A Habit of Dying (33 page)

‘Oh, I thought it was just you and me who knew about all this.’ Almost imperceptibly Dorothy had stiffened, her tone a fraction cooler towards Lydia than a moment before. It had never occurred to Lydia that Dorothy would mind about Stephen or anybody else knowing about her family. She felt a rush of guilt as if she had broken some great confidence.

‘Dorothy, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think, I mean all these names and dates, they’re just that really, just names and dates, they’re open to anyone, there are millions and millions of them and millions of people all over the world looking at them.’

‘I expect there are, but you’ve put them all together to make my family. I don’t suppose it makes any difference. It was a bit of a surprise to think that there was someone else looking at all this, someone I didn’t know, a stranger. I thought it was just you.’

‘I should have told you, I’m sorry,’ then almost to her surprise she heard herself saying, ‘He’s a lovely man, and he’s very discreet. There’s no one else.’ Lydia crossed her fingers in the habit from childhood, in case she was not telling the truth. Jacqueline might know, someone in some department might know if Stephen had needed to explain himself when he’d made his private enquiries. All this time she had thought it was her project, her enquiry, that Dorothy was not really engaged. In fact, Lydia had come to think of the Joslins as being her family more than Dorothy’s, and now here was Dorothy laying claim to them, protecting their privacy.

‘What’s his name, dear?’ Dorothy had forgiven her.

‘Stephen.’

‘And you trust him. I can see that.’

Lydia nodded.

‘And you and this Stephen have discovered some strange things. What kind of strange things?’

‘Well, that’s just it Dorothy, I don’t know yet if they are strange. What I wanted to ask you was whether you would want to know anything anyway. A bit like knowing, or not knowing, about your father.’

‘Something bad, is it?’

‘It might be.’

‘Isn’t there enough bad in the world already, dear?’

Suddenly Lydia felt as if she were seeking permission to make her enquiries, which was not the way she’d meant things to go. She had no intention of giving Dorothy a veto, not now, not anytime. She shifted tack a little.

‘Probably, but we won’t be adding to it. It’s either there or it isn’t. I just wanted to know if I should tell you anything that might come out. In case you didn’t want to know.’

‘I’ll think about it, dear.’

Whenever Lydia had visited Dorothy, the return to her home always gave her a fresh eye for its shortcomings. Always she saw the parallels between the house in Orke Road with its mish-mash of dated contents and her own shabby belongings. Nor was the likeness confined to the objects, for it was all too easy to imagine herself in Dorothy’s place in thirty years or so. They were not the same, far from it, but they could end up the same way. It was unsettling, and compounded by the unsatisfactory nature of this last visit. Dorothy had caught her unawares with her sensitivities to Stephen’s involvement, but that horse was running now, and there was no stopping it. The trouble was too, that Lydia could half understand how she felt, and the guilt she’d experienced had not entirely dissipated. Somehow, she had been cast as the outsider taking advantage of a helpless woman, exploiting her family for her own selfish reasons. Lydia could not get out of her head that there might be a germ of truth in it. But she had handed Dorothy the albums, kept her promise on that, even though she still had the copies she had made of some of the photographs. The promised Joslin report would take all her notes, her research and the family tree and combine it all into one document. When it was complete she would neatly bind it and send it to Dorothy. The greater part of it could be done right now, but until the final
chapter could be written Lydia held back from thinking about it. Meanwhile the cardboard box that had lived beside her desk for so long was gone. Only the journal remained with her and this she kept safely in its plastic folder in the bottom drawer of her desk.

Probabilities, Stephen had said, and he was right, it was how she had worked on the Joslin puzzle right from the beginning, how she always worked in the absence of hard facts, whether on her own family with its apparently easily traced surname, or anyone else’s. If Andrew were dead, still a big ‘if ’ in Lydia’s mind, and if he’d been registered properly, and in the county, then a simple error or omission was the most likely reason for his absence from the index. A first step to verifying this would be to check the physical index held at the registry office. If he were not there then Lydia didn’t know which way she would turn next. At the back of her mind she hung on to the idea that he was not dead, that Susan had chosen to be a widow out of convenience, he had simply disappeared and his wife had not tried, or been able, to find him.

No matter how hard she tried, Lydia could find no way into the events that had taken place after the last entry in the journal. There were plenty of clues to Andrew’s state of mind, clues to his intentions, clues that he was taking some form of medication, knowingly or otherwise, but the image of that final scene would not coalesce. Lydia pulled out the sheets of her typed version of the journal and turned to the thirty-first and last entry with its familiar final words.

‘I am at once calm and excited, nervous and elated. [It] just occurs to me as I write those words that it may simply be a migraine in waiting. Or the [vicious indigestion] that wrecks my snatches of sleep. All is ready and I have everything in [perfection] in my head. Rehearsed and rehearsed until I know it in my sleep, can walk with my eyes tight shut. This book has done its job, been the space needed. It seems certain that this will be the last entry, something I did not realise until I wrote it out now. Maybe a new book will be needed another day. Tomorrow is another world a new world a better world. Or it is oblivion. Which would be its own peculiar blessing. But
action will cause reaction and something will happen. The leaf will be cast to the forest floor where it will lie anonymously turning to mould. Though a million feet were to walk right by it, none would pause to remark its presence. Even I would not be able to detect it. The future at once looks crystal clear and impenetrable. The calmness of the centre has flowed out to envelop me and all around is light and clarity but the horizon remains black and infinite. This I think is the world without her even though she sleeps a sleep through this last night. Check mate in the game. Mr Punch.’

