Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  The path returned to the river, whose surface was now opaque with rainfall. Poppy squelched on, encouraged by the memory that the village lay on the river so she wasn’t going to miss it. There ought to be signs of it now, surely. A figure appeared, moving towards her through the rain, a man, an old man, doddering along under the willows, with no hat, and no coat, and, now that he was almost on her and she could see, a bedroom slipper on one foot, and just a muddy sock on the other. The question about the distance to the village died on her lips.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered gruffly.

  ‘You shouldn’t be out in this,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, all right, all right, I’ll come back. I know when I’m beaten.’

  He took her by the shoulder and leaned heavily on her as he limped along. She spotted his other slipper lying in the path and persuaded him to put it on.

  ‘Bloody British weather,’ he said. ‘Never catch anything except a cold in this, I tell you. What’s the point?’

  His voice was humorous, military. His limp had become a shuffle. The path joined a road which ran on beside the river. A woman with an umbrella was hurrying away from them in the distance. Something about her gait, the panic and desperation of her movements, made Poppy call out.

  ‘I’ve got him! He’s here!’

  The woman turned, peered, and came back towards them.

  ‘Oh, thank God, where was he?’ she said.

  ‘Ah, Brenny,’ said the man. ‘Where’ve you been all this time? Just popped out to look for you.’

  ‘I found him on the footpath by the river,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ sighed the woman, without reproach but in tones of pure despair. ‘He usually goes the other way. Come under my brolly, darling, and we’ll take you in and get you dry.’

  There was a row of newish brick bungalows by the road, facing the river, only vaguely noticed till now. The woman held the umbrella over the man as they went through the gate of the tidy little garden. There was a 9 on the gatepost. This would be the road to Winchester. The man continued to grip Poppy’s shoulder and lean on her. She could feel how exhausted he was, how soon he would fall. The door of the house was open and somehow the three of them, moving together as if in a complex version of a three-legged obstacle race, manoeuvred themselves into the tiny hallway and on into the living-room, where Poppy and the woman, each holding the man by an elbow, lowered him into a chair.

  ‘That’s better,’ he mumbled. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’ ‘I’ll get some dry clothes,’ said the woman. ‘Keep an eye on him, will you?’

  She left. Poppy removed her anorak. Her clothes were wet through but not actually dripping. The room was very warm—they’d keep it like that for the man.

  ‘Just time for one more dance before the ferry goes,’ he said, and fell asleep.

  Poppy looked round the room. The green carpet was stained in places, but the furniture was good, walnut and mahogany, with brass fittings. Everything was polished and carefully kept, but the pieces were rather too large, or otherwise inappropriate for the living-room of a new brick bungalow in a row of others at the edge of a village. This was not the social context they had been made for.

  The woman came back with pyjamas and dressing-gown and—Poppy already realised that this was typical of her—dry jersey and slacks for Poppy.

  ‘I think we’re about the same size,’ she said. ‘We’ll put yours on the boiler.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. But I mustn’t stay. If you’re all right …’

  ‘Nonsense. I think you may have saved my husband’s life. He could easily have fallen in the river. Usually he goes the other way, into the village, and someone sees him and brings him back, but you couldn’t expect anyone to be out in this. The least we can do is dry you off and then get Tony Waters to drive you home.’

  She was kneeling by the man while she spoke, removing his slippers and socks. Then she stood and began to ease his arms out of the sleeves of his jacket. He mumbled occasionally but did nothing to help, so Poppy went to the other side of the chair and together they stripped him of his clothes.

  ‘You’re so kind,’ said the woman. ‘I can do it alone—and when he’s awake, of course. But when he’s like this it’s a bit of a struggle. He used to stand six foot four, you know, and weighed sixteen stone. Not an ounce of fat, either.’

  He was soaked right through to his underclothes, thermal vest and long johns.

