The Office of the Dead (19 page)
‘So Canon Youlgreave remains a man of mystery,’ Janet said, cutting the slice of bread into two, half for Rosie, half for Angel.
‘What about mine?’ Mr Treevor demanded.
‘Just coming, Daddy.’
There was something in her voice that alerted me. ‘How have you been?’
Janet pushed her hair from her forehead. ‘Fine, really. A bit tired.’
Our eyes met. She was tired, so she should rest. But how could she rest with these people in this house?
I said, ‘When the weather’s cleared up, I’ll mow the lawn.’
Janet began to speak, but was interrupted by the slamming of the door in the hall above. She straightened up. Suddenly the tiredness was smoothed away.
‘David’s home early,’ she said. ‘That’s nice, isn’t it, poppet?’
Rosie nodded.
‘You’ve got crumbs on your chin,’ Janet went on. ‘Wipe them off with your napkin and sit up.’
Rosie obeyed.
Usually David would come down to the kitchen to say hello when he got back from the Theological College, if only for a moment.
Janet took some toast from the grill, added a layer of grated cheese and slid it back. ‘I’ll just pop up and see if he needs a cup of tea.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on the toast,’ I said.
I listened to Janet’s slow footsteps on the stairs to the hall. A moment later I gave Mr Treevor his second slice of cheese on toast.
‘Thank you, Mummy,’ he said, and seized it with both hands.
He had almost finished by the time Janet came back downstairs. I knew by her face something was wrong.
‘Janet –’
‘There was a meeting of the trustees this afternoon,’ she said dully. She leant on the table, taking the weight from her feet. ‘They’ve decided to close the Theological College after all.’
I was still angry on Thursday morning when the parcel came. I was in the drawing room doing the dusting. The postman knocked at the back door and David answered. He brought the parcel up to me, which I suppose was meant as an olive branch. I recognized the handwriting at once and so I expect did he.
He gave me the parcel and said, ‘Wendy, I must apologize.’
‘What for?’
‘Last night. I know I was upset but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.’
‘And on Janet and Rosie,’ I reminded him, rubbing salt into the wound. I was in no mood for an apology, and I thought if David was going to put himself on a pedestal as a clergyman, he should have had all the more reason to act like a civilized and Christian human being.
‘Yes,’ he said mildly. ‘You’re right.’ But the Olivier nostrils flared momentarily and I realized that I was trespassing yet again on the wrong side of an invisible line. Not that I cared. ‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘it was unforgivable of me.’
Suddenly there was no longer any satisfaction in attacking him. ‘It’s all right. Anyway, it’s not me you have to worry about, is it? It’s Janet.’
He nodded curtly and left the room. I knew it was pointless to goad him, but if he was angry with me then I was angry with him. There hadn’t been much point in his shouting at Janet over supper last night, or in his storming out of the kitchen in the middle of the meal and slamming the door behind him.
If David hadn’t been a priest, if he hadn’t been a man who habitually kept his emotions so tightly under control, it would have been less shocking. After he’d left, Janet had wept into a tea towel, Rosie had played with Angel in the corner by the dresser, and Mr Treevor had quietly finished off all the untouched food on everyone else’s plates.
I sat down on the sofa, turning Henry’s parcel over and over in my hands. On Monday Henry had said he wanted to buy a birthday present for Rosie and in the end there hadn’t been time that afternoon. He had the cheek to ask me to do it for him, but I’d refused.
It was odd seeing my name in Henry’s handwriting, as subtly unsettling as receiving a self-addressed envelope. I undid the string and unwrapped the brown paper. Inside were three books and a letter.
Noddy Goes to Toyland
and
Hurrah for Little Noddy
were by Enid Blyton. He had written Rosie’s name inside but in a way they were meant for me. The third book was a slim green volume almost identical to the library book in my bedside cupboard upstairs. It was a copy of Francis Youlgreave’s
The Tongues of Angels
.
I opened the letter, which was written on note-paper from Brown’s Hotel. He was obviously still doing his best to run through the £47,000 as soon as possible.
My dear Wendy
I hope Rosie likes the Noddy books. Noddy looks like an odious little twerp to me, but perhaps I’m not the best judge.
Anyway, over to Youlgreave. I’ve done a little checking. There is a Farnworthy collection listed in the catalogue of the British Museum Library – mainly theology. It doesn’t include the sermons of Dr Giles Briscow, though the library does have a late-seventeenth-century copy of that. So presumably it’s not the one that Youlgreave had, if Youlgreave’s ever existed.
Now for the big news. On Tuesday I went to the Blue Dahlia only to find your little bald man just leaving. I followed him back to Holborn. He’s got an office over a tobacconist’s. Harold Munro, Ex-Detective Sergeant Metropolitan Police, Private Investigations & Confidential Enquiries Undertaken. That’s what it said on his card in the tobacconist’s window. And I know it’s him, because he came into the shop for some cigarettes while I was there and the tobacconist called him Mr Munro.
