The Office of the Dead Page 3

  ‘Yes, but –’

  Yes, but isn’t it rather expensive? And what shall I wear?

  ‘Good. How about twelve forty-five in the lounge?’

  There was just time for me to go home, deal with my mother’s curiosity (‘A friend of Janet’s, Mother, no one you know’), change into clothes more suitable for the Metropole and reach the hotel five minutes early. It was a large, shabby place, built to impress at the end of the century. I had never been inside it before. Only the prospect of Henry gave me the courage to do so now. I sat, marooned by my own embarrassment, among the potted palms and the leather armchairs, trying to avoid meeting the eyes of hotel staff. Time moved painfully onwards. After five minutes I was convinced that everyone was looking at me, and convinced that he would not come. Then suddenly Henry was leaning over me, his lips brushing my cheek and making me blush.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ He wasn’t – I’d been early. ‘Let’s have a drink before we order.’

  Henry wasn’t good-looking in a conventional way or in any way at all. At that time he was in his late twenties but he looked older. He was wearing a grey double-breasted suit. I didn’t know much about men’s tailoring but I persuaded myself that it was what my mother used to call a ‘good’ suit. His collar was faintly grubby, but in this city collars grew dirty very quickly.

  Once the dry martinis had been ordered he didn’t beat about the bush. ‘I expect you’ve heard my news from Janet?’

  ‘That you’ve – you’ve left the Choir School?’

  ‘They gave me the push, Wendy. Without a reference. You heard why?’

  I nodded and stared at my hands, not wanting to see the shame in his eyes.

  ‘The irony was, the damn horse won.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I knew it would. I could have repaid them five times over. Still, I shouldn’t have done it. You live and learn, eh?’

  ‘But what will you do now?’

  ‘Well, teaching’s out. No references, you see, the headmaster made that very clear. It’s a shame, actually – I like teaching. The Choir School was a bit stuffy, of course. But I used to teach at a place in Hampshire that was great fun – a prep school called Veedon Hall. It’s owned by a couple called Cuthbertson who actually like little boys.’ For an instant the laughter vanished and wistfulness passed like a shadow over his face. Then he grinned across the table. ‘Still, one must look at this as an opportunity. I think I might go into business.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Investments, perhaps. Stockbroking. There’s a lot of openings. But don’t let’s talk about that now. It’s too boring. I want to talk about you.’

  So that’s what we did, on and off, for the next four months. Not just about me. Henry wooed my mother as well and persuaded her to talk to him. We both received the flowers and the boxes of chocolates. I don’t know whether my mother had loved my father, but certainly she missed him when he was no longer there. She also missed what he had done around the house and garden. Here was an opportunity for Henry.

  He had the knack of giving the impression he was helping without in fact doing very much. ‘Let me,’ he’d say, but in fact you’d end up doing the job yourself or else it wouldn’t get done at all. Not that you minded, because you somehow felt that Henry had taken the burden from your shoulders. I think he genuinely felt he was helping.

  Even now it makes me feel slightly queasy to remember the details of our courtship. I wanted romance and Henry gave it to me. Meanwhile he must have discovered – while helping my mother with her papers – that my father’s estate, including the house and the shop, was worth almost fifty thousand pounds. It was left in trust to my mother for her lifetime and would afterwards come to me.

  All this makes me sound naive and stupid, and Henry calculating and mercenary. Both are true. But they are not the whole truth or anything like it. I don’t think you can pin down a person with a handful of adjectives.

  Why bother with the details? My father’s executor distrusted Henry but he couldn’t stop us marrying. All he could do was prevent Henry from getting his hands on the capital my father left until after my mother’s death when it became mine absolutely.

  We were married in a registry office on Wednesday the 4th of May, 1953. Janet and David sent us a coffee set of white bone china but were unable to come in person because Janet was heavily pregnant with Rosie.

