Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  He had been just as good with Jocelyn’s parents. They were well mannered with Rachel, but couldn’t help her perceiving that they thought her nothing like good enough for Jocelyn; and not unreasonably they detested her father. Unable to express their feelings openly, they had displaced them into highly exacting rules about the behaviour of the grandchildren, incomprehensible to toddlers used to the tolerance of a doting ayah. It had been a considerable concession that Leila and Fish could bring two further brats for their first visit. By the end of it not only had the rules been greatly relaxed, but Rachel’s own status and worth seemed to have improved, and this had been Fish’s achievement as much as her own.

  Before their ’37 leave her mother-in-law had written, unasked, to say that the Staddings would be welcome for as long as they wished to stay.

  Then the volumes spanning the immense hole of the war, and the two more years before she could bear to photograph Jocelyn again—or, naturally, any of the other Cambi veterans.

  “Oh, that’s the one you’ve got on the desk.”

  Jocelyn and the Rover. Not in fact the first picture she’d taken of him since his recovery, but it was here in the Life because it was the first that seemed to her to carry the full charge of her love for him, and of her relief that he was himself again…And the later knowledge that he wasn’t? Should that have been there, to eyes unblinded by affection? How should she know, even now, with the blindness undiminished?

  The page turned. Ah.

  Jocelyn and Fish. Another instance of the trick that still worked, that could still, despite repetition, in some sense surprise—even herself, though she had contrived it by placing it immediately next. Again there was a car with its bonnet gaping, again Jocelyn was poised beside it, caught in the action of turning towards the camera at her call. The echo was so strong that everything else in the picture seemed for an instant wrong—wrong setting, the stable yard; wrong car, the Staddings’ Bentley; an intruder, Fish, smiling, his greeting to her. They had been there so that Jocelyn could make some minor engine adjustment—something Fish wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting for himself—but they must have finished with that because when Rachel had come into the yard they were simply talking.

  About what?

  That, though it could never be answered, was the central question, and the photographs were where they were to ask it. For the real trick was not the superficial one of the echo, but a deeper and darker artifice. She had, of course, been wholly unaware of it for long after she had taken the photograph. She had done so, no doubt, in the hope of capturing a sense of a deep intimacy born of comradeship through dreadful times, times expressed in Fish’s still slightly unwholesome look—he had come through less wasted than Jocelyn, but had recovered more slowly. That comradeship had seemed to Rachel the only good thing to come out of the ordeal, because it balanced her bond with Leila, making the husbands equal partners in the family friendship.

  But by the time she had composed the Life those friendships were gone, dissolved by death, and disappearance, and the residual acids of Fish’s treachery. The picture expressed a premonition of that change, a pivotal moment at which one kind of past began to become a different kind of future. Fish’s stance gave nothing away, but comparing the images Rachel believed she could perceive a difference in Jocelyn’s. In the one with the Rover it had expressed not just competence in the task, but assurance about the world and his own place in it. In the one with the Bentley there was a touch of uncertainty, of doubt of his own worth and need. Rachel had found it among the rough prints, having rejected it, presumably because when she’d first seen it it hadn’t seemed to her to present the “real” Jocelyn. The camera can deceive in that way. Sometimes it may picture a self which the subject would prefer not to display, but just as often the apparent self is an illusion. Looking through the roughs, Rachel must have thought the picture was of the latter kind. By the time she composed the Life she could see it was of the former.

  She let Dilys leaf on through the remaining volumes, the world acquiring its postwar pattern: the girls becoming women; Dick becoming yearly more and more like Jocelyn in appearance, and less in actuality; Jocelyn settling into his role in the county—the High Sheriff year, and so on—and the Staddings coming in and out of the story, once on a Greek cruise, but mostly on visits to Forde Place.

