Some Deaths Before Dying (18 page)

She gazed anxiously up at him.

“I daresay we’re all getting on a bit, Miss Flora,” he said gravely, speaking her name this time with confidence.

“Well I hope I’m in anything like as good shape as you are when I get to your age. These are all Ma’s photos, of course—you
remember how potty she was about her cameras—she’s looked some out to show you. Ah. Dilys. Here’s our visitors. Sergeant Fredricks
and Mrs. Pilcher. And this is Dilys, who’s been an absolute angel to Ma. All set up?”

A plump, grey-haired woman in a blue uniform had appeared from a door further along the book-lined corridor.

“We’re all ready, Mrs. Thomas,” she said, “and I’ve got the table out for when the tea comes up.”

“Good for you. I wasn’t quite sure what you’d want at such a funny time of day, Mrs. Pilcher, so we’re sending you up a sort
of betwixt and between kind of meal. How would you like to do this? Ma won’t want us all milling around, and Dilys had better
stay to—”

“Can’t have that,” said Uncle Albert. “We’ve got private affairs to see to.”

“Oh, but you see, Sergeant Fred, Ma will need somebody—”

“Penny can see to all that,” said Uncle Albert. “She’s a good enough girl, though I say it myself. And she’s young, what’s
more, so she’s good sharp ears, and you’re telling me Mrs. Matson can’t talk that easy…”

“What do you think, Dilys? Would you mind, Mrs. Pilcher?”

Jenny forced herself to respond. They were looking at her. The sudden wave of old horrors had swept over her without any warning.
She had felt no qualms at all about bringing Uncle Albert to visit a bedridden old acquaintance. She hadn’t assumed that she’d
be able to stay out of the sickroom. She’d need at least to meet the patient, because Uncle Albert would expect her to, and
would want to talk later about the encounter. Even the prospect of eating her meal in the room had raised no doubts. Mrs.
Matson was clearly very well cared for. By somebody else. Not Jenny. So she wouldn’t even need to nerve herself to cross the
threshold of the sick room…

She blinked and shook her head. Her hands moved downwards, just as they had used to almost twenty years before, smoothing
the crisp invisible pinafore into place at her grandfather’s door.

“I’m sorry,” said Sister Jenny coolly. “I was thinking about something else. Yes, of course I can manage if I’m shown how.
I’ve looked after an old person before.”

Her voice sounded perfectly normal in her own ears.

“Well, that’s fixed,” said Mrs. Thomas affably. “Dilys will show you what to do. Now we won’t keep her waiting any longer.”

She knocked at the door they had reached, opened it and put her head round.

“Hi, Ma,” she said. “Here they are, then, right on time.”

She went in and held the door for them. Uncle Albert, typically, stood aside to let the others through, Jenny first. She halted
a couple of paces inside the room and saw that they had come too late. The bed was immediately opposite her, placed parallel
to the wall beneath a wide window. The dead woman’s head was cradled on the spotless pillows, peaked, fleshless, the yellow
skin blotched with purple but otherwise almost translucent above the bone. Dead. Jenny had only once seen death before, when
she had found her grandfather’s body one Sunday morning. Then her magical uniform had vanished at the sight, and the household
had been woken by her scream. Now, as she struggled for control, Uncle Albert marched confidently past her.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Matson,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Major Fredricks,
at
your service, ma’am.”

The greeting had the ring of ritual whose repetition invoked the pleasure of previous meetings. The undifferentiated lips
of the corpse smiled and moved apart.

“Sergeant Fred,” came the dead-leaf whisper.

Still barely in command of herself, Jenny turned away and moved down the room. There was a second, similar window further
along the wall. In the space between the two hung a large, framed photograph, almost poster-size, black and white, of a huge
fungus growing out of the bole of a tree. Jenny stared at it, seeing it first simply as pattern, but then, as if with the
inner click of a switch, suddenly perceiving what it showed. Logically, it should have reinforced the horror of the death
mask. The fungus was huge, a monstrous symbol of decay, but for some reason Jenny found it steadying, peaceful, normal. Thinking
about the episode afterwards she was still unable to decide why. It was something to do with its—she didn’t have a word for
it—being-what-it-was?—the fungus was what it was and the photograph was what it was and they were different things, fungus
and photograph, and there was some kind of balance and tension between the two things which the photograph let you see and
feel, but why that should make the photograph beautiful, let alone why it should have given Jenny something to grasp, allowed
her to haul herself our above the tide of horror…

“Mrs. Pilcher?”

