The Office of the Dead

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘Except perhaps the sister.’

  Henry cocked an eyebrow, a trick I’d seen him practise in the mirror. ‘You think she’s still alive? After what Martlesham told us?’

  The story had emerged by fits and starts. It was as if Martlesham was in the witness box, reluctantly disgorging information, volunteering nothing, and leaving the cross-examining counsel to do as much of the work as possible. The Martlesham children’s mother had died in childbirth. At the time there wasn’t a man living with them. ‘Pregnancy scared them off, I reckon,’ Simon told us. ‘And she was getting very sickly.’ He never actually said, but it was clear that Mr Martlesham had not been seen for many years. Simon hinted that his parents might not have been married and there was even some question as to whether his father was also Nancy’s.

  Simon had met Francis during the winter before his mother’s death. The relationship sounded innocent, even praiseworthy. Francis lent Simon books and encouraged him to go to evening classes in English literature and arithmetic. He invited both Simon and Nancy to tea at the Dark Hostelry, where he was living at the time. Francis was looked after by two elderly servants, a cook-housekeeper and a maid who disapproved of the Martlesham children.

  ‘For me and Nancy,’ Martlesham said, ‘it was like a glimpse of paradise. Sitting on a comfortable chair in a clean house. Afternoon tea with sandwiches and as much cake as you wanted to eat. Youlgreave gave me a penknife and let me carve my initials on a walnut tree in the garden, to show how well I could make the letters. He used to put Nancy on his knee and read us stories. Is the walnut tree still there?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s only an apple tree now.’

  When the mother died –‘I heard her screaming,’ Martlesham remarked in a matter-of-fact voice – the only other relative in Rosington had been an aunt, the mother’s elder sister who worked in a haberdasher’s in the High Street. ‘She’d come a long way from Swan Alley, Aunt Em had,’ Martlesham said. ‘Us kids were just a burden to her. And she was walking out with someone she wanted to marry, a very respectable man with a house and everything. She didn’t want us queering her pitch. Hard woman. But I can’t say I blame her.’

  That was when Francis had stepped in. He helped to pay for the mother’s funeral. One evening he called on Aunt Em with a proposal. He was willing to arrange for Simon to go to Canada, where he could learn a trade and make a fresh start in life. And he had an even more alluring offer for Nancy. A lady and gentleman who lived near his brother’s house in Middlesex were unable to have children. They wanted to adopt a little girl and bring her up as a lady. Nancy would be perfect for them. She was quick, intelligent and pretty. Her eyes were the same colour as the lady’s. She would live in a house with a big garden and have a pony and a room of her own.

  ‘Aunt Em was pleased, of course, then she said I was old enough to make up my own mind. Nancy said she wanted to stay with me, but there was nothing I could do for her. Or not for years, until I got myself established. No, it was the right choice, no doubt about that.’

  ‘You said she accused you of selling her,’ I said. ‘What did you mean by that?’

  His face darkened. I guessed he hadn’t meant to tell us that, that the words had slipped out. He wasn’t angry, I realized a moment later, he was embarrassed.

  ‘Just before I left Rosington, Mr Youlgreave gave me fifteen pounds.’ He hesitated, selecting the right words. ‘To help me settle in Canada. But Nancy was only a kid, she misunderstood what was going on.’

  Now, in the upstairs room of the pub, Henry said, ‘We’ve only Martlesham’s word that Nancy was adopted. As we’ve only got his word about so much else. There’s another reason why he might not have tried to get in touch with his sister when he got back to England. Perhaps he knew there was no point.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What if he knew she was dead?’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s where all this is going, if you ask me.’ Henry lit two cigarettes and passed one to me. ‘There was a very strange side to Francis Youlgreave – that’s obvious from the poems. And Martlesham got very worked up when you asked him about the animals.’

