Some Deaths Before Dying

JENNY

1

“Wake up, Uncle Albert—I think we’re there.”

Jenny braked inside the gates to give him time to pull his wits together before they reached the house. He had dozed in snatches for almost half the journey, and each time he woke had checked the cardboard box on his lap, raising the lid and groping inside to make sure that nothing had been substituted for the pistol while he slept. It was already early afternoon, but since Mrs. Thomas had insisted that food would be waiting for them on their arrival, they had stopped only once on the way, for coffee and biscuits at a service station. There they had scarcely sat down before Uncle Albert was fidgeting to be off again.

Now he woke and checked the box once more.

“Well, what are we stopping for?” he said. “It’s a long way, you keep telling me.”

“I think we’re there.”

Distrustingly he gazed through the windscreen, then relaxed.

“Ah, that’s more like it,” he said. “That’s Forde Place all right. Well done, girl.”

It was not at all what Jenny had expected from the picture of well-to-do squirearchy suggested by Mrs. Thomas’s telephone voice and chance remarks from Uncle Albert. The grounds were appropriate—not a flower bed visible, but large old trees, cedars and planes and such, rising from several acres of lawn that sloped down to what was probably a river, with a wooded bluff beyond. But the house itself was odd for such a setting, a solid slab of dark red brick with a wide-eaved slate roof and serried windows. It didn’t look like a building intended for people to live in. It was utterly different from Jenny and Jeff’s own little house, but it had the same quality of being obstinately itself, and the hell with anyone else’s ideas of taste and style. Jenny rather liked it for that.

She drove on, stopping a little beyond the front door, climbed stiffly out and went round to help Uncle Albert.

“Lend me your shoulder, girl,” he said. “That’s right. I’ll do in a minute. Legs aren’t what they used to be.”

“Shall I take the box? It’ll go in my bag.”

“Might as well, now we’re here.”

The bell was answered by a middle-aged woman whom Jenny assumed to be Mrs. Thomas, but Uncle Albert spoke first.

“You’re new.”

“Only been here twelve years,” she answered. “Tell Mrs. Thomas you’ve come, shall I? She’s expecting you. If you’ll wait just a minute.”

She led them into the hall and walked off along a sunlit corridor.

Jenny gazed around. This was more like it—more in conformity with her expectations, that is, though still with something very odd about its proportions. A large space, three storeys high, roofed with glass. Polished old furniture, hyacinths, still lifes, seascapes, display cabinets, never-sat-in easy chairs. An extraordinary staircase, not, as would be expected in such a room, climbing handsomely up in broad flights, but a sort of free-standing shaft, a lattice of pale narrow timbers—satinwood Jenny thought—with stubby flights rising inside the shaft. It was a life-size version of the sort of staircase a hobbyist might model out of matchsticks. It had the beauty of total economy, with no ornament except itself, fashioned from the lightest materials, its obvious strength inherent in the design, in the almost pure idea. Jenny had walked across to look at it more closely when a voice reached her from the corridor.

She recognised it from the telephone calls, though the words weren’t distinguishable because, as it turned out when she emerged into the hall, Mrs. Thomas had been talking over her shoulder to somebody behind her. She halted and turned to finish her instructions.

“…and if he hasn’t got them in, ask him to order them. We don’t want anything different. We want the ones we’ve always had.”

She turned again.

“Well, well, well! Sergeant Fred! And you’re looking wonderful! What a stroke of luck you could come! Ma’s so looking forward to seeing you again. You remember me, don’t you? I’m Flora. I dare say you think I’ve changed a bit.”

She took both his hands in hers and gazed up at him, openly delighted. She was a neatly plump woman, somewhere in her sixties, Jenny guessed, with blond permed hair unashamedly greying, a little powder, scarlet lipstick prissily applied, scarlet fingernails, green flannel skirt and matching cardigan, cream ruffled blouse pinned with a jade brooch. She radiated a sort of dishevelled but contented energy.

“Ah, Miss Flora,” said Uncle Albert, a little uncertainly. “So you’ve turned out all right. And where’s little Anne?”

