Property of a Lady (19 page)

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again
 . . . The ruinous Manderley with its iron gates and blackened walls and sad secrets would not be at the end of the lane. But whatever was ahead, it was mine. I was coming home.

Everywhere was so quiet and still, I could almost have believed I had stepped back to the days when Elvira Lee lived here. There are places in England – I dare say all over the world – that have that effect. As if, here and there, something has puckered the fabric of time and tiny shards of the past can trickle out.

I went past the ruined carriageway, pausing to glance along it and sparing a thought for a manor house no longer there. I do know it’s more important for ordinary people to have decent houses and a bit of garden, but it’s such a shame that so many of England’s great houses have been lost – to fire, to flood, to improvidence or debt. If this war that’s coming lasts as long as the war that took my Harry and all those other young men, I suppose even more of them will be lost.

I don’t think Charect House will ever be lost, though. It has such a stubborn air of survival. It stands well back from Blackberry Lane behind overgrown gardens, and it’s one of those four-square red-brick houses built about a century and a half ago. (Which means everywhere will be crumbling or sagging or rotten, and it will probably cost far more money than I shall ever possess to restore it . . .)

Tacked on to the gate was an oblong of wood with the house’s name and a rusting chain that snapped in two when I lifted it. When I unlocked the door and pushed it open, there was the most tremendous feeling of ownership. Again, I thought:
I am coming home
.

What did I expect from the inside of the house? Gothic gloom, shrouded rooms, dusty sunlight lying across oak floors . . . ? I got that, all right. But I also got the depressing, bad-smelling evidence of forty years of neglect and dereliction. The best ghost stories don’t mention the smell you get from an old, deserted house. They don’t mention the damp, dank stench – decades of ingrained grime and mouse droppings and rusting taps that drip into green-crusted sinks.

(Actually, there was a faint sound of water dripping all the time I was there – there’s something so lonely about the sound of a tap dripping, and this was a particularly insistent, very nearly rhythmic dripping. It seemed to follow me into every room.)

I don’t have very much knowledge of houses or what goes wrong with them, but anyone can recognize when age or rot has caused window frames to crumble, and sprawling grey-green patches of damp on walls. There was, in fact, a particularly unpleasant patch on the main landing wall. As I went up the main stairway I had quite a scare because it looked for all the world like the figure of a man, rather stocky, standing there watching me. I didn’t quite scream, but it was several minutes before my heart resumed its normal rate.

But even with wallpaper peeling from the walls, and plaster mouldings fallen from the ceilings – even allowing for the army of invisible creatures undoubtedly nibbling industriously at the woodwork – the house is lovely. Someone has at least had the housewifely good sense to cover most of the furniture with dust sheets. I dragged them off because I wanted to see everything, and clouds of dust rose up nearly choking me. But when the dust settled it was worth it, because the furniture is beautiful. And valuable as well, I should think. If I really do need money (and it’s looking as if I shall), I may be able to sell some of the better pieces. But I’d like to keep most of it: there are deep armchairs with faded rose-patterned fabric, a writing bureau, a round rosewood table, a long-case clock . . .

What daunted me far more than the elegant dereliction, though, were the boxes and trunks stuffed with papers and letters and fabrics and household miscellany. They’ll all have to be opened and properly investigated. For all I know poor old Elvira might have murdered half a dozen people and secreted their remains in the two big cabin trunks. I don’t really think she did, and I know that, just as anything of any value will have been destroyed or sold, every scrap of boring minutiae will have been diligently preserved. But there’s always the faint chance that Great Uncle Somebody squirrelled a few Holbein sketches among the rubbish, or that great-grandmamma tucked a first-folio Shakespearean manuscript between the leaves of a cookery book.

All the time I was in the house I had the feeling of being watched. I do know that’s quite common in empty houses though. It felt strongest in the library – that’s a rather grand term for a house of that size, but the room is lined with books that nobody thought to pack away. There are rows upon rows of them, floor to ceiling. There’s a big, leather-topped table and several deep chairs, and a long-case clock in a corner. It’s long since stopped, of course, so winding it and setting the time is another task for me.

When my self-appointed hour was up, I locked the doors and went out to Blackberry Lane to meet the taxi.

I have no idea how much actual money (if any!) comes with this legacy or the likely cost of the work needed at the house, but tomorrow I shall ask the solicitor.

In the meantime, it’s almost midnight and I’ve retired to bed. Charect House’s atmosphere is somehow still with me though – and I don’t mean the smell of damp or rot. It’s that impression of being watched that’s stayed with – that, and that persistent dripping tap. And – let’s be honest in these pages if nowhere else – it’s Elvira’s tale about a nameless man who sings that macabre song – it’s from the
Ingoldsby Legends
, that rhyme, I found that out years ago – but whose mind touched a deep, unwholesome core, like the old apple tree’s roots. On balance, I really could wish I had never heard that story, and I certainly wish I had never met Elvira herself.

18th February Midday

Today I’ve brought my diary to Charect House with me. It will provide a welcome respite from all the sorting out, and it will be company in the silence of the place.

It isn’t entirely silent, of course. No house ever is. And there’s still the constant drip of water somewhere. It started to annoy me after a while, but although I’ve explored the sculleries – grim, badly-lit caverns – all the taps were dry. I hope it isn’t something in the roof – I should think roofs cost the earth to mend – but if rain has got in and is leaking into the house somewhere, it will need to be dealt with.

I never realized before what a huge responsibility a house is! Harry and I used to talk about how we would have a cottage in the country after the war. We visualized log fires and latticed windows and chintz. We didn’t get as far as leaking roofs and rusting taps, or crumbling window frames. If Harry was here now, he would laugh my fears away and probably trace the source of the lonely dripping tap or pipe quite easily, either mending it himself or arranging for a plumber to do so.

