The Office of the Dead

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘I know that. But is it nice?’

  ‘Very nice, I expect.’

  If it existed, it couldn’t be much worse than the life that some people left behind them. Like poor Isabella of Roth, if she had existed, burning to a cinder in Rosington marketplace for believing the wrong thing at the wrong time about something that didn’t exist in the first place.

  ‘Do they have nice food in heaven?’ Rosie asked, settling herself down in bed.

  ‘I’m sure they do. Nothing but the best.’

  ‘Angels eat food too, don’t they? It’s not just for the dead people?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Daddy. He’s the expert. Now, sleep well and see you in the morning.’

  I bent to kiss her. Rosie’s nightdress and the doll’s angelic uniform blended with the pillowcase and sheet. For an instant in the half-light it looked as if there were two fair disembodied heads resting like head-hunters’ trophies on the pillow. A memory stirred. Someone’s father at a party in Durban, talking about head-hunters and why they did it.

  The phone began to ring. I heard Janet talking in Mr Treevor’s room and David’s footsteps crossing the hall. I went down to the drawing room. A moment later, David poked his head around the door.

  ‘It’s Henry.’

  I went into the study, wishing I’d had time to have a drink or a cigarette, or even to touch the sprig of lavender for luck. It wasn’t easy seeing him again. I had grown used to his absence.

  ‘Wendy!’ Henry’s enthusiasm bubbled down the line. ‘How are you, darling?’

  ‘All right, thanks.’ I was so glad to hear him that I decided to postpone reminding him that I wasn’t his darling any more. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. What’s up with David?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I tried to let you know.’

  ‘Let me know what? What’s happened? Are you OK?’

  ‘It’s not me. When I got back on Friday, I found that Janet had lost the baby.’

  Henry whistled. ‘It never rains but it pours, eh?’

  ‘There’s more. Mr Treevor’s going into hospital tomorrow morning, and then to a nursing home next week. Permanently.’

  ‘Sounds quite sensible – I’d have thought that would be a relief.’

  ‘It is sensible and it will be a relief, but it doesn’t stop Janet feeling awful about it. And Mr Treevor hasn’t taken it well, either.’

  ‘Why didn’t David say something to me? I’m meant to be his friend.’

  ‘You know him. His idea of a heart-to-heart chat is to ask you if it’s stopped raining yet.’

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. It was a trunk-call. I wondered how much the silence was costing.

  ‘Wendy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry about the other day. At Liverpool Street. I shouldn’t have said all that.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I felt a surge of pleasure I didn’t want to think about too much. ‘I got a bit carried away too.’

  There was another pause. I heard the scrape of a match as Henry lit a cigarette.

  ‘I bet the atmosphere’s pretty grim. You must need a holiday.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful. When Janet’s better I think I’ll probably have one.’

  ‘Have you paid in that cheque yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Damn it. Why not?’

  ‘I haven’t had time.’

  ‘Would you like me to do it for you?’

  I laughed. ‘It’s not like you to be careful with money.’

  ‘I’m a reformed character nowadays. Economizing like mad. I’ve left Brown’s.’

  ‘I know. I tried to phone you on Saturday.’

  Another expensive silence went by.

  ‘I thought about phoning,’ Henry said at last. ‘But I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘That’s why I was phoning you, actually. To let you know. I’ve got a room at the Queen’s Head.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s the pub at Roth.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing there?’

  ‘Sleuthing. That’s the technical term, isn’t it? I had to go somewhere, so I thought why not here? The Queen’s Head is very cheap, compared to Brown’s at any rate. The food’s not bad, and it turns out they’ve got quite a good cellar. I went to church yesterday – the vicar’s about ninety-nine and quite inaudible – and I’ve had tea at the café on the green, which is run by some terrifyingly refined ladies.’

  ‘How long are you staying?’

  ‘I haven’t made my mind up. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered –’

  ‘You see, dearest,’ Henry said quickly, ‘without your organizational powers I go to pieces. I need you to make the decisions. I wish you were here.’

  ‘So do I.’ I’d spoken without thinking but immediately realized I might have given him the wrong impression. I rushed on before he had time to comment. ‘Have you got anywhere? With the sleuthing, I mean.’

  ‘I tried to call at the Old Manor House this morning. I had it all worked out. I was going to be an architectural historian writing an article about interesting houses in the area. But I didn’t have a chance to say anything. A woman in a pinny answered the door and said Lady Youlgreave wasn’t at home. And there were a couple of dogs, too.’ His voice became plaintive. ‘Savage brutes. One was an Alsatian. It kept trying to bite me.’

  I don’t think anyone except myself knew that Henry was afraid of dogs. When he was a kid he had been bitten in a sensitive place by a long-haired collie.

  ‘I tried the library, though, and that wasn’t a complete wash-out. There was a pile of old newspapers on a table at the back. The local rag, the Courier.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. For 1904 or 1905?’

  ‘Both. The librarian just said that another reader had left them out.’

  ‘So Munro’s been back to Roth?’

