Some Deaths Before Dying

RACHEL

1

A voice that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless months may summon.

Rachel couldn’t remember how she knew the lines, or where they came from, but they sidled often into her mind these days as she struggled with her increasingly erratic command of speech. Today was in fact one of her better days, when she seemed able to put several words together at times and without huge effort. Dilys had returned late yesterday afternoon with the tape, and she had listened twice to the brief message, and had then lain and thought, eaten her supper, watched TV, slept well, and woken full of the excitement of her planned day. It was the excitement, the urgency to get the thing finished at last, that supplied the energies needed for speech.

First, before she started the hunt, the tape again, the two voices from the speaker beside her on the pillow. She had expected Simon to erase her question by recording his answer over it, but he hadn’t.

So first, the moistureless, breathless whisper, her own ancient ghost.

“Simon, this is Rachel Matson…For old time’s sake…I must know…Before I die…Did Jocelyn kill your father?”

Then the more recent ghost, the weary mutter from the new-filled grave.

“I am sorry, Rachel. Memories of Forde Place are among the few sad pleasures I have left to me. I too am dying, and wish it were over. I made Uncle Jocelyn an explicit promise, by which I still feel bound, that I would not answer your question. All I can tell you is that none of the participants would have regarded the event as being, in essence, shameful or iniquitous.”

That was all, apart from what might have been a sigh.

She blinked her eyelids twice to signal that she had finished.

The Walkman gave an unfamiliar shape to the blur of Dilys’s head as she bent over the bed to switch the machine off and take it away.

“There now, dearie. All done, and I’ll take this thing off so I can hear you again. Just leave it on the table, shall I, for next time?”

“No. Wipe it…please. Then albums. Life…’Thirty-one…to ‘Fifty-eight.”

Dilys made two trips for the nine volumes she had asked for. There were fifteen in all, Rachel’s own deliberately composed autobiography, wordless apart from the brief captions, names, places, dates. She had made the decision to put it together on the train back from London after seeing Dr. Lefanu and persuading him to tell her without palliation the likely course of her disease. He had given her a maximum of four years before she became imprisoned in the total physical dependence she now endured. She had by willpower wrung almost five from the failing carcase, starting the day after her return by getting Farrow and Milligan in from the garden to fetch box after box of stored film down from the attic and stack them in her dining room, once the night nursery, now Dilys’s sitting room. For the last three volumes she had no longer been able to work the controls of the enlarger, or to manipulate the prints through the trays, so had hired students, training them to do the job to her satisfaction. Thus the captions to those last volumes were written in a variety of strange young hands. It had been an early exercise in the art of controlling her world from inside a body that couldn’t itself be controlled.

Some sections had already been partly composed, the equivalent of diary extracts quoted in a written autobiography, but even here she had not always left the original intact, but had sometimes altered enlargements or interpolated images that seemed to her to adjust a perspective in the light of later understandings.

Begun as a task to see her through the dispiriting process of dying, it had become a wholly absorbing and rewarding occupation, worth doing—no, demanding to be done—for its own sake, a summation of a life and of a way of seeing; like a serious novel, though it could never find a publisher, indeed would never have more than one reader, herself, with anything like a proper comprehension of its meanings, and not many others. Still, fully worth doing for its own sake.

So she had never expected to use it for any practical purpose, as she was now about to do in order to track Fish Stadding through its pages, and study him in the light of what she found there, and thus perhaps, at last, understand him.

The volumes Dilys had brought opened with one of the “diary” passages, composed immediately after her return from India, newly engaged to Jocelyn. She had looked through it at least yearly since then—if you are the only reader of your book, then it’s up to you to see that it is actually read now and again—and she still found it satisfyingly remarkable that, though some of the individual compositions left much to be desired, she should have been able, so early in her career, to construct a detached and shaped account of the unbelievable event.

The quay at Karachi. The ship and gangplanks providing a grey-white, sharply angled background. A porter, naked to the waist, staggering on camera under the load of an enormous bale. Leila Valance sitting on a pile of trunks and suitcases and looking straight at the lens. Dear Leila, best friend since earliest school days. In the light of Dilys’s report on her visit to the Staddings, Rachel gazed at the image with a sort of bewilderment. She had so long been used to the obvious paradox about Leila, the way in which the looks belied the character. And not only the looks, but movements and postures, all the physical manners—as here, with the glossy, jet black, shoulder-length hair, the almost pearl-pale face, the big, luminous, slightly pop eyes, the luxuriantly languid pose—made people say “very Russian” or something of the kind, implying intellectual, alien, affected, erratic, absurdly emotional and altogether un-English. Not a bit of it. As a close friend Rachel had known her as down-to-earth ordinary, not specially bright but shrewd in her way, loyal and expecting similar loyalty from others, and extraordinarily determined, sometimes to a point beyond pigheadedness. Even the abrupt and, to Rachel, desperately painful shattering of their friendship had seemed of a piece with this reading of her character. Leila’s loyalty lay with her husband, overriding all other loyalties, to the extent of refusing to believe that he had in fact utterly betrayed her, and that there wasn’t some other explanation for what seemed to have happened. Rachel, though deeply hurt and grieved, had to some extent sympathised. She too, after all, had been almost equally betrayed, and had remained loyal. What if Jocelyn, having done what he’d done and been found out, had then disappeared? Could she have brought herself to believe that he had actually run away? Surely not.

But now, gazing at the picture of Leila on the quayside, she wondered. Had she been wrong about her all along? Or had Leila’s inward self, over the years of useless hope, gradually grown to conform to what was suggested by her looks? “Very Russian” it sounded, that to Rachel shocking business of snipping the images of her enemies out of all the photographs she kept on display.

Not yet. That all came later. Back to 1931.

