The Silence of Ghosts (7 page)

‘What if I fall?’ I felt crushed by the sudden change in her attitude.

‘Then you’ll pick yourself up and keep walking. Listen to me, Dominic, I’m sorry if I sound harsh, but if I let you off the hook you’ll wind up bedridden, and that’s the last thing any of us need. If we’re to be friends, you have to pull yourself together and make me proud of you. I can only admire a man who acts like a man. You did well to join the Navy and go into battle twice, but this is your real battle and you have to do most of it yourself.’

She helped me dress, let me lean on her while I stood, and held me while I took hold of the crutches and fixed them beneath my arms. I was stung by what she said, but I could hardly deny the truth of it.

We asked Octavia to stay behind. Rose thought her asthma might be activated by the cold.

‘I know someone who makes herbal remedies,’ said Rose. ‘I’m not supposed to encourage such things, but I know very well that this woman’s treatments work in some cases. I’ll ask her to call in some day.’

Outside, the light was good. My movements were uncertain. I had to balance on each crutch in turn while I moved the other forward. Of course, this was easy enough when I could lean on my good leg, but I was still awkward with the amputation. But even there I found the artificial leg would bear my weight better than I at first imagined. And Rose clung to me by my left arm, very like a sweetheart, though I dared not let my thoughts stray in that direction.

We walked down to the lake shore. As we did so we noticed four children standing a little further up, watching us, a boy of about sixteen and three girls of about ten or eleven.

‘Do you know them?’ I asked.

Rose shook her head.

‘I’ve never seen them before. They do look an odd bunch, though. I imagine the youngest girl is about ten and the oldest twelve. The boy is a few years older. They should be better dressed for one thing. As it is, they look very pale, almost as though they are consumptive. Let me have a word with them.’

She left me leaning against a tree and walked directly towards the children. As she did so, they turned and hurried away from her. After a few minutes’ searching, she came back to me.

‘That’s the funniest thing,’ she exclaimed. ‘They ran off, and by the time I got there they’d vanished. Well, no doubt I’ll see them around. Maybe somebody in Howtown or Martindale or Pooley Bridge will know who they are. I’d like to get them some warmer clothes.’

I wondered about the children, though I said nothing to Rose. Octavia said she saw a pale face at an upstairs window. Was it possible these children, who might have been vagrants of some kind, Romanies perhaps, had found a way into the house, seeking shelter and warmth? Was it they who left the light on for Rose to see?

We continued our walk. After weeks of bed rest, the cold air came as a shock. I was getting some exercise, but not the robust kind I had been used to. As we reached the lake, we saw that the water had frozen over from bank to bank. Ullswater is a narrow lake, nine miles long but only three wide, so I imagine the ice runs all the way along.

‘One year we came down for Christmas and there was ice just like this,’ I said. ‘I went skating with a friend from Glenridding. We went out every day of the holiday, and it was still frozen when we left.’

‘Where was Octavia?’

‘She was very small, and her asthma kept her away. Do you think this herbalist can help?’

‘I’m sure of it. But don’t tell Dr Raverat. He’s very agin natural healing.’

‘But you’re a nurse. Don’t you have problems with it?’

‘With a lot of it, yes – be careful there, there’s a pothole – but I’ve known some who are helped greatly with herbs.’

I stopped and looked out over the lake.

‘God, what I’d give to skate again.’

She squeezed my arm.

‘If you work at it, you’ll be skating by Christmas, if there’s any ice left by then. My only worry would be to make sure the ice wasn’t going to break. If that happened you could be in serious trouble, and I doubt very much I could get you out. Now, I think it’s time to get you back.’

‘What about staying to supper?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘I have to get back to my mother. I’ve told her all about you. She likes to hear about my patients. I’ve asked her to come down to visit you some day, but she seems nervous about something and says she’d rather meet you in Pooley Bridge once you’re able to get there. She lived down here in Martindale before I was born. She says she knows this stretch of the woods well, knows your house too.’

‘Is that why she won’t come? What does she know about the house?’

