“You mustn’t think that bad of yourself,” said Dilys. “You’re being brave about it, you really are. I’ve seen some make far
more fuss when they hadn’t got half what you’ve got to put up with.”
“Only it’s so hard to keep going.”
“Of course it is.”
“And I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it—it’s thinking he should never have let any of it happen in the first place, and
he knows it and I know it. Oh, why couldn’t he tell those stupid old men that their silly quarrel wasn’t any of his business,
and just gone ahead and married the girl, if he was that fond of her?”
As she started to weep the bell rang again, longer and more insistently. Mr. Stadding could hear their voices, Dilys guessed.
She took Mrs. Stadding by the shoulders and eased her back into her chair.
“Now, you sit there and drink your tea,” she said. “I haven’t finished mine so I’ll be back in a minute for the rest of it,
and we can talk some more if you want.”
She left her dutifully sipping as she wept.
Mr. Stadding was sitting with his head bowed and his eyes shut. The recorder was in his lap with the case closed and the microphone
unplugged and coiled. After a few seconds he looked up, slowly, as if just raising his eyelids was almost too taxing.
“I trust you have had a pleasant gossip,” he said. “Well, I have recorded an answer of a sort for Mrs. Matson. I hope it will
satisfy her. Will you make her understand that I have done even this with considerable reluctance, and shall not respond to
any further enquiries. I suppose I must thank you for coming. Goodbye.”
Dilys tucked the recorder and microphone into her bag. She was all too used to the way the old and ill can exploit their weakness
to control others. She spoke to Mr. Stadding as if he had been one of her patients, not letting her anger show, using a quiet,
professional tone, as if she’d been advising him on the management of his illness.
“I’ve got something to say to you before I go, Mr. Stadding. You’ll think it’s no business of mine, but I’ve been talking
to your wife, like you said to. She’s having a very rough time, poor thing…No, you listen to me, and of course you’re wishing
it wasn’t so but there’s nothing you can do about it. Well there is. She’s got ideas into her head about the whys and wherefores
of stuff that’s happened—this stuff I came to see you about, not that I know much about it myself, but I know enough to see
that some of her imaginings are mistaken. No, wait. Far as I can gather, you’ve never told her, not because you didn’t want
to, but because you gave someone your word about it, once. Well, that’s all over. It’s years and years ago. Colonel Matson’s
dead and Mrs. Matson won’t be long going and there isn’t anyone else that matters, except Mrs. Stadding. You think it’s not
got anything to do with her, but it has. More than anyone else it has, now. You don’t want to leave her thinking worse of
you than she need do, do you? So you go ahead and tell her everything you can. You’re a decent man, and you’ve been trying
to do the decent thing all these years to a lot of people who don’t matter any more. It’s her turn now. She’s the one who
matters. Don’t leave it lying between you the way it is now, and you’ll both feel better for it, really you will.”
His answer was toneless with weariness.
“As you say, it is none of your business, Miss Roberts. Nevertheless I will think about it.”
“You do that. And show her the photograph Mrs. Matson took of you, and talk to her about Miss Anne. It won’t upset her, nothing
like the way she’s upset now.”
“Goodbye, Miss Roberts.”
Mrs. Stadding was still in the kitchen, but she had finished her tea and cleaned away the traces of her tears.
“I made you another cup,” she said. “Yours looked cold and horrid.”
The bell rang, a single, longer burst.
“That’s for me to go and give him a hand with…you know. He can’t manage on his own any more. I’m afraid it takes a while,
but please stay as long as you want and let yourself out if you’ve got to go.”
“I’ll just have my tea and then I’ll be off, thank you. I told the driver half an hour, and it’s past that already.”
“In that case…well, goodbye, Miss Roberts.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Stadding. And I do hope things go better for you soon.”
“Oh, dear.”
A voice that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless months may summon.
R
achel couldn’t remember how she knew the lines, or where they came from, but they sidled often into her mind these days as
she struggled with her increasingly erratic command of speech. Today was in fact one of her better days, when she seemed able
to put several words together at times and without huge effort. Dilys had returned late yesterday afternoon with the tape,
and she had listened twice to the brief message, and had then lain and thought, eaten her supper, watched TV, slept well,
and woken full of the excitement of her planned day. It was the excitement, the urgency to get the thing finished at last,
that supplied the energies needed for speech.
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.”
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.