Not Thinking of Death Read online

  Perhaps one was too protective of one’s little brother, he thought. Perhaps one should let him fight his own battles. If there was any battle to be fought, even: looking at her across the long mahogany table, recalling the expression he’d seen on her face when she’d thought herself alone with Dymock in the hall, it occurred to him that she might only have been trying to make this stranger out, or put into perspective something he’d just said.

  Now, she’d said something about a cousin – one who’d had a bad fall from a horse six months ago and was still laid up – and her mother had seized on it quickly, asking Dymock whether he had many cousins: ‘I mean of course first cousins. The other kinds are two a penny, aren’t they?’ Her light laugh was camouflage to the fact that it was a leading question aimed at getting a run-down on his family.

  ‘Only two. Both female – my mother’s sister’s daughters.’

  ‘Oh. Well, two’s enough to be going on with… Where do your people live, Toby?’

  He put down his fork. The soufflé had been delicious. ‘My father’s in deepest Devonshire, and my mother and her husband have a place in Suffolk. They – my parents – split up, years ago. When I was twelve, actually.’

  ‘Heavens!’ Suzie’s blue eyes shone. ‘Did they divorce?’

  ‘Suzie—’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Dymock gave his hostess one of his smiles. ‘Old history, now… Yes, Suzie, they divorced. And both re-married. My mother immediately, and the old man a few years later.’ He told Sir Innes, ‘Speaking of fishing, my father’s mad keen. He has a double-bank stretch of the Torridge, and he goes to Ireland most years for salmon and sea-trout. Stays with old Army friends over there and has a whale of a time.’

  Chalk put in – feeling that he’d been locked in his own thoughts for too long – ‘Despite having lost a leg at Passchendaele in ’17.’

  ‘Oh, really.’ Sir Innes frowned, putting his mind back. ‘Third battle of Ypres, that was. I was in the previous one – summer of ’16. But – lost a leg, you say. Well – wait a minute… Dymock. Dymock? Why, I knew him!’

  ‘In the war, sir?’

  ‘No. After – as fellow members of Boodles. He was a member there, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I didn’t know, but – I’m sure…’ Dymock pushed the bone of one lamb chop aside and started on another. ‘He isn’t now though, I don’t think.’

  ‘Must be a dozen or more years since we last saw each other. But I remember him well. Coming back to me now. He was using a crutch when I first met him, then he graduated to two sticks. He was having an artificial leg of some kind fitted, as I remember.’ Staring at Dymock across the table, he pointed downwards. ‘This one – the left – he’d lost. Eh?’

  ‘Yes. He could lean on the crutch and cast right-handed.’

  ‘He was in the club a great deal, at that time. I was only in and out, myself – had a job at the War Office, for my sins – but as I remember he was almost always there. Charming fellow, first-rate… But his wife had—’

  He’d checked: looking at his own wife. She’d shaken her head: ‘Innes, he was only just telling you—’

  ‘My mother had done a bunk, with the man she’s married to. I was at prep school: I suppose during term-times he did five at his club. It was a year or two at least before he met his present wife and moved to Devon.’

  ‘And she was Mary Ellesley. Old thingummy’s daughter. Ellesley was killed in about the last week of it, wasn’t he?’ Sir Innes slapped the table. ‘This is extraordinary, you know, quite extraordinary. Haven’t thought of old Charlie Dymock in years, and now out of the blue—’ Sir Innes paused, gazing at Dymock. ‘Old Charlie Dymock’s boy. You’d have been born about – when—’

  ‘1910, sir.’ Glancing at Chalk. ‘Same year as Rufus.’

  ‘Obviously a vintage year.’

  ‘Thank you, Suzie.’

  ‘Not a patch on the ’19, mind you.’

  Chalk smiled. ‘We won’t dispute that for a moment.’

  ‘But look here, now.’ Sir Innes was frowning at Dymock. ‘This nonsense about not fishing with borrowed tackle – you don’t mean to stick to that, do you?’

  ‘Afraid I do, sir.’ He hesitated. ‘At least – did…’

  ‘That sounds better. Eh, Chalk?’

