The Office of the Dead (16 page)

I caught the stick before it fell. A drop of coffee had fallen on the toecap of one of Martlesham’s shoes. It looked like a grey star on a curved black mirror.

‘He was the Cathedral librarian at one time,’ I said. ‘Some of the books I found used to belong to him. He seemed quite an interesting person.’

Martlesham stared out of the window. ‘Compared to the rest of them, he certainly was that.’ He turned back to me. ‘Do you live in the Close, Mrs Appleyard?’

‘I’m staying at the Dark Hostelry.’

‘I remember. When I was a lad I think the precentor had it. Though Canon Youlgreave lived there for a few months, I remember. So is your husband a clergyman?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, really?’

I hurried on. ‘I expect the Close has changed a good deal since you were there.’

‘I doubt it. But I wouldn’t know what it’s like now. I haven’t been there for years.’ He glanced at me and went on, speaking more quickly than before, ‘Never liked the atmosphere, to be honest. When I was growing up there wasn’t much love lost between town and Close. Either you were one or t’other. Which made it awkward for the people like me. For the servants.’

‘That’s one thing that’s changed.’ I thought of Janet imprisoned in her own kitchen. ‘I don’t think there are many servants in the Close nowadays.’

‘I was lucky,’ he said.

‘Because you worked at the Palace?’

He shook his head. ‘Worst place of all. The bishop’s butler could have given Stalin a few lessons. No, I meant I was lucky because I didn’t have to work there very long. Not much more than a year. I’ve got Canon Youlgreave to thank for that. But I doubt if anyone remembers him now.’ His voice roughened. ‘Not as he really was. After all, it must be more than fifty years.’

‘Some people do.’

‘Not
him
. Not the man. If they remember anything, they’ll remember what happened. But there was more to him than that. Those folk are meant to be Christians and yet they’re as fond of scandal as anyone else.’

‘More to him than what? You mean the poetry?’

‘Yes, there’s that. But I don’t go in for that sort of thing myself. No, what I meant is that he did a lot of good in a quiet way. I know people thought he was strange. All right, he was a bit odd. But the long and the short of it is, if it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be here.’

‘What happened?’

‘I suppose you could say he took a fancy to me. First time we met was when he had a fall in the Close – he’d slipped on some ice and I helped him home. Later on he lent me some books. You know, encouraged me to think there was more to life than cleaning other people’s boots.’ He brought out a silver case and fumbled one-handedly for a cigarette. ‘A lot of people were poor in those days. Really poor. Hard to imagine it now, isn’t it? No one goes hungry any more. No one dies because they can’t afford the doctor.’

‘It’s progress,’ I said.

He nodded but his attention was elsewhere, on whatever he saw in his memory. ‘Most people in the Close didn’t give a damn about what was happening on their own doorstep. They’d only put their hands in their pockets if it was somewhere else. India, say, or even the East End. But they didn’t want to see it themselves a few hundred yards from the Close.’

‘In Swan Alley?’

‘Maybe they thought poverty might be infectious, like the plague. Or maybe they’d have to realize it was their fault.’ For a few words his accent changed – the vowels broadened and the Fen twang of his childhood emerged. ‘But Mr Youlgreave wasn’t like that.’

He put the cigarette in his mouth at last. I flicked the lighter under his nose.

After a moment I said, ‘Did you hear that last sermon of his? The one that caused such a lot of fuss?’

‘What sermon?’

‘Apparently he said there was no reason why women couldn’t be priests as well as men.’

Martlesham shook his head. ‘I was in Canada by then. I’d lost touch with him. I heard him preach a sermon about Swan Alley, though. Said it was a blot on God’s earth. They didn’t like that, either. He was a good man.’

A good man
? So unlike the other epitaphs for Francis Youlgreave.

‘What did you mean about scandal? You said that’s what people would remember.’

‘Scandal? That’s the whole point. What scandal? If you ask me, it was all smoke, no fire. He didn’t fit in, you see. And they made him suffer for it.’

