The Lively Dead Read online

  “It appears to be for you,” he said in an amused voice. “Treasure!” shouted Dickie.

  “Family letters or something, I should think,” said Lydia drily. “Drat that kid, I’ll have to go and change him. Let’s get this other bit across, then I can manage.”

  “Can I open the treasure?” asked Dickie.

  “No, darling,” said Lydia. Her hand shook as she took the envelope from Paul and put it on the mantelpiece. As they hefted the other half of the wardrobe across she collected her wits. The feel of the envelope had certainly been that it held banknotes; there was no reason to be panicky and secretive; all she need feel was excitement at Procne’s good fortune. On the other hand, there was no sense in telling the world.

  “I must cope with that poor child,” she said as she carried the pedestal across. “Dickie, will you be all right here for a bit?”

  “I want to see the treasure,” said Dickie.

  “You stay here with me and I’ll tell you a story,” said Paul.

  “A battle?” asked Dickie.

  “There used to be some pretty scary witches in Livonia.”

  “A battle,” said Dickie. “I’ll make the sand table. Here.”

  He jumped off the bed and hoicked its cover into a range of mountains.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lydia. “His grandfather is a nut on military history. You don’t have to do it, honestly, Paul.”

  “No, that’s fine,” said Paul. “I was in a sort of a battle once. I’ll tell you how Aaku Aakisen ambushed the Russian slave-train and rescued the prisoners. OK?”

  “That’s marvellous,” said Lydia. “You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for, though. I’ll be about five minutes.”

  She snatched the envelope off the mantelpiece, ran out and whisked the carrycot down the stairs with such acceleration that Trevor was startled out of his whine. She grabbed the pot out of Mrs Pumice’s room, rushed him down to the basement and plonked him down on it. His whine modulated into a wail, but she ignored him.

  The money was in five-pound notes, in labelled bundles of £200. There were five of these and a thinner one containing £165. Just under twelve hundred quid. The envelope contained one piece of lined writing-paper covered with Mrs Newbury’s large and spiky script. It said:

  I, Doris Newbury, of 11 Devon Crescent, London W.11, being in my right mind and all that, undo all my other wills, not that I have made any as I remember, and leave this money and everything else I got to Lydia Timms, Lady Timms that is, for her boy Dickie to have when he grows up, and I do NOT leave anything to my own daughter Procne, that’s been a pain in the neck to me no matter how I’ve tried. Signed by me Doris Newbury on the 12th of Jan, being in my right mind like I said.

  She had signed with vigour, but had not asked anyone to witness the will.

  Lydia read it again, sighing.

  “Silly old bitch,” she said, out loud.

  She held the paper over her sink to burn it. Trevor stopped whining to stare in astonishment at the creeping flame, vivid in the gloom of the basement. When the paper was ashes Lydia broke them up smaller, turned on the cold tap and eased them down the drain. As she carried Trevor, clean and dry but still grizzling, back up the stairs, a shoulder bag containing twelve hundred pounds bounced menacingly against her other hip.

  “Slowly the slave-train stopped,” Paul was saying. “Wheeee, ssshhhh.”

  “Tonkatonkatonkatonktonktonk,” added Dickie, always the perfectionist where stage effects were concerned.

  Three pens tied with thread lay end to end in a valley on the white bedcover. The valley was blocked by a tumbled heap of paper pellets. Paul and Dickie craned over the scene, like the Gods above Troy.

  “Now,” said Paul, “old Aaku wanted the Russians to think that the avalanche was an accident until all the guards were out of the train and he’d blocked the line behind—otherwise they’d just reverse out. From the hillside he watched the soldiers climb out. Their uniforms looked black against the snow.”

  Lydia crept out and rang the bell of the Government’s inner door. After a long wait Mr Obb opened it. He smiled with pleasure when he saw her, then stared doubtfully at the baby. The baby stopped whining and stared back. Their faces had a lot in common, blankness, baldness and an innocent bleariness of eye.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Lydia. “I’ve just started to redecorate Mrs Newbury’s room, and I’ve found a place where something has leaked down from above. I don’t know whether it comes from outside or from that room where you keep your files. Can I come and look?”

