Some Deaths Before Dying (13 page)

She bought a pad at the station bookstall, and on the train north thought and remembered, sucking her pen, scribbled a bit
and thought and remembered again, so that she wouldn’t leave anything out. She had it all down and in order by the time she
reached Matlock station.

M
rs. Matson listened with closed eyes, looking as peaceful as the dead, and after a whispered “Thank you, Dilys,” stayed like
that for some while.

At length, still with closed eyes, she whispered again.

“Albums, please. Second shelf, far end. Letter J. Nineteen forty-eight.”

“I know, dearie. Shan’t be a mo.”

Dilys hurried out, both pleased and intrigued—pleased because Mrs. Matson was so obviously much less fretful now that she’d
found a loose end to tease at in her tangle, and intrigued because this was an album she’d never been asked to bring before.
J. was Colonel Matson, of course. Jocelyn. Pity him having a girl’s name like that, when he was such a big, strong man—and
he’d called Mrs. Matson “Ray” too. It was short for Rachel, but still it was a boy’s name, really. Dilys knew that because
once or twice in the albums there’d been photographs where Mrs. Matson had set the camera up so that she’d got time to get
into the picture herself, and “Ray” was what she’d written underneath. She’d several times asked for the J. albums from before
the war, but not this one. Interesting that it didn’t start till ’48 too. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to take pictures of him
until he’d got over what they’d done to him in that Jap camp.

Back in the room, Dilys cranked the bed up, slid the reading table into place, adjusted the lamp, got the reading specs comfortable,
opened the album and started to turn slowly through the pages.

A shooting party, eight men in plus fours, with guns, and a row of dead birds and three hares laid out on pale stubble. She
picked the Colonel out at once, him being the tallest. Anybody, any nurse, at least, would have spotted he’d been ill and
was getting better. He had that newly fleshed appearance. Dilys really liked the way he looked, the way he stood. With pride.
Not thinking about it, not working at it, not stuck-up about it—she remembered miners and farmhands who’d held themselves
that way—no wonder Mrs. Matson had been so keen on him. She turned more pages. She guessed Mrs. Matson wanted to look at one
special picture, but she was very kind about letting Dilys go slowly so she had a chance to see the other ones. Each pair
of pages had a sheet of tissue between them, so the photos didn’t lie against each other. Sometimes there were two or three
on one page, sometimes just a single larger one, like the shooting party. That had been posed, obviously, but most of them
hadn’t. Still, they weren’t exactly snapshots—not like other people’s snapshots, anyway. There was something about them. They
weren’t careless—no, they were somehow
meant
, even when you couldn’t guess what the meaning might be. There was a copy of the one on the bureau, with the Colonel standing
by his car. Underneath in silvery ink it said “Jocelyn. The Rover. November 1948.”

A few pages later the tissue came up sticking to the left hand page. Opposite it was a picture of Colonel Matson out on the
lawn with the big cedar beyond him. He had his right arm up and was taking aim with a pistol—no, he was actually firing, because
you could see the puff of smoke against the dark of the cedar…

“Stop,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Other page.”

The tissue was sticking to something, four spots of old gum which had once held a photograph in place. At the bottom of the
page it said “The Laduries. October 1949.”

“Dick,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Let you in. Stayed out there. He took it. And the list.”

JENNY

“F
or heaven’s sake! Not that tie with that shirt! Here, this one.”

(Left to himself, even when not in a hurry, Jeff would have dressed in whatever was out—yesterday’s clothes or something,
perhaps still slightly damp off the bathroom clothesline—rather than go to the trouble of opening a drawer and choosing. His
ensembles tended therefore towards the random.)

“And stop worrying. I’ll be all right. He won’t have a clue who I am, anyway.”

“I was thinking if you took the bloody thing with you, it might jog his memory. Look. Take it, see how it goes, and if it
looks—”

“Jeff! Stop it! Your lace-up shoes, not those horrible brown things. And your good coat. You’ve got three minutes. I’m doing
your thermos.”

