The Office of the Dead

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘Bleeders Hall. Where the Hudsons are now. I was working next door in the Deanery. Of course they did things in a lot more style in those days. The dean had a butler and kept his own carriage.’

  ‘Really? And what was it like at Canon Youlgreave’s?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. I never had any call to go there. Of course, Mr Youlgreave was a bachelor and didn’t need the sort of establishment the dean did. But he had the house redecorated – I remember that. He lived in the Dark Hostelry while it was being done.’

  Janet brought the tea. ‘Who lived in our house?’

  ‘Francis Youlgreave,’ I said. ‘But Mrs Elstree says it was only for a short time. Apparently he had the house the Hudsons have got.’

  ‘He wasn’t liked, I’m afraid,’ Mrs Elstree said. ‘And of course he went mad in the end. Not that we were surprised. We could see it coming.’

  ‘Did you hear the famous sermon about women priests?’

  She shook her head and then, as if to make up for this failure, added, ‘They say he was over-familiar with the servants. And some of his ideas were very strange. You know he did away with himself?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ I watched her spooning sugar into her tea. ‘I thought he’d not been well for some time and he just died.’

  ‘That’s not what we heard. And him a clergyman. But it didn’t happen here. It was after they got rid of him.’ She took a sip of tea and then turned to Janet. ‘What I say, Mrs Byfield, is that you’re bound to get a few rotten apples in every barrel.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you knew a boy called Simon Martlesham in those days. He worked at the Bishop’s Palace.’

  ‘Simon Martlesham? Oh yes.’ She hesitated and stirred her tea again, quite unnecessarily. ‘I think he used to run errands for Canon Youlgreave sometimes. But he left Rosington years ago. He lives in Watford now. My brother bumped into him in the Swan.’

  ‘I know. The pub by the river.’

  She nodded. ‘His family used to live down there. There was his mother and sister. By that time he was at the Palace, of course, the servants lived in … I don’t remember a father. I expect he was in the area and thought he’d go and see his old home. Not that there’s much to see.’

  People swirled between us. Someone jogged my elbow and tea slopped in the saucer and on the sleeve of my mackintosh. Other conversations began. Later Janet bought a knitted golliwog in a blue boilersuit for Rosie’s birthday and I found a Busy Lizzie for the kitchen windowsill.

  Afterwards as we were walking home arm in arm under one umbrella, Janet said, ‘So you’re still interested in Francis Youlgreave?’

  ‘Just something to pass the time.’ I was afraid that Janet would sense my ingratitude, my boredom with Rosington, my shabby little thoughts about David. I rushed into speech. ‘I imagine Mrs Elstree can be rather terrifying. But she was very pleasant to us.’

  ‘Mrs Elstree tries as hard as she can to be nice to me,’ Janet said. ‘That’s because if David gets Osbaston’s job, she hopes we’ll keep her on.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. I think she’s too used to running the place, too set in her ways. Mr Osbaston leaves everything to her. But she’s right about the work involved.’ She looked sideways at me. ‘Actually, I don’t think it would be much fun being the principal’s wife.’

  We hurried through the rain in silence after that. David was at home working on his book in the study and in theory keeping an eye on Mr Treevor and Rosie. In the Close a car passed us, splashing water over my shoes and stockings.

  ‘Can you smell anything?’ Janet asked when we were taking off our raincoats in the hall.

  ‘Only damp.’ I sniffed the air. ‘And perhaps bacon from this morning.’

  ‘No, it’s something underneath that. Something not very nice. At least I think it is.’

  It was the first time any of us mentioned the smell. Of course Janet must have imagined it or smelled something different from the later smell. There’s no other explanation.

  David came out of the study. ‘Hello. How was it?’

  ‘Much as you’d imagine,’ Janet said. ‘But wetter. Where’s Rosie?’

  ‘Somewhere upstairs with your father. I think they were going to play Snap.’ Then his voice dropped a little in pitch. ‘Ah – Wendy?’

