Property of a Lady (17 page)

It’s now six a.m. and she’s finally fallen into an exhausted sleep, but every so often we can hear her crying inside whatever dreams she’s having.

I’m typing this very hastily because Liz is packing our things and in about half an hour we’re going to drive out to her cousins at New Jersey. It’s a five-hour drive, but I’m beyond caring. I’d drive round the entire globe if it would help Ellie. The cousins have one of those rambling old houses, and it’s permanent open house to the world and his wife. They’re noisy and cheerful and eminently sane and I defy anyone to have nightmares in the midst of that crowd – in fact, if Liz’s godmother is there I defy a nightmare to come within gibbering distance. (First and probably only glimmer of humor from your usually flippant friend.)

If we can, we’ll spend about a week at the cousins’, then drive up to New York and get a flight from JFK to Heathrow around the 16th. All being well we’ll have a few days in London – Liz can shop and we’ll take Ellie to all the tourist places. Ellie’s never been to London, and surely it will drive the ghosts away for her. Then, jet-lag permitting, we’ll hire a car and come up to Marston Lacy for the 22nd or 23rd.

I’ll put the laptop in the case, but it’ll probably stay there for the next couple of weeks, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me until we’re actually in London. You’ve got my mobile number if you need to reach me – if Charect House blows up or falls down.

Liz is already yelling up to me to get a move on so I’ll send this now. I’ll phone when we reach London – I don’t know yet where we’ll stay.

But – you will spend Christmas with us in Marston Lacy, won’t you?

Till then,

Jack

‘This was sent at seven a.m. their time,’ said Michael, sitting back. ‘That’s about midday here. I’ll send a reply, but I don’t think they’ll get it.’

‘You’ve got his mobile number, though?’ said Nell, who had come to stand by him and was reading the email over his shoulder. ‘You can reach him on that?’

‘I should have it somewhere. I don’t think I’ve ever used it,’ said Michael. He tried not to think that if he couldn’t reach Jack, he would be arriving in Marston Lacy in two weeks’ time, along with Liz and Ellie.

In disconcerting echo of this thought, Nell said, ‘D’you think Ellie’s in danger?’

‘Oh God, I hope not,’ said Michael. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think I’ll just repeat that Charect House won’t be anywhere near ready for Christmas and ask him to phone so I can explain in more detail.’

‘Shall you tell him about our side of things with Elvira? When you get to speak, I mean.’

‘I think I’ll have to.’

‘It won’t sound as peculiar to him as it would to anyone else,’ said Nell. ‘He’s more than halfway there already.’

‘That’s true.’ Michael drew breath to tell her about finding Harriet Anstey’s journal, then changed his mind. He would keep Harriet to himself just a little longer.

He sent the email to Jack and closed the laptop. As he got up to leave, Nell said, ‘Will you stay in touch?’ And then, hastily: ‘Because I do want to know what happens.’

There were still smudges of tiredness under her eyes, and she looked small and vulnerable, and Michael discovered he wanted to put his arms round her. He said, ‘Of course I will. I’d stay in touch even without all this.’

‘Oh good.’ The words appeared to come out involuntarily.

Back at the Black Boar, Michael arranged to have an early breakfast and to check out afterwards, then went up to his room. He would probably reach Oxford around mid-morning tomorrow, and providing he could find Jack’s mobile number he would phone him then. In the meantime, there was Harriet Anstey’s journal.

He would not have been surprised if it had vanished like the chimera it probably was, but it lay as he had left it in the locked suitcase. Michael looked at the papers for a moment, trying to work out why he had not told anyone about them – in particular why he had not told Nell. He frowned, shook his head impatiently and took the papers out.

16th February 1939 7.00 p.m.

Tomorrow I shall finally see the house that lay at the heart of all father’s stories. And – more to the point – that lay at the deepest point of my own nightmare. The nightmare Father and I shared and that we never repeated to Mother.

