The Office of the Dead

I shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t want to. Anyway, my father wouldn’t let me. He thinks it’s unnatural for women to have an education.’

‘Surely he’d let you do something?’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, what do you want to do?’

I watched myself blowing smoke out of my nostrils in the mirror behind Janet’s head and hoped I looked sophisticated. I said, ‘I don’t know what I want.’

That was the real trouble. Boredom saps the will. It makes you feel you no longer have the power to choose. All I could see was the present stretching indefinitely into the future.

But two months later everything changed. My father died. And three weeks after that, on the 19th July 1952, I met Henry Appleyard.

4

Memory bathes the past in a glow of inevitability. It’s tempting to assume that the past could only have happened in the way it did, that this event could only have been followed by that event and in the order they happened. If that were true, of course, nothing would be our fault.

But of course it isn’t true. I didn’t have to marry Henry. I didn’t have to leave him. And I didn’t have to go and stay with Janet at the Dark Hostelry.

During her last year at Oxford, Janet decided that after she had taken her degree she would go to London and try to find work as a translator. Her mother’s contacts might be able to help her. She told me about it over another cup of tea, this time in her cell-like room at St Hilda’s.

‘Is it what you want to do?’

‘It’s all I can do.’

‘Couldn’t you stay here and do research?’

‘I’ll be lucky if I scrape a third. I’m not academic, Wendy. I feel I don’t really belong here. As if I got in by false pretences.’

I shrugged, envious of what she had been offered and refused. ‘I suppose there are lots of lovely young men in London as well as Oxford.’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

Men liked Janet because she was beautiful. She didn’t say much to them either so they could talk to their hearts’ content and show off to her. But she went out of her way to avoid them. Janet wanted Sir Galahad, not a spotty undergraduate from Christchurch with an MG. In the end, she compromised as we all do. She didn’t get Sir Galahad and she didn’t get the spotty undergraduate with the MG. Instead she got the Reverend David Byfield.

Early in 1952 he came over to Oxford for a couple of days to do some work in the Bodleian. He was writing a book reinterpreting the work of St Thomas Aquinas in terms of modern theology. That’s where he and Janet saw each other, in the library. It was, Janet said, love at first sight. ‘He looked at me and I simply knew.’

Even now, I find it very hard to think objectively about David. The thing you have to remember is that in those days he was very, very good-looking. He turned heads in the street, just as Janet did. Like Henry, he had charm, but unlike Henry he wasn’t aware of it and rarely used it. He had a first-class degree in theology from Cambridge. Afterwards he went to a theological college called Mirfield.

‘Lots of smells and bells,’ Janet told me, ‘and terrifyingly brainy men who don’t like women.’

‘But David’s not like that,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, and changed the subject.

After Mirfield, David was the curate of a parish near Cambridge for a couple of years. But at the time he met Janet he was lecturing at Rosington Theological College. They didn’t waste time – they were engaged within a month. A few weeks later, David landed the job of vice-principal at the Theological College. They were delighted, Janet wrote, and the prospects were good. The principal was old and would leave a good deal of responsibility to David. David had also been asked to be a minor canon of the Cathedral, which would help financially. The bishop, who was chairman of the Theological College’s trustees, had taken quite a shine to him. Best of all, Janet said, was the house that came with the job. It was in the Cathedral Close, and it was called the Dark Hostelry. Parts of it were medieval. Such a romantic name, she said, like something out of Ivanhoe. It was rather large for them, but they planned to take a lodger.

The wedding was in the chapel of Jerusalem, David’s old college. Janet and David made a lovely couple, something from a fairy tale. If I was in a fairy tale, I told myself, I’d be the Ugly Duckling. What made everything worse was my father’s death – not so much because I’d loved him but because there was now no longer any possibility of his loving me.

Then I saw Henry standing on the other side of the chapel. In those days he was thickset rather than plump. He was wearing a morning suit that was too small for him. We were singing a hymn and he glanced at me. He had wiry hair in need of a cut and straight, strongly marked eyebrows that went up at a sharp angle from the bridge of his nose. He grinned at me and I looked away.

