Some Deaths Before Dying

RACHEL

1

Cleaned, changed, propped inert on her pillows and now waiting for her breakfast, Rachel studied the rooks.

First she counted the nests. Ten, still, but the two new ones had grown appreciably since last evening. She had known that serious building had been going on, from the particular type of racket the birds had been making almost from first light, beyond the closed curtains. Indeed, she was disappointed to find that an eleventh nest had not been started. It was in the earliest stages, when the half-completed nest didn’t already conceal the process, that she had most chance of seeing how it was done.

It was strangely frustrating. Last spring she had lain here, watching until the young leaves hid the almost completed nests—fourteen of them. Her long sight was remarkably good. She could make out the individual twigs as they were carried in. But she still hadn’t been able to see how the birds had achieved structures firm enough not just to endure rearing boisterous young but, all bar one, to stay put through the winter. Then, in early spring, with a lot of yelping and squawking and what looked like real fights, four had been destroyed and rebuilt while the rest had been merely refurbished.

How did they do it? Rachel was far from sure that, if one of the nest sites had been at ground level and she had been given a supply of twigs, she could with two deft-fingered hands have woven a nest to withstand twelve months’ weather. Yet the birds did it with no more than a beak. She had seldom seen one use a foot for anything other than to grip the tree. And they worked to some kind of plan. She remembered, years ago, watching one wrestle a twig off a bush down by the churchyard gate, a good two hundred yards from the copper beech where the nests were. Apparently no other twig in the garden would do. It was like Jocelyn embarking on a bit of carpentry by going to the timber store and sorting through a stack of apparently identical planks for the three that suited him.

And only some nest sites were acceptable. Thirty-two years ago Jocelyn had decided that the big beech behind the stables had to come down. It had developed an extremely handsome bracket fungus, over a yard across by the time of the first frosts, then collapsing into slimy pulp. Rachel had taken a truly satisfying series of photographs of it over several years, until Jocelyn had got a tree expert in to take a look at it. Merulius giganteus it had turned out to be, a relative of dry rot, and the tree had better come down before the next northeasterly toppled it onto the stables.

“What about the rooks?” Rachel had asked.

“There’s plenty of other trees,” Jocelyn had answered.

But there hadn’t been, not in the rooks’ eyes. The copper beech had looked entirely suitable, and indeed in some years an outcast pair had built a solitary nest on a particular side branch, but only three more moved in the first spring after the old beech was felled, and another couple the spring after that. Rachel had paid less attention to them in those days, and in many years didn’t bother to count the nests, but her impression was that it had taken a surprising time for the numbers to build up to the dozen plus that they had been since she was first confined here, with time to study the nests and wonder how they were made.

No, “wonder” was too feeble a word for the serious effort and attention she put into it, a tactic in her long and steadfast campaign to keep hold of her mind. Almost everything else was gone, the provinces of her body lost for good. Four years ago she had first been aware of the invaders as an awkwardness in standing and walking, with a tendency to stumble—messages received at the centre of government but then for a while just pigeonholed. It had taken her nearly two months to decide that what was happening to her wasn’t fairly normal in the elderly, and that she should go to Dr. Cherry about it. A fortnight later she had learned, from a London specialist, the barbarous name of the invaders, and that they were irresistible.

The illness followed its expected course, with the head the last to go. By now parties of the invaders were inside the undefended walls. Though taste still functioned, thank goodness, swallowing was starting to be difficult, as was speech—both varyingly, on some days almost normal, on others a willed effort, extremely tiring. Meanwhile signals persisted in arriving from the abandoned provinces—a bit of the bureaucracy still pigheadedly trying to function, but to no purpose because without muscular control, Rachel’s sense of her own body was haphazard. If, while her eyes were shut, something touched her hand, she would be aware of the touch, and that it came from her hand, but not which one, nor how it was disposed on the bed. When her lungs went, she would die. (A ventilator? What was the point?) So a few months more, at most.

But until then her mind was hers, untouchable, holy to her, hagia sophia. She was determined to die knowing what was happening to her, and aware and confident of the reality of anything in the field of her remaining perceptions.

This was a decision she had come to while she could still walk with two sticks, play bridge, set the shutter speeds on her cameras, be reasonably amusing company. She had made it on what turned out to be her last visit to her elder sister, then in a home. Tabby had not been felled by anything as specific as Rachel’s illness, but, it seemed, by something in her own nature. She had kept a good deal of physical control—more, Rachel suspected, than she admitted, preferring to be helpless—but she had given in. That afternoon she had seemed delighted by her visitors at first, but within ten minutes had returned to her TV, switching channels every few minutes but seeming to regard all she saw—soaps, advertisements, news bulletins, horse races—as a single series of events in which she herself was taking part, and all of it somehow continuous with the dream from which they had woken her when they arrived.

“She can’t be bothered to distinguish,” Rachel had said as Flora drove her home. She had heard the distress and disgust in her own voice. Different though they were, Tabby had always mattered to her.

“Oh, Ma, why should she?” Flora had protested. “What’s really happening to her is pretty bloody boring. She has much more fun making it up.”

This was true, and very much Tabby’s style. Make her live in a pigsty, Jocelyn had once said, and she’d show you proudly over it and tell you that the man who came to change her straw was a real sweetie. But Rachel had found such willing acceptance of mental death impossible to bear, and had, there and then, made her vow not to let it happen to her. Better the dreariness of endless real hours than any escape into fantasy. There was no honour in fantasy, no respect, no decency, none at all.

So now she chose one busy nest, watched a bird depart and counted the seconds until its return. Three hundred and seven. Call it five minutes. Had it been searching for the precise twig? Would it now locate it in a preselected position? Not this time. Several trials at different angles…but then, ah, back to a lot of pokings and thrashings and flappings which looked like mere frenzy, looked indeed certain to unsettle the whole structure.

The bird’s partner, meanwhile, watched tolerantly from a nearby branch. One needed to stay by the nest the whole time, because if both left, neighbours would nip in and steal material.

The thrashings must have been purposeful, because when the bird desisted the partner hopped up, gave a perfunctory tweak to something, and then both birds cawed vigorously for a while before the nest-builder flew off.

As it did so the door opened and Dilys backed in, fuzzy already as she entered and no more than a talking cloud by the time she reached the bed.

“Here’s our breakfast then, dearie. Nice scrambled eggs she’s done us. That’ll put roses in our cheeks. Still comfortable, are we?”

Code, answered by Rachel with a brief smile, also code, meaning no, she didn’t believe her pad needed changing yet. It was probably damp already, but it would have to become really sopping before it began to discomfort her.

“There’s a good girl,” said Dilys, putting the tray down. “I’ll just get the coffee going, shall I?”

She crossed the room and returned to a human shape. The sturdy blue pillar was her uniform, the silvery blob was the back of her head, and the white fuzz was her cap. Rachel listened with satisfaction to the sounds of her folding the filter and measuring grounds and water into the coffee maker. She came back, cranked the top section of the bed to a steeper angle, folded the duvet aside, slid her arms under Rachel’s shoulders and thighs and effortlessly eased her into a half-sitting position, wedging her into place with bolsters and pillows. She handled the wasted and useless body with gentleness and dexterity, as if it had been fully sensate.

It had at first appalled, but now after two months merely amused Rachel that somebody so skilled in the essentials of her craft should be so inept in how she spoke of them—that awful “we” and the baby talk, and the coyness about physical functions. Dilys dealt with diarrhoea or a suppurating sore in the most matter-of-fact manner, but couldn’t bring herself to name them. Jocelyn would have detested her for that, and manifested his dislike in exaggerated politeness. But already Rachel, though never given to instant friendships, liked her better than any of the other nurses who had cared for her in her helplessness. Nursing skills apart, there was not simply a human warmth about Dilys, there was a strong sense that she in her turn liked and respected the real person inside the stupid inert carcase, and thought of her not as the painful leftover of a life, but as a fully human citizen, with human rights and responsibilities and needs. She was supposed to have weekends off, when Pat, the retired midwife in the village, took over; but when on only her third weekend Pat had had the flu, Dilys had stayed on not just willingly but with something like eagerness. Rachel guessed she would rather be nursing.

“Open wide,” she said. “There’s a good girl. Not too hot for us? Sure?”

