An English Ghost Story (17 page)

‘There might be a percentage in looking after the house, putting a bit of money into restoration.’

‘All mod cons?’

‘More like all old cons. With advice, we could get the place exactly as it was when Weezie was here.’

‘Which, if you remember, was only last year.’

‘Not Louise, Weezie. This is the house in the books, Hilltop Heights. We could get a replica made of the sign over the door, maybe change the name.’

That was a bad idea. He felt it deep in his water, reacting strongly even before he could think about why Kirsty was wrong.

‘We’re on a moor, not a hill,’ he said. ‘This is a Hollow, not a Heights.’

Kirsty angled her head on one side. She was also trying to say something she couldn’t put into words. They were venturing further out onto the ice. He recognised her incipient smouldering.

(When angry, she was terrifying, a biter and a breaker.)

‘I know, but it’s as if the Hollow wants to rearrange itself.’

‘And we’re merely keepers of the flame?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, but we have to respect the house. This is not an ordinary place.’

‘You’ll get no arguments from me on that, Kirst. But, with respect, Weezie was never real and Louise is gone. We live at the Hollow now. Us, the Naremores. It’s our home. If it’s rearranging itself, it’s to suit us. We can’t live and work in a museum of childhood chintz.’

‘There are grants available for sites of interest.’

Kirsty had always been keen on grants and loans and start-up schemes. Oddments had been puffed up with every hand-out going, and hadn’t been able to survive after the dole dried up.

‘It’s all very well to have Wing-Weirdie and his pals over for tea and buns, but you can’t cover the walls with Weezie paper to keep him happy.’

‘I knew you’d take it like this.’ Kirsty’s face was in shadow. ‘It’s a threat to you, OMB, isn’t it?’

OMB. O Mighty Breadwinner.

Tim looked up sharply, catapult at the ready.

‘Is this an argument?’ he asked.

‘It’s a discussion,’ Steven assured him.

‘That’s all right, then. You promised. No arguments.’

‘So we did, soldier.’

He looked at his wife and still couldn’t see her face.

‘It’s all right,’ she said in precisely the tone that implied that nothing was all right or ever would be again. He couldn’t tell which of them she was failing to reassure. ‘Mum’s just off her head, as usual.’

‘But it’s such a nice head,’ he said, getting up.

He wasn’t going to let ill-feeling last till bedtime. He was going to crawl to Kirsty, give her some ground (or at least seem to) and make things right again, in this room, at this instant. The move to the Hollow proved he could change, that he was not trapped in the patterns of the past.

He stood up and walked to the long table. A splay of Weezie books was laid out like prospectuses in a travel agent’s. He pulled Kirsty up out of her chair and held her to him.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘You’re right. The Hollow is a responsibility. Get what you can out of Wing-Godfrey’s Society, only don’t let them run our lives.’

‘They won’t,’ she said, still cold. ‘They can’t.’

He kissed her.

‘And, darling, think of the ghosts. How much do you want outsiders to know about them?’

She closed her eyes.

* * *

T
im wasn’t fooled. His parents cuddled, but he stepped up to DefCon 2. There were definite signs that the peace was breaking. It was a strain to keep to treaty terms.

The U-Dub was stripped, cleaned and back together.

Something he could depend on.

He would have to be careful. Negotiations with the IP were at a delicate stage. It wasn’t a question of going over to their side. He would always owe primary allegiance to the family unit. No state of hostility existed between the IP and the FU. He wasn’t sure such a state was even possible.

Of them all, he was closest to the IP. Perhaps it was because he was physically nearer the ground, used to looking up at faces and paying attention to skirting boards. He was small for his age, shorter than most of the boys in his old class at school.

Did his parents not see the girl standing in the fireplace, still as a statue? Dressed all in black, all black herself. Not like West Indian children in the city – they were brown, really. This girl was coal-black, down to her lips and eyeballs, camouflaged against sooty bricks.

He saluted the IP officer.

The black eyes passed approvingly over him and fastened on his parents.

