The Lively Dead Read online

  “That’s fine,” said Lydia and ran up the steps.

  She felt full of warmth and inner life. She knew that the sheepskin coat didn’t suit her, making her already pudgy figure seem square as a brick. Ages ago, before Dickie was born, one of her half-sister Lalage’s blokes had made a family film at Christmas and had shown it to a roomful of people. A lot of it, of course, had been of Lalage looking languorous, but there’d been one long middle-distance take of Lydia walking down a path beside a yew hedge, wearing a heavily padded anorak. The whole room had laughed, including Lydia herself. So now she knew exactly what she looked like as she clip-clopped past the sugar-icing façades of the other Devon Crescent houses—a sort of square leather parcel-thing, with her sturdy legs strutting jerkily below and her aggressive little head, pink-checked, black-browed, poking out at the top. She didn’t mind. She was herself, Lydia Timms. That’s what she was like. You could say that the trouble with the sheepskin coat was that it suited her too well.

  She went to Minwick’s and bought a couple of hacksaw blades and resisted the temptation of a brutal blue wrench which would have been just the job when it came to cope with back-room sink, but at four pounds sixty was simply a luxury, when she could do the job with the tools she had already. Then she went to the hire shop and checked that the Acrow hoists were coming to-morrow afternoon. She came out knowing from the man’s manner that they were, but wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t checked. At the library she looked in vain for something to read to a seven-year-old dyslexic boy who had an obsession with warfare; she also checked the travel shelves to see whether there were any new books on Russia (there were) and whether any of the travellers had thought Livonia worth than the usual Intourist paragraph (they hadn’t).

  Finally she picked Dickie up from his remedial tutor, took him to Holland Park for a machine-gun battle with his cronies in the adventure playground, and home for tea.

  She was still cheerful.

  Chapter 2

  Even at week-ends Lydia and Richard Timms didn’t speak much to each other during the day, and their week-day evenings, once Dickie was in bed, would have appeared to a stranger very gruff and chilly. If something simply had to be discussed they would talk it over rather formally, like a two-man committee. But mostly after supper Richard worked at his law-books while Lydia made careful diagrams for tomorrow’s carpentry, or drew look-and-say pictures of tanks, Greek hoplites, Crecy archers and atomic submarines, or—if she felt suddenly escapist—worked on her plan of the fantasy car she was going to build as soon as Richard was earning real money and the dry rot was vanquished. They had no television and seldom listened to the radio.

  But once the lights were out they were both slow droppers-off, and since Richard’s breakdown had got into the habit of talking for an hour in the dark, sometimes in each other’s arms for a while and then holding hands, but more often simply lying side by side on their backs. When they had to spend a night apart Lydia missed this hour horribly and found it difficult to go to sleep at all. She wondered, those times, whether—supposing Richard took a girl to his hotel room (unlikely)—he simply lay on his back in the dark and talked to her. That would have made Lydia more jealous than if he’d attended the sort of orgies at which Procne Newbury had earned her living before she went to jail.

  “Dead?” said Richard. “Yes, I suppose it’s about time.”

  “Um.”

  “What do you mean? You usually say he doesn’t exist.”

  “Then he can’t be dead. I mean … Don’t be flip about it, darling. I can’t imagine why, but a care.”

  “Sorry. What I think I meant is that they’d have to kill him off some time—it’d look a bit fishy if they were still putting out propaganda about the great national hero imprisoned by the wicked Bolsheviks when he was officially a hundred and twenty. They must have slipped a year or two in any case. He can’t have been only seventy-six.”

  “It said seventy-six years of fighting. He couldn’t have begun till he was … how old?”

  “Say twelve. Eighty-eight. Pretty long-lived for a labour camp.”

  “He existed once.”

