Some Deaths Before Dying (2 page)

Rachel ate as much as she could bear to, then a few fingers of toast and marmalade, the toast from a presliced loaf, a disgrace
to the household, but the marmalade homemade by Dora Willmott-Wills and brought by her on her last visit. Finally, redeeming
everything, hot, strong Java coffee with a little cream and sugar. Incense in the cathedral.

“Bliss,” she whispered as Dilys lifted the cup clear.

“There was a shop in Bangor used to smell this way when you walked past,” said Dilys, giving Rachel another sip. “Before the
war it would’ve been of course. They had this machine in the window turning the beans over and over, roasting them. Don’t
know when I last saw one of those.”

“How old?” said Rachel.

“Me? Nineteen thirty-three I was born, so I couldn’t’ve been more than five or maybe six. Funny how clear you remember some
things and others are all gone. I don’t remember my dad at all from those days, not till he was back from the war and we’d
got to look after him. I’d’ve been twelve or more by then, of course. He’d been a Jap POW, dad, and he was never right after.
Mrs. Thomas was telling me it was the same with her dad, being a POW, I mean.”

“Yes.”

The subject had not come up before in their one-sided conversations. Rachel wouldn’t herself have mentioned it, and most of
Dilys’s talk was discreet trivia about patients and families she had worked for.

“Looks like he came through it better than my dad,” said Dilys. “Judging by the picture of him.”

Rachel made a questioning murmur, misunderstood by Dilys.

“That one on the bureau, I’m talking about,” she said. “You must’ve took it yourself. Show you, shall I?”

She went to the other end of the room, returned and slid Rachel’s spectacles into place. The room unblurred. Dilys acquired
a face, round, pallid, with soft brown eyes, a rather spread nose and a deep-dimpled chin. Rachel glanced at the photograph
unnecessarily, so well did she know it. It had stood on her worktable or desk for almost fifty years.

It was a snapshot only, but as characteristic of Jocelyn as anything that she had ever persuaded him to pose for. Nineteen
forty-eight, and the Rover almost new. He’d been adjusting the timing—no garage could tune a car to his satisfaction. She’d
stalked him, called when she was set. He’d straightened and turned, allowing her to catch him before he’d realised what she
was up to. She could read his expression perfectly—pride in his machine, confidence in what he’d been doing, mild irritation
at the interruption—Jocelyn to the life. To the loved life.

“Big man,” she whispered. “When he came back, seven stone ten.”

“My dad too, he was a skeleton all right, and like I say he never got it back, not really. Looks like Colonel Matson did a
bit better for himself.”

“Yes,” said Rachel, smiling inwardly as she took another sip of coffee. The phrase was so exactly right to describe what he
had done.

“Yes, I’m a bit of a mess at the moment,” he’d told her, when she’d failed to conceal her horror at the thing that tottered
down onto the platform at Matlock and took her in its arms. “You must have got my letter. Told you I’d lost a bit of weight.”

“Yes, but…oh my darling, what have they done to you?”

“Oh, I’m not so dusty, compared to some of the others. No point in going back into the hospital now that I’m home. I’ll sort
myself out sooner here, with you.”

Rachel learnt later that he had discharged himself directly from the hospital ship, against doctors’ orders and in defiance
of military discipline.

There had actually been talk of a court-martial. But at Cambi Road reunions veteran after veteran, some of them still half-broken
men, had taken her aside to tell her that they wouldn’t have made it through, but for the Colonel. By those times he had his
weight and strength back, using his own regime of rest and exercise (the rest, of course, much more of an effort of will for
a man of his temperament than the exercise) and food from the garden.

“Tell Thwaite to plant a lot of spinach,” he’d said.

“You hate spinach.”

“Course I do. Filthy stuff, but I’ll get it down somehow. And broccoli and cabbage and that kind of muck. Spring greens, whatever
they are. I’ll make a list.”

“I’ll need to stand over Mrs. Mears to stop her boiling them to shreds. She must have been trained as a laundrywoman and got
into cooking by accident. I’ll look in the library for books about growing vegetables.”