  ‘I’ll do this bit,’ said the woman. ‘If you wouldn’t mind looking the other way for a couple of minutes …’

  Poppy turned. She could have used the opportunity to put on the dry clothes the woman had brought for her, but she was determined not to stay, to be out of the house as soon as she’d helped get the man dressed again. There was a half-oval table against the wall, with photographs on it in silver frames, the head and shoulders of a handsome young woman, three wedding scenes, grandchildren. Behind her she heard the guggle of an incontinence bag being changed. The bridal couple on the left were the Simpsons, he already balding and bearded, she with her coarse mane, tough little chin and royal-visit smile.

  ‘Those are my daughters,’ said the woman by way of a signal that she’d finished with her privacies. ‘The eldest never …’

  ‘Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me anything! Please.’

  Poppy realised that she’d shouted. She turned and saw that the woman—Mrs Ogham-Ferrars—was staring at her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not mad. I’ll just help you get his clothes on, then I’ll go.’

  They dressed the man in silence, working easily, like a team who were used to each other. When they’d finished Mrs Ogham-Ferrars took his hand and his fingers closed round hers in his sleep.

  ‘I ought to send for the doctor,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t seem fair on a Saturday. I don’t think he got cold inside. He can’t have been out that long. I don’t think he’s ready to go yet. He’s still surprisingly strong, in spite of the operations. Will you tell me what’s been going on?’

  Poppy stared at her. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars met her gaze with the unrufflable calm of true despair.

  ‘You were coming to see us, weren’t you?’ she said. ‘I think I’d guessed already, but when you shouted just now … The police telephoned yesterday, you see, about Laura. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but I know it’s got something to do with Jonathan. It’s always him. I told them he was in Canada. That’s what I usually say. What’s he done now? Please. I do think I’ve got a right to know.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’

  Mrs Ogham-Ferrars looked down at her husband.

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ she said. ‘When he’s in one of his clear patches. It’ll be such a weight off his mind, just for a bit. He won’t remember, but perhaps if I keep telling him … What happened? Please? I’d much rather find out from you than anyone else.’

  Poppy told her everything, except the possibility of the two deaths being murders. Her clothes steamed. The man twitched and muttered in his sleep like a dreaming dog. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars sat on the arm of his chair, one hand still in his and the other round his shoulder. When Poppy had finished she shook her head.

  ‘I sometimes think we loved each other too much,’ she said. ‘We met at a dance, and by the end of the evening we both knew that neither of us would ever look at anyone else, and we didn’t. Even now, when everything seems so dreadful and we’re just waiting for the end, I know it’s all been worth it. Only really we shouldn’t have had any children. We didn’t have anything to spare for them. All we wanted was each other, to be together and do and see things together. The girls were fun, of course, when they were small, but Jonathan … I should never have gone through with it … they had just changed the law, of course, but David … there’s no point in making things up about what might have happened, is the
re? And anyway, it’s over now. You haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘Poppy Tasker.’

  ‘Were you coming to see me?’

  ‘No. I mean, that’s what I meant to do when I left London, and then I realised I hadn’t got any right, and then …’

  ‘I’m glad you did. I’m glad it was you. You’ll at least let me give you a cup of tea, won’t you, and I’ll see if Tony’s free to drive you to the station. He’s not really a taxi, but he does it for me once a month when my eldest daughter, Rosemary, takes a couple of days off—she’s a management consultant and can work as it suits her—and looks after David while I go up and stay at my next daughter’s—that’s Marigold—I don’t know if you know her. She lives quite near you, I suppose, but she isn’t often in England.’

  ‘I’ve met her, and her husband, and I know your grandson quite well because he’s in the play-group. He’s a very nice little boy.’

  ‘Isn’t he? I hardly know the others. I never imagined I’d mind … Now I’ll put the kettle on if you’ll keep an eye on David. He’ll wake up for the tea, and then, for about ten minutes … you’ll see.’

  It worked as she said. At the chink of the tea-tray Mr Ogham-Ferrars opened his eyes, sat up and looked around.

  ‘Fallen asleep again?’ he said. ‘Bad sign. Bad sign. Hello, I don’t know you, do I? Been out in the rain? Hey! What the hell am I doing in my jim-jams? It can’t be bedtime yet.’

