The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “I don’t know. Perhaps she only started drinking after you’d come here. We don’t drink anything much at the moment because we haven’t got any spare cash, so she didn’t get at me. She did tell me about your father hurting you, and talked about the wickedness of drink in general—but you know, she did it with a sort of relish, slightly like a reformed drunk at a temperance meeting.”

  “Yes, that’s Mum. It was all a play to her, wasn’t it, with her acting all the best parts, too!”

  Procne’s laugh was surprisingly loud, but seemed to Lydia a completely natural sound, an expression of pure enjoyment of the instant, which the dreary hours coming before and after could never infect or alter. Most educated people have had a sheltered upbringing, because shelter makes the educator’s task easier. Procne had not. For the past six years she had led a life which many people nowadays would consider sophisticated, that is to say a life in close contact with violence, drama, risk and passion. You might have thought that by now she would be mature and knowledgeable, pickled in the brine of life. But she was naive, ignorant and unenquiring about the nature of the society that had used and crushed her. In fact she was not even aware that she had been crushed. Even here, in the heart of the burial mound, she fizzed like a child.

  Lydia felt for her a strangely powerful flow of attraction and sympathy. In her own bustling life she had often fought with all her energy for odd underdogs and misfits; but these earlier episodes suddenly now seemed to her callow, sacrifices to her own conscience, Pharisaic in their rectitude and egoism. Procne was different. It seemed to Lydia of enormous importance, comparable almost to the love and protection she owed Richard and Dickie, that an area of freedom should be found in which Procne could live and expand and fulfil her enormous potential for happiness.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll try and find out where your mother was buying the drink. We ought to know. My father’s a surgeon and knows a lot of medical people—I’ll see if he can find out whether there was anything in the medical evidence that didn’t come out at the inquest. And I’ll try and find whether anyone knows anything about what she did with the money. I suppose that’s the most important, because if there’s any left it would be useful to have when you come out.”

  “Ooh, yes,” said Procne, evidently thinking of this point for the first time. “That would be ever so useful. Only, if she made a will …”

  “I doubt it. She had a thing about lawyers. My husband is training to become a barrister, and she was always at me about it, suggesting other things he ought to do. She said lawyers were worse than criminals, all out to cheat you. I can’t see her making a will.”

  “That’s only Mum. Soon as she wanted a bloke she’d of gone and found one. One time, a bit after I set up with Gavin, she was on about making a will just to leave me out of it—course I only laughed. Never thought I’d need the money.”

  “OK, I’ll see if I can find out about that too. She might have told Mrs Pumice.”

  “And the booze,” said Procne earnestly. “Don’t forget about the booze. That’s screwy, Liz, I promise you. Anyway, vodka! I mean, suppose she’d started drinking, it’d of been Scotch. Or gin. Can’t you just see what she’d of said about vodka? Foreign muck! Don’t know where it’s been or what they’ve put in it! Dead men’s feet! Sniff!”

  Both voice and sniff were so accurate that the ghost of Mrs Newbury floated vividly through Lydia’s mind and the hair on her nape prickled. They laughed together, and the conversation was still effortlessly flowing out of the suddenly opened spring of their friendship when the Welfare Officer came back.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Procne, rather formal in this new presence.

  “I’ve loved it,” said Lydia. “Thank you, too. Shall I see if they’ll let me come again?”

  “Ooh, would you? That’d be great!”

  Chapter 8

  The pattern, by which men came unnoticed into a room where Lydia was working, continued. They seldom offered to help, though. “Can I help?” said a voice.

  Lydia poked her head up between the joists. Mr Vaklins was standing by the door, wearing a dark mauve suit and an egg-yellow polo-necked jersey.

  “You’d ruin that snappy get-up,” she said.

  “I have overalls in the car. What are you doing?”

  “Just checking for dry rot under here. It’s come in from next door, along that wall, and got into that cupboard. The question is how far it’s spread. I’ve had that beam out and back, and it’s OK, and so far I can’t see anything under here, so we may be just in time. Did you come to ask about the room?”

