A Habit of Dying (16 page)

With Albert Marshall a tantalizing possibility, already to Lydia a probability, she was tempted to search through every index she could find to look for a Marshall marriage that could conceivably be Phoebe’s parents. There was no justification in doing so, nothing she found would be of value until it was matched with a birth certificate. But she was desperate to build on her discovery, without the enforced wait while the certificate was acquired. Again she sat with the photograph, drifting back into her own afternoon at Longlands, the lawn, the laughter, the smallest echoes of a distant summer. What had Phoebe been doing before she was called to pose with the family? Had her mother insisted on brushing her hair and tying the ribbon just so? Did she tease her little brother? A search for Albert M might not be wasted effort, he was someone that she could profitably explore. How many Albert Marshalls were born between say 1903 and at the latest 1906, to judge by the image of the boy? Already she knew that there were a lot of Marshalls and Albert would be a challenge, still one of the most popular names in the early years of the century. But it was certainly worth a look, especially if she confined herself to possibilities in Essex, or better still, in Braintree.

Within forty minutes she had the answer she sought. Of seventy-nine Albert Marshalls, a mere four were registered in Essex. Of the four, a solitary Albert William F Marshall had been registered in Braintree in the last quarter of 1904. She was triumphant, her theory all but proved. Now she would send for both Phoebe’s and Albert’s birth certificates, and resist all temptation to investigate further until she had them. The moment they were ordered, she closed all her notepads and albums, shut down her laptop and put everything out of sight under her desk.

Resolve is one thing, but a racing mind requires an immediate occupation. She still needed something to take her right away from Longlands, Marshalls and maybe’s. She had been home less than a day, and one way and another that elusive unnamed family had occupied her for nearly a week. There was plenty around the house needing some attention, including the unwelcome consequences of returning to an empty fridge with no more than a bag of dirty clothes. For the greater part of her single, divorced life, such domestic tasks had never bothered her. They had always been done without much thought or interest, in a mechanical way that demanded little. But at that moment they were distinctly unappealing, yet nothing else attracted her. Her mind swarmed over the prospects of solving her self-made puzzle, anxious to be getting on with the story, establishing the characters. Yet there was nothing that she could sensibly do except wait.

By Sunday, the need to be constructive got the better of her. What if Phoebe was not the golden ticket after all? Surely she was duty bound to follow up on her other ten candidates who, in her excitement, she had completely forgotten. One by one she looked up their death entries and made notes of the references. So simple was the exercise that in no time at all her list was complete. It had filled an hour of her time but without any satisfaction. She was left staring at the notepad, completely at a loss as to what she might do next. The grey and dreary day beyond her window had seeped into her home and with it a great wave of depression, a deep anticlimax, swept over her. The excitement of the chase, the clear purpose and direction, both had vanished, leaving her adrift and rudderless. The pleasures of her stay in the lakes each turned to dust as she recalled them, a deceptive mirage of happiness dissolving as quickly as it had appeared.

Lydia remained enveloped in this cloud of gloom for the next two days as she fiddled her way through work, avoiding any chance of direct conversation with Gloria until the Wednesday, when she was cornered by the coffee machine.

‘Meet anyone that took your fancy then?’

‘I don’t think I know what my fancy is these days,’ she replied
with as light hearted and uninformative an answer as she could manage.

‘No, Lydia, I don’t think you do. What did you get up to then?’

‘Oh, you know, walked a bit, read a bit, just pottered around really. It’s a lovely area.’

Gloria shook her head to emphasise just how hopeless a case Lydia was. ‘I bet you found time to check out a few tombstones though. Met a few dead people, eh? Go on, say you didn’t.’

God, she hated Gloria, hated her shallow monochrome view of life, hated her trying to foist it on the rest of her narrow world. Mostly she could tolerate the stream of nonsense, the fixation with sex and shoes, the daily recounting of the gruesome details of the previous night. Oh how she was tempted to shock her once and for all, if only she had something to shock her with.

