A Habit of Dying (25 page)

S: A teacher, aged 31 in summer 1983, when her godmother/cousin/aunt(?) Phoebe Joslin died in Cockermouth. Described as short haired, sharp featured with wide mouth. Enjoys gardening (rose bushes) on a small plot. Attends conferences/training in summer holidays. French holiday with writer.

Writer: Advertising copywriter(?), 8 years with company(Pink2?) in 1983 so started in 1975. Drives to work (in Botley?). Has female GP(?).

They: Have friends H & J. Had a child who died at (or near) birth. Live near a river which they could ‘walk right into’.

As she wrote the details, Lydia felt sure that she was on firm ground with these facts, paltry as they were. She knew in themselves they would not lead her to the writer, but she also knew they could prevent her heading down a blind alley in her quest. Another small detail, not a fact, but perhaps interesting, caught her eye. At the end of both of the last two entries the writer had used the words ‘Mr Punch’. Lydia could not guess at their significance, although clearly they had some special meaning for the author. Her sense of place told her that these were people living in a town of some size, even though some rural outposts would have shops and rivers that you could ‘walk right into’. If he did work in Botley, as she surmised, then the obvious town was Oxford, with Abingdon a close second. Consideration might be given to Kidlington, even Woodstock or Witney. But all this was more than twenty, nearer thirty, years ago, and as she well knew, things have a habit of changing.

Putting her papers to one side, Lydia poured the last of the bottle and lit a large candle, lemon scented supposedly to repel insects. The steady glow of the flame in the still air wrapped the deepening night around her like a blanket. For a little while longer, the sun’s heat, stored in the bricks of her house, radiated back on her to keep the chill at bay. Every time she had read the journal, she felt a fraction closer to the lives it encompassed, the world they inhabited. Familiarity dulled the shock of the insight to another’s mind, to the innermost secrets entrusted to a neglected notebook. But they were still shocking, still they said that he planned to eliminate his wife. Lydia baulked at thinking of ‘kill’, even though she knew that was what it might mean. ‘Kill’ might simply be her obvious interpretation of the words, ‘eliminate’ might be closer to the reality, he may simply have had a plan by which he could leave her, or make her leave him. And yet, those words about ‘
casting a leaf to the forest floor to be lost amongst all the other leaves
’, what other
meaning could be contained there? But she ran ahead of herself again, there was no solution to be found simply by re-reading the journal, nor even by forensic examination, despite what Felix Russell might have said. Or whatever help Stephen might wish to offer. She let him drift back into her thoughts with a degree of pleasure, despite her erratic behaviour towards him. They had parted amicably enough, no doors were closed and they certainly knew a little more about each other, even if it was not what might have been anticipated twenty-four hours previously. She would continue with her own mixture of method and feeling until either she found answers or all avenues had been explored. When she found the connection, and she was very sure that she would, found who they might be, then there was the chance of an answer.

Mr Punch. It was that character’s name which came first into Lydia’s head when she woke in the morning. He must surely be Judy’s murderous husband. Murderous? Even in her waking moment had she seen the simple connection, the simple reason that entries thirty and thirty-one ended with that particular name? It seemed tenuous, and yet somehow fitted with the fractured mind of the man who’d written it. And now that she came to think about it, did Mr Punch kill Judy, or was it the crocodile? And the more she thought about it the more she realised that although Punch and Judy were a part of the language, instantly recognisable, she really couldn’t remember anything about the story.

By lunchtime, still in her pyjamas and dressing gown, Lydia had read all that she could find about
Punchinello
and his murderous exploits. First the baby, beaten to death when left in his care, then Judy for discovering the crime. Then came the assaults on the policeman, deceiving the hangman, brushes with the crocodile, and at each new twist, each victory over his enemies, the star turn cries ‘that’s the way to do it!’ Little wonder that today’s Punch and Judy had been reduced to anodyne blandness. Such scenes of domestic violence would never do for today’s fresh-faced innocents.
But even in her cynicism, she had to concede it was probably right. She had never suffered anything more than indifference from Michael before their divorce, but she read enough and knew enough to know that many wives suffered far worse than a blow with Mr Punch’s slapstick.

Lydia read the passages from the journal again, to see if the famous catch-phrase might be substituted for ‘Mr Punch’.
‘So long as I can hang on to that sequence and repeat it faultlessly that will be the way to do it. Mr Punch I think.’ a
nd ‘
This I think is the world without her even though she sleeps a sleep through this last night. Check mate in the game. Mr Punch.’
As soon as she did so, it was obvious that there was no need for substitution, the writer had not written ‘Mr Punch’ as some code with some deep meaning. He was almost quoting from the script, and simply attributing the quote. A seriousness settled over her as this discovery sunk in. Remove the comic clothing, remove crocodiles and sausages, remove the hunch back and the hook nose, and you were left with a dark core of violence, murder and deception.

The sobering thought of such crimes came even closer to home when Lydia remembered that her writer had something else in common with the evil puppet. A dead child. Quickly she turned through the pages to the passage. It was fresh in her mind from last night but she wanted the exact wording. ‘. . .
that tiny scrap of a person, that dead, dead baby lay for a few minutes in his Perspex crib, for all the world peacefully asleep as any other baby on the ward except that he wasn’t breathing.’
It was with some relief that Lydia could detect no hint of malice in the words, no suggestion that the death might have been anything but a private tragedy. On the contrary, there was something tender and caring in the ‘tiny scrap of a person’ phrase. Whatever crimes he had considered, planned, even committed, he had not killed his son.

