Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

But Jeff, and her marriage to and passion for him, didn’t come under that heading. They were fluid, dynamic, unpredictable. There were patterns in them that happened to persist, like eddies below a weir, convolutions with much the same structure as the knot, but these could never be traced to any calculable cause, and some minor change in the flow of the stream might at any moment dissolve them completely, re-create them elsewhere or perhaps abolish them forever. Not even the passion could be taken for granted.

So perhaps it was this experience over the past seventeen months that had allowed the fibres of the knot first to soften and then to ease from their taut interlocking so that now with the very minor effort on Jenny’s part of reaching out and grasping a skeletal hand, the knot itself should have at last slipped free and gone.

How else was she to explain to herself her betrayal of Uncle Albert’s confidence? Mrs. Matson was, and would remain, a stranger, unreachable in the prison of her carcase. Yes, her condition was very sad, and yes, she seemed to cope with it with courage and decency, in a manner that Jenny believed she herself would never be able to cope, should that befall her. But she had no claim on Jenny.

Uncle Albert on the other hand, she knew and liked and admired. Moreover he was family. Family was important to her. Though her own had been an apparent disaster, they had lived together in a series of houses through the almost two decades that had made Jenny what she was. They were part of each other, in a relationship for which there isn’t a word, so “love” has to do. The worst horror of her mother’s drinking had been that Jenny had continued to “love” her. Her suicide had solved intolerable problems for all of them, but Jenny had sobbed with fierce and genuine grief at the bleak funeral. Now she and her brother and sister communicated only perfunctorily, and never made a point of going somewhere for the purpose of meeting, but when something happened to bring them together the old currents instantly flowed between them, and they parted with a sense of renewal and unvoiced celebration.

Jeff had none of that, apart from Uncle Albert. His childhood had been yet more bereft than Jenny’s. His mother had walked out when he was seven. His father, though fairly well off, had placed him in a foster home. His great-aunt, Uncle Albert’s sister, had wanted to have him live with her, but his father had rancorously refused permission. The great-aunt was now dead, so there was only Uncle Albert, who must for that reason be cherished and cared for. Jenny didn’t merely accept this as a duty, she both thought and felt it.

But despite that she hadn’t hesitated to tell Mrs. Matson part of a secret that was sufficiently important to him to be worth the humiliation of publicly pleading his own failing memory. Indeed she was now planning, as soon as she had the chance, to look in his bottom drawer for the Cambi Road Association address lists to see if somebody called Terry Voss was still alive—and wondering, even, if there was any excuse for not telling Jeff about all this in case he should, very reasonably, ask her not to.

The answer, if you could call it that, she decided, was that Mrs. Matson was not after all a stranger. There had been an exchange between them. Something had flowed, and Jenny had been the beneficiary. Years ago, at college, she had known a young man whose legs had been badly damaged in a bicycling accident and who needed a stick to walk. The other noticeable oddity about him was that he was never there on Sunday. He was quietly amiable, and so tended to get included in the activities of the group to which Jenny loosely belonged, but when pressure was put on him to make up the numbers, if the event was planned for a Sunday he always refused. One evening when they were sitting around talking about what they individually believed in he told them why.

After his accident, he said, he’d been confined to a wheelchair and told he would never walk again. His parents had been determined he should, and had tried a series of increasingly weird treatments. Eventually a faith healer had visited them, and had sat alone with Dominic and talked what he described as a lot of stupid guff about spirit and matter and cosmic currents. He had been bored and embarrassed, and longing for the man to leave. He had then been aware of feeling curiously warm, from inside, but without the need to sweat. The warmth had appeared to flow down into his legs, and after a bit the healer had put his hands in his and told him to stand up, which he had done, and then walked across the room, with the healer doing no more than hold his hands to give him confidence, and not supporting him in any way. Though he wasn’t completely healed he hadn’t needed the wheelchair again.

So now, every Sunday, Dominic made a difficult cross-country journey to be with the cult to which his healer belonged and attend their ceremonies. “I’m not going to tell you what we believe,” he said. “You’d think it was a lot of stupid guff, like I did. But when I’m among the Companions I can walk as well as you can. I have to believe.”

Jenny felt that something very like that had happened to her as she’d stood by Mrs. Matson’s bed and held her hand. She’d been uncrippled. It didn’t matter how or why. It had happened, and she was therefore committed. If this included doing what Mrs. Matson had asked and finding out what she could and passing it on, she must, regardless of rationality, do it.

They reached Hastings after ten o’clock. Jenny helped Uncle Albert, very stiff and shaky, out of the car. He leaned heavily on her shoulder for the few paces to the door. She rang the night bell. It was a while before they heard footsteps. A nurse she didn’t know opened the door.

“So you’ve come home to us, Albert?” she said. “Quite the night owl you’re getting. We thought you’d be hungry, so there’s a tray for you in your room. Had a good trip, then? I’ll take him now, miss, unless you want to come in. Come along, Albert.”

“Hold it,” he said firmly, and turned to Jenny.

“You’re a good girl,” he said, “and you’ve done me proud. And I’ll tell you this. You made a much better job of it than that other girl would’ve. What’s her name…?”

“Your niece in America, you’re talking about?” said the nurse. “Penny, isn’t she?”

“That’s right, Penny. She’d’ve got us lost ten times over, for a start. So I’ll say thank you, young lady, and good night.”

“Good night, Uncle Albert. I enjoyed it.”

He let himself be led into the hallway, but before the door closed halted again and turned.

“And ask that husband of yours when he’s coming to see me,” he called.

RACHEL

1

The footsteps, faint on the carpet, receded. The door opened and closed. An odd young woman, Rachel thought, stranger in the flesh than she’d seemed on television. It would have been a challenge to capture that quality through the lens, the features soft but strong, self-possession with considerable tension, disciplined will constraining something wilder…

Voices in the passage, the tone of farewells. The door again. Dilys.

“Well, well, quite a day we’ve had of it, haven’t we, dearie? And what a grand old gentleman, coming all this way at his age, and still holding himself like a soldier. Now, we need seeing to, I dare say—we’ll have drunk a bit with all that chat. And then I’ll set your bed flat, so we can have a bit of a rest.”

“Soon. Album first. One he brought in. Something in it…”

“Right you are…This one? ‘People,’ it says on the back. Then here’s our specs. Start at the beginning, shall I?”

Dilys settled the album onto the stand and leafed slowly through, commenting here and there.