I’ve still got a photograph of Janet’s wedding. It was taken in the front court of Jerusalem. In the centre, with the Wren chapel behind them, are David and Janet looking as if they’ve strayed from the closing scene of a romantic film. David looks like a young Laurence Olivier – all chiselled features and flaring nostrils, a blend of sensitivity and arrogance. He has Janet on one arm and is smiling down at her. Old Granny Byfield hangs grimly on to his other arm.

Henry and I are away to the left, separated from the happy couple by a clump of dour relations, including Mr and Mrs Treevor. Henry is trying half-heartedly to conceal the cigarette in his hand. His belly strains against the buttons of his waistcoat. The hem of my dress is uneven and I am wearing a silly little hat with a half-veil. I remember paying a small fortune for it in the belief that it would make me look sophisticated. That was before I learned that sophistication wasn’t for sale in Bradford.

John Treevor looks very odd. It must have been a trick of the light – perhaps he was standing in a shaft of sunshine. Anyway, in the photograph his face is bleached white, a tall narrow mask with two black holes for eyes and a black slit for the mouth. It’s as if they had taken a dummy from a shop window and draped it in a morning coat and striped trousers.

A moment later, just after the last photograph had been taken, Henry spoke to me for the first time. ‘I like the hat.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, once I’d glanced over my shoulder to make sure he was talking to me and not someone else.

‘I’m Henry Appleyard, by the way.’ He held out his hand. ‘A friend of David’s from Rosington.’

‘How do you do. I’m Wendy Fleetwood. Janet and I were at school together.’

‘I know. She asked me to keep an eye out for you.’ He gave me a swift but unmistakable wink. ‘But I’d have noticed you anywhere.’

I didn’t know what to say to this, so I said nothing.

‘Come on.’ He took my elbow and guided me towards a doorway. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

‘Why?’

The photographer was packing up his tripod. The wedding party was beginning to disintegrate.

‘Because I happen to know there’s only four bottles of champagne. First come first served.’

The reception was austere and dull. For most of the time I stood by the wall and pretended I didn’t mind not having anyone to talk to. Instead, I nibbled a sandwich and looked at the paintings. After Janet and David left for their honeymoon, Henry appeared at my side again, rather to my relief.

‘What you need,’ he said, ‘is a dry martini.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. Nothing like it.’

I later learned that Henry was something of an expert on dry martinis – how to make them, how to drink them, how to recover as soon as possible from the aftereffects the following morning.

‘Are you sure no one will mind?’

‘Why should they? Anyway, Janet asked me to look after you. Let’s go down to the University Arms.’

As we were leaving the college I said, ‘Are you at the Theological College too?’

He burst out laughing. ‘God, no. I teach at the Choir School in the Close. David’s my landlord.’

‘So you’re the lodger?’

He nodded. ‘And resident jester. I stop David taking himself too seriously.’

For the next two hours, he made me feel protected, as I had made Janet feel protected all those years ago. I wanted to believe I was normal – and also unobtrusively intelligent, witty and beautiful. So Henry hinted that I was all these things. It was wonderful. It was also some compensation for a) Janet getting married, b) managing to do it before I did, and c) to someone as dashing as David (even though he was a clergyman).

While Henry was being nice to me, he found out a great deal. He learned about my family, my father’s death, the shop, and what I did. Meanwhile, I felt the alcohol pushing me up and up as if in a lift. I liked the idea of myself drinking dry martinis in the bar of a smart hotel. I liked catching sight of my reflection in the big mirror on the wall. I looked slimmer than usual, more mysterious, more chic. I liked the fact I wasn’t feeling nervous any more. Above all I liked being with Henry.

He took his time. After two martinis he bought me dinner at the hotel. Then he insisted on taking me back in a taxi to my hotel, a small place Janet had found for me on the Huntingdon Road. On the way the closest he came to intimacy was when we stopped outside the hotel. He touched my hand and asked if he might possibly see me again.

I said yes. Then I tried to stop him paying for the taxi.

‘No need.’ He waved away the change and smiled at me. ‘Janet gave me the money for everything.’

