Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

Saturday’s my day off, if that suits you, but we can get the other nurse in different days if you’d sooner. And there’s a phone up here, so if you ring the number at the top and ask for the nursery wing, they’ll put you through.

Yours truly,

Dilys Roberts (Miss)

Mrs. Matson had actually slept, and when she woke her voice, though feeble, was more under her control. A little reluctantly Dilys read her the letter, but she didn’t seem at all put out by its frankness and smiled and said, “Well done,” so Dilys parcelled it up with the photograph and put it on the table in the hall to go with the afternoon post. Two morning later Mrs. Stadding telephoned, obviously reluctant, to say that her husband could see Dilys the following Saturday morning. Dilys, with Ellen’s help, had already looked up trains and found that though Market Drayton was only sixty miles away there wasn’t anything that got there without taking all day and going all round the shop; and the buses were just as bad. So Mrs. Matson asked Mrs. Thomas if Trevor Sweeting couldn’t take her. He was really the under-gardener, but mostly he did odd jobs and stuff, and anyway Saturdays were supposed to be his days off too, but Mrs. Thomas must have got him in a good mood—she had a real trick for that, Dilys had found; everyone seemed to eat out of her hand because it never crossed her mind they wouldn’t—so in the end it all worked out.

2

The sixty miles took almost two hours along busy winding roads. Trevor listened to Radio One turned up loud. Dilys sat in the back letting time drift past in a kind of half dream. Looking at all those photos with Mrs. Matson, it must have been, but she found herself supposing she’d spent her life taking pictures of everything that had ever happened around her, so she’d shelves and shelves of albums of her own she could use to fish stuff out of the long ago, the way Mrs. Matson did. Nursing college, say, back at Tredegar. There’d’ve been an album for that. Who’d have been in it? Di Phillips, for a start, bleached blond hair, pouty lips, always messing around with her uniform to get it a bit tighter where it showed—as if she needed it—and waggling her bum at the senior consultant—a good nurse, mind you, and there’d been a dozen young doctors she could’ve taken her pick of, instead of which she’d gone and got involved with one of the night porters, old enough to be her father almost, and married him and stuck with him and had three kids, and he’d carried on being just a night porter but she’d gone back into nursing and done very well, heading for matron last Dilys had heard…heard how? Somebody must’ve told her, and the rest, different times, because Di was the sort you talked about…but if she didn’t know how she knew, how did she know she knew…? And what about that other girl—she was a darling and there weren’t that many black nurses back then—but Dilys couldn’t remember a thing about her, not her name, nothing she’d said or done, leave alone what happened to her after, only the glossy skin and the big laughing mouth and the sideways glancing eyes, yes, just like one of Mrs. Matson’s photos. Bonnie Wincing now—it was the other way with her because there’d been a photo to go on, the one in the newspapers and it had to be her because there couldn’t be two people called that. Dilys didn’t remember much about her from Tredegar, except the name, but now the papers said she’d given a patient ten times the drug he was supposed to be on and faked a card to make it look like the doctor prescribed it, so she’d be in real trouble when the patient died, which he did. The doctor was a woman, that was the point, and she’d been having it off with another doctor who Bonnie fancied. Looking at the photos in the papers, Dilys wouldn’t’ve known she’d ever seen the face before…It was all gone, gone, except scraps, and most of your life is like that, really, if you thought about it, even when you think there’s lots and lots you remember. Maybe there were people who had it all sorted and stored away in their minds, like Mrs. Matson had with her albums, but most of us aren’t like that…

The car slowed right down. Trevor read the name on a gate.

“Looks like we’re here,” he shouted over the radio. “Fanning, wasn’t it? How long are you going to be, then?”

“I don’t know. Not very long. Half an hour?”

“Oh, that’s not so bad. I’ll put the car on the verge there and stretch my legs a bit. OK?”

The house must have been two small cottages once, because half of it had a slate roof and the other half was thatched, and the windows didn’t line up—one of them you could see where the other front door had been. There was a tidy plain garden. When Dilys was halfway up the flagged path from the gate, the door was opened by a small, stooped woman, neatly dressed in a wool-knit skirt and twinset. Well into her seventies. Heart condition. Osteoporosis. Might last for years, might go this afternoon, poor thing. Her voice was the twitter Dilys had heard on the telephone.

“You’re Miss Roberts? How do you do? I’m Ida Stadding. My husband’s expecting you. Please—I don’t know what this is about—he won’t tell me but I know he’s upset about it, and that isn’t good for him. He gets so tired.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Stadding,” said Dilys, on her home ground and armed with her professional confidence. “I don’t know that much about it myself, but I don’t think it’ll take long, and if you want to know my guess is it’s something he’ll be happy to have off his chest. And I’m a nurse, remember, so I’ll know if I’m taxing him, and I’ll be careful.”

“All right, then. This way…”

The house inside was nothing special to Dilys’s eye, but it had that pleasant feel you get when a couple have lived companionably together for many years. Most of the pictures were of birds. Mrs. Stadding opened a door, and a wave of warmth flooded into the hallway. The room was hotter than the greenhouse at Forde Place where Mr. Worple brought the houseplants on. Despite that, the man in the chair had a rug across his lap, a shawl round his shoulders and wore a knitted scarf and mittens. His skin was a dirty yellow, his eyes sunk and his flesh fallen away, but Dilys could still see that she’d been right in her guess, and he’d been the beautiful young man Mrs. Matson had photographed on the fire escape. Liver, obviously. Should’ve been in hospital, poor man, but by the looks of him it was a bit late even for that.

He acknowledged their entry with a sour little smile.

“I won’t get up, if you’ll forgive me,” he said. “As you see, I am not in very good health.”

“Now do be careful, Sim, and not upset yourself,” said Mrs. Stadding. “I’ll run and put a kettle on for Miss Roberts. Tea or coffee?”

“Don’t make it special for me, Mrs. Stadding. Only if you’re having some. Tea and milk and one sugar, which I know I oughtn’t.”

“Count yourself fortunate to be able to make the choice,” said Mr. Stadding.

He waited for the door to close.

“Now, what have you got for me?”

Dilys fished in her bag.

“There’s the tape recorder,” she said. “Put it on your table, shall I, where you can reach it? And I’ll plug the microphone in. There’s fresh batteries, so you won’t need a cord. All you’ve got to do is—”

“I am familiar with these devices.”

“That’s all right then. But you’re going to have to listen real hard, because her voice is starting to go and she can’t talk above a whisper, just two or three words at a time. I was in the room with her to press the buttons for her and that, but I was wearing my Walkman which I’ve got for sitting up with my patients so I don’t disturb them, so I didn’t hear anything she said, I promise you that. Now I’ll just go outside…”