Some Deaths Before Dying (34 page)

Then, in some respite from the horrors of captivity, Fish had, deliberately and for his own amusement, seduced him. That was
a guess, but it fitted the structure. It was the same thing as stealing the caviare, the real satisfaction lying not in the
physical pleasure but in shaping the world however Fish chose, despite the desires and duties of anyone else. Jocelyn would
probably have told himself that this was only the same situation that he had known at Eton, a temporary imbalance, something
that could be put aside when he returned to the sanity of peacetime.

But he would have known in his heart that was not true. It was altogether different, because this time he had broken faith,
and he had done so because Fish had discerned, released and revealed to him his “true” nature.

Furthermore, though he may never have known this, his self-discovery on the Cambi Road hadn’t only been of his sexual nature.
That was superficial and partial. If he’d been an out and out homo-sexual the pleasure in their marriage would never have
been there in the first place. His nature, presumably, was bisexual, and if that had been all there was to it he should have
been able to make love to Rachel as he had done before. Fish could do it, giving Leila pleasure or withholding it as he chose,
and getting his own pleasure from the power to do so. But Fish wasn’t bothered about honour. What haunted Jocelyn as they
lay together was the knowledge that he could no longer make love to Rachel in good faith.

Oh, Christ, if only he could have brought himself to tell her!

Once honour is broken it will not mend. All you can do, all Jocelyn did in the end, is to use your will to hold yourself as
near as you can into the shape that honour would have dictated. The result, like a dubbed voice on a foreign film, is never
exactly right, and every now and then it is betrayingly wrong.

Sometime in the early ’fifties Fish had started his boys’ club, characteristically presenting it not as a public-spirited
act but as a chore taken on to please a group of wealthy clients. He would have had secret amusement in telling so much more
of the truth than he seemed to be doing, for the clients’ interest would have been less in the boys’ welfare than in their
availability. And, being Fish, he might have got pleasure from the hidden power of pimping for the plutocracy.

But how on earth had Jocelyn allowed himself to be drawn back in?

Man of honour, however willed? Self-disgust, perhaps. No, not quite that. But say to yourself, “I have betrayed the person
who is dearest in the world to me. How did I come to do this?” Then tell yourself, “Because it is my nature. That is what
I am. It can’t be changed.” “Prove it.” “Very well, if I must.” Let there be an overwhelming reason for the broken faith,
retested and renewed on visits to London, rather than the self-knowledge of honour needlessly lost forever. And let it not
be an attraction towards a particular person, an intellectual and social equal, a long-term mistress as it were, who happened
to be male. No, let the need be for nothing emotional or companionable. Let it be purely and explicitly physical, nothing
to do with the inward self that still, in its way, loved Rachel more than anyone or anything in the world. Hence the rough
trade, the young man.

Well, perhaps.

Fish, in the end, had run through Leila’s money and started to take his clients’. Questions had begun to be asked, and to
clear himself in the emergency he had turned to the Cambi Road funds and then, because he’d needed to act in a hurry, been
found out sooner than he’d planned for. Perhaps all along he’d intended to turn from pimping to blackmail—it was the obvious
next step—but he wasn’t yet ready. The urgent need was to let Jocelyn understand what Fish’s exposure would cost him, so he’d
delayed him in London and sent the young man to Forde Place on the earlier train. “Don’t tell her anything,” he’d have said.
“All I want is for her to start asking questions when the old boy gets home. Here’s the key.” (Yes, the one that Jocelyn had
niggled about having cut for him.) Perhaps, again, such a move had been part of the long-term plan, but in the rush to act
there had not been time for full preparation and rehearsal.

So the young man had got it wrong. Fatally.

And so too had Fish. He had pushed Jocelyn to his sticking point: Rachel herself. It was not because she had killed the young
man, though this, if he had learnt of it, would have given Fish a monstrous extra leverage for blackmail. It was that Fish
had tried to involve Rachel in Jocelyn’s own loss of honour. One way or another, an end must now be made.