Charect House itself won’t hold any nightmares – how could it when I’ve never seen the place? But it feels remarkable to know I’m about to see it, and that’s why I’ve decided to keep this journal. There are moments in one’s life that one wants to erase for ever, but there are also moments – whole experiences – one wants to preserve. So that, a long way in the future, it will be possible to unwrap the memories and the experiences, and relive them and think – oh yes, that was the day I was really happy. You can’t preserve those things by coating them in isinglass like eggs, or putting a glass case over them like waxed fruit, but you can write them down while they’re still fresh. I wish I had done that on the night Harry asked me to marry him. I wish even more I had done so after that night in the old gardens with the air heavy with the scent of lilac and the grass soft under us . . . I have no regrets about that night – it was sweet and sinless and he was being sent to the front the next day and we both knew he might not come back.

And if I had written it all down, that marvellous cascade of astonished delight, I could occasionally reread it and recapture fragments . . . How he looked and felt, and how, afterwards, he propped himself up on one elbow and smiled down at me, and traced the lines of my face with his fingertips as if he wanted to absorb every detail of how I looked, not just with his eyes, but with his skin and nerves and mind . . .

But I promised myself I would not become sentimental in this journal and I won’t! Instead I’ll tidy myself for supper in the Black Boar’s dining room – and admit privately I’m a touch nervous about walking in there by myself, because no matter how emancipated we’re supposed to be, ladies don’t very often stay in hotels by themselves. I wonder if the locals will be curious – if they’ll see me as a mysterious lone traveller, or even think I’m an adventuress (ha!).

Adventuress or not, I’ve been given a very pleasant room. Chintz curtains and matching counterpane, and a writing desk in one corner. The window overlooks what I think might have been the old coach yard – I can see the cobblestones and the big wide doors. Beyond that are gardens, fringed by whispering trees and with an old sundial half covered in moss at the centre of a velvety lawn.

She stayed here, thought Michael, looking up from the slanting writing. In this room? There was a writing desk in the corner – had Harriet written these pages there? He went to the window and opened the curtains a little, and even in the darkness, he could see what was unmistakably the old tilt yard. The cobblestones had been replaced by a patio with wrought-iron chairs, but beyond that were the whispering trees and the mossy sundial. He returned to the bed and began to read.

FOURTEEN

16th February, 9 p.m.

I
thought I would remember everything about the Black Boar, but now I’m here I can only remember parts. But then it’s more than thirty years since I came here as a wide-eyed child, clinging to Father’s hand. One thing I do remember though is Mother saying to me beforehand: ‘You’ll be staying at an inn, Harriet. It’s a very grown-up thing to do, so you must be well-behaved and polite to everyone, and make Father proud of you.’

She knew I would be well-behaved and polite, and so did Father. I was a polite child. Children were in those days. And I was wide-eyed with awe at the huge adventure of going on a train with Father, just the two of us.

At the little station was a trap drawn by a fat pony, which took us into Marston Lacy and the Black Boar. Eating our supper in the dining room was another adventure. We had Brown Windsor Soup and roast mutton, and I was given half portions. Father had a joke with the waiter about whether he would only have to pay half of the cost for me.

But what I do remember in clear detail is the trap returning next morning after breakfast to take us to the place we were here to visit.

There are some memories that with time become buried, almost painlessly, beneath thick layers of scar tissue. They only hurt occasionally, those memories, and they’re natural and wholesome and part of the journey through life. The memories of Harry are like that.

But there are other memories, darker, deeper ones, that never quite heal, no matter how much they become overlaid with other experiences. They stay raw, those memories, and from time to time something will jab into them, making them bleed. My memory of that morning when I was seven years old, and Father, dear impractical Father, was in quest of his improbable inheritance, is one of those painful, unhealed memories.

I hadn’t intended to write an account of that time, but there’s more than an hour before I shall want to get into bed and I suddenly feel I would like to do so. Perhaps if I expose that deep, unhealed wound to the light, it will finally skin over and leave me.