Why didn’t he fit in? Wasn’t his father a baronet and his mother the cousin of the dean? Fifty years later I didn’t fit in either. But at least I knew why. My lipstick was too bright and I’d mislaid my husband. And something else was niggling at me, something to do with now, with the Blue Dahlia Café.

‘Mr Youlgreave paid for me to emigrate,’ Martlesham went on. ‘He had a friend on the committee of this organization, the Church Empire Society. If they liked you, if you had good references, they’d put up half the money if someone else would put up the rest.’ He laid his right hand on the book, the cigarette still smouldering between his fingers. ‘That’s why I’m glad to get this. A bit late, but in a way that makes it all the better.’

‘So you never had it at the time?’

He shook his head. ‘Do you know where I was on my thirteenth birthday? In the middle of the Atlantic on the
Hesperides
. He probably bought it and forgot to give it to me before we sailed. But how did it get in the library?’

‘There were several of his books there. He was ill when he left Rosington, so perhaps they just got left behind. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. No one’s sorted out that library for years and I’ve found all sorts of odd things.’

Like
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, for example, unexpurgated but disappointingly dull. Meanwhile my sense of unease was growing. I glanced round the room. What was so familiar about the Blue Dahlia Café? There were fewer customers now. Perhaps this was the lull before lunch. The waitress met my eyes for an instant and then looked away. The man with the bald patch like Africa turned another page of his
Daily Express
. I glanced at my watch. I was going to be late for Henry if I wasn’t careful. Not that it mattered. He could wait or stay as he pleased.

‘He wanted me to have a chance to make something of myself,’ Martlesham was saying. ‘In the colonies everyone was as good as everyone else. No one cared who your parents were. The Church Empire Society made sure you learned a trade.’ He looked at his hands. ‘I was a carpenter. Did quite well, too. I had my own little business in Toronto. Then came the war, the Great War, I mean, and that was the end of that.’

‘You joined up?’

‘Hard not to. So there I was, back in England. But at least I had a trade. Probably saved my life, that did. Most of the chaps I joined up with died in the trenches. Me, I spent most of the time on Salisbury Plain teaching heroes like them how to saw props for dug-outs.’

‘It must have been nice to see your family again.’

‘What family?’

‘I thought – Mrs Elstree mentioned your mother, and a sister.’

He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Mother died before I went to Canada. As for Nancy, she was in Toronto. Mr Youlgreave saw to that as well.’

‘She went with you?’

‘Yes. The society had an orphanage. She was adopted almost as soon as we got there. Best thing that could have happened to her.’

‘It must have been a wrench for you, though. Your last link with home.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a long time ago. I can’t remember. I didn’t go back to Rosington. No point. Nothing to go back to. But I stayed here.’

‘Why?’

‘Met a girl at a dance in Winchester.’ He was looking not at me but through me. ‘It was Armistice Day. Vera.’ He swallowed, and his eyes focused on me again. ‘Died last year.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Anyway. So I let the house in Watford and moved back to town. I’ve got the flat over the café. That’s the story of my life, for what it’s worth.’ He smiled, revealing a sudden glimpse of the charm he must have had as a younger man. ‘I don’t know why a pretty young woman like you should bother to listen, but thanks. And I’m glad to have the book.’

‘It was no trouble.’ I looked at my watch again, this time more obviously. ‘I really should be going. I’ve an appointment.’

‘Hope I haven’t made you late.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘Don’t worry about paying for your coffee, Mrs Appleyard. Least I can do.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind. Don’t get up, there’s no need.’

We shook hands, and I almost ran out of the café. It was half past twelve and I was going to be very late. Not that it mattered. Anyway, it wasn’t that. It was because I’d suddenly realized why the Blue Dahlia Café was making me uneasy.

Turkish tobacco, or something very similar to it. Someone in the café had been smoking it. Perhaps even Martlesham himself. After all, there had been a touch of the dandy about him, from the tiepin to the glistening shoes, from the spotless collar to the silver cigarette case. It was perfectly possible that Francis Youlgreave himself had smoked cigarettes like that at the turn of the century, oval Sullivan Powells, perhaps, or Kyprinos from Cyprus.

