We have crossed time itself, he thought; and as she drew him in, he seemed to walk among the stars, as well as the fretful guns.
He swam back towards consciousness, groping for memories of the night. The terrible times when she had clung to him, and whispered of dreadful, unbelievable things; of buses fallen into holes in the earth; of babies split wide open like a burst pillow; of shelters where everyone sat dead, without a mark on them. Whispered till the whisper grew towards a scream, and he screwed up his bare legs in terror, and fought to disentangle his wet body from her strangling arms, and failed.
And the other times, when she needed him and opened herself to him and it was a ride of terror and glory with the broken drone of German bombers passing overhead, and the shrapnel rattling on the roof.
I have known it, he thought, and survived. For the rumpled sheets were warm under him, and the dim light of morning was starting to filter through his closed eyes, and he knew the bed was empty of her at last.
He kept his eyes shut a long time, because now it was gone, he wanted to recapture and store every moment of it. He had done it and survived; a journey through time itself.
As his granny had always said, love was stronger than the grave.
But he had to open his eyes at last; his bladder was full to bursting.
He opened his eyes, and Mrs Meggitt was sitting on a chair drawn up across from the bed, looking at him through her pebble spectacles, wearing her shiny baggy slacks, thick pilled grey cardigan, and lace-up shoes.
Glory turned to panic. He was a little boy caught out; tossed and naked in a sacred memorial of a bed. All he could think of to say was, ‘I thought you were in Scotland.’
It was not even the beginnings of an excuse. He expected her to start to rave and scream at him, to throw him out into the street, naked as he was, to write and complain to the Lodgings Officer, to get him thrown out of the university . . . but she simply said, ‘I came back early.’
‘I’m sorry . . .’ he started feebly.
‘There is no need to explain,’ she said, not angry; no emotion at all, really. Then she bent down and picked something off the floor, and showed it to him.
Through bleary eyes, he saw it was the incendiary bomb; the German incendiary bomb he had left out on the guttering.
He scanned her face, incredulous. But her muddy eyes swam away from him, behind the thick pebble lenses. And the silence went on and on.
Finally, he took a deep breath and said, ‘You know. You know it all.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know it all.’
Suddenly, he understood. She was . . . the humble, faithful acolyte, the priestess of this shrine. Who kept it and guarded it selflessly, so that, in her good time, the dead goddess could come. She was the one who cleared up afterwards.
Instead of feeling ashamed, he suddenly felt proud. She knew what he had done; she knew of his wild ride through time. He could discuss it with her. She was the only person in the world he could ever discuss it with. Suddenly he felt a little glow of affection towards her, poor old thing.
‘Was she your daughter?’
A slight, bitter smile crossed the woman’s pale, lifeless lips. She shook her head, and he knew he had said something hurtful. He was eager to make amends. ‘Your younger sister?’
Another wry shake of the head.
‘Your . . . friend?’
‘No,’ she said, and for once her eyes did not swim away behind her pebble glasses. ‘She was me!’
And at once, for some reason, he knew she was mad. He was fastened up, naked, with a revolting madwoman.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ She smiled, a quite horrible smile.
‘No,’ he said stoutly, pulling up the bedclothes around his nakedness.
‘How old do you think I am then?’
‘Fifty-five,’ he said savagely. ‘Sixty!’
‘And how old would . . . she have been. If she’d lived?’
He did not answer.
She reached up slowly, and undid the tatty old headscarf.
A cascade of dark, lovely hair tumbled down. Hair that he knew. Young, young, lovely hair, on an old, old face.
She began to undo the belt of the old pilled cardigan.
The long neck, the night-dress . . . the long, smooth, bare arms. And the pebbled glasses.
And then with a gesture, the pebbled glasses went. For a moment, the face was still set in the rigid, hard lines of a landlady.
And then she smiled the smile of last night.
He covered up his eyes and moaned, ‘No, no, no.’
Without taking his hands away from his face, he said feebly, ‘The incendiary bomb . . .’
‘I’ve had it since the War, Harry. Souvenir. I stuck it into the gutter while you were out, and you never noticed it, till I went out into the garden and threw a stone on the roof, that night.’
‘The guns, the sirens, the bombers.’
She laughed, a low, mad laugh. ‘They have a full archive of tape recordings, at the BBC. I have loudspeakers, here and there.’
‘The perfume!’ he shouted defiantly.
‘A little pad of cotton wool, under the carpet. Where you will tread on it.’
‘The diary . . .’
‘The diary is real. I wrote it, in 1940. The first student I had found it. That’s what started it all. Young men are so in love, with love and death.’
‘But why?’ He glared at her, full of rage now.
Her face changed, from expression to expression, so that first she looked like a younger, handsomer Mrs Meggitt, and then she looked like a worn, weary Catherine; and then her face lit up with memory, so she just looked like real Catherine, ghostly Catherine. That was worst of all.
‘My first dark and dangerous man . . . I suppose he did kill me really. He was wonderful for a week, but he never came back.’
‘Was . . . was he killed in action?’
‘I don’t know. I never even knew his name.’
‘What about . . . Ben?’
‘Ben never came back either. Killed in Egypt.’
‘And ever since . . .’
‘Sometimes the tricks worked; sometimes they didn’t.’ She laughed to herself. ‘I got pretty clever at it.’
‘But why did you have to? You’re . . .’ He was going to say, ‘A handsome woman. Thirty-six years old.’ Which she was, even by daylight. And then he watched the expressions playing across her face, one after the other. And young as he was, he despaired.
Instead, as something to say, he said lightly, ‘So the house wasn’t haunted after all, then?’
She looked at him straight for a moment; looking a handsome thirty-six-year-old, who even a lad of twenty-one might fancy. And then she got up and said, ‘It’s me that’s the haunted house, Harry. Everybody gets to be a haunted house in the end.’ Then she added, ‘I’ll be glad if you can move out today. It never works a second time. I’ve tried it.’
And picking up her scarf and cardigan, she went off downstairs.
As he left, an hour later, he put his door key on the hall-stand and stood on the doormat and listened.
The house was silent. He couldn’t tell if she was in or out.
He never went back to Brangwyn Gardens, and he never saw her again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Westall was born in North Shields, Northumberland in 1929. After taking degrees in fine art from Durham University and London’s Slade School, Westall worked as an art teacher and was also a freelance journalist and art critic for The Guardian.
It was not till later in life that Westall turned to fiction, having been inspired to become a writer after telling his son Christopher stories about his childhood during World War II. His first book, The Machine Gunners, was published in 1975 when he was 45; it was a major success, winning the Carnegie Medal, and has been recognized by critics as a lasting classic of children’s literature. He would go on to publish over 40 books for young readers, including works that drew on his boy
hood during the war, stories involving cats, and tales of the ghostly and supernatural. Besides The Machine Gunners, Westall is perhaps best known for The Scarecrows (1981), which won him a second Carnegie Medal and which his obituary in the Independent called ‘one of the most searing and haunting child-eyed views of divorce yet to have been written’, and Blitzcat (1989), which won the Smarties Prize. The Watch House (1977) and The Machine Gunners were also adapted for television serials.
After retiring from teaching in 1985, Westall worked briefly as an antique dealer, an experience that partly inspired his sole work of fiction for adults, the ghost story collection Antique Dust (1989). The first edition’s jacket lists his hobbies as ‘nosing round old buildings, studying cats and looking for the unknown’ and notes that ‘he has never seen a ghost but has not yet given up hope’.
Robert Westall died in 1993 at age 63.
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