Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  The room beyond, overlooking the avenue, was empty. No Constance stood there. I turned back to the maid in bewilderment. A telephone in the hall began to shrill.

  “You wait. One minute. Please excuse.”

  The maid disappeared. She closed the door behind her. From the hallway beyond I heard long silences, mouselike maid squeaks.

  Confused, I walked across to the room beyond: a bedroom. No one lurked; no Constance waited just behind the door. Both rooms astonished me. I could not imagine Constance, even in extremis, living here.

  You should understand: Constance was a decorator, an obsessive arranger of rooms. Everything in her rooms, even her hotel rooms, had to conform to her taste. Constance would no more sit in a room she found unsympathetic than a concert pianist would listen to an amateur mangle Mozart.

  Could Constance, in any circumstances, live here?

  Constance liked flamboyant rooms; she liked strong, vivid, daring colors: budgerigar yellow, finch green, Prussian blue, or—her favorite, this—a garnet that gave a womblike effect and that she called, inaccurately, Etruscan.

  She liked these vivid rooms to be enclosed, sumptuous spaces, crammed with rare and surprising things. Out of colors that in less sure hands would have clashed, out of furniture whose derivation and date were discordant, Constance made harmony.

  Japanese screens—she had always loved them, indeed loved screens of any kind. An abundance of flowers, always. Chinese porcelain. Some charming curiosity—a birdcage, say, shaped to resemble a pagoda, a bowl filled with shells, an antique wooden toy. Painted furniture, always; and mirrors everywhere, old ones, their mercury stained and foxed. Could Constance live here? No, she could not.

  This room was painted off-white. It was a symphony of Syrie Maugham creams and beiges. It sang the song of the cocktail age, 1925 to 1930 at the latest, a period Constance had always detested. It was rectilinear, chaste, with a nod toward Bauhaus brutalism. Constance could not be here, I decided. I had come to the wrong place. As I turned to the door, the maid reentered and I discovered my mistake.

  Constance was here in this room with me. This was, I suppose, where I found her, and—as I might have foreseen—she was waiting to play another trick.

  “Present.” The maid gestured across the room toward a table of bleached wood. She gave another little giggle. “Miss Shawcross—on phone. Flight being called. Big hurry. Left present for you. You take it with you, yes?” She gestured again at the table. She gestured toward something on the table.

  I walked the length of the room. I looked at it. It seemed a curious kind of present. There on the table was a stack of notebooks—about twenty or twenty-five of them, I estimated. Each was about twelve inches by fourteen; all had identical black covers. They resembled an old-fashioned school exercise book. The top book in the pile bore no label or identifying mark of any kind; the rest, I was later to discover, were similarly anonymous. They had been carefully and neatly stacked, the pile tied with well-knotted string.

  In case there should be any doubt that this was a present, and intended for me, a note had been attached with my name on it. Heavy white paper; familiar handwriting: the strokes of the letters were bold, the ink black, the message brief.

  Whistle and I’ll come to you, Constance had written. You’ve been looking for me, dearest Victoria. Well, here I am.

  I went back to England. Back to Winterscombe. I took Constance’s present with me, the notebooks still unopened, still tied together with string. I suppose I knew there was no point in pursuing Constance herself any further, no point in calling friends or hotels or airlines. I had the notebooks instead: Here I am.

  Even so, I was reluctant to undo that parcel. I was made uneasy by the manner and the circumstances in which it had been given. I was also irritated by the note Constance had attached: Whistle and I’ll come to you. It was a quotation, I thought, and a familiar one, but I could not place it. A line from a poem? I was not sure.

  When I arrived at the house I put the parcel of notebooks away in the library. I avoided the room; I avoided them. This was easy enough at first; Winterscombe distracted me.

  In order to come here I had had to postpone some commissions, delegate work to others. Better not to delay, I told myself as I locked up my town flat; several weeks had already passed while I extricated myself from London. It was, by then, September. Winterscombe was in a poor state of repair. It would not do to leave it closed up, empty, another winter—that was the argument I used to myself. It was not the whole truth. The truth was that after years of avoiding it, my home pulled me back.