“She’s in Canada, breeding horses. We were over there a couple of summers ago and she seemed fine. And you must be Mrs. Pilcher. How very good of you to bring him all this way. I wish I could have persuaded you to stay the night. I hope you didn’t have too grim a journey—it all depends on the M25, doesn’t it? Somebody told me such a good joke about the M25 the other day—I wish I could remember it. You know, I could pretty well have told you the first thing he’d ask me about was my sister. She’s younger than me and it used to make me mad with jealousy that she was the one everybody was interested in. Well now, I’ll show you where the loos are. Can he cope for himself?”

She scarcely lowered her voice for the question.

“Now, this is my niece, Penny,” said Uncle Albert. “Penny, this is…”

He stopped, frowning.

“Flora. Flora Thomas, actually. I’m married now. This way.”

Still talking as if not expecting answers to any of her questions, she led them back along the corridor from which she’d come.

“…and then we’ll go up by the back stairs, and that’ll mean Sergeant Fred can use the chair-lift. We put it in for my mother when she could still get about a bit. Of course we’d never have got one in on our ridiculous main stairs…”

“I think they’re wonderful,” said Jenny.

“Oh, do you? I do too, of course, but then we’ve always loved this house, all of us. You know people used to say how hideous it was—here you are, Sergeant Fred, you’ll find everything you want in there—but nowadays students are ringing up the whole time saying can they come and look at it. He’s in a muddle about you being his niece, isn’t he? I suppose you don’t want me to ask you anything about the pistols?”

She asked both questions in exactly the same tone of sprightly candour, though she had glanced a couple of times at Jenny’s shoulder bag. The plural was puzzling. It must have been clear from the TV show that Jenny had brought only one pistol, and knew nothing about any others.

“I still couldn’t tell you anything, I’m afraid,” she said. “But Penny’s my mother-in-law. I’m Jenny.”

“How confusing for the old boy, but he’s pretty wonderful in other ways, isn’t he? Do you know, we’ve got a party of Taiwanese students coming to look at the house next month. Taiwanese, for heaven’s sake. Here you are—you must be bursting. Mind you, they didn’t come halfway round the world just for us—they were on some kind of tour, but even so…”

She laughed at her own amazement and let Jenny go.

Uncle Albert, of course, refused to use the chair-lift and climbed slowly but steadily up four longish flights, resting briefly on each landing. Mrs. Thomas talked the whole way, mainly to him, do-you-remembers about previous visits and encounters—usefully stabilising for him, Jenny thought, though she wasn’t sure that she was doing it with that in mind.

At the top she broke off, turned to him and said, “I’d better warn you about Ma, Sergeant Fred. Otherwise you may find it a bit of a shock. She’s completely paralysed, poor old thing, and she needs to have everything done for her. She can talk, but it’s an effort—just a few words at a time, and only a whisper, so you’ve got to listen pretty carefully. But she’s absolutely all there in her mind—sharp as a needle still. And her hearing’s spot on—you don’t have to shout or talk slowly, but she doesn’t give any sign—she can’t—she just lies there, but you’ve got to remember that she’s hearing and understanding, and thinking about what you’re saying all the time. You do see, don’t you?”

She gazed anxiously up at him.

“I daresay we’re all getting on a bit, Miss Flora,” he said gravely, speaking her name this time with confidence.

“Well I hope I’m in anything like as good shape as you are when I get to your age. These are all Ma’s photos, of course—you remember how potty she was about her cameras—she’s looked some out to show you. Ah. Dilys. Here’s our visitors. Sergeant Fredricks and Mrs. Pilcher. And this is Dilys, who’s been an absolute angel to Ma. All set up?”

A plump, grey-haired woman in a blue uniform had appeared from a door further along the book-lined corridor.

“We’re all ready, Mrs. Thomas,” she said, “and I’ve got the table out for when the tea comes up.”

