The Chandelier Ballroom (16 page)

‘I always found her to be a nice person,’ Jennifer Wainwright put in as she eased a couple of tupenny stamps from the perforated main leaf. With no one else waiting to be served there was time to talk. ‘A bit on the quiet side. I never would have dreamed her capable of doing what she did. I think I feel more sorry for her than her poor husband.’

‘You knew he was carrying on with some other woman?’ whispered Florrie.

Jennifer managed to look surprised. Joyce had confided her suspicions to her some time back but she was not going to divulge that to anyone, priding herself on not being one for tittle-tattle.

‘She did go strange though,’ Florrie went on. ‘I found her kneeling beside him ranting on about that room with the chandelier and a strange woman warning her not to trust him. But there was no one else in that house at the time but me and her. Young Doris had gone home and, well, you heard it all at the trial, her talking about some woman appearing from nowhere, a ghost she said, though who I’ve no idea.’

Jennifer kept her opinions to herself, remembering how Joyce had shuddered as she spoke of the first time she’d seen that apparition, as she had called it later. The only person Jennifer could think of as being an apparition would have been that poor man Horace Butterfield who drowned in the lake.

Some said it had been suicide, the man besotted with that gold digger he’d thought was as much in love with him as he was with her. Everyone but him could see what she was. The wife had walked off and left him over it. But that Celia running off with another man must have got to him so badly.

Jennifer believed it had been suicide. But Joyce had spoken of seeing a woman dressed in clothes ten years out of date. It did get a person thinking. Even if that Celia had died since, she’d been extremely fashionable, skirts reaching well below the knees, so whoever Joyce saw couldn’t have been her, no more than it could have been the girl Joyce’s husband had been seeing.

True, Joyce had always insisted she felt something odd about that room with its chandelier, that it gave her the shudders whenever she entered it; had said her mother too had felt it on occasions. Whatever it was, it had led to her finding her husband carrying on with that secretary of his and, like the worm that turns, so had she.

Jennifer couldn’t blame her entirely. Any woman in her state of mind might have done the same. Maybe not to the extreme that Joyce had, but that opinion was best kept to herself, she thought, as two people came up to stand behind Florrie at the postal counter, terminating the conversation.

What continually plagued Jennifer’s mind was Joyce’s description of the dress worn by whoever she’d imagined she’d seen in that room, seeming more the style of the late twenties than the mid-thirties. Wondering if it had anything to do with the chandelier Joyce hated so much, she had delved deeper, finally remembering what Butterfield’s cook had once said when describing the lovely ballroom her employer had constructed, the glittering parties he’d thrown and how much his guests had admired that splendid chandelier of his. He’d always been ready to tell them the story attached to it of a woman jilted by her lover after losing all her money in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and her attempted suicide by hanging herself from it, laughingly adding that it had given way and fallen on her instead, killing her instantly.

Was that the answer to Joyce’s dislike of the thing, of the out-of-date dress of the apparition she said she’d seen? That solution had come as such a revelation that she couldn’t wait to confide it to Florrie Evans. But she had reckoned without Florrie’s love of gossip. The woman saw no point in keeping such a wonderful tale to herself and before long it had spread like wildfire around the whole village, to the macabre delight of everyone who heard it – real proof of that house being haunted!

Six months since the tragedy and the house was still empty.

Locals had assumed that the murdered man’s parents would have placed it on the market immediately, glad to be rid of the bad memories the loss of their son had left them with. But if they had done so they’d certainly not bothered with its upkeep. It lay behind a now overgrown hedge, hardly visible from the road, and if one ventured beyond the low, wrought-iron gates – not that anyone was brave enough to do so – it would have been to a weed-grown drive, bordered by ragged, untrimmed shrubbery, grass lawns uncut, while the windows of the house gaped at the intruder like empty eye sockets, despite the curtains still being in place.

