One Foot in the Grave

by Peter Dickinson

  Lady Treadgold stopped laughing.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know Tommy was my nephew,” she croaked. “Well, why should you? He was only my step-nephew in any case. … Funny, I came up here thinking I’d have to work round to what I wanted to ask you about, and not let you know that was really why I’d come, but now you’ve told me about Tommy. …

  For once, she hesitated. Pibble understood the dilemma. In her curious world view, his connection with her nephew’s death was a recommendation; not a total guarantee of trustworthiness, but analogous to an introduction to a tradesman—a decorator, say, or a couturier—who had done satisfactory work for a friend. But she didn’t want to offend Pibble by saying so. He produced his sweet-old-man smile.

  “Well,” she said slowly. “George told me something, or half-told me. While all these policemen are here, they might as well do something useful. I want you to get them to look into Archie Gunter’s death.”

  “Sir Archibald. …”

  A shadowy figure, wavering among the mistinesses of Pibble’s diminished perceptions when he had first come to Flycatchers. Wizened but military, with a remarkable bray.

  “Hasn’t it struck you, Mr. Pibble, that this is a very expensive way of dying? We don’t all have shipping millionaires to pay for us.”

  Pibble managed not to blink. If she knew that, then there might be tatters of truth in the rest of the gaudy gossip she was laying out before him.

  “Yes, of course, but …”

  “Then who is it expensive for, my dear man? Not for me, not for Archie Gunter, not even for poor Weeny. It doesn’t matter to us how much we spend, does it, provided the money doesn’t run out before we do? It’s our heirs, poor darlings, who suffer. Now, I knew Archie well. He was a fathead, but I liked him. He wasn’t a rich man—comfortable, but not by any means rolling—and those girls of his were as fond of him as anybody could be of a stuffed-shirt ambassador; not that I’m against the F.O.—does a very useful job, I say, getting all those clever-clever nincompoops out of the country and into embassies in places like Bolivia where they won’t do any harm. Don’t look at me like that, my dear man, I know what I’m talking about, what with poor old Treadgold being one of them until he had to retire after that business with the fertility dancers in Mali; all my fault, though as a matter of fact he was delighted to resign and take up breeding his bantams … bantams, Mali … never regretted a second of it, myself … and at least what I did was popular with the native section of the audience. … Ah, yes, they were fond of him, I suppose, but they had been looking forward to their nest egg. Perfectly happy about his staying here for a few months and then quietly fading away—they were about ten thousand quid fond of him, at a guess—but when he started getting better. … What’s the name of that play now, the one about the feller with the daughters, he starts off potty and finishes totally bonkers? Shakespeare, isn’t it? That’s the worst of the diplomatic service, having to go and sit through Shakespeare in Portuguese and Tamil and so on—bad enough in English, but in Hungarian! Lear, that’s the feller’s name, I must have watched it a dozen times and I always sided with the daughters. Why, my own father—I’ll tell you about him some other time. … Ah, yes, I remember one of Archie’s gels, the fat one, coming down here to take him away because he was better, and he dug his toes in. I saw her saying goodbye to him, and if ever a real woman could have played one of those Lear gels! You see what I’m driving at? Of course it was the other one who fixed things up, and there, five weeks later, poor Archie wasn’t even an ex-ambassador anymore …”

  “There’d be a post-mortem and inquest.”

  “No, not always. I don’t know about post-mortems, but we don’t always have inquests. Was there one on Archie? I think there was. But you’ve got to remember people are dying here all the time, so they don’t … you won’t remember Bertie Foster-Banks, of course. He died three years ago. No, Mr. Pibble, Bertie had never done anything in his life except gamble and play practical jokes on people, and he carried on like that after his stroke. He’d bet on anything, and since he couldn’t get out to the casinos he started making a book on which of the patients here would be the next one to pop off. Rank bad taste, and some of them wouldn’t touch it, but it gave the rest of us a bit of fun, trying to wheedle stable news out of the staff—you can imagine it, Mr. Pibble—and Bertie upsetting the odds with his hairy great spiders he’d bought from that joke shop in Holborn; not very popular with the doctors, you can imagine, but Bertie was a shareholder, so they couldn’t have him slung out, and some of the stuff-pots complained, and the nurses all hated him. Isn’t it interesting who they take against? I gather you’re quite a favorite, for instance. … But you see the trouble was, from Bertie’s point of view, that the book kept going broke because too many favorites romped home; the people who were supposed to die died. … But I was thinking only last week that supposing Bertie’d been running his book these last two years, he’d have cleaned up handsomely—we’ve had half a dozen outsiders popping off when they looked as if they might have years in them …”

