The Silence of Ghosts (16 page)

We joked a little like this, using humour as a means of winding down. I could not get certain sounds and images out of my head.

‘What did you mean?’ asked Rose. ‘When you said he spoke
in Portuguese? Surely that isn’t possible. There have never been any Portuguese here.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘Certainly, dozens of Portuguese businessmen and their wives visited Hallinhag House and toured the Lakes during the summers since this place was built.’

‘What did he say?’

‘As far as I can remember, it went much like this. “
Leve o padre a cabo, vai embora, e não volte nunca mais. Eu, Senhor Guilherne e os crianças ficaremos em casa. Pertencemos aqui. Em esta casa. Finalmente, feche a entrada a chave
.” It means, “Take the priest and go away, and never come back. The children, Sir William and I will stay in the house. We belong here. In this house. Finally, lock the door behind you.” ’

‘You understand all that?’

‘Rose, my love, my family has been doing business in Portugal for about three hundred years. When I was growing up, my father brought in a succession of tutors to teach me Portuguese, and I used to get practice when we visited. I’m fairly fluent, though I really have little use for the language now.’

‘Perhaps you will again,’ she said, ‘when the war is over and you can go there. Your father will need someone to take over the business when he’s gone.’

‘He’d never let me. He’d as soon have an outsider as his own son.’

She looked tenderly at me.

‘We shall see,’ she said.

We did not go to bed, but sat in our chairs all night, for we were afraid, each of us, of being alone. ‘
Leve o padre a cabo . . 
.’ went through my head while I lay awake, and when dreams came at last, I saw the dancers capering again. Before they had had no faces, now they had no heads, and they capered madly, their legs kicking high in the air and their arms flailing as if it
were St Vitus’s Dance. Sometimes they would bend and pick up their heads and replace them on their necks, and the eyes would open, and look out glaring at the world.

We were woken by Jeanie coming down about six o’clock. She said nothing about finding us there, and set about warming the little kitchen and making breakfast. Rose went up and fetched Octavia. She had not slept well either, and told me she had seen the children, that they had seemed ill, that their staring eyes had been eaten up with grief or mourning or suffering – she could not say which.

‘They are changing,’ she said. ‘Their eyes are not the same, their bodies are not the same, their clothes are not the same. They have scars on their faces, something is wrong with their skin.’

And when I thought back to the night before, I had to agree that she was right. The children had changed in perceptible ways. And the skin on their cheeks seemed darker and thicker than previously.

We sat down to a fine breakfast of bacon and eggs. Jeanie kept a couple of pigs in her back garden, in a little hut of corrugated iron, and when the inspectors came they knew better than to examine that part of her property. This was the countryside, and keeping pigs was common practice. Of course, she always feared the arrival of a new inspector come up from Liverpool or some other city, an inspector who would take the trouble to go outside, an inspector who would confiscate her precious pigs and fine her heavily.

The Reverend Braithwaite arrived not long after we had finished. He looked very glum as he came in, but bucked up tremendously when he was offered a plate of bacon and eggs and the single sausage still lurking in the meat safe. These were the perks of vicarhood. He sat down and ate while we watched. At least he still had a good appetite, but he looked poorly. Talking
of ghosts in the abstract, as he had done, was clearly one thing, but seeing them in reality, hearing the men’s voices at the end, finding dead a man who had been alive not so long ago – all this had taken it out of him.

When Jeanie started on her chores, she asked Octavia to help. The two of them got on very well together, and I had hopes that they would see a lot of one another in coming years. Rose, the vicar and I retired to the living room.

Braithwaite told us he had spent the night in prayer. He looked as though he had gone without sleep for hours.

‘I can’t deal with this,’ he said. ‘There was such a sense of evil in the house, and when I found Declan Carbery lying dead . . . I will have to go to my bishop in Carlisle, perhaps speak with the priest who handles exorcisms. I feel completely out of my depth.’ He stopped to compose himself, and after a moment continued, ‘Perhaps there’s some rational explanation for all this. I don’t mean the hauntings as such, but something historical. They are the ghosts of real children, perhaps children who once lived in the house.’