  Mr Obb shrugged. For a moment Lydia thought he was going to refuse, but he smiled again and held the door open. Trevor, on being taken into an unfamiliar part of the house, snuggled closer against her side but stayed silent, as though instinctively aware of protocol. The filing room was a fair size, the same as Mrs Newbury’s but with a lower ceiling and smaller window. It was so crammed with filing cabinets that it seemed claustrophobic. A narrow alleyway led straight from the door between two ranks of cabinets, all at least five feet high and piled on the top with bundles of documents, completely screening the corner where the leak had come through. At the end of this alley Lydia found that another rank of cabinets backed onto the one she had just passed, and another faced that, and another backed onto that, facing the far wall. But here there was a change—instead of a final rank lining the wall she found four large barrels and two big plastic dustbins. Until she had almost reached them the dusty dry odour of old documents had obscured this other smell, but now it was unmistakably the same as that of the leak below. She stood and stared, petting the baby absentmindedly.

  “What on earth … ?” she began.

  “Oh, oh,” said Mr Obb in a worried voice, “I had not thought. Of course, of course, Yes.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “This is where we make our varosh—our vodka.”

  “You aren’t running a still, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Still? Ah, distillation. No, no, no. We, tsk, tsk, tsk, infuse, yes?”

  “Are all these things full, Mr Obb?”

  As she reached her free hand towards the lid of the nearer bin Mr Obb seized her elbow, squeaking with alarm.

  “No, no, no! Not to touch, please! Varosh is most infectable!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lydia, withdrawing. “I was worried about the weight. I hadn’t realised how much you kept in here. I don’t know whether the joists will stand it. This is an old house, you know.”

  Mr Obb stood back, stroking his bald head and looking vaguely relieved, as though the collapse of the floor were a minor problem compared with the invasion of his booze by some bug.

  “We have kept all these things here for many years,” he said.

  “Well, let’s hope it’s OK. I’ll ring up the Building Centre and see whether they have any standards for the strength of floors supporting filing cabinets. You’ve got rows—eight in a row, forty. What about the barrels?”

  “Oh, ah. Linden would know. Yes, Two barrels and one bin are always full. Sometimes the third barrel.”

  Lydia measured them with her eye. About forty gallons in the barrels and twenty in the bins. If it had been water, that would make a bit over half a ton. Say a couple of hundredweight each for the cabinets. Another four tons. Say five in all, minimum. It ought to be just about OK, provided the joists were sound. She nodded.

  “OK,” she said. “Now, do you know how much got spilt? I’ve got to have some idea how long it’s going to keep coming through.”

  Mr Obb made vague gestures with his hands, a poor method of indicating liquid volume.

  “Perhaps two litres, perhaps three,” he said at last. “We had an old man, a servant, who made excellent varosh, very skilled, very careful. But then he died …”

  “In this house?”

  “No, no,” said Mr
Obb, suddenly vehement again. “Not in this house. But … yes, Count Linden and I were changing the liquor from one stage to the next when Linden dropped the jug. It is a fault of education. To be not clever with one’s hands is a mark of the intellectual—in Linden’s case of the aristocrat, of course. How could old Linden have known that the day would come when his heir must make his own varosh? Tsk, tsk.”

  It was impossible to dislike Mr Obb, even when he burbled class-ridden nonsense like this. In fact he seemed naively eager to placate Lydia’s wrath at the spillage, as ingratiating as a savage who has committed some venial murder and is trying to explain his harmlessness and goodwill to a District Officer—a comparison out of another world which no longer exists and so can now also have its iniquities smiled at. Mr Obb mimed shame, and eagerness to please, and promises that he and Count Linden would never again throw sticky liquors around. Trevor Pumice gazed at him with a look of mild distrust.

  “I expect it will be all right,” said Lydia. “If it keeps coming through I can line that bit with foil before I paper.”

