Some Deaths Before Dying

RACHEL

1

“The most extraordinary thing. Ma! You’ll never guess. I was just finishing doing the flowers last evening when Simon Stadding rang—he really doesn’t sound at all well, poor man. I wonder if he ever thinks about Anne now. Oh dear, never mind. Anyway all he would tell me was that there was this woman called Pilcher, in Maidstone, wanting to get hold of me. You remember I rang him to ask if anyone in the Association lived in Maidstone and he said no, but apparently he’d forgotten that that was where Sergeant Fred’s great-nephew—you remember Sergeant Fred, of course—that was where this great-nephew lives who looks after Sergeant Fred’s affairs. Light dawned, you could say. So of course I rang the woman straight away. I thought she’d be asking for money, so I was pretty sharp with her to start with and I didn’t say anything about Sergeant Fred. I just tackled her straight off about the pistol and told her we’d got to have it back. She was remarkably cool about it, I must say—she’s some kind of solicitor, she says, but she’s not wearing her solicitor’s hat about this—solicitor’s wig. I suppose I mean—no I don’t—that’s barristers—but she absolutely refused to say anything about the pistol except that it wasn’t hers and she shouldn’t have taken it to the show, and she’d pass a message on to whoever it did belong to, only it didn’t of course because it belongs to you, but you know what I mean. And then she rather took the wind out of my sails by saying that what She was calling about was that Sergeant Fred has suddenly decided he wants to come and see you, and we hummed and hawed about that for a bit but I thought if it means we’re going to get the pistol back, and apparently she’s prepared to drive him up, with her husband because it’s a long way, though we did talk about them staying the night—he’s spry as a flea, she says, but his mind’s a bit off so he’s never quite sure what’s what—the other way round from you, I told her—I hope you don’t mind—so Mrs. Pilcher says he may have forgotten all about it by tomorrow, but she doesn’t think so because he seems to have a thoroughgoing bee in his bonnet about something—she says he was trying to come up here on his own, after she’d gone, and they had to stop him—I must say I rather took to her in spite of her sounding so keep-your-distance about everything. She’d taken Sergeant Fred for a drive this afternoon, she said, and she sounds rather fond of him, so her heart’s in the right place. I’d’ve come up last night and told you only supper was ready and kidneys are Jack’s favourite and you know how easily those cream sauces crack—wasn’t it good though? She’s terrific at the tricky things, only she can’t be bothered to get the easy ones right, and really there’d be something indecent about having two cooks…anyway. I’ve been thinking. I bet what’s bothering Sergeant Fred is that he’s got the pistols, somehow, heaven knows how. I mean if it had been—what was that funny crook’s name Da was so fond of? Terry something. Vass?”

“Voss.”

“That’s right. If it had been him…but Sergeant Fred? Anyway, he’s got the pistols, and someone must have been messing around firing them and not cleaning them properly, which is a shame because you know what a fuss Da always made about that—and then this woman got hold of one of them—I mean if she’d had the other one and the box she’d have taken them all along to the show, wouldn’t she?

So now it’s all come out and Mrs. Pilcher says his memory’s not too good so perhaps he’d just forgotten about them, but now he’s decided that he’d better get them off his conscience by bringing them back. Don’t you think that’s what’s happened, Ma?”

“Possibly,” whispered Rachel. This was one of her no-saliva days. She couldn’t have argued, even if she had wished to.

“So if that’s what’s going on,” said Flora, “wouldn’t it be easier all round if I just popped down to Hastings and saw Sergeant Fred and told him all was forgiven and forgotten and he could give me the pistols to bring back to you. I’ll be going to London anyway for the Mc-Nulty bash—think of those two staying married for fifty years! Like one of those wars people used to have which just went on and on till that’s all anyone knows about them—do you have the faintest notion what the Thirty Years War was about?—instead of Mrs. Pilcher having to bring the old boy all the way up here. You do agree, don’t you?”

“Won’t know who you are.”

