The Half That You See

by Rebecca Rowland

  Martin’s response to this was silent at the time, but the following day I noted in his datebook an appointment in London with an otologist. Without saying a word to me, he was having his hearing checked out. It did apparently check out just fine and he returned without any tiny mechanism half hidden behind his lobes. But that only deepened the mystery. So he moved his bed chamber to the little parlor on the first floor. For a few weeks that appeared to be the solution.

  But even before the irritating sounds returned for him, I noticed a distinct if not very large alteration in Martin’s behavior. He insisted on speaking of private matters between us outside of the house and usually on one of our walks, or long drives, which we begun to take whenever we faced inclement weather. One of these conversations began with Martin saying, “You don’t think me a failure in life, do you?”

  I was never so astounded by a statement in my life and hastened to refute it. “Who has made you think anything that wrong?” I asked. “Tell me, Martin and I’ll…I’ll slap his face.”

  “Too late for that,” he said, laughing at my surprising vehemence, “She was buried a decade ago, although she seemed to hang on far too long.” It was then that Martin told me of his father’s “second wife,” He never called her any kind of mother, and it became clear why. She’d scolded and chided and denigrated him behind his father’s back from the time they met until the day he joined the U.S. Navy, lying about his age to enter at age 17. He’d never once spoken of her to me in our long marriage and I was both pleased for it now, and yet saddened by his awful parental experience—mine had been so normal by comparison—which seemed for some unknown reason to be returning to bother Martin’s consciousness so much later.

  Not too long after this, we found ourselves entertaining another delegation from the village with a second request. It had been a dry and quite lovely autumn, and the month of December seemed unusually mild. Martin and I had discussed whether we ought to return to Longmeadow, Massachusetts for the holidays, but only the previous day, we’d been apprised that we needn’t bother: our children and three grandchildren had decided instead to come to us. Partly it was curiosity, of course, to see where we resided; partly an excuse for a real holiday.

  When I mentioned this to Elspeth Westin and her mother and several other women at “tea,” they looked more than ordinarily pleased and Elspeth added, “emboldened by the news to ask another boon of us.” That boon was the use of the ground floor rooms of our house for a holiday party Christmas Eve with a tiny ball dance. When I wondered how that might be accomplished, the two Westins stood up and asked Dimitry to help them push aside a wall-sized sideboard. Behind it were wide double doors, (see? more of them) barely visible in the flocked ivy wall papering. These doors opened the large dining room to the even larger front formal parlor we sat in, making for a good-sized space that they assured us would sufficiently hold all the guests coming. They would seasonally decorate it all, including an eight-foot tall pine tree for the entry foyer.

  “Perhaps,” Martin said when I related all this to him later that day. “They can be persuaded to also provide holiday presents for our relations when they arrive?” I had to laugh but when Elspeth dropped by later with time-worn photographs of how it had all looked decked out on the holidays during “her Ladyship’s final decades,” in the teens of the past century, I had to admit it would not only work well but look marvelous for the grandchildren to see. So that was agreed upon, too.

  Good to their word, Elspeth and a group of her minions arrived two days before our children’s arrival and began their assault upon the décor. Dimitry and his mother helped, and Martin and I got out of their way and instead took a long drive to pick up our prepared goose and various accoutrement foods for the holiday dinner itself, to be served the day after the little cotillion. Upon our arriving home, the Gracks excitedly helped us unload our two-seater Ford KA, barring us from the main rooms until after our latish supper in the breakfast nook, at which time we were led blindfolded into the festive area and were delightedly shocked at its transformation via natural and unnatural elements into a winter wonderland.

  This holiday event turned out to be nearly perfect, but for one miniscule moment of disquietude. The already elderly parson brought along his quite aged mother, a wisp of a white-haired thing in a handsome oak wheelchair. During the course of the evening, she seemed to disappear and I went in search of her to bring her back to the festivity or to see if she needed anything. I found her in the little used, southeastern end of the house, in a hallway of what I always thought of as Dimitry’s domain, as there were several chambers where he did his various household repairs and storage. I located her chair turned to face a completely unprepossessing stretch of hallway wall and at first, I thought her asleep, she was so utterly still.

