The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “If you make the arrangements,” muttered Lydia, purring back into the nest of warmth in which she’d woken.

  The week-end turned into an absurd little idyll, most of it spent plodding round a small patch of Hampshire, among untarred lanes and across fields, while Richard and Dickie re-fought the Battle of Cheriton Wood from the strangely confused accounts of the Civil War diarists. It was brisk but not bitter weather, with a pale blue sky, snowdrops in the hedgerows, birds singing and hopping, pudgy lambs nuzzling at ewes’ udders, and the noon sun strong enough to make summer seem quite near. The hired car didn’t break down, the fisherman’s inn on the Itchen contained no fishermen, and though it was fairly crowded with raucous near-gentry on Saturday night the Timmses went to bed early and treated the noise as though it had been sea-surge against cliffs under a hotel window. They lay talking for a long time, weary and fond, about nothing that concerns us.

  Chapter 7

  The spy was rapping at the basement door when Lydia got back from taking Dickie to school. Approached from the other side, with the light full on him, he looked quite different, smaller, older—less, in fact, like a spy.

  “You’re Mr Roberts,” said Lydia, running down the basement steps. “I’m sorry if I’m late.”

  “I don’t know you’re late,” he said.

  “Now,” she said, “I’ve talked to some of my neighbours, and I think we can find you something to do every morning, Monday to Friday. We’ve all got the same lay-out, a bit of garden in front, mostly paved, and a bigger bit at the back. Mine’s in an awful state, I’m afraid, because I don’t like gardening and I’ve been throwing all sorts of building rubbish out and burning it. Come and have a look.”

  She led him through the basement and up into the litter and mire of the back garden. Mrs Pelletier was hanging her washing out. As usual, Mr Pelletier seemed to have got through twelve shirts in the week.

  “I’ve tried to keep the rose-bed clear,” said Lydia, “but the roses don’t look very happy to me.”

  The spy shook his head, fingered a weary leaflet, poked his toe-cap into the slimy earth and grunted.

  “I don’t much care for roses anyway,” said Lydia. “Look, I think the best thing, for a start, would be if I took you round to the other houses and introduced you. Then, if there’s any time after that, you could make a start on my front garden. I don’t think there’s any point doing anything back here till I’ve finished the worst of my building.”

  “Best get that finished,” he said.

  Mrs Tevell was in, and garrulous. Mrs Schelling insisted on hobbling all round her domain, discussing every shrub. June Stoddart was having coffee and needed somebody to moan to about the loneliness and uselessness of wives. So it was nearly eleven when Lydia got home. That left her time before lunch to find the spy some tools, ring the prison to check that her visit to Procne was still in order, and give the back-room beam its final dosing of chemicals. It also meant that she had to pay the spy two pounds forty for an hour’s work, but at least he had got a lot done in that hour—in fact it was extraordinary how spruce and lively the front garden now looked, with all the leaves and sweet-papers gone, and the wistaria pruned, and the black, winter-smeared soil raked and aerated. Despite the expense Lydia ate her lunch with a feeling of triumph at having made another step towards civilisation, and only a faint regret that Mr Roberts wasn’t a spy. That really would have been using the system to beat the system. She was still a little worried by her inability to be certain whether he was the same man that she’d first met, but even if he wasn’t that probably only meant that Mr Ambrose had sent along a different lame dog, a bloke who actually knew a buddleia from a buttercup. It would be typical of Mr Ambrose’s dictatorial style not to tell her what he was doing.

  Once upon a time, when criminals were still deported to Australia, they used to be kept waiting for shipment in the idiot squalor of the hulks. They were a suppuration, which eventually even our thick-skinned society noticed, and slapped a poultice on, and called it cured. Procne’s prison had been part of the poultice, built on the south-eastern outskirts of London, not far from the main-line railway. Unfortunately the railway had attracted a suburb of fair-sized respectable houses, whose developers were distressed by the notion that house-buyers might wish to pay less for property so close to a prison, as though crime were a sort of marsh-fever that might seep out and infect the honest bourgeois. The balance was redressed by the prison architects, who made the prison look thoroughly, even grandly respectable—a close replica of the Château de Chambord, in fact. The gate-tower still looks stunning against the western sky as you walk up the dreary (and now quite unrespectable) avenue of Croydon Road.