“But I’ll tell him, Ma. I’ll get Mrs. Pilcher to come too. And I’m sorry, Ma, but if you get him all this way and he sees you like this, perhaps he won’t… I mean, when he used to know you…”

“Knows the house. Knows pistol belongs here.”

“But honestly, Ma…”

“Drink.”

“I’m sorry. Try not to talk. Here you are, then. Ready?”

The effort at speech had exacerbated the drought in Rachel’s mouth to a pitch beyond discomfort, not exactly pain, but still with the true ferocity of pain. And now Flora, overconfident in the convenience of the invalid cup, tried to pour too fast. Rachel forced her lips to reject the spout just in time to stop herself choking, a hideous experience, convulsing the insensate body while the mind endured, helpless and aware of the ease with which one could suffocate on one’s own vomit. Taken by surprise, Flora poured a generous slop of barley water over Rachel’s chest.

“Oh, sorry, Ma.”

She put the cup down and mopped with a towel at the spillage, using a vigorous rubbing motion, as if drying a spaniel. Rachel’s head joggled helplessly to and fro. The second attempt was more successful.

“Better? No, don’t try to talk, Ma.”

“Ask her to bring Sergeant Fred.”

“Oh, but, Ma…”

“No. Listen. Knows what he wants. Doesn’t matter how…”

Rachel willed the obscenity out.

“…gaga he is. He knows.”

Flora shrugged. Most people would have described her as strong-willed. She had that manner and usually got away with it. They would also, probably, have thought Rachel diffident, but even now both still accepted, as they always had, that it would be Rachel who had her way.

She must have smiled without deliberately causing her lips to move (unusual these days) because Flora responded with a laugh. Rachel was aware of feeling peculiarly close to her daughter, the closeness of affection and habit, but not, alas, what she understood by love. Not for the first time she wondered whether Flora had any conscious understanding of how she had been cheated, almost from the beginning. She had been given warmth, interest, help and comfort when needed, all unstinted. But true, deep love from her parents—the real things, irreplaceable, no other product would do—love such as Jocelyn had felt for Anne and Rachel for Dick—no. Somehow Rachel kept her smile in place, though now weeping inwardly and raging that her stupid arms couldn’t stir, couldn’t even ache with the physical impulse to stir, reach out, embrace this sixty-four-year-old woman and at last start to atone for all those years of love withheld.

“Darling,” she whispered. “I haven’t—”

She stopped herself in time and closed her eyes. Loved you enough, she had been going to say, but Flora wouldn’t have understood, would have protested, distressed. It was too late to explain now, much too late.

“That’s right, Ma. You have a good rest, and I’ll come up later and tell you what the woman says.”

Rachel felt the brush of a kiss on her forehead, heard the movement of door handle and door, and then Flora’s rattling syllables receding along the corridor as she moved towards Dilys’s sitting room, already explaining herself. Rachel couldn’t distinguish the words, and Dilys’s softer answers from inside the room, but amid the diversions the gist was plain from the intonation: Mrs. Pilcher’s call; Sergeant Fred—who he was and why he mattered; his wish to visit Rachel; Rachel’s wish to see him; half-admiring exasperation at the determination of these two old things to meet again; passing mention of the accident with the barley water; and so on. Then both voices moving back towards Rachel’s door, the actual words becoming audible as the door opened.

“…could ask Pat to come and give you a hand for the night, I suppose.”

“I think I can manage, Mrs. Thomas, really I do. It doesn’t sound like the old man’s going to be a lot of trouble.”

“Well, let’s just see…”

(Flora now moving away and speaking over her shoulder.)

“…and as soon as I know which day it’ll be I’ll check with Pat whether she’ll be free.”

The door closed. Rachel heard Dilys sigh.

“Now then, dearie, we’ve been at it again, wearing ourselves out chatting, Mrs. Thomas says. You’re each as bad as the other, I’m beginning to think. And she spilt your drinkie over you too, she says. Let’s have a look. Dearie me, we’re all sticky, like a kid who’s been at the treacle tin. I don’t know. Looks like I’ll have to give you your bath all over again. And a clean nightie… We’re all right, aren’t we, dearie? We didn’t choke or anything?“

“Nearly.”

