The Empty Frame (4 page)

“This room was improved,” he told them, “for the young Elizabeth the First. She was a friend of Lady Alice Neale. It's not very likely she held councils here, but that's why they enlarged it, just in case.”

“What a waste,” said Sam. He disapproved of the Royal Family. “It's like putting new lavatories into
places when the Queen's only going to be there for about five minutes.”

“But even royalty has to go to the lavatory,” Magnus observed solemnly.

Floss started to laugh but the Colonel didn't seem to notice. “They raised the floor in this room,” he said. “It would have been much lower, originally. They really did do their best to get the Court to come here. They were obviously very ambitious, and it worked. The husband became a major diplomat. Anyhow, that's about it, really. Pleasant room for a spot of reading or sewing, not to mention the royal comings and goings. Come along then, we'll do the lower floor next.”

Floss and Sam set off in front of him. They were bored with these empty rooms. “Do you think we could slip away?” Sam suggested. “He's obviously not going to show us much else. I'd rather come back when he's out of the way, when he goes off to London or something.” The gardens and the river looked much more tempting than this series of empty rooms and, so far as he was concerned, the sooner the grand tour was over the better.

As the Colonel pulled the heavy door shut behind them, Magnus, hanging back for a final peek, was aware of a rush of cold air. It was not the general cold of an ancient, thick-walled dwelling, that retained its delicious coolness on a day of sun, it was a more precise, sharp
cold; it was enclosed in time, like a phrase of music, or a sentence. And he distinctly saw, as the closing door filled the sunlit space beyond, the figure of a woman moving across the Council Chamber from right to left. Her Elizabethan dress was pure white and round her neck hung a broad, black priest-like stole. She was carrying white gloves and she continually twisted them in her hands, as if they were a handkerchief. He could hear a sobbing noise. He was unable to see the apparition's feet. These were cut off from his view above the ankle, as if the rest of her was moving along at a lower level, about a foot below his eye.

Magnus cried out, then clapped his hand across his mouth. The Colonel looked down sharply. “You all right, young man? Got a pain? Shouldn't bolt your food, you know.”

He said, “You've just locked somebody in. There's somebody in there, a woman. Listen, she's crying, can't you hear her?”

Colonel Stickley stared at him, grimaced, pulled at his moustache then stood very still. The sound, though muffled through the thick oak door, was the same sound that had woken him in the night, the anguished sound of inconsolable weeping that Magnus had been unable to bear. And he could not bear it now. He clapped his hands to his ears and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it, can't you!”

The Colonel dropped his bunch of keys and shook him vigorously. “Come on now, no hysterics, there's no need for that.” But his voice was quite gentle. This was the foster child, the boy whose father had walked out, never to be heard of again, and whose mother had lost her mind, the child who'd never had a childhood. “Wait there,” he said, and he limped off after Floss and Sam. “I just have to oil a lock,” he called after them. “Make your way down to the buttery. We'll be with you in a jiffy.”

Coming back to Magnus he picked up his keys, unlocked the door of the Council Chamber and steered him into the room. “See for yourself,” he said, “go on, investigate. Climb up the chimney and pull up the floor boards. It's all been done before, you know.” His voice, no longer brisk and soldierly, was wavering, that of a tired old man. It was almost as if
he
wanted to cry now.

Magnus stared into the room though he knew perfectly well that he would not see the woman in white. She belonged to another time, to a time when the floor of the Council Chamber had been lower. She had been walking on
that
floor which was why she had seemed to him to have no feet. These were the simple mechanics of ghosts. Magnus knew all about them from old Father Robert, whose church had once been inhabited by an unhappy spirit which he had laid to rest
with his prayers. The mechanics were not what scared him, they were just about two kinds of time getting muddled up. What was frightening was how he felt about the two women – the one who had cried in the night and the one he had just seen gliding across this room. Each spectre had brought the awful coldness with her, a cold that went into his very marrow and felt like death. And the coldness was part of her pain, of the grief which troubled her so. In a way he didn't fully understand, it was as if her pain had joined itself to his. He was suffering as well, which was why he'd had to stop the noise of the crying.

Were there two women or were they one and the same person – the woman in the night, who he believed must have been Lady Alice, because her frame had stood empty, and now this other woman, all in white? Magnus could not begin to work out what was happening. He felt as if the top of his head was coming off, through too much thinking.

A hand descended on to his shoulder. “As you see,” Colonel Stickley informed him, “the room really is empty. There is nothing going on here and there never has been. All this talk of ghosts is all silly rumour, put about by people who are trying to ruin my business because they want to get this place from me. Do you understand, boy… what's your name?”