  He had come the nearest I’d seen him to losing his temper. He said that was typical of all he hated about Rosington. People had said that Canon Youlgreave was mad, going around cutting up animals for sadistic reasons of his own. But he, Simon Martlesham, knew better, and so did many other people, including Canon Youlgreave’s servants. Mr Youlgreave had an interest in animal physiology. Once or twice Simon Martlesham had helped him to dissect small animals. There was one occasion when Simon had found a drowned kitten floating in the river and had fished it out for Youlgreave, who had rewarded the boy with half a sovereign for his pains. But the twisted minds of others had soon interpreted this absolutely innocent scientific enquiry into something sinister,

  ‘Call themselves Christians?’ Martlesham had said, just as he had done on the first occasion I met him and echoing Janet a few hours earlier. ‘They were no more Christian than this desk is. And from what you say, it sounds like things haven’t changed.’

  ‘Suppose he’s feeling guilty?’ I said to Henry, wondering if there was time for another drink. ‘He’s had a stroke, he’s lost his wife, he’s got no children. Suppose this is the first time in his life he’s had time to think about what he did to his sister. I think he needs to find out if she’s still alive.’

  ‘Because he wants to see her again?’

  ‘Not necessarily. He might just want to reassure himself that Francis was telling the truth, that she was adopted, that she did grow up to be a lady. He feels guilty. He simply doesn’t know what happened to her.’

  Henry picked a shred of tobacco from his lip. ‘I suppose it would explain a lot. The private investigator going to Roth, going to Rosington, taking an interest in us. This isn’t just about Youlgreave.’

  ‘If she – she died in 1904, do you think The Voice of Angels tells us anything about how?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Wendy.’ Henry stared at me. ‘You’re not suggesting that Youlgreave took that tripe literally?’

  I shrugged and pushed aside my empty glass. ‘It’s time I went.’

  There was a scrap of pleasure to be derived from the knowledge that I’d shocked Henry. It was usually the other way round. He walked with me to the station. I wouldn’t let him see me on to the train. At the barrier, I paused to say goodbye. Suddenly he leaned forward and put his arms around me. He was clumsy about it, which was unlike him. He tried to kiss my lips. I turned aside so he kissed the lobe of my right ear instead. I pulled his arms away from me and stepped back.

  ‘Wendy, listen, when can I see you again?’

  ‘I don’t know. I expect I’ll be coming up to London sooner or later.’

  ‘Can’t we fix a time? If it would help, I could come to Rosington.’

  If Henry was seen in Rosington, the Touchies would really have something to gossip about and he’d run the risk of being snubbed as he came round every corner.

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  ‘I thought perhaps the wedding ring meant –’

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  ‘Wendy, please –’

  Suddenly furious, I turned on my heel and left him. I had my ticket punched at the barrier and walked up the length of the train. I knew Henry was still watching me but I didn’t turn round and wave.

  How dared he think he could snap his fingers and I’d come running back? Damn Henry, I thought, as I squeezed myself into a compartment already crowded with commuters, damn Francis and damn everything.

  Between Cambridge and Rosington I indulged in an unpleasant fantasy conversation with Henry. I told him that I fancied his friend David much more than him, that David was much better looking and had a much nicer body. David’s bottom didn’t wobble, I told Henry, and his skin wasn’t so flabby it looked as if it needed ironing. I knew I’d never say any of these things, and I fe
lt rather sick for even thinking them.

  At Rosington, I walked quickly up the hill and went into the Close by the Porta. There was no sign of Mr Gotobed, or indeed of anyone I knew, and for that I was glad. I didn’t want to make conversation.

  I opened the gate to the Dark Hostelry garden. Rosie’s tricycle was standing on the lawn. Janet made a fuss about things being left out in the garden overnight, so I picked it up and put it in the little shed in the corner by the honeysuckle.

  The garden door was unlocked. I went into the hall.

  ‘Nurse!’ called a man’s voice from the landing on the floor above. ‘Is that you?’

  Dr Flaxman’s head appeared over the banisters. He frowned when he saw me.

  ‘Come up here,’ he barked. ‘Come and make yourself useful.’

  36

  It wasn’t just the baby that died.