  “To see you and ask about the room.”

  “Oh … well … it’s a bit difficult … I can’t really make up my mind yet …”

  “No hurry. I suppose the rent would be somewhere round twenty pounds a week?’

  “Twenty! You could get somewhere much nicer for that!”

  “Not a room in the same house as my work. You see, being a Minister is not a full-time job, so I would run my own business from here also. I’ve been using my flat as an office, and I’ve got used to sleeping above the shop, you know. You wouldn’t mind if I put a telephone in?”

  “Of course not,” said Lydia, torn by the thought of the extra rent, and wine for Richard at supper, and a bike for Dickie, and a power sander. “Hell … you see, the trouble is I’ve been sort of planning to use Mrs N’s room to sort the tenancies out a bit. People have grown into this house all higgledy-piggledy, and now I think I could work it so that everybody lived on their own floor, with their own bathrooms and so on.”

  “Yes, I see … Are you going to have that wainscot off? Shall I do it?”

  “You can’t. Those sockets are live. Some nit seems to have done some private wiring, years ago, and as far as I can make out they come off the supply to the top two floors, so I can’t switch them off without putting the Government out of action.”

  He shrugged, nodded and picked his way out.

  It was almost pleasant to be back again in the dank, rank cavity beneath the joists; the problems here were at least inanimate (though sometimes it is hard to believe that the dry-rot fungus does not have a primitive, malevolent will of its own). Lit by the inspection-lamp the cavity was dreary but not gruesome; it smelt of town gas and mouse-droppings and the faint, sweetish, fallen-leaf reek of one of the wet-rots, whose brownish mycelium fanned out, pretty as sea-weed, along the party wall. The creak of footsteps came when Lydia was some distance away from her entrance-hole. By the time she had huddled her way back Mr Vaklins, in clean white overalls, was kneeling by the wall unscrewing one of the live sockets.

  “Don’t be a bloody fool,” she snapped.

  He turned, smiling, and spread out a hand which wore a heavy-duty rubber glove. Sulkily Lydia climbed out of the hole and stood by his shoulder, lighting his work with her inspection-lamp like a dutiful little woman, tense to cope if he made a mistake. He knew exactly what he was doing, though; his movements were quick, firm and deft. He’d brought his own little kit of electrical tools, which Lydia at once longed for in the way some women long for jewels; they seemed to her beautiful, neat and glistening in their wash-leather roll.

  “Forgive me,” he said, moving to the second socket. “I’m always inquisitive, especially about my hosts, the English. I don’t quite understand why you’re doing this—I mean doing it all yourself, crawling under floorboards, bashing away at plaster. I know some of your tenants only pay you a pittance, but the Livonians pay an economic rent, and your husband goes out to work. I’d have thought you could afford to hire men to do the worst of it.”

  Lydia approved of his asking so directly—it was what she would have done herself. That made her uncomfortable about having to hedge her answer; but Richard’s breakdown was still no one’s business but the Timms’s.

  “Well,” she said, “I do like t
o do things myself. That’s partly because I enjoy it, and partly because it makes me feel a parasite if I buy someone else’s time to do a job which I could perfectly well do myself. I mean, I’m not much good at plastering, so I’m happy to hire a plasterer—that’s an art. But it makes me sick when I read—oh, there was a bloke in the New Statesman last year complaining in one breath about the exploitation of the working classes and the next that he couldn’t find anyone to fix his slates at a reasonable price. Anybody can fix slates. But in fact you’re wrong about Richard—he’s not earning at the moment—he’s studying law.”

  “Ah,” said Mr Vaklins, apparently perfectly satisfied. But Lydia, having got that far, thought she owed both him and Richard more.

  “He was a soldier when I married him. I hated the idea, but you know, one’s in love, and besides his family had always been soldiers, and so on. I thought I could stick it out, but I couldn’t. He did a stint as military attaché in a couple of places, but I couldn’t even stand that. So he jacked it in.”