Dutifully Rachel masticated, swallowed and opened her mouth for more. The eggy pap was in fact tepid, fluffy with milk, undersalted and overcooked, everything that scrambled eggs ought not to be, but there was no point in complaining to Dilys. Dilys had no leverage in the kitchen. She was employed by the Trust, and her loyalty was to Rachel. Cooks were Flora’s concern. This one was new, and would be busy establishing her own rights and territories. She might well react to any complaint from Dilys by sending up even worse meals.

Still, a fuss must be made. It wasn’t just that taste was the only physical pleasure remaining, but the making of a successful fuss, the achieving of a result, would be good for morale, a foray from the citadel to prove that Mind could still accomplish something beyond those walls. The coffee maker had been such a victory, and so had the rejection of the microwave. Again, it wasn’t only that it was not Dilys’s job to prepare meals. It was that if they came up from the kitchen all ready for the microwave, though they would then at least be hot the machine would have no effect on texture or flavour. No, this cook must be made to provide real scrambled eggs.

Rachel ate as much as she could bear to, then a few fingers of toast and marmalade, the toast from a presliced loaf, a disgrace to the household, but the marmalade homemade by Dora Willmott-Wills and brought by her on her last visit. Finally, redeeming everything, hot, strong Java coffee with a little cream and sugar. Incense in the cathedral.

“Bliss,” she whispered as Dilys lifted the cup clear.

“There was a shop in Bangor used to smell this way when you walked past,” said Dilys, giving Rachel another sip. “Before the war it would’ve been of course. They had this machine in the window turning the beans over and over, roasting them. Don’t know when I last saw one of those.”

“How old?” said Rachel.

“Me? Nineteen thirty-three I was born, so I couldn’t’ve been more than five or maybe six. Funny how clear you remember some things and others are all gone. I don’t remember my dad at all from those days, not till he was back from the war and we’d got to look after him. I’d’ve been twelve or more by then, of course. He’d been a Jap POW, dad, and he was never right after. Mrs. Thomas was telling me it was the same with her dad, being a POW, I mean.”

“Yes.”

The subject had not come up before in their one-sided conversations. Rachel wouldn’t herself have mentioned it, and most of Dilys’s talk was discreet trivia about patients and families she had worked for.

“Looks like he came through it better than my dad,” said Dilys. “Judging by the picture of him.”

Rachel made a questioning murmur, misunderstood by Dilys.

“That one on the bureau, I’m talking about,” she said. “You must’ve took it yourself. Show you, shall I?”

She went to the other end of the room, returned and slid Rachel’s spectacles into place. The room unblurred. Dilys acquired a face, round, pallid, with soft brown eyes, a rather spread nose and a deep-dimpled chin. Rachel glanced at the photograph unnecessarily, so well did she know it. It had stood on her worktable or desk for almost fifty years.

It was a snapshot only, but as characteristic of Jocelyn as anything that she had ever persuaded him to pose for. Nineteen forty-eight, and the Rover almost new. He’d been adjusting the timing—no garage could tune a car to his satisfaction. She’d stalked him, called when she was set. He’d straightened and turned, allowing her to catch him before he’d realised what she was up to. She could read his expression perfectly—pride in his machine, confidence in what he’d been doing, mild irritation at the interruption—Jocelyn to the life. To the loved life.

“Big man,” she whispered. “When he came back, seven stone ten.”

“My dad too, he was a skeleton all right, and like I say he never got it back, not really. Looks like Colonel Matson did a bit better for himself.”

“Yes,” said Rachel, smiling inwardly as she took another sip of coffee. The phrase was so exactly right to describe what he had done.

“Yes, I’m a bit of a mess at the moment,” he’d told her, when she’d failed to conceal her horror at the thing that tottered down onto the platform at Matlock and took her in its arms. “You must have got my letter. Told you I’d lost a bit of weight.”

“Yes, but…oh my darling, what have they done to you?”

“Oh, I’m not so dusty, compared to some of the others. No point in going back into the hospital now that I’m home. I’ll sort myself out sooner here, with you.”

Rachel learnt later that he had discharged himself directly from the hospital ship, against doctors’ orders and in defiance of military discipline.

There had actually been talk of a court-martial. But at Cambi Road reunions veteran after veteran, some of them still half-broken men, had taken her aside to tell her that they wouldn’t have made it through, but for the Colonel. By those times he had his weight and strength back, using his own regime of rest and exercise (the rest, of course, much more of an effort of will for a man of his temperament than the exercise) and food from the garden.

“Tell Thwaite to plant a lot of spinach,” he’d said.

“You hate spinach.”

“Course I do. Filthy stuff, but I’ll get it down somehow. And broccoli and cabbage and that kind of muck. Spring greens, whatever they are. I’ll make a list.”

“I’ll need to stand over Mrs. Mears to stop her boiling them to shreds. She must have been trained as a laundrywoman and got into cooking by accident. I’ll look in the library for books about growing vegetables.”

“See what you can find. There was an M.O. in Singapore with his head screwed on about this sort of stuff. Interesting chap. Won’t get anywhere in his trade, of course, with the self-satisfied clowns they’ve got running it. Don’t worry, Ray, we’ll do it between us.”

He wasn’t trying to cheer himself up, or her. He was stating a fact.

They would do it between them. And they had.

The men at the reunions seemed not to envy Jocelyn his return to fitness. One of them, still in his wheelchair, said as much to Rachel once.

“Good to see the Colonel looking so grand. I’d hate to see him stuck in one of these things.”

For his part Jocelyn would have preferred to miss out on these meetings. The war was over, and he was in any case almost wholly uninterested in the past. He went, really, because the men wanted him there, but that was something he would have refused to acknowledge. He did it, he said, because he needed to talk to the men and check whether there was any way in which he could help them, write references, arrange job interviews, cajole, bully, plead, argue, on their be-half. “What’s the point of having been to a bloody expensive school where they didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing if you didn’t pick up a bunch of friends in high places whose arms you can twist in a good cause?”

There was no way now that Rachel could explain any of this, so she simply smiled, accepting that Jocelyn had done well to regain his fitness, and sipped her coffee with relish. Before she had finished there was a knock on the door.

“Come in, Mrs. Thomas,” Dilys called. “We’re just finishing our breakfast.”

She stood out of the way as Flora came bustling in, permed, pink cheeked, scarlet lipped, bright eyed.

“Morning, Ma,” she said, bending for a peck at Rachel’s cheek. She was wearing that boring scent again. Why bother, if you finish up smelling like last year’s potpourri?

“How are you this morning, Ma? Sorry about the eggs. You’d have thought somebody who can manage a perfectly respectable faisan nor-mande would have the right idea about scrambled eggs. Da would have dropped them out of the window. And thrown the toast after them. Dick’s coming to lunch. He wants to talk to you.”

Rachel reacted slowly, though she was well used to her daughter’s sudden transitions of subject. No need for a foray about the eggs, then, she’d been thinking with some disappointment.

“Dick?” she whispered.

“That’s right. It’ll be nice for you to see him, won’t it? He says he’s been busy. Now, don’t be naughty, Ma—Devon is a long way.”

As far, in fact, as the detestable Helen could take him. But busy? Flapdoodle.

“What about?”

“He’s got someone to see in York, apparently.”

More flapdoodle, and judging by the “apparently” Flora thought so too. M5, M42, MI, AI—Matlock wasn’t more than a few miles out of his way, but he wanted something all the same. Money, probably. How bad a mess was he in this time?

“All right,” she whispered.

2

“Hi, Ma. You’re not looking so dusty.”

He bent and kissed her with a passable imitation of affection. She smiled. He had of course come in without knocking, but nothing demeaning had been going on. She’d had her elevenses early, and then Dilys had cleaned her up and done her hair and makeup with cheerful enjoyment, taking pride in her patient’s appearance, much like that of a breeder preparing a favorite pony for a show. She had slipped out as soon as the visitor was in the room.

“Specs,” whispered Rachel. “On the table.”

