by Jane Adams
The children, Gareth and Beth, raced ahead. So far Ray had only heard them giggle and he wondered if they were actually capable of speech. He wasn’t used to children. Wasn’t even certain that he liked them, though he had long ago learned better than to say so.
The two women were already chatting, walking side by side and Ray fell into step with John.
‘We’re really glad you could come,’ John told him. ‘And that you could bring Sarah. It’s great for Maggie having another woman to talk to. I mean one that isn’t on a parish committee.’
‘Has to be on her best behaviour then, I suppose. She’s not what I would think of as a vicar’s wife.’
John laughed. ‘Well, thank the Lord for that! Actually, it’s been tough on her. I grew up with the job. It’s what my father did, but Maggie, well, I’m not sure she was even a believer until we met.’
‘And now?’
John just smiled. ‘I don’t have theological discussions with my wife,’ he said. ‘She supports me in all I do. She’s my best friend and my sharpest critic and, at the risk of sounding trite, I really do believe that God knows what goes on in our hearts and that he wouldn’t object to anything that goes on in Maggie’s.’
The two women had waited for them by the gate and Ray was glad not to have the opportunity to reply. He was rather touched by John’s words, but hadn’t a clue what to follow them with.
‘I’ve cooked lamb,’ Maggie said. ‘I hope that’s OK with everyone.’
‘Anything I don’t have to cook is great with me,’ Sarah told her. ‘I’m a disaster in the kitchen, but if you’re prepared to take the risk I’ll give you a hand.’
‘If you could make tea or coffee, that would be great. It’ll be about another fifteen minutes.’
The house was Victorian — dark, carved wood on the curving banisters and polished block floors scuffed and scratched by years of feet. Lunch was served in the dining room at the back of the house. French doors led from there out into a long garden.
‘We tell everyone that we’re encouraging wildlife,’ John said when he saw Ray looking out. ‘But the truth is we don’t have time to do it properly. I manage to cut the grass and Maggie’s doing a good job of putting new plants in so I suppose we’ll get it straight some time.’
The dining table must have come with the house, Ray thought. It looked too large and heavy to fit through any of the doors and the chairs were an assortment of Victorian, 1950s and modern pine. He had glimpsed a round pine table as they had passed the kitchen and guessed that they had come from there. Hastily packed-away toys stacked in the corner of the room and traces of crayon on the polished surface suggested that the dining room was more often used for the children’s games than it was a place to eat.
He made himself useful, dressing the table with a cloth and laying cutlery while John chased the children around the garden and the dog, a lop-eared thing with a rough brown coat, chased him. The children, he noted, were still giggling but he had heard them shout a few words to their father so presumably they could talk. He took his time with the table, glad of an excuse not to join the game. He was relieved when the meal was served and everything called to order.
‘You’re a good cook, Maggie.’
‘Thank you, Ray. I enjoy it. Beth, if you don’t want that just leave it. It doesn’t need spreading around your plate.’
‘Ray tells me you met at the records office.’
Sarah nodded. ‘I work there.’
‘She’s the boss lady.’
‘Try and tell my staff that. No, but it’s a nice job. I’m lucky, doing something I like.’
‘And the research,’ John asked, ‘how is it going?’
‘Pretty well,’ Ray told him. He watched in fascination as Beth dissected a piece of cauliflower with the tip of her knife. ‘She should become a surgeon.’
‘Beth, I told you just leave it. She doesn’t like vegetables.’
‘Neither did I at that age,’ Ray sympathized.
‘She doesn’t like meat either,’ Maggie added. ‘Sometimes I don’t know what the child lives on.’
The dog, Ray decided, lived on table scraps. It had decided he might be a soft touch and sat at his feet begging. Ray resisted mostly, not certain what the house policy was on feeding dogs at the dining table. The children finished their meal first and were told that they could get ice cream and take it out into the garden. Seeing the size of Beth’s portion as she dived past the French doors a few minutes later Ray thought he could guess what it was she lived on. Children out of the way and a more grown-up Dutch apple pie served to the adults, the talk moved back to the matter that had first brought them all together.