Leila and Rachel had come to India with “the fishing fleet,” though unlike most of the other young women on the expedition Rachel had had no intention of finding a husband, while Leila, who with her striking looks and fair-sized fortune could have hooked almost any fish she chose, in any seas, had one particular catch in mind, who merely happened to be in India.

Rachel was there to keep her company and take photographs, Leila paying her passage. For propriety they had attached themselves to a Mrs. Splingford, not one of the regular semi-professional chaperones, but polo mad, and therefore going to Meerut, which was where Leila’s fish was to be found. And, as it turned out, Lieutenant Jocelyn Matson. That was why the porter was part of the image. His inscrutable burden portended that future.

“Turn…Stop.”

Fish.

For at least the hundredth time in her life Rachel felt a pulse, a glow of satisfaction at the complexity hidden in the apparently redundant caption.

“My, what a monster!” said Dilys. “Not that I’d fancy eating it, mind you.”

Two market porters faced the camera at a right angle, so that their burden was displayed. Turbans and loincloths, wiry emaciated torsos, looks of baffled impassivity, what could the memsahib want with such a creature? The pole they bore on their shoulders pierced its gills, bowing beneath its weight. Its tail brushed the ground. The individual scales were half a handsbreadth across, the shiny bulging eye yet larger. Leila, in the centre of the picture, had her back to the camera, but her whole stance, the stilled movement of recoil, the raised, spread hands—surrender or rejection—expressed her reaction to the proffered gift, expressed even, Rachel believed (though aware it would have taken improbable perceptiveness on the part of a stranger to read into the image what her long friendship inevitably told her), Leila’s simple-minded uncertainty how to take it. Pure joke? A way of moving the courtship on a stage by letting her realise that the reason for her coming to Meerut was common knowledge? A superficially amusing but actually rather unpleasant way of telling her that the metaphorical fish she had come to catch didn’t intend to rise? Beyond her, framing the tableau on the right, stood the watching donor, Lieutenant Gregory Stadding, to his intimates henceforth and forever “Fish.”

They’d gone, the four of them, to the market, ostensibly so that Leila could look for trinkets and Rachel for subjects for her lens; in actuality to be together, and apart from the other British. Mr. Stadding had disappeared without explanation, returning a few minutes later to confront Leila with an elaborately courtly salute.

“I understand you came to Meerut for a fish, Miss Valance,” he had said, and moved aside. The shutter had clicked about two seconds later.

Rachel’s eyes searched the figure. It was as if her mind manipulated invisible fingers to adjust to its finest focus the lens through which she captured the world. This was her first clear picture of him, a decidedly handsome young man, slight and elegant, his features, though less exotic than Leila’s, having the same suggestion of an un-English sensibility, an intensity of feeling, in his case salted with wryness and irony. Superficially they seemed an obvious match. She already adored him. He behaved as if attracted to her, but so did almost every other man she encountered, and Rachel had almost at once become aware of his far greater intelligence and more complex personality…

“Do you think there’s any chance they’ll understand each other, Mr. Matson?”

“I don’t know it matters. People talk about understanding other people, but what do they mean? You can’t look inside. It’s just guess-work. And in any case you’d have to go a long way before you met anyone, man or woman, who got near understanding Greg Stadding. I’ll tell you this though, and you can pass it on to Miss Valance if you want—he isn’t a skirt-chaser, as far as I know. And given the chance he’d throw up the army and go home, but to do that he’ll need either a goodish job or a wife with money of her own. He’s not going to live in a cottage and raise chickens.”

“What about you, Mr. Matson? I don’t see you raising chickens either.”

“Oh, I’d make a go of it if I had to. But soldiering suits me, and I imagine I’ll stick with it until my old man keels over and I have to go home and look after things.”

She had let the focus blur. Steadfastly she readjusted the lens and gazed. No, not a hint, not in the picture. In Jocelyn’s words, possibly.

“Turn…Stop.”

The Student Prince, put on by the officers at the end of the fortnight with the female parts transposed for tenor voices. The dress rehearsal. Lieutenant Stadding smoking in the wings while he waited to go on as Kathie, wearing not the standard fräulein frills but the uniform of a Lyons tea-room waitress, lace cap and white apron, black frock and stockings—the skirt not quite allowing a glimpse of the knees—and high heels, built to male size by a cobbler in the market. To Leila’s distress he had shaved his moustache. The calves were a bit muscular, but that apart…

“Oh, it’s a man!…Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Yes? Not a skirt-chaser, confident in women’s clothing…No, that was hindsight.

“Turn.”

A dozen images flipped past. Rachel could have closed her eyes and described any detail in any of them—the polo, a boating picnic, sunset over one of the listless canals, unpeopled except for two striplings working a bucket lift to carry water by those countless thimblefuls up to their father’s fields—but she and Jocelyn had walked by the sluggish levels all afternoon (Sunday, and so no polo) and talked for the first time seriously about themselves, without reticence or pretence, revealing and discovering…

“Stop.”

The four portraits. She had used delayed exposure for her own, and developed them in her hotel room so that each should keep a picture of their lover when they parted.

“Why, that’s you! What do you mean telling me you weren’t ever that pretty? I tell you I wouldn’t have minded looking half so good. You’re just putting yourself down, compared to your friend. She was a stunner, mind you…”

Jocelyn and Rachel, Leila and Fish. When the album was closed the couples lay mouth to mouth. The portrait of Leila wasn’t particularly striking, compared to others Rachel had taken, but the one of Fish was excellent. Clean-shaven, his mouth was fully visible. He had chosen not to smile, but this had the effect of bringing to the surface his odd, ambivalent humour—“He’s serious about not being serious,” Leila had once explained—and a certain loneliness, or rather aloneness, a state chosen rather than endured. He was such good company that you didn’t normally notice that side of him. Rachel thought it one of the best portraits she had ever done, but though Leila liked to cram all available surfaces of her house with framed photographs of her family, mostly snapshots or banal studio portraits, this had never been among them. “I don’t like him without his moustache,” she’d said when Rachel had asked about it.

