Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Jack Barnard. Billy Chart, and that’s his missus—what was her name? I’ll get it…”

“Florence?”

“Ah, right. Florrie Chart. Stan Upping—he’d been Mess Waiter. Mr. Graham—went for a curate, didn’t he, after demob, and then the police picked him up—choirboys and scouts—and he did himself in. Might’ve been a bishop by now…”

He seemed to speak entirely without blame. Jenny wouldn’t have expected him to mention such a thing at all, or else to do so with anger and disgust. There was a striking contrast a few pages later.

“Dickie Fearing; Dickie Brown, Terry Voss—showed up with a couple of thousand fags—black market, of course—rare as gold dust, they were.”

“Wait. Back, please. Those two.”

Jenny had turned the page, so leafed back. Below the group containing the two Dickies and the man with the black market cigarettes was a picture of two men standing in conversation beside an old muzzle-loading gun on a plinth. Both were in civilian clothes, but bearing and style suggested they were officers. The nearer one had his back to the camera, and the other faced it almost directly. Jenny would have thought him much more recognisable than some that Uncle Albert had so amazingly picked out—darkly good-looking, despite the aftereffects of emaciation, with naturally rounded features, a short but dense moustache, eyebrows and hair of the same apparent texture. Uncle Albert, however, had merely glanced at him and shaken his head, so Jenny had passed on. He looked again with his mouth clamped shut.

“Major Stadding,” whispered Mrs. Matson, no louder than she had so far, but before Jenny could pass the name on Uncle Albert spoke.

“Least said, soonest mended. Let the lads down—let us down badly, and the Colonel most of all. That’s enough about him. Get on with it, miss. We haven’t got all day.”

“Wait,” said Mrs. Matson. “What happened to him? After? Dead?”

Warned by her earlier rebuff Jenny phrased the question carefully.

“She says do you know what happened to Major Stadding in the end? She wants to know if he’s still alive.”

“Went abroad, last I heard,” muttered Uncle Albert. For an old soldier he was a remarkably bad liar.

“Tell him, come closer. Try to hear me.”

“Uncle Albert, she wants to try to talk to you direct. See if you can get close enough. Shall I come round and give you a hand?”

“Stay where you are, miss—I can do for myself,” he said, sounding a bit relieved, Jenny thought, by the apparent change of subject. He rose, placed his right hand beside the pillows for support, and craned forward. Jenny could hear the effort as Mrs. Matson struggled for extra volume.

“Please tell me. You brought the pistol. You said. Water under the bridge. Can’t matter now. Please. Sergeant Fred.”

He pushed himself up from the bed, straightened, turned and strutted off down the room with short, angry steps that suggested he would have liked to march clear away over the horizon. Reaching the table where they had eaten he halted with his back to the bed and rapped the surface several times with his knuckles. He then rounded the table, rapping it twice more as he passed, and came marching back to the bed, where he halted, staring ahead of him, as if being reprimanded by a superior officer on parade.

“Can’t tell you anything about that, ma’am,” he said. “Don’t remember. Fact is, my memory’s all to pot—and what do you think you’re looking at me like that for, young woman?”

Jenny had indeed stared for a moment in astonishment. She was, of course, used to his lapses of memory, but knew too that they mustn’t be treated as normal for him now but as isolated, temporary, wholly uncharacteristic.

There was more than anger in his voice, there was deep shame and misery. Before she could speak she heard the faintest of sighs from the bed.

“Tell him. Not important.”

“Mrs. Matson says not to worry, Uncle Albert. It doesn’t matter. She just wondered.”

He swallowed a couple of times and sat down.

“Let’s get on with it, then,” he said.

They finished the album and started another one—the same faces at different occasions large and small. There were several pictures of Major Stadding, passed over in silence. Then, to his obvious distress, Uncle Albert’s memory started to waver. Mrs. Matson too was tiring, needing to sip more often at her barley water and closing her eyes from time to time, but apparently neither wished to disappoint the other by calling a halt.

“Let’s have a rest,” said Jenny, realising it was up to her. “I’ll fetch the nurse, shall I? And Uncle Albert can watch the TV for a bit, or something.”

“Please,” whispered Mrs. Matson.

“Time we were off,” said Uncle Albert, rising. “It’s a long way for the girl to drive, and I’ve done what I came for. Right, Penny?”

“If you like, Uncle Albert. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Matson? You must be pretty well done for.”

“Yes. Say goodbye. Thank you. Sergeant Fred.”

“She says, ‘Goodbye, Sergeant Fred, and thank you for coming. It’s been wonderful to see you again.’ ”

Uncle Albert drew himself up to his parade stance.

“Thank you yourself, ma’am. It’s been a privilege to know you, ma’am. A privilege to serve with the Colonel, and a privilege to know his lady wife.”

He ducked his head, turned and marched for the door, which he held for Jenny, as if impatient to make his exit with soldierly smartness.

She started for the door, remembered her shoulder bag, slung on a chairback, hesitated only an instant and walked on.

“I’ll just get the nurse, Uncle Albert. Do you want to use the toilet before we go? Hell, I’ve left my bag in the room. I won’t be a sec. Oh, could you show him where the toilet is while I get my bag? The nurse will show you, Uncle Albert.”

Without waiting she slipped back into the room, closing the door behind her. Mrs. Matson had her eyes shut, but opened them as Jenny approached.

“Spectacles off,” she whispered. “Please. Itch.”

Jenny lifted them clear and laid them on the table.

“The nurse is just coming,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid Uncle Albert wasn’t telling the truth. He really did tell me that those young men had something to do with Major Stadding, and a while ago, when we were trying to find your telephone number, he said that the Mr. Stadding who runs the Association couldn’t be Major Stadding, because he was dead. He said he’d seen it happen. He said, ‘Ask Terry Voss,’ so I think he must have been there too.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

Jenny waited, sensing that there was more. As the nurse opened the door the whisper came again.

“Anything you can find out.”

2

Uncle Albert dozed most of the way home. Jenny spent much of the journey thinking about what had happened, not outside and around her, but within. There had been a moment when everything had changed. Perhaps the change had imperceptibly been preparing for a long while, but this afternoon there had been an identifiable point at which it had taken place, when she had held Mrs. Matson’s near-dead fingers in her own. It was as though there had been a knot in the cord of her being only, a simple half hitch which, if anyone had known about it and helped her with it at the time of its tying, might have been freed. But over the years it had been strained so tight that the strands had almost lost their differentiation and it had become a dense little nut in the run of the cord, impossible ever to ease or tease apart. The rest of the cord ran smoothly enough over its pulleys, and long before she was a woman Jenny had become so used to the existence of the knot that without any awareness of doing so she had learnt to adjust her use of the mechanism so that only in exceptional circumstances did it snag. But the cost of being all the time ready for those potential judderings, of not allowing herself to seem to be shaken or troubled by them, had been considerable—an outward wariness and chill, a detachment, a sort of void or buffer zone between that outward and her true inward, a concentration on things rather than people—she belonged to no informal feminine networks, had no bosom friends—especially on things that were stable and controlled, that seemed to her to have confidence in their own selfhood and thus make no demands on her and pose no threats. (That, perhaps, was why she so loved the little house she shared with Jeff, and why Mrs. Matson’s photographs spoke so strongly to her.)