A Habit of Dying (14 page)

His direct manner of speaking, delivered in his soft and even voice left her both disarmed and confused. He had a way of leaving doors wide open when he finished speaking. Now she had a choice to make. How long since someone offered her even such a trivial choice as this. If she waited and said nothing he would walk on alone, if she said yes, let’s walk together, would he take it the wrong way? If she said no, she preferred her solitude, would it be true?

‘That’s ok, I do completely understand,’ he said as she dithered, and made to leave her side.

‘No, it would be fine to have some company, it would be nice,’ and then as if to cement her decision she added, ‘thank you, Stephen.’

So they walked through the woods together, she at first full of anxiety that she could think of nothing to say while he strolled easily beside her, or in front or behind according to the width of the path. After a mile or so she grew more comfortable with silence, so that when they stopped to enjoy their surroundings at a little pebble beach she was almost at ease with herself. Stephen tossed a few pebbles into the lake, skimming them and counting the bounces, saying how he could never resist the temptation of rekindling childhood memories. He pointed out a farmhouse high above on the opposite side of the lake, telling her how that house had looked upon the water for more than four hundred years, and asking how that made one think, did it not? Which chimed immediately with Lydia’s own sense of history and place, though it made her think less about the house and the four hundred years than it did of this easy-going stranger she found herself with.

It took well over an hour for them to complete the first half of the walk. While Stephen collected a menu for lunch and bought
some drinks, Lydia sat at a table in the pub garden. She was enjoying the day, the change of scene, and even the company. She had almost forgotten that she had a little work to do in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard and wondered how best to explain without going into detail. But whereas before her walk she would have fretted over revealing her ridiculous enterprise, now it did not disturb her. If it all came out then so what? It struck her that neither Stephen nor she had indulged in any of the small talk usually associated with such casual acquaintance, no questions of occupation or age or children and certainly not of marriage, no urgent need to find common ground to enhance conversation. In fact they had spoken little, and after her initial anxiety it had been a companionable silence, a silence that did not cry out to be broken. Which did not mean that Lydia was not curious about this languid man, she most certainly was, but there seemed no urgency in discovery.

‘Shall we have the time-honoured argument over who pays for lunch, Lydia?’

‘No, Stephen, we will not. I will pay for mine, and you will pay for yours,’ she replied, a little more firmly than she had meant. She had been ready for his offer to pay, but not in the way that he had done so.

‘Fair enough, Dutch it is. Quite right too.’

Lydia rummaged in her bag and passed him a note while he found some coins to give her the exact change. While this was precisely what she had said, it left her a little uncomfortable. She had expected him to counter with at least an ‘Are you sure?’, instead of which he had simply agreed and that was the end of the matter.

‘Will you take the walk straight back?’ she said, somehow needing to approach the question of her graveyard detour.

‘Probably sit here for a bit, and then, yes, a gentle stroll back. There’s a path down by the water for much of the way, although the road is fairly quiet. Did you have something else in mind?’

‘Well, I would like to spend a while at the church.’

‘Religion or architecture? Or maybe both?’

‘Oh no, not religion, I’m not religious. No offence to you, if
you are, I mean.’ Again she had been wrong footed by his directness and by her own perverse wish to keep her motive secret.

‘Nor me, so no offence.’ He said it with a weariness that hinted of faith lost, rather than faith never held. ’I might join you, if you don’t mind. In all these years I have never been inside the place.’

‘No, no, that would be fine, er, nice.’

Now there would be no getting away from it, she could hardly walk round the churchyard studying the memorials, maybe noting some down, then not go in the church itself, without offering some explanation as to what she was doing. And if she lied or told half the truth, then that would only invite another question and another lie.

