by Diane Janes
‘Well, I think you need to be more careful. Katie’s oversensitive.’
‘Overindulged, more like,’ Wendy muttered as she dragged the duvet back into place, but either Bruce did not hear her or he chose not to reply.
As she settled back into bed, she considered asking Bruce if he did not feel that Katie’s latest little exhibition might have been fortuitously timed for their own bedtime, but she decided that suggesting Katie had been faking would only inflame the situation. And what had Katie been up to, pretending that she’d been locked inside her bedroom? It would be difficult to manage the children if Bruce was about to start undermining her. First the business with Tara, and now Katie … She comforted herself with the thought that if Katie continued with such blatant fictions as suggesting that it was possible to confine her in a room without a working lock, Bruce would soon see through her games.
The sound above the ceiling was so faint that at first she wasn’t sure whether she had heard anything at all. She lifted her head clear of the pillow and concentrated. She was aware of Bruce’s breathing and the muted passage of a distant car. Nothing else. She was just deciding that she had been mistaken when it came again. A faint series of creaks, commensurate with footsteps crossing the attic floor.
‘Bruce?’ she whispered. She didn’t want to wake him over nothing, but if he was awake already …
No reply.
‘Bruce …’ She tried a little louder.
Still no reply.
Was there someone up there? Impossible, surely? If Tara had come up the stairs from her wing, she would have had to pass their bedroom door and they would surely have heard her. Katie was hardly likely to venture up there when she’d just had a bad dream. Bruce was sleeping beside her. Jamie then? She remembered Jamie and the wretched secret den in the cellar. Perhaps he had made some similar arrangements in the attic. He’d once drawn attention to hearing some footsteps in the attic himself. Could that have been some kind of elaborate ruse to cover his own after-bedtime activities up there? Surely not! He was barely out of infant school.
She ought to go and check. If it was Jamie, then he ought to be sent back to bed.
Trying not to wake Bruce, she slid out of bed into the velvety darkness without recourse to the bedside light. It was easy to navigate her way out of the bedroom, because the night light which was always left burning on the landing glowed under the door. The landing was deserted. The silence within the house had begun to feel oppressive. She put an exploratory hand on the handle of the attic door, as cautiously as if she expected it to burn her, turned it slowly and allowed the door to swing open. The night light only reached as far as the first two treads leading upwards; the rest of the staircase was in darkness. She felt around on the wall until her fingers encountered the switch. She flicked it on, but no sound came from above.
‘Jamie,’ she called softly. He might be playing a game of some kind, pretending not to be up there, just as he had done in the cellar. He would know perfectly well that he was not supposed to be up there at this time of night, so he probably wouldn’t answer. The only way to check would be to ascend the stairs and see for herself, but even with the benefit of the electric light, she baulked at the thought of going up to the attic at this hour.
‘Jamie …’ It occurred to her that from where she was standing, if he was awake, he could just as easily hear her from his bedroom as he could from the attic. Then she remembered that she could check on his whereabouts by simply looking into his bedroom. Feeling rather stupid at the way this obvious solution had escaped her, she crept across the landing and pushed Jamie’s door until his pillow, complete with tousled, fair head, came into view.
As she turned away from his room, it was all she could do to stifle a scream. Bruce had appeared silently outside their bedroom door.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, fine. You startled me. I was just checking on Jamie.’
‘Why are you creeping about at this time of night? What were you doing in the attic?’
‘Nothing. I haven’t been in the attic.’
‘Then why is the door open and the light on?’ He reached in and snapped the switch off, turning to close the door.
‘I thought I heard someone up there. I thought it might have been Jamie.’
‘Jamie? At this time of night?’
‘Well … there were footsteps …’
‘Footsteps my eye. It’s these boards creaking. I often hear it. For goodness’ sake, come back to bed. Some of us have to be up for work in the morning.’
He was right, of course, Wendy thought. Old houses were full of funny noises. The wood expanding and contracting as the temperature changed, as if the house yawned and stretched at night, like a living thing, settling to sleep. It was a comforting thought.
The tree has haunted my dreams. One recurring sequence finds me approaching the tree in winter. The leaves are gone, but the branches are not empty. The finger bone twigs are painted gaudy colours and a strange assortment of small articles hang from them, like decorations placed among the branches in readiness for Christmas. I recognize some of the items. The belongings of the dead mock me.
EIGHT
November 1980
When Wendy arrived outside Joan’s bungalow to collect her for their trip to the county record office, she experienced an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. She had spoken to Joan several times on the telephone but had not mentioned the outcome of the last occasion on which she had given Joan a lift. She was still waiting to receive a date for the case to be heard, but Bruce seemed to think it certain that she would receive a ban, at which point she knew that people would become aware of the episode, because she would have to explain why she wasn’t driving. Embarrassment flooded through her every time she thought of it.
Joan had evidently been looking out for her, because she emerged from the front door without Wendy needing to get out of the car.
‘Well, this is nice,’ Joan said, settling herself into the passenger seat and arranging her large handbag between her feet before clipping her seat belt in place. ‘It’s jolly good of you to give me a lift.’
