A Habit of Dying (23 page)

Ready or not, she would have to do. It was a few minutes walk up into the centre of Oxford but it was raining, and she wished she’d been ready earlier. Too late to call a taxi, she set off through the puddles, her shabby winter coat completely at odds with the new finery beneath. She had sacrificed her usual bag for a smaller, dressier one that had lain unused at the bottom of her wardrobe for several years, a present from her brother and Joan if memory served her right. The long straps of the handles were too wide to sit well in the hand and yet were too short to be put over her shoulder. Once the evening was over it would return to the wardrobe to rest in peace for a few more years. As she neared St Giles, she was thankful her choice of shoes had leaned toward sensible rather than high fashion. Even so, they were tighter than she remembered them being in the shop. Approaching The Randolph it was impossible not to think of that moment when she had slunk into the shadows rather than risk speaking to the man she was about to meet inside. He could not possibly have guessed the irony in suggesting they meet there, where he was staying, before their meal. With as much poise as she could muster she ascended the steps, horribly aware that hers was not the million-dollar hair and the glittering beauty she had last seen with Stephen on those self same steps.

Loud young men in dinner jackets and willowy models sheathed
in silk filled the foyer. Lydia stared about her, desperate to see a familiar face. She quickly slipped off her coat, partly to give herself something to do and partly to fold the offending garment over her arm.

‘Hello, Lydia,’ said a familiar voice behind her.

She turned and looked straight into the face of Gloria Fitzgerald.

‘Blimey Lydia, look at you! You dark horse, you. Who’s the lucky man? Are you at this bash tonight?’

Lydia was too shocked to speak, her mouth moved and a low noise emerged but it had no meaning.

‘Come on, what’s the deal?’

‘I . . . I’m meeting someone, someone I know, someone I met, not a man.’

‘Are you serious? You’re meeting a woman dressed like that? Wow! this has to be seen.’

‘No, no, it is a man, just not a man like that.’

‘Yeah, right. Not a man that you get dressed up for, not a man you wear makeup for. For Christ’s sake Lydia, give me some credit will you.’

‘Ok, well, I just thought that in a place like this it would be better, you know, to dress up a bit.’ Lydia was grasping for some reason to be there, some plausible excuse for the position in which she found herself.

‘Wait a minute. You’ve got the day off tomorrow haven’t you? You crafty . . . .’

Whatever Gloria was about to call her was cut short by Stephen Kellaway who had arrived at their side unnoticed.

‘Hello Lydia, good to see you again,’ and then without pause he turned and held out his hand to Gloria, ‘Stephen Kellaway, pleased to meet you.’

‘Oh and pleased to meet you too, Stephen Kellaway,’ responded Gloria, pushing back her shoulders to ensure that her breasts held front and centre stage.

Lydia wished that she had never agreed to the idea, the meeting, the venue, any part of it. Her cheeks flamed and she yearned for the floor to open and swallow her, but no such miracle was forthcoming.

‘Hello Stephen,’ she said, with as much composure as she could gather, ‘This is Gloria Fitzgerald, someone I work with.’ Even in her confusion, she baulked at the word ‘colleague’.

To Lydia’s immense relief Stephen at once recognised the position and took immediate charge. Afterwards she wondered if he had watched her encounter with Gloria and summed it all up before he came across to them.

‘Gloria, I don’t wish to appear rude, but we really need to be getting along. You will excuse us won’t you? Nice to have met you.’ And with that he gently steered Lydia back towards the entrance, leaving an amazed and frustrated Gloria in their wake.

A taxi took them the short distance up the Woodstock Road to The Lemon Tree, recommended, Stephen had said, by a friend. He’d booked a table although on a Thursday night he need not have bothered, there were few diners, and while they sipped aperitifs, they had the little bar to themselves. It took Lydia a few minutes to recover herself from the embarrassments of The Randolph, and she groped for conversation before she recognised that it wasn’t necessary. She let the silence grow until it was comfortable, relaxing into his company.

‘Lydia, I think the first thing to say is thank you for coming. I did not really know the best way to get in touch and ask you.’

‘It was lovely to get your letter, and kind of you to think of me. Do tell me what you think will be of interest to me at the college tomorrow.’

‘Ah, the conference. Yes, I hope you enjoy it. It’s put on by The Forensic Science Society, there are some interesting topics and good speakers. But like all these affairs, it’s the coffee time conversations and lunchtime asides that make the day.’