Jenny shook herself and came to.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was looking at the fungus. It’s marvellous.”

“You do keep saying the right things, don’t you?” said Mrs. Thomas. “Ma took it, of course. She took all of these, and you’re
going to help her show Sergeant Fred some of her old albums, while Dilys and I push off and leave you to it. So if you’ll
let Dilys explain to you about anything Ma might need…”

“Yes, of course.”

Jenny listened with full attention. Those were the reading spectacles. That was the reading desk, all ready, with the first
album on it. She just had to slide it across the bed. Those were other albums, on the table, and the package was something
Mrs. Matson wanted to show Mr. Fredricks. This was Mrs. Matson’s barley water—she’d need a sip every few minutes if she wanted
to talk. The trick was to slide your other arm down behind her and steady her head in the crook of your elbow—she didn’t weigh
anything—and not to pour too fast in case she choked, and this was how you adjusted the angle of the bed if she asked you,
and that was all really.

“I’m sure I’ll manage,” said Sister Jenny, coolly. She could almost feel the starch in the imaginary uniform.

“I’ll just give her a quick little drinkie now to show you, shall I?” said the nurse. “We’d like that, wouldn’t we, dearie?”

Jenny watched the process without alarm. By the time it was over Mrs. Thomas had embarked on a complex flight of reminiscence
about old acquaintances, in which Uncle Albert was keeping his end up with astonishing coherence, so Jenny took the chance
to walk round and look at the several other photographs on the walls. The room was a fair size, longer than it was wide, and
painted white throughout. All the pictures were in black and white, and framed in the same style. This, despite the bits of
household furniture—a round folding table set ready for a meal, with two chairs, a really nice old walnut bureau, other chairs,
bookshelves and so on—and the bed and sick-room appurtenances, gave it more of the feel of an art gallery than anything else.
None of the photographs was of anything particularly striking —a stretch of sunlit paling overtopped by brambles, shadows
in a barn, water flowing into darkness beneath two low arches, a white poodle coiffeured as for a show, nibbling its own flank
in an ecstasy of pure canine concentration —but as with the one of the fungus all had the quality of instantly communicating
their selfhood, why they had been taken in that light, at that angle, developed and printed to these tones and textures, enlarged
to this size and these dimensions. That they were also obviously immensely skilled was part of the pleasure they gave, but
secondary. She was going round the room, looking at each of them again, now in the light of the others, and paused at the
one of the stream flowing away beneath the arches. Despite the stillness of the image, it seemed to have the true, hypnotic
quality of moving water. She could remember, as a child, standing on a sunlit footbridge in a park somewhere, rapt, lost.
That must have been very early, before Daddy walked out, when she had still been happy…

Just as then, a voice broke in, calling her. Uncle Albert. Mrs. Thomas and the nurse were in the process of leaving.

“All right, girl, let’s get on with it. We haven’t come all this way for just a lot of chat. My hearing’s not what it was,
Mrs. Matson, so my niece here’s going to tell me if there’s anything you say and I don’t catch it. She’s a good girl, now
that she’s settled down and got a young man of her own. Now, then, there’s something…the Colonel left it with me, long way
back…after…never mind about that now…But it’s been on my mind a while, seeing how it doesn’t signify that much now—water under
the bridge after all these years—so I thought…I thought…”

While speaking he had turned and reached towards the bedside table, but not finding what he wanted had hesitated and begun
to pat his pockets, frowning and peering round the room.

“I’ve got it, Uncle Albert,” said Jenny quickly. “You gave it to me to carry when we were getting out of the car. One moment…here
you are…”

He took the cardboard box from her and stood erect, as if the touch of it were restorative. He laid it on the bed and with
untrembling fingers removed the lid, took out the package and slowly unwrapped the yellow duster, putting it back in the box.
Grasping the pistol by the barrel he held it over the bed for Mrs. Matson to inspect. Her lips moved.

