An English Ghost Story (22 page)

Wing-Godfrey smiled sagely.

This was not down to her being her usual inept self and forgetting that the Society were coming. They really hadn’t fixed a date. This was a total surprise. Wing-Godfrey had said
a
Saturday, not
this
Saturday. A big appointments diary lay beside the telephone; nothing was written in it until Tim’s first day of school in September. If this visit were arranged, she’d have noted it in red. Despite what Steven thought of her, she wouldn’t forget a concrete arrangement and let it creep up on her.

This was a trap. Somehow, she had been set up.

God, she hoped there were enough biscuits. They probably expected cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, or baskets of Drearcliff Grange tuck. Not just tea, but high tea. She wasn’t prepared.

‘Shall we start in the orchard?’ said Steven, standing to one side to let the guests use the French windows.

The Japanese women led the expedition. Wing-Godfrey hung back.

‘That’s better, Kirsty,’ he said, looking at her clothes.

The brown man went to join his comrades in the orchard.

‘I swear I didn’t know,’ Kirsty insisted.

Steven’s face was shut.

‘We’ve got to make the best of this,’ he said. ‘Jord, get to work in the kitchen. Root out some provisions. We’ve got enough apples, at least. They’ll like apples from the orchard. For the associations. And we’ll need gallons more tea. These are what you might call tea people.’

He had got his way about that. Kirsty wasn’t inclined to protest.

Jordan looked to her for confirmation of orders.

It broke her heart, but immediate needs meant she had to back Steven up.

‘If you could, darling,’ she said. ‘We’d owe you a tremendous favour.’

‘Tremendous,’ Jordan repeated.

Kirsty nodded.

Her daughter began collecting empty mugs from various surfaces and coasters.

‘United front,’ said Steven, offering Kirsty his arm.

Damn it, he had won. He was master here. She was just a bubble-headed ornament.

She would not let this rest. Inside, she boiled like a kettle.

Composed and smiling, they stepped into the orchard and found the Society looking up with awe at the house, exchanging Teazle tit-bits. The Japanese women used rolls of film. The Bullitts were canoodling; Kirsty overheard Mr Bullitt call his wife ‘Head Prefect’ and shuddered to think of their sex life.

(She and Steven had played that game.)

Miss Hazzard looked through the tree telescope, at the standing stones. Wing-Godfrey stood by her, proprietarily, lightly holding her head as he had held Kirsty’s. He was overly prissy about touching anyone. Perhaps that came from so long a confinement, removed from human contact beyond the occasional beating.

She didn’t want to feel sorry for him. She was angry at his imposition. She wasn’t even sure there wasn’t some sinister purpose to this visit.

Steven, who knew nothing about Louise Teazle, led them around the outside of the house, spouting like a tour guide, running through the original features they’d left alone and pointing out what they were doing with each room.

The Society were especially interested in the East Tower, where Louise had lived.

‘I’ve occupied her study,’ Steven said, ‘and Jordan, our daughter, has the bedroom.’

Miss Hazzard sighed out loud, trembling with ecstatic envy. The girl couldn’t be twenty. Shouldn’t she be interested in clubbing, drugs and wild boys? What had driven her to seventy-year-old kids’ books? She wasn’t really deformed, just a victim of bad posture.

‘What of your plans to open the place to the public?’ squeaked Mr Bullitt. ‘Bernard has been telling us about Mrs Naremore’s exciting ideas. I dare say this could be quite a tourist trap.’

Steven looked as if he’d been shot but tried to cover up.

‘Kirst is getting ahead of herself there, I’m afraid,’ he said, darting a venomous glance at her. ‘We’re not really set up for that sort of thing. Short on reliable staff. You might have noticed. Oh, we try, of course, but we’re proper ones for the odd spot of bungling.’

‘Still, such an opportunity…’

Mr Bullitt looked up to his wife for support.

‘We’re certainly not ruling anything out at this stage,’ said Steven. ‘It’s early days yet.’

He would never let Kirsty make anything of the Hollow. Any time she raised it, he would bring up this incident as a humorous justification for stamping on her projects. Had he somehow contrived the situation? Set her up for a humiliation so he would have unlimited ammunition?