“That’s all. Thank you. Next one. Please.”

The weddings. Rachel had begged off being the sole adult bridesmaid alongside a flock of Leila’s little cousins, all of them with the fascinating Valance style. She had gone alone and mostly stalked faces and poses round the sunlit lawns, spending an amusing half hour with the official photographer, a wizened little Scot, a fanatic about his craft, using a superb old full-plate for his work but well up to date with all the latest gadgets and delighted to find somebody else who cared. There were, of course, the standard wedding shots, the couple under the church porch, cutting the cake, getting into the open Lagonda (Leila’s gift to Fish) under a blizzard of rose petals—and there were others, more peripheral.

“Stop.”

Fish with one of the male guests by an ornamental pond and dribbling fountain. Grey tail suits, wing collars, toppers on the chairs beside them. Fish was Fish, lissom, amused, somehow both tense and lounging; the other man—Lord Something, Rachel seemed to remember—though no taller, must have been twice Fish’s weight, stocky rather than stout, with a snub-nosed, shrewd, bucolic air. He was smoking an aggressively large cigar.

“Why, that must be Mr. Stadding’s…father I suppose. Isn’t there a likeness! Funny I didn’t see it in the other ones.”

“Yes. Do they…know…each other?”

“I’d say they do. He’s kind of teasing the other one, the fellow with the cigar, and he’s making out he’s hoity-toity about it, but really he’s enjoying it no end.”

“Flirting?”

“Well, if your friend had been a woman now…Is that what you’re asking me? Well, now. Not to say yes, that’s what they’re up to, but could be there’s something between them…or could be there isn’t, not yet, but they’re getting interested. Thinking about it, if you know what I mean…”

Yes, perhaps, thinking about it. Rachel remembered deciding to use the image mainly because she’d liked it. The balance of shapes was pleasing, the moss-streaked fountain seemed to have an odd menace in the sunlight, the picture of Lord Something was a speaking study of a particular type of man, and the one of Fish was, simply, much better of him than any of the ones with Leila. Rachel hadn’t asked herself why, certainly not when she’d looked with satisfaction at the first enlargement, not even when she’d reused it for the Life. Now, though, the reason seemed manifest. The picture with Lord Something spoke of a truth, while those with Leila spoke of, at best, a skilful act, a pretence.

She let Dilys leaf on to her own wedding.

“Why, it’s just snapshots, like I used to take with my little Brownie.”

“Yes. Pocket camera.”

In the last of her twice-weekly letters to Jocelyn, Rachel had told him, trying to make her own disappointment sound merely comic, that her parents had absolutely refused to let her ruin the expensive white wedding that they had scraped to pay for by carrying “that hideous black object” around with her everywhere. The letter had reached him the day before he sailed. He had read behind the comedy and wired to a school friend in the Washington embassy. The friend had telephoned around and found in Bloomingdale’s, in New York, a white pocket camera, a ladies’ accessory that happened to take snaps, for use by starlets and such. It had arrived by way of the diplomatic bag with a day to spare. Pure Jocelyn—the perceived need, the resourcefulness, the contacts. The inadequate images that the trinket produced were worth their pages, for that reason alone.

As a result, Rachel now realised she had never looked at them with anything like the attention that she would have given to “serious” photographs, not even while she was so painstakingly compiling the Life. They were there for what they were, not for what they showed. She was certain there was one of Fish only because she could remember the difficulty of taking it in the first place. Yes, there, wolfing a canapé.

“Glass, please.”

“Drinkie first, dearie?…There. Better now? Which one did you want to look at? Oh, this one, I suppose, because it’s your friend again. You tell me when I’ve got it right.”

“Higher…Left…Too far…Stop…Closer…Stop.”

The prints were postcard size, the largest Rachel had been able to make without the images from the coarse little lens dissolving into their individual grains. That now happened under the magnifying glass. She could just make out the finger and thumb of the left hand, a pale something between them piled with a darker mound. Rachel was fairly sure what it must be, though she was not the sort of bride who could remember, sixty years after the event, the exact list of catered snacks handed round at her wedding reception.

“No good…You try…What’s he…eating?…What’s on…other chair?”

“Now, dearie, don’t try and talk too much. We’ve all the time in the world, haven’t we? Let me see…Perhaps if I take it to the window…That’s better…Well, it’s one of those little cocktaily things, isn’t it? What’s that black stuff called? Caviare? It might be that…Isn’t that just a serviette on the chair? Oh, no, there’s something under it—it might be a bit of a plate…And doesn’t he look pleased with himself?”

Somewhere at the base of her neck Rachel felt a curious sensation, not itself a tingle, but a blocked impulse to send such a tingle down her spine and along her limbs, to cause the skin to crawl and the body shiver with pure fulfilment, satisfaction at the equation solved, the image perfect on the print, the chaser backed on a hunch nosing home at ridiculous odds. The caviare.

Time and again in his whining old age Rachel’s father had reverted to the caviare.

“Want you to meet my daughter, Rachel. Married Jocelyn Matson. What a wedding that was! Best party I’ve ever been to, though I say it myself. Champagne and caviare.”

“You oughtn’t to be keeping me in a hole like this, Rachel. You’re my daughter, aren’t you? Remember what I stumped up for your wedding? Do you know what caviare costs?”

By the end he would bring it up four or five times a visit.

It had been a promise since childhood, at that time easily within his means. But his spice business was one of the early victims of the Depression, when it became an absurdity—except that his hard won status as an English gentleman mattered more than anything else, and a gentleman keeps his promises, whatever the cost.