The sort of cigarette that made the café smell like
The Tongues of Angels
in my handbag.

A gypsy was selling lavender at Piccadilly Circus.

‘Have a sprig, sir,’ she said to the man in front of me. ‘Bring you luck.’

He side-stepped, trying to get round her, but she wouldn’t let him. ‘Just a little bit,’ she whined, ‘and bless you, so much luck.’

He brushed her arm from his sleeve and hurried towards the steps to the tube.

‘God rot you in hell,’ she shouted after him. Then she saw me and the anger left her face and the whine returned to her voice. ‘A little bit of lavender, missy? Bring you luck. Young ladies need luck as well as a pretty face.’

I didn’t want her to curse me. I felt I had enough bad luck to cope with already. Meeting Martlesham had settled nothing. It had just made matters worse. And now I had to deal with Henry.

I found my purse and gave the gypsy sixpence. A hand like a monkey’s paw snatched the money and dropped the lavender in the palm of my hand. The hand was damp and left a smear of dirt on my pale leather glove.

I hurried up Regent Street. It was nearly ten to one. Still clutching the lavender, I hurried through the revolving door of the Café Royal.

If Henry had waited for me, I expected to find him in the bar. But he was standing just in front of me in the lobby and looking almost as dapper as Simon Martlesham in a dark-blue suit with a faint pinstripe. He had a white carnation in the buttonhole and a silk handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. For an instant I saw him with Rosington eyes. Mrs Forbury and her Touchies would have thought him a bit of a cad.

‘Wendy.’ He lunged towards me. ‘You’re looking beautiful.’

I couldn’t stop him embracing me but I turned my head and all he succeeded in kissing was my ear. He smelt familiar, but as smells from the past do. The sort of smells that belonged to you at another time, when you were another person.

‘We must celebrate,’ he was saying. ‘Let’s have a drink. Why are you carrying that bit of lavender?’

I looked at the sprig. I had been holding it so tightly that the stain had spread further. The glove was probably ruined.

‘I bought it from a gypsy just now.’

‘Not like you to be superstitious.’ Henry was always quick. ‘Is that the effect of Rosington?’

I shook my head and said what about that drink.

We went into the bar. I wrapped the lavender in a handkerchief and dropped it in my handbag. When the waiter came Henry ordered dry martinis.

‘Just like when we first met,’ he murmured.

‘Don’t be sentimental. It doesn’t suit you.’

But I was glad he’d chosen dry martinis. I needed a slug of alcohol.

‘We can have lunch here if you like,’ he was saying. ‘Or if you’d rather we could go somewhere else. I wondered about the Savoy, perhaps.’

‘Where does all this money come from?’ I asked. ‘Your Hairy Widow?’

‘I told you on the phone. I haven’t seen her since – since the day I last saw you.’

Luckily the drinks arrived at this moment.

‘Cheers,’ Henry said, and we drank.

For the next few minutes, neither of us found much to say. We smoked cigarettes, finished our drinks and ordered another round. Henry asked how the Byfields were, and I said they were very well, and that Janet and David sent their love.

‘How’s Rosie?’

‘Very well.’

‘Isn’t her birthday around now?’

‘Last Wednesday.’

‘She must be – ah –?’

‘Five.’

‘Perhaps I should send her a present.’

Once again the conversation languished.

‘We should talk about the divorce,’ I said at last.

‘I meant what I said on the phone. I love you.’ He sat up, squaring his shoulders. ‘I was a bloody fool. Can’t we start again?’

‘There’s no point. There’d be someone else. Some other poor fat widow with a big bank balance.’

‘There won’t. Because –’

‘And where did you go to, anyway? Your solicitor told mine that you’d just vanished.’

‘It was a business trip, and I was a little short of cash.’ Henry stared at his hands. ‘I left a letter with him for you. Did you get it?’

‘I told my solicitor to put it in the wastepaper basket.’

