The Office of the Dead (25 page)

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s fascinating.’

‘What is?’

He smiled up at me and gestured with his glass towards the crowd of people swirling through the room and spilling on to the terrace and down into the garden and around the pool. ‘All this. Ritual behaviour is one of my interests.’

I laughed. ‘You’re teasing me.’

He shook his head and explained that his work had encouraged him to develop an interest in anthropology.

‘Yes, but that’s about savages – primitive people, I mean.’

‘All human societies have their rituals, Mrs Appleyard, however sophisticated they may appear to be on the surface. Think of the ritual mourning we indulged in when the King died. And look at this – intoxication, formalized sexual display and childish games, many of them of an aggressive nature. I could give you plenty of parallels from tribal cultures in West Africa.’

‘But that can’t be the same,’ I said. ‘Their reasons for doing it must be completely different from ours.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re Europeans and they’re Africans.’

‘It makes no difference. That is one of the interesting things that anthropology shows. On a ritual level, human societies are strikingly similar in many respects. Take cannibalism, for instance.’

I made a face at him. ‘Rather you than me.’

‘I don’t mean cannibalism from necessity or inclination, of course, where eating other human beings is a matter of survival, or an addition to the diet. No, I mean ritual cannibalism, which has nothing to do with nourishment. It’s often allied to head-hunting. I came across a certain amount of it in West Africa and also in the East Indies. There were various reasons for it, but the most common, found in most cultures at some point or another, is that by eating something of a person you acquire his soul, or perhaps a part of him you particularly value. His courage, for example, or his prowess in battle.’

‘Not in Europe, surely? Or at least not since we all lived in caves and went around knocking each other over the head with rocks.’

‘There’s evidence to show that the practice persisted in England and Scotland until the Middle Ages. And there were cases in other parts of Europe much later than that. There was one in the Balkans, in Montenegro, in 1912. And a diluted version of this lasted much longer. Think of hair, for example. Other people’s hair.’ He smiled grimly at me. ‘You wouldn’t necessarily eat it, of course, not nowadays. But I can remember my aunts wearing mourning brooches and rings containing locks snipped from the loved one’s head. What they were really doing, of course, was carrying around a little bit of the soul of a person they’d lost. Rather like the head-hunters do in parts of Borneo. More genteel than eating his brain as they might have done at another time or in another place, but the principle’s exactly the same.’

The rest of what he’d said had been drowned in dry martinis or lost in the blue haze of cigarette smoke. It didn’t matter. The question was what had Francis wanted that a child might possess? Youth, health and life? Had Francis believed that the purpose of dead children was to feed the living with life? How did that compare with buying a sprig of lavender from a nasty old woman in the hope it would bring you luck?

I turned over the pages of
The Voice of Angels
until I came to ‘Breakheart Hill’.

‘For hart’s blood makes the young heart strong,’ quoth he.
‘God hath ordained it so. He dies that ye
‘May hunt, my son, and through his strength be free.
’

Time sanitizes all but the most dreadful horrors. There I was, entertaining the bizarre idea that a clergyman of the Church of England might have considered eating bits of children in the crazy belief that this would somehow extend his life. But it was only a speculation, and the fact that Francis had died more than fifty years ago removed it one stage further from here and now. So I felt pleased with myself. I was even looking forward to telling Henry about the idea tomorrow.

I put out the cigarette and settled down. I thought of Henry briefly, that he had his good points as well as his bad, then I slid into a deep sleep. There must have been dreams, though I don’t remember any of them, and they must have been happy ones because I was still feeling happy when I woke up.

It was one of those times when there’s very little transition between sleep and being awake. It’s like swimming up from the bottom of a pool, the sense of urgency and speed, the sense of breaking out of one element into another.

The room was full of light. I knew it was still early because the light had that soft, almost colourless quality you get in the hour or two after dawn. I opened my eyes and saw Janet in the doorway. She was wearing a long pale-blue nylon nightdress and her hair was loose and unbrushed.

