ANDREW TAYLOR
THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD
COPYRIGHT
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
Harper HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Andrew Taylor 1999
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013 Cover photography © Mark Pennington
Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006496557
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007502035
Version: 20190225
DEDICATION
For Vivien, with love and thanks
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I: The Door in the Wall
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part II: The Close
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
Part III: The Blue Dahlia
44
45
46
47
48
49
Keep Reading
About the Author
Authors Note
Praise
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
PART I1
Im nobody, Rosie said.
It was the first thing she said to me. Id just pushed open the door in the wall and there she was. She wore red sandals and a cotton dress, cream-coloured with tiny blue flowers embroidered on the bodice, and there were blue ribbons in her blonde hair. The ribbons and flowers matched her eyes. She was very tidy, like the garden, like everything that was Janets.
I knew she was Rosie because of the snapshots Janet had sent. But I asked her name because thats what you do when you meet a child, to break the ice. Names matter. Names are hard to forget.
Nobody? Im sure thats not right. I put down the suitcase on the path and crouched to bring my head down to her level. I bet youre really somebody. Somebody in disguise.
Im nobody. Her face wasnt impatient, just firm. Thats my name.
Nobodys called nobody.
She folded her arms across her chest, making a cross of flesh and bone. I am.
Why?
Because nobodys perfect.
She turned and hopped up the path. I straightened up and watched her. Rosie was playing hopscotch but without a stone and with an invisible pattern of her own making. Hop, both legs, hop, both legs. Instead of turning to face me, though, she carried on to the half-glazed door set in the wall of the house. The soles of her sandals slapped on the flagstones like slow applause. Each time she landed, on one foot or two, the jolt ran through her body and sent ripples through her hair.
I felt the stab of envy, almost anger, sharp as John Treevors knife. Nobody was beautiful. Oh yes, I thought, nobodys perfect. Nobodys the child I always wanted, the child Henry never gave me.
Id been trying not to think about Henry for days, for weeks. For a moment his face was more vivid than Rosie and the house. I wished I could kill him. I wished I could roll up Henry and everything else that had ever happened to me into a small, dark, hard ball and throw it into the deepest, darkest corner of the Pacific Ocean.
Later, in one of those fragmentary but intense conversations we had when Janet was ill, I tried to explain this to David.
Wendy, you cant hide away from the past, he said. You cant pretend it isnt there, that it doesnt matter.
Why not? I was a little drunk at the time and I spoke more loudly than Id planned. If you ask me, theres something pathetic about people who live in the past. Its over and done with.
Its never that. Not until you are. It is you.
Dont lecture me, David. I smiled sweetly at him and blew cigarette smoke into his face. Im not one of your bloody students.
But of course he was right. That was one thing that really irritated me about David, that so often he was right. He was such an arrogant bastard that you wanted him to be wrong. And in the end, when he was so terribly wrong, I couldnt even gloat. I just felt sorry for him. I suppose he wasnt very good at being right about himself.
Nobodys perfect.
2
When I was young, the people around me were proud of their pasts, and proud of the places where they lived.
My parents were born and bred in Bradford. Bradford was superior to all other towns in almost every possible way, from its town hall to its department stores, from its philanthropists to its rain. Similarly, my parents were quietly confident that Yorkshire, Gods Own County, outshone all other counties. We lived in a tree-lined suburb at 93, Harewood Drive, in a semi-detached house with four bedrooms, a Tudor garage and a grandfather clock in the hall.
My father owned a jewellers shop in York Street. The business had been established by his father, and he carried it on without enthusiasm. He had two interests in life and both of them were at home his vegetable garden and my brothers.
Howard and Peter were twins, ten years older than me. They were always huge, semi-divine beings who took very little notice of me, and they always will be. I find it very hard to recall what they looked like.
You must remember something about them, Janet said in one of our heart-to-hearts at school.
They played cricket. When I think about them, I always smell linseed oil.
Didnt they ever talk to you? Do things with you?
I remember Peter laughing at me because I thought Hitler was the name of the greengrocers near the station. And one of them told me to shut up when I fell over on the path by the back door and started crying.
Janet said wistfully, You make it sound as if youre better off without them.
