I filled the kettle and put it on the stove. While Janet laid the tea tray, I leant against the sink and watched her. I remember how she fetched the cups and saucers and aligned them on the tray, how the teaspoons were polished on the tea towel, how the milk jug was filled and then covered with a little lacy cloth designed to keep out the flies. I remember how deft her movements were, how she made a little island of order amid all the chaos, and how beautiful she was, though she was still pale and her face was rigid with shock.
She must have sensed me watching her, because she glanced up and smiled. For an instant it was as if she’d struck a match behind her face, and the flame flared, warmed the chilly air for a moment, and died.
I made the tea. Janet poured it and added three teaspoonfuls of sugar to each cup.
‘It’s my fault,’ she said after the first sip.
‘Of course it isn’t.’
She shook her head. ‘He couldn’t face going away. We were putting him out like a piece of rubbish for the dustmen. My father.’
‘He was going into hospital for his sake as much as for yours.’ I reached across the table and touched her hand. ‘You know how he’s been lately. He could have done this at any time, for any reason. Or for no reason at all. He wasn’t himself.’
Janet gasped, a single, ragged sob. ‘Then who was he?’
‘At one point he thought he was Francis Youlgreave,’ I said. ‘Listen, all I’m saying is that part of him had already died. The important part, the part that was your father.’
Janet took a deep breath. ‘I must phone someone. Dr Flaxman, I suppose.’
I touched the key lying between us on the table. ‘You’ve locked the bedroom door?’
She nodded. ‘In case Rosie –’
‘What about David?’
Janet blinked, wrinkled her forehead and looked up at the clock on the dresser. ‘He’ll be getting up in a moment to say the morning office.’
‘Janet, why did you go into your father’s room?’
‘I woke up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I – I thought I’d just peep in and see if he was all right. He was so upset. When do you think –?’
‘I don’t know.’ I remembered how still everything had been in Mr Treevor’s bedroom, how the blood had soaked into the bedding, how dark the blood had been. ‘Probably hours ago.’
‘What a way to end.’
‘If he’d had the choice, he’d probably have preferred it. I’d much rather go like that than get more and more senile.’
Water rustled in one of the pipes running down the wall. Janet pushed back her chair.
‘That’s David,’ she said.
I wondered why she’d come to me not him after she found her father.
Death wasn’t something I’d had to deal with very often. I hadn’t had the practice. I didn’t know the procedures. I thought that Mr Treevor had somehow cheated death by killing himself. Part of me, the little selfish child that lives within us all, was glad he was dead. In the long run, it would save everyone a lot of trouble.
I just wished he hadn’t made such a mess of his exit. Literally. Why hadn’t he done it sensibly and discreetly somewhere in the wings of our lives? A nice quiet overdose, perhaps, almost indistinguishable from a natural death, or at least something Janet could have told herself was an accident, like stepping in front of a bus. At times like this I was glad of the privacy of the mind. If my thoughts had been public property, the world would have labelled me a psychopath.
Janet slipped away to talk to David. I went upstairs to dress. Afterwards I took another cup of tea into the drawing room and smoked a cigarette. David was now in the study talking on the phone. The doors were open and I could hear what he was saying.
‘No, there’s no doubt at all, I’m afraid … can’t you come sooner than that?’
I stared through a window at a garden varnished with dew. The spire gleamed in the early morning sun. Francis must have stood in this room, looked out of this window, seen this view.
‘I appreciate that,’ David was saying. ‘Very well … Yes, all right, I’ll ring them straightaway … Goodbye.’
He put down the phone and came to join me in the drawing room.
‘Flaxman can’t manage it before half past eight.’
‘I’ll take Rosie to school.’
‘Thanks.’ I doubt if he heard what I’d said. ‘Poor Janet,’ he went on. ‘All this on top of the miscarriage.’
‘I think she needs to be in bed.’
‘Would you tell her about Flaxman? I’d better phone the police, and the dean.’