“See what you can find. There was an M.O. in Singapore with his head screwed on about this sort of stuff. Interesting chap.
Won’t get anywhere in his trade, of course, with the self-satisfied clowns they’ve got running it. Don’t worry, Ray, we’ll
do it between us.”

He wasn’t trying to cheer himself up, or her. He was stating a fact.

They would do it between them. And they had.

The men at the reunions seemed not to envy Jocelyn his return to fitness. One of them, still in his wheelchair, said as much
to Rachel once.

“Good to see the Colonel looking so grand. I’d hate to see him stuck in one of these things.”

For his part Jocelyn would have preferred to miss out on these meetings. The war was over, and he was in any case almost wholly
uninterested in the past. He went, really, because the men wanted him there, but that was something he would have refused
to acknowledge. He did it, he said, because he needed to talk to the men and check whether there was any way in which he could
help them, write references, arrange job interviews, cajole, bully, plead, argue, on their be-half. “What’s the point of having
been to a bloody expensive school where they didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing if you didn’t pick up a bunch of friends
in high places whose arms you can twist in a good cause?”

There was no way now that Rachel could explain any of this, so she simply smiled, accepting that Jocelyn had done well to
regain his fitness, and sipped her coffee with relish. Before she had finished there was a knock on the door.

“Come in, Mrs. Thomas,” Dilys called. “We’re just finishing our breakfast.”

She stood out of the way as Flora came bustling in, permed, pink cheeked, scarlet lipped, bright eyed.

“Morning, Ma,” she said, bending for a peck at Rachel’s cheek. She was wearing that boring scent again. Why bother, if you
finish up smelling like last year’s potpourri?

“How are you this morning, Ma? Sorry about the eggs. You’d have thought somebody who can manage a perfectly respectable
faisan nor-mande
would have the right idea about scrambled eggs. Da would have dropped them out of the window. And thrown the toast after
them. Dick’s coming to lunch. He wants to talk to you.”

Rachel reacted slowly, though she was well used to her daughter’s sudden transitions of subject. No need for a foray about
the eggs, then, she’d been thinking with some disappointment.

“Dick?” she whispered.

“That’s right. It’ll be nice for you to see him, won’t it? He says he’s been busy. Now, don’t be naughty, Ma—Devon is a long
way.”

As far, in fact, as the detestable Helen could take him. But busy? Flapdoodle.

“What about?”

“He’s got someone to see in York, apparently.”

More flapdoodle, and judging by the “apparently” Flora thought so too. M5, M42, MI, AI—Matlock wasn’t more than a few miles
out of his way, but he wanted something all the same. Money, probably. How bad a mess was he in this time?

“All right,” she whispered.

“
H
i, Ma. You’re not looking so dusty.”

He bent and kissed her with a passable imitation of affection. She smiled. He had of course come in without knocking, but
nothing demeaning had been going on. She’d had her elevenses early, and then Dilys had cleaned her up and done her hair and
makeup with cheerful enjoyment, taking pride in her patient’s appearance, much like that of a breeder preparing a favorite
pony for a show. She had slipped out as soon as the visitor was in the room.

“Specs,” whispered Rachel. “On the table.”

He shoved them into place and she looked at her son with all the old muddle of feelings. It was extremely tiresome, she thought
yet again, how when almost everything else was gone the emotions still raged on—worse, perhaps, now that there was no input
from the limbs to distract them with trivia. All Rachel’s rational self despised her son, but the rest of her, that other
self beyond reason, persisted in adoring…adoring what? There had been a child, yes, but…Surely, surely, surely, somewhere
inside the middle-aged boor by her bed…

Why did he have to look, speak, laugh, carry himself so like his father when any stranger, suppose one could have met both
men at the same age, would have seen at once that Jocelyn was honest timber and Dick was plastic trash? It was detestable.
Dick would be sixty next year. He exercised himself at best casually, smoked, drank too much, ate with a boy’s greed, but
he hadn’t run to fat. He hadn’t drilled or born arms since the JTC, but he stood and moved like a soldier. Look closely and
you saw that the pinkness of the skin wasn’t the flush of health. Look into the blue eyes…

Jocelyn had glanced up from his book, keeping his place with his thumb, and said quietly, “I think we’d better face it. Dick’s
no good.”