  “Yes, but …”

  “It doesn’t have to be one of the doctors; in fact, I don’t see how it could be. Difficult for the nonresidents, and I know your friend Follick was in America when Archie died … of course, anybody could have wanted to do away with Bertie Foster-Banks. I can’t think how the shareholders put up with him, but Archie was a dear … suppose the shareholders … no … let’s assume it was one of the doctors, Mr. Pibble.”

  “But what do they …”

  “Get out of it? Money, Mr. Pibble. Money. Quite a lot of it. Listen, some old buffer, as it might be you, starts to get a bit doddery and his family decides to put him into kennels; that’s been going on for ages, but do you remember when that socialist woman with the tiresome voice changed the rules so that the Health Service couldn’t pay half the cost any longer? That’s when your next of kin started having delicate little conferences with your doctor. … ‘We’re all very fond of dear Daddy, but how long do you think. …’ Very tricky on both sides, to get it going, just like those tacky little chats one used to have at the beginning of a seduction before it all became so easy, though it’s funny how there were always some men … I remember a Belgian bishop in Florence, now, what was his name? The Hound of Heaven we called him, because he got you in the end—you’d start off in some contessa’s drawing room, eating little cress sandwiches and talking about Mussolini, and you’d find him staring at you as if you were a halibut he was thinking of buying and wondering how to cook, and you’d decide he was a gruesome little creep, but by the time you said goodbye he’d actually hypnotized you into going to look at his icon next morning, and you’d go, too, despite knowing just what you were in for, like a visit to the dentist. … Yes, somebody like that in your team and you’d soon have the dutiful daughters telling you exactly how fond they were of dear Daddy and getting out their checkbooks to prove it.”

  “But that’d be killing the goose …”

  “Plenty more geese around, and the golden eggs weren’t going to the doctors anyway. But suppose this daughter of yours goes and lays a nice little nest egg in a bank in Switzerland, tax-free, too—now, if you could get the mysterious Mr. Wilson to talk, he’d tell you all about the advantages of tax-free income.”

  “But which of the doctors …”

  “That’s what I’m telling you I want them to find out … but do you know, I’ve just had the most extraordinary idea about Mr. Wilson. I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner. I know who he is!”

  “Ur?”

  “Just about when you came here. The papers were full of it and then went dead. Now, let me see—I was interested because of Horace Trubshott—there was an informer, and the police were keeping him somewhere, and he was going to tell them enough to put half the criminals in London in jail … I wonder how I can find out if I’m right? … You won’t—no, of course not … but
there was that extraordinary woman Bunty Jaques got hold of; Bunty swore she was running her own gang. I could write to Bunty …”

  “I don’t think …”

  “Why on earth not? It’s a free country.”

  She stared at him, outwardly stony with affront, but just as obviously enjoying his dilemma.

  “Sir Archibald’s death,” he murmured. “You want them to take you seriously. Supposing you’re right about Wilson—I don’t know … you see. …”

  She smiled with malicious triumph.

  “I am right. I always know. I wish I could remember that woman’s name—something Jewish, I’m sure. …”

  “Toffs, they make me mad!” Foyle used to say. “Anything they do, it’s all right because it’s them doing it.” A newspaper photograph of some titled politico pouring champagne into the glass of a known villain, both men in gray toppers, Derby Day in full swing around them; another of a yacht-load of countesses, the very deck they lounged on paid for by heroin profits. “It gives the silly bitches a kick, going into the cage and stroking the tiger.” Foyle—he had been a tiger too. Perhaps it was that that had enraged him.

