The Office of the Dead

‘I want a divorce,’ I said to Henry when he came back to our room in the hotel. By the smell of him he’d fortified himself in the bar downstairs.

‘Wendy – please. Can’t we –?’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘Darling. Listen to me. I –’

‘I mean it.’

‘All right,’ he said, his opposition crumbling with humiliating speed. ‘As soon as you like.’

I felt sober now and I had a headache. I had found the bottle of black hair dye hidden as usual in one of the pockets of his suitcase. It was empty now. I’d poured the contents over his suits and shirts.

‘No hard feelings,’ I lied. ‘I’ll let you have some money.’

He looked across the room at me and smiled rather sadly. ‘What money?’

‘You know something?’ I said. ‘When I saw you on top of that cow, your bum was wobbling around all over the place. It was like an old man’s. The skin looked as if it needed ironing.’

In the four months after I found Henry doing physical jerks on top of his widow, I wrote to Janet less often than usual. I sent her a lot of postcards. Henry and I were moving around, I said, which was true. Except, of course, we weren’t moving around together. In a sense I spent those four months pretending to myself and everyone else that everything was normal. I didn’t want to leave my rut even if Henry was no longer in there with me.

Eventually the money ran low and I made up my mind I had to do something. I came back to London. It was February now, and the city was grey and dank. I found a solicitor in the phone book. His name was Fielder, and the thing I remember most about him was the ill-fitting toupee whose colour did not quite match his natural hair. He had an office in Praed Street above a hardware shop near the junction with Edgware Road.

I went to see him, explained the situation and gave him the address of Henry’s solicitor. I told him about the photograph but didn’t show it to him, and I mentioned my mother’s money too. He said he’d see what he could do and made an appointment for me the following week.

Time crawled while I waited. I had too much to think about and not enough to do. When the day came round, I went back to Fielder’s office.

‘Well, Mrs Appleyard, things are moving now.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards me. ‘The wheels are turning. Time for a fresh start, eh?’

I opened the sheet of paper. It was a bill.

‘Just for interim expenses, Mrs Appleyard. No point in letting them mount up.’

‘What does my husband’s solicitor say?’

‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem there.’ Mr Fielder patted his face with a grubby handkerchief. He wore a brown double-breasted pinstripe suit which encased him like a suit of armour and looked thick enough for an Arctic winter. There were drops of moisture on his forehead, and his neck bulged over his tight, hard collar. ‘Yes, a bit of a problem.’

‘Do you mean there isn’t any money?’

‘I did have a reply from Mr Appleyard’s solicitor.’ Fielder scrabbled among the papers on his desk for a few seconds and then gave up the search. ‘The long and the short of it is that Mr Appleyard told him your joint assets no longer seem to exist.’

‘But there must be something left. Can’t we take him to court?’

‘We could, Mrs Appleyard, we could. But we’d have to find him first. Unfortunately Mr Appleyard seems to have left the country. In confidence I may tell you he hasn’t even settled his own solicitor’s bill.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Not a desirable state of affairs at all. Not at all. Which reminds me …?’

‘Don’t worry.’ I opened my handbag and dropped the bill into it.

‘Of course. And then we’ll carry on in Mr Appleyard’s absence. It should be quite straightforward.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘By the way, your husband left a letter for you care of his solicitor. I have it here.’

‘I don’t want to see it.’

‘Then what would you like me to do with it?’

‘I don’t care. Put it in the wastepaper basket.’ My voice sounded harsh, more Bradford than Hillgard House. ‘I don’t mean to seem rude, Mr Fielder, but I don’t think he has anything to say that I want to hear.’

Walking back to my room along the crowded pavement I wanted to blame Fielder. He had been inefficient, he had been corrupt, but even then I knew neither of these things were true. I just wanted to blame somebody for the mess my life was in. Henry was my preferred candidate but he wasn’t available. So I had to focus my anger on poor Fielder. Before I reached my room, I’d invented at least three cutting curtain lines I might have used, and also constructed a satisfying fantasy which ended with him in the dock at the Old Bailey with myself as the chief prosecution witness. Fantasies reveal the infant that lives within us all. Which is why they’re dangerous because the usual social constraints don’t operate on infants.