It had been about the only useful thing poor Fielder had ever done for me. His unpaid bill was still in my bedroom at the Dark Hostelry. The amount seemed rather large for what he’d achieved.

I said, ‘I’m saving up to divorce you.’

‘Is there someone else?’

I stared at Henry. He had a little dimple in his chin which made him look like an overgrown baby. I had always found it rather attractive. I wondered what he’d say if I said,
Yes, there is someone else. David
.

‘It’s none of your business any more.’

‘I owe you some money.’

‘You owe a lot of people some money.’

‘Do you remember Grady-Goldman Associates?’

‘I’ll hardly forget.’

He nodded. ‘When Grady went bust I ended up with about thirty per cent of the stock in Grady-Goldman.’

Aloysius Grady lived like a rich man and talked like one too. He had wanted Henry to set up a European property portfolio for him and then to manage it on his behalf. Henry had put in a lot of work. He had even lent Grady a lot of money for him to give to his daughter, who was studying in the UK, and taken company stock as collateral on the loan. When the crash came, our money vanished and the stock plummeted.

‘Just after you – you left,’ Henry went on, ‘I had a cable from Louis Goldman. A subsidiary of Unilever wanted to buy the company and the shares had gone through the roof. He was the other major shareholder, and he thought we could get them higher if we worked together.’

‘Come on, Henry.’

‘What?’

‘This sounds like another one of your fairy tales.’

‘It’s not, I promise. That’s why I had to leave the country. Louis bought me a ticket. It was all in that letter.’

I tried to remember the Grady-Goldman place. A big compound with a wire fence and lots of huts roofed in corrugated iron. A black watchman making tea. Grady’s Rover driving into the compound in a cloud of dust. Cigar smoke catching the back of my throat in a small, hot office. And Grady himself, a big, balding man with wispy red hair who tried to pinch my bottom.

‘What did they do? Why did Unilever want to buy them?’

‘Machine tools,’ Henry said. ‘That’s why Grady-Goldman seemed a good bet to me in the first place. There’re not many people who make them south of the Sahara. Louis had got the company up and running again. They weren’t into profit because of the debts Grady had left. But they had the trained workers, they had the plant, and they had the customers.’

‘If you’re trying to tell me your financial acumen has made you rich, I just won’t believe you.’

‘It wasn’t my financial acumen. It was Louis’s. But it was my luck.’ He hesitated. ‘To be precise, just over forty-seven thousand pounds’ worth of luck.’

‘Good God.’ I thought about the sprig of lavender in my bag. It seemed to have worked retrospectively, and for the wrong person. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘I’m going to give you some.’

I said nothing.

‘I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things lately,’ Henry went on, sounding pleased with himself.

‘Good for you. It’s a big responsibility, isn’t it, having all this money to waste?’

‘That’s just it. Change of plan. I’ve come to the conclusion that gambling as a career doesn’t suit me. I’m thinking of becoming a schoolmaster again.’

I laughed.

‘It’s not such a silly idea. I was a schoolmaster when you first met me. I rather enjoyed it.’

‘Henry,’ I said. ‘Have you forgotten what happened at the Choir School? They more or less chucked you out. No one’s going to give you a job without a reference.’

He looked smug. ‘I’ve thought of that. Though to be honest, I didn’t have to do much thinking. Someone else did my thinking for me.’

‘Like Louis Goldman? I wish you’d stop being mysterious.’

‘You remember I taught at another school before Rosington? Veedon Hall. The Cuthbertsons want to sell up. A friend of mine who’s still on the staff wrote to me out of the blue and asked if I knew anyone who might be interested in going into partnership with him. It’s a going concern, waiting list as long as your arm, and old Cuthbertson always had a soft spot for me. The price is a snip, too. All it would take is thirty thousand.’

‘Then there’s nothing to stop you going ahead.’

‘I don’t want to do it by myself. I want us to do it.’

I shook my head.

‘It wouldn’t be like burying yourself in the sticks.’ He stretched out a hand towards me which I pretended not to see. ‘It’s not far from Basingstoke. You could be up in town in no time.’