Thats something Ill never know. When I was ten, they were both killed, Peter when his ship went down in the Atlantic, and Howard in North Africa. The news reached my parents in the same week. After that, in memory, the house was always dark as though the blinds were down, the curtains drawn. The big sitting room at the back of the house became a shrine to the dear departed. Everywhere you looked there were photographs of Peter and Howard. There were one or two of me as well but they were in the darkest corner of the room, standing on a bookcase containing books that nobody read and china that nobody used.
Even as a child, I noticed my father changed after their deaths. He shrank inside his skin. His stoop became more pronounced. He spent more and more time in the garden, digging furiously. I realized later that at this time he lost interest in the business. Before it had been his duty to nurse it along for Peter and Howard. Without them the shops importance was reduced. He still went into town every day, still earned enough to pay the bills. But the shop no longer mattered to him. He no longer had any pride in it. I dont think he even had much pride in Bradford any more.
In my fathers world girls werent important. We were needed to bear sons and look after the house. We were also needed as other mens objects of desire so the men in question would buy us jewellery at the shop in York Street. We even had our uses as sales assistants and cleaners in the shop because my father could pay us less than he paid our male equivalents. But he hadnt any use for a daughter.
My mother was different. My birth was an accident, I think, perhaps the result of an uncharacteristically unguarded moment after a Christmas party. She was forty when I was born so she might have thought she was past it. But she wanted a daughter. The problem was, she didnt want the sort of daughter I was. She wanted a daughter like Janet.
My mothers daughter should have looked at knitting patterns with her and liked pretty clothes. Instead she had one who acquired rude words like cats acquire fleas and who wanted to build streams at the bottom of the garden.
It was a pity we had so little in common. She needed me, and I needed her, but the needs werent compatible. The older I got, the more obvious this became to us both. And thats how I came to meet Janet.
I suspect my father wanted me out of the house because I was an unwelcome distraction. My mother wanted me to learn how to be a lady so we could talk together about dressmaking and menus, so that I would attract and marry a nice young man, so that I would present her with a second family of perfect grandchildren.
My mother cried when she said goodbye to me at the station. I can still see the tears glittering like snail trails through the powder on her cheeks and clogging the dry ravines of her wrinkles. She loved me, you see, and I loved her. But we never found out how to be comfortable with one another.
So off I went to boarding school. It was wartime, remember, and Id never been away from my parents before, except for three months at the beginning of the war when everyone thought the Germans would bomb our cities to smithereens.
This was different. The train hissed and clanked through a darkened world for what seemed like weeks. I was nominally in the charge of an older girl, one of the monitors at Hillgard House, whose grandmother lived a few miles north of Bradford. She spent the entire journey flirting with a succession of soldiers. The first time she accepted one of their cigarettes, she bent down to me and said, If you tell a soul about this, Ill make you wish youd never been born.
It was January, and the cold and the darkness made everything worse. We changed trains four times. Each train seemed smaller and more crowded than its predecessor. At last the monitor went to the lavatory, and when she came back shed washed the make-up off her face. She was a pink, shiny-faced schoolgirl now. We left the train at the next stop, a country station shrouded in the blackout and full of harsh sounds I did not understand. It was as if Id stepped out of the steamy, smoky carriage into the darkness of a world that hadnt been born.
Someone, a man, said, Theres three more of you in the waiting room. Enough for a taxi now.
The monitor seized her suitcase in one hand and me with the other and dragged me into the waiting room. That was where I first saw Janet Treevor. Sandwiched between two larger girls, she was crying quietly into a lace-edged handkerchief. As we came in, she looked up and for an instant our eyes met. She was the most beautiful person Id ever seen.
Is that a new bug too? the monitor demanded.
One of the other girls nodded. Hasnt turned off the waterworks since we left London, she said. But apart from the blubbing, she seems quite harmless.
The monitor pushed me towards the bench. Go on, Wendy, she said. You might as well sit by her. She watched me as I walked across the room, dragging my suitcase after me. At least this ones not a bloody blubber.
I have always loathed my name. Wendy sums up everything my mother wanted and everything Im not. My mother loved Peter Pan. When I was eight, it was that years Christmas pantomime. I sat hugely embarrassed through the performance while my mother wept happy tears beside me, the salty water falling into the box of chocolates open on her lap. They say that James Barrie invented the name for the daughter of a friend. First he called her Friendy. Then with gruesome inevitability this became Friendy-Wendy. Finally it mutated into Wendy, and the dreadful old man left it as part of his legacy to posterity in general and me in particular. The only character I liked in his beastly story was Captain Hook.