So there had been champagne, as cheap as could be found, and four plates of little round biscuits spread as thinly as the caviare would cover.

“I’ll tell Fish to lay off or he’ll wolf the lot,” Leila had said. “He’d live on the stuff if we could afford it.”

Rachel had no doubt that the order had been given. For twelve years they had been telling each other their private miseries, and Leila knew from many visits the emotional discomforts of Rachel’s home. She would certainly have understood how much it mattered that Rachel’s father shouldn’t be given such leverage to use and reuse.

And yet Fish had taken one of the four plates, carried it, with the two chairs, to a corner of the rose garden well away from the marquee, and hidden it under the napkin. Rachel had spotted him through the rose trellis and photographed him in the act of eating one of the biscuits piled with the scrapings of several others, he unaware of her presence, she of the apparently trivial betrayal. The lens had only three focal settings. The gap in the screening roses was too high for her to be able to hold the camera at waist level and peer down through the viewfinder. She had had to stand sideways on, unable to see him directly, and wait for the moment when the minuscule image looked somehow expressive of him.

Which it did. As with the other image, with Lord Something, his essential nature seemed to speak from the page, a deep satisfaction with himself, independent of anyone else in the world. Dilys had it exactly right. It was himself he was pleased with. The pleasure lay only superficially in the taste and texture of the caviare. (It had, apparently, been of fair quality—Rachel’s father still had connections in the trade.) The deeper pleasure lay in his own wishes prevailing over those of anyone else, no matter who.

Since his disappearance, and his leaving Leila so desperately in the lurch, Rachel had come to accept that that was indeed his true nature. But while he had still been there, coming in and out of their lives, such easy company, so useful in odd little ways, so well liked by the children, so continuingly doted on by Leila, it had seemed to be merely the occasional carelessness and thoughtlessness, by-products of an easygoing nature, that had caused the unpredictable let-downs. Jocelyn, a very perceptive judge of men (less so, in Rachel’s view, of women), had accepted him fully. Before their marriages they had been no more than regimental colleagues, and would probably not have become friends but for Rachel and Leila’s need of each other; even then for a while their friendship couldn’t have been called close.

Small chance of that, with Rachel joining Jocelyn in India, and all three children being born out there, and no plans to return permanently to England until the eldest boy, if any, needed to go to prep school. The war had intervened when Dick was only three.

So in the next three albums the only images of Fish had been captured during the Staddings’ trip to India in the first year after the marriages, and twice during home leaves, when the Matsons had stayed for a week with Leila and Fish, and a return visit had been paid to Forde Place as guests of Jocelyn’s parents. It was there that Rachel had first recorded the bond between Anne and Simon, two three-year-olds, hand in hand, lurking crouched behind a topiary box obelisk, poised to spring out when Fish, already visible on the right of the picture, came strolling towards the ambush, obviously aware of it but happy to play and overplay his role.

Again Rachel willed all her concentration into focus on the image. No, you wouldn’t have guessed. However closely you’d watched him then, you wouldn’t have guessed. For one thing, how could you suspect anyone whom children liked so readily? He was wonderful with them, full of jokes that stretched but didn’t exceed their understanding, and so were especially delightful to them; inventive of amusements for them to learn and then play on their own; patient with their bad moods—able indeed to coax a tot out of a tantrum faster than anyone Rachel had ever known, and without conceding and inch over the cause of the uproar.

He had been just as good with Jocelyn’s parents. They were well mannered with Rachel, but couldn’t help her perceiving that they thought her nothing like good enough for Jocelyn; and not unreasonably they detested her father. Unable to express their feelings openly, they had displaced them into highly exacting rules about the behaviour of the grandchildren, incomprehensible to toddlers used to the tolerance of a doting ayah. It had been a considerable concession that Leila and Fish could bring two further brats for their first visit. By the end of it not only had the rules been greatly relaxed, but Rachel’s own status and worth seemed to have improved, and this had been Fish’s achievement as much as her own.

Before their ’37 leave her mother-in-law had written, unasked, to say that the Staddings would be welcome for as long as they wished to stay.

Then the volumes spanning the immense hole of the war, and the two more years before she could bear to photograph Jocelyn again—or, naturally, any of the other Cambi veterans.

“Oh, that’s the one you’ve got on the desk.”

Jocelyn and the Rover. Not in fact the first picture she’d taken of him since his recovery, but it was here in the Life because it was the first that seemed to her to carry the full charge of her love for him, and of her relief that he was himself again…And the later knowledge that he wasn’t? Should that have been there, to eyes unblinded by affection? How should she know, even now, with the blindness undiminished?

The page turned. Ah.

Jocelyn and Fish. Another instance of the trick that still worked, that could still, despite repetition, in some sense surprise—even herself, though she had contrived it by placing it immediately next. Again there was a car with its bonnet gaping, again Jocelyn was poised beside it, caught in the action of turning towards the camera at her call. The echo was so strong that everything else in the picture seemed for an instant wrong—wrong setting, the stable yard; wrong car, the Staddings’ Bentley; an intruder, Fish, smiling, his greeting to her. They had been there so that Jocelyn could make some minor engine adjustment—something Fish wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting for himself—but they must have finished with that because when Rachel had come into the yard they were simply talking.

About what?

That, though it could never be answered, was the central question, and the photographs were where they were to ask it. For the real trick was not the superficial one of the echo, but a deeper and darker artifice. She had, of course, been wholly unaware of it for long after she had taken the photograph. She had done so, no doubt, in the hope of capturing a sense of a deep intimacy born of comradeship through dreadful times, times expressed in Fish’s still slightly unwholesome look—he had come through less wasted than Jocelyn, but had recovered more slowly. That comradeship had seemed to Rachel the only good thing to come out of the ordeal, because it balanced her bond with Leila, making the husbands equal partners in the family friendship.

