The Office of the Dead (20 page)

I think now that the oddest thing of all was the violence of my reaction. The poem shocked me before I’d read it, before I knew why it was shocking. It didn’t make sense, any more than the fact I had smelled something unpleasant in the hall before Mr Treevor could have put the pigeon’s wings there. There are some things I still don’t understand.

I turned back to the title page. At last I saw what should have stared me in the face as soon as I opened Henry’s parcel. I had expected this book to be called
The Tongues of Angels.
After all, it looked like
The Tongues of Angels
and Henry had said it was
The Tongues of Angels.
And most of its contents were identical in every way to those of
The Tongues of Angels.

This book was called
The Voice of Angels.

I turned back to the title page. Instead of being published by Gasset & Lode,
Voice
had been ‘privately printed for the author’. Everything else was the same as far as I could tell – the date, the typeface, even the paper.

I turned the pages to the end of the book. The new section had its own epigraph, taken apparently from the fourth section of the
Celestial Hierarchies
of Dionysius the Areopagite, whoever he was.

They, above all, are pre-eminently worthy of the name Angel because they first receive the Divine Light, and through them are transmitted to us the revelations which are above us.

The poem was long and very obscure, even by Francis’s standards, and written in the painfully archaic language he had liked so much. I skimmed through it. As far as I could tell, it was in the form of a conversation between the poet and a passing angel. The angel told Francis why he’d left his principality and come down among the sons and daughters of men. The angels had the gift of eternal life, it seemed, and they wanted to share it with a handful of suitably qualified humans. In fact, according to the angel, he and his friends had just about everything in their gift.

I didn’t like the poem – it made me feel uncomfortable, and I certainly didn’t begin to understand it. On the whole, I thought it was just another version of the old Christian claptrap about death being just a gateway to eternal life. What was so wonderful about life that you should want it to go on for ever?

I closed the book with a snap and tossed it on to the table by the sofa. It slid across the polished wood and almost fell off. Why had Francis bothered to print a separate edition of
The Tongues of Angels
? Was there something about ‘The Office of the Dead’ that he didn’t want the rest of the world to see? If so, what? Or was it simply that Gasset & Lode had refused to print it in the commercially published edition because it was such a bad poem?

The rain had stopped at last and a pale sun was trying to force its way through the clouds. I decided to have a walk before I went back to work. I needed to clear my head. I put on my hat and raincoat and went into the Close. There was a farm on the other side of the Theological College. If the ground wasn’t too muddy I’d get out of the city for half an hour and walk among fields, dykes and hedgerows that sloped down to the Fens.

But I never even left the Close. Just as I reached the Porta, I heard the tinkle of a handbell, uncannily similar to the one we used in the Dark Hostelry to let people know a meal was ready. Then came a jangling crash. I looked towards the Gotobeds’ cottage. One of the first-floor windows was open. A hand fluttered in the room behind the window.

I walked over to the cottage and looked up. ‘Hello, Mrs Gotobed. How are you?’

The hand appeared again, beckoning me. I couldn’t see her face, but the sound of her voice floated down to me.

‘The door’s unlocked. Come upstairs.’

I picked up the bell from the flagstone path, went inside and up the stairs to the little sitting room. There were several changes since I had seen it last. For a start, Mrs Gotobed was sitting at the window overlooking the Close with Pursy on the ledge between her chair and the glass. Secondly, the room had not been smartened up for a visitor. The remains of her lunch were on a tray beside her, the commode was uncovered, and she looked as if she hadn’t bothered to brush her hair since yesterday.

‘Is there something I can do?’ I asked.

‘Have you seen him?’ she hissed at me.

‘Mr Gotobed? Not recently, not since this –’

‘Not him. That man who was trying to get in.’

‘What man?’

‘There was a fellow in a black overcoat trying to get in.’ Her voice was shaking, and she looked older than she had yesterday. ‘I’ve never seen him before. Though I didn’t get a good look at him, me being above and him wearing a hat.’

‘What happened?’

‘He knocked on the door. I was asleep, nodded off after my dinner, didn’t hear him at first. Then I looked out to see who it was and there he was. He tried the door handle. He was about to come in, murder me in my sleep, I shouldn’t wonder. I called down, “What do you think you’re doing?” and he glanced up at me and scarpered. Out through the Porta, and the Lord knows where he went then. If I’d been a couple of years younger, I could have got to the other window to see where he went.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, drawing up a chair and sitting beside her. I took one of her hands in mine. Her skin was as cold as a dead person’s. ‘Would you like me to fetch Mr Gotobed, or the police?’