“Well, a miss is as good as a mile, I always say. She’s a very good soul, Mrs. Thomas, and I’d be the last to deny it, but I’ll go down on my knees and thank my creator that I didn’t have the training of her as a nurse.”

Rachel would have laughed aloud, had the mechanism still existed. Years ago, on a nanny’s afternoon out, she had watched Flora change one of the children’s nappies, talking over her shoulder as she did so, and finishing with a bewildered child wearing a vast but unreliable package of terry cloth wrapped loosely round its midriff.

Still with closed eyes she lay, but for once didn’t listen to Dilys chattering away as she worked. She was aware of being in a strange state. Normally, despite the unresponsiveness of her body, not a minute went by, except in dreams, when she wasn’t fully conscious of its prisoning reality. This morning there seemed to be a looseness in the connection. She could feel, in the sense that the signals came from the inert limbs, but she was unable to interpret the signals. By the movement of her head she could tell that her torso had been gently lifted so that the sodden nightie could be eased free, but after that, for a while, the eerie disembodiment seemed so complete that if she had known the password she could have slid out of this place, out of this time, out of the inert flesh, away…

No. She mustn’t do that yet. There was work to be done, tidying and sorting, before she could allow herself to leave. She opened her eyes and found her vision blocked by blurred yellow cloud-stuff, which she discovered to be a clean nightie which had draped itself in front of her as her raised left arm was fed into the sleeve. Then, gently, she was rolled to one side to let the nightie be eased beneath her, rolled back to have her right arm inserted, before the garment was fastened down the front and the bedclothes drawn up.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“It’s a pleasure,” said Dilys. “And now, what’ll we do with ourselves? Listen to our book for a bit?”

“No. Albums.”

“Oh, good, ever so interesting, I find them. Drinkie before you tell me? We’re a bit dry today, aren’t we?”

Typical of her attention, Rachel thought, that she could distinguish between one sere whisper and another. She sipped gratefully, then explained which volumes she wanted. Ostensibly she was looking for pictures that might interest Sergeant Fred, so that Dilys could mark them, ready for his visit. It would have been logical to begin with the early part of the war, before the regiment had sailed for Singapore. Sergeant Fred had barely yet become a friend then, but there were a few faces he might remember. Then there was a whole volume devoted to the Cambi Road Association, and there’d be pictures of the children at various ages. But instead of any of those Rachel chose the final one devoted to Jocelyn. Though the previous album had been less than half full, she had started a fresh one for the funeral.

The rector had been in the parish less than a month. Rachel had done no more than shake hands with him after his first service, until he had called to express his condolences over Jocelyn’s death, and discuss arrangements for the funeral. Rachel hadn’t taken to him. He had a soft but at the same time domineering manner, and though all he said was impeccably correct she detected no real feeling behind it. He had taken so long to answer her request that she’d thought he was going to refuse.

“Very well,” he had said at last. “I will say a few words by way of explanation before the service starts.”

“Oh, thank you. Honestly, I don’t think anyone is going to think it peculiar. They’re so used to me and my cameras.”

“That would not have been the problem, Mrs. Matson. You will find that I am not greatly influenced by what people think.”

And yet he’s lasted twenty-three years in the parish, never putting a foot wrong, but still not much liked by anyone. Sad.

“Ready?” said Dilys. “Oh, my goodness, it’s…Sorry, dearie, I didn’t mean to be rude, but…And you can’t have taken this one! That’s you, there, isn’t it?”

Impossible that she should have been able to recognise Rachel, standing at the foot of the open grave, all in black, her face hidden by not only the veil, and the shadow from the hideous black hat, but also by the bulk of the camera aimed down at the descending coffin.

“Tom Dawnay,” croaked Rachel. “Local paper. Old friend.”

