Property of a Lady (16 page)

But if anyone really had stood in this room and looked down from the window, there was no trace of that now. Michael was conscious of a stab of disappointment. But he stepped through the jagged pieces of wall and into the dusty space beyond. Was there a faint imprint of a hand on the grimed window, as if someone had pressed against it? But there seemed to be nothing except the encrusted dirt of years. He looked out, seeing the outlines of the old shrubbery below, then turned back into the room. The plaster and brick-dust was starting to settle, and the builder and his assistants had gone in search of implements to clean it up. Michael could hear them calling to one another as to the whereabouts of the heavy-duty vacuum cleaner, asking which daft bugger had used it last and not put it back in the hall.

He was about to go back downstairs when he saw that a small section of wall near the window had crumbled away. Fresh plaster dust had showered out, together with some kind of packing, which must have been thrust into the cavity of the partition wall.

It was not packing. It was a sheaf of yellowed papers, covered in writing. Michael’s heart began to race. Even from here he could see that the writing was erratic, the ink faded to sepia, but it looked as if it was just about legible. Was this something more from Alice Wilson?

The men were coming back up the stairs, dragging the vacuum cleaner with them, grumbling good-humouredly about the narrowness of the attic stair.

Michael bent down, picked the papers up and slipped them into an inside pocket.

It was almost three o’clock when Michael got back to the Black Boar, and he suddenly realized he’d had nothing to eat or drink since breakfast at seven. Bar lunches had finished, it seemed, but some sandwiches and coffee could certainly be made up for him. What would he like?

‘Anything,’ said Michael, who wanted nothing more than to get to the privacy of his room and read the papers he had stolen from Charect House. No, stolen was too strong a word. He fully intended to give them to the house’s owner. After he had read them. They would turn out to be just somebody’s old laundry list, of course.

He put them on the bedside table and managed to make himself wait until the plate of sandwiches and pot of coffee had been brought. He was starting to feel slightly light-headed, although he had no idea if this was from ordinary hunger or nervous tension. Just in case it was hunger he gulped down some coffee and crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, then reached for the papers.

He had more than half expected to see Alice Wilson’s familiar writing at the top of the first page – his mind and his eyes were prepared to do so. But the writing was very different to Alice’s impatient scribble. The date was a good thirty years before Alice had come to Charect House.

7th February 1939

This morning I received the letter for which I have waited almost my entire life.

That strange, tragic woman, who dwelled in a sad twilight world for so long, has died, and Charect House is finally mine.

Father always said it would be. ‘One day, Harriet,’ he used to say, ‘one day, we shall be rich. We shall have a beautiful house in a wonderful party of the country. Remember that. Remember there’s only one person who stands between us and our inheritance.’

When I was small I believed it, but over the years the story of the house we should one day own took on the flavour of a dream – another one of Father’s many fantasies. Mother never believed it at all. She died telling me to look after Father because he was a dreamer and dreamers were notoriously impractical.

Sometimes Father tried to explain why we would one day inherit a house and to sketch out the line of descent, although I never really followed it. ‘The Ansteys are an obscure branch of the Shropshire Lees,’ he said. ‘It’s a complicated descent though.’

I don’t know the complexities of the line of descent, but I do know any cousins I might have had – any children born to my father’s generation – were all lost. The Great War took most of the men, leaving the ladies behind in a welter of jingoism and songs about it being a long way to Tipperary. It’s scaldingly sad that thousands of those men never came back, and that an incredibly large number of the girls never found anyone else to love, but clung to letters and photographs of heartbreakingly young men.

I’m one of those girls. I have my own sepia photograph of someone who might have married me if he hadn’t been killed on the Somme, and my own might-have-been daydreams. He still smiles out of the photograph at me, and I often smile back and say goodnight to him as I get into bed. Harry, that was his name. Harry Church. He used to say we were destined to be together because even our names fitted. Harry and Harriet.