He shoved them into place and she looked at her son with all the old muddle of feelings. It was extremely tiresome, she thought yet again, how when almost everything else was gone the emotions still raged on—worse, perhaps, now that there was no input from the limbs to distract them with trivia. All Rachel’s rational self despised her son, but the rest of her, that other self beyond reason, persisted in adoring…adoring what? There had been a child, yes, but…Surely, surely, surely, somewhere inside the middle-aged boor by her bed…

Why did he have to look, speak, laugh, carry himself so like his father when any stranger, suppose one could have met both men at the same age, would have seen at once that Jocelyn was honest timber and Dick was plastic trash? It was detestable. Dick would be sixty next year. He exercised himself at best casually, smoked, drank too much, ate with a boy’s greed, but he hadn’t run to fat. He hadn’t drilled or born arms since the JTC, but he stood and moved like a soldier. Look closely and you saw that the pinkness of the skin wasn’t the flush of health. Look into the blue eyes…

Jocelyn had glanced up from his book, keeping his place with his thumb, and said quietly, “I think we’d better face it. Dick’s no good.”

This had been apropos of nothing. Four days earlier Dick had driven back to Cirencester for his last term at the agricultural college. They had barely mentioned him since. Rachel was at her worktable, masking negatives for enlargement.

“Oh, dear. I can’t help hoping. But…”

“Maybe if I’d been home during the war…”

“No. It was always there. He was a lovely little boy, but in some of the photographs… You couldn’t be expected to see it at the time, but you can now. Do you want me to show you?”

“No point. I’m sorry, Ray. It’s worse for you.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Anyway, we have to do the best for him we can. Maybe he’ll find a woman who’ll make something of him.”

“Let’s hope,” Rachel had said.

She’d had her wish, but in the manner of some moralising fairy tale, in which the princess gets all the gifts her parents asked for, but which then turn out to be the last thing they wanted. For all her many-faceted dislikability Helen had had both the wit and will to make something of Dick, kept him out of both gaol and bankruptcy, organised a life for him, seen to it that he had a job, and held on to it, made not merely something but perhaps the most that could be made out of such material.

Yet, despite such knowledge, even now as she gazed up at him Rachel remembered an eight-year-old wolfing the lardy cake she had found for him in Matlock. Lardy cake had been as good as unobtainable in wartime. He hadn’t remembered to say thank you, hadn’t understood the achievement, but her body had brimmed with satisfied love at the sight of his pleasure. So now. Though the visit was sure to be uncomfortable and might well be painful, as she looked at him her main emotion was happiness that he had, for whatever reason, come back to her.

“Well, what have you been up to?” she whispered, making the effort to talk in full sentences, as if for a stranger.

He grinned.

“Sweating and suffering, if you want to know,” he said. “This stupid beef scare’s still playing havoc with the business. Farmers haven’t got any money to pay for the stuff, and haven’t got any cows to feed it to supposing they had. Not to mention they’re pointing the finger at us for starting it. Of course we were cutting the odd corner, but who wasn’t? Anyway the rug’s been pulled from under us with a vengeance, and unless something happens PDQ to turn the ship round we’re all going down the tube. No fun at all.”

“So you’re going to York?”

“Just scratching around. Not much chance of it coming to anything, but it’s better than sitting on my backside waiting for the roof to fall in.”

“How are the children?”

“Little monsters. Belinda’s got another on the way. She’s due to pop next month. Helen must’ve put all that in our Christmas card, didn’t she?”

No shame, none at all. In most years the only communication Rachel received from her son was the annual news roundup that Helen composed on her PC and sent out with the Christmas cards, often signing the card on Dick’s behalf. Not that Helen would have allowed any greater contact, but suppose Dick had married a wife who felt drawn to the family rather than repelled by it, he would still have let her do all the work.

Now, though, came a small surprise.

“I’ve brought you some photos, Ma. Toby’s a camera nut, like you, and he sent us a sheaf of the things from last time they were down. Want to see?”

“Please.”

Toby was an affable, dull planning official, married to Dick’s other daughter, Harriet. (Charley, Belinda’s husband, was a Devonshire GP.) Dick shifted his chair to lean over the bed and show her the photographs, mumbling names as he went. Rachel could hear that the process irritated him but that he was trying for as yet undisclosed purposes to please her, presumably to put into her mind that she had these descendants to whom she still owed duties. She barely listened, concentrating on the images.

Winter scenes. Michelin tots—woolly hats and snow suits—poking sticks into bonfires, confronting one of Helen’s Shetlands at a fence…

“Wait. Back one. Who…?”

“That’s Stan again. He’s supposed to take after me.”

“Yes.”

The pang was appalling. Rachel gazed at the small figure absorbed in stamping an icy puddle into splinters. She had a photograph—black and white, of course—of Dick at that age, wearing the then standard tweed coat, leggings and furry cap, but standing in the identical pose to study something on the ground before him. This was the self-same child. Suppose in the winter of 1905 someone had captured the image yet again, Jocelyn aged two and a half, wrapped against the cold, absorbed in some fragment of the universe that lay at his feet…Ah, which way would this child go?

“Very, very like,” she whispered.

“He’s a grand little wretch too,” said Dick. “Look, that’s him again.”

But this picture was not of her lost son, only of a rather similar infant. That was part of the treachery of the frozen image. By insisting on the pure truth of the isolated instant it denied the shift and dither of reality. Jocelyn, anchored in his certainties, could never accept this.

“Why must you take such a lot of the things?” he would grumble.

“Can’t you make sure you’ve got what you want before you press the button?”

(It wasn’t the cost he grudged, or the loss of her time, but the sense of sheer waste, waste for waste’s sake.)

“It isn’t like that, darling. I can take two pictures of something—a boulder or a tree trunk—one after the other, with the same settings and everything, but they’ll never be quite the same, not when you know how to look.”

“It’s the same rock, isn’t it? And anyway we aren’t just talking about a couple of pictures. You take a spool of film and rough-print it—how much of it do you bother to print up? One picture in eight? Ten?”

“Something like that.”

“And how many of those do you put in an album? Same again, and that’s a generous estimate. They’re all just as real as each other, Ray, but only about one in eighty of them makes it into your version of reality.”

“You’re shifting the argument, darling. And anyway the film’s all there in the attic. If I wanted I could go back and make an album of every picture I took of you on Dinah at Meerut.”

He had laughed at the memory, but for his next birthday she had in secret got out the old film, stored in acid-free paper, labelled and put away on their return to England almost twenty years earlier. She had needed to contact the celluloid onto fresh film, but from those negatives had printed up forty-three reasonable shots of Jocelyn on his favourite pony during that marvellous fortnight when the regiment had so very nearly won the All-India, and night after night they had danced till the stars faded, and he had proposed to her loping beside her window as her train steamed out. It had been the second best present she had ever given him.

Dick started to put the photographs away.

“May I keep the one of Stan?” she whispered.

“Sure you can. This one?”

“No. Breaking the ice.”

“Right, here you are then. I thought you might get a kick out of them.”

There was a smugness in his tone, as if he had conferred a major benefit on her and could now expect her to reciprocate. She postponed the moment.

“How is Helen?”

“Firing on all cylinders, including some she’d never told me about. God, what a woman for a crisis! She’s found herself a job, dogsbody in a locum agency, but they’d better watch out. Six months and she’ll be running the show.”

“You’ve lost your job?”

“Sharp as ever, Ma! But no, I’m still hanging on, though I can see which way the wind’s blowing. It’s always been a family firm, and I’m the only senior bod left who isn’t one of the clan. If they’ve got to choose between me and some useless little twerp who married the boss’s niece, you know darn well who it’s going to be.”

“Diffcult. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Ma. Something will turn up. It’s just a matter of having enough irons in the fire and tiding things over meanwhile. By the way talking of irons, do you know where Da’s pistols are? The Laduries?”

The suddenness of it was like a physical blow. Dick didn’t seem to notice the pause. Perhaps, since she always needed to summon the resources for speech, it hadn’t been markedly longer than usual.

“In the bank, I think. Why?”

“They’re really mine, you know. He left them to me in his will.”

“He changed it.”

“Yes, but that was after his stroke, when he was a bit gaga, poor old boy. I bet I could have contested it at the time, but it wouldn’t have been worth the rumpus.”

It was astounding that he didn’t perceive her fury. Surely her eyes at least must blaze, blaze shockingly. The downright falsehood, compounded by the perfunctory sympathy. If she could have moved a muscle she would have struck him. As it was, her anger supplied the energies for a longer answer.

“His first stroke. The same time he set up the trusts. Was he gaga then, Dick?”

