The Office of the Dead (15 page)

I felt like a fool on Monday morning. Part of me was also excited, as if I was going to a party.

When the train left Cambridge I went along the corridor to the lavatory. As I sat there I took off my wedding ring, which wasn’t easy, and slipped it in my handbag. The skin where it had been was slightly paler than the rest of the finger. As far as the world was concerned, Mrs had turned into Miss, a magical transformation like frog into prince, or the other way round. Perhaps snakes felt this way when they sloughed off a dead skin, colder and suddenly more vulnerable, but also lighter than air.

I checked my make-up in the lavatory mirror for the third time since leaving the Dark Hostelry and then returned to the compartment. There were two men, one my age, one a little older, and they both glanced at me as I came in. The younger of the two was quite good-looking. He stared discreetly as I crossed my legs, and I was glad I was wearing the new stockings.

The Tongues of Angels
was one of the two books in my shopping bag. I took it out and skimmed through the poems again. I thought I knew where Francis had found the title – I’d checked the phrase in David’s dictionary of quotations. Almost certainly he’d taken it from the New Testament, from the opening sentence of the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’

But the contents didn’t have much to do with charity, not on the surface at least. The poems were divided into seven sections. Each of the sections had the name of an archangel. Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Sariel, Gabriel and Remiel. Oddly enough the poems themselves weren’t about angels, arch or otherwise. They were mainly about children or animals, sometimes both. I’d read all of them at least three times but I still wasn’t sure what most of them were really about.

But there was one thing I approved of. There was none of that J. M. Barrie nonsense for Francis. Quite the reverse. The children in ‘The Children of Heracles’ were cut up into little bits by their father, because a goddess had put him under a spell and made him think they were his enemies. Another poem was about the Spartan boy who ran with a fox gnawing his vitals and saved his country at the cost of his own life. At the end of it the fox ran off laughing. A third concerned a cat at the court of Egypt, a cat who was older and more mysterious than the Sphinx, a cat who watched with unblinking eyes as the children of the pharaoh died of the plague.

The longest poem was called ‘Breakheart Hill’. It was about a hunt in a pseudo-medieval forest where people said ‘prithee’ and ‘by our lady’ at the drop of a hat, and varlets lurked on the greensward’ neath the spreading oaks. The quarry was a hart, the noblest in the country, and the king, his huntsmen and his hounds pursued it all day for miles and miles. At last the light began to fade and the king commanded the huntsmen to drive the stag up a steep hill near the royal hunting lodge, for it was time for it to die.

The king’s son, who was on his first hunt, begged his father to spare the hart which had given them so much sport. But the king would not. The pack drove the stag up the hill, and there, on the summit, its great heart broke open and it died of exhaustion just before the hounds leapt at its throat. The young prince wept.

The king ordered his huntsmen to drive the dogs back. Then he took his son by the hand and led him to the stag. He drew his dagger, sliced open its breast and cut deep down to its broken heart. The king put his hand inside the broken heart and drew it out, dripping with blood. The prince watched. The king daubed blood on the boy’s face and kissed his forehead.

‘For hart’s blood makes the young heart strong,’ quoth he.
‘God hath ordained it so. He dies that ye
‘May hunt, my son, and through his strength be free.’

So what had angels to do with all this? Maybe Francis believed he’d cracked their code, and worked out what they talked about among themselves when not on official business. And their favourite topic of conversation turned out to be nasty anecdotes involving children and animals.

Or perhaps it was the other way round and the message was straightforwardly Christian. Heracles, the fox, the pharaoh’s cat and the hunting king were all dominant types who either remained aloof from the crowd or got their own way. But was this of any use to them or anyone else, Francis was asking, without charity?

None of this made much sense. But with Francis I was used to that. I felt a kinship with him for that very reason. My life didn’t make much sense either. At least I was going to London for the day. I crossed my legs again, glanced up at the younger man and caught him watching.

The train was slowing for Liverpool Street Station. I put the book in my bag and stared out of the window at bomb sites, the backs of grimy houses and new tower blocks. The last time I had seen this view I had been suffering from a king-sized hangover and more unhappy than I could ever remember being before. Life had improved. London was huge and full of possibilities. Excitement wriggled inside me as if the snake was escaping from another skin.

I took the tube to Chancery Lane. The noise, the crowds and the constant movement were partly scary and partly invigorating. So was the fact that no one knew who I was. I felt like someone who had emerged from months of seclusion – from a monastery, say, or hospital or prison. Rosington had been all three of those things to me.

When I left the station I had to ask directions to Fetter Passage. Not once but three times. It was that sort of place – people thought they knew where it was but turned out to be wrong. I found it at last, a lane curved like a boomerang, north of Holborn in the maze of streets between Hatton Garden and Gray’s Inn Road. On one side were warehouses and offices, and on the other a small Victorian terrace, now incomplete because a bomb had ripped out one end of it. Most of the houses had shopfronts. The one nearest the bomb site was the Blue Dahlia Café, the side wall shored up with balks of timber growing out of a sea of weeds. I lingered outside, looking through the window.

The café was about half full. The customers, men and women, seemed respectable. Office workers, I thought, perhaps having elevenses. Was one of the men Simon Martlesham? I went inside.

Layers of smoke moved sluggishly through the air. At the back was an archway masked by long multi-coloured strips of nylon which trembled in the draught. A radio played quietly. Few people were talking. A sad-faced woman was washing up at the sink behind the counter and a man was making sandwiches. They ignored me.

I waited at the counter. Eventually the woman dried her hands and shuffled over to me. She had sallow skin and black lank hair.

‘My name’s Appleyard. I’ve arranged to meet a Mr Martlesham here, but I’m a little early. Do you know him?’

