Some Deaths Before Dying (17 page)
“But…All right. Ma, I can see that’s pretty awful for you, but it’s not enough! It’s bloody well not enough! What’s it got
to do with Simon and me? Nothing. We knew about Uncle Fish doing a bunk, and we knew it had to be something like that, though
Aunt Leila won’t talk to any of us… Look, Simon’s always been a bit iffy about Uncle Fish—he says you can’t tell where you
are with him. But he’s always worshipped Da, and if Da came and told him he couldn’t marry me because of something
else
Uncle Fish had done—something unspeakable—I can just about see Simon—he’s got these stupid ideas about honour…Jesus, I’m
furious with him! And Da! There’s something he told Simon and he wouldn’t tell me, though he’s bloody well wrecked my life!
I’m sorry, Ma. I’m sorry about what happened to Da, and I wish it hadn’t, but I came to tell him how furious I was, and I
still am, and even if I’d known he’d got a weak heart I’d still have come and I’d still have said what I said!”
A pit had opened into a place which Rachel for the past seventeen days had been schooling herself not to think about. No,
that had nothing to do with Fish. She clutched at an irrelevance.
“I think it’s a stroke, darling, not heart. You couldn’t have known.”
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“I’m sure I’d feel the same in your shoes. I’m truly sorry for you, darling. I hope you’re wrong about Simon wanting to get
out of it. I’ve always loved him. If it’s any use to you, Da and I used to tell each other how stupid we’d been, waiting till
we were married.”
“Not much,” snapped Anne, unrelenting. And then, “Oh, God, I’m never going to feel about anyone the way I do about Simon.
I can’t imagine even being interested in anyone else!”
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Rachel rose to stand beside her and hold her close again, but she shrugged
herself free and moved away, still blindly sobbing.
“I’m sorry, Ma, Oh, God, I’m being desperately self-centred when…I just can’t think about anything else. I’d better go.”
“Please, darling. Oh, please…I…I…”
But Rachel couldn’t bring herself to say “I need you.” Not even now, when it would have been for the first time true. For
twenty-eight years all that she had truly needed had been supplied by Jocelyn. Even Dick had been no more than an emotional
extra, a luxury, a want and not a need. It was to late for such a demand.
“I’ll go for a walk and think about it,” said Anne.
She had stayed on, in fact, for three silently dutiful days and then gone back south. A month later a card had arrived saying
that she was moving to Bristol, with the address. She hadn’t returned to Matlock until the funeral.
Rachel lay and considered the event. The emotions didn’t return, however faintly, to confuse her.
All there was was the puzzle for her mind to tease at. She had been aware of it at the time, and Anne had, in effect, stated
it aloud, but it had been among the mass of stuff at the periphery of Rachel’s concerns, whose centre was wholly occupied
with the horror of what had happened to Jocelyn, and then with the obstinate, passionate nurturing of hope when everyone was
insisting that there could be none.
The puzzle was that the emotional logic didn’t cohere. Fish Stadding had embezzled the Cambi Road funds. When discovered he
had fled abroad. The committee had decided not to try and hunt him down. The money was apparently gone on some speculation
in the City, so what was the point? Besides, Fish had been on the Road.
The Staddings were old friends, Uncle Fish and Aunt Leila to the children. They had always brought their three boys to Forde
Place for a week or so in the school holidays. There had been a lovely inevitability about Anne and Simon deciding to marry.
Rachel remembered walking by the river with him—a still, early summer day, a perfect light. She had lagged behind the others,
taking pictures, and Simon had stayed with her, unasked, for company. That was Simon, sensitive, considerate, straightforward,
very like Leila in that. (In fact it was as if all the good fairies had come to his christening, because he seemed to have
inherited his father’s quirky intelligence, not to mention the rather oriental good looks of both parents.)
“We didn’t fall in love,” he’d told Rachel. “I think we were born in love.”
The memory simply didn’t chime with any picture of a Simon who, on learning that his father was an embezzler who had shamefully
betrayed his future father-in-law, had so readily, and apparently shiftily, broken the engagement. Yes, a young man might
well have behaved like that, but it would have been a different young man from the one Rachel had talked to by the river.