She shook her head violently. ‘Don’t go.’

‘I won’t. Can you remember anything else about this man?’

Her fingers gripped mine. ‘Black hat, black coat. I think he was a little fellow, though I can’t be sure as I was above him, you see.’ She breathed deeply. ‘Bold as brass,’ she muttered. ‘In broad daylight, too, and in the middle of the Close. Wouldn’t have happened when I was a girl, I’ll tell you that. It’s been one of those days, Mrs Appleyard, I don’t mind telling you. I was all shook up to start with, but I didn’t expect something like this.’

‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

‘Later.’

‘I’m sure he won’t come back. Not now you’ve frightened him off.’

‘How can I be sure of that?’

There wasn’t any way you could be sure. Once you’re frightened, you’re frightened and common sense doesn’t come into it.

‘Could the man have been a tramp?’

‘He could have been a parson for all I know. All I saw was the black hat and black coat, I told you.’ Suddenly she paused and stared at me. ‘Tell you one thing, though, his shoes were clean. If he was a tramp, he was a very particular one.’

Another possibility was that Mrs Gotobed had misinterpreted the situation altogether. Perhaps it had been a door-to-door salesman paying a perfectly innocent call. He might have been as frightened of her as she was of him.

‘What a day, eh?’ said Mrs Gotobed. ‘First poor Pursy, and now this.’

We both looked at the cat who was still sprawled at his ease on the window ledge. He had taken no notice of either of us since I had come in.

‘He came in this morning like a bat out of hell,’ Mrs Gotobed said. ‘Through the kitchen window, we keep it open a crack for him, and Wilfred said he broke a vase he was in such a hurry. Came streaking up here and jumped on my lap. He doesn’t do that very often unless he wants something. Cats aren’t stupid.’

She rested her hand on Pursy’s fur. He turned his head and stared out of the window, ignoring her. It was only then that I saw that his left ear was caked with blood.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Must have got into a fight. The other fellow nearly had his ear off.’

I scratched the cat gently under its chin with one hand and with the other smoothed aside the matted fur round the base of the ear. It looked as if a single claw had sliced through the skin near where the ear joined the scalp. A claw or a knife? At least the blood had dried and if the wound wasn’t infected it should heal easily. Pursy pulled his head away from me and examined me with amber eyes.

‘Poor little fellow,’ Mrs Gotobed mumbled. ‘When he was a kitten, he was such a scrap of a thing. Just like a little baby.’ Her hands turned and twisted in her lap. ‘You’ve not had children then, you and Mr Appleyard?’

‘No.’

‘Not yet,’ she amended. ‘Don’t leave it too long. I didn’t have Wilfred till I was forty, and then it was too late to have more.’ Her jaw moved up and down, up and down as if she were chewing her tongue. ‘I never had much time for children. But it’s not the same when it’s your own. You feel differently somehow. And it never goes away, neither. Sometimes I look at Wilfred and I feel like he’s a baby all over again.’

‘I’m sure he’s a good son.’

‘Yes. But that’s not to say he isn’t a silly boy sometimes. I don’t know what he’ll do without me to look after him, and that’s the truth. Lets his heart rule his head, that’s his problem. If he could find himself a nice wife, I’d die happy.’

I wondered if she suspected I was dallying with her son’s affections and was therefore warning me off. For a moment we sat in silence. I stroked Pursy, who rewarded me with a purr.

‘This cut,’ I said. ‘I think this might have been done with a knife.’

Mrs Gotobed wrinkled her nose. ‘Shouldn’t be surprised. They’re everywhere, you know.’

‘Who are?’

‘Mad people. Ought to be locked up.’

‘Does this remind you of what happened before?’

‘That pigeon Wilfred found?’

I nodded.

‘What I’d like to know is where the wings went.’

‘And it’s not just the pigeon, is it? What about fifty years ago and all the things that happened then?’

Her shoulders twitched. ‘Same thing, another person.’

‘You said in those days a boy was doing it. A boy called Simon.’

‘Did I?’

‘It couldn’t be him, could it?’

She shook her head. ‘He went away. Years ago.’

‘But he might have come back.’

‘Why would he do that? Nothing to come back
for
.’

‘I don’t know. Was his surname Martlesham, by the way?’

‘Might have been. I can’t remember. Why?’

‘I found something in the Cathedral Library which mentioned him meeting Canon Youlgreave. Was there a boy called Martlesham?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He used to clean the boots and things at the Palace.’