‘A museum,’ Mrs Bullitt said. ‘That’s what this place should be, for the public trust. It’s a national treasure, a resource. Teazle belongs to us all, you know.’

‘But the Hollow belongs to us,’ said Steven, uncomfortable but firm.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bullitt.

When the place came on the market, why hadn’t these people put in an offer? It wasn’t as if it had been overpriced.

‘I don’t know that I could live here,’ said Miss Hazzard. ‘Too many…’

‘Associations?’ suggested Kirsty.

‘…ghosts,’ the girl said.

* * *

W
hen the fruitcakes left,
if
they ever left, he would strangle Kirsty. Slowly. This disaster was down to her failure to share information, to keep track of important things. She’d given a vague invitation and not remembered when the Society got back to her. Now, the Hollow was invaded.

Steven was handling the crisis with consummate diplomacy and skill. After the spectacle Kirsty made of herself when they arrived, Wing-Godfrey’s weirdies knew something was wrong. He exerted his powers of persuasion to make them forget the fright in her knickers and project an image of normality. He gritted his teeth as if clamping an imaginary pipe and talked bollocks about the house and grounds. He was a spellbinder; they’d all go away idiotically happy, privileged to have been shown around by such an expert. He also dropped a few digs to let them know he wasn’t completely a subscriber to their daft religion. The Hollow was his home now. He wouldn’t be pushed about because of their devotion to a fusty spinster whose books only sissies would have read at his school.

Keeping the group together was hard. Their subtly different enthusiasms pulled in different ways.

‘There’s a division in our ranks,’ Wing-Godfrey explained, in the hayloft above the garage, ‘between those who primarily prize the Weezie books and those who rate Drearcliff Grange above all.’

This empty space was a Weezie site.

If this went on and on, he would have to
read
the blasted books. He could never trust Kirsty, who had actually read Teazle as a girl and again recently, to guide parties about the place. Maybe now things were better with Jordan, she could be trained up and fed full of the information. She had always been good at passing exams. The uniform had gone over well. Just the sort of frill that sold a prospect. Putting this together was just like assembling a big money deal.

Steven was ready to move on, but the Weezies – Mr Bullitt and one of the Japanese women – were exploring a shadowed corner that was a lair for some species of twee creature. Mrs Twomey, he gathered, was a lifelong ‘Grange Gel’, and impatient to get on. She wanted to see ‘the West Wing’.

He ran a head-check. The Society had seven members, present and accounted for. Or was it one president and seven members? He had an idea the Bullitts had a family member with them, dragged along unwillingly on this expedition. Or was it Wing-Godfrey who had a shadow?

He counted again. Eight heads, excluding Kirsty. Fine.

This space had changed. He’d thought of turning the hayloft into a suite of offices. There was room for serious computer and communications equipment. He had envisioned a grown-up version of the Steve caves he’d made as a kid, with a bar and a pool table. When he first climbed up here, he knew it was a man’s preserve, just as Jordan’s bedroom and the spare room Kirsty called the sewing room were female spaces.

Now, with the Society pottering around, the hayloft was spoiled. Even at the height of summer, there were draughts. A rotten smell suggested parasite problems which hadn’t showed up in the sinister survey. The roof was too low. He kept scraping his head on beams.

No. There would be no office-suite here, no den, no Steve cave. He just didn’t like the hayloft. He didn’t know why.

Did something live here?

To keep calm, he counted again. Nine heads, including Kirsty. Ten, with himself.

He must be wrong.

No. He knew enough about the Hollow not to be fooled. They had another guide on this tour.

He counted, slowly this time.

By opening the bale-door, Steven let in enough light to see everybody clearly. If only they wouldn’t drift around the place so much. What was so fascinating about empty corners?

Nine.

Or ten.

He looked at each one in turn. There was no one left over, no stranger.

‘Let’s see if tea is ready,’ he suggested, his voice sounding weak in this echoey space. ‘Then, we can tour the inside of the house.’

He wasn’t sure he wanted this lot traipsing through his office and bedroom, but anything was better than staying in the hayloft.

‘That’s too much to ask,’ said Wing-Godfrey, sincerely.

‘No,’ Steven said, hating himself. ‘I insist.’

‘We are fortunate that custodianship of the Hollow has fallen to such sympathetic and congenial persons,’ said Wing-Godfrey. ‘I propose you both for lifetime honorary membership…’

‘Seconded,’ said one of the others.

