The previous owners, the Cuthbertsons, had invited us to stay the week after Janet’s death. When Henry told me, I assumed there had been an element of calculation in the invitation, that they wanted to safeguard the sale they had agreed with Henry. It’s always easier to believe the worst about human nature than the best. But when I met them, I soon realized they simply wanted to help.
Henry and I had spent much of the summer term at Veedon Hall, gradually growing used to the place and to each other. I was surprised to discover that as far as the school was concerned I was one of Henry’s advantages. His new partner was what we used to call a confirmed bachelor and, as Mrs Cuthbertson told me, the mothers liked to think there was a woman about the place. As for Henry, he slotted into the rhythms of the school as though he’d never been away.
‘The boys actually work for him,’ Mr Cuthbertson said. ‘Lord knows why, but there’s not many of us you can say that about.’
I was fond of Veedon Hall for what it was and what it could be. Best of all, it wasn’t the Close at Rosington. It was another miniature world, but this one was dominated by a hundred and seventeen fairly healthy little savages. The boys had to learn about the subjunctive of Amo and simultaneous equations, which fortunately was not my province, but they also had to be fed and watered, looked after when they were ill and comforted when they were sad. One of the junior matrons left suddenly when her mother fell ill and I took on some of her duties.
It made me feel as if I was someone else now, knowing that I was not only pregnant but owned part of the school. Henry had put both our names in the contract. So far I’d enjoyed the school more than the pregnancy. Henry and his partner might be wonderful teachers but neither of them had the slightest idea how to organize the place or control the money. Gradually I began to take over the administration. I had come a long way from 93, Harewood Drive, Bradford, but part of me was still the daughter of a Yorkshire shopkeeper.
So I was busy. During the summer term and afterwards, I didn’t have much time to brood or to grieve about Janet. I didn’t have much time to think about what had happened. That suited me very well. But I could run away from Rosington for the rest of my life. I could never run away from Janet.
Janet. However busy I was, she was always there in the back of my memory, waiting patiently. I’d kept cuttings about the case in a large manila envelope because I knew sooner or later I would have to read them again.
One of the newspapers carried the headline THE WOMAN WHO DIED FOR LOVE. The News of the World said Janet was an Angel of Mercy who had killed to save suffering. She had done the wrong thing for the right reason, and had made herself pay the price. The general verdict was that she was kind-hearted but fatally weak. It was taken for granted that suicide was a coward’s way out. I didn’t understand that, and still don’t. Killing yourself must take more courage than I ever had.
None of the accounts mentioned David’s lost job or indeed David’s failings as a husband. He and Rosie were confined to the margins of the drama. Janet would have been glad of that. She wasn’t vindictive, and she cherished her privacy. At some point before swallowing the rest of her father’s sleeping tablets, she wrote three letters and put them under her pillow.
The coroner’s letter was read out at the inquest. Janet said she was sorry to be such a trouble to everyone. She’d decided to take an overdose and kill herself because she’d killed her father. She had not been able to bear him going senile, and she knew how desperately unhappy he was, and how much more unhappy he would be when he went to the nursing home. He had begged her to kill him, she wrote. She added that she couldn’t stand living with the knowledge of what she had done, and that in any case she was very depressed after losing a baby. The coroner saw the letters to David and me but did not think it necessary to read them out in open court.
I never knew what was in Janet’s letter to David. Mine was short and to the point, and more than forty years later I can recite it word for word.
There’s nothing anyone can do, even you. The police know I killed Daddy and I think it’s only a matter of hours before they arrest me. You’ve always been a sort of guardian angel to me, but please don’t think this is your fault.
This way it’s better for everyone, especially David and Rosie. I want so much for them to be free to make a fresh start and they can’t do that if I’m here. I know you’ll help them if you can. Thank you for everything.
Do you know how much Henry needs you? Give him my love and to you, as always, my special love.
Janet
The coroner was scrupulously fair and even sympathetic. The evidence presented by the police left no doubt that Mr Treevor had been killed. A number of witnesses, including David and myself, had testified that Mr Treevor was very unhappy and had on several occasions asked to be killed. Dr Flaxman had told the court that Mrs Byfield was seriously depressed after losing her baby and that he was worried about her mental health.
Then came the clinching piece of evidence. The police had visited the council dump. A few hours after Mr Treevor’s death, early on Tuesday morning, the dustmen had done their round. So detectives painstakingly picked their way through a mound of rubbish until they had found items from the Dark Hostelry.
Inspector Humphries testified that these included envelopes addressed to the Byfields and to me, and an empty Worcestershire sauce bottle with Janet’s fingerprints on it. A few inches away they found a damp bundle of newspaper, the Church Times, as it happened, containing potato peelings and a quantity of wet rags. Under examination, the rags had proved to be part of a cotton winceyette nightdress, Inspector Humphries said, originally cream-coloured and with a pattern of small pink bows.
