Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  This, Jenny thought, was remarkably perceptive of him. She too had been vaguely puzzled by the oddity of what was clearly a sitting room, with armchairs and a sofa arranged for people to gather and converse. There were upright chairs against the walls, a couple of tables, a bookcase, pictures on the walls, rugs—but nothing seemed to relate to the room or to any of the other objects in it. As Uncle Albert said, it was as if a random collection of furniture had been brought in and arranged wherever it would physically fit, but not because anyone was going to want to live with it.

  Ms. Cowan came back with a tray, wading through a moving eddy of cats. She almost knocked the milk jug over as she slid the tray onto a table, but Jenny had moved to help and caught it in time.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Ms. Cowan. “We’re not going to starve, at least. My parishioners rightly consider that I am incapable of looking after myself, let alone visitors, so I have only to mention that I have somebody coming and I am inundated with scones. Now, out you go! Shoo! No laps on Sunday. You know that perfectly well.”

  She chivvied the cats out and closed the door. They miaowed affrontedly beyond it.

  “Weekdays I wear skirts on which the hairs don’t show,” she explained. “Well now, this is wonderful. So you’re Bert Fredricks! Do you mind if I call you Bert? My Uncle Terry always did. It’s how I think of you. My name’s Eileen, but Terry always called me Nell.”

  “Nell?” said Uncle Albert, as if instantly, magically unbewildered. “You’re telling me you’re Terry’s little Nell!”

  He guffawed with amazement and delight. Jenny had never heard him produce such a sound. It made the effort of bringing him here, even the half day away from Jeff, worth while.

  “Yes, I’m little Nell,” said Ms. Cowan.

  He had risen when she’d brought the tray in, and she now stood in front of him, smiling. With simple naturalness he put his hands on her shoulders, bent and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to Jenny to hesitate for a moment, but then closed her arms round him and hugged him. The movement was gawky, uncertain, as if long unpractised. After a few seconds she released him and turned to Jenny.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t really introduced myself in the excitement. I’m Eileen Cowan, of course. Nobody except Uncle Terry and his friends has ever called me Nell, but we’ll stick to that to avoid confusion. And you’re Jenny? Jennifer?”

  “Jenny except on cheques and things.”

  “Jenny, not Penny,” confirmed Uncle Albert. “She’s worth twice what Penny’s worth, if you want to know. Can’t think what their mother was doing, calling ’em pretty well the same name like that. It’s not as if they’d been twins.”

  He spoke with the full authority of the head of the imaginary family.

  “Well, that’s settled,” said Nell. “Now if I give each of us a little table. And everyone must have two scones, so that I can say with honesty how much we enjoyed them. The smaller ones are Sharon Smith’s and the others and Annie Fletcher’s. The jam is Cyril Buck’s from his own strawberries. Splendid. Now tea … Oh dear, what on earth have I done? And it’s almost cold. I know I warmed the pot, and I know the kettle was boiling … bother, I shall have to go and make a fresh pot.”

  “Why don’t you let me do that?” said Jenny. “You stay and talk to Uncle Albert—after all that’s what we’re here for.”

  “Oh, would you? The kitchen’s just along the passage, and I’ve left everything out.”

  This turned out to be no less than the truth. The makings of several meals littered the working surfaces, actual food being protected from the cats by being shoved under a couple of old-fashioned meat-safes. When Jenny emptied the teapot she found five tea-bags in it, three round and two rectangular. She deduced that one set had been left in from last time tea had been made, and furthermore, since Nell hadn’t discovered them when she emptied the water out after warming the pot, that hadn’t been done either.

  The cats ignored Jenny as she boiled the kettle and made fresh tea. Two were busy licking the last smears of butter from a wrapping and three others were curled in their baskets. They all looked well and cared for.