Munro asked the tobacconist to take any messages the next day, that was Tuesday, because he had to be out of the office. The tobacconist said where was he going, and hoped it was somewhere nice. And Munro said it was a place called Roth, up the Thames near Shepperton.
There were footsteps in the hall and I looked up. Mr Treevor had come up from the kitchen and was moving towards the downstairs lavatory.
‘Mr Treevor?’ I called.
He paused, his hand on the lavatory door. ‘Yes?’
‘You know the man you saw watching the house from the High Street?’
‘I’ve seen him before,’ Mr Treevor said. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s a ghost.’
‘Was he bald?’
‘Might have been.’ Mr Treevor twisted the handle of the lavatory door. ‘Yes, I think he was.’
‘And can you remember the shape of his bald patch? You must have seen it from above when he was in the High Street.’
‘It wasn’t a nice shape. He wasn’t a nice man.’
‘Was it triangular? A bit like a map of Africa?’
‘I expect so,’ said Mr Treevor obligingly, vanishing into the lavatory and locking the door behind him.
I went back to Henry’s letter.
So next morning I went down to Waterloo and caught a train for Shepperton – Roth is too small to have a station. In fact, Roth hasn’t got much of anything besides a church, a bus shelter and a pub. It’s one of those villages that got swallowed by the suburbs and apart from a whacking great reservoir and one or two fields that the builders forgot, all you can see are houses.
But there’s a sort of green where the bus shelter is and the pub. This seems to be the centre of the place and I reckoned if Munro came to Roth he’d probably come there sooner or later. I spent about an hour having a cup of coffee in a ghastly little café, all chintz and horse brasses. No luck there. When it was opening time, I pottered along to the pub. Luckily our Harold had had the same idea. He was talking to an old codger in the snug, so I nipped into the lounge bar, got myself a drink and settled down for a spot of eavesdropping.
I wonder if he’s ex-Metropolitan Police because they kicked him out for inefficiency. I sat at the bar pretending to read the paper. I could hear some of what they were saying. Munro seemed to be asking about the Youlgreaves. They mentioned someone called Lady Youlgreave who lives in the Old Manor House (just down the road). Unfortunately some people came in and I couldn’t hear very well, because people were talking loudly on the other side of me.
But I heard the name Francis Youlgreave several times. The old codger was rabbiting on about a place called Carter’s Meadow. I think Youlgreave may have upset a neighbour by doing something beastly to a cat there.
Munro left soon afterwards. The last I saw of him, he was walking fast down the road to the station.
I didn’t want to follow, because I thought it might make my interest in him a little too obvious. So I had a look at the church, which is small and old. Francis Youlgreave is buried here – there is a memorial tablet in the chancel to him. All very discreet – just the family crest, his name and the dates of his birth and death.
The only other thing was the poems. There was a box of second-hand books near the door, threepence each, all profits to the Church Restoration Fund. One of them was some poems by Francis Youlgreave, which I thought you might like. I had a look at it on the train back to town, and I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Nutty as a fruit cake, as your mother used to say.
On Thursday, I’ll try and find out something about Martlesham and I’ll give you a ring in the evening. With luck you’ll get this before I phone.
I meant everything I said on Monday. I know I’ve been a bloody fool but don’t let’s throw it all away. If you haven’t cashed that cheque, please do.
All my love,
Henry
I don’t know why, but that letter made me want to cry. I suppose it underlined how far Henry and I had travelled since we married, and especially since I found him with his Hairy Widow on the beach.
I went up to my room with the parcel. I’d have to find some paper to wrap up the present for Rosie. The house was very quiet. Janet had taken Rosie to school, David was in his study and Mr Treevor was in his room. I mounted the second flight of stairs up to my landing. When I put the books in my bedside table, I noticed the sprig of lavender resting on Henry’s cheque beside the gin bottle. I didn’t feel lucky. Just miserable.
I lit a cigarette. I was in no hurry to go to work. I stared at the photograph Canon Osbaston had lent me. It was propped up on an old washstand in the corner of the room behind the door. The trouble was, nothing made sense, then or now. What the hell were Martlesham and Munro up to? If they wanted to find out about Francis, why couldn’t they do it openly? Perhaps there was some obvious explanation staring me in the face which I couldn’t grasp because I was too busy making a mess of my life and watching Janet and David making a mess of theirs. Where did the mutilated pigeon come in? And what about the little man Mr Treevor saw, the little man like a shadow who might or might not be the same as, or at least overlap with, Harold Munro, the private investigator with a bald patch the shape of Africa?
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.
‘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 House. 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’.