  Memories should not be monkeyed with—I had felt that. I had wanted Winterscombe to remain the house of my childhood, the house I had loved between the wars. Even when Steenie lived there I had been reluctant to visit it. During the years I lived in America, avoiding Winterscombe was easy. I had avoided it still, even after I returned. It was simple enough; I purchased the London apartment, though I spent less time in it than I did in hotel rooms. If Steenie pressed invitations upon me (and he did, at first) I could always plead pressures of work. Until the months of his final illness, I had revisited the house no more than three or four times. I had never spent a night under its roof. I had dreaded the house, dreaded to see its proof of change, of time passing. Yet now—and I felt this very strongly—it called to me.

  A matter of practicality, I told myself. Winterscombe would have to be sold. But before it could be sold, before I telephoned Sotheby’s or Christie’s about auctioning its contents, I would have to go through the house. I did not want the dispassionate hands of an auctioneer or an appraiser sorting through the trunks and boxes, examining old clothes, old toys, papers, photographs, letters. That sad task—one with which anyone middle-aged will be familiar—was mine. This was my past, and my family’s. Only I could decide what to discard and what to keep.

  I had allowed myself one month. Almost as soon as I arrived I realized that a month would not be enough; Steenie had left Winterscombe in chaos. During the years when, down on his luck, he had lived there, many rooms had been closed. In the months of his last illness I had had no heart to explore them. Now, when the caretakers came up from the lodge, when rooms were unlocked, windows opened, cupboards exposed, I saw to the full the havoc that Steenie had wrought.

  At first I thought it carelessness; Steenie never minded disorder. Then, as the days passed, I changed my mind. What Steenie had been doing, I realized, was searching for something, searching with increasing desperation, going from room to room, opening a desk here, a trunk there, spilling the contents out, then passing on. Steenie had left a trail of some kind—a trail it was impossible to follow.

  In that old disused ballroom where Franz-Jacob and I once danced, I found a box of my grandmother’s dresses. Another lay, half-unpacked, in the room always known as the King’s bedroom; a third, spilling whalebone corsets, turned up in the stables.

  There was a croquet set in a bathroom, a collection of moth-eaten teddy bears on a back landing. Parts of a once-opulent dinner service lay in the china pantries; the rest were stacked under the billiard table. And the papers—there were papers everywhere, glimpses of a family past I never knew existed. Love letters from my grandfather to my grandmother, letters home from the trenches from her sons. Ancient bills, theater programs, children’s drawings, photograph albums, envelopes containing clippings of babies’ hair, ledgers recording fishing catches or numbers of pheasants shot, designs for orphanages never built, drafts for speeches in the Lords, newspaper cuttings, pictures of long-dead dogs, of favorite ponies, of unidentified women in huge Edwardian hats, of unidentified mustachioed young men playing tennis or posed on the portico steps wearing World War One uniforms.

  There were treasures here for me in this welter of papers: I found journals kept by my mother which I had never known existed. I found letters my father sent her long before I was born. I looked at these things with pleasure and with unease, wanting to read them, uncertain if I had a right to
do so. I felt like a trespasser, and (this increased my unease) I was clearly not the first person to trespass here. Where I searched now, Steenie had searched before me—that much was clear. Letters had been tossed to one side, envelopes torn, diaries opened, then thrown down. It was as if Steenie had been looking for something, failed to find it, and become increasingly frantic. A nasty suspicion came to me: Could my uncle have been looking for those notebooks which now lay downstairs, neatly parceled, in the library?

  During the day, when the caretakers were with me, when the sun shone and there was work to do, it was easy to push such suspicions to one side. It was less easy after nightfall. Then, when I was alone in the house, the presence of the notebooks pressed upon me. I would go into the library. I would look at them. I would go out.

  On the third night, still tempted, still drawing back, I telephoned Wexton in London.