‘Where were you living then?’

‘Down by the river.’

‘In Swan Alley?’

She sighed, a long broken sound like rustling newspaper. ‘No – Bridge Street. Over a shop.’

‘Not far away. Did you know the Martlesham family?’

‘Everyone knew the Martleshams.’ She licked her lips. ‘The mother was no better than she should be. Called herself missus but she was no more married than I was in those days.’

‘Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Simon was the eldest, and he worked at the Palace. And then there was a sister?’

‘Simon was always going to make something of himself. Ideas above his station. Nancy must have been five or six years younger. Funny little thing, black, straight hair, always watching people, never said very much. Never heard her laughing, either, not that there was anything to laugh about in Swan Alley.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘The mother died in childbirth. Don’t know who the father was. It was around that time Simon went a bit queer in the head. But Canon Youlgreave helped him.’

I waited. Pursy’s paw dabbed at a fly on the windowpane. The sun had broken through the clouds. There was a big puddle near the chestnuts and two schoolboys in short trousers were trying to splash each other.

‘He heard their mother had died, and he helped Simon emigrate. Paid for him to learn a trade, as well. And he found someone to adopt Nancy.’

‘So Nancy emigrated as well?’

‘Might have.’ Blue-veined lids drooped over the eyes. ‘I can’t remember.’

The front door opened. I turned in my chair, half fearing and half hoping that the little man in black had come back. But Mrs Gotobed didn’t stir. There were footsteps on the stairs, heavy and confident. Then Mr Gotobed came into the room. He saw me, and the air rushed out of his mouth in a squeak of surprise.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Your mother’s had a bit of a shock, but she’s all right now.’

‘It’s all wrong,’ Mrs Gotobed said, ‘frightening people like that.’

As the evening went on, I felt increasingly annoyed with Henry. It was true that we hadn’t arranged a time for him to ring, but I naturally assumed he’d phone while Janet was out with the Touchies, as he had last week. He didn’t.

I made beans on toast for Rosie and Mr Treevor. I banged the plates down on the table, not that they noticed, and had a minor tantrum when I couldn’t find the vegetable knife. They didn’t notice that either. It was stupid, but I wanted to talk to him. He might be able to make more sense out of
The Voice of Angels
and what Mrs Gotobed had said than I could.

After I’d washed up and done the vegetables for the grown-ups’ supper, I fetched the book and went through ‘The Office of the Dead’ again. There were some grisly bits which reminded me of ‘The Children of Heracles’ and ‘Breakheart Hill’. Blades sliced through flesh, bones cracked asunder. There was a particularly disgusting passage about a bleeding heart. I was trying to work out what the angel wanted the poet to do with this when Mr Treevor tottered into the kitchen.

‘Am I Francis Youlgreave?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re John Treevor.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely sure.’

‘It’s only that I thought someone said I was Francis Youlgreave. But if you’re sure I’m not I must be John after all.’

‘Who said you were Francis Youlgreave?’ I asked.

‘Someone I saw this morning. When I was out.’

‘In the Chapter House, do you mean?’

‘Yes. He was the little man near the winkle thing.’

‘The what?’

‘You know, that thing that’s a bit like a willie when it’s big.’ He stared at me, his face suddenly aghast. ‘Oh dear. Shouldn’t I have said that?’

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. The thing to remember is, you’re John Treevor.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Treevor. ‘I know.’

He went upstairs again, leaving me to remember the scene in the Chapter House with the model of the Octagon, which was like no willie I’d ever seen. Besides Mr Treevor, the other men in there had been Mr Gotobed, Canon Hudson and two of the Cathedral workmen. Mr Gotobed and the workmen were all big and burly. Canon Hudson was small but not particularly dark. I gave up the puzzle just as the garden door opened and Janet called downstairs that she was back.

‘That was extraordinary,’ she said when she came down to the kitchen. ‘You’ll never guess who the Touchies talked about.’

‘Henry?’

‘Francis Youlgreave.’ She filled the kettle at the sink, raising her voice to be heard over the rushing water. ‘According to Mrs Forbury, they used to call him the Red Canon.’

‘How does she know?’

‘Because she grew up in Rosington. Her father was the vicar of St Mary’s.’

‘She can’t have known him personally, can she? She doesn’t look much more than fifty.’

Janet shook her head. ‘She remembers people talking about him when she was growing up. Did you know he used to smoke opium?’

‘She’s pulling your leg.’

