Skeleton-in-Waiting (18 page)

“You are going to tell me she killed them for the jewels.”

“I expect some of them just died. It must have been a frightful journey. But, well, Fred did say she'd shot ‘the others'. That means more than just the khan. It was sort of in the air those days, wasn't it—stories about servants rising up and massacring their masters? And I've sometimes wondered what they ate during the journey. Fred was terrified of her.”

“You've met her, I haven't. You really think she was up to all that?”

“Oh, yes. Easily. That's what I meant about her being different from Maria. She didn't care about anybody else at all. She tried to make people nothing.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I know you think we aren't really there at all. We're just a sort of compromise, but …”

“That's a caricature of my position. The I that I think of as I is not an entity. It is an abstraction, a balance of opposing forces, but as such it is as real as, say, the British Constitution. Nobody can say precisely what the British Constitution is, or where it lies, but it is absurd to deny its existence.”

“All right, let's call it a balance. What I was trying to say is you aren't allowed to go poking around interfering with other people's balances. Making them what you want them to be instead of what they are.”

“Everybody does it.”

“Almost everybody. It's what the GBP and the hacks are doing all the time to us. It's what I was trying to do to Janine, I suppose. It's what the terrorists keep trying to do not just to one or two people but to whole countries. It's what you tried to stop us doing to you when we got married. It's why Soppy went off her rocker …”

“A factor, at most. There must have been an hereditary element, not to mention her relations with her mother.”

“But it's still there. It's part of it. If it hadn't been for that she might've kept her balance. But what I'm trying to tell you is that Mrs Walsh didn't just go poking around, didn't just try and make people something else, she tried to make them nothing. What she did to Rose was the worst, but there was Fred, too. And Aunt Bea, I suppose, only actually you can't do that to Aunt Bea. She stays herself, in spite of anything you try.”

“With most people the balance is extraordinarily resilient to change. The forces re-group, and a fresh balance, externally almost identical with the old one, is achieved.”

“I hope so.”

“A thought strikes me. The most extreme form of interference, obviously, is killing somebody. But isn't it almost as extreme to bring them into being in the first place?”

“Nonsense.”

“In what way nonsense?”

“I'm too tired to think about it. I'll tell you tomorrow. Let's call it a day. Have you had enough concrete whatsits?”

“Particularities? I think so. Sleep well.”

“Sleep well.”

They kissed. Louise turned on her side and massaged the small of her back into the hollow above his hip. His arm was still stretched out beneath her neck. He would sleep on his back all night, mysteriously managing not to snore. She felt for his hand and held it. It was good of him to have let her talk her day through—he hadn't really wanted to—he'd much rather have stayed in his maze, but instead he'd actually listened, helped, paid attention to nuances … Like Soppy, she was tired of skeletons, and though these ones had mainly been of no real concern of hers she felt that at last she had taken them out of their shadowy cupboards and laid them in the earth where they belonged. They could all sleep now.

Piers was asleep already. Davy? England was four hours behind Baku, so it would be getting on for half past ten at Quercy. Helen might be in the nursery this very moment, doing a last check-up. If Davy was starting a cold she'd be in for a restless night. In Louise's mind the nursery lost scale. The cot and the bending figure dwindled, remote figures in a vast dim room. Needs another cot, needs populating, she thought. Drowsily she counted months. Joan had been keeping a six-week gap in the diaries, a clearing among the prisoning thickets of entries, a glade into which, if she got it right, Louise could drop her fawn. It was still a month too early to start. On the other hand she'd got it wrong with Davy, been a tiresome three weeks late … A girl this time please … You weren't supposed to say that, not even to think it … Louise remembered talking to Soppy about this sort of thing, just after the Garden Party. I was a bit too tough with her, she thought—hope she took no notice … Anyway, it's nonsense what Piers was saying, about it being interfering with someone else getting them born in the first place—it's just as interfering deciding not to. Remember to tell him in the morning.

Gently she ran her fingertips over the coarse-boned wrist and along the muscle towards the elbow.

After we've done the practical, she thought. Before he's started thinking. And the hell with the diaries.

About the Author

P
eter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of
Punch
, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.

The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children's literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers' Association for two books running:
Skin Deep
(1968) and
A Pride of Heroes
(1969).

A collection of Dickinson's poetry,
The Weir
, was published in 2007. His latest book,
In the Palace of the Khans
, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1989 by Peter Dickinson

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-5040-0495-4

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com