‘It sounds a little above my head, but if you think I’ll enjoy it then I’ll be glad to come and listen.’

‘Good, though I have just realised that I have left the details, your pass and so on, back at the hotel. You must remind me to give them to you later.’

Lydia saw that she had only half remembered the easy smile, the economy with words, the lithe movement. Neither did she
recall him looking as attractive, no, not so much attractive as distinguished, as he did now in his linen summer jacket, sage shirt open at the collar, slender hands holding a gin and tonic. ‘Smart-casual’ might have been coined for him, and yet there was a distinct touch of academia about him too.

‘Stephen, I was wondering, just how did you find me? Did you get my address from the hotel?’

He looked at her quizzically for a brief moment, then smiled and shook his head a fraction. ‘Nothing so clever, Lydia. I looked you up in the phone book.’

‘The phone book?’

‘Yes, well, the online version. You of all people should know there are very few ‘Silverstreams’ in Oxfordshire. Two in fact. One in Banbury I think, and you in Oxford.’

‘Oh.’ The phone book, yes, how blindingly obvious. And she was the one who secretly thought of herself as the great detective.

He was very keen to know how the Joslin saga was unfolding and once he had Lydia started, all her discoveries tumbled out over their meal. She picked up where they had left off in Cumbria, telling him all about Dorothy and her mother, how she had written to two hundred Joslins, identifying ‘B’ as Phoebe, Alethia and James, Albert and Hannah. Only at a couple of points did Stephen break her flow with a question, for the rest, he remembered enough of the story to pick it all up again as she went along.

‘And just this week, after I heard from you, I had a very interesting excursion. You know, one of the real pleasures of all this is that it takes me down different paths, to places and events that I would know nothing about. And if I choose to linger a little in a place because it is interesting then I can, because there is no deadline, nothing depends on what I do.’

‘A luxury, indeed, and the better to be enjoyed since you recognise it. So where did you go this week?’

‘The thing is, I really wanted to have something to tell you, something more than a few more certificates ordered, something interesting. The whole thing had suddenly gone a little flat, I might have just given it all up, then your letter jerked me back to life and
I solved one problem easily enough when I saw my own stupid mistake. Then I had a brilliant stroke of luck.’

‘Luck? Someone once said that the harder he worked, the luckier he got.’

‘Well, I was looking for Bertie, the one who was Alethia’s stepson, in the RAF and I’d looked before and there was nothing, and I was just following my nose through all sorts of different places and found all this information about prisoners of war. There’s reams of it, some of the survivors still have reunions, they even invite their old guards from the camps. It seems extraordinary but apparently they do. Anyway, I started reading all about a camp called Stalag Luft 3, it was fascinating and horrible too, they just lined up a whole group of prisoners who had escaped and shot them. And among all the information was this little link to a site with lists of RAF POWs. And he was there, Bertie Dix-Myers was right there. He spent almost the whole war as a prisoner.’

Stephen smiled and studied her face, flushed with excitement even in re-telling the tale. He had been right to make contact with her again, despite his misgivings. Her brief note of acceptance had given nothing away, no clue as to her feelings, but the acceptance alone had surely said something. He realised she was looking at him with expectation of a reply. ‘Yes, that’s very good. I don’t know where luck comes into it, though.’

‘There’s more! Stalag Luft 3 was the one where they dug the tunnels.
The Great Escape
. Tom, Dick and Harry they called them.’ She saw that he was looking blank. ‘It was a film, had Steve McQueen in it, it was very famous,’ she implored.

‘Oh, right, yes,’ said Stephen, although he was thinking less about Steve McQueen and more about how wonderfully animated Lydia became, how passionate she could be once she warmed to her topic. Yet he could also see her fragility. Scarred, perhaps? Too often bruised by life? For the moment it did not matter.

‘And so, Lydia, what’s next? Where have you got to in this tale? I can see that Dorothy is the end of the road in one sense, but you still have the journal, and I’m guessing that is your real objective now.’

‘Yes, it is. I didn’t realise it for a long time, then when I saw that the albums would end up with Dorothy, one way or another, there was a moment when I didn’t want to let them go. I couldn’t let them go, not without understanding the journal.’ Lydia hadn’t put these thoughts into words before, not really been comfortable with such an admission, even to herself, but sitting with Stephen, lingering over the remains of an excellent meal in such sympathetic company, it all came into perspective, all made sense when she said it.