“Good for you. I wasn’t quite sure what you’d want at such a funny time of day, Mrs. Pilcher, so we’re sending you up a sort of betwixt and between kind of meal. How would you like to do this? Ma won’t want us all milling around, and Dilys had better stay to—”

“Can’t have that,” said Uncle Albert. “We’ve got private affairs to see to.”

“Oh, but you see, Sergeant Fred, Ma will need somebody—”

“Penny can see to all that,” said Uncle Albert. “She’s a good enough girl, though I say it myself. And she’s young, what’s more, so she’s good sharp ears, and you’re telling me Mrs. Matson can’t talk that easy…”

“What do you think, Dilys? Would you mind, Mrs. Pilcher?”

Jenny forced herself to respond. They were looking at her. The sudden wave of old horrors had swept over her without any warning. She had felt no qualms at all about bringing Uncle Albert to visit a bedridden old acquaintance. She hadn’t assumed that she’d be able to stay out of the sickroom. She’d need at least to meet the patient, because Uncle Albert would expect her to, and would want to talk later about the encounter. Even the prospect of eating her meal in the room had raised no doubts. Mrs. Matson was clearly very well cared for. By somebody else. Not Jenny. So she wouldn’t even need to nerve herself to cross the threshold of the sick room…

She blinked and shook her head. Her hands moved downwards, just as they had used to almost twenty years before, smoothing the crisp invisible pinafore into place at her grandfather’s door.

“I’m sorry,” said Sister Jenny coolly. “I was thinking about something else. Yes, of course I can manage if I’m shown how. I’ve looked after an old person before.”

Her voice sounded perfectly normal in her own ears.

“Well, that’s fixed,” said Mrs. Thomas affably. “Dilys will show you what to do. Now we won’t keep her waiting any longer.”

She knocked at the door they had reached, opened it and put her head round.

“Hi, Ma,” she said. “Here they are, then, right on time.”

She went in and held the door for them. Uncle Albert, typically, stood aside to let the others through, Jenny first. She halted a couple of paces inside the room and saw that they had come too late. The bed was immediately opposite her, placed parallel to the wall beneath a wide window. The dead woman’s head was cradled on the spotless pillows, peaked, fleshless, the yellow skin blotched with purple but otherwise almost translucent above the bone. Dead. Jenny had only once seen death before, when she had found her grandfather’s body one Sunday morning. Then her magical uniform had vanished at the sight, and the household had been woken by her scream. Now, as she struggled for control, Uncle Albert marched confidently past her.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Matson,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Major Fredricks, at your service, ma’am.”

The greeting had the ring of ritual whose repetition invoked the pleasure of previous meetings. The undifferentiated lips of the corpse smiled and moved apart.

“Sergeant Fred,” came the dead-leaf whisper.

Still barely in command of herself, Jenny turned away and moved down the room. There was a second, similar window further along the wall. In the space between the two hung a large, framed photograph, almost poster-size, black and white, of a huge fungus growing out of the bole of a tree. Jenny stared at it, seeing it first simply as pattern, but then, as if with the inner click of a switch, suddenly perceiving what it showed. Logically, it should have reinforced the horror of the death mask. The fungus was huge, a monstrous symbol of decay, but for some reason Jenny found it steadying, peaceful, normal. Thinking about the episode afterwards she was still unable to decide why. It was something to do with its—she didn’t have a word for it—being-what-it-was?—the fungus was what it was and the photograph was what it was and they were different things, fungus and photograph, and there was some kind of balance and tension between the two things which the photograph let you see and feel, but why that should make the photograph beautiful, let alone why it should have given Jenny something to grasp, allowed her to haul herself our above the tide of horror…

“Mrs. Pilcher?”

Jenny shook herself and came to.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was looking at the fungus. It’s marvellous.”

“You do keep saying the right things, don’t you?” said Mrs. Thomas. “Ma took it, of course. She took all of these, and you’re going to help her show Sergeant Fred some of her old albums, while Dilys and I push off and leave you to it. So if you’ll let Dilys explain to you about anything Ma might need…”

“Yes, of course.”