  As I tried to move her away and back into the main rooms, she said quite clearly, “Of course you don’t hear it, do you?”

  “Hear what?” I asked, as one could barely make out the sounds of the musical trio playing this far away.

  “Hear what?” she asked. “Why, the tapping.” When I asked what tapping, she instead remarked, “Clear as when I first heard it here when I was a lass of six, helping my own granny.” She began speaking of her visits to the house with her grandmother who occasionally helped out in service here. She spoke so much of her then that I asked where her own parents were. She made a little moue and said, “They weren’t good to me. I was taken away to live with Grams—for my own good.”

  I managed to get her turned about and back into the main rooms, where we were both greeted warmly with toasts of eggnog and little gifts. But she had made a distinct impression upon me and I made certain to say goodbye to her again when her wheelchair was ramped into a Caravan on the street to take her home. She grasped my hand then and pulled me close to her face with an unsuspected vigor and fiercely whispered, “You are a far better mistress here than that old witch, you know.” When I looked surprised, she nodded at the house. “The one they all cream over.”

  “Lady Sofia, you mean?”

  To which she replied, “I heard this myself from my Granny: while that one was carrying her first born, her husband’s child vanished one summer’s day. A bright and handsome little lad. He was never found again.” Then we were pulled apart by the van’s other occupants already inside and clamoring to leave.

  It wasn’t until after the holidays when we were alone again that I asked Martin if he still heard the tapping. He looked at me curiously and repeated, “Tapping! Yes, perhaps that’s what it is: not a leak!” I was about to tell him the parson’s mother heard it too when he brushed me off. “I’ve learned to live with it. It’s of no matter, anyway.” But, of course, that made me wonder all the more. I’d not read anything of Lady Sofia’s personal life in the lending library book, which was after all, more broadly narrated and somewhat more architectural in intent. But I’d found out at tea that there was a sort of historical society in the shire’s main town and a few days later while shopping there, I stopped in and introduced myself.

  A dark-haired woman looked me up and down and asked what I wanted to know, specifically, about the place. To which I answered, “Well, I suppose about its longest-term mistress, Lady Sofia Cranburgh.” Lydia, for so her name was, suggested I go about my shopping and return in an hour or so at which time she would have “photocopies you might look at in your leisure.”

  I did so, and she had a small sheaf of paper for me when I returned, saying, “No charge for the service.” When I was surprised at that, she explained, “The few I know from the village say that although an American, that you and your husband are among the nicest tenants in Cranburgh Grange in many a generation.” I blushed at the compliment and said she’d surely be invited to any other galas held there in future. She had used the word “nice” in the British sense of apt, appropriate, mannerly, and correct.

  This is what I read in the obituary:

  Although Lady Sofia was said to be extremely eleemosyn
ary, with charities both private and public, and she was so beloved by the locals, her life seemed by many to be bedeviled by several unfortunate experiences. She outlived her husband by three decades, and even before he passed, he had spent long periods of time away from home on foreign missions for a White Hall ministerial office. She outlived her two sons and her daughter. The first lad died in action at the Orange River in the Boer War; the second, upon a British ship sunk by a German U-Boat. Her daughter died giving birth to her first child, who was still-born.

  But first and chief among the misfortunes was the still unsolved disappearance in 1867 of her husband’s son by his first wife. This lad, just turned seven years old, was by all reports, a sunny, handsome, and active fellow all over the estate, a joy to his father and to most onlookers, engaged in the usual boyish activities such as fishing, hunting with a little bow and arrows fashioned by a village man, etc. He’d gone out as usual one summer day and never returned. Fairly all the shire was enjoined to search for him, which they did for over a week’s time. But no signs of the lad and no remains were ever found. It was then believed that he had been abducted.

