Samain

by Meg Elizabeth Atkins

  Samain

  Meg Elizabeth Atkins

  © Meg Elizabeth Atkins 1976

  Meg Elizabeth Atkins has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1976 by Cassell & Company Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  1

  2

  *

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  For my Husband

  The point is that our time does not exist to the sixth sense. Forward or backward make no difference.

  In the sixth sense’s world there is only the eternal ‘now’.

  T.C. LETHBRIDGE

  Preface

  InThe British Film as Entertainment, Max Holme — after giving an account of the career of the director Augustus Wynter — continues:

  His place as one of the immortals (whether divine or demonic depends on the viewpoint) is assured. From the earliest silent films to the present day his work can be seen as an organic whole, displaying consistency of quality and theme; for although he has experimented and extended, his theme has remained constant. On a straight reading of the screenplays of The Druids and Elphame there may seem little to link the religious savagery of the former with the obliquely ghost-like beauty of the latter; but in these, as in all others, he is concerned with those far-off echoes of magic that still sound upon man’s inner ear and find expression in myth and superstition.

  When his latest film was abandoned in an atmosphere of tragedy the rumours that arose proved how closely, in the mind of the public, the man had become identified with the phantasmagoria of his screen images. The death of his brilliant star, Jessica Rayle, the complete disappearance of his ten-year-old niece, led people to believe that in approaching too closely the mysteries that preoccupied him he had passed into that dangerous territory beyond reality and there become the victim of the phantoms he had once manipulated ...

  TheBritish Film as Entertainment was published posthumously; immediately he had finished the first draft, Max Holme was killed in a car crash. The manuscript was edited, and where necessary completed, by his friend, scriptwriter Alfred Allen.

  1

  In the early sun the morning hung densely green, clear as dew. Great chestnut trees, burdened with candles of blossom, bordered the common, and beyond them stood the houses.

  A tall, narrow terrace of houses, faded and unfashionable, ornamented only by a wrought iron arcaded verandah that ran the length of the row over the first-storey windows and was supported at either end and at intervals by iron columns; the tracery of the spandrels, where one column arched to another, was decorated by scrolls and volutes as delicate and intricate as lace.

  Henry Beaumont, standing beneath the trees, had a slantwise view of the houses across the narrow, unmade road. Aloud, but very softly, he counted the doors beneath the glass verandah, ‘... three, four, five ...’ The fifth, the one farthest away from him, the end house — that was his. His inheritance.

  He had left his car and walked deliberately through the unawakened village, looking at everything, not lingering, pulled always on the thread of expectation to the moment when he would set eyes on his house for the first time. His pleasure opened him to the excited vulnerability of a child; perhaps that was why he looked back the way he had come, an overwhelmed, triumphant glance that stated clearly — I’m here ...

  A woman was crossing the common.

  In his solitary happiness, in the silence and feeling of the emptiness of the world, his surprise at seeing her was disproportionate. And because he knew he was hidden from her view, and it was one of those private moments when he was unguarded, he saw her with exaggerated clarity.

  She was some distance away, level with him but taking a diagonal course across the common, away from where he was standing. She was tall and walked with an air of serene but absorbed purpose. She wore a long skirt of dark printed cotton that swept the grass and a variety of upper garments, a messy assemblage of cardigan and blouse and jersey and shawl. Her beautiful tawny hair, glinting in the sunlight, fell to her shoulders; she wore round owllike spectacles on a round-cheeked face that had the solemnity of an owl.

  She looked out of place. More than that, she looked out of time — put down on the deserted common by some kind of cosmic mismanagement, knowing well enough where she was and yet faintly perplexed by the suddenness of her arrival. Henry had an impulse to call out to her; but the impulse died in acceptance of the dream-like state that possessed him, the state where movement or speech — if they are possible — serve only the destructive means of shattering the dream. For a moment, as she walked away, her head turned. Following the direction of her gaze, he saw that she was looking at the end house. His house.

  He saw her face clearly then, and the eerie notion entered his mind that although she was looking at his house she was — from whatever dimension contained her — looking directly into his eyes. He received the impression there was something utterly disorganised about her, that behind the serene exterior and earnest expression something had invisibly and irretrievably gone to pieces.

  *

  He let himself into the house, moving through the enclosed air with careful pleasure, an apology for trespass; his tall, taut figure appearing in dusty mirrors, his shadow falling across the sunlight that flooded in through the windows.

  The furnishings and ornaments had mellowed through the years to an out-of-fashion simplicity, faded and cared-for and now forlorn, waiting his judgement. The unhappiness he had known in his life he guarded with a composure that expressed itself in physical tension, even a general hardness of manner; but in the empty, undefended house his own defences were weakened and he moved about freely, looking, touching, with a respectful yet unabashed curiosity. In the main bedroom he grinned to find a high, stately brass bedstead, a feather mattress — and a real patchwork quill, painstakingly hand-stitched of a thousand hexagons of patterned cloth.