Jenny listened with full attention. Those were the reading spectacles. That was the reading desk, all ready, with the first album on it. She just had to slide it across the bed. Those were other albums, on the table, and the package was something Mrs. Matson wanted to show Mr. Fredricks. This was Mrs. Matson’s barley water—she’d need a sip every few minutes if she wanted to talk. The trick was to slide your other arm down behind her and steady her head in the crook of your elbow—she didn’t weigh anything—and not to pour too fast in case she choked, and this was how you adjusted the angle of the bed if she asked you, and that was all really.

“I’m sure I’ll manage,” said Sister Jenny, coolly. She could almost feel the starch in the imaginary uniform.

“I’ll just give her a quick little drinkie now to show you, shall I?” said the nurse. “We’d like that, wouldn’t we, dearie?”

Jenny watched the process without alarm. By the time it was over Mrs. Thomas had embarked on a complex flight of reminiscence about old acquaintances, in which Uncle Albert was keeping his end up with astonishing coherence, so Jenny took the chance to walk round and look at the several other photographs on the walls. The room was a fair size, longer than it was wide, and painted white throughout. All the pictures were in black and white, and framed in the same style. This, despite the bits of household furniture—a round folding table set ready for a meal, with two chairs, a really nice old walnut bureau, other chairs, bookshelves and so on—and the bed and sick-room appurtenances, gave it more of the feel of an art gallery than anything else. None of the photographs was of anything particularly striking —a stretch of sunlit paling overtopped by brambles, shadows in a barn, water flowing into darkness beneath two low arches, a white poodle coiffeured as for a show, nibbling its own flank in an ecstasy of pure canine concentration —but as with the one of the fungus all had the quality of instantly communicating their selfhood, why they had been taken in that light, at that angle, developed and printed to these tones and textures, enlarged to this size and these dimensions. That they were also obviously immensely skilled was part of the pleasure they gave, but secondary. She was going round the room, looking at each of them again, now in the light of the others, and paused at the one of the stream flowing away beneath the arches. Despite the stillness of the image, it seemed to have the true, hypnotic quality of moving water. She could remember, as a child, standing on a sunlit footbridge in a park somewhere, rapt, lost. That must have been very early, before Daddy walked out, when she had still been happy…

Just as then, a voice broke in, calling her. Uncle Albert. Mrs. Thomas and the nurse were in the process of leaving.

“All right, girl, let’s get on with it. We haven’t come all this way for just a lot of chat. My hearing’s not what it was, Mrs. Matson, so my niece here’s going to tell me if there’s anything you say and I don’t catch it. She’s a good girl, now that she’s settled down and got a young man of her own. Now, then, there’s something…the Colonel left it with me, long way back…after…never mind about that now…But it’s been on my mind a while, seeing how it doesn’t signify that much now—water under the bridge after all these years—so I thought…I thought…”

While speaking he had turned and reached towards the bedside table, but not finding what he wanted had hesitated and begun to pat his pockets, frowning and peering round the room.

“I’ve got it, Uncle Albert,” said Jenny quickly. “You gave it to me to carry when we were getting out of the car. One moment…here you are…”

He took the cardboard box from her and stood erect, as if the touch of it were restorative. He laid it on the bed and with untrembling fingers removed the lid, took out the package and slowly unwrapped the yellow duster, putting it back in the box. Grasping the pistol by the barrel he held it over the bed for Mrs. Matson to inspect. Her lips moved.

“Spectacles, please.”

Uncle Albert was in the way, so Jenny went round to the other side, between the bed and window, and slid the spectacles into place. Mrs. Matson’s gaze didn’t immediately return to the pistol, but remained for a few seconds fixed on Jenny, as if seeing her for the first time—which indeed, Jenny realised, she might well be doing. The curve of the lenses suggested a strong correction for near sight.

The slight delay seemed to irritate Uncle Albert.

“All right, then. You show her, girl,” he said and passed the pistol across. Jenny took it and turned it to and fro, and moved the catch and opened the breach in the way that the weapons expert had done on the Roadshow. She handed it back to Uncle Albert, who laid it down beside the box.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Matson. “Now, brown envelope. By albums. Give it him. Then go outside. Not long. Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” said Jenny. “I quite understand.”