Whatever Andrew had in mind for Susan, his own future was uncertain. ‘
A better world or oblivion,
’ he had written. Better if he removed her from his world, oblivion if he failed? He sees a world without her, even though she is still sleeping in tonight’s world. With diamond clarity a stark thought came blindingly to Lydia, something that had never caught her eye, for all the times that she had read it. What if the leaf cast to the forest floor were not Susan, but Andrew? This last entry, perhaps more before it, was a suicide note. How could she not have considered that? Like Stephen’s unexpected third option that had so surprised her, this shift in the reading made her sag as if she had been physically winded. Recovering herself, she read again through the last half dozen entries. A plan to be rid of Susan, yes, but the means might as easily be self-destruction as murder. She had been so set on Andrew the tormented killer, the desperate, unbalanced man consumed with an unrequited love, so set on that, she had seen no other picture. Then Stephen, taking facts and statistics and yes, her own theory of probabilities, had sown the seeds of that other way, the too-often-unfortunate Susan, and she had needed little persuasion to take that up. Now the truth seemed obvious, he had tried to kill himself in such a way as to never be found. If the attempt had failed then he had simply disappeared, become one of those who live a half-life on the edge of society, unnoticed by anyone, a leaf on the forest floor. It all fitted perfectly and Lydia glowed in the rush of achievement, the familiar surge of pleasure which came with a puzzle solved.

She turned again to Susan’s second marriage and her declared
status. If Andrew had succeeded in ending his life but failed to conceal the fact, then Susan would have been a widow plain and simple. If he had succeeded on both counts then she would have been a widow by default and Lydia was not at all sure how such things were recorded. No doubt a legal process would have been gone through and some record would exist somewhere, but she had no idea where. If the plan had failed completely then Susan was a widow of convenience, and who could blame her for that? Andrew might be alive still, rotting in a psychiatric ward somewhere, although Lydia knew that to be unlikely. More chance that he was grubbing along in the gutters, being ‘cared for in the community’. She might even have seen him that very day, the dishevelled figure shuffling anxiously to and fro along Paradise Street by the Castle Mill stream where the flotsam and jetsam of the Thames gathers by the old weir. He’d stared right at her, fiercely clutching the plastic bag with his few possessions tightly to him, then let out a stream of foul abuse that may have been aimed at her, but may just as easily have been meant for some person not present.

The elation of her new discovery was tempered by the realisation that it might take her further from an answer rather than closer to it. She had a chance of finding Andrew if he were dead but almost none if he were alive but lost. A few minutes earlier she had been on the verge of calling Stephen to share her new insight, but now it seemed less like something to celebrate, more a fresh hurdle, and possibly a final insurmountable one. His ‘someone-who-knew-someone’ might have come up with something helpful, but if that were the case Lydia was sure that he would have mailed or called her, and he had done neither. For a while she sat and let the whole saga play out in her head, letting the generations slip by in snatches of light here and there. A photograph, a newspaper report, a change of address, the births and deaths, the spreading family year by year seeping away from their once solid roots in Essex, all this and more she had come to know. Perhaps now she was seeking the unknowable, the unguessable, and as Dorothy had said, maybe it was better left in the past. Was it some kind of justice she was
seeking, and if so then, for whom? For Andrew, for Susan? Perhaps even for Dorothy, the last of Papa’s Joslins.

‘I feel so stupid.’

‘Again?’ Stephen gently chided her. ‘That’s getting to be a habit. What have you done now?’

‘More what I hadn’t done.’

After seriously considering closing the Joslin book once and for all, Lydia had decided that so long as Stephen’s discreet enquiries were continuing, she might as well take his advice and tackle the most obvious possibility, an error in the index. So she’d made an appointment at the registry office and taken the day off work to sit with the original index, all the way from 1984 through to 1992. She had looked at every entry, taking care to make no mistakes, no omissions in the mind-numbing task. At each entry which could possibly be Andrew Stephen Myers, regardless of the actual name or the way it was spelt, she logged a record on her laptop of all the details and what reason had made her add them to the list. Then she rated it with a score out of ten as to how strongly she felt it might be her man. Each entry she deemed worthy of obtaining a copy of the original was going to cost money, and while she was prepared to spend a little, she was not prepared to spend a lot. When she completed the list, she would look at those with the highest ratings and prioritise those for whom she would obtain certificates. What she would most liked to have done was search through the registers themselves, page by page, but this was not allowed to her.

The little side room she’d been allocated was stiflingly hot with a window that wouldn’t open and a radiator with a broken thermostat. It was hard to concentrate as she searched line by line through each year. More than once she caught herself drifting off on some tangent while her fingers continued to slide the ruler down the column of names, and she had to return to the start of the page. Only the occasional excitement of an addition to her list,
the rating of how likely it might be, relieved the monotony. By mid-afternoon she had twenty-seven names on her list, even thinking to include a Mylar and an Andic Meers. She had given none a higher rating than six. Susan had declared herself a widow on 2
^nd
May 1992 and Lydia was just finishing the 1991 index and was not encouraged by the results so far. Tired, hot and dehydrated, she started on 1992 and even then almost missed it. Andrea S Muers. Wrong sex, wrong name, but as she typed it out, she saw that it would be the one. Two little typos, that was all it had taken. Perhaps the clerk who had made them was as tired and hot as she was. She rated Andrea Muers as a ten, then although tempted to do otherwise, carried on to the end of the index. She did not add further to her list.