An English Ghost Story (7 page)

Looking at Kirsty, though, he wondered.

These last years – God knows how many? – their lives had been changing. Properly looking at her had sometimes been difficult. There were always people – the kids, Vron, others – and things – work, craziness, medication – in the way. They had both turned into strangers.

His wife was still a stranger, but not in a frightening way. Behind her, the moors were twilit. A moon hung up high, light scattering in through the wall of glass, falling all about the Summer Room. The view was spectacular, endlessly changing but eternally the same. From this room, the landscape they saw was exactly as it would have been to a Monmouth rebel or a Roman legionary standing on the same spot. Only the occasional winking red aeroplane light among the stars let slip that this was nearly the twenty-first century.

And his wife was the same. Eternally the same, eternally a surprise. He remembered how she had been when they met, and understood that in recent years she had just channelled her wildness into other things. Now, it was being directed back at him and his mouth was dry with excitement.

‘Where’s the other glove, Mum?’ Jordan asked.

‘Does everything have to be symmetrical, darling girl?’

Kirsty made a flourish with her fingers.

Steven was suddenly very hungry indeed.

They all took their places at the table, clustering at one end around a candelabrum Jordan had found in one of the unexplored rooms. Candles dripped on white cloth. The big bowl of pasta had to be passed from person to person. It was almost too heavy for Tim.

Steven hadn’t had to say grace since school and wasn’t about to start now. But something had to be said. He could not let this moment pass.

He lifted a glass of wine.

‘A toast, I’m afraid. We have to have one. Jordan, pour Tim some wine.’

No protest came from Kirsty, whose eyes and earrings sparkled with candlelight. Tim put aside his orange juice and Jordan grinned at her brother as she decanted a half-measure of Chilean red. Steven was determined to do this properly.

‘To us, to the Naremore family, and to our new home. We would like to thank the Hollow for having us, and we hope that it will keep us always.’

‘Here here,’ said Jordan, chinking her glass against Tim’s.

The sparkles in Kirsty’s eyes were tears. Steven’s chest tightened with unbidden memories of other tears. The glass in his hand was crystal, very easy to shatter with too heavy a grip.

Kirsty dabbed her eyes with the back of her new-old glove and touched his glass with hers. She mouthed ‘I love you’ at him and took a deep drink.

‘Magic,’ she said out loud.

They ate.

* * *

J
ordan lay on her old mattress in her new bed. She was a little tipsy. Halfway through the meal, she realised her parents were looking at each other the way she and Rick looked at each other. It was the feeling she associated with Peggy Lee singing ‘Fever’, that finger-snapping, languid beat of mutual desire.

Right now, in the other tower, her parents were having sex. She was more aware of it than she ever had been in the flat, though her room there had adjoined her parents’. One or other of them had been sleeping out of the flat or on the front-room sofa for what seemed like three-quarters of the time.

She supposed it was a good thing, Mum and Dad making love. But, still, well…
ugh!

The landline wouldn’t be hooked up until tomorrow and she hadn’t been able to exchange more than a few words with Rick’s father on Dad’s mobile. She gathered Rick wasn’t at home. She hadn’t expected him to stay in, missing her, though that would probably have made her feel nice.

When she had a phone in her room, she would be able to talk to Rick every night. She tipsily pondered this phone sex thing. How did it work exactly? Like Rock Hudson and Doris Day in their split-screen baths in
Pillow Talk
?

She didn’t feel alone or lonely.

There were tiny movements in the room. The chair by the window was rocking, not vigorously, not noisily. It was a comfort. The rocking was in time to ‘Fever’.

All at once, she fell asleep and dreamed.

* * *

S
he kept her glove on, enjoying the feel of him through satin, hooking her arm around his neck. In the dark, they were new people, without all the baggage of a marriage. Kirsty forgot everything beyond the bed.

Afterwards, she was too exhausted to sleep. The rhythm still beat in her body, and she still felt him close, pushing gently against her, pressing down tenderly. He had most of the duvet but she was warm enough, wondering if her skin was glowing with the heat she felt inside.

Steven had dropped off and was sighing in his sleep. He only snored when he had the flu.

