Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  But now, gazing at the picture of Leila on the quayside, she wondered. Had she been wrong about her all along? Or had Leila’s inward self, over the years of useless hope, gradually grown to conform to what was suggested by her looks? “Very Russian” it sounded, that to Rachel shocking business of snipping the images of her enemies out of all the photographs she kept on display.

  Not yet. That all came later. Back to 1931.

  Leila and Rachel had come to India with “the fishing fleet,” though unlike most of the other young women on the expedition Rachel had had no intention of finding a husband, while Leila, who with her striking looks and fair-sized fortune could have hooked almost any fish she chose, in any seas, had one particular catch in mind, who merely happened to be in India.

  Rachel was there to keep her company and take photographs, Leila paying her passage. For propriety they had attached themselves to a Mrs. Splingford, not one of the regular semi-professional chaperones, but polo mad, and therefore going to Meerut, which was where Leila’s fish was to be found. And, as it turned out, Lieutenant Jocelyn Matson. That was why the porter was part of the image. His inscrutable burden portended that future.

  “Turn…Stop.”

  Fish.

  For at least the hundredth time in her life Rachel felt a pulse, a glow of satisfaction at the complexity hidden in the apparently redundant caption.

  “My, what a monster!” said Dilys. “Not that I’d fancy eating it, mind you.”

  Two market porters faced the camera at a right angle, so that their burden was displayed. Turbans and loincloths, wiry emaciated torsos, looks of baffled impassivity, what could the memsahib want with such a creature? The pole they bore on their shoulders pierced its gills, bowing beneath its weight. Its tail brushed the ground. The individual scales were half a handsbreadth across, the shiny bulging eye yet larger. Leila, in the centre of the picture, had her back to the camera, but her whole stance, the stilled movement of recoil, the raised, spread hands—surrender or rejection—expressed her reaction to the proffered gift, expressed even, Rachel believed (though aware it would have taken improbable perceptiveness on the part of a stranger to read into the image what her long friendship inevitably told her), Leila’s simple-minded uncertainty how to take it. Pure joke? A way of moving the courtship on a stage by letting her realise that the reason for her coming to Meerut was common knowledge? A superficially amusing but actually rather unpleasant way of telling her that the metaphorical fish she had come to catch didn’t intend to rise? Beyond her, framing the tableau on the right, stood the watching donor, Lieutenant Gregory Stadding, to his intimates henceforth and forever “Fish.”

  They’d gone, the four of them, to the market, ostensibly so that Leila could look for trinkets and Rachel for subjects for her lens; in actuality to be together, and apart from the other British. Mr. Stadding had disappeared without explanation, returning a few minutes later to confront Leila with an elaborately courtly salute.

  “I understand you came to Meerut for a fish, Miss Valance,” he had said, and moved aside. The shutter had clicked about two seconds later.

  Rachel’s eyes searched the figure. It was as if her mind manipulated invisible fingers to adjust to its finest focus the lens through which she captured the world. This was her first clear picture of him, a decidedly handsome young man, slight and elegant, his features, though less exotic than Leila’s, having the same suggestion of an un-English sensibility, an intensity of feeling, in his case salted with wryness and irony. Superficially they seemed an obvious match. She already adored him. He behaved as if attracted to her, but so did almost every other man she encountered, and Rachel had almost at once become aware of his far greater intelligence and more complex personality…

  “Do you think there’s any chance they’ll understand each other, Mr. Matson?”

  “I don’t know it matters. People talk about understanding other people, but what do they mean? You can’t look inside. It’s just guess-work. And in any case you’d have to go a long way before you met anyone, man or woman, who got near understanding Greg Stadding. I’ll tell you this though, and you can pass it on to Miss Valance if you want—he isn’t a skirt-chaser, as far as I know. And given the chance he’d throw up the army and go home, but to do that he’ll need either a goodish job or a wife with money of her own. He’s not going to live in a cottage and raise chickens.”