John had filled Maggie in on the background.
‘Do you feel anything in the house?’ she wanted to know.
‘No. If I feel anything it’s Mathilda’s influence. She lived there for years and loved the place. I don’t think I have what it takes to see ghosts.’
‘I wish I did,’ Maggie said wistfully. ‘I’d love to see a ghost.’
‘You’re not supposed to say that, darling. You’re supposed to talk pityingly about poor lost souls.’
Maggie laughed. ‘Come off it, John. I spend enough time with poor lost living ones. A ghost would make a refreshing change.’ She turned back to Ray. ‘John says your aunt was very aware of Kitty but he didn’t feel anything strange in the house either.’
‘Maybe she’s choosy, I don’t know. Mathilda was an unusual woman.’
‘You didn’t move to the area at the same time as John?’ Sarah asked Maggie.
‘No, I was finishing my degree course. I’d gone back as a so-called mature student and I was in my final year when John got drafted. His predecessors hadn’t got their new place sorted out at first so John found accommodation with Ray’s aunt. The kids and I moved in with my parents until the summer.’
‘What were you studying?’
‘French and German combined honours. I want to do an MA on medieval French literature when time allows, but that’s got to be put on hold until at least next year.’
‘How did you meet Mathilda?’ Ray asked John.
‘I put a card in the local shop, Mathilda phoned me and offered me a room. Things worked out well and I really liked her. I stayed for something like eight months and moved in here just after she died, then I rattled around this place on my own for a couple of months until Maggie and the kids arrived.’
‘I wish I’d kept in better touch,’ Ray said.
John nodded sympathetically. ‘Have you got any further with Kitty’s story?’
‘A little. I know that she was taken to Leicester after her arrest and that she was tried at the assizes there but I’m going to have to go to that records office to get any further. Sarah’s faxed them and they’re seeing what they have but apparently records for the period I’m looking at haven’t survived too well.’
‘What sparked the trouble?’ Maggie asked.
‘Well, it seemed to have begun in the August after the Reverend Randall arrived. Some quarrel about a Lammas doll that got the new vicar riled.’
‘Lammas was like an early harvest festival,’ Sarah told him.
‘And the doll would be something like a corn dolly, I imagine.’
Ray nodded. ‘I figured it must be something of the sort. The locals made a new one every year and kept it in the church. The old one was burned.’
‘Very pagan,’ Maggie commented. ‘Nice, though. We always have a sheaf of wheat brought into the church.’
‘Well, the Reverend Randall wasn’t that open-minded. It caused a big argument and Kitty took the villagers’ side.’
‘She wasn’t arrested then, though?’
‘No, that was just the start of things. It was June the following year when things got really out of hand and I haven’t read that far yet, so I can’t tell you exactly what went wrong. But she was brought to trial at the autumn assizes and sentenced to death by hanging.’
‘Poor woma
n,’ Maggie said softly. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be alive then.’
She got up, poured more wine for everyone and then went through to the kitchen to make the coffee while the others gathered pots and cutlery and cleared the table. Sarah was thoughtful when they sat back down.
‘When I was at school,’ she said, ‘we did something rather silly.’
‘Didn’t we all?’
She smiled. ‘There was this rumour that one of the classrooms was haunted. That someone had died there. I mean, this was a 1960s concrete monstrosity so I think it was a bit unlikely, but we believed it. Or at least we said we did.’
‘You held a seance,’ Ray guessed.
‘One lunch break. We were supposed to go outside at lunchtimes, but on rainy days we were allowed to stay in and two members of staff patrolled the corridors to make sure we weren’t getting up to anything. Anyway, we’d worked out we had a fifteen-minute window and we’d got someone sitting by the door watching the corridor.’
