Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  “Looks like you did, too,” said Dilys. “It’s got a nice homey something about it, this house. I felt it the moment I came in.”

  “Oh, yes, hasn’t it? And I’ve worked so hard for that, and so has he. He didn’t used to be like this, you know—it’s just his illness. It’s eating him up. He keeps saying he’s got bad blood—well of course he has, now, but it’s as if he’s always had it and it’s his own fault for being born like that, and now he’s being punished for it, and he can’t think about anything else. He was always so thoughtful too…and we’ve had wonderful holidays together…and been so…comfortable…and it’s not going to be like that any more…never any more…”

  She had stopped crying and now sat staring, grey-faced, at something that wasn’t there between her and the Aga.

  “You know what’s killed him?” she said, biting the words out. “It’s the Cambi Road Association, that’s what. And that’s what you’ve come about too now. I didn’t want him to see you, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dilys. “I’m only a messenger, sort of, bringing him something. I don’t know much about it myself.”

  “But you wrote, didn’t you? The postmark said Matlock. It must have been a photograph of something, but he’d hidden it when I came back. And he was upset—in a funny kind of way, though…you aren’t going to tell me, are you? It’s another of their stupid secrets…”

  In a sense the situation was familiar to Dilys, familiar enough to know what she felt and what she should do. It happened again and again, younger relatives concealing stuff from her patients on the pretext of saving the old and helpless from unnecessary fret, though in reality, as often as not, doing it to avoid having to cope with what might be a perfectly justifiable fuss. It put her in a false position, and she resented it. Regardless of who was paying the fees her primary loyalty was to her patient, and she disliked being forced to go along with these deceits, as in most cases she was, because now if she told the truth the patient would suffer not only the original fret but also the greater hurt of betrayal. Mrs. Stadding wasn’t her patient really, but…

  “I’ll tell you what was in the letter, if you like,” she said. “I don’t think Mrs. Matson would mind, because she did it that way in case it got opened by somebody else. It was just so Mr. Stadding could know it was Mrs. Matson who sent me. It was a photo she took of him, years ago at Forde Place, on the fire escape, looking all romantic. And she said to tell him ‘Carrot,’ because it was some sort of joke had happened, and he’d remember and know it must be from her in spite of me writing it. And I was going to bring him a tape with a message on it, and he could send a message back the same way. It was to keep it all secret, you know.”

  “Don’t I just!” sighed Mrs. Stadding. “It’s always secrets, and they’re killing him. I knew he shouldn’t have let you come.”

  “If you want my opinion, it might help this time,” said Dilys. “It might be a chance to get something off his chest after all these years.”

  “Oh, if only he’d do that! If only he’d tell me! I can’t ask—I just can’t. It’s the same with his brothers. There’s two of them, and years and years ago us three wives—because they’re both married—we got together—we didn’t see that much of each other, not usually—but that time we were on our own and we settled down and thrashed out everything we’d picked up, one way or another…Do you mind? It’s just that I’ve had it buzzing around in my head all these years…”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Dilys. “In the ordinary way of things I’d say you tell me if you want and I won’t pass it on. But this time…I’m here for Mrs. Matson. She’s not got long to live now and there’s something she’s desperate to know before she goes, and she’s hoping Mr. Stadding will tell her. And it’s all to do, far as I can see, with the same sort of secrets, so suppose you went and told me stuff Mrs. Matson might want to know, I’m not going to pretend I wouldn’t tell her.”

  Mrs. Stadding was gazing again at the ghost behind Dilys’s shoulder. Dilys wasn’t at all sure she’d heard or understood, but she smiled stonily.

