Some Deaths Before Dying

RACHEL

1

The footsteps, faint on the carpet, receded. The door opened and closed. An odd young woman, Rachel thought, stranger in the flesh than she’d seemed on television. It would have been a challenge to capture that quality through the lens, the features soft but strong, self-possession with considerable tension, disciplined will constraining something wilder…

Voices in the passage, the tone of farewells. The door again. Dilys.

“Well, well, quite a day we’ve had of it, haven’t we, dearie? And what a grand old gentleman, coming all this way at his age, and still holding himself like a soldier. Now, we need seeing to, I dare say—we’ll have drunk a bit with all that chat. And then I’ll set your bed flat, so we can have a bit of a rest.”

“Soon. Album first. One he brought in. Something in it…”

“Right you are…This one? ‘People,’ it says on the back. Then here’s our specs. Start at the beginning, shall I?”

Dilys settled the album onto the stand and leafed slowly through, commenting here and there.

“Now that’s what I call a well set up lass…Shouldn’t care to meet them in a dark alley…”

Already almost exhausted, Rachel gazed vaguely at the passing images. Faces and postures. Strangers, friends, family, that didn’t matter, wasn’t what they’d been chosen for. The photographs were in this series of albums because when she’d begun to compile them in the second long winter of her widowhood, each had seemed to be, as it were, a passing remark—nothing so solemn as a statement—on what it meant to be a human being.

“Look at that hairdo! And those shoes! You should’ve heard what my Nan said when I showed up on her doorstep got up like that! I thought she wasn’t going to let me over the mat—”

“Stop. That one.”

“Teds…we had’em too. Welsh Teds. There was a Welsh word for them, even—Tedwboi, was it? Not that I knew more than a dozen words in Welsh myself. What was the point in Bangor? And now my other niece and her hubby—never mind he’s from Norfolk—they talk Welsh at home, and the kids too…Ready?”

“Wait. Please.”

Rachel willed her mind into focus and studied the half-hidden face. Bewildering that she must have seen it twice in the flesh, and then at least four times more in this image—looking through the rough prints, printing it up, and then selecting and reprinting it for the album, and had not then made the essential connection. Only now this ambush.

How long had the intervals been? She could actually remember taking the photograph, pretending to focus on the outfielder so as not to distract her quarry out of their speakingly self-conscious poses, that special uncertain swagger…1955, she guessed. Dick had captained a team against Fish Stadding’s Walthamstow youth club (of course Jocelyn had had to do the actual work of getting eleven players together). Rachel had gone along to be with them both—Dick consented to be so little at home…

It had been the group, not any of the individuals, that had caught her eye. No reason she should have recognised one of them, meeting him two years later. Jocelyn had died in’59, so it would have been’61 or’62 when she was working on this album. Only four or five years, then, since she’d truly seen him, watched and studied him for an hour or so…And she must have looked carefully at the photograph when she was deciding whether to include it. Perhaps she’d still been mesmerised by the group, not to pick him out. Yet now, another thirty-five years on, instantly, on a page half glimpsed as it was turned.

“Thank you, Dilys. Rest now.”

As far as possible she blanked her mind while Dilys lowered the bed, peeled back the covers and changed her pad. She was wet, of course, but to judge by the odours had stayed clean. Dilys had clearly been greatly impressed by Sergeant Fred.

“Funny how different they all go,” she said. “Not that I’ve seen a lot of them like that, looking after themselves and everything, just the mind a bit wandery—they don’t need my kind of nursing, that sort. There was an old lady I looked after—stuck in a wheelchair she was, and mostly didn’t know nor care if she was coming or going, but the family used to take her along Sundays to visit her sister—in a home she was, and her mind gone too, but the two old things would sit together for a couple of hours on end just holding each other’s hand, and the family swore blind that they both knew whose hand they were holding, and they were the better for it after. But it wasn’t them I was thinking of. There was another old dear in this home—Lettice her name was—and she was spry enough but she was the sort who says the same thing over and over and over, like one of those dolls with a string in its back, only they’re all electronic now, I suppose. Anyway, everyone loved this Lettice, but for one or two of the snarky old crabs you always get in a home, biting everyone’s heads off ’cause of not being able to bear it, what they’ve come to, but Lettice was just the other way, she was so happy. And what made her happiest was helping anyone up the stairs, or down them. Opening doors for them and holding them and closing them after they’d been through was better than nothing, but stairs were the best. She’d hang around in the hall-way looking at the pictures, which she’d seen over and over and over, but as soon as anyone showed up she’d take a quick peek at them—she knew not to try and help the ones who could manage, but if they were using a frame or maybe just a stick, she’d be at their elbow…There, now, that’s a bit better. Last little drinkie?”

“Please.”

Rachel sipped gratefully.

“Thank you. Flora?”

“Mrs. Thomas said to say she was out saving the children, but she’ll look in later if you’re up to it. You want me to put your parcel back in its hidey hole before she comes?”

“No. Leave it. In drawer. Not secret. Now.”

“Right you are. And she’ll be wanting to hear all about the old gentleman too, won’t she? You have a good rest, and you’ll be feeling perky for her.”

