The Silence of Ghosts (20 page)

Back home, Rose asked to see my parents and courteously thanked them for their hospitality. She asked to phone for a taxi, then fetched her bag and coat. She ignored me all the time. Five minutes later, the taxi arrived, and she left, saying goodbye to Octavia, but not to me.

‘Has nursey gone?’ asked my father. ‘That little dalliance doesn’t seem to have lasted long. But what can you expect if you must start romances with such an unsuitable person? A nurse, for heaven’s sake. And a low-grade district nurse from the sticks. Were you that desperate? But I expect your injury has turned your brain. I can fit you up with any number of women.
I’ll get you some to be serious with, or if you prefer to go to bed with them, there are plenty who make that their business. Was that the problem with little nursey? Didn’t she want you between the sheets? Was your leg too much for even her coarsened sensibilities?’

I would have hit him, and came close to doing so, but I was tired of him, and there were things I wanted from him first, so I checked my temper and went up to my bedroom, where I cried into my pillow.

I did not see my parents again until dinner. I had to be there in order to tell them of Dr Martin’s diagnosis. Octavia was excused dinner and told to eat in her room, leaving me free to explain all I had been told. They listened and said they would find a proper doctor in Harley Street. This rash had been exaggerated out of all proportion. I listened. Octavia was my sister, but their daughter, and there was nothing I could do to defy them. I could only hope they would settle on a doctor – no doubt one with a knighthood – who knew his stuff, one who would agree with the diagnosis two other doctors had already given.

‘Father,’ I said, ‘there’s something I’d like to ask. When I was in Hallinhag House, I grew interested in its history. And that has sparked off an interest in the history of the family firm.’

‘That is unlike you, Dominic.’ My father impaled several spears of asparagus on his fork. I cannot imagine where he gets them from, given the season and wartime conditions.

‘I have fully made my mind up to enter the firm. I think it will suit me better than any other work, especially with how things are for me now.’

‘Really? Well, if you are sincere, no doubt you can be accommodated. Don’t you think so, my dear?’

My mother looked up from lifting her own asparagus on to her plate.

‘What? Oh, yes, of course, darling. He may be suited to it, and it will keep the business in family hands.’

He looked back at me.

‘Of course, you’ll have to start as a junior, I’m sure you understand that. But I will provide you with another Portuguese teacher. I consider that important, so we can communicate with associates who don’t speak English.’

‘I’ll go along with whatever you say, Father. There’s just one thing. Because of my interest in our early years, I’d like to look over any papers we may have relating to our activities in Portugal and England. I might even be able to put together a brief history of the firm. That could be of interest to our customers.’

I thought he would tell me the family papers were off bounds or that they had been destroyed, but he did not.

‘Very well. I’m going in to the office tomorrow. We have an archivist, Cecil Blanchard. I’ll ask him to explain what’s what. I never paid any attention to that side of things myself. But if it improves your loyalty to the firm, why not?’

He had just reached out for another slice of beef when we heard something from upstairs. Octavia was screaming at the top of her lungs. It went on and on for over a minute. I told my parents to stay and headed upstairs myself.

Friday, 3 January

I spent most of the morning moping about the flat. I was tired, of course, having been up with Octavia. My mother was with me part of the time, but my father just put her screaming down to the air raid that had come later than usual last night. I knew it wasn’t the bombing. I knew Octavia scarcely heard it, even
with her hearing aid in place. I knew better than anyone that something was in the house.

When my mother left the room to have an early breakfast and see to her toilette – about which she is fastidious, of course – I sat on the edge of the bed and wrote on a notepad for Octavia.

‘Why did you scream last night, dear?’ I asked.

‘I told you,’ she wrote on the next sheet. ‘Someone is here in the flat.’

‘Do you know who?’

She shook her head and wrote.

‘Not one of the children. A man, I think. He speaks to me, but I don’t understand the words he uses. Do you know who he is?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I saw him at the house, I think. I’m trying to find out who he is. But I want to know why you screamed. You don’t normally scream, and never so loudly. Did you see him, is that what it was?’

