The Ghost Writer (27 page)

I found a small parlour or breakfast room, immediately below the dining room, with shuttered French windows opening—or rather refusing to open—on to the courtyard. Behind the parlour was a small kitchen—1920s or 30s, I thought—three-burner gas cooker, chipped porcelain sink, wooden cupboards and benches. Mixed crockery, also chipped and cracked, that looked like the remnants of expensive services. A few tins rusting in the food cupboard, labels long gone.

The main house door next to the parlour was painted a drab black. It appeared to be locked and bolted. To the right of that was another set of French windows, also locked, into the conservatory. Peering through the glass, I saw a long trestle table crammed with pots and seed trays from which a few desiccated sticks protruded. Garden tools leaned against walls and benches. An old wooden barrow stood blocking one of the aisles.

No other doors. The stairs continued on down, back in under the house. Daylight slanted down the stairwell on to a patch of stone floor. From where I stood in the entrance, the original kitchen extended out to my left. An ancient black range with a corroded flue; brick walls; a scarred worktable; canisters rusting along a wall shelf in descending order of size. The air down here was colder, and distinctly damp; the ceiling was only a foot above my head. I took a few uneasy steps into the gloom. There was a doorway in the opposite wall, opening onto darkness.

I
RETREATED UP THE STAIRS TO THE LANDING, TOOK THE
first door on my left, opposite the dining-room, and was greeted by the warm, faintly sweet smell of printed paper and cloth boards, dust and leather and old bindings.

The shutters—polished wood here, rather than painted—opened into a library as imposing as the drawing-room. Tall bookcases rose like pillars between four high, narrow windows in the rear wall of the house. Around the other three sides of the room, a mezzanine gallery had been built about seven or eight feet above the floor, giving access to a second tier of shelves, with cases built out like piers from the recessed shelves below, so that the books in the lower section were housed in a series of alcoves. There was an open spiral staircase at the far end of the room, leading up to the gallery; a chesterfield and two cracked brown leather armchairs stood below the windows. The centre of the floor was taken up by a massive table covered in worn green baize, with four high-backed library chairs ranged around it. Several large blank sheets of what looked like butcher's paper had been left at one end of it, with a folded chessboard and some sort of child's toy on top of the pile.

I wandered along the cases, pulling out volumes at random. Blue books, parliamentary papers, regimental histories, accounts of military campaigns and naval battles, gazetteers, clerical lists, law lists, county histories and so forth, occupied an entire wall. A nineteenth-century gentleman's library. Belonging to one J.G. Ferrier ... and a G.C. Ferrier ... then a C.R. Ferrier, in thick, greyish ink on the flyleaf of A
Narrative of the Operations of a Small British Force Employed in the Reduction of Monte Video on the River Plate, A.D. 1807. By a Field Officer on the Staff.

I moved on to the next wall. Literature: Greek and Latin, all J.G. Ferrier; the standard English poets, mostly in nineteenth-century editions inscribed by J.G. and G.C ... until I took down one of several disintegrating Byrons and found 'V. Ferrier/ Jan. 1883' on the flyleaf in a clear, spiky hand. And in the next alcove, in a well-worn copy of Balzac's
Illusions perdues,
'V. Hatherley/ Oct. 1901'.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER, THOUGH
I
HADN'T EVEN STARTED ON
the mezzanine gallery, I knew that Viola Ferrier had become Viola Hatherley some time between 1887 and 1889; that she often marked passages in her books, but did not annotate beyond an occasional cryptic reference such as v.
P. de C, ix
'; that she, or someone with whom she shared her books, had been a heavy smoker—traces of ash and fine shreds of tobacco appeared between numerous pages in all her books—and that she read widely and eclectically in French as well as English. A system of shelving books by author and subject had been gradually subverted, so that a book by one Georges Lakhovsky,
he Secret de la vie: les ondes cosmiques et la radiation vitale,
marked simply 'VH/ Aug 1930', appeared between Richard Le Gallienne and Alice Meynell on a shelf devoted to the poets and essayists of the 1890s. Percy Brown's
American Martyrs to Science through the Roentgen Rays,
which looked as if it had been dropped in the bath or left out in the rain, lay sideways across the top of Lakhovsky.