They’re five by five really, he thought at her, with a tiny, half-embarrassed shrug. Mum and Dad were doing that grown-up kissy stuff most kids were obsessed with. Unhygienic and surplus to requirements, but it was not his place to criticise.

The black face didn’t smile or frown. Nothing was given away.

The little girl stuck out her arms and legs, fastening toes and fingers into crannies in the walls at either side of the chimney, and scuttled upwards swiftly, like a big spider, climbing silently out of sight.

A fine rain of soot fell, unnoticed by anyone except him.

There were others in the room, but he was used to them. Dad’s chair was one, a set of dents and impressions in its back resembling a scowling face. A single pane of glass set high in the French windows was an eternal smile, which showed only in the afternoon when you stood in the doorway (and were four feet tall). The smile had eyes in other panes, but they were fixed like a painting; the smile could change from a close-lipped friendly crescent to an almost-ferocious grin, displaying rows of pearly whites.

The IP were good people, Tim knew. Rock solid and reliable in a world where everything was always shifting. Men to go into the jungle with and have at your back during the thickest firefight.

But there was something about that smiling window. Like a smirk in the ranks at inspection. Nothing against regulations, but Tim knew something was being put over on the sly. He had that one marked down as a potential discipline problem.

Tim would keep an eye out in that direction. At the first sign of trouble, he would lodge an official complaint with the IP C.-in-C.

The MP and the PP were dancing close together, without any music.

Time to fade into the scenery.

* * *

A
fter midnight, in her new dress, Jordan came down from her room, gliding silently so as not to wake anyone (they were all off in their tower, anyway). She went out into the orchard. It had been a hot day, stuffy in her room, so the chill of night was welcome, like feathers brushing her bare shoulders and arms. In the dark, she wasn’t such a grotesque frump. If she kept to shadows, the dress would make her seem slim.

It was tight for walking, but a hidden slit, up to the thigh, meant she could make her way. The shoes were a problem. She had kept her trainers (silly as they might look) because she knew walking along the unlit road to the village in heels was an invitation to disasters, from feet chafed bloody to a dunking in a ditch.

In her right hand, the only part of her which was as slim and pale as she wanted to be all over, she held the Letter. Eighteen pages of perfect venom. Posting it would be a significant juncture in her life. The end of Rick and the birth of the new Jordan, the thin girl.

She walked down the drive, opened the gate a crack, and tried to slip through. Her hips caught and she had to push the gate open wider to escape. Her cheeks burned with humiliation but there was no one to see. The night breeze stroked away her blush with a sympathetic touch.

Cold caresses and whisper kisses.

There was no traffic at this hour. She walked down the middle of the road, trainers flapping, her dress hiked up around her thighs to keep it from trailing along the tarmac. The Letter was tucked warm under her armpit, to impregnate it with the scent of her body, to remind Rick of what was lost to him for ever.

Out of sight of the house and not yet within sight of the village, she wondered what she was doing. She was all alone on the face of a dark earth. Only the paved road distinguished this landscape from the moors King Alfred had known. The stars were fixed above her, glinting messages from a million years ago.

What was she doing?

She wasn’t fat and she was being silly.

The caresses and chills were withdrawn. She was hot inside, almost with a fever. She spun around and around, dress skirling out like a flamenco dancer’s. The Letter slipped out of its flesh-nook, sailing over the verge and a rhyne. It fell, a shining white oblong, in dark grey-green grass.

Her head buzzed.

She looked at the black marble water of the ditch. A full yard across, unfathomably deep. Its verges were overgrown with sharp reeds and grasses, suggesting a patch of marsh into which a whole person could sink and be stuck.

She was not dressed for fording the rhyne.

Her fingers still tingled with the effort of typing the letter, the pads of her forefingers flattened from repeated jamming against the keys.

She called the Letter to her.

And it was in her hand.

Yes. She shouted silently, holding up the Letter like a winning lottery ticket.

Even the moor sided with her.

She found a box set into a drystone wall. Black in the night, red under daylight. She posted the Letter.

Done.

She must be in the village, though no buildings loomed in the dark. She also had the idea that she hadn’t taken the usual road here.

It didn’t matter.

She walked back to the Hollow and was home in a trice.