  Lydia hated the tower, and was not remotely interested in its history. Her clothes and skin seemed to melt into a hard, protective carapace as she waited at the gate for the warder to open to her knock; and waited again in the drab octagonal room where other visitors sat and smoked, all tense with the nearness of Authority; and waited finally in a pink, oppressive barrel-vaulted cell while a welfare officer went to fetch Procne Newbury. The cell had been converted to an office, and contained a couple of chairs and a desk. Lists of names were Sellotaped to one wall and a Mocha poster of a dreamy pale woman, all gold, to another. There was a telephone and an overflowing ash-tray. But despite these signs of a live occupant, to Lydia it might have been an alcove in Richard’s family vault. All that weight of sooty brick, all the weight of that other edifice whose bricks are warders and policemen and judges and Home Secretaries and respectable people, towered above her as a monstrous burial-mound. But Lydia didn’t feel that she was buried as a body is buried. She was more like the bulb of a bluebell in a town garden over which paving-stones have been laid, but still the leaves find their way out to the light, heaving aside if necessary the crushing hundredweights of stone.

  Outside little bell-like noises went to and fro as officers passed, all carrying their own bunch of keys. Lydia had brought cigarettes, knowing that that was expected; she herself smoked seldom, but she thought it would seem more natural, less Lady-Bountiful, if she already had an opened packet when Procne came, so she lit one and sucked the smoke in with shuddering relief. At last footsteps stopped at the cell door and keys jingled with a purpose. The Welfare Officer held the door open for Procne, who came rather hesitantly in.

  “Will half an hour be enough?” asked the Welfare Officer, breezy and friendly but not waiting for an answer. The door closed and was locked. Lydia found that she was standing and smiling too, unnaturally, with a patch of tense muscle in either cheek. Procne looked back at her, cow-eyed, emotionless. They stayed like that for some time. Procne was six inches taller than Lydia; she wore her hair dyed silvery blonde, in a semi-afro frizz; except for her eyes her features were small, and her face was slightly flat, its skin very soft and coloured, partly with make-up and partly by nature, like a sentimental pastel of a child. A minute before all Lydia’s thoughts and emotions had been a complex of angers and theories about the oppression-machine which surrounded her; now she was flooded with absurd longing and resentment, almost with jealousy. Procne’s life was smashed, her future a foreseeable vista of shoddy notoriety and shoddy let-downs. Lydia’s was still full of drive and promise and, even, love. But to be so beautiful! Impossible not to believe that it made everything else worth while.

  “Wh-which chair would you like?” she said at last.

  “I don’t mind,” said Procne in a dull voice.

  They settled. Procne took a cigarette and lit it awkwardly. Slowly the strange mood seeped away.

  “My name’s Lydia—Lydia Timms. I came to tell you about your mother.”

  “I spose so. You butch?”

  “No. At least I don’t think so. I’ve never tried. Are you?” Procne shrugged.

  “Sorry, what did you say yer name was?” she said.

  “Lydia. Or Liz.”

  “Lydi
a and Procne. Jesus, some parents want their heads looked at. Mine wasn’t Mum’s fault, not really. She wanted to call me Suez, but the parson wouldn’t have it. She near as hit him, right there by the font, she told me. She was after something real unusual, see. Not some bleeding saint, neither. That’s how they come to Procne. Dad always said it sounded like a bloody health-food.”

  “I never knew your father.”

  Procne nodded. She sat uncomfortably in her chair with the arm she wasn’t using for smoking held stiffly across her stomach, as though in an invisible sling.

