I picked up the photograph and took it to the window so I could see it better. There, according to Mrs Elstree, was Francis Youlgreave. Hero or villain? Madman or saint? If I could climb into the blurred monochrome world of the photograph and talk to him for five minutes, I would at least find the answers to those questions. And perhaps I would also find the answers to others in the present.
I stubbed out my cigarette and got ready to go to the library. When I went downstairs I found David in the hall. He was wearing his hat and raincoat and bending over the oak chest. He poked his umbrella between it and the wall.
‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘Lost something?’
‘It’s this smell.’ He jabbed the umbrella viciously downwards. ‘I wondered if there’s something got trapped down here. I can feel something.’
‘Why don’t we move the chest out?’
‘It may not be terribly pleasant. If it’s a dead rat, for example. And wouldn’t the chest be rather heavy for you?’
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘But are you sure you can manage?’
Those nostrils flared, but he bit back the temper and nodded. There were handles at either end of the chest. We lifted it a few inches away from the wall, easy enough with two of us, though hard for one person to do without scraping the chest on the flagstones.
Wedged in the angle between the wall and the floor was a mass of feathers and bone. The smell was suddenly much stronger.
David said, ‘What the hell –?’
I touched his arm. ‘We must get it out of the way before Janet sees it.’
Not it – them.
As if on cue, the kitchen door slammed, and we heard Janet’s footsteps coming up the stairs to the hall.
32
‘He’ll have to go,’ David said. ‘You must see that, Janet.’
She chewed her lower lip. ‘We don’t know it was him.’
‘Who else could it have been?’ He sighed, rather theatrically. ‘Rosie?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s a symptom of severe mental illness. He needs to be under proper medical supervision.’
‘But he’d hate it if we put him in a home.’
There was a sudden rushing of water and the bolt on the door shot back. Mr Treevor slipped out, walking backwards as if from a royal presence, peered into the empty lavatory and carefully closed the door. Only then did he turn round and see the three of us.
The chest was still pulled away from the wall. David and Janet were facing each other across it. I was on my hands and knees, eavesdropping while sweeping up the mess with the coal shovel and brush from the drawing room fireplace. The smell was worse, so I was breathing through my mouth. I tried not to look too closely at the wings because I thought there might be maggots.
Mr Treevor was carrying The Times. He tapped it importantly and said, ‘Good morning. I can’t stop and chat, I’m afraid. I must check my investments.’
‘Daddy –’ Janet began.
He paused, his foot already on the first stair. ‘Yes, dear?’
‘Nothing.’
He smiled at all three of us. ‘Oh well, I must be on my way.’
We listened to his footsteps mounting the stairs and waited for the slam of his bedroom door. I shovelled the wings on to a sheet of newspaper, part of yesterday’s Times, and wrapped it into a parcel. I could cover it with brown paper and string, put a stamp on it, and send it through the post. To Henry? To his Hairy Widow? I shook my head to shake the madness out of it. Perhaps madness was infectious, and this house was riddled with its germs.
David glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll talk about it this evening,’ he said to Janet. ‘But I’m afraid he can’t stay here.’
‘It could have been anyone,’ Janet burst out. ‘We don’t lock the door in the day. They could have just walked in.’
‘Why should they bother?’ David picked up his briefcase. ‘I have to go. Canon Osbaston’s expecting me.’
He and David were meeting to discuss ways of reversing the decision to close the Theological College. The trustees’ change of heart was due to the diocesan architect’s unexpectedly gloomy report on the fabric of the Theological College. Apparently it needed thousands spent on it, quite apart from the cost of the proposed modernization programme. But there were a number of other considerations which had not been taken into account. David had lectured Janet and me about them last night. There was the question of whether the trustees were legally entitled to close down the college and divert its endowment to the wider needs of the diocese. In any case, shouldn’t they seek a second opinion from another, and more objective, surveyor? There was also the point that one of the trustees had been absent. It might be possible to raise extra funds from sources outside the diocese. And then there was the bishop. David was seriously disappointed in him. Instead of throwing his weight behind the Theological College, as he’d led everyone to expect he would do, he had abstained when it came to the vote. But if there were a new vote, he might be persuaded to change his mind.
‘It’s the dean and Hudson who are the real problem,’ David had told us, not once but several times. ‘Not that report – they’re just using it as an excuse. But they don’t realize what they’re destroying. Once the college is dosed, they’ll never be able to get it started again.’
I watched him through the glazed door as he strode down the garden path to the gate into the Close, the rain pattering on his umbrella. What he hadn’t mentioned last night, but what Janet and I knew, was that if his career was a boat, it had just hit a rock. The principal’s job would have been perfect for him, and according to Janet it would have almost certainly led to higher things.
But with that no longer a possibility, what was David going to do? He couldn’t stay here as a minor canon for ever. Unless a friendly bishop could be persuaded to pull a tasty rabbit out of a hat, at best he’d have to become a chaplain to a school or college and at worst he’d end up as a parish priest in the back of beyond.