‘Did you have a Ouija board?’ Ray asked.
‘Oh no, nothing so sophisticated. Marjie Amos had pinched a glass from the dining hall and we’d spent break tearing up bits of paper and writing out the alphabet. And, if I remember right, we had scraps of paper with yes and no written on them as well. So we set this thing up on the teacher’s table, there were six of us all crowded round with our little fingers resting on the glass and twelve minutes left on the clock, trying not to giggle.
‘I remember The Exorcist had just come out at the cinema and we were all too young to get in, though one girl, Julie something, she tried and managed it. She had big tits and make-up put on with a trowel so I suppose that helped.’
John laughed. ‘Some of the fourteen-year-olds at my youth club can get into the over-twenty-ones’ nights at the local club.’
‘I always looked about twelve,’ Maggie complained. ‘No curves. Nothing till I turned eighteen.’
‘So what happened with this spirit stuff?’ Ray questioned.
‘Well, we scared ourselves senseless in the end. Talk about hysterical teenagers, we were the archetypes. This Julie, she’d got a copy of the book The Exorcist and we all read it. I remember she’d marked the pages with all the best bits on, and we took it in turns to read them out. It was like a dare. You’ve got to remember, this was an all-girls grammar school, and we were all sex-obsessed fifteen-year-olds. Anyway, after a while, we moved everything into the big stationery cupboard at the back of the class, we had to leave the door open a crack to let some light in at first, then someone got more organized and borrowed a torch. Boy, it was scary and it was obsessive too. For weeks we couldn’t think of anything else. My grades went down, I had nightmares, the works.’
‘Did you get any messages?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Sarah told them. ‘One from somebody’s gran and a lot of fragmentary stuff from people claiming to be Napoleon or whatever we were doing in history at the time.’
‘Speak perfect English, did he?’
‘Immaculate. Not a trace of accent. But there was one thing that really upset us all. A whole series of messages from a little boy. His name was Tom and he was utterly miserable because he missed his mum and couldn’t understand why he’d been taken away from her. He kept begging for her to come and fetch him and saying that he promised not to be naughty anymore. It was pathetic really, but it got to us in a big way.’
‘Did you try to find out about him?’ Maggie asked.
‘We tried. He gave an address that was fairly local and a couple of the girls actually went there, but the street was being demolished. It was one of these old rows of terraced houses they were so fond of knocking down in the 70s and that was that.’
‘And what made you stop?’ John asked.
Sarah frowned. ‘It had started off as a bit of a laugh,’ she said. ‘Then it became something more. It was distressing, if you want to know the truth. We all of us began to take it seriously, to feel sorry for this child crying for his mother and we knew that there was no way we could help.’
‘You felt that he was real,’ John pressed.
‘Are you about to condemn me for conjuring devils?’ Then she nodded. ‘Yes, he was real. He was in pain and he was lost and it gave us all bad dreams. Eventually one of the girls said that she’d been pushing the glass and made the whole thing up. We refused to believe her at first, then made out we were all furious to be taken for such a ride, but really, I think we were all relieved to have an excuse to stop. So, we didn’t talk to her for a couple of days and we threw our bits of paper away, took the glass back and closed the book on that particular fad.’
She sipped her wine and there was silence for a moment until Ray asked, ‘Did you try it again?’
Sarah nodded slowly. ‘I did,’ she said. ‘Oh, not with scraps of paper and a wine glass. It was about five years ago. A close friend had just lost her mother and was very cut up about it. She felt that she hadn’t had the opportunity to say goodbye. Anyway, she got it into her head to go to this spiritualist meeting and I went along with her as moral support. I’d expected some grey-haired, blue-rinsed Doris Stokes type but the medium was a young woman with a really kind and down-to-earth approach to it all. It surprised me.’
‘And did your friend get her message?’ John asked.
