The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  Procne shook her head.

  “No, Mum weren’t never ill,” she said. “You’d of had to lay her out before you could of made her touch a drop. Why, weddings she always used to take her own Thermos of tea to toast the bride in.”

  “Well, what do you think happened?”

  “Someone done her in,” whispered Procne.

  “Why should they?”

  “Find that money, of course. Or perhaps … yes, look, Liz, she was ever so nosey. I told you we used to have a long chat on the phone, Thursdays, and I told her how I was doing and all? Well, I don’t remember but I expect I told her quite a bit about the mob what I was working for. Suppose she thought she might try a bit of blackmail? They wouldn’t of stood for that, but she wouldn’t of known. They’d rub her out, easy as winking, wouldn’t they?”

  Lydia decided to go along with the fantasy. Procne evidently had all her mother’s relish for melodrama, and there was no point in spoiling her fun by raising any of the obvious practical objections.

  “You’d better not tell anyone, Procne,” she said. “I mean, if you’re right, you don’t want to get it into the grapevine.”

  “Or I’ll tell you what,” said Procne, ignoring her, “Them old gentlemen, they got something hid up there. There’s rooms they wouldn’t never let her into.”

  “I’ve been into all their rooms,” said Lydia.

  “But you’re not nosey, like what she was. They got secrets.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Lydia, sighing mentally at those mummified Baltic intrigues. “Anyway, I’ll see if I can find out some more. I’ll remind my bloody father …”

  “Why don’t you get along with him, Liz? You sound worse than what I was with Mum. What’s your mother like?”

  “She died when I was eight. I think she killed herself but I’ve never had the guts to find out. She divorced my father when I was four.”

  “That’s why … you and your Dad, I mean?”

  “We’ve always fought. It was worst when Richard decided to leave the army. But we get along now in a sort of way, like most people. Anyway, I’ll remind him to find out about that autopsy. The trouble is, with a house like mine it’s only too easy for a stranger to get in and out.”

  “There you are then. Only you be careful too, Liz. Don’t go nosing around. It isn’t worth it. Tell me about your little boy.”

  Dickie lasted them until the half hour was up. In a few last gabbled sentences they made arrangements for another visit and Procne promised to think about whether she wanted a room at Devon Crescent. Lydia walked to the tube, buffeted by the dusty gusts of a dry spring wind and depressed by the knowledge of the odds against her bringing off what she wanted to achieve for Procne. But by the time she was sitting in the clanging train she was already so busy with plans for reducing the odds that she was humming loud enough to make the bloke sitting opposite her keep glancing at her over his paper.

  Chapter 14

  It was impossible not to think of Mr Roberts as ‘The Spy’ still. There was something about him that kept the absurd charade alive, and actually made Lydia slightly jumpy when he came in for morning coffee, in case she should accidentally say something which let on that he had a two-fold existence, if only in her mind. The trouble was that it wasn’t pure charade—there were several silly little details which kept making links with the real world, not strong enough to bear the weight of any deduction, but teasingly there. He was too good a gardener, and too hard a worker, for one thing. It was quite unnatural that a casual labourer, engaged by impulse, should be such a treasure. He was a stocky little man in his late fifties, with a rather soft and completely humourless pale face, but Lydia was still genuinely not certain that he was the same man she’d bumped into in the basement doorway. She had quite a strong mental picture of that other man—taller and thinner with heavy eyebrows—but again she wasn’t wholly sure that this wasn’t her imagination. Finally there was his conversation. He had, or affected, a peasant-like reserve. When Lydia said anything, however provocative, he would appear to think about it in silence for several seconds. Then he would agree with her, usually repeating her words in a flat, unplaceable accent. Often she wasn’t even certain that he understood what he was saying. The style of assent was almost theatrically sage, but sometimes she felt it was a technique for preserving his own privacy as an urban solitary; sometimes for concealing his real trade as a spy; and sometimes just an instinctive method of disguising stupidity.