  “We will pay, of course,”

  It’s hard to guess why Lydia’s mind, occupied by the practical problem of stopping strong drink from penetrating a fresh-painted ceiling, should have at that moment made a lateral leap.

  “You top the bins up with vodka and brandy,” she said. “Mrs Newbury used to buy it for you.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed Mr Obb. “You see, we are spied on, all of the time. We must be most careful to do nothing that will make bad propaganda. We must not allow the Muscovites to say in Livonia that we spend government income on varosh. We do not, of course. We spend our own money.”

  Lydia would have like to ask for more details, but was afraid that if she did so he would put two and two together and find out that Mrs Newbury had been cheating them. As soon as she took a step away from the barrels he scuttered to the door and held it open for her. Down the corridor she could hear General Busch’s rasping voice, speaking German behind a closed door.

  “Political matters,” said Mr Obb, relaxing. “A man from Der Spiegel is interviewing Busch about the death of Aakisen. The tragedy has created great interest on the continent.”

  “Heavens!” said Lydia. “I must rush. Poor Paul Vaklins is still telling Dickie about how Aakisen stopped the slave train.”

  “Not Aakisen,” said Mr Obb. “That was an episode in the Estonian resistance—a good story, however. Quite true.”

  “Let’s hope Dickie doesn’t find out. He disapproves strongly of fiction—it’s his grandfather’s fault. I’ll let you know whether the Building Centre people think that floor’s safe. Oh, can you remember exactly when you spilt the stuff?”

  “Indeed,” said Mr Obb. “It was the night before the funeral. Linden was tired with his vigil by the coffin—that is how he dropped the jug.”

  “Thanks,” said Lydia. “I’ll let myself out. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Delighted, delighted,” said Mr Obb, his relief at getting rid of her so obvious that Lydia ran down the stairs wondering what on earth the old men were up to that they were so anxious to hide. Probably some piece of Baltic politics, so mummified that it no longer mattered to anybody except themselves.

  A Mig howled over Mrs Newbury’s bed. Paul did the jet-scream and Dickie the guns.

  “Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.”

  “Tack attack attack attack attack tack.”

  It curved away over a coarsely darned hill-ridge.

  “The prisoners ran between the pine trees,” said Paul. “The bullets made lines across the snow like the tracks of a running deer. They threw white splinters from the pine-trunks. Women screamed. A man carried his dead son up the hill, but the bullets caught him and he himself fell dead across the body. The smoke from the wrecked train was like a war-signal, calling to the Russian garrisons. The prisoners wanted to scatter, to hide, to crouch down in the snow, to go back and surrender. But Aaku was their sheepdog, old Aaku with his sticky-out ears. He kept them fleeing in one bunch, all up the hill where the trees were thickest. Fresh groups of his men waited to help the prisoners and to pin down the pursuit. See, now, here is the hill-crest, where the sledges were waiting, and rough little ponies. They pile the women and the wounded on and race down the far slope. Night comes soon in our winters. It is dusk when they reach the frozen river. All along the ice the explosives are set. They cross, and …”

  His fingers made explosions on the dust sheet.

  “Boom! Boom! Boom!” yelled Dickie.

  “So now the river was a defence line, and beyond it lay the wild forest and the marshes which Aaku knew like no man else. A few planes came over, dropping bombs at random …”

  “Kerrump, kerrump.”

  “… but they had no target and did no harm.”

  Even Lydia’s imagination was unwillingly stirred, more by the idea of freedom than by the old hopeless heroisms. She waited for Dickie’s inevitable question.

  “Is it true, please?”

  “Quite true,” said Paul, “It was just like that. I was there.”

  Lydia was faintly irritated by the truthful ring of what she knew to be a lie, and then by the amused glance Paul flashed at her.

  “Dickie is a good demonstration of Lysenkoist theory,” he said. “The military urge has become hereditable.”

  “Rubbish,” snapped Lydia. “He’s been indoctrinated, and by a civilian sawbones at that. Sorry—I didn’t mean to sound churlish. He’s loved it, haven’t you, darling?”