But by the time she had composed the Life those friendships were gone, dissolved by death, and disappearance, and the residual acids of Fish’s treachery. The picture expressed a premonition of that change, a pivotal moment at which one kind of past began to become a different kind of future. Fish’s stance gave nothing away, but comparing the images Rachel believed she could perceive a difference in Jocelyn’s. In the one with the Rover it had expressed not just competence in the task, but assurance about the world and his own place in it. In the one with the Bentley there was a touch of uncertainty, of doubt of his own worth and need. Rachel had found it among the rough prints, having rejected it, presumably because when she’d first seen it it hadn’t seemed to her to present the “real” Jocelyn. The camera can deceive in that way. Sometimes it may picture a self which the subject would prefer not to display, but just as often the apparent self is an illusion. Looking through the roughs, Rachel must have thought the picture was of the latter kind. By the time she composed the Life she could see it was of the former.

She let Dilys leaf on through the remaining volumes, the world acquiring its postwar pattern: the girls becoming women; Dick becoming yearly more and more like Jocelyn in appearance, and less in actuality; Jocelyn settling into his role in the county—the High Sheriff year, and so on—and the Staddings coming in and out of the story, once on a Greek cruise, but mostly on visits to Forde Place.

Sometimes Fish had come with them, sometimes not, because he had been working. But he had often shown up on his own, using the house as his northern base. Before the war he had worked for a large insurance agency, but now he had his own business, specialising in the needs of the owners of country houses and estates, undercutting the big general agencies by insuring direct through Lloyds. Not much was said, but Rachel was well aware that Jocelyn was crucial to the success of the business, because Fish’s natural clients tended to be conservative in their ways, sticking with the insurers they had always used until the suggestion for a change was presented to them in a way that they felt comfortable with. Jocelyn’s introduction was the sort of thing such people trusted. Fish, in return, had taken on the chore of running the Cambi Road Association, though of course his secretary did all the work.

There was nothing in any of the images, and nothing in Rachel’s own memory, to suggest that Fish had been in financial trouble. Certainly he had had his extravagances, but his business had seemed to be prospering and Leila, surely, had plenty of money. She had happily let him run her affairs since their marriage. The camera had caught the well-to-do, contented surface, but nothing of the underlying hollowness.

What it had caught, if only for the eye of hindsight, was the curious, paradoxical relationship between the two men. There were not that many pictures of them together—Rachel was not the sort to pose her travelling companions on the ramp at Delos—but no one glancing at them as they happened by would have doubted that Jocelyn was the dominant one of the pair—not just for his greater size, but the stance of command, the self-assurance, keenness of look and definiteness of gesture, all so much more emphatic than Fish’s elusive, lounging, ironic personality. Jocelyn dealt seriously with the world. He had the energy and intelligence to achieve. Fish, potentially had them too, but made little use of them. It wasn’t that he lacked the will. He willed the negative.

But now, for Rachel, the cumulative effect was different. Perhaps she had sensed something of it when she had originally compiled the albums, but at last she could see it clearly. Now the series of images seemed to her to portray something very like the history of a marriage, in which there is one busy and active partner, and a quieter one; but it is the quieter one who makes all the major choices, with which the other then copes. In this case the chooser had been Fish.

Just before the end of the final album there was a picture of Jocelyn taken after his second stroke, in a wheelchair on the terrace in the October sun, seemingly content. Beside him stood the glass of champagne he was unable to lift to his lips. Rachel remembered willing herself to take the photograph, a record of continuing love, in sickness and in health. It had been Jocelyn’s sixty-fourth birthday.

Last of all Tom Dawnay’s picture of Rachel herself, photographing the coffin as it descended into the grave, only the second time her own likeness appeared in any of these fifteen albums.

She closed her eyes.

“Enough.”

“I should think so too! You must be quite worn out! My, though, it’s been interesting, looking at them all the way through like that. Quite a story they tell too—but I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Thank you, Dilys.”

“And now we’d better have a wee rest, hadn’t we? If I just get you all comfortable and settle you down.”

“Please. Flora?”

“Oh, she’ll be looking in this evening as usual. She’d have told us if she wasn’t.”

Rachel caught the note of mild surprise and anxiety, and understood it. It wasn’t like her to ask that kind of question, to need reassurance. She relied on her own memory to know what had been arranged. But it was important that Flora should come today, when speech was still minimally possible. There weren’t going to be many more such days. She could feel the change in herself, mental as well as physical, an acceptance that the time had now come to let go, to fight no more. Almost everything that needed to be done was done, and understood that needed to be understood. After Flora’s visit it would be over.

“Curtains open or shut, dearie? Can’t see the rooks so well, can we, now that the leaves are coming?”

“Shut.”

“Right you are.”

2

Deliberately Rachel emptied her mind and waited while Dilys dealt with her, tidied and left. For some time after that she rested, suppressing thought and memory, waiting for the necessary energies to renew themselves. Then, calmly, for the last of many times, but with fresh hope, she thought the whole thing through.

Most of it she had known for weeks, allocating each detail to its place, twisting it to and fro and finding out how it could best be fitted to the structure, as the rooks did when they brought another twig to their nests. Large pieces of the structure had seemed to acquire coherence, allowing them to be manipulated and joined to other such pieces. But the whole would never cohere, falling always into its two halves, the two betrayals, Jocelyn’s of their love, Fish’s of their friendship, with no connection between them beyond the coincidence of time.

Perhaps she had been blind. Perhaps even before the event she should have seen. It wouldn’t have been easy. When she and Leila had been alone together they had talked still just as they used to, as openly, as trustingly. It had been natural for Rachel to tell Leila about her sorrow at Jocelyn’s waning physical interest in her, and Leila had told her in return that Fish was still sometimes wonderful when he was in the mood. On their Greek tour, indeed, it hadn’t needed a lot of perception to see that she, at least, was having that kind of a good time, though Fish had remained as unreadable as ever.