* * *

F
rom his observation post, he saw the truant return. He would have preferred to take a position inside Green Base. A sleeping bag could easily be jammed into the trunk, making a nicely padded foxhole. That would involve leaving the house, which meant negotiating the creaky stairs outside the parental bedroom. However, his OP would do. He had picked his room in the first place because it commanded the high ground.

Once the night’s story was done and the MP had seen him safely tucked in bed, he had counted slowly to a hundred, then got out from under the duvet and fixed up his OP. By the window was a half-sofa, a couch about his length with a rail-like back and single side. Mum said it was probably the survivor of a pair, but its broken-off arrangement suited him. He could get back support and let his legs stretch out, feet dangling. With his duvet wrapped around like a blanket and two pillows under his head, he was cocooned in a space by the tower window, close enough to the glass that his cheek felt the cold coming off it. The window faced the other tower, the smaller one. He had a view of the drive and the road and the orchard and the moor.

He caught quick naps during the day and night when he could, to be alert when he needed to be. Any wrong movement snapped him out of a doze.

The truant had left the Hollow less than an hour ago. He’d watched her trudge down the drive to the road. She came back walking differently, her arms not awkwardly clamped to her sides, as if she had got the hang of wearing her new dress. She didn’t return by the road, but appeared out of the orchard, startling him. He couldn’t work out her route, and was annoyed with himself that he hadn’t spotted her the instant she breached the perimeter.

What was the BS doing?

The U-Dub was in his hand. A detachable pane in the window made a firing port. He would not normally have cocked the weapon for a routine watch, but at DefCon 2 it was vital to be prepared for any attack.

DefCon 1 was war.

He pulled back the U-Dub and sighted on his sister.

The BS didn’t immediately come into the house, but lingered in the orchard – passing out of his sight for tense seconds – and wandered, with apparent lack of urgency, out to his HQ.

Tim had concluded his sister was behind the first incursion. The MP and the PP were too caught up in their own protracted peace talks to risk an incident over mere territoriality.

What would she do?

His arm was tense.

The BS stood among the trees and curtsied, raising her skirts and dipping like a dancer, bowing her head. Was she communicating with the IP or anyone else? He didn’t want to believe she’d gone over to the hostiles, but she had form. In London, she’d always been an iffy prospect, weak and strong at the same time, hard to predict. At times, she was in his corner with commitment and vehemence, shielding him from the fall-out. At others, she was on his back like a vulture, jabbing and clawing with words and fingers. Seventy-five percent reliable wasn’t good enough.

He was sorry, but that’s the way it was.

A vital truth that the IP had conveyed to him was that people didn’t change, they just became more themselves. As time went by, it got harder and harder to pretend.

The BS seemed to be dancing with herself. Innocent enough. Not a week ago, the FU had all danced together, with the IP, during the grand summit. That had felt like permanent peace. Now, it looked like a mere armistice, and a shaky one at that.

Suddenly, his sister stopped dancing, pulled up her dress and squatted by Green Base. He saw the shining stream. She was pissing where he lived.

Anger made him loosen his hold on the U-Dub.

He nearly fired the first shot. He would have been within his rights.

But he took the advice of the IP C.-in-C., the Ipkick.

Not yet. He wasn’t resourced for all-out war. But at DefCon 2, a guerrilla campaign was permissible.

He rolled away from the window, having seen enough, and let himself go to sleep, plotting…

* * *

H
er old bank phoned in connection with the Oddments account. A stray £35.79 in charges needed to be paid before the account could be closed. Kirsty was puzzled for a moment when the woman referred to ‘your letter of yesterday’, then went utterly cold. She promised to send a cheque for the outstanding amount and hung up.

That was the end of that.

She couldn’t remember a letter. There had been so many back-and-forth recriminations. It was probably something from last week or last month that had only just got to the woman’s desk. If she could bring herself to sit through the inevitable lecture, she would ask Steven; the mess had been turned over to him to sort out. As a little boy, had he seen
Mary Poppins
and identified with the stuffy bankers who suggested pocket money should be invested rather than going to feed the birds?