The Office of the Dead. Andrew Taylor
be suitable. I’ve never done anything like this before.’
He beamed across the table. ‘Personally I’ve never found that a good reason not to do something.’
Hudson was persistent, even wily. He proposed I try my hand after lunch at half a dozen of the books under his supervision. If the results were satisfactory to me and to him then he suggested a trial period of a week, for which he would pay me three pounds, ten shillings. If we were both happy after this, the job would continue until the work was finished. All it needed, he said, was application and intelligence, and he was quite sure I had both of those.
The week passed, then another, then a third. It was easier to carry on with it than to try to explain to Hudson yet again why I wasn’t suitable. The money was useful, too. I worked methodically round the room, from bookcase to bookcase. I did not move any of the books except when reuniting volumes belonging to a set. I used five-by-three index cards for the catalogue. On each card I recorded the author, the title, the publisher and the date. I added a number which corresponded to the shelf where the book was to be found and I added any other points which seemed to me to be of interest such as the name of the editor, if there was one, or the name of the series or whether the book contained one of Dean Pellew’s bookplates, and had therefore been part of the original endowment.
It was surprisingly dirty work. On my first full day I got through several dusters and had to wash my hands at least half a dozen times. At Janet’s suggestion, I bought some white cotton dusting gloves.
I reserved a separate table for the books which were in any way problematical. One of these was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I found halfway through my second week sheltering in the shadow of Cruden’s Concordance. I flicked through the pages, feeling guilty but failing to find anything obscene. So I borrowed it to read properly, telling my conscience that it wouldn’t matter two hoots to Hudson if I found it today or next week.
I watched the cards expanding, inching across the old shoebox I kept them in until that shoebox was full and Canon Hudson found me another. My speed improved as I went on. The first time I managed to dust and catalogue fifty books in a single day, I went to the baker’s and bought chocolate eclairs. Janet and Rosie and I ate them round the kitchen table to celebrate the achievement. As time went by, too, I needed to refer fewer and fewer queries to Canon Hudson.
At first he came in once a day to see how I was getting on. Then it became once every two or three days or even longer. There was pleasure in that too.
‘You’ve got a naturally orderly mind, Wendy,’ he told me one day towards the end of April. ‘That’s a rarity.’
Henry would have laughed at the thought of me in a Cathedral Library. But the job was a lifeline at a time when I could easily have drowned. I thought it came to me because of the kindness of Canon Hudson, and because I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Years later I found out there was a little more to it.
It was in the early 1970s. I met June Hudson at a wedding. I said how much the job in the Cathedral Library had helped me, despite everything, and how grateful I was to her husband for offering it to me.
‘It’s Peter who was grateful to you, my dear. At one point he thought he’d have to catalogue all those wretched books himself. Anyway, if anyone deserves thanking it ought to be Janet Byfield.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was her idea. She had a word with me and asked if I would suggest you to Peter. She said she hadn’t mentioned it to you in case it didn’t come off. But I assumed she’d have said something afterwards.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She never did.’
That increased my debt to Janet. I wish I knew how you pay your debts to the dead.
Then there was the business about the bishop’s invitation. It was delivered by hand through the letter-flap from the High Street while Janet and I were having tea in the kitchen. She ripped open the envelope, which had the arms of the see on the back, read the note from Mrs Bish and pushed it across the table to me. She had asked the Byfields to dinner.
‘That means he’s asked us,’ Janet explained. ‘David will be pleased.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He was the Suffragan Bishop of Knightsbridge before he came here.’ Janet blushed as she usually did when she was going to say something unkind. ‘And some people say he was better at the Knightsbridge part than the bishop part.’
‘You mean he’s a snob?’
On that occasion she wouldn’t say more. But after meeting the bishop once or twice I knew exactly what she meant. Like so many people in those days, he secretly felt that the Church should be a profession confined to gentlemen. His chaplain was a young man named Gervase Haselbury-Finch, who looked like Rupert Brooke and had a titled father, qualifications which as far as the bishop was concerned made up for his lack of organizational abilities. I don’t mean to imply there was anything improper about the bishop’s behaviour, not in the sense that makes tabloid headlines. He was married and had three grown-up children.
‘The bishop likes to have little chats with David,’ Janet went on. ‘He says things like, “I’m expecting great things of you, my boy.” He’s very much in favour of keeping the Theo. Coll. going and he thinks that David would make a marvellous principal. So that’s something in our favour. A very big something.’
‘Is that how they choose someone?’ I said. ‘Because the bish likes their face?’
‘Well, there’s more to it than that. Obviously. But it helps.’
‘It’s not exactly fair.’
She made a sour face. ‘The Church isn’t. Not always.’
‘It’s like something out of the Middle Ages.’
‘That’s exactly what it is. You can’t expect it to behave like a democracy.’
Later that evening we discussed the invitation over supper. David already knew about it because he had met the bishop at evensong. The only other people invited were the Master of Jerusalem and his wife. It turned out that the bishop had been at Jerusalem College too.
‘I haven’t anything to wear,’ Janet said.
‘Of course you have.’ David smiled at her. ‘Wear what you wore for the Hudsons. You’ll look lovely.’
‘I always wear that.’
‘They’ll notice your face not your dress.’
‘Your mother had a very pretty dress at our engagement party,’ Mr Treevor put in. ‘I wonder if she’s still got it. Why don’t you ask her? Are there any more baked beans?’
Afterwards David took his coffee to the study and Mr Treevor went upstairs. Janet shook a small avalanche of powdered Dreft into the sink and turned on the tap so hard that water sprayed over the front of her pinafore and on to the tiled floor.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
‘It’ll be ghastly. They’ll make me feel like a poor little church mouse. I can never think of anything to say to the bishop. He pretends I must be frightfully intellectual because he’s read some of Mummy’s translations. So he tries to have conversations about the theme of redemption in Dostoevsky’s novels and the irrationality of existentialism. It’s dreadful. Meanwhile the women look at my shoes and wonder why they clash with my handbag.’
‘Don’t go,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to. David will be so upset if I don’t. The bishop wants me to come, you see, and the bishop’s word is law. And what about you?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’d much rather stay at home.’
I