But it’s sentimentality to talk like that, and it’s over twenty years ago since he died. And if I didn’t meet anyone else I could care about, I’ve had a good life so far. Nor is it over by a long way, because I’m only just turned forty, and if this new war is coming, as everyone says, I dare say there will be ways in which I can be useful.

And now, after all these years, there’s Charect House.

The solicitor’s letter says, with an unmistakable note of apology, that the place is not in a very good condition, due to its having been empty for a very long time. That sends me into a whole new set of romantic daydreams, visualizing a grey grange or gloomy manor house, dripping with cobwebs, occupied by insubstantial wraiths or unhouseled souls, sobbing with loneliness . . .

It takes me back to that strange haunted woman inhabiting her own mist-shrouded half-world for so many years.

I make no apology for those last two paragraphs, since I feel I can be allowed an outbreak of romantic Gothicism on the occasion of inheriting the tumbledown home of my ancestors. When I finally walk up to it, I shall be like the heroine of that splendid book by Daphne du Maurier I read at Christmas –
Rebecca
. ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again . . .’

On a more practical note, I have arranged to travel to Shropshire next week. The solicitor’s letter requests me to provide suitable proof of my identity – birth certificate and passport were suggested as being acceptable. But I’ve never possessed a passport because I’ve never been outside England. I’ve always dearly wanted to see other lands and meet other races, but with that vulgar little man Adolf Hitler rampaging greedily across Europe, occupying Czechoslovakia as if he considers it his own back garden, it doesn’t look as if I’m likely to get my wish for a good while.

So I’m taking my birth certificate as proof. It’s a bit ragged at the edges because of being stored in a tin box all these years, but it states, quite clearly, that Harriet Anstey was born in the county of Cheshire on the 10th day of April, in the year 1898.

Harriet Anstey, thought Michael, lowering the papers for a moment. For a moment he could almost see her, bright-eyed and intelligent, walking along Blackberry Lane to the house. The lane would have looked much as it looked now, and she would have been excited and slightly amused at her own romantic expectations. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .’ But for Manderley read Charect House, thought Michael, and for Rebecca read Elvira.

He saw it was half-past four, and with extreme reluctance he put the papers carefully inside his suitcase, locked it, and prepared to go along to Nell’s shop. He nearly forgot the laptop, which they had arranged he would bring to check on emails from Jack, but remembered in time and went back upstairs.

THIRTEEN

N
ell was making a pot of tea when Michael arrived, and Beth was toasting teacakes with careful concentration. You could not, she explained seriously, burn teacakes or they would taste horrid.

‘I love toasted teacakes,’ said Michael, going over to help her watch the teacakes turn the required shade of golden brown. ‘I expect you’re glad to be home, aren’t you?’

‘I had trifle in hospital,’ confided Beth. ‘It was nice, but not as nice as Mum’s.’ A tiny frown creased her brow. ‘I didn’t like that man carrying me away,’ she said.

Michael glanced at Nell and saw that although she was apparently concentrating on pouring milk into a jug, she was listening intently. He said, ‘I should think it was pretty grim.’

‘Yes, it was pretty grim.’ She appeared to like the expression.

Michael said, ‘Did you know who he was?’

‘No. I don’t know, akcherly, how he got me,’ said Beth. ‘On account of I know about not speaking to strangers or getting in cars and stuff like that, and I never do. I jus’ remember him carrying me down a road and singing to himself.’

‘I think it was a really bad dream,’ said Nell. ‘I think you were sleepwalking.’

‘It sounds like it,’ said Michael, following her lead.

‘Sleepwalking’s pretty important, isn’t it?’ said Beth hopefully.

‘It is, rather.’

‘I didn’t much like it, however,’ said Beth. ‘I most of all didn’t like it when he sang ’bout the dead man’s hand.’ She looked at Nell from the corners of her eyes. ‘I don’t s’pose there’s any such thing, really, is there? I mean, you couldn’t have a dead man’s hand that opens doors that’re locked?’

‘Definitely not,’ said Nell at once.