“Magnus.”

“Do you understand, Magnus? Do we understand… each other?”

“Yes.” Then he added, because he felt that Colonel Stickley was very afraid, and lonely, “sir”.

Inside, he wanted to challenge the Colonel, but how could he say, “Actually, you're a liar and so is Cousin M.” He felt sorry for him and he knew he was only trying to protect them, probably hoping this bit of ghostly activity would die down, which was what sometimes happened. Magnus knew quite a bit about ghosts. Father Godless had made a study of them, after the episode in his church, and one thing he'd discovered was that ghosts who've been quiet for centuries sometimes are often activated by children. There'd been lots of children coming to the Abbey, to do sports courses, then they'd gone away. Now he'd arrived, with Flossie and Sam. Was it
their
presence that had started things up again? More particularly, was it
his
? He asked himself this question, not because he was special – Magnus hadn't felt special to anybody for a very long time – but because he had a feeling that the two women, if there were two, might be trying to tell him something.

“Good man,” the Colonel grunted, and locked up again. “Let's go down to the buttery,” he said, resuming his normal, crusty, old-soldier voice, and he led the way towards the stairs.

Floss and Sam were waiting for them in the entrance hall. “We couldn't find the steps down,” Floss said, but Magnus knew that this wasn't true. She had decided she ought to wait for him. Now she caught hold of his hand. “You OK, Mags? You look cold. You've got goose-pimples.”

He hesitated. “I'm OK, but I thought I saw someone in that room, that Council Chamber. We went back.” He wanted to say, “It was a woman dressed in white and she had no feet.” But he felt he'd made a kind of promise to Colonel Stickley so instead he said, “Anyhow, there wasn't anybody. It was just so bright in that room. I suppose the light comes off the river, I suppose that was it.”

“Yes, that would be it,” Floss said reassuringly, but she could not quite look him in the eyes, and Magnus had the feeling that she, too, was pretending – that they were all pretending, with each other.

The buttery was the old name for the kitchens. To get to these they passed through a series of low-ceilinged rooms which ran into each other through a series of shallow arches, the roofs propped up here and there by stubby columns. This part of the Abbey had more the feel of a crypt than a dwelling house, but it smelt of stale cigarettes and gravy. There was a Coke machine in one corner, a row of pay phones and a lot of plastic tables and chairs.

Sam was very excited. “This part's really
ancient
,” he said, poking at the knobbled walls. “Can't you just see those Black Canons down here, Burst Belly tearing meat off a spit and chucking his bones through the window? Pity about the machines.”

Colonel Stickley seemed to respond to this enthusiasm. “I know, but it's what the modern world demands, I'm afraid. Anyhow, I might get them ripped out. We don't need them any more. Hmmm. This house should be restored to its former glory.”

The windows in these rooms were almost on a level with people's feet. Through them you could see the river
sliding past and beyond the river unfolded an endless vista of fields and woods, basking in the steady light of another perfect day. A fly buzzed. It was going to be very hot.

In the buttery kitchen a small muscular-looking man in long khaki shorts stood frying something at an Aga cooker. At his feet, curled up in a basket, slept Arthur. The basket had toys in it – a blue mouse, some ping-pong balls and a fluffy black spider.

“Morning, Wilf,” said Colonel Stickley.

“Morning, sir.”

The man in shorts stuck his rubber spatula in the air as a kind of salute, clicked his heels together and went on frying.

“These are Maude's young relations,” said Colonel Stickley. “Er, what are your names?” He was irritable again. They couldn't keep up with his moods.

“Floss.”

“Magnus.”

“Sam.”

They spoke dutifully, in turn, feeling like the Three Wise Monkeys, and Floss knelt down by the cat basket and tickled Arthur's ears.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Wilf. “Hope you enjoyed your breakfast. I'm just about to have mine.”

“Oh,
you
cooked it,” said Floss. “We thought it was the Colonel—”

“He's Front of House,” explained Wilf. “I'm your man. Want some more? There's plenty going.”

“I wouldn't say no,” began Sam, his mouth watering at the sight of a pan of scrambled eggs. But Colonel Stickley was making it very clear that the official tour of the Abbey was over. He had produced a clipboard and a pen.

“Plans for the day, Wilf,” he muttered, unfolding some spectacles.

“Yes, sir,” said Wilf, clicking his heels again.

“We muster at twelve-thirty for a light luncheon,” the Colonel told the three children. “Until then, a very good morning to you. You may have the run of the grounds and gardens, although anywhere closed to you is, naturally
closed.
I may trust you, I hope?”