When Dilys had gone Rachel lay and gazed through the window. The rooks were raucous and active in the tree, but she was too exhausted to attend to them. Too exhausted for anything…

No! It wouldn’t do. It was another excuse, another shying away, the latest of countless evasions over the years. The thing must be faced, now, and in detail. If it was there, the answer would lie somewhere in the details, just as the young man’s image had lain so long unnoticed in the album.

Buried memory, unconsidered for decades, can’t simply be dug up, unpackaged and laid out for inspection. After such a span in the earth, though the shape may still be plain, the individual parts will at first be unrecognisable, compacted, clogged, corroded, some of them of stuff too transient to endure, others readable after careful cleaning. Fragments, though, persist almost unchanged—a coal fire in a half-lit room, the stealthy opening of a door in an empty house, squat fingers uncapping a bottle, the tweed of a greatcoat against her cheek in a dark car park, Jocelyn pausing at the study door, absorbing what she’d told him—from such morsels, with willed persistence, Rachel teased out most of the rest of it. All the essentials she was sure of, though parts she knew to be reconstructions—sequences of minor events, the actual words of a conversation—but even these didn’t merely ring true but were flecked here and there with the gleam of metals that burial doesn’t corrode.

Twice Dilys came in and took her pulse, but Rachel closed her eyes, pretended to be asleep and waited until she heard her leave. By night-fall she had as much as she thought she was going to get.

2

Begin at the beginning. A mild, dank October day. Late morning. The telephone call. She took it in the hall.

“Hello?”

The clatter of coins being fed into a public telephone.

“Ray?”

“Oh, it’s you, darling. What’s up?”

“Can’t tell you over the telephone. I’ll be late back—on the eleven-twelve. Don’t meet me. I’ll take a cab. Sorry.”

“Bother. All right. Shall I keep supper?”

“I’ll eat on the train.”

“Is it something serious?”

“Afraid so. Tell you when I see you. Look after yourself.”

“You too, darling.”

“Do my best.”

She put the handset down, disappointed for herself because she wanted him home—yesterday’s lonely evening had been more than enough—and troubled for him, though mainly about his personal discomforts. The late train was always crowded, the dining car often full for two sittings. Though what was keeping him in London was obviously important and by the abruptness of his tone unpleasant, it would be part of his public world, and he would deal with it as such. He would tell her about it, as he’d said, but by then he would have decided exactly what to do about it, and so would not bring it home in the form of a disruptive worry.

She sighed and went to the kitchen. Thursday was the Ransons’ afternoon off. Normally Mrs. Ranson would have set out the makings of a meal, simple enough for Rachel to cope with, before she and her husband went to the bowling club. Rachel told her not to bother. She’d have cheese and biscuits and tomatoes at her table while she finished the Christmas cards. Her afternoon was planned, and that would fill the empty evening.

Those plans for the afternoon. She could remember their existence, but not what they’d been. Had she driven somewhere? Yes, she must have. The trip itself was irrecoverable, but she could remember her sense of utter loneliness as she’d let herself into the house at dusk and locked the door behind her.

The evening, then. About a quarter to seven—the time not memory but reconstruction, since the train—the one Jocelyn should have been on—got in at six-eighteen. The study. Curtains closed and a coal fire starting to glow, not for herself, but so that Jocelyn should have his own warm lair to come home to, where he could sip his scotch and tell her about his day. A pool of light from his desk lamp, for imaginary company: dark, and he was not in the house; lit, and he could just have gone out of the room. Her supper tray at the other end of the desk, so that she wouldn’t need to face the ambient emptiness till he returned.

Her own worktable sharp-lit, cleared for her task and then systematically set out: three stacks of blank cards of different sizes; their envelopes; a dozen piles of photographs to be selected and pasted in; her card lists for the past three years; two address books, hers and Jocelyn’s; paste; pen; blotter; stamps. Apart from desk and table the room in deep shadow.

The night silent. Neither she nor Jocelyn listened to music, and used the wireless solely for the early morning news. When the Ransons were in you might catch the mutter of their television. The house itself stood rock solid. After ninety years not a floorboard creaked, every door clicked quietly home, and it took a full gale to rattle a window. So the gentle flap of a flame over the coals was enough to mask the opening of the door, which she’d left an inch ajar for air. She merely sensed its movement.

Her heart thumped. Dick? Not the Ransons, home early—she’d have heard the car in the yard. Flora or Anne would certainly have called. Dick was supposedly in Australia, but hadn’t been heard from for three months. This would be typical.

She put the paste brush back in its pot and turned. Her heart thumped again. The head that was peeking round the door, though hard to make out with lamp-dazzled eyes, wasn’t Dick’s. Before she could speak the man stepped confidently into the room, closing the door behind him.

“Hello,” she said, now startled but not yet alarmed. “Who are you? This is a private house, I’m afraid.”

Without answering he switched on the overhead light and strolled towards her. A young man—eighteen?—slight, blond, with high cheekbones and sunken cheeks. Pale blue eyes and a full-lipped mouth. He was wearing a short dark overcoat with heavily padded shoulders. This, and something in his bearing and look, though his face bore no marks of old blows, suggested he might be a boxer, or perhaps wish to pass as one.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Just a pal of old Joss,” he said.