She hesitated.

‘I had a bad dream. People were dancing. They had soot on their faces and none of them had feet and some of them had no arms, and in the dream I could hear properly: drums were beating and a man’s voice sang words I couldn’t understand, and his voice went up and down, and I saw a great mist that came down and covered the dancers, but I could still hear the drumming and the man’s voice, and then it was still and I heard nothing, just as if my deafness had returned, and when I woke I was still deaf.’

I thought of my Morris men with their black faces, dancing as they formed a ring about me.

‘Did they ring bells?’ I asked.

She seemed unsure, so I picked up the little bell she sometimes uses to summon help in the middle of the night. I put it by her
ear and she turned up the volume on her aid, and I rang it. She shuddered and nodded, the memory awakened deep inside her.

I went to my room and came back to her, bringing with me my Portuguese guitar. I remembered how I had promised to play it for Rose, and it cut me through and through to think I might never do that now. But I wanted to play for Octavia, something I had never done before. If she could not understand speech yet, surely she could appreciate music. I started with a piece for guitar by Fernando Lopes-Graça, a
partita
which I had adapted for the twelve-string instrument. She’d heard a little music in church, and now I saw her face as she struggled to make sense of it. It did not happen right away, and I had worked my way through three other composers before I saw her eyes light up and a smile come to her lips. I thought I might have found a way to her soul, but I did not ask about such a thing. The damned do not have souls. I looked at the lesions on her face and body and was sure they had grown.

In the afternoon, I went to our offices in High Holborn. My father was busy when I arrived, but I was made welcome and taken to a small, elegantly furnished room and given a cup of green tea, something that must have become hard to get. There were
quejadinhas
from Évora too. Or perhaps someone had baked them from a recipe. They tasted good. I sat down to wait for my father when he was free. To my surprise, he arrived in my little room ten minutes later, bringing with him a man I had not seen before. I tried to stand, rather clumsily I must admit, but he insisted on my staying seated.

The stranger was introduced to me as Cecil Blanchard.

‘Cecil is something of an institution here, Dominic. I’m surprised you haven’t met him before. Cecil has a phenomenal memory, don’t you Cecil?’

‘I really can’t remember, sir,’ said Cecil in a quiet sort of voice.

‘Of course,’ my father said, ‘he is also something of a wit. His formal position in the company is that of archivist. He can pluck out a long-buried document from any point in the two hundred years we have been trading. He knows the names – the names of the people and the names of the ships, he knows the vintage years, two or three per decade, we are terribly fussy, as you know. Tell me, just what is it you’re after here? In the murky depths of our history, what do you seek? A
billet-doux
? The diaries of your grandfather’s mistress, or his father’s paramour or his father’s bit on the side? No? What can possibly interest you among all those dusty scrolls tied with pink ribbon? Surely you are not planning to become a historian?’

Sensing that I was about to turn on him, Father addressed himself to Mr Blanchard.

‘Cecil, will you please take my son down to the cellars where you keep our sad little collection of invoices and receipts, bills of lading and manifests?’

He turned back to me.

‘I’m afraid, Dominic, you’ll not find much down there. I should put a handkerchief across your mouth, for there is a lot of dust.’

I thanked him, and Blanchard and I shot off as fast as I could manage. He produced a large key from his pocket and took me to the ground floor, where he showed me a heavy door that sported long iron hinges.

‘It won’t be easy getting you down here,’ he said.

He opened the door, and I saw a narrow staircase that turned as it went down.

‘To tell you the truth, a basement is never the best place to keep an archive like this. We constantly have to protect it from damp. I learned a few tricks when I worked at the British
Museum library, but there was a time when none of those things were implemented. Some items have been lost irretrievably.’

‘Haven’t you tried to move the archive?’

He shook his head.

‘May I be completely honest?’

‘Of course. Nothing will reach my father.’