“That was old Bickner. He did a pretty good job on the trusts, and I’m very grateful.”

“Jocelyn told Bickner exactly what he wanted.”

“Well, that’s as may be, but—”

She could stand no more and cut him short.

“What about the Laduries? Why?”

He shrugged, glanced out of the window, then back at her, smiling, confident in the cloak of candour. It didn’t fit.

“Funny coincidence,” he said. “Here I was, coming to see you anyway… Do you ever watch a thing on the box called The Antiques Roadshow, Ma?”

“Sometimes.”

“Helen makes a point of it, so I do too if I’m around. Last Sunday…You know how it goes. They have these experts, and they set up shop in the town hall somewhere, like Salisbury, and people bring their heirlooms in to ask about—pictures, furniture, knickknacks, whatever, and then some old biddy who’s had a Rembrandt hanging in the loo all these years pretty well has a heart attack when they tell her what it’s worth. Right? Well, this time one of the pros was doing arms and armour, and some young woman—never seen her in my life before—showed up with a pistol, just the one of them, but I knew it was one of the Laduries the moment I clapped eyes on it. It had the initials even, J.M. ‘Hey! That’s one of Da’s,’ I told Helen. And the fellow who looked at it really knew his stuff. He spotted it for a Ladurie at once, and got very excited. Said it ought to be in a museum, and all that, and it must be one of a pair, and if the woman had had the other one and the box and all the fittings it would’ve been worth getting on fifty thousand quid—more, if it had belonged to someone famous, which it easily might have, judging by the workmanship. He even got it right that it could’ve been made for one of Napoleon’s marshals. The trouble was she’d only got just the one, and it hadn’t been properly cleaned last time it was fired, which knocked the value down a bit, but even as it stood he said it might fetch a couple of thousand. Are you listening, Ma? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Rachel had closed her eyes, rather than gaze any longer into the countenance of Greed. Lardy cake, she thought. I might have guessed, even then.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Go on.”

“There isn’t anything more. That’s it. The question is, How’s this woman got hold of one of my pistols? And where’s the other one, and the box and stuff?”

“Not yours.”

“Ours, then. When did you last see them? Where are they now? In the bank you said.”

“Don’t know. I’m tired. Can’t think.”

“But listen, Ma…”

“Sorry, darling. Tell Dilys… nurse … need her.”

He drew breath to persist, but then gave in.

“Oh, all right. I’m sorry, Ma, if I’ve upset you, but I’ve got to be on my way in any case. I’ll have a word with Flora about it. She’s got power of attorney, hasn’t she? See you soon.”

He squeezed her hand—she could feel the touch but not the compression—and kissed her on the forehead, but didn’t think to remove her spectacles. Her fury was now mingled with shame as she listened to his footsteps crossing the room. The door opened. She heard both voices from the corridor, footsteps returning, a murmur from Dick and a thank-you from Dilys, the door closing behind her as she crossed to the bed.

Good heavens, Rachel thought, Helen’s been teaching him manners. The notion was bitter.

“How are we then, dearie? Mustn’t wear ourselves out, chatting away, must we! Done with our specs, then?”

“No, leave them. Lock the door, please. Need you.”

“Now what’s this about?” said Dilys, coming back and feeling Rachel’s pulse. “So we’ve got ourselves excited, haven’t we? Tsk, tsk.”

“Do something for me. Important.”

“Well, well, well, aren’t we being mysterious? Out with it, then.”

“Don’t tell anyone, Dilys. Not Flora. Nobody.”

“Cross my heart. It’s all right, dearie, it’s just my manner of talking. I can see you’re dead serious, and I shan’t let you down. There’s secrets I’ve heard over the years from patients of mine—not like you, dearie, because maybe they’d lost their grip a bit and you’re all there and no mistake—but anything they told me like that, it’ll go with me to my grave. It wouldn’t be right any other way, would it?”

She spoke earnestly, with pride in her professional reticence—nothing that she’d ever taken an oath to, but she was a confidential nurse, and for her the word meant what it said.

“Thank you,” said Rachel. “Bottom drawer of bureau. Take everything out. Pull drawer right out.”

“Got you. My, isn’t this exciting!”

Dilys bustled off. Rachel listened to the slither of the drawer, and the movement of packages. While she waited she thought about the trusts, one for the as yet unborn children of each child. Jocelyn had begun to set them up a fortnight after his first stroke, when he could still barely make himself understood, and then only to her—just as she had at first been the only person who believed that Jocelyn himself was still there, locked inside the mumbling wreck in the wheelchair, all his intelligence, all his pride, all his immense willpower. Mr. Bickner had come and sat with them in the study, stiff and uncertain. Jocelyn had mumbled, she had interpreted, Bickner had answered pityingly, patronisingly, speaking to her, not Jocelyn, until she had been forced to interrupt him in mid-sentence.

“Stop. This won’t do. You must talk to my husband, not me. Look him in the eye—it’s what he expects you to do. He understands every word you’re saying, better than I do, in fact. And listen to him. You can hear what he’s saying, if you really try. Think of it like a very bad line on a telephone, but you’ve got this important message coming and you’ve just got to catch it, somehow. Please. You’ve been a very good friend to us over the years, so do please try. Now, darling, just a few words at a time, so I can help Mr. Bickner understand what you’re telling him.”

And stuffy, unimaginative old Bickner had genuinely tried, and by his third visit was making something of it and answering Jocelyn direct, without waiting for Rachel to interpret. That had been wonderful for Jocelyn, just knowing that there was someone other than his wife and one daughter who was prepared to make the effort to reach him… Dick couldn’t be bothered, and Anne, alas, had stayed away, furious and frightened … only Flora … Did she ever think how unfair it had all been? Anne always Jocelyn’s darling. Dick Rachel’s, but Flora, decent, impulsive, conscientious Flora, simply taken for granted, given her due of parental concern and affection, but never that extra element of passionate love?

There was a rap and creak as the drawer was pulled free. Dilys came back.

“That’s all done, dearie, but there’s nothing I can see in behind.”

“Put a lamp on the floor. Knothole at back on left. Put your finger in. Push left, till it clicks. Pull panel out. Package behind. Bring it.”

“Oh, a secret compartment, like in a Victoria Holt! I knew it had to be.”

Almost exhausted now, Rachel lay and waited, willing fresh energies to secrete themselves. She watched the rooks without attention, just letting them come and go… The panel clicked. Dilys gave a tweet of excitement. There was a scrabble as she eased the package free. It had barely fitted when Rachel had wedged it in against the back panel of the bureau… and then Dilys was by the bed again, her eyes bright, her mouth slightly open. She showed Rachel a large buff envelope with a flat rectangular shape inside it.

“Well done,” Rachel whispered. “Box inside. Undo catches. Tilt it so I can see. Then open it. Please don’t look. Sorry.”

“That’s all right, dearie. A secret’s a secret only till you’ve told it, I always say. I promise you I’m not bothered.”

Dilys followed her instructions to the letter. While she studied the catches Rachel looked at the box. It was just as she remembered, about nine inches by eighteen, polished rosewood with a silver coat of arms let into the top.

“Ready,” said Dilys, sliding brass hooks free. “You don’t think anything’s going to fall out?

“All in its own little beds.”

“Right, here we go then.”

Dilys tilted the box into position, crooking it on one forearm, ostentatiously closed her eyes, and opened the lid with her other hand.

Rachel had not seen the contents for almost forty years, since the night when the young man came, but she remembered exactly how it had looked. The purple baize lining, indented with shaped slots and pockets. All but one still held the specific item for which it had been made. The two cleaning rods, brush and plunger, spanner, screwdriver, keys, oil phial, cap-flask, mold, cartridges, slugs and a single pistol, its dark metal lightly chased, its ebony butt inlaid with the two silver initials—expensive, beautiful in its precision and its dormant power, a tool to use. The other pistol was missing. The wrong one.

Perhaps her eyes were failing her.

“Closer.”

Dilys obeyed.

No, there was no mistake. To the casual eye the pistols had seemed identical, but trying them in his hand Jocelyn had decided that one was lighter than the other, and weighing them on his postal scales had found this to be the case, though the difference was barely half an ounce. The discrepancy was evidently deliberate. Concealed in the chasing below the firing hammer, unnoticeable unless you were searching for it, was a single letter, a D for the heavier weapon and an S for the lighter one. Ladurie had been a Swiss, working in Paris. Droit. Sinistre. The lighter gun was intended for the left hand. It had been natural for Rachel to use it when she and Jocelyn had been doing target practice together.