  ‘Presumably. Though nothing had been cut out. No chance, I suppose. I had a look through. There was a certain amount about the Youlgreaves and Roth Park, charitable stuff mainly, but nothing about Francis leaving Rosington.’

  ‘The Youlgreaves probably owned a chunk of the newspaper.’

  ‘And hushed up the Rosington business as far as they could?’ Henry said. ‘Maybe. He was mentioned in December 1904, though, as one of a list of local worthies who gave money to the village school. Then there’s nothing till the report of his death the following summer.’

  ‘That’s something. What exactly happened?’

  ‘There was an inquest but the official line was that it was a pure accident. Youlgreave’s room was quite high up in the house and apparently he fell out of his window one night. A maid found the body the following morning. Accidental death. That was the story. The coroner said he must have leant out a bit too far trying to get a breath of air. It was a very warm night.’

  ‘When are you going back to London?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, probably. Any chance of your coming up to town in the next few days?’

  ‘Not really. There’s too much I need to do here.’

  ‘How would it be if I came to see you?’

  ‘In Rosington?’ I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice. ‘They’ve got long memories here, you know. If Oliver Cromwell turned up, they’d probably present him with a bill for damaging the carvings in sixteen forty-something.’

  ‘I don’t mind that. Why don’t I come up tomorrow? I’ve got a date with the Cuthbertsons but I can easily put them off. We could have lunch at the Crossed Keys.’

  ‘The Cuthbertsons?’

  ‘I told you – they own Veedon Hall. I’d arranged to run down and spend the day with them looking over the school and so on. But they won’t mind if –’

  ‘You mustn’t cancel that.’

  ‘All right, then I’ll come and take you to lunch on Wednesday. So that’s settled. I’ve looked up the trains. T
here’s one that gets to Rosington at about twelve thirty-five.’

  ‘But Janet –’

  ‘She can come too, if you like. And David, I suppose. Though I’d much rather it was just you.’

  I gave in, mainly, I told myself, because it would mean I wouldn’t have to cook lunch.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘And afterwards we can go to the bank and pay in your cheque.’

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. Henry was like a terrier with a sense of humour. He made me laugh and he never let go.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, I’d better leave you to make cocoa or whatever you do for fun at this time. I love you. I’m going to put the phone down now so you don’t have to reply to that.’

  There was a click and the line went dead. I stared at the handset for a moment and then replaced it on its base. I felt happier than I had done for months, which was stupid of me. I heard Janet’s footsteps on the stairs and went to tell her that Henry had invited us to lunch the day after tomorrow: She must have had a bath while I was on the phone because she was already in her nightclothes – a dressing gown over a cotton winceyette nightdress, cream-coloured and with a pattern of small-pink bows. It was a thick winter dressing gown, which made me think that even a bath had failed to warm her up. But her face lit up when I told her Henry was coming.

  ‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything’s changed,’ I warned her.

  ‘But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t behave like civilized human beings, is there?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘It’s Tuesday tomorrow,’ I said hastily, knowing I was beginning to blush, and seizing on an exit line: ‘I’d better put the rubbish out.’

  I was still feeling happy when I went to bed that night. Before going to sleep, I reread ‘The Office of the Dead’ whilst smoking a final cigarette.

  Enough! I cried. Consume the better part,

  No more. For therein lies the deepest art …

  The words triggered the memory that had begun to surface when I was talking with Rosie. Or rather parts of a memory, about the conversation with someone’s father in Durban. The man who knew about head-hunting.

  It had been at one of Grady’s parties. This one had been just before the company crashed, and with it Henry’s investment. My memory of it was partial because even by Grady’s standards, the party had been particularly drunken.

  The ex-colonial administrator had stuck out because he didn’t resemble any of the other guests. He was somebody’s father on a visit from England. He was a little, hunched man with a creased yellow face. I remember him early on in the evening standing in a corner with a glass of orange juice in his hand watching us making fools of ourselves. I felt sorry for him because I thought he was obviously lonely, and anyway I was trying to escape from Grady, so I went to talk to him. I asked him if he was bored.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s fascinating.’

  ‘What is?’

  He smiled up at me and gestured with his glass towards the crowd of people swirling through the room and spilling on to the terrace and down into the garden and around the pool. ‘All this. Ritual behaviour is one of my interests.’

  I laughed. ‘You’re teasing me.’

  He shook his head and explained that his work had encouraged him to develop an interest in anthropology.

  ‘Yes, but that’s about savages – primitive people, I mean.’

  ‘All human societies have their rituals, Mrs Appleyard, however sophisticated they may appear to be on the surface. Think of the ritual mourning we indulged in when the King died. And look at this – intoxication, formalized sexual display and childish games, many of them of an aggressive nature. I could give you plenty of parallels from tribal cultures in West Africa.’

  ‘But that can’t be the same,’ I said. ‘Their reasons for doing it must be completely different from ours.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’re Europeans and they’re Africans.’

  ‘It makes no difference. That is one of the interesting things that anthropology shows. On a ritual level, human societies are strikingly similar in many respects. Take cannibalism, for instance.’