‘Well, sir, I’ve gone to your father several times over the years and told him the archive’s at risk. He just snaps at me and says I must do as I can. I think he would prefer to see the archive destroyed sooner than preserve it properly.’

I told him what I was looking for.

‘That shouldn’t be too hard, sir. When I started here, I saw that the oldest papers were most at risk, so I moved them to the safest part of the basement. You say you want documents about Hallinhag House?’

I nodded and he went inside and down. I left the door agape and went off to find a little office for myself on the ground floor. One of the secretaries, a middle-aged woman with spectacles and her hair tied up in a bun, and a pencil stuck inside it as if in a bird’s nest, saw me struggling past, guessed who I was, and turned a young woman out of her office to let me use her desk.

Blanchard took his time. I’d been told he was thorough, so I didn’t grow too impatient. A junior brought me another cup of tea and a second plate of
quesadinhas
.

‘Or perhaps you’d prefer a glass of port, sir. I can fetch you a single
quinta
vintage from 1931, our finest year in some time.’

‘Take the tea away,’ I said, ‘and let me have the port. I had a little of that vintage a few years ago, and it was scrumptious. You should pour a glass for yourself. Bring it here and we’ll share it together.’

I reckoned that, if I was to become a port baron, it was time I started to know some of our employees. We sat drinking our port – and
it was every bit as delicious as I remembered, even more so when drunk with the little cakes – while we chatted. He told me about his wife – they were newly married – and the little property they rented, and by the time he finished I thought I understood him, his problems and what he wanted to do in his life.

Over an hour had passed when Cecil Blanchard returned, carrying several boxes. My port-drinking companion made his excuses and left, taking the bottle with him. I told him to take it home to share with his wife, who is a stenographer at the War Ministry. Father will never miss it.

The next two hours passed surprisingly quickly. Blanchard had extracted all the early documents relating to Hallinhag, but had also brought along a box of papers that told the story of the founding of the firm, its first imports to London, and some bits and pieces about my family: letters, a wedding certificate, some burial notices, and even part of a diary, similar to the one I am keeping today.

I only left because of the curfew, and then most reluctantly. At first the papers were jumbled, and many were hard to read. Gradually, however, with Blanchard’s help, a pattern began to emerge. Port came from Oporto in small shipments to begin with, during the 1730s and 1740s. It was stored in a shed on the East London Docks. At that time, the family had other businesses, manufacturing ropes for naval ships and importing cotton, silk and tea from India as shareholders in the East India Company. They were also involved with the Company in the trade in opium from Bengal to China.

The head of my family at that time was Sir Henry Lancaster. At the age of thirty-five, he married the Honourable Lucy Craven, who bore four children for him and promptly died. Lucy came from a very respectable family that had a magnificent house in the Lake District, Marlowe Hall. There, the happy
couple – if they were indeed happy – had spent many weeks each year, but in 1731 a fire broke out that gutted the house far beyond repair. Blanchard showed me a full account of the event, what had become of the staff, and how the loss of the Hall had broken Lucy’s father’s heart. He had set great store by the building, which had been designed at the start of the century when Wren and Hawksmoor were still in partnership, and which had contained furniture and
objets d’art
of great cost and surprising beauty.

Sir Henry ordered the construction of Hallinhag House, a much smaller establishment, as a temporary dwelling for his parents-in-law, who were settling into their London house for the coming season. They never lived there, but when visiting during its construction Lord Craven went swimming in Ullswater one Sunday afternoon and never returned to shore. They found his shoes, his shirt and his breeches on the rock where he had left them. His body was never recovered. His widow decided to remain in London.

And so Hallinhag became the Lancaster family’s summer resort. At about that time, Sir Henry was looking for a business that could be run closer to home. The long distances to and from India, and the precarious nature of the opium trade, which was illegal in China, led him to think of Portugal, with its long history in trade and exploration in the East, and this led him to port and the development of the vineyards in the upper Douro region. Thus Lancaster ports were born.