Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

They’d gone, the four of them, to the market, ostensibly so that Leila could look for trinkets and Rachel for subjects for her lens; in actuality to be together, and apart from the other British. Mr. Stadding had disappeared without explanation, returning a few minutes later to confront Leila with an elaborately courtly salute.

“I understand you came to Meerut for a fish, Miss Valance,” he had said, and moved aside. The shutter had clicked about two seconds later.

Rachel’s eyes searched the figure. It was as if her mind manipulated invisible fingers to adjust to its finest focus the lens through which she captured the world. This was her first clear picture of him, a decidedly handsome young man, slight and elegant, his features, though less exotic than Leila’s, having the same suggestion of an un-English sensibility, an intensity of feeling, in his case salted with wryness and irony. Superficially they seemed an obvious match. She already adored him. He behaved as if attracted to her, but so did almost every other man she encountered, and Rachel had almost at once become aware of his far greater intelligence and more complex personality…

“Do you think there’s any chance they’ll understand each other, Mr. Matson?”

“I don’t know it matters. People talk about understanding other people, but what do they mean? You can’t look inside. It’s just guess-work. And in any case you’d have to go a long way before you met anyone, man or woman, who got near understanding Greg Stadding. I’ll tell you this though, and you can pass it on to Miss Valance if you want—he isn’t a skirt-chaser, as far as I know. And given the chance he’d throw up the army and go home, but to do that he’ll need either a goodish job or a wife with money of her own. He’s not going to live in a cottage and raise chickens.”

“What about you, Mr. Matson? I don’t see you raising chickens either.”

“Oh, I’d make a go of it if I had to. But soldiering suits me, and I imagine I’ll stick with it until my old man keels over and I have to go home and look after things.”

She had let the focus blur. Steadfastly she readjusted the lens and gazed. No, not a hint, not in the picture. In Jocelyn’s words, possibly.

“Turn…Stop.”

The Student Prince , put on by the officers at the end of the fortnight with the female parts transposed for tenor voices. The dress rehearsal. Lieutenant Stadding smoking in the wings while he waited to go on as Kathie, wearing not the standard fräulein frills but the uniform of a Lyons tea-room waitress, lace cap and white apron, black frock and stockings—the skirt not quite allowing a glimpse of the knees—and high heels, built to male size by a cobbler in the market. To Leila’s distress he had shaved his moustache. The calves were a bit muscular, but that apart…

“Oh, it’s a man!…Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Yes? Not a skirt-chaser, confident in women’s clothing…No, that was hindsight.

“Turn.”

A dozen images flipped past. Rachel could have closed her eyes and described any detail in any of them—the polo, a boating picnic, sunset over one of the listless canals, unpeopled except for two striplings working a bucket lift to carry water by those countless thimblefuls up to their father’s fields—but she and Jocelyn had walked by the sluggish levels all afternoon (Sunday, and so no polo) and talked for the first time seriously about themselves, without reticence or pretence, revealing and discovering…

“Stop.”

The four portraits. She had used delayed exposure for her own, and developed them in her hotel room so that each should keep a picture of their lover when they parted.

“Why, that’s you! What do you mean telling me you weren’t ever that pretty? I tell you I wouldn’t have minded looking half so good. You’re just putting yourself down, compared to your friend. She was a stunner, mind you…”

Jocelyn and Rachel, Leila and Fish. When the album was closed the couples lay mouth to mouth. The portrait of Leila wasn’t particularly striking, compared to others Rachel had taken, but the one of Fish was excellent. Clean-shaven, his mouth was fully visible. He had chosen not to smile, but this had the effect of bringing to the surface his odd, ambivalent humour—“He’s serious about not being serious,” Leila had once explained—and a certain loneliness, or rather aloneness, a state chosen rather than endured. He was such good company that you didn’t normally notice that side of him. Rachel thought it one of the best portraits she had ever done, but though Leila liked to cram all available surfaces of her house with framed photographs of her family, mostly snapshots or banal studio portraits, this had never been among them. “I don’t like him without his moustache,” she’d said when Rachel had asked about it.

“That’s all. Thank you. Next one. Please.”

The weddings. Rachel had begged off being the sole adult bridesmaid alongside a flock of Leila’s little cousins, all of them with the fascinating Valance style. She had gone alone and mostly stalked faces and poses round the sunlit lawns, spending an amusing half hour with the official photographer, a wizened little Scot, a fanatic about his craft, using a superb old full-plate for his work but well up to date with all the latest gadgets and delighted to find somebody else who cared. There were, of course, the standard wedding shots, the couple under the church porch, cutting the cake, getting into the open Lagonda (Leila’s gift to Fish) under a blizzard of rose petals—and there were others, more peripheral.

“Stop.”

Fish with one of the male guests by an ornamental pond and dribbling fountain. Grey tail suits, wing collars, toppers on the chairs beside them. Fish was Fish, lissom, amused, somehow both tense and lounging; the other man—Lord Something, Rachel seemed to remember—though no taller, must have been twice Fish’s weight, stocky rather than stout, with a snub-nosed, shrewd, bucolic air. He was smoking an aggressively large cigar.

“Why, that must be Mr. Stadding’s…father I suppose. Isn’t there a likeness! Funny I didn’t see it in the other ones.”

“Yes. Do they…know…each other?”

“I’d say they do. He’s kind of teasing the other one, the fellow with the cigar, and he’s making out he’s hoity-toity about it, but really he’s enjoying it no end.”

“Flirting?”

“Well, if your friend had been a woman now…Is that what you’re asking me? Well, now. Not to say yes, that’s what they’re up to, but could be there’s something between them…or could be there isn’t, not yet, but they’re getting interested. Thinking about it, if you know what I mean…”

Yes, perhaps, thinking about it. Rachel remembered deciding to use the image mainly because she’d liked it. The balance of shapes was pleasing, the moss-streaked fountain seemed to have an odd menace in the sunlight, the picture of Lord Something was a speaking study of a particular type of man, and the one of Fish was, simply, much better of him than any of the ones with Leila. Rachel hadn’t asked herself why, certainly not when she’d looked with satisfaction at the first enlargement, not even when she’d reused it for the Life . Now, though, the reason seemed manifest. The picture with Lord Something spoke of a truth, while those with Leila spoke of, at best, a skilful act, a pretence.

She let Dilys leaf on to her own wedding.

“Why, it’s just snapshots, like I used to take with my little Brownie.”

“Yes. Pocket camera.”

In the last of her twice-weekly letters to Jocelyn, Rachel had told him, trying to make her own disappointment sound merely comic, that her parents had absolutely refused to let her ruin the expensive white wedding that they had scraped to pay for by carrying “that hideous black object” around with her everywhere. The letter had reached him the day before he sailed. He had read behind the comedy and wired to a school friend in the Washington embassy. The friend had telephoned around and found in Bloomingdale’s, in New York, a white pocket camera, a ladies’ accessory that happened to take snaps, for use by starlets and such. It had arrived by way of the diplomatic bag with a day to spare. Pure Jocelyn—the perceived need, the resourcefulness, the contacts. The inadequate images that the trinket produced were worth their pages, for that reason alone.