  “Of course. You know, I think he was probably pretty well always a figurehead—that’s why they made him President in the first place. Then he stayed behind with the Resistance, and I should think the Russians got him about 1946, tidying up after the war. The people here would simply hope, and go on putting out propaganda stories about him and his Hereward-the-Wake stunt in the marshes. But when the Cold War began to thaw, and Amnesty got going, and so on, they decided that they’d get more mileage out of making him a prisoner of conscience, or whatever they call it, so they announced that news had come that he was in Siberia. But even that couldn’t last for ever. Now’s a good time to bump him off.”

  “Why now?”

  “Oh, well, they must be getting pretty jumpy now Sir Alec’s gone from the FO. He’d invested a lot of face in the Baltic States, right back to before the war, so even with all this détente going on he’d have stood by them. The Kremlin boys never give up. At some point quite soon there’ll be something we want, and they’ll ask for a quid pro quo, and that might be closing down the Baltic legations in London and recognising Russia’s de jure sovereignty—we’d do it, too, if they offered us enough. So all the old men can hope is to up the price by throwing Aakisen into the fight. If people believe he’s just been starved to death in a labour camp, it’ll make it that bit harder for us to go along with the Russians.”

  “It makes me sick. If a thing’s wrong in the first place, it can’t suddenly become right just because we’ve got a new Foreign Secretary.”

  “There aren’t any rights in that world—only a choice between wrongs.”

  “I hope it was true—Aakisen, I mean.”

  “I rather approve of the old boys, fighting their war with men who are dead already and can’t be killed any more.”

  “They brought back Mrs N to-day.”

  The tenants were none of Richard’s business and he had seen very little of Mrs Newbury. He simply accepted the news with a grunt, and it was some seconds before he really took in what Lydia had said.

  “Back?” he said.

  “The Government are being very funny about her. They’ve laid out her room like a military chapel, and they’re going to stand sentry over it all night.”

  Richard chuckled.

  “I nearly took Dickie up to see,” said Lydia.

  “Good God! Isn’t that carrying his obsessions a bit far?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t for the soldier bit. It’s just I’ve read you ought to get kids used to the meaning of death. I’m not keeping hamsters.”

  “Darling, I don’t think it’s a very good idea.”

  “I only thought about it. He didn’t really like Mrs N. She used to make him kiss her.”

  “Ugh. That makes it worse. Furry corpse stiffening in its cage, I can see the point. Ogress shut away in box, nightmares. She’d be lifting the lid and coming for him.”

  Most of Lydia’s own nightmares ran at the level of attending grand dinners and discovering she was still wearing her rubber gloves. Only occasionally did she wander into a darker world, and even then it seemed to be someone else who ran, hopeless, from …

  Waking, she could not even remember what, only the terror.

  “I think I’ve got a gardener,” she said.

  “That’s housekeeping.”

  “I think I can scrape up three hours a week. And I was talking to Mr Tevel at 76, and he hates gardening too. And 87’s a jungle—I don’t know the people there but I can go and ask. And Jack Stoddart would far rather spend time on that stupid boat of his. And it wouldn’t matter if this bloke didn’t know anything about gardening because Mrs Schelling would love to boss him about and I know she’s looking for somebody because her back is getting so bad.”

  “Where on earth did y
ou find a man with so much time? What does he say?”

  “He said ‘Uh’ twice. I bumped into him in the doorway. He’s the latest spy.”

  “Darling!”

  “I can’t see why it shouldn’t work. And it would give the poor sod something real to do.”

  “I can see you’re going to make it work. I love you. You spend half your days fighting social systems and the other half constructing new ones. You’re the Lenin of W.11.”

  Lydia didn’t feel like wandering down the old track, endlessly fascinating to Richard, that explored the thicket of her own personality. She didn’t find it a very interesting place.

  “I wonder how you get references from a spy,” she said.

  “Supposing he is one.”

  “Who else could he be, hanging around in the basement door? Oh, bloody hell! You don’t think he was the Building Inspector?”

  “Inspectors are more garrulous than that.”

  “Damn! If it wasn’t him, he didn’t come. I bet he comes when I’m at the funeral.”

