Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

Before their ’37 leave her mother-in-law had written, unasked, to say that the Staddings would be welcome for as long as they wished to stay.

Then the volumes spanning the immense hole of the war, and the two more years before she could bear to photograph Jocelyn again—or, naturally, any of the other Cambi veterans.

“Oh, that’s the one you’ve got on the desk.”

Jocelyn and the Rover. Not in fact the first picture she’d taken of him since his recovery, but it was here in the Life because it was the first that seemed to her to carry the full charge of her love for him, and of her relief that he was himself again…And the later knowledge that he wasn’t? Should that have been there, to eyes unblinded by affection? How should she know, even now, with the blindness undiminished?

The page turned. Ah.

Jocelyn and Fish. Another instance of the trick that still worked, that could still, despite repetition, in some sense surprise—even herself, though she had contrived it by placing it immediately next. Again there was a car with its bonnet gaping, again Jocelyn was poised beside it, caught in the action of turning towards the camera at her call. The echo was so strong that everything else in the picture seemed for an instant wrong—wrong setting, the stable yard; wrong car, the Staddings’ Bentley; an intruder, Fish, smiling, his greeting to her. They had been there so that Jocelyn could make some minor engine adjustment—something Fish wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting for himself—but they must have finished with that because when Rachel had come into the yard they were simply talking.

About what?

That, though it could never be answered, was the central question, and the photographs were where they were to ask it. For the real trick was not the superficial one of the echo, but a deeper and darker artifice. She had, of course, been wholly unaware of it for long after she had taken the photograph. She had done so, no doubt, in the hope of capturing a sense of a deep intimacy born of comradeship through dreadful times, times expressed in Fish’s still slightly unwholesome look—he had come through less wasted than Jocelyn, but had recovered more slowly. That comradeship had seemed to Rachel the only good thing to come out of the ordeal, because it balanced her bond with Leila, making the husbands equal partners in the family friendship.

But by the time she had composed the Life those friendships were gone, dissolved by death, and disappearance, and the residual acids of Fish’s treachery. The picture expressed a premonition of that change, a pivotal moment at which one kind of past began to become a different kind of future. Fish’s stance gave nothing away, but comparing the images Rachel believed she could perceive a difference in Jocelyn’s. In the one with the Rover it had expressed not just competence in the task, but assurance about the world and his own place in it. In the one with the Bentley there was a touch of uncertainty, of doubt of his own worth and need. Rachel had found it among the rough prints, having rejected it, presumably because when she’d first seen it it hadn’t seemed to her to present the “real” Jocelyn. The camera can deceive in that way. Sometimes it may picture a self which the subject would prefer not to display, but just as often the apparent self is an illusion. Looking through the roughs, Rachel must have thought the picture was of the latter kind. By the time she composed the Life she could see it was of the former.

She let Dilys leaf on through the remaining volumes, the world acquiring its postwar pattern: the girls becoming women; Dick becoming yearly more and more like Jocelyn in appearance, and less in actuality; Jocelyn settling into his role in the county—the High Sheriff year, and so on—and the Staddings coming in and out of the story, once on a Greek cruise, but mostly on visits to Forde Place.

Sometimes Fish had come with them, sometimes not, because he had been working. But he had often shown up on his own, using the house as his northern base. Before the war he had worked for a large insurance agency, but now he had his own business, specialising in the needs of the owners of country houses and estates, undercutting the big general agencies by insuring direct through Lloyds. Not much was said, but Rachel was well aware that Jocelyn was crucial to the success of the business, because Fish’s natural clients tended to be conservative in their ways, sticking with the insurers they had always used until the suggestion for a change was presented to them in a way that they felt comfortable with. Jocelyn’s introduction was the sort of thing such people trusted. Fish, in return, had taken on the chore of running the Cambi Road Association, though of course his secretary did all the work.

There was nothing in any of the images, and nothing in Rachel’s own memory, to suggest that Fish had been in financial trouble. Certainly he had had his extravagances, but his business had seemed to be prospering and Leila, surely, had plenty of money. She had happily let him run her affairs since their marriage. The camera had caught the well-to-do, contented surface, but nothing of the underlying hollowness.

What it had caught, if only for the eye of hindsight, was the curious, paradoxical relationship between the two men. There were not that many pictures of them together—Rachel was not the sort to pose her travelling companions on the ramp at Delos—but no one glancing at them as they happened by would have doubted that Jocelyn was the dominant one of the pair—not just for his greater size, but the stance of command, the self-assurance, keenness of look and definiteness of gesture, all so much more emphatic than Fish’s elusive, lounging, ironic personality. Jocelyn dealt seriously with the world. He had the energy and intelligence to achieve. Fish, potentially had them too, but made little use of them. It wasn’t that he lacked the will. He willed the negative.

But now, for Rachel, the cumulative effect was different. Perhaps she had sensed something of it when she had originally compiled the albums, but at last she could see it clearly. Now the series of images seemed to her to portray something very like the history of a marriage, in which there is one busy and active partner, and a quieter one; but it is the quieter one who makes all the major choices, with which the other then copes. In this case the chooser had been Fish.

Just before the end of the final album there was a picture of Jocelyn taken after his second stroke, in a wheelchair on the terrace in the October sun, seemingly content. Beside him stood the glass of champagne he was unable to lift to his lips. Rachel remembered willing herself to take the photograph, a record of continuing love, in sickness and in health. It had been Jocelyn’s sixty-fourth birthday.

Last of all Tom Dawnay’s picture of Rachel herself, photographing the coffin as it descended into the grave, only the second time her own likeness appeared in any of these fifteen albums.

She closed her eyes.

“Enough.”

“I should think so too! You must be quite worn out! My, though, it’s been interesting, looking at them all the way through like that. Quite a story they tell too—but I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Thank you, Dilys.”

“And now we’d better have a wee rest, hadn’t we? If I just get you all comfortable and settle you down.”

“Please. Flora?”

“Oh, she’ll be looking in this evening as usual. She’d have told us if she wasn’t.”

Rachel caught the note of mild surprise and anxiety, and understood it. It wasn’t like her to ask that kind of question, to need reassurance. She relied on her own memory to know what had been arranged. But it was important that Flora should come today, when speech was still minimally possible. There weren’t going to be many more such days. She could feel the change in herself, mental as well as physical, an acceptance that the time had now come to let go, to fight no more. Almost everything that needed to be done was done, and understood that needed to be understood. After Flora’s visit it would be over.