She slipped out from under his arm and rolled off the bed, landing like a cat.

Perspiration dried on her back.

The moon shone through the curtains. She crawled across the floor, feeling the bare boards between the rugs, relishing the scent of the old wood, and sat cross-legged in front of her magic chest.

‘Thank you, Weezie,’ she whispered.

She peeled off her glove, finding her arm and hand slick with sweat, and popped it into the top drawer. She made the glove go away, padded back across the room, and slipped into bed. She gently wrestled a stretch of the duvet onto herself, snuggled against the comforting presence of her husband, and surrendered to night and darkness.

* * *

T
he family all dreamed the same dream. They were together, at the Hollow, on the crazy paving patio beyond the French windows of the Summer Room, looking at the orchard, which was crowded with more trees than they had imagined. The sun was high but its light was as gentle as the moon. Everything was alive and moving lazily: the trees, the birds, the house, the grass, the streams.

From out of the orchard came a little girl in a straw hat and a white sailor suit, with blue ribbons around her hat and waist and knees. She was solemn beyond her years but bright and friendly and all that they could wish she was. She was a friend and a sister and a daughter and a comfort.

With her, hanging back cautiously in the green shadows of the orchard, were playmates. The little girl looked at the family, fixing on each in turn, seeing right into their hearts. She understood at once that they were not what they had been in the city but were reborn in this place, at the Hollow.

Once she had decided that it was all right, her playmates came out of the trees.

The family were seized with joy.

A
s weeks passed, the family settled, explored, discovered. They filled the Hollow, fitted in nicely.

They lost their city pallor and began to tan. They ate healthily and never got tired of apples. They were not bothered by insects, even at dusk. Midges swarmed in pestilential clouds across the moor but turned aside at the ditch-moat of the property.

In tune with their surroundings, the family were at last in tune with each other. They listened, they cared, they were tolerant, they loved and were loved.

They were constantly surprised, but never shocked.

For the first time in their lives, they felt perfectly safe. In learning to live in a new place, they learned to live with each other, to appreciate each other’s mysteries.

The Hollow, they decided, was a happy place.

* * *

I
n the octagonal room, Steven experimented with seven different positions for his desk before realising Louise Teazle had been right all along. He set up his computer in exactly the spot hers had been. Kirsty and Tim were off foraging at the County Stores in Taunton, which left Jordan at home to help arrange his office.

‘Sit in your chair,’ said his daughter. ‘Give it a whirl.’

He pulled his chair close to the desk and sat down, getting the feel of the position. A significant chunk of his life would be spent here. He stretched fingers to touch his keyboard. Jordan adjusted the back of the chair.

‘Comfy?’

He was.

‘You have to watch out for repetitive stress injury,’ Jordan warned.

In London, he had felt the beginnings of back pain and semi-arthritic aches in his finger joints. What with everything else, he’d never even mentioned it to anyone but Tatum. A few twinges didn’t count for anything set beside the rest of the problems.

In the Hollow, it all cleared up. It had probably been psychosomatic.

‘In Computer Studies, we had a whole lesson on setting up a work station,’ said Jordan.

She measured the distance between his chair and the desk with finger-spans, and did mental calculations. She took a ruler and sized him up, as if for a sitting-down suit. When thinking, she looked younger than she was.

‘I’ll tape an X on the floor,’ she said, ‘to show where your chair should be. It’s what we had to do. After a couple of months, you can pull up the mark. By then, you’ll be settled. Where do you keep your masking tape?’

‘It’s in one of those.’

She looked at a stack of cardboard boxes. ‘Shouldn’t they have been unpacked
weeks
ago?’

She was almost funny, trying to be strict.

(not screaming)

He ummed and ahhed about having been busy. She put hands on her hips and tutted. Her navel winked at him above her jeans’ waistline. Before her Audrey Hepburn craze set in, she had agitated for permission to get her belly button pierced.

Steven saw an opportunity. He tickled her. She screamed (not the old kind of screaming) with laughter, and hauled his chair off its X spot, then spun him around.

He laughed too.