I put the parcel in the dustbin. Before going to the Cathedral Library I had a cup of coffee with Janet because that was the only way I could persuade her to sit down for ten minutes.
‘I’m sorry about David being so rude,’ she said. ‘He’s so upset he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’
‘It’s not surprising.’
‘But it’s not fair of him to take it out on everyone.’
‘I’m not sure I’d behave much better if I was in his shoes. Losing a job you’ve –’
‘It’s not just the job. It’s Peter Hudson.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Janet wrinkled her forehead. ‘He’s the only person in the Close David really admires. He says he’s got a first-class brain.’
‘Lucky him.’
‘David respects him. He’d like Peter to like him.’
‘So it must have made it worse that he was the one who wanted to close the Theo. Coll.?’
She nodded. ‘I think he hoped that Peter would change his mind at the last moment. Not that there was ever much chance of that.’
‘Men can be such babies.’ I took our cups and saucers to the sink.
‘The funny thing is, I think Peter does like David. June said something once … Wendy, leave the washing-up. You must go to work.’
Janet became almost cross when I tried to help, so I left her in the kitchen, with the suds up to her elbows. At the library, I began with the proofs for the Chapter House exhibition, which didn’t take long. Despite his poetry, Francis hadn’t earned a place in the dean’s roll of honour. When I’d finished, I took the marked-up proofs to the Chapter House. Canon Hudson was there with Mr Gotobed, directing two of the Cathedral workmen as they moved display cases around the big room. Mr Gotobed beamed shyly at me as I came in.
‘Thank you for tea yesterday,’ I said. ‘It was nice meeting your mother too.’
Hudson looked sharply at me. I was about to give him the proofs when I saw that there was another person in the Chapter H
ouse. Mr Treevor perched like a little black bird in one of the niches which ran round the walls below the great windows. He was very close to the model of the Octagon and was staring at it with huge, fascinated eyes.
‘Thanks for doing that.’ Hudson skimmed through the proofs. ‘Not too many problems, then?’
‘No. Is Mr Treevor all right?’
‘He’s no bother.’ Hudson looked up. ‘He wandered in a few minutes ago.’
‘It’s just that he doesn’t normally go out by himself now.’
‘Then if Mrs Byfield is at the Dark Hostelry, perhaps you could take him home? I wouldn’t like her to be worried.’
I went over to Mr Treevor, laid a hand on his arm, smiled at him and told him it was time to go. He nodded and put his arm through mine. In the archway leading to the cloisters he stopped to wave at the men in the Chapter House. They waved back.
Outside it was still raining. I put up my umbrella. The pair of us walked slowly through the Close.
‘I saw him going into the Chapter House,’ Mr Treevor confided.
‘Who?’
‘The dark little man. I saw him in the garden, you see, so I followed him. He went into the Chapter House but he must have gone when I wasn’t looking. He wasn’t there when we left.’
‘Do you see him a good deal?’
Mr Treevor considered the question. There was a drop of moisture on the end of his nose and I didn’t think it was rain. I watched it trembling and wished it would fall.
‘Yes, he’s often around. You don’t think he could be my brother?’
‘I didn’t know you had one.’
‘Nor did I, but I think I might. It’s possible they didn’t tell me. And it would make sense, wouldn’t it?’
In the Dark Hostelry, we found Janet in the kitchen scrubbing the floor. She hadn’t noticed her father’s departure.
‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ I said. ‘Leave it for the charwoman.’
‘I was going to,’ Janet said, ‘but Daddy spilled porridge on the floor this morning and then Rosie stepped in it.’
‘Then you should have asked me.’
‘I can’t ask you to do everything. It’s not fair.’
‘Why not? After all, you won’t be pregnant for ever. Anyway, I must run. I’ll see you at lunchtime.’
‘You know I’ve got the Touchies this afternoon?’
Mr Treevor wandered into the kitchen. He drew back the sleeve of his jacket and ostentatiously consulted his wristwatch. ‘I see it’s lunchtime. I’ve washed my hands.’
Janet glanced at her own watch. ‘Did you forget to wind your watch last night? It’s only quarter past ten.’
‘But I’m hungry.’
‘That’s all right, Daddy. Don’t worry. You can have some bread and dripping to be going on with.’
Mr Treevor looked at his watch again. ‘But I was sure it was one o’clock.’
‘What’s on your wrist?’ Janet said, taking a step nearer to him. ‘Have you cut yourself?’
He held out his arm, and stood, head bowed, waiting for her to examine it. Janet pushed back the watch. The strap had partly concealed a gently curving scratch about two inches long. Part of it had been deep enough to draw blood, now dried. The blood was on the inside of Mr Treevor’s shirt cuff. The second hand was still sweeping round the dial of the watch. The hour and minute hands stood at seventeen minutes past ten.
‘How did you do that?’ asked Janet.