Whether the furniture had been removed was anyone’s guess, for not even the family of the woman who’d murdered her husband had come nigh or by. No one knew what was going on. Rumours abounded. At the murder trial it was said that the wife of the dead man had ranted on about having been spoken to by, as she put it, the ghost of some strange woman in what she termed the chandelier room. It was all that was needed to set people talking about Crossways Lodge being haunted.

‘They say she’d always been susceptible to odd goings on,’ someone said in the post office after the trial. ‘It seems she said the woman she saw actually warned her that her husband was being unfaithful. And I think it came out in court that he had been.’

For all her resolve to keep her one-time friend’s confidences to herself, the post mistress Jennifer Wainwright talking to Florrie Evans one day when the post office was quiet couldn’t help making a comment of her own on how Joyce Johns-Pitman had told her on one occasion all about what she’d seen.

Florrie nodded sagely. ‘Her mother said that even she felt very queer about that room, even wondered if it had anything to do with that chandelier itself, the one that hung in that room, though goodness knows what.’

Jennifer Wainwright made a personal note to delve into the tale a little deeper if she could, loving a mystery. Now she said, ‘I don’t know how true it is but when those other people, the Butterfields, had the place, the chap Horace who used to hold all those grand parties, who was drowned in that lake of his, once told someone I knew that that chandelier had a bit of a history to it. He apparently boasted about it. Said the people he bought it from when he first came to live here told him that some wealthy woman in London had tried to hang herself from it but it fell on her and killed her.’ She gave a small titter. ‘Maybe it was her Joyce Johns-Pitman saw before she killed her husband?’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Florrie Evans. ‘But I quite believe you. She said at her trial that it was a woman, definitely a woman, not a man.’

‘But it makes you think,’ said Jennifer Wainwright as the bell on the post office door tinkled and two people came in, necessitating her to let the matter drop. It was better not to spread too much gossip around the place.

She had, however, reckoned without Florrie Evans’ loose tongue, with no need for her to keep quiet over what she had seen going on from day to day in the Johns-Pitman household, and it didn’t take long for speculation to become truth in the minds of local people.

It now became clear why the place was still empty after six months. After all, who would want to lay out good money for a house that was possibly haunted?

The six months became a year and still Crossways Lodge remained on the market, no one apparently interested. There had been several look at it but none had expressed a desire to buy, despite the price having been lowered several times. The only reason Johns-Pitman could think was that word had gone around of the heart-stopping tragedy that had happened there. Nor did it take long for local tittle-tattle to reach the ears of any potential buyer of it being haunted and the tale attached to it.

‘All I want is to be rid of the bloody place!’ Johns-Pitman said vehemently to his wife. ‘I’d give it away if that was possible.’ But of course it wasn’t, nor could it be demolished, a protection order attached to part of it.

‘I really should go over there to check on it,’ he said reluctantly. The mere thought of venturing anywhere near the place where his son had been murdered made him quail, hard-headed professional person though he was.

Gertrude Johns-Pitman shuddered, imagining he might expect her to accompany him. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t go within miles of the place.’

‘Nevertheless, we can’t go on leaving it to itself. I’m going to have to go sometime to see what condition it’s in.’

‘But the agent does that, surely? You pay him to have it inspected regularly and kept tidy.’

‘So he says, but if I don’t go over there, he could say anything.’

‘I’m sure he cannot be such a rogue as that,’ she scoffed. ‘He has his reputation to think about, surely.’

But Howard senior frowned. ‘Maybe I should tell him my plan to go there at some time.’ Though when that would be, he didn’t even want to think. ‘It’ll make him check that his own people are doing what I pay him to do. He doesn’t seem to be putting much energy into trying to sell it.’

Came the thought that maybe he should procure another real estate agent, but all he did in the end with no heart for anything was to write and enquire how the upkeep of the place was going. It wasn’t like him at all, but the loss of his youngest son in such circumstances had knocked all the stuffing out of him.

Bad enough his son’s face coming back to him whenever he closed his eyes, his dreams filled with muddled scenes – Arnold a young lad swimming in the sea, playing football for his school, graduating, clasping his bride to him at his wedding, laughing, strong, intelligent – leaving an unbearable weight in his heart as well as a deep hatred for the woman who’d robbed him of that promising future he would have had, her only punishment to be committed to a mental institution.

