Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“What do you think, Dilys? Would you mind, Mrs. Pilcher?”

Jenny forced herself to respond. They were looking at her. The sudden wave of old horrors had swept over her without any warning. She had felt no qualms at all about bringing Uncle Albert to visit a bedridden old acquaintance. She hadn’t assumed that she’d be able to stay out of the sickroom. She’d need at least to meet the patient, because Uncle Albert would expect her to, and would want to talk later about the encounter. Even the prospect of eating her meal in the room had raised no doubts. Mrs. Matson was clearly very well cared for. By somebody else. Not Jenny. So she wouldn’t even need to nerve herself to cross the threshold of the sick room…

She blinked and shook her head. Her hands moved downwards, just as they had used to almost twenty years before, smoothing the crisp invisible pinafore into place at her grandfather’s door.

“I’m sorry,” said Sister Jenny coolly. “I was thinking about something else. Yes, of course I can manage if I’m shown how. I’ve looked after an old person before.”

Her voice sounded perfectly normal in her own ears.

“Well, that’s fixed,” said Mrs. Thomas affably. “Dilys will show you what to do. Now we won’t keep her waiting any longer.”

She knocked at the door they had reached, opened it and put her head round.

“Hi, Ma,” she said. “Here they are, then, right on time.”

She went in and held the door for them. Uncle Albert, typically, stood aside to let the others through, Jenny first. She halted a couple of paces inside the room and saw that they had come too late. The bed was immediately opposite her, placed parallel to the wall beneath a wide window. The dead woman’s head was cradled on the spotless pillows, peaked, fleshless, the yellow skin blotched with purple but otherwise almost translucent above the bone. Dead. Jenny had only once seen death before, when she had found her grandfather’s body one Sunday morning. Then her magical uniform had vanished at the sight, and the household had been woken by her scream. Now, as she struggled for control, Uncle Albert marched confidently past her.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Matson,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Major Fredricks, at your service, ma’am.”

The greeting had the ring of ritual whose repetition invoked the pleasure of previous meetings. The undifferentiated lips of the corpse smiled and moved apart.

“Sergeant Fred,” came the dead-leaf whisper.

Still barely in command of herself, Jenny turned away and moved down the room. There was a second, similar window further along the wall. In the space between the two hung a large, framed photograph, almost poster-size, black and white, of a huge fungus growing out of the bole of a tree. Jenny stared at it, seeing it first simply as pattern, but then, as if with the inner click of a switch, suddenly perceiving what it showed. Logically, it should have reinforced the horror of the death mask. The fungus was huge, a monstrous symbol of decay, but for some reason Jenny found it steadying, peaceful, normal. Thinking about the episode afterwards she was still unable to decide why. It was something to do with its—she didn’t have a word for it—being-what-it-was?—the fungus was what it was and the photograph was what it was and they were different things, fungus and photograph, and there was some kind of balance and tension between the two things which the photograph let you see and feel, but why that should make the photograph beautiful, let alone why it should have given Jenny something to grasp, allowed her to haul herself our above the tide of horror…

“Mrs. Pilcher?”

Jenny shook herself and came to.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was looking at the fungus. It’s marvellous.”

“You do keep saying the right things, don’t you?” said Mrs. Thomas. “Ma took it, of course. She took all of these, and you’re going to help her show Sergeant Fred some of her old albums, while Dilys and I push off and leave you to it. So if you’ll let Dilys explain to you about anything Ma might need…”

“Yes, of course.”

Jenny listened with full attention. Those were the reading spectacles. That was the reading desk, all ready, with the first album on it. She just had to slide it across the bed. Those were other albums, on the table, and the package was something Mrs. Matson wanted to show Mr. Fredricks. This was Mrs. Matson’s barley water—she’d need a sip every few minutes if she wanted to talk. The trick was to slide your other arm down behind her and steady her head in the crook of your elbow—she didn’t weigh anything—and not to pour too fast in case she choked, and this was how you adjusted the angle of the bed if she asked you, and that was all really.

“I’m sure I’ll manage,” said Sister Jenny, coolly. She could almost feel the starch in the imaginary uniform.

“I’ll just give her a quick little drinkie now to show you, shall I?” said the nurse. “We’d like that, wouldn’t we, dearie?”

Jenny watched the process without alarm. By the time it was over Mrs. Thomas had embarked on a complex flight of reminiscence about old acquaintances, in which Uncle Albert was keeping his end up with astonishing coherence, so Jenny took the chance to walk round and look at the several other photographs on the walls. The room was a fair size, longer than it was wide, and painted white throughout. All the pictures were in black and white, and framed in the same style. This, despite the bits of household furniture—a round folding table set ready for a meal, with two chairs, a really nice old walnut bureau, other chairs, bookshelves and so on—and the bed and sick-room appurtenances, gave it more of the feel of an art gallery than anything else. None of the photographs was of anything particularly striking —a stretch of sunlit paling overtopped by brambles, shadows in a barn, water flowing into darkness beneath two low arches, a white poodle coiffeured as for a show, nibbling its own flank in an ecstasy of pure canine concentration —but as with the one of the fungus all had the quality of instantly communicating their selfhood, why they had been taken in that light, at that angle, developed and printed to these tones and textures, enlarged to this size and these dimensions. That they were also obviously immensely skilled was part of the pleasure they gave, but secondary. She was going round the room, looking at each of them again, now in the light of the others, and paused at the one of the stream flowing away beneath the arches. Despite the stillness of the image, it seemed to have the true, hypnotic quality of moving water. She could remember, as a child, standing on a sunlit footbridge in a park somewhere, rapt, lost. That must have been very early, before Daddy walked out, when she had still been happy…

Just as then, a voice broke in, calling her. Uncle Albert. Mrs. Thomas and the nurse were in the process of leaving.

“All right, girl, let’s get on with it. We haven’t come all this way for just a lot of chat. My hearing’s not what it was, Mrs. Matson, so my niece here’s going to tell me if there’s anything you say and I don’t catch it. She’s a good girl, now that she’s settled down and got a young man of her own. Now, then, there’s something…the Colonel left it with me, long way back…after…never mind about that now…But it’s been on my mind a while, seeing how it doesn’t signify that much now—water under the bridge after all these years—so I thought…I thought…”

While speaking he had turned and reached towards the bedside table, but not finding what he wanted had hesitated and begun to pat his pockets, frowning and peering round the room.

“I’ve got it, Uncle Albert,” said Jenny quickly. “You gave it to me to carry when we were getting out of the car. One moment…here you are…”