She did as she was asked, and left, glad of the chance of a few minutes alone. She found herself unexpectedly upset, or rather upset in a manner that she wouldn’t have expected. It was no longer the horror of the dead thing on the bed—even her extreme reaction of a few minutes ago she’d have regarded as a normal, if stupid and shameful, quirk in her own makeup. What had shaken her now was almost the opposite thing, the simple, lively health of the eyes that had studied her from behind the spectacle lenses, both when she’d first put them on and again when Mrs. Matson had slowly whispered her requests. Jenny would not have believed that a pair of eyes, with no facial change whatever to help them, could have sent so clear a message of interest and apparent amusement. One of Jeff’s minor oddities was his fanatical interest in the Star Trek series, which Jenny usually watched with him for company. Her experience with Mrs. Matson was like some episode in which a team gets beamed down to an apparently dead planet, sends probes into the permafrost and discovers not just a few single-cell organisms that have evolved to survive such conditions, but a whole civilisation, science, arts, sociology, legends, cuisine, religion, hobbies, the lot.

She had no chance to settle down and come to terms with this revelation. The nurse must have been listening for the door, and at once came quietly up the passage.

“She’s needing something?” she whispered.

“No, it’s all right, she just wants to be alone with him for a bit. I suppose Mrs. Matson took the big photographs on the walls?”

“Indeed she did, and all these here too in the albums. Thousands of them, there must be, and she’ll tell you exactly where to look for anything she wants. Amazing she is like that. Other day I was asking about pictures of the house, and, look…”

The nurse moved a little to her left, pulled out a blue ring-binder and gave it to Jenny.

“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said. “She likes people to see. That one’s a bit different, mind you, because it was for some schoolwork her daughter was doing…”

Jenny opened the binder. The photographs were interleaved with pages of self-conscious young handwriting. There was the house itself, very much as Jenny had seen it from the top of the drive, though later in the year with the trees heavy with leaf. Next a patch of plain brickwork and the corner of a sill, no context, but insistently those particular bricks, seen in that light by those eyes, an effect impossible to analyse but still, to Jenny, obvious. She stared at the picture for a good minute before turning on and experiencing the same trance-like effect from a picture of a fire escape.

It struck her that there might be something wrong with her—sugar shortage maybe. She had had to get up at five, so breakfast had been almost that long ago, and skimped. Since then she’d had just a couple of biscuits and sugarless coffee at the service area…

At this point, as if she’d unconsciously willed it to be so, the woman who had first opened the door to them appeared at the far end of the corridor with a laden tray. Her odd mood broken, Jenny put the binder back in its place and explained the situation.

“Just leave it here till you’re ready, then?” said the woman, laying the tray down beside the door. Jenny thanked her and she left.

“Your old gentleman looks in very fine shape for his age,” said the nurse.

“Yes, thank heavens. Of course his memory comes and goes a bit, but today’s one of his good days.”

“Wonderful how they can pull themselves together for an occasion. Now, we’ve got out some of her albums for her to show him so I’ll come and settle her down for a rest while you’re eating your dinner, and after that your old gentleman will want to go to the toilet, so you can take him out for that while I tidy her up and make her comfortable again. All right?”

It worked out smoothly enough. When Uncle Albert came to fetch her she took the tray to the table and sat him down to eat, which he did with steady gusto. The food was much what Jenny would have chosen, cold chicken, salad, and what seemed to be homemade rolls, cheese and fresh fruit. Meanwhile the nurse dealt with Mrs. Matson and then made tea for Uncle Albert and coffee for Jenny. The brown envelope, Jenny noticed, was back in its place by the albums. The pistol was nowhere to be seen. The box in which they’d brought it was still on the bedside table, with the duster folder beside it. When they’d eaten Jenny took Uncle Albert out to the loo, as arranged.

Emerging, he at once tried to head back to the bedroom.

