A Habit of Dying (32 page)

‘Sudden Death of Local Builder – James Watson (74), former head of the Oxford building company Watson Homes, died suddenly at his home in Cumnor on Tuesday night from what is believed to have been a heart attack. His wife Susan (42) was with him. Mr Watson started his company immediately after WWII and prospered during the post-war building boom. He retired and sold the company soon after marrying in 1992. Funeral arrangements will be announced following a post mortem.’

As she read this, Stephen’s words came back to her – ‘particularly unfortunate’ he had said, but Lydia wondered if she may also have been particularly fortunate. Most likely she would have been left a wealthy woman.

Ten days passed before the two death certificates arrived. A
quick cross reference to medical terminology confirmed the initial report about James Watson had been correct, ‘
myocardial infarction
‘ was indeed a heart attack. The informant to the registrar was predictable, and to Lydia’s way of thinking, depressingly so, ‘
Susan D. Ingleby (wife)
’. At least the third death she had registered and the fourth at which she’d been present, not counting her own on 3rd July 2006, when she suffered a stroke and died in the same house as her husband. It was just a mile or so away from where Lydia sat, she could drive there in a few minutes, walk it in half an hour, but she felt no urge to do so; no trace of the Watsons would remain, there would be no echo for even the most sensitive of ears to hear. All that was left of them now were the records she held in her hand, with all their tantalising ambiguity right there on the page. She was almost convinced of Stephen’s third option and could not help but see a final irony that Susan, who seemed to have remained an Ingleby all her life, had her death recorded as a Watson, the one moment when she had no say in the matter.

The days dragged by and she was at the point of giving up the requested marriage certificate as lost when the envelope with the green address window fluttered onto her doormat. Carefully she slit it open and unfolded the document. There she was, still Ingleby of course, aged thirty-nine years with an address in Summertown, marrying seventy-two year old James Victor Watson at the Oxford registry office on 2
^nd
May. Susan had given her marital status as ‘widow’. Andrew was dead. Not missing, not buried anonymously somewhere, not a leaf on the forest floor, but officially dead. And if he were officially dead, then where was the record of that death? There must be one, for if not then Susan would hardly so publicly declare herself to be a widow. It did not make much sense.

By the evening Lydia had made herself a list of reasons why she could find no record of Andrew or his death. Top of that list was ‘missed it!’ which she heavily underlined and left there, even though she checked the index twice more to be sure she had not. Then came ‘abroad’, ‘lost at sea’ – although she was not sure about that
one, ‘not registered’, and finally ‘transcription error’ meaning that the index she was using was incomplete or wrong. She saw a long path ahead of her, trying to discover one simple thing that should have been so easy, and she grew suddenly weary at the prospect. To compound her problem, Lydia realised that finding the word ‘widow’ did not mean that Andrew was dead at all. It simply meant that Susan could justify her marriage without the possible inconvenience of a divorce. For some reason she may have been in a hurry to marry James; maybe she had presented herself as single and did not have time to make it so, maybe she needed to seize the moment, maybe James was ill already. There had been a time when Lydia would have thought nothing but good of Susan, ill of Andrew, but now she could not find a charitable motive for any of her actions. With no proof at all, she had her condemned as a bigamist marrying an older man for his money, and far worse besides.

An urgent need to talk to Stephen swept through her. They had used the post but lately had taken to emailing in a business like way, without any of the coded fun of their postcards. They had not spoken since the weekend at Grantchester, neither of them finding the right moment to make that closer contact. She had his number right from the start, it was there on his first letter to her where he’d given her every possible means of reply. The regular but unpredictable presence of Jacqueline at The Old Rectory had made her pause before, and it did so again. As she popped open her email the little symbol beside his name in her list of contacts blinked green. He was at his computer right now. Quickly she typed ‘Can I call you?’ and clicked send before she thought better of it. Two minutes later her phone rang.

‘That was a nice surprise, so I thought I’d give you one.’

‘Hello, Stephen, yes, thank you. I wasn’t sure about just calling.’

‘Please do, anytime,’ then a slight pause before he added, ‘I’m usually here on my own, and if I’m not then it doesn’t matter.’ He had understood her hesitation. ‘It must be something important. The unfortunate Susan?’

‘Yes. Susan. I sent you the other things about her death, but I got her marriage details today.’

‘Informative?’

‘You could say that. When she married James Watson she was a widow. Or at least, she said she was a widow.’

‘Ah.’

‘But I’ve double and treble checked and I can’t find anything about Andrew dying. I’ve written out a few ideas, but wanted to talk them through.’

She rehearsed her list with him and they discussed all the possibilities. Stephen added one small refinement, suggesting that Andrew might not be dead, but only ‘officially’ dead having been missing for a certain length of time, but he was not sure how the process worked. He thought probably that even then there would need to be some indication the missing person had died. And he was fairly sure a death certificate would have been issued. From the problem of Andrew, the conversation turned to Susan.

‘I have to admit, she does look more unfortunate at every turn,’ Lydia conceded.

‘Statistically I suspect that she may have been uniquely unfortunate. Which makes me think you might look at it the way that you started out, the way that you showed me, look at the probabilities. So make a judgement as to which of all the reasons you cannot find Andrew is the most likely, then take that and see what you can do about it. Or just take the one that you can do something about and then find it or eliminate it. It’s a bit thin, but all I can think of.’

‘I suppose so, I would guess that the most likely thing is that the index is wrong in some way, the record is there, but I just can’t see it.’

‘There is one other possibility, but I haven’t liked to suggest it.’