So good a friend that he hadn’t submitted the picture for use in the Inquirer, who would certainly have printed it. Indeed, it might well have made the national press. It was an image of surreal force, even when stripped of the layers of personal meaning that it had for Rachel. On the left a dark slab, the backs of the mourners, corrugated with heads above and fringed with legs below. Then a strip of sunlit grass, with receding gravestones, then the single black column of the widow, rapt in her rite. The camera that had taken the picture was outside the rite, looking at it, but the camera in the window’s hands was integral, essential to its completeness. Rachel had almost never included photographs by anybody else in her albums, but she had put Tom’s here, at the start, because she felt it would resonate through the volume, so that only the most insensitive peruser wouldn’t sense, looking at the rest of the photographs, that particular presence, those particular emotions, there behind the viewfinder.

She grunted to tell Dilys to leaf on. Apart from that first picture the album was in chronological order: a line of neighbours, friends, cousins, crossing the graveyard towards the church, the picture taken with a wide-angle lens and the negative cropped to produce a frieze-like strip punctuated by verticals, black and grey, people and tombstones; Maxwell in his chauffeur’s uniform pulling Dinah Tremlett in her old Bath chair; the children lined up at the porch, Flora pregnant with Ferdie and on the edge of tears, Jack dapper at her elbow and properly solemn, Dick trying to look so and faking it, Anne…It was for the image of Anne that Rachel had included this otherwise banal funeral group. Physically she took after Rachel, almost pretty in a fine-boned but still slightly horsy fashion. She had been a lively, amenable child, but around the age of eleven had begun to withdraw, to conceal her pleasures and troubles, to seem to wish to become less part of the family. That was what made the picture of her so instantly shocking, the ferocity of dry-eyed grief that was still half rage, though it was almost two years now since the business about Simon Stadding that had precipitated Jocelyn’s first stroke. She had at first refused to come to the funeral, but Jack had gone to Bristol of his own accord and persuaded her.

“Mrs. Thomas hasn’t changed that much,” said Dilys. “Nor Mr. Thomas, come to that, given he’s lost a bit of hair. And wasn’t Mr. Dick a well set up lad? Image of his father too. No wonder you’re fond of him.”

She moved to turn the page. Rachel didn’t stop her. No mention of Anne. She must have noticed. Tact, presumably, not to comment on such a glimpse of the raw innards of a wounded family.

Inside the church. The other camera, largest aperture, ultrafast film, then delicate development and printing—the results misty greys, sometimes with focal moments: the jet black of the silhouetted coffin and bearers against the open west door; the coffin at the altar, with candles; the congregation standing for a hymn, Rachel’s own place empty, a gap in the pattern of open mouths; Sergeant Fred against the north window (Rachel had almost grovelled to achieve the angle) standing at the eagle lectern to bark the lesson with toneless precision. (extraordinary—still after almost forty years extraordinary—to think that if Jocelyn had died two years sooner it might have been Fish Stadding reading that lesson. Had Simon or Leila ever heard from him? There’s been no way to ask. There was still none. He’d be dead by now, surely.) The last picture she’d taken inside the church was of the front of the coffin in close-up as it had passed her place on its way down the aisle, with the near-side bearer also in close-up, a strong, unreadable face.

Then a gap in the sequence, filled only by a cutting from the Inquirer, Tom Dawnay’s published picture of the coffin emerging from the porch with Rachel on Dick’s arm behind it. (She had handed her cameras to Jack to bring out.) The gap continued for the period she had had to stand, barely holding herself together, accepting the unavoidable condolences. Ten or so blurred awful minutes, the same phrases over and over till they lost all meaning, and Jocelyn dead, dead, dead. No meaning in anything, ever again. Her only solid memory of that phase was of Leila Stadding’s face, grief and anger like Anne’s but so differently borne; the mouth working almost as if in epilepsy as she tried to speak, but then she had turned away and shoved herself past whoever had been waiting behind her. Rachel hadn’t expected any of the family to come, but had hoped that Simon might. He hadn’t, Leila’s elder son, Bob, had brought her, according to Flora.

And then at last the saving reality of the camera, the light meter, her fingers composedly setting apertures and exposures and changing filters, that composure steadying the whole being.