The other cause of her blindness had been of her own making. It was as if she had all along been trying to build the nest on the wrong bough. To her the overwhelming event of that dreadful evening had never been her killing of the young man. He mattered to her not because of that, but because he had been the annunciating devil, informing her of her own betrayal. Though at the intellectual level she knew the horror of her crime, she was numb to it. If Jocelyn had said to her, “Yes, we must tell the police,”she would have accepted that as legally correct and morally justified, but she wouldn’t have felt that she had done anything she wasn’t compelled to. She would have told the court as much of the truth as she was able to, without at the same time telling the world of Jocelyn’s betrayal of her.

Even now, just as it had first done in the numbness of the act, her whole emotional being resonated to the clapper-blow of revelation, drowning all other vibrations.

Thus, though over the last three weeks she believed that she had again and again thought through every detail of the young man’s visit, that had not been the case. Much of what he had told her she had set aside as unimportant or untrue. He’d known Jocelyn for some while, she’d guessed, and had been given money by him. He must then have decided, or had it suggested to him, that there was more money to be earned by blackmail than by sex. Jocelyn—how could he have been so infatuated?—must have told him something about his home life—he’d known there were servants—so he had also realised that Jocelyn’s one truly vulnerable point was his relationship with Rachel. He had presumably purloined Jocelyn’s keys long enough to have copies made, and learning that Jocelyn was delayed in London had taken the chance to come to Forde Place, not intending to precipitate an immediate breakdown in the marriage but to show Jocelyn that he could do so if he chose. He had then misplayed his hand.

That would do as an explanation. It became a structured element in the puzzle, which she took for granted and tried to locate in its entirety each time she attempted a solution.

It fell to pieces only after Sergeant Fred’s visit—the picture of the young man at the cricket match, what Mrs. Pilcher had said, Sergeant Fred’s painful lying—with the realisation that the “he” who had told the young man about the servants, and produced the key, had been not Jocelyn but Fish.

Jocelyn and Fish. Two separate boughs, but crossing so close that over the years they had actually grown together. Useless for Rachel to try to build her structure, the random twigs of memory and surmise that she had collected, on Jocelyn’s bough alone. Only at the point of intersection with Fish’s bough would it cohere and remain.

The beginning was hidden, though Jocelyn had once told Rachel he’d been in a buggers’ house at Eton, using the phrase dismissively but without disgust, as if it had been an inevitable aspect of herding growing boys together. He had neither implied nor disowned having taken part himself, but if he had done so, it would have been a phase abandoned as soon as he moved on into a world with a saner distribution of genders.

Then, in some respite from the horrors of captivity, Fish had, deliberately and for his own amusement, seduced him. That was a guess, but it fitted the structure. It was the same thing as stealing the caviare, the real satisfaction lying not in the physical pleasure but in shaping the world however Fish chose, despite the desires and duties of anyone else. Jocelyn would probably have told himself that this was only the same situation that he had known at Eton, a temporary imbalance, something that could be put aside when he returned to the sanity of peacetime.

But he would have known in his heart that was not true. It was altogether different, because this time he had broken faith, and he had done so because Fish had discerned, released and revealed to him his “true” nature.

Furthermore, though he may never have known this, his self-discovery on the Cambi Road hadn’t only been of his sexual nature. That was superficial and partial. If he’d been an out and out homo-sexual the pleasure in their marriage would never have been there in the first place. His nature, presumably, was bisexual, and if that had been all there was to it he should have been able to make love to Rachel as he had done before. Fish could do it, giving Leila pleasure or withholding it as he chose, and getting his own pleasure from the power to do so. But Fish wasn’t bothered about honour. What haunted Jocelyn as they lay together was the knowledge that he could no longer make love to Rachel in good faith.

Oh, Christ, if only he could have brought himself to tell her!

Once honour is broken it will not mend. All you can do, all Jocelyn did in the end, is to use your will to hold yourself as near as you can into the shape that honour would have dictated. The result, like a dubbed voice on a foreign film, is never exactly right, and every now and then it is betrayingly wrong.

Sometime in the early ’fifties Fish had started his boys’ club, characteristically presenting it not as a public-spirited act but as a chore taken on to please a group of wealthy clients. He would have had secret amusement in telling so much more of the truth than he seemed to be doing, for the clients’ interest would have been less in the boys’ welfare than in their availability. And, being Fish, he might have got pleasure from the hidden power of pimping for the plutocracy.

But how on earth had Jocelyn allowed himself to be drawn back in?

Man of honour, however willed? Self-disgust, perhaps. No, not quite that. But say to yourself, “I have betrayed the person who is dearest in the world to me. How did I come to do this?” Then tell yourself, “Because it is my nature. That is what I am. It can’t be changed.” “Prove it.” “Very well, if I must.” Let there be an overwhelming reason for the broken faith, retested and renewed on visits to London, rather than the self-knowledge of honour needlessly lost forever. And let it not be an attraction towards a particular person, an intellectual and social equal, a long-term mistress as it were, who happened to be male. No, let the need be for nothing emotional or companionable. Let it be purely and explicitly physical, nothing to do with the inward self that still, in its way, loved Rachel more than anyone or anything in the world. Hence the rough trade, the young man.

Well, perhaps.

