Ghost Song (40 page)

Shona had felt slightly headachy ever since waking that morning. The night's bad dream—the screaming clawing thing trying to break out from behind the brick wall in the cellar—had dissolved, but it had left her with the usual feeling of disorientation. Before leaving London she had swallowed a couple of paracetamol, and thought she would have a more substantial lunch than usual; she and Hilary could drive off the motorway and find a reasonable pub or hotel somewhere. Cousin Elspeth had always believed in a good meal at midday: people needed a hot dinner she used to say, serving up stodgy meat and gravy concoctions and tutting if people did not leave clean plates or if Shona, then in her teens, asked for salad and cottage cheese in order to achieve a fashionable stick-like figure. Such nonsense, said Elspeth, who was four-square and dumpy and could not be doing with such vanity. When Elspeth clumped through Shona's nightmares, she always did so with a very heavy tread, and she always smelt of gluey gravy and cabbage boiled too long.

The journey took longer than they had expected, mostly because of a hold-up on the M3, and darkness had fallen as Shona drove the last few miles to Levels House. A drizzly rain was falling, blurring the view through the windscreen.

‘It's quite lonely countryside out here, isn't it?' said Hilary, helping to wipe condensation from the windows.

‘Whatever it is, this rain is a nuisance,' said Shona. ‘It's difficult to see through it. It's a bit like the mists that used to roll in from the moors where I grew up,' she said, then thought: damn, I'm breaking one of my own rules about never referring to my childhood. To stop Hilary picking up on it, she said, ‘Is that the sign for Fosse Leigh?'

‘Yes. Turn right in about a hundred yards, then three miles along. I hope,' said Hilary suddenly, ‘that Madeleine Ferrelyn isn't some sad frail recluse with not much money and no family.'

‘If she owns the Tarleton she can hardly be said to have no money,' rejoined Shona rather tartly. ‘And she mentioned having plenty of space for overnight guests so the house must be quite substantial. This looks like the start of the village now.'

‘Yes. It's quite small, isn't it?'

Fosse Leigh was very small indeed; Shona thought it was not much bigger than Moil. There was a straggle of houses along the road—some were pleasingly old, some were probably former tied cottages, recently tarted up, and there was a row of council houses. A church spire rose up at the far end, and there was a small square with a few shops, a post office, a village hall and a pub.

‘There should be a manor house or the squire's residence looking down on all this,' murmured Hilary. ‘The place where the village girls could always get domestic work and the squire's lady helped people in trouble. Rural paternalism. Early version of the welfare state.'

Levels House was about a mile beyond the village proper, and they almost drove past it because there were no street lights anywhere and the house itself was thickly screened by old trees. But Hilary spotted the sign on the gatepost in time, and Shona braked hard and reversed so they could turn in. Several times since leaving the motorway she had felt vaguely confused as to where they were going and had been grateful to Hilary who had said things like, ‘That's the turning for Salisbury,' and talking briefly about the awesome cathedral there and the smaller one at Wells with its remarkable clock figures, and about Glastonbury and its Arthurian associations. It's all right, Shona had thought. I do know where we are, after all—it's only the remnants of the nightmare that's making me feel light-headed. I know quite well we're driving through Hampshire and Wiltshire, and this isn't Yorkshire with the mists coming in from the North Sea.

Even so, approaching Levels House brought a brief, shutter-flash impression of the old private roadway up to Grith. Thick rhododendrons fringed the drive: in summer they would be a riot of colour, but now they were dark gloomy shapes. The untrimmed laurel bushes at Grith had looked like that. They had blotted out most of the light, those laurel bushes, and they dripped moisture onto the ground so that when you walked along the drive you thought you could hear ghost footsteps creeping along behind you.

As the house came into view round the drive's curve, it was as if something made a vicious swiping blow at the centre of Shona's mind. It's Grith, she said to herself. You're going back to Grith. Anna's been pulling you back here, back to Grith, all this time. Would Anna be waiting for her?