5

In those days, in the 1950s, people still wrote letters. Janet and I had settled into a rhythm of writing to each other perhaps once a month, and this continued after her marriage. That’s how I learned she was pregnant, and that Henry had been sacked.

Janet and David went to a hotel in the Lake District for their honeymoon. He must have made her pregnant there, or soon after their return to Rosington. It was a tricky pregnancy, with a lot of bleeding in the early months. But she had a good doctor, a young man named Flaxman, who made her rest as much as possible. As soon as things had settled down, Janet wrote, I must come and visit them.

I envied her the pregnancy just as I envied her having David. I wanted a baby very badly. I told myself it was because I wanted to correct all the mistakes my parents had made with me. With hindsight I think I wanted someone to love. I needed someone to look after and most of all someone to give me a reason for living.

Henry was sacked in October. Not exactly sacked, Janet said in her letter. The official story was that he had resigned for family reasons. She was furious with him, and I knew her well enough to suspect that this was because she had become fond of him. Apparently one of Henry’s responsibilities was administering the Choir School ‘bank’ – the money the boys were given as pocket money at the start of every term. He had to dole it out on Friday afternoon. It seemed he had borrowed five pounds from the cash box that housed the bank and put it on a horse. Unfortunately he was ill the following Friday. The headmaster had taken his place and had discovered that money was missing.

At this time I was very busy. My mother and her solicitor had decided to sell the business. I was helping to make an inventory of the stock, and also chasing up creditors. To my surprise I rather enjoyed the work and I looked forward to going to the shop because it got me away from the house.

When there was a phone call for me one morning I thought it was someone who owed us money.

‘Wendy – it’s Henry.’

‘Who?’

‘Henry Appleyard. You remember? At Cambridge.’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly. ‘How are you?’

‘Wonderful, thanks. Now, what about lunch?’

‘What?’

‘Lunch.’

‘But where are you?’

‘Here.’

‘In Bradford?’

‘Why not? Hundreds of thousands of people are in Bradford. Including you, which is why I’m here. You can manage today, can’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’ Usually I went out for a sandwich.

‘I thought the Metropole, perhaps? Is that OK?’

‘Yes, but –’

Yes, but isn’t it rather expensive? And what shall I wear?

‘Good. How about twelve forty-five in the lounge?’

There was just time for me to go home, deal with my mother’s curiosity (‘A friend of Janet’s, Mother, no one you know’), change into clothes more suitable for the Metropole and reach the hotel five minutes early. It was a large, shabby place, built to impress at the end of the century. I had never been inside it before. Only the prospect of Henry gave me the courage to do so now. I sat, marooned by my own embarrassment, among the potted palms and the leather armchairs, trying to avoid meeting the eyes of hotel staff. Time moved painfully onwards. After five minutes I was convinced that everyone was looking at me, and convinced that he would not come. Then suddenly Henry was leaning over me, his lips brushing my cheek and making me blush.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ He wasn’t – I’d been early. ‘Let’s have a drink before we order.’

Henry wasn’t good-looking in a conventional way or in any way at all. At that time he was in his late twenties but he looked older. He was wearing a grey double-breasted suit. I didn’t know much about men’s tailoring but I persuaded myself that it was what my mother used to call a ‘good’ suit. His collar was faintly grubby, but in this city collars grew dirty very quickly.

Once the dry martinis had been ordered he didn’t beat about the bush. ‘I expect you’ve heard my news from Janet?’

‘That you’ve – you’ve left the Choir School?’

‘They gave me the push, Wendy. Without a reference. You heard why?’

I nodded and stared at my hands, not wanting to see the shame in his eyes.

‘The irony was, the damn horse won.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I knew it would. I could have repaid them five times over. Still, I shouldn’t have done it. You live and learn, eh?’

‘But what will you do now?’