For a moment she couldn’t think who he was talking about.

“You mean my husband, Colonel Matson?”

“You’re on,” he said. “Been a good friend to me, Joss has, a very good friend.”

He looked at her half sideways and smiled. She said nothing, only stared. She was aware of her chest heaving, dragging air in, forcing it out unused. Not the words but the look had carried the meaning.

“So when he says to me, ‘Why don’t you just run up to Matlock, tell my good lady I’ll be late home?’ I thought, Why not, seeing it’s old Joss. ‘Here’s a tenner for the ticket and the taxi,’ he says. ‘Tell him Forde Place. And here’s the keys so you don’t bother the servants.’”

The heaving was replaced by nausea. He was lying, of course. Jocelyn had called. He’d have known the Ransons would be out—he didn’t forget that sort of thing. He’d never have sprung something like this on Rachel, or given anyone else his key—he’d even made a fuss about having one cut for Fish Stadding when he’d had a room of his own here…

The young man was watching her, still smiling. She saw that he didn’t expect her to believe him. His confidence lay elsewhere. In the “friendship.”

“Joss didn’t want you worrying, really he didn’t,” he said. “Very thoughtful, Joss is…Fag anywhere? No, you stay put, lady.”

His right hand, which had so far remained casually in the pocket of his coat, moved as if to withdraw something, and stopped. A flick knife? Rachel had read about flick knives.

He lounged over to Jocelyn’s desk, took a cigarette out of the ebony box, and lit it one-handed with Jocelyn’s lighter. He inhaled deeply, confident in his own dominance.

“One for you?” he suggested, teasing.

“I don’t smoke.”

Her voice answered flatly, controlled by some corner of her mind detailed to keep the rest of the system going when the rest was in shock. It wasn’t thinking, that rest. It was refusing to think, refusing to imagine, huddling down with its eyes uselessly shut and its hands uselessly over its ears. She had no ideas, no plan. What she had was a vomit-like upsurge of emotions, disgust, jealousy, hate, rage, bottled up in herself for a dozen frustrated years. She had no doubt that her understanding was far more than a good guess. If anything, she should have at least guessed before. Jocelyn was a sensual man. He lived through his body. Younger, she had not believed that of herself, had thought she lived primarily through her eyes and mind. Without Jocelyn she might never have discovered her other self—only, through his captivity and the years that followed, to have to put that self back to sleep, and learn to live again just through the eye and the mind. But it was still there, sleeping, dreaming, dreaming of wakefulness once more. She had shared many of those dreams. But Jocelyn…People don’t change that much. They don’t. Jocelyn was a sensual man still, living through his body. What had changed was the objects of his sensuality. Changed when? On the Cambi Road.

“Well, aren’t you going to say nothing?”

The corner of her mind did its duty.

“Sorry…I was surprised…I wasn’t expecting…Do you want anything to eat…? A drink…?”

“What you got?”

“The drinks are in the cabinet there.”

He opened it and drew the bottles out one by one for inspection, standing sideways on to keep an eye on her. He sniffed a decanter.

“Scotch,” he said. “Can’t stand it. Rotgut. What’s this one?”

The question steadied her.

“It should have a label round its neck. I think it’s Marsala. Sweet. A bit like port.”

“Port’ll do. What’s this? Lemon. Well, I’m happy.”

He poured a couple of fingers into a schooner, uncapped a bottle of bitter lemon and half filled the glass. He tasted, grimaced, added Marsala and tried again. His hands were small and short-fingered, his movements deft.

“That’s something like,” he said. “What’s yours, then?”

“Scotch,” she said. “Not much. Neat.”

“I’m surprised at you,” he said mockingly, but poured the drink and set it in front of her.

“Thank you,” she said, still speaking like an automaton. Jealousy, disgust and fury screamed inside her, but she isolated and contained them. More of both mind and body came under control. She was aware of a change in him, a loss of confidence. He had expected something different.

“You’re taking this pretty cool,” he said. “I mean me just walking in.”

“It’s interesting to meet one of my husband’s London friends,” she said. The absence of emotional colouring made the words seem to hang there, waiting for him to decide how to take them.

He lost patience.

“’My husband’s London friends,’ ” he jeered. “I suppose you think you know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes,” she said.

He took a couple of paces forward and stared down at her, leaning his knuckles on the table. She looked up at him, unafraid. There was nothing more he could do to her now.

“Bugger me!” he said quietly. “I don’t get it. There was a fat old cow across the road when I was a kid. Been a housemaid or something in big houses, back before the first war, she had, full of stories about life among the nobs, Lord this having it off nine ways with Lady that, and her husband not giving a fuck because he was going with a lot of stable lads. ‘Don’t you take no notice of her,’ my ma told me. ‘It’s only stories.’”

“Do you want anything to eat?” said Rachel.

He took a look at the tray, sniffed the cheese and made a face.

“There’s some ham in the kitchen,” said Rachel. “I could make you a ham sandwich.”

“What about the servants? He said there’d be servants.”