That Simon would have said, “This is tragic and appalling, and I will do everything in my power to make it up, but the first
thing I will do is insist on marrying Anne, if she will still have me.”
Indeed a Simon something like that surfaced a few years later, when out of the blue he had written to Rachel saying that he
had learnt that the Association was looking for a younger secretary, and asking if she would put his name before the committee.
He had added in a private note to Rachel that he would like to do something to repair the harm that his father had done to
the Association. Rachel had hesitated, but she knew the committee were desperate and Anne was now settled in Canada, so she’d
done what he asked.
Surely that Simon would have waited a little while for decency and then gone to Anne and told her he couldn’t live without
her. As far as Rachel knew there hadn’t at the time been another woman. A decade or so later he had married a widow, older
than himself, apparently out of a shared delight in bird-watching. He had never brought her to reunions at Forde Place. There
had been no children.
No, Anne was right. Jocelyn must have told him about something else. The young man’s visit? He certainly couldn’t have borne
to tell Anne, of all people, about that, and it would have been astonishing if he’d told Simon. Besides, it had nothing to
do with Fish.
Unwilled, her lips moved and the dry whisper came.
“He didn’t tell me, either.”
“W
ake up, Uncle Albert—I think we’re there.”
Jenny braked inside the gates to give him time to pull his wits together before they reached the house. He had dozed in snatches
for almost half the journey, and each time he woke had checked the cardboard box on his lap, raising the lid and groping inside
to make sure that nothing had been substituted for the pistol while he slept. It was already early afternoon, but since Mrs.
Thomas had insisted that food would be waiting for them on their arrival, they had stopped only once on the way, for coffee
and biscuits at a service station. There they had scarcely sat down before Uncle Albert was fidgeting to be off again.
Now he woke and checked the box once more.
“Well, what are we stopping for?” he said. “It’s a long way, you keep telling me.”
“I think we’re there.”
Distrustingly he gazed through the windscreen, then relaxed.
“Ah, that’s more like it,” he said. “That’s Forde Place all right. Well done, girl.”
It was not at all what Jenny had expected from the picture of well-to-do squirearchy suggested by Mrs. Thomas’s telephone
voice and chance remarks from Uncle Albert. The grounds were appropriate—not a flower bed visible, but large old trees, cedars
and planes and such, rising from several acres of lawn that sloped down to what was probably a river, with a wooded bluff
beyond. But the house itself was odd for such a setting, a solid slab of dark red brick with a wide-eaved slate roof and serried
windows. It didn’t look like a building intended for people to live in. It was utterly different from Jenny and Jeff’s own
little house, but it had the same quality of being obstinately itself, and the hell with anyone else’s ideas of taste and
style. Jenny rather liked it for that.
She drove on, stopping a little beyond the front door, climbed stiffly out and went round to help Uncle Albert.
“Lend me your shoulder, girl,” he said. “That’s right. I’ll do in a minute. Legs aren’t what they used to be.”
“Shall I take the box? It’ll go in my bag.”
“Might as well, now we’re here.”
The bell was answered by a middle-aged woman whom Jenny assumed to be Mrs. Thomas, but Uncle Albert spoke first.
“You’re new.”
“Only been here twelve years,” she answered. “Tell Mrs. Thomas you’ve come, shall I? She’s expecting you. If you’ll wait just
a minute.”
She led them into the hall and walked off along a sunlit corridor.
Jenny gazed around. This was more like it—more in conformity with her expectations, that is, though still with something very
odd about its proportions. A large space, three storeys high, roofed with glass. Polished old furniture, hyacinths, still
lifes, seascapes, display cabinets, never-sat-in easy chairs. An extraordinary staircase, not, as would be expected in such
a room, climbing handsomely up in broad flights, but a sort of free-standing shaft, a lattice of pale narrow timbers—satinwood
Jenny thought—with stubby flights rising inside the shaft. It was a life-size version of the sort of staircase a hobbyist
might model out of matchsticks. It had the beauty of total economy, with no ornament except itself, fashioned from the lightest
materials, its obvious strength inherent in the design, in the almost pure idea. Jenny had walked across to look at it more
closely when a voice reached her from the corridor.
