Again Rachel willed all her concentration into focus on the image. No, you wouldn’t have guessed. However closely you’d watched
him then, you wouldn’t have guessed. For one thing, how could you suspect anyone whom children liked so readily? He was wonderful
with them, full of jokes that stretched but didn’t exceed their understanding, and so were especially delightful to them;
inventive of amusements for them to learn and then play on their own; patient with their bad moods—able indeed to coax a tot
out of a tantrum faster than anyone Rachel had ever known, and without conceding and inch over the cause of the uproar.
He had been just as good with Jocelyn’s parents. They were well mannered with Rachel, but couldn’t help her perceiving that
they thought her nothing like good enough for Jocelyn; and not unreasonably they detested her father. Unable to express their
feelings openly, they had displaced them into highly exacting rules about the behaviour of the grandchildren, incomprehensible
to toddlers used to the tolerance of a doting
ayah
. It had been a considerable concession that Leila and Fish could bring two further brats for their first visit. By the end
of it not only had the rules been greatly relaxed, but Rachel’s own status and worth seemed to have improved, and this had
been Fish’s achievement as much as her own.
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.
“Curtains open or shut, dearie? Can’t see the rooks so well, can we, now that the leaves are coming?”
“Shut.”
“Right you are.”
D
eliberately 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.