  “Then we’re both in the same boat, I suppose. I’m desperate to know before Sim goes. I’ve got nothing against Mrs. Matson—not that I’ve ever met her—Sim didn’t want me coming to Forde Place…Oh, you tell her what you like, Miss Roberts…If it hadn’t been for Colonel Matson I’d never have had my life with Sim, anyway…

  “There was this girl I told you about you see, the one Sim loved. She was Colonel Matson’s daughter, and they were all great friends, the Staddings and the Matsons, and Sim and the girl were going to get married, and everyone was very happy about it. But then there was some kind of row between Colonel Matson and Sim’s father—I don’t know what it was about, but it must have been something Sim’s father had done because he walked out. Went abroad somewhere, I mean, and never came back, and took a lot of his wife’s money with him too. Leila, her name was—she was my mother-in-law, of course, and Sim used to take me to visit her in Torbay sometimes, where he and the other two had bought a little house for her. She was a sad old thing, and she’d been such a beauty once—that’s where Sim got his looks, of course—and there were all these photographs all round the room with bits cut out of them. And it wasn’t Sim’s father, if that’s what you’re thinking. There were lots of him, so I know what he looked like, though I never met him. No, it was the Matsons. Any of her photographs had one of them in it, she snipped carefully all round them and put it back in the frame, because she didn’t want to let anyone forget that everything that had gone wrong, it was all Colonel Matson’s fault.

  “Of course I asked Sim about it, soon as we were in the car to come home—it was a terrible drive those days, before the motor-ways—and all he said was, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I would if I could, but I can’t. It’s something she’s done in the last few months, they weren’t like that last time I came. And please don’t ask me again.’ I could tell from the way he said it he was very upset.

  “Of course I guessed it was something he’d promised his mother, not to talk about the Matsons, though it didn’t stop him going over to Forde Place for the Cambi Road reunions.

  “Anyway he’d been in love with this girl, Anne her name was, and they were going to get married. I found some of the wedding invitations at the back of a drawer once, so they’d got that far, and it would have been a big, smart wedding, but their two stupid fathers had this row and it was all broken off. I don’t know what it was about. One of us three wives said Sim’s father had run off with a woman Colonel Matson had introduced him to, but the other one said no, it was because he’d stolen a lot of money belonging to Colonel Matson, and Colonel Matson had come and told Sim that he didn’t want him for his son-in-law any longer. Sim absolutely worshipped Colonel Matson, I should have told you, so I thought that made a bit better sense than the other story, but it still wasn’t like my Sim, not if he loved the girl the way I’m sure he did. You can see about cancelling the fancy wedding, I suppose, but what was to stop them waiting a little while and them marrying each other quietly, and bother their parents if they were against it, they were both old enough? And anyway, he was honour bound to marry her, wasn’t he, like he was honour bound to the Cambi Road Association, and he wouldn’t give it up, whatever I said.

  “His father used to be secretary, you see, and Colonel Matson was the boss. And then his father ran off, and somebody else took over, but he got ill and Colonel Matson died, so they were in trouble until Sim went to them and said he’d do the job. I don’t know how he put it to them, I expect they were a bit surprised but of course they jumped at the chance. Only whatever he said his real reason was he knew he’d made a terrible mistake and he wanted to keep in touch with the Matsons, just hoping he might pick up with the girl again. I expect he’d written to her before, and she hadn’t answered or she’d given him the brush-off, but he wasn’t going to give up. He’s like that.

  “Of course that was all before I met him—”<
br />
  An electric bell rang briefly, twice, from the hall.

  “That’ll be for you,” said Mrs. Stadding, rising. “And thank you for listening to a stupid old woman worrying away at what can’t be helped.”

  “You mustn’t think that bad of yourself,” said Dilys. “You’re being brave about it, you really are. I’ve seen some make far more fuss when they hadn’t got half what you’ve got to put up with.”

  “Only it’s so hard to keep going.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “And I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it—it’s thinking he should never have let any of it happen in the first place, and he knows it and I know it. Oh, why couldn’t he tell those stupid old men that their silly quarrel wasn’t any of his business, and just gone ahead and married the girl, if he was that fond of her?”

  As she started to weep the bell rang again, longer and more insistently. Mr. Stadding could hear their voices, Dilys guessed. She took Mrs. Stadding by the shoulders and eased her back into her chair.

  “Now, you sit there and drink your tea,” she said. “I haven’t finished mine so I’ll be back in a minute for the rest of it, and we can talk some more if you want.”

  She left her dutifully sipping as she wept.