“It’s their evening out. They won’t be back until ten.”

“All right. Got any pickles?”

“I expect so.”

All that Rachel could recover from the time in the kitchen was an image of the cooking knives in the jar beside the salt-pot and the scales, and the thought drifting through her strangely will-less mind, Perhaps I could kill him with one of those.

Then they were back in the study, under the ugly, dull illumination of the overhead light. She was at her table again, and he half perched on the edge of Jocelyn’s desk, munching. On the plate beside him were the discarded crusts of his sandwiches and a yellow smear of pickle sauce. A fresh cigarette lay on the ashtray, smoke curling up from its tip. He must have helped himself to more Marsala, neat—the glass was half full and the liquid unclouded. He was looking at Jocelyn’s lighter, with his initials on it, a thank-you present from Flora and Jack after their wedding.

“Nice,” he said. “He’d like me to have that, wouldn’t he? Something to remember him by.”

“If you like,” she said, indifferent.

His eyes widened. Perhaps he had been expecting at least a token resistance. He smiled and dropped the lighter into his coat pocket. His confidence was returning. No doubt the Marsala helped. Rachel wondered whether he would become drunk enough to attack her, and if that would be enough to rouse her from her apathy. Part of her seemed to stand outside herself and consider the question. Probably not, she concluded. She watched him rise, walk round the desk, and sit in Jocelyn’s chair. The stimulus of pure anger returned, but there was no eruption. He tried the drawers and found the centre and top left ones locked.

“Where’s the key, then?”

“On my husband’s key ring.”

He nodded, apparently assured that she was too tamed to lie to him, and tried the others. The ones he could open contained little to interest him—writing paper, envelopes, stamps, account books—but from the lowest on the right he pulled out a flat hinged box, opened it, and frowned.

“What’s this, then?”

“The ammunition for my husband’s antique pistols.”

“Pistols, now. Where?”

“On the lower shelf of the table beside you.”

He reached down, lifted out the rosewood box, laid it on the desk and opened it.

“Hey! Now that’s something!” he said.

He picked out one of the pistols and aimed it at her, grinning. She saw that he was younger than she’d thought. He was a boy, playing with a toy gun.

He switched his aim to other targets, the fire, the portraits of Jocelyn’s parents, the fox’s mask beside the window. When he pulled the trigger there was no answering click, as the gun wasn’t cocked. He put it back in the box and took out the other one, turning it to and fro to study the details. The neat movement of his fingers demonstrated his respect and admiration for the object, something like Rachel herself felt for her favourite cameras.

“Got his initials on them, too,” he said. “Only they got to be older than that. His dad’s, were they?”

“No. They belonged to a man called Joachim Murat. He was one of Napoleon’s generals. The pistols are about a hundred and fifty years old.”

“You don’t say!”

No mockery now. He seemed genuinely impressed. Rachel could imagine a young man of her own class—one of Dick’s friends, say—reacting less appropriately. He looked up, and his manner reverted.

“Now that’s something Joss’d really want me to have,” he suggested. “To remember him by, you know? Seeing I’ve been a good friend to him.”

Anger found leverage at last. Her will woke and controlled it, letting her answer in the same dead tone.

“I don’t know.”

He picked up the other pistol and fought an imaginary skirmish, two-handed, gunning down half a dozen outlaws in rapid succession.

“You’d need to reload between shots,” said Rachel.

“Yeah,” he said absently, whirling to take a snap shot at the half-caste creeping up behind him.

“Shall I show you how?” said Rachel.

“Oh. Right you are. No, you stay where you are, lady.”

He came round the desk with the box and handed her one of the pistols. She picked one of the slugs out of its nest, then put it back.

“We’d better not use these,” she said. “They’re the original ones, and the paper on the cartridges is very fragile. Will you bring me the other box? Thank you. If you just watch what I do, and copy me, so you know how. You’ve got the right-hand gun, by the way—it’s a little bit heavier. Now you need a slug, and a cartridge and a cap.”

She picked out of their compartments two of the elongated lead pellets, about three eighths of an inch in diameter and twice that long, with one end rounded and the other flat; two of the cartridges, tubes of thick waxed paper pinched shut at one end and with a brass base at the other; and from individual slots in the third compartment two caps, squat copper cones with a nipple at the point.

“First you fit the cap into this pit at the bottom of the cartridge. It goes in pointed end first, like this. That’s right. Put it down carefully. They can go off at the slightest tap. Now, you have your own loading rod and mallet. Here. You move this catch up—it’s on a spring and fairly stiff—and break the gun open. That’s right. Hold the barrel in your left hand, pointing downwards. Now drop the slug in, pointed end first. Look and check that it’s sitting centrally. Put the loading rod into the breech, this end first—you’ll find it just fits—and give it a tap with the mallet. Again—I don’t think that was quite hard enough. That’s to seat the slug into the rifling. Now drop the cartridge in on top of it, this way round, and push it down with your thumb until you can feel it’s flush with the rim of the breech. Let me see. Yes, that’s right. Now close the breech—do it firmly, so that the catch clicks. No, take your finger off the trigger. Lay it along the trigger guard, like this. Now with your left hand—you can do it with your thumb, but it’s safer to use both hands—cock the gun. That’s this lever here. Check that it’s all the way back …”

While he lowered his glance to make the unnecessary inspection she aimed her own gun at his chest and fired.