  Janet’s miscarriage was the turning point of the whole business. Until then, I’d never thought much about miscarriages. They were something that happened to queens in the history books whose husbands were desperate for an heir. Or to characters in novels. Or to quiet little women I didn’t know very well because they didn’t go out much. A miscarriage was hard luck for all concerned, I assumed in so far as I thought about it at all, but not the end of the world.

  It was a day or two before I learned the full story. On Friday morning, after I had left for London, Janet had finished the housework before going into the garden to mow the lawn. The pains started coming at teatime. They grew steadily worse in the early evening. David was late home, and both Rosie and Mr Treevor were demanding food and attention and I wasn’t there to share the load. Janet meant to sit down and rest for a moment, but every time she was about to do so there would be another demand.

  ‘Anyway, I thought I was just having a few twinges,’ she wailed to me when I went to see her on Saturday morning in hospital. ‘It’s like the curse – you carry on and sooner or later they go away. But this time they didn’t. They got worse.’

  Janet had gone to the lavatory and that was when she realized that things were very wrong. Even then, she wouldn’t phone David. She phoned the doctors’ surgery instead, and was lucky enough to catch Flaxman as he was about to go home. That was the only piece of luck she had that day.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ she said in the hospital. ‘I killed him.’

  ‘Look,’ I said awkwardly, ‘that’s nonsense. It wasn’t your fault. And in a way it wasn’t a proper baby yet. You don’t even know it was a boy.’

  ‘Of course it was a proper baby,’ she snarled at me. ‘And I know it was a boy, I always did. His name was going to be Michael. Michael.’

  For a moment she held my eyes with hers. She looked as if she wanted to strangle me. Then she started crying again and held out her arms, asking for comfort.

  Later she told me what Dr Flaxman had said when he had visited her earlier in the morning. ‘He told me I had to put it behind me and get pregnant again. What does he know? He made it sound as if I’d had a tooth out and another would grow in its place.’

  No matter how often I told her not to be silly, no matter how often I told her the miscarriage was nobody’s fault, no matter how often she said that she quite agreed, she still felt she was to blame on some level I couldn’t reach. In the end, no one reached her there.

  In the meantime I rather enjoyed myself. I had the agreeable sense that other people thought I was rising to the crisis. I tried to comfort Janet. I looked after Rosie and Mr Treevor, whose needs were almost identical. I ran the Dark Hostelry after a fashion. And I listened to David when he needed to talk.

  ‘I had a note from the bishop this afternoon,’ he told me on Saturday evening. ‘Asking after Janet, and so on. But he said that there’s a combined living becoming vacant at the end of the summer. Asked if I might be interested.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Tattisham with Ditchford. It’s about thirty miles away. Near Wisbech.’

  ‘So it’s in the depths of the Fens?’

  He nodded. ‘You can’t get much more remote. It would be a struggle financially too – the stipend’s nothing special and one would have to run a car. I don’t know how Janet would manage. There would be no one for her to talk to.’

  Nor for David, I thought, who was one of those people who wherever they live never quite leave university.

  ‘Still, perhaps she would like the change,’ he went on. ‘A chance for a new start. How’s Rosie, do you think? This must be very unsettling for her.’

  ‘She’s OK, I think,’ I said with the assurance of the childless. ‘Of course, she’s very young, and children that age are self-absorbed.’

  ‘Does she know about the baby?’

  ‘I told her Mummy had to go into hospital, and that she wouldn’t be having a baby after all.’

  ‘How did she take it?’

  ‘In her stride.’

  This was entirely true. When I told Rosie the news, she smiled up at me and said, ‘Good.’ I thought David might find this upsetting. Now I’m old and times have changed, I see things rather differently. It strikes me as faintly ridiculous that Janet and I, two grown women, should have spent so much time and effort worrying about David’s feelings. We treated him as if his heart was made of eggshells.