‘Suggest away, I’m almost past caring.’

‘Alright, but if you don’t like it then say so. I know quite a few people, that is, have contacts with people who might be in a better position to find out things.’ He tried to be as tentative and vague as he could, acutely aware how protective Lydia still was about her Joslins. He had been invited into that world once but had no intention of presuming the invitation was still open.

Lydia was wary of his idea. ‘The police, you mean?’

‘Not exactly, maybe someone who knows someone at the Home Office. But I won’t if you think not, entirely up to you.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ then quickly as an afterthought, ‘Thank you, I should have said. Ok, why not.’

‘You could think of it as just another resource that you’re tapping in to.’

‘I could.’

Suddenly the summer was gone. The rain swept in from the sea in torrents along Marine Parade and hurled itself at the windows of the café on Worthing Pier. Dorothy and Lydia had decided to venture out for lunch despite the forecast of ‘blustery showers’, but now they looked out at a bleak white-capped Channel crashing up the shingle, only to draw back, clawing the pebbles down again by the ton, and they thought it might have been better to have stayed indoors.

‘You’re not walking so well, Dorothy.’

‘No, dear, old age catching up with me.’

‘Have you seen the doctor about it?’ Lydia asked, although it was no surprise to hear that Dorothy had not. ‘They can do some great things these days, even getting a hip replaced is commonplace. It could change your life.’

‘Maybe one day, we’ll see how it goes. But you look well, dear.’

‘I am well, I am very well.’

The small talk continued, about everything and nothing, Lydia keen to tell of her discoveries yet unsure of how they would be received. She had brought all the albums with her and left them at Dorothy’s. It was the day that she had originally hoped for and then come to resist, as the end of her journey down the Joslin line had approached. Now she had arrived at her destination, or as good as, so far as Dorothy was concerned, and she had few regrets. The albums had run their course, there was nothing more to be gained from them, no purpose in her keeping them. The same was true of the
journal, but she had not brought it with her, there might yet be a reason to refer to it. She was not sure if she would ever give it to Dorothy, she had no real claim on it and would never make any sense of it. Lydia could easily have written to her, simply sent her the family details as she knew them and left Dorothy to draw her own conclusions if she wished. For all she’d been supportive, encouraging Lydia to find more at each step, Lydia was not even sure Dorothy had looked at the diagrams she had sent her, or understood them if she had. Besides, there was the problem of Susan, Dorothy’s second cousin by one remove, and Susan’s story was not quite concluded. She felt the need to prepare Dorothy for what might emerge.

‘Dorothy, remember when you said to me that you didn’t want me to look into anything concerning your father, that you thought it was better to leave things as they were?’

Dorothy looked up quickly from her cheese omelette. Was she anxious for knowledge or anxious to remain innocent? Lydia could not tell.

‘Yes, I remember. I thought a lot about that afterwards, thought whether I would want to know. I hadn’t had to think about it for years. None of it makes any difference, does it? Nothing would change, whether we know or not, and the truth might be worse than not knowing. Who knows the truth after all these years?’ Dorothy caught something in Lydia’s expression, ‘No, dear, I don’t mean what you have done, all these names and dates, all that’s amazing, I mean who knows the truth, there are so many versions of the truth don’t you think?’

What a curious wisdom she had, thought Lydia, this unworldly old lady, living out her spinster life in her mother’s house. She wondered where the knowledge, the insight into worldly affairs had come from. There were indeed many versions of the truth, but, as Lydia realised, all too often her own hobby, her passion for finding solutions, demanded there be only one.

‘No, no, Dorothy, I haven’t looked at your father at all, not once. I only know what you’ve told me.’

‘Good. Now I know that, I’m relieved. I thought you might be about to tell me something.’

‘There are some other things though, some things that I’m still not really sure about, and one thing that I am pretty sure of. Not so much a discovery, more a conclusion. It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t alter a single thing. But in a way I find it a little bit sad.’

‘What’s that, dear?’

‘You don’t have to remember all the stuff I’ve sent you, but remember that Albert Joslin is your great grandfather? He’s the one in that first big picture, the one of the family in the blazing hot summer of 1911, the one that started all this off. He’s got all his family around him, I’ve always called him ‘Papa’ because that is how his daughter Alethia identified him in the caption.’

‘Yes, I think I know who you mean. I’ve looked at the copy you sent me several times. My grandfather Joseph is in that picture too.’

‘Yes he is. Well, of all that family, Albert, his five children and all his grandchildren and great grandchildren, I think you may be the last Joslin. That is, the last Joslin with Papa’s blood in your veins.’

Dorothy looked out through the rain spattered window, along the length of the parade as it appeared and disappeared in the squalls. She looked for a long time, no expression apparent on her face, before she said half to herself, half to Lydia, ‘I don’t feel sad, I don’t think you should. It’s just life, it’s no sadder than my mother not having any grandchildren. I always thought I was the end of the line anyway. Like you, you’re the end of your line, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I have my brother, he has children.’

‘Not yours though.’

When they had splashed their way back to Dorothy’s home, hung their wet things in the little bathroom at the back and steamed a little in front of the electric fire, Dorothy remembered Lydia had said there were other things to tell her about.

‘It’s about your second cousin Susan and her husband Andrew. He was a relative too, but more distant. I found out that he wrote the diary I mentioned once and it has some strange things in it. And from that we found some other things about Susan which are also a bit strange. Or they might be.’

‘We? Who’s we?’ Dorothy instantly rounded on the inconsistency.

‘I have a friend who’s been really helpful when I’ve been stuck trying to sort it all out.’