  “That must have been a wrench.”

  “Yes … well, we looked around and decided that he’d make a good lawyer. I wasn’t going to have him doing some dreary job all day and then doing night school. Besides, he’d done it all for my sake, so now I thought it was up to me to support him. I didn’t want to go out to work because of Dickie—that’s our son—he’s seven now. But my mother left me just enough money to buy this place—we got it cheap because of all the sitting tenants—and that’s how I became a landlady. It suits me.”

  “It appears to, certainly. You wouldn’t make a happy parasite.”

  His movements slowed. Rather thoughtfully he wrapped the last length of insulation tape round the earth wire, making a neat finish so that the end of the cable looked like the bandaged stub of an elfin limb. He rose slowly and gazed discontentedly at the result.

  “I don’t know if I shall stay in England,” he said. “It is so full of parasites. Every society must have a few, I suppose, but in a way England has become like this house of yours, full of weak places and rots and moulds. Your tenants, my Government, we live here as though the house would go on just as before—and in England there isn’t someone like you to repair the structure. They just slap on a bit of paint, blue or pink, over the worst bits. But you know, Lydia, when you’ve done you’ll still have an old house, always in need of repair.”

  “You’ve got to do what you can,” said Lydia.

  “That is the rule?” (His voice sounded more foreign once he got away from small talk.)

  “I don’t know about rules. But if you let things go you never forgive yourself. Look, Paul, I haven’t been quite honest about that room. It would suit me if I could get Mrs Pumice to move up there, and the rest of the tenants to sort themselves out. But … about parasites. I hate the idea of being one. I hate the idea of exploiting people just because my mother happened to leave me enough money to buy this house. I’ve never turned anyone out, and I keep the rents as low as I can, and even if all the tenants suddenly cleared out I wouldn’t dream of converting to a lot of expensive flats for Biba people. I like tenants who have some sort of right to live here.”

  “Can we just rip this off, or must we be careful?”

  “I’ll get my crowbar.”

  As soon as she’d levered a gap big enough for him to get his fingers down he ripped the wainscot away as if it had been cardboard. Lydia crawled along with her inspection lamp. The fan of wet-rot had sent a tendril up this far but there seemed to be no sign at all of that faint, grey, cobwebby network which is the first wave of a dry-rot invasion.

  “Great,” she said. “It seems all clear. The damp-course men can do it the same time they do the front room. I’d been dreading what I’d find along here.”

  “What now?”

  “Oh. Well, I’ve just got time to finish inspecting underneath before I go and fetch Dickie from school.”

  “May I take you? I’m at a loose end. Honestly.”

  She was about to refuse, out of a habit of independence, when she realised how enormously Dickie would enjoy a ride in that car. Carless, he longed for cars as petless children long for imagined furry friends.

  “That would be marvellous,” she said. “It gives me ten minutes extra, too. Can we leave at twelve fifteen?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  His smile and nod—even his stance—made it a relief for her to slither into her musty catacomb and work off her embarrassment by scrabbling into dark nooks. The last conceivable thing she wanted was a dashing, rich, handsome, helpful admirer.

  Chapter 9

  With babies Lydia let herself go. When she had been pregnant with Dickie, in Germany, she had read all the how-to-be-a-mother books she could find—in much the same spirit, Richard had said, as she’d have read all the manuals before deciding to buy a new car. She’d been alarmed by all the advice about a baby’s need for fondling and for the stimulus and reassurance of touch, because she’d felt this to be contrary to her own nature. So (again to Richard’s amusement) she’d borrowed neighbouring babies to practise on, and had found that she had been wrong about her own nature, or perhaps about Nature. She had liked—loved—the touching and fondling.

  Then Dickie had turned out an awkward baby, all elbows, and curiously cunning at folding a floppy little leg the wrong way; a wriggler, almost from the instant of birth. This might have been a factor inherited from either parent; or it might have been something to do with the insecurity caused by the slowly forming crisis that would take Richard out of the army; or even by the child perceiving before either parent the first signs of Richard’s breakdown. Anyway, he’d never been fun to hold.