  “What about you, Mr. Matson? I don’t see you raising chickens either.”

  “Oh, I’d make a go of it if I had to. But soldiering suits me, and I imagine I’ll stick with it until my old man keels over and I have to go home and look after things.”

  She had let the focus blur. Steadfastly she readjusted the lens and gazed. No, not a hint, not in the picture. In Jocelyn’s words, possibly.

  “Turn…Stop.”

  The Student Prince, put on by the officers at the end of the fortnight with the female parts transposed for tenor voices. The dress rehearsal. Lieutenant Stadding smoking in the wings while he waited to go on as Kathie, wearing not the standard fräulein frills but the uniform of a Lyons tea-room waitress, lace cap and white apron, black frock and stockings—the skirt not quite allowing a glimpse of the knees—and high heels, built to male size by a cobbler in the market. To Leila’s distress he had shaved his moustache. The calves were a bit muscular, but that apart…

  “Oh, it’s a man!…Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes? Not a skirt-chaser, confident in women’s clothing…No, that was hindsight.

  “Turn.”

  A dozen images flipped past. Rachel could have closed her eyes and described any detail in any of them—the polo, a boating picnic, sunset over one of the listless canals, unpeopled except for two striplings working a bucket lift to carry water by those countless thimblefuls up to their father’s fields—but she and Jocelyn had walked by the sluggish levels all afternoon (Sunday, and so no polo) and talked for the first time seriously about themselves, without reticence or pretence, revealing and discovering…

  “Stop.”

  The four portraits. She had used delayed exposure for her own, and developed them in her hotel room so that each should keep a picture of their lover when they parted.

  “Why, that’s you! What do you mean telling me you weren’t ever that pretty? I tell you I wouldn’t have minded looking half so good. You’re just putting yourself down, compared to your friend. She was a stunner, mind you…”

  Jocelyn and Rachel, Leila and Fish. When the album was closed the couples lay mouth to mouth. The portrait of Leila wasn’t particularly striking, compared to others Rachel had taken, but the one of Fish was excellent. Clean-shaven, his mouth was fully visible. He had chosen not to smile, but this had the effect of bringing to the surface his odd, ambivalent humour—“He’s serious about not being serious,” Leila had once explained—and a certain loneliness, or rather aloneness, a state chosen rather than endured. He was such good company that you didn’t normally notice that side of him. Rachel thought it one of the best portraits she had ever done, but though Leila liked to cram all available surfaces of her house with framed photographs of her family, mostly snapshots or banal studio portraits, this had never been among them. “I don’t like him without his moustache,” she’d said when Rachel had asked about it.

  “That’s all. Thank you. Next one. Please.”

  The weddings. Rachel had begged off being the sole adult bridesmaid alongside a flock of Leila’s little cousins, all of them with the fascinating Valance style. She had gone alone and mostly stalked faces and poses round the sunlit lawns, spending an amusing half hour with the official photographer, a wizened little Scot, a fanatic about his craft, using a superb old full-plate for his work but well up to date with all the latest gadgets and delighted to find somebody else who cared. There were, of course, the standard wedding shots, the couple under the church porch, cutting the cake, getting into the open Lagonda (Leila’s gift to Fish) under a blizzard of rose petals—and th
ere were others, more peripheral.

  “Stop.”

  Fish with one of the male guests by an ornamental pond and dribbling fountain. Grey tail suits, wing collars, toppers on the chairs beside them. Fish was Fish, lissom, amused, somehow both tense and lounging; the other man—Lord Something, Rachel seemed to remember—though no taller, must have been twice Fish’s weight, stocky rather than stout, with a snub-nosed, shrewd, bucolic air. He was smoking an aggressively large cigar.

  “Why, that must be Mr. Stadding’s…father I suppose. Isn’t there a likeness! Funny I didn’t see it in the other ones.”

  “Yes. Do they…know…each other?”