  Then he grew thoughtful again and turned away, climbing the narrow stair to the attic, wondering about the woman who had lived and died her spinster life, held to him by ties of kinship so faint they were scarcely traceable and yet, unknown by him, unseen by him, had left him this, all she possessed.

  The attic was one enormous sunlit room, hung as if suspended in space, in the dust-mote silence of neglect. From its front window he could see over the tops of the chestnut trees clear across the common and its fringe of houses, to the hill. The hill, a long, slow undulation, curved tapering down at either end: two green arms holding the village.

  The back window gave a distant view of an encircling river sparkling here and there between tree-fringed banks and, rising more starkly to its crowning earthwork, another hill. There, scattered in petrified irregularity — as if time and the elements had worked together to obliterate what coherence they once expressed — were the remnants of huge stones: some standing, some recumbent, some broken and half buried. Almost destroyed as they were, these relics of an age lost before recorded time retained an awesome majesty, their purpose surviving in the name of the village itself: Marchstearn. The mark stones, Henry thought. Or, time and idiom bringing about a shift in meaning: the marching stones.

  The faintest shiver touched the nape of his neck ... There could be no reason for it, unless it was being alone in the strange house, vulnerable to impressions ...

  And memories?

  Or perhaps it had begun before that when
he, Henry Beaumont, practical and unimaginative and solitary, walked through the empty village with the sense that he was the only real person there, living and breathing as he moved across a painted landscape. And it was merely an aberration induced by this sense that caused him to invest with a mysterious significance the woman he had seen on the common.

  He shrugged and turned from the window. He had explored the house with a curiosity so private, so intense, only the faintest perplexity had at times touched the edge of his awareness. But now, focusing his attention, he understood that whatever it was it had filtered through to the level where his professional instincts operated. Prompted by these he examined the attic and then with detached watchfulness retraced his steps, going from room to room until he was on the ground floor again.

  The kitchen window overlooked the back garden; it was the large, old-fashioned type of sash window. Round the catch the paintwork was scarred, tiny splinters of wood stood roughened, as if gouged by something sharp; and the catch was in the open position.

  He went down the steps and into the garden. In the border immediately beneath the window clumps of aubrietia had been flattened, the once brilliant flowers crushed and faded.

  The click of the gate in the garden wall made him look up.

  A woman entered, carrying a tray, holding it with exaggerated steadiness to counter-balance the odd gait of her small, distorted body. Even her face was awry, the mouth almost formless, one eye slightly higher than the other; but the eyes were bright, the skin clear and tanned, hazed by the finest lines.

  She approached, and spoke with a diffidence so extreme it might almost have been timidity. ‘Good morning. I’m your neighbour, Lydia Marshall. I thought you might like some coffee.’

  ‘Thank you, I would. I’m Henry Beaumont.’

  He took the tray and held it easily in his left hand, offering his right hand to her; she took it firmly. Everything about her was neat, from her short grey hair to her white sandals: a ladylike neatness deliberately imposed upon her deformed frame.

  Henry said, ‘This is very kind of you. Shall we go inside? I’ve brought all sorts of practical provisions but they’re in my car. I left it over the other side of the village and walked ...’ Going ahead as if by accidental lack of manners, he made conversation over his shoulder, hearing her lop-sided gait as she negotiated the steep steps to the kitchen.

  When they were in the sitting room and she was pouring the coffee, she answered with a composure in which there was almost a hint of mischief, ‘I know. I saw you. I’m an early riser, the pottering type ... I was in the attic, pottering. From there one can see across the common. Here —’ a small, suntanned hand gestured to the window — ‘the trees, the bushes tend to obstruct the view.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry agreed, going to the window.

  In front of the houses a lawn inclined from the base of the graceful verandah to the shrubs overhanging the wall; it was this long sweep of green, interrupted only by five evenly spaced paths, that gave the row of houses their look of meticulous composition, balanced and restful. At the back — he had seen from his attic window — each house was separated from its neighbour by a high wall. The next-door garden was tended with a loving artistry — by this woman, he thought, who, engrossed in her work and hidden from view, would pass vivid and enclosed hours, the consciousness of her bodily imperfection set aside.

  ‘You were my aunt’s friend?’

  She agreed, with a steadiness that masked any emotion, that they had been great friends. ‘I miss Bertha.’

  I, notwe. Henry had noticed the wedding ring on her left hand. She was, perhaps, widowed.

  ‘Then you know I never met her. It wasn’t any immediate relationship.’

  ‘Somewhere on your father’s side, I believe. She was attached to him, and corresponded with him, not frequently, until his death. Now you have no one ... No one close.’

  ‘No one,’ he repeated politely, from the distance of his own thoughts.

  There was a silence, a suggestion on her part of mental fumbling, as if she had been guilty of some social indelicacy and wished to apologise; but her tone, when she spoke, was brightly impersonal. ‘I do hope you don’t consider me inquisitive, coming in here almost the instant you arrive. And, goodness, you must have set out before it was light to arrive here so early. No, strangers are rare here, these houses have changed ownership so seldom. Your aunt lived here all her life, you know. I was born in my house; when I married my husband came to live here. I was widowed some years ago.’