‘Well, teaching’s out. No references, you see, the headmaster made that very clear. It’s a shame, actually – I like teaching. The Choir School was a bit stuffy, of course. But I used to teach at a place in Hampshire that was great fun – a prep school called Veedon Hall. It’s owned by a couple called Cuthbertson who actually like little boys.’ For an instant the laughter vanished and wistfulness passed like a shadow over his face. Then he grinned across the table. ‘Still, one must look at this as an opportunity. I think I might go into business.’

‘What sort?’

‘Investments, perhaps. Stockbroking. There’s a lot of openings. But don’t let’s talk about that now. It’s too boring. I want to talk about you.’

So that’s what we did, on and off, for the next four months. Not just about me. Henry wooed my mother as well and persuaded her to talk to him. We both received the flowers and the boxes of chocolates. I don’t know whether my mother had loved my father, but certainly she missed him when he was no longer there. She also missed what he had done around the house and garden. Here was an opportunity for Henry.

He had the knack of giving the impression he was helping without in fact doing very much. ‘Let me,’ he’d say, but in fact you’d end up doing the job yourself or else it wouldn’t get done at all. Not that you minded, because you somehow felt that Henry had taken the burden from your shoulders. I think he genuinely felt he was helping.

Even now it makes me feel slightly queasy to remember the details of our courtship. I wanted romance and Henry gave it to me. Meanwhile he must have discovered – while helping my mother with her papers – that my father’s estate, including the house and the shop, was worth almost fifty thousand pounds. It was left in trust to my mother for her lifetime and would afterwards come to me.

All this makes me sound naive and stupid, and Henry calculating and mercenary. Both are true. But they are not the whole truth or anything like it. I don’t think you can pin down a person with a handful of adjectives.

Why bother with the details? My father’s executor distrusted Henry but he couldn’t stop us marrying. All he could do was prevent Henry from getting his hands on the capital my father left until after my mother’s death when it became mine absolutely.

We were married in a registry office on Wednesday the 4th of May, 1953. Janet and David sent us a coffee set of white bone china but were unable to come in person because Janet was heavily pregnant with Rosie.

At first we lived in Bradford, which was not a success. After my mother died we sold the house and went briefly to London and then to South Africa in pursuit of the good life. We found it for a while. Henry formed a sort of partnership with a persuasive businessman named Grady. But Grady went bankrupt and we returned to England poorer and perhaps wiser. Nevertheless, it would be easy to forget that Henry and I had good times. When he was enjoying life then so did you.

All things considered, the money lasted surprisingly well. Henry worked as a sort of stockbroker, sometimes by himself, sometimes with partners. If it hadn’t been for Grady he might still be doing it. He once told me it was like going to the races with other people’s money. He was in fact rather good at persuading people to give him their money to invest. Occasionally he even made them a decent profit.

‘Swings and roundabouts, I’m afraid,’ I heard him say dozens of times to disappointed clients. ‘What goes up, must come down.’

So why did his clients trust him? Because he made them laugh, I think, and because he so evidently believed he was going to make their fortunes.

So why did I stay with him for so long?

It was partly because I came to like many of the things he did. Still do, actually. You soon get a taste for big hotels, fast cars and parties. I liked the touch of fur against my skin and the way diamonds sparkled by candlelight. I liked dancing and flirting and taking one or two risks. I occasionally helped Henry attract potential clients, and even that could be fun. ‘Let’s have some old widow,’ he’d say when things were going well for us, and suddenly there would be another bottle of Veuve Clicquot and another toast to us, to the future.

When Henry met me I was a shy, gawky girl. He rescued me from Harewood Drive and gave me confidence in myself. I think I stayed with him partly because I was afraid that without him I would lose all I had gained.

Most of all, though, I stayed because I liked Henry. I suppose I loved him, though I’m not sure what that means. But when things were going well between us, it was the most wonderful thing in the world. Even better than dry martinis and the old widow.

Letters continued to travel between Janet and me. They were proper ones – long and chatty. I didn’t say much about Henry and she didn’t say much about David. A common theme was our plans to meet. Once or twice we managed to snatch a day in London together. But we never went to stay with each other. Somehow there were always reasons why visits had to be delayed.

We were always on the move. Henry never liked settling in one place for any length of time. When he was feeling wealthy we rented flats or stayed in hotels. When money was tight, we went into furnished rooms.

