Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Yes,” said Rachel, smiling inwardly as she took another sip of coffee. The phrase was so exactly right to describe what he had done.

“Yes, I’m a bit of a mess at the moment,” he’d told her, when she’d failed to conceal her horror at the thing that tottered down onto the platform at Matlock and took her in its arms. “You must have got my letter. Told you I’d lost a bit of weight.”

“Yes, but…oh my darling, what have they done to you?”

“Oh, I’m not so dusty, compared to some of the others. No point in going back into the hospital now that I’m home. I’ll sort myself out sooner here, with you.”

Rachel learnt later that he had discharged himself directly from the hospital ship, against doctors’ orders and in defiance of military discipline.

There had actually been talk of a court-martial. But at Cambi Road reunions veteran after veteran, some of them still half-broken men, had taken her aside to tell her that they wouldn’t have made it through, but for the Colonel. By those times he had his weight and strength back, using his own regime of rest and exercise (the rest, of course, much more of an effort of will for a man of his temperament than the exercise) and food from the garden.

“Tell Thwaite to plant a lot of spinach,” he’d said.

“You hate spinach.”

“Course I do. Filthy stuff, but I’ll get it down somehow. And broccoli and cabbage and that kind of muck. Spring greens, whatever they are. I’ll make a list.”

“I’ll need to stand over Mrs. Mears to stop her boiling them to shreds. She must have been trained as a laundrywoman and got into cooking by accident. I’ll look in the library for books about growing vegetables.”

“See what you can find. There was an M.O. in Singapore with his head screwed on about this sort of stuff. Interesting chap. Won’t get anywhere in his trade, of course, with the self-satisfied clowns they’ve got running it. Don’t worry, Ray, we’ll do it between us.”

He wasn’t trying to cheer himself up, or her. He was stating a fact.

They would do it between them. And they had.

The men at the reunions seemed not to envy Jocelyn his return to fitness. One of them, still in his wheelchair, said as much to Rachel once.

“Good to see the Colonel looking so grand. I’d hate to see him stuck in one of these things.”

For his part Jocelyn would have preferred to miss out on these meetings. The war was over, and he was in any case almost wholly uninterested in the past. He went, really, because the men wanted him there, but that was something he would have refused to acknowledge. He did it, he said, because he needed to talk to the men and check whether there was any way in which he could help them, write references, arrange job interviews, cajole, bully, plead, argue, on their be-half. “What’s the point of having been to a bloody expensive school where they didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing if you didn’t pick up a bunch of friends in high places whose arms you can twist in a good cause?”

There was no way now that Rachel could explain any of this, so she simply smiled, accepting that Jocelyn had done well to regain his fitness, and sipped her coffee with relish. Before she had finished there was a knock on the door.

“Come in, Mrs. Thomas,” Dilys called. “We’re just finishing our breakfast.”

She stood out of the way as Flora came bustling in, permed, pink cheeked, scarlet lipped, bright eyed.

“Morning, Ma,” she said, bending for a peck at Rachel’s cheek. She was wearing that boring scent again. Why bother, if you finish up smelling like last year’s potpourri?

“How are you this morning, Ma? Sorry about the eggs. You’d have thought somebody who can manage a perfectly respectable faisan nor-mande would have the right idea about scrambled eggs. Da would have dropped them out of the window. And thrown the toast after them. Dick’s coming to lunch. He wants to talk to you.”

Rachel reacted slowly, though she was well used to her daughter’s sudden transitions of subject. No need for a foray about the eggs, then, she’d been thinking with some disappointment.

“Dick?” she whispered.

“That’s right. It’ll be nice for you to see him, won’t it? He says he’s been busy. Now, don’t be naughty, Ma—Devon is a long way.”

As far, in fact, as the detestable Helen could take him. But busy? Flapdoodle.

“What about?”

“He’s got someone to see in York, apparently.”

More flapdoodle, and judging by the “apparently” Flora thought so too. M5, M42, MI, AI—Matlock wasn’t more than a few miles out of his way, but he wanted something all the same. Money, probably. How bad a mess was he in this time?

“All right,” she whispered.

2

“Hi, Ma. You’re not looking so dusty.”

He bent and kissed her with a passable imitation of affection. She smiled. He had of course come in without knocking, but nothing demeaning had been going on. She’d had her elevenses early, and then Dilys had cleaned her up and done her hair and makeup with cheerful enjoyment, taking pride in her patient’s appearance, much like that of a breeder preparing a favorite pony for a show. She had slipped out as soon as the visitor was in the room.

“Specs,” whispered Rachel. “On the table.”

He shoved them into place and she looked at her son with all the old muddle of feelings. It was extremely tiresome, she thought yet again, how when almost everything else was gone the emotions still raged on—worse, perhaps, now that there was no input from the limbs to distract them with trivia. All Rachel’s rational self despised her son, but the rest of her, that other self beyond reason, persisted in adoring…adoring what? There had been a child, yes, but…Surely, surely, surely, somewhere inside the middle-aged boor by her bed…

Why did he have to look, speak, laugh, carry himself so like his father when any stranger, suppose one could have met both men at the same age, would have seen at once that Jocelyn was honest timber and Dick was plastic trash? It was detestable. Dick would be sixty next year. He exercised himself at best casually, smoked, drank too much, ate with a boy’s greed, but he hadn’t run to fat. He hadn’t drilled or born arms since the JTC, but he stood and moved like a soldier. Look closely and you saw that the pinkness of the skin wasn’t the flush of health. Look into the blue eyes…

Jocelyn had glanced up from his book, keeping his place with his thumb, and said quietly, “I think we’d better face it. Dick’s no good.”

This had been apropos of nothing. Four days earlier Dick had driven back to Cirencester for his last term at the agricultural college. They had barely mentioned him since. Rachel was at her worktable, masking negatives for enlargement.

“Oh, dear. I can’t help hoping. But…”

“Maybe if I’d been home during the war…”

“No. It was always there. He was a lovely little boy, but in some of the photographs… You couldn’t be expected to see it at the time, but you can now. Do you want me to show you?”

“No point. I’m sorry, Ray. It’s worse for you.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Anyway, we have to do the best for him we can. Maybe he’ll find a woman who’ll make something of him.”

“Let’s hope,” Rachel had said.

She’d had her wish, but in the manner of some moralising fairy tale, in which the princess gets all the gifts her parents asked for, but which then turn out to be the last thing they wanted. For all her many-faceted dislikability Helen had had both the wit and will to make something of Dick, kept him out of both gaol and bankruptcy, organised a life for him, seen to it that he had a job, and held on to it, made not merely something but perhaps the most that could be made out of such material.