  “I’d say they do. He’s kind of teasing the other one, the fellow with the cigar, and he’s making out he’s hoity-toity about it, but really he’s enjoying it no end.”

  “Flirting?”

  “Well, if your friend had been a woman now…Is that what you’re asking me? Well, now. Not to say yes, that’s what they’re up to, but could be there’s something between them…or could be there isn’t, not yet, but they’re getting interested. Thinking about it, if you know what I mean…”

  Yes, perhaps, thinking about it. Rachel remembered deciding to use the image mainly because she’d liked it. The balance of shapes was pleasing, the moss-streaked fountain seemed to have an odd menace in the sunlight, the picture of Lord Something was a speaking study of a particular type of man, and the one of Fish was, simply, much better of him than any of the ones with Leila. Rachel hadn’t asked herself why, certainly not when she’d looked with satisfaction at the first enlargement, not even when she’d reused it for the Life. Now, though, the reason seemed manifest. The picture with Lord Something spoke of a truth, while those with Leila spoke of, at best, a skilful act, a pretence.

  She let Dilys leaf on to her own wedding.

  “Why, it’s just snapshots, like I used to take with my little Brownie.”

  “Yes. Pocket camera.”

  In the last of her twice-weekly letters to Jocelyn, Rachel had told him, trying to make her own disappointment sound merely comic, that her parents had absolutely refused to let her ruin the expensive white wedding that they had scraped to pay for by carrying “that hideous black object” around with her everywhere. The letter had reached him the day before he sailed. He had read behind the comedy and wired to a school friend in the Washington embassy. The friend had telephoned around and found in Bloomingdale’s, in New York, a white pocket camera, a ladies’ accessory that happened to take snaps, for use by starlets and such. It had arrived by way of the diplomatic bag with a day to spare. Pure Jocelyn—the perceived need, the resourcefulness, the contacts. The inadequate images that the trinket produced were worth their pages, for that reason alone.

  As a result, Rachel now realised she had never looked at them with anything like the attention that she would have given to “serious” photographs, not even while she was so painstakingly compiling the Life. They were there for what they were, not for what they showed. She was certain there was one of Fish only because she could remember the difficulty of taking it in the first place. Yes, there, wolfing a canapé.

  “Glass, please.”

  “Drinkie first, dearie?…There. Better now? Which one did you want to look at? Oh, this one, I suppose, because it’s your friend again. You tell me when I’ve got it right.”

  “Higher…Left…Too far…Stop…Closer…Stop.”

  The prints were postcard size, the largest Rachel had been able to make without the images from the coarse little lens dissolving into their individual grains. That now happened under the magnifying glass. She could just make out the finger and thumb of the left hand, a pale something between them piled with a darker mound. Rachel was fairly sure what it must be, though she was not the sort of bride who could remember, sixty years after the event, the exact list of catered snacks handed round at her wedding reception.

  “No good…You try…What’s he…eating?…What’s on…other chair?”

  “Now, dearie, don’t try and talk too much. We’ve all the time in the world, haven’t we? Let me see…Perhaps if I take it to the window…That’s better…Well, it’s one of those little cocktaily things, isn’t it? What’s that black stuff called? Caviare? It might be that…Isn’t that just a serviette on the chair? Oh, no, there’s something under it—it might be a bit of a plate…And doesn’t he look pleased with himself?”

  Somewhere at the base of her neck Rachel felt a curious sensation, not itself a tingle, but a blocked impulse to send such a tingle down her spine and along her limbs, to cause the skin to crawl and the body shiver with pure fulfilment, satisfaction at the equation solved, the image perfect on the print, the chaser backed on a hunch nosing home at ridiculous odds. The caviare.

  Time and again in his whining old age Rachel’s father had reverted to the caviare.

  “Want you to meet my daughter, Rachel. Married Jocelyn Matson. What a wedding that was! Best party I’ve ever been to, though I say it myself. Champagne and caviare.”