The graveside—family and servants, Jocelyn’s sisters and the Austen cousins, three or four old friends, the Cambi Road Association representatives. Not good of Sergeant Fred, unfortunately. That must be the top of his head behind Duggie Rawlings. Duggie had driven the others from London up in his new taxi. Rachel remembered him coming to her before he left and taking her aside to explain that the reason he hadn’t been able to bring Terry Voss was that Terry was in prison again. Of course she’d want to know that, the Colonel having been so thick with Terry all along.

“Thank you very much, Duggie,” she’d managed to say. “I’m sure Terry would have come if he could.”

And it was true, just as Jocelyn would have moved heaven and earth to attend Voss’s funeral, Jocelyn, who, for instance, had refused to shoot again with an old acquaintance whom he’d discovered to be behaving dubiously over the division of an inheritance. But Voss, of course, had been on the Cambi Road. That changed everything.

Finally, completing the sequence, the picture she had been taking when Tom Dawnay had photographed her, the coffin being lowered into its slot of earth, the V of the straining tapes that held it, the surrounding, almost regular patterned frame made by the lower legs and feet of the mourners.

“How sad,” said Dilys, closing the album. “But it’s wonderful what we can get over, isn’t it! Do you want another one, then, or are we finding it a wee bit tiring? How about a little rest now? A drinkie first, and then a little rest, eh?”

“Thank you, Dilys.”

“My pleasure, dearie.”

2

Horizontal again, Rachel lay and watched the rooks, but today without studying them, though it seemed a waste of a crystal morning, with every twig clear. Absurdly she felt a sense of dereliction at her failure to carry on with her self-imposed task. It didn’t even help to tell herself that what she was now attempting to do was a continuation of the task, was indeed the true task, for which the study of nest-building had been a kind of preliminary exercise. Apart from the young man’s visit she had not herself witnessed, and would never now have direct evidence of, whatever it was that had happened thirty-nine years ago, any more than she would ever be able to look directly down on a rook’s nest in the process of construction. All she had to go on in either case were the side effects, the comings and goings, the shudderings of the structure, the occasional protrusion of objects of events beyond its edge. In one case the distance was in length, in the other in time…

Anne banging in through the front, door, wholly unexpected, while Rachel was stitching up the hem of one of the hall curtains. No telephone call, no request to be met at the station. No kind of greeting now.

“Where’s Da?”

“Hello, darling. What a surprise!”

“Where’s Da?”

“In the study, I think. But please, darling…”

Anne strode past, blank-faced. When Rachel went to close the door she saw the taxi waiting in the drive. She had guessed it might be bad, but never as bad as this.

And then, of course…but there is always something worse that could happen. Mercifully you seldom get to the true worst.

Because there was nothing better to do and it was an excuse for staying nearby, she went back to the dreary job of the curtain. The study was round the corner on the way to the dining room and kitchen, and its door was solid. Jocelyn never raised his voice, spoke more softly when angry, and Anne was no screecher. The first she heard was a single, dull thud. Perhaps she felt rather than heard it, juddering up through the floor. But she sensed it, knew at once what it meant, and ran.

The door of the study opened as she reached the corner.

“Quick, Ma, the doctor. Something’s happened to Da.”

Then she was in the room.

He must have been standing behind his desk and then have fallen half sideways, heavily, all of a piece. Now he was lying almost prone, with his face in the carpet and his right arm twisted beneath him. Rachel knew nothing about medicine. She took one look, picked up the telephone, dialed 999, was answered almost at once and spoke briefly, keeping her head, to explain the urgency and give directions. Then she flung herself down beside the body and let the dry sobs shudder through her.

“Oh, Ma, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, darling…Not your fault.”

“Is he dead? I suppose we’d better not move him.”

“I…don’t know…The ambulance…Go and wait for it please…”

Voices at the door. Yes, of course. Thwaite and Young Jim would be in for their elevenses in the kitchen. They too must have heard the fall. Her right arm was across his back when she felt the slight spasm. His left hand was beneath her breast on the carpet. She shifted and clutched it. His fingers moved in answer.

Somebody touched her shoulder.

“Now, Mrs. Matson…”

Ranson.