  “Wexton,” I said, when we had finished with the usual updates and pleasantries, “Wexton, may I try a quotation on you? It’s been bothering me for weeks. I’ve heard it before but I can’t place it—”

  “Sure.” Wexton sounded amused. “I’m a pretty good dictionary. Try me.”

  “Whistle and I’ll come to you. Is it a poem, Wexton?”

  Wexton chuckled. “No. It’s not a poem, and it’s not complete. ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’ It’s the title of a story. M. R. James—nothing to do with Henry, by the way. Linguist, medievalist, biblical scholar. Heard of him?”

  “Vaguely. I’ve never read him.”

  “Well, he’s dead now, of course. Besides the scholarly works, he also wrote stories—not bad stories, in their way. That’s the title of one of the nastiest.”

  “Nastiest?”

  “They’re ghost stories. That’s what he wrote. Extremely chilling ones too. If you’re embarking on him, don’t do it at Winterscombe. Not if you’re alone at night.”

  “I see.” I paused. “And this particular story, Wexton—can you remember what it’s about?”

  “Sure.” Wexton sounded amused. “It’s probably the most famous one he wrote. But I don’t want to tell you the plot—not if you intend reading it. I don’t want to spoil it—”

  “Just the gist, Wexton. That would do.”

  “Well,” Wexton replied, “it’s about … a haunting. As you might expect.”

  That decided me. Constance was not a great reader—indeed I could not remember her ever finishing a book; it was one of the great differences between us. But Constance was a great borrower of other people’s books, a great dipper-in to them. If she had chosen that quotation (perhaps expecting me to recognize it at once) she would have done so deliberately—yet another little trick in the game of hide-and-seek she played with me. Or was it cat and mouse?

  I had had enough of Constance’s games by then. Since she had given me the present, I would look at her notebooks, have done with them, and then forget them, but I would do so on my own terms and in my own way. If Constance intended to haunt me (and she would have liked that idea) she would not succeed. I would exorcise her first.

  I began the preparations the next day. The weather had changed, and it was a cold one. Winterscombe felt chill, with that damp and clinging cold peculiar to houses after long disuse.

  I persuaded the caretaker to tackle the old boiler in the basement, the one I used to see as burning crisp pound notes. After much coaxing, and protesting, it caught. I returned upstairs. Pipes wheezed and rattled. I could sense the old beat of my house’s heart, coming back to life.

  That night, when I was alone, I took Constance’s parcel of books to the drawing room. I lit the fire. I closed the old and tattered curtains. I moved furniture from place to place. Some pieces were still missing, lost in the intervening years, but there were enough left to re-create, by lamplight, the illusion of the past. The sagging sofa, the worn rugs, my mother’s chair, the writing desk between the windows, the chaise longue where Aunt Maud held court, the stool where my friend Franz-Jacob always sat—when all these pieces were in their accustomed places, my house began to speak again. I was almost ready. There was just one component left.

  I found it at last, stored away in a closet: the folding table at which, in another life, a girl called Charlotte had once sat with me, playing cards.

  I set the table up. I placed a chair for myself, and another chair for a girl I had not seen in thirty years. Then—I suppose I had known I would do this—I put Constance’s black notebooks down on the green baize. This was where Constance had entered my life; this was where she would depart from it. Here I am.

  The room was still. I closed my eyes. I let Winterscombe seep through my skin and inhabit my mind: damp and woodsmoke, leather chairs and long corridors, linen and lavender, happiness and cordite. When I opened my eyes, the room was peopled.

  My uncle Steenie yawned and stretched; he flipped the pages of a magazine. My aunt Maud read a romance called The Crossroads of the Heart. My uncle Freddie snoozed, his two greyhounds at his feet. My mother left her account books, unbalanced, on her writing desk; at her piano she played Chopin, a few desultory bars. My father watched her, then bent toward the fire. He stirred a log with his foot. The wood crackled and the sparks flew upward.

  Beyond them, quiet but substantial, waiting as if to be greeted, there were other figures: my third uncle, the one I never knew, who died in World War One; my grandfather Denton, dead before I was born; my American grandmother, Gwen, who died so soon after him. They were waiting, with the humility of supplicants; because they were there, and I trusted them, I cut my parcel’s string.