  Mr. Stadding was sitting with his head bowed and his eyes shut. The recorder was in his lap with the case closed and the microphone unplugged and coiled. After a few seconds he looked up, slowly, as if just raising his eyelids was almost too taxing.

  “I trust you have had a pleasant gossip,” he said. “Well, I have recorded an answer of a sort for Mrs. Matson. I hope it will satisfy her. Will you make her understand that I have done even this with considerable reluctance, and shall not respond to any further enquiries. I suppose I must thank you for coming. Goodbye.”

  Dilys tucked the recorder and microphone into her bag. She was all too used to the way the old and ill can exploit their weakness to control others. She spoke to Mr. Stadding as if he had been one of her patients, not letting her anger show, using a quiet, professional tone, as if she’d been advising him on the management of his illness.

  “I’ve got something to say to you before I go, Mr. Stadding. You’ll think it’s no business of mine, but I’ve been talking to your wife, like you said to. She’s having a very rough time, poor thing…No, you listen to me, and of course you’re wishing it wasn’t so but there’s nothing you can do about it. Well there is. She’s got ideas into her head about the whys and wherefores of stuff that’s happened—this stuff I came to see you about, not that I know much about it myself, but I know enough to see that some of her imaginings are mistaken. No, wait. Far as I can gather, you’ve never told her, not because you didn’t want to, but because you gave someone your word about it, once. Well, that’s all over. It’s years and years ago. Colonel Matson’s dead and Mrs. Matson won’t be long going and there isn’t anyone else that matters, except Mrs. Stadding. You think it’s not got anything to do with her, but it has. More than anyone else it has, now. You don’t want to leave her thinking worse of you than she need do, do you? So you go ahead and tell her everything you can. You’re a decent man, and you’ve been trying to do the decent thing all these years to a lot of people who don’t matter any more. It’s her turn now. She’s the one who matters. Don’t leave it lying between you the way it is now, and you’ll both feel better for it, really you will.”

  His answer was toneless with weariness.

  “As you say, it is none of your business, Miss Roberts. Nevertheless I will think about it.”

  “You do that. And show her the photograph Mrs. Matson took of you, and talk to her about Miss Anne. It won’t upset her, nothing like the way she’s upset now.”

  “Goodbye, Miss Roberts.”

  Mrs. Stadding was still in the kitchen, but she had finished her tea and cleaned away the traces of her tears.

  “I made you another cup,” she said. “Yours looked cold and horrid.”

  The bell rang, a single, longer burst.

  “That’s for me to go and give him a hand with…you know. He can’t manage on his own any more. I’m afraid it takes a while, but please stay as long as you want and let yourself out if you’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll just have my tea and then I’ll be off, thank you. I told the driver half an hour, and it’s past that already.”

  “In that case…well, goodbye, Miss Roberts.”

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Stadding. And I do hope things go better for you soon.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  RACHEL

  1

  A voice that has no moisture and no breath

  Breathless months may summon.

  Rachel couldn’t remember how she knew the lines, or where they came from, but they sidled often into her mind these days as she struggled with her increasingly erratic command of speech. Today was in fact one of her better days, when she seemed able to put several words together at times and without huge effort. Dilys had returned late yesterday afternoon with the tape, and she had listened twice to the brief message, and had then lain and thought, eaten her supper, watched TV, slept well, and woken full of the excitement of her planned day. It was the excitement, the urgency to get the thing finished at last, that supplied the energies needed for speech.

  First, before she started the hunt, the tape again, the two voices from the speaker beside her on the pillow. She had expected Simon to erase her question by recording his answer over it, but he hadn’t.

  So first, the moistureless, breathless whisper, her own ancient ghost.

  “Simon, this is Rachel Matson…For old time’s sake…I must know…Before I die…Did Jocelyn kill your father?”

  Then the more recent ghost, the weary mutter from the new-filled grave.

  “I am sorry, Rachel. Memories of Forde Place are among the few sad pleasures I have left to me. I too am dying, and wish it were over. I made Uncle Jocelyn an explicit promise, by which I still feel bound, that I would not answer your question. All I can tell you is that none of the participants would have regarded the event as being, in essence, shameful or iniquitous.”