  Chapter 3

  Mr Obb, wearing a black frock coat and a black tie, came down to fetch Lydia. His pale eyes widened slightly at the sight of her.

  “I’m sorry,” she lied. “I haven’t got anything blacker than this.”

  It was a dark blue trouser-suit, ideal for wearing at windy gravesides. Its sharp-edged, soldierly cut looked well on Lydia, emphasising her competence and energy, mitigating her pudginess.

  “We will provide a sash,” said Mr Obb.

  “Thank you.”

  (The last time Lydia had worn a black sash was outside South Africa House.)

  Almost a dozen frock-coated men waited in the hall. Two or three were surprisingly young. At a nod from General Busch they marched out down the steps and peeled off into the glossy black cars of the cortege.

  “Have you met Mr Paul Vaklins?” said Mr Obb. “Lady Timms.”

  Lydia, already shrinking into herself, reducing her world-awareness against the coming dreary charade, took a second to realise that she was being introduced to one of the young men, whom she vaguely recognised. His large, muscular body was topped by a head which seemed slightly too small and not quite adult, as though the years had never properly smoothed out the crumpled skin of childbirth. Apart from that he would have been very handsome, with his short blond hair and pale blue eyes. He half-bowed.

  “We’ve encountered each other a couple of times on the stairs,” he said. “I have the honour to escort you, Lady Timms. My car’s down here.”

  He led her to a vast, bright yellow monster, Italian coachwork on an American chassis by the look of it. The door he held for her seemed as big as the whole side of a Mini.

  “I’ll stay a bit back,” he said as the big engine sucked the car away behind the black Daimlers. “She’s not quite the thing for a funeral. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I prefer it,” said Lydia. “I love cars. In a year or two I’m going to build one for myself.”

  “One like this?”

  “No, almost the exact opposite, as a matter of fact. Small and square, with a very tight lock. Sixty m.p.g. Nothing to rust. My husband says it will be a hundred-mile-an-hour shopping basket.”

  She cocked her head and listened to the engine.

  “Sixteen cylinders?” she asked.

  “That’s right—it’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? I tell myself it’s a symbol of exile. I don’t have a home, I have a car.”

  Lydia warmed to him, not simply because he accepted without a smile the notion that a woman could build her own car. His hands on the steering were stubby and short-fingered and he drove with no fuss at all, although the pace of the cortege came tiresomely at a point where his automatic transmission couldn’t quite make up its mind between ratios. At traffic lights the car sidled close up behind the last of the Daimlers.

  “Did you ever meet Aakisen?” said Lydia.

  He seemed faintly startled, turning to stare at her with ice-blue Livonian eyes. Then he laughed.

  “Yes, I see,” he said. “You’re being a bit subtle, but you may be right. Because we can’t bury Aakisen properly we’re acting out our mourning by giving a grand funeral to this woman? But no, I never met him. In fact I never heard his name until I came to England. Officially in Russia he didn’t exist.”

  “Oh … I didn’t realise … I mean you speak English so well.”

  “Better than I speak Liv, to be honest. Russian is my first language and English my second. Liv is a nursery language I’ve had to re-learn. I got out in the aftermath of the Khrushchev regime. But my old colleagues, they stick to their bad accents as a means as of sticking to their identities. I think if you shouted at Busch in English that the house was on fire he would run down the stairs.”

  “I’d like to be there. It sometimes irritates me, I’m afraid, though I’m not much good at languages myself. Is that why they’re such mechanical nits, too?”

  “Uh?”

  “I have to keep running up and mending the Gestetner for them. If you’re going to be about at all, I’ll show you and you can do it.”

  “I don’t know. I would say that their mechanical incompetence was a bourgeois class thing, a bit like the way Chinese Mandarins grew their nails long to demonstrate that they did no manual work. So gentlemen and intellectuals prefer to show that they do not belong to the mechanic classes. But as for being at Devon Crescent … it’s not the ideal moment to ask, but have you any plans for Mrs Newbury’s room?”