  They were journals or diaries of some kind; I think I had expected that. I opened the first of them, to see a date, 1910, and a location, Winterscombe. Lines of neat copperplate marched across the page; this handwriting was one I did not recognize.

  I stared at the page in confusion. There was something familiar on this page, but I could not place it. It was there, out of reach, nagging away on the edge of memory. Whose writing was this? Why should Constance send me journals this old? I opened the next notebook; the same unfamiliar writing. I opened the third—a different hand, this, and one I did recognize. A letter fell out, tucked between cover and first page.

  That letter was the first and the last letter I ever received from Constance. I was to reread it, many times. I have it beside me still, quintessential Constance.

  My dearest Victoria [she wrote],

  Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I shall tell you a story—a story you think you already know. It is about Winterscombe, your family, your parents and me. It is also about a murder—is it a murder?—so pay attention as you read. I should hate you to miss the vital clues.

  Well now, where shall we begin? With your christening, and my banishment? You might like that, I think—a chance to resolve all those mysteries! But I prefer that you wait. We shall come to your part in this story eventually; to begin with, I am center stage.

  I may surprise you, I think! You may find you do not know this Constance. You may also find you do not know this mother and this father—we may even shock you a little. Never mind that—it is good to be shocked occasionally, don’t you think? Take my hand and come back with me: Look, I am a child, and the year is 1910.

  Tonight your grandmother Gwen, who is still young and still beautiful (the age you are now, my dear Victoria), is giving a great party. Tonight, a comet—Halley’s comet—will pass. We shall all watch its progress—that is one purpose of the party. A comet is not, perhaps, the best omen for an occasion like this, but your grandmother forgets that; she has other things on her mind. What’s that? You’ve heard about that night, and that party? I’m sure you have. Well, listen again: I shall give you the uncensored account.

  Read my father’s version of events (yes, the first two notebooks are his). Then read mine. But don’t stop there—not if you want to catch up with me. For that, you must read on to the end. There is a great space of time in these little journals of mine!


  Then, when you have finished reading, shall we talk? I should like that, for I miss you, you know, my little godchild with the moral eyes! Yes, let’s talk. Give me your solution. I should like to hear that. You tell me who the murderer was and who the victim. You explain to me the nature of the crime.

  Meanwhile, it is 1910. Does that sound very distant to you? It isn’t, you know: blink, and it’s yesterday. Look, here is the house. Here are the gardens. There are the woods where your clever little friend Franz-Jacob once smelled blood….

  The past. That is a good present to give someone, don’t you think? And the moment seems right—for you, and for me. Listen, here is the past; here is a present only I can give you. Do you know what it looks like? Like my hall of mirrors in New York, the hall you used to love so much. Back and back; one reflection, then another behind that, on and on, all the way to infinity.

  When you’ve finished reading, you tell me: How many fathers can you see? And how many Constances?

  She had meant to intrigue, and she succeeded. I began to read. I let Constance and her father be my guides—to begin with, anyway.

  I had remembered, by then, where I was the last time the year 1910 was mentioned. I heard sitar music, faced a portrait of a latter-day saint, smelled India, smelled Winterscombe. Magic, perhaps, of a kind. When I turned to copperplate handwriting, and a date in April 1910, I felt as if Mr. Chatterjee joined the other watchers at my side.

  To the Stone House in the gardens, [I read]. This morning, with Gwen. The new black ribbons in my pocket, safely concealed. Once there, alas, that great bore Boy required us to pose for a photograph. What a simpleton he is! Infernal delays, a long exposure; an imprint of adultery: which sweet fact Boy, a fool indeed, never suspects …

  I read on: what follows is what I was shown not just by Constance and her father, but also by those other witnesses then summoned to my house. I will show it to you as I saw it then: as a story, but also as a puzzle. It was a puzzle whose pieces did not always fit, a puzzle (I sometimes feared) with key pieces left out.