The Office of the Dead Read Free Page A

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.

4
     
    Memory bathes the past in a glow of inevitability. It’s tempting to assume that the past could only have happened in the way it did, that this event could only have been followed by that event and in the order they happened. If that were true, of course, nothing would be our fault.
    But of