‘She wasn’t.
She
believes it, and so do all the other Touchies.’

‘The Red Canon – so he was a Socialist?’

Janet shrugged. ‘Or he had one or two vaguely Socialist ideas. I doubt if they’d seem very radical now. There was that business about the slums near the river. Youlgreave made himself unpopular by going on about it ad nauseam at chapter meetings. And what was worse, much worse, he was far too free and easy with the servants. Mrs Forbury said he invited working-class children into his house and gave them unsuitable ideas.’

‘What does that mean exactly?’

‘She was far too coy to say. But she mentioned his experiments with animals. Someone claimed he’d cut up a cat, so people started talking about witchcraft. There were complaints to the dean, who was in a very awkward position because Youlgreave was some sort of cousin. But he had to do something about it because the police were involved. Not officially, I think, but someone had a word in the ear of the chief constable.’

‘They certainly laid it on with a trowel,’ I said. ‘So he’s a drug addict and a revolutionary, and practises black magic on the side.’

‘He was also a heretic as well, or the next best thing. When he preached that sermon about women priests, he played into everyone’s hands. Mrs Forbury said it was so obviously loopy, it made his position untenable.’

‘That’s Rosington logic,’ I said. ‘They could cope with drug-taking and witchcraft, but they couldn’t let him get away with heresy.’

‘One of those people who live in the wrong time.’

‘And the wrong place. Don’t forget the place.’

All at once I felt depressed. It seemed to me that whatever Francis had been guilty of, he wasn’t alone with his guilt. I thought of the Touchies smacking their lips around a tea table in the Deanery. How did you calibrate guilt? How did you measure one guilt against another?

‘I don’t suppose they mentioned the names of any children, did they? A boy called Simon Martlesham?’

‘I don’t think so. And
was
there a boy? I thought Mrs Forbury said something about a little girl.’

Then Rosie came downstairs and we started talking about other things. One of them was Mr Treevor. I didn’t tell Janet about his willie-winkle remark because that would have only added to her worries. But she was concerned that he’d gone out by himself again this morning. I suggested we start locking the doors, even when one of us was at home, so he couldn’t slip out without our knowing.

Underneath this was the other conversation that we weren’t having. Finding the wings this morning had brought matters to a head. Though I wasn’t going to say so to anyone, least of all Janet, for once I agreed with David. Mr Treevor ought to go into a home, for his sake and everyone else’s.

I knew he would be miserable, but if he stayed here he wouldn’t be particularly happy either, and he’d make at least two other people miserable as well. And, as the dementia took hold, there was always the risk that he’d do something far worse than he’d already done. At the back of my mind was the possibility that he might already have done worse things than kill a pigeon and cut off its wings.

‘And it’s going to be difficult when the baby comes,’ Janet was saying. ‘I’ll have to go into hospital for a few days, I can’t see any way round that.’

‘I’ll come and hold the fort if you want.’

I saw alarm flicker in Janet’s face. She was looking over my shoulder. I turned. Rosie was in the room, sitting on the floor with Angel on her lap in her corner by the dresser. She met my eyes and I knew she had heard us talking about the baby, and understood what it meant as well. Whatever else Rosie was, she was never stupid. Janet and David had decided not to tell her about it until the pregnancy was past the first twelve weeks.

‘Oh,’ Janet said. ‘I didn’t see you down there, darling. I wish you wouldn’t sit on the floor. You’ll get your school dress dirty.’

‘All right.’

She got up and wandered round the table, a thumb in her mouth.

‘Where are you going?’ Janet said.

‘Up to my room.’

Rosie broke into a run as she reached the doorway. Her feet pattered up the stairs.

‘Oh, Lord,’ Janet said. ‘This would happen now.’

The evening continued to roll downhill. David came home but communicated mainly in grunts before going to ground in the study. Rosie had a tantrum, which ended in her lying rigid and bright red on the floor, screaming as loudly as possible. Mr Treevor climbed into his bed and pulled the covers over his head. David came out of the study and shouted upstairs, ‘Can’t you control her, Janet? I’m trying to work.’ Meanwhile, I made an egg-and-bacon flan with too few eggs and not enough bacon.

I went upstairs for a bracing nip of gin. I hadn’t touched my bottle since the trip to London on Monday but these were special circumstances. On the first-floor landing I heard voices in Rosie’s room and paused to eavesdrop.

‘Are we really having a baby?’ Rosie was saying in a singsong, babyish voice.

‘Yes, darling,’ Janet said. ‘Isn’t that nice?’