“Yes, Colonel Stickley,” they all said in chorus. They hadn't meant to, at all, they didn't like being treated like infants. But he was that kind of person; it was best to humour him.

“His ‘luncheon' means, cheese and pickle sarnies made by yours truly,” whispered Wilf. “See you around.” And he grinned at them.

Unexpectedly dismissed, they trailed up the stairs again and found themselves back in the entrance hall with its tapestries of Balaam's donkey and Pontius Pilate washing his hands. The front door stood open and they
went through on to the gravelled drive where the taxi had deposited them the night before. Directly in front of them stretched a long lawned walk, edged by huge trees, and at the end of this they could see tall walls of dark brick. To one side was a circular building with a conical roof and some tiny dormer windows. “That must be the dovecote,” said Sam, “it's huge… and there's the walled garden. Come on!” He wanted to explore it all now, without Colonel Stickley breathing down his neck.

“Think I'd like to go and put something cooler on first,” Floss said. “It's fantastically hot. If we got our swimming things, do you think we'd be allowed in the pool?”

“It's worth a try, if it's not locked,” Sam answered.

“Let's go back upstairs for a bit,” Magnus said. “I've got to talk to you. It's urgent.”

The other two looked at him, then at each other. It wasn't a bit like Magnus to take the initiative. He usually did whatever the other two suggested.

“Talk to us about what, Mags?”

He looked round cautiously. “Everything. Let's go to the dormitory, where we can be private.”

The bedroom was very stuffy, in spite of its open windows, and the lawns below were starting to go brown. They looked dried-up at the edges. “This is definitely a heatwave,” said Floss, pulling a baggy T-shirt and some shorts out of her suitcase. After
inspecting the shorts, she put them back. They were last year's and quite tight. They would cling to her bottom and make her hotter than ever. Instead, she selected a long cotton skirt. She would float round the Abbey in it and pretend to be Lady Macbeth, even if she didn't audition for the play next term.

“‘Had he not resembled my father, as he slept, I had done it…'” she murmured, dreamily. Magnus stared at her. “That's
Macbeth
,” she informed him rather proudly. “You see, even Lady Macbeth had some human feelings. She couldn't actually bring herself to murder King Duncan in the end, so she made her husband do it.”

“I know it's
Macbeth
,” replied Magnus quite irritably. “Killing Duncan affected her the most. Macbeth turned into a kind of monster, but she went steadily mad. She just couldn't forget what they'd done, all that wringing of hands, all that trying to wash the blood away. ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?'” he whispered. “Nobody could help her, they did try.”

There was a silence then, because tears had come into his eyes and Floss realised that Magnus was really speaking about his own mother. She wanted to put her arms round him but she didn't dare. It all felt too private.

Instead, she clapped him rather too heartily on the back. “Magnus,” she said breezily, “the things you
know. You amaze me. I've been doing
Macbeth
for weeks and you never let on that you knew all that.”

“Well, I don't know much,” he said modestly, “but Father Godless took me to it, in London. It was in a park, in the open air. I read bits of it afterwards, on my own. I suppose I just remembered those lines.” Then he added, “And that's what I want to talk to you about. I think the women here are a bit like Lady Macbeth.”

“What women?” Sam said, sitting on his bed. “There aren't any women, apart from Cousin M.” He was feeling a bit excluded by all this talk about Shakespeare between his sister and Magnus.

“Yes there are. Haven't you heard them?”

“Heard what? What are you on about, Mags? Why do you have to talk in riddles?”

Floss glared at him. They both knew that Magnus could be very unpredictable and that you sometimes had to tread carefully with him, especially when something really upset him. It was fantastic that he'd done as much talking as he had, since they'd arrived at the Abbey. It could only be because they were on their own, away from the grown-ups. But if Sam bullied him he'd go back into his shell and clam up for the rest of the holiday. He was an extremely fragile person and he'd just made it very clear to them how much his mother's sufferings were preying on his mind.

He sat cross-legged on his divan, put the tips of his
fingers together and brought his hands to his mouth. Then he looked up at the other two and said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No.” Sam answered first, firmly and loudly, without hesitation.

“Why not?”

“Because, well, I don't know why not. Except that there are usually quite good explanations for them, most of the time.”

“What kind of explanations?”

“Well, for example – in houses that make noises in the night. It's usually something like central-heating pipes, that kind of thing.”

Magnus was unimpressed. “What else?” he said. “That's not much to go on.”

“I don't know what else. I just don't believe in ghosts and actually, I'm not very interested in them.” For some reason Sam was feeling threatened.

“But you're interested in history.”

“Well, so what?”