Much of the fabric was stained with what forensic tests established was blood identical to Mr Treevor’s blood type. The police believed that Janet had tried to wash the nightdress and herself after killing her father, and had then decided to cut up the nightdress with scissors and put it out with the rubbish. On the hem of the nightdress was a laundry label which had been traced back to the Dark Hostelry. David himself confirmed that his wife had owned such a nightdress. Neither he nor the police had been able to find it in the house. He was almost sure that his wife had been wearing it on the evening before her father’s death.
So she hadn’t put on the pale-blue nylon nightdress to make herself look pretty for David after all. I wished I believed in God so I could at least pray for Janet’s soul. I’d failed her, you see, because I was so tied up with my own affairs, with Henry and Francis Youlgreave. I hadn’t noticed that my best friend was driving herself into a corner.
The coroner said it was a tragedy, which I suppose it was, and that Janet had loved not wisely but too well. I wondered if there had been hatred mixed up with the love. Nowadays the psychologists would say that Mr Treevor had behaved ‘inappropriately’ with Rosie on several occasions, perhaps many. Had he also behaved ‘inappropriately’ with Janet when she was a child? I couldn’t imagine her hating anyone enough to kill them. Except of course herself, the person she always hated most of all.
But what about David? I’d seen the way he had looked at Mr Treevor when he had found him in Rosie’s bed, heard the tone of his voice. Hatred turned David into someone else. If hatred alone could kill, then Mr Treevor would have died long before he bled to death.
Janet loved David. In a sense she’d lived for him. When I stopped feeling numb, and when I stopped trying to distract myself with the doings of a hundred and seventeen small boys, I started to think again. It was then that it occurred to me that Janet might have done more than live for David. She might have died for him as well.
47
On that Sunday we didn’t talk much as we drove back from Roth to Veedon Hall. When we turned into our drive relief dropped over me like an eiderdown. I must have sighed.
‘What is it?’ Henry said.
‘Do you know, this is the first proper home we’ve ever had?’
‘Better late than never.’
I slipped my arm into Henry’s. ‘It’s so quiet.’
‘Wait till the little hooligans get back. Then we’ll know what noise means.’
Because of my pregnancy Henry insisted on strolling at a pace suitable for a funeral procession. He was also smoking his pipe, a messy habit which at least kept away the midges. The pipe was a recent innovation designed to make him look solid and dependable in front of parents. Henry hadn’t quite mastered the art so he was practising in private with me.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘you’ll soon be a parent.’
There was a stone bench beside what we naturally called the Lakelet, and we sat here for a while, despite the fact the midges were worse near the water. Henry was convinced I needed a rest. It was still light but now the sun had gone the air was rapidly cooling. Ducks sent ripples swirling across the silver water. I thought of the mallards I’d fed with Rosie near the place where Swan Alley had once been, and wondered if Nancy Martlesham had fed their ancestors when she was a child growing up by the river.
‘She hasn’t any,’ Henry was saying. ‘That’s one consolation.’
I’d missed something. ‘Who hasn’t? And hasn’t any what?’
‘Grandsons. Lady Youlgreave’s got no children at all. So we don’t have to be nice to her on that account.’
‘You asked her?’
‘No, it was when you went to the lavatory. I happened to mention you were pregnant, you see. And she said she was glad she’d never had children because looking after herself was a full-time job as it was.’
‘Do you think she’s happy?’
Henry shrugged and sent a wavering plume of smoke across the water. I suspect he was trying to blow smoke rings.
I said, ‘I don’t think she lets herself think whether she’s happy or not.’
Henry sucked on the pipe, which made a gurgling sound. ‘I don’t see what she’s got to complain about. She’s obviously not short of a bob or three.’
Lady Youlgreave told us that Uncle Francis had never lived in the Old Manor House. In his day the family’s home was Roth Park, a redbrick mansion whose chimneys were visible over the roofs of the newer houses. He died at Roth Park, too, jumping from the sill of his bedroom window to the gravel beneath. In his way he had been very kind to her, Lady Youlgreave said, and she used to call him Uncle Francis.
It wasn’t Francis she’d hated. It was the people who had sold her to him. Her mother’s sister Aunt Em and her brother Simon Martlesham. She didn’t use the word hate, but that’s what I thought. I saw in her sallow little face as she sat on her white wicker throne in the garden of the Old Manor House.
‘Uncle Francis thought he was acting for the best. But it’s never nice for a child to be torn away from her family.’ Lady Youlgreave smothered a little yawn, as though either we or the subject bored her, possibly both. ‘Especially if your mother has just died. At first he sent me to live with a dreadful woman in Hampstead. She’d been a governess to the Youlgreave children when he was a boy. She taught me how to mind my p’s and q’s. She bought me clothes.’ Her lips curled. ‘She gave me elocution lessons.’
‘How long were you there?’
‘A couple of months. It seemed like centuries. But Uncle Francis was being cruel to be kind. He didn’t want me to come as too much of a shock to the couple who’d agreed to adopt me. And I didn’t. I settled in very well. Father’ – she gave the last word a faint ironical inflection – ‘was a solicitor in Henley. We had a house by the river. I had my own governess. My father’s aunt had married a man named Carter who owned land in Roth. That’s how Francis knew him. I rather think Francis had been in some sort of legal trouble and Father helped him out.’
