Some Deaths Before Dying (25 page)

“I and my husband could collect Uncle Albert and bring him to you, if that would help, but it would have to be at a weekend.
I shall be working again from Monday on.”

“Unfortunately parish priests tend to be busiest at weekends … ah, yes, I could arrange to have an hour and a half free this
coming Sunday, before evensong. I could offer you tea.”

“That sounds great. I’ll have to check with my husband, and the nursing home, but I should think it will be all right. Can
I let you know?”

“Of course. I’ll pencil it in. Provisionally then, four o’clock, Sunday the 24th. Do you need directions?”

“Not if I can find it on the map.”

“We will assume you can. The vicarage is opposite the church, and clearly designated as such. I hope that none of you is allergic
to cats.”

“Hell … Oh, sorry. I’m afraid my husband is. I may have to come without him. I’ll let you know.”

Jeff decided not to risk the cats, with the hay fever season almost on him.

“I’m sorry about that,” said Ms. Cowan, when Jenny telephoned. “But I’m greatly looking forward to meeting Bert Fredricks
after all these years. About your other problem I’m not so sure. We may in any case have some difficulty in discussing it
in his presence, if he’s so unwilling to talk about it.”

“Suppose I wrote telling you in confidence as much as I know. It isn’t a lot. The main thing this time is to give you a chance
to make up your mind whether you want to help at all.”

“That might be very useful. I’m glad you see it that way. Till Sunday then.”

T
he village—almost a small town—was in that tangle of lanes with which the Kentish Weald is reticulated between the roaring
thoroughfares to the coast. It was self-consciously kempt, with old, small-windowed houses, weatherboarded and tile-hung,
all in near-perfect condition—this not to catch the tourist’s eye and camera, but for the gratification of the inhabitants
who had chosen to live in this half-artificial version of the English dream, and had the money to maintain it. The main street
curved up a hill—little more than a mound—to a church and churchyard at the top, building and tombstones of the same dark
sandstone. The church looked genuinely mediaeval, and was probably fascinating, but Jenny found churches oppressive. She responded
much more willingly to the houses of the living.

A woman answered the vicarage door. Several cats wove purring round her ankles. She was about fifty, tall and angular, with
a narrow pale face framed by a helmet of dense, shining white hair. She wore silver pendant earrings, a dog collar and a dark
grey suit, with the frilled white cuffs of her shirt just visible. The effect, obviously deliberate, was strikingly black
and white.

Her smile was thin but not sour.

“Come in,” she said. “The kettle is just coming to the boil. Mind your head, Mr. Fredricks—the ceilings are desperately low.
You too, Mrs. Pilcher—in fact you’ll find the doorways are more of a trap for you, because you aren’t used to ducking. This
way. I shan’t be a moment.”

She showed them into a dark room with a lattice-paned window and a beamed ceiling so low that Uncle Albert couldn’t stand
erect.

“What’s going on?” he said. “What’s this woman doing, got up like that?”

“She’s the parson here. They have woman parsons now, you know.”

“It’s not right. Not in the Bible—bet you it’s not. So what does she want with us, then?”

“She wants to talk to you about Terry Voss. She’s his niece. You remember Terry Voss?”

“Terry? I should think I do. What does she know about Terry, then?”

Jenny guessed from his tone what he meant.

“She knows he was in prison quite often. But she was very fond of him. That’s why she wanted to meet you.”

“Terry’s all right. More than all right. Only he couldn’t tell yours from mine—never could and never would. Is he showing
up here then? She’ll need to watch her spoons.”

“I’m afraid Terry’s dead, Uncle Albert.”

“Can’t be helped. A lot of ’em are. Most of ’em now, I dare say. Funny sort of room. Looks like it’s been got ready for a
sale, somehow.”

This, Jenny thought, was remarkably perceptive of him. She too had been vaguely puzzled by the oddity of what was clearly
a sitting room, with armchairs and a sofa arranged for people to gather and converse. There were upright chairs against the
walls, a couple of tables, a bookcase, pictures on the walls, rugs—but nothing seemed to relate to the room or to any of the
other objects in it. As Uncle Albert said, it was as if a random collection of furniture had been brought in and arranged
wherever it would physically fit, but not because anyone was going to want to live with it.