  ‘Does indeed.’ Dymock’s eyes met his momentarily, shifted away again. He told Suzie, ‘Fact is, I’d been rather hoping for a game of tennis. ’

  ‘So that's it!’

  Suzie’s mother laughed, looking at her. Dymock protesting that he’d thought of tennis only because he hadn’t expected to be going on the fishing expedition – not the other way about, for heaven’s sake… Suzie said, ‘We must play, anyway. The court’s mown and marked out – most of it my doing, I might add!’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘You’re on.’ She switched her smile from Dymock to Chalk. ‘With Alastair here, we could make it a foursome.’

  He nodded. ‘You and your brother versus us interlopers?’

  He suppressed an urge to raise a laugh at Dymock’s expense by pointing out that he’d have to play with a borrowed racket. Dymock’s surrender, he thought, had been enough to be going on with; with any luck he might behave himself, from now on.

  Chapter 5

  Driving south to the Clyde on the Sunday evening, Chalk said, he and Dymock didn’t talk much. He told me, on his terrace overlooking the bay at Glandore, ‘I remember that there was – well, as you’d expect – a considerable gulf between us. In my own thinking, incidentally, there was a degree of ambivalence – as I saw it he’d behaved extremely badly, taken advantage of the invitation which after all I’d extended to him, and I wasn’t trusting him an inch as far as Suzie was concerned, but at the same time I didn’t want this contretemps between us – after all, we’d been friends for a very long time, and we were going to have to get along together in the Service for a lot longer yet. So at least some of the time I was trying to convince myself that his interest in Suzie didn’t have to be any of my business. No obligation to act as my brother’s keeper, I told myself. In fact if she was going to allow herself to fall for this bugger, Guy might be well out of it anyway.’

  I put in, with diffidence – ‘If I could ask you a rather personal question – it’s important, to the story as a whole – is it conceivable that by this time you might have developed rather a soft spot for her yourself?’

  ‘I don’t know why you should imagine so. It was my brother’s relationship with her that mattered – the danger to it that Dymock might pose. Plus the fact I’d brought the fellow up there with me, introduced him—’

  ‘Yes. I know. But at the same time it’s not impossible that in the course of your first weekend there you might have come to rather more than just like her. It matters because if so, it could have influenced your view of things. One or two things you’ve said – for instance, seeing her as beautiful rather than just “pretty”—’

  ‘Entirely objective observation. The thought behind it being “Gosh, but Guy’s a lucky fellow!”’

  I’d nodded. ‘What I’m getting at is how much you might have been prejudiced in her favour. Whether – for instance, remembering that scene in the hall as you described it – whether you didn’t have any thought that she could have been encouraging Dymock – or at least meeting him halfway.’

  ‘At that stage—’ his eyes were narrowed against the light reflected from the bay below us – ‘no, I did not have any such thought. But mind you, she’d only have had to look back at a man and not actually spit in his eye, and he’d feel encouraged… But—’ a raised forefinger wagged to and fro – ‘it wouldn’t have been intentional on her part. It was – oh, how she looked, obviously – isn’t it always, at least to start with? – but not just the colour of her eyes or the shape of her nose. Her whole personality… Remember that song of Chevalier’s, one look that sends you crashing through the ceiling?’

  ‘Well – sorry to flog a dead horse, but there you go again.’ I exp
lained, shifting the emphasis slightly, ‘What I’m wondering is whether the Suzie–Dymock flirtation – for want of a better word – might have been less one-sided than you thought at the time. Your sympathy for your brother could on its own have been enough to affect your view of it. Well, obviously it must have, that was the main issue… But – well, now, would you put all the blame on Dymock, as you did then?’

  A long breath… ‘Dymock was Dymock. I think he did genuinely fall for her later. Benefit of the doubt, anyway… But at the time, the dire effect of his self-indulgence – for which one must attribute blame, if words mean anything at all, and he was self-indulgent to a marked degree – there isn’t any doubt at all that to start with he was simply amusing himself. And I disliked him for it – intensely.’

  ‘You didn’t come to dislike her, for letting your brother down?’