‘It makes sense not to take two cars. It wasn’t a problem – I dropped Bruce at the office and I’ll pick him up again tonight. That way I get to use the car all day.’ (Actually, Bruce had tried to turn it into a problem, grumbling even though the arrangement made no real difference to him at all.)
‘I’ve been looking forward to this,’ Joan said. ‘It’s very intriguing, isn’t it, all this delving into the past? You know, I think after I’ve cut my teeth on this little project, learned the ropes as it were, I might have a go at my family history. There’s always been a rumour that we’re related to the Howards – the Norfolk Howards, that is – way back on my grandmother’s side.’
Wendy, who had no idea who the Norfolk Howards were, decided to gloss over the point. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get this trip organized,’ she said. ‘It’s just been one thing after another at home. Of course, Tara’s eighteenth took up a lot of time.’
‘Your daughter’s party – of course. How did that go?’
‘It was super. The food was a big success and everyone danced.’ Wendy smiled at the recollection of herself and Bruce joining the youngsters on the floor for ‘Oops Upside Your Head’, and later dancing close together when the DJ played Streisand’s ‘Woman in Love’. It had been such a happy evening, to which thankfully it did not seem to have occurred to Tara to invite either her newly discovered father and stepfamily, or the wretched John, about whom nothing further had been said since the apparently coincidental meeting at Darlington station. It only served to show that they were a happy, united family, Wendy decided. Everyone went through tricky patches, but underneath they were rock solid.
Like Joan, she had been looking forward to seeing the county archives, but on arrival her initial emotion was disappointment. She had anticipated the faded elegance of the central library in Middlesbrough, with its a
ntique radiators, glass-fronted cabinets and inviting alcoves, but Durham’s archives were housed in the modern basement of County Hall, and instead of paper documents, she and Joan were faced with microfilm machines, which were fiddly to work and lacked the romance of the anticipated ancient volumes.
They shuffled two chairs in front of a single machine and, after several false starts, managed to load the film containing the 1851 census for Bishop Barnard. This revealed that The Ashes had been occupied by James Coates, aged thirty-two years, who described himself as being of independent means. He lived with his wife, Maria, and they had one daughter, Elizabeth, who was just a year old. The Coates family were outnumbered by their resident servants: a cook, a manservant and various maids, the youngest of whom, Mary Mason, was just thirteen years old.
‘Where the slaveys slept’ – the words returned to Wendy’s head unbidden. ‘Poor Mary Mason,’ she said aloud. ‘I hope they didn’t work her too hard.’
By the 1861 census, the Coates family had increased considerably. James, Maria and Elizabeth had been joined by young Ann Maria, George Frederick and six-year-old Matilda, and all the domestic personnel had been replaced by newcomers.
‘We could probably find baptisms for these Coates children in the parish registers,’ said Joan. ‘They have them here.’
‘Let’s finish the census first. We’ve only got 1871 left,’ Wendy said.
‘I suppose 1881 will be available in a couple of years,’ Joan said. ‘What a nuisance this hundred years’ business is.’
By 1871 James and Maria’s family had increased still further. Elizabeth – a young woman of twenty-one – was still at home and now had another four siblings, Eleanor and Joanna, who were ‘scholars’, Madeline Victoria, who was three, and baby Francis Michael, who was just two months old. In contrast, the number of servants living in the house had reduced to just three: Hannah Colbeck, aged twenty-five, Alice Croft, aged eighteen, and Edward Graves, aged twenty-nine, none of whom had been at The Ashes ten years earlier.
The searchers turned their attention to the parish registers next. These were also on microfilm and the two women were soon cursing the Victorian incumbent of Bishop Barnard, whose handwriting was extremely difficult to decipher. In spite of this, they quickly realized that the census had under-represented James and Maria’s progeny. It was a rare year in which the couple had not presented an infant for baptism, but the burial register provided an answer for the absence of Charlotte, Amy, James Henry, Philippa, Catherine, Sophia, and even poor little Francis Michael had not survived many weeks beyond his 1871 census appearance. In 1873 Maria Coates herself was laid to rest in the churchyard.
‘What an existence,’ said Joan. ‘Married at twenty, pregnant for the next twenty-three years, dead at forty-five. Thank heavens for birth control! Let’s go and find some lunch.’
In the afternoon they followed up the various Coates children in the parish registers. All the daughters had been married in Bishop Barnard. George, heir to the house, had married elsewhere, but his four children had been baptised in the parish church. Three had pre-deceased him, and the only surviving son, Albert George, was identifiable from the name they had seen on the war memorial. With George Coates’s burial in 1919, entries in the name of Coates ceased to appear in the parish registers.
‘It’s quite sad, really,’ Wendy mused. ‘I imagine when James Coates built his house he thought his family would be there for generation after generation, but in spite of having all those children, the family barely lasted seventy years.’
‘We’ve still got well over an hour before they close,’ Joan said. ‘What do you say we have a look at the local newspapers for the time when Dora disappeared?’