“Not yet, Uncle Albert,” she said. “We’ve got to wait while the nurse makes her comfortable—you know, cleans her up and so on. She can’t look after herself like the rest of us.”

“Ah. Right you are. Got it.”

He turned and began to study the spines of the albums on the shelves beside him, but almost at once swung round on her.

“What are we waiting for, then?” he said. “We haven’t got all day.”

“No, Uncle Albert. I told you. We’ve got to wait. It won’t be long.”

“Ah, yes, right,” he said, but it was obvious that he had for the moment lost the grasp of events he’d so strikingly displayed while talking to Mrs. Matson. To distract him she pulled out an album and leafed through, but it seemed to be devoted entirely to studies of moving water. She tried another from a different shelf. It opened at a cricket match.

Not Forde Place, or anything like it. Some kind of urban playground, with ’fifties high-rise blocks on the further side. The game was not what had interested Mrs. Matson. Only a couple of outfielders were visible to the right of the picture, the centre was a receding curve of spectators in deck chairs or lying on the grass, and in the left foreground, the nearest part of that line, a group of half a dozen young men stood together. They were so perfectly in period, somewhere in the mid-’fifties, that Jenny grinned with pleasure at the inch-soled shoes, the loose-draped, huge-lapelled suits, the exiguous neckties, the fags drooping from pouting mouths, the sideburns, the forelocks greased and curled into a hummocky wave. They seemed unaware of the camera, probably, if they’d noticed it, thinking it was focused on something beyond them, yet they were clearly the subject of the picture. As with the other photographs Jenny had seen, these young men were emphatically what they were.

Uncle Albert was fidgeting again.

“I wonder who they are,” Jenny said, thrusting the album under his nose. Obediently he took his spectacles from his breast pocket and put them on.

“Some of Major Stadding’s boys, they’ll be,” he said. “Had me along a couple of times, so I could tell ’em about soldiering and that, in case any of ’em felt like joining up, he said.”

He looked at the picture a moment more, and started to close the album.

“A bad lot. A bad lot all around,” he said.

Before he could make for the bedroom again Jenny took the album from him and turned the pages. The contents seemed to be character studies, and old man sitting at the door of a cottage shelling peas into a bucket, a small woman in an ugly hat which she clearly thought well of, a seven-year-old girl absorbedly fishing…

“Ah, now, that’s Miss Anne,” said Uncle Albert with a complete change of tone. “Everyone’s darling, she was. Wonder what’s come of her.”

“She’s raising horses in Canada, Mrs. Thomas said.”

“Right.”

He was still chuckling over the photograph when the door of the bedroom opened and the nurse came out.

“We’re ready now, if you are,” she said.

“Right, then, let’s get on with it,” said Uncle Albert, tucking the album under his arm and marching off. Jenny might have taken it from him at the bedroom door but decided not to risk unsettling his recovered confidence.

The bed was now cranked up so that Mrs. Matson was in almost a sitting position. She was wearing her spectacles and had a pretty cream scarf round her shoulders. Her hands and arms, fleshless as the leg of a starling, lay inert on the counterpane. The tilted reading stand was in front of her, with a high-seated chair for Uncle Albert beside the pillows so that he could see too, and a stool on the further side of the bed for Jenny.

“Now we’re all set,” said the nurse. “You’ll be all right here, will you, Mr. Fredricks? And if the young lady would go round the other side—you’ll have to reach a bit, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Jenny. “Are these in the right order?“

She picked up the topmost of the pile of five albums that lay ready.

The brown envelope, she observed, was no longer beside them.

“That’s right—” the nurse began, but Uncle Albert broke in.

“As you were—this here’s the one we’re wanting.”

He plonked the album he was carrying onto the stand, sat and started to turn the pages. Jenny and the nurse glanced at each other. Jenny signalled with her hands to let it be, and the nurse nodded, signalled in her turn that she’d be along the passage as before, and left. As Jenny reached her place at the bedside Mrs. Matson’s lips moved.

“Wait.”

