Closed at Dusk (5 page)

‘But look here.' Ralph Stern had both hands reverently round a Victorian goblet, making a connoisseur's face at his brandy. ‘There must be stories about real ghosts in a fantastic old place like this. Skeletons in cupboards, that sort of thing … grey ladies …'

‘Yeah.' Keith laughed. ‘Grandmother Sylvia. She holed up here for years, you know, with junk and old newspapers. Pretty weird lady.'

‘She wasn't.' Dorothy gave him a look to shut him up. ‘She simply felt safe here.' Sylvia was an eccentric myth now, her deficiencies towards her son William understood and forgiven, as far as Dottie was concerned.

‘What about the lilies?' Keith used the enlarging lenses of his round glasses not only to see through, but to stare at you provokingly.

‘Nothing about the lilies.'

‘My mother told me.'

‘Harriet's silly gossip,' Dottie said dismissively. ‘There are no supernatural phenomena at The Sanctuary.'

‘But if there
were
,' Ralph did not want it dismissed, ‘what would they be? If this were a different kind of house, how would it be haunted?'

‘You like that kind of stuff, Sir Ralph?' Rodney did not see the point of it, now that science and technology had left it far behind.

‘Yes,' Ralph said. ‘I must say I do. I'm –' self-deprecating laugh – ‘I suppose you could say I'm a bit psychic.'

‘Oh, darling, what nonsense.' Angela moved to sit on the floor and lean against his perfect trousers. One of her goodwill missions was to try to stop him bringing every subject round to himself.

‘I mean,' he paid no more attention to her than he ever did, ‘for instance, who would the ghost of Flusher be?'

‘Flusher,' said Nina solemnly, on the stool by the fire, hugging her knees, ‘is not a ghost, actually. It's a domestic monster. It lives upstairs in a room called the housemaid's closet, and no child will ever go in there alone.'

‘Except that dentist's child, do you remember, Neen?' Keith was playing up to his cousin. ‘He thought it was a good place to hide, in Sardines.'

‘Sheldon his name was, poor little boy.'

‘What happened to him?' Ralph spoke seriously; the other grown-ups were smiling encouragingly at Nina, who had not talked much in company before her mother died, and hardly at all after.

She stared at the fire for a moment, then lifted her head and put back the heavy mat of hair with a small childish hand, to drone at him, ‘He was never seen again.'

‘Oh, come on,' Matthew said. ‘No fairy-tales.'

‘No.' Ralph raised an autocratic hand. ‘Go on, Nina.'

‘Well.' She took a breath and talked fast. ‘Flusher is this really grotesque sort of ancient loo, right? With a sort of draining-board round the hole instead of a seat, where the poor overworked female slaves, right, had to empty and scrub out the chamber-pots.'

‘And so?'

‘So one of them, a slave, not a potty, right, was driven to
despair. She killed her baby, and then she –'

‘Go on.'

‘She flushed it away.'

‘And ever since then,' Keith added with relish, ‘Flusher waits hungrily for another meal.'

‘Sheldon?' Angela whispered, bright rose lips parted.

‘Who knows?' Nina wrapped her arms round herself and rocked her whole body back and forth on the stool.

‘That's it.' Her grandmother held up a hand. ‘That's enough, both of you.'

‘All right.' With a swift change of mood, Nina scrambled to her feet and stamped to the door, knocking into a small table. ‘I'll go to bed then, if I'm not wanted.'

Matthew moved uncertainly, as if he would go after her, then sat back and said shyly to Angela, ‘Sorry about that.'

‘Don't worry,' Ralph said. ‘She's used to sulking bloody teenagers.'

‘Nina's mother,' Dottie told him politely, ‘died less than two years ago.'

Angela, who had again ignored the sneer at her son, saved Ralph's bacon by asking him brightly. ‘Want to hear another story, since you liked that one? Will told me about the poor pony mare and her colt that got burned to death, in the foaling stable. Local people said that you could hear the terrible screaming for years afterwards, and one of the women in the tea-room says she hears it now – she went home without washing up the cups.'

‘Well, there you are.' Ralph was pleased with her. ‘What else? I mean, I know,' he bowed to Dorothy, ‘good Doctor Taylor, there are no ghosts at The Sanctuary, but this is such a pleasant evening and no one wants to go to bed. So let's go on pretending there are …'

‘If there
was
a ghost here,' Rodney said, ‘which there isn't, I
suppose the wretched thing would have to be in the basement.'