  At first we lived in Bradford, which was not a success. After my mother died we sold the house and went briefly to London and then to South Africa in pursuit of the good life. We found it for a while. Henry formed a sort of partnership with a persuasive businessman named Grady. But Grady went bankrupt and we returned to England poorer and perhaps wiser. Nevertheless, it would be easy to forget that Henry and I had good times. When he was enjoying life then so did you.

  All things considered, the money lasted surprisingly well. Henry worked as a sort of stockbroker, sometimes by himself, sometimes with partners. If it hadn’t been for Grady he might still be doing it. He once told me it was like going to the races with other people’s money. He was in fact rather good at persuading people to give him their money to invest. Occasionally he even made them a decent profit.

  ‘Swings and roundabouts, I’m afraid,’ I heard him say dozens of times to disappointed clients. ‘What goes up, must come down.’

  So why did his clients trust him? Because he made them laugh, I think, and because he so evidently believed he was going to make their fortunes.

  So why did I stay with him for so long?

  It was partly because I came to like many of the things he did. Still do, actually. You soon get a taste for big hotels, fast cars and parties. I liked the touch of fur against my skin and the way diamonds sparkled by candlelight. I liked dancing and flirting and taking one or two risks. I occasionally helped Henry attract potential clients, and even that could be fun. ‘Let’s have some old widow,’ he’d say when things were going well for us, and suddenly there would be another bottle of Veuve Clicquot and another toast to us, to the future.

  When Henry met me I was a shy, gawky girl. He rescued me from Harewood Drive and gave me confidence in myself. I think I stayed with him partly because I was afraid that without him I would lose all I had gained.

  Most of all, though, I stayed because I liked Henry. I suppose I loved him, though I’m not sure what that means. But when things were going well between us, it was the most wonderful thing in the world. Even better than dry martinis and the old widow.

  Letters continued to travel between Janet and me. They were proper ones – long and chatty. I didn’t say much about Henry and she didn’t say much about David. A common theme was our plans to meet. Once or twice we managed to snatch a day in London together. But we never went to stay with each other. Somehow there were always reasons why visits had to be delayed.

  We were always on the move. Henry never liked settling in one place for any length of time. When he was feeling wealthy we rented flats or stayed in hotels. When money was tight, we went into furnished rooms.

  But I was going to spend a few days with Janet and David in Rosington after Easter 1957. Just me, of course – Henry had to go away on what he called a business trip, and in any case he didn’t want to go back to Rosington. Too many people knew why he’d left.

  I’d even done my packing. Then the day before I was due to go, a telegram arrived. Mrs Treevor had had a massive heart attack. Once again the visit was postponed. She died three days later. Then there was the funeral, and then the business of settling Mr Treevor into a flat in Cambridge. Janet wrote that her father was finding it hard to cope since her mother’s death.

  So we continued to write letters instead. Despite her mother’s death, it seemed to me that Janet had found her fairy tale. She sent me photographs of Rosie, as a baby and then as a little girl. Rosie had her mother’s colouring and her father’s features. It was obvious that she too was perfect, just like David and the Dark Hostelry.

  Life’s so bloody un
subtle sometimes. It was all too easy to contrast Janet’s existence with mine. But you carry on, don’t you, even when your life is more like one long hangover than one long party. You think, what else is there to do?

  But there was something else. There had to be, as I found out on a beach one sunny day early in October 1957. Henry and I were staying at a hotel in the West Country. We weren’t on holiday – a potential client lived in the neighbourhood, a wealthy widow.

  It was a fine afternoon, warm as summer, and I went out after lunch while Henry went off to a meeting. I wandered aimlessly along the beach, a Box Brownie swinging from my hand, trying to walk off an incipient hangover. I rounded the corner of a little rocky headland and there they were, Henry and the widow, lying on a rug.