‘No, no meetings with the dead,’ and then added straight faced, ‘but you know, they often have a lot more of interest to say than some of the living.’

‘If you say so, Lydia,’ Gloria retorted as she flounced off, the sarcasm passing her by completely.

It was no better at home where she could settle to nothing. No sooner had she sat down than she needed to get up and prowl the house, which for the first time in the eleven years that she had lived there, felt cramped and unwelcoming. Like her clothes, all her other possessions had acquired a shabby second-hand quality. Once, for no apparent reason, Lydia found herself suddenly close to tears as she washed a few pans after her supper. Her meals, repeated with little variation for so long that she could not remember a different time, became tasteless. Her sleep was punctuated with fearful dreams, waking her with no memory of their content, only the fear. Each morning she blinked into the day as tired as the night before, so that by the end of the week she did not know whether the weekend was a blessing or a curse.

It turned out to be a blessing. Saturday’s post brought three letters and Lydia knew instantly from the colours of the paper showing through the envelopes that these were a death certificate and two birth certificates. Before she opened them, she sat at her
desk and carefully arranged her workspace. If they contained what she so fervently hoped they contained, the day ahead of her would sweep the week’s depression away. The death certificate would be opened first because that was the order in which she had done things. Carefully she flattened the folded document. It was as sad in its way as everything else Lydia had come to understand about Phoebe Marshall. The date of death was given only approximately: ‘
About 17
^th
July 1983’.
And under cause of death ‘
Myocardial infarction, Ischaemic Heart Disease’,
which was certified by the coroner
‘after post mortem without inquest
’. The informant was a police constable, the date of registration 23
^rd
July, the place of death Bride’s Cottage, Bridekirk. The place of birth was given as Essex, confirming it was almost certainly the Phoebe whose birth certificate she would be reading in a moment. Heart failure, a coroner, a police constable, these new details only served to underline the air of melancholy that surrounded this lady. Lydia could see her body in the cottage, or worse, in the garden, discovered by the milkman or a neighbour. The police are called, an ambulance arrives shortly after, no sirens or lights. Days later a doctor examines the remains and a constable is despatched to the registrar. Later still, the neighbour goes through her things, sorts through her papers, and finds some reference to S. It could even have been S who arranged and paid for the funeral. A will! There might be a will, the thought had not occurred to her until that moment, but now she had the details of death, finding a will would be a real possibility. And that might tell her much about this Essex girl who came to final rest in Bridekirk.

Lydia opened the two birth certificates and knew in one glance that she had a brother and sister. Here was Phoebe Isabella and her younger brother Albert William Francis. Both born at Coggeshall, Essex, both born to Isabella Marshall formerly Joslin and Francis Marshall, an insurance agent. ‘
Formerly Joslin
’, she savoured the two words that could unlock the Longlands picture. Lydia felt a smile on her lips for the first time in ten days. She took great care to record the details from the certificates into her table of information. Then, in a most deliberate manner she opened the Longlands album. Second left in the second row there is Isabella, but there is
no Francis recorded in the caption. Are these the Joslins in their Edwardian prime? A search through the 1901 census would surely establish the family once and for all. And then there was Isabella and Francis’ marriage to find, and after that maybe other children.