She had been expecting one gun to be missing, since the mysterious woman had apparently shown up with one on The Antiques Roadshow. But it was the wrong gun.

Not hers. His.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You can put it back.”

Dutifully Dilys kept her eyes closed until she had the box shut and fastened. She slid it back into the envelope and carried it out of sight. Rachel listened to the rasp of it being wedged back into its hiding place, the rattle and click of the panel being fitted in, then the deeper rattle and slither of the drawer. Before Dilys had finished replacing the contents there was a knock at the door.

She hurried across, unlocked it and opened it.

“Not a good moment?” came Flora’s voice.

“We’re just making ourselves comfortable, Mrs. Thomas. We’ll be three or four minutes yet.”

(To Rachel’s ears Dilys sounded wholly unconspiratorial.)

“I’ll be back in ten minutes then, if you think she’s up to it.”

“I don’t know. She was a wee bit tired after Mr. Matson.”

“All right. Give me a buzz. I’ll be in the morning room.”

Dilys closed and locked the door and returned to the bureau. When she’d finished she came back to the bed.

“All done,” she said. “Now, up to seeing Mrs. Thomas, are we?”

“Yes. Want to talk to her. Tell her half an hour.”

“And we’ll have a bit of a rest so we’re ready for her? That’s the ticket. Off with our specs, then, and a little drinkie before I settle you down? There’s a good girl.”

Rachel smiled assent and sipped at the barley water. Slop, of course, nothing like Mrs. Moffet used to make, but welcome still. Then she lay with closed eyes and tried to think about the missing pistol. It must have been missing when she had first hidden the box. She would have been too distressed to notice the difference in weight. If it had been hers that was gone, that might have made sense. But Jocelyn’s, and badly cleaned after its last firing…

Her mind refused to grapple to the task. From the corridor came the sound of Dilys’s voice, speaking to Flora on the in-house system. Half an hour…The pistols…

October 1949, a fortnight before Jocelyn’s birthday. She already had his presents, a pullover knitted by Jennie Walters, a book about British India, a slashing tool for nettles, a card of trout flies. Though they were wealthy enough by most people’s standards, they didn’t go in for expensive gifts and she wasn’t looking for anything else. Petrol was still rationed, so she had come by bus to Nottingham for her dental appointment and now had over an hour to spend before she could return. There was a street near the bus station that contained not one but three junk shops, and on such occasions she used to go along there and poke around. Two years earlier she had found a Victorian half-plate camera, bartered but complete. It was now restored, and she used it with great satisfaction.

Two of the shops made little claim to sell anything but junk, but the third had pretensions to the antiques trade. Indeed, its proprietor, a Mr. O’Fierley, dapper, elderly, chirpy, appeared to know a good deal about porcelain, in particular the simpering figurines that many people liked to keep in display cabinets. His main trade was in these, and his shop—dark, cluttered, smelling of dust and leather—was a sort of by-product, stocked with odd items which he had happened to pick up, mainly, Rachel guessed, to conceal his real interest from other, more ignorant dealers. The box had been under a pile of books beside his desk. Rachel had asked to see it.

“Well now…” he had begun, doubtfully, and then with a twitter of amusement in his voice. “Care to guess what’s in it?”

“I was hoping it might be lenses.”

“Oh no. Oh no.”

“Not just fish knives, anyway, or you wouldn’t…I give up.”

He had opened the box with a flourish. The moment Rachel had seen the pistols she had known that she had to have them.

“Why! Those are my husband’s initials!”

“You don’t say. They’re duelling pistols, but it’s not my field. An unpleasant custom, really.”

“Are they for sale? How much do you want for them?”

“Well now. As I say, it’s not my field. In fact I’d put them aside to show to someone, but…My guess is that they’re rather good. What would you say to four hundred pounds?”

“Oh dear. I’ll have to think.”

“Would three hundred and seventy-five assist in your cogitation?”

“That’s very kind. Oh, I don’t know…”

“Shall I put them aside for you, then?”

“Oh, yes, please! Look, I’ll be in Nottingham next week, and…Oh, I’ll give you my telephone number, just in case somebody else comes in.”

“There’s no need. The gods send signals to us, you know. They don’t bother to tell us what they mean, but it’s unwise to ignore them. These are meant for you, my dear.”

He was teasing, of course, and Rachel laughed as she thanked him and left. But already on the bus home, with her face still tingling with the after-effects of the anaesthetic, she had known that she would have bought the pistols if he had asked her double what he’d suggested. It wasn’t simply that she knew Jocelyn would enjoy them. He had various shotguns and sporting rifles, which on winter evenings he would sometimes fetch out and clean, not because they needed it, but for the pleasure of handling them, of deriving—though he would never have thought of it in such a way—aesthetic delight from the caress of their functional craftsmanship. But for Rachel there was more to it than that. Mr. O’Fierley had been right—the gift was meant. Suppose Jocelyn had been the woman and she the man, and suppose the woman had been forced to spend several years away, enduring hideous privations and sufferings and had then come home to him with her health and strength gone forever, but by her own willpower (and with a little help from the man) had made herself sound and whole, as Jocelyn had, then the time would now be ripe for him to give her some special token in celebration, a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, to be a seal of their love and a sign that all was well with them. Almost unconsciously she had been hoping to find or think of some such object—a new fishing rod, perhaps—but no amount of deliberate searching would have produced anything as exactly right as the pistols.

Jocelyn had undone the wrappings and looked at the box with puzzled interest. He had opened it and stared. She had never before seen him speechless with pleasure—could not have imagined that such a thing was possible. Even now, as she lay waiting for Flora’s return, her arid tear ducts attempted to water at the memory. All day, in any vacant few moments, he had the box out and was playing with one of the pistols, loading and unloading it, aiming, feeling the balance in his hand. He carried the box up to bed as if he intended to sleep with it under his pillows, like a child, but he merely put it on his bedside table.

Next week, going up to London for one of his committees, he left early. That evening at supper he said. “Do you mind telling me what you paid for those guns?”

“I don’t think I’d better. It was rather a lot.”

“Four figures?”

“Goodness me, no!”

“Then you’ve done well. You remember Gerald Mackie, used to be a beak at Eton? I got to know him because in my day he helped coach the Eleven. He left after the war and got himself a job at Christie’s—He’d always been interested in china and stuff, and they were glad to have him.”

“Didn’t you introduce me to him on Fourth of June? He had a Hitler moustache.”

“That’s right. He’s still got it. Had it before anyone took any notice of Adolf, he used to say, and he was going to hang on to it. Anyway, he couldn’t help me himself about the pistols, but he put me onto a chap in Ebury Street who deals in that sort of thing. I looked in this morning, before the committee. Wonderful shop. I could have spent a week there poking around. The fellow who runs it, Grisholm’s his name, is a rum little gnome with a club foot, but he obviously knows his stuff, and he got really excited about your pistols. They were made by a fellow called Ladurie—he was a Swiss, but he worked in Paris and Grisholm said he’d only once had another pair through his hands, nothing like as good as yours—it was just the guns, without the box or the trimmings—and they’d been knocked around a bit, and they were Ladurie’s ordinary stock-in-trade, whereas yours are obviously custom built for somebody pretty swell…Like to guess what Grisholm says he sold his for?”

“I don’t know. A hundred pounds?”

“Three fifty.”

“Oh my goodness.”

“The thing about Ladurie, Grisholm says, is that he was the first person to make a truly modern pistol. Most of the elements were around already, but he put them together, rifling, cap, powder cartridge, breech loading, firing pin—the only thing still to come was getting the slug and cap and powder all together into a single round. There were a couple of other fellows trying to do much the same thing, Frenchmen too, in the early eighteen hundreds, with the Napoleonic Wars in full swing, and they were all trying to interest the French army in taking their guns up. Ladurie’s were the best, but he didn’t get anywhere with them. His problem was that his craftsmanship was just too damn good. You can see that, can’t you—see it the moment you open the box. You’d need a workshop full of Laduries if you were ever going to turn out more than a handful of guns as good as what he made himself. So that’s why there aren’t that many around, and Grisholm’s never heard of anything this quality. Ladurie would have tested them in the workshop, but Grisholm says it looks as if they’ve never been fired since. Black powder’s desperately corrosive, of course, so you can usually tell unless they’ve been cleaned at once by someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“Does that mean you can’t use them? I hope not. I thought we might be able to get some fresh ammunition made, somehow. Those won’t still fire, will they, after—what is it?—a hundred and fifty years?”