‘Wendy,’ she said. ‘Wendy.’

I sat up. ‘What is it?’

She seemed not to have heard me. She looked so cold, an ice woman. You could see the shape of her body through the nylon of the nightdress. With a twist of envy I wondered if she’d bought it to make herself look pretty for David.

‘Janet, what’s happened?’

‘Wendy.’ She took a step into the room, then stopped and blinked. ‘Daddy’s
dead.
’

Blood is the colour of a scream.

Neither of us said anything as we stood in the doorway looking down at the body of John Treevor. But that’s what I thought.
Blood is the colour of a scream.
There was nothing logical, nothing rational, about it. I couldn’t scream for fear of waking Rosie.

Who would have thought he had so much blood in him?

Really we should get the sheets and the pillowcase in a bath full of cold water as soon as possible. Soak blood in cold water, said my mother, who was a sort of walking housewife’s manual. But the bedding was so saturated I doubted if it would ever be dean again. And there was nothing we could do about the mattress. It wasn’t just the cover. The blood would have soaked right into the horsehair.

I knew Janet was right, that he was dead. He was so very still, you see, and the blood had stopped flowing.

There were red splashes on the bedside rug. The rug would have to go, too. Mr Treevor’s false teeth, clamped for ever shut, were in the glass on the bedside table. His knees had drawn up under the eiderdown. He was lying on his back and it looked as if he had two open mouths, one redder than the other. All the redness cast a sombre glow through the room, neutralizing the pale dawn light.

On the rug was a knife, the vegetable knife we’d lost. Oh well, I thought, that’s something. None of the other knives in the kitchen drawer were nearly as good for peeling potatoes. Mr Treevor’s eyes were open and he stared up at the ceiling towards David’s heaven. Except that David was far too sophisticated to believe in a common-or-garden traditional heaven located above the sky.

Janet stirred. ‘At least he’s at peace now.’

Peace? Is that what you call it?
‘I’m going to be sick.’

I pushed past her, went into the bathroom and locked the door. When I came out, Janet was waiting for me on the landing. She had a key in her hand and the door to Mr Treevor’s room was dosed. Without exchanging a word we went down to the kitchen.

I filled the kettle and put it on the stove. While Janet laid the tea tray, I leant against the sink and watched her. I remember how she fetched the cups and saucers and aligned them on the tray, how the teaspoons were polished on the tea towel, how the milk jug was filled and then covered with a little lacy cloth designed to keep out the flies. I remember how deft her movements were, how she made a little island of order amid all the chaos, and how beautiful she was, though she was still pale and her face was rigid with shock.

She must have sensed me watching her, because she glanced up and smiled. For an instant it was as if she’d struck a match behind her face, and the flame flared, warmed the chilly air for a moment, and died.

I made the tea. Janet poured it and added three teaspoonfuls of sugar to each cup.

‘It’s my fault,’ she said after the first sip.

‘Of course it isn’t.’

She shook her head. ‘He couldn’t face going away. We were putting him out like a piece of rubbish for the dustmen.
My father.’

‘He was going into hospital for his sake as much as for yours.’ I reached across the table and touched her hand. ‘You know how he’s been lately. He could have done this at any time, for any reason. Or for no reason at all. He wasn’t himself.’

Janet gasped, a single, ragged sob. ‘Then who was he?’

‘At one point he thought he was Francis Youlgreave,’ I said. ‘Listen, all I’m saying is that part of him had already died. The important part, the part that was your father.’

Janet took a deep breath. ‘I must phone someone. Dr Flaxman, I suppose.’

I touched the key lying between us on the table. ‘You’ve locked the bedroom door?’

She nodded. ‘In case Rosie –’

‘What about David?’

Janet blinked, wrinkled her forehead and looked up at the clock on the dresser. ‘He’ll be getting up in a moment to say the morning office.’

‘Janet, why did you go into your father’s room?’

‘I woke up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I – I thought I’d just peep in and see if he was all right. He was so upset. When do you think –?’