  I made a face at him. ‘Rather you than me.’

  ‘I don’t mean cannibalism from necessity or inclination, of course, where eating other human beings is a matter of survival, or an addition to the diet. No, I mean ritual cannibalism, which has nothing to do with nourishment. It’s often allied to head-hunting. I came across a certain amount of it in West Africa and also in the East Indies. There were various reasons for it, but the most common, found in most cultures at some point or another, is that by eating something of a person you acquire his soul, or perhaps a part of him you particularly value. His courage, for example, or his prowess in battle.’

  ‘Not in Europe, surely? Or at least not since we all lived in caves and went around knocking each other over the head with rocks.’

  ‘There’s evidence to show that the practice persisted in England and Scotland until the Middle Ages. And there were cases in other parts of Europe much later than that. There was one in the Balkans, in Montenegro, in 1912. And a diluted version of this lasted much longer. Think of hair, for example. Other people’s hair.’ He smiled grimly at me. ‘You wouldn’t necessarily eat it, of course, not nowadays. But I can remember my aunts wearing mourning brooches and rings containing locks snipped from the loved one’s head. What they were really doing, of course, was carrying around a little bit of the soul of a person they’d lost. Rather like the head-hunters do in parts of Borneo. More genteel than eating his brain as they might have done at another time or in another place, but the principle’s exactly the same.’

  The rest of what he’d said had been drowned in dry martinis or lost in the blue haze of cigarette smoke. It didn’t matter. The question was what had Francis wanted that a child might possess? Youth, health and life? Had Francis believed that the purpose of dead children was to feed the living with life? How did that compare with buying a sprig of lavender from a nasty old woman in the hope it would bring you luck?

  I turned over the pages of The Voice of Angels until I came to ‘Breakheart Hill’.

  ‘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.’

  Time sanitizes all but the most dreadful horrors. There I was, entertaining the bizarre idea that a clergyman of the Church of England might have considered eating bits of children in the crazy belief that this would somehow extend his life. But it was only a speculation, and the fact that Francis had died more than fifty years ago removed it one stage further from here and now. So I felt pleased with myself. I was even looking forward to telling Henry about the idea tomorrow.

  I put out the cigarette and settled down. I thought of Henry briefly, that he had his good points as well as his bad, then I slid into a deep sleep. There must have been dreams, though I don’t remember any of them, and they must have been happy ones because I was still feeling happy when I woke up.

  It was one of those times when there’s very little transition between sleep and being awake. It’s like swimming up from the bottom of a pool, the sense of urgency and speed, the sense of breaking out of one element into another.

  The room was full of light. I knew it was still early because the light had that soft, almost colourless quality you get in the hour or two after dawn. I opened my eyes and saw Janet in the doorway. She was wearing a long pale-blue nylon nightdress and her hair was loose and unbrushed.

  ‘Wendy,’ she said. ‘Wendy.’

  I sat up. ‘What is it?’

  She seemed not to have heard me. She looked so cold, an ice woman. You could see the shape of her body through the nylon of the nightdress. With a twist of envy I wondered if she’d bought it to make herself look pretty for David.

&nbs
p; ‘Janet, what’s happened?’

  ‘Wendy.’ She took a step into the room, then stopped and blinked. ‘Daddy’s dead.’

  39

  Blood is the colour of a scream.

  Neither of us said anything as we stood in the doorway looking down at the body of John Treevor. But that’s what I thought. Blood is the colour of a scream. There was nothing logical, nothing rational, about it. I couldn’t scream for fear of waking Rosie.

  Who would have thought he had so much blood in him?

  Really we should get the sheets and the pillowcase in a bath full of cold water as soon as possible. Soak blood in cold water, said my mother, who was a sort of walking housewife’s manual. But the bedding was so saturated I doubted if it would ever be dean again. And there was nothing we could do about the mattress. It wasn’t just the cover. The blood would have soaked right into the horsehair.

  I knew Janet was right, that he was dead. He was so very still, you see, and the blood had stopped flowing.

  There were red splashes on the bedside rug. The rug would have to go, too. Mr Treevor’s false teeth, clamped for ever shut, were in the glass on the bedside table. His knees had drawn up under the eiderdown. He was lying on his back and it looked as if he had two open mouths, one redder than the other. All the redness cast a sombre glow through the room, neutralizing the pale dawn light.

  On the rug was a knife, the vegetable knife we’d lost. Oh well, I thought, that’s something. None of the other knives in the kitchen drawer were nearly as good for peeling potatoes. Mr Treevor’s eyes were open and he stared up at the ceiling towards David’s heaven. Except that David was far too sophisticated to believe in a common-or-garden traditional heaven located above the sky.

  Janet stirred. ‘At least he’s at peace now.’

  Peace? Is that what you call it? ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  I pushed past her, went into the bathroom and locked the door. When I came out, Janet was waiting for me on the landing. She had a key in her hand and the door to Mr Treevor’s room was dosed. Without exchanging a word we went down to the kitchen.