It was no more than a few steps from the Kirkstile Inn to St Bartholomew’s and whatever she might find it would not take long. Modern graves had been placed in a small extension to the main area and for the most part they were arranged in chronological order. A matter of minutes Lydia imagined. While she started her inspection, Stephen tried the door of the church, but it was locked. By the time he had wandered round the exterior without finding anything to take his interest, Lydia was almost done. One name had been noted, one that she was feeling quietly optimistic about. ‘
Beatrice Jinifer Wright, 1903-1984, Benefactor of this Place, Much Loved and Much Missed Friend
’. To Lydia’s mind it was as near as any inscription she’d read had come to saying ‘spinster’. And everything else worked beautifully, not that she allowed herself to get carried away and think that this Beatrice must be the one she was looking for.

Stephen rejoined her as she was approaching the gate.

‘Well, not much of interest here, at least not for the casual observer,’ he suggested.

‘Nothing in the church to draw the eye?’

‘Locked. And you, did anything draw your eye?’

‘Yes, well maybe. Something of interest, but it might be nothing.’

‘Not a wasted trip then.’

‘No, not wasted, and even if there had been nothing at all, it wouldn’t have felt wasted.’

‘Indeed not. Apart from what you are doing with your notepad, you are also here to enjoy the place, so no, not wasted.’

So, thought Lydia, he is not going to ask me what I am up to, he’s probably just not that interested, no curiosity in him. But as soon as the thought came, so she took it back. Perhaps his apparent lack of interest might be simply reserve, an old-fashioned politeness, a reluctance to go where he was not invited. Her story, the whole reason for her being there, was entirely contained within her head, wavering daily from conviction to far-fetched fantasy. Inviting him to share that story would not make it any less than it already was, he could only laugh. Not that he was likely to, far too polite. Maybe too considerate also. If he thought her foolish, saw huge flaws in her theories, he was after all just a stranger she happened to have met and would never see again. To share it with another, put her ideas and logic into words, that would also test it out for herself, would it not?

‘Have you ever had any interest in genealogy, family history and the like?’ she ventured as they climbed up from the village.

‘No, it’s not really something I’ve ever considered. I have an interest in history, or rather the sense of history in places, in events in ordinary people’s lives. I suppose that would touch on family history, or do you mean strictly the ‘who begat who’?

‘I wondered because of the way you spoke about that house this morning, and your interest in the church. And yes, ‘who begat who’ is a part of it, but there’s a lot more to it than that.’

‘Well, the church was no more than idle curiosity I’m afraid, something to fill a few minutes while you were busy with your notepad. I had rather assumed that you were looking for an ancestor.’

If Lydia was going to tell him her story, she would not have a better opening than this.

‘An ancestor, yes, but not one of mine. And funny you should say that because the person I am looking may not have been anyone’s ancestor.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser. Will you tell me about it?’

Just below the house he had pointed out in the morning they paused by a gate. Between them and the lake an emerald pasture
sloped gently to the water’s edge. A half dozen horses grazed, the sound of their cropping the grass drifting on the breeze to the two observers.

‘It’s a long story.’

‘We have the afternoon, will that be long enough?’

So, almost to her surprise, Lydia told the story of the box of albums, of how she came to have them, what she would do with them. She told of her investigations, the frustrations, the visit to Longlands. She told him about the journal, about the feeling of intruding in something private. She even told him of her suspicions of the unknown outcome, and of how she came to be walking down a lane in Cumbria telling a perfect stranger about her foolish obsession. Not everything came out in the exact sequence it had happened, and she could not instantly recall every detail or tally of the abortive census searches. But the few items that she was fairly sure about, the Myers family, Longlands, Cockermouth, Pink2, she related in detail. She had finished her tale before she remembered the postcards, unconnected to anything else she could find and yet a real physical link between the places of the story, between Braintree, Cumbria and Oxford. And while she spoke, Lydia had a growing belief in her story, the more she put it into words the less ridiculous and fanciful it felt. It was the first time that she had assembled and recited the whole thing, even though she had picked over the detail endlessly in her head, and it was plausible, her box of albums could all be linked, they could be different parts of one whole. Stephen appeared to listen intently throughout, once or twice interrupting her to clarify a particular point.

The little hotel was in sight by the time Lydia fell silent. They walked on another dozen steps before Stephen observed, ‘Well, that’s quite a puzzle you have set yourself. But a fascinating one, nonetheless.’