When I went into the house, Mrs Hyson, the landlady, opened the kitchen door a crack and peered at me, but said nothing. I ate dry bread and elderly cheese in my room for lunch to save money. I kept on my overcoat to postpone putting a shilling in the gas meter. Since leaving Henry I had lived on the contents of my current account at the bank and my Post Office Savings Account, a total of about two hundred pounds, and by selling a fur coat and one or two pieces of jewellery.

I wasn’t even sure I could afford to divorce Henry. First I needed to find a job but I was not trained to do anything. I was twenty-six years old and completely unemployable. There were relations in Leeds – a couple of aunts I hadn’t seen for years and cousins I’d never met. Even if I could track them down there was no reason why they should help me. That’s when I opened my writing case and began the letter to Janet.

Looking back, I think I must have been very near a nervous breakdown when I wrote that letter. It’s more than forty years ago now, but I can still remember how the panic welled up. The certainties were gone. In the past I’d always known what to do next. I often didn’t want to do it but that was not the point. What had counted was the fact the future was mapped out. I’d also taken for granted there would be a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food on the table. But now I had nothing.

I looked for the letter after Janet’s death and was glad I could not find it. I hope she destroyed it. I cannot remember exactly what I told her, though I would have kept nothing back except perhaps my envy of her. What I do remember is how I felt while I was writing that letter in the chilly little room in Paddington. I felt I was trying to swim in a black sea. The waves were so rough and my waterlogged clothes weighed me down. I was drowning.

Early in the evening I went out to post the letter. On the way back I passed a pub. A few yards down the pavement I stopped, turned back and went into the saloon bar. It was a high-ceilinged room with mirrors on the walls and chairs upholstered in faded purple velvet. Apart from two old ladies drinking port, it was almost empty, which gave me courage. I marched up to the counter and ordered a large gin and bitter lemon, not caring what they thought of me.

‘Waiting for someone then?’ the barmaid asked.

‘No.’ I watched the gin sliding into the glass and moistened my lips. ‘You’re not very busy tonight.’

I doubt if the place was ever busy. It smelled of failure. That suited me. I sat in the corner and drank first one drink, then another and then a third. A man tried to pick me up and I almost said yes, just for the hell of it.

There were women around here who made a living from men. You saw them hanging round the station and on street corners, huddled in doorways or bending down to a car window to talk to the man inside. Could I do that? Would you ever get used to having strange men pawing at you? How much would you charge them? And what happened when you grew old and they stopped wanting you?

To escape the questions I couldn’t answer, I had another drink, and then another. In the end I lost count. I knew I was drinking tomorrow’s lunch and tomorrow’s supper, and then the day after’s meals as well, and in a way that added to the despairing pleasure the process gave me. The barmaid and her mother persuaded me to leave when I ran out of money and started crying.

I dragged myself back to the bed and breakfast. On my way in I met Mrs Hyson. She knew what I’d been doing, I could see it in her face. She could hardly have avoided knowing. I must have smelt like a distillery and it was a miracle I got up those stairs without falling over. It was too much trouble to take off my clothes. The room was swaying so I lay down on top of the eiderdown. Slowly the walls began to revolve round the bed. The whole world had tugged itself free from its moorings. The last thing I remember thinking was that Mrs Hyson would probably want me out of her house by tomorrow.

7

I began the slow hard climb towards consciousness around dawn. For hours I lay there and tried to cling to sleep. My mouth was dry and my head felt as though there were a couple of skewers running through it. I was aware of movement in the house around me. The doorbell rang and the skewers twisted inside my skull. A few moments later there was a knock on the door.

Trying not to groan, I stood up slowly and padded across the floor in my stockinged feet. I opened the door a crack. Her nose wrinkling, Mrs Hyson stared up at me. I had slept in my clothes. I hadn’t removed my make-up either.

‘There’s a gentleman to see you, Mrs Appleyard.’

‘A gentleman?’

Mrs Hyson frowned and walked away. My stomach lurched at the thought it might be Henry. But I had nothing left for him to take. Maybe it was that solicitor, anxious about his cheque.

