Some Deaths Before Dying (20 page)

“Can’t tell you anything about that, ma’am,” he said. “Don’t remember. Fact is, my memory’s all to pot—and what do you think
you’re looking at me like that for, young woman?”

Jenny had indeed stared for a moment in astonishment. She was, of course, used to his lapses of memory, but knew too that
they mustn’t be treated as normal for him now but as isolated, temporary, wholly uncharacteristic.

There was more than anger in his voice, there was deep shame and misery. Before she could speak she heard the faintest of
sighs from the bed.

“Tell him. Not important.”

“Mrs. Matson says not to worry, Uncle Albert. It doesn’t matter. She just wondered.”

He swallowed a couple of times and sat down.

“Let’s get on with it, then,” he said.

They finished the album and started another one—the same faces at different occasions large and small. There were several
pictures of Major Stadding, passed over in silence. Then, to his obvious distress, Uncle Albert’s memory started to waver.
Mrs. Matson too was tiring, needing to sip more often at her barley water and closing her eyes from time to time, but apparently
neither wished to disappoint the other by calling a halt.

“Let’s have a rest,” said Jenny, realising it was up to her. “I’ll fetch the nurse, shall I? And Uncle Albert can watch the
TV for a bit, or something.”

“Please,” whispered Mrs. Matson.

“Time we were off,” said Uncle Albert, rising. “It’s a long way for the girl to drive, and I’ve done what I came for. Right,
Penny?”

“If you like, Uncle Albert. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Matson? You must be pretty well done for.”

“Yes. Say goodbye. Thank you. Sergeant Fred.”

“She says, ‘Goodbye, Sergeant Fred, and thank you for coming. It’s been wonderful to see you again.’ ”

Uncle Albert drew himself up to his parade stance.

“Thank you yourself, ma’am. It’s been a privilege to know you, ma’am. A privilege to serve with the Colonel, and a privilege
to know his lady wife.”

He ducked his head, turned and marched for the door, which he held for Jenny, as if impatient to make his exit with soldierly
smartness.

She started for the door, remembered her shoulder bag, slung on a chairback, hesitated only an instant and walked on.

“I’ll just get the nurse, Uncle Albert. Do you want to use the toilet before we go? Hell, I’ve left my bag in the room. I
won’t be a sec. Oh, could you show him where the toilet is while I get my bag? The nurse will show you, Uncle Albert.”

Without waiting she slipped back into the room, closing the door behind her. Mrs. Matson had her eyes shut, but opened them
as Jenny approached.

“Spectacles off,” she whispered. “Please. Itch.”

Jenny lifted them clear and laid them on the table.

“The nurse is just coming,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid Uncle Albert wasn’t telling the truth. He really did tell me that
those young men had something to do with Major Stadding, and a while ago, when we were trying to find your telephone number,
he said that the Mr. Stadding who runs the Association couldn’t be Major Stadding, because he was dead. He said he’d seen
it happen. He said, ‘Ask Terry Voss,’ so I think he must have been there too.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

Jenny waited, sensing that there was more. As the nurse opened the door the whisper came again.

“Anything you can find out.”

U
ncle Albert dozed most of the way home. Jenny spent much of the journey thinking about what had happened, not outside and
around her, but within. There had been a moment when everything had changed. Perhaps the change had imperceptibly been preparing
for a long while, but this afternoon there had been an identifiable point at which it had taken place, when she had held Mrs.
Matson’s near-dead fingers in her own. It was as though there had been a knot in the cord of her being only, a simple half
hitch which, if anyone had known about it and helped her with it at the time of its tying, might have been freed. But over
the years it had been strained so tight that the strands had almost lost their differentiation and it had become a dense little
nut in the run of the cord, impossible ever to ease or tease apart. The rest of the cord ran smoothly enough over its pulleys,
and long before she was a woman Jenny had become so used to the existence of the knot that without any awareness of doing
so she had learnt to adjust her use of the mechanism so that only in exceptional circumstances did it snag. But the cost of
being all the time ready for those potential judderings, of not allowing herself to seem to be shaken or troubled by them,
had been considerable—an outward wariness and chill, a detachment, a sort of void or buffer zone between that outward and
her true inward, a concentration on things rather than people—she belonged to no informal feminine networks, had no bosom
friends—especially on things that were stable and controlled, that seemed to her to have confidence in their own selfhood
and thus make no demands on her and pose no threats. (That, perhaps, was why she so loved the little house she shared with
Jeff, and why Mrs. Matson’s photographs spoke so strongly to her.)