  He murmured a conventional regret as she drew breath and went on:

  ‘A couple did move in to number three, let me see ... four years ago. They tended towards — er — show. Builders’ men coming and going, doing renovations inside. And outside ... they put things: wheelbarrows with flowers in, and tubs, a sort of dovecote, and a large wheel, and painted everything white.’

  He smiled. In her restrained emphasis there was not so much condemnation as horrified disbelief.

  ‘They were quite elderly, one could not have expected such an urge for ... display. They liked “life” they said, and the quiet here irked them. So fortunately they did not stay long. Will you mind the quiet?’ Too polite to ask what he intended to do with the house, she contrived to put the question obliquely.

  ‘Not at all. It’ll be a welcome change when I come down at weekends and holidays.’

  ‘Ahh ...’ Her relieved smile conveyed far more than she probably intended: her approval of him, her conviction he would go about any renovations discreetly and not commit vulgarities outside in white paint. ‘I thought perhaps you might not wish to keep the house. You have to travel a long way and ... having the opportunity to enjoy it ... You’re in the police force, aren’t you? Isn’t your time very much occupied?’

  ‘During the week, yes; but I’m on the administrative side now, at Headquarters; my weekends are generally free. And the motorway makes short work of the distance.’

  ‘Good. This house needs to be lived in by someone who — belongs to it, that’s what Bertha wanted.’

  Taking his cup and pouring more coffee for him, she began once more to talk, about their neighbours, the village, the county town. Her voice was pleasantly melodious, a brightness of sound pattering on the silence as rain patters through the leaves of trees; and the longer she spoke, the less Henry responded, the emptier her words became. From time to time she turned on him a measuring look; behind that look lay the question she must ask, the statement she must make. He waited, and wondered.

  ‘... I do hope that if there is anything I can do for you, you will ask me. Although I understand you’re accustomed to looking after yourself.’

  ‘You know a great deal about me.’

  ‘I do, yes,’ her voice muffled on a half-apologetic laugh. She glanced at him and away, fiddling with the coffee spoon in her saucer. ‘Everything is all right? With the house?’

  ‘I would be the last person to know, never having seen it before today. Do you have any reason for thinking anything might not be right?’

  To the calm, almost casual tone she reacted hastily, ‘No, oh no ... Nobody would — come in. Nobody has any right, except you, of course ... Even I, as Bertha’s closest friend, have no key. I’m sure that everything ... everything ...’ The fitful comments subsided. ‘But now you mention it,’ she began again, as if forcefully retrieving a thought that was in danger of passing away forever, ‘I did wonder if you — or someone on your behalf — had, let me see ... Three days ago ...’

  He made sense of the slightly incoherent statement in the most direct way possible. ‘Been in the house?’

  ‘Yes. Yes ... I did wonder.’

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘No, no, it was too late at night. I just heard, or thought I heard ... But possibly it was a dream, or imagination. A noise.’

  ‘It must have been pretty loud to wake you if you were asleep, these walls are too stout to let much through.’

  ‘Oh, qui
te. Yes. Absolutely. That was why, as I say, it must have been merely imagination. My little dog disturbed me, you see, that was why I woke.’

  ‘It barked?’

  ‘No, she never barks, she’s extremely quiet, nobody has ever had any cause to complain of her at all, she’s most well behaved.’

  ‘I’m sure she is,’ Henry said with a smile. ‘And I like dogs. Why didn’t you bring her in with you?’

  ‘Oh, do you really?’ A genuine pleasure swept away all the contrived expressions. ‘I didn’t know, and not everyone cares to have a dog in the house, I would always make sure first.’

  ‘My aunt didn’t mind, I see she had one of her own. At least, I assume this is her ...’

  He went and took from an alcove shelf a framed photograph. It showed a smiling woman with a black labrador standing beside her; the background was recognisably the garden behind the house. The photograph had the smudged look that seemed not so much to do with the quality of the film as with the passage of time; unreachable now, the dead woman and her dog stood forever in the sunlight of some lost day, and this mere shadow of all they had known and been and shared conveyed a poignancy that made it difficult for Henry to look at the photograph.

  Lydia Marshall, when he held the photograph towards her, simply glanced at it and away, as if she struggled momentarily with some inward pain. ‘Yes, that was Bertha, and old Bruce...’

  He replaced the photograph, waiting for her to say more. Because he wanted to hear and because, talking of everyday matters that had been pleasant in her life, she would relax the curious artificiality that had restrained her when she had mentioned — and dismissed, almost in the same breath — the possibility of intruders in the house.

  But she sat silent, her hands clasped in a way that suggested an increase of tension. Henry, thinking over his exploration of the house, searched his mind for items that would have impressed themselves on him: a dog basket, a feeding bowl, a lead hanging behind a door. If there had been anything he would not have overlooked it, but there was no indication at all that a dog had recently been kept as a pet. ‘It must be some time since she — lost him? He died?’