Fish, in the end, had run through Leila’s money and started to take his clients’. Questions had begun to be asked, and to clear himself in the emergency he had turned to the Cambi Road funds and then, because he’d needed to act in a hurry, been found out sooner than he’d planned for. Perhaps all along he’d intended to turn from pimping to blackmail—it was the obvious next step—but he wasn’t yet ready. The urgent need was to let Jocelyn understand what Fish’s exposure would cost him, so he’d delayed him in London and sent the young man to Forde Place on the earlier train. “Don’t tell her anything,” he’d have said. “All I want is for her to start asking questions when the old boy gets home. Here’s the key.” (Yes, the one that Jocelyn had niggled about having cut for him.) Perhaps, again, such a move had been part of the long-term plan, but in the rush to act there had not been time for full preparation and rehearsal.

So the young man had got it wrong. Fatally.

And so too had Fish. He had pushed Jocelyn to his sticking point: Rachel herself. It was not because she had killed the young man, though this, if he had learnt of it, would have given Fish a monstrous extra leverage for blackmail. It was that Fish had tried to involve Rachel in Jocelyn’s own loss of honour. One way or another, an end must now be made.

The details were unknowable. What had Jocelyn said to Sergeant Fred and Voss? Surely he couldn’t have told them everything, but he had the young man’s body to explain as well. (Sergeant Fred had recognised him from the photograph, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he’d seen him alive.) That Rachel herself had killed him? No, for then Voss wouldn’t have said what he had to her in Parkhurst. But none of that would have been necessary. He could simply have said, “I am in trouble, and I need your help, I can’t give you reasons, so I must ask you to trust me. There is a dead man to be disposed of, and there is Major Stadding to be dealt with. The trouble I’m in is his deliberate doing.”

They would have taken him at his word. Voss, after all, owed him a life.

So between them they had collared Fish. How? It didn’t matter. But Doug Rawlings might have had something to do with it. There’d been that odd look from Voss when his name had come up on her prison visit. Ah, had Jocelyn helped him buy his own cab, by way of reward? Possibly. And then Essex, and a place Voss knew of where bodies could be lost, for a price. Two prices. First, Voss’s own four-year imprisonment, paid to the man called Brent for the use of the facility. Second, what Jocelyn had given Voss to allow him to rescue his niece from the Elect of God, and provide a home for her and her family.

And there they had killed Fish Stadding.

When it was all over, after Jocelyn had come back to Rachel with the plaster on his cheek and dealt with what else needed to be dealt with, he had gone to see Simon Stadding and told him that he had killed his father (oh the willed attempt at honour, rather than the integral thing!).

What else had he said? He must have given more reasons than he had to Voss and Fredricks, but not that Rachel had killed the young man.

Had he simply said that Fish had been trying to blackmail him, through Rachel, and for her sake one of them had to go? And then, “Well, I am in your hands. You may go to the police if you want. I won’t deny the charges.”

That would have been nonsense, of course. Jocelyn must have been almost wholly confident that Simon would keep his silence, if only for Leila’s sake, and Anne’s. But the honourable thing would have been to keep his secret to himself, and when the day came to take his daughter down the aisle at his proudest pace—except that it wouldn’t have worked out like that, with Leila’s intransigence after the disappearance of Fish.

But in any case that was not enough. It would, perhaps, have been a reason for not telling the world what had happened, but for not telling Anne…? No. Impossible.

And now Simon kept complaining that he had bad blood, as if he’d always had it—had been born with it, inherited it. What did that mean? It meant that Jocelyn must have told him how far his father’s baseness had extended beyond mere abuse of funds. Told him in such a way that he had then decided that his own blood was tainted…Oh, heavens! Jocelyn had adored Anne almost to the point of obsession. Was it conceivable—he wouldn’t have done it consciously, surely—but was it conceivable that at some hidden level he had taken the chance to satisfy his own unacknowledged jealousy by breaking the engagement, done so by explaining the leverage that Fish had attempted to use on him, something that Simon would feel he could never tell Anne? Oh, God! Let it not have been so!

Poor Simon, poor Anne. They were like chance passers-by—a couple on their honeymoon, perhaps—caught in the blast when a car bomb explodes, detonated in a cause that has nothing to do with them. For a while Rachel lay and grieved for them, a loss unmitigated by time. It might have happened yesterday.

Then, thinking about what had now become of Simon—how the Simon she had known, witty, charming, thoughtful, sensitive, seemed to have gone completely, to be replaced in the same body (altered by illness, but still the same body) by a dreary and exploitative old whiner—it struck her that there are many ways of dying before the nurse comes to close your eyelids and lay your body straight, and that her own way was by no means the worst, nor Sergeant Fred’s, though most people would have thought of those as deaths-in-life: she trapped in her only just not yet purulent carcase; he…oh, it was strange, Rachel thought. What made her herself, Rachel and no one else? What but the shelf upon shelf of ordered memories of all that had composed and shaped her life? To take those away from her, that would be the true death. But Sergeant Fred still moved, talked and held himself in a manner that asserted the living essence of who he was and had been and would remain, like some saga-hero, living flesh still, but riding his skeleton horse among the wraiths of the underworld.

Whereas Simon, though his mind was still his own, did not. Yes. That was worse.

And Jocelyn? Honour dead, but willing himself into the modes and speech of honour, and to such disastrous ends? No. Rachel loved him too much, loved him both before that death and after, loved him even now. She would not bring herself to judge him.

Instead she returned to the conclusion of her earlier thoughts and began deliberately to compose the event into visual images, as definite and solid as she could make them. It felt necessary to do this, in order to be able to put the whole thing aside and have done with it. She knew her imaginings to be invention, but they were all that she could now have, so it was up to her to give them the kind of inward truth that was there in the photographs in her albums. Those two-dimensional black and white and grey shapes on paper were none of them the thing they showed, but its essence was in them.

