Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  “Tell you what,” said Louise. “I’ll look after it for the time being, but it’s still yours. When I get home I’ll get a lawyer to draw out a deed of gift—that’ll take a month or two, so you’ll have time to change your mind. I’ll make the deed to a charity called Wells for the Sahel. It’s a very good cause. They can sell this and use the money. That way it’ll save a lot of children from dying of starvation. OK?”

  (Seventy new wells, about—or two years’ salary and expenses for the Director.)

  “OK,” said Rose, smiling for the first time—her mother’s thin-lipped smile, but in Rose wholly different. It was true all through her, Louise realised, the sameness and the difference, the force of will, the singleness of aim, the immediate sense of grandeur you felt on meeting her, and the other sense, more slowly realised, that she had created herself and her world to be what she chose, unaided. The difference lay in the nature of that choice.

  Rose shook hands, and did her curtsey. Fred must have taught her that, Louise thought. Then she turned away and was hidden as the dismal officials closed round the table.

  2

  The conference had almost been cancelled at the last minute, because of the growing ethnic unrest, and the marches and demonstrations on the streets of Baku. One of the organising committee had told Piers that it was Louise who had saved it. Somebody in the Kremlin had decided that the royal presence might be a help, by distracting the world media for a few days, so the venue had been switched to a holiday complex forty miles up the coast. That had sounded idyllic, but when they got there they found that they were looking out over the results of another ecological cock-up but on an immensely grander scale than anything Louise had seen before. Thanks to irrigation schemes and uncontrolled pollution along the Volga, the Caspian had shrunk. Beneath the hotel windows the great pale lake was dying. The exposed shoreline stank, despite attempts to spray it with deodorants. But how could you be sure, said Piers, that exactly the same thing wouldn’t have happened if there had still been Tsars?

  Louise reached the hotel just before two in the morning. The lights were on in the living-room of the suite, and the floor around the ludicrously ornate sofa was strewn with scribbled foolscap sheets. The air smelt as though Piers had spent the evening experimenting with joss-sticks. The bedroom door was open, with a low light shining beyond. Louise went quietly through, expecting to find Piers asleep, but he was sitting on the far edge of the bed rubbing his eczema cream into his shins. The relaxed curve of his spine and the repetitive self-hypnotising motion told her that he was still deep in the invisible maze of his work, lost, happy, infinities of thought beyond her reach; but when she passed the edge of his vision on her way to the bathroom he looked up.

  “Back, darling? What’s the time?”

  “Getting on two. You’ve had a good day.”

  “How did you know? Excellent.”

  “What on earth have you been burning through there?”

  “Joe Matalamaya’s cheroots. The chap you danced with.” Louise laughed at the memory. Professor Matalamaya was about fifty, bald, short, tubby, with a reddish copper skin and an equally metallic accent—Philippine crossed with Chicago, someone had told her. For five minutes he had made her believe she could really waltz.

  “It turns out he and I have been spending the last eighteen months solving each other’s problems,” said Piers. “I’ve read his papers of course and he’s read mine, but you tend not to publish accounts of the brick walls you’ve been banging your head against.”

  “So it was worth coming?”

  “Was it not! I’ll try and explain if you like.”

  “Let me do my teeth. Did you remember to ring home in the excitement?”

  “He’s starting a cold. That tooth’s right through. Helen got him to burble at me but I don’t know how to pass that on.”

  As they lay in the dark Louise could feel Piers’s happiness like a soft current flowing into her, easing the exhaustions and disappointments of what had been a twenty-hour day. It struck her that it was a long time since she had felt quite like this about him, as though they were the only two people in the universe, and all life, everything that mattered, existed in the mysterious field of attraction between their poles. Then, from the moment she had had her first scan, seen the shadowy shape of Davy beginning to grow into existence, felt him shrug himself to a new position in her womb, there had been a third pole in the field, distorting the simplicities of the original pattern, twisting the currents along new lines. A life, a treasure, had been gained, but something had been lost. Tonight she felt as if she had been given it back. It didn’t matter that she was too tired to make love—Piers wouldn’t want to anyway, not in this mood … She sensed a slight change in him, the vaguest disruption in his purring content. “You don’t have to,” she said. “I wouldn’t understand, would I, however easy you made it?”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No. In fact I rather like it like that, I think. I mean knowing there’s something out there, different, right beyond my reach, something I can’t touch or change or make what I want it to be. Pure.”

  “It’s a point of view.”

  “You can’t either, can you? I mean you can get out there somehow and find it and explore it, but you can’t change it. You can’t ever make it into something it isn’t.”

  “What prompts these lucubrations?”

  “I don’t know. Meeting Rose, I suppose. Mrs Walsh’s daughter.”

  “Pukka?”

  “Absolutely. Don’t you want to go on thinking?”

  “Much better not. I’m on a sort of abstract high. I need a few concrete particularities to slow me down. Tell me about Rose.”

  Louise told him. The flight back from Tashkent had taken almost four hours. She’d had plenty of time to sort the events through in her own mind, and make guesses about what they meant, but for the moment she stuck to plain narrative. It didn’t take long.