But it’s an unsettling sound, that rhythmic drip-drip. I really do
not
like the thought of something dripping away somewhere in a dark, unreachable space . . . I don’t like, either, how regular the sound is – it’s almost like a small mechanism, or like someone lightly tapping a tattoo on the very tiny drum, or small, thick wings beating against a glass pane.

But whatever it is, I shall try to ignore it. I’ve made the library my headquarters. The Black Boar can provide a Thermos flask of coffee, together with a pack of sandwiches each day, so I shan’t have to return there for lunch. It’s bitterly cold in the house, of course – the cold of a house unheated and unlived-in for forty years – so I have arranged for a small delivery of logs (the taxi driver has a brother-in-law who can supply them). Providing it doesn’t smoke out the entire house, I shall build a fire in the library hearth.

20th February 2.30 p.m.

I’ve had a very useful morning, and quite soon I shall lock everything up and go out to meet my friend the taxi driver who is going to pick me up here at four o’clock.

The logs duly arrived midway through the morning, and I’ve built a fire in the library hearth. It smoked furiously for about ten minutes, but now it’s settled down to a very pleasant crackle and the room is nicely warm.

I’ve even set the old clock going. The hinges of the door protested like a soul in torment, but they aren’t rusted and the pendulum with its weight turned out to be perfectly workable. When I touched it, it moved at once, and (I know how fantastical this sounds) it was as if a heart was struggling into life after a long stillness. And then the rhythmic ticking began, and I reached up to move the hands to the correct time and closed the door.

I dare say a good deal of craft went into that clock, but I don’t much like it. To my eye it’s Victorian workmanship at its most florid. It has one of those vaguely macabre faces over the main dial – a swollen moon-face, which I suppose marks the passing of the moon’s cycle. The sphere representing the moon has been lightly marked to indicate features – like children’s books with the Man in the Moon smiling benignly down from the night sky. The face is half visible, which I suppose means it was midway between moons when it stopped. Still, at least the ticking seems to have smothered the dripping tap. Perhaps it’s ticking exactly simultaneously with it.

Regarded as a spyhole into the house’s earlier occupants, the contents of the boxes are fascinating. I’m trying to make notes of it all as I go along. I’ve just found some letters from a Mrs W. Lee, who had entered into a somewhat vituperative correspondence with the fishmonger over an order of herring that appeared to have been dubious. I can’t imagine why such letters were preserved, but it’s interesting to speculate who Mrs W. Lee was. There are also a few old concert and theatre programmes from performances at one or two local theatres, with notes made in the margin by a neat, masculine-looking hand. The writer compares one performance of
The Bells
unfavourably with Henry Irving’s appearance in the same piece, which he had apparently seen in London a few years earlier. Personally, I shouldn’t have expected a small provincial theatre to even come close to Sir Henry’s incandescent acting, but it all makes absorbing reading.

There’s something soporific about a firelit room and a ticking clock, and despite Sir Henry and the herring, I’m having to fight the compulsion to drift into a half-doze . . .

It’s so restful in here. Not entirely silent, but then no house is ever entirely silent. As I make these notes, I’m hearing voices, just very faintly. They’re a long way off, though. Children, perhaps, playing somewhere in a field. Or would children be at school at this time on a weekday? Whatever it is, it sounds as if they’re singing . . .

It’s rather a nice sound – it makes me think of peaceful, soothing things. Warm honey running off the spoon into a dish. Dappled sunlight coming through the trees on a green and gold summer’s afternoon, and bees humming among the flowers. Soft rain in a forest in autumn, and the scent of chrysanthemums . . .

I think someone tapped at the door a few moments ago, but it was a soft, light tap and I was so comfortable and so drowsy that I couldn’t be bothered to wake up enough to see if anyone was there. If it was important, whoever it was will come back.

I don’t think the singing I can hear is children. It’s a single voice – a man’s voice . . . I can’t quite hear the words, but it sounds like one of those old-fashioned chants . . .

Black Boar: 6.30 p.m.

I’m not at all sure I shan’t destroy these pages, but for the moment it’s calming to write down what happened at Charect House this afternoon.

Sleep is a curious thing. It’s a like an ocean. There are shallow parts and very deep parts, and there are currents that can pull you into very strange places indeed . . . The only explanation I have for what happened to me this afternoon is that one of those strange currents had me in its arms and took me to a curious, none too comfortable, place.

At first I enjoyed the gentle undertow that tugged at my mind. At one level I knew I was falling asleep, that I was on the borderlands of dreaming, but it didn’t seem to matter. I even thought: perhaps Harry will be in the dream. He is, sometimes. He comes walking towards me, smiling, holding out his hands, and he looks so dashing in his uniform, and I’m so proud of him and filled with such soaring delight at seeing him after so many years . . .

At first I thought he
was
in the dream, and I think I smiled as I lay back in the deep old chair. It felt as if he was closer to me than ever before, and when I turned my head slightly, I became aware of a hand moving lightly over my face, tracing the features, exactly as he always did. If I opened my eyes he would be there – this time he really would, and the bloodbath of the Somme would never have happened . . .

That was when I opened my eyes.

And oh God, oh God, standing over the chair, his face inches from my own, was a man I had never seen in my life – a man with a very pale face and black shadows half-concealing the upper part of his face. He was leaning over me, and his hands were crawling over my face like spiders . . .

I didn’t scream, but it was a close thing. I gasped and started back though, and at once he flinched as if he had been burned. In that moment, I made to jump up from the chair, but it overturned and I fell backwards in an awkward jumble. By the time I scrambled to my feet, he had gone, but the door into the hall was swinging softly and slowly shut. Exactly as if someone had just gone through it and had pushed it closed.