He came down the stairs like a falling boulder. She had the door open, locked it behind him and ran for the car. All the way
to the station he rabbitted on about Uncle Albert, but she was too busy making time through traffic to pay attention. They
reached the station with forty-five seconds to spare. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see Sister Morris first. I’ll take the
gun and show him if I think it’ll help. I’ll
cope
, right? And this evening you’ll come home and tell me that Sir Vidal has ordered Billy’s public disembowelment. Kiss me.”

He did, and loped away. She watched him out of sight, and drove home to make herself breakfast feeling weirdly unresentful
that a tycoon’s whim should have cost them one of these free days together.

* * *

Marlings Retirement Home had originally been built, apparently, by a successful tea planter when he had returned to England
with his family just before the First World War. Jenny was unsystematically interested in that kind of thing. She had never
been to India, but she felt she might have guessed about the house—wide-eaved, with a deep verandah of dark brown wood, occupying
the crest of a low ridge, with dense rhododendrons all along the drive, and behind them droop-branched conifers that might
as well have been deodars but presumably weren’t. Anyway, it didn’t feel as if it really belonged in England. Perhaps it wouldn’t
have felt right in India either, because it didn’t actually belong anywhere. This made it a bit depressing for the kind of
place it now was, full of people sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting, the way one does in airports when one’s flight’s
delayed. There’s nothing to do here and nowhere else to go.

Sister Morris was a heavy, dark-skinned woman with a faintly scowling look which Jeff said didn’t mean anything.

“I was hoping to see Mr. Pilcher,” she said. “Thing is, we’ve had a bit of bother about Albert. There was a gentleman came
a couple of days back—no, I’m a liar, Friday it would’ve been—said he thought he’d look in seeing he was passing so close.
Matson, he said his name was, and his dad had been in the war with Albert. Be that as may be, he sounded all right, but when
I told Albert he pulled me up sharp. It was Colonel Matson, he told me, and anyway he was dead and Albert knew that ’cause
he’d been to the funeral. I told him, no, that must’ve been this Mr. Matson’s father, and Albert went all stubborn the way
he does, and said he didn’t want to see him, but I persuaded him. They get things into their heads, you know, but seeing the
gentleman had come all this way, from Devon, he told me…

“Turned out Albert was right and I was wrong, ’cause I’d not left them alone five minutes when Albert was shouting from the
top of the stair to me to come and show the gentleman out. He can shout too when he puts his mind to it. So up I run and there’s
the gentleman trying to calm him down but I could see it wasn’t any good so I had to tell him he’d better go.”

“Did you tell him anything about Jeff looking after Uncle Albert’s affairs?”

“No, I didn’t. I was just set on getting shot of him quick as I could, and he’d lost his rag and was trying to put it over
me in that hoity-toity voice of his and I wasn’t standing for that. Good as a play it must’ve been for the other old dears
by then. Should I have told him about Mr. Pilcher?”

“No, I’m sure Jeff would say you did right. It was just that he came and saw me, later that evening, and pretended he didn’t
know anything about Uncle Albert living here…I wonder how he found me…Never mind. Anyway, I know what this is about. Mr. Matson
is trying to get hold of something belonging to Uncle Albert. I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m not letting him come bothering Albert again, and that’s for sure. The poor old boy’s been that fussed since it
happened, not wanting to come down for meals in case the gentleman showed up.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure he’ll listen to me. He doesn’t usually remember who I am, especially
with Jeff not here. Is he up in his room? I’ll go straight up, shall I?”

From her first visit Jenny had been impressed by how they did things at Marlings. The stair carpet was thick, the elaborate
dark woodwork dusted and polished. There were cyclamen and heavy-scented narcissi in pots on sills and landings. The staff
had time for you. Jenny had merely appreciated these things on earlier visits, but this time she saw them not under the pleasant
glow of civilised behaviour towards the elderly, but in the more acid light of cost. Uncle Albert’s pension, with the annuity
from his savings, didn’t make up half the Marlings fees. Jeff supplied the rest. This hadn’t been difficult out of one excellent
salary and one reasonable one, but it would be impossible with both jobs gone.

She went down a corridor, passing two fire doors, and knocked at a room labelled “Mr. Fredricks.”

“Who’s that?” snapped a voice. Even without what Sister Morris had told her Jenny might have detected the note of anxiety.
She opened the door and put her head round.

