Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“But…All right. Ma, I can see that’s pretty awful for you, but it’s not enough! It’s bloody well not enough! What’s it got to do with Simon and me? Nothing. We knew about Uncle Fish doing a bunk, and we knew it had to be something like that, though Aunt Leila won’t talk to any of us… Look, Simon’s always been a bit iffy about Uncle Fish—he says you can’t tell where you are with him. But he’s always worshipped Da, and if Da came and told him he couldn’t marry me because of something else Uncle Fish had done—something unspeakable—I can just about see Simon—he’s got these stupid ideas about honour…Jesus, I’m furious with him! And Da! There’s something he told Simon and he wouldn’t tell me, though he’s bloody well wrecked my life! I’m sorry, Ma. I’m sorry about what happened to Da, and I wish it hadn’t, but I came to tell him how furious I was, and I still am, and even if I’d known he’d got a weak heart I’d still have come and I’d still have said what I said!”

A pit had opened into a place which Rachel for the past seventeen days had been schooling herself not to think about. No, that had nothing to do with Fish. She clutched at an irrelevance.

“I think it’s a stroke, darling, not heart. You couldn’t have known.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“I’m sure I’d feel the same in your shoes. I’m truly sorry for you, darling. I hope you’re wrong about Simon wanting to get out of it. I’ve always loved him. If it’s any use to you, Da and I used to tell each other how stupid we’d been, waiting till we were married.”

“Not much,” snapped Anne, unrelenting. And then, “Oh, God, I’m never going to feel about anyone the way I do about Simon. I can’t imagine even being interested in anyone else!”

She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Rachel rose to stand beside her and hold her close again, but she shrugged herself free and moved away, still blindly sobbing.

“I’m sorry, Ma, Oh, God, I’m being desperately self-centred when…I just can’t think about anything else. I’d better go.”

“Please, darling. Oh, please…I…I…”

But Rachel couldn’t bring herself to say “I need you.” Not even now, when it would have been for the first time true. For twenty-eight years all that she had truly needed had been supplied by Jocelyn. Even Dick had been no more than an emotional extra, a luxury, a want and not a need. It was to late for such a demand.

“I’ll go for a walk and think about it,” said Anne.

She had stayed on, in fact, for three silently dutiful days and then gone back south. A month later a card had arrived saying that she was moving to Bristol, with the address. She hadn’t returned to Matlock until the funeral.

Rachel lay and considered the event. The emotions didn’t return, however faintly, to confuse her.

All there was was the puzzle for her mind to tease at. She had been aware of it at the time, and Anne had, in effect, stated it aloud, but it had been among the mass of stuff at the periphery of Rachel’s concerns, whose centre was wholly occupied with the horror of what had happened to Jocelyn, and then with the obstinate, passionate nurturing of hope when everyone was insisting that there could be none.

The puzzle was that the emotional logic didn’t cohere. Fish Stadding had embezzled the Cambi Road funds. When discovered he had fled abroad. The committee had decided not to try and hunt him down. The money was apparently gone on some speculation in the City, so what was the point? Besides, Fish had been on the Road.

The Staddings were old friends, Uncle Fish and Aunt Leila to the children. They had always brought their three boys to Forde Place for a week or so in the school holidays. There had been a lovely inevitability about Anne and Simon deciding to marry. Rachel remembered walking by the river with him—a still, early summer day, a perfect light. She had lagged behind the others, taking pictures, and Simon had stayed with her, unasked, for company. That was Simon, sensitive, considerate, straightforward, very like Leila in that. (In fact it was as if all the good fairies had come to his christening, because he seemed to have inherited his father’s quirky intelligence, not to mention the rather oriental good looks of both parents.)

“We didn’t fall in love,” he’d told Rachel. “I think we were born in love.”

The memory simply didn’t chime with any picture of a Simon who, on learning that his father was an embezzler who had shamefully betrayed his future father-in-law, had so readily, and apparently shiftily, broken the engagement. Yes, a young man might well have behaved like that, but it would have been a different young man from the one Rachel had talked to by the river. That Simon would have said, “This is tragic and appalling, and I will do everything in my power to make it up, but the first thing I will do is insist on marrying Anne, if she will still have me.”

Indeed a Simon something like that surfaced a few years later, when out of the blue he had written to Rachel saying that he had learnt that the Association was looking for a younger secretary, and asking if she would put his name before the committee. He had added in a private note to Rachel that he would like to do something to repair the harm that his father had done to the Association. Rachel had hesitated, but she knew the committee were desperate and Anne was now settled in Canada, so she’d done what he asked.

Surely that Simon would have waited a little while for decency and then gone to Anne and told her he couldn’t live without her. As far as Rachel knew there hadn’t at the time been another woman. A decade or so later he had married a widow, older than himself, apparently out of a shared delight in bird-watching. He had never brought her to reunions at Forde Place. There had been no children.

No, Anne was right. Jocelyn must have told him about something else. The young man’s visit? He certainly couldn’t have borne to tell Anne, of all people, about that, and it would have been astonishing if he’d told Simon. Besides, it had nothing to do with Fish.

Unwilled, her lips moved and the dry whisper came.

“He didn’t tell me, either.”

JENNY

1

“Wake up, Uncle Albert—I think we’re there.”

Jenny braked inside the gates to give him time to pull his wits together before they reached the house. He had dozed in snatches for almost half the journey, and each time he woke had checked the cardboard box on his lap, raising the lid and groping inside to make sure that nothing had been substituted for the pistol while he slept. It was already early afternoon, but since Mrs. Thomas had insisted that food would be waiting for them on their arrival, they had stopped only once on the way, for coffee and biscuits at a service station. There they had scarcely sat down before Uncle Albert was fidgeting to be off again.

Now he woke and checked the box once more.

“Well, what are we stopping for?” he said. “It’s a long way, you keep telling me.”

“I think we’re there.”

Distrustingly he gazed through the windscreen, then relaxed.

“Ah, that’s more like it,” he said. “That’s Forde Place all right. Well done, girl.”

It was not at all what Jenny had expected from the picture of well-to-do squirearchy suggested by Mrs. Thomas’s telephone voice and chance remarks from Uncle Albert. The grounds were appropriate—not a flower bed visible, but large old trees, cedars and planes and such, rising from several acres of lawn that sloped down to what was probably a river, with a wooded bluff beyond. But the house itself was odd for such a setting, a solid slab of dark red brick with a wide-eaved slate roof and serried windows. It didn’t look like a building intended for people to live in. It was utterly different from Jenny and Jeff’s own little house, but it had the same quality of being obstinately itself, and the hell with anyone else’s ideas of taste and style. Jenny rather liked it for that.