So, now, the marshes. Early morning, a salty wind off the North Sea. Gulls. A flat landscape crossed by dikes. Smoke from some town on the level horizon. A car crawls down a rutted track on the top of a dike and stops. Four men get out, two of them holding a third by the elbows. They climb down the dike to a squelchy patch of turf. One man, tall and athletic, stands aside. A second, taller but bonier, paces out a distance, marking each end by digging his heel several times into the turf. He has a rectangular box under his arm. The third man guards the prisoner, an elegant, well-fed figure who watches these proceedings with curiosity, like a passing stranger who has stopped to see what’s up.

The tall man goes to the burly one and opens the box. The burly man takes out a pistol, loads it methodically, puts it back and repeats the process with the second pistol. The tall man takes the box to the prisoner, who chooses a pistol and allows himself to be led to one of the marks. The burly man goes to the other and takes the second pistol when it is brought to him. The two duellists face each other. The tall man moves to one side, halfway between them, and the guard stands opposite him, so that the four of them mark out the four corners of a square. The tall man raises his right arm. The duellists level their guns. The arm falls. In the silence of her imagination Rachel hears no shots, but sees the smoke fluff suddenly from the muzzles, and the prisoner stagger back and fall.

Nobody moves for a while. Then the tall man goes to the fallen body and inspects it. He picks up the pistol, puts it in the box and takes it to the other duellist. Blood covers the lower half of the duel-list’s left cheek. He stares at the box, takes it and closes it, then hands the pistol he has used to the tall man, speaks briefly and turns away. Rachel hears no words, but knows what he has said. He never wants to see it again.

Why? Because it is the weapon he has used to kill a man to whom his life has been bound for almost thirty years, whom he had thought his closest friend but found to be his secret enemy?

In that case, why the absurdity of the duel? (Forget the apparent frivolity of using the Laduries. Fish was a reasonable shot, and had often played with them on visits to Forde Place. What other pair of fairly matched weapons was available?)

Honour gone finally mad?

Not in that way, no. But it was a final, despairing attempt at the recovery of lost honour, an acknowledgement that Jocelyn’s own shame was in some ways equal to Fish’s, or greater, and that he couldn’t therefore kill the man as an executioner. Each must be given an equal chance. (And no doubt he had plans laid out for what was to happen if he was the one who died.)

And only when it was done had he discovered that honour was still unsatisfied, could never now be satisfied, because it was dead. Long dead on Cambi Road.

Poor darling.

Rachel fell asleep to the imagined yelping of the gulls.

3

She slept peacefully, a huge stint, and woke in the middle of the afternoon. Dilys cleaned her up, made her a delectable cup of Oolong, fed her, and put on the new talking book, about traumatised soldiers during the First World War. Worth listening to, but Rachel barely did so.

All that, fact or fiction, was over and done with, past. There was only a scrap of future left for her. She thought about that. First, today, while her voice still worked…

Flora came, cheerfully fussed about one of her dozen godchildren.

“Hello, Ma. Do you remember Zelda Warkley? The one with the pointy ears, and her kids have got them too—it must be one of these gene things. Of course you remember, they came here when they were small and we had to fish Donald out of the river—he’d actually got through the netting—and he’s still like that. Zelda was just the same, but it doesn’t stop her worrying about Donald. I got a letter from her this morning. Apparently he’s in Brisbane—is that Australia or New Zealand?—not that it matters, provided he’s on the other side of the world. He went out there to sell this new sheep dip, and I do think somebody might have asked first, but they’d already made it illegal—it’s terrific for the wool, but the shearers started getting Gulf War syndrome—so Zelda’s writing round all her friends asking if they know anyone who could give Donald a job—anything to get him out of England, really. I don’t suppose you can think of anyone who might have a job for a totally charming layabout with pointy ears? What’s up, Ma? You’ve got one of your teases brewing—I can always tell, you know.”

“Bureau. Bottom drawer. Brown envelope. Big.”

“Told you so! Like wrapping our Christmas presents up to look like they weren’t, remember?”

She disappeared out of Rachel’s line of sight. The drawer scraped. Papers rustled.

“This what you mean?…Oh, good heavens! You remembered where you’d put them? No, you didn’t. You’d known all along, you wicked old thing! That’s wonderful. I’d better take them straight along to the bank tomorrow, don’t you think?”

“Wait. You don’t…need…money?”

“Lord, no. I don’t know how Jack does it, but we seem to get more disgustingly well off every year. I’m really ashamed to think about it.”

“Anne?”

“She’s all right. It’s those quarter horses she breeds, tough as old boots but such sweeties, and they keep winning championships so everybody wants one now. And anyway, I’m not at all sure she’d accept…Oh, Ma! You’re not going to give them to Dick after all! I couldn’t stand that! I’d make a really shameful fuss! Please, Ma…Oh you are an old tease! It isn’t fair at your age!”

“Send Dick…something…My…trust.”

“Well, I suppose, if you must. I’ll ask Jack. How much? It was five thousand last time, and a darned sight too generous, to my mind, though he didn’t seem to think so.”

“Same?”

“Oh, all right. What about the pistols?”

“Grisholm…Ebury Street…Ask him…sell…Money…to Sergeant…Fred…Trust…You and…Mrs….Pil…cher…”

“Don’t try and talk anymore, Ma. You’re wearing yourself out. I think it’s a terrific idea. I’d been wondering if we oughtn’t to do something about Sergeant Fred. And you want me and Mrs. Pilcher to be trustees, is that right? No, don’t try and talk. She’s a funny little thing but I rather took to her, she was so sweet about the house—I mean it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And apparently both their jobs are a bit iffy at the moment, and they’ve been subsidising Sergeant Fred at this home he’s at, and they don’t know how long they can go on doing that—you remember you asked me to find out if he was all right that way? Oh, good heavens, wasn’t Grisholm that funny little man on the antiques programme? You think he’d be interested? Oh, Ma, don’t tease! You’ve been up to something, going behind my back again. And I bet Dilys is in it too. What a pair you are! Thick as thieves.”