  ‘No.’ Staring out across the bay again – with a hand down to rub his rather heavyweight red setter behind its ears. It was the only one that roamed free, the rest were kennelled behind the house, with a big wire run. He’d said of this dog earlier – its name incidentally was Rufe – ‘Fat old sod, isn’t he? No shooting this time of year, that’s half the trouble. Other half is he’s so damn placid, nothing like the bag of nerves most of ’em are.’

  It was why Chalk-bred setters were in great demand, I’d gathered. They had an unusual breadth of head, and temperaments to match.

  Answering my question about Suzie, though – shaking his head, a movement so small that it was like a twitch of nerves… ‘No, I did not. First out of sympathy for the ordeal she was put through – which we’ll come to, obviously it’s the main focus of your interest in all this… Second – she was extremely young, inexperienced.’ Quiver of the head again… ‘I knew right from the start she’d been far more a victim of circumstances than a cause of them. Another major factor, which I mentioned just now, was my own sense of responsibility for the whole thing. Responsibility to my brother, primarily. I’d brought Dymock to Glendarragh. I can tell you, I’ve lived with that ever since. But – back to your question about Suzie, attribution of blame and so forth – Dymock was by nature a seducer, he was nearly ten years older than her, had a great deal of experience, and he was damn good-looking. What’s more, she simply did not envisage the potential damage… Which – all right – might not have been inevitable exactly – that’s hindsight, I suppose – but it might at least have been foreseen as a possibility – by her parents, particularly. In fact they were either blind to it or saw it and did nothing about it. Took a calculated risk, perhaps.’

  ‘Are you saying they approved of him – despite having allegedly been very fond of Guy?’

  ‘Pragmatically they must have seen certain rather obvious differences. I mean advantages. Dymock was after all a man of some substance, with a clearly marked-out future before him. How many years might it have been before anyone could say that of Guy? Dymock was also extremely personable – and Sir Innes had known and liked his father… All in all, young Guy could be given a friendly pat on the head and told to go and play.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And Suzie wouldn’t have realized how cruel she was being. Wouldn’t have guessed at the depth of the wound she was inflicting. Partly because he had all but literally swept her off her feet, and in that state of mind – can’t expect good judgement, can you?’

  ‘But the same would have applied to Dymock. If he genuinely fell in love with her?’

  ‘Yes. If he genuinely fell in love. Bloody great “if”, that is too. Alternative is that it was just another conquest. In his time he must have pinched quite a few girls from other men; his attitude would have been “Well, bad luck…’” Chalk shrugged. ‘Natural enough, too. Law of the jungle, may the best man win, so forth. But there and then, I wouldn’t have made any allowances at all, I’d have hanged him.’ The clear blue eyes held mine. ‘Didn’t have to, did I.’

  There was a silence. I used it to check that the recorder was working and that the tape had some way to run.

  ‘One other question – of a general kind.’ I put the recorder down between us on the table. ‘When you tell me how you felt about this or that, should I allow for the influence of hindsight? In other words, how much latitude for interpretation do I have?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been giving you both aspects, as far as possible. How I felt then, and how I see it now. But if it doesn’t seem to add up, use your own judgement. Just bear in mind that I’m describing it as accurately as I can recall.’

  ‘So far, your recall’s fairly staggering.’

  ‘Probably because it’s been kept fresh. I’ve been over it in my mind God knows how many times. But as I say, you must use your own judgement, when you’re putting it together. There could be a touch of hindsight here or there – or even totally crossed wires. The more-or-less hundred-per-cent reliable memories relate of course to the main events, things you couldn’t forget; but as for who said what to whom and precisely when – well, take our drive south that evening. If Dymock and I did have any exchanges of conversation, I don’t remember them.’

  ‘All right… Actually there’s a slight discrepancy here. You and Dymock hardly on speaking terms, but where we broke off – at dinner at the Cameron-Greens – you said you were hoping he might behave himself from then on. Presumably he hadn’t.’