  Sometimes Fish had come with them, sometimes not, because he had been working. But he had often shown up on his own, using the house as his northern base. Before the war he had worked for a large insurance agency, but now he had his own business, specialising in the needs of the owners of country houses and estates, undercutting the big general agencies by insuring direct through Lloyds. Not much was said, but Rachel was well aware that Jocelyn was crucial to the success of the business, because Fish’s natural clients tended to be conservative in their ways, sticking with the insurers they had always used until the suggestion for a change was presented to them in a way that they felt comfortable with. Jocelyn’s introduction was the sort of thing such people trusted. Fish, in return, had taken on the chore of running the Cambi Road Association, though of course his secretary did all the work.

  There was nothing in any of the images, and nothing in Rachel’s own memory, to suggest that Fish had been in financial trouble. Certainly he had had his extravagances, but his business had seemed to be prospering and Leila, surely, had plenty of money. She had happily let him run her affairs since their marriage. The camera had caught the well-to-do, contented surface, but nothing of the underlying hollowness.

  What it had caught, if only for the eye of hindsight, was the curious, paradoxical relationship between the two men. There were not that many pictures of them together—Rachel was not the sort to pose her travelling companions on the ramp at Delos—but no one glancing at them as they happened by would have doubted that Jocelyn was the dominant one of the pair—not just for his greater size, but the stance of command, the self-assurance, keenness of look and definiteness of gesture, all so much more emphatic than Fish’s elusive, lounging, ironic personality. Jocelyn dealt seriously with the world. He had the energy and intelligence to achieve. Fish, potentially had them too, but made little use of them. It wasn’t that he lacked the will. He willed the negative.

  But now, for Rachel, the cumulative effect was different. Perhaps she had sensed something of it when she had originally compiled the albums, but at last she could see it clearly. Now the series of images seemed to her to portray something very like the history of a marriage, in which there is one busy and active partner, and a quieter one; but it is the quieter one who makes all the major choices, with which the other then copes. In this case the chooser had been Fish.

  Just before the end of the final album there was a picture of Jocelyn taken after his second stroke, in a wheelchair on the terrace in the October sun, seemingly content. Beside him stood the glass of champagne he was unable to lift to his lips. Rachel remembered willing herself to take the photograph, a record of continuing love, in sickness and in health. It had been Jocelyn’s sixty-fourth birthday.

  Last of all Tom Dawnay’s picture of Rachel herself, photographing the coffin as it descended into the grave, only the second time her own likeness appeared in any of these fifteen albums.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Enough.”

  “I should think so too! You must be quite worn out! My, though, it’s been interesting, looking at them all the way through like that. Quite a story they tell too—but I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “Thank you, Dilys.”

  “And now we’d better have a wee rest, hadn’t we? If I just get you all comfortable and settle you down.”

  “Please. Flora?”

  “Oh, she’ll be looking in this evening as usual. She’d have told us if she wasn’t.”

  Rachel caught the note of mild surprise and anxiety, and understood it. It wasn’t like her to ask that kind of question, to need reassurance. She relied on her own memory to know what had
been arranged. But it was important that Flora should come today, when speech was still minimally possible. There weren’t going to be many more such days. She could feel the change in herself, mental as well as physical, an acceptance that the time had now come to let go, to fight no more. Almost everything that needed to be done was done, and understood that needed to be understood. After Flora’s visit it would be over.

  “Curtains open or shut, dearie? Can’t see the rooks so well, can we, now that the leaves are coming?”

  “Shut.”

  “Right you are.”

  2

  Deliberately Rachel emptied her mind and waited while Dilys dealt with her, tidied and left. For some time after that she rested, suppressing thought and memory, waiting for the necessary energies to renew themselves. Then, calmly, for the last of many times, but with fresh hope, she thought the whole thing through.

  Most of it she had known for weeks, allocating each detail to its place, twisting it to and fro and finding out how it could best be fitted to the structure, as the rooks did when they brought another twig to their nests. Large pieces of the structure had seemed to acquire coherence, allowing them to be manipulated and joined to other such pieces. But the whole would never cohere, falling always into its two halves, the two betrayals, Jocelyn’s of their love, Fish’s of their friendship, with no connection between them beyond the coincidence of time.