  Pibble sighed. It was far from impossible that one of Lady Treadgold’s circle had made friends with Mary Lou Isaacs.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “The police aren’t likely to be very cooperative if you spoil their plans by broadcasting Mr. Wilson’s real name, supposing you’re right about it.”

  She pouted, wanting it both ways.

  “They should do their duty, whatever I do,” she said.

  “On the other hand, if I were to tell them about your guess—still only supposing it’s right—it would incline them to take your views on Sir Archibald’s death more seriously.”

  “You mean they think I’m a stupid old woman,” she snapped. “Well, they’re wrong.”

  She ignored Pibble’s mumbles of protest by heaving herself from her frame, turning and stumping toward the door. Once there, she turned again and glared at him.

  “They’re wrong,” she said, her face now redder than ever with effort or anger. “I have all my wits about me. I may be stupid about the things the clever-clevers are good at—books and plays and stuff like that—but I know about people. People are my hobby—no, that’s not strong enough—they’re my food, they’re the air I breathe. I understand ’em, better than anyone you’ll ever meet. All right. To show your friends I’m not stupid, you tell ’em what I say about Mr. so-called Wilson. And to show you I’m not stupid, Mr. Pibble, I’ll tell you something else. When you marry Nurse Blayne, I’ll send you a wedding present.”

  Without waiting to see how the shaft struck, she banged out through the door and was gone.

  He closed his eyes and lay in a dull haze. The shaft had struck, but into a mind already half-anesthetized by the effort of argument. He was aware that she had said something of importance, not the nonsense about Gunter’s death; that in the clatter of gossip lay a distinct message, like a human signal in the mess of radio noise that spreads between the galaxies. Not long ago his tuning to such signals had been sensitive and precise, but now the knob that controlled it kept slipping, revolved uselessly. All he got was noise, but what noise! Huge energies split from a dying star. Grotesque.

  Without any lurch his mind was back among the grotesques of childhood. Ted Fasting, all buttocks, bent over his prize onions; Miss Amelia Barton, with the whiskery wart on her upper lip, lurked in her doorway to kiss any small boy she could grab; Joe Pritchett shuffled to the pub in his Sunday best, with yellow slippers on his feet. That was how children saw the world, filling it with neighbors and strangers who are cartoons of goodness, of absurdity, of danger. Later on, the cartoons came into drawing, lost their grotesqueness, were human: Ted Fasting’s buttocks less obvious than his guessed frustrations, Melly Barton’s wart hardly noticeable in the face that held her pleading eyes. But with age the grotesques return, joined now by a new comrade, the central figure, the observer who has been child and then adult and has registered the others all the time against a scale of normality which is himself, only to realize that after all he is as distorted as any of them, a tottering body inhabited by a wavering mind, absurd and obscene. Absurdity and obscenity creep along, and their trail slimes the past. Entrancing childhood was aimed at this end.

  “Had a good day?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You sound a bit tired.”

  “Lot of visitors. Two. Felt like a lot.”

  “It isn’t fair. Days when I’m here you go gaga, and days when I’m away you entertain the world with sparkling conversation.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Rather a beastly morning. I had to hold Mum’s hand while she gave her tenant notice. When Dad ran off she split the bungalow in two and let half of it. This bloke sounded all right, but he keeps trying to run her life for her. You know, the worst thing about it was how nice he was. He couldn’t understand why she wanted him to go, and actually she hasn’t any legal right to turn him out, but he was quite charming, and of course that made Mum feel miserable with guilt, so in the afternoon I took her to a garden center and she bought three clematises and two daphnes and what looked like a bramble and some other things that didn’t look like anything except twigs stuck into pots. That’s where I get it from, I suppose.”

  “Ur?”