‘Of that I’m quite sure,’ I said. ‘There are the two men as well. One is Portuguese, but the other could well be an ancestor of mine, if he owns the house. That means he has a direct connection with my family, and the children too perhaps. If there’s something in the family records, maybe we can use it to get to the bottom of the thing. Perhaps there’s something they want and can’t do for themselves but want us to do for them. Do you think that’s possible?’

‘The children, yes,’ said Rose. ‘I think they’re quite innocent in this, but they seem to be trapped by something. And speaking of them, have you forgotten your promise to the evacuee children here? The trip on the lake? I thought you’d made arrangements.’

I sat back. The trip had gone completely out of my mind.

To be honest, I really wasn’t in the mood for an outing, but I didn’t like to break a promise to any child, especially these children. Their hosts were going to scrimp with their ration books to put together a picnic that would be just enough for seven healthy kids. After all that, I couldn’t very well back out.

Afterwards, Rose and I both wished we had.

Later

The
Kingfisher
was a lovely boat, with twin sails and a leather-upholstered cabin down below. The deck had been polished to perfection, the sails were pure white with purple stripes, and the rails looked safe enough for the children.

Adrian helped us pick them up one by one. Their pallid faces were shining with anticipation. I think they had never before gone anywhere or seen anything outside their own dark, narrow streets, where they would have been sitting targets for Hitler and his bombs if they hadn’t been evacuated. They had arrived in clothes too thin to keep the cold out, and I think they had suffered badly from this unusually freezing winter. I couldn’t have taken them on the water today if they’d still been dressed in their old clothes, but their hosts had been using their ingenuity. They’d heard that the WVS runs a Centre in Barrow, where they take in old things, fix them up, and sell them on to make money for the organization. There’s a woman called Nella Last who’s in charge of all this, and she and her helpers do incredible things with clothes. A couple of the host women had taken the bus there before Christmas and had come home with more pullovers and overcoats than they could manage. People had helped them on board the bus home, the conductor didn’t charge them a halfpenny more, and there were willing hands to get their purchases off the bus in Pooley Bridge.

So our little rabble weren’t shivering, and the fresh air seemed to be putting a glow in their cheeks. I had an uncomfortable feeling that none of them would want to go back home to Liverpool when the war was over. I wrapped Octavia well in her little red coat and Rose found a beret for her that she herself had worn at about her age. It was black and went well with the coat. As I put it on, I noticed that Octavia had what looked like a rash on her jaw. I asked Rose to examine it and she said it could be eczema or early signs of acne. She would ask Dr Raverat to look at it when he got back.

My spirits were lifted by the trip. I tried as hard as I could to put last night behind me. When we ferried the last two children to the landing stage, they were jumping up and down in delight. Some of them had already made friends; others had been isolated on their farms, but didn’t take long to start chatting.

We spent some time instructing our landlubbers about how to behave on board a yacht. They were issued with their life jackets. On questioning, none of them said they could swim, so I insisted they keep the jackets on all the time. A cold wind blew past and the surface of the lake grew a little choppy. I decided that a strong following wind would help speed things up and make the sailing part of the trip more exciting.

And so it was. We set off, Adrian at the helm, myself on the sails, while Rose brought up a couple of kids at a time on to the deck. Some of them started out frightened, the movement of the yacht quite unlike anything they’d ever known on trams or buses. Most of them settled quickly and got the hang of how it all worked, and those who didn’t retired below decks.

Cherry Holm is a tiny island near the end of the lake, with Glenridding to the west and Patterdale to the south. It has a single tree that I, in my urban ignorance, take for an alder, and masses of bushes. There isn’t much room to sit and contemplate
the universe. Not much room to run and play. On the other hand, I’d thought, perhaps it was just as well that they wouldn’t be able to scarper off in all directions, getting lost and getting into trouble.