The details were unknowable. What had Jocelyn said to Sergeant Fred and Voss? Surely he couldn’t have told them everything,
but he had the young man’s body to explain as well. (Sergeant Fred had recognised him from the photograph, but that didn’t
necessarily mean that he’d seen him alive.) That Rachel herself had killed him? No, for then Voss wouldn’t have said what
he had to her in Parkhurst. But none of that would have been necessary. He could simply have said, “I am in trouble, and I
need your help, I can’t give you reasons, so I must ask you to trust me. There is a dead man to be disposed of, and there
is Major Stadding to be dealt with. The trouble I’m in is his deliberate doing.”

They would have taken him at his word. Voss, after all, owed him a life.

So between them they had collared Fish. How? It didn’t matter. But Doug Rawlings might have had something to do with it. There’d
been that odd look from Voss when his name had come up on her prison visit. Ah, had Jocelyn helped him buy his own cab, by
way of reward? Possibly. And then Essex, and a place Voss knew of where bodies could be lost, for a price. Two prices. First,
Voss’s own four-year imprisonment, paid to the man called Brent for the use of the facility. Second, what Jocelyn had given
Voss to allow him to rescue his niece from the Elect of God, and provide a home for her and her family.

And there they had killed Fish Stadding.

When it was all over, after Jocelyn had come back to Rachel with the plaster on his cheek and dealt with what else needed
to be dealt with, he had gone to see Simon Stadding and told him that he had killed his father (oh the willed attempt at honour,
rather than the integral thing!).

What else had he said? He must have given more reasons than he had to Voss and Fredricks, but not that Rachel had killed the
young man.

Had he simply said that Fish had been trying to blackmail him, through Rachel, and for her sake one of them had to go? And
then, “Well, I am in your hands. You may go to the police if you want. I won’t deny the charges.”

That would have been nonsense, of course. Jocelyn must have been almost wholly confident that Simon would keep his silence,
if only for Leila’s sake, and Anne’s. But the honourable thing would have been to keep his secret to himself, and when the
day came to take his daughter down the aisle at his proudest pace—except that it wouldn’t have worked out like that, with
Leila’s intransigence after the disappearance of Fish.

But in any case that was not enough. It would, perhaps, have been a reason for not telling the world what had happened, but
for not telling Anne…? No. Impossible.

And now Simon kept complaining that he had bad blood, as if he’d always had it—had been born with it, inherited it. What did
that mean? It meant that Jocelyn must have told him how far his father’s baseness had extended beyond mere abuse of funds.
Told him in such a way that he had then decided that his own blood was tainted…Oh, heavens! Jocelyn had adored Anne almost
to the point of obsession. Was it conceivable—he wouldn’t have done it consciously, surely—but was it conceivable that at
some hidden level he had taken the chance to satisfy his own unacknowledged jealousy by breaking the engagement, done so by
explaining the leverage that Fish had attempted to use on him, something that Simon would feel he could never tell Anne? Oh,
God! Let it not have been so!

Poor Simon, poor Anne. They were like chance passers-by—a couple on their honeymoon, perhaps—caught in the blast when a car
bomb explodes, detonated in a cause that has nothing to do with them. For a while Rachel lay and grieved for them, a loss
unmitigated by time. It might have happened yesterday.

Then, thinking about what had now become of Simon—how the Simon she had known, witty, charming, thoughtful, sensitive, seemed
to have gone completely, to be replaced in the same body (altered by illness, but still the same body) by a dreary and exploitative
old whiner—it struck her that there are many ways of dying before the nurse comes to close your eyelids and lay your body
straight, and that her own way was by no means the worst, nor Sergeant Fred’s, though most people would have thought of those
as deaths-in-life: she trapped in her only just not yet purulent carcase; he…oh, it was strange, Rachel thought. What made
her herself, Rachel and no one else? What but the shelf upon shelf of ordered memories of all that had composed and shaped
her life? To take those away from her, that would be the true death. But Sergeant Fred still moved, talked and held himself
in a manner that asserted the living essence of who he was and had been and would remain, like some saga-hero, living flesh
still, but riding his skeleton horse among the wraiths of the underworld.

Whereas Simon, though his mind was still his own, did not. Yes. That was worse.

And Jocelyn? Honour dead, but willing himself into the modes and speech of honour, and to such disastrous ends? No. Rachel
loved him too much, loved him both before that death and after, loved him even now. She would not bring herself to judge him.

