have cheese and biscuits and tomatoes at her table while she finished the Christmas cards. Her afternoon was planned, and that would fill the empty evening.

  Those plans for the afternoon. She could remember their existence, but not what they’d been. Had she driven somewhere? Yes, she must have. The trip itself was irrecoverable, but she could remember her sense of utter loneliness as she’d let herself into the house at dusk and locked the door behind her.

  The evening, then. About a quarter to seven—the time not memory but reconstruction, since the train—the one Jocelyn should have been on—got in at six-eighteen. The study. Curtains closed and a coal fire starting to glow, not for herself, but so that Jocelyn should have his own warm lair to come home to, where he could sip his scotch and tell her about his day. A pool of light from his desk lamp, for imaginary company: dark, and he was not in the house; lit, and he could just have gone out of the room. Her supper tray at the other end of the desk, so that she wouldn’t need to face the ambient emptiness till he returned.