  Janet came home on Sunday morning with orders to rest as much as possible for a few days. She was very weak and still depressed. Flaxman told us that the best thing to do was to try to jolly her out of it, and David and even I colluded with this. I think this was probably the worst thing we could have done. Every time David or Flaxman said, ‘Never mind, Janet, you’ll soon get over it, and then you can get pregnant again and have another baby’, he was telling her that she wasn’t allowed to mourn for the one she’d just lost. No one else was mourning, not really. We were being relentlessly bloody jolly. So Janet had to grieve inside herself, and confined griefs grow bitter.

  On Sunday afternoon Janet said to me, ‘I’m worried about David.’

  ‘Because of Tattisham with Ditchford?’

  She shook her head. ‘Because I’m ill, I won’t be able to – well, he’ll have to do without it for a while.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll manage.’ It would have grated if either of us had used the word sex.

  ‘It’s different for men, I suppose.’

  ‘Each to his own,’ I said, wondering whether Henry was doing without it at present and why he hadn’t phoned me. I’d tried to phone him at Brown’s on Saturday but he had already paid his bill and left the hotel. He had not left a forwarding address. Perhaps he’d had enough of me.

  Sunday went from bad to worse. Mr Treevor went to bed early, Janet had her supper in bed, and David and I ate in the kitchen. Afterwards David went upstairs to collect Janet’s tray. A moment later I followed him up because he had forgotten to take Janet’s coffee. I found David ushering a whimpering Mr Treevor across the landing. The old man wasn’t wearing his teeth and his face had collapsed in on itself.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘He was in Rosie’s room again.’ David glared at me as if it was my fault. ‘I’m not having this.’

  Suddenly Mr Treevor flung himself on his knees and embraced David’s legs. ‘Don’t send me away,’ he wailed. ‘Please don’t put me in a home.’

  I tried to help him to his feet but he dung to David.

  ‘Come on, Mr Treevor,’ I urged him. ‘Why don’t you get into bed and I’ll bring you a nice warm hot-water bottle and a cup of cocoa?’

  ‘Don’t send me away!’

  I noticed that Rosie was watching from the doorway of her room. It could only be a matter of seconds before Janet appeared.

  White-faced, David bent down, gripped Mr Treevor’s wrists and broke his hold. He pulled the old man to his feet. David’s eyes were so bright that it seemed to me that it wasn’t him looking through them but someone else.

  ‘Get back in your room,’ he said softly, and his fingers squeezed the frail old wrists until Mr Tre
evor squealed. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble.’

  He pushed Mr Treevor away from him. The old man would have fallen if I had not put out an arm to steady him. He stared at David as if he was seeing his son-in-law for the first time, which in a sense of course he was.

  ‘I wish I was dead,’ Mr Treevor said. ‘Please kill me. I don’t want to live.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ I said briskly, taking him by his arm and drawing him towards his room. ‘We all love you very much, Mr Treevor, but we’re all a bit upset now because Janet’s not well. But things will seem much better in the morning.’

  Suddenly the fight went out of him. I led him into his room. He allowed me to put him into bed. I tucked him in.

  ‘Night, night,’ I said. ‘Don’t get out of bed again, and I’ll come and see you soon.’

  He held up his face to me. ‘Kiss,’ he ordered.

  I bent down and kissed his forehead. It was like kissing an old newspaper. Then I went back to the landing, which by now was empty. I peeped into Rosie’s room. She was in bed, pretending to be asleep with Angel on the pillow beside her. Rosie had never held up her face and asked me to kiss her. Janet and David’s door was closed and I heard voices on the other side.

  I felt very sorry for myself. So I went down to the drawing room, mixed myself a large gin and Angostura, stretched out on the sofa and lit a cigarette. Things would get better, I told myself without conviction. I thought that David had behaved appallingly. And I also thought that, given the right circumstances, or rather the wrong ones, I might have behaved in exactly the same way.

  After a while, he came downstairs. I didn’t bother to take my feet off the sofa or try to hide the glass. He sat down beside the empty fireplace.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I lost my temper. I shouldn’t have done that with anyone, but with poor John it’s even more inexcusable.’