Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Terry’s all right. More than all right. Only he couldn’t tell yours from mine—never could and never would. Is he showing up here then? She’ll need to watch her spoons.”

“I’m afraid Terry’s dead, Uncle Albert.”

“Can’t be helped. A lot of ’em are. Most of ’em now, I dare say. Funny sort of room. Looks like it’s been got ready for a sale, somehow.”

This, Jenny thought, was remarkably perceptive of him. She too had been vaguely puzzled by the oddity of what was clearly a sitting room, with armchairs and a sofa arranged for people to gather and converse. There were upright chairs against the walls, a couple of tables, a bookcase, pictures on the walls, rugs—but nothing seemed to relate to the room or to any of the other objects in it. As Uncle Albert said, it was as if a random collection of furniture had been brought in and arranged wherever it would physically fit, but not because anyone was going to want to live with it.

Ms. Cowan came back with a tray, wading through a moving eddy of cats. She almost knocked the milk jug over as she slid the tray onto a table, but Jenny had moved to help and caught it in time.

“Oh, thank you,” said Ms. Cowan. “We’re not going to starve, at least. My parishioners rightly consider that I am incapable of looking after myself, let alone visitors, so I have only to mention that I have somebody coming and I am inundated with scones. Now, out you go! Shoo! No laps on Sunday. You know that perfectly well.”

She chivvied the cats out and closed the door. They miaowed affrontedly beyond it.

“Weekdays I wear skirts on which the hairs don’t show,” she explained. “Well now, this is wonderful. So you’re Bert Fredricks! Do you mind if I call you Bert? My Uncle Terry always did. It’s how I think of you. My name’s Eileen, but Terry always called me Nell.”

“Nell?” said Uncle Albert, as if instantly, magically unbewildered. “You’re telling me you’re Terry’s little Nell!”

He guffawed with amazement and delight. Jenny had never heard him produce such a sound. It made the effort of bringing him here, even the half day away from Jeff, worth while.

“Yes, I’m little Nell,” said Ms. Cowan.

He had risen when she’d brought the tray in, and she now stood in front of him, smiling. With simple naturalness he put his hands on her shoulders, bent and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to Jenny to hesitate for a moment, but then closed her arms round him and hugged him. The movement was gawky, uncertain, as if long unpractised. After a few seconds she released him and turned to Jenny.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t really introduced myself in the excitement. I’m Eileen Cowan, of course. Nobody except Uncle Terry and his friends has ever called me Nell, but we’ll stick to that to avoid confusion. And you’re Jenny? Jennifer?”

“Jenny except on cheques and things.”

“Jenny, not Penny,” confirmed Uncle Albert. “She’s worth twice what Penny’s worth, if you want to know. Can’t think what their mother was doing, calling ’em pretty well the same name like that. It’s not as if they’d been twins.”

He spoke with the full authority of the head of the imaginary family.

“Well, that’s settled,” said Nell. “Now if I give each of us a little table. And everyone must have two scones, so that I can say with honesty how much we enjoyed them. The smaller ones are Sharon Smith’s and the others and Annie Fletcher’s. The jam is Cyril Buck’s from his own strawberries. Splendid. Now tea … Oh dear, what on earth have I done? And it’s almost cold. I know I warmed the pot, and I know the kettle was boiling … bother, I shall have to go and make a fresh pot.”

“Why don’t you let me do that?” said Jenny. “You stay and talk to Uncle Albert—after all that’s what we’re here for.”

“Oh, would you? The kitchen’s just along the passage, and I’ve left everything out.”

This turned out to be no less than the truth. The makings of several meals littered the working surfaces, actual food being protected from the cats by being shoved under a couple of old-fashioned meat-safes. When Jenny emptied the teapot she found five tea-bags in it, three round and two rectangular. She deduced that one set had been left in from last time tea had been made, and furthermore, since Nell hadn’t discovered them when she emptied the water out after warming the pot, that hadn’t been done either.

The cats ignored Jenny as she boiled the kettle and made fresh tea. Two were busy licking the last smears of butter from a wrapping and three others were curled in their baskets. They all looked well and cared for.

Jenny admitted to being mildly obsessive about cleanliness—Jeff said she was a hygienopath. Left by a man, this level of mess would have disgusted and angered her. Left by most women it would have been even worse, not mere slobbishness, but a kind of betrayal. But left by Nell, her reactions were more uncertain. Disgust and horror, certainly—mercifully she had brought out the cup into which Nell had begun to pour, so she could at least get that clean for herself—but the anger was replaced by confusion. To be angry with somebody is to judge them, and she wasn’t prepared to judge Nell, both in the sense of not wishing to and of not having enough to go on. Nell’s treatment of Uncle Albert seemed to be absolutely honest, from the heart. Did it follow that her method of life was equally honest? Of course not. Nobody needed to be as domestically helpless as Nell made herself out to be—apparently revelled in being, and in her parishioners rushing to her rescue with scones and jam … But then again, mightn’t that pose, though deliberate, have a quite different motivation? How should a woman conduct herself so as to be accepted as priest to a presumably very conservative parish such as this? Perhaps by letting them believe that she was no more than a slightly different version of a phenomenon they were already used to—the otherworldly bachelor scholar—not many of ’em about these days, mind you—gone with the gouty colonels and the hard-riding squires … If so, there was actually something pleasingly subversive about Nell’s performance, which she herself might well be aware of.

Then, as she carried pot and cup back to the sitting room, it crossed Jenny’s mind to wonder whether Nell might be gay. She knew herself to be imperceptive about that sort of thing. The clerical dress was masculine in effect, and Nell’s manner to Uncle Albert had been mildly flirty …

She found them sitting knee to knee, bending towards each other as they talked. Both started to rise at her entry.

“Don’t get up,” she said. “I’ll pour. You haven’t got all that time.”

“You do that,” said Uncle Albert, settling back. “Now where was I?”

“You were telling me about Terry giving you all pickpocketing lessons so that you could steal from the guards if you got the chance. Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Dangerous and then some. It was a way of passing the time as much as anything. I don’t know anyone was fool enough to try it. Find you at something like that, and morning parade the Japs would tie you to a post and make the rest of us watch while they hammered you unconscious.”

“Terry told me about that. It happened to him, he said. It was so bad he didn’t remember anything that had happened for days afterwards and when he came round you were in a different camp. The rest of you had carried him there, he said.”

“Not exactly carried him—you want me to tell you about that? It isn’t party conversation, not to my mind.”

“Please. Anything you can about Terry, good or bad.”

“Right you are … just put it there, lass—two sugars and a good dollop of milk … Well, we were building this road, like I told you, and the drill was that when we’d finished one section they’d parade us and march us on to a new camp. Anyone that couldn’t stand to for the parade they hammered with their rifle butts and left. No food, no water. I’ve heard tell of natives come creeping out of the forest and carrying them away and looking after them, but it can’t’ve happened that often—anyway not to anyone I ever ran into.