* * *

Another gap, but of a different nature, because even at the time there had been no memory to fill it. Nothing between the jar of the explosion and her becoming aware of herself sitting in the dark of the hall, shuddering as if with extreme cold. She rose, felt her way to the cupboard and fetched out coats, choosing them by touch, her own camel-hair, which she put on, and Jocelyn’s big raglan, which she heaped over herself when she huddled back into the armchair. The movements had been awkward because all the while she had been clutching a hard object in her left hand—the key to the study. That told her why she was here. She was waiting for the lights of the Triumph to sweep across the windows as it took the bend of the drive when the Ransons came home. She would then go down to the back yard and tell them to leave the car out for her to take to the station to meet the Colonel.

There was a taste of cheese in her mouth. She could remember everything that had happened up to the moment she had fired the shot. Her supper tray had remained untouched at the end of the desk, apart from the young man picking up the cheese and sniffing it. She seemed to have no horror of what she had done, but the fact that she must then have felt hungry enough to eat the cheese he had handled struck her as very strange. Strange, but satisfying.

The sequence repeated itself, she didn’t know how many times—the waking, the shuddering cold despite the coats, the key, realisation she was waiting for the Ransons to return, the mouth’s memory of cheese …

Another gap, and then she found herself driving into the station car park and choosing a place well beyond the buildings so that she could be sure of seeing the train come in. She didn’t remember speaking to the Ransons, but in her mind’s ear was a kind of echo of her own voice, sounding brisk and normal. She must also have driven here. Some part of her mind, disconnected, must have seen to all that.

Perhaps not wholly disconnected, because the thought came to her that she dare not wait in the car, as she’d planned, in case she was in one of her blanks when the train arrived. She got out, went into the station, buying a platform ticket from the machine by the gate, and paced up and down the platform, frowning at the clock sometimes as she passed it, but unable to calculate how long it still was until twelve past eleven.

A porter emerged from a door, saw and recognised her.

“London train’s not for another forty minutes, Mrs. Matson.”

“Yes, I know. I misread my watch and came an hour early, so I thought I’d wait.”

“It’s getting parky out here. Be a frost by morning, I shouldn’t wonder. Look, there’s a nice fire in the porters’ room. We’re not supposed to, but it’s only two of us on, and seeing it’s you …”

“I was afraid of falling asleep if I waited in the car. And my husband doesn’t know I’m meeting him.”

“You’ll be all right in our room. There’s a bell goes off like the crack of doom when it passes the signal box.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

The blank this time less absolute. Something like warmth beginning to invade her body, something like coherence attempting to piece her mind together as the forlorn minutes dawdled away. Actual thoughts about her situation. One certainty—that she loved, wanted, needed Jocelyn, and always would. An absurdity—that at least it wasn’t some other woman. A possible way of thinking and feeling about him: Belinda Daring’s cousin the archdeacon, was married to a woman who couldn’t help swearing, wild streams of obscenity, provoked by nothing, in public. Otherwise a pleasant, kind woman, apparently—Rachel hadn’t met her—but with this debilitating tic. There was a name for it, somebody’s syndrome. Her husband, his colleagues, her own friends, the parish, simply ignored it among themselves, but led her out when it happened among strangers … Perhaps Rachel might school herself to do the same, to treat what was happening to Jocelyn as merely an unpleasant and embarrassing ailment, but not despicable or degrading because not his fault, being beyond his power to control … It would be hard, hard almost to the point of despair, an uncovenanted doubling of the price she had paid for having him home, but still, bitterly, worth it.

The bell. The clarity of full recall. She rose and went to wait by the barrier. Blotches of light and dark along the platform. The thud of the big diesel. The train itself invisible, and then a sudden loom in the darkness when it was almost in. Its slowing rumble along the platform. Arms reaching through windows to turn the handles, the doors swinging open, tired men getting down, their feet finding the still moving platform from habit. Others after the train had halted, not many at this late hour. Jocelyn, unmistakable the moment he emerged, signalling for the porter and then turning to help somebody with suitcases. An elderly couple climbing down to join him.

He spoke briefly with them, tipped his hat in farewell and strode towards her, gesturing to the porter as he passed to show where he was needed.

“Hello, I said not to trouble. This is … What’s up?”

“I can’t tell you here.”

He took her by the arm and led her out.

In the darkness by the car she stopped him with a touch, turned him, put her arms round him, laid her head against his shoulder and sobbed. He asked no questions, but hefted his briefcase onto the roof of the car and held her close, smoothing the back of her head with his right hand. She remembered standing like this, in the early days of the war, outside the ward where Anne lay moaning with rheumatic fever, and the crass consultant had offered them nothing but self-important mystifications.

When she was ready she gave him the key of the car. The Triumph was hers, but if they were together it was always he who drove. He still asked nothing, and she sat drawn into herself, unable to think how to tell him. He didn’t drive down to the yard but stopped at the front door, which he opened with the key on his ring. Still she waited until she was forced to speak, having led him by the wrist to the study door and put the key into his hand.