  Even though his father had three other children by Lady Sofia, he never gave up hope of the boy’s return and spoke of him upon his own deathbed, asserting in his final moments that he sensed the child “very near indeed.” It was then that Lady Sofia began to open the house up to villagers and shire folk for various communal occasions, which she did until her own passing at an advanced age.

  That sealed it as far as I was concerned.

  Martin was as pleased as he was surprised by my suggestion: “What do you mean? You really think we ought to call in a psychic?” For the tapping, I responded. “You hear it then?” he asked. I said no, but others did: the parson’s mother for example. “Calling in a psychic is the wackiest thing you ever suggested,” Martin said, laughing, “Let’s do it!”

  A week later, M. Alcide Alexander Bonort the Third, an obese and pleasantly saucer-faced young man of indeterminate European origin, dressed like a stage actor in clothing a little bit too small for him, came to tea. Then, with us hovering behind him, he did some kind of “purification” ceremony of the house, room by room, utilizing handle-less brooms of white sage mixed in with violet gorse leaves, and chanting some gobbledy gook. This seemed so absurd that we were almost unable to stop ourselves from laughing until he did something very curious. He stopped at the very same blank wall that the parson’s mother had been staring at when I came upon her. Alcide put down his flaming herbs and said, his voice rising with every phrase, “This is a very bad spot. It resists purification. I cannot remain here!” With the last almost a shriek, he sped out of the hallway and stumbled out of doors and was in his little old purple Dauphine and taking off before we could catch up or even pay him.

  We didn’t speak of this incident but the next morning at breakfast, Martin asked if I still had out that book on Cranburgh Grange from the Lending Library. I had returned it and he said he thought he might take a look at it again. He dropped me off at the Parson’s manse, as the old house was called. Once there, I invited myself to tea with the Parson’s mother. I’d suspected she hadn’t too many visitors and I was right. She was happy to see me. Even better, it was she not I who brought up the subject of Lady Sofia and the little boy. Her grandmother had been in the village, which was more populous than now as the local farmers had many for-hire hands, and especially harvest season workers. That was how her mother and father had come to the village, a young couple seeking work. Her mother’s mother followed, because she had already experienced the couple’s great devotion to drink and fun and their equal lack of devotion to caring for their only child, the parson’s mother herself, then a lass of not quite six years. It was the grandmother who had worked at Cranburgh Grange and, perhaps sensitized by her own daughter, had not failed to notice Lady Sofia’s contempt for her new husband’s little heir.

  True enough, her Granny had told her, the boy went his own way much of the time, spoiled by his sickly mother’s absence. He had a tutor in the morning, but once he’d finished his noontime meal, every afternoon he would gather up his walking stick or fishing rods or his little bow and arrows for hunting and step out until sunset. “Betimes he brought in river perch or a small leveret, but mostly he came home empty handed and in need of a bath. When his father was away, the Lady disdained him and had him sup, filthy as he was, among the servants,” her grandmother told her. All the more of a shock when the lad went missing and the Lady of Cranburgh Grange waited several days to report it, and then made such a large to-do about it, having all the men and some women available in the shire search for him or of any sign of him, and bewailing his disappearance. “Which some thought overdramatic, since she’d not cared for him a whit.”

  I repeated this information to Martin that evening at supper. He meanwhile had obtained the book he’d been seeking and as we were having coffee and trifle, he opened the pages for me to an old photograph and said, “Does this look like the south facade of this house?” I looked and said yes, it much resembled it. “Really? Then what about this little doorway with a horizontal window above it?” Martin had us step out of doors, the open book in my hands and a strong torch in his, and sure enough, that section of the south façade was instead, a brick wall with neither portal nor ventilation.