  At his second visit he had asked quite lot of questions about the other occupants of the house, what their families were and how long they’d been there, but had shown no interest at all in the Government—in fact he had almost ostentatiously avoided talking about them. Yet another thing was that Mrs Tevell had told Lydia that he was a frightful old gossip, though that may have been only her way of describing a good listener. At any rate, he made Lydia nervous.

  On a soft Monday morning in the third week of March they stood side by side at the top of the steps leading up into the back garden from the basement. Their mugs steamed in their hands. Birds trilled, buds glistened in the precocious and deceitful sunlight. The fresh-dug earth in front of them, though, seemed to smell still of winter, clammy and chill.

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see the last of those roses, Mr Roberts,” said Lydia. “I hated them. They had a few mangy flowers in summer and looked hideous for the rest of the year.”

  “Weren’t much good,” agreed Mr Roberts.

  “What shall we do with the bushes? The dustmen are a bit bolshie about collecting garden rubbish, especially if it’s got thorns on …”

  “Well, yes, there’s thorns,” admitted Mr Roberts.

  “Are they too wet to burn?”

  “They’re wet enough.”

  “Anyway, let’s try. I’ve got some bits of spare timber you could use to start a bonfire—I kept them to show the dry-rot people, but they weren’t interested. And I’ll find you a couple of planks to put down by the wall there, so that Mrs Pelletier can get at her washing-line.”

  “Ah.”

  “It seems a pity to get a good fire going just for a few old rose bushes. I wonder whether there’s anything worth burning at Mrs Tevell’s or any of the others. We could get rid of it all in one go.”

  “Ah.”

  This grunt seemed even more non-committal than the last. Did it go against his training as a spy to admit that he kept reserves of garden rubbish elsewhere? Did he regard his dealings with his other employers’ rubbish as a private matter? Was he simply too thick to grasp the advantages of a communal bonfire? Lydia stared at the neat patch where the roses had been, suddenly oppressed by the knowledge that now she’d have to decide what to put into it. One half of her longed for flagstones, trouble-free tubs of annuals, a tree for summer shade; the other half wanted jungle, wildness and freedom in the urban barracks.

  “Would a passion-flower grow here, Mr Roberts?”

  “Passion-flower. Ah.”

  “I don’t mean in the bed—I mean up the back of the house.”

  He turned and stared up at the white façade, so much less regular, but somehow more pleasing, than the front. Lydia followed his gaze. There was a smear all down the clean Snocem from one of the drain-pipes—Mrs Evans had blocked her sink outlet again. Bloody woman. It was really quite extraordinary that somebody who could turn herself out so neatly and behave, socially, with such precise decorum, should fail to grasp that a mixture of tea-leaves, potato-peelings and grease was bound to block a sink outlet.

  Higher up a head craned out of a window gazing down at the garden, motionless, a live gargoyle. It was Count Linden, but he didn’t answer Lydia’s wave. The spy appeared not to notice him.

  “Ah, a passion flower,” he said. “That’ll grow all right. Right old nuisance you’ll find it, too. And you’ll have to restrict its roots, or you won’t get no fl
owers.”

  “Restrict its roots?” said Lydia, changing roles so that she echoed what he said.

  “Ah,” said the spy. “Squash ’em in tight. That’s right.”

  It was only in the spy-fantasy that he seemed to be speaking about Count Linden, and thinking of little Livonia. It would be the season of thaw in the Baltic republics now, the time (Mr Obb had once said) when the whole world seemed new and beautiful, full of beginnings.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Lydia.

  He made a very effective bonfire, got the roses burning, fetched hedge clippings and Michaelmas daisy stalks from other gardens, swept up every leaf in the back garden (in London new drifts of leaf-fall seem to accumulate all winter) and burnt them too. Not once, as ordinary gardeners do, did he stop working to gaze into the smoking pile, as if searching in the twirling white streams for portents and omens. Before he went he shovelled the hot ashes onto the rose-bed, forked them around and raked them in.