  ‘You went out for a walk without your mac, darling, and Mrs Tasker found you and brought you back. You might have fallen in the river and drowned.’

  ‘Good riddance. Oh, Lord, the things I get up to. Bloody nuisance all round, aren’t I? Come to think of it, there was a fellow called Tasker, ah yes, Djibouti. You remember, Brenny, he’d been in the Fore-and-Aft alongside me at Salerno, and we worked out we’d actually been taken into the same field hospital on the same bloody day, only we hadn’t met then, and then we go and bump into each other at Djibouti, of all places. Lord, we had hangovers next day. If ever you find yourself in Djibouti, Mrs Tasker, don’t have a night out on the local plonk. Brenny swore she was only having a migraine, of course. Any connection?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It would be someone in my husband’s family, but I don’t remember any of them being soldiers.’

  ‘Long shot, anyway. Ah, tea. Maketh glad the heart of man, as that American preacher-fellow used to say. Belonged to a sect who swore that every word of the Bible was dead true, every darned word of it, except when it had anything good to say about alcohol. Know what the good Lord did by way of a miracle at Cana, Mrs Tasker? He turned bread into raisin cake. Fact.’

  He lifted his cup with quivering hands and sucked enthusiastically at it. Life energy shone from him, not just in the rattling anecdotes but in the feeling he gave of enjoyment of everything that happened, the hot liquid, the company, his memories, even the fact of his having gone rambling and helpless off in the rain. You could see what fun he must have been as a companion, easy and sweet-natured, and how Mrs Ogham-Ferrars could complete a wholly self-sufficient pairing with him; and now how the memory of such a life could give her the courage to see it through with dignity.

  ‘And what are you doing in these promiscuous parts, Mrs Tasker? Not that our charming little river has much in common with the great grey greasy Limpopo, eh?’

  ‘I was just out for a walk and got caught in the rain,’ said Poppy. ‘And then I bumped into you and your wife was kind enough to ask me in.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Ah, well.’

  And the flame had died, without even a last flicker. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars took his cup from him and put it on the tray, then gave him a digestive biscuit which he broke in two and ate slowly. They drank their tea in silence. A car hooted in the road.

  ‘That’ll be Tony,’ said Mrs Ogham-Ferrars. ‘Are you sure I can’t lend you some clothes? You could always take them down to Marigold’s and I could collect them on my next jaunt.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’m almost dry. Goodbye, Mr Ogham-Ferrars.’

  He mumbled what might have been a farewell. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars­ went with her to the door.

  ‘I suppose I ought to tell someone about Jonathan,’ she murmured. ‘Marigold’s still in England. She could go and identify the body. She wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Do you know who to ring?’

  ‘The policeman left me a number. He had an odd name.’

  ‘Caesar?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Ask to talk to Detective Inspector Firth, if you can. He’s very sympathetic, I think. And if you can get away without saying anything about me being here …’

  ‘I’ll see. And thank you for coming, Mrs Tasker. Goodbye. And … oh, I don’t know if I ought to say this, but I’m going to. Don’t waste a second. Not one second. It’s all so precious, and there’s never as much of it as you think.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  The train was fairly empty and Poppy had a four-seat section to herself all the way to London. Passengers got on, but none of them seemed to fancy sitting with a bedraggled, wet-wool–smelling middle-aged woman. Poppy thought about time, and there never being as much of it as you think, and the trout, or perhaps grayling, in the river. David Ogham-Ferrars would have been a child like Toby, she fancied. Very like Toby, handsome, strong, eager, intelligent, thoughtful, experimental. With Janet’s genes in him Toby could grow to six foot four, sixteen stone, and not an ounce of fat. You could put the two images into either end of a family album and almost without further help reconstruct the arching life between. Not really, of course, any more than you could put, say, little Pete Simpson and dead Jonathan at the opposite ends of some short and ill-built span and know that that was what must happen. Being an afterthought, an accident, with a doting nanny and uninvolved parents didn’t necessarily make you an inadequate, or a paedophile. It might drive you instead to self-sufficiency, ambition, achievement. Marigold Simpson, for instance—of course she’d had siblings nearer her own age, and had had to compete with them for affection and attention, the scraps and leavings of their parents’ passion for each other. Hence the chin, and the will, and the chilliness.