But Anna was long since dead and this was not Grith, although it was probably the same age and was built in the design of that era for people of a certain income—people requiring spaciousness in an age when domestic labour was cheap.

But Grith was grey and black and lowering like a sombre and grainy old photograph, and it was set amidst the bleak Moil moors. Levels House looked exactly how Grith would look if it was treated to a wash of warm colour—twopence-coloured as they used to say of the old posters, against Grith's penny-plain. Instead of the moors of Moil, the backcloth here was gentler fields and hedgerows, but in essence everything was the same. The house had the same small, latticed windows and the same lowering eaves above them, like frowning eyebrows.

‘Beautiful grounds,' Hilary was saying. ‘How on earth does Madeleine Ferrelyn manage this all by herself, I wonder? That looks like an orchard beyond the gardens.'

Grith had never been called lovely or had its gardens admired; it had been dismal and far too large for Grandfather and Mother and Shona. Levels House had welcoming lights and an old-fashioned coach lamp over the porch, sending out a warm glow. No one ever hung lamps outside Grith, because no one ever came to Grith after dark.

For a few moments they thought no one was going to answer Hilary's ring at the bell, then there was the sound of rather slow footsteps and an elderly lady opened the door. She was tall and spare with short brown hair streaked with grey, and although she looked to be in her late seventies and leaned quite heavily on a stick, she had an energetic air about her and an apple-cheeked face as if she spent a good deal of her time out of doors. She wore a tweed skirt and pullover, with a bright red scarf knotted at the neck.

‘Hello!' said this lady, looking and sounding pleased. ‘You'll be Miss Seymour and Miss Bryant from London. I'm delighted to see you both. I'm Madeleine Ferrelyn—well, you'll have realized that. Come along inside. You'll be glad of a cup of tea or coffee after your journey, I expect. Rather you than me to go whizzing along those dreadful motorways. Wretched things, although I daresay they're a necessary evil.'

Immediately inside was a large hall like Grith's, easily big enough to use as a dining room as Grandfather had sometimes done. There was the same wide stairway leading up off it.

Madeleine Ferrelyn took them into a long, low-ceilinged sitting room with old-fashioned cretonne covers on the sofa and chairs, and a large fireplace with a thick oak mantel and copper brush and shovel in the hearth. Several framed prints and watercolours of the area hung on the walls and a bowl of bronze chrysanthemums stood on a gate-leg table. The scent of woodsmoke mingled pleasantly with the wet-rain scent of the chrysanthemums. It's all right, thought Shona. This is nothing like Grith. I'm back in the present. Safe.

Their hostess was saying she hoped the house would be warm enough for them, because the area was shockingly damp at times. ‘We're a bit prone to the occasional winter flood here: there're what they call clay levels along the coast—effectively, sea walls—but there are peaty moors inland that are lower and the Severn estuary's got a high tidal range. Occasionally it gets past the defences and slops a bit further inland than it should. I'm used to it: I've lived here a very long time—it belonged to my husband's family but he's been dead a good many years now.'

‘It's a lovely house,' said Hilary, looking about her. ‘Oh, and we brought you this.' She handed over the small bag containing a whole Brie, a pottery dish of pâté and a bottle of Madeira. ‘A contribution to your larder.'

‘That's extremely kind of you. There was really no need, but—oh my, that Brie looks good. We'll have some of it to round off our supper. Now then, the cloakroom's off the hall if you want a wash and brush up after the journey, and your rooms are just at the head of the stairs,' said Madeleine Ferrelyn briskly. ‘First right and second right off the landing. Bathroom's at the end of the passage. I won't take you up if you don't mind—the medics have banned me from climbing stairs more than once a day. A great nuisance, but there it is. But while you take your things up I'll be putting on the kettle, my dears.' The ‘my dears' came out naturally in the country fashion.

‘Thank you, Mrs Ferrelyn,' began Hilary.

‘Make it Madeleine, do. Can't be bothered with fuss and formality. You're Hilary, that's right, isn't it?'