  Perhaps she had been blind. Perhaps even before the event she should have seen. It wouldn’t have been easy. When she and Leila had been alone together they had talked still just as they used to, as openly, as trustingly. It had been natural for Rachel to tell Leila about her sorrow at Jocelyn’s waning physical interest in her, and Leila had told her in return that Fish was still sometimes wonderful when he was in the mood. On their Greek tour, indeed, it hadn’t needed a lot of perception to see that she, at least, was having that kind of a good time, though Fish had remained as unreadable as ever.

  The other cause of her blindness had been of her own making. It was as if she had all along been trying to build the nest on the wrong bough. To her the overwhelming event of that dreadful evening had never been her killing of the young man. He mattered to her not because of that, but because he had been the annunciating devil, informing her of her own betrayal. Though at the intellectual level she knew the horror of her crime, she was numb to it. If Jocelyn had said to her, “Yes, we must tell the police,”she would have accepted that as legally correct and morally justified, but she wouldn’t have felt that she had done anything she wasn’t compelled to. She would have told the court as much of the truth as she was able to, without at the same time telling the world of Jocelyn’s betrayal of her.

  Even now, just as it had first done in the numbness of the act, her whole emotional being resonated to the clapper-blow of revelation, drowning all other vibrations.

  Thus, though over the last three weeks she believed that she had again and again thought through every detail of the young man’s visit, that had not been the case. Much of what he had told her she had set aside as unimportant or untrue. He’d known Jocelyn for some while, she’d guessed, and had been given money by him. He must then have decided, or had it suggested to him, that there was more money to be earned by blackmail than by sex. Jocelyn—how could he have been so infatuated?—must have told him something about his home life—he’d known there were servants—so he had also realised that Jocelyn’s one truly vulnerable point was his relationship with Rachel. He had presumably purloined Jocelyn’s keys long enough to have copies made, and learning that Jocelyn was delayed in London had taken the chance to come to Forde Place, not intending to precipitate an immediate breakdown in the marriage but to show Jocelyn that he could do so if he chose. He had then misplayed his hand.

  That would do as an explanation. It became a structured element in the puzzle, which she took for granted and tried to locate in its entirety each time she attempted a solution.

  It fell to pieces only after Sergeant Fred’s visit—the picture of the young man at the cricket match, what Mrs. Pilcher had said, Sergeant Fred’s painful lying—with the realisation that the “he” who had told the young man about the servants, and produced the key, had been not Jocelyn but Fish.

  Jocelyn and Fish. Two separate boughs, but crossing so close that over the years they had actually grown together. Useless for Rachel to try to build her structure, the random twigs of memory and surmise that she had collected, on Jocelyn’s bough alone. Only at the point of intersection with Fish’s bough would it cohere and remain.

  The beginning was hidden, though Jocelyn had once told Rachel he’d been in a buggers’ house at Eton, using the phrase dismissively but without disgust, as if it had been an inevitable aspect of herding growing boys together. He had neither implied nor disowned having taken part himself, but if he had done so, it would have been a phase abandoned as soon as he moved on into a world with a saner distribution of genders.

  Then, in some respite from the horrors of captivity, Fish had, deliberately and for his own amusement, seduced him. That was a guess, but it fitted the structure. It was the same thing as stealing the caviare, the real satisfaction lying not in the physical pleasure but in shaping the world however Fish chose, despite the desires and duties of anyone else. Jocelyn would probably have told himself that this was only the same situation that he had known at Eton, a temporary imbalance, something that could be put aside when he returned to the sanity of peacetime.

  But he would have known in his heart that was not true. It was altogether different, because this time he had broken faith, and he had done so because Fish had discerned, released and revealed to him his “true” nature.

