Andrew Taylor - The Office of the Dead

Mr Treevor’s flat was the upper part of a little mid-Victorian terraced house in a cul-de-sac off Mill Road, near the station. I hadn’t known what to expect but it wasn’t this. The landlady, the widow of a college porter, kept the ground floor for herself. Mr Treevor and the widow and the widow’s son shared the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and the bathroom which was beyond the kitchen, tacked on as an afterthought.

The landlady was out. Janet let herself in with her father’s key and we went upstairs. I must have shown what I was feeling on my face.

‘It’s a bit seedy, I’m afraid,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You didn’t think he’d live somewhere like this, I suppose? He wanted to stay in Cambridge, you see, and it was all he could afford when Mummy died.’

Janet took me along the landing to the room at the front, which was furnished as a sitting room. It smelled of tobacco, stale food and unwashed bodies.

‘She gives him his breakfast and an evening meal,’ Janet said, meaning the landlady, ‘and she’s meant to clean for him as well and send his washing to the laundry.’ She threw up one of the sash windows and cold, fresh air flooded into the room. ‘I don’t think she does very much. That’s one reason why I didn’t warn her we were coming.’

‘I’m sorry. I – I suppose there was nowhere better available.’

‘Beggars couldn’t be choosers.’ She turned round to face me. ‘There was enough money when I was growing up. My mother was always working and she was good at her job. They were queuing up for her. And Daddy had a little money of his own. Not much, about a hundred a year, I think. They didn’t have pensions or anything like that. I think they more or less lived up to their income.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said awkwardly, because I was English and in those days the English hated talking about money, especially with friends. ‘I quite understand.’

Janet was braver than me, always was. ‘When Mummy was ill, the translation work dried up and they had to live on Daddy’s capital. So what with one thing and another there wasn’t much left when Mummy died.’ She waved her arm. ‘But he had this. He could be independent and he loves Cambridge.’

I said, suddenly understanding, ‘You and David are helping to pay for this, aren’t you?’

She nodded. ‘Only a little.’

‘That’s something,’ I said. ‘You won’t have to any more.’

But I knew as well as she did that they would have to pay for other things now, and in other ways.

John Treevor was still alive and less than twenty miles away in Rosington. Yet as we moved around his flat, sorting his possessions, it was as if he were already dead. His absence had an air of permanence about it.

His possessions dwindled in significance because of this. People lend importance to their possessions and when they’re dead or even absent the importance evaporates. I remember there was a thin layer of grime on the windowsills, dust on the books, holes in most of the socks.

‘It would be much simpler if we could just throw it all away,’ Janet said as she closed the third of the three suitcases we’d brought with us. ‘And what are we going to do about his post? He’s not going to want to write letters.’

While I took the suitcases down to the car, Janet went through the drawers of the desk. When I came back there was a pile of papers on top and she was looking at a photograph, tilting it this way and that in front of the window.

‘Look.’

I took it from her. The photograph was of her when she was not much older than Rosie, a little snapshot taken on the beach. She was in a bathing costume, hugging her knees and staring up at the camera. I handed it back to her.

‘It was before the war. Somewhere like Bexhill or Hastings. We used to go down to Sussex to stay with my grandparents. I thought it was heaven. Daddy taught me to swim one summer, and he used to read me to sleep.’ Her voice was trembling. ‘There was a collection of fairy stories by Andrew Lang, The Yellow Fairy Book. I’d forgotten all about it.’

She foraged for her handkerchief in her handbag and blew her nose.

‘Why did it have to happen to him?’ she said angrily, as though it were my fault. ‘Why couldn’t he just have grown old normally, or even died? This is nothing. It’s neither one thing nor the other.’

I said nothing because there was nothing to say.

Janet left a note for the landlady. I took her out to lunch and afterwards we walked in the pale sunshine through St John’s College and on to the Backs. It wasn’t much of an attempt at consolation but it was the only one I could think of.

Now the decision had been made, David felt there was no point in delay. Over the next few weeks we sold or gave away or threw away two-thirds of the contents of the flat.

Mr Gotobed, the assistant verger, helped David bring the rest of Mr Treevor’s belongings back to the Dark Hostelry. Puffing and grunting, the two men carried some of the furniture – the desk, the chair, the glass-fronted bookcase – up to Mr Treevor’s bedroom to make it seem homely. Janet arranged photographs on the desk, herself and her mother, both in newly cleaned silver frames. She brought her father’s pipe rack and tobacco jar, not that he smoked any more, and put them where they used to stand on his desk.

I’m not sure this was a good idea. One morning, shortly after we’d finished the move, Mr Treevor emerged from the bathroom as I was coming down the stairs from my room. He laid his hand on my arm and looked around as if checking for eavesdroppers.

‘There’s funny things happening in this house,’ he confided. ‘They’ve got the builders in. They’ve been changing my room. It must be at night because I’ve never actually seen them at work. I’ve seen one of them in the hall, though. Furitve-looking chap.’ He padded across the landing towards his room. At the door he glanced back at me.

‘Better keep your eyes skinned, Rosie,’ he hissed. ‘Or there’s no knowing what they’ll get up to. Can’t be too careful. Especially with a pretty girl like you.’

Rosie?

I have to admit the Cathedral came in handy when it was raining. You could walk almost the length of the High Street under cover. Or you could cut across from the north transept to the south door and avoid going right the way round the Cathedral outside. And sometimes if the choir was practising or the organ was playing I’d sit down for a while and listen.

That’s where Peter Hudson found me.

It was raining heavily that morning, silver sheets of icy water sweeping across the Fens from the east. I had been to the Labour Exchange in Market Street. The woman I talked to disapproved of me. Was it my-lipstick? The tightness of my skirt? The fact I’d forgotten to bring my gloves? I suspect she labelled me as louche, dangerously sophisticated and a potential husband-snatcher. Which tells you as much about the competition as it does about me.

At present the Labour Exchange had only two jobs for which I was suitably qualified. They needed someone behind the confectionery counter in Woolworth’s. Or, if I preferred, I could earn rather more if I worked shifts at the canning factory on the outskirts of town. Neither of them had anything to be said for them except money, and there wasn’t much of that on offer either.

I was beginning to think I’d have to go back to London. I didn’t want to do that, partly because I thought Janet needed me but more because I knew I needed her. It wasn’t just the breaking up with Henry. It was as if every mistake I had ever made in my life had come back to haunt me. It was rather like when you leave a hotel and they present you with a bill that’s three times larger than you thought it was going to be.