  “But I got to know your mother pretty well these last few years,” said Lydia. “I remember the first time I met her …”

  It was a relief to be able to put into words what she had felt, but never till now formulated, about Mrs Newbury, what had made the old rogue, with her sharp-featured decisive head and slack, floppy, shambling body, so intricate, so amazing. There are some people, worthy and cultured, whose characters can be discussed and agreed on in five minutes; others will occupy a party of close friends all through a wet week-end, and Mrs Newbury was one of those. Quite soon Procne took her arm out of the imaginary sling, leaned forward, began to gesture agreement, and then started on her own store of childhood study. Mrs Newbury had been a houseful, a street of people, a world … Suddenly Lydia saw how proper it was that this estranged daughter should have wept so at her mother’s funeral.

  “Not that we got on, not really,” Procne said. “She was always at me, never satisfied, trying to live my life, plans, plans, plans. My first bloke—not counting boys at school, acourse, I was only a kid then—he found me a lovely flat near Marble Arch, colour TV, the lot. Mum was ever so cross and snarky. Wasn’t me setting up professional—he had to pay the rent somehow, didn’t he?—but cos Mum hadn’t found him for me herself. In the end it come so she’d just phone me up Thursdays and we’d have a long chat, and I didn’t even go round, Christmas, with a present. She never come and visit me here, mind. Did she read all about my trial?”

  “Oh yes—she kept a scrapbook. I’m afraid she rather revelled in it.”

  “Well, that’s Mum—you can’t hold it against her. In fact I’m glad she had her bit of fun. No fun for me, mind, shut away like this.”

  “I think it’s absolutely disgraceful. All those time-serving hypocrites who’d have been queuing up to meet you if they’d had the chance, working out their stupid little repressions by smashing you to bits. I couldn’t even read about it, I was so angry.”

  “D’you really think so, Liz? I know some judges what go with girls, but mine wasn’t like that. I saw a picture of him in the papers with his family in front of his house. Two lovely daughters he had. Honest, I don’t think he was like that.”

  “I didn’t mean … oh, I’m sure you’re right. I get a bit het up about the things we do to each other, sometimes. Your mother used to tell me …”

  “How much rent she pay you?”

  “One pound fifty. I hope it wasn’t too much. It was what she was paying when we bought the house.”

  “Je-sus! You’re another wants her head looked at! I always sent her ten quid a week to help with the rent.”

  Lydia laughed. It was so typical of Mrs Newbury—not that she’d ever had the feel of real poverty about her and had often said that old-age pensioners had nothing to grumble about and ought to be more grateful for what the Government did for them.

  “Are you sure she got it?” she asked.

  “All I know is that time I couldn’t spare it …”

  Suddenly Procne seemed to shrink back into the stolid, dull, institutionalised self she had been before they started talking about Mrs Newbury. She even glanced at the door, as if expecting to see an eye peering in through the peep-hole.

  “What’s the matter?” said Lydia.

  Procne looked at her troubled.

  “All right,” she said, “I better tell you. I got to tell somebody, or I’ll do my nut. You know I was saying about my bloke what found me that flat? Gavin’s his name. We was doing OK, but he fancied himself as a businessman and he wanted to expand—get a few more girls on his books, all that. I didn’t mind. Trouble was, he had big ideas but he didn’t have the organisation, and after a bit he run into a mob what did. They done him proper—he’s in Morocco, last I heard. It come at a bad time for me—I was due an abortion—it’s not as nice as it says in the papers, really—so one thing and another the mob didn’t realise at first I was—you know—valuable. So I was short, and Mum was getting at me, and I met this lordship at a party. He’s quite famous but he’s ever so forgetful, always leaving things in my flat, like, and sending his chauffeur round for them after. I just knew he wouldn’t notice if I took a couple of his cheques, like, and he didn’t. I wasn’t greedy—just enough for Mum for a few weeks, and buy me a new trouser suit. Well, after that the mob cottoned on to what I was worth—it’s funny, another lordship what works in the City told me it’s just like that when one company does a take-over on another, they take a bit of time to sort out what they bought. Anyway the mob set me up proper again, and put in a bloke, Chris, to look after me and that, and I thought well this is a bit of OK. Chris is nice, and he can act posh, and he was too scared of the mob to beat me up the way Gavin sometimes done, but he was just like Gavin one way—he had ideas. When I told him about them cheques he said “We’ll try a bit more of that.” He worked it out that if we was careful whose cheques we borrowed—you know, blokes what wouldn’t like it to come out about their funny tastes, and that—we’d be OK. Only it didn’t work out. We was ever so stupid, really. One thing, it was a mercy the police copped us before the mob found out. That would not have been funny.”