“Getting on that. I don’t know. When we were in Bangalore—’38, wasn’t it?—the Quartermaster came up with some ammo which had been around since before the first war, and we tried it out. There were just two duds in a hundred rounds. That was thirty years old, of course, but a craftsman like Ladurie…at a guess I’d say about one in five of the caps might fire, and the cartridges look sound and dry. But if the set’s a museum piece, which Grisholm says it is, they’re all part of it. No, I’ll ask Purdey’s. There’s bound to be someone there who can tell me how to get fresh ammo made, and how to clean the guns right, and all that, and then we’ll have some fun together…What’s the matter, Ray? Don’t you…?”

“No, I’d love to try, darling. It isn’t that. To tell you the truth I’m worried about Mr. O’Fierley. I feel as if I’ve swindled him out of several hundred pounds.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. You take the rough with the smooth in his line of business. He’ll have made what he regards as a decent profit already.”

“Yes, I know, but…I mean, they’re so perfectly right, I don’t want anything spoiling it. Did I tell you, Mr. O’Fierley said they were meant for us?”

“That’s poppycock. Look, next time you’re in Nottingham, why don’t you look in and tell him about it, and see what he says? It was a fair sale, so if he tries to be greedy you can just offer him a couple of hundred more and leave it at that, but if he’s decent about it then you can work it out between you.”

“All right.”

“And see if you can take a worthwhile picture of the coat of arms, and I’ll send it to be Joe Popplewell at the College of Heralds.”

“It’ll be French, won’t it?”

“Yes, of course, but he should be able to look it up.”

The answer came back before Rachel next had reason to visit Nottingham. The arms were those of Joachim Murat, Marshal of the first Empire, later King of Naples. Ladurie had presumably made them as a presentation gift, in the hope of persuading this influential soldier to take an interest in his weapons. Jocelyn telephoned Mr. Grisholm, who told him that such a provenance perhaps doubled the already considerable value of the pistols, but Jocelyn, typically, was far less impressed by this than their having belonged to a brave and successful soldier.

Mr. O’Fierley’s eyes had barely widened at the news.

“I’d been wondering,” he said. “When you’ve been in the trade as long as I have…well, well, well. But you’ve no need to worry, Mrs. Matson. A sale’s a sale, and I’ve been in the other ends of deals like this often enough in my time. If I had to go back now and make it up to all the people who’ve sold me stuff when I knew what it was worth and they didn’t, I’d be bankrupt ten times over. No, I’m delighted for you, and I haven’t made a loss on them—quite the contrary.”

“I thought you might say that,” said Rachel, “but I know I don’t want to leave it like that, so I’ve brought you these. I’ve no idea what they’re worth, if anything, but they’ve been sitting in the back of a cupboard since an aunt of mine died, and you might as well have them.”

While she was talking she took the cardboard box out of her bag and unwrapped the little china figures, a man and a woman, idealised peasants, far too elaborately dressed for real work, he with a sickle and she with a hay rake. Mr. O’Fierley looked them over with great care.

“Well, well, well,” he said again. “The boot is now perhaps on the other foot. These are rather nice, you know. Chelsea, red anchor period, 1753 or so, pretty good condition—there’s a tiny chip here, and a flaw here, do you see? Unusual, too…Care to know what I’d offer you for these if you brought them in off the street?”

“No, and please don’t tell me. If they’re worth something then I’m delighted, because I won’t have it on my conscience not paying you enough for the pistols. And the same with you about these, I hope. Is that all right?”

“Indeed it is, Mrs. Matson. I believe this is what the economists call the Ideal Transaction. Both parties believe themselves to have done well out of it. O si sic omnia.”

“Well, that’s all right, then. I’m so relieved.”

So they had parted, and rather to her own surprise Rachel had found herself reluctant to return to Mr. O’Fierley’s shop when she had spare time in Nottingham. The episode was over, sealed, and could now be put away. The pistols were Jocelyn’s, unsullied by any sense of debt. She was still thinking about this when Flora knocked.

“It’s all right now, Mrs. Thomas,” Dilys called.

Flora, as usual, was speaking before she was through the door.

“…don’t need to lock me out, Dilys. I always knock, and I don’t mind waiting.”

“Oh, it wasn’t for you, Mrs. Thomas, but Mr. Matson didn’t knock and I didn’t know if he mightn’t come back.”

“Blast him, and I gather he wore Ma out too. You’re sure she’s up to this?”

“Well, we are a teeny bit tired, Mrs. Thomas, but she’s insisting she’s got to talk to you. So I’ll be in my room if you need me.”

“Thank you, Dilys.”

“That woman’s a jewel,” said Flora as soon as the door closed. “You’re sure you’re not too tired?”

“Yes. Dick gone?”

“Forty minutes ago, in a foul temper. He wouldn’t stay for lunch, which was a relief in the circs. We had a proper up and downer about Da’s pistols. He said they belonged to him.”

“No.”

“That’s what I kept telling him. He tried to make out that Da was past it when he changed his will, but I wasn’t having any. He was completely all there, only he had a bit of trouble making himself understood. I was bloody furious with Dick. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if he never sets foot in this house again.”

“Tell you about TV?”

“Yes, and I don’t think he was inventing it, though I wouldn’t put it past him. Isn’t it extraordinary? Did you have any idea the Laduries were worth that sort of money, Ma? I mean, I knew they were pretty special, belonging to old Murat and so on, but Da and you used to pop away with them on the terrace as if they’d been toys, of course Da was like that, it never bothered him what things cost or didn’t. But don’t you think we ought to look into this a bit? I mean, if some total stranger has somehow got hold of one of them. Dick says you told him they were in the bank, but I’ve just checked the list and they aren’t. When did you last see them, Ma? I’ve been trying to think. I remember Da showing Jack how to use them—that’d have been when we were engaged—and then I remember after his first stroke thinking it might do him good to play with them, but they weren’t on the table by his desk, where they used to be…Didn’t you tell me you’d put them away?”

“Did I?”

“Or was that after he’d died?”

Rachel didn’t respond, relying on Flora to rattle off in some other direction.

“And another thing—according to Dick the fellow on the box said the pistol he was looking at hadn’t been cleaned right, and Da always made such a fuss about that. I must say it’s all very baffling. I wonder if I couldn’t get hold of a tape of the programme, I’ll ask Biddy Paxton, her brother’s something fruity in the BBC…All right, Ma, you’re worn out and you need a rest. I’ll push off. I just wanted you to know I’m not going to stand any nonsense from Dick, and I won’t do anything without your say-so. There was just something you wanted me for, wasn’t there?”

Rachel managed to smile. Her chief worry had been that Flora might try to appease Dick by conceding some kind of right over the pistols to him, but that obviously wasn’t now in question. She should have known Flora would do the right thing. She almost always did, though because of her manner those who didn’t know her very well tended to take her minor acts of virtue for a lifelong series of flukes. This was what made the coming deception oddly painful.

“Tape,” Rachel whispered, as if that had been what was on her mind. “Good idea. But don’t tell Biddy it’s about pistol. Or anyone. Only Jack. Private. Family.”

“Yes, of course, Ma. I know they were pretty special to you both, weren’t they?”

“Thank you. No, wait…Just this. I want you to know you’re very good to me, darling. Much, much better than I deserve.”

“Nonsense, Ma, you’re just tired. I’ll send Dilys along, and then you must have a good rest after your lunch. It’s truite au beurre noir for supper, and you’ll want to enjoy that.”

3

Rachel’s midday meal was usually little more than a snack, and then Dilys would put some familiar novel onto the machine and she would lie for an hour or two and half listen to it and nap off for a while into dream and wake and half listen again. Henry James was particularly good to doze to, but Jane Austen too insistently soporific.

Today she was too tired to swallow more than a couple of mouthfuls, and then asked Dilys to close the curtains and leave her in silence, so that she could attempt real sleep.

