Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

Yet, despite such knowledge, even now as she gazed up at him Rachel remembered an eight-year-old wolfing the lardy cake she had found for him in Matlock. Lardy cake had been as good as unobtainable in wartime. He hadn’t remembered to say thank you, hadn’t understood the achievement, but her body had brimmed with satisfied love at the sight of his pleasure. So now. Though the visit was sure to be uncomfortable and might well be painful, as she looked at him her main emotion was happiness that he had, for whatever reason, come back to her.

“Well, what have you been up to?” she whispered, making the effort to talk in full sentences, as if for a stranger.

He grinned.

“Sweating and suffering, if you want to know,” he said. “This stupid beef scare’s still playing havoc with the business. Farmers haven’t got any money to pay for the stuff, and haven’t got any cows to feed it to supposing they had. Not to mention they’re pointing the finger at us for starting it. Of course we were cutting the odd corner, but who wasn’t? Anyway the rug’s been pulled from under us with a vengeance, and unless something happens PDQ to turn the ship round we’re all going down the tube. No fun at all.”

“So you’re going to York?”

“Just scratching around. Not much chance of it coming to anything, but it’s better than sitting on my backside waiting for the roof to fall in.”

“How are the children?”

“Little monsters. Belinda’s got another on the way. She’s due to pop next month. Helen must’ve put all that in our Christmas card, didn’t she?”

No shame, none at all. In most years the only communication Rachel received from her son was the annual news roundup that Helen composed on her PC and sent out with the Christmas cards, often signing the card on Dick’s behalf. Not that Helen would have allowed any greater contact, but suppose Dick had married a wife who felt drawn to the family rather than repelled by it, he would still have let her do all the work.

Now, though, came a small surprise.

“I’ve brought you some photos, Ma. Toby’s a camera nut, like you, and he sent us a sheaf of the things from last time they were down. Want to see?”

“Please.”

Toby was an affable, dull planning official, married to Dick’s other daughter, Harriet. (Charley, Belinda’s husband, was a Devonshire GP.) Dick shifted his chair to lean over the bed and show her the photographs, mumbling names as he went. Rachel could hear that the process irritated him but that he was trying for as yet undisclosed purposes to please her, presumably to put into her mind that she had these descendants to whom she still owed duties. She barely listened, concentrating on the images.

Winter scenes. Michelin tots—woolly hats and snow suits—poking sticks into bonfires, confronting one of Helen’s Shetlands at a fence…

“Wait. Back one. Who…?”

“That’s Stan again. He’s supposed to take after me.”

“Yes.”

The pang was appalling. Rachel gazed at the small figure absorbed in stamping an icy puddle into splinters. She had a photograph—black and white, of course—of Dick at that age, wearing the then standard tweed coat, leggings and furry cap, but standing in the identical pose to study something on the ground before him. This was the self-same child. Suppose in the winter of 1905 someone had captured the image yet again, Jocelyn aged two and a half, wrapped against the cold, absorbed in some fragment of the universe that lay at his feet…Ah, which way would this child go?

“Very, very like,” she whispered.

“He’s a grand little wretch too,” said Dick. “Look, that’s him again.”

But this picture was not of her lost son, only of a rather similar infant. That was part of the treachery of the frozen image. By insisting on the pure truth of the isolated instant it denied the shift and dither of reality. Jocelyn, anchored in his certainties, could never accept this.

“Why must you take such a lot of the things?” he would grumble.

“Can’t you make sure you’ve got what you want before you press the button?”

(It wasn’t the cost he grudged, or the loss of her time, but the sense of sheer waste, waste for waste’s sake.)

“It isn’t like that, darling. I can take two pictures of something—a boulder or a tree trunk—one after the other, with the same settings and everything, but they’ll never be quite the same, not when you know how to look.”

“It’s the same rock, isn’t it? And anyway we aren’t just talking about a couple of pictures. You take a spool of film and rough-print it—how much of it do you bother to print up? One picture in eight? Ten?”

“Something like that.”

“And how many of those do you put in an album? Same again, and that’s a generous estimate. They’re all just as real as each other, Ray, but only about one in eighty of them makes it into your version of reality.”

“You’re shifting the argument, darling. And anyway the film’s all there in the attic. If I wanted I could go back and make an album of every picture I took of you on Dinah at Meerut.”

He had laughed at the memory, but for his next birthday she had in secret got out the old film, stored in acid-free paper, labelled and put away on their return to England almost twenty years earlier. She had needed to contact the celluloid onto fresh film, but from those negatives had printed up forty-three reasonable shots of Jocelyn on his favourite pony during that marvellous fortnight when the regiment had so very nearly won the All-India, and night after night they had danced till the stars faded, and he had proposed to her loping beside her window as her train steamed out. It had been the second best present she had ever given him.

Dick started to put the photographs away.

“May I keep the one of Stan?” she whispered.

“Sure you can. This one?”

“No. Breaking the ice.”

“Right, here you are then. I thought you might get a kick out of them.”

There was a smugness in his tone, as if he had conferred a major benefit on her and could now expect her to reciprocate. She postponed the moment.

“How is Helen?”

“Firing on all cylinders, including some she’d never told me about. God, what a woman for a crisis! She’s found herself a job, dogsbody in a locum agency, but they’d better watch out. Six months and she’ll be running the show.”

“You’ve lost your job?”

“Sharp as ever, Ma! But no, I’m still hanging on, though I can see which way the wind’s blowing. It’s always been a family firm, and I’m the only senior bod left who isn’t one of the clan. If they’ve got to choose between me and some useless little twerp who married the boss’s niece, you know darn well who it’s going to be.”

“Diffcult. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Ma. Something will turn up. It’s just a matter of having enough irons in the fire and tiding things over meanwhile. By the way talking of irons, do you know where Da’s pistols are? The Laduries?”

The suddenness of it was like a physical blow. Dick didn’t seem to notice the pause. Perhaps, since she always needed to summon the resources for speech, it hadn’t been markedly longer than usual.

“In the bank, I think. Why?”

“They’re really mine, you know. He left them to me in his will.”

“He changed it.”

“Yes, but that was after his stroke, when he was a bit gaga, poor old boy. I bet I could have contested it at the time, but it wouldn’t have been worth the rumpus.”

It was astounding that he didn’t perceive her fury. Surely her eyes at least must blaze, blaze shockingly. The downright falsehood, compounded by the perfunctory sympathy. If she could have moved a muscle she would have struck him. As it was, her anger supplied the energies for a longer answer.