  If you thought of him as a gardener he was a jewel, Lydia agreed with her neighbours. But if you thought of him as a spy his efficiency was frightening. When he had gone the rose-bed had the look of a patch sown with salt, deliberately, so that nothing should ever grow there.

  Chapter 15

  “Captain Sir Richard Timms and Lady Timms,” bawled the bloke. As always at this moment Lydia blushed, not with shyness but with shame at the ridiculous tag which an accident of love had wished on her. The Russian Ambassador and his wife both looked as though they had been deliberately bred to conform to a new module of humanity, perhaps designed to colonise a planet with greater gravity than earth’s, as they were stocky and extraordinarily short-necked. The Ambassador took Lydia’s hand and bent as if to kiss it, but then seemed to recoil from such a revision of Marxist-Leninist etiquette and compromised with a pudgy, lingering squeeze. Lydia had a sudden lust to kick him on the knee-cap and see what happened, but that would have been impossible in the ridiculous crimson tube which Lalage had coaxed her into wearing.

  She and Richard passed on, took glasses of champagne from a tray, and drifted into the muttering throng. The atmosphere was familiar from diplomatic days. It always reminded Lydia of the congregation in a church before a big posh wedding, crowds of people who know each other well and long to give glad cries and swap family scandal, but are forced by the semi-sanctity of the occasion into small gestures and whispered talk. Then George Dunakhov barged between two groups of silvery First Secretaries like a tank coming out of a birch wood. He buffeted Richard on the shoulder and hugged Lydia so firmly to his unyielding chest that she felt that she would be branded for the rest of her life with a vertical row of little red stars where the buttons of his uniform dug into her flesh.

  “Hoi, hoi,” he bellowed. “Now I see it is worth I come to England!”

  He was drunk already.

  “George will never stay the course, unless there’s a war,” Richard had once said. “Suddenly they’ll get tired of him, and then, puff. If there’s a war he’ll do well—he’s a bloody good tank commander.”

  But here he was still beating the system somehow. Lydia would have liked him for that alone. He let go of her, but grabbed her hand and towed her at high speed through the crowd to a table by the wall. Naturally he’d already set himself up with the necessities of life—two bottles of champagne, spare glasses and a smiling huge-bosomed blonde in a green dress. With exaggerated gestures, like a pimp in a baroque comedy, George introduced her. Her name was Natya, plus one of those impossibly amnemonic Russian surnames. She preferred to speak French.

  Before they’d settled a tall, dark-skinned young man strolled up and found himself sucked into the tornado of George’s hospitality. His name was Nikolai Diarghi. He worked at the Embassy and spoke perfect English.

  George immediately began to tell the blonde a shooting story, remotely based on something that had actually happened to him and Richard in Hungary. In the middle of a train of surreal improbabilities he would stop and ask Richard to confirm some small irrelevant detail, as if taking up an everyday parcel at a little way-side halt, before steaming on through the landscape of his fantasy.

  “Do you find much shooting in England, Lady Timms?” said Mr Diarghi, deliberately drawing her out of George’s audience.

  “We don’t live that sort of life nowadays. Richard is reading for the bar and I look after a large house and a small boy.”

  “A small boy? Ah, I wonder if you can help me. I am preparing a report on the British nursery education system. Of course I have access to all sorts of official views, but it is hard for me to make contact with ordinary mothers of small children. Do you have any views on the subject?”

  Poor man. It was as if Moses had struck the rock and out gushed Niagara. Lydia’s views on nursery education were precise and vehement. For six months in the previous year she had been one of an action group who were trying to coax or force the ILEA into opening a new nursery school in her, area, and had resigned when she discovered that most of her colleagues really wanted it as a convenience for the Lady Timmses of W.11 and not as a life-line for the Mrs Pumices. She was still talking when the flunkey bawled for silence. The Ambassador made an oily little speech of welcome. Everybody started to move towards another room.

