The Office of the Dead. Andrew Taylor
at Mrs Hyson’s and bought my train ticket. I thought about the cost of Mr Treevor’s taxi from Cambridge, and how having two extra mouths to feed – and in my case water – would affect a household budget.
I drew out a chair and sat down beside her. ‘You’ve been very good to me,’ I said. ‘Both of you, real friends in need. But I shan’t stay long.’
Janet lifted her face. ‘I don’t want you to go. I like having you here. Anyway, where would you go? What would you do?’
‘I’ll find something.’
She shook her head. ‘Not yet. God knows what would happen to you.’
‘Other people manage,’ I said airily.
‘You’re not other people. You’re Wendy. Anyway, what about Henry?’
My heart twisted. ‘What about him?’
‘You don’t think –?’
‘I told you in the letter. It’s over. I’m going to divorce him. He can’t contest it. He only married me for the bit of money I had.’ I rubbed a patch of rough skin on my hand, trying to smooth away the hurt. ‘I caught him making love to another woman and she was the ugliest bitch you’ve ever seen.’
‘Oh, Wendy.’
She took my hand. I stared at them, her hand and mine lying on the scrubbed deal table.
Janet said, ‘You must stay for a while.’
‘Only if you let me pay something. And if you let me help you around the house.’
‘You haven’t got any money.’
‘I’ve got one or two little bits of jewellery.’
‘You’re not to sell them.’
‘Then I’ll have to go.’
We glared at each other. She began to cry. So did I. While we finished laying the table we shared a brief companionable weep. By the time we’d dried our eyes, hugged each other and cleared the draining board we both knew that I would stay.
The first Saturday of my visit was cold but sunny. David took Janet and me up the west tower of the Cathedral. We climbed endless spiral staircases and edged along narrow galleries thick with stone dust. At last he pushed open a tiny door and we crawled out on to an unbearably bright platform of lead.
There was no wind. I swear it was colder and sunnier up there than it had been on the ground. I leaned against one of the walls, which were battlemented like a castle’s. I was gasping for breath because of too many stairs and too many cigarettes.
I looked out. The tower went down like a lift in a horror film. The ground rushed away. I held on to the parapet, the roughness of the stone scouring my hands as I squeezed it more and more tightly.
Below me was the great encrusted hull of the Cathedral and the tiled and slated roofs of Rosington. Around them as far as the eye could see were the grey winter Fens. They stretched towards the invisible point where they became one with the grey winter sky.
For an instant I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. I was adrift between the sky and the earth. All my significance had been stolen from me.
Then Janet put her hand on my arm and said, ‘Look, there’s Canon Osbaston coming out of the Theological College.’ She lowered her voice. ‘If tortoises waddled they’d look just like him.’
In those days Rosington was a small town – perhaps eight or nine thousand people. Technically it was a city because it had a cathedral, so its sense of importance was out of proportion to its size. It was also an island set in the black sea of the Fens, a place apart, a place of refuge. It was certainly a place of refuge for me. Even if he wanted to, Henry would hardly follow me to the town where he had made such a fool of himself.
David told me that in the Middle Ages the Isle of Rosington was largely surrounded by water. It was a liberty, almost a County Palatine, in which the abbots who preceded the bishops wielded much of the authority usually reserved for the king. Here the Saxons made one of their last stands against the invading armies of the Normans.
The city still felt a place under siege. And the Cathedral Close, a city within a city, was doubly under siege because the town around it nibbled away at its rights and privileges. The Close was an ecclesiastical domain, older than the secular one surrounding it, and conducted according to different laws. Its gates were locked at night by an assistant verger named Gotobed who lived beside the Porta with his mother and her cats.
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 dock 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