  She was an ugly woman with a moustache and fat legs. I had a very good view of the legs because her dress was up around her thighs and Henry was bouncing around on top of her. His bottom was bare and for a moment I watched the fatty pear-shaped cheeks trembling. The widow was still wearing her shoes, which were navy-blue and high-heeled, surprisingly dainty. I wouldn’t have minded a pair of shoes like that. I remember wondering how she could have walked across the sand in such high heels, and whether she realized that sea water would ruin the leather.

  I had never seen Henry from this point of view before. I knew he was vain, and hated the fact that he was growing older. (He secretly touched up his grey hairs with black dye.) The wobbling flesh was wrinkled and flabby. Henry was getting old, and so was I. It was the first moment in my life when I realized that time was running out for me personally as well as for other people and the planet.

  Maybe it was the alcohol but I felt removed from the situation, capable of considering it as an abstract problem. I walked towards them, my bare feet soundless on the sand. I crouched a few yards away from the shuddering bodies. Suddenly they realized they were not alone. Simultaneously they turned their heads to look at me, the widow with her legs raised and those pretty shoes in the air.

  Still in that state of alcoholic transcendence, I had the sense to raise the Box Brownie and press the shutter.

  6

  I don’t keep many photographs. I am afraid of nostalgia. You can drown in dead emotions.

  Among the photographs I have thrown away is the shot of Henry bouncing on his widow on the beach. I knew at once that it could be valuable, that it meant I could divorce Henry without any trouble. At the time, the remarkable thing was how little the end of the marriage seemed to matter. Perhaps, I thought as I took the film out of the camera, perhaps it was never really a marriage at all, just a mutually convenient arrangement which had now reached a mutually convenient end.

  I still have a snap of us by the pool in somebody’s back garden in Durban with Henry sucking in his tummy and me showing what at the time seemed a daring amount of naked flesh. There’s just the two of us in the photograph, but it’s obvious from the body language that Henry and I aren’t a couple in any meaningful sense of the word. Obvious with twenty-twenty hindsight, anyway.

  In my letters to Janet I had been honest about everything except Henry. I didn’t conceal the fact that money was sometimes tight, or even that I was drinking too much. But I referred to Henry with wifely affection. ‘Must close now – His Nibs has just come in, and he wants his tea. He sends his love, as do I.’

  It was pride. Janet had her Mr Perfect and I wanted mine, or at least the illusion of him. But I think I’d known the marriage was in trouble before the episode with the widow. What I saw on the beach merely confirmed it.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ I said to Henry when he came back to our room in the hotel. By the smell of him he’d fortified himself in the bar downstairs.

  ‘Wendy – please. Can’t we –?’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  ‘Darling. Listen to me. I –’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, his opposition crumbling with humiliating speed. ‘As soon as you like.’

  I felt sober now and I had a headache. I had found the bottle of black hair dye hidden as usual in one of the pockets of his suitcase. It was empty now. I’d poured the contents over his suits and shirts.

  ‘No hard feelings,’ I lied. ‘I’ll let you have some money.’

  He looked across the room at me and smiled rather sadly. ‘What money?’

  ‘You know something?’ I said. ‘When I saw you on top of that cow, your bum was wobbling around all over the place. It was like an old man’s. The skin looked as if it needed ironing.’

  In the four months after I found Henry doing physical jerks on top of his widow, I wrote to Janet less often than usual. I sent her a lot of postcards. Henry and I were moving around, I said, which was true. Except, of course, we weren’t moving around together. In a sense I spent those four months pretending to myself and everyone else that everything was normal. I didn’t want to leave my rut even if Henry was no longer in there with me.

  Eventually the money ran low and I made up my mind I had to do something. I came back to London. It was February now, and the city was grey and dank. I found a solicitor in the phone book. His name was Fielder, and the thing I remember most about him was the ill-fitting toupee whose colour did not quite match his natural hair. He had an office in Praed Street above a hardware shop near the junction with Edgware Road.

  I went to see him, explained the situation and gave him the address of Henry’s solicitor. I told him about the photograph but didn’t show it to him, and I mentioned my mother’s money too. He said he’d see what he could do and made an appointment for me the following week.