I persuaded Janet to go back to bed. Then I got Rosie up, made breakfast and walked her to school. It felt unnatural to be doing normal things. Everything should have become abnormal in deference to Mr Treevor’s death. But Rosington ignored his absence. The city was the same today as it had been yesterday, which was wrong.
I looked at Rosie as we drifted down the hill towards St Tumwulf’s. She had Angel clamped under her arm and she was sucking her thumb. The doll was wearing its pink outfit because it was moving in disguise among mortals, and so she matched Rosie in her pink gingham school dress. I thought Rosie was paler than usual. She’d been as fond of Mr Treevor as anybody.
During breakfast, David had told her that Grandpa had gone to heaven in the night.
‘Will he be coming back?’ she had said.
‘No,’ David replied. Rosie nodded and went back to her cornflakes.
At the school gates, I asked Rosie if she was feeling all right.
‘I’m all right. But Angel’s got a tummy ache.’
‘A bad one?’
‘A little bit bad.’ Rosie’s face brightened. ‘I’m going to finish sewing Angel’s shawl today and it’ll go nicely with her dress. That’ll cheer her up.’
‘She’ll look very pretty.’
‘We’re sisters now,’ Rosie told me. ‘Both in pink.’
‘Makes the boys wink, doesn’t it?’
She gave me the doll and went into the playground. It seemed to me the other children parted before her like the Red Sea. I found the headmistress in her office, told her what had happened and asked her to keep an eye on Rosie.
‘A death in the family, in the home,’ the headmistress said. ‘It’s a terrible thing for a child.’
When I got back to the Dark Hostelry, I found Dr Flaxman in the drawing room talking to David and Janet.
‘I’d better have the key,’ he was saying. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
David frowned at him. Janet moved along the sofa and patted the seat beside her. I sat down.
‘I don’t understand,’ David said.
‘It’s common practice in cases like this, Mr Byfield.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Cases where the coroner will have to be notified.’
‘I can understand that of course, but –’
‘And particularly where there’s an element of doubt about the death.’
‘I should have thought that was plain enough.’
Flaxman’s eyes flickered towards me and then returned to David. ‘Perhaps I could have a word in private.’
Janet said, ‘That’s not necessary. Whatever you can say to my husband you can say to Mrs Appleyard and me.’
David nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Very well.’ Flaxman continued to speak to David, ignoring Janet and me. ‘It’s possible that Mr Treevor killed himself. But any death like this needs careful investigation.’
‘Surely you’re not suggesting –?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Flaxman said. ‘I’m just doing my job. May I use your phone?’
People came and went, doing their jobs, while we sat by and watched. Dr Flaxman waited until two uniformed police officers appeared on the doorstep. David took the police to see Mr Treevor. They didn’t stay long in the room and they said very little. But when they came out, one of them went away and the other lingered like a ghost on the landing in front
of Mr Treevor’s door.
I took him up a cup of coffee and a biscuit. He looked at me as if I were a Martian and blushed. But he said thank you and then broke wind, which embarrassed him more than it did me.
Our next visitors were also police officers. But these were detectives in plain clothes. Inspector Humphries was a tall, hunched man with short, fair hair which looked as if it would be as soft as a baby’s. He had a broken-nosed sergeant called Pate, all bone and muscle. I later discovered Pate played fly-half for the town’s rugby football fifteen. David introduced me and explained that his wife was in bed.
Humphries grunted. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take us upstairs, sir,’ he said. ‘Who was it who actually found the body?’
‘My wife. Then she woke Mrs Appleyard and me.’
‘I see.’ The inspector had a Midlands accent and a way of mumbling his words that made it sound as if he was speaking through a mouthful of thick soup. ‘And when was Mr Treevor last seen alive?’
‘About half past ten the previous evening. My wife looked in to say good night.’
