The Office of the Dead. Andrew Taylor

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 can’t hide away from the past,’ he said. ‘You can’t pretend it isn’t there, that it doesn’t matter.’

      ‘Why not?’ I was a little drunk at the time and I spoke more loudly than I’d planned. ‘If you ask me, there’s something pathetic about people who live in the past. It’s over and done with.’

      ‘It’s never that. Not until you are. It is you.’

      ‘Don’t lecture me, David.’ I smiled sweetly at him and blew cigarette smoke into his face. ‘I’m 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 couldn’t even gloat. I just felt sorry for him. I suppose he wasn’t very good at being right about himself.

      Nobody’s 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, God’s 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 jeweller’s 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.’

      ‘Didn’t they ever talk to you? Do things with you?’

      ‘I remember Peter laughing at me because I thought Hitler was the name of the greengrocer’s 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 you’re better off without them.’

      That’s something I’ll 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 shop’s 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 don’t think he even had much pride in Bradford any more.

      In my father’s world girls weren’t important. We were needed to bear sons and look after the house. We were also needed as other men’s 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 hadn’t 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 didn’t want the sort of daughter I was. She wanted a daughter like Janet.

      My mother’s 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 weren’t compatible. The older I got, the more obvious this became to us both. And that’s 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 I’d 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, I’ll make you wish you’d 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 she’d 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 I’d stepped out of the steamy, smoky carriage into the darkness of a world that hadn’t been born.

      Someone, a man, said, ‘There’s 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 I’d ever seen.

      ‘Is that a new bug too?’ the monitor demanded.

      One of the other girls nodded. ‘Hasn’t 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 one’s not a bloody blubber.’

      I have always loathed my name. ‘Wendy’ sums up everything my mother wanted and everything I’m not. My mother loved Peter Pan. When I