  “She kept calling the man Fred?” said Piers. “Wasn’t his name John?”

  “Colonel John Walsh. That’s the name on the book.”

  “Could have been John Frederick. Or like old Professor Onions, who everyone called Pete except his wife.”

  “You didn’t read the book. Do you remember I told you about the fight by the railway-siding, when Mrs Walsh first met him? There was another Englishman, who got shot. ‘My servant, poor Fred Creech.’”

  “I suppose it’s a possibility. The question is whether it’s a necessary hypothesis.”

  “How am I supposed to tell?”

  “The current orthodoxy is that you grade hypotheses according to their explanatory power. That in turn depends on what you wish to explain.”

  “I want to know what happened. Three lots of what happened, I suppose. What happened in the real adventure? What happened to Maria? What happened to Alex?”

  “Alex? I thought Gorman shot him. He’d had the bad luck to come round and see Mrs Walsh while Gorman was setting things up, didn’t he?”

  “She was buying mothballs before that. She wanted to stop the body smelling. She’d shot other people in the back of the head, according to Fred. She’d got a gun, the one she shot Gorman with. It was part of Colonel Walsh’s uniform. I think she kept it in a funny lacquered table she had on the landing.”

  “And she shot him out of habit? He was being a nuisance about your grandmother’s papers so she asked him round and put a bullet in him? Your hypothesis begins to falter, darling.”

  “No. It wasn’t like that. I’m almost sure. We’d all been working ourselves into a stew about Granny’s papers getting out. That’s all we could think of. But I don’t believe that was what was worrying Mrs Walsh at all. Suppose when Great-grandfather was still alive somebody’d found out Colonel Walsh wasn’t Colonel Walsh at all, but only poor old Fred Creech, an ex-servant, pulling a fast one—the Walshes would have b
een out on their ears, wouldn’t they? Even after that, when he’d retired and they were living at Hampton Court—I mean if they’d got there by false pretences in the first place … I think what Mrs Walsh was really scared about was something she’d found in one of Alex’s letters. He was the one who passed on the émigré gossip, remember. It might have been something his mother had told him ages ago, when he was still a boy, and he’d passed on and then forgotten about. Or perhaps I reminded him that evening he came to supper, and he got so frustrated with Mrs Walsh that he tried to use it to twist her arm …”

  “All right. That will do as a possibility. It certainly seems a stronger motive for Mrs Walsh’s behaviour than fear of exposure of their original book as fraudulent. That has never seemed to me fully plausible.”

  “I’ll tell you something funny. From the moment Mrs Walsh first mentioned her baby I knew it mattered. I suppose it was because of me having just had Davy. I’m glad I met Rose, only there’s such a lot I don’t know still. She’s just like her mother in some ways. Extraordinary will-power. Force of character. The difference is, she’s good.”

  “You can tell?”

  “Oh, yes. In my work, you know. I don’t think you can tell straight off if someone’s bad, and anyway most people are sort of in-between, but from time to time I meet—oh, for instance, that surgeon at the blind children’s institute at Entebbe, remember? Lucy Ndolo?—people like that. You know. You feel it. I’ve seen a whole group of hacks suddenly realise what they’ve got in front of them and be pretty well bowled over—Rose’s one of them. Given different chances in life she could have been as famous as Mother Teresa. As it is she does it for what she calls her nephews and nieces. And just think of her being wheeled round Hyde Park by a frightened, tipsy little man who was the only person in her childhood who gave her anything like love!”

  “Under an assumed name.”

  “That’s the point. He loved her because he could be himself with her. Fred Creech. He wasn’t allowed to teach her English, but he taught her how to curtsey. Mrs Walsh talked to her in Iranian—that’s what the Tadzhiks speak—but only a few words, for orders. When they got to India, you see, Rose was just a tiny baby, and it didn’t matter her looking a bit foreign. But as soon as she started losing that baby face people could see there was something odd. They’d used her as part of their act—Mother, father, baby, escaped from the Reds after terrible adventures—and now she was beginning to look as though she couldn’t be their baby, and perhaps they weren’t pukka either … So Mrs Walsh’s answer was to say she was Down’s syndrome. Mongol, they’d have called it then. Not letting her speak English was part of that. And when she couldn’t keep that up any longer she put her in a home. I’m fairly sure about all that, though I still think it’s amazing she got away with it.”

  “People accept what they’re told they’re perceiving. There’s been a lot of work done on it.”

  “I don’t know what happened next. There was this strike at the factory, she said, and the Party took her on and showed she wasn’t a loony and got her out of the home. That’s how I know about the home. She must have been pretty well grown up by then if she was working in a factory, and surely people must have realised she wasn’t MSN before that.”

  “They might have realised but not let on. I spent my childhood in places like that, remember. I was comparatively lucky, but even with us there were staff who’d come there as kids and been kept on for the mucky jobs. Some were a bit retarded. They didn’t get paid much—worked for their keep.”

  “Yes. I can see Mrs Walsh putting her daughter somewhere like that. There’d be an understanding. Provided she wasn’t bothered she wouldn’t ask any questions. But how did Rose ever get out?”