Suddenly overtaken by a lurching wave of fatigue, I sat down at the central table. Filaments of dust drifted in the light from the four great windows on my right.
Soon, maybe sooner than you think
... Perhaps Alice would simply appear in her white dress, leaning over the gallery rail, smiling down at me ... 171
come to your house.

From my perspective, the gallery formed an elevated U, with the spiral staircase immediately to the right of the windows. At the corresponding point on the opposite side, just before the end wall, one of the bookcases seemed to have been set back into the side wall at a considerable angle. No; a dummy bookcase, disguising a low, narrow door, like the ones on the galleries in the old Round Reading Room. Odd that I hadn't noticed it before.

Idly, I reached over to the stack of paper and picked up the toy. It resembled a miniature tricycle, four or five inches long, with two polished wheels at the back of a boat-shaped platform of the same dark wood. But instead of a front wheel, the stub of a pencil had been pushed through a hole at the front, point downward, and secured with a rubber band.

I put down the toy and opened the chessboard. Only it was not a chessboard. Instead of squares it had YES in the top left corner, next to an image of the sun, and NO opposite, next to the moon, above the letters of the alphabet set out in two shallow horseshoe arcs, then the numbers 1 to 10, and below that, GOODBYE. The William Flud Talking Board Set. John Waddington Ltd, Leeds & London, permitted user of the trade marks Ouija, William Flud and Mystifying Oracle.

Now I knew what the tricycle was. I leafed through the sheets of paper, but they were all blank. After a little practice with the—plechette?—no, planchette—I could produce legible words. On a clean sheet of paper I wrote

WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNE?

in large, spidery letters, and set the planchette below the W, with my fingers resting lightly on the wooden platform.

I
DIDN'T—DID
I?—
SERIOUSLY EXPECT IT TO ANSWER
. Y
OU
needed at least two people, anyway. But I did have to find the answer myself if I possibly could. Because clearly Miss Hamish had given me the keys as a sort of test. To prove myself a worthy heir to Ferrier's Close and Staplefield. She had all but said so on the last page of her letter.
There is a destiny at work here ... my passionate yearning to
know,
for certain, what became of my best and dearest friend ... if anyone is ever to uncover the answers, it will be you.

But suppose—just supposing—I were to discover that my mother really had murdered her sister? I would have to live with the knowledge for ever; it would poison my reunion (as I often found myself thinking, perhaps because of our shared dream) with Alice; and Miss Hamish certainly wouldn't leave me the estate.

Of course I didn't know that Anne Hatherley was dead. She might have ... packed her things, suffered an attack of total amnesia, and started a new life under a different name? Joined a silent order of nuns and forgotten to tell anyone? Been abducted by aliens? All we knew for certain was that her body had never been found. Or at least identified.

The police found nothing amiss.
But how thoroughly had they searched the house? Had they dug up the garden? What if the person who left with Anne's suitcases hadn't been Anne at all?

The old sick feeling of dread came flooding back. I released the planchette and tried to focus on breathing deeply and slowly. Unclench your hands. Concentrate on breathing. Repeat after me: if the police and the lawyer hadn't been certain that Phyllis was innocent, Miss Hamish would have known, because she was their principal witness.

And in the very worst case, if I were to uncover anything along those lines, telling Miss Hamish would be sheer, pointless cruelty. Whereas if I could come up with something benign—amnesia was, after all, a possibility, especially after so many traumatic events, coming so close together—or even a religious conversion, one of those blinding light experiences ... really, I owed it to Miss Hamish to keep an open mind and not leap to conclusions that could only distress her. I hadn't even seen the upstairs rooms yet.

I
HAD ASSUMED THAT BY THE END OF THIS FIRST EXPLO
ration, I would have gained a clear picture of the house and its surroundings. But the higher I climbed, the more disoriented I became. The air grew hotter and stuffier. I tried various windows on the upper floors, but none of them would budge: many above the ground floor were so thickly coated with grime that when blurred patches of the Heath began to appear amongst the treetops, I wasn't always sure which direction I was looking in. And yet there was something oddly familiar about the place.

