The Office of the Dead (4 page)

I began the slow hard climb towards consciousness around dawn. For hours I lay there and tried to cling to sleep. My mouth was dry and my head felt as though there were a couple of skewers running through it. I was aware of movement in the house around me. The doorbell rang and the skewers twisted inside my skull. A few moments later there was a knock on the door.

Trying not to groan, I stood up slowly and padded across the floor in my stockinged feet. I opened the door a crack. Her nose wrinkling, Mrs Hyson stared up at me. I had slept in my clothes. I hadn’t removed my make-up either.

‘There’s a gentleman to see you, Mrs Appleyard.’

‘A gentleman?’

Mrs Hyson frowned and walked away. My stomach lurched at the thought it might be Henry. But I had nothing left for him to take. Maybe it was that solicitor, anxious about his cheque.

A few minutes later I went downstairs as if down to my execution and into Mrs Hyson’s front room. I found David Byfield examining a menacing photograph of the dear departed Mr Hyson. He turned towards me, holding out his hand and offering me a small, cool smile. He didn’t seem to have changed since his wedding day. Unlike me.

‘I hope you don’t mind my calling. I was up in town anyway, and Janet phoned me this morning with the news.’

‘She’s had my letter, then?’

He nodded. ‘We’re so sorry.’

How I hated that
we.
‘No need. It had been coming to an end for a long time.’ I glared at him and winced at the stabs of pain behind my eyes. ‘You should be glad, not sad.’

‘It’s always sad when a marriage breaks down.’

‘Yes, well.’ I realized I must sound ungracious, and added brightly, ‘And how are you? How are Janet and Rosie?’

‘Very well, thank you. Janet’s hoping-we’re hoping that you’ll come and stay with us.’

‘I can manage quite well by myself, thank you.’

‘I’m sure you can.’

The Olivier nostrils flared a little further than usual. ‘It would give us all a great deal of pleasure.’

‘All right.’

‘Good.’

He smiled at me now, showing me his approval. That’s what really irritated me, the way I felt myself warming in the glow of his attention. Sex appeal can be such a depressingly impersonal thing.

David swiftly arranged the next stage of my life, barely bothering to consult me. His charity was as impersonal as his sex appeal. He was helping me because he felt he ought to or because Janet had asked him to. He was earning good marks in heaven or with Janet, possibly both.

A few hours later I was in a second-class smoking compartment and the train was pulling out of the echoing cavern of Liverpool Street Station. I still had the hangover but time, tea and aspirins had dulled the skewers of pain and made them irritating but bearable, like a certain sort of old friend. My suitcase was above my head and the two trunks would be following by road. I had bathed and changed. I’d even managed to eat and keep down a meal that wasn’t quite breakfast and wasn’t quite lunch. David wasn’t with me – his conference ended at lunchtime tomorrow.

The train lumbered north between soot-streaked houses beneath a smoky sky.

‘Let’s face it,’ I told myself as the train began to gather speed and I fumbled for my cigarettes, ‘he doesn’t give a damn about me. And why the hell should he?’

It occurred to me that I wasn’t quite sure which he I meant.

After Cambridge the countryside became flat. The train puffed on a straight line with black fields on either side. It was already getting dark. The horizon was a border zone, neither earth nor sky. I was alone in my compartment. I felt safe and warm and a little sleepy. If the journey went on for ever, that would have been quite all right by me.

The train began to slow. I looked out of the window and saw in the distance the spire of Rosington Cathedral. The closer we got to it, the more it looked like a stone animal preparing to spring. I went to the lavatory, washed a smut off my cheek and powdered my nose. David had telephoned Janet and asked her to meet me.

By the time I got back to the compartment, the platform was sliding along the window. I pulled down my suitcase and left the train. The first thing I noticed was the wind that cut at my throat like a razor blade. The wind in Rosington isn’t like other winds, Janet had written in one of her letters, it comes all the way from Siberia and over the North Sea, it’s not like an English wind at all.

Janet wasn’t on the platform. She wasn’t at the barrier. She wasn’t outside, either.

