Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“No. Albums.”

“Oh, good, ever so interesting, I find them. Drinkie before you tell me? We’re a bit dry today, aren’t we?”

Typical of her attention, Rachel thought, that she could distinguish between one sere whisper and another. She sipped gratefully, then explained which volumes she wanted. Ostensibly she was looking for pictures that might interest Sergeant Fred, so that Dilys could mark them, ready for his visit. It would have been logical to begin with the early part of the war, before the regiment had sailed for Singapore. Sergeant Fred had barely yet become a friend then, but there were a few faces he might remember. Then there was a whole volume devoted to the Cambi Road Association, and there’d be pictures of the children at various ages. But instead of any of those Rachel chose the final one devoted to Jocelyn. Though the previous album had been less than half full, she had started a fresh one for the funeral.

The rector had been in the parish less than a month. Rachel had done no more than shake hands with him after his first service, until he had called to express his condolences over Jocelyn’s death, and discuss arrangements for the funeral. Rachel hadn’t taken to him. He had a soft but at the same time domineering manner, and though all he said was impeccably correct she detected no real feeling behind it. He had taken so long to answer her request that she’d thought he was going to refuse.

“Very well,” he had said at last. “I will say a few words by way of explanation before the service starts.”

“Oh, thank you. Honestly, I don’t think anyone is going to think it peculiar. They’re so used to me and my cameras.”

“That would not have been the problem, Mrs. Matson. You will find that I am not greatly influenced by what people think.”

And yet he’s lasted twenty-three years in the parish, never putting a foot wrong, but still not much liked by anyone. Sad.

“Ready?” said Dilys. “Oh, my goodness, it’s…Sorry, dearie, I didn’t mean to be rude, but…And you can’t have taken this one! That’s you, there, isn’t it?”

Impossible that she should have been able to recognise Rachel, standing at the foot of the open grave, all in black, her face hidden by not only the veil, and the shadow from the hideous black hat, but also by the bulk of the camera aimed down at the descending coffin.

“Tom Dawnay,” croaked Rachel. “Local paper. Old friend.”

So good a friend that he hadn’t submitted the picture for use in the Inquirer , who would certainly have printed it. Indeed, it might well have made the national press. It was an image of surreal force, even when stripped of the layers of personal meaning that it had for Rachel. On the left a dark slab, the backs of the mourners, corrugated with heads above and fringed with legs below. Then a strip of sunlit grass, with receding gravestones, then the single black column of the widow, rapt in her rite. The camera that had taken the picture was outside the rite, looking at it, but the camera in the window’s hands was integral, essential to its completeness. Rachel had almost never included photographs by anybody else in her albums, but she had put Tom’s here, at the start, because she felt it would resonate through the volume, so that only the most insensitive peruser wouldn’t sense, looking at the rest of the photographs, that particular presence, those particular emotions, there behind the viewfinder.

She grunted to tell Dilys to leaf on. Apart from that first picture the album was in chronological order: a line of neighbours, friends, cousins, crossing the graveyard towards the church, the picture taken with a wide-angle lens and the negative cropped to produce a frieze-like strip punctuated by verticals, black and grey, people and tombstones; Maxwell in his chauffeur’s uniform pulling Dinah Tremlett in her old Bath chair; the children lined up at the porch, Flora pregnant with Ferdie and on the edge of tears, Jack dapper at her elbow and properly solemn, Dick trying to look so and faking it, Anne…It was for the image of Anne that Rachel had included this otherwise banal funeral group. Physically she took after Rachel, almost pretty in a fine-boned but still slightly horsy fashion. She had been a lively, amenable child, but around the age of eleven had begun to withdraw, to conceal her pleasures and troubles, to seem to wish to become less part of the family. That was what made the picture of her so instantly shocking, the ferocity of dry-eyed grief that was still half rage, though it was almost two years now since the business about Simon Stadding that had precipitated Jocelyn’s first stroke. She had at first refused to come to the funeral, but Jack had gone to Bristol of his own accord and persuaded her.

“Mrs. Thomas hasn’t changed that much,” said Dilys. “Nor Mr. Thomas, come to that, given he’s lost a bit of hair. And wasn’t Mr. Dick a well set up lad? Image of his father too. No wonder you’re fond of him.”

She moved to turn the page. Rachel didn’t stop her. No mention of Anne. She must have noticed. Tact, presumably, not to comment on such a glimpse of the raw innards of a wounded family.

Inside the church. The other camera, largest aperture, ultrafast film, then delicate development and printing—the results misty greys, sometimes with focal moments: the jet black of the silhouetted coffin and bearers against the open west door; the coffin at the altar, with candles; the congregation standing for a hymn, Rachel’s own place empty, a gap in the pattern of open mouths; Sergeant Fred against the north window (Rachel had almost grovelled to achieve the angle) standing at the eagle lectern to bark the lesson with toneless precision. (extraordinary—still after almost forty years extraordinary—to think that if Jocelyn had died two years sooner it might have been Fish Stadding reading that lesson. Had Simon or Leila ever heard from him? There’s been no way to ask. There was still none. He’d be dead by now, surely.) The last picture she’d taken inside the church was of the front of the coffin in close-up as it had passed her place on its way down the aisle, with the near-side bearer also in close-up, a strong, unreadable face.

Then a gap in the sequence, filled only by a cutting from the Inquirer , Tom Dawnay’s published picture of the coffin emerging from the porch with Rachel on Dick’s arm behind it. (She had handed her cameras to Jack to bring out.) The gap continued for the period she had had to stand, barely holding herself together, accepting the unavoidable condolences. Ten or so blurred awful minutes, the same phrases over and over till they lost all meaning, and Jocelyn dead, dead, dead. No meaning in anything, ever again. Her only solid memory of that phase was of Leila Stadding’s face, grief and anger like Anne’s but so differently borne; the mouth working almost as if in epilepsy as she tried to speak, but then she had turned away and shoved herself past whoever had been waiting behind her. Rachel hadn’t expected any of the family to come, but had hoped that Simon might. He hadn’t, Leila’s elder son, Bob, had brought her, according to Flora.

And then at last the saving reality of the camera, the light meter, her fingers composedly setting apertures and exposures and changing filters, that composure steadying the whole being.

The graveside—family and servants, Jocelyn’s sisters and the Austen cousins, three or four old friends, the Cambi Road Association representatives. Not good of Sergeant Fred, unfortunately. That must be the top of his head behind Duggie Rawlings. Duggie had driven the others from London up in his new taxi. Rachel remembered him coming to her before he left and taking her aside to explain that the reason he hadn’t been able to bring Terry Voss was that Terry was in prison again. Of course she’d want to know that, the Colonel having been so thick with Terry all along.