Ms. Cowan came back with a tray, wading through a moving eddy of cats. She almost knocked the milk jug over as she slid the
tray onto a table, but Jenny had moved to help and caught it in time.

“Oh, thank you,” said Ms. Cowan. “We’re not going to starve, at least. My parishioners rightly consider that I am incapable
of looking after myself, let alone visitors, so I have only to mention that I have somebody coming and I am inundated with
scones. Now, out you go! Shoo! No laps on Sunday. You know that perfectly well.”

She chivvied the cats out and closed the door. They miaowed affrontedly beyond it.

“Weekdays I wear skirts on which the hairs don’t show,” she explained. “Well now, this is wonderful. So you’re Bert Fredricks!
Do you mind if I call you Bert? My Uncle Terry always did. It’s how I think of you. My name’s Eileen, but Terry always called
me Nell.”

“Nell?” said Uncle Albert, as if instantly, magically unbewildered. “You’re telling me you’re Terry’s little Nell!”

He guffawed with amazement and delight. Jenny had never heard him produce such a sound. It made the effort of bringing him
here, even the half day away from Jeff, worth while.

“Yes, I’m little Nell,” said Ms. Cowan.

He had risen when she’d brought the tray in, and she now stood in front of him, smiling. With simple naturalness he put his
hands on her shoulders, bent and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to Jenny to hesitate for a moment, but then closed
her arms round him and hugged him. The movement was gawky, uncertain, as if long unpractised. After a few seconds she released
him and turned to Jenny.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t really introduced myself in the excitement. I’m Eileen Cowan, of course. Nobody except Uncle
Terry and his friends has ever called me Nell, but we’ll stick to that to avoid confusion. And you’re Jenny? Jennifer?”

“Jenny except on cheques and things.”

“Jenny, not Penny,” confirmed Uncle Albert. “She’s worth twice what Penny’s worth, if you want to know. Can’t think what their
mother was doing, calling ’em pretty well the same name like that. It’s not as if they’d been twins.”

He spoke with the full authority of the head of the imaginary family.

“Well, that’s settled,” said Nell. “Now if I give each of us a little table. And everyone must have two scones, so that I
can say with honesty how much we enjoyed them. The smaller ones are Sharon Smith’s and the others and Annie Fletcher’s. The
jam is Cyril Buck’s from his own strawberries. Splendid. Now tea … Oh dear, what on earth have I done? And it’s almost cold.
I know I warmed the pot, and I know the kettle was boiling … bother, I shall have to go and make a fresh pot.”

“Why don’t you let me do that?” said Jenny. “You stay and talk to Uncle Albert—after all that’s what we’re here for.”

“Oh, would you? The kitchen’s just along the passage, and I’ve left everything out.”

This turned out to be no less than the truth. The makings of several meals littered the working surfaces, actual food being
protected from the cats by being shoved under a couple of old-fashioned meat-safes. When Jenny emptied the teapot she found
five tea-bags in it, three round and two rectangular. She deduced that one set had been left in from last time tea had been
made, and furthermore, since Nell hadn’t discovered them when she emptied the water out after warming the pot, that hadn’t
been done either.

The cats ignored Jenny as she boiled the kettle and made fresh tea. Two were busy licking the last smears of butter from a
wrapping and three others were curled in their baskets. They all looked well and cared for.

Jenny admitted to being mildly obsessive about cleanliness—Jeff said she was a hygienopath. Left by a man, this level of mess
would have disgusted and angered her. Left by most women it would have been even worse, not mere slobbishness, but a kind
of betrayal. But left by Nell, her reactions were more uncertain. Disgust and horror, certainly—mercifully she had brought
out the cup into which Nell had begun to pour, so she could at least get that clean for herself—but the anger was replaced
by confusion. To be angry with somebody is to judge them, and she wasn’t prepared to judge Nell, both in the sense of not
wishing to and of not having enough to go on. Nell’s treatment of Uncle Albert seemed to be absolutely honest, from the heart.
Did it follow that her method of life was equally honest? Of course not. Nobody needed to be as domestically helpless as Nell
made herself out to be—apparently revelled in being, and in her parishioners rushing to her rescue with scones and jam … But
then again, mightn’t that pose, though deliberate, have a quite different motivation? How should a woman conduct herself so
as to be accepted as priest to a presumably very conservative parish such as this? Perhaps by letting them believe that she
was no more than a slightly different version of a phenomenon they were already used to—the otherworldly bachelor scholar—not
many of ’em about these days, mind you—gone with the gouty colonels and the hard-riding squires … If so, there was actually
something pleasingly subversive about Nell’s performance, which she herself might well be aware of.

