The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (60 page)

“I suppose that’s why you work there. I admire them, yes, but in many cases by ignoring their history of cruelty.”

“Why must you and Peter always look for the horrid things? What about this house? There are beautiful things here. That gramophone – you can look at it and imagine all the craftsmanship it took. Doesn’t that seem to you fulfilling?”

“You know we leftists have a functional aesthetic. Anyway—” Maureen paused. “If that’s your view of the house you’d best not know what I found out about it.”

“Go on, I want to hear.”

“If you insist. The
Brichester Herald
was useless – they reported the death of the owner and that was all – but I came across a chapter in Pamela Jones’ book on local hauntings which gives the details. The last owner of the house lost a fortune in the stock market – I don’t know how exactly, of course it’s not my field – and he became a recluse in this house. There’s worse to come, are you sure you want –? Well, he went mad. Things started disappearing, so he said, and he accused something he thought was living in the house, something that used to stand behind him or mock him from the empty rooms. I can imagine how he started having hallucinations, looking at this view—”

Alma joined her at the window. “Why?” she disagreed. “I think it’s beautiful.” She admired the court before the house, the stone pillars framing the iron flourish of the gates; then a stooped woman passed across the picture, heaving a pram from which overflowed a huge cloth bag of washing. Alma felt depressed again; the scene was spoilt.

“Sorry, Alma,” Maureen said; her cold hand touched Alma’s fingers. Alma frowned slightly and insinuated herself between the sheets. “. . . Sorry,” Maureen said again. “Do you want to hear the rest? It’s conventional, really. He gassed himself. The Jones book has something about a note he wrote – insane, of course; he said he wanted to ‘fade into the house, the one possession left to me’, whatever that meant. Afterwards the stories started; people used to see someone very tall and thin standing at the front door on moonlit nights, and one man saw a figure at an upstairs window with its head turning back and forth like clockwork. Yes, and one of the neighbours used to dream that the house was ‘screaming for help’ – the book explained that, but not to me I’m afraid. I shouldn’t be telling you all this, you’ll be alone until tonight.”

“Don’t worry, Maureen. It’s just enjoyably creepy.”

“A perceptive comment. It blinds you to what really happened. To think of him in this house, possessing the rooms, eating, sleeping – you forget he lived once, he was
real.
I wonder which room—?”

“You don’t have to harp on it,” Alma said. “You sound like Peter.”

“Poor Peter, you
are
attacking him today. He’ll be here to protect you tonight, after all.”

“He won’t, because we’ve parted.”

“You could have stopped me talking about him, then. But how for God’s sake did it happen?”

“Oh, on Friday. I don’t want to talk about it.” Walking hand in hand to the front door and as always kissing as Peter turned the key; her father waiting in the hall: “Now listen, Peter, this can’t go on” – prompted by her mother, Alma knew, her father was too weak to act independently. She’d pulled Peter into the kitchen – “Go, darling, I’ll try and calm them down” she’d said desperately – but her mother was waiting, immediately animated, like a fairground puppet by a penny: “You know you’ve broken my heart, Alma, marrying beneath you.” Alma had slumped into a chair, but Peter leaned against the dresser, facing them all, her mother’s prepared speech: “Peter, I will not have you marrying Alma – you’re uneducated, you’ll get nowhere at the library, you’re obsessed with politics and you don’t care how much they distress Alma—” and on and on. If only he’d come to her instead of standing pugnaciously apart! She’d looked up at him finally, tearful, and he’d said: “Well, darling, I’ll answer any point of your mother’s you feel is not already answered” – and suddenly everything had been too much; she’d run sobbing to her room. Below the back door had closed. She’d wrenched open the window; Peter was crossing the garden beneath the rain. “Peter!” she’d cried out. “Whatever happens I still love you—” but her mother was before her, pushing her away from the window, shouting down: “Go back to your kennel!” . . . “What?” she asked Maureen, distracted back.

“I said I don’t believe it was your decision. It must have been your mother.”

“That’s irrelevant. I broke it off finally.” Her letter: “It would be impossible to continue when my parents refuse to receive you but anyway I don’t want to any more, I want to study hard and become a musician” – she’d posted it on Saturday after a sleepless sobbing night, and immediately she’d felt released, at peace. Then the thought disturbed her: it must have reached Peter by now; surely he wouldn’t try to see her? But he wouldn’t be able to get in; she was safe.