  Jenny admitted to being mildly obsessive about cleanliness—Jeff said she was a hygienopath. Left by a man, this level of mess would have disgusted and angered her. Left by most women it would have been even worse, not mere slobbishness, but a kind of betrayal. But left by Nell, her reactions were more uncertain. Disgust and horror, certainly—mercifully she had brought out the cup into which Nell had begun to pour, so she could at least get that clean for herself—but the anger was replaced by confusion. To be angry with somebody is to judge them, and she wasn’t prepared to judge Nell, both in the sense of not wishing to and of not having enough to go on. Nell’s treatment of Uncle Albert seemed to be absolutely honest, from the heart. Did it follow that her method of life was equally honest? Of course not. Nobody needed to be as domestically helpless as Nell made herself out to be—apparently revelled in being, and in her parishioners rushing to her rescue with scones and jam … But then again, mightn’t that pose, though deliberate, have a quite different motivation? How should a woman conduct herself so as to be accepted as priest to a presumably very conservative parish such as this? Perhaps by letting them believe that she was no more than a slightly different version of a phenomenon they were already used to—the otherworldly bachelor scholar—not many of ’em about these days, mind you—gone with the gouty colonels and the hard-riding squires … If so, there was actually something pleasingly subversive about Nell’s performance, which she herself might well be aware of.

  Then, as she carried pot and cup back to the sitting room, it crossed Jenny’s mind to wonder whether Nell might be gay. She knew herself to be imperceptive about that sort of thing. The clerical dress was masculine in effect, and Nell’s manner to Uncle Albert had been mildly flirty …

  She found them sitting knee to knee, bending towards each other as they talked. Both started to rise at her entry.

  “Don’t get up,” she said. “I’ll pour. You haven’t got all that time.”

  “You do that,” said Uncle Albert, settling back. “Now where was I?”

  “You were telling me about Terry giving you all pickpocketing lessons so that you could steal from the guards if you got the chance. Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Dangerous and then some. It was a way of passing the time as much as anything. I don’t know anyone was fool enough to try it. Find you at something like that, and morning parade the Japs would tie you to a post and make the rest of us watch while they hammered you unconscious.”

  “Terry told me about that. It happened to him, he said. It was so bad he didn’t remember anything that had happened for days afterwards and when he came round you were in a different camp. The rest of you had carried him there, he said.”

  “Not exactly carried him—you want me to tell you about that? It isn’t party conversation, not to my mind.”

  “Please. Anything you can about Terry, good or bad.”

  “Right you are … just put it there, lass—two sugars and a good dollop of milk … Well, we were building this road, like I told you, and the drill was that when we’d finished one section they’d parade us and march us on to a new camp. Anyone that couldn’t stand to for the parade they hammered with their rifle butts and left. No food, no water. I’ve heard tell of natives come creeping out of the forest and carrying them away and looking after them, but it can’t’ve happened that often—anyway not to anyone I ever ran into.

  “It wasn’t a long march on, no more than about ten miles, but the state we were in then it might’ve been from Harwich to hell. And those as couldn’t keep up they pulled out of the line and hammered and left by the road—the very bit of road that man might’ve been building the day before.

  “Now our last lot of guards, they’d been a bit soft—bastards still, but sloppy bastards, so we’d been getting away with little things. Then this new lot came, and they were hard bast
ards. They didn’t just crack down, fair and square—they set traps. Day before we were due our next move we were lining up for our ration—mostly it was just boiled rice, but some days there’d be scraps of meat in it, or dried fish—you wouldn’t’ve fed a dog on it, back home—and Terry spotted a bit of fish, as big as my thumb, maybe, lying by the pot, like it could’ve fallen out of the pot while they were mixing up. It didn’t look like any of the Japs was watching, so Terry scooped it up, but of course one of ’em had been keeping an eye on it while the others were looking the other way deliberate, so they were on him, and next morning they tied him to the pole and hammered him unconscious in front of us all. After that they kept us standing out in the sun while they got ready for the move.

  “Now Terry was tough. He didn’t look it, mind you, a skinny fellow with a big head—big hands and feet too, like he hadn’t been put together right, somehow—but by the time the Japs were ready we could see how he was trying to stand up. And just before they gave the order to march Colonel Matson stood out of line, which he wasn’t supposed to, and said, ‘That man’s coming with us.’

