Ghost Song (10 page)

Grandfather said Shona must be diligent and work hard, never mind that she did not go to some fine-sounding school or college in York or Durham. Grith House and the school in Moil was good enough for anyone, said her grandfather, and Shona must be conscientious and pious and strive to keep out all wickedness. They had to be forever on the watch for wickedness, and work was one of the best deterrents.

The much younger Shona had not known what a deterrent was but she did as she was told and worked hard, mostly because there was not much else to do. Every day she went to the village school which looked out over Moil Moor, and every afternoon at half past three Mother was at the gates to collect her. If it was sunny they walked because Grandfather believed in the benefits of good Yorkshire air, but if it was very cold or if what they called the Moil mist had come down, her mother drove the battered station wagon which was quite good enough for jolting around the moor roads. They were certainly not going to spend good money on a smart shiny car whose paintwork would be splattered with mud and whose suspension would be ruined inside of a week.

After school there was usually homework which Shona did in the dining room with the lights on, because all the windows at Grith were tiny and most of the rooms were dark. The two Cheesewright sisters, who came to help with the cleaning every Wednesday and the washing every Monday, said Grith was the darkest and gloomiest house in the world, and told how you could get smart windows with white frames and double-glazing, but Grandfather would not have any truck with such gimcrack nonsense and the windows stayed as they were.

When the mist came in from Moil Moor, Grith became wrapped in a thick silence. All the mirrors fogged up and sometimes there was what Mother called a bloom on the furniture. Edna Cheesewright polished everything for all she was worth every Wednesday, using soft cloths and beeswax, but it did not make much difference.

There was often a bloom on the dining table which was big and heavy, so that Shona had to put two volumes of the encyclopedia on her chair to be high enough to reach the table. Other girls had desks in their bedrooms which had been made into little studies. Shona would have liked a desk in her bedroom as well, but even though there were several spare rooms at Grith her mother and grandfather did not seem to think it a good idea. Most unhealthy to be shut away, said her grandfather. Shona would do better to be down in the everyday part of the house. There were plenty of things for her to do, he said. She had her studies, and could do needlework—embroidery and the like. In his day, embroidery had been what little girls did. Traycloths and handkerchiefs. Quiet things. Pressing wildflowers in a book—Moil Moor was a grand place for wildflowers, you could not find a better if you travelled the length and breadth of England, not that he himself had ever felt the need to do so.

No one Shona knew had to sit at a dining-room table on two volumes of encyclopedia and press wildflowers or embroider for a hobby. People had music centres and their own televisions, and they saw things like
Jaws
at the cinema. The older girls went to see
The Godfather
and said Marlon Brando must have been a knock-out as a young man, and boasted that they had got in to see
The Exorcist
. They sang pop songs and read
Lord of the Rings
(or at least, they read
The Hobbit
, which they said got you started). The older girls tried to look like Abba, and the boys they giggled over tried to look like the BeeGees. None of the girls embroidered traycloths; Shona thought most of them probably did not even know what a traycloth was.

Once, when Grandfather thought Shona was not listening, he said to her mother that they were coping very well; all that was needed was a quiet life. Nothing to excite or stimulate. It was already working, did not Margaret see that it was?

‘I do. And you're very good to us, Father,' said Shona's mother, in the snuffly voice that usually meant she was trying not to cry. ‘I'll never be able to repay you for what you've done.' Shona's grandfather h'rrmphed and said, now then, lass, there was no call to be getting emotional, family was family; there were loyalties and obligations.

At eight years old Shona did not know what loyalties and obligations were, but she knew about having to be quiet all the time. Even if she was asked to a birthday party or a picnic, or to join in the little trips and expeditions the school sometimes arranged, there were always reasons against it.

‘Best not,' Mother said, and when the other girls were talking about what they would wear for the party, or what they would eat at the picnic or the play, Shona's mother would be at the school gates and Shona would go home to Grith and the silent dining room and the cold kitchen with the stone floor and the smell of onions if it was Wednesday when Edna Cheesewright made a big hotpot which stank out the house almost until the following week.

But it might have been worse. It was a large house, and her grandfather was in his study quite a lot. Shona always knew when he came out, because he hummed snatches of old songs to himself: you often heard the humming before you heard his footsteps. He liked the old songs. Occasionally he sat down at the jangly old piano in what used to be the morning room and tried to play them. The morning room was the dampest room in the house and no one ever used it. The music in the tapestry-covered brass box was spotted with damp and the piano strings were warped and her grandfather's fingers were no longer supple because of rheumatism, but sometimes he still liked to play.

‘Caterwauling sound,' Edna Cheesewright said dismissively, although her sister, Mona, thought it was grand to hear the old piano coming to life and was apt to become sentimental about her own childhood when families gathered round a piano and sang. You did not get that any longer, music was all thumping rubbish from modern radios.

It was shortly after Shona's ninth birthday that she began to think the wickedness—the wickedness her grandfather was always saying they must watch for—might have something to do with Anna.

Anna. It was curious how the name had got into Shona's mind and it was even more curious that she had not noticed it getting in. One minute it was not there at all, and the next it seemed to have been there very firmly for a long time. When Shona looked properly at this name, this
Anna
, she saw she knew quite a lot about her and one of the things she knew was that Anna had lived at Grith House. But when she asked Mother about Anna, Mother stared at her as if suddenly confronted with something terrible. Then, in a tight high voice quite unlike her usual one, she asked wherever Shona had heard the name.