I dragged my suitcase through the ticket hall and into the forecourt beyond. The station was at the bottom of the hill. At the top was the stone mountain. The wind brought tears to my eyes. A tall clergyman was climbing into a tall, old-fashioned car. He glanced at me with flat, incurious eyes.

Before I went to Rosington I didn’t know any priests. They were there to be laughed at on stage and screen, avoided like the plague at parties, and endured at weddings and funerals of the more traditional sort. After Rosington, all that changed. Priests became people. I could believe in them.

I wasn’t any nearer believing in God, mind you. A girl has her pride. Sometimes, though, I wish I could think that it was all for the best in the long run. That God had a plan we could follow or not follow, as we chose. That when bad things happened they were due to evil, and that even evil had a place in God’s inscrutable but essentially benevolent plan.

It’s nonsense. Why should we matter to anyone, least of all to an omnipotent god whose existence is entirely hypothetical? I still think that Henry got it right. It was one evening in Durban, and we were having a philosophical discussion over our second or third nightcaps.

‘Let’s face it, old girl,’ he said, ‘it’s as if we’re adrift on the ocean in a boat without oars. Not much we can do except drink the rum ration.’

At Rosington station, I watched the clergyman’s car driving up the hill into the darkening February afternoon. I waited a few more minutes for Janet. I went back into the station and phoned the house. Nobody answered.

So there was nothing for it but one of the station taxis. I told the driver to take me to the Dark Hostelry in the Close. In one of her letters, Janet said someone told her that in the Middle Ages, when Rosington was a monastery, the Dark Hostelry was where visiting Benedictine monks would stay. The ‘Dark’ came from the black habits of the order.

The taxi took me up the hill and through the great gateway, the Porta, and into the Close. I saw small boys in caps and shorts and grey mackintoshes. Perhaps they were at the Choir School. None of the boys would remember Henry. Six years is a long time in the life of a school.

We followed the road round the east end of the Cathedral and stopped outside a small gate in a high wall. I didn’t ask the driver to carry in my suitcase
–
it would have meant a larger tip. I pushed open the gate in the wall, and that’s when I saw Rosie playing hopscotch.

‘And what’s your name?’ I asked.

‘I’m nobody.’

Rosie wasn’t wearing a coat. There she was in February playing outside and wearing sandals and a dress, not even a cardigan. The light was beginning to go. Some children don’t feel the cold.

‘Nobody?’ I said. ‘I’m sure that’s not right. I bet you’re really somebody. Somebody in disguise.’

‘I’m nobody. That’s my name.’

‘Nobody’s called nobody.’

‘I am.’

‘Why?’

‘Because nobody’s perfect.’

And so she was. Perfect. I thought,
Henry, you bastard, we could have had this.

I called after Rosie as she skipped down the path towards the house. ‘Rosie! I’m Auntie Wendy.’

I felt a fool saying that. Auntie Wendy sounded like a character in a children’s story, the sort my mother would have liked.

‘Can you tell Mummy I’m here?’

Rosie opened the door and skipped into the house. I picked up my case and followed. I was relieved because Janet must have come back. She wouldn’t have left a child that age alone.

The house was part of a terrace. I had a confused impression of buttresses, the irregular line of high-pitched roofs against a grey velvet skyline, and small deeply recessed windows. At the door I put down my case and looked for the bell. There were panes of glass set in the upper panels and I could see the hall stretching into the depths of the building. Rosie had vanished. Irregularities in the glass gave the interior a green tinge and made it ripple like Rosie’s hair.

A brass bell pull was recessed into the jamb of the door. I tugged it and hoped that a bell was jangling at the far end of the invisible wire. There was no way of knowing. You just had to have faith, not a state of mind that came easily to me at any time. I tried again, wondering if I should have used another door. The skin prickled on the back of my neck at the possibility of embarrassment. I waited a little longer. Someone must be there with the child. I opened the door and a smell of damp rose to meet me. The level of the floor was a foot below the garden.

‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’

My voice had an unfamiliar echo to it, as though I had spoken in a church. I stepped down into the hall. It felt colder inside than out. A clock ticked. I heard light footsteps running above my head. There was a click as a door opened, then another silence, somehow different in quality from the one before.

Then the screaming began.

There’s something about a child’s screams that makes the heart turn over. I dropped the suitcase. Some part of my mind registered the fact that the lock had burst open in the impact of the fall, that my hastily packed belongings, the debris of my life with Henry, were spilling over the floor of the hall. I ran up a flight of shallow stairs and found myself on a long landing.

The door at the end was open. I saw Rosie’s back, framed in the doorway. She wasn’t screaming any more. She was standing completely still. Her arms hung stiffly by her sides as though they were no longer jointed at the elbows.

‘Rosie! Rosie!’

I walked quickly down the landing and seized her by the shoulders. I spun her round and hugged her face into my belly. Her body was hard and unyielding. She felt like a doll, not a child. There was another scream. This one was mine.

The room was furnished as a bedroom. It smelled of Brylcreem and peppermints. There were two mullioned windows. One of them must have been open a crack because I heard the sound of traffic passing and people talking in the street below. At times like that, the mind soaks up memories like a sponge. Often you don’t know what’s there until afterwards, when you give the sponge a squeeze and you see what trickles out.

At the time I was aware only of the man on the floor. He lay on his back between the bed and the doorway. He wore charcoal-grey flannel trousers, brown brogues and an olive-green, knitted waistcoat over a white shirt with a soft collar. A tweed jacket and a striped tie were draped over a chair beside the bed. His left hand was resting on his belly. His right hand was lying palm upwards on the floor, the fingers loosely curled round the dark bone handle of a carving knife. There was blood on the blade, blood on his neck and blood on his shirt and waistcoat. His horn-rimmed glasses had fallen off. Blue eyes stared up at the ceiling. His hair was greyer and scantier than when I’d seen it last, and his face was thinner, but I recognized him right away. It was Janet’s father.

‘Come away, Rosie,’ I muttered, ‘come away. Grandpa’s sleeping. We’ll go downstairs and wait for Mummy.’

As if my words were a signal, Mr Treevor blinked. His eyes focused on the two of us in the doorway.

‘Fooled you,’ he said, and then he began to laugh.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Janet was brushing Rosie’s hair. The bristles caught in a tangle, and Janet began carefully to tease it out. ‘He just
arrived.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Oh, but it does.’ Her eyes met mine, then returned to the shining hair. ‘The doorbell rang at half past three and there he was. He’d come all the way from Cambridge in a taxi.’

Rosie was sitting on a stool on the hearthrug, her back straight, not leaning against her mother’s knees. In her place I would have been fidgeting, or playing with a toy, or looking at a book. But Rosie seemed hypnotized by the gentle scratching of the brush.

‘It didn’t occur to him to telephone. He just came as he was. No luggage, no overcoat. He even forgot his wallet. I had to use the housekeeping.’ Janet smiled but I knew her too well to be fooled. ‘He was still in his slippers.’

We were in a narrow, panelled sitting room. The three of us were huddled round the hearthrug in front of the fire. Rosie was in her nightclothes. Janet had given me a gin and orange, with rather too much orange for my taste, and I was nursing it between my hands, trying to make it last.

‘He’d forgotten his medicine too. Actually they’re laxatives. He gets terribly concerned about them. That’s why I had to pop out to the chemist’s before it closed. And then the dean’s wife swooped and I couldn’t get away.’ The brush faltered. Janet rested her hands on Rosie’s shoulders. ‘Poor Grandpa will forget his own name next, won’t he, poppet? Now, say good night to Auntie Wendy and we’ll put you into bed.’

When they went upstairs, I wandered over to the drinks tray and freshened my glass with a little gin. All three of us had tiptoed round what Mr Treevor had done upstairs. I wondered what Janet was saying to Rosie about it now. If anything. How
do
you explain to a child that Grandpa found a bottle of tomato ketchup in the kitchen, took it upstairs to his room and splashed it over him to make it look as if he’d stabbed himself to death? What on earth had he been thinking about? He had ruined his clothes and the bedroom rug. God knew what effect he had had on Rosie. The only consolation was that all the excitement had tired him out. He was resting on his bed before supper.