She succeeded, but woke weeping, ravaged with sexual expectation suddenly cut short. The setting was already vague. A boat, rocking on warm waves. Nighttime. The tock of the lanyards against the mast. The man not Jocelyn, not even some particular stranger, just depersonalised man, hands, mouth, weight, member. But herself, her own body, real and solid, not young, no identifiable age, but with senses vivid and focused…

Her pad was sopping, of course. Her sheets might need changing.

Why now? It was the first time since—oh, long before she’d been nailed to this bed.

Within a few seconds the physical sensation, so intense in the dream, was mere memory, memory that thinned and became disgusting and absurd as it encountered the reality of her body. But she continued to weep, not now for the lost dream, but the lost years, the years after Jocelyn had come home.

They had both been virgins on their wedding night, but Jocelyn, unlike many of his apparent type, had not been straitjacketed by his culture and upbringing; she in fact had started off the more squeamish and apprehensive, thanks to her mother’s embarrassed explications. But they had given each other confidence to explore the possibilities, discover what pleased them and then make the most of it.

This hadn’t, in those days, been the kind of thing one talked about to even one’s closest friends, but one evening, about two years married, they’d been dining with the Staddings, and she and Leila had left Jocelyn and Fish to their cigars to sit out on the verandah with the punkah swaying softly overhead, its slow draft heavy with the scent of a nearby lemon tree. Beneath the silk of her dress and petticoat her skin felt like sentient velvet. It was that kind of night, but she was in no hurry to get home. The small hours were often the best.

Now Leila decided that she wanted a chartreuse to bring her evening to full perfection, and demanded that Rachel should keep her company. Rachel had already been drinking with care, knowing her own needs and balances. When she refused Leila tried to insist.

“Honestly, no thanks, I’ve had enough.”

“But you’re pretty well stone cold sober. What’s the matter with you?”

“If you must know, I’m feeling just right for when I get home with Jocelyn. If I drink any more, it’ll take the edge off it.”

“Oh,” said Leila as if this had been something she couldn’t have imagined. And then, after a pause, “Tell me more, Ray. I’m not being nosy. Please. It sounds as if we’ve been missing something.”

It had been Rachel’s turn to be surprised, though she was long used to the contrast between Leila’s exotic looks and her straightforward inner self. But Fish? Rachel knew him far less well, but looks, style and everything else about him made it impossible for her to believe that he had not come to the bridal bed already an experienced lover.

“Please, Ray,” Leila had said again, so Rachel had done her best to communicate the nature of her pleasure and the means of it, and Leila had thanked her, telling her later that some of what she’d said had been very useful. Strange, at the time, and in hindsight differently strange.

For the rest of their time in India her pleasure and Jocelyn’s in each other had been barely interrupted by the birth of children and by the jerky slither of the nations into war, continuing through the scramble of departure, and his brief leaves from various camps and barracks right up until his eventual sailing for what had seemed the comparative safety of Singapore.

In the years of his absence Rachel had woken night after night aching with longing for him. Occasionally she had felt physically attracted by other men but had not for an instant thought, or even fantasised, about carrying it any further. She was wholly Jocelyn’s. She felt that for her any other man would have been, literally, impossible.

Then he had returned, and she had once again slept curled in his arms, though it had been months before he had been well enough for anything beyond caresses. At this point, slowly, she had started to realise that she had not got all of him back. He could, and did, satisfy her physical need. He would initiate the performance and carry it through. But it was a performance. Not that he actively disliked what he was doing. He made the sounds and motions of enjoyment. But after a while she had to accept that what they had had before the war, what they had been so completely and passionately to each other, was now gone.

She had tried to tell herself that it was only natural, that they were older now, and such passion is the province of the young. Her own body gave her the lie. The loss was hers, but it was in him and it had nothing to do with age. It was the result of what had been done to him on the Cambi Road. For his sake, then, she learnt to suppress and control the need, telling herself that if this was the price she must pay for having him home she would pay it ungrudgingly, heavy though it was, because it was worth it, worth it a hundred times over.

She succeeded too. The ache came less often and when it did she was able to order it back to its lair. Sometimes they still made love, gently, without any fuss, like going for a walk together on a fine autumn morning. Thus all was fundamentally well and she loved him as deeply and strongly as ever, and was confident he did her. She had never in these years wept for her loss.

She did now, acid little droplets that were all the withered ducts could wring out beneath the wincing eyelids. They had not ceased when Dilys crept in to see if she’d woken.

“Awake at last? My, we’ve slept, haven’t we? Why, what’s up dearie? We’ve been crying.”

“Nothing. Stupid dream. Pad needs changing. Sorry.”

“Bound to after this time. Never mind, I’ll have you comfortable in a couple of minutes. Let’s just dry our poor face off first. Tsk, tsk, naughty girl, getting herself into such a state. Nice happy patients, that’s what I like. There. That’s better. Now let’s see to you.”

With her usual sturdy deftness she did what was necessary, chatting away as she worked, a kind of professional tact on her part, a way of making it seem that this was a pleasant social occasion, and the indignities to which she was subjecting her patient were subsidiary and irrelevant.

“Did I say, I got a letter from my niece yesterday? She’s the one who married a Yank, took her out to live somewhere in the middle where there isn’t much of anything except more of the same, and after a bit she couldn’t stand it any longer so she walked out on him, which wasn’t very nice of her, I’m afraid, but she always was headstrong. And then she went to live up in the top left corner—you can see the Pacific Ocean from her bathroom, she says—that’s when you can see anything because mostly it rains and rains like Scotland, she says, but without the bagpipes, though there’s a lot of wet sheep. Well I sent her a snap I’d taken of this house in the snow—just after I came, it was, if you remember, we had that snow—so she could see where I was living. But she didn’t answer and she didn’t answer and then, like I say, yesterday, I got this letter, fourteen whole pages on a typewriter, which is why I’ve only just finished reading it. I’m going to have to read it again, mind you, because it’s a muddle to sort out what she’s saying. She’s always flying off at an angle and going on to something else, and then, no warning, you’re back where you were before only you’ve forgotten where that was. Anyway, like I was telling you, I’d sent her this snap of the house and now she’s wanting to know all about it and how old it is, and everything. Victorian, I was going to tell her, and didn’t Mrs. Thomas say it was Colonel Matson’s grandfather that built it, him having done well out of his cotton mills, and with all these children to house, like families used to be those days—getting on a dozen, wasn’t it? Poor women, you can’t help thinking. I remember my mum telling me about some old aunt of hers who was a farmer’s wife, and her saying how she always loved the springtime, when the evenings were longer and the fields greener and there was milk in the cows and the baby was born. Almost done, dearie. There now, that’s better, isn’t it?”

“Thank you. Albums.”

“Out in the passage? Right you are. Which one? Look in the card index, shall I?”

“No. Different from others. Top left. Blue ring binder. Show me. Something I want to see.”

“Righty-oh, I’ll just get rid of this wet stuff and put a kettle on for our cup of tea, and then we’ll settle down and have a good look.”

The folder was one Anne had put together for a Social History project. She was in the Sixth at the time, so it would have been 1952—a good year, Flora in her first job, in a tiny flat just behind Harrods; Anne in her last school year, intelligent, pretty, already a little tending to detach herself from the family, but not yet into the desperate withdrawal that came later; Dick at Eton, and according to his tutor showing signs of pulling himself together.

“Would you like me to take a few photographs?” Rachel had suggested.

“That would be super, Ma. Only if you want to, you know? You don’t have to go to town.”

“Nonsense. It’ll give me a chance to play with the half-plate.”

Not the least of Dilys’s virtues was her enjoyment of looking at photograph albums. She slid the reading desk across the bed, laid the folder in place and opened it at the beginning.

“My, what a big picture! And doesn’t it look handsome like that.”

Yes, the clear summer light and the motionless subject had suited the half-plate very well. There, on the first spread, opposite a page of Anne’s neat italic handwriting (still then showing the self-consciousness of a newly acquired skill) was the view of Forde Place from the main gate, with the monkey puzzle to the right and the stable block to the left. Almost nothing had changed since the afternoon when Rachel had first seen it.

Jocelyn had stopped the car at the top of the drive.

“Oh dear,” she had said.