‘It was just something someone said in the village,' mumbled Shona, letting her eyes slide away from her mother's stare, because eyes were the things that could give you away. ‘I 'spect I got it wrong, though.'

‘I think you must have done,' said Mother.

This seemed to mean that no one called Anna had ever lived here, which Shona found puzzling because Anna seemed to understand so much about Grith. She said she had hated the things Shona hated about it: gardening and helping with church fêtes and being quiet and well mannered all the time. Boring, said Anna.

When Shona lay in bed at night she could hear Anna whispering to her—she could not hear everything Anna said, but if she concentrated very hard she could hear most of it.

At first it was quite scary to have this whispery person around, but after a while Shona got used to it. Sometimes she tried to work out when Anna had first started whispering to her and peering out from the mirrors that fogged over when Moil Moor overflowed, but she could not. She was fairly sure, though, that Anna had not been around until after Shona's own ninth birthday.

S
HONA HAD LOOKED
forward to her ninth birthday. Nine was nearly grown up, almost double figures. She tried to imagine the presents she would get. Grandfather usually gave things like new pyjamas or gloves but sometimes he gave a book token which was better, except that he had to be shown the book Shona bought with it. It never mattered what it was, because he always thought it a poor choice, and wanted to know why she could not read the good old classics of his own youth.
Aesop's Fables
or
The Water Babies
. He had enjoyed
The Water Babies
as a boy: a very improving tale, it was.

It was the middle of the 1970s and people in Shona's class were reading things like
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
. If Shona was given a book token, that was what she would buy, but she was not going to say this until she had actually got the book and it was too late for grandfather to do anything about it.

She liked to lie in bed for as long as she could stay awake, and think about her birthday. So, about a week before the day, she did not in the least mind being told to go to bed earlier than usual, even though it was Friday, with no school tomorrow. She was, in fact, feeling a bit tired.

‘Early bed, I think,' her mother said, as Shona drooped over her supper, and for once Shona did not try to argue that the girls at school were allowed to stay up much later.

She lay in bed thinking about her birthday. Mother had said there could be a small party and Shona must make a list of her school friends so they could be sent an invitation. She could ask eight children which grandfather thought quite enough. They would be given a nice tea and could stay until six o'clock. It would be dark then but their parents would collect them. Mother wondered rather tentatively whether they might not offer the parents a glass of sherry, and Grandfather, when consulted, was agreeable. He dared say folk would not stay all that long anyway.

It was an odd thing about parents. Everybody Shona knew had a father as well as a mother, except for one or two whose fathers had died young. But when Shona asked about her own father, her mother became tight-lipped and frosty, and would not discuss it. Not a subject to talk about, she said. Certainly it was very sad for Shona not to have a father like other girls—it was very unfair for her—but life could be unfair at times. No, he was not dead, he had just gone away and that was an end to the subject.

Shona would have liked to have a father who came to things like other girls' fathers did. To clap at school concerts if she had a poem to recite, or to run in the fathers' race at sports day. He would have been at her birthday party as well; he might have made people laugh, and he would have joined in the games. You could not imagine Grandfather joining in Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or Squeak Piggy Squeak.

She had fallen asleep thinking about all this, and she had thought, on the way down into sleep, that she would not wake until morning, so it was a surprise to find herself wide awake in the pitch dark, and to look at her little bedside clock which said two a.m. Two a.m. was the middle of the night, Shona knew that. Usually she liked being awake when everyone else was asleep, and feeling warm and safe in the darkness, but tonight the darkness did not feel safe at all. Shona began to feel as if something was wrong somewhere. Was someone moving round the house, perhaps? She listened carefully. There might be a bird fluttering in the eaves outside her window—the house martins liked to build nests at Grith—but a bird would not make her feel frightened like this. Perhaps it was just Grith itself, creaking in the cold night air. Grandfather had explained about that to Shona; he said things got a bit clattery and creaky when they were older and it all sounded different in the dark. Grith was quite old and had doors that rattled in the wind and pipes that clanked. He probably creaked and clanked a bit himself, he said with one of his rare smiles. Shona had not minded hearing the creakings after that; she had thought of them as being like Grandfather's legs which he said were a tribulation to him, especially when it rained and Moil Moor became sodden and the mist came creeping into the house.

But it was not the house creaking tonight. It was someone walking about. Yes, there it went again. Someone had walked along the short corridor outside her room and was going downstairs. There was the creak of the fourth stair which was always quite loud if you did not remember to skip over it, and now she could hear a door being opened and closed. She sat up in bed, shivering a bit in the cool air. Who was walking round downstairs? The clock had moved to half past two, which was surely very late for Mother or Grandfather to be around. It was to be hoped neither of them was ill. Or might it be a burglar? This was a very scary idea indeed; Shona did not want to stay in her room on her own in case the burglar came in. She would get up and creep along the passage to her mother's bedroom, but she would be very quiet about it and if she saw a burglar she would run as fast as she could and once in Mother's room they would bolt the door and telephone the police from the phone by the bed.

She put on her dark blue dressing gown which would look like part of the shadows and went cautiously out. But when she got to the head of the staircase she saw lights downstairs. Burglars did not put lights on: they had torches and moved around in the dark. Shona crept part way down the stairs until she reached the half-landing where she could look down into the hall. She sank down onto the stairs and peered through the banisters.

This was becoming odder and odder. The little door in a corner of the hall—the door to the cellar that was hardly ever opened—was propped wide by a chair. It was not the main lights that were on, but the two table lamps. In the dim glow from them she could see that the door leading through to the kitchen was propped open by another chair. Shona stayed where she was and waited to see what happened.