A Habit of Dying (29 page)

While they broke bread still warm from the oven and washed down smoked salmon with a fresh bottle, they spoke more of children and the lack of them, and how each of them could imagine the other’s feelings. They talked of nieces and nephews and how they could become surrogate children. Mention of Stephen’s niece Fiona inevitably brought Phoebe Joslin to Lydia’s mind and Phoebe brought memories of Loweswater and Cockermouth for them both to share again.

‘And did you bring your Joslin treasures with you?’

Until the moment of her arrival Lydia had been bursting to tell him the news of her great discoveries, but in the pleasure of seeing him, the warmth of the summer garden, the bubbles in the creamy wine, the Joslins and their affairs had slipped from her mind. ‘Oh, yes, I did. I have everything in one of my cases.’

‘I wondered if two cases might be a little much for a single night,’ he smiled at her.

‘Stephen, I know who the journal writer is, I know who his wife is. I think that I know everyone in the albums.’

‘That’s wonderful! Not just wonderful but amazing too, you have put so much into it. Does Dorothy, was it Dorothy, does she know all this?’

‘No, I haven’t told her but I’m going to see her in September. There’s one thing I don’t know, I don’t know what happened to Susan, she is the SDI in the journal, the writer’s wife. The story just stops, I can find no trace of anything.’ Then in a moment of confidence only partly supplied by the Prosecco, she added, ‘Maybe you can see where I’ve missed something or where I should go next. Maybe you can see the answer, maybe it is staring me in the face all the time.’

He looked at her for a moment before answering, recognising the honour that she was offering him, giving up sole ownership of her precious project. ‘Are you sure? You know I am interested to look, but to contribute something at this stage when you have come so far? Thank you, of course I’ll help. Well, that does rather assume that I have some help to give. So tell me, who is this journal writer and how did you find him.’

‘He is, or was, Andrew Stephen Myers. And here’s the thing, Susan, his wife who is a child in sandcastles, is . . .’

‘Sandcastles?’ he interrupted her.

‘That’s what I call the album with all the holiday pictures, sandcastles. There’s that one, the oldest one which is Longlands, and the RAF album. The empty one I called the VE Day album. But Susan was a Joslin, or rather her mother was, and Andrew was a Myers or a Dix Myers, and they were related. To be precise, they were fourth cousins twice removed,’ she concluded triumphantly

‘All right, I can see it’s somehow important, but you may have lost me somewhere. What does that mean, fourth cousin twice removed?’

‘Well, it means that Susan’s five times great grandfather, or five-g grandfather, who was John Jolly, was also Andrew’s three times great grandfather.’

‘Right.’ Stephen paused before adding, ‘And the significance of that is?’

‘First it is unusual, but second it explains how the RAF album and the other two could have come to be together. Andrew would have had the RAF album from his family and Susan would have had the others from hers.’

‘I think you’d better tell me the whole thing.’

‘Shall I get the albums and my notes?’

‘No, just take me on from where we were in Oxford.’

So as the afternoon drifted lazily on, Lydia told Stephen how she had found that Susan was an Ingleby from the photo of the two girls under the road sign. From there she had found the family, found her mother was Ethel Joslin, and that Susan was Papa’s great great granddaughter, and how Susan had married Andrew in Abingdon in 1976. Stephen let her run on through the discoveries, the certificates, the births and the deaths. He learnt how Andrew was the elusive Bertie’s son and Lydia guessed he might have been born in Rhodesia or South Africa, which was why she couldn’t find any trace of him until he popped up on Bertie’s death registration with an address in South Africa in 1971. Then in 1975 when his mother died he appeared again, only by that time he was living in Chesham, at the same address as his mother. It all tumbled out as she laid each new revelation before him to be wondered at. Try as he might, he still couldn’t quite share her enthusiasm, her passion for the subject, but he enjoyed seeing the life and excitement it brought to her face. She was so animated that he stopped trying to take in all the details of her discoveries and settled for catching the gist while enjoying her pleasure. Even when she came to an abrupt halt, saying that was as far as she could go, she knew who they were, she knew so much about them, but could find no trace of either of them dead or alive in the years after the journal, even then Lydia spoke with an intensity that Stephen found quite captivating.

‘And what have you brought with you?’

‘Nearly everything. The albums and the journal obviously, and
all the notes I have made, all the certificates and my laptop. You can look at the Joslin family tree on that.’

‘Well, I think if you show me what you have, then allow me a while to read it all and try and understand it, then it is possible some new avenue might suggest itself.’

Stephen brought the second suitcase down from Lydia’s room and together they arranged its contents in his study. She explained each of her treasures, showed him how she’d filed the certificates, explained how the Joslin family could be viewed and how their sometimes confusing relationships came about by the marriage of cousins. Finally Lydia presented him with the precious journal, both the original which she now kept in a plastic document bag, and her transcript.

‘Ah, the journal itself,’ he said with not entirely false deference. ‘Funny to think that I now have it in my hand. Remember talking about it as we walked in Loweswater?’

‘Yes I do.’ Lydia let the scene take shape in her mind again, just as she had several times before. ‘Where do you want to start?’

‘Lydia, if it is alright with you, I’ll roughly follow your course, spend time with the albums, look at your notes about them, see how you’ve fitted the family together, then read the journal. I want to have some sense of the people that is beyond the facts you’ve discovered and see if I find a similar picture is formed.’

He seemed to have no doubt as to how to go about the task, a new and interesting case, but a procedure he was familiar with. And he seemed ready to undertake it without her. Lydia imagined how he might have overseen some junior’s investigations when the conclusions were open to question, how he would have taken all the papers, shut himself away until the job was done.