“Spectacles, please.”

Uncle Albert was in the way, so Jenny went round to the other side, between the bed and window, and slid the spectacles into
place. Mrs. Matson’s gaze didn’t immediately return to the pistol, but remained for a few seconds fixed on Jenny, as if seeing
her for the first time—which indeed, Jenny realised, she might well be doing. The curve of the lenses suggested a strong correction
for near sight.

The slight delay seemed to irritate Uncle Albert.

“All right, then. You show her, girl,” he said and passed the pistol across. Jenny took it and turned it to and fro, and moved
the catch and opened the breach in the way that the weapons expert had done on the
Roadshow
. She handed it back to Uncle Albert, who laid it down beside the box.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Matson. “Now, brown envelope. By albums. Give it him. Then go outside. Not long. Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” said Jenny. “I quite understand.”

She did as she was asked, and left, glad of the chance of a few minutes alone. She found herself unexpectedly upset, or rather
upset in a manner that she wouldn’t have expected. It was no longer the horror of the dead thing on the bed—even her extreme
reaction of a few minutes ago she’d have regarded as a normal, if stupid and shameful, quirk in her own makeup. What had shaken
her now was almost the opposite thing, the simple, lively health of the
eyes
that had studied her from behind the spectacle lenses, both when she’d first put them on and again when Mrs. Matson had slowly
whispered her requests. Jenny would not have believed that a pair of
eyes
, with no facial change whatever to help them, could have sent so clear a message of interest and apparent amusement. One
of Jeff’s minor oddities was his fanatical interest in the
Star Trek
series, which Jenny usually watched with him for company. Her experience with Mrs. Matson was like some episode in which
a team gets beamed down to an apparently dead planet, sends probes into the permafrost and discovers not just a few single-cell
organisms that have evolved to survive such conditions, but a whole civilisation, science, arts, sociology, legends, cuisine,
religion, hobbies, the lot.

She had no chance to settle down and come to terms with this revelation. The nurse must have been listening for the door,
and at once came quietly up the passage.

“She’s needing something?” she whispered.

“No, it’s all right, she just wants to be alone with him for a bit. I suppose Mrs. Matson took the big photographs on the
walls?”

“Indeed she did, and all these here too in the albums. Thousands of them, there must be, and she’ll tell you exactly where
to look for anything she wants. Amazing she is like that. Other day I was asking about pictures of the house, and, look…”

The nurse moved a little to her left, pulled out a blue ring-binder and gave it to Jenny.

“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said. “She likes people to see. That one’s a bit different, mind you, because it was for some
schoolwork her daughter was doing…”

Jenny opened the binder. The photographs were interleaved with pages of self-conscious young handwriting. There was the house
itself, very much as Jenny had seen it from the top of the drive, though later in the year with the trees heavy with leaf.
Next a patch of plain brickwork and the corner of a sill, no context, but insistently those particular bricks, seen in that
light by those eyes, an effect impossible to analyse but still, to Jenny, obvious. She stared at the picture for a good minute
before turning on and experiencing the same trance-like effect from a picture of a fire escape.

It struck her that there might be something wrong with her—sugar shortage maybe. She had had to get up at five, so breakfast
had been almost that long ago, and skimped. Since then she’d had just a couple of biscuits and sugarless coffee at the service
area…

At this point, as if she’d unconsciously willed it to be so, the woman who had first opened the door to them appeared at the
far end of the corridor with a laden tray. Her odd mood broken, Jenny put the binder back in its place and explained the situation.

“Just leave it here till you’re ready, then?” said the woman, laying the tray down beside the door. Jenny thanked her and
she left.

“Your old gentleman looks in very fine shape for his age,” said the nurse.

“Yes, thank heavens. Of course his memory comes and goes a bit, but today’s one of his good days.”

“Wonderful how they can pull themselves together for an occasion. Now, we’ve got out some of her albums for her to show him
so I’ll come and settle her down for a rest while you’re eating your dinner, and after that your old gentleman will want to
go to the toilet, so you can take him out for that while I tidy her up and make her comfortable again. All right?”