It was the prospect of a fresh challenge, rather than the potentially tedious business of filling out the details of lives she thought she already knew, that prompted Lydia to reach for her ‘sandcastles’ album. It was either that or hunt for a marriage for Bertie or look for Albert and Hannah’s children, neither of which she much relished. It had been a while since she had held the book, longer since she had so diligently made her notes on the names and the places. Cheap board with a dimpled surface bound the black card pages where stick-on corners held the precious records of family life in their places. The captions were carefully written in white pencil or crayon under each snapshot until near the end, by which time the faces were so familiar that a simple page heading had been considered sufficient. Slowly she leafed through, re-acquainting herself with the 1950s, with Fred, Susan and Paul, Beryl and Archie, and of course with ‘self’, the one seeming constant in every album. Fred and ‘self’ were certainly husband and wife, Susan and Paul their children. They holidayed in Margate and Hastings, Devon and the Dales. So, Lydia guessed, most likely the album covered four years, four summer holidays with a few other snaps in between. The shiny Humber with the white-walled tyres appeared for the third holiday, the summer in Devon at Pickwell Manor.

Then there were Beryl and Archie, ‘the Arncliffes’ according to a Margate caption, their regular holiday companions with their two children Linda and Stephen. Pretty much of an age with Susan and
Paul, which was only to be expected. Archie, like Fred, smoked a pipe, whether on the beach in a deck chair or picnicking in the Dales. How long since Lydia had seen anyone smoke a pipe? A centuries old tradition had apparently vanished in less than a generation. Fred and Archie both looked so much older than fathers of young children did today, but then again, they had lived through different times, had more reason to have aged. And Lydia’s mind being the way it was, she fell to wondering what these two daddies had done in the war, and whether later, she would need to answer that question.

The summer holidays gave up nothing of their secrets, no matter how hard Lydia looked at them, no matter how often she examined the faces or the backgrounds with her magnifying glass. She turned her attention to the scattering of photos that interspersed the holidays. One of ‘self’ and Fred simply captioned ‘London’, a busy street with a trolleybus in the background, not a scene that Lydia recognised. But a trolleybus, that might at least date the snap as being no later than a certain year, another straw to be clutched at should she need to. There was Susan, for it was surely her, aged about four or five, half hidden by fluttering pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Here was Fred in gardening mode, posed with his foot on a spade on what looked like an allotment, the ever present pipe gripped in his teeth. Next to him, ‘self ’ stood by the railings on some promenade, headscarf flapping in the breeze, with the town pier in the background. Without the repitition of the faces, they would be no more than a random selection of snapshots. There on the last page was ‘self ’ again, sitting on a plaid picnic rug with tasselled edges, looking up at the camera. Her two children had their backs to the lens, while a fourth figure sat in a folding chair, the face in shadow under a broad-brimmed hat. A hat from another era, thought Lydia, but a favourite hat, or perhaps an only hat. With a sudden surge of recognition, Lydia grabbed the magnifying glass and looked again. No, more than that, it was a familiar hat! This was a hat she’d seen before in another photograph. The RAF album? She looked again at ‘self’ and the skirt spread out on the blanket, saw the floral pattern that had cried out 1950s when she
had seen it before in Dorothy’s kitchen drawer photographs. She scrabbled for the envelope and slid out the battered prints; same dress, same ‘self’, same hat on the same figure of the older woman. A stiffened straw hat with a broad ribbon around the crown, a best hat, a hat to wear when visiting, an old hat bought in better days. But most importantly to Lydia, it was a hat to link Dorothy and the sandcastles, a link absolutely confirmed by the face and bold print dress of ‘self ’.

Dorothy’s recollection was of ‘cousins’, and why should they not be cousins, whether first or second or any number she chose, it did not matter. But Lydia felt there was more to it than that, for while the sandcastles ‘self’ might be a cousin, then so too might the figure in the hat, for why else would she be both picnicking on a plaid rug and in the gardens at Highdown with Dorothy and her mother? Frustratingly, there was no caption to the picture, not even a title for the page, which seemed to be a collection of odd snaps, maybe not even in time with the holidays, just left-overs that could fill the last page of the album. Did ‘self ’ think that anyone looking would be bound to know who all these people were? Of course she would never have anticipated a stranger poring over them, ignorant of any aspect of their lives. But Lydia realised she might not be completely ignorant, she may know all about their parents or their grandparents or even their great grandparents. These people, this ‘self ’, this Fred, these children, they would have Joslin blood in their veins and if not Joslin then Dix or Myers, possibly all three if they ran true to the pattern of the generations.

All of which brought her back to the task of researching the births, marriages and deaths to fill out the details of Bertie Dix-Myers and find possible children for Albert and Hannah Joslin. There remained a possibility that the sandcastles family belonged to one of those missing girls, to Verity, Harriet or Alice, and the thought did not sit well. Lydia had spent many hours searching and researching for each of them and found trace of neither death nor marriage. Sifting through those same hundreds of index pages yet again was a dismal prospect, one she would only contemplate if all else failed. Surely there was some further
insight to be gained from the album, something of which later she might think ‘oh, yes, now I see it, if only I had realised.’ It was tempting to sit longer, to turn and re-turn the pages, but Lydia knew she would be better off coming to it later, with a fresh mind. If there were some further gem it might be she’d already seen it, already logged it in the subconscious where a night’s sleep might reveal its place in the scheme of things. And besides, her weekend was all but done and none of her domestic needs had been attended to - the fridge was nearly as empty as her knicker drawer. If ever there was a day for clean underwear it was surely tomorrow, for tomorrow was her birthday. There would be a card and a little present from her colleagues, she would buy some cakes to be handed round, but above all there would be a grilling from Gloria about Stephen.