Andrew Taylor - The Office of the Dead

Rosington wasn’t like Bradford or Hillgard House or Durban or any of the other places I’d lived in. The past was more obvious here. If you glanced up at the ceiling while you were sitting in Janet’s kitchen you saw the clumsy barrel of a Norman vault. The Cathedral clock rang the hours and the quarters. The Close and its inhabitants were governed by the rhythm of the daily services, just as they had been for more than a thousand years. I had never lived among religious people before and this was unsettling too. It was as though I were the one person capable of seeing colours, as if everyone else lived in a monochrome world. Or possibly it was the other way round. Either way I was in a minority of one.

When we were at school Janet and I used to laugh at those who were religious. Now I knew she went to church regularly, though it was not something we had talked about in our letters.

On my first Sunday morning in Rosington I stayed at home. Janet and Rosie were going to matins at ten thirty. The pair of them looked so sweet dressed up for God in their Sunday finery.

‘If you don’t mind I won’t come to church,’ I said to David at breakfast. I’d already made this dear to Janet but I wanted to say it to him as well. I didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

He smiled. ‘It’s entirely up to you.’

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not particularly godly. I’d rather do the vegetables.’

‘That’s very kind of you. But are you sure it isn’t too much trouble?’

I don’t know how, but he made me feel like the prodigal daughter a long way from home.

‘I suppose you have to go to church,’ I said to Janet as we were washing up after lunch. ‘Part of your wifely duties.’

She nodded but added, ‘I like it too. No one makes any demands on you in church. You can just be quiet for once.’

I was stupid enough to ignore what she was really saying. ‘Yes, but do you believe in God?’

I didn’t want Janet to believe in God. It was as if by doing so she would believe a little less in me.

‘I don’t know.’ She bent over the sink and began to scour the roasting tin. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what I believe, does it?’

During my first fortnight in Rosington the five of us settled into a routine. Given how different we were, you would have expected more friction than there was. But David was out most of the time – either at the Theological College or in the Cathedral. Rosie was at school during the week – she was in her second term at St Tumwulf’s Infant School on the edge of the town. Old Mr Treevor – I thought of him as old, though he was younger than I am now – spent much time in his bedroom, either huddled over a small electric fire or in bed As far as I could see his chief interests were food, the contents of The Times and the evacuation of his bowels.

The house itself made co-existence easier. The Dark Hostelry was not so much large as complicated. Most of the rooms were small and there were a great many of them. David said the building had been in continuous occupation for seven or eight hundred years. Each generation seemed to have added its own eccentricity. It was a place of many staircases, some of which led nowhere in particular, small, crooked rooms with sloping floors and thick walls. The kitchen was in a semi-basement, and as you washed up you could watch the legs of the passers-by in the High Street, which followed the northern boundary of the Cathedral Close.

Although the Dark Hostelry was good for keeping people apart, it was not an easy house to run. A charwoman came in three mornings a week to ‘do the rough’. Otherwise Janet had to do the work herself. And there was a lot of it – this was 1958, and the nearest thing Janet had to a labour-saving device was a twin-tub washing machine with a hand mangle attached. The last time the place had had a serious overhaul was at the turn of the century when the occupants could probably have afforded two or three servants.

In some ways I think Janet would have preferred to be a paid servant. She loathed the work but at least she would have been getting a wage for it. A simple commercial transaction has a beginning and end. It implies that both parties to it have freedom of choice.

Janet had the worst of both worlds. There was a dark irony in the fact that as well as running that ridiculous old house she also had to pretend to be its mistress, not its slave. Janet was expected to be a lady. When the Byfields came to Rosington she had visiting cards engraved. I’ve still got one of them – yellowing pasteboard, dog-eared at the corners, the typeface small and discreet.

Mrs David Byfield

The Dark Hostelry

The Close

Rosington

Telephone: Rosington 2114

When the Byfields arrived at the Dark Hostelry, the ladies of the Close and the ladies of the town called and left their cards. Janet called on them and left hers. It was a secular equivalent to what David was doing every day in that echoing stone mountain in the middle of the Close. A ritualistic procedure which might once have had a purpose.

I doubt if David knew what a burden he’d placed on her shoulders. Not then, at any rate. It’s not that he wasn’t a sensitive man. But his sensitivity was like a torch beam. It had to be directed at you before it became effective. But it wasn’t just a question of him being sensitive or not being sensitive. Everyone thought differently. This was more than forty years ago, remember, and in the Cathedral Close of Rosington.

Nowadays I think David and Janet were both in prison. But neither of them could see the bars.

It became increasingly obvious that something would have to be done about Mr Treevor.

He and I, a pair of emotional vampires, arrived on the same February afternoon and more than three weeks later we were still at the Dark Hostelry. I flattered myself there was a difference, that at least I did some of the housework and cooking. I sold my engagement ring, too. I’d never liked the beastly thing. It turned out to be worth much less than Henry had led me to expect, which shouldn’t have surprised me.

Mr Treevor did less and less. He took it for granted that we were there to supply his needs – regular meals, clean clothes, bed-making, warm rooms and a daily copy of The Times, which for some reason he liked to have ironed before he would open it.

‘He never used to be like that,’ Janet said to me on Thursday morning as we were snatching a cup of coffee. ‘He hardly ever read a paper, and as for this ironing business, I’ve no idea where that came from.’

‘Isn’t it the sort of thing they used to do in the homes of the aristocracy?’

‘He can’t have picked it up there.’

‘Perhaps he saw it in a film.’

‘It’s a bit of a nuisance, actually.’

‘A bit of a nuisance? It’s a bloody imposition. I think you should go on stroke.’

‘I think his memory’s improving. That’s something, isn’t it?’

I wondered whether it would ever improve to the point where he would be able to remember who I was from one day to the next.

‘He told me all about how he won a prize at school the other day,’ Janet went on, sounding as proud as she did when describing one of Rosie’s triumphs at St Tumwulf’s. ‘For Greek verses. He could even remember the name of the boy he beat.’

‘He’s getting old,’ I said, responding to her anxiety, not what she’d said. ‘That’s all. It’ll happen to us one day.’

Janet bit her lip. ‘Yesterday he asked me when Mummy was coming. He seems to think she’d gone away for the weekend or something.’