  Surprised, I looked away from my reflection in the mirror. I was wondering if my nose was unusually red. Was it becoming what my mother would have called a ‘toper’s nose’? I thought David was looking accusingly at me.

  ‘I had a letter this morning,’ he said. ‘From Henry.’

  I stared at him. I felt sick. What he’d said was as unexpected as a punch in the stomach. But David and Henry were friends, in the inexplicable way that men are friends. Which meant that it didn’t necessarily matter that they hadn’t seen each other for years, they rarely wrote to each other, and they had completely different outlooks on life. I wondered if they’d been plotting about me.

  ‘He asked if you were here,’ David went on.

  I said nothing.

  ‘I’ll have to write back and say you are. Naturally.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘He wants to see you. He says –’

  ‘I don’t want to see him,’ I said loudly. ‘Just tell him that. Now I’m going to get changed. I’m soaking wet.’

  I ran upstairs, past the sound of giggling coming from Rosie’s room and up the next flight of stairs to my own bedroom. When I got there I blew my nose and looked away from my reflection in the mirror on the dressing table. What I needed, I decided, was a very early nightcap.

  Two days later, on Monday, I came across a copy of an Edwardian children’s book in the library. It was by G. A. Henty and was called His Country’s Flag. Though the spine had faded the colours of the picture on the jacket were still as vivid as the day it was new. The picture showed a young English boy in a red coat. He was harvesting a crop of frightened-looking Zulus with a sabre. I opened the book and there was that familiar handwriting on the flyleaf.

  For Simon Martlesham on his thirteenth birthday with good wishes from F. Youlgreave. July 17th, 1904.

  23

  Rosie’s fifth birthday was on Wednesday, 14th May. All of us except Mr Treevor got up a little earlier than usual so she could have her presents before going to school.

  As I came downstairs I thought for an instant that I smelled something unpleasant, like meat that’s beginning to go off. I remembered Janet mentioning a smell the previous Saturday when we returned from the jumble sale at the Theological College. But when I stopped in the hall and sniffed, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Only damp, old stone and yesterday’s vegetables.

  Rosie was very excited, darting round the kitchen like a swallow round the Octagon. On the table was a little heap of cards and presents.

  ‘May I open them?’ she demanded. ‘May I, please?’

  ‘Have some breakfast first,’ Janet told her.

  ‘I want them now. It’s my birthday.’

  ‘Yes, poppet, but you have to eat breakfast, even on your birthday.’

  ‘Afterwards.’

  ‘Now. Please, Mummy.’

  They stared at each other. Janet looked away first, about to concede.

  I picked up the card and parcel I had put on the table. ‘Well, you won’t be needing this then.’

  Rosie looked up at me, her gaze both curious and calculating.

  ‘This is for a little girl who does what her mummy tells her to do.’

  I smiled at her, wishing I hadn’t interfered. Rosie was Janet’s business, not mine. A moment later Rosie sat down at her place and watched her mother pouring cornflakes into her bowl. If she had been a general, she would have called it a tactical withdrawal.

  It took Rosie five minutes to eat her cereal and a slice of toast, and drink a glass of milk. Then she worked through the pile before her. First she opened the envelopes, glanced at the birthday cards and put them on one pile. The discarded env
elopes went on another. But two postal orders and a Premium Bond went in a special pile of their own, weighted by a fork.

  Next came the parcels. She allowed David to cut them open with scissors. The parcel which had come in the post contained a maroon cardigan.

  ‘How nice of Granny Byfield,’ Janet said without enthusiasm.

  Rosie did not comment.

  Now there were four parcels left, the ones from the adults in the house. First she opened Mr Treevor’s. The old man had wanted to give Rosie an apple taken from the bowl on the dresser. Last night, he’d told Janet that an apple would be good for Rosie and would also be something she would enjoy eating. When he was a boy, he said, he had often wished for an apple but no one had ever given him one for his birthday. Janet said it was a lovely present and very thoughtful of him. But when she wrapped up the apple she added the blue golliwog she had bought at the jumble sale.