The blurred views compounded the sensation of slipping backwards and forwards in time, for if it was still 1850 in the drawing-room below, the first-floor sitting-room had got as far as the 1940s: a large, light, comfortable room furnished with a sagging floral sofa, stuffed chairs, a massive cabinet radio to the right of the fireplace, and a bookcase full of novels: Galsworthy, Bennett, Huxley, early Graham Greene ... Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett ... detective stories even I had never heard of, such as
The Public School Murder,
by R.C. Woodthorpe, inscribed 'V.H. Xmas 1932'. The window looked down upon the overgrown courtyard. A door to the right of the window led to the rear stairs—there seemed to be at least two different ways of getting from any one room to another—and to an L-shaped passage with doors leading to the mezzanine floor of the library at one end, and to the gallery above the drawing-room at the other.

Apart from the sitting-room at the rear of the house, there were only two other rooms on this level: another, much smaller sitting-room, and a bedroom, both opening off the front landing. The upper levels of the drawing-room and library and their respective galleries took up the rest of the space. The two front rooms, I decided, had probably been Iris's: the sitting-room bookcase held long runs of two spiritualist journals from the 1920s and 30s:
Light,
and
The Medium,
along with numerous volumes on theosophy, the tarot, Buddhism, astrology, astral travelling, divination, reincarnation, and more. I noticed a copy of
An Adventure
—which I had once skimmed—about the two women who claimed to have got lost in the gardens of Versailles and found themselves back in the eighteenth century. The closet was still full of clothes that looked as if they might have belonged to a tall, elderly woman; a rusting lipstick and several faded cardboard containers were neatly arranged on the dressing-table beneath a thick layer of dust.

I went on up the stairs to the second-floor landing. Ahead of me, a dim corridor led towards the rear of the house. Threadbare Persian runners over dark stained boards; William Morris paper, frayed and peeling at the joins.

I started down the corridor and tried the first door on my left. Daylight showed faintly below the curtains at the far end of the room, which shared a common wall with the landing. A musty old-dog smell rose from the carpet as I approached the window; for a moment I was a child again, trespassing in my mothers bedroom. I dragged the curtains open. Looking down at a blurred glimpse of laneway through thick foliage, I realised that this room must be directly above the drawing-room. Dust and fragments of the curtains—a dingy maroon—drifted down around me. To the right of the window stood a dressing-table with a swing mirror and a brocaded stool; on the left, an oak tallboy, and then a small bookcase. The bed, a single, draped in a bedspread the same colour as the curtains, stood with its head against the panelling opposite the window. The other three walls were papered: more fraying William Morris.

A closet had been let into the panelling beside the bed; the door was slightly ajar. Moving closer, I drew back the bedspread and saw that the bed was fully made up. A moth fluttered out from behind the pillow, trailing its own tiny cloud of dust as it whirred past my face. Inside the closet hung a single white dress or tunic; a yellowy, greyish white now. And on the floor below the dress, a tennis racquet, with
ANNE HATHERLEY
burnt in pokerworked capitals into the wooden handle.

The bedroom next door was almost a mirror image of Anne's, except that the window was in the side wall of the house. It too had a single bed, with its head against the common partition, and a closet built into the corresponding space to the left of the bed. The curtains and bedspread were dark green, made of the same heavy material. Nothing in the closet this time except dust and a few wire hangers. Just four books in a small case on the other side of the bed. A
High Wind in Jamaica, Rebecca, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
and
The Death of the Heart.
The Agatha Christie was unmarked. The other three had 'P.M. Hatherley' written in neat, slightly rounded script on the flyleaf.

F
OR SOMEONE WHO HAD LEFT HOME FOR EVER WITH JUST
a couple of suitcases, Phyllis Hatherley had done a remarkably thorough job of clearing out her room. Apart from the four novels, and a musty blanket in the bottom drawer of a chest by the window, the room was completely bare. Of course she might have come back later, when the house was empty ... best not to think too far along that track. In fact it would make my task a lot easier if I were to think of Phyllis Hatherley and my mother as two quite separate people.