Instead she returned to the conclusion of her earlier thoughts and began deliberately to compose the event into visual images,
as definite and solid as she could make them. It felt necessary to do this, in order to be able to put the whole thing aside
and have done with it. She knew her imaginings to be invention, but they were all that she could now have, so it was up to
her to give them the kind of inward truth that was there in the photographs in her albums. Those two-dimensional black and
white and grey shapes on paper were none of them the thing they showed, but its essence was in them.

So, now, the marshes. Early morning, a salty wind off the North Sea. Gulls. A flat landscape crossed by dikes. Smoke from
some town on the level horizon. A car crawls down a rutted track on the top of a dike and stops. Four men get out, two of
them holding a third by the elbows. They climb down the dike to a squelchy patch of turf. One man, tall and athletic, stands
aside. A second, taller but bonier, paces out a distance, marking each end by digging his heel several times into the turf.
He has a rectangular box under his arm. The third man guards the prisoner, an elegant, well-fed figure who watches these proceedings
with curiosity, like a passing stranger who has stopped to see what’s up.

The tall man goes to the burly one and opens the box. The burly man takes out a pistol, loads it methodically, puts it back
and repeats the process with the second pistol. The tall man takes the box to the prisoner, who chooses a pistol and allows
himself to be led to one of the marks. The burly man goes to the other and takes the second pistol when it is brought to him.
The two duellists face each other. The tall man moves to one side, halfway between them, and the guard stands opposite him,
so that the four of them mark out the four corners of a square. The tall man raises his right arm. The duellists level their
guns. The arm falls. In the silence of her imagination Rachel hears no shots, but sees the smoke fluff suddenly from the muzzles,
and the prisoner stagger back and fall.

Nobody moves for a while. Then the tall man goes to the fallen body and inspects it. He picks up the pistol, puts it in the
box and takes it to the other duellist. Blood covers the lower half of the duel-list’s left cheek. He stares at the box, takes
it and closes it, then hands the pistol he has used to the tall man, speaks briefly and turns away. Rachel hears no words,
but knows what he has said. He never wants to see it again.

Why? Because it is the weapon he has used to kill a man to whom his life has been bound for almost thirty years, whom he had
thought his closest friend but found to be his secret enemy?

In that case, why the absurdity of the duel? (Forget the apparent frivolity of using the Laduries. Fish was a reasonable shot,
and had often played with them on visits to Forde Place. What other pair of fairly matched weapons was available?)

Honour gone finally mad?

Not in that way, no. But it was a final, despairing attempt at the recovery of lost honour, an acknowledgement that Jocelyn’s
own shame was in some ways equal to Fish’s, or greater, and that he couldn’t therefore kill the man as an executioner. Each
must be given an equal chance. (And no doubt he had plans laid out for what was to happen if he was the one who died.)

And only when it was done had he discovered that honour was still unsatisfied, could never now be satisfied, because it was
dead. Long dead on Cambi Road.

Poor darling.

Rachel fell asleep to the imagined yelping of the gulls.

S
he slept peacefully, a huge stint, and woke in the middle of the afternoon. Dilys cleaned her up, made her a delectable cup
of Oolong, fed her, and put on the new talking book, about traumatised soldiers during the First World War. Worth listening
to, but Rachel barely did so.

All that, fact or fiction, was over and done with, past. There was only a scrap of future left for her. She thought about
that. First, today, while her voice still worked…

Flora came, cheerfully fussed about one of her dozen godchildren.

“Hello, Ma. Do you remember Zelda Warkley? The one with the pointy ears, and her kids have got them too—it must be one of
these gene things. Of course you remember, they came here when they were small and we had to fish Donald out of the river—he’d
actually got through the netting—and he’s still like that. Zelda was just the same, but it doesn’t stop her worrying about
Donald. I got a letter from her this morning. Apparently he’s in Brisbane—is that Australia or New Zealand?—not that it matters,
provided he’s on the other side of the world. He went out there to sell this new sheep dip, and I do think somebody might
have asked first, but they’d already made it illegal—it’s terrific for the wool, but the shearers started getting Gulf War
syndrome—so Zelda’s writing round all her friends asking if they know anyone who could give Donald a job—anything to get him
out of England, really. I don’t suppose you can think of anyone who might have a job for a totally charming layabout with
pointy ears? What’s up, Ma? You’ve got one of your teases brewing—I can always tell, you know.”