Humphries grunted again. We had reached the landing. At a nod from the inspector, the constable on guard unlocked Mr Treevor’s door. I heard Pate sucking in his breath. Then the two detectives went into the room and closed the door behind them. Then the doorbell rang and David and I went downstairs and answered it together.
The doorbell kept ringing all morning. First there was another doctor, the police surgeon. Then came Peter Hudson, who asked if there was anything he could do and said that he would take over David’s responsibilities at the Cathedral for the time being. Later on in the day we found in our letterbox a stiff little note from the dean, addressed to Janet, expressing polite regret at the death of her father.
Canon Osbaston turned up in person, suddenly frail, his little head wagging like a wilting flower on the long stalk of his neck. David put him in the drawing room and I brought him a glass of brandy.
‘Poor Janet,’ he said, ‘it’s so very hard. Sometimes it seems so meaningless.’
‘Yes,’ said David.
‘So pointless,’ Osbaston murmured. ‘It really makes one wonder.’ Then he glanced at his watch, finished his brandy and struggled to his feet. ‘Give my love to Janet and let me know if there’s anything I can do. But I’ll call again tomorrow, if I may. Perhaps I’ll see you at evensong, David.’
In that moment I liked him better than I had ever done.
June Hudson appeared just as Osbaston was leaving. She was holding a large earthenware dish.
‘Just a little casserole,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘I thought you might not have time to cook a proper meal tonight.’ She shifted from one foot to the other. ‘And how’s Janet?’
‘Very shaken, naturally,’ David said. ‘She’s resting now.’
‘Let me know when you think she might like a visitor.’
‘You’re very kind.’ David made it sound like an’ accusation.
June Hudson smiled at us both and almost fled down the garden towards the gate to the Close.
Shortly after this, they took the body away. They brought an ambulance into the Close and backed it up to the gate into our garden. People lingered to watch, swelling to a small crowd when the police raised screens. Sergeant Pate suggested that it might be better if we kept out of the way. So the three of us sat in Janet and David’s room and tried to resist the temptation to peer out of the window.
We heard the tramp of feet on the stairs. They took away the mattress and the bedding as well as the body. They also removed some of Mr Treevor’s possessions. They gave David a receipt. Janet wanted to say goodbye to her father, but David wouldn’t let her. He said there would be other opportunities. He meant when the mortuary had cleaned him up.
‘I’m trying to remember him now as he used to be,’ Janet said carefully, like a child repeating a lesson. ‘Before Mummy died.’
Then it was time for me to collect Rosie. David offered me the use of the car but I refused, because it was garaged at the Theological College and fetching it would have meant one of us having to walk through the Close. Besides, I thought it would be better for Rosie if everything that could be normal was normal.
I met no one I knew on my way to school with Angel. None of the mothers and grandmothers at the school gate talked to me, though one or two of them gave me curious looks. They did that anyway. When Rosie came out I gave her the doll.
‘I’ve done the shawl,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s pink. I’ve got it in my satchel. Where’s Mummy?’
‘She’s having a rest at home.’
‘But it’s daytime.’
‘You know she hasn’t been very well recently. And of course she’s very sad at present because of Grandpa.’
‘Grandpa’s in heaven,’ Rosie announced, with a hint of a question mark trailing at the end of the sentence.
‘Yes, that’s what Daddy said.’
She took my hand because it was less effort for her if I towed her up the hill to the town. ‘Angel says, perhaps he went to hell.’
‘Why would he go there?’
‘If you do bad things, you go to hell.’
‘Did Grandpa do bad things?’
Rosie conferred silently with her doll. ‘Angel doesn’t know. What’s for tea?’
‘That’s something I don’t know. I expect we’ll find something.’
We didn’t talk for the rest of the way. There was a men’s outfitters with a large plate-glass window in the High Street, and as usual Rosie lingered as we passed to admire her reflection. The proprietor was fetching a rack of ties from the window display for a customer standing a yard or two behind him. It was the dean. For an instant his eyes met mine and then he turned away to examine a glass-fronted cabinet containing cufflinks and tiepins.