It struck Steven that he couldn’t remember the last time he had been alone with Jordan. He and Tim were together often, doing Dad–son things with tools. When the home front was at its worst, the only cause that united him with Kirsty was worrying about Jordan. As a trio, they had been through several, hideous sessions, more like an encounter group than a family argument.

That was another life.

He stopped spinning.

‘Dad,’ Jordan said, ‘has Mum heard from Veronica?’

The name still turned him cold.

‘Not since we moved,’ he said. (She hadn’t, had she? The new Kirsty would have said something.)

‘Good,’ she replied, kissing his forehead. ‘Veronica used to frighten me.’

‘Me too,’ he confessed. ‘But she was Kirst’s friend. Your Mum needed a friend.’

(Veronica called herself a healer.)

‘She wasn’t anyone’s friend, not really.’

Jordan was sharp about people. It was one of her problems, actually. When she was in her darkest self, she always knew the worst thing to say. The truth.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said.

This bright, sunny, funny girl was a delight and a wonder. One of the great discoveries of the Hollow. He had to think hard to remember the old Jordan.

‘There’s something wrong with Veronica, isn’t there?’

‘Yes, Jord,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know what it is or how she gets her hold over people, but she’s not like us. Not like the way we are now.’

‘Does Mum miss her?’

Steven thought hard. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘Mum has us. It was the choice she made. The choice we all made. To come here, and be a family.’

(What did the witch think about Kirsty’s choice?)

‘I’m glad,’ Jordan said. ‘I can’t imagine how it would have been if we hadn’t found the Hollow.’

‘What makes you think the Hollow didn’t find us?’

He had to say that. It had been in his mind from the first sight of the place.

Jordan sat in a window-nook, sunlight on her hair, and got comfortable. Steven was impressed at how relaxed his daughter was. She had always been intensely self-conscious, but that was gone.

‘Dad, have you noticed?’

She was looking at him, light behind her. He knew what she meant, what she wanted to talk about. He was excited but a little anxious. It was enormous, when he thought about it. He had a sense of privilege that Jordan had chosen to raise it with him, not Kirsty.

‘Little things,’ she said. ‘When you go into a room, it’s as if someone has just stepped out. I keep thinking it’s Mum or you, but it can’t be. There’s a rocking chair in my room. Sometimes, it rocks by itself.’

‘Does it frighten you?’

She shook her head. ‘Not at all. I don’t think it should.’

‘It’s a mystery,’ he said. ‘I’ve come across them too. Things change when you’re not looking, rearrange themselves. Always for the better. I was thinking of opening those boxes, and letting the fairies do the unpacking but I think that’s not in the programme. We have to make an effort, or it doesn’t count. But let’s start a mystery collection. Mum and Tim can join in. In the end, we’ll get to the bottom of it.’

‘I suppose,’ she said, doubtful.

‘The fun of mysteries isn’t the explanation,’ he said, tweaking her nose. ‘It’s the wondering.’

His computer came on, by itself. Startled, he pantomimed fear, with ridiculously exaggerated face-pulling and contorted limbs.

‘Spooo-ooooky,’ he said.

Jordan laughed and launched a cushion at him.

‘One for the collection,’ he said, glancing at his screen.

HH, it flashed at him. HH HH HH, filling the screen. Then his file manager was there, neat as it could be.

‘Did you see that?’ he asked Jordan.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. It was for me.’

* * *

A
fter supper, Jordan sat in her rocking chair, examining the book. It was something she had found, or which – to pick up on Dad’s thinking – had found her. Running her fingers along a row of shelved spines, this was where she had stopped.
The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange
was a hardback with an unfaded jacket. The cover showed a wood-panelled corridor after dark, lit by a single candle. Four alarmed girls in straw hats and school blazers cowered away from a see-through knight in armour who was raising a solid-seeming battle-axe.

The book was yellow and dusty at the top edge, but good as new. If this was Louise Teazle’s own copy it had probably never been read. Having written it, she knew how the story came out. From the flap copy, Jordan learned it was the fifth of the Drearcliff Grange School books. A first edition, from 1944. Had either of her dead grandmothers read it then, during the War? Mum said girls still read Louise Teazle when she was at school.