  Dickie grunted his thanks, already absorbed in the process of re-settling the paper avalanche on its hillside so that he could fight the whole battle over again. Trevor stirred on Lydia’s shoulder and burped so suddenly and violently that he shocked himself into a howl. Like a mother seal rushing to the sound of her pup’s voice Mrs Pumice came bowling into the room, looking almost dizzy with happiness.

  “Hello!” she cried. “My, you’ve been busy. Have you been a good boy then, sweetie?”

  Trevor’s wail rose. Mrs Pumice snatched him from Lydia’s arms and made a great but ineffective show of loving him.

  “I must go now,” said Paul, picking up the pens, and did so before Lydia could thank him. Dickie looked sulky at the disappearance of his train, but in a second or two he had replaced it with an imaginary one which puffed, inaudible through Trevor’s crying, between the snow-sprinkled pines.

  “I’m glad you found me up here,” shouted Lydia. “I wanted to consult you about colour schemes in here.”

  “It’s all right,” yelled Mrs Pumice. “I haven’t got to move. “I’ve got my back rent, and a month in advance.”

  She dumped Trevor onto the bed, ruining the Livonian landscape. He rolled onto his stomach and crawled towards the scene of the battle, whining. A Mig came over, whining on a different note, and strafed him vigorously. Mrs Pumice took her rent book and a sheaf of money out of her shoulder-bag.

  “Five weeks back is twenty-two fifty,” she said, “and four in advance is eighteen. That’s forty fifty, right?”

  She counted the money out in five-pound notes.

  “You’ve found treasure too?” said Dickie. “I found treasure, Mum found treasure, you found treasure. Tack attack attack attack tack.”

  “You found Ma Newbury’s will?” said Mrs Pumice, bright and gossipy. “Was there any money with it? I bet there was.”

  “Dickie found tuppence under the carpet and I found some family papers of Mrs Newbury’s. There isn’t a will,” said Lydia.

  She tried to speak with less coldness than she felt but the tone came out obviously false, and that made her produce one of her classic blushes, scarlet from scalp to collar-bone. Mrs Pumice evidently felt the rebuff, for she answered with sudden aggressiveness.

  “You never asked me where my money come from,” she said. “Don sent it, more than what he owed.”

 
; “That’s great.”

  “So now I haven’t got to move. You can’t make me, can you? It might mean he wants to come back after all, see?”

  She stared at Lydia as if challenging her to say it was a lie. Mrs Newbury had used exactly that look to support her more outrageous fibs.

  “Well, that’s fine,” said Lydia. “We’ll just leave everybody where they are for the moment, and Mr Vaklins can move into this room, which he wants to do.”

  “Ooh, that’ll be nice,” said Mrs Pumice. “Have you seen his car? It’s smashing! Well, I’ll be seeing you. Tirra, Dickie.”

  She snatched her child out of Livonia and left. Dickie restored his battlefield to coherence and started the ambush again. Lydia went gloomily back to work, reshaping her ideas as she did so. OK, leave everybody in their existing rooms. If Paul would pay twelve for this one there’d be no need to ask the Pellettiers for any more. Allow another six weeks to get the basement into decent nick, why, she could have started her baby months ago and she’d still have been all right. Some clouds do have silver linings.

  Chapter 12

  In the unwilling March sunshine Dickie and Lydia stood under the porch of the white plaster wedding-cake which was 109 Hyde Park Gardens. First Sundays in the month were always the same: she woke with a vague reluctance which increased by midday to a depression which made lunch seem completely insipid; Dickie, on the other hand, lived in a mounting tornado of activity and excitement; now they both stood under the porch, Dickie skipping from foot to foot even while he pressed the bell, and Lydia feeling as usual like a dark little mouse whose weight on the step would snap the trap shut and cage her for ever.

  “Who is it?” crackled Lalage’s voice from the speaker by the column of bell pushes.

  “The men come to Hoover the elephant,” cackled Dickie (a new joke, concocted by him and Richard during last night’s bed-time session).