‘Will it be a boy or a girl?’

‘We don’t know yet. We have to wait till it comes. We can’t be absolutely sure it’s coming yet – that’s why Daddy and I haven’t told you before. Would you like a little brother or a little sister?’

‘Rosie doesn’t want a baby,’ she said in the same silly voice. ‘Angel doesn’t want one, either. Never, never, never.’

Things improved slightly at suppertime, partly because of the gin. Mr Treevor was lured out of bed at the thought of food. Rosie was so exhausted that she fell asleep. Even David cheered up a little, after drinking two glasses of sherry before we ate. Meanwhile, Janet carried on as usual. She was, of course, the one person in the house who wasn’t allowed to be depressed or have tantrums, or act strangely or brace themselves with fortifying nips of gin. Someone at the Dark Hostelry had to be reliable, and we had chosen her.

After supper, she went up to check on Rosie and settle Mr Treevor. I washed up, made coffee and took it up to the drawing room. David was reading
The Voice of Angels.
I poured the coffee. He looked up as I handed him the cup.

‘Thanks. Is this yours?’

‘Yes. Henry sent it. He found it in a box of second-hand books.’

‘It’s absolute tosh, isn’t it?’ He smiled up at me as he spoke, making it obvious that the sting in the words was not directed at me. ‘I knew Youlgreave was eccentric, but I hadn’t realized he was quite such a bad poet.’

‘I think he was very unhappy,’ I said.

‘Quite possibly. But is that an excuse?’

Part of me was annoyed with David for criticizing Francis, and another part of me had treacherously abdicated its responsibilities and turned into a mass of goo because he’d smiled at me. I sat down and lit a cigarette. David shut the book and put it gently on the side table by his chair. He always treated books as though they were infinitely fragile.

‘Why are you spending so much time on Youlgreave?’

‘I’m interested in him,’ I said, blowing smoke out of my nostrils like an outraged dragon. ‘He was an interesting person.’

David smiled at me again. He opened his mouth to speak but then Janet came back into the room. I finished my coffee and said there was something I needed to do upstairs. I wasn’t sure whether the result of leaving David and Janet alone would be a quarrel or a reconciliation, but I knew I had to let them try and find out.

On the first floor, Rosie’s room was dark and silent. Mr Treevor’s door was closed. I went upstairs to my room. The first thing I did was open the bedside cupboard and take out the gin bottle. The cupboard smelled of lavender. The light gleamed on the green glass like the smile on the face of a welcome friend. I poured myself a comfortable inch and sat on the bed, sipping slowly and feeling liquid fire run down my throat and into my belly. Who needed babies when you had London Dry Gin?

Bloody Henry.

So I took out the photograph of Henry and his Hairy Widow and looked at it again, something I’d sworn not to do. I looked at her legs waving in the air and his quaking bottom between them and thought I would probably need another glass of gin in a moment. To delay this, I put the photograph away and looked around for a distraction.

My eyes fell on the other photograph, the one of the clergymen and the children in front of the Theological College. I lifted it down from the washstand and held it under the bedside light. Francis, the little man with the long nose and the black shadows where his eyes should be, was face to face with me.

I rubbed the glass with my finger, trying to see him better. Once again, I wished I could pass through it into that world and find out what they were doing in the photograph and who they all were. I took another sip of gin and at that very moment, as though the liquid brought inspiration with it, I realized that there was a way.

I turned the photograph over. The frame was wooden, and the photograph was backed by a thin sheet of plywood held in place by tacks. I levered some of them up with a nail-file and then pulled out the plywood. I pushed the glass up from underneath and pulled out the cardboard, the mount and the photograph in one go. I peeled the photograph and mount away from the cardboard. There was writing on the back of the photograph. I had gone through the glass.

In that other time it was high summer. ‘Tableaux Vivants at the Principal’s Garden Party: first prize Oberon, Titania, and attendant fairies. August 6th, 1904.’

Not angels after all.

Underneath, written in the same faded brown ink, were the names. ‘The Revd Canon Murtagh-Smith, Principal – the Revd J. R. Heckstall, Vice-Principal, Canon Youlgreave …’ But it was the name next to his that leapt up at me.

‘N. Martlesham’.

In my haste I knocked the glass as I turned the photograph over. Drops of gin slopped on to the frame. So that was Nancy, the little girl standing literally in Francis’s shadow. She was the real mystery, not Simon, not Francis. What was a little girl from Swan Alley doing with wings sprouting from her shoulders at a Theological College garden party?