  “Vegetables,” she said, enigmatically. She had been putting his clothes away as she spoke. She looked younger than ever in her T-shirt and jeans, a schoolchild almost. In three years she would be thirty, but time appeared not to have noticed her, to wander past year after year without bringing her up-to-date. She wasn’t supposed to be working tonight, or to come into the Residents’ Wings out of uniform, but she had managed to make a regular exception for him. He watched her with pleasure, and was instantly aware of a slight change in mood as she turned from the wardrobe.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “I couldn’t ask you yesterday. Your hat’s vanished.”

  “Blew off, I’m afraid, my dear. Sorry. Only thing I can call my own, as the lady said to Dr. Joh—”

  She had taken three quick strides across the room and was staring down at him.

  “You were going outside all along,” she whispered.

  “Ur?”

  “You were going outside all along. You put your hat on. That story about waiting for George in the kitchen and him not coming. …”

  She gripped his hand with both of hers and pressed it, hard, as though trying to extrude the truth from him. He lay still, gazing up, as the fences of his carefully reconstructed Eden withered and the desert rolled in. In a second she would guess the truth.

  “Coat,” he murmured. “Put on coat. Put on hat. Don’t think about it. Coat. Hat. See if you can find it, Jenny.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “Your friend Mike came yesterday. I told him you weren’t up to seeing him. I think he really wanted to talk to you. He said you were one of the best detectives he’d ever met, in a certain sort of case. He said this was it. … Jimmy, you knew all along, or guessed. You went to look.”

  “I want my hat. It’s mine.”

  He had summoned this wish as a defense against her, but not it was all he could think about. Without his own hat, his last worldly possession, he would cease to be Jimmy Pibble, become a zombie, animated only to wear the alien clothes in the cupboard, to be an object for Jenny to nurse, a fraction of the Flycatchers’ income.

  “Honestly!” she snapped, then laughed. “I’ll try to find your stupid hat for you. When did it blow off?”

  “Going along the colonnade.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember any of that.”

  He said nothing. She nodded and turned herself, like a car passenger who can only read a map in the direction of travel. Wind over her right shoulder—she knew that—he could almost feel its rus
h; could she too?

  “Out there,” she said, pointing decisively. “Those bushes by the croquet lawn. If it’s not there it’ll have blown all the way to Godalming.”

  “If they haven’t found it already,” he said.

  She swung back, head cocked on one side, half smiling and half frowning, improvising the charade.

  “If they have … I suppose you can still tell them it’s yours. That bit about your coat. You can make them believe that, can’t you?”

  “Ur.”

  “I think you’re quite extraordinary! This sort of thing and Dr. Johnson. What did he say to the lady, anyway?”

  “Madam, do you call my heart nothing?”

  She bent as if to look at his hand, which she was still clasping in hers. She lifted it slightly, put it down and let it go, then looked at him.

  “About his hat?”

  “No, about her coffeepot. But it’s the wrong way round. You’re supposed to be saying it to me.”

  “Do I have to call you madam?”

  “Ur.”

  Waking again. He was the yokel at the fair, tricked every time by the illusion. Under which flowerpot lurks the stuffed mouse? There, surely … no, only the emptiness of dream. But through several layers of nonwaking rambled the same figure. As far as he knew he had never before dreamed about any of the inhabitants of Flycatchers—they belonged to their own nonworld—but now, of all people, Colonel McQueen kept trying to break into the misty adventures, more nonsensical even than usual, and tell Pibble something that mattered. In one of the last layers before true waking the message at last came through. Pibble was sitting on a sunlit beach, on a hard upright chair. He was about forty. The sand and sea were quite empty. Then the dream surface quivered, and he and Mary, still on the beach, were playing bridge. It must be an immense tourney. The tables spread all along the sand. The cards in his hand had no cohesion. He made a plan, but when he started to play to it, the necessary elements were no longer there. Colonel McQueen, playing at a neighboring table, flung down his hand and said, “The rest are mine.” After that Pibble and McQueen were paddling in the thin froth of the wave margins and McQueen was saying, “Of course it looked hopeless, but there was one distribution which could save me, so I played as if it was true. And it was.”