The Office of the Dead (31 page)

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.’

After supper we went for a gentle walk in what we had taken to calling the Parklet. Mist was already creeping up the lawn towards the terrace. When I glanced back at Veedon Hall, for once it looked beautiful, a house from a fairy tale.

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 dance 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.’

I sipped my tea and then picked up the envelope. The handwriting was familiar but I couldn’t put a name to it. I slit the envelope with the handle of a spoon, pulled out the letter and glanced at the signature. It was from Peter Hudson.

My dear Wendy

I imagine you’re both very busy, on the verge of the new term. I am writing partly so June and I can wish you and Henry the best of luck with your new venture.

The cataloguing of the Cathedral Library has at last been finished! James Heber (a friend of Mrs Forbury’s nephew) spent the summer finishing what you so ably began. He has just completed the History Tripos at Cambridge and is going on to do his MA at Durham. He found no more surprises, thank heaven! No decision has yet been made about what we shall do with the books, nor with those in the Theological College Library.

The dean’s exhibition in the Chapter House has been a success, you will be glad to hear – so much so that there are plans to expand it and make it permanent. So the dean asked young Heber to have a look at the Rosington Archive in Cambridge University Library to see if there was anything worth including. It’s a collection of records and other material, some monastic but most Post-Reformation, relating to the Cathedral and the diocese. It was lodged in the University Library by Canon Youlgreave. Someone catalogued it in a rather perfunctory way in the 1920s, but only in part.

Heber turned up several possible exhibits. He also came across a reference in the Sacrist’s Accounts for 1402 to the cost of fuel and other expenses relating to the burning of heretics. There was some debate about who should be ultimately responsible for meeting these expenses – the Abbey felt it was the King’s responsibility, not theirs. The interesting point is that those burned were named – two of them came from the village of Mudgley, and one of those was called Isabella. So perhaps that poem of Youlgreave’s had some foundation in fact after all. Unfortunately there was no mention of the precise charges.

There’s one other thing. I had a letter last week, addressed to me as Cathedral Librarian, from a man named Simon Martlesham. He said he had been trying to get in touch with you at the Dark Hostelry, had found out you had moved, and wondered if I had a forwarding address. He said you knew how to contact him so I’ve dropped him a line saying that I’ve passed his request on to you.

We hope to see David and Rosie in October if all goes well. I know you have been in touch too. Remember us to them when you see them.

June sends her affectionate good wishes to you both, as do I,

Peter

I passed the letter to Henry and watched him read it as I finished my tea. I saw the frown shooting up between his eyebrows as he neared the end.

‘I think we should call it a day,’ he said after he’d finished.