Читать книгу The Office of the Dead - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 9

I had never known a family like Janet’s. Perhaps they didn’t breed people like the Treevors in Bradford.

For a long time our friendship was something that belonged to school alone. Our lives at home were something separate. I know that I was ashamed of mine. I imagined Janet’s family to be lordly, beautiful, refined. I knew they would be startlingly intelligent, just as Janet was. Her father was serving in the army, but before the war he had lectured about literature and written for newspapers. Janet’s mother had a high-powered job in a government department. I never found out exactly what she did but it must have been something to do with translating – she was fluent in French, German and Russian and had a working knowledge of several other languages.

In the summer of 1944 the Treevors rented a cottage near Stratford for a fortnight. Janet asked if I would like to join them. My mother was very excited because I was mixing with ‘nice’ people.

I was almost ill with apprehension. In fact I needn’t have worried. Mr and Mrs Treevor spent most of the holiday working in a bedroom which they appropriated as a study, or visiting friends in the area. John Treevor was a thin man with a large nose and a bulging forehead. At the time I assumed the bulge was needed to contain the extra brain cells. Occasionally he patted Janet on the head and once he asked me if I was enjoying myself but did not wait to hear my answer.

I remember Mrs Treevor better because she explained the facts of life to us. Janet and I had watched a litter of kittens being born at the farm next door. Janet asked her mother whether humans ever had four at a time. This led to a concise lecture on sex, pregnancy and childbirth. Mrs Treevor talked to us as if we were students and the subject were mathematics. I dared not look at her face while she was talking, and I felt myself blushing.

Later, in the darkness of our shared bedroom, Janet said, ‘Can you imagine how they …?’

‘No. I can’t imagine mine, either.’

‘It’s horrible.’

‘Do you think they did it with the light on?’

‘They’d need to see what they were doing, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, but just think what they’d have looked like.’

A moment afterwards Mrs Treevor banged on the partition wall to stop us laughing so loudly.

After Christmas that year, Janet came to stay with me at Harewood Drive for a whole week. She and my mother liked each other on sight. She thought my father was sad and kind. She even liked my dead brothers. She would stare at the photographs of Howard and Peter, one by one, lingering especially at the ones of them looking heroic in their uniforms.

‘They’re so handsome,’ she said, ‘so beautiful.’

‘And so dead,’ I pointed out.

In those days, the possibility of death was on everyone’s minds. At school, fathers and brothers died. Their sisters and daughters were sent to see matron and given cups of cocoa and scrambled eggs on toast. The deaths of Howard and Peter, even though they had happened before my arrival at Hillgard House, gave me something of a cachet because they had been twins and had died so close together.

To tell the truth, I was jealous when Janet admired my doomed brothers, but I was never jealous of the friendship between Janet and my mother. It was not something that excluded me. In a sense it got me off the hook. When Janet was staying with us, I didn’t have to feel guilty.

During that first visit, my mother made Janet a dress, using precious pre-war material she’d been hoarding since 1939. I remember the three of us in the little sewing room on the first floor. I was sitting on the floor reading a book. Every now and then I glanced up at them. I can still see my mother with pins in her mouth kneeling by Janet, and Janet stretching her arms above her head like a ballet dancer and revolving slowly. Their faces were rapt and solemn as though they were in church.

Janet and I shared dreams. In winter we sometimes slept together, huddled close to conserve every scrap of warmth. We pooled information about proscribed subjects, such as periods and male genitalia. We practised being in love. We took it in turns at being the man. We waltzed across the floor of the library, humming the Blue Danube. We exchanged lingering kisses with lips damped shut, mimicking what we had observed in the cinema. We made up conversations.

‘Has anyone ever told you what beautiful eyes you have?’

‘You’re very kind – but really you shouldn’t say such things.’

‘I’ve never felt like this with anyone else.’

‘Nor have I. Isn’t the moon lovely tonight?’

‘Not as lovely as you.’

And so on. Nowadays people would suggest there was a lesbian component to our relationship. But there wasn’t. We were playing at being grown up.

Somewhere in the background of our lives, the war dragged on and finally ended. I don’t remember being frightened, only bored by it. I suppose peace came as a relief. In memory, though, everything at Hillgard House went on much as before. The school was its own dreary little world. Rationing continued, and if anything was worse than it had been during the war. One winter the snow and ice were so bad the school was cut off for days.

Our last term was the summer of 1948. We exchanged presents – a ring I had found in a dusty box on top of my mother’s wardrobe, and a brooch Janet’s godmother had given her as a christening present. We swore we would always be friends. A few days later, term ended. Everything changed.

Janet went to a crammer in London because the Treevors had finally woken up to the fact that Hillgard House was not an ideal academic preparation for university. I went home to Harewood Drive, helped my mother about the house and worked a few hours a week in my father’s shop. There are times in my life when I have been more unhappy and more afraid than I was then, but I’ve never tasted such dreariness.

The only part I enjoyed was helping in the shop. At least I was doing something useful and met other people. Sometimes I dealt with customers but usually my father kept me in the back, working on the accounts or tidying the stock. I learned how to smoke in the yard behind the shop.

I got drunk for the first time at a tennis club dance. On the same evening a boy named Angus tried to seduce me in the groundsman’s shed. It was the sort of seduction that’s the next best thing to rape. I punched him and made his nose bleed. He dropped his hip flask, which had lured me into the shed with him. I ran back to the lights and the music. I saw him a little later. His upper lip was swollen and there was blood on his white shirtfront.

‘Went out to the gents,’ I heard him telling the club secretary. ‘Managed to walk into the door.’

The club secretary laughed and glanced in my direction. I wondered if I was meant to hear, I wondered if the secretary knew, if all this had been planned.

It was a way of life that seemed to have no end. Janet wrote to me regularly and we saw each other once or twice a year. But the old intimacy was gone. She was at university now and had other friends and other interests.

‘Why don’t you go to university?’ she asked as we were having tea at a café in the High on one of my visits to Oxford.

I shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t want to. Anyway, my father wouldn’t let me. He thinks it’s unnatural for women to have an education.’

‘Surely he’d let you do something?’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, what do you want to do?’

I watched myself blowing smoke out of my nostrils in the mirror behind Janet’s head and hoped I looked sophisticated. I said, ‘I don’t know what I want.’

That was the real trouble. Boredom saps the will. It makes you feel you no longer have the power to choose. All I could see was the present stretching indefinitely into the future.

But two months later everything changed. My father died. And three weeks after that, on the 19th July 1952, I met Henry Appleyard.