“There’s a man in there,” she said. “I think he’s dead. I shot him with my Ladurie. I don’t know his name, but he said he was a friend of yours. He called you Joss. He had a key to the house.”

Jocelyn took a slow breath and nodded, but made no other move. He must have stood a good minute—more—before he turned, said, “Wait here,” unlocked the door and went in, closing it behind him. He came out, it seemed to Rachel, almost at once, carrying the whisky decanter and a siphon. He handed the siphon to Rachel, relocked the door and led the way to the dining room. There were glasses in the sideboard. He poured two drinks, put them on the table, pulled out a chair and settled her into it, then sat cornerwise across from her. He took her right hand in his left and held it.

“Have a drink,” he said. “Then tell me what happened, if you can.”

She sipped. The bite of the scotch pierced her numbness.

“I was doing the Christmas cards. He just came in. He said you’d asked him to come up and tell me you’d be late home. He said you’d given him a key. I knew he was lying. But he kept saying you were a very good friend of his. He wasn’t lying about that. Jocelyn, I knew what he meant.”

She’d tried to speak in the same automaton voice she’d used with the young man, but it wouldn’t hold true. She found she was crying. She put her other hand over his, and he responded by doing the same.

“I’ve just got this to say,” she sobbed. “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be … as all right as it can be. Whatever happens, you are still my only darling …”

“And you are mine.”

“I suppose we’d better call the police.”

“No. Go on, if you can.”

“Well, we talked for a bit. I wasn’t frightened. I was furious—much worse than furious—I’ve never felt like that about anyone or anything. But I was sort of numb too. He had one of your cigarettes and a drink—Marsala and bitter lemon. He gave me some scotch. I took him to the kitchen and made him a ham sandwich. We came back to the study. He had another cigarette. He decided to keep the lighter, the one Flora and Jack gave you. He said you’d like him to have it. Then he found the ammunition for the pistols. He didn’t know what it was. I told him about the pistols—he was going to find them anyway. He said you’d like him to have them too. I decided to stop him, I didn’t know how, but he was playing around with them, and that gave me an idea. I said he’d need to know how to load them, and I pretended to show him. I made him copy what I was doing. When I’d got my gun loaded I shot him. I don’t know what happened after that. I must have locked the study door. I waited in the hall till the Ransons came back, because I didn’t want him coming to tell me they were in. Then I came to meet you. I think that’s all.”

“All right. Let me think.”

She waited for at least ten minutes while he concentrated, sipping his drink. At last he nodded and put his glass down.

“All right. I think that’s the best we can do,” he said. “First, I’ve got to ask you this. Are you really sure about what you said just now—I mean that you want to stick with me—in spite of what I am? I don’t think I can change that. I would like to, for both our sakes, but I don’t believe it’s possible.”

“I thought about it while I was waiting for you. Yes. I’m quite sure.”

“There’s not enough I can say, so I won’t try. If you want to, we’ll talk about it later. And if you want me to go and see psychiatrists and so on.”

“Like spinach.”

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘Filthy stuff, but I’ll get it down somehow,’ ” she quoted. “You healed yourself after Cambi Road, darling. I think that for my sake you would heal yourself from this if you could, and if you can’t then I don’t believe anyone else can help you.”

“Well, we’ll think about it later. What I want you to do now is to go to bed. Do everything you would on any other evening but don’t go to sleep. I’ll be up in about three quarters of an hour.”

“There’s nothing I can do to help?”

“I don’t think so.”

He rose, picking up the decanter and siphon.

“Oh, put these glasses in the kitchen on your way up, as if you’d taken them in from the study.”

“What about his? It’ll have his fingerprints on it, won’t it?”

“Everything’s going to have to be wiped down. I’ve just got to get the timing right. Off you go, now.”

She did as she was told, taking as long as possible about everything. There was no hope of any book holding her mind, but she opened the Angela Thirkell she’d been reading and sat in bed, her eyes scanning the lines, her hands turning the pages, but not a word going in. She refused to look at the clock.

Eventually Jocelyn appeared, came round the bed to kiss her, and started to undress, talking quietly as he did so.

“All right. In a few minutes we’re going to smell burning. I’m going down to investigate. I’ll yell for you. You put on your dressing-gown and slippers and come down. I’ll tell you to go and fetch Ranson and tell him there’s a fire in the study, and then to call the fire brigade. You’re up to that?”

“I think so.”

She watched him go rapidly through his full bedtime ritual, glancing every now and then at his wristwatch. He climbed into bed beside her, put on his reading glasses and picked up his book. He actually seemed to read a page before he said, “That should about do it. We don’t want to burn the house down.”

Without apparent hurry he got up, stepped into his slippers, picked up his dressing-gown and left, putting it on as he went. With the door open, Rachel caught the whiff of burning.

She did what she would naturally have done in such a case, getting up and following him as far as the top of the stairs. She could hear his footsteps racing down the short flights. His shout rose.

“Ray! Ray! Quick!”