‘Or that sends people to sleep? That’s what he sang. “Sleep and be dead for the dead man’s sake.”’

She glanced nervously at Nell, and Michael, seeing Nell’s hesitation, said, ‘It’ll have been part of an old song. Country places like this have really old songs – people hand them down from their grandparents, and they’ve handed them down from
their
grandparents. Some of them are actually quite interesting. It lets us know what people sang hundreds of years ago. I quite like knowing what people used to sing.’

‘I’d like knowing as well,’ said Beth. ‘Only, not when it’s about dead men’s hands and stuff. That’s pretty grim, I think.’

‘So do I. But I bet it really was just an old song you heard.’

Beth appeared to find this acceptable. She said, ‘That man thought I was somebody else. He thought I was somebody called Elvira.’

Elvira . . . It whispered into the kitchen, leaving a snail’s trail of fear through the homely scents of teacakes being toasted and the singing of the kettle as it came up to the boil. Elvira whose name was inscribed on a forgotten gravestone in a desolate churchyard. But where was Elvira’s grave?

Nell said, ‘Beth, that teacake’s burning. How did you know that about Elvira?’

‘Because he said so.’ Beth rescued the teacake. ‘“You’re not Elvira,” that’s what he said. “I must find her.” Then he sort of cried a bit. It was sad when he did that.’

‘Perhaps Elvira was somebody he had once known.’

‘I think Elvira’s a stupid name,’ said Beth robustly. ‘Can we have the teacakes now? And can I hear some more about Wilberforce?’

After the teacakes had been consumed, Beth went up to her room to tell the animal collection about a new exploit involving the mice’s preparations for Christmas and a Christmas tree in which Wilberforce had become indignantly entangled.

Nell said, ‘Sleepwalking was the most reassuring answer I could think of.’

For her or for you? Michael wondered, but he only said, ‘It might even be true.’ He studied her for a moment. ‘D’you still think the nightmares are bound up with her father’s death?’ Damn, he thought, why can’t I say “your husband”. Or even use his name? Brad, that’s what he’s called.

‘I’m not discounting it entirely,’ said Nell slowly, and Michael looked at her and thought: you’re not discounting it because you have nightmares of your own. ‘It doesn’t explain Elvira, though,’ said Nell and, before Michael could say anything, she said: ‘It doesn’t explain the Hand of Glory rhyme, either. That’s what Beth heard, isn’t it? It’s what Ellie hears, as well. “Sleep all who sleep, wake all who wake, but be as the dead for the dead man’s sake.” And Michael, the thing that terrifies me most about that—’

‘Is that it actually seems to have sent Beth to sleep,’ said Michael.

‘Yes.’

It terrified Michael as well, but he only said, ‘She seems to have bounced back fairly quickly.’

‘She does, doesn’t she?’ said Nell with a kind of eager gratitude. ‘She’s astonishingly resilient, really. I think she could go back to school in a couple of days. I think the normality of that will help. She’ll get absorbed in lessons and her friends, and it will fade. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. Would you like another cup of tea? And d’you want to check your emails?’

‘Yes to both questions, please,’ said Michael, smiling at her.

He connected up the laptop, pleased to find he remembered which socket plugged into the phone line, and switched on.

The email programme opened up and Jack’s name seemed to jump out at him.

Michael—

We’ve made a decision, and it’s that Ellie absolutely must have a complete change of scenery and people. Frankly, it’s the only thing left we can think of to try.

Last night she began crying around midnight – the most despairing, heart-rending sobbing you can imagine, and nothing we could do or say seemed to reach her.

“He’s waiting for me,” she kept saying. “He really is. Don’t let him get to me, please don’t.”

She wasn’t asleep, and she was perfectly lucid – she knew me, and she knew Liz, and she clutched at us, begging us to keep ‘him’ away from her. We considered ER again, but they couldn’t help last time and all they could suggest was analysis. But that will be our last, despairing resort for Ellie.