Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Curtains open or shut, dearie? Can’t see the rooks so well, can we, now that the leaves are coming?”

“Shut.”

“Right you are.”

2

Deliberately Rachel emptied her mind and waited while Dilys dealt with her, tidied and left. For some time after that she rested, suppressing thought and memory, waiting for the necessary energies to renew themselves. Then, calmly, for the last of many times, but with fresh hope, she thought the whole thing through.

Most of it she had known for weeks, allocating each detail to its place, twisting it to and fro and finding out how it could best be fitted to the structure, as the rooks did when they brought another twig to their nests. Large pieces of the structure had seemed to acquire coherence, allowing them to be manipulated and joined to other such pieces. But the whole would never cohere, falling always into its two halves, the two betrayals, Jocelyn’s of their love, Fish’s of their friendship, with no connection between them beyond the coincidence of time.

Perhaps she had been blind. Perhaps even before the event she should have seen. It wouldn’t have been easy. When she and Leila had been alone together they had talked still just as they used to, as openly, as trustingly. It had been natural for Rachel to tell Leila about her sorrow at Jocelyn’s waning physical interest in her, and Leila had told her in return that Fish was still sometimes wonderful when he was in the mood. On their Greek tour, indeed, it hadn’t needed a lot of perception to see that she, at least, was having that kind of a good time, though Fish had remained as unreadable as ever.

The other cause of her blindness had been of her own making. It was as if she had all along been trying to build the nest on the wrong bough. To her the overwhelming event of that dreadful evening had never been her killing of the young man. He mattered to her not because of that, but because he had been the annunciating devil, informing her of her own betrayal. Though at the intellectual level she knew the horror of her crime, she was numb to it. If Jocelyn had said to her, “Yes, we must tell the police,”she would have accepted that as legally correct and morally justified, but she wouldn’t have felt that she had done anything she wasn’t compelled to. She would have told the court as much of the truth as she was able to, without at the same time telling the world of Jocelyn’s betrayal of her.

Even now, just as it had first done in the numbness of the act, her whole emotional being resonated to the clapper-blow of revelation, drowning all other vibrations.

Thus, though over the last three weeks she believed that she had again and again thought through every detail of the young man’s visit, that had not been the case. Much of what he had told her she had set aside as unimportant or untrue. He’d known Jocelyn for some while, she’d guessed, and had been given money by him. He must then have decided, or had it suggested to him, that there was more money to be earned by blackmail than by sex. Jocelyn—how could he have been so infatuated?—must have told him something about his home life—he’d known there were servants—so he had also realised that Jocelyn’s one truly vulnerable point was his relationship with Rachel. He had presumably purloined Jocelyn’s keys long enough to have copies made, and learning that Jocelyn was delayed in London had taken the chance to come to Forde Place, not intending to precipitate an immediate breakdown in the marriage but to show Jocelyn that he could do so if he chose. He had then misplayed his hand.

That would do as an explanation. It became a structured element in the puzzle, which she took for granted and tried to locate in its entirety each time she attempted a solution.

It fell to pieces only after Sergeant Fred’s visit—the picture of the young man at the cricket match, what Mrs. Pilcher had said, Sergeant Fred’s painful lying—with the realisation that the “he” who had told the young man about the servants, and produced the key, had been not Jocelyn but Fish.

Jocelyn and Fish. Two separate boughs, but crossing so close that over the years they had actually grown together. Useless for Rachel to try to build her structure, the random twigs of memory and surmise that she had collected, on Jocelyn’s bough alone. Only at the point of intersection with Fish’s bough would it cohere and remain.

The beginning was hidden, though Jocelyn had once told Rachel he’d been in a buggers’ house at Eton, using the phrase dismissively but without disgust, as if it had been an inevitable aspect of herding growing boys together. He had neither implied nor disowned having taken part himself, but if he had done so, it would have been a phase abandoned as soon as he moved on into a world with a saner distribution of genders.

Then, in some respite from the horrors of captivity, Fish had, deliberately and for his own amusement, seduced him. That was a guess, but it fitted the structure. It was the same thing as stealing the caviare, the real satisfaction lying not in the physical pleasure but in shaping the world however Fish chose, despite the desires and duties of anyone else. Jocelyn would probably have told himself that this was only the same situation that he had known at Eton, a temporary imbalance, something that could be put aside when he returned to the sanity of peacetime.

But he would have known in his heart that was not true. It was altogether different, because this time he had broken faith, and he had done so because Fish had discerned, released and revealed to him his “true” nature.

Furthermore, though he may never have known this, his self-discovery on the Cambi Road hadn’t only been of his sexual nature. That was superficial and partial. If he’d been an out and out homo-sexual the pleasure in their marriage would never have been there in the first place. His nature, presumably, was bisexual, and if that had been all there was to it he should have been able to make love to Rachel as he had done before. Fish could do it, giving Leila pleasure or withholding it as he chose, and getting his own pleasure from the power to do so. But Fish wasn’t bothered about honour. What haunted Jocelyn as they lay together was the knowledge that he could no longer make love to Rachel in good faith.

Oh, Christ, if only he could have brought himself to tell her!

Once honour is broken it will not mend. All you can do, all Jocelyn did in the end, is to use your will to hold yourself as near as you can into the shape that honour would have dictated. The result, like a dubbed voice on a foreign film, is never exactly right, and every now and then it is betrayingly wrong.

Sometime in the early ’fifties Fish had started his boys’ club, characteristically presenting it not as a public-spirited act but as a chore taken on to please a group of wealthy clients. He would have had secret amusement in telling so much more of the truth than he seemed to be doing, for the clients’ interest would have been less in the boys’ welfare than in their availability. And, being Fish, he might have got pleasure from the hidden power of pimping for the plutocracy.

But how on earth had Jocelyn allowed himself to be drawn back in?

Man of honour, however willed? Self-disgust, perhaps. No, not quite that. But say to yourself, “I have betrayed the person who is dearest in the world to me. How did I come to do this?” Then tell yourself, “Because it is my nature. That is what I am. It can’t be changed.” “Prove it.” “Very well, if I must.” Let there be an overwhelming reason for the broken faith, retested and renewed on visits to London, rather than the self-knowledge of honour needlessly lost forever. And let it not be an attraction towards a particular person, an intellectual and social equal, a long-term mistress as it were, who happened to be male. No, let the need be for nothing emotional or companionable. Let it be purely and explicitly physical, nothing to do with the inward self that still, in its way, loved Rachel more than anyone or anything in the world. Hence the rough trade, the young man.