Ghost Song (12 page)

Grandfather died at the height of that summer which was a particularly humid one. A lot of people were away on holiday and the wearing of black was stickily uncomfortable. When they drove past Moil Moor on the way to the funeral, the undertaker had to close all the car windows because Moil always smelt bad in the hot weather. The church smelt of clogged-up drains and the vicar did not seem to have washed his cassock for about a year because when he came to talk to them after the service, he smelt of clogged-up drains as well.

A few people were invited to Grith for a glass of sherry and ham sandwiches afterwards. Edna Cheesewright had baked the ham and Cousin Elspeth had supervised it even though Edna had been baking hams for years and did not need telling how you rubbed brown sugar onto the outside and studded it with cloves. Mona had made plain scones and there were wedges of veal and ham pie.

All the mourners were polite and soft-voiced and said what a sad day it was, but Shona noticed most of them kept sneaking furtive looks round the big drawing room which had been opened up for the occasion. People did not often get asked to Grith and she thought most of them were only there from curiosity.

Shona's mother sat down and cried when everyone had gone, and said it was too much for a body to bear—all those folk coming to gloat. People could be very cruel and very critical, Shona must always remember that.

Shona was about to ask why people should gloat or be critical, when Elspeth came bustling in and said it would not help anyone if Margaret wilted and drooped all over the house. Life went on, said Elspeth briskly, and Mother sat up a bit straighter and said Elspeth was perfectly right, and she would have a small drop of whisky to put new heart into her, never mind it being four o'clock in the afternoon. After the small drop, she said it was all very sad, but they had to remember Grith House was now theirs, and they were lucky to have such a lovely home. When they got used to not missing Father so much, said Margaret Seymour taking a second small drop of whisky, things would be just as they had been before.

Shona did not much miss her grandfather who had been strict and old-fashioned, and things were not in the least as they had always been. One of things that was different, was having Elspeth here. She seemed to have fallen into place at Grith, but it was a rather odd place, midway between a guest and a housekeeper. Mother said Elspeth was useful in helping to run the house—Shona did not realize what a lot of work there was in a house this size—but Shona could not see there was all that much to do with just the three of them. Hardly anyone ever came to Grith; her grandfather had not much liked visitors—‘Poking and prying into folk's private business,' he always said—and her mother had never seemed to like them either.

Elspeth undertook some of the cooking, which these days seemed to be too much for Shona's mother, and oversaw the Cheesewrights when they did the cleaning. Edna Cheesewright said that Miss Ross was downright rude at times: she and Mona were not skivvies to be spoken to like that and they only came to Grith to oblige. Shona's mother promised Elspeth would not be so outspoken in the future, but Edna said they were hurt in their feelings and might have to consider their position. They were neither of them as young as they had been. Shona heard Mona say afterwards that happen Mrs Seymour would be selling the rickety old house now Mr Ross had died—a shocking condition it was in, wasn't it? But likely it would fetch a good price and then Mrs Seymour could get a neat little bungalow, said Mona. You could go further and fare worse than a neat little bungalow.

Shona was beginning to have some sympathy with what her grandfather had said about people poking and prying, because Elspeth poked and pried a lot and most of it was into what Shona did. She was often the one who took Shona to and from school: she had learned to drive the old station wagon and was always outside the school gates on the dot of half past three.

Outside school hours she watched Shona a good deal, which was annoying. If Shona went for a walk to the village, like as not she would hear Elspeth's loud voice hailing her cheerily—Elspeth was always cheery, Mother said it was as good as a tonic having her in the house—but Shona found it very wearing at times. There was always a good reason for her to be following Shona: Elspeth had just discovered they were out of butter, or scouring powder, or black sewing thread, and she had said to Margaret she would just nip along to the village to get some. Or she had found it stuffy in the house, and had just nipped out to get a breath of air. She was always just nipping somewhere and most of the nipping seemed to take her in the same direction as Shona. She was a frumpy old nuisance and if Shona had been able to think of a way of getting rid of her without getting caught and punished, she would have done it.

The old dream about the cellar came back occasionally, which Shona hated, but it was her first year of being a teenager and there were more important things to think about than stupid childish nightmares. You were almost grown up when you were a teenager—everybody at school said so—and Shona hoped things at Grith would change at last, and she would be allowed to go out and do the things other girls did: youth clubs and parties with cider to drink, and giggly shopping trips into the nearest town with a group of girls.

But things did not change at all and the nearest she got to shopping trips was if Cousin Elspeth drove them into Norton or Scagglethorpe. Twice they took the train to York and went into Marks & Spencer and had lunch in a tea room on the top floor of C&A. Cousin Elspeth said this was a great treat. Shona thought she could hear Anna laughing at this.

Shona finally left Moil and Grith House three weeks after her eighteenth birthday. She went quietly and unobtrusively, and without any regrets. She had been born there and had lived there all her life, but she would not miss any of it—not the place or the people or the memories.

She knew all the stories about naive trusting girls who went to London thinking they were going to become actresses or film stars or models, and who ended up living in dreadful bedsits or even sleeping rough on the streets, but she did not particularly want to be an actress or a model. She thought she was being practical and sensible about the whole thing. She was prepared to take almost any job she could find, and she had money on which to live for a reasonable length of time.