  That was all, apart from what might have been a sigh.

  She blinked her eyelids twice to signal that she had finished.

  The Walkman gave an unfamiliar shape to the blur of Dilys’s head as she bent over the bed to switch the machine off and take it away.

  “There now, dearie. All done, and I’ll take this thing off so I can hear you again. Just leave it on the table, shall I, for next time?”

  “No. Wipe it…please. Then albums. Life…’Thirty-one…to ‘Fifty-eight.”

  Dilys made two trips for the nine volumes she had asked for. There were fifteen in all, Rachel’s own deliberately composed autobiography, wordless apart from the brief captions, names, places, dates. She had made the decision to put it together on the train back from London after seeing Dr. Lefanu and persuading him to tell her without palliation the likely course of her disease. He had given her a maximum of four years before she became imprisoned in the total physical dependence she now endured. She had by willpower wrung almost five from the failing carcase, starting the day after her return by getting Farrow and Milligan in from the garden to fetch box after box of stored film down from the attic and stack them in her dining room, once the night nursery, now Dilys’s sitting room. For the last three volumes she had no longer been able to work the controls of the enlarger, or to manipulate the prints through the trays, so had hired students, training them to do the job to her satisfaction. Thus the captions to those last volumes were written in a variety of strange young hands. It had been an early exercise in the art of controlling her world from inside a body that couldn’t itself be controlled.

  Some sections had already been partly composed, the equivalent of diary extracts quoted in a written autobiography, but even here she had not always left the original intact, but had sometimes altered enlargements or interpolated images that seemed to her to adjust a perspective in the l
ight of later understandings.

  Begun as a task to see her through the dispiriting process of dying, it had become a wholly absorbing and rewarding occupation, worth doing—no, demanding to be done—for its own sake, a summation of a life and of a way of seeing; like a serious novel, though it could never find a publisher, indeed would never have more than one reader, herself, with anything like a proper comprehension of its meanings, and not many others. Still, fully worth doing for its own sake.

  So she had never expected to use it for any practical purpose, as she was now about to do in order to track Fish Stadding through its pages, and study him in the light of what she found there, and thus perhaps, at last, understand him.

  The volumes Dilys had brought opened with one of the “diary” passages, composed immediately after her return from India, newly engaged to Jocelyn. She had looked through it at least yearly since then—if you are the only reader of your book, then it’s up to you to see that it is actually read now and again—and she still found it satisfyingly remarkable that, though some of the individual compositions left much to be desired, she should have been able, so early in her career, to construct a detached and shaped account of the unbelievable event.

  The quay at Karachi. The ship and gangplanks providing a grey-white, sharply angled background. A porter, naked to the waist, staggering on camera under the load of an enormous bale. Leila Valance sitting on a pile of trunks and suitcases and looking straight at the lens. Dear Leila, best friend since earliest school days. In the light of Dilys’s report on her visit to the Staddings, Rachel gazed at the image with a sort of bewilderment. She had so long been used to the obvious paradox about Leila, the way in which the looks belied the character. And not only the looks, but movements and postures, all the physical manners—as here, with the glossy, jet black, shoulder-length hair, the almost pearl-pale face, the big, luminous, slightly pop eyes, the luxuriantly languid pose—made people say “very Russian” or something of the kind, implying intellectual, alien, affected, erratic, absurdly emotional and altogether un-English. Not a bit of it. As a close friend Rachel had known her as down-to-earth ordinary, not specially bright but shrewd in her way, loyal and expecting similar loyalty from others, and extraordinarily determined, sometimes to a point beyond pigheadedness. Even the abrupt and, to Rachel, desperately painful shattering of their friendship had seemed of a piece with this reading of her character. Leila’s loyalty lay with her husband, overriding all other loyalties, to the extent of refusing to believe that he had in fact utterly betrayed her, and that there wasn’t some other explanation for what seemed to have happened. Rachel, though deeply hurt and grieved, had to some extent sympathised. She too, after all, had been almost equally betrayed, and had remained loyal. What if Jocelyn, having done what he’d done and been found out, had then disappeared? Could she have brought herself to believe that he had actually run away? Surely not.