But Jeff, and her marriage to and passion for him, didn’t come under that heading. They were fluid, dynamic, unpredictable.
There were patterns in them that happened to persist, like eddies below a weir, convolutions with much the same structure
as the knot, but these could never be traced to any calculable cause, and some minor change in the flow of the stream might
at any moment dissolve them completely, re-create them elsewhere or perhaps abolish them forever. Not even the passion could
be taken for granted.

So perhaps it was this experience over the past seventeen months that had allowed the fibres of the knot first to soften and
then to ease from their taut interlocking so that now with the very minor effort on Jenny’s part of reaching out and grasping
a skeletal hand, the knot itself should have at last slipped free and gone.

How else was she to explain to herself her betrayal of Uncle Albert’s confidence? Mrs. Matson was, and would remain, a stranger,
unreachable in the prison of her carcase. Yes, her condition was very sad, and yes, she seemed to cope with it with courage
and decency, in a manner that Jenny believed she herself would never be able to cope, should that befall her. But she had
no claim on Jenny.

Uncle Albert on the other hand, she knew and liked and admired. Moreover he was family. Family was important to her. Though
her own had been an apparent disaster, they had lived together in a series of houses through the almost two decades that had
made Jenny what she was. They were part of each other, in a relationship for which there isn’t a word, so “love” has to do.
The worst horror of her mother’s drinking had been that Jenny had continued to “love” her. Her suicide had solved intolerable
problems for all of them, but Jenny had sobbed with fierce and genuine grief at the bleak funeral. Now she and her brother
and sister communicated only perfunctorily, and never made a point of going somewhere for the purpose of meeting, but when
something happened to bring them together the old currents instantly flowed between them, and they parted with a sense of
renewal and unvoiced celebration.

Jeff had none of that, apart from Uncle Albert. His childhood had been yet more bereft than Jenny’s. His mother had walked
out when he was seven. His father, though fairly well off, had placed him in a foster home. His great-aunt, Uncle Albert’s
sister, had wanted to have him live with her, but his father had rancorously refused permission. The great-aunt was now dead,
so there was only Uncle Albert, who must for that reason be cherished and cared for. Jenny didn’t merely accept this as a
duty, she both thought and felt it.

But despite that she hadn’t hesitated to tell Mrs. Matson part of a secret that was sufficiently important to him to be worth
the humiliation of publicly pleading his own failing memory. Indeed she was now planning, as soon as she had the chance, to
look in his bottom drawer for the Cambi Road Association address lists to see if somebody called Terry Voss was still alive—and
wondering, even, if there was any excuse for not telling Jeff about all this in case he should, very reasonably, ask her not
to.

The answer, if you could call it that, she decided, was that Mrs. Matson was not after all a stranger. There had been an exchange
between them. Something had flowed, and Jenny had been the beneficiary. Years ago, at college, she had known a young man whose
legs had been badly damaged in a bicycling accident and who needed a stick to walk. The other noticeable oddity about him
was that he was never there on Sunday. He was quietly amiable, and so tended to get included in the activities of the group
to which Jenny loosely belonged, but when pressure was put on him to make up the numbers, if the event was planned for a Sunday
he always refused. One evening when they were sitting around talking about what they individually believed in he told them
why.

After his accident, he said, he’d been confined to a wheelchair and told he would never walk again. His parents had been determined
he should, and had tried a series of increasingly weird treatments. Eventually a faith healer had visited them, and had sat
alone with Dominic and talked what he described as a lot of stupid guff about spirit and matter and cosmic currents. He had
been bored and embarrassed, and longing for the man to leave. He had then been aware of feeling curiously warm, from inside,
but without the need to sweat. The warmth had appeared to flow down into his legs, and after a bit the healer had put his
hands in his and told him to stand up, which he had done, and then walked across the room, with the healer doing no more than
hold his hands to give him confidence, and not supporting him in any way. Though he wasn’t completely healed he hadn’t needed
the wheelchair again.