‘It was the journal that made me think of you when this conference came up.’ This was not entirely true, since he had been thinking of her quite often. ‘You might bring it along with you, one of the speakers will be talking about his speciality. I think his presentation is called Documents – Inferences and Evidence. Even if it isn’t immediately relevant I thought you would find it interesting and you never know what can come out of these things. It might even be fun.’

‘It’s a bit daunting, the idea of going to something like this.’

‘They’re just people, specialists I agree, but still just people. And nowhere near as . . .’ he was going to say passionate but changed his mind, ‘nowhere near as enthusiastic as you.’

Stephen had insisted she take a taxi home from the Randolph after they’d shared a final drink at the bar. Thankfully, the hotel had quietened, and better still, there was no sign of Gloria or her noisy companions. Time enough for that confrontation come Monday morning. He had given her the envelope with her pass and the conference programme, warning her that he would not be able to spend much time with her during the proceedings as he would be ‘on duty’. She was surprised to find herself too excited to settle immediately to sleep, so she sat in her bed, letting images of the evening with Stephen flow through her mind. She allowed herself a smile at the thought that the state of her underwear had not come into question. He had been good company, not seeming to mind that she had talked far too much. Although, hadn’t there been a moment, when she had looked at him and he was staring at her with, well, with an odd look in his eye, as if he wasn’t really
there at all? Maybe he had glazed over and hadn’t noticed that she’d stopped talking. At length she took out the folder from its envelope to study the timetable for tomorrow. Her pass looked important enough, an identity badge wrapped in a plastic case and clipped to a ribbon to hang round her neck. ‘Lydia Silverstream. Guest’. Precise and to the point. There she was too, on the list of forty or so delegates, where she could not help but notice that hers was the only name not followed by a series of initials.

Despite having lived in the city for so long, Lydia had never once ventured into any of the colleges, so she was interested to see that the precise venue was the Summer Common Room at Magdalen, which according to the little map was right in the heart of the ancient buildings of the college. The programme included a couple of coffee sessions, lunch at the college and a meal in the evening. Stephen hadn’t said anything about that. Maybe it was always implied for such gatherings. The topics for the conference included ‘
Detecting DNA – Latest Developments’
, ‘
Documents – Inferences and Evidence
’ exactly as Stephen had recalled, ‘
Fire Scene Secrets
’ and ‘
Evaluation and Interpretation of Evidence
’, this last item of the day being presented by Sir Stephen Kellaway, FFSS. Lydia read it again.
Sir
Stephen? She couldn’t grasp it for a moment. A small hole grew in her stomach and she had difficulty focusing on the paper in her hand. How could he not have told her, how could he let her get so out of her depth? Then, from being angry at the perceived deception, she became angry with herself for having been so stupid as to think she could move in his circles, go to his conference, chat over coffee with such men of science – ‘the leaders in their fields’ the programme said. She, Lydia Silverstream, ‘guest’, with her crushing ignorance, what made her think that she would have anything to share with these people, people with more letters after their names than she had in hers? Lydia clenched her hands so tightly that the programme tore as it scrunched in her fists.

Too agitated to stay in bed, she paced her tiny room for a minute or two, disoriented, dishevelled and disappointed. Slowly the turmoil subsided and she took herself down to the kitchen to make a hot drink. She needed something calming, something
soothing, and the mechanical action of preparing it occupied a small part of her brain. The cup warmed her hands, soothed her senses. She found a blanket and took herself to her chair, tucking her legs underneath her. A dull depression seeped into her and began feeding on itself. Even to recognise her reaction as irrational was to underline her lack of confidence. The pleasures of the evening were mirages made from her own naivety, now exposed for what they were. If only she had stuck to her instincts, stayed hidden in the shadows and watched from a distance. Whichever way she turned her thoughts to find some virtue in them, there was another telling her there was no virtue to be found. Should she still go to this conference? If she did then surely it would only be because she lacked the nerve, the confidence, to stay away. But if she were to stay away, it would be proof indeed that she lacked the confidence to go. The image of her beleaguered journal writer, unable to select a pen from the two available, swam briefly before her. For an instant Lydia felt his dilemma, the paralysis of choice, before the shaft of insight closed.