‘ To be honest, you are the only person I’ve told. I think I’ve used you as a sounding board, to try it all out in words and see if they made sense.’

‘And now that you have, what do you think of it all?’

‘I feel ok about it. It sounded better than I thought it might. It doesn’t seem completely foolish now.’

‘I will take that as a compliment, that you risked looking foolish by telling me. But tell me, why do you think that the journal is real? I mean, that its contents are not fiction?’

‘Oh did I not say? If it is fiction then it is a most elaborate hoax or an amazing coincidence. First, I was, well, pushed in that direction, not by the words so much as their physical appearance. The writing varies enormously and in places the sheer anger of the words is right there, etched into the paper where the writer pressed so hard. And there are sections that I can’t make out at all, so scrawled is the writing. I think that no fiction would be written like that, even if it were a draft or something like that.’

‘Ok, I can accept that, it’s a good conclusion. Or at least, a reasonable inference that you take from the evidence.’ He spoke with mock formality, as if correcting a junior, but his open smile told Lydia that he was mocking himself not her.

‘No, there’s more. There’s the little bits of paper that fluttered out of the pages,’ Lydia was back into her stride again. ‘Near the end there is a passage about how he has written a plan and a list in a notepad and to keep it secret he has torn the pages off and destroyed them once he is sure he has it memorised. Look.’ Lydia took her notepad from her bag and turning to an unused page near the end, ripped it from its spiral binding. ‘See, there are little pieces that fall away as you do that. Well, right there at that page in the journal, right in the binding, there were little fragments like that.’ She offered a few specks of paper to him in the palm of her hand.

‘I like that, that’s very good. You have a passion for this. I like that too. I’m convinced, even though I haven’t seen this journal. From all that I hear, I agree with you. And what have you to lose anyway? You will either prove your theory and have a most satisfying outcome, or you will not, which may be unsatisfactory, but you will have had much pleasure in trying. Surely that is far from foolish? And if I may offer some advice from my own experience, then it would be that not every puzzle has a solution that can be found, too many of the pieces have been lost or rotted away, for anyone to
discover the truth. Sometimes we can only throw a little light on one tiny part of the whole.’

‘I know, and as you say, much of the pleasure is in the trying. But you sound as if you know something about puzzles like this. Have you done something similar?’

‘Well,’ began Stephen a little sheepishly, ‘my life has been full of puzzles for many years, because you see I am, or was, an archaeologist of sorts. The proper name is forensic archaeology. These days I’m semi-retired, just do the occasional lecture, I don’t get involved in the . . . er, field work.’

Lydia was a little taken aback by this revelation, even though she was not sure why. She had idly speculated that he might be an academic of some kind, maybe a mathematician by his precise manner of speaking. But to find that he was one of a select few in this lately glamorous field of investigation, a real detective as she saw him, well, that just added weight to his earlier comments about her own little project. Suddenly it did indeed seem insignificant, and she merely a clumsy amateur when put beside such knowledge and experience as he must have.

After a few moments silence she said, ‘That’s rather daunting, you know.’

‘Yes, I can see that you might feel that way. It always has been a bit of a conversation stopper. But look at it from my point of view, I know next to nothing of the world in which you are working, and I find your puzzle fascinating. And for many people I suspect that what you are doing would also be a conversation stopper.’

‘Forensic archaeologist. That would be examining bodies? Buried, murdered bodies?’

‘Not always murdered, not always bodies, but always buried in one way or another. It’s a lot more besides, but it’s only the bodies that ever get any attention. It’s really about examining very carefully anything buried to see what can be found relating to that burial. So in some small way my work has been similar to what you are doing. We can find out many facts, but it is the joining of the dots that makes the picture. Sometimes we cannot and no picture emerges. When you said about how you like to immerse yourself in the
subject, to feel your way into the lives in your photograph’s, I thought how lucky you were to have that opportunity and freedom to imagine. I have often felt that there are times when we lack that creative thinking when we are wrestling with a few fragments of someone’s life.’