A few minutes later I went downstairs as if down to my execution and into Mrs Hyson’s front room. I found David Byfield examining a menacing photograph of the dear departed Mr Hyson. He turned towards me, holding out his hand and offering me a small, cool smile. He didn’t seem to have changed since his wedding day. Unlike me.

‘I hope you don’t mind my calling. I was up in town anyway, and Janet phoned me this morning with the news.’

‘She’s had my letter, then?’

He nodded. ‘We’re so sorry.’

How I hated that we. ‘No need. It had been coming to an end for a long time.’ I glared at him and winced at the stabs of pain behind my eyes. ‘You should be glad, not sad.’

‘It’s always sad when a marriage breaks down.’

‘Yes, well.’ I realized I must sound ungracious, and added brightly, ‘And how are you? How are Janet and Rosie?’

‘Very well, thank you. Janet’s hoping-we’re hoping that you’ll come and stay with us.’

‘I can manage quite well by myself, thank you.’

‘I’m sure you can.’

The Olivier nostrils flared a little further than usual. ‘It would give us all a great deal of pleasure.’

‘All right.’

‘Good.’

He smiled at me now, showing me his approval. That’s what really irritated me, the way I felt myself warming in the glow of his attention. Sex appeal can be such a depressingly impersonal thing.

David swiftly arranged the next stage of my life, barely bothering to consult me. His charity was as impersonal as his sex appeal. He was helping me because he felt he ought to or because Janet had asked him to. He was earning good marks in heaven or with Janet, possibly both.

A few hours later I was in a second-class smoking compartment and the train was pulling out of the echoing cavern of Liverpool Street Station. I still had the hangover but time, tea and aspirins had dulled the skewers of pain and made them irritating but bearable, like a certain sort of old friend. My suitcase was above my head and the two trunks would be following by road. I had bathed and changed. I’d even managed to eat and keep down a meal that wasn’t quite breakfast and wasn’t quite lunch. David wasn’t with me – his conference ended at lunchtime tomorrow.

The train lumbered north between soot-streaked houses beneath a smoky sky.

‘Let’s face it,’ I told myself as the train began to gather speed and I fumbled for my cigarettes, ‘he doesn’t give a damn about me. And why the hell should he?’

It occurred to me that I wasn’t quite sure which he I meant.

After Cambridge the countryside became flat. The train puffed on a straight line with black fields on either side. It was already getting dark. The horizon was a border zone, neither earth nor sky. I was alone in my compartment. I felt safe and warm and a little sleepy. If the journey went on for ever, that would have been quite all right by me.

The train began to slow. I looked out of the window and saw in the distance the spire of Rosington Cathedral. The closer we got to it, the more it looked like a stone animal preparing to spring. I went to the lavatory, washed a smut off my cheek and powdered my nose. David had telephoned Janet and asked her to meet me.

By the time I got back to the compartment, the platform was sliding along the window. I pulled down my suitcase and left the train. The first thing I noticed was the wind that cut at my throat like a razor blade. The wind in Rosington isn’t like other winds, Janet had written in one of her letters, it comes all the way from Siberia and over the North Sea, it’s not like an English wind at all.

Janet wasn’t on the platform. She wasn’t at the barrier. She wasn’t outside, either.

I dragged my suitcase through the ticket hall and into the forecourt beyond. The station was at the bottom of the hill. At the top was the stone mountain. The wind brought tears to my eyes. A tall clergyman was climbing into a tall, old-fashioned car. He glanced at me with flat, incurious eyes.

Before I went to Rosington I didn’t know any priests. They were there to be laughed at on stage and screen, avoided like the plague at parties, and endured at weddings and funerals of the more traditional sort. After Rosington, all that changed. Priests became people. I could believe in them.

I wasn’t any nearer believing in God, mind you. A girl has her pride. Sometimes, though, I wish I could think that it was all for the best in the long run. That God had a plan we could follow or not follow, as we chose. That when bad things happened they were due to evil, and that even evil had a place in God’s inscrutable but essentially benevolent plan.

It’s nonsense. Why should we matter to anyone, least of all to an omnipotent god whose existence is entirely hypothetical? I still think that Henry got it right. It was one evening in Durban, and we were having a philosophical discussion over our second or third nightcaps.