She kicked off her stupid slippers and ran. He was outside the study, with a soaked tea-towel covering his face. He had one of the red extinguishers in his hand. Smoke was pluming out under the door.

“Wake Ranson,” he said. “Tell him to cover his face with a wet cloth, get an extinguisher and come here. Then call the fire brigade.”

She met Ranson hurrying down the back stairs in his night clothes. She told him what to do, ran and called the brigade from the hall, and then fetched the extinguisher from the gun room at the end of the north corridor and ran with it to the study. Ranson was crouched at the doorway, masked like Jocelyn, directing the jet from his extinguisher into the room. Clouds of smoke and steam streamed out over his head. Crouching beneath them she reached the door.

“Here’s a spare,” she said. “Where’s the Colonel?”

“Over by the window. I think we’re winning. This muck is mostly steam. Looks like a spark must’ve somehow got into the wastepaper basket.”

“Out of the way,” called Jocelyn—loud, but not a shout—a command.

A moment later he came crouching through the door, choking and gasping.

“Mine’s empty. I’ll … Ah, you’ve got it—good for you. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Try not to get it on my Christmas cards!”

The mess was merely smouldering by the time the firemen came tramping in to inspect the embers and splash a bit more water around. The patch of carpet where the body had lain was burned right through. The whole room was smeared with smoke, and reeked appallingly. The front of Rachel’s worktable was scorched, the envelopes, cards and remaining photographs discoloured. The stack she had completed was gone. Dully she opened the low cupboard behind her chair to inspect her cameras. Several, all her best ones, were not in their places.

She found the cards out on the post table in the hall, where she would naturally have left them. Was it conceivable that she had actually put them there, in that first long blank period after she had fired the shot? The cameras were in her darkroom. True, she might sometimes leave one, or possibly two there, but not five. Jocelyn must have done that. But at no point, except for once next morning, did he say anything to suggest that the fire had been other than an accident, or that the young man had been there at all.

She knew that if she had wanted to talk about what had become of him he would have done his best to comply, but she didn’t want—indeed, if he had offered she would have declined. That world was gone. She must learn to live contentedly in this diminished one.

The following morning, then.

Mrs. Ranson brought their tray up as if nothing special had happened. They agreed with her verdict that it was a mercy Rachel had smelt the fire so that the men could get to it in time. Rachel sat up in bed sipping her tea, while Jocelyn stalked half dressed round the room, as he did every morning, fiddling with objects and adjusting them to the precise positions he preferred.

“I’m going to have to go to London,” he said suddenly. “It’ll take me about three days. I don’t want you here alone.”

“I can’t come with you?”

“Afraid not. No. You’d better go to Jack and Flora if they can have you.”

“What shall we tell them?”

“That you’re upset about the fire, and you want to be out of the way while the worst of the mess is cleaned up.”

“No. That’s not me. I’d stay and cope.”

“I suppose so.”

He rattled a breath out between fluttered lips.

“Right,” he said. “It’s not just the fire. The reason I have to go back to London is that we’ve been very badly let down by Fish Stadding. There should have been about thirty-six thousand pounds in the Association funds. It looks as if there’s only a few hundred.”

“Fish! Is that true? Are you sure?”

“Yes. It looks as if he’s been playing fast and loose with some of his clients’ money—people I’d put him on to in the first place. Gerry St. Looe was beginning to ask questions. Fish needed to come up with the money fast, so he took what he could get at. We were bound to find out in a month or so, but it was a breathing space—only it wasn’t.”

“But Leila’s rolling!”

“Was rolling, at a guess. He’ll have gone through all that.”

“Oh, God! Fish! What about Leila? And Anne and Simon …? Oh, Jocelyn!”

“This only came up yesterday. That’s why I had to hang on in London, to see what Fish had to say about it. The answer wasn’t very satisfactory.”

“What on earth can I say to Leila? Does she even know yet?”

“I don’t suppose Fish has said a word to her. I was going to tell you about this, of course, until … anyway, I don’t want it going any further than Flora, and Jack. But that and the fire—do you think it’s enough reason for you to go to Flora?”

“Well, I’d want to talk to her anyway, about how we can help Anne …”

“If she’ll let herself be helped … All right, then?”

“I suppose so. But be as quick as you can, darling. Be as quick as you can.”

“Do my best,” he said, half absently, his mind already busy with necessary plans. But then he put down the stick of never used sealing wax he’d been rearranging on the pen tray, and came and squatted by the bed and took her hand in both of his.

“I need you too, you know,” he said.

During his absence Jocelyn called her every day, but naturally couldn’t speak of anything of importance on the telephone. After four days he came to Froggatt in the Rover to take her home. There was a large strip of sticking plaster on his left cheek, just above the jaw line.

“Darling! What have you done to yourself!”

“It’s not as bad as it looks. I was in Victoria Street waiting to cross, when a damned light lorry swung round the corner, right in the gutter, going a real lick, and a loose end of lashing whipped out and caught me. Just took the skin off, but I bled all over my jacket.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Didn’t want you to worry.”