‘The basement, ah yes.' Ralph Stern, sophisticate of cellars and dungeons, nodded.

‘We used to play torture chambers there as kids in my grandmother's day,' Rodney went on, ‘and pretend we saw the spectre of Maryann Button, hanging among the pheasants and hares. Though I think Troutie made that up, don't you, Tessa?'

‘No, Rod. She may not know the score now, but she still remembers old things like that. She remembers the All Souls night when someone broke into the mausoleum and tried to prise the stone slabs off the tombs of Walter and Hardcastle.'

‘Body-snatchers?' Ralph Stern grinned. He did not smile enough, but when he grinned, you didn't want more.

‘They never knew,' Tessa said. ‘It might have been the dead men trying to get out.'

‘Any dogs and cats rising up with eldritch howls from the pet cemetery?' Her sister-in-law's quick, crisp voice put Tessa among the silly children. ‘You'll be putting that grotesque thing in there one of these days.' Jill's tight blond pony-tail wagged as she nodded at the little dog asleep in the chair against Tessa's thigh. ‘You shouldn't let her up on chairs, you know. She's supposed to be a sporty little type with those shoulders and chest, not a lap dog. You spoil her.'

‘I need her.' Tessa had been sleepy, after drinking a fair amount of wine at dinner and playing up to Ralph, just for general practice with older men, but she was awake now, and piqued. ‘I love this funny-looking mongrel. People who live alone, or with just a small child, need a dog who thinks they're the best thing on earth. You married Rod out of your nursery, but you try living without a man, Jill, you just try it.'

‘Your choice. You could have stayed with Rex.'

‘Thanks.' Tessa made a face at her.

‘Anyway, I got the idea you weren't exactly alone at the moment, Tessa. Who was that muscle man you had in tow at the theatre and didn't introduce to me?'

‘Lenny? I wouldn't risk introducing
him
to any of you.'

The sisters-in-law were only sparring lightly, but Dorothy picked up Tessa's defensiveness, and asked, ‘Why? When have we ever been critical?'

‘You all were at first, with Rex.'

‘Well,' William said mildly, ‘he
was
rather heavily married.'

‘He won you over, though. None of you waited till his divorce to fall in love with him.'

‘Perhaps we should have followed our first instincts,' Dorothy said dryly. ‘I'm sorry.' She turned to the Sterns with a civil smile. ‘Just family chatter.'

Ralph, who had tuned out when the women started pecking at each other, said, ‘About the lilies, Dorothy. You were going to tell us about the lilies.'

‘I was not. I have no story to tell.'

‘Matthew?' Ralph raised a dark Mephistophelean eyebrow at William's quiet brother, who shook his head.

‘My turn.' Keith put a log on the fire and poked it into incandescence. Since his illness, he was often cold. ‘I'm panting for my turn.'

‘I thought you were too tired to pant.' Jill was one of the people who took myalgic encephalomyelitis with a grain of salt.

‘I am, but I can lie in tomorrow, if you'll keep that baby quiet.'

‘I'll bring her in for you to amuse.'

‘I'll tell the story of the Reverend Hardcastle.' From the fireplace, Keith said to Ralph, ‘Great-great-grandma Beatrice's lover. He had a beautiful tenor voice, for a parson. Much in demand at soirées, and he got a good choir going in the
church. It broke up after he died, but I was told that when he was shacked up with Walter in the mausoleum, Beatrice opened her bedroom window one night and heard the non-existent choir singing, across the lawns and fields, with Hardcastle's soaring tenor.'

Leaning on the mantelpiece, head poked forward like a hanged man, Keith looked gloomily round his audience. Where had he unearthed this story?

‘I never heard that before,' Dorothy said.

‘That doesn't make it not true,' Keith said. ‘Since Beatrice, certain switched-on souls also claim to have heard the choir.'

‘Why not?' Sir Ralph had gone to the bay window to look out at the moonless garden, his head slightly turned, as if he were listening.

Keith went to the piano at the other end of the room and played a few bars of a chorale.

‘Ralph!' Angela called sharply to her husband. ‘Come away from the window. You're taking this game too seriously.'