  Furthermore, though he may never have known this, his self-discovery on the Cambi Road hadn’t only been of his sexual nature. That was superficial and partial. If he’d been an out and out homo-sexual the pleasure in their marriage would never have been there in the first place. His nature, presumably, was bisexual, and if that had been all there was to it he should have been able to make love to Rachel as he had done before. Fish could do it, giving Leila pleasure or withholding it as he chose, and getting his own pleasure from the power to do so. But Fish wasn’t bothered about honour. What haunted Jocelyn as they lay together was the knowledge that he could no longer make love to Rachel in good faith.

  Oh, Christ, if only he could have brought himself to tell her!

  Once honour is broken it will not mend. All you can do, all Jocelyn did in the end, is to use your will to hold yourself as near as you can into the shape that honour would have dictated. The result, like a dubbed voice on a foreign film, is never exactly right, and every now and then it is betrayingly wrong.

  Sometime in the early ’fifties Fish had started his boys’ club, characteristically presenting it not as a public-spirited act but as a chore taken on to please a group of wealthy clients. He would have had secret amusement in telling so much more of the truth than he seemed to be doing, for the clients’ interest would have been less in the boys’ welfare than in their availability. And, being Fish, he might have got pleasure from the hidden power of pimping for the plutocracy.

  But how on earth had Jocelyn allowed himself to be drawn back in?

  Man of honour, however willed? Self-disgust, perhaps. No, not quite that. But say to yourself, “I have betrayed the person who is dearest in the world to me. How did I come to do this?” Then tell yourself, “Because it is my nature. That is what I am. It can’t be changed.” “Prove it.” “Very well, if I must.” Let there be an overwhelming reason for the broken faith, retested and renewed on visits to London, rather than the self-knowledge of honour needlessly lost forever. And let it not be an attraction towards a particular person, an intellectual and social equal, a long-term mistress as it were, who happened to be male. No, let the need be for nothing emotional or companionable. Let it be purely and explicitly physical, nothing to do with the inward self that still, in its way, loved Rachel more than anyone or anyth
ing in the world. Hence the rough trade, the young man.

  Well, perhaps.

  Fish, in the end, had run through Leila’s money and started to take his clients’. Questions had begun to be asked, and to clear himself in the emergency he had turned to the Cambi Road funds and then, because he’d needed to act in a hurry, been found out sooner than he’d planned for. Perhaps all along he’d intended to turn from pimping to blackmail—it was the obvious next step—but he wasn’t yet ready. The urgent need was to let Jocelyn understand what Fish’s exposure would cost him, so he’d delayed him in London and sent the young man to Forde Place on the earlier train. “Don’t tell her anything,” he’d have said. “All I want is for her to start asking questions when the old boy gets home. Here’s the key.” (Yes, the one that Jocelyn had niggled about having cut for him.) Perhaps, again, such a move had been part of the long-term plan, but in the rush to act there had not been time for full preparation and rehearsal.

  So the young man had got it wrong. Fatally.

  And so too had Fish. He had pushed Jocelyn to his sticking point: Rachel herself. It was not because she had killed the young man, though this, if he had learnt of it, would have given Fish a monstrous extra leverage for blackmail. It was that Fish had tried to involve Rachel in Jocelyn’s own loss of honour. One way or another, an end must now be made.

  The details were unknowable. What had Jocelyn said to Sergeant Fred and Voss? Surely he couldn’t have told them everything, but he had the young man’s body to explain as well. (Sergeant Fred had recognised him from the photograph, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he’d seen him alive.) That Rachel herself had killed him? No, for then Voss wouldn’t have said what he had to her in Parkhurst. But none of that would have been necessary. He could simply have said, “I am in trouble, and I need your help, I can’t give you reasons, so I must ask you to trust me. There is a dead man to be disposed of, and there is Major Stadding to be dealt with. The trouble I’m in is his deliberate doing.”