  Carried away by the vigour of her story-telling, Procne only came back in the last few words to remembering her fear of “the mob”. Even then she only saw one part of the ugliness of it all, and didn’t seem to realise that “the mob” was really only another section of the oppression machine—the crudely stamped reverse of the medal whose obverse is Justice, elegantly engraved.

  “They sound pretty frightening,” said Lydia. “Could they really be spying on us here, though?”

  “Not in here—we’re off the wing. But I shouldn’t be surprised they knew you was coming. I got a message from Chris. He’s in Parkhurst, and first week he was there he had his face slashed and a couple of ribs broken. They’ll leave him alone now … Cheer up, Liz, don’t you worry—you’ll never meet up with them.”

  “I hope not, but that isn’t what bothers me. I hate being part of a society in which that sort of thing is allowed to exist.”

  “Nothing you can do about it, so why worry? What was we on about? Oh, yes, I was telling you about the cheques. Point is, Mum begun it.”

  “I don’t think she realised.”

  “Course not, but she wouldn’t of minded. Given her a kick, more like, thinking I done it for her sake. I wonder what she done with all that money.”

  “She may have spent it. She wasn’t old enough to draw her pension, was she?”

  “No, but there was Dad’s from the railway, and what she was getting cleaning for them foreign gentlemen—she was ever so funny about them, sometimes. Used to tell me on the phone, all their little secrets—no, if she was only paying one fifty rent she wouldn’t have no cause to spend what I was sending her.”

  “I don’t know. Vodka costs getting on for …”

  “Vodka! Mum never touched a drop! Never!”

  “Oh. I didn’t realise you didn’t know. I’m so sorry. At the inquest …”

  “You ever seen her drinking? Or drunk?”

  “As a matter of fact, no.”

  “There you are then. You can’t keep it quiet, not in a lodging house like what you keep.”

  “We were all very surprised, but the evidence at the inquest seemed clear. She was in pretty good condition, the pathologist said, but there was q
uite a lot of alcohol in her blood stream. She seemed to have been climbing up on her table to do something to her curtains, and she fell and hit her head on a brass fender. One of my other tenants, Mrs Pumice, went up next morning to ask your mother to mind her baby and found her lying there, still in the clothes she’d been wearing the night before. There was a bottle of Smirnoff on the mantelpiece and four empties in the cupboard. They all had her fingerprints on.”

  “Empties!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Never!”

  “But …”

  “Listen, Liz, when my Dad was drinking, the trouble Mum went to to get the empties out of the house! She got a funny little basket on wheels and she took the washing out to the public laundry in it, what she’d always used to do at home. She tucked the empties into the washing, see, and went to the laundry the long way round so as she could put the bottles into people’s dustbins what wasn’t her neighbours. Always.”

  “Even so, I suppose she might have been saving a batch up to get rid of. And …”

  “Hey! You find out where she was buying the stuff?”

  “I don’t think the question came up. If you like I could …”

  Procne, without asking, helped herself to another cigarette and lit it with shaking fingers. Her face seemed to have gone pale and textureless.

  “Tisn’t true,” she said suddenly.

  “I’m afraid it seems to be.”

  “No, it’s only evidence. Evidence doesn’t have to be true. I got sent down fair enough, seeing I done what they said I did. But you should of heard some of the evidence, both sides. I know. And I know Mum had a horror of drink, an absolute horror. My Dad was a bastard drunk—near as killed me when I was five. I drink. I’ve been to a party Friday night and next thing I know it’s Tuesday and I don’t know who I’ve been with or what I’ve done. That’s what come between me and Mum, more than anything; she was always at me to pack it in, but it’s my life, isn’t it? Supposing she’d been on the bottle, she’d have been a bit more friendly like, wouldn’t she?”