‘And I'm Shona,' said Shona.

‘That's a beautiful old Scottish name. How lucky you are to have been given it.'

Shona was glad she and Hilary did not have to share a bedroom: she disliked sharing a room with anyone unless it was a lover, and even then she tried to part company before falling asleep. Her room was comfortable, with the bed neatly made up, and fresh towels and soap on the little hand basin. There was a heavy old-fashioned wardrobe and dressing table with a lace runner, and a flowered carpet, slightly faded by the window where the sun would come in.

The curtains were open and Shona stood for a moment looking out over the gardens and the dark fields beyond. What had Madeleine Ferrelyn said? The Severn slopes a bit further inland than it should…
Moil Moor sometimes overflows,
Grandfather used to say.
After heavy rain the cellars occasionally get flooded…

But downstairs again, with the fire crackling in the hearth and a pot of tea set out on a low table, she began to feel better. Hilary produced her notes on the Tarleton and embarked on an explanation of the preliminary proposals, and Shona listened, content for the moment to let her take the lead. She had come up with some excellent outlines, especially when you remembered that this time yesterday the identity of the Tarleton's owner had still been a mystery.

‘Whatever's staged on that first night has to be explosive,' Hilary was saying. ‘Really memorable. I also think it should link to the Tarleton's past, even if modern stuff gets put on later.'

‘Agreed.'

‘An all-out Victorian evening would be quite good and make for lively publicity,' said Hilary. ‘And we might end up having to settle for that. But I can't help feeling that would be a bit obvious, a bit predictable. What would be brilliant is if we could recreate the final show put on before the place closed. The closing night reclaimed.' She looked at them both.

Madeleine said, slowly, ‘I like that idea very much, Hilary. But—would it be possible? Could you trace the details of that last performance? After so long?'

‘I don't know yet. We might be lucky and turn up an actual programme or a poster. Or it might be a case of putting together fragments of information from old books and newspapers: one person might make mention of a single act in one place; another might make mention of another in a totally different place, and we'd join it all up. That would be long-winded, but not impossible. There are any amount of privately printed memoirs of old actors and all kinds of sources I could check. The internet's brilliant for a lot of research nowadays, of course—you often get drama students publishing theses on the net, and sometimes they give their primary sources—perhaps an odd playbill they've turned up or an old set of theatrical accounts. And what I had in mind,' said Hilary, ‘was that we'd have replicas of those acts. Not mimicking the original singers or musicians or dancers—certainly not caricaturing them, either. Just performing them as they were written and as they were intended to be performed.'

‘Reclaiming the past,' said Madeleine thoughtfully. ‘I love the idea.'

‘Do you?' Hilary's eyes shone. ‘I'm so pleased. I love it as well. See, we could even set the acts against a huge backdrop of blown-up photos of the originals. We might have blown-up newspaper articles or advertisements of the time, as well: they'd be easy to find. The rest might take a lot of delving, but I'd love to do it,' she said. ‘I'd organize everything for you. I mean—the Harlequin would organize it.'

‘Would you? I've got a few old photographs from my father's time—you could see if they'd help as a starting point,' said Madeleine enthusiastically. ‘And I think there are even some old programmes—it'd be too much to hope that the closing programme's there, but you might get some leads. Everything's stowed in the attic and I haven't been able to get up there for years, but we'll see about making a proper search.'

‘I'd go up if you'd let me,' said Hilary eagerly.

‘It's a bit of a climb. And you'd need to spend several days going through it all, although there is electricity up there.'

‘Madeleine, I'd climb up Mount Everest for the Tarleton,' said Hilary, earnestly. ‘I'd spend seven years in the attic—in any attic—if I had to. I'm so intrigued by that theatre that I can't bear the thought of—of anything second-rate for its reopening. I don't want us to short-change it.' She paused, a bit uncertainly as if she thought she might have gone too far, but Madeleine at once said, ‘Hilary, you're a treat. Let's go all out for this.'