  “For you?”

  “If possible. There’s going to be a Government reshuffle, now Aakisen is dead. Busch will be President and Obb Prime Minister, and I will take over Maritime Affairs. After all, I own the ship.”

  “I thought there was more than one.”

  “Yes, there are six, but I own the new one.”

  “How on earth did you get a new one?”

  Lydia knew that some of the Government’s money came from the tiny merchant fleet that happened to be out of Livonia when the Russians had come. But by now all of them must surely be much-patched old dodderers.

  “Willi Brandt gave it to me, in effect, as a result of his Ostpolitik. It was a highly complex transaction which freed certain assets frozen in East Germany but belonging to me through my grandmother who was a West German. It would take a lawyer to explain how these assets came to me not as cash but in the form of a 6,000-ton Stralsund-built coaster. Do I drive in? Will the car mar the atmosphere of grief? Agh, it is too cold to walk.”

  In the car-park he helped her to adjust the black sash, again with unfussy efficiency, so much so that he surprised her by standing back when he had finished and saying, “No need to be ashamed of it. It goes with your uniform. The sash of the Order of Aakisen.”

  She smiled meaninglessly, not even sure whether it was a joke. He took her arm and led her along a muddy gravel driveway behind the old men, bareheaded now, who were following the flower-strewn hearse. The path became worse and worse, puddled, and churned here and there by tyres. Grey grave-stones flanked it, hugger-mugger, the grass between them coarse and spiritless as that on an over-used recreation field. They crossed another driveway, and here the grass was not even mown, but a rank fawn mat criss-crossed with the purple arching stems of brambles. Some of the grave-stones leaned crooked and many of their inscriptions were illegible; but slowly, as the tangle and decay grew worse, the jutting monuments became grander; at another crossway sat the first carved angel; ivy seethed around her knees and sent tentacles up to fondle her shoulders; she looked posed, intentional, as if the wilderness and ruin were proper to her. Beyond that the procession trudged through an area of mausoleums, wilder and more entangled still, though here and there some great-niece of the last deceased had kept the family tomb tended; pillars stood askew, gothic vaults had been patched with corrugated iron, buddleia seedlings sprouted
from pediments. In places between these shanty-like monuments a fresh grave had been dug and filled and was marked with a modern headstone or a white wooden stake bearing only a number; the effect was like that of a Victorian suburb of large houses, plots of whose gardens are now sold as sites for neat new bungalows. At just such a site the cortege halted.

  The undertaker’s men hefted the coffin out. A train drummed past on the other side of the boundary wall, and by the time its noise faded the priest’s ghastly mumble had begun.

  Lydia was so withdrawn into herself, snail-like, against being touched by any of this dreary celebration that it took her some time to notice that four of the party had not come from Devon Crescent. Her attention was first caught by two men in short fawn coats who were acting in a non-mourning fashion, prancing and posing—who were in fact taking photographs. Lydia thought this excessive as an act of piety for a Government burying its charlady, until she saw that the photographers were aiming their cameras at two women on the far side of the grave, a tall pale girl also (to Lydia’s relief) wearing trousers and a nondescript older woman in a dark blue coat. There was a touch of the old-fashioned nanny about this second woman, but the girl didn’t look the type to have belonged to the nannied classes; her face was working, without tears, until she noticed the photographers and steadied herself. Then her features settled and she became Procne Newbury.

  Lydia had never met Mrs Newbury’s famous daughter, though she had been forced many times to look through the collection of press cuttings of the trial. Before that Mrs Newbury had often talked of herself as a sadly wronged mother, but when Procne had rocketed into notoriety she had been filled with pride and pleasure, as though it had been she who had lit the touch-paper. For Lydia this encounter by the graveside was like the thud of the stick falling.

  As soon as the coffin had been lowered and the earth had rattled onto its lid Lydia slipped round the blind side of the crowd and walked straight up to Procne.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Lydia Timms. Your mother had a room in my house.”