There was a brief family conference about Fish Stadding. It looked as if over the years he had run through Leila’s once considerable fortune, and had taken the Cambi Road Association funds in an attempt to recoup by speculating in titanium options. (It later turned out that he had also taken out a mortgage and second mortgage on their house. That money was also gone.) Fish himself seemed to have disappeared, taking anything that was left.

The immediate problem was Anne’s wedding to Simon Stadding, due in six weeks’ time, with a big reception at Forde Place. Should this be reduced or postponed, or could it conceivably go ahead as planned, with Fish himself mysteriously absent? Jocelyn had spoken with several members of the Association’s committee, and the general inclination was to hush the matter up, partly for Leila’s sake, but largely because Fish had been with them on Cambi Road: not that they were inclined to forgive him for what he had done—the opposite, if anything—but because that made even this betrayal something between themselves. Legal action wouldn’t recover their money, merely expose their shame. So the question was whether Fish’s absence from his son’s wedding was likely to produce less questioning comment than the other possible courses of action.

“We’ll have to talk to Anne and Simon, anyway,” said Rachel. “And Leila, of course. I’ll ring her as soon as I get home. I would anyway. I’m worried sick for her.”

“There’s no point in talking to Anne,” said Flora. “She’ll just bite our heads off. But Jack gets on pretty well with Simon. He could—”

“I think I’d better have a word with Simon,” said Jocelyn.

On the way home he and Rachel talked mainly about Leila, and what could be done for her, and Anne’s need for a more generous settlement now that nothing would be coming from Simon’s side.

The call to Leila proved extremely painful. She was distraught almost to the point of insanity, and furious, but not with Fish, with anybody and everybody else but Fish. Jocelyn and the “Cambi Road gang” in particular. Fish certainly hadn’t done what they seemed to be saying he’d done, and why weren’t people who were supposed to be his friends standing up for him, and so on. Rachel barely got a word in. Her attempts at sympathy and consolation were brushed aside in the tirade. There was no possibility of discussing the wedding date. The conversation ended with Leila sobbing wildly and slamming the handset down.

“I’ll have a word with Simon when the dust’s settled a bit,” said Jocelyn.

All this Rachel dealt with just as she would have if the young man had never come to Forde Place. From minor anxieties such as Jocelyn’s accident with the lorry, to the near-agony of her call to Leila, her reactions were, so to speak, “normal.” During her four days at Froggatt she had occasionally found herself slipping through into that parallel universe with its slightly different history, in which she had been sitting at her table, alone in the house, and sensed the movement of the study door, and turned … but she had already learnt to recognise the moment of slippage and to will herself not to let it happen, just as, with recurrent nightmares, one learns to recognise when one reaches it the rocky hillside halfway up which one is going to look back and see that one is pursued, and by what, and so wakes oneself before one sets foot on the path, and then, wakeful, has only the foreshudderings of horror to deal with, not the horror itself. Now Rachel was able to use these discussions, these “normal” reactions and emotions, as present, this-universe realities, to cover over and solidify, layer upon layer, the surface beneath which lay those pits of slippage, until this universe became the only one there was.

One connection, though, remained. She knew what Jocelyn was, and knew—or would have known if she had allowed herself to think about it—how she knew. She didn’t allow herself. Though that pit still gaped she fenced it round with “Danger” signs and didn’t go near it. So for the next seventeen nights she slept curled into his arms, but made no demands on him, as he made none on her. By denying her own sexuality as they lay together in the dark, she was denying his, and helping him to do the same.

The men had done wonders with the study. Though the reek of smoke was still perceptible it was no longer intense. Everything had been washed down, the ceiling repapered, and the walls repainted. Only the top coat on the woodwork remained to be done. Her table had been taken away and an identical one ordered from the joiners.

When she and Jocelyn moved back in a week later his lighter was on the desk. She didn’t see the Laduries, didn’t look for them or wonder about them. Only clearing his desk for Jack to use, when he and Flora came to live at Forde Place after Jocelyn’s death, she found the box at the back of one of the locked drawers and hid it away in the secret compartment in her bureau, not having opened it and failing to notice that its weight was short by that of one pistol.

3

Once again Rachel heard the approaching pad of feet and felt cool fingers probe gently at her wrist. This time she opened her eyes.

“Well, guess who’s slept and slept? And who’s been dreaming then! Heart going like a train last time. Any more of that, and I’d’ve been sending for the doctor. Was it a nice dream?”

“Horrid.”

“Tsk, tsk—but funny how they come, that kind. I still have ’em, some nights, no reason at all. Worst is when I’m a little girl again, only I’m grown up inside me somehow, with all I’ve known and seen, but there I am with the other kids on the footbridge below the pin mill, and we’re dropping twigs into the tail of the race, the way we used to, coming home from Sunday School. And then I’m alone and it’s getting dark and I look to see where the other kids have got to, but the town’s all different, not anywhere I know, so I don’t know my way home and there’s no one to ask. Then the twig I’m holding gives a sort of kick in my hand and I look and see it’s a wicked little lizard, so I go to throw it into the race, only it’s all dry, and that’s the worst bit, I don’t know why … I’m sorry, dearie. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. Don’t know what came over me. I’ve never told anyone else before. It’s funny what we’ve all got bottled up inside us, isn’t it?”