A Habit of Dying (22 page)

In the first, three women of varying ages sat on a bench in sunshine, at their feet two toddlers squatted, looking grimly at the camera. In the second there were only the younger and the older of the women, otherwise the scene was the same. The older
woman, in her fifties perhaps, slim and poised in a dark coat and under a hat which might have been circa 1930; Fanny, Dorothy’s mum, a little younger in a lighter half-length coat, hatless; the youngest of the trio and therefore probably the children’s mother, still had the sparkle of youth about her, sitting in her floral print frock with its full skirt that shouted 1950’s spread out on the bench.

Dorothy leant across and pointed to the figure missing in the second photograph. ‘That’s mum. I think she must’ve taken the other photo.’

‘I wonder who took this one then?’

‘There’s nothing on them, but I thought they might be interesting.’

‘Oh yes, they are, thank you. They were in a drawer you say?’

‘Yes, you know how it is with kitchen drawers, they gets full of all kinds of stuff. I was looking for some drawing pins and see this envelope and as soon as I do, I knew what was in it right away, dear.’

Lydia wondered how long it had been since she had sorted out any of her own cupboards and drawers, how long it would yet be before she did. Forty years did not seem quite so long when looked at in this way. She held the photos beside each other and studied them. Something was familiar, but she was not sure what. She did not recognise the faces, the scene was foreign to her. Perhaps it was the period, perhaps it was the look which took her back to her own mother’s family albums.

‘Can I hang on to these for a while Dorothy? I’ll let you have them back of course. I’ll get copies done.’

‘Yes dear, like I said, I was going to send them to you anyway.’

When they’d had their sit in the sunshine and the conversation began to flag, Lydia suggested they went down to the sea and walk along the promenade, just as generations of visitors had done. Dorothy was happy to do so, and show Lydia a little of the town that had been home all her life. She pointed out where she had worked all those years in the department store, and the landmark of the Dome cinema, where she and Frank, that had been his name,
had done a little courting before he left for a new life ‘down under’. At mid-afternoon they took tea in a café, which Dorothy announced on leaving had ‘once been a nice place’. During their wanderings Lydia suggested to Dorothy that when she had done with the albums, found Dorothy’s family as best she could, then perhaps Dorothy might like to visit some of the places connected to them, maybe even go across the Channel and visit the war graves. She was non-committal, grateful for the offer, but Lydia could tell that she had no appetite for such a project, and in that moment guessed also she was less interested in the detail of her family than Lydia was herself. Seeing Lydia, helping her, writing to her, was not all about Dorothy’s family, it was also about pleasing this curiosity of a woman from Oxford who had popped so unexpectedly into her life.

In the following week Lydia did little with the Joslins, picking at this and that, but unable to settle to any concentrated effort. She had come so far, maybe to the point where all but the journal could be unravelled, and yet the urge had left her, temporarily at least. Behind it, she knew, was the knowledge that Dorothy did not really care about what she was doing. What had she expected, a bouquet and a fanfare? Dorothy was curious about her family and why would she not be, given her solitary upbringing? But the process was of only passing interest to her, she did not share in the pleasures of the chase, each new discovery was just another remote fact, connected in some way to her, but in what way was apparently immaterial.

This depression engulfed her until the Saturday after her lunch in the sunshine with Dorothy. Blazing June announced itself with a cold rain blowing down from the north, and the weekend held no attractions. None, that is, until a solitary letter plopped onto her doormat. The steady sloping handwriting was unfamiliar, the postmark smudged. It was typical of Lydia that she should try to work out who it might be from before taking the simple option of
opening it, and she knew it. She slit the envelope neatly with a knife. As she read the single page her mouth opened a little more with every line.

The Old Rectory

Grantchester

Cambs

28
^th
May

Dear Lydia

I hope you will not mind me writing to you, but I thought you would find it preferable to a phone call, or worse still, my turning up on your doorstep!

I shall be in Oxford on 16
^th
June for a couple of nights and hope you will have a meal with me on that evening. And if you were interested I would be very pleased if you would be my guest at a conference on the 17th at Magdalen College. I think you would find it interesting, and if not the subject matter, then at least the occasion. I shall not be in any way offended if you are unable to accept. Please drop me a line or email me –
[email protected]
.

How is the project going? Perhaps you have solved your puzzles, I know how deeply involved you were. I will be very interested to know how it all turned out.

Your friend from the Lakes

Stephen Kellaway

Lydia put the letter on her desk and sat staring out of the window for a few minutes, trying to gather her thoughts. Mixed up in them were the prospect of a meal with Stephen - someone she had already decided that she could never see or speak to again; going to a conference of all things; her limp lack of application with Joslins; and the energy she would need to dress herself up for the occasion. Her fingers twirled absentmindedly through her hair, grown longer than when she had last seen him, now tied back in a band for simple convenience. She would need to do something with her hair. She read the letter again, just to be sure exactly what it said,
what additional meaning she might find hidden between the lines, but she found none that was anything but pure fancy. It was as straightforward as she would have expected from Stephen, had she expected anything at all. Her choices were abundantly clear. Either she could do nothing, pretend she’d not received the letter, or she could reply politely saying that she was busy or could not get the time off work. Or, just conceivably, she could accept, with all that would entail. Her instinct was to run and hide, but, in thinking about Stephen, their companionship as they walked round Loweswater came back to her, how they had paused a while here and there on their journey, taking in the landscape, each easy in the other’s company. This would be something quite different, an intention, a plan, a decision, not the coincidence of a casual meeting, each far from home. Neither would it be the ‘nearly’ meeting outside the Randolph. Never one to act in haste, Lydia chose to do nothing. She would let the whole idea evolve, and see how it seemed when she woke tomorrow. She was quite sure it would be the first thought to come to her mind.