‘Shall I leave you to it? It might take you quite a while.’

‘Is that alright? Not the best of hosts perhaps, to leave you to your own devices. I thought you would want . . .’ His voice trailed off and Lydia saw uncertainty in him for the first time.

‘I can amuse myself. I’m practised at it, remember? I’ll do a little exploring if that’s ok.’

‘Good, yes, please do. Oh and I had planned that we would eat
out tonight, there is a taxi from the village booked for seven thirty. A place in Cambridge.’

‘That will be lovely, thank you. I’ll leave you to it.’ ‘I’ll come and find you if I’m stuck,’ he called after her, delighted she’d instantly understood his need to look at her puzzle in his own way, how easy it was for her to simply let him do so.

The heat of the day had abated as Lydia strolled round the grounds. They stretched further than she had realised, and all was tidiness and order. Beyond the little orchard and the roses clambering over the brick behind it, lay a paddock, occupied by a solitary horse that came to investigate her but quickly lost interest. Had Jacqueline had a pony she wondered, maybe Elspeth had ridden? Was it Elspeth’s framed picture on Stephen’s desk? Surely it must be, a golden haired young woman with a pageboy cut last fashionable in the seventies, posed in a black and white studio portrait. Another life, yes, but the echoes remained. After a while she took herself back to the seats under the awning and retrieved the bottle from the ice bucket. It was still cool enough although the ice was long gone. She was greatly tempted to explore the rest of the house, to see who else was important enough for Stephen to have their photographs displayed, but she contented herself with sitting in the peace of the garden. She should be feeling like a fish out of water, should be tempted to run home to West Street. Instead she felt as relaxed as she had anywhere since, well, she was not sure since when. Maybe since a day in the Lakes.

When Lydia woke she was unsure for a few moments if she were awake or still dreaming. Nothing around her was familiar, in fact it hardly seemed real at all. She was in someone else’s room, the morning sun angled in through white net curtains stirring softly across an open window. She felt sure that she would recognize the scene beyond the window and yet she could not quite say what it would be. The room was silent and beyond the room, the house was silent.

As the world solidified, recollection flooded in, and she stretched out in the bed, hugging the pleasure of the moment to herself. Scenes from the previous day flickered through her head, bubbles streaming in her glass as they sat in the shade, the scents of the garden wafting around them, Stephen working quietly away at her papers as she opened his study door to check on progress, the swish of gravel as the taxi took them to dinner. The restaurant was not intimidating, as she had feared it might be, but informal and quite unpretentious. They’d passed two untroubled and pleasurable hours there, lingering over their meal, then over coffee until the car returned to carry them back to Grantchester. After the rare indulgence of a brandy, shared under the last strands of light in the night sky, they had said their goodnights and exchanged an awkward kiss, unpractised as they were in such familiarity. Stephen had looked right into her and repeated his goodnight.

Lydia lay perfectly still in her bed, letting the moments from yesterday flow round her without question or reservation until she was happy she had them properly arranged, that no sudden recall would unsettle her day. Then she showered and dressed, ready for whatever Sunday might have to add to her memories.

The house remained silent as she entered the kitchen, but she was not first there, the aroma of fresh coffee greeted her and a clean mug was waiting ready for her by the pot. She helped herself, then went to Stephen’s study, pushed open the door and found him exactly where she had the evening before, with her Joslin papers spread across his desk. She noticed too that Elspeth’s photograph had been pushed back to make room for a reference book.

‘Good morning, Lydia. How was the bed?’

‘Very comfortable, you can tell your daughter that she had it right. Have you been up long looking at my puzzle?’

‘Maybe an hour or so. I hadn’t realised the journal was so long, I was just finishing it again. I tried reading the original, but that would’ve taken all day, so I’ve dipped into it, looked at the way each entry was written to get the sense of it, then read your transcript. It’s very powerful. It’s raw and disturbing, the word subversive
comes to my mind, but I don’t quite know why. I understand how you’ve got hooked on it.’

‘The big question is whether you have any ideas.’

Stephen paused a moment and looked out at the summer morning before answering. ‘Maybe, but I have a few notes of my own and a question or two first. I’ll finish this off quickly, then we can have some breakfast.’

They settled on juice, toast and more coffee and took themselves round to the sunny side of the house by the rose garden. Stephen brought his page of notes, the file of certificates and a paper copy of the Joslin family tree from Lydia’s laptop.

‘You had some questions?’

‘I haven’t been through every name and date to check if they are right and anyway, I’m guessing it would mean taking each reference and re-doing the search. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And tell me if I am correct also when I say your premise is that the family you have established, all the generations, all the detail, that family is the one in the albums for sure because it is the one that fits best.’

‘No, not quite. I think it is the family in the albums because it fits exactly where it is possible to measure that fit, and because I think the probability is very high that it’s the family and that the probability is extremely low that there’d be another family that could fit any better. Nothing in the family, the certificates, the references, contradicts the albums. Nothing in the albums contradicts the family.’

‘And the family proves the albums are linked?’

‘Yes, plus the other things, like Dorothy having a photo of Phoebe with her mother, and Phoebe in the sandcastles album. And although it isn’t proof, there is the simple fact that they were all together in one box.’

‘Which could have been pure coincidence.’ Stephen’s tone was that of the fair inquisitor, not the dismissive prosecutor.

‘It could, and I treated it as such to begin with. I started from that point.’ Lydia took another sip of coffee, desperate to know where he was leading, but willing to be patient.

Stephen nodded to himself and gazed into the middle distance for a few moments. ‘And if they had been in the same box but tied together by a ribbon with a neat bow then you would probably have made the opposite decision and assumed that they were linked right from the start.’