‘Anything is possible if we will only listen.' He turned round and looked at them with glittering eyes. ‘Listen.' He put up his hand for silence. The others sat still and tense, and everyone jumped at the small click of the door handle. The door opened slowly, just an inch or two.

Rodney got up with an exclamation, and pulled it open.

Rob was there, very small in the high doorway.

Tessa got up swiftly and went to him, but he headed past her to the fire and climbed into the chair with Charlotte. Tessa sat down again and took him on to her lap, his hot head under her chin, the pressure of his bony damp body all that her breast wanted.

The others were getting up. The evening was over. The stories were done.

‘So I was right.' Ralph Stern was his usual bumptious self
now, not mysterious. ‘Many phantom memories to haunt a strange old house.'

‘Sorry,' William said. ‘Nothing sinister or strange – unless peace and happiness is strange. There's a smaller ring of stones, you know, above Avebury, where the ancients celebrated joy in life. They called it The Sanctuary. That's where this place gets its name.'

‘I know,' Ralph said, predictably. He didn't.

‘Was I stuffy with him?' William asked Dottie, through the open door of their old-fashioned bathroom, where she was scouring her small healthy teeth. ‘I got sick of him playing spooks with our honest old house. Do you think he's really psychic?'

‘He was putting it on.' Dottie came to the doorway in her seersucker pyjamas, polishing her face on a towel. ‘For control. To be different from the rest of us: “I know something you don't know.” Tiresome man. I'm sorry for his wife.'

‘So am I.' All day and evening William had been stirred by rescue (and other) fantasies. ‘I wish I didn't have to go on seeing him, but he's setting up a meeting for me with the Barrett Mayne people. Dinner at his house. Will you come?'

‘No,' Dorothy said, and William's foolish heart leaped ahead to excitement.

Dottie had been losing interest in sex as her fifties advanced. She was not interested tonight.

‘Some psychologist,' William grumbled. ‘You're bored with it, so I'm supposed to be too.'

‘Don't be childish, Will.'

‘If I were a child, you would understand my case.'

She turned away from him and lay neat and straight, the back of her small cropped head, the short strong neck above the innocent rounded pyjama collar, touching and familiar. ‘Anyway, too much wine and whisky, Wum.'

‘You're right.' First he was a child to her, then a grandfather. He lay for a while, thinking about Angela in the big puffy guestroom bed with Mephistopheles. Then he masochistically started on another chapter of Ralph Stern's obviously ghosted book,
Games of Chance
. He fell asleep with the light on, mouth open, book on the floor, where the yellow labrador snored.

‘No nightmares?' William, up first, was in the kitchen when Angela came down in a crimson kimono, looking for coffee.

‘I slept like an angel in that heavenly bed.'

Sitting companionably at the table with him, Angela sighed and said, ‘I feel comfortable here, Will. What was the toast you gave your wife at dinner?'

‘All's well.'

‘You're lucky.' She put a hand on his arm.

‘Isn't it for you?'

But she had taken the hand away and put it round her orange juice. Dennis and Annabel came charging down the hall with their father, and that was it.

Rodney's family left soon after breakfast, because he was flying to New York in the evening. William went to inspect fences and a cracking wall with George Barton, who could put his hand to anything. When William came round from behind the hidden garden, Angela was in the cat temple. She had found a small picture of her tortoiseshell cats in her wallet, and was pinning it up among the other love tokens. ‘Aren't you coming back with the Christmas card photograph then?'

‘I'll give it to you at Ralph's high-powered dinner.'

‘I wish you'd bring it here.' Steady, William.

Her eyes laughed into his. ‘Perhaps I could get Ralph to bring one of his horrible tycoons to The Sanctuary.'

The hell with that, William longed to say. I want
you
.

A reminder of sanity, Dottie and Rob were pottering about
in Wellingtons with hammers and nails, repairing one of the duck platforms. Male menopause, said Grandpa Wum's inner clown.

Angela went to help Tessa get lunch ready. ‘Nothing very grand, I'm afraid. We have to clear off the terrace at two, like Cinderella.'

‘Or charge extra to see the Taylors' feeding time. Are you –' Angela paused, chopping celery for chicken salad, then finished impulsively, ‘are you all right?'