Once the house was sold and off his hands he’d be able to rest more easily. In the meantime he wrote to the agent in the strongest terms. Maybe the man did need a squib up his arse!

It wasn’t that he needed the money from the sale of the house. His investments were sound, his company thriving, more now as repercussions of the past recession faded, replaced by sighs of relief at Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain bravely averting the threat of war. That September had brought joy, seeing their Prime Minister brandishing a paper the German Chancellor had signed proclaiming ‘Peace in Our Time’, happy in the belief that everyone could now get on with their lives.

Surely the house would sell now, thought Johns-Pitman. At last he’d be rid of that, if not the heartbreaking loss of his youngest son to that mad woman who had ranted and raved in court of a ghost telling her that her husband was being unfaithful, causing her to lose control enough to stab a carving knife into his neck.

It was summer again. Still the house hadn’t sold.

‘I cannot understand it,’ said the agent, Mr Morris. ‘I do assure you your property is being kept in excellent order. I have people there constantly overseeing its upkeep so I really cannot understand it.’

After another stern reprimand from Johns-Pitman on the apparent lack of attention being given to the property, with a word of warning of it being put into the hands of a more competent firm of estate agents, he had pulled out all the stops to make certain that the place was now bright as a new pin.

‘It’s an attractive enough property. All I can say is it has to do with the times. War hanging over our heads again isn’t making it easy, but I do assure you I am doing all I can. I cannot say better than that and I am sure we will see a realistic buyer before long.’

But he too had heard the rumours that still abounded around the area of the place being haunted, rumours that had grown in strength and inventiveness. There was now not one ghost but two. How the story of the chandelier had got about, no one was certain, but got about it had.

Mr Morris secretly felt that most potential buyers had got to hear of it and had backed off for that very reason. He still lived in hope that some hardy soul would shrug off the stories as pure piffle and put a substantial down payment on it. The place was becoming a drain on his own resources, despite reaping a steady income for all his services.

To the people of Wadely village, the brightening up of the haunted house, as it had come to be called, could only mean that it would soon be occupied by new people. But what if the ghost or ghosts refused to be laid to rest? For months every local waited in suspense, their attention finally averted by the sad and regrettable voice of Neville Chamberlain announcing that the country was at war.

‘We won’t sell that blasted place now,’ Johns-Pitman complained bitterly, even as he thought of his two remaining sons who, if war continued for too long, could be conscripted despite being married men. ‘The only thing, being empty, is that we might end up with a lot of young evacuees.’

A second wave of children were pouring out of London to the country and safety, away from possible bombing. The first wave had arrived before war had been declared. This time it was even more serious. ‘God knows what state it’ll end up in by the time it’s all over.’

But it wasn’t to be. Within weeks an elderly couple with no family had snapped the house up, the price having been lowered considerably owing to the times. They were laying out their entire savings with the idea that if bombs did begin dropping on the part of London where they had been living, the country would be the best place for them. The place had gone for a song in the end, such was Johns-Pitman’s despair that he had become willing to be rid of it at any price. He didn’t need the money, but he did need peace of mind, able to wash his hands of the place entirely.

The elderly couple living safe from the air raids that began in May 1940 felt fortunate to be out of it. Unfortunately, at the end of May they visited a couple of old friends living in the East End, deciding to go home the following morning, the air raid sirens already having gone off. Seeing no point in the four of them huddling together in one tiny, cold air raid shelter for hours, especially as all was quiet with a temporary lull in the raid, the occupants and their guests were still indoors when the house received a direct hit.

At the start of the war the couple had made wills, leaving everything to each other, but stating that if both passed away at the same time, everything was to go to their only surviving relative, the woman’s elderly brother Benjamin Lacey who lived in Vancouver in Canada. He was entirely alone, having lost his wife a few years back; their son, an only child, had been killed thirty years ago in an accident at the age of twelve.