This had been apropos of nothing. Four days earlier Dick had driven back to Cirencester for his last term at the agricultural
college. They had barely mentioned him since. Rachel was at her worktable, masking negatives for enlargement.

“Oh, dear. I can’t help hoping. But…”

“Maybe if I’d been home during the war…”

“No. It was always there. He was a lovely little boy, but in some of the photographs… You couldn’t be expected to see it at
the time, but you can now. Do you want me to show you?”

“No point. I’m sorry, Ray. It’s worse for you.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Anyway, we have to do the best for him we can. Maybe he’ll find a woman who’ll make something of him.”

“Let’s hope,” Rachel had said.

She’d had her wish, but in the manner of some moralising fairy tale, in which the princess gets all the gifts her parents
asked for, but which then turn out to be the last thing they wanted. For all her many-faceted dislikability Helen had had
both the wit and will to make something of Dick, kept him out of both gaol and bankruptcy, organised a life for him, seen
to it that he had a job, and held on to it, made not merely something but perhaps the most that could be made out of such
material.

Yet, despite such knowledge, even now as she gazed up at him Rachel remembered an eight-year-old wolfing the lardy cake she
had found for him in Matlock. Lardy cake had been as good as unobtainable in wartime. He hadn’t remembered to say thank you,
hadn’t understood the achievement, but her body had brimmed with satisfied love at the sight of his pleasure. So now. Though
the visit was sure to be uncomfortable and might well be painful, as she looked at him her main emotion was happiness that
he had, for whatever reason, come back to her.

“Well, what have you been up to?” she whispered, making the effort to talk in full sentences, as if for a stranger.

He grinned.

“Sweating and suffering, if you want to know,” he said. “This stupid beef scare’s still playing havoc with the business. Farmers
haven’t got any money to pay for the stuff, and haven’t got any cows to feed it to supposing they had. Not to mention they’re
pointing the finger at us for starting it. Of course we were cutting the odd corner, but who wasn’t? Anyway the rug’s been
pulled from under us with a vengeance, and unless something happens PDQ to turn the ship round we’re all going down the tube.
No fun at all.”

“So you’re going to York?”

“Just scratching around. Not much chance of it coming to anything, but it’s better than sitting on my backside waiting for
the roof to fall in.”

“How are the children?”

“Little monsters. Belinda’s got another on the way. She’s due to pop next month. Helen must’ve put all that in our Christmas
card, didn’t she?”

No shame, none at all. In most years the only communication Rachel received from her son was the annual news roundup that
Helen composed on her PC and sent out with the Christmas cards, often signing the card on Dick’s behalf. Not that Helen would
have allowed any greater contact, but suppose Dick had married a wife who felt drawn to the family rather than repelled by
it, he would still have let her do all the work.

Now, though, came a small surprise.

“I’ve brought you some photos, Ma. Toby’s a camera nut, like you, and he sent us a sheaf of the things from last time they
were down. Want to see?”

“Please.”

Toby was an affable, dull planning official, married to Dick’s other daughter, Harriet. (Charley, Belinda’s husband, was a
Devonshire GP.) Dick shifted his chair to lean over the bed and show her the photographs, mumbling names as he went. Rachel
could hear that the process irritated him but that he was trying for as yet undisclosed purposes to please her, presumably
to put into her mind that she had these descendants to whom she still owed duties. She barely listened, concentrating on the
images.

Winter scenes. Michelin tots—woolly hats and snow suits—poking sticks into bonfires, confronting one of Helen’s Shetlands
at a fence…

“Wait. Back one. Who…?”

“That’s Stan again. He’s supposed to take after me.”

“Yes.”

The pang was appalling. Rachel gazed at the small figure absorbed in stamping an icy puddle into splinters. She had a photograph—black
and white, of course—of Dick at that age, wearing the then standard tweed coat, leggings and furry cap, but standing in the
identical pose to study something on the ground before him. This was the self-same child. Suppose in the winter of 1905 someone
had captured the image yet again, Jocelyn aged two and a half, wrapped against the cold, absorbed in some fragment of the
universe that lay at his feet…Ah, which way would this child go?

“Very, very like,” she whispered.