  The next morning, he showed the illustration to Dmitry Grack and said to him, “I want you to go inside and open the window or door of each room on this first floor that looks out and say hello to us out of it.” Dimitry naturally thought him cracked, but he did as he was asked. Sure enough, there was the walled space with no window. Then, Martin went in again and said he would make a noise of some sort from each wall with the windows closed and Dimitry and I were stand outside and tell him what we heard. “From there and from there,” we pointed on either side of the bricked wall, “We heard you well enough, but we didn’t hear you at all from behind that wall!” He said that he had rapped on every interior wall, every five feet apart, barring none. He then pointed to the brick wall and said, “There’s something behind there different than when the house was built.”

  Getting permission from a majority of the disputing heirs to “repair the plumbing at our own cost” took only a fortnight. It was an unusually warm and sunny day when two men came up from Camden Town with tools and levels and all sorts of carpentry equipment I’d never seen before. The first thing they did was sound out the walls every half yard. That way, they located what they believed was a hollower space which might be a little door. On a ten-foot ladder, they then sounded out the upper wall and found the little window behind wood and plaster. Martin showed them the legal permits and they began work up top since it would be easier there, and they knocked out the wood lathing and found the window behind it and cleared it.

  “It’s a little room. An empty little room,” their chief said, peering in the window. Martin went up and he also looked in. “Not quite empty. There’s something on the floor in that corner.” The chief opined that it was just a pile of rags or discarded clothing. But Martin gave the order, and by lunch time, they had part of the brick wall below the window torn down. After lunch, they called Martin and all of us went out to look. A little wooden door was there, as in the old photo but very worn. “It’s sealed shut. Shall we break it open and go in?” Martin told them yes.

  I recall the loud protests of the old wood as it was stove in by their sledge but even more once the door was pulled off, I recall the strange yet unmistakably thick and pungent must of age that seemed to escape past us before we could enter. There in the far corner of the narrow, high room was the pile of clothing previously noted. Inside the pile of clothes, not really noticeable except for one tiny outthrust hand holding out a pen-knife, and still dressed in play clothes, was the mummy of a little boy. At that very moment through some quirk of physics I’ve never had properly explained, the little window above our head shattered and we had to withdraw out of doors again. I, for one, w
as glad for it, because I vowed to never step in that room again.

  We hastily packed overnight bags and slept in the village inn that we knew so well that night and remained there for the next few days. I soon noticed that everyone who had been so friendly to us now avoided us: the men in the pub, the shop keepers, everyone looked at us quite suspiciously. And no wonder: we’d destroyed the legend of the good Lady Sofia. I told Martin I wanted to leave and go home, and he drove me to Heathrow and saw me off to America. He used as an excuse for not joining me that there was so much officially still to be done about it all: the police, the local historian and architectural society. But I found out later that he left the inn and returned to the house and he slept there in comfort and quietude.

  It was the Parson who wrote and begged me to return. He said the villagers felt lost and at sixes and sevens without their “Lady of Cranburgh Grange” present. I kept telling Martin that I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, not in the light of what we’d found. But since he would not budge from there to return to America, I did eventually go back. The entire back wall and hidden room were gone, of course, and in their place was a new double doorway opened up from the back hall to a charming new terrace looking onto the southern lawn with a view down to the little stream.

  And so, the offending little room was expunged. Everywhere I went thereafter in the village, people befriended me, saying they hoped we would remain “forever.” Ms. Sheriff, the real estate agent, called on us and said the contesting heirs of the estate had gotten together again and had agreed to sell to us at a much-reduced price because of “our great love of the house.” Right there, on the spot, Martin agreed. This news was greeted in the village by such effusions of friendliness that I must be a cynic to doubt their affection. Once all of the various authorities had finished with the “case,” the Parson of our village announced “a proper funerary service for the child.” Because of the newsworthiness of the entire business, this rite attracted more people than could be held within the church. The lad was buried under his own gravestone far from that of the step-mother. And so, life went on as before. Apparently.