‘She won’t say. She may know something, she may not. They’re all the same round here, they like mysteries, well-hidden secrets, things only a handful of them know. Treating patients is murder. Half the time they won’t say what’s really going on, they keep back symptoms, they even lie about them. My mother’s as bad as the next. All this rain and mist makes the lake people wary of letting the outside world in on their secrets.’

‘But I’m not the outside world. My family own this house . . .’

‘For the folk round here you’re an interloper, however many houses you may own.’

‘And what about you?’ I asked.

‘I’m one of them, but the time I spent training opened my eye. You can’t keep secrets and be a nurse, not a lot anyway.’

‘Are you keeping any secrets from me?’

‘I think we should get back,’ she said, and we started to pick our way along the uneven ground. I was gaining my balance, but I didn’t want to tell that to Rose. I enjoyed having her by my side, the feel of her hand on my arm. I won’t say this to anyone, but I think even more that I am falling in love with her, and I know there’s nothing I can do about it.

We both looked up as we reached the front door, to see if there was any sign of life upstairs; but nothing stirred. Perhaps it had, after all, been a trick of the light.

Octavia came to see me safely in. Rose made to go, then turned and smiled.

‘I’m sorry I was hard on you earlier.’ Saying which she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. Hours later, and I can still feel the touch of her lips on my skin.

Octavia had prepared enough for an early meal. But as I entered, I detected something amiss with her. It was already dark, and the candles and lamps had been lit, perhaps more than was really necessary. We ate in silence, something that rarely happened between us. When I got into bed, wrapped in an eiderdown against the cold, she sat down facing me. Her face showed concern, as it had yesterday.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

She shrugged.

I asked it again, this time using my hands.

She shrugged again.

‘Something is wrong,’ I said. ‘Have you been upstairs again?’

This time she shook her head.

‘Then what is it? Please don’t hold things back from me.’

‘It will only worry you,’ she said, clenching her jaws and putting her hands back together tightly. I am familiar with this behaviour. When Octavia wants to be difficult, nothing will budge her. We did not speak for the rest of the evening. After my exertions I wanted an early night. Octavia would not sleep without the candles, and I let her keep them.

‘But you can’t do this every night,’ I said. ‘Candles and oil are like gold-dust nowadays, and if we use too many we’ll have none at all in a week or two.’

‘I don’t want to sleep in the dark,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because somebody’s living in this house. I heard them earlier. Whispering. When I turned round there was no one there. But there was still whispering.’

Friday, 13 December

I settled Octavia, who fell asleep soon afterwards in spite of her fears, but I found I could not get to sleep myself. I had a nagging pain from my stump, and remained awake until an hour or so before dawn. All night I listened for the whispers Octavia had told me about, but I heard nothing. It didn’t make sense, given how very deaf she is. I can’t think of anything loud enough for her to hear that I couldn’t hear much more clearly. But as long as I stayed awake, the house was silent.

Octavia said nothing about the whispers this morning, and I decided not to raise the subject myself. If the whispering does
persist, I may take her back to London to visit her specialist, Dr Radley, just to see if anything is happening to her ears.

I put this to Rose this afternoon, when she turned up to take me for another circuit. She didn’t think it likely that a child of Octavia’s age would be experiencing changes in the structure of her eardrum, but she did not rule it out entirely. She brought a bottle of herbal medicine. Octavia found the taste disgusting, but Rose used some of our precious sugar to sweeten it, and it went down well.

Our walk went well. We didn’t see the four children from yesterday. Rose said she’d asked here and there about them, but nobody knew who they were. I found it easier to lean on my left leg, and almost imagined I could walk without the crutches.

‘You will do in time,’ Rose said. ‘But don’t run before you can walk.’