  Time crawled while I waited. I had too much to think about and not enough to do. When the day came round, I went back to Fielder’s office.

  ‘Well, Mrs Appleyard, things are moving now.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards me. ‘The wheels are turning. Time for a fresh start, eh?’

  I opened the sheet of paper. It was a bill.

  ‘Just for interim expenses, Mrs Appleyard. No point in letting them mount up.’

  ‘What does my husband’s solicitor say?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem there.’ Mr Fielder patted his face with a grubby handkerchief. He wore a brown double-breasted pinstripe suit which encased him like a suit of armour and looked thick enough for an Arctic winter. There were drops of moisture on his forehead, and his neck bulged over his tight, hard collar. ‘Yes, a bit of a problem.’

  ‘Do you mean there isn’t any money?’

  ‘I did have a reply from Mr Appleyard’s solicitor.’ Fielder scrabbled among the papers on his desk for a few seconds and then gave up the search. ‘The long and the short of it is that Mr Appleyard told him your joint assets no longer seem to exist.’

  ‘But there must be something left. Can’t we take him to court?’

  ‘We could, Mrs Appleyard, we could. But we’d have to find him first. Unfortunately Mr Appleyard seems to have left the country. In confidence I may tell you he hasn’t even settled his own solicitor’s bill.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Not a desirable state of affairs at all. Not at all. Which reminds me …?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ I opened my handbag and dropped the bill into it.

  ‘Of course. And then we’ll carry on in Mr Appleyard’s absence. It should be quite straightforward.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘By the way, your husband left a letter for you care of his solicitor. I have it here.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘Then what would you like me to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t care. Put it in the wastepaper basket.’ My voice sounded harsh, more Bradford than Hillgard House. ‘I don’t mean to seem rude, Mr Fielder, but I don’t think he has anything to say that I want to hear.’

  Walking back to my room along the crowded pavement I wanted to blame Fielder. He had been inefficient, he had been corrupt, but even then I knew neither of these things were true. I just wanted to blame somebody for the mess my life was in. Henry wa
s my preferred candidate but he wasn’t available. So I had to focus my anger on poor Fielder. Before I reached my room, I’d invented at least three cutting curtain lines I might have used, and also constructed a satisfying fantasy which ended with him in the dock at the Old Bailey with myself as the chief prosecution witness. Fantasies reveal the infant that lives within us all. Which is why they’re dangerous because the usual social constraints don’t operate on infants.

  When I went into the house, Mrs Hyson, the landlady, opened the kitchen door a crack and peered at me, but said nothing. I ate dry bread and elderly cheese in my room for lunch to save money. I kept on my overcoat to postpone putting a shilling in the gas meter. Since leaving Henry I had lived on the contents of my current account at the bank and my Post Office Savings Account, a total of about two hundred pounds, and by selling a fur coat and one or two pieces of jewellery.

  I wasn’t even sure I could afford to divorce Henry. First I needed to find a job but I was not trained to do anything. I was twenty-six years old and completely unemployable. There were relations in Leeds – a couple of aunts I hadn’t seen for years and cousins I’d never met. Even if I could track them down there was no reason why they should help me. That’s when I opened my writing case and began the letter to Janet.

  Looking back, I think I must have been very near a nervous breakdown when I wrote that letter. It’s more than forty years ago now, but I can still remember how the panic welled up. The certainties were gone. In the past I’d always known what to do next. I often didn’t want to do it but that was not the point. What had counted was the fact the future was mapped out. I’d also taken for granted there would be a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food on the table. But now I had nothing.

  I looked for the letter after Janet’s death and was glad I could not find it. I hope she destroyed it. I cannot remember exactly what I told her, though I would have kept nothing back except perhaps my envy of her. What I do remember is how I felt while I was writing that letter in the chilly little room in Paddington. I felt I was trying to swim in a black sea. The waves were so rough and my waterlogged clothes weighed me down. I was drowning.