“Wait, Uncle Albert.”

He appeared not to hear and leafed confidently on for another few pages.

“Now, that’s what I call a picture!” he announced.

“Anne,” whispered Mrs. Matson, or perhaps, Jenny thought, “Anne?” It was hard to tell with the sound so faint.

“A great favourite Miss Anne was with us all,” said Uncle Albert. “Never mind her being a wilful little imp. How old would she have been for that, then?“

“Seven,” whispered Mrs. Matson. Jenny relayed the figure.

“Seven, eh?” said Uncle Albert. He gazed at the photograph a few seconds more, shook his head and chuckled. Jenny reached to removed the album.

“No. Leave it. Back.”

Jenny leafed back, pausing at each page. Mrs. Matson stopped her at the picture of the cricket match.

“Those boys. Who? Ask him.”

“Oh, we were looking at that one outside. He said they were some of Major Stadding’s boys. Is that right, Uncle Albert? It sounded as if they came from some kind of youth club, or a delinquents’ home, or something like that. Uncle Albert?“

He didn’t immediately respond. His attention seemed to have slipped now that the remembered child was no longer there to hold it.

“Wait,” whispered Mrs. Matson before Jenny could try again. “Third from left. Ask him who?”

“This one?“

“No. Behind. Blond.”

The lower part of the face was hidden by the head of a young man nearer the camera. It was in half profile, showing a peak of pale hair, a straight forehead, sunken eye and high cheekbone. Rather than reach right across the bed Jenny carried the album round to show to Uncle Albert.

“Mrs. Matson says, ’Do you know anything about this young man?’” she said.

He barely glanced at the picture before turning his head away, refusing to look any more.

“Never seen him in my life,” he snapped.

“But, Uncle Albert, you told me just now, out in the—“

“Now then, young woman, how often have I got to tell you not to go poking your nose in where it’s not wanted? None of your business d’you hear me? None. Of. Your. Business.”

Jenny looked at Mrs. Matson for guidance. It was some while before the lips moved.

“Drink, please.”

Jenny laid the album aside, picked up the invalid cup and went round to her place again. As she did so, her earlier reaction returned, not this time as horror or dread, but as the conviction that just as she embarked on the childishly simple task of placing the spout between the patient’s lips and tilting gently, watching the level in the cup so that she could see when the liquid began to flow, the wave would rush up at her, causing her to jerk the cup, and Mrs. Matson would choke, and die hideously in front of her eyes before anything could be done. It didn’t, of course, happen. Her hand remained perfectly steady, but she found herself swallowing compulsively as she laid the cup aside.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Matson whispered, with her faint but potent smile. Jenny’s arm and hand responded as it of their own accord, reaching out and taking hold of the fleshless fingers where they lay inert on the bed just in front of her. This was not something she could have imagined herself deliberately doing, or even bearing to do. The skin felt brittle and empty, like a sloughed snakeskin. She was conscious of the contrasting life and warmth of her own hand. Mrs. Matson smiled again.

“Try and ask him…again…later,” she whispered. “Another album now.”

The weird pressure was already slipping away. By the time Jenny had laid the album she’d brought on the stand and opened it at the first page she felt pretty well normal. Relaxed. Confident that it wasn’t going to happen again, and therefore able to concentrate on the photographs.

The first was of files of men passing a parade stand, some marching, a few on crutches or in wheelchairs. A very senior looking officer, his chest smothered with medal ribbons, was taking the salute. Jenny thought she might have seen his face in an old newsreel. Not Montgomery, but someone like that. A tall, skeletally emaciated but still unmistakable figure was marching beside the line.

“That’s you, isn’t it, Uncle Albert?“

He craned, his anger forgotten.

“Right you are. And there’s the Colonel, leading us past. Duggie Rawlings that is at right marker—drove a taxi in London after the war. Now, when would that have been?“

“’Forty-seven. Mons,” whispered Mrs. Matson, and Jenny relayed the words.