Then, as she carried pot and cup back to the sitting room, it crossed Jenny’s mind to wonder whether Nell might be gay. She
knew herself to be imperceptive about that sort of thing. The clerical dress was masculine in effect, and Nell’s manner to
Uncle Albert had been mildly flirty …

She found them sitting knee to knee, bending towards each other as they talked. Both started to rise at her entry.

“Don’t get up,” she said. “I’ll pour. You haven’t got all that time.”

“You do that,” said Uncle Albert, settling back. “Now where was I?”

“You were telling me about Terry giving you all pickpocketing lessons so that you could steal from the guards if you got the
chance. Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Dangerous and then some. It was a way of passing the time as much as anything. I don’t know anyone was fool enough to try
it. Find you at something like that, and morning parade the Japs would tie you to a post and make the rest of us watch while
they hammered you unconscious.”

“Terry told me about that. It happened to him, he said. It was so bad he didn’t remember anything that had happened for days
afterwards and when he came round you were in a different camp. The rest of you had carried him there, he said.”

“Not exactly carried him—you want me to tell you about that? It isn’t party conversation, not to my mind.”

“Please. Anything you can about Terry, good or bad.”

“Right you are … just put it there, lass—two sugars and a good dollop of milk … Well, we were building this road, like I told
you, and the drill was that when we’d finished one section they’d parade us and march us on to a new camp. Anyone that couldn’t
stand to for the parade they hammered with their rifle butts and left. No food, no water. I’ve heard tell of natives come
creeping out of the forest and carrying them away and looking after them, but it can’t’ve happened that often—anyway not to
anyone I ever ran into.

“It wasn’t a long march on, no more than about ten miles, but the state we were in then it might’ve been from Harwich to hell.
And those as couldn’t keep up they pulled out of the line and hammered and left by the road—the very bit of road that man
might’ve been building the day before.

“Now our last lot of guards, they’d been a bit soft—bastards still, but sloppy bastards, so we’d been getting away with little
things. Then this new lot came, and they were hard bastards. They didn’t just crack down, fair and square—they set traps.
Day before we were due our next move we were lining up for our ration—mostly it was just boiled rice, but some days there’d
be scraps of meat in it, or dried fish—you wouldn’t’ve fed a dog on it, back home—and Terry spotted a bit of fish, as big
as my thumb, maybe, lying by the pot, like it could’ve fallen out of the pot while they were mixing up. It didn’t look like
any of the Japs was watching, so Terry scooped it up, but of course one of ’em had been keeping an eye on it while the others
were looking the other way deliberate, so they were on him, and next morning they tied him to the pole and hammered him unconscious
in front of us all. After that they kept us standing out in the sun while they got ready for the move.

“Now Terry was tough. He didn’t look it, mind you, a skinny fellow with a big head—big hands and feet too, like he hadn’t
been put together right, somehow—but by the time the Japs were ready we could see how he was trying to stand up. And just
before they gave the order to march Colonel Matson stood out of line, which he wasn’t supposed to, and said, ‘That man’s coming
with us.’

“A couple of Japs ran to push him back into line with their butts, but he stood his ground and called out, ‘On your feet,
Private Voss. Jump to it, man! Attention! Quick march!’

“And then Terry was up and starting to stagger over, and I yelled out the step for him. Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right,
and the lads joined in, and we hauled him across that way in little dribbles of steps while the guards stood and laughed until
we dressed him in line.”

He paused in what was clearly a well-worn narrative, stirred his tea and drank.

“I don’t know why it is,” said Nell. “Heroism ought to be horrible. The need for it is usually horrible, and so is the event
itself. So why is it that when one hears a story like that one feels a need to weep with a kind of joy?”