Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

So now it’s all come out and Mrs. Pilcher says his memory’s not too good so perhaps he’d just forgotten about them, but now he’s decided that he’d better get them off his conscience by bringing them back. Don’t you think that’s what’s happened, Ma?”

“Possibly,” whispered Rachel. This was one of her no-saliva days. She couldn’t have argued, even if she had wished to.

“So if that’s what’s going on,” said Flora, “wouldn’t it be easier all round if I just popped down to Hastings and saw Sergeant Fred and told him all was forgiven and forgotten and he could give me the pistols to bring back to you. I’ll be going to London anyway for the Mc-Nulty bash—think of those two staying married for fifty years! Like one of those wars people used to have which just went on and on till that’s all anyone knows about them—do you have the faintest notion what the Thirty Years War was about?—instead of Mrs. Pilcher having to bring the old boy all the way up here. You do agree, don’t you?”

“Won’t know who you are.”

“But I’ll tell him, Ma. I’ll get Mrs. Pilcher to come too. And I’m sorry, Ma, but if you get him all this way and he sees you like this, perhaps he won’t… I mean, when he used to know you…”

“Knows the house. Knows pistol belongs here.”

“But honestly, Ma…”

“Drink.”

“I’m sorry. Try not to talk. Here you are, then. Ready?”

The effort at speech had exacerbated the drought in Rachel’s mouth to a pitch beyond discomfort, not exactly pain, but still with the true ferocity of pain. And now Flora, overconfident in the convenience of the invalid cup, tried to pour too fast. Rachel forced her lips to reject the spout just in time to stop herself choking, a hideous experience, convulsing the insensate body while the mind endured, helpless and aware of the ease with which one could suffocate on one’s own vomit. Taken by surprise, Flora poured a generous slop of barley water over Rachel’s chest.

“Oh, sorry, Ma.”

She put the cup down and mopped with a towel at the spillage, using a vigorous rubbing motion, as if drying a spaniel. Rachel’s head joggled helplessly to and fro. The second attempt was more successful.

“Better? No, don’t try to talk, Ma.”

“Ask her to bring Sergeant Fred.”

“Oh, but, Ma…”

“No. Listen. Knows what he wants. Doesn’t matter how…”

Rachel willed the obscenity out.

“…gaga he is. He knows.”

Flora shrugged. Most people would have described her as strong-willed. She had that manner and usually got away with it. They would also, probably, have thought Rachel diffident, but even now both still accepted, as they always had, that it would be Rachel who had her way.

She must have smiled without deliberately causing her lips to move (unusual these days) because Flora responded with a laugh. Rachel was aware of feeling peculiarly close to her daughter, the closeness of affection and habit, but not, alas, what she understood by love. Not for the first time she wondered whether Flora had any conscious understanding of how she had been cheated, almost from the beginning. She had been given warmth, interest, help and comfort when needed, all unstinted. But true, deep love from her parents—the real things, irreplaceable, no other product would do—love such as Jocelyn had felt for Anne and Rachel for Dick—no. Somehow Rachel kept her smile in place, though now weeping inwardly and raging that her stupid arms couldn’t stir, couldn’t even ache with the physical impulse to stir, reach out, embrace this sixty-four-year-old woman and at last start to atone for all those years of love withheld.

“Darling,” she whispered. “I haven’t—”

She stopped herself in time and closed her eyes. Loved you enough , she had been going to say, but Flora wouldn’t have understood, would have protested, distressed. It was too late to explain now, much too late.

“That’s right, Ma. You have a good rest, and I’ll come up later and tell you what the woman says.”

Rachel felt the brush of a kiss on her forehead, heard the movement of door handle and door, and then Flora’s rattling syllables receding along the corridor as she moved towards Dilys’s sitting room, already explaining herself. Rachel couldn’t distinguish the words, and Dilys’s softer answers from inside the room, but amid the diversions the gist was plain from the intonation: Mrs. Pilcher’s call; Sergeant Fred—who he was and why he mattered; his wish to visit Rachel; Rachel’s wish to see him; half-admiring exasperation at the determination of these two old things to meet again; passing mention of the accident with the barley water; and so on. Then both voices moving back towards Rachel’s door, the actual words becoming audible as the door opened.

“…could ask Pat to come and give you a hand for the night, I suppose.”

“I think I can manage, Mrs. Thomas, really I do. It doesn’t sound like the old man’s going to be a lot of trouble.”

“Well, let’s just see…”

(Flora now moving away and speaking over her shoulder.)

“…and as soon as I know which day it’ll be I’ll check with Pat whether she’ll be free.”

The door closed. Rachel heard Dilys sigh.

“Now then, dearie, we’ve been at it again, wearing ourselves out chatting, Mrs. Thomas says. You’re each as bad as the other, I’m beginning to think. And she spilt your drinkie over you too, she says. Let’s have a look. Dearie me, we’re all sticky, like a kid who’s been at the treacle tin. I don’t know. Looks like I’ll have to give you your bath all over again. And a clean nightie… We’re all right, aren’t we, dearie? We didn’t choke or anything?“

“Nearly.”

“Well, a miss is as good as a mile, I always say. She’s a very good soul, Mrs. Thomas, and I’d be the last to deny it, but I’ll go down on my knees and thank my creator that I didn’t have the training of her as a nurse.”

Rachel would have laughed aloud, had the mechanism still existed. Years ago, on a nanny’s afternoon out, she had watched Flora change one of the children’s nappies, talking over her shoulder as she did so, and finishing with a bewildered child wearing a vast but unreliable package of terry cloth wrapped loosely round its midriff.

Still with closed eyes she lay, but for once didn’t listen to Dilys chattering away as she worked. She was aware of being in a strange state. Normally, despite the unresponsiveness of her body, not a minute went by, except in dreams, when she wasn’t fully conscious of its prisoning reality. This morning there seemed to be a looseness in the connection. She could feel, in the sense that the signals came from the inert limbs, but she was unable to interpret the signals. By the movement of her head she could tell that her torso had been gently lifted so that the sodden nightie could be eased free, but after that, for a while, the eerie disembodiment seemed so complete that if she had known the password she could have slid out of this place, out of this time, out of the inert flesh, away…

No. She mustn’t do that yet. There was work to be done, tidying and sorting, before she could allow herself to leave. She opened her eyes and found her vision blocked by blurred yellow cloud-stuff, which she discovered to be a clean nightie which had draped itself in front of her as her raised left arm was fed into the sleeve. Then, gently, she was rolled to one side to let the nightie be eased beneath her, rolled back to have her right arm inserted, before the garment was fastened down the front and the bedclothes drawn up.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“It’s a pleasure,” said Dilys. “And now, what’ll we do with ourselves? Listen to our book for a bit?”