Wendy had been privately hankering after exactly the same thing but had hesitated to say so for fear of upsetting Joan.
‘The North Eastern Gazette was worth three halfpence of anybody’s money,’ Wendy said a few minutes later, when they had fetched the relevant film and fitted it on their reader. ‘Look at this “Join the Silent Column”. And the cinema listings! You could have gone and seen a different film every night of the week. I love these advertisements too. “Ladies lock-knit directoire knickers, exceptionally well cut, all colours two shillings, usual price two shillings and eleven pence.’
‘Sounds like a bargain.’
Wendy wound the reel on again.
‘Look.’ Joan’s voice rose slightly above the archive-appropriate whisper. ‘Here’s the first mention of it. “Dora Duncan, aged fifteen, the daughter of Mr and Mrs Herbert Duncan of The Ashes, Bishop Barnard, failed to return home yesterday evening after going for a cycle ride. Local police are appealing for anyone who may have seen Dora to come forward. She has blonde hair, blue eyes and was wearing a blue cotton dress. She was last seen riding a black bicycle”.’
The following day, the paper carried a much bigger piece explaining that Dora had left home alone in the afternoon and was believed to have been cycling along the track leading to Holm Farm at around three p.m. Concern was mounting, the report added, since there was no known reason why Dora would have absented herself from home. Police and volunteers were searching fields and woodland nearby. The photograph of Dora which accompanied the article had not reproduced well, and it was impossible for them to be sure from the grainy microfilm whether Dora had even been smiling for the camera. Only the shape of her hair and the white semi-circles of her collar stood out with any clarity.
Concern was mounting! Wendy could only imagine the state she would have been in if it had been Tara or Katie who was missing.
Though the paper continued to devote some space to Dora each day, with subsequent editions naming Dora’s siblings and explaining that she had been doing well at school and had numerous friends, there were no fresh developments until a full week had gone by.
‘Fresh lead in schoolgirl’s disappearance,’ Joan read. ‘Child witness, nine-year-old Peggy Disberry, has told police that she believes she saw Dora Duncan on the afternoon she went missing. Peggy Disberry was unavailable for comment yesterday, blah, blah … police are pursuing this new lead … blah blah … But what is the new lead? What did this Peggy Disberry see?’
‘Wind the film on to the next day,’ Wendy said. ‘There might be something there.’
They combed the following day’s edition, and the next day and the day after that, but the coverage of Dora’s disappearance had faltered to a halt due to lack of new information.
‘I wonder what the child saw?’
‘It may have been nothing. Particularly as it took her a whole week to come forward.’
‘She may have been attention-seeking.’
‘Well, we’ve found out an awful lot about the Coates family,’ said Joan, as they walked towards the car park.
‘But nothing new about Dora. I was just thinking what a lot of babies have been born at The Ashes. Did your aunt Elaine have her children there too?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Women mostly did have their children at home in those days, though I suppose she could have afforded a nursing home if she’d wanted one. I’m still thinking about that Peggy girl in the newspaper. What was her name again?’
‘Disley?’ Wendy flipped open the shorthand notepad she was carrying and thumbed through a couple of pages. ‘No, sorry, Disberry. Unusual name.’
‘That’s what I was thinking. We might be able to find her, if she still lives around here. She was nine in 1943, so she’d only be forty-six now.’
‘She’s probably got married. Her name will be different.’
‘Even so, we might be able to track her down with an unusual name like that. Of course, you’re quite right, some children are terrible fibbers.’
It was only after she had dropped Joan off that Wendy remembered the photograph Peter had discovered in the cellar. She’d intended to mention it on both occasions she had seen Joan following her initial visit. Not that she could remember much about it, or even whether the young man in it could be said to r
esemble any of the family members in Joan’s album. It was just that she thought Joan might have had some suggestion as to what it had been doing, hidden under the attic floorboards – perhaps it was connected with some sort of game the children had all played together? The trouble was that she and Joan always got talking and the mystery photo slipped her mind.
Wendy was eager to share her discoveries over dinner, but the rest of the family were no more than politely interested. Katie wanted to talk about her forthcoming school play, in which she had been cast as a fox. It wasn’t a speaking part, which was fortunate as she would need to wear a mask. Tara was in a hurry to get away from the table and phone a friend – allegedly about a shared college project. Bruce merely said, ‘It was very clever of you to find out so much. It’s great that you’ve satisfied your curiosity, because now you’ll be able to get the whole thing out of your system.’
Wendy had stuck to the information regarding the Coates family, deciding that it was better not to mention anything about Dora (since this was a chapter of the house’s history that Bruce considered an inappropriate topic for the ears of the younger children). She said nothing at all about the fact that she and Joan had spent part of the journey home speculating about the possibility of tracking down Peggy Disberry.
I find it better not to dwell on anniversaries. Christmases and birthdays, special occasions which some people will never again be able to share with the lost ones. But there are some anniversaries that you aren’t allowed to forget. The blood, the dirt, the digging – the desperate, desperate digging.
NINE
December 1980–January 1981