‘Let’s face it, old girl,’ he said, ‘it’s as if we’re adrift on the ocean in a boat without oars. Not much we can do except drink the rum ration.’

At Rosington station, I watched the clergyman’s car driving up the hill into the darkening February afternoon. I waited a few more minutes for Janet. I went back into the station and phoned the house. Nobody answered.

So there was nothing for it but one of the station taxis. I told the driver to take me to the Dark Hostelry in the Close. In one of her letters, Janet said someone told her that in the Middle Ages, when Rosington was a monastery, the Dark Hostelry was where visiting Benedictine monks would stay. The ‘Dark’ came from the black habits of the order.

The taxi took me up the hill and through the great gateway, the Porta, and into the Close. I saw small boys in caps and shorts and grey mackintoshes. Perhaps they were at the Choir School. None of the boys would remember Henry. Six years is a long time in the life of a school.

We followed the road round the east end of the Cathedral and stopped outside a small gate in a high wall. I didn’t ask the driver to carry in my suitcase – it would have meant a larger tip. I pushed open the gate in the wall, and that’s when I saw Rosie playing hopscotch.

‘And what’s your name?’ I asked.

‘I’m nobody.’

Rosie wasn’t wearing a coat. There she was in February playing outside and wearing sandals and a dress, not even a cardigan. The light was beginning to go. Some children don’t feel the cold.

‘Nobody?’ I said. ‘I’m sure that’s not right. I bet you’re really somebody. Somebody in disguise.’

‘I’m nobody. That’s my name.’

‘Nobody’s called nobody.’

‘I am.’

‘Why?’

‘Because nobody’s perfect.’

And so she was. Perfect. I thought, Henry, you bastard, we could have had this.

I called after Rosie as she skipped down the path towards the house. ‘Rosie! I’m Auntie Wendy.’

I felt a fool saying that. Auntie Wendy sounded like a character in a children’s story, the sort my mother would have liked.

‘Can you tell Mummy I’m here?’

Rosie opened the door and skipped into the house. I picked up my case and followed. I was relieved because Janet must have come back. She wouldn’t have left a child that age alone.

The house was part of a terrace. I had a confused impression of buttresses, the irregular line of high-pitched roofs against a grey velvet skyline, and small deeply recessed windows. At the door I put down my case and looked for the bell. There were panes of glass set in the upper panels and I could see the hall stretching into the depths of the building. Rosie had vanished. Irregularities in the glass gave the interior a green tinge and made it ripple like Rosie’s hair.

A brass bell pull was recessed into the jamb of the door. I tugged it and hoped that a bell was jangling at the far end of the invisible wire. There was no way of knowing. You just had to have faith, not a state of mind that came easily to me at any time. I tried again, wondering if I should have used another door. The skin prickled on the back of my neck at the possibility of embarrassment. I waited a little longer. Someone must be there with the child. I opened the door and a smell of damp rose to meet me. The level of the floor was a foot below the garden.

‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’

My voice had an unfamiliar echo to it, as though I had spoken in a church. I stepped down into the hall. It felt colder inside than out. A clock ticked. I heard light footsteps running above my head. There was a click as a door opened, then another silence, somehow different in quality from the one before.

Then the screaming began.

There’s something about a child’s screams that makes the heart turn over. I dropped the suitcase. Some part of my mind registered the fact that the lock had burst open in the impact of the fall, that my hastily packed belongings, the debris of my life with Henry, were spilling over the floor of the hall. I ran up a flight of shallow stairs and found myself on a long landing.

The door at the end was open. I saw Rosie’s back, framed in the doorway. She wasn’t screaming any more. She was standing completely still. Her arms hung stiffly by her sides as though they were no longer jointed at the elbows.

‘Rosie! Rosie!’

I walked quickly down the landing and seized her by the shoulders. I spun her round and hugged her face into my belly. Her body was hard and unyielding. She felt like a doll, not a child. There was another scream. This one was mine.