That long-ago morning began happily enough with breakfast and then another ride in the trap. I was allowed to stroke the pony’s velvety nose, and the driver showed me how to offer a lump of sugar to him, with my hand flattened.

The trap jolted us through the centre of Marston Lacy, which was yet another adventure for me who had never been in a pony trap. I had never been outside our own Cheshire village either, although Marston Lacy had the same kind of village street with shops displaying their goods. But there were what Father called workshops here, as well: places where people made cabinets and chairs and clocks, and a blacksmith’s where a scent of hot iron gusted out into the street. I would have liked to see more of that, but the trap rattled its way on, all the way through the village and out the other side.

Father pointed out to me the smudgy mountains in the distance. ‘That’s Wales,’ he said.

But I had never heard of Wales, so I just said, ‘Oh, is it?’

As we went between hedges and fields, the sky seemed to grow darker. ‘Rain,’ said Father, glancing up. I believe that was the moment when I stopped being excited and inquisitive and when fear scratched at my mind, because the dark sky did not seem like the start of an ordinary rainstorm.

The trap turned into a narrow lane where the hedges gave way to high brick walls. I didn’t like them – they were too high and dark and if you were trapped behind them you would not be able to climb out because there were little hard bits of glass on the very top. Then, directly ahead of us, a massive building reared up. It seemed that one minute it was not there and the next it appeared between the trees. It had flat, dark-grey walls and tiny, mean windows with iron bars at some of them. I hated it.

‘Here we are,’ said the driver, pulling the pony up before black gates. Without the cheerful clatter of the wheels and the clip-clop of the pony’s hoofs it was suddenly and disturbingly quiet. There was lettering set into the gates, but although I leaned forward to try to read it, I could not.

‘This is where you wanted, isn’t it?’ said the driver.

‘I think so,’ said Father. ‘If this is—’

‘Brank Asylum,’ said the man.

I didn’t know, not at seven years of age, what an asylum was. But the sound of the name frightened me –
Brank
. It made me think of iron and blackness, and it made me wonder why there had to be bars at all those windows.

Father was handing the driver some coins. ‘You’ll come back to collect us in one hour?’ he said. ‘I shall pay you the other half of the money then.’

‘I will indeed,’ said the man, touching his cap and turning the pony’s head round.

‘We shan’t be as long as an hour, Harriet,’ said Father, taking my hand firmly and leading me forward. ‘But there’s someone in here who wants to meet you.’

That sent the fear spiking even deeper. ‘Someone who wants to meet you . . .’ Like any child of the early part of the century, I had read the extraordinarily macabre fairy-tales deemed suitable then. It meant I knew what sort of people lived inside lonely forbidding houses and wanted to meet little girls. Witches who put children in cages and fattened them up for the ovens. Wolves who dressed up in human clothes and pretended to be human.

Father rang the bell outside the huge main doors. He kept a firm hold of my hand – perhaps he thought I might suddenly bolt and run back down that long drive to the lanes beyond. I wish I had. I wish I had never gone inside Brank Asylum, and I wish, above everything in the world, that I had not followed Father and a grey-clad, slab-faced woman to the small, mean room at the end of one of the corridors. They smelt of food cooked too long, those corridors – unappetizing food, boiled cabbage and onions. Beneath that was another smell I had never encountered. I could not, then, put a name to it, but it made me think of people drowning in the dark. It made me want to cry.

‘In here,’ said the granite-coloured woman, opening a door and standing back to let us go inside. I hung back, but Father said, quite gently, ‘Come along, Harriet, it’s all right,’ and I had to go in.

The sad, drowning-in-the-dark smell was much stronger, and there was a horrid smeary darkness in the room. I had the feeling that things might be hiding inside that darkness – things that never went outside, things that had become covered with layers and layers of cobwebs until the cobwebs had formed thick ropes that tangled in hair and coiled around ankles and wrists . . .