It’s not far from the shore at Glenridding to Cherry Holm. There was no hope of mooring the
Kingfisher
at the island, but we dropped anchor on the lakeside where Glenridding comes down to meet the water. Adrian manoeuvred the dinghy round to the side, and we lowered the children down, first a group of three, then another of three, and finally two. Then he got Rose down and came up to tie a line round my waist so he could lower me into Rose’s waiting arms. Then he took us over to the island, to a spot where there was a wooden dock with a cleat to tie the dinghy up. The kids were bubbling over with enthusiasm.

I was churning inside, for my thoughts were with Father Carbery and how he must have died. I hoped it had been quick, but feared that it had not. Would Dr Raverat have the answer when he came home today? I hoped to hear that it had been a heart attack, something without mystery.

But my worries prevented me from thinking about Cherry Holm Island and the children I had brought there. Dear God, if only I had used my head, a great tragedy might have been averted.

Later

I have had to take a break from writing, to steady my nerves before recalling the rest of our trip to Cherry Holm. When I was younger, as I have mentioned previously, I often repaired there alone or with friends to play or read. It was a benign place, big enough in a child’s eyes to serve as a kingdom. My father never came with me, for which I felt some relief. He did
talk to me about brave and honourable men who built shining realms by standing up against all others and beating them to submission. He tried to instil this idea into me, and to show me how a well-run business was a ruthless enterprise, that a true businessman was as much a warrior as any general, that such a man should be cold-hearted, pitiless, single-minded and self-interested.

The kingdom I built in my imagination during my childhood days on Cherry Holm was built on kindness. At home or at Hallinhag, my father frequently boasted of how he’d sacked this or that worker, or even one long-serving member of his board. He had a reputation for hardness, and prided himself in the fact that his workers all lived in fear of him. From an early age, I resolved to be unlike him and swore that if, by some twist of fate, I should ever become head of the firm, I would cancel his petty rules and regulations and institute a new regime based on loyalty and trust. And I would deal with my customers in the same way.

It was dreams like these that I took with me to Cherry Holm back then, and today I set foot there with equally naïve thoughts about giving my abandoned children their first real chance in life. Hallinhag House and its ghostly inhabitants faded in my mind and were blown away by the light breeze and the cries of laughter and excitement from the children.

Rose in particular knew how to deal with them. She would sit down with three or four at a time and take out their lunches, chatting with them while she distributed the food and saw that everybody got their fair share. She was everybody’s favourite that day, and the more I watched her with the children the more I loved her and wanted children of our own. Much to her credit, she spent what time she could with Octavia, who was having her usual difficulty in winning acceptance from the other
children, children with little notion of politeness, experienced in the rough ways of the school of hard knocks and unfamiliar with the deaf.

The lunches came with bottles of pop, most of it ginger beer, and we quickly learned that several of the children had never tasted such luxury. There was much hilarity when the first one burped audibly. Apart from Octavia, there were four girls and three boys, and I determined, once there was a chance, to talk to them in order to find out what sort of lives they had lived until now. They had seen some bombing, but didn’t like to speak of it. If I asked, they said they weren’t afraid of Herr Hitler, but I could sense that, underneath, they took the bombs very seriously indeed. They had seen houses brought down on top of whole families, bodies laid out among the ruins, children running through the streets in search of their fathers and mothers.

After lunch, we decided to play hide and seek, a game they were all familiar with, but which they had only ever played in the street. There wasn’t much space on Cherry Holm, but it offered some very enticing bushes, quite a few good-sized rocks, and the sheer excitement of being outside amidst such stunning scenery. Off behind Glenridding, the children could see the great height of Helvellyn, one of our country’s highest peaks, and everywhere they looked were the tallest fells and the most wooded slopes. There was snow on the higher parts. I thought it could not have been a better place for them to play.

Then we did another countdown, and Rose and Adrian and I dutifully closed our eyes. Then, half-way through, I heard a low cry and opened my eyes. Some of the children were running to the east side of the island, as though in alarm. Octavia was standing right next to me, and from her expression I could see that something was wrong. She gestured, but I could not make
out at first what it was about. Rose and Adrian still had their eyes covered.