Despite her intention to forget the invitation for twenty-four hours, it did have one immediate effect - when her few household tasks had been done, she sat down to the Joslins with a fresh determination. She told herself that this was simply a new surge of energy, nothing to do with Stephen’s letter, but a small part of her knew that if she should accept his offer, if she were to be asked how the project was going, then it would be satisfying to have something more than ham sandwiches with Dorothy to report. As usual at such points in her research, Lydia sifted through her notes, rearranging them, refreshing her mind and re-making her list of outstanding questions. Still at the head of the list was Bertie Dix-Myers. She had looked in every place she could think of to find some trace of his existence, but all she had was what she had started with, his photos in the RAF album. She examined them again, minutely, looking for some missed clue, but she found none. Her notes confirmed that she had found no birth entry for him under Joslin or Myers or Dix-Myers. She had looked for Albert, Herbert and Hubert, for Bertram and Bertie, each with the same result.
Which meant either he was not registered, was missing from the index, or had been registered under another name. Unless of course he had been born abroad, in which case her search was certainly doomed to failure and she might as well not waste any more time on it. She had checked marriages until the end of the war and war graves too. Another possibility crept into her thoughts. She could have simply missed him, the depressing doubt that afflicts all such research. Had she really checked every page for every quarter for every year? Had she really thought to see if his name was added as an afterthought to the bottom of the typed lists? It was very easy to forget, and if she had, then there was no alternative but to start again, and while she was at it, she could see if Verity had fallen through the same crack. It was a daunting prospect. She thought of her little mistake in recording names from the graves around Cockermouth, how she might have not revisited them without Stephen’s encouragement. Here he was encouraging her again.

At the very moment Lydia typed in ‘1922’ to retrieve the first year’s list of births she stopped. All this time she had seen Bertie through his mother’s eyes, seen how she took care over his photographs, wrote the captions with the same love as for her twins. She had seen him as Alethia’s son, whether by James or some previous liaison. Suppose he were not her son at all, but had come to take that place through love or circumstance? What if he were James’ son but not hers? The fleeting pleasure of the insight was lost as she realised she’d never checked if James and Barbara Vaughan had a child. When had Barbara died? She looked it up in an instant. It was the June quarter of 1920, too soon after marriage for them to have had a child. A stupid assumption, of course they could have had a child, they could have had a child whose birth had led to Barbara’s death. And so it was that she finally found Bertram A D Myers, registered in the same place and in the same quarter of the same year as his mother’s death. Lydia took an educated guess that the ‘D’ in ‘A D’ would be Dix, and noted how the Dix and the Myers showed signs of separating again. The certificate would tell her if the ‘A’ was Albert, as she had a feeling it might be.

The first thoughts that entered Lydia’s head as she blinked into Sunday morning were not of Stephen, nor his letter or anything about it. Her first thoughts were to question the wisdom of having drunk nearly a whole bottle of white burgundy the previous evening. She had intended only a glass or two, settled back in her chair and let her thoughts roam where they would while resisting any consideration of Stephen’s letter. Resistance was futile and a third glass led to a fourth. Before she went to bed she already knew she would find an excuse to say yes to him, find some reason to justify such a course of action to herself. So later, as she sipped coffee propped up on her pillows, it was no surprise to find that the decision had been made, she would accept, and do her best to overcome the difficulties of time, of dress, and of confidence that would result.

The day they were to meet arrived far too quickly. It was on her before she had time to breathe. For two weeks, her life had seemed a whirlwind compared to its normal steady pace. With reluctance at first, then with a growing abandonment she’d shopped for clothes, renewed her supply of makeup, agonised over her hair, and finally selected some shoes. What she had spent on herself in the last two years she now splashed in a matter of days. While she was trying on a third dress in a shop that she felt far too old for, she noticed her underwear in the mirror. It was as grey and tired as her skin was pallid. In a couple of places the fabric was beginning to part company with the seams. It should be replaced. Not that she had even contemplated the notion that it might be seen be anyone else, seen by Stephen, no, it simply needed replacing. But to do so now, at this particular moment in her life, wasn’t it just asking for trouble? Supposing that some development occurred to lead in that direction, the direction of trouble, wouldn’t the quality of her bra provide the resolve that she might need? She sagged at the prospect. No, there would be no new bra to go with the new dress, what was hidden would stay hidden.

Now it came to preparing herself, she realised that there were some items that she had not considered. Her hands would have benefited from some attention and it would have helped if she’d had more recent practice in making her face look something other than a painted doll. With only an hour to the appointed time she
decided to start again, this time using far less of everything. The result was not what she had hoped, but as she looked at her reflection she decided that it was passable and most certainly an improvement on the first attempt. She had finally settled on a loose fitting black dress with a modest neckline and sleeves just below the elbow. Lydia fervently hoped it would be appropriate to whatever the evening might hold. As a finishing touch she put on her one decent pair of earrings and necklace to match. They were handmade, silver, and had been a present from Michael on their first wedding anniversary. She had often worn them in those far off days. As she fixed the clasp, Lydia realised they had become just objects, she could like them for what they were, their associations and meaning had died. The thought gave her a certain liberation.