  Was it doomed to happen in certain families, generation after generation, passed on, almost as if in the genes, this stunting? Even Toby? Could you see it already latent in him, and trace it back through Hugo’s coldness and Janet’s outward-turning energies, and then through Poppy and Derek (they’d chosen each other, after all, and not just for a shared interest in music, surely) right back to Poppy herself being an afterthought, late-born, fatherless, and with a mother obsessed at first with her ailments and then with her Old Spots? Was this what the mutterer beneath the stairs foresaw?

  Poppy shook herself inwardly, though the train was for once well heated and she was steaming peacefully. She wasn’t going to start brooding yet again on her own emotional inadequacies, without even a gin bottle to hand. She’d walked that path too often. Yes, she’d been too timid to give her emotions much chance, but one day … One day soon it would have to be … stop it!

  The Simpsons. Had they literally not been aware that Jonathan was living, and had died, so close? Well, they hadn’t been in England that much, and the family seemed to have written him out of their lives (his mother usually told people he was in Canada—no photograph on the half-oval table) and you couldn’t imagine Mr Simpson wanting to have much to do with such a brother-in-law .

  ‘Brother-in-law.’

  The still-damp hair on Poppy’s nape prickled erect. She was aware of having spoken the words aloud—the man across the aisle had glanced up from his crossword. She dropped her eyes and gazed at her folded hands. Not John Capstone’s brother-in-law—Jonathan’s. Laura had just said ‘his’. The him in her life was Jonathan, but Mrs Capstone had understood it as the him in her own life. John and Mr Simpson were bringing heroin into the country together.
>
  No. Not John. She made the effort of trust and reconstructed in her mind what had happened the evening before. His excitement had been real. Something was about to happen, soon, involving a lot of money; he could even have prepared his speech about his Romania of the mind; much of what he’d said could have been true, merely omitting the fact that one of the sources of his employers’ treasure hoard was using diplomatic bags and such to smuggle drugs—they certainly weren’t above that, by the sound of it. But no. It still didn’t fit. It was like a piece of a jigsaw which you try and try to lock into the obvious-seeming place, but one small projection refuses to locate—not anything John had said, but Mrs Capstone. ‘Not if it’s illegal. Not in any country. I’ve always said that. I can’t afford it.’ Of course John could have been cheating on her still, but he wasn’t. That was an absolute. Laura had just been lashing out, accusing everyone of whatever Jonathan might have told her.

  Still, he must have told her something, about someone. The Simpsons, for instance. What did they do for a living? They lived in a little house close to the railway, its roof leaking in several places, but at the same time they kept a yacht in Turkey and sent three children to boarding-schools—and where was all the money they must have made from the house in Addison Crescent?

  Mr Simpson, standing by the rain-smeared window:

  ‘What did he look like, then? White? Yellow? Green?’ A weird question, unless he already knew, knew how Jonathan had died, wanted to check that the signs of apparent suicide were still visible. And Marigold Simpson too, how quickly she’d snatched at the notion of accident or suicide, and the body being moved. How unextraordinary it had seemed to her. She’d known, too. She’d known … actually eased the needle into the vein with her own steady hands while he held her brother still? … Shadows, imaginings, but they’d known all the same, both of them, how Jonathan had died.

  Doomed, hopeless, inadequate Jonathan. Ah, let him at least have been happy, once, for a while, happy in his bond with solemn young Laura, complete to each other for those first few years. He’d have been too young to remember, but still … let it have been the case. (Can you pray for something to have happened, in the past? She still hadn’t sent a Christmas card to her brother Philip in his seminary—it would be something to ask him, for once. He’d know.) No photographs anywhere, no images, no imprint. They’d taken the ones Laura had hoarded, all her past too, the pictures of other families who had been her life. There’d been no time to pick and choose. All gone.