“You can’t tell me you love your mother more than Peter. You’re simply taking refuge again.”

“Surely you don’t think I love her now. But I still feel I must be loyal. Is there a difference between love and loyalty?”

“Never having had either, I wouldn’t know. Good God, Alma, stop barricading yourself with pseudo-philosophy!”

“If you must know, Maureen, I shall be leaving them as soon as I’ve paid for my flute. They gave it me for my twenty-first and now they’re threatening to take it back. It’ll take me two years, but I shall pay.”

“And you’ll be twenty-five. God Almighty, why? Bowing down to private ownership?”

“You wouldn’t understand any more than Peter would.”

“You’ve returned the ring, of course.”

“No.” Alma shifted
Victimes de Devoir.
“Once I asked Peter if I could keep it if we broke up.” Two weeks before their separation; she’d felt the pressures – her parents’ crush, his horrors – misshaping her, callous as thumbs on plasticine, And he’d replied that there’d be no question of their breaking up, which she’d taken for assent.

“And Peter’s feelings?” Maureen let the question resonate, but it was muffled by the music.

“Maureen, I just want to remember the happy times!”

“I don’t understand that remark. At least, perhaps I do, but I don’t like it.”

“You don’t approve.”

“I do not.” Maureen brandished her watch; from her motion she might have been about to slap Alma. “I can’t discuss it with you. I’ll be late.” She buttoned herself into her coat on the landing. “I suppose I’ll see Peter later,” she said, and clumped downstairs.

With the slam Alma was alone. Her hot-water bottle chilled her toes; she thrust it to the foot of the bed. The room was darker; rain patted the pane. The metronome stood stolid in the shadow as if stilled for ever. Maureen might well see Peter later; they both worked at Brichester Central Library. What if Maureen should attempt to heal the breach, to lend Peter her key? It was the sort of thing Maureen might well do, particularly as she liked Peter. Alma recalled suggesting once that they take Maureen out – “she does seem lonely, Peter” – only to find the two of them ideologically united against her; the most difficult two hours she’d spent with either of them, listening to their agreement on Vietnam and the rest across the cocktail-bar table: horrid. Later she’d go down and bolt the door. But now – she turned restlessly and
Victimes de Devoir
toppled to the floor. She felt guilty not to be reading on – but she yearned to fill herself with music.

The shadows weighed on her eyes; she pulled the cord for light. Spray laced the window like cobwebs on a misty morning; outside the world was slate. The needle on her gramophone was dulled, but she selected the first record, Britten’s
Nocturne
(“Finnegan’s Half-Awake” Peter had commented; she’d never understood what he meant). She placed the needle and let the music expand through her, flowing into troubled crevices. The beauty of Peter Pears’ voice. Peter. Suddenly she was listening to the words: sickly light, huge sea-worms – She picked off the needle; she didn’t want it to wear away the beauty. Usually Britten could transmute all to beauty. Had Peter’s pitiless vision thrown the horrid part into such relief? Once she’d taken him to a concert of the
War Requiem
and in the interval he’d commented: “I agree with you – Britten succeeds completely in beautifying war, which is precisely my objection.” And later he’d admitted that for the last half-hour he’d been pitying the poor cymbal-player, bobbing up and down on cue as if in church. That was his trouble: he couldn’t achieve peace.

Suppose he came to the house? she thought again. Her gaze flew to the bedroom door, the massed dark on the landing. For a moment she was sure that Peter was out there; wasn’t someone watching her from the stairs? She coughed jaggedly; it recalled her. Deliberately she lifted her flute from its case and rippled a scale before the next cough came. Later she’d practise, no matter how she coughed; her breathing exercises might cure her lungs. “I find all these exercises a little terrifying,” said Peter: “a little robotic.” She frowned miserably; he seemed to wait wherever she sought peace. But thoughts of him carried her to the dressing-table drawer, to her ring; she didn’t have to remember, the diamond itself crystallized beauty. She turned the jewel but it refused to sparkle beneath the heavy sky. Had he been uneducated? Well, he’d known nothing about music, he’d never known what a cadenza was – “what’s the point of your academic analysis, where does it touch life?” Enough. She snapped the lid on the ring and restored it to its drawer. From now on she’d allow herself no time for disturbing memories: down-stairs for soup – she must eat – then her flute exercises followed by
Victimes de Devoir
until she needed sleep.