‘Well, yes, she did I suppose. I mean I’ve no idea whether or not it was from her mother but this medium seemed to recognize what she needed. She said that my friend had someone who had passed on recently and that she felt she hadn’t been as close to this person as she should have been.’
‘Fair guess,’ Ray commented, ‘given the circumstances.’
‘Oh, I agree. But she told my friend that the soul who had passed on understood. And loved her and that there was nothing to forgive. It was what she wanted, needed to hear, and I thought it showed great compassion.’
‘I agree,’ John said, accepting that her words were something of a challenge. ‘But what else happened, Sarah?’
She laughed. ‘You’re as bad as Ray. But you’re right. It was late in the meeting and this medium suddenly looked across at me. She said she had a message for me from someone who had been just a child when he had passed over. That his name was Tom and it was all right now, because his mother had come for him.’
‘Oh my God,’ Maggie said. ‘That must have been weird.’
‘It shook me badly,’ Sarah admitted. ‘I’d never forgotten about Tom. I still had dreams about him years later, but to have someone confront me with the memory, that really was too much.’
Ray looked across and met her eyes. Five years ago, he thought. That would be the same time Sarah had been battling with the cancer. To have such a shock added to an already stressed mind must have been devastating.
‘And you never tried anything again?’ John asked.
‘No. I never did. Do you believe we can contact the dead?’
‘I don’t know, Sarah. I think maybe that the dead have better things to do with their time. But there are so many anecdotal stories that it would be foolish to discount the possibility of spirit contact and, of course, the Church never has. It just warns against tampering in realms that you cannot understand.’
‘And what Mathilda was doing with Kitty,’ Ray asked, ‘you don’t see that as tampering?’
‘It’s a difficult one,’ John said as he got up. ‘Would everyone like more coffee? I don’t really think Mathilda had a choice — Kitty rather imposed herself. If Mathilda had felt threatened by her then I would have tried to do something or at least got some advice for her, but your aunt felt that Kitty belonged in the house and had as much right to be there as she had. And, well, you know already how sorry for her she felt.’
‘And yet it was only when you came along that she actively did anything about it?’ Maggie questioned.
‘So far as I’m aware, but you have to bear in mind that Mathilda was a busy woman even after she’d retired. She was on parish committees and charity boards and she did voluntary
work. It was only the last eighteen months or so, when her health began to decline, that she stayed at home all day or that she would really have had the time.’
John had returned with the coffee and talk became more general as the children came charging back in, begging their father to come and play, then camping by the French door to wait when he told them five minutes while he finished his coffee. Ray listened as the women switched their conversation back to Maggie’s prospective MA course, his mind drifting from the problem of Kitty and Mathilda and nagging instead at the news clipping he had received.
‘Will you go back to your job?’ John was asking him. Ray brought his mind back to attention.
‘I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. I still have a lot of pain in my hands and I’m having physio to improve the mobility. A friend’s offered me a partnership in a security firm he wants to set up. We’re still thrashing out the details, but I think that’s what I’ll do.’
‘Security?’ John asked him. ‘You mean like night watchmen or bouncers?’
Ray laughed. ‘No, nothing like that. George is thinking in terms of corporate stuff. Surveillance equipment and alarms, that sort of thing, and he’s been very involved in computer fraud this last year or so.’
‘Preventing it, presumably.’
‘You can never tell with George, but yes. It’s big business these days and I figure it’s time for a change after twenty-odd years. I’ve never really done anything else.’
The children were getting impatient and John went out to play. Maggie and Sarah, chatting like old friends, began to clear the table of the last few things and disappeared into the kitchen once again. Ray thought about following them, but the kitchen with its circular table was cramped and he wasn’t that interested in the academic discussion the two women seemed to be enjoying. Courtly poetry just wasn’t on his list. So he sat, sipping the last of his coffee and staring out into the garden, wondering if he should call home and see if there were any messages and knowing that would be a bad idea. If George had left him something then he’d want to get onto it straightaway and he didn’t think Sarah would be appreciative of that.