“It’s me, Jenny, Jeff’s wife,” she said.

He was sitting in an upright armchair with a newspaper across his knees, a gaunt old man with a large, high-bridged nose and
a thin mouth. He was wearing a suit and tie, and brown laced shoes, polished to a high sheen.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, “but I don’t need anything just now.”

“Hello, Uncle Albert,” she said, paying no attention. “I’m afraid Jeff couldn’t come at the last moment. He sent his love.
I’ve brought some fruit. Shall I put it in the bowl?”

“That’s right.”

She did so, then adjusted the other chair so that she was almost facing him, and sat down. He was only a little deaf, but
on earlier visits he had seemed to find the lighter timbre of her voice harder to hear than Jeff’s. After the fraught, irrational
apprehension of her first visit, when, in spite of Jeff’s assurances that Uncle Albert was a nice old boy in excellent health,
she had really needed to force herself to go through with it, for Jeff’s sake, Uncle Albert’s room now held no horror for
her. His grasp of present reality might waver, but the habits of order and cleanliness persisted. All his possessions had
their exact places. There was none of the reek which pervades the air around some of the old. The visitor’s only difficulty
was keeping a conversation going.

Jeff’s technique was to talk much as he would have to anyone else, a little more slowly but no louder, and if the old boy
got hold of the wrong end of the stick, not to correct him, but either to carry on or, if it looked more promising, to go
off in the new direction. He said you never knew how much Uncle Albert would pick up, but he would spot it at once if you
were trying to make things easy for him.

“I’m sorry Jeff couldn’t come,” she said. “So’s he. It happened only this morning. In fact we were still asleep when the phone
rang. The thing is, Jeff had a row with his immediate boss and walked out. Or he was sacked—it depends how you look at it.
Anyway, the call was from someone who works for the top guy in the whole company, saying the big man wanted to see Jeff today,
in Birmingham, about the row. It looks like being his one chance to put his case…”

He was peering at her, frowning.

“Dyed your hair, then?” he said.

“No, it’s always been this colour.”

“Not since I’ve known you, it hasn’t, and then you were just about so high. You took after your dad, that way. Comes of living
in America. They’re always messing around with how they look, Americans. Your lad’s not coming today, then? What’s his name?
I’ll get it in a minute.”

The gnarled fingers groped for the memory.

“Jeff,” she said. “He had to go to Birmingham all of a sudden. He sent his love.”

“That’s right, Jeff. A good enough lad. You’ve done very well by him, Penny.”

Jenny grasped the nature of the confusion, shrugged inwardly, and settled for the moment into the role of being her own mother-in-law.

“I’m glad you think so,” she said. “I’m very proud of him.”

“Jeff,” he said, frowning again. “There’s something—you tell him—something he’s looking after for me.”

He fell silent, staring at her with obvious distrust. Jenny didn’t hesitate. If she pretended ignorance now, what if he remembered
that when she admitted knowledge later? Anyway, she wanted to get it over.

“Your pistol, you mean?” she said.

The stare hardened to chilly ferocity. He hadn’t done this to her before. It was as if an old family myth of Jeff’s, a quirk
from his childhood, had stalked living and potent into the room.

“What do you know about that?” he said in a quiet, level voice, seeming to bite each word off to separate it from the next.
“Who the hell are you, anyway, coming here making out you’re my niece. You’re not.”

“I’m Jeff’s wife, Jenny,” she said. “Look, I’ve brought the pistol to show you it’s all right, and Jeff’s still got it.”

She took the parcel out of her shoulder bag and gave it to him. He opened the box, checked that the pistol was there, closed
it and put it on the table beside him, all without acknowledgement or comment.

“Do you want me to tell you what happened?” she said.

“If you think you’ve something to say for yourself, miss, say it.”

His tone was unmollified.

“Jeff put it carefully away, like you asked him,” she explained. “I found it when I was looking for something else. I didn’t
know what it was, so I left it out to ask him about when he got home. Then…”

His look didn’t soften as she told the story. She couldn’t guess how much he was taking in, but if she paused he nodded to
her to carry on.