“I told you it was an eyesore,” he’d answered, and driven her on down to meet his parents.

Anne’s researchers had tended to confirm the family legend that old Eli Matson hadn’t employed an architect, but had told his mill foreman to build him a house. The man, after all, was responsible for a couple of perfectly adequate mills. Certainly the house had that look. There was a vernacular style, still to be seen along these valleys: severe facades of brickwork, undecorated apart from a change of colour for the surrounds of the ranked, flat-arched windows; sweeps of narrow-eaved slate roof, soaring stacks; proportions, achieved by eye and instinct rather than theory, that were often strongly satisfying. When Rachel had realised how many demolitions were likely to come she had spent eighteen months systematically recording what still stood, and years later had given her collection to the local record office.

These virtues didn’t tame easily to domesticity. Forde Place hadn’t the look of a mill in miniature, but of one somehow compacted—drop it in water and it would then expand into a mill. Even the chimneys appeared to be lacking their upper sixty feet. The stables too—they should have housed bale-hoppers, not traps and horses. In the early years of her marriage Rachel couldn’t have imagined that she could bear to live here. Now she could hardly remember having wanted to live anywhere else.

Dilys turned the page. Ah. Rachel had forgotten how beautiful. Almost pure abstract. The near-dead lighting of a cloudy noon. Course after course of dark unweatherable bricks, and the lower corner of a window. She and Jocelyn had once come round the corner of the house and found an old builder, there to repair one of the greenhouses, actually caressing a stretch of wall. At their footsteps he had looked up, unashamed. “Lovely work that,” he’d said. “You wouldn’t find a brickie to touch it, these days. Stand a thousand years, that will, and a thousand after.”

Another page. The fire escape. Anne had told the story opposite, how Eli as a young man had worked in a factory that had been gutted by fire, and workers, some of them as young as eight, had died, trapped on the upper floors. All his mills had fire escapes, and so of course did his house, good solid cast iron, painted dark industrial green, zigzagging brazenly up the west facade to the nursery floor. Jocelyn’s parents had buried it in Virginia creeper, whose autumn blaze clashed hideously with the purple bricks of the house, but this had got honey fungus and died during the war. On taking over the house Jocelyn had had the ironwork scraped down and repainted, and Rachel had realised that she actually liked the fire escape for the same reason that she had learnt to like the whole building, that it was, emphatically and uniquely, itself.

More pages. Views and details. The stable clock; the bell in its little turret; the boiler shed for the greenhouses. Not many interiors. The main staircase, of course, but few of the actual rooms, as they fitted in less well with Anne’s thesis, being surprisingly light and lively, though often oddly proportioned. Jocelyn’s parents, on moving in in the nineteen twenties, had redecorated in a nondescript but not unpleasing way; too late for arts and crafts, too early for art deco. Jocelyn, often radical in practical matters, was deeply conservative in his tastes. If a room needed to be done up, he didn’t see that it needed to be done differently.

Tucked in at the end of the folder was a large plain envelope.

“More photos,” said Dilys, peeking in. “Want to look, dearie? Here you are, then.”

Spares. Other interiors. The greenhouses. The laundry. The fire escape again, looking dizzingly down from above. The old nursery—this very room. Last of all, Jocelyn at his desk in the study.

“You’re supposed to be taking pictures of the house, aren’t you? You don’t want people in them.”

“I need a focal point.”

(Liar. She wanted a picture of him at his desk. It would be her fee for taking all this trouble for his Anne.)

“Oh, if you must.”

“You’re going to have to sit still when I tell you. It’ll be a long exposure because I don’t want to bring a lot of lights in. That’s why the sitters in some of those old photographs look as if they’d been stuffed.”

“I can look stuffed as well as any man I know.”

And, of course, he’d stayed as still as a tree stump while she counted the thirty seconds. You could see every wisp of his sparse, sandy hair. His hand, poised above the letter he was writing, had not quivered. His head was bent into the soft glow of the lamp, the rest of his body in shadow. Glow and shadow patterned the room. She had waited till the evening, because this was the hour she had wished to celebrate. Though there were more obviously comfortable rooms in the house, this was where they always sat when alone, a habit begun in the feebleness and chill of his homecoming, because coal had still been rationed and the study was simpler to make snug than anywhere else. She had moved two easy chairs in, and a worktable large enough for her to spread her photographs on. The result was a clutter, but he hadn’t once grumbled, even in jest, about her invasion of so male a sanctum. Though by his second winter Jocelyn had regained his robust indifference to temperature, and then fuel had become available and a modern oil-fired boiler had been installed, they had without any discussion stayed on here. As with so many things, they had grown to the shape of their discomforts, and would for a while have felt awkward anywhere else.

Still, it was a strange room to have chosen, a kind of left-over space, all its proportions dictated by whatever lay on the other side of its walls. The chunk out of the corner opposite the door was the back stairs, whose existence also meant that there was only one window, looking out onto the kitchen yard. The fireplace was off centre in the left-hand wall, because the position of the flue was dictated by the dining room fireplace beyond. The fireplace wasn’t visible in the photograph, but part of the window was, and the intrusion of the back stairs.

Rachel gazed at the picture. It was exactly as she had remembered, unsurprisingly, as it had stood on her worktable from the day she developed it until the morning after Jocelyn’s death, when she had taken it from its frame and put it back here. She had not then expected ever to want to look at it again. It was, in its way just as expressive of Jocelyn’s nature as the one of him with the Rover, just as full of the instant, but at the same time seeming to throb faintly with the movement of the web of time around it, invisible threads linking instant to instant, the whole life, the whole memory of that life, right up to this instant now in which she was looking at the photograph after an interval of almost forty years.

It told her nothing that she did not already know. Half the box was clearly visible by the light of the desk lamp on the small table at Jocelyn’s right elbow. The further half was in shadow.

“Thank you. Dilys,” she whispered. “Copy it for your niece. Copier in office.”

“Lovely,” said Dilys. “I’m not that much of a writer, you see, and I feel stupid sending her just a page or two back, so it’ll be just what I want. Now, I’ll change our specs, shall I, and see what’s on the telly? Oh, Thursday—it’ll be that cooking programme you liked that last time.”

“All right.”

Dilys swung the bed to face the television, a large screen, mounted well up on the further wall, so that Rachel could watch it more easily. The cooking programme would do, anything would do that would distract her from thought and memory. She would have to face it sometime, sometime soon but not now, she was too tired, too disturbed…

It wasn’t enough. As Dilys said, she usually enjoyed cooking programmes, despite the tendency of the presenters to thrust their personalities, always so much less pleasing than they seemed to imagine, at the viewer. Rachel herself had never been much of a cook—she had had no need—but she enjoyed watching the process, and the imagined taste seemed to help her to salivate, moistening her mouth for a while. But not today.

Deliberately she had buried patches of memory, though not in the manner she had read about, where the person in question is no longer superficially aware that some hideous event took place. She had always known, just as she had known where she had hidden the pistol box and put the picture of Jocelyn at his desk. At any time in the past forty years she could, if she had chosen, have related in outline most of what had happened on the night that the young man came, but she had never chosen, never intentionally recalled any part of it. Sometimes, unwilled, a fragment would insinuate itself, but as soon as she was aware of it she would push it away, muttering angrily to herself about something irrelevant, until she could force herself to concentrate on the here and now.

But today she lacked the willpower to do that. She would watch the programme for a little, lapse into a snatch of unwanted recall, drag herself clear, watch, and lapse again. Senility must be like this, she thought. Please God may my stupid body go first.

“We’re still tired aren’t we?” said Dilys as the programme ended. “We must really have overdone things today.”

Rachel attempted a “yes” smile, but her lips seemed not to respond and her mouth was too dry for speech. Dilys leaned over the bed, all blur, but her voice revealed her anxiety.

“Worse than that, is it, dearie? Something’s really bothering us. Tsk, tsk. But you’d tell Dilys, wouldn’t you, if there’s anything I can do.”

Rachel felt something happen, an actual physical event taking place in the citadel of her mind, a mine sprung, a crack opening in a rampart. To her shame and anger she was weeping again, those strange dry tears, the squeezings from an almost juiceless citrus.

“Jocelyn’s pistol,” she heard her lips whisper. “She’s got Jocelyn’s pistol.”