She recognised it from the telephone calls, though the words weren’t distinguishable because, as it turned out when she emerged
into the hall, Mrs. Thomas had been talking over her shoulder to somebody behind her. She halted and turned to finish her
instructions.
“…and if he hasn’t got them in, ask him to order them. We don’t want anything different. We want the ones we’ve always had.”
She turned again.
“Well, well, well! Sergeant Fred! And you’re looking wonderful! What a stroke of luck you could come! Ma’s so looking forward
to seeing you again. You remember me, don’t you? I’m Flora. I dare say you think I’ve changed a bit.”
She took both his hands in hers and gazed up at him, openly delighted. She was a neatly plump woman, somewhere in her sixties,
Jenny guessed, with blond permed hair unashamedly greying, a little powder, scarlet lipstick prissily applied, scarlet fingernails,
green flannel skirt and matching cardigan, cream ruffled blouse pinned with a jade brooch. She radiated a sort of dishevelled
but contented energy.
“Ah, Miss Flora,” said Uncle Albert, a little uncertainly. “So you’ve turned out all right. And where’s little Anne?”
“She’s in Canada, breeding horses. We were over there a couple of summers ago and she seemed fine. And you must be Mrs. Pilcher.
How very good of you to bring him all this way. I wish I could have persuaded you to stay the night. I hope you didn’t have
too grim a journey—it all depends on the M25, doesn’t it? Somebody told me such a good joke about the M25 the other day—I
wish I could remember it. You know, I could pretty well have told you the first thing he’d ask me about was my sister. She’s
younger than me and it used to make me mad with jealousy that she was the one everybody was interested in. Well now, I’ll
show you where the loos are. Can he cope for himself?”
She scarcely lowered her voice for the question.
“Now, this is my niece, Penny,” said Uncle Albert. “Penny, this is…”
He stopped, frowning.
“Flora. Flora Thomas, actually. I’m married now. This way.”
Still talking as if not expecting answers to any of her questions, she led them back along the corridor from which she’d come.
“…and then we’ll go up by the back stairs, and that’ll mean Sergeant Fred can use the chair-lift. We put it in for my mother
when she could still get about a bit. Of course we’d never have got one in on our ridiculous main stairs…”
“I think they’re wonderful,” said Jenny.
“Oh, do you? I do too, of course, but then we’ve always loved this house, all of us. You know people used to say how hideous
it was—here you are, Sergeant Fred, you’ll find everything you want in there—but nowadays students are ringing up the whole
time saying can they come and look at it. He’s in a muddle about you being his niece, isn’t he? I suppose you don’t want me
to ask you anything about the pistols?”
She asked both questions in exactly the same tone of sprightly candour, though she had glanced a couple of times at Jenny’s
shoulder bag. The plural was puzzling. It must have been clear from the TV show that Jenny had brought only one pistol, and
knew nothing about any others.
“I still couldn’t tell you anything, I’m afraid,” she said. “But Penny’s my mother-in-law. I’m Jenny.”
“How confusing for the old boy, but he’s pretty wonderful in other ways, isn’t he? Do you know, we’ve got a party of Taiwanese
students coming to look at the house next month. Taiwanese, for heaven’s sake. Here you are—you must be bursting. Mind you,
they didn’t come halfway round the world just for us—they were on some kind of tour, but even so…”
She laughed at her own amazement and let Jenny go.
Uncle Albert, of course, refused to use the chair-lift and climbed slowly but steadily up four longish flights, resting briefly
on each landing. Mrs. Thomas talked the whole way, mainly to him, do-you-remembers about previous visits and encounters—usefully
stabilising for him, Jenny thought, though she wasn’t sure that she was doing it with that in mind.
At the top she broke off, turned to him and said, “I’d better warn you about Ma, Sergeant Fred. Otherwise you may find it
a bit of a shock. She’s completely paralysed, poor old thing, and she needs to have everything done for her. She can talk,
but it’s an effort—just a few words at a time, and only a whisper, so you’ve got to listen pretty carefully. But she’s absolutely
all there in her mind—sharp as a needle still. And her hearing’s spot on—you don’t have to shout or talk slowly, but she doesn’t
give any sign—she can’t—she just lies there, but you’ve got to remember that she’s hearing and understanding, and thinking
about what you’re saying all the time. You do see, don’t you?”