“No, don’t touch him. Wait for the ambulance men. He’s alive. Is Minnie there?”

“Here, Mum.”

“Get a bag together for him. Pyjamas. His yellow dressing-gown. His shaving kit, hair brushes…”

Things he knew. Things that were his own, part of his being. While she was listing them Rachel eased herself up, never letting go of his hand, so that she could sit nestled against his side and with her free hand gently stroke the back of his neck and head, her own touch, all she could give him to let him know she was there, with him in this pit, this darkness…

“They’re here, Ma. They’ve just turned into the drive.”

She stayed where she was, waiting. The men were competent and friendly. They let her keep hold of his hand as they eased him onto the stretcher, lifted him and carried him out.

“Do you want me to stay, Ma? I wasn’t going to, but…”

“Please. For a bit. Ring Flora. Dick, if you can find him. The aunts. Minnie’s putting a bag together. Bring it to the hospital. And some stuff for me. I don’t know if they’ll let me stay. Take the Triumph. The keys are in the hall drawer. Look in his diary and see if he’s got any appointments and cancel them if you can. Numbers in his book on the desk…”

The hospital was stupidly rigid about visitors. Outraged and distressed, Rachel came home to find that Anne, after coping well with everything within her competence, had worked herself into a pit of her own, in which she was hurled and battered by misery, rage and self-blame. She allowed herself to be held close on the morning room sofa for a while, but rose abruptly and moved away.

“I suppose you want me to tell you what happened,” she said.

“Yes, please. Anything. Everything.”

“Simon came and told me he couldn’t marry me. It was because of something Da had told him.”

“Oh, my darling!”

“Did you know he was going to do that?”

“Of course not. Only that Da was going to talk to him about his father.”

“About Uncle Fish? What…? And anyway, what bloody business is it of Dad’s who 1 marry? Of either of yours? I’m twenty-three. I can marry anyone I bloody well choose!”

“Yes, of course, darling. Simon didn’t tell you what it was about?“

“No. If you want to know there was something shifty…I mean, he was upset all right, but it wasn’t just about us. He had to get out somehow. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. We’ve always wanted each other. Always. Ever since we were little. Simon’s mine. I’m his. I don’t want anyone else, and I don’t want anyone else to have him. We’ve been going to bed for ages, whenever we got the chance. Why do you think I was so sweet as pie about putting the wedding off? Because it doesn’t make any difference, that’s why. We’re good as married already, and we can go to a Registry Office and get it made official anytime we want. You can’t stop us, Aunt Leila can’t stop us, however crazy she’s gone. When Simon showed up I thought…Oh, Christ! he just wanted to get it over.”

“Shall I tell you what Da told him?”

“If you like.”

“Fish has run off with the funds of the Cambi Road Association, as well as any of Leila’s money that’s left. He’s abroad somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ! Is that all?”

“About forty thousand pounds. Everything Da had raised to help with pensions and so on.”

“But…All right. Ma, I can see that’s pretty awful for you, but it’s not enough! It’s bloody well not enough! What’s it got to do with Simon and me? Nothing. We knew about Uncle Fish doing a bunk, and we knew it had to be something like that, though Aunt Leila won’t talk to any of us… Look, Simon’s always been a bit iffy about Uncle Fish—he says you can’t tell where you are with him. But he’s always worshipped Da, and if Da came and told him he couldn’t marry me because of something else Uncle Fish had done—something unspeakable—I can just about see Simon—he’s got these stupid ideas about honour…Jesus, I’m furious with him! And Da! There’s something he told Simon and he wouldn’t tell me, though he’s bloody well wrecked my life! I’m sorry, Ma. I’m sorry about what happened to Da, and I wish it hadn’t, but I came to tell him how furious I was, and I still am, and even if I’d known he’d got a weak heart I’d still have come and I’d still have said what I said!”

A pit had opened into a place which Rachel for the past seventeen days had been schooling herself not to think about. No, that had nothing to do with Fish. She clutched at an irrelevance.