‘I don’t know.’ I remembered how still everything had been in Mr Treevor’s bedroom, how the blood had soaked into the bedding, how dark the blood had been. ‘Probably hours ago.’

‘What a way to end.’

‘If he’d had the choice, he’d probably have preferred it. I’d much rather go like that than get more and more senile.’

Water rustled in one of the pipes running down the wall. Janet pushed back her chair.

‘That’s David,’ she said.

I wondered why she’d come to me not him after she found her father.

Death wasn’t something I’d had to deal with very often. I hadn’t had the practice. I didn’t know the procedures. I thought that Mr Treevor had somehow cheated death by killing himself. Part of me, the little selfish child that lives within us all, was glad he was dead. In the long run, it would save everyone a lot of trouble.

I just wished he hadn’t made such a mess of his exit. Literally. Why hadn’t he done it sensibly and discreetly somewhere in the wings of our lives? A nice quiet overdose, perhaps, almost indistinguishable from a natural death, or at least something Janet could have told herself was an accident, like stepping in front of a bus. At times like this I was glad of the privacy of the mind. If my thoughts had been public property, the world would have labelled me a psychopath.

Janet slipped away to talk to David. I went upstairs to dress. Afterwards I took another cup of tea into the drawing room and smoked a cigarette. David was now in the study talking on the phone. The doors were open and I could hear what he was saying.

‘No, there’s no doubt at all, I’m afraid … can’t you come sooner than that?’

I stared through a window at a garden varnished with dew. The spire gleamed in the early morning sun. Francis must have stood in this room, looked out of this window, seen this view.

‘I appreciate that,’ David was saying. ‘Very well … Yes, all right, I’ll ring them straightaway … Goodbye.’

He put down the phone and came to join me in the drawing room.

‘Flaxman can’t manage it before half past eight.’

‘I’ll take Rosie to school.’

‘Thanks.’ I doubt if he heard what I’d said. ‘Poor Janet,’ he went on. ‘All this on top of the miscarriage.’

‘I think she needs to be in bed.’

‘Would you tell her about Flaxman? I’d better phone the police, and the dean.’

I persuaded Janet to go back to bed. Then I got Rosie up, made breakfast and walked her to school. It felt unnatural to be doing normal things. Everything should have become abnormal in deference to Mr Treevor’s death. But Rosington ignored his absence. The city was the same today as it had been yesterday, which was
wrong
.

I looked at Rosie as we drifted down the hill towards St Tumwulf’s. She had Angel clamped under her arm and she was sucking her thumb. The doll was wearing its pink outfit because it was moving in disguise among mortals, and so she matched Rosie in her pink gingham school dress. I thought Rosie was paler than usual. She’d been as fond of Mr Treevor as anybody.

During breakfast, David had told her that Grandpa had gone to heaven in the night.

‘Will he be coming back?’ she had said.

‘No,’ David replied. Rosie nodded and went back to her cornflakes.

At the school gates, I asked Rosie if she was feeling all right.

‘I’m
all right. But Angel’s got a tummy ache.’

‘A bad one?’

‘A little bit bad.’ Rosie’s face brightened. ‘I’m going to finish sewing Angel’s shawl today and it’ll go nicely with her dress. That’ll cheer her up.’

‘She’ll look very pretty.’

‘We’re sisters now,’ Rosie told me. ‘Both in pink.’

‘Makes the boys wink, doesn’t it?’

She gave me the doll and went into the playground. It seemed to me the other children parted before her like the Red Sea. I found the headmistress in her office, told her what had happened and asked her to keep an eye on Rosie.

‘A death in the family, in the home,’ the headmistress said. ‘It’s a terrible thing for a child.’

When I got back to the Dark Hostelry, I found Dr Flaxman in the drawing room talking to David and Janet.

‘I’d better have the key,’ he was saying. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

David frowned at him. Janet moved along the sofa and patted the seat beside her. I sat down.

‘I don’t understand,’ David said.