Glass in hand, I wandered round the room, picking up ornaments and looking at the books and pictures. I had grown sensitive to poverty in others as you do when your own money runs low. I thought I saw hints of it here, a cushion placed to cover a stain on a chair’s upholstery, a fire too small for the grate, curtains that needed relining. David couldn’t earn much.

There was a wedding photograph in a silver frame on the pier table between the windows, just the two of them in front of Jerusalem Chapel, David’s clerical bands snapping in the breeze. I didn’t have any photographs of my wedding, a hole-in-the-corner affair compared with theirs. My mother had thought we should have a white wedding with all the trimmings but Henry persuaded her to let us have the money instead for the honeymoon.

Janet came downstairs.

‘Supper will have to be very simple, I’m afraid. Would cheese on toast be all right? There’s some apple crumble in the larder.’

‘That’s fine.’ I noticed her shiver. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I wanted it to be nice for you on your first evening especially. We haven’t seen each other in such ages.’

‘It’s all right. It’s lovely to be here: Will your father be coming down?’

‘He’s dozed off.’ She went over to the fire and began to add coal. ‘I didn’t like to wake him.’

I sat on the sofa. ‘Janet – does he often do things like that?’

‘The tomato ketchup?’

I said nothing.

‘He’s always had a sense of humour,’ she said, and threw a shovelful of coals on the fire.

‘He kept it well concealed when I came to stay with you.’

Janet glanced at me. Tears made her eyes look larger than ever. ‘Yes. Well. People change.’

‘Come on.’ I patted the seat of the sofa. ‘Come and tell me about it.’

‘But supper –’

‘Damn supper.’

‘I wish I could.’ Suddenly she was almost shouting. ‘You’ve no idea how much I hate cooking. In the morning the sight of a fried egg makes my stomach turn over.’

‘Me too. Anyway, I’m going to help with supper. But come and sit down first.’

She dabbed her eyes with a dainty little handkerchief. She was one of the few people I’ve ever known who don’t make a spectacle of themselves when they cry. Janet managed everything gracefully, even tears. I brought her another drink. She made a half-hearted attempt to push the glass away.

‘I shouldn’t drink this. I’ve already had one tonight.’

‘It’s medicinal.’ I watched her take a sip. ‘Tell me, how long’s he been like this?’

‘I don’t know. I think it must have started before Mummy died. It’s been very gradual.’

‘Have you thought about putting him in a home?’

‘I couldn’t do that. He’s not old. He’s not even seventy yet. And it’s not as if he’s ill. Just a bit forgetful at times.’

‘Has he seen the doctor?’

‘He doesn’t like doctors. That business with the tomato sauce …’

‘Yes?’

‘I think he was just trying to be friendly. Just trying to play a game with Rosie, to make her laugh. But he didn’t realize the effect he would have.’

She hesitated and added carefully, ‘He was never very good with children.’

‘And what does David say?’

‘I haven’t liked to bother him too much. He’s very busy at present. There’s a possibility of a new job …’

‘But surely he must have noticed?’

‘He hasn’t seen Daddy for a while. Anyway, for most of the time he’s all right.’

I felt like an inquisitor. ‘And what did Rosie say?’

‘Nothing really.’ Janet ran her finger round the rim of her glass. ‘I told her that Grandpa was just having a joke, and it was one of those grown-up jokes that children don’t always understand. And she nodded, and that was that.’

It turned into quite a nice evening in the end. Rosie fell asleep, and so did that dreadful old man upstairs. Janet and I ended up making piles of toast over the sitting room fire and getting strawberry jam all over the hearthrug. Janet gave me a chance to talk about Henry but I didn’t want to, not then. So we ignored him altogether (which he would have hated so much) and I was happy. There was I acting the tower of strength while inside I felt like a jelly, just as I had all those years ago at school. Between them, Janet and Mr Treevor made me feel useful again. We choose our own families, especially if our biological ones aren’t very satisfactory.