  “You oughtn’t to be keeping me in a hole like this, Rachel. You’re my daughter, aren’t you? Remember what I stumped up for your wedding? Do you know what caviare costs?”

  By the end he would bring it up four or five times a visit.

  It had been a promise since childhood, at that time easily within his means. But his spice business was one of the early victims of the Depression, when it became an absurdity—except that his hard won status as an English gentleman mattered more than anything else, and a gentleman keeps his promises, whatever the cost.

  So there had been champagne, as cheap as could be found, and four plates of little round biscuits spread as thinly as the caviare would cover.

  “I’ll tell Fish to lay off or he’ll wolf the lot,” Leila had said. “He’d live on the stuff if we could afford it.”

  Rachel had no doubt that the order had been given. For twelve years they had been telling each other their private miseries, and Leila knew from many visits the emotional discomforts of Rachel’s home. She would certainly have understood how much it mattered that Rachel’s father shouldn’t be given such leverage to use and reuse.

  And yet Fish had taken one of the four plates, carried it, with the two chairs, to a corner of the rose garden well away from the marquee, and hidden it under the napkin. Rachel had spotted him through the rose trellis and photographed him in the act of eating one of the biscuits piled with the scrapings of several others, he unaware of her presence, she of the apparently trivial betrayal. The lens had only three focal settings. The gap in the screening roses was too high for her to be able to hold the camera at waist level and peer down through the viewfinder. She had had to stand sideways on, unable to see him directly, and wait for the moment when the minuscule image looked somehow expressive of him.

  Which it did. As with the other image, with Lord Something, his essential nature seemed to speak from the page, a deep satisfaction with himself, independent of anyone else in the world. Dilys had it exactly right. It was himself he was pleased with. The pleasure lay only superficially in the taste and texture of the caviare. (It had, apparently, been of fair quality—Rachel’s father still had connections in the trade.) The deeper pleasure lay in his own wishes prevailing over those of anyone else, no matter who.

  Since his disappearance, and his leaving Leila so desperately in the lurch, Rachel had come to accept that that was indeed his true nature. But while he had still been there, coming in and out of their lives, such easy company, so useful in odd little ways, so well liked by the children, so continuingly doted on by Leila, it had seemed to be merely the occasional carelessness and thoughtlessness, by-products of an easygoing nature, that had caused the unpredictable let-downs. Jocelyn, a very perceptive judge of men (less so, in Rachel’s view, of women), had accepted him fully. Before their marriages they had been no more than regimental colleagues, and would probably not have become friends but for Rachel and Leila’s need of each other; even then for a w
hile their friendship couldn’t have been called close.

  Small chance of that, with Rachel joining Jocelyn in India, and all three children being born out there, and no plans to return permanently to England until the eldest boy, if any, needed to go to prep school. The war had intervened when Dick was only three.

  So in the next three albums the only images of Fish had been captured during the Staddings’ trip to India in the first year after the marriages, and twice during home leaves, when the Matsons had stayed for a week with Leila and Fish, and a return visit had been paid to Forde Place as guests of Jocelyn’s parents. It was there that Rachel had first recorded the bond between Anne and Simon, two three-year-olds, hand in hand, lurking crouched behind a topiary box obelisk, poised to spring out when Fish, already visible on the right of the picture, came strolling towards the ambush, obviously aware of it but happy to play and overplay his role.

  Again Rachel willed all her concentration into focus on the image. No, you wouldn’t have guessed. However closely you’d watched him then, you wouldn’t have guessed. For one thing, how could you suspect anyone whom children liked so readily? He was wonderful with them, full of jokes that stretched but didn’t exceed their understanding, and so were especially delightful to them; inventive of amusements for them to learn and then play on their own; patient with their bad moods—able indeed to coax a tot out of a tantrum faster than anyone Rachel had ever known, and without conceding and inch over the cause of the uproar.