“I think it’s a stroke, darling, not heart. You couldn’t have known.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“I’m sure I’d feel the same in your shoes. I’m truly sorry for you, darling. I hope you’re wrong about Simon wanting to get out of it. I’ve always loved him. If it’s any use to you, Da and I used to tell each other how stupid we’d been, waiting till we were married.”

“Not much,” snapped Anne, unrelenting. And then, “Oh, God, I’m never going to feel about anyone the way I do about Simon. I can’t imagine even being interested in anyone else!”

She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Rachel rose to stand beside her and hold her close again, but she shrugged herself free and moved away, still blindly sobbing.

“I’m sorry, Ma, Oh, God, I’m being desperately self-centred when…I just can’t think about anything else. I’d better go.”

“Please, darling. Oh, please…I…I…”

But Rachel couldn’t bring herself to say “I need you.” Not even now, when it would have been for the first time true. For twenty-eight years all that she had truly needed had been supplied by Jocelyn. Even Dick had been no more than an emotional extra, a luxury, a want and not a need. It was to late for such a demand.

“I’ll go for a walk and think about it,” said Anne.

She had stayed on, in fact, for three silently dutiful days and then gone back south. A month later a card had arrived saying that she was moving to Bristol, with the address. She hadn’t returned to Matlock until the funeral.

Rachel lay and considered the event. The emotions didn’t return, however faintly, to confuse her.

All there was was the puzzle for her mind to tease at. She had been aware of it at the time, and Anne had, in effect, stated it aloud, but it had been among the mass of stuff at the periphery of Rachel’s concerns, whose centre was wholly occupied with the horror of what had happened to Jocelyn, and then with the obstinate, passionate nurturing of hope when everyone was insisting that there could be none.

The puzzle was that the emotional logic didn’t cohere. Fish Stadding had embezzled the Cambi Road funds. When discovered he had fled abroad. The committee had decided not to try and hunt him down. The money was apparently gone on some speculation in the City, so what was the point? Besides, Fish had been on the Road.

The Staddings were old friends, Uncle Fish and Aunt Leila to the children. They had always brought their three boys to Forde Place for a week or so in the school holidays. There had been a lovely inevitability about Anne and Simon deciding to marry. Rachel remembered walking by the river with him—a still, early summer day, a perfect light. She had lagged behind the others, taking pictures, and Simon had stayed with her, unasked, for company. That was Simon, sensitive, considerate, straightforward, very like Leila in that. (In fact it was as if all the good fairies had come to his christening, because he seemed to have inherited his father’s quirky intelligence, not to mention the rather oriental good looks of both parents.)

“We didn’t fall in love,” he’d told Rachel. “I think we were born in love.”

The memory simply didn’t chime with any picture of a Simon who, on learning that his father was an embezzler who had shamefully betrayed his future father-in-law, had so readily, and apparently shiftily, broken the engagement. Yes, a young man might well have behaved like that, but it would have been a different young man from the one Rachel had talked to by the river. That Simon would have said, “This is tragic and appalling, and I will do everything in my power to make it up, but the first thing I will do is insist on marrying Anne, if she will still have me.”

Indeed a Simon something like that surfaced a few years later, when out of the blue he had written to Rachel saying that he had learnt that the Association was looking for a younger secretary, and asking if she would put his name before the committee. He had added in a private note to Rachel that he would like to do something to repair the harm that his father had done to the Association. Rachel had hesitated, but she knew the committee were desperate and Anne was now settled in Canada, so she’d done what he asked.

Surely that Simon would have waited a little while for decency and then gone to Anne and told her he couldn’t live without her. As far as Rachel knew there hadn’t at the time been another woman. A decade or so later he had married a widow, older than himself, apparently out of a shared delight in bird-watching. He had never brought her to reunions at Forde Place. There had been no children.

No, Anne was right. Jocelyn must have told him about something else. The young man’s visit? He certainly couldn’t have borne to tell Anne, of all people, about that, and it would have been astonishing if he’d told Simon. Besides, it had nothing to do with Fish.

Unwilled, her lips moved and the dry whisper came.

“He didn’t tell me, either.”