We went into the Close by the Sacristan’s Gate. Mr Gotobed was shooing a group of schoolboys off the sacred grass around the east end of the cathedral, the skirts of his cassock fluttering in the breeze. He turned as he heard our footsteps on the gravel, abandoned the children and walked quickly and clumsily towards us.
‘Mrs Appleyard.’
I smiled at him.
‘Mother and me were sorry to hear about Mr Treevor. She asked me to send her condolences.’
‘Thank you. I’ll tell the Byfields.’
His eyes were full of yearning. I told him Rosie needed her tea and that I had to rush.
When we got home, Rosie went up to see her mother. There was a knock on the garden door. A small man with no chin and a very large Adam’s apple was standing on the doorstep. He waved at me. When I opened the door he edged forward, smiling, and I automatically stepped back into the hall.
‘Rosington Observer, miss. I’m Jim Filey. I called about the sad fatality.’
‘I see.’
‘I gather there’ll have to be an inquest. Very distressing for the family, I’m sure.’ He pulled out a notebook. ‘And you are?’
It was the way he stared at me that made up my mind. He was younger than me and acting like a hard-bitten newshound. I didn’t like anything about him, from his over-greased hair to the fussy little patterns on his gleaming black brogues.
‘My name’s none of your business.’ I began to close the door. ‘I’ll say goodbye.’
‘Here, miss, wait. Is it true Mr Treevor cut his throat?’
‘I’d like you to go, Mr Filey.’
But he was no longer looking at me. He was looking over my shoulder, into the hall.
‘Get out,’ David said very quietly.
I stepped aside from the doorway. David moved towards Filey. For an instant I thought that he was going to hit the reporter. Filey took a couple of steps backwards. David shut the door and locked it. Filey scowled at us through the glass and then walked rapidly down the garden to the gate.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘He was beginning to be a pest.’
‘You shouldn’t have to put up with that sort of thing.’
He had calmed down now
. The whole episode had lasted less than a minute. What really shook me was not that nasty little reporter but what I’d glimpsed in David. There was so much rage in him. Perhaps that was why he needed to believe in God, to find something greater than himself that would contain and repress whatever was swirling around inside him and trying to find a way out.
I said, ‘This may be a sign of things to come.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘Surely not?’
I’d lowered my voice to a whisper, as had he. ‘This is going to get in the newspapers.’
‘You may be right. I’d better phone my mother.’
He returned to the study to phone Granny Byfield. I went downstairs to the kitchen. I to someone who didn’t belong in Rosington, who wasn’t part of the little world of the Close. That wasn’t the whole truth – I wanted to talk to Henry.
In the kitchen I opened the larder door and wondered what to do for Rosie’s tea. At least we had the Hudsons’ casserole for supper. All at once the idea of living in Henry’s prep school seemed wonderfully attractive. At least there would be staff to take care of the cooking and cleaning, the washing and ironing.
I turned round to put a loaf of bread on the table. For a moment I thought Mr Treevor was sitting in the Windsor chair at the end of the table. Suddenly the knowledge that he would never be there again, demanding a second helping before some of us had even started our first, made my eyes fill with tears.
40
On Wednesday morning our first visitor was Mrs Forbury. She came through the gate to the Close, glancing over her shoulder like a thief as she slipped into the garden.
‘It’s the Queen Touchy,’ I told Janet, who was lying on the sofa in the drawing room. ‘I’ll send her away.’
‘No, don’t,’ Janet said. ‘It’s kind of her to come.’
You can never predict how people are going to react. When Mrs Forbury saw Janet lying there in her dressing gown, she bustled over to her, put her arms around her and gave her a hug. Janet hugged her back and started to cry.
‘There, there,’ said the Queen Touchy. ‘There, there.’
The Office of the Dead Page 26