  “A couple of Japs ran to push him back into line with their butts, but he stood his ground and called out, ‘On your feet, Private Voss. Jump to it, man! Attention! Quick march!’

  “And then Terry was up and starting to stagger over, and I yelled out the step for him. Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, and the lads joined in, and we hauled him across that way in little dribbles of steps while the guards stood and laughed until we dressed him in line.”

  He paused in what was clearly a well-worn narrative, stirred his tea and drank.

  “I don’t know why it is,” said Nell. “Heroism ought to be horrible. The need for it is usually horrible, and so is the event itself. So why is it that when one hears a story like that one feels a need to weep with a kind of joy?”

  “It’s because we are the way we are,” said Uncle Albert. “Mind you, that’s just the half of it. We’d got about ten miles to go, and we’d got to get Terry there somehow, though ten miles was about as much as any of us could do, never mind helping a man along who couldn’t hardly walk a couple of steps on his own, and the Japs watching out for anyone slowing the line down, ready to haul him out and hammer him and leave him in the ditch. But most of the way they let us drag old Terry along, turn and turn about, one on each side with his arms round our shoulders. I thought maybe they’d eased off a bit because they’d been impressed with Terry’s guts, but it wasn’t that at all. They were just playing with us.

  “All of a sudden, when we reckoned we’d just about done it, they pushed their way in among us and grabbed Terry and started to hammer him again. Of course we yelled at them and broke rank to try and stop them, but they’d got their guns on us before we’d hardly moved, and we could see they meant it. So we fell back, all except the Colonel. He just walked up to Terry regardless and bent down to pick him up.

  “And then one of the Japs brought his butt crashing down on the back of his head and knocked him flat and half of them kept their guns on us while the others kicked and hammered the Colonel where he lay.

  “Then they shoved us back into line and marched us on, broken men, broken men. Half of us wouldn’t have lasted the time we had, nothing like, without the Colonel, and we knew it. And that night, lying in our sheds, I could hear men sobbing in the dark.

  “Only somewhere in the middle of the night the Colonel came crawling into the camp with Terry on his back. He’d tied his arms round his neck with his belt so he could drag him along. The Japs just flung them into the shed with the rest of us. And they had them both working on the road next day, but this time they let us cover for them a bit. More than a bit. I met a Jap one time—after the war this was—and I told him about this, and he said it was because they’d been impressed by an officer doing that for one of his men. I don’t know, myself. I could never figure the bastards out.”

  He sat back and drank his tea again.

  “Thank you,” said Nell. “Terry told me some of that, but of course it wasn’t from his own memory. It’s never the same as when someone has actually seen it happen. Now we must test the scones. I know the jam to be excellent.”

  The reminiscence seemed to have exhausted Uncle Albert’s conversational energies, but he sat and munched and listened benignly while Nell talked about her own memories of her uncle. Gradually, as she did so, though her diction remained as precise as ever, the underlying oddity of some of her vowels became more noticeable, but at the same time less odd, once the connection had been made to the childhood of which she spoke.

  She had been born in Whitechapel, just as the war was ending, into a family belonging to the Elect of God, one of those rigid, highly exclusive millenarian sects, the thought of which gave Jenny the shudders—far worse than the blanketing Anglicanism that her own grandparents had practised, and against which her mother had reacted with total impatience of anything to do with religion.

  Nell’s family had been very poor. The sect’s principles forbade them the use of money that they hadn’t earned by their own labour, so they wouldn’t accept any kind of welfare payment or charitable help. If they had been permitted, they would have let their children die rather than use the National Health system. Their women were not allowed to work for wages. All this was justified by close reading of the Authorised Version.

  They did, however, acknowledge a duty to look after their own. Nell’s father was a cobbler, but he died when she was five, leaving her mother with her and two younger brothers and no income at all. The sect, in their own phrase, “took pity on her,” that is to say she became a virtual domestic slave in the house of her in-laws, who, when there wasn’t work to keep her busy all day, loaned her to other members of the sect in the same capacity. Nell now thought that at least one of the men took advantage of this situation, but her mother had been too cowed to complain.