So totally had Lydia become engrossed in Phoebe, her death and her place in the journal, she almost overlooked her original purpose. All those months ago she had set out to re-unite the Longlands album with some yet to be found family member. If she could truly establish the surname, then reunion would surely follow. She set about her task with renewed vigour. First stop were the Marshalls, Isabella and Francis. Plenty of matches in the 1901 census to Francis but none that were married to an Isabella, so she turned to Isabella Joslin. Two possibilities in Essex, one of which was in Bocking. There she was, she and her parents Albert and Pitternelle, her brother Joseph and sisters Alice and Aletha. Aletha! Alice’s presumed twin now had a name, and an unusual name at that, maybe a mistake in the record, but in due course a birth certificate would establish that. Now Lydia could put a name to ‘self’, something which gave her a huge sense of achievement. And because she was thorough, she also noted another Alice, Alice Speen, domestic servant recorded on the census form. Could she still be with the family ten years later? Was it Alice Speen who forever adjusted the curtains at the upstairs window? The address was ‘Bocking End’, no mention of Longlands. It did not matter that every name from the photograph was not represented, what mattered most was that nothing in the census contradicted the theory that Lydia was building. Census and photograph were entirely consistent, only when theory and record disagreed would she question that theory.

Saturday morning turned into the afternoon and evening before Lydia rested from her searches. Even then it was only because her eyes were sore, her back and shoulders ached and she felt faint from hunger. She was completely satiated with Joslins and their variants. From census to census she had worked back to Joshua, born around 1800, a farmer at High End Farm, Bocking in 1841. And then with no census to rely on she had used all the other
sources she could find to look for Joshua’s marriage to Constance Jolly in 1825 and from Constance she found her parents John and Martha. They in turn gave her Constance’s sister Prudence and brothers Nathaniel and John. Lydia had to keep reminding herself that all this was provisional, all depended on the actual records, but it didn’t dim her enthusiasm. At every generation, every change in circumstances she had trawled through the birth and marriage index to find likely entries for her subjects. Killing them off would come later, even though it ran the risk of false trails now. In the fullness of time she would need to see copies of the critical entries in the registers to verify the picture that she was building. At least a dozen of those entries appeared essential even at this stage, which could be costly. She would start with the most important and order the certificates one by one, so that not only would the expense be spread but she would not waste her money if there was a broken link in the chain. And if the certificates endorsed her work, then it would be time to think of studying the actual parish records, not just other people’s often faulty transcriptions.

Not content with the Joslin and Jolly ancestors, she started working with the children of the marriages. It was not with huge success, but she found that Prudence had married a James Dix. Then by pure chance as she entered the wrong dates into a marriage search, she noticed that ‘Papa’ had apparently been married before he and Pitternelle had wed. And his first wife was Isabella Dix, daughter of Prudence. She went through her records and repeated all the relevant searches. There was no mistake. She knew the information could not always be trusted, especially where some of her sources were sloppy researchers who posted their guesses as fact. But, if the records were to be believed, then ‘Papa’ Albert’s first wife was a close cousin. Lydia sketched out the relationships and yes, sure enough, first cousins once removed. Nothing unusual in that in 1874, no more than her probable death a year later, which would make Isabella Dix only one among tens of thousands of women who had not survived their first pregnancy. Perhaps that was why, when Pitternelle had borne his first daughter in 1881, he had found it natural to name her Isabella. Such things escape the
parish record and the census enumerator but Papa can scarcely have plucked the name from thin air.

Some food, her first glass of wine since Loweswater, and a dreamless sleep set her up for more of the same on the Sunday. She turned her efforts to finding likely identities for the remaining faces in the Longlands photograph. Gradually she made her lists and they were satisfyingly short. In part she relied on the Joslins having their children in and around Braintree and in this she was not disappointed. The family appeared to have been successful farmers, well established in the surrounding area for several generations. No ‘
Ag Labs
’ amongst the Joslins. A likely date for the birth of Albert and maybe even his marriage would be easily verified with yet another certificate. Likewise for Beatrice, another Albert, and Harriet, children or grand children perhaps, but most importantly, with names in the album. Late in the afternoon Lydia prioritised her list of critical certificates to be ordered. She decided on three to start with, ‘Papa’ Albert Joslin and his marriages to possibly Isabella and certainly Pitternelle, together with his probable eldest son Albert’s birth certificate. With nearly twenty more ‘criticals’ on her list Lydia was sincerely hoping that these three were not duds, she could hardly afford expensive failures at this early stage.