  David’s present was Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, an illustrated edition with simplified language. Janet had bought her a new dress, very smart, in navy-blue needlecord covered with pale-pink horses and trimmed with pink lace. It had puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. Rosie was enchanted. Before she went to school she took the dress up to her parents’ room so she could put it on and look at herself in the big mirror.

  But first she opened my present. I had asked Janet to find out what Rosie wanted. It turned out she wanted an angel. Janet and I decided that a doll might be an acceptable compromise. In the toy shop in the High Street I’d found a rather expensive one with long blonde hair and blue eyes which opened and closed according to whether the doll was vertical or horizontal. The legs and the arms were jointed where they met the torso and the head swivelled on the neck. If you pressed the chest it croaked ‘Mama’.

  The doll came complete with a pink dress, underwear, socks and shoes. This didn’t seem quite the right outfit for a celestial being, so I’d made a long white gown out of a couple of old handkerchiefs and embroidered an A for Angel in blue cotton over the heart, or rather over the place where the heart would have been if the angel had possessed one. We dressed the doll in the gown and packed away the pink clothes in an empty cigar box.

  ‘They can be her trousseau,’ Janet had said.

  ‘Or her disguise when she goes out among humans,’ I replied.

  When Rosie opened the box and saw her angel lying there, she didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, very slowly and very gently, she picked up the angel and cradled it in her arms.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Janet asked. ‘Go and say thank you to Auntie Wendy.’

  Still carrying the doll, Rosie came to stand by my chair and waited for me to kiss her cheek.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you like it.’

  Janet explained about the trousseau and how I’d made the gown and about the doll’s saying ‘Mama’.

  Rosie nodded. ‘But where are the wings?’

  ‘Not all angels have wings,’ I said.

  ‘They do,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Ask your father, dear,’ Janet suggested. ‘He knows about this sort of thing. And I’m sure he’d like to have a good look at your angel.’

  In fact, David’s attention was now divided between The Times and a slice of toast and marmalade. But he allowed himself to be diverted for long enough to agree that angels didn’t always have wings, which allayed Rosie’s doubts for the time being.

  ‘Auntie Wendy,’ she said to me when she and Janet were leaving for school. ‘My angel is my favourite present.’

  On Rosie’s birthday I did not come home at my usual time. I wanted her to have her birthday tea, with the cake, with Janet and David. It was her birthday and she deserved to have her parents all to herself. So at lunchtime I told Janet that I wanted to do some shopping and I would be a little later than usual.

  Late in the afternoon I found another book that had once belonged to Francis Youlgreave, the Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, in an edition published in 1889. I was keeping a separate list of everything that had been his, and I felt everything I found told me a little more about him. The book was bound in flaking leather that left crumbs of dead skin on my fingers, and the spine was cracked. I riffled through the pages, which rustled like leaves in autumn. I found a passage marked in the margin with a wavering line of brown ink.

  Nay, further, we are what we all abhor, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth: for all this mass of flesh which we behold, came in at our mouths; this frame we look upon, hath been upon our trenchers; in brief, we have devour’d our selves.

  It took me a moment to work out what the writer was saying, and when I did I shivered. I thought of those pictures of snakes with their tails in their mouths.

  ‘Not nice, Francis,’ I said aloud. ‘And why did you mark it?’

  In-the still air of the Cathedral Library, the words waited for an answer. Jesus, I thought with another shiver, I’m talking to myself, this is ridiculous.

  I stood up and walked over to the old catalogue in the big foolscap volume. Here were listed the books in Dean Pellew’s original bequest and a number of later additions. The last entry was dated 1899. No sign of the Religio Medici. I checked the cabinet by the door which contained the later records, equally patchy. The earliest of these was a commentary in German on the Pentateuch. The entry was dated November 1904 and was in a neat copybook hand, very unlike Francis’s scrawl.

