The Office of the Dead. Andrew Taylor
mountain. The wind brought tears to my eyes. A tall clergyman was climbing into a tall, old-fashioned car. He glanced at me with flat, incurious eyes.
Before I went to Rosington I didn’t know any priests. They were there to be laughed at on stage and screen, avoided like the plague at parties, and endured at weddings and funerals of the more traditional sort. After Rosington, all that changed. Priests became people. I could believe in them.
I wasn’t any nearer believing in God, mind you. A girl has her pride. Sometimes, though, I wish I could think that it was all for the best in the long run. That God had a plan we could follow or not follow, as we chose. That when bad things happened they were due to evil, and that even evil had a place in God’s inscrutable but essentially benevolent plan.
It’s nonsense. Why should we matter to anyone, least of all to an omnipotent god whose existence is entirely hypothetical? I still think that Henry got it right. It was one evening in Durban, and we were having a philosophical discussion over our second or third nightcaps.
‘Let’s face it, old girl,’ he said, ‘it’s as if we’re adrift on the ocean in a boat without oars. Not much we can do except drink the rum ration.’
At Rosington station, I watched the clergyman’s car driving up the hill into the darkening February afternoon. I waited a few more minutes for Janet. I went back into the station and phoned the house. Nobody answered.
So there was nothing for it but one of the station taxis. I told the driver to take me to the Dark Hostelry in the Close. In one of her letters, Janet said someone told her that in the Middle Ages, when Rosington was a monastery, the Dark Hostelry was where visiting Benedictine monks would stay. The ‘Dark’ came from the black habits of the order.
The taxi took me up the hill and through the great gateway, the Porta, and into the Close. I saw small boys in caps and shorts and grey mackintoshes. Perhaps they were at the Choir School. None of the boys would remember Henry. Six years is a long time in the life of a school.
We followed the road round the east end of the Cathedral and stopped outside a small gate in a high wall. I didn’t ask the driver to carry in my suitcase – it would have meant a larger tip. I pushed open the gate in the wall, and that’s when I saw Rosie playing hopscotch.
‘And what’s your name?’ I asked.
‘I’m nobody.’
Rosie wasn’t wearing a coat. There she was in February playing outside and wearing sandals and a dress, not even a cardigan. The light was beginning to go. Some children don’t feel the cold.
‘Nobody?’ I said. ‘I’m sure that’s not right. I bet you’re really somebody. Somebody in disguise.’
‘I’m nobody. That’s my name.’
‘Nobody’s called nobody.’
‘I am.’
‘Why?’
‘Because nobody’s perfect.’
And so she was. Perfect. I thought, Henry, you bastard, we could have had this.
I called after Rosie as she skipped down the path towards the house. ‘Rosie! I’m Auntie Wendy.’
I felt a fool saying that. Auntie Wendy sounded like a character in a children’s story, the sort my mother would have liked.
‘Can you tell Mummy I’m here?’
Rosie opened the door and skipped into the house. I picked up my case and followed. I was relieved because Janet must have come back. She wouldn’t have left a child that age alone.
The house was part of a terrace. I had a confused impression of buttresses, the irregular line of high-pitched roofs against a grey velvet skyline, and small deeply recessed windows. At the door I put down my case and looked for the bell. There were panes of glass set in the upper panels and I could see the hall stretching into the depths of the building. Rosie had vanished. Irregularities in the glass gave the interior a green tinge and made it ripple like Rosie’s hair.
A brass bell pull was recessed into the jamb of the door. I tugged it and hoped that a bell was jangling at the far end of the invisible wire. There was no way of knowing. You just had to have faith, not a state of mind that came easily to me at any time. I tried again, wondering if I should have used another door. The skin prickled on the back of my neck at the possibility of embarrassment. I waited a little longer. Someone must be there with the child. I opened the door and a smell of damp rose to meet me. The level of the floor was a foot below the garden.
‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’
My voice had an unfamiliar echo to it, as though I had spoken in a church. I stepped down into the hall. It felt colder inside than out. A clock ticked. I heard light footsteps running above my head. There was a click as a door opened, then another silence, somehow different in quality from the one before.
Then the screaming began.
There’s something about a child’s screams that makes the heart turn over. I dropped the suitcase. Some part of my mind registered the fact that the lock had burst open in the impact of the fall, that my hastily packed belongings, the debris of my life with Henry, were spilling over the floor of the hall. I ran up a flight of shallow stairs and found myself on a long landing.
The door at the end was open. I saw Rosie’s back, framed in the doorway. She wasn’t screaming any more. She was standing completely still. Her arms hung stiffly by her sides as though they were no longer jointed at the elbows.
‘Rosie! Rosie!’
I walked quickly down the landing and seized her by the shoulders. I spun her round and hugged her face into my belly. Her body was hard and unyielding. She felt like a doll, not a child. There was another scream. This one was mine.
The room was furnished as a bedroom. It smelled of Brylcreem and peppermints. There were two mullioned windows. One of them must have been open a crack because I heard the sound of traffic passing and people talking in the street below. At times like that, the mind soaks up memories like a sponge. Often you don’t know what’s there until afterwards, when you give the sponge a squeeze and you see what trickles out.
At the time I was aware only of the man on the floor. He lay on his back between the bed and the doorway. He wore charcoal-grey flannel trousers, brown brogues and an olive-green, knitted waistcoat over a white shirt with a soft collar. A tweed jacket and a striped tie were draped over a chair beside the bed. His left hand was resting on his belly. His right hand was lying palm upwards on the floor, the fingers loosely curled round the dark bone handle of a carving knife. There was blood on the blade, blood on his neck and blood on his shirt and waistcoat. His horn-rimmed glasses had fallen off. Blue eyes stared up at the ceiling. His hair was greyer and scantier than when I’d seen it last, and his face was thinner, but I recognized him right away. It was Janet’s father.
‘Come away, Rosie,’ I muttered, ‘come away. Grandpa’s sleeping. We’ll go downstairs and wait for Mummy.’
As if my words were a signal, Mr Treevor blinked. His eyes focused on the two of us in the doorway.
‘Fooled you,’ he said, and then he began to laugh.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Janet was brushing Rosie’s hair. The bristles caught in a tangle, and Janet began carefully to tease it out. ‘He just arrived.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
‘Oh, but it does.’ Her eyes met mine, then returned to the shining hair. ‘The doorbell rang at half past three and there he was. He’d come all the way from Cambridge in a taxi.’
Rosie was sitting on a stool on the hearthrug, her back straight,