Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

First, before she started the hunt, the tape again, the two voices from the speaker beside her on the pillow. She had expected Simon to erase her question by recording his answer over it, but he hadn’t.

So first, the moistureless, breathless whisper, her own ancient ghost.

“Simon, this is Rachel Matson…For old time’s sake…I must know…Before I die…Did Jocelyn kill your father?”

Then the more recent ghost, the weary mutter from the new-filled grave.

“I am sorry, Rachel. Memories of Forde Place are among the few sad pleasures I have left to me. I too am dying, and wish it were over. I made Uncle Jocelyn an explicit promise, by which I still feel bound, that I would not answer your question. All I can tell you is that none of the participants would have regarded the event as being, in essence, shameful or iniquitous.”

That was all, apart from what might have been a sigh.

She blinked her eyelids twice to signal that she had finished.

The Walkman gave an unfamiliar shape to the blur of Dilys’s head as she bent over the bed to switch the machine off and take it away.

“There now, dearie. All done, and I’ll take this thing off so I can hear you again. Just leave it on the table, shall I, for next time?”

“No. Wipe it…please. Then albums. Life…’Thirty-one…to ‘Fifty-eight.”

Dilys made two trips for the nine volumes she had asked for. There were fifteen in all, Rachel’s own deliberately composed autobiography, wordless apart from the brief captions, names, places, dates. She had made the decision to put it together on the train back from London after seeing Dr. Lefanu and persuading him to tell her without palliation the likely course of her disease. He had given her a maximum of four years before she became imprisoned in the total physical dependence she now endured. She had by willpower wrung almost five from the failing carcase, starting the day after her return by getting Farrow and Milligan in from the garden to fetch box after box of stored film down from the attic and stack them in her dining room, once the night nursery, now Dilys’s sitting room. For the last three volumes she had no longer been able to work the controls of the enlarger, or to manipulate the prints through the trays, so had hired students, training them to do the job to her satisfaction. Thus the captions to those last volumes were written in a variety of strange young hands. It had been an early exercise in the art of controlling her world from inside a body that couldn’t itself be controlled.

Some sections had already been partly composed, the equivalent of diary extracts quoted in a written autobiography, but even here she had not always left the original intact, but had sometimes altered enlargements or interpolated images that seemed to her to adjust a perspective in the light of later understandings.

Begun as a task to see her through the dispiriting process of dying, it had become a wholly absorbing and rewarding occupation, worth doing—no, demanding to be done—for its own sake, a summation of a life and of a way of seeing; like a serious novel, though it could never find a publisher, indeed would never have more than one reader, herself, with anything like a proper comprehension of its meanings, and not many others. Still, fully worth doing for its own sake.

So she had never expected to use it for any practical purpose, as she was now about to do in order to track Fish Stadding through its pages, and study him in the light of what she found there, and thus perhaps, at last, understand him.

The volumes Dilys had brought opened with one of the “diary” passages, composed immediately after her return from India, newly engaged to Jocelyn. She had looked through it at least yearly since then—if you are the only reader of your book, then it’s up to you to see that it is actually read now and again—and she still found it satisfyingly remarkable that, though some of the individual compositions left much to be desired, she should have been able, so early in her career, to construct a detached and shaped account of the unbelievable event.

The quay at Karachi. The ship and gangplanks providing a grey-white, sharply angled background. A porter, naked to the waist, staggering on camera under the load of an enormous bale. Leila Valance sitting on a pile of trunks and suitcases and looking straight at the lens. Dear Leila, best friend since earliest school days. In the light of Dilys’s report on her visit to the Staddings, Rachel gazed at the image with a sort of bewilderment. She had so long been used to the obvious paradox about Leila, the way in which the looks belied the character. And not only the looks, but movements and postures, all the physical manners—as here, with the glossy, jet black, shoulder-length hair, the almost pearl-pale face, the big, luminous, slightly pop eyes, the luxuriantly languid pose—made people say “very Russian” or something of the kind, implying intellectual, alien, affected, erratic, absurdly emotional and altogether un-English. Not a bit of it. As a close friend Rachel had known her as down-to-earth ordinary, not specially bright but shrewd in her way, loyal and expecting similar loyalty from others, and extraordinarily determined, sometimes to a point beyond pigheadedness. Even the abrupt and, to Rachel, desperately painful shattering of their friendship had seemed of a piece with this reading of her character. Leila’s loyalty lay with her husband, overriding all other loyalties, to the extent of refusing to believe that he had in fact utterly betrayed her, and that there wasn’t some other explanation for what seemed to have happened. Rachel, though deeply hurt and grieved, had to some extent sympathised. She too, after all, had been almost equally betrayed, and had remained loyal. What if Jocelyn, having done what he’d done and been found out, had then disappeared? Could she have brought herself to believe that he had actually run away? Surely not.

But now, gazing at the picture of Leila on the quayside, she wondered. Had she been wrong about her all along? Or had Leila’s inward self, over the years of useless hope, gradually grown to conform to what was suggested by her looks? “Very Russian” it sounded, that to Rachel shocking business of snipping the images of her enemies out of all the photographs she kept on display.

Not yet. That all came later. Back to 1931.

Leila and Rachel had come to India with “the fishing fleet,” though unlike most of the other young women on the expedition Rachel had had no intention of finding a husband, while Leila, who with her striking looks and fair-sized fortune could have hooked almost any fish she chose, in any seas, had one particular catch in mind, who merely happened to be in India.

Rachel was there to keep her company and take photographs, Leila paying her passage. For propriety they had attached themselves to a Mrs. Splingford, not one of the regular semi-professional chaperones, but polo mad, and therefore going to Meerut, which was where Leila’s fish was to be found. And, as it turned out, Lieutenant Jocelyn Matson. That was why the porter was part of the image. His inscrutable burden portended that future.

“Turn…Stop.”

Fish .

For at least the hundredth time in her life Rachel felt a pulse, a glow of satisfaction at the complexity hidden in the apparently redundant caption.

“My, what a monster!” said Dilys. “Not that I’d fancy eating it, mind you.”

Two market porters faced the camera at a right angle, so that their burden was displayed. Turbans and loincloths, wiry emaciated torsos, looks of baffled impassivity, what could the memsahib want with such a creature? The pole they bore on their shoulders pierced its gills, bowing beneath its weight. Its tail brushed the ground. The individual scales were half a handsbreadth across, the shiny bulging eye yet larger. Leila, in the centre of the picture, had her back to the camera, but her whole stance, the stilled movement of recoil, the raised, spread hands—surrender or rejection—expressed her reaction to the proffered gift, expressed even, Rachel believed (though aware it would have taken improbable perceptiveness on the part of a stranger to read into the image what her long friendship inevitably told her), Leila’s simple-minded uncertainty how to take it. Pure joke? A way of moving the courtship on a stage by letting her realise that the reason for her coming to Meerut was common knowledge? A superficially amusing but actually rather unpleasant way of telling her that the metaphorical fish she had come to catch didn’t intend to rise? Beyond her, framing the tableau on the right, stood the watching donor, Lieutenant Gregory Stadding, to his intimates henceforth and forever “Fish.”