Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“I thanked him for telling me. Of course I believed what he said, and still do. He liked, as I have said, to talk about criminal activities, and if he himself had been involved he made no attempt to conceal or palliate his own guilt. The fact that he had never before, and never again mentioned what sounded like a startlingly dramatic episode, and that he was so determined to insist on its ultimate propriety as far as he could, is for me sufficient warranty that whatever had happened out on the marshes must have been very different in nature from anything else he had told me about.

“I think that is all that I can usefully tell you. I would like to add that we have once met, though I do not expect you to remember the occasion. My uncle brought me to a summer reunion of the Association in the garden of your house, and you spoke to me very kindly of him.

Yours very sincerely,

Nell Cowan.

“Only like I say she’s written it Eileen underneath.”

Dilys sighed deeply as she folded the letter away.

“Well, what a story,” she said. “But frustrating, really. Like missing an episode on the telly. And that’s what’s been fretting you so, isn’t it, just the not knowing? And it’s something to do with those pistols of yours—got to be, seeing that’s what started you off…I’m sorry, dearie. I know it’s no business of mine. I shouldn’t’ve let myself be carried away like that. Only…We’re tired, aren’t we? Been a bit much for us, has it?”

“I’m all right.”

Rachel was in fact exhausted, though not in her usual manner, with the ridiculously small reserve tank on which she now depended for all her energies having run almost dry—though that was indeed the case too. But she was experiencing a kind of spiritual depletion, a feeling that all the extrinsic parts of her self were being stripped away in order that whatever powers were left to her could be concentrated into the central essence, for it to confront and finish with the thing it was here for. In order to reach that moment, other things needed to be done, some practical, some, so to speak, ritual.

She calculated. Voss had been in prison by the time of the funeral. His sentence would have been a year or so earlier. He had “taken the rap” so that Nell could continue her schooling after the age of fourteen. When he had brought her to Forde Place she had been at university…

“Albums,” she whispered. “CRA. About ’64.”

“Right you are, dearie. Coming.”

Dilys bustled eagerly out.

A ritual, a politeness, that one. The next one, something practical. Rachel continued to consider the problem while Dilys returned, cranked the bed up, adjusted the reading table and light, and settled the spectacles into place.

“There we are, dearie, all ready. I’ve brought the one from ’61 to ’66, so that should cover it, easy. Start at the beginning, just in case, shall I?”

“Please.”

The pictures ambled past. She had taken as many but kept fewer of these later years. Groups and individual studies of men, and a few women, mostly in early middle age, all wearing Sunday best, styles conservative even in their day, regimental ties, short haircuts, hats and caps—faces and poses caught, embalmed in their instant, by the flick of the shutter. Time at a standstill. Illusion, manifested as such each time the same face recurred at a later meeting, sometimes perceptibly older after the lapse of only a year…

“Stop.”

The girl was standing with Voss in front of one of the cedars. He was smiling confidently and holding himself with his usual swagger—or attempting to, as he didn’t now look well, worse than he had in Parkhurst. Perhaps he was not many weeks out of there, for his long-jacketed, narrow-legged suit looked very new. But for the fact that his arm was round her waist one wouldn’t have thought the girl could have had any connection with him. Rachel could see no family likeness. She was barely shorter than him, the narrowness and primness of her face accentuated by a tight bun. She wore a coarse-knitted jersey and patchwork skirt, both so shapeless as to deny any guess at the body within, and she held herself not with the regulation student droop but with stiff unease. There was no sign of the strong affection for her uncle as expressed in the letter. The image of her was in fact uninteresting, but it was good of Voss, and Rachel had few of him elsewhere. Presumably that was why she had kept it.

She closed her eyes and tried to summon energies.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Take it out.”

“Out of the book? You’re sure? How…Oh, it comes quite easily. You want me to send it to her?”

“Yes. Say thank you. Letter very useful. Next. Call Simon Stadding. Number…from Ellen. Can he come and see me? Not been well. But try. Let me…hear.”

“Righty oh. Just put the bed down a bit first shall I, so we can have a bit of a rest. Now don’t be naughty. I can tell. We’re near done for and we mustn’t pretend we aren’t.”

Rachel tried to protest. Her lips moved, but no sound came. Vaguely she sensed the lowering of the bed as a shift and easing of the pressures on her spine and neck. Her awareness of the change seemed in itself changed—less than she was used to, another loss of the defended ground. A sign that Dilys was right. She was almost done for.

DILYS

1

Deliberately Dilys took her time about putting the album away, phoning the secretary for Mr. Stadding’s number and setting up the extension speaker. It wasn’t going to be much of a rest anyway, but she would make it as long as she could. She felt anxious. There was nothing to show for it on the chart, temperature and pulse normal, bowels a bit slow, appetite down a little, but over the past few days she had sensed more and more strongly that Mrs. Matson’s illness was moving towards a crisis, not drifting towards it, either, as is the case with most really old people as they are eased into their deaths, but being sucked towards it by a strengthening inner current. And night after night Mrs. Matson hadn’t been sleeping properly. She was thinking too hard, remembering too fiercely, and all the while digging into herself for any little scraps that might be left there to feed her thinking and remembering.

The doctor was coming this afternoon for a checkup, but Dilys didn’t intend to tell him any of this, not unless he asked her directly, and perhaps not even then. She knew what he’d do, he’d prescribe a sedative to calm Mrs. Matson down into a nice peaceful departure. That wasn’t right. Mrs. Matson wanted to think. It was really important. It was the only thing left.

But if she didn’t let herself rest a bit when she got the chance, she’d be gone too soon to find the answer. That must’ve been a nasty moment for her just now, when she’d tried to say something and found she couldn’t. Frightening.

Having spun things out as much as she could, Dilys made the call. A woman’s voice answered, light, anxious, hesitating over the number she gave.

“Is Mr. Stadding there, please?”

“I’ll just go and see…Who shall I say?”

“My name’s Dilys Roberts. I’m speaking for Mrs. Matson, because she can’t use the phone.”

“I don’t understand. Which of you wants to talk to my husband?”

Dilys explained again.

“It’s about the Cambi Road Association,” she added.“Oh, dear…well, I’ll see.”

There was a long pause. Dilys waited, puzzled. This Mr. Stadding was Major Stadding’s son, wasn’t he, the one in the photographs. He oughtn’t to have been much more than Mrs. Thomas’s age, but his wife sounded quite a bit older than that, nervy too, used to being looked after, finding even the taking of a telephone message bothersome.

There was the click of another extension and the voice returned, more anxious than ever.