Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

This was true, and very much Tabby’s style. Make her live in a pigsty, Jocelyn had once said, and she’d show you proudly over it and tell you that the man who came to change her straw was a real sweetie. But Rachel had found such willing acceptance of mental death impossible to bear, and had, there and then, made her vow not to let it happen to her. Better the dreariness of endless real hours than any escape into fantasy. There was no honour in fantasy, no respect, no decency, none at all.

So now she chose one busy nest, watched a bird depart and counted the seconds until its return. Three hundred and seven. Call it five minutes. Had it been searching for the precise twig? Would it now locate it in a preselected position? Not this time. Several trials at different angles…but then, ah, back to a lot of pokings and thrashings and flappings which looked like mere frenzy, looked indeed certain to unsettle the whole structure.

The bird’s partner, meanwhile, watched tolerantly from a nearby branch. One needed to stay by the nest the whole time, because if both left, neighbours would nip in and steal material.

The thrashings must have been purposeful, because when the bird desisted the partner hopped up, gave a perfunctory tweak to something, and then both birds cawed vigorously for a while before the nest-builder flew off.

As it did so the door opened and Dilys backed in, fuzzy already as she entered and no more than a talking cloud by the time she reached the bed.

“Here’s our breakfast then, dearie. Nice scrambled eggs she’s done us. That’ll put roses in our cheeks. Still comfortable, are we?”

Code, answered by Rachel with a brief smile, also code, meaning no, she didn’t believe her pad needed changing yet. It was probably damp already, but it would have to become really sopping before it began to discomfort her.

“There’s a good girl,” said Dilys, putting the tray down. “I’ll just get the coffee going, shall I?”

She crossed the room and returned to a human shape. The sturdy blue pillar was her uniform, the silvery blob was the back of her head, and the white fuzz was her cap. Rachel listened with satisfaction to the sounds of her folding the filter and measuring grounds and water into the coffee maker. She came back, cranked the top section of the bed to a steeper angle, folded the duvet aside, slid her arms under Rachel’s shoulders and thighs and effortlessly eased her into a half-sitting position, wedging her into place with bolsters and pillows. She handled the wasted and useless body with gentleness and dexterity, as if it had been fully sensate.

It had at first appalled, but now after two months merely amused Rachel that somebody so skilled in the essentials of her craft should be so inept in how she spoke of them—that awful “we” and the baby talk, and the coyness about physical functions. Dilys dealt with diarrhoea or a suppurating sore in the most matter-of-fact manner, but couldn’t bring herself to name them. Jocelyn would have detested her for that, and manifested his dislike in exaggerated politeness. But already Rachel, though never given to instant friendships, liked her better than any of the other nurses who had cared for her in her helplessness. Nursing skills apart, there was not simply a human warmth about Dilys, there was a strong sense that she in her turn liked and respected the real person inside the stupid inert carcase, and thought of her not as the painful leftover of a life, but as a fully human citizen, with human rights and responsibilities and needs. She was supposed to have weekends off, when Pat, the retired midwife in the village, took over; but when on only her third weekend Pat had had the flu, Dilys had stayed on not just willingly but with something like eagerness. Rachel guessed she would rather be nursing.

“Open wide,” she said. “There’s a good girl. Not too hot for us? Sure?”

Dutifully Rachel masticated, swallowed and opened her mouth for more. The eggy pap was in fact tepid, fluffy with milk, undersalted and overcooked, everything that scrambled eggs ought not to be, but there was no point in complaining to Dilys. Dilys had no leverage in the kitchen. She was employed by the Trust, and her loyalty was to Rachel. Cooks were Flora’s concern. This one was new, and would be busy establishing her own rights and territories. She might well react to any complaint from Dilys by sending up even worse meals.

Still, a fuss must be made. It wasn’t just that taste was the only physical pleasure remaining, but the making of a successful fuss, the achieving of a result, would be good for morale, a foray from the citadel to prove that Mind could still accomplish something beyond those walls. The coffee maker had been such a victory, and so had the rejection of the microwave. Again, it wasn’t only that it was not Dilys’s job to prepare meals. It was that if they came up from the kitchen all ready for the microwave, though they would then at least be hot the machine would have no effect on texture or flavour. No, this cook must be made to provide real scrambled eggs.

Rachel ate as much as she could bear to, then a few fingers of toast and marmalade, the toast from a presliced loaf, a disgrace to the household, but the marmalade homemade by Dora Willmott-Wills and brought by her on her last visit. Finally, redeeming everything, hot, strong Java coffee with a little cream and sugar. Incense in the cathedral.

“Bliss,” she whispered as Dilys lifted the cup clear.

“There was a shop in Bangor used to smell this way when you walked past,” said Dilys, giving Rachel another sip. “Before the war it would’ve been of course. They had this machine in the window turning the beans over and over, roasting them. Don’t know when I last saw one of those.”

“How old?” said Rachel.

“Me? Nineteen thirty-three I was born, so I couldn’t’ve been more than five or maybe six. Funny how clear you remember some things and others are all gone. I don’t remember my dad at all from those days, not till he was back from the war and we’d got to look after him. I’d’ve been twelve or more by then, of course. He’d been a Jap POW, dad, and he was never right after. Mrs. Thomas was telling me it was the same with her dad, being a POW, I mean.”

“Yes.”

The subject had not come up before in their one-sided conversations. Rachel wouldn’t herself have mentioned it, and most of Dilys’s talk was discreet trivia about patients and families she had worked for.

“Looks like he came through it better than my dad,” said Dilys. “Judging by the picture of him.”

Rachel made a questioning murmur, misunderstood by Dilys.

“That one on the bureau, I’m talking about,” she said. “You must’ve took it yourself. Show you, shall I?”

She went to the other end of the room, returned and slid Rachel’s spectacles into place. The room unblurred. Dilys acquired a face, round, pallid, with soft brown eyes, a rather spread nose and a deep-dimpled chin. Rachel glanced at the photograph unnecessarily, so well did she know it. It had stood on her worktable or desk for almost fifty years.

It was a snapshot only, but as characteristic of Jocelyn as anything that she had ever persuaded him to pose for. Nineteen forty-eight, and the Rover almost new. He’d been adjusting the timing—no garage could tune a car to his satisfaction. She’d stalked him, called when she was set. He’d straightened and turned, allowing her to catch him before he’d realised what she was up to. She could read his expression perfectly—pride in his machine, confidence in what he’d been doing, mild irritation at the interruption—Jocelyn to the life. To the loved life.

“Big man,” she whispered. “When he came back, seven stone ten.”

“My dad too, he was a skeleton all right, and like I say he never got it back, not really. Looks like Colonel Matson did a bit better for himself.”