‘It’s common practice in cases like this, Mr Byfield.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Cases where the coroner will have to be notified.’

‘I can understand that of course, but –’

‘And particularly where there’s an element of doubt about the death.’

‘I should have thought that was plain enough.’

Flaxman’s eyes flickered towards me and then returned to David. ‘Perhaps I could have a word in private.’

Janet said, ‘That’s not necessary. Whatever you can say to my husband you can say to Mrs Appleyard and me.’

David nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Very well.’ Flaxman continued to speak to David, ignoring Janet and me. ‘It’s possible that Mr Treevor killed himself. But any death like this needs careful investigation.’

‘Surely you’re not suggesting –?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Flaxman said. ‘I’m just doing my job. May I use your phone?’

People came and went, doing their jobs, while we sat by and watched. Dr Flaxman waited until two uniformed police officers appeared on the doorstep. David took the police to see Mr Treevor. They didn’t stay long in the room and they said very little. But when they came out, one of them went away and the other lingered like a ghost on the landing in front of Mr Treevor’s door.

I took him up a cup of coffee and a biscuit. He looked at me as if I were a Martian and blushed. But he said thank you and then broke wind, which embarrassed him more than it did me.

Our next visitors were also police officers. But these were detectives in plain clothes. Inspector Humphries was a tall, hunched man with short, fair hair which looked as if it would be as soft as a baby’s. He had a broken-nosed sergeant called Pate, all bone and muscle. I later discovered Pate played fly-half for the town’s rugby football fifteen. David introduced me and explained that his wife was in bed.

Humphries grunted. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take us upstairs, sir,’ he said. ‘Who was it who actually found the body?’

‘My wife. Then she woke Mrs Appleyard and me.’

‘I see.’ The inspector had a Midlands accent and a way of mumbling his words that made it sound as if he was speaking through a mouthful of thick soup. ‘And when was Mr Treevor last seen alive?’

‘About half past ten the previous evening. My wife looked in to say good night.’

Humphries grunted again. We had reached the landing. At a nod from the inspector, the constable on guard unlocked Mr Treevor’s door. I heard Pate sucking in his breath. Then the two detectives went into the room and closed the door behind them. Then the doorbell rang and David and I went downstairs and answered it together.

The doorbell kept ringing all morning. First there was another doctor, the police surgeon. Then came Peter Hudson, who asked if there was anything he could do and said that he would take over David’s responsibilities at the Cathedral for the time being. Later on in the day we found in our letterbox a stiff little note from the dean, addressed to Janet, expressing polite regret at the death of her father.

Canon Osbaston turned up in person, suddenly frail, his little head wagging like a wilting flower on the long stalk of his neck. David put him in the drawing room and I brought him a glass of brandy.

‘Poor Janet,’ he said, ‘it’s so very hard. Sometimes it seems so meaningless.’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘So pointless,’ Osbaston murmured. ‘It really makes one wonder.’ Then he glanced at his watch, finished his brandy and struggled to his feet. ‘Give my love to Janet and let me know if there’s anything I can do. But I’ll call again tomorrow, if I may. Perhaps I’ll see you at evensong, David.’

In that moment I liked him better than I had ever done.

June Hudson appeared just as Osbaston was leaving. She was holding a large earthenware dish.

‘Just a little casserole,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘I thought you might not have time to cook a proper meal tonight.’ She shifted from one foot to the other. ‘And how’s Janet?’

‘Very shaken, naturally,’ David said. ‘She’s resting now.’

‘Let me know when you think she might like a visitor.’

‘You’re very kind.’ David made it sound like an’ accusation.

June Hudson smiled at us both and almost fled down the garden towards the gate to the Close.

Shortly after this, they took the body away. They brought an ambulance into the Close and backed it up to the gate into our garden. People lingered to watch, swelling to a small crowd when the police raised screens. Sergeant Pate suggested that it might be better if we kept out of the way. So the three of us sat in Janet and David’s room and tried to resist the temptation to peer out of the window.