  “Called up for war-work?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Then some kind of strike led by the Communists. She must have gone to them with her problem. She’s not very articulate, in English, anyway.”

  “Learnt it late, from work-mates. The Party might have taken her on as a sort of mascot.”

  “She was on some kind of demo up in London when she recognised Hyde Park and wandered around and found KP. Security wouldn’t let her through of course, but that gave her a line and she found the Walshes. Fred, anyway. He said what I told you. Next thing I know she’s out here, in the camps.”

  “The Party could have helped her get a visa and so on, but those days she would have been arrested pretty well as soon as she’d stepped off the boat.”

  “I think her lawyer had come to some kind of an arrangement with Mrs Walsh to pay her an allowance provided she went back to Russia and stayed there. When she’d got out of the camps she somehow made her way down to Tadzhikstan—a place called Dzhalal Abad which Fred had told her about, and asked around until she heard a story about some petty khan, years before, whose people had found two strangers dying of hunger. He’d taken them into his camp and kept the woman as one of his wives, but one night she’d taken his pistol and shot him in the back of his head and escaped with the other stranger, taking back her jewels which the khan had kept as dowry. She must have been several months pregnant. I think that’s what Rose was trying to tell me. Anyway, she decided this khan was her real father, so she hitched herself onto the clan as a kind of honorary aunt.”

  “She’d have been quite welcome if she was getting a regular allowance from England.”

  “She used it for dowries and things. What do you think?”

  “I suppose it hangs together. What about what you call the real adventure? If Rose reported Fred correctly, this khan was not the only person Mrs Walsh had wiped out.”

  “Yes. When I saw her in her flat that time she told me about her mother’s death. She sounded really bitter about it. Left in the snow with the spittle freezing on her cheek, like a foundered horse, she said. And she said it was how they were treated. I don’t think she was making­ that up.”

  “Left by the khan?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that … No, I think she would have sounded different. She used to talk about the Tadzhiks in a much more detached way. I think she was talking about her real mother, who was one of the Belayevs’ servants. You remember they used to make their servants act plays for them? I don’t think it was Mrs Walsh’s mother—she hinted it was her grandmother—who’d been the Grand Duke’s mistress.”

  “You are introducing a new element.”

  “Not really. Didn’t I tell you? Alex and Mr Brown were talking about it that evening. It started with Mrs Walsh looking like Granny, and whether she could be a Romanov too. There was a Grand Duke Aleksei. Mr Brown said he liked fast women and slow ships, and Alex said he preferred actresses to countesses. I think he must have given the grandmother the egg. That’s why Mrs Walsh never sold it with the other jewels. It really was hers. She sold the ones she’d stolen from the Belayevs.”

  “You are going to tell me she killed them for the jewels.”

  “I expect some of them just died. It must have been a frightful journey. But, well, Fred did say she’d shot ‘the others’. That means more than just the khan. It was sort of in the air those days, wasn’t it—stories about servants rising up and massacring their masters? And I’ve sometimes wondered what they ate during the journey. Fred was terrified of her.”

  “You’ve met her, I haven’t. You really think she was up to all that?”

  “Oh, yes. Easily. That’s what I meant about her being different from Maria. She didn’t care about anybody else at all. She tried to make people nothing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I know you think we aren’t really there at all. We’re just a sort of compromise, but …”

  “That’s a caricature of my position. The I that I think of as I is not an entity. It is an abstraction, a balance of opposing forces, but as such it is as real as, say, the British Constitution. Nobody can say precisely what the British Constitution is, or wh
ere it lies, but it is absurd to deny its existence.”

  “All right, let’s call it a balance. What I was trying to say is you aren’t allowed to go poking around interfering with other people’s balances. Making them what you want them to be instead of what they are.”

  “Everybody does it.”

  “Almost everybody. It’s what the GBP and the hacks are doing all the time to us. It’s what I was trying to do to Janine, I suppose. It’s what the terrorists keep trying to do not just to one or two people but to whole countries. It’s what you tried to stop us doing to you when we got married. It’s why Soppy went off her rocker …”

  “A factor, at most. There must have been an hereditary element, not to mention her relations with her mother.”

  “But it’s still there. It’s part of it. If it hadn’t been for that she might’ve kept her balance. But what I’m trying to tell you is that Mrs Walsh didn’t just go poking around, didn’t just try and make people something else, she tried to make them nothing. What she did to Rose was the worst, but there was Fred, too. And Aunt Bea, I suppose, only actually you can’t do that to Aunt Bea. She stays herself, in spite of anything you try.”

  “With most people the balance is extraordinarily resilient to change. The forces re-group, and a fresh balance, externally almost identical with the old one, is achieved.”

  “I hope so.”

  “A thought strikes me. The most extreme form of interference, obviously, is killing somebody. But isn’t it almost as extreme to bring them into being in the first place?”

  “Nonsense.”

  “In what way nonsense?”

  “I’m too tired to think about it. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Let’s call it a day. Have you had enough concrete whatsits?”

  “Particularities? I think so. Sleep well.”

  “Sleep well.”