Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

He took the cardboard box from her and stood erect, as if the touch of it were restorative. He laid it on the bed and with untrembling fingers removed the lid, took out the package and slowly unwrapped the yellow duster, putting it back in the box. Grasping the pistol by the barrel he held it over the bed for Mrs. Matson to inspect. Her lips moved.

“Spectacles, please.”

Uncle Albert was in the way, so Jenny went round to the other side, between the bed and window, and slid the spectacles into place. Mrs. Matson’s gaze didn’t immediately return to the pistol, but remained for a few seconds fixed on Jenny, as if seeing her for the first time—which indeed, Jenny realised, she might well be doing. The curve of the lenses suggested a strong correction for near sight.

The slight delay seemed to irritate Uncle Albert.

“All right, then. You show her, girl,” he said and passed the pistol across. Jenny took it and turned it to and fro, and moved the catch and opened the breach in the way that the weapons expert had done on the Roadshow . She handed it back to Uncle Albert, who laid it down beside the box.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Matson. “Now, brown envelope. By albums. Give it him. Then go outside. Not long. Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” said Jenny. “I quite understand.”

She did as she was asked, and left, glad of the chance of a few minutes alone. She found herself unexpectedly upset, or rather upset in a manner that she wouldn’t have expected. It was no longer the horror of the dead thing on the bed—even her extreme reaction of a few minutes ago she’d have regarded as a normal, if stupid and shameful, quirk in her own makeup. What had shaken her now was almost the opposite thing, the simple, lively health of the eyes that had studied her from behind the spectacle lenses, both when she’d first put them on and again when Mrs. Matson had slowly whispered her requests. Jenny would not have believed that a pair of eyes , with no facial change whatever to help them, could have sent so clear a message of interest and apparent amusement. One of Jeff’s minor oddities was his fanatical interest in the Star Trek series, which Jenny usually watched with him for company. Her experience with Mrs. Matson was like some episode in which a team gets beamed down to an apparently dead planet, sends probes into the permafrost and discovers not just a few single-cell organisms that have evolved to survive such conditions, but a whole civilisation, science, arts, sociology, legends, cuisine, religion, hobbies, the lot.

She had no chance to settle down and come to terms with this revelation. The nurse must have been listening for the door, and at once came quietly up the passage.

“She’s needing something?” she whispered.

“No, it’s all right, she just wants to be alone with him for a bit. I suppose Mrs. Matson took the big photographs on the walls?”

“Indeed she did, and all these here too in the albums. Thousands of them, there must be, and she’ll tell you exactly where to look for anything she wants. Amazing she is like that. Other day I was asking about pictures of the house, and, look…”

The nurse moved a little to her left, pulled out a blue ring-binder and gave it to Jenny.

“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said. “She likes people to see. That one’s a bit different, mind you, because it was for some schoolwork her daughter was doing…”

Jenny opened the binder. The photographs were interleaved with pages of self-conscious young handwriting. There was the house itself, very much as Jenny had seen it from the top of the drive, though later in the year with the trees heavy with leaf. Next a patch of plain brickwork and the corner of a sill, no context, but insistently those particular bricks, seen in that light by those eyes, an effect impossible to analyse but still, to Jenny, obvious. She stared at the picture for a good minute before turning on and experiencing the same trance-like effect from a picture of a fire escape.

It struck her that there might be something wrong with her—sugar shortage maybe. She had had to get up at five, so breakfast had been almost that long ago, and skimped. Since then she’d had just a couple of biscuits and sugarless coffee at the service area…

At this point, as if she’d unconsciously willed it to be so, the woman who had first opened the door to them appeared at the far end of the corridor with a laden tray. Her odd mood broken, Jenny put the binder back in its place and explained the situation.

“Just leave it here till you’re ready, then?” said the woman, laying the tray down beside the door. Jenny thanked her and she left.

“Your old gentleman looks in very fine shape for his age,” said the nurse.

“Yes, thank heavens. Of course his memory comes and goes a bit, but today’s one of his good days.”

“Wonderful how they can pull themselves together for an occasion. Now, we’ve got out some of her albums for her to show him so I’ll come and settle her down for a rest while you’re eating your dinner, and after that your old gentleman will want to go to the toilet, so you can take him out for that while I tidy her up and make her comfortable again. All right?”

It worked out smoothly enough. When Uncle Albert came to fetch her she took the tray to the table and sat him down to eat, which he did with steady gusto. The food was much what Jenny would have chosen, cold chicken, salad, and what seemed to be homemade rolls, cheese and fresh fruit. Meanwhile the nurse dealt with Mrs. Matson and then made tea for Uncle Albert and coffee for Jenny. The brown envelope, Jenny noticed, was back in its place by the albums. The pistol was nowhere to be seen. The box in which they’d brought it was still on the bedside table, with the duster folder beside it. When they’d eaten Jenny took Uncle Albert out to the loo, as arranged.

Emerging, he at once tried to head back to the bedroom.

“Not yet, Uncle Albert,” she said. “We’ve got to wait while the nurse makes her comfortable—you know, cleans her up and so on. She can’t look after herself like the rest of us.”

“Ah. Right you are. Got it.”

He turned and began to study the spines of the albums on the shelves beside him, but almost at once swung round on her.

“What are we waiting for, then?” he said. “We haven’t got all day.”

“No, Uncle Albert. I told you. We’ve got to wait. It won’t be long.”

“Ah, yes, right,” he said, but it was obvious that he had for the moment lost the grasp of events he’d so strikingly displayed while talking to Mrs. Matson. To distract him she pulled out an album and leafed through, but it seemed to be devoted entirely to studies of moving water. She tried another from a different shelf. It opened at a cricket match.

Not Forde Place, or anything like it. Some kind of urban playground, with ’fifties high-rise blocks on the further side. The game was not what had interested Mrs. Matson. Only a couple of outfielders were visible to the right of the picture, the centre was a receding curve of spectators in deck chairs or lying on the grass, and in the left foreground, the nearest part of that line, a group of half a dozen young men stood together. They were so perfectly in period, somewhere in the mid-’fifties, that Jenny grinned with pleasure at the inch-soled shoes, the loose-draped, huge-lapelled suits, the exiguous neckties, the fags drooping from pouting mouths, the sideburns, the forelocks greased and curled into a hummocky wave. They seemed unaware of the camera, probably, if they’d noticed it, thinking it was focused on something beyond them, yet they were clearly the subject of the picture. As with the other photographs Jenny had seen, these young men were emphatically what they were.