“History's about ghosts.”

“It's not. It's about time.”

“Same thing,” said Magnus. “What about you, Floss? Do you think ghosts are a load of rubbish too? It's obvious your brother does.”

She said nothing at first. Sam wouldn't like this remark and neither did she. Eventually she said rather
coldly, “I've never seen a ghost, Magnus, but that's not to say I don't believe.”

“Why are you asking us, anyhow?” Sam said irritably. “And why are you being so rude? Would you mind getting to the point? We're not all as intellectual as you, Magnus, and I must say you're extremely good at making people feel small.”

Magnus blushed. There was an atmosphere now. This was the nearest the three of them had ever come to quarrelling.

“I'm sorry,” he said in a small voice, but Sam had stalked across to the window and was staring moodily through the bars. Magnus looked taken aback. Sam had always been so kind to him, they both had. “I've said I'm sorry,” he repeated. His father, whom he didn't remember very well any more, had always said that if you apologised then that was it, that the other person had to accept it. “Can't we be friends?” he pleaded, realising that he really minded Sam ignoring him, and that both Sam and Floss were very important to him, and that he needed them to stick up for him.

But Sam went on staring through the window. Floss walked over to him and whispered something that Magnus couldn't hear, then a prolonged and muffled conversation took place.

“OK,” he heard finally. “But stop going on about it!” And Sam, red-faced and fierce-looking, turned back into
the room then came and flopped down on his bed. “Go on, Mags,” he said. “You were saying, about whether ghosts exist or not. Why are you so uptight about it all?”

Magnus hesitated. He was nervous now, in case Sam shouted again. “Do you really want to know?” he asked cautiously.

“Yes, I really want to know,” replied Sam in an expressionless voice.

“Well all right. I think there's something wrong with this house, something seriously wrong. I felt it as soon as we arrived.”

Sam pulled a face. “Well, that's not new. There's lots wrong, I'd say, but it's got nothing to do with ghosts.”

“All right, what
is
wrong?” asked Floss. She hadn't managed to talk to their mother about Cousin M and the Abbey, but she knew that Sam had, after the booklet arrived.

He said, “Well, it's all a bit mysterious. According to Mum the Colonel's obviously spent a load of money on this place, in the past I mean, trying to make a profit out of it, so that he can carry on living here. But it's all come to nothing, and now Cousin M's had to bale him out. People obviously don't use it for conferences, and they don't do any sports training here, either. It feels as if the whole place is in limbo to me. And who looks after it? There's nobody around much, except that old man Wilf.
Cousin M does the garden and the Colonel just, well, fusses around saying he's busy.”

“There's something evil about the place, that's the reason,” said Magnus, with complete authority. “People must have been put off by something, they must be too frightened to come here. Cousin M told us that the Colonel always went to bed early, but he was awake, in the middle of the night, and he was still fully dressed. He was playing chess by the fire. He obviously can't sleep. His worries keep him awake.”

“And what were
you
doing wandering round in the night?” Sam asked suspiciously.

Magnus hesitated. Sam had already dismissed ghosts, relegating them to creaking water pipes. But Floss felt more sympathetic. He had a choice. He could either pretend that all was well, like Colonel Stickley did, or he could take Floss and Sam into his confidence. He liked them and he very much wanted them to like him. He'd never been part of a proper family before.

He took the plunge. “Something woke me up,” he said, “a woman.”

“Did you see anything?”

“No. I just heard her. She was crying. And this room – it went terribly cold and it, sort of, filled with mist. It felt just like it did when we went into the Great Hall, cold all of a sudden, and for no reason. The cat was
asleep on my bed but it woke up, and it went rigid. He was really terrified, honestly and he ran away.”

Floss put her hand on his arm. “OK. Well, that's interesting because we were cold too. Weren't we, Sam?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, grudgingly. “But that doesn't mean anything. This is a tower room, for heaven's sake. Look how thick the walls are.”

“Yes, but it's one of the warmer rooms, according to Cousin M, that's why she put us here, in spite of Colonel Stickley telling her not to. You told us that yourself,” Floss reminded him.

“That's true, I admit that,” Sam said reluctantly. He
had
been woken up by the sound of somebody crying and he knew that it hadn't been Magnus. The voice had been grown-up, and female.

“I went down to the picture gallery,” Magnus went on, “you know, the hall where we had the sandwiches. That's where the Colonel was, playing a chess game with himself. And when I looked at that big portrait, the one of the woman—” But he stopped. They were not going to believe this.

“
What
?”

“She wasn't there.”

Sam's mouth curled. “What do you mean, ‘she wasn't there'?”