She nodded.

‘He’s not here already?’

‘You sit down and wait. You want something?’

I ordered coffee. She waved me to an empty table and said something in what sounded like Italian to the man making sandwiches. Then she slipped through the ribbons into the room beyond, her slippers slapping on the linoleum. A little man in a raincoat was reading a newspaper at the next table. He glanced up at me, squinting through his cigarette smoke, but turned away when I met his eyes.

While I waited, I dipped into
His Country’s Flag
, the other book in my shopping bag. Soon I learned that young Harry Verderer had recently been orphaned, but his wealthy uncle intended to send him to Cape Town where there were openings at a bank with whom the uncle had connections. This was appropriate, because the man at the next table was going bald, and the patch of shiny skin on the top of his head was shaped rather like a map of Africa. Harry was frightfully cross because he wanted to join the army and become a hero like his father and grandfather before him. Instead he had to buckle down and do his duty at the bank for the sake of his kid sister Maud.

At that moment the woman brought my coffee. The man at the next table squirmed in his chair, brushing ash from his lap.

The ribbons fluttered again, and then I was no longer alone. A man limped towards my table, dragging his left leg across the floor. His left arm hung down at his side with a
Daily Telegraph
wedged near the armpit. He wore a worsted suit and carried a stick. His dark eyes were on the book, not me.

‘Miss Appleyard?’ He must have looked for a wedding ring.

‘Mr Martlesham. And in fact it’s “Mrs”.’

We shook hands. I wondered why I’d been so keen to claim the ‘Mrs’ I could so easily have discarded with the ring.

Martlesham propped his stick against the table and sat down, lowering himself awkwardly into the chair. If his thirteenth birthday had been in July 1904, he must now be almost sixty-seven. He had neat, well-proportioned features and once must have been handsome. Still would have been if his face hadn’t been lower on the left side than on the right. But the suit was brushed and pressed, his hair had been recently cut and his collar was spotless. He wore a gold tiepin, a horse’s head inlaid with enamel. He smelled of shaving cream now, not rancid fat.

When he was settled, he glanced at the waitress and she went through the ribbons again.

‘You’ve got them well trained,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The waitress. Is she fetching you something?’

‘Coffee. Sorry. Is there anything else you would like?’

‘No, thanks. Do you live near here now?’

‘In a way.’ He smoothed back his silver hair and nodded towards the book. ‘Is that the one you mentioned?’

‘Yes.’

Martlesham had sounded suspicious when I’d phoned him on Thursday, but had been too surprised to ask many questions. I hadn’t been sure how he would take it – not everyone wants to be reminded of their childhood, me included. But he’d said he’d like the book, if it was all the same to me. I’d suggested the time for our meeting, and said I was coming up to Liverpool Street, and he’d suggested the Blue Dahlia Café. I assumed it was near where he lived or worked, but perhaps he had just thought it would be convenient for me.

‘I don’t mind telling you, that phone call of yours took me by surprise.’ He had a strange accent, clipped as a suburban privet hedge, but the stroke had slurred his voice just as it had changed the shape of his face and crippled his left arm and leg. ‘Still, it’s very kind of you, I’m sure.’

‘That’s all right. I was coming up to town anyway.’

‘Even so.’

‘Actually, I was curious.’

‘Why?’

‘As I told you on the phone, I’m cataloguing the Cathedral Library.’

He nodded, impatiently. ‘That’s where you found the book.’

‘Yes. By and large it’s not exactly an exciting job. So anything out of the ordinary makes it more interesting. You see?’

‘Can I have a look?’

‘Of course.’ I pushed the book across the table. ‘After all, it’s got your name in it.’

He opened the book and read what Francis had written on the flyleaf. I drew on my cigarette. I wasn’t sure whom the book belonged to. I hadn’t asked Canon Hudson if I could give it to Simon Martlesham. That would have involved showing him the inscription, and I was sure he would disapprove of my trying to find out anything to do with Francis.

The waitress brought Martlesham’s coffee and a plate with two Rich Tea and two ginger biscuits on it. She stationed the plate between us and went away. Neither took any notice of the other. They might have been mutually invisible.

He looked up and stared across the table at me. I was shocked to see tears in his eyes. No reason for him to be sad. Perhaps the stroke had affected his tear ducts.

‘What I don’t understand is how you found me,’ he said. ‘I forgot to ask. I mean, you just rang up out of the blue.’

‘Mrs Elstree told me you lived in Watford. So I asked directory enquiries, and a lady who was your tenant gave me your London number.’

‘Who’s Mrs Elstree?’

‘I don’t know what her maiden name was but she knew you when you were a boy, when she worked at the Deanery. And she said her brother met you a year or two back, when you visited Rosington.’

‘Oh yes. That’d be Alf Butler. The first and last time I’ve been back to Rosington. Just happened to be passing through and I thought I’d take a look at the old place. He was down by the Swan, and he recognized me right away.’ He caressed the handle of the stick with his right hand. ‘I looked different then.’

‘You knew him when you were children?’

‘Alf’s parents used to have a little shop in Bridge Street. So Mrs What’sername must be Enid.’ Martlesham gave me a crooked smile. ‘I remember her. Always full of doom and gloom, that one.’

I smiled back. ‘She’s Canon Osbaston’s housekeeper now. He’s the principal of the Theological College.’

‘Hang on a minute.’ His forehead wrinkled. ‘How come you were talking to her about me in the first place?’

‘I wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Not exactly. I was asking about Canon Youlgreave. Because he was the one who gave you the book.’

He moved sharply. The stick propped against the table began to slide. The coffee swayed in the cups. ‘What’s your interest in Canon Youlgreave, Mrs Appleyard?’