So now, every Sunday, Dominic made a difficult cross-country journey to be with the cult to which his healer belonged and
attend their ceremonies. “I’m not going to tell you what we believe,” he said. “You’d think it was a lot of stupid guff, like
I did. But when I’m among the Companions I can walk as well as you can. I have to believe.”

Jenny felt that something very like that had happened to her as she’d stood by Mrs. Matson’s bed and held her hand. She’d
been uncrippled. It didn’t matter how or why. It had happened, and she was therefore committed. If this included doing what
Mrs. Matson had asked and finding out what she could and passing it on, she must, regardless of rationality, do it.

They reached Hastings after ten o’clock. Jenny helped Uncle Albert, very stiff and shaky, out of the car. He leaned heavily
on her shoulder for the few paces to the door. She rang the night bell. It was a while before they heard footsteps. A nurse
she didn’t know opened the door.

“So you’ve come home to us, Albert?” she said. “Quite the night owl you’re getting. We thought you’d be hungry, so there’s
a tray for you in your room. Had a good trip, then? I’ll take him now, miss, unless you want to come in. Come along, Albert.”

“Hold it,” he said firmly, and turned to Jenny.

“You’re a good girl,” he said, “and you’ve done me proud. And I’ll tell you this. You made a much better job of it than that
other girl would’ve. What’s her name…?”

“Your niece in America, you’re talking about?” said the nurse. “Penny, isn’t she?”

“That’s right, Penny. She’d’ve got us lost ten times over, for a start. So I’ll say thank you, young lady, and good night.”

“Good night, Uncle Albert. I enjoyed it.”

He let himself be led into the hallway, but before the door closed halted again and turned.

“And ask that husband of yours when he’s coming to see me,” he called.

RACHEL

T
he footsteps, faint on the carpet, receded. The door opened and closed. An odd young woman, Rachel thought, stranger in the
flesh than she’d seemed on television. It would have been a challenge to capture that quality through the lens, the features
soft but strong, self-possession with considerable tension, disciplined will constraining something wilder…

Voices in the passage, the tone of farewells. The door again. Dilys.

“Well, well, quite a day we’ve had of it, haven’t we, dearie? And what a grand old gentleman, coming all this way at his age,
and still holding himself like a soldier. Now, we need seeing to, I dare say—we’ll have drunk a bit with all that chat. And
then I’ll set your bed flat, so we can have a bit of a rest.”

“Soon. Album first. One he brought in. Something in it…”

“Right you are…This one? ‘People,’ it says on the back. Then here’s our specs. Start at the beginning, shall I?”

Dilys settled the album onto the stand and leafed slowly through, commenting here and there.

“Now that’s what I call a well set up lass…Shouldn’t care to meet them in a dark alley…”

Already almost exhausted, Rachel gazed vaguely at the passing images. Faces and postures. Strangers, friends, family, that
didn’t matter, wasn’t what they’d been chosen for. The photographs were in this series of albums because when she’d begun
to compile them in the second long winter of her widowhood, each had seemed to be, as it were, a passing remark—nothing so
solemn as a statement—on what it meant to be a human being.

“Look at that hairdo! And those shoes! You should’ve heard what my Nan said when I showed up on her doorstep got up like that!
I thought she wasn’t going to let me over the mat—”

“Stop. That one.”

“Teds…we had’em too. Welsh Teds. There was a Welsh word for them, even—
Tedwboi
, was it? Not that I knew more than a dozen words in Welsh myself. What was the point in Bangor? And now my other niece and
her hubby—never mind he’s from Norfolk—they talk Welsh at home, and the kids too…Ready?”

“Wait. Please.”

Rachel willed her mind into focus and studied the half-hidden face. Bewildering that she must have seen it twice in the flesh,
and then at least four times more in this image—looking through the rough prints, printing it up, and then selecting and reprinting
it for the album, and had not then made the essential connection. Only now this ambush.