  But Lydia still allowed herself to go soft with other people’s babies; if challenged she’d have argued that it must be dangerous to suppress such a strong impulse in herself, but Mrs Pumice wasn’t the type to raise questions like that. She was simply glad to have her baby held.

  Trevor Pumice cannot have been the Health Visitor’s delight; his skin had a yellowish tinge and he was about two pounds overweight. He was still very bald at an age when Dickie had sprouted a handsome thatch. Though not yet teething he dribbled. But he fitted his head into the hollow by Lydia’s collar-bone, allowed one gross little hand to slide across the fullness of her breast and fell instantly asleep.

  Mrs Pumice, also yellow-skinned and overweight, smiled and lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of her old one. She had had her seventeenth birthday a week after Trevor was born.

  “Crying half the night again,” she said. “Now he’ll sleep all day and wake up in time to cry all night.”

  “Poor you,” said Lydia. “Dickie was hell at that age, too. It’s the most tiring thing in the world.”

  “It’s not being tiring I mind, only it’s so dead boring. But I’m glad you come. I was meaning to ask, will it be all right about the rent for a few days?”

  “Is Mr Pumice out of work again?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t heard nothing, and I expect I’d of heard if it was that. You see, it’d be a bit of an excuse for him getting so behind with my payments, wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh dear. I suppose it’s all right, Mrs Pumice. I won’t turn you out, or anything, I mean. But I really can’t afford to let you get tremendously behind. Look, I’m going to put a proper cooker into Mrs Newbury’s room, and paint and paper it. When that’s done, I wonder whether you’d like to move up there; it’s less than half the rent, and you can have the pick of the furniture out of both sets of rooms, if you want.”

  Mrs Pumice’s round, spiritless face went blanker still, but the look in her pale brown eyes hardened. Lydia didn’t resent this—it was natural that somebody already so cheated by life as Mrs Pumice should regard any proposal at all as the start of yet another confidence trick. She gave her time to think by wiping away Trevor’s steady, frothy dribble. The baby stirred, stretched
and snuggled back. Lydia smiled at him.

  “I’m going to have another of my own as soon as I can get a bit more sorted out,” she said.

  “That what you want me to move up to Ma Newbury’s for?”

  (Mrs Newbury, after her break with Procne, had tended to treat Mrs Pumice as a surrogate daughter. Mrs Pumice had resented this but had also in a way welcomed it, as even resentment was better than nothing at all in the vacuum of her life.)

  “Not really,” said Lydia. “I simply want to sort things out.”

  She explained carefully just how. Mrs Pumice’s frown deepened.

  “But what’ll I do when Don comes back?” she burst out, clearly not having listened to half of what Lydia was saying. Don’s return was a piece of future myth, in the sense that the arrival of Apollo at Delphi is a piece of past myth, and of much the same order of credibility. It was safe to promise almost anything against that event.

  “With luck I’ll have the basement ready by then,” said Lydia.

  “Oooh, well …” (Another thought slowly penetrated.) “If I’m saving that lot of rent I could trade in my TV for colour.”

  Lydia achieved a smile. Mrs Pumice already smoked the rent she’d be saving, plus the rent she owed. This was no moment to start the old argument about having part of Don’s wages attached; Mrs Pumice simply said you couldn’t expect a man to put up with that kind of treatment. It was better to move the conversation elsewhere.

  “Did Mrs Newbury give you any papers to look after?” Lydia asked.

  “Not really,” said Mrs Pumice, still thinking about colour TV.

  “You see, I was talking to her daughter last week …”

  “Were you? Honest?”

  In a flash the whole atmosphere changed. The dreary room seemed to withdraw its weight of boredom as Mrs Pumice leaned forward, greedy-eyed. A tinge of health glowed in her cheeks. Her lips, half open, glistened.