  I now knew from the Dictionary of National Biography that Francis had come to Rosington in 1900 and had departed at some point in 1904. He might have left some books in the library, but I hadn’t come across any trace of him in the various catalogues. It suddenly struck me that the catalogue entry for November 1904 might well mark the point when someone more conscientious had started to look after the collection. Which suggested Francis had probably been forced to resign in the late summer or early autumn of the year. Which in turn would make my job easier if I ever wanted to try to trace a public record of his last sermon.

  Until then the idea of doing so hadn’t occurred to me. But why not? Osbaston had said the sermon had been mentioned in the papers. It must surely have been reported in the Rosington Observer.

  I glanced at my watch. I had planned to spend forty-five minutes dawdling round the shops before going back to the Dark Hostelry. But there was nothing I wanted to buy that couldn’t wait.

  The Rosington Observer had an office in Market Street. It was a weekly newspaper which told you all about markets and meetings, and announced auctions, births, deaths and marriages. Funerals were covered in obsessive detail. The main editorial policy was to mention the names of as many local people as possible and to include the word ‘Rosington’ at least once in the first sentence of every piece.

  Two women sat behind a long, polished counter in the room overlooking the street. They were talking about someone called Edna while one of them typed with two fingers and the other knitted. I asked if they kept old copies of the newspaper, and the knitter took me into a room at the back whose walls were lined with deep steel shelving. There was a table under the window with a single chair beside it. The newspapers were stacked in chronological order.

  ‘They’re filthy,’ the woman warned me. ‘I’ll leave you to it. We close at five.’

  I had my cotton dusting gloves, so the dust and the ink didn’t bother me. I worked my way round the shelves to the pile that included issues from 1904. That was when I began to get suspicious.

  First, there was no dust on the top of the pile. But there was on the piles to the right and the left, and indeed on every other pile in this part of the shelves. The pile covered 1903 to the first half of 1906, so you would have expected the issues for 1904 to be somewhere in the middle. But they weren’t. They were on top.

  I carried them over to the table and began to work back from November. I found a mention of Francis almost at once in a small item on the fifth page.

  The Re
vd J. Heckstall will give a series of four evening lectures on the Meaning of Advent, beginning Tuesday next at 7.30 p.m., at the Almonry. All are welcome to attend. These were previously advertised as being given by Canon Youlgreave. There will be a collection in aid of the Church Empire Society.

  I worked backwards. In October the newspaper told its readers that Canon Youlgreave had resigned and left Rosington because of poor health, and that the dean and chapter thought it unlikely that his successor to the canonry would be appointed until the new year.

  In September I expected to find details of the sermon that had led to the resignation and its consequences. Instead I found something that in a way was worse than nothing. Two issues had been mutilated. Someone had used a penknife to cut out a total of five items, two of them probably letters to the editor. They’d pressed so hard that the blade had sliced through two or three of the pages beneath.

  I took the two newspapers into the front office. The knitter and the typist stopped talking and looked at me.

  ‘They mustn’t be taken out of the room,’ the knitter said. ‘It’s the rules.’

  I spread the papers out on the counter. ‘Look. Someone’s been cutting bits out.’

  ‘People just don’t care, do they?’ the typist said. ‘I mean, look at those Teddy boys.’

  The knitter popped a peppermint in her mouth. ‘Just couldn’t be bothered to copy it out, I expect. Whatever it was.’

  ‘Has anyone been in there lately?’

  ‘Could have been done years ago.’

  I doubted it because the cuts in the yellowing paper looked too clean. ‘Perhaps. But has anyone been recently – in the last few weeks, say?’

  ‘There was Mrs Vosper,’ the typist said. ‘Wanted to find out the date of her parents-in-law’s wedding.’

  The knitter gave a bark of laughter. ‘A bit late for that.’

  ‘And the solicitor’s clerk came in on Friday, didn’t he?’ the typist went on.

  ‘Which solicitor?’ I asked.