  The mother had converted into the Elect, which was sometimes permitted when no suitable brides were available from within it. Nell believed she had married to escape from her own family, which was a branch of one of the criminal clans which then governed the underworld of the East End. Her father had been a professional hard man and frightener, notorious for his violence, and her only protector in her childhood and youth had been her older brother, Terry. When she was fifteen he was sent to prison for the first time, and offered a way out she took it, marrying illegally, and without the consent of her parents.

  They made no effort to get her back. She was one fewer mouth to feed, and was never going to be handsome enough to earn worthwhile money on the streets. On her admittance to the sect she was “made new,” and nothing in her past was of any interest to them, so when Terry sought her out on leaving prison he was not welcomed. He was an ingratiating character, however, and managed to persuade the elders that his main interest was in their beliefs. Luckily for him they didn’t accept male converts, but had a category of “Tolerables,” who, if they remained faithful, would not be fully saved when the Lord destroyed sinful humanity, causing them to die of thirst by removing the sea (Revelation 21:1) but would be allowed to toil in a sort of underheaven, or celestial basement, doing such tasks as emptying the latrines, a necessary consequence of the full resurrection of the body.

  (“They’d thought it all out, you see,” said Nell. “That’s the great weakness of systematic religion, the conviction that one can know everything.”)

  Surprisingly there were almost a dozen of these hangers-on, some of them regular attenders at services and meetings, where they stood behind a rail just inside the door, some more occasional. Moreover their earnings were “purified by faith” and they were thus allowed—indeed expected—to contribute to the finances of the sect. So Terry could help his sister, buying clothes for her and the children, and bringing them permitted treats, such as raisin buns, though not the ones with sugar icing, which were forbidden by a text in Leviticus.

  Terry took a particular interest in Nell, declarin
g from the first that she was a bright kid, and doing all he could to help and encourage her. The sect were forced by law to send their children to state schools, but removed them as soon as they were able to, in those days at fourteen. By that point Nell had won her first scholarship, to a local grammar school, but that made no difference to the sect’s plans for her, which were to bring her home, keep her there, and at sixteen to marry her to one of the men to bear his children and drudge for him.

  Terry, having told only Nell what he was doing, arrived one morning with a parcel of gifts. As soon as the door was opened to take it in he forced his way through, while two of his friends appeared to hold the door and prevent anyone in the house going to find help. It was all over in a few minutes. Terry collected his sister and the family’s few belongings and drove off in the van in which they’d come to the basement flat he had rented for her. He went with her to collect the boys from their school. Nell found her own way to the new home.

  A fortnight later Terry was in prison, awaiting trial for robbery with violence. He had left funds with a local solicitor to pay the rent and provide a weekly allowance for the next four years, the sentence he expected and received.

  “He never had that kind of money,” said Nell, “and he didn’t go in for that kind of crime. From things he said later I believe that he took a rap for a man called Dan Brent, whose brother was a major vice racketeer. I doubt the police really believed that Terry was guilty, but he had confessed and they knew they’d get a conviction. I think the money was what Dan’s brother paid him for the confession. He didn’t do it for my mother or my brothers. He did it for me, so that I could go on with my schooling.”

  “Were you happy in the flat?” said Jenny.

  “Not particularly. I was happy to continue at school, but I missed Terry. My mother cooked and cleaned, to some extent, but she couldn’t cope with the responsibility of dealing with money and being on her own. I had to see to all that. And my brothers were too conditioned to the Elect. They had not had too bad a time there. Boys were much more considerately treated than girls. After a couple of years my mother received an offer of marriage from one of the Elect, a widower who needed somebody to keep house, so she moved back and took my brothers with her. I refused to go, and the Elect didn’t insist. I think they knew they couldn’t keep me, and I would be trouble in the meanwhile. My teachers found somebody to take me in, and Terry’s money paid for my upkeep. When he came out of prison there was enough left for him to rent another flat, and I moved in and kept house for him until I went to university. I converted to the Church of England in my first year, and he was the only member of my family who came to the service.”