‘No opposition? I should say that’s the easiest decision this thorny little group has ever made. Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Naremore. Welcome to the Louise Magellan Teazle Society.’

Steven really wanted to get out of the hayloft. He couldn’t believe he had contemplated working in this hideous, oppressive space. His jaw hurt from smiling. His gut churned with the strain of keeping so much inside.

‘You’ll have to take the Drearcliff entrance exam, of course,’ said Wing-Godfrey. ‘But that should be no problem for you. Miss Hazzard sets the paper. She’s the ranking mistress of Teazle Trivia. When
Mastermind
had Teazle as a specialist subject, the BBC came to her to set the questions.’

The shadows were getting thicker. Steven was going to scream. A trickle of sweat got in his eye.

‘Tea,’ he creaked.

‘Just about now that would be most welcome. What say we, girls?’

The After Lights-Out Gang chirruped enthusiasm.

Steven tried not to fall off the steps on the way down. He dashed out of the garage, not caring what these loonies thought, and filled his lungs with fresh air.

‘Are you overcome by the closeness?’ Miss Hazzard asked.

‘Something like that,’ he said.

‘I quite understand.’

The young woman laid a hand on the crook of his elbow and squeezed, like a very old relative.

‘You should wear a crystal to earth the power, or it’ll build. In the end, something will go
pop!
and there’ll be tears before bedtime.’

He felt better already. It had just been the hayloft. Something in the hayloft.

It took engineering to get Mrs Bullitt down the ladder. One of the Japanese women asked if she could spend a penny. He gave her the choice between the outside loo and the ground floor inside toilet.

‘It’s glands,’ Mrs Twomey said, nodding at Mrs Bullitt. ‘She’s a martyr to her glands.’

Jordan appeared from the kitchen, wearing a straw boater with a tartan band.

Tea things were set out on the garden table. Jordan had made a pile of sandwiches and arranged biscuit selections into mandala mosaics on three large plates.

Dare he let these people eat or drink anything Jordan prepared? She could have laced the tea with weed-killer or spread drain-cleaner on the sandwiches. He didn’t pretend to know what went on inside her head and this had been such a day of disasters he almost expected another explosion.

Jordan picked up the large tea-pot – it looked like an oversized
Alice
prop – and posed, like a giant tea-pot herself, arm crooked like a handle, pot held like a spout.

‘Shall I be mother?’ said his daughter.

* * *

T
hey survived tea. Kirsty would never again underestimate Jordan. She’d acted as if this whole farce was expected and planned.
Had
Jordan known about the surprise visit in advance? And kept quiet to bring about just this situation? A disaster which made her look better than her parents? Kirsty hadn’t expected a challenge from that direction, but behind her daughter’s retro timidity was dangerous steel.

Kirsty sat, gripping her tea-cup like a fetish, as Jordan talked knowledgeably and amusingly about living in Weezie’s room. The Society were won over by the girl in school uniform. Kirsty didn’t realise her daughter had read so much Louise Teazle.

Jordan looked younger, yet more poised.

The crises were not over. Once Wing-Godfrey’s crowd were persuaded to depart, the family still had a great sorting-out to go through. Kirsty didn’t expect all of them to be still standing when it was over.

Whatever else, the After Lights-Out Gang had saved them from a titanic row. That was a mercy. Steven hadn’t exploded, so he must have been forced to cool down. Jordan had proved by her actions that she was not a pushover.

A settlement would be reached, a division of power. Nothing permanent. Something workable until the next quake. Kirsty was not going to let the others get away with this. If it looked unliveable for her, she’d call Vron.

She smiled at the thought. No matter what they had found in themselves at the Hollow, Steven and Jordan were no match for Vron. Beside her, they were amateurs. Vron played with people’s heads the way most folk played patience, to pass the time and keep her hand in. There were Vron stories Steven didn’t know.

Kirsty forced herself to pay attention to the chatter.

Jordan was coaxing personal, human things out of Miss Hazzard – Harriet Hazzard, she turned out to be, which made her sound like the heroine of a girls’ story. She had an open place at an Oxford college, but couldn’t take it up at the moment because she was carer for her brother, who had AIDS.