‘It’s too late.’

‘I shouldn’t have blurted it out like this. I’m sorry. Look, why don’t you think about it for a few days? A few weeks, if you like. Talk to Janet. Let’s go and have some lunch.’

After that, my mood changed. I don’t know whether it was the alcohol or what Henry had said, but I felt much happier. Perhaps the lavender was doing its job. We took a taxi to the Savoy and had lunch in the Grill Room. Henry wanted champagne.

‘Not Veuve Clicquot,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of widows.’

So he ordered a bottle of Roederer instead. ‘Talking of widows,’ he said. ‘That reminds me.’

He launched into a long, involved story about Grady’s widow and her attempts to entrap a Unilever executive for herself or, failing that, for her daughter. He ended up making me laugh. Later I told him about the Dark Hostelry and my job. We compared notes about the inhabitants of the Close.

‘There’s no need for you to stay in that job if you don’t want to,’ Henry said over coffee.

‘I need to earn my living now,’ I said as lightly as I could.

He took an envelope from his jacket pocket and laid it on the table between us. ‘That’s up to you.’

‘What is it?’

‘A cheque for ten thousand.’

‘You’re paying me off? Is that what it is?’

‘Don’t be silly, Wendy. It’s yours. I want you to have it.’

‘A divorce settlement?’ My voice was rising. ‘Is that it?’

His lips tightened. ‘At least you won’t have to work in a dead-end job if you don’t want to, and you won’t have to live in Rosington.’

‘I’m going to finish the job.’

‘You don’t
have
to. You can just walk away from it.’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to Hudson.’

‘Wendy, you don’t owe him anything. You’ve done some work for him, he’s paid you for it, but there’s no reason why you should work any longer than you want to.’

‘I know, but I’d like to finish it.’

I watched Henry putting two cigarettes in his mouth, lighting them both and giving one to me. It seemed such a natural thing to do. He hadn’t asked, either, just taken it for granted that as he was having a cigarette I would have one as well.

I said, ‘Actually, there’s another reason.’

‘I thought there might be. There is someone else, isn’t there?’

‘It’s none of your business. Not now.’ Then I laughed at his face, which was pink with champagne and anger. ‘OK, there is someone. His name’s Francis Youlgreave.’

He ran a hand through his hair, leaving a tuft of it standing up, the way he always did when he was puzzled. ‘Youlgreave? Who?’

‘You might have come across him at Rosington.’

‘The bastard,’ Henry muttered.

‘He’s been dead for fifty-two years. He was one of the canons in the early nineteen-hundreds, and a minor poet as well. He caused a bit of a scandal and they made him leave.’

Henry’s face brightened. ‘Then Francis and I have got something in common. Besides you, I mean.’

‘There’s a lot of unexplained things about him. For example, no one seems to know whether he died naturally or committed suicide.’

‘At Rosington?’

‘No – he died a little later, after they’d made him resign. The story was that he was forced out because he preached a sermon in favour of having women priests.’

Henry raised his eyebrows. ‘If you did that in Rosington even today you’d probably get tarred and feathered.’

‘There was more to it than that. I keep finding traces of him
now
. But the strangest thing, the thing that worries me, is that something’s going on, something I don’t understand.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Someone else is interested in Francis Youlgreave, someone else is trying to find out about him.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘No reason. But I think they’re doing it secretly.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

I sighed. I wasn’t sure. No one seemed to know the little man who looked like a solicitor’s clerk, but that didn’t mean he was trying to hide his identity. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for his interest in Francis. And apart from him, what else had I got to worry me? The fact that Mr Treevor kept seeing little men hanging around the Dark Hostelry? Senile dementia does not make for reliable witnesses. Or the pigeon with its wings cut off? Someone’s idea of a joke, perhaps, or just a schoolboy with an absorbing interest in biology. Nothing necessarily suspicious, nothing to do with Francis. The smell of what might have been Turkish tobacco clinging to
The Tongues of Angels?
Coincidence.