The staircase merged into the hall, vaguely defined beneath her drowsiness; the Victorian valentines seemed dusty in the dusk, neglected in the depths of an antique shop. As Alma passed the living-room a stray light was caught in the mirror and a memory was trapped: herself and Peter on the couch, separating instantly, tongues retreating guiltily into mouths, each time the opening door flashed in the mirror: towards the end Peter would clutch her rebelliously, but she couldn’t let her parents come on them embracing, not after their own marriage had been drained of love. “We’ll be each other’s peace,” she’d once told Peter, secretly aware as she spoke that she was terrified of sex. Once they were engaged she’d felt a duty to give in – but she’d panted uncontrollably, her mouth gulping over his, shaming her. One dreadful night Peter had rested his head on her shoulder and she’d known that he was consulting his watch behind her back. And suddenly, weeks later, it had come right; she was at peace, soothed, her fears almost engulfed – which was precisely when her parents had shattered the calm, the door thrown open, jarring the mirror: “Peter, this is a respectable house, I won’t have you keeping us all up like this until God knows what hour, even if you are used to that sort of thing—” and then that final confrontation – Quickly, Alma told herself, onward. She thrust the memories back into the darkness of the two dead rooms to be crushed by her father’s desk, choked by her mother’s flowers.

On the kitchen windowsill the medicine was black against the back garden, the grey grass plastered down by rain: it loomed like a poison bottle in a Hitchcock film. What was Peter doing at this moment? Where would he be tonight? She fumbled sleepily with the tin of tomato soup and watched it gush into the pan. Where would he be tonight? With someone else? If only he would try to contact her, to show her he still cared – Nonsense. She turned up the gas. No doubt he’d be at the cinema; he’d tried to force films on her, past her music. Such as the film they’d seen on the afternoon of their parting, the afternoon they’d taken off work together,
Hurry Sundown
; it hadn’t been the theme of racism which had seemed so horrid, but those scenes with Michael Caine sublimating his sex-drive through his saxophone – she’d brushed her hair against Peter’s cheek, hopefully, desperately, but he was intent on the screen, and she could only guess his thoughts, too accurately. Perhaps he and Maureen would find each other; Alma hoped so – then she could forget about them both. The soup bubbled and she poured it into a dish. Gas sweetened the air; she checked the control, but it seemed turned tight. The dresser – there he had stood, pugnaciously apart, watching her. She set the medicine before her on the table; she’d take it upstairs with her – she didn’t want to come downstairs again. In her mind she overcame the suffocating shadow of the rooms, thick with years of tobacco-smoke in one, with lavender-water in another, by her shining flute, the sheets of music brightly turning.

A dim thin figure moved down the hall towards the kitchen; it hadn’t entered by the front door – rather had it emerged from the twin vista in the hall mirror. Alma sipped her soup, not tasting it but warmed. The figure fingered the twined flowers, sat at her father’s desk. Alma bent her head over the plate. The figure stood outside the kitchen door, one hand on the doorknob. Alma stood; her chair screeched; she saw herself pulled erect by panic in the familiar kitchen like a child in darkness, and willed herself to sit. The figure climbed the stairs, entered her room, padded through the shadows, examining her music, breathing on her flute. Alma’s spoon tipped and the soup drained back into its disc. Then, determinedly, she dipped again.

She had to fasten her thoughts on something as she mounted the stairs, medicine in hand; she thought of the Camside orchestral concert next week – thank God she wouldn’t be faced with Peter chewing gum amid the ranks of placid tufted eggs. She felt for her bedroom light switch. Behind the bookcase shadows sprang back into hiding and were defined. She smiled at the room and at herself; then carefully she closed the door. After the soup she felt a little hot, light-headed. She moved to the window and admired the court set back from the bare street; above the roofs the sky was diluted lime-and-lemon beneath clouds like wads of stuffing. “‘Napier Court’ – I see the point, but don’t you think that naming houses is a bit pretentious?” Alma slid her feet through the cold sheets, recoiling from the frigid bottle. She’d fill it later; now she needed rest. She set aside
Victimes de Devoir
and lay back on the pillow.