We were finding it easier in one another’s company. Rose told me the story of how she had come to train as a nurse. While at school in Glenridding, she had entertained all sorts of ideas as to the course of her future life. Childish dreams of becoming a ballerina or a concert pianist gave way bit by bit to expectations of a husband and a life in a country cottage as a housewife. Of course, the choice of a man in the countryside for a woman like Rose was not exactly wide. There were farmers’ sons whom she met at the county shows, and older men who had been farming their acre of land for a decade or more, and the doctor’s son, whom she considered far above her, though she knew he liked her. They walked out together for a little while, and one night he kissed her, and she kissed him back, but there was no spark in it, and they drew apart and he went to university and never returned.

‘It was his loss,’ I said. ‘He’ll never find anyone as beautiful as you again.’

She stopped and looked into my eyes, giving me a very cheeky look.

‘So, you think I’m beautiful, do you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Well, you’re not a bad-looking fellow. Six out of ten, I’d say.’

‘Are nurses supposed to engage in banter like this?’

She shook her head.

‘We’re not. But there’s no Sister and no Matron for about fifty miles in any direction, so I do as I please.’

‘Is that why you became a nurse? Just so you could mock the rules and regulations.’

She laughed.

‘I’m sure you broke a few of those when you were in the Navy.’

‘You were telling me why you became a nurse, but so far we’ve only heard about farmers’ sons.’

Her face shifted. The mischief went out of her eyes.

‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I did promise to tell you.’

We walked on a bit in silence. The cold air bit our ears and turned our lips blue. It bit into my wound, exacerbating the pain there. Rose was planning to reduce my morphia another notch.

‘I have a brother, Jack,’ she said. ‘He is five years older than me, and I always remember him being so far ahead. The older I got, the more I appreciated him. My parents adored him. He was bright, and Mother had hopes of a scholarship that would take him to university. She would talk about Cambridge or Oxford in hushed tones. Father talked about driving us all there one day, to one of them at least. Jack was the family’s hope for the future, and my hope too, because I felt things couldn’t go wrong for me if they went well for him. We went everywhere together, and in the spring and summer we had a little place where we went swimming. We made one another the finest Christmas presents
and tied them up with cloth and special string with bows, and one year he bought me a box of face powder in Woolworth’s.’

She stopped talking, remembering.

‘I still have the box,’ she said and fell silent for a minute.

‘What happened?’ I asked, because I knew something had.

‘One day he went with his friends to play football. It’s all it was, a silly football game. He was eighteen and had sat his exams and was waiting for the results. My mother knew it had happened before he got home. She went white and sat down, half fainting, and when I brought her a glass of spirits to revive her, she turned to me and said “I can see three men, they’re bringing your brother Jack”, and not long passed after that when I saw three men coming holding a door, and on the door was Jack, and they told me he’d fallen in the game when someone tackled him, and couldn’t stand up on his feet again. We got him to bed and my father fetched the doctor, and the next day our doctor brought another doctor, so we knew something serious was wrong, because Jack could feel nothing beneath the waist and couldn’t walk. I was in floods of tears and my mum too, we howled like banshees from morning to night just looking at him, just watching him lie on that bed immobile. They took him in the end to North Lonsdale Hospital, and he’s there to this day. He can talk and all that, but it’s not the old Jack. I felt terrible in the early days, because I didn’t know how to look after him. I wanted to care for him, and after he was taken to the hospital I saw how real nurses did that. That was when I decided to become a nurse. Now, I can do more than pity him. I can help somebody like you to walk. You’ve had a tremendous blow, but it’s not the end of the world like it was for my brother. He passed his exams, you know, he could have had a scholarship. One of the Cambridge colleges was willing to pay him a bursary.

‘Before the war is over, you’ll just be one of thousands who’ve lost a limb or an eye or suffered burns across their whole bodies. I’ve seen men with burns who look like nothing human. But you’re still a very good-looking man. Don’t take my word for it. By the time you’re on your feet, women will be desperate to make your acquaintance. Now, before your head’s too stuffed with grand ideas and you start to have mad thoughts about my finding you attractive, we’d better walk on a bit further.’

Somehow, knowing about Jack makes it easier for me to understand why she pushes me to make an effort. There’s nothing she can do for her brother, she says, for he will never walk again, short of a miracle. Every time she can help somebody like myself, it’s a compensation for the state her brother is in.