  ‘Couldn’t have, could he? You’re right. I suppose he’d just gone on – well, forcing his attentions on her… But – wait a minute, there was some damn thing as it were sticking in my gullet.’ He passed a hand over his eyes. ‘Something I sort of half remember. Give me a minute…’

  ‘It can be counter-productive, to concentrate too hard. Let’s see if we can’t as it were creep up on it. For instance, d’you remember how the fishing trip went, that Saturday?’

  ‘I know we caught a lot of trout. And I remember chatting with Sir Innes about the more immediate concerns of that pre-war time. Spain, for instance. Including Jacko Pargeter’s information about so-called “unidentified” – meaning Italian – submarines sinking neutral ships. And Austria, where the Nazis were positioning themselves to take over. Austria was obviously at the top of Hitler’s hit-list – as we’d term it now – at that juncture, and Sir Innes kept himself well informed on international affairs – what with reading all the journals of the day, and having friends at or near the centre of things. But he hadn’t heard what Dymock had to tell him about the Italian submarines’ murderous activities. I think it must have been kept quiet – probably to avoid pressure being exerted on the government to do something about it. Pargeter had elaborated on the subject – to Dymock – since that first mention of it, and apparently it was an open secret to those in the know that they’d sunk at least one British freighter and some French and Russians – and Anthony Eden was actually bestirring himself to call for an international conference of Mediterranean naval powers… Apart from that – I think we may have had the overcast conditions we needed. Caught an astonishing number of orange-spotted mountain trout, anyway – and had our picnic, saw a few red deer on our way down in the early evening. The visual memories last, you know, when others fade. Like snapshots… But I’m sure we must have talked about a lot more than Spain and Austria…’

  He snapped his fingers. ‘Got it. There was talk about the ensuing weekends – when would Diana be coming up with Guy, and so forth. We were going to have to prepare a suitable landing-strip for her, incidentally. But the coming weekend was the one when I was going to have to stay down there in order to meet my new CO, who’d obviously want a progress report from me, and I mentioned this to Sir Innes, who expressed disappointment but at once asked Dymock, ‘You’ll be with us, I hope?’

  Dymock thanked him, and accepted, and Sir Innes told him to consider it a standing invitation. Any weekend that he was at a loose end, etcetera. Well, you can imagine – can’t you? Dymock like a cat that’s collared all the cream: and looking at me with a gleam of triumph in his eyes… That was it. Not a word
said – so nothing to take him up on – but it was still to all intents and purposes a statement of his intentions. That, and then of course sticking to her like glue the rest of the weekend. May not sound like much – but remember I’d brought him up there, he was supposed to be an old chum and he knew damn well that she was my brother’s girl – eh?’

  * * *

  Chalk had asked Suzie when they’d happened to be alone together for a minute, ‘Are you still looking forward to having Guy here?’

  ‘Of course I am!’

  Then she’d done a double-take on the question. ‘Why ask me that, Rufus?’

  ‘Just hoped you were. He’s certainly looking forward to seeing you again.’

  ‘I know he is. I hear from him too, you know!’

  ‘You mean he actually puts pen to paper?’

  It had become a joke then, and she relaxed. ‘On occasion, he does. Widely-spaced occasions, but—’ shrugging – ‘not so dusty. I mean I can’t complain, I probably write less often than he does. But of course he writes, Rufus – how else would I know he’s given up the idea of going to fight in Spain?’

  Her brother had joined them at that moment.

  ‘Who’s off to Spain now, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Talk about picking up fag-ends…’ She told him, ‘Guy was thinking he might. Now he’s had second thoughts.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. We both told him what a chump he was. I’m glad he’s seen sense, finally.’

  Alastair Cameron-Green was about five-eight or five-nine, solidly built, with rather close-set eyes and a nose between them that gave him a hawkish look. A young hawk, only recently into feathers… Nodding to Chalk – ‘Awfully good chap, your brother.’

  ‘I like him.’ Glancing at Suzie. ‘I think she does too.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’ Her brother laughed. ‘And I am delighted he’s changed his mind about Spain. Particularly as he was set on joining the wrong side.’

  ‘Aren’t most foreign volunteers fighting for the Loyalists?’