  “I didn’t realise we were going to be fed,” said Lydia.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr Diarghi. “Excuse me. Dunakhov will know where you sit. I’d like to carry on with our conversation, so I’ll just nip ahead and see if I can fiddle the seating plan.”

  It was a vast, slow meal, with speeches and toasts between the courses. The object of the reception was to celebrate a big cultural-exchange deal between the two countries, and the British speakers—politicians, diplomats, art administrators—seemed to Lydia even suaver and more hypocritical than the Russians. Only one knighted actor even faintly hinted at the lives that might be crushed, the truth that might be poisoned in order that the garden of Russian culture should bloom as its owners wished. His speech was especially well received, being neatly within the limits of polite protest and thus serving as the token conscience of authority. But for her promise to Richard Lydia would have thrown her plate at the purring sir. Instead, when talk and eating restarted, she loosed her rage on poor George.

  He smiled, shrugged and began another of his stories. Lydia was already a bit irritated with him, because she’d decided that the real reason for their being there was that George wanted to show off his baronet to his blonde. When she swung away from him in mid sentence Mr Diarghi neatly fielded her diatribe.

  “Yes,” he said when she ran out of breath. “Have you been in Bombay, or any place where there are many beggars?”

  “No.”

  “It is horrible, but it is also a parable. Along the streets where the rich men go they line the paving, like soldiers guarding a state visit. Each has his own pitch, and each has his own hideous defect—he is blind, she has a withered arm, that child has no legs, that old man a great sore that suppurates. No, I am not changing the subject. My point is that the idea, in that context, of a healthy beggar is a contradiction in terms. In the present context of the world—the stage we have reached in the historical process—the idea of a government that does not crush some individuals is a contradiction in terms. They all must do it, and in that case it is clearly more satisfactory to have a government that knows who it is crushing, and why.”

  “I don’t think I accept any of that,” said Lydia, too earnest to eat. “I don’t accept that governments have to crush people. Suppose they do, though, I don’t accept that it’s better for them to be aware of what they’re doing, because that sanctions the repression and makes it officially OK. And even if it were better, it’s still vital that people shouldn’t accept it. Once you start shrugging your shoulders whenever somebody gets trampled on, then the stupid government engine begins to think that no one minds. It has no feelings, you see. So it tramples w
here it likes. Look, as a Marxist you’re supposed to be working towards a perfect government, so it matters even more that you should have the imperfections shown up, by people like me, if there’s no one else to do it.”

  Mr Diarghi nodded but said nothing.

  “How long would I survive in Russia?” she asked.

  “If you started throwing plates at distinguished speakers at official functions?”

  “I wouldn’t get asked again, but what else?”

  “Well, you would survive your natural span, of course, but perhaps if you disturbed the ideas of too many people it might be necessary to restrain you. But remember, if you think that an injustice, that you have to balance it against the far greater injustice of the millions of people in capitalist countries whose lives the system makes ugly and stunted, but who would be allowed to thrive under our system.”

  “By restrain me you mean send me to a lunatic asylum, or to a labour camp?”

  “If necessary.”

  “Are you seriously telling me that I’d live to a ripe old age in Siberia?”

  “Most people do—in fact some remain active to an extraordinary old age—Aaku Aakisen is a good example.”

  Lydia was about to argue when the plates were cleared and a Russian rose to reply to the actor with a speech so inept and boring that it seemed to dim even the chandeliers. Lydia could sense the dust settling on distinguished pates, the infection of dullness creeping, like one of the Devon Crescent fungi, from mind to mind. George was not the only guest snoring. When at last the man sat down to a round of muffled clapping she found that she no longer had any gusto for a political set-to.

  “I didn’t know that you acknowledged Aakisen’s existence,” she said.

  “Oh yes. His name came to mind because I’ve just read a report of his death in a CIA propaganda sheet, but it’s surprising that you’ve heard of him. The attempt to make propaganda with his death was very ineptly handled.”