‘I must have caught it on a nail when I went out for my walk.’
Janet and I exchanged glances. Mr Treevor sat down at the kitchen table and asked how many slices of bread and dripping he could have. I went back to work. For the next two hours I catalogued library books. There were no surprises either, not unless you count a bound volume of Punch for 1923. 1 was bored, but the boredom was a kind of relief. It was better to be bored than to worry about Janet and about Mr Treevor and his ghostly brother and about what Simon Martlesham might be up to.
At a quarter to one I locked the library and went back to the Dark Hostelry for lunch. We had bread and soup, followed by cheese and fruit. Mr Treevor ate in silence as though his life depended on it. Janet and I made sporadic attempts to start a conversation, but our minds were on different things and in the end we gave up.
After lunch I washed up while Janet went to lie down for half an hour. I took her a cup of tea, but she was so deeply asleep I tiptoed away without waking her.
I had my own tea in solitary state in the drawing room. I fetched The Tongues of Angels to read, the copy Henry had sent me. It was just possible, I thought, I might be able to trace the former owner of the book, who might have known him. Or there might be marginal notes. Or the book might turn out to be Francis’s own copy.
But Francis hadn’t read this book. No one had – the pages were still uncut. I fetched the paperknife from Janet’s bureau and worked my way through, reading scraps of verse as I turned each page. There were my old friends Uriel, Raphael, Raguel and Co. There were the children of Heracles, sliced into bits by their dreaming spellbound father. There was the cat watching the pharaoh’s children die, and the slaughter of the stag on Breakheart Hill.
I turned back to the beginning of the book and noticed something I’d missed when I’d looked at it before. There was an epigraph, and I knew at once where it had come from, knew the very book Francis had taken it from.
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.
I’d found this very passage marked in the Religio Medici which had once belonged to Francis. It was an oddly intimate discovery, as though I had sliced open his mind with Janet’s paperknife, and now I was seeing something that perhaps only he himself had seen before.
I turned the page and glanced at the table of contents. For one vertiginous moment I thought I was falling. Or rather that everything else was falling away from me. It was exactly the sensation I had felt on the afternoon near the beginning of my stay in Rosington when David had taken Janet and me up the west tower of the Cathedral. This time there was no Janet to put her hand on my sleeve and murmur that if tortoises waddled, they would waddle like Canon Osbaston. I shut my eyes and opened them again.
Nothing was altered. I hadn’t imagined it. The table of contents wasn’t as it should have been. As before, it listed all the poems in the collection under their appropriate angelic sub-heading. But there weren’t seven archangelic sub-headings now, as there were in the copy of the book I had borrowed from Rosington Library. There were now eight. The new sub-heading came at the end – ‘The Son of the Morning’, which sounded like a suitable pseudonym for an angel – and it contained only one poem, ‘The Office of the Dead’.
I think now that the oddest thing of all was the violence of my reaction. The poem shocked me before I’d read it, before I knew why it was shocking. It didn’t make sense, any more than the fact I had smelled something unpleasant in the hall before Mr Treevor could have put the pigeon’s wings there. There are some things I still don’t understand.
I turned back to the title page. At last I saw what should have stared me in the face as soon as I opened Henry’s parcel. I had expected this book to be called The Tongues of Angels. After all, it looked like The Tongues of Angels and Henry had said it was The Tongues of Angels. And most of its contents were identical in every way to those of The Tongues of Angels.
This book was called The Voice of Angels.
I turned back to the title page. Instead of being published by Gasset & Lode, Voice had been ‘privately printed for the author’. Everything else was the same as far as I could tell – the date, the typeface, even the paper.
I turned the pages to the end of the book. The new section had its own epigraph, taken apparently from the four
th section of the Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite, whoever he was.
They, above all, are pre-eminently worthy of the name Angel because they first receive the Divine Light, and through them are transmitted to us the revelations which are above us.
The poem was long and very obscure, even by Francis’s standards, and written in the painfully archaic language he had liked so much. I skimmed through it. As far as I could tell, it was in the form of a conversation between the poet and a passing angel. The angel told Francis why he’d left his principality and come down among the sons and daughters of men. The angels had the gift of eternal life, it seemed, and they wanted to share it with a handful of suitably qualified humans. In fact, according to the angel, he and his friends had just about everything in their gift.
I didn’t like the poem – it made me feel uncomfortable, and I certainly didn’t begin to understand it. On the whole, I thought it was just another version of the old Christian claptrap about death being just a gateway to eternal life. What was so wonderful about life that you should want it to go on for ever?
I closed the book with a snap and tossed it on to the table by the sofa. It slid across the polished wood and almost fell off. Why had Francis bothered to print a separate edition of The Tongues of Angels? Was there something about ‘The Office of the Dead’ that he didn’t want the rest of the world to see? If so, what? Or was it simply that Gasset & Lode had refused to print it in the commercially published edition because it was such a bad poem?
The Office of the Dead Page 19