‘Why?’ I’d said. ‘Why this business with Harold Munro?’
‘After all these years – is that what you mean? You’ll understand when you’re my age, Mrs Appleyard. When you’re young you’ve no time to look back. But when you’re old there’s little else to do. Besides, I wanted to know what had happened to my brother.’
‘And your aunt.’
She laughed. ‘That was a bonus. I’d assumed she was dead. She must have been over ninety.’
‘But all the secrecy –’
‘Why should I have made a song and dance about it? Tell me, Mrs Appleyard, if you’d been brought up in Swan Alley, if you’d been bought and sold as a child, would you like the world to know? Of course you wouldn’t. That’s why I chose a private investigator. A journalist would probably have ferreted out the information more efficiently, but I couldn’t have relied on him to be confidential. The only obvious alternative would have been a lawyer. But that would have been much more expensive.’ She stared haughtily at us down her nose, which was small and pitted. ‘I’m not made of money, you know.’
All the while she was talking, I had the feeling she was laughing at us.
‘When I first talked to your brother, he said you’d gone to Canada with him.’
‘That’s Simon all over. Wouldn’t want to put himself in a bad light, the one who’d abandoned his little sister. He always was a dreadfully smarmy boy. You should have seen him with Uncle Francis. He’d have said black was white if Uncle Francis wanted him to. At least Aunt Em was quite open about it. She didn’t want children wrecking her last chance of marriage, especially not children from Swan Alley with a mother like ours and no father worth mentioning. To hear her talk about Sammy Gotobed, you’d have thought he was the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ She twisted her features into a pop-eyed, hollow-cheeked mask and intoned in a deep voice, ‘The acme of respectability.’
‘You’ve read the poems, of course?’
Her head dipped. ‘Of course. Munro sent me a copy of The Tongues of Angels he found in Rosington Library. But there was no point. I already have it.’
‘Do you have The Voice of Angels?’
‘It’s the same thing. A privately printed edition of Tongues. For some reason he changed the title slightly.’
‘He also added another poem.’
She stared without expression across the white table. ‘So? Perhaps his publishers wouldn’t let him include it in the edition they produced.’
‘It’s rather an odd poem.’
‘You could say that of almost all of them.’
I was the first to drop my eyes. What she said was reasonable by its own lights. It was probably the truth.
Henry murmured that perhaps we had taken up too much of Lady Youlgreave’s time. He had been very patient with me. I found that was one of the few advantages of being pregnant. People tended to humour you when you had whims. You were almost expected to behave irrationally.
It was then that I asked to use the lavatory. Lady Youlgreave took me into the house by a side door. Shaky bladder control was one of the many things I didn’t like about being pregnant. But I admit I was nosy too. The part of the house I saw was full of battered furniture and paintings in tarnished frames. Nevertheless it smelled of money, just like the car, the sort of money that has been part of your life for so long that you no longer notice it.
As she walked down the hall with me, Lady Youlgreave said, ‘I hope you won’t mind treating this as confidential, Mrs Appleyard.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘I’m sure you understand that it’s not very pleasant to have one’s family secrets displayed in public. As poor Mr Byfield has found out.’ She waved towards a door. ‘It’s in there.’
‘Don’t think I’m prying – well, I am, I suppose – but how did you come to marry into the family?’
‘It’s not so very strange. My parents’ – once again that ironic inflection – ‘used to visit my great-aunt’s house here. The Carters. Most of their land is under the Jubilee Reservoir now, and the house too. They had a d
ance for their daughter’s twenty-first and that’s where I met my future husband.’ She looked at the door of the lavatory, barely trying to conceal her impatience. ‘So you see – it’s all quite simple.’
The lavatory had rich mahogany woodwork, brass taps and blue-and-white tiles. The pan was raised on a dais and I felt like a queen as I sat there hoping to squeeze out more than the usual two teaspoons’-worth so I wouldn’t need a lavatory again before we got home.
But I found it hard to concentrate. I felt uneasy, a sensation that was almost physical, like a mild form of morning sickness. Perhaps I was wrong, and certainly I had only first impressions to go on, but Lady Youlgreave seemed an arrogant, self-sufficient woman with so much money and so few ties that she had no reason to worry about the opinions of others. She had no reason to talk so frankly to a strange woman who turned up with her husband out of the blue on Sunday afternoon.
So why had she answered my questions so frankly?
Another perk of pregnancy was early-morning tea. You need perks when your body has been invaded by a demanding little stranger, your hormones are behaving like disruptive toddlers, and your digestive system is in the throes of a revolution.
Henry was so convinced of my infinite fragility that he would get up early to make the tea. In the back of both of our minds was the memory of what had happened to Janet and the baby she had thought was a boy.
On Monday morning he put the tray by the bed and kissed me. Being together had become a routine, though not I think one we would ever take for granted. He poured the tea and wandered over to the window, twirling the cord of his dressing gown.
‘Lovely morning.’ He sat down in the chair by the window and fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes. ‘There’s a letter for you on the tray.’ He paused just long enough to alert me. ‘A Rosington postmark.’
The Office of the Dead Page 31