But I was going to spend a few days with Janet and David in Rosington after Easter 1957. Just me, of course – Henry had to go away on what he called a business trip, and in any case he didn’t want to go back to Rosington. Too many people knew why he’d left.

I’d even done my packing. Then the day before I was due to go, a telegram arrived. Mrs Treevor had had a massive heart attack. Once again the visit was postponed. She died three days later. Then there was the funeral, and then the business of settling Mr Treevor into a flat in Cambridge. Janet wrote that her father was finding it hard to cope since her mother’s death.

So we continued to write letters instead. Despite her mother’s death, it seemed to me that Janet had found her fairy tale. She sent me photographs of Rosie, as a baby and then as a little girl. Rosie had her mother’s colouring and her father’s features. It was obvious that she too was perfect, just like David and the Dark Hostelry.

Life’s so bloody unsubtle sometimes. It was all too easy to contrast Janet’s existence with mine. But you carry on, don’t you, even when your life is more like one long hangover than one long party. You think, what else is there to do?

But there was something else. There had to be, as I found out on a beach one sunny day early in October 1957. Henry and I were staying at a hotel in the West Country. We weren’t on holiday – a potential client lived in the neighbourhood, a wealthy widow.

It was a fine afternoon, warm as summer, and I went out after lunch while Henry went off to a meeting. I wandered aimlessly along the beach, a Box Brownie swinging from my hand, trying to walk off an incipient hangover. I rounded the corner of a little rocky headland and there they were, Henry and the widow, lying on a rug.

She was an ugly woman with a moustache and fat legs. I had a very good view of the legs because her dress was up around her thighs and Henry was bouncing around on top of her. His bottom was bare and for a moment I watched the fatty pear-shaped cheeks trembling. The widow was still wearing her shoes, which were navy-blue and high-heeled, surprisingly dainty. I wouldn’t have minded a pair of shoes like that. I remember wondering how she could have walked across the sand in such high heels, and whether she realized that sea water would ruin the leather.

I had never seen Henry from this point of view before. I knew he was vain, and hated the fact that he was growing older. (He secretly touched up his grey hairs with black dye.) The wobbling flesh was wrinkled and flabby. Henry was getting old, and so was I. It was the first moment in my life when I realized that time was running out for me personally as well as for other people and the planet.

Maybe it was the alcohol but I felt removed from the situation, capable of considering it as an abstract problem. I walked towards them, my bare feet soundless on the sand. I crouched a few yards away from the shuddering bodies. Suddenly they realized they were not alone. Simultaneously they turned their heads to look at me, the widow with her legs raised and those pretty shoes in the air.

Still in that state of alcoholic transcendence, I had the sense to raise the Box Brownie and press the shutter.

6

I don’t keep many photographs. I am afraid of nostalgia. You can drown in dead emotions.

Among the photographs I have thrown away is the shot of Henry bouncing on his widow on the beach. I knew at once that it could be valuable, that it meant I could divorce Henry without any trouble. At the time, the remarkable thing was how little the end of the marriage seemed to matter. Perhaps, I thought as I took the film out of the camera, perhaps it was never really a marriage at all, just a mutually convenient arrangement which had now reached a mutually convenient end.

I still have a snap of us by the pool in somebody’s back garden in Durban with Henry sucking in his tummy and me showing what at the time seemed a daring amount of naked flesh. There’s just the two of us in the photograph, but it’s obvious from the body language that Henry and I aren’t a couple in any meaningful sense of the word. Obvious with twenty-twenty hindsight, anyway.

In my letters to Janet I had been honest about everything except Henry. I didn’t conceal the fact that money was sometimes tight, or even that I was drinking too much. But I referred to Henry with wifely affection. ‘Must close now – His Nibs has just come in, and he wants his tea. He sends his love, as do I.’

It was pride. Janet had her Mr Perfect and I wanted mine, or at least the illusion of him. But I think I’d known the marriage was in trouble before the episode with the widow. What I saw on the beach merely confirmed it.