“Course it was,” said Uncle Albert. “Mons Barracks, nineteen forty-seven. The Colonel laid it on for when we set the Association up, so as to show ’em all that we meant it, though there was some of the lads as couldn’t walk farther than you’d throw a tram car, or you’ld’ve thought so, but they all got ’emselves round somehow. I remember Don Kitchens telling me he felt prouder that day than he did when he went up to the Palace for his DSM.”

The next few pictures had been taken on the same occasion, three more of the parade, and then the same men, with what were presumably relatives, sitting or standing around at an open air reception. Beer glasses, wine glasses, teacups; cigarettes and pipes; glimpses of a military band. The photographs hadn’t been taken with an aesthetic purpose, but as a record of an occasion, but the same thoughtful eye was strongly evident, and the same care for composition. Many of the characters seemed as clearly defined as they would have in a good studio portrait. All the men bore the marks of their imprisonment, a gauntness and frailty, partly masked in some cases by the babyish look of flesh recently put back on. As each page turned Uncle Albert would study it for a while, then name the men he remembered. Occasionally Mrs. Matson whispered an interjection and Jenny passed it on.

“Jack Barnard. Billy Chart, and that’s his missus—what was her name? I’ll get it…”

“Florence?”

“Ah, right. Florrie Chart. Stan Upping—he’d been Mess Waiter. Mr. Graham—went for a curate, didn’t he, after demob, and then the police picked him up—choirboys and scouts—and he did himself in. Might’ve been a bishop by now…”

He seemed to speak entirely without blame. Jenny wouldn’t have expected him to mention such a thing at all, or else to do so with anger and disgust. There was a striking contrast a few pages later.

“Dickie Fearing; Dickie Brown, Terry Voss—showed up with a couple of thousand fags—black market, of course—rare as gold dust, they were.”

“Wait. Back, please. Those two.”

Jenny had turned the page, so leafed back. Below the group containing the two Dickies and the man with the black market cigarettes was a picture of two men standing in conversation beside an old muzzle-loading gun on a plinth. Both were in civilian clothes, but bearing and style suggested they were officers. The nearer one had his back to the camera, and the other faced it almost directly. Jenny would have thought him much more recognisable than some that Uncle Albert had so amazingly picked out—darkly good-looking, despite the aftereffects of emaciation, with naturally rounded features, a short but dense moustache, eyebrows and hair of the same apparent texture. Uncle Albert, however, had merely glanced at him and shaken his head, so Jenny had passed on. He looked again with his mouth clamped shut.

“Major Stadding,” whispered Mrs. Matson, no louder than she had so far, but before Jenny could pass the name on Uncle Albert spoke.

“Least said, soonest mended. Let the lads down—let us down badly, and the Colonel most of all. That’s enough about him. Get on with it, miss. We haven’t got all day.”

“Wait,” said Mrs. Matson. “What happened to him? After? Dead?”

Warned by her earlier rebuff Jenny phrased the question carefully.

“She says do you know what happened to Major Stadding in the end? She wants to know if he’s still alive.”

“Went abroad, last I heard,” muttered Uncle Albert. For an old soldier he was a remarkably bad liar.

“Tell him, come closer. Try to hear me.”

“Uncle Albert, she wants to try to talk to you direct. See if you can get close enough. Shall I come round and give you a hand?”

“Stay where you are, miss—I can do for myself,” he said, sounding a bit relieved, Jenny thought, by the apparent change of subject. He rose, placed his right hand beside the pillows for support, and craned forward. Jenny could hear the effort as Mrs. Matson struggled for extra volume.

“Please tell me. You brought the pistol. You said. Water under the bridge. Can’t matter now. Please. Sergeant Fred.”

He pushed himself up from the bed, straightened, turned and strutted off down the room with short, angry steps that suggested he would have liked to march clear away over the horizon. Reaching the table where they had eaten he halted with his back to the bed and rapped the surface several times with his knuckles. He then rounded the table, rapping it twice more as he passed, and came marching back to the bed, where he halted, staring ahead of him, as if being reprimanded by a superior officer on parade.

“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.”

2

Uncle 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.