The room was furnished as a bedroom. It smelled of Brylcreem and peppermints. There were two mullioned windows. One of them must have been open a crack because I heard the sound of traffic passing and people talking in the street below. At times like that, the mind soaks up memories like a sponge. Often you don’t know what’s there until afterwards, when you give the sponge a squeeze and you see what trickles out.

At the time I was aware only of the man on the floor. He lay on his back between the bed and the doorway. He wore charcoal-grey flannel trousers, brown brogues and an olive-green, knitted waistcoat over a white shirt with a soft collar. A tweed jacket and a striped tie were draped over a chair beside the bed. His left hand was resting on his belly. His right hand was lying palm upwards on the floor, the fingers loosely curled round the dark bone handle of a carving knife. There was blood on the blade, blood on his neck and blood on his shirt and waistcoat. His horn-rimmed glasses had fallen off. Blue eyes stared up at the ceiling. His hair was greyer and scantier than when I’d seen it last, and his face was thinner, but I recognized him right away. It was Janet’s father.

‘Come away, Rosie,’ I muttered, ‘come away. Grandpa’s sleeping. We’ll go downstairs and wait for Mummy.’

As if my words were a signal, Mr Treevor blinked. His eyes focused on the two of us in the doorway.

‘Fooled you,’ he said, and then he began to laugh.

PART II

8

‘I’m so sorry.’ Janet was brushing Rosie’s hair. The bristles caught in a tangle, and Janet began carefully to tease it out. ‘He just arrived.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Oh, but it does.’ Her eyes met mine, then returned to the shining hair. ‘The doorbell rang at half past three and there he was. He’d come all the way from Cambridge in a taxi.’

Rosie was sitting on a stool on the hearthrug, her back straight, not leaning against her mother’s knees. In her place I would have been fidgeting, or playing with a toy, or looking at a book. But Rosie seemed hypnotized by the gentle scratching of the brush.

‘It didn’t occur to him to telephone. He just came as he was. No luggage, no overcoat. He even forgot his wallet. I had to use the housekeeping.’ Janet smiled but I knew her too well to be fooled. ‘He was still in his slippers.’

We were in a narrow, panelled sitting room. The three of us were huddled round the hearthrug in front of the fire. Rosie was in her nightclothes. Janet had given me a gin and orange, with rather too much orange for my taste, and I was nursing it between my hands, trying to make it last.

‘He’d forgotten his medicine too. Actually they’re laxatives. He gets terribly concerned about them. That’s why I had to pop out to the chemist’s before it closed. And then the dean’s wife swooped and I couldn’t get away.’ The brush faltered. Janet rested her hands on Rosie’s shoulders. ‘Poor Grandpa will forget his own name next, won’t he, poppet? Now, say good night to Auntie Wendy and we’ll put you into bed.’

When they went upstairs, I wandered over to the drinks tray and freshened my glass with a little gin. All three of us had tiptoed round what Mr Treevor had done upstairs. I wondered what Janet was saying to Rosie about it now. If anything. How do you explain to a child that Grandpa found a bottle of tomato ketchup in the kitchen, took it upstairs to his room and splashed it over him to make it look as if he’d stabbed himself to death? What on earth had he been thinking about? He had ruined his clothes and the bedroom rug. God knew what effect he had had on Rosie. The only consolation was that all the excitement had tired him out. He was resting on his bed before supper.

Glass in hand, I wandered round the room, picking up ornaments and looking at the books and pictures. I had grown sensitive to poverty in others as you do when your own money runs low. I thought I saw hints of it here, a cushion placed to cover a stain on a chair’s upholstery, a fire too small for the grate, curtains that needed relining. David couldn’t earn much.

There was a wedding photograph in a silver frame on the pier table between the windows, just the two of them in front of Jerusalem Chapel, David’s clerical bands snapping in the breeze. I didn’t have any photographs of my wedding, a hole-in-the-corner affair compared with theirs. My mother had thought we should have a white wedding with all the trimmings but Henry persuaded her to let us have the money instead for the honeymoon.

Janet came downstairs.

‘Supper will have to be very simple, I’m afraid. Would cheese on toast be all right? There’s some apple crumble in the larder.’

‘That’s fine.’ I noticed her shiver. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I wanted it to be nice for you on your first evening especially. We haven’t seen each other in such ages.’