It was as simple as getting a taxi to York, then boarding the London train and getting out again at Euston Station. She stood for a moment on the platform, clutching her suitcases, momentarily bewildered by the sheer size and noise of everything, and by the volume of people all rushing to and fro so purposefully, but she was determined not to panic at any of it. Wasn't this what she had wanted?

Despite her resolve, she found London frightening at first and what she found even more frightening was the realization that her money might not last as long as she had thought. Rents for even the pokiest of places were astronomical and the cost of quite ordinary things appalled her, but eventually she got a tiny flat south of the river, in a house overlooking Tabard Gardens. She furnished the two rooms carefully, because she might have to stay there for several years.

Finding a job was a bit more difficult than finding a flat. It was the mid-eighties, still the era of the yuppies, but the effects of the boom and bust years were starting to bite and employment was becoming uncertain. In the end she got a very junior position with a company managing theatres for absentee landlords or owners, and specializing in research into Victorian and Edwardian theatre. It was not precisely the kind of job she had imagined, but for the time being she did not mind performing lowly but necessary tasks such as answering telephones, making coffee and filing. A gofer, they called it—Shona had never heard the word before, but she understood it was what her grandfather would have called a dogsbody. It did not much matter what it was called because it was a job with a salary and the office was in Southwark, reassuringly near her flat—she could not afford to live in Central London which still bewildered her. She did not know very much about theatre in any form, but she could learn and it seemed to be the kind of set-up where you could get noticed.

It certainly looked as if her boss was going to notice her; Shona had dressed carefully for the initial interview and after she got the job, she bought smart but subtly sexy outfits to wear each day. She was not very knowledgeable about clothes—she had already realized that Moil was about fifty years behind the fashions—but she studied people in the street and the displays in the better-class shops. The money she had brought from Moil was already deposited in the bank to earn interest—her grandfather would have approved of that!—but Shona thought she was justified in using some of it for clothes. She bought well-cut suits with narrow skirts or trousers and expensive shoes or boots, and she had her hair done every week and learned about make-up. Without telling anyone at the office, she took evening classes in management and book-keeping. Attending the classes and completing the various assignments filled her evenings, which might otherwise have been lonely. When she had the qualifications she intended to mention them casually to her boss. Between classes she read up on Edwardian and Victorian theatre, and went to lectures and exhibitions. She made a few rather tepid friendships and determinedly lost her virginity to a fellow student on the book-keeping course, in order to learn the rudiments of love-making. After this she progressed to one of the lecturers who was older and more experienced and from whom she was able to learn considerably more than just the rudiments. It was amazing what two human bodies could achieve, although some of the positions were surprising.

She had worked for the Harlequin Society for four years, gradually learning about the administration of the place, and was starting to be given slightly more responsible work, when she was trusted with checking the inventory of a couple of the theatres. ‘Good training,' said Shona's boss, who had not missed the fact that this attractive member of his staff worked hard and often stayed after hours or skipped her lunch hour. ‘A straightforward job and it needn't take you much more than a couple of hours for each one, but it's something we have to do.'

One of the theatres in question was a small concert hall, tucked between two warehouses, and mostly used for amateur shows and choral societies. It only took Shona an hour and a half to go through the list of contents, and by four o'clock she had typed up the report, although she was careful to be seen still diligently working on it when everyone left at five thirty.

The other theatre was the old Tarleton Music Hall. Her boss had said he would not normally suggest she go into this one by herself because it was quite a big place and a bit more of a target for vandals and drop-outs, but the cleaning company had just yesterday finished the six-monthly spruce-up, so she would be perfectly safe.

‘The electricity's been switched on for the week for the cleaners, so it'll still be on now,' he said. ‘But you'd better take a torch in case any bulbs have blown. You really only need to check the auditorium, the supper room and the dressing rooms anyway— Oh, and the green room. Don't bother about the dress circle or the boxes—they've been empty of everything for years. And we leave the lower levels to the annual survey—in fact it would be better not to go through the door leading down to the cellars at all; it'll be dark and possibly dangerous.'

It's dangerous, Shona… You can go anywhere else, but not down there…
In the depths of Shona's mind something stirred, but she pushed it away, and said of course she would not go into the underground sections. Was there something structurally wrong with the place? She had been secretly trying to study some of the basic points of building construction, but it was not a thing you could do properly without practical experience and someone to explain things to you along the way. ‘Has it got settlement?' she said tentatively, not exactly plucking the word at random from her gleanings, but hoping it was a sufficiently general term to be appropriate. ‘That area's had problems in the past, hasn't it?'

Her boss glanced at her, plainly surprised, and then with more attention, which was exactly what she had been hoping for. He said, ‘I don't think there's any actual settlement, in fact on the whole the fabric's very stable and sound. But there's an old pumping station in Candle Square and I shouldn't be surprised if the Thames doesn't occasionally slop over its sluice gates round that neighbourhood; so it's possible the Tarleton's foundations occasionally get flooded.'

The memories stirred again.
Moil Moor sometimes overflows a bit after heavy rain,
her grandfather had said.
It's likely that the cellar occasionally gets flooded.
The words came into Shona's mind like thin fog, like the will o' the wisp lights people said flickered over Moil Moor itself. She frowned and forced her mind to concentrate on what had to be done, getting the file from the cabinet, studying the list of contents she would have to check. It would probably not take long: it sounded as if anything not actually nailed down had long since been removed.