Ghost Song

by Rayne, Sarah

  Whoever was walking along the gravel path towards the house was singing softly, in the way a man might whistle to keep up his spirits or to keep himself company.

  But the song the unknown caller was singing was the song Hilary had heard in the dark old Tarleton Music Hall with Robert. It was the song Shona had played on the old gramophone last night. Toby Chance’s ‘The Ghost Walks’.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CALEY WAS EXTREMELY nervous by the time the taxi drew up outside Levels House. It had been a worrisome journey; he had spent most of it in trying to work out exactly what he would say when he reached his destination and he was still very unsure about that. He also hoped very fervently that it would not be what he thought of as a grand house.

  It was not until the train drew into Castle Cary station that it suddenly occurred to him he might not be Madeleine Ferrelyn’s only visitor. Shona Seymour would have received that letter two—no, three—days ago. Supposing that was the reason for her slightly puzzling absence from the Harlequin office? This possibility sent a wave of panic through him. What would he do if Miss Seymour was already at Levels House? But he had not come this far to back out now, so he got a taxi from the small taxi rank outside the station, and gave the address.

  The house, when they reached it, was not grand, but it was quite large and you could see at once that it had been lived in by people who were not wildly wealthy, but who did not have to worry over-much about money. Caley had not really expected anything less, but he still had to fight against a feeling of panic all over again, because people like himself did not knock at the doors of houses such as this one, and coolly request admittance. He paid the taxi driver, careful to add a modest tip, and it was not until the man had driven off that he noticed the two cars parked in the drive. Might Shona Seymour really be here, then? He stood very still, trying to decide what to do.

  If it had not been for the ten-mile journey to the railway station, at this point he really would have fled back to London. But he reminded himself that he had no real reason to be afraid of Miss Seymour and he had a perfect right to be here if he chose. He straightened his collar and brushed down his jacket, but as he walked towards the house he realized he was humming a snatch of one of the Tarleton’s songs. It was a nervous habit, but it was something that always gave him confidence, almost as if the Tarleton people—Caley’s own people—were with him and as if they were saying: it’s all right; we’re around you, we’re helping you along. Today they said: you’ve come here to protect us, remember that. And you have as much right as anyone to be here, remember that, as well.

  His heart was pounding and he had to pause to pat his pocket to make sure the asthma spray was safely there. He had thought out what he would say and do when the door was opened, but he knew this pre-arranging of a scene hardly ever worked, because the other person did not know his or her part in the play.

  It did not work now, because the person who opened the door was someone he had not expected to see: Hilary Bryant. Caley had been partly prepared for Shona, but he was thrown completely by Hilary’s appearance and for a moment he could not think what to say.

  Hilary was looking startled, but she said, ‘Mr Merrick? Caley? What on earth are you doing here?’

  Caley managed to pull himself together sufficiently to say, ‘I wanted to see—is Mrs Ferrelyn in? Mrs Madeleine Ferrelyn?’

  ‘Well, she is, but—’ Hilary broke off and Caley saw a door open beyond the hall and a fairly tall lady come out.

  ‘Hilary, was that someone at the door? I thought I heard—’ She saw Caley and looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Mrs Ferrelyn?’ said Caley.

  ‘Yes.’

  Caley had known who she was without asking, and he went straight into the little script he had compiled for himself. He said, ‘You don’t know me, but my name is Merrick and I would like to talk to you about your—about the Tarleton Music Hall.’ He had intended to say ‘about your theatre’ but when it came to it, he could not. My theatre, he thought. In everything but name, it’s my theatre. It always was, ever since the first time I stepped inside.

  Madeleine said, perfectly politely, ‘Unfortunately, we have to go out very shortly and it’s an appointment we can’t easily change, but I have a few moments to spare.’

  She clearly thought he was some kind of salesman, although the mention of the Tarleton had caught her attention. At least she had not slammed the door in his face. Hilary said, ‘Madeleine, Mr Merrick—Caley—helps us at the Harlequin office sometimes.’

  This at least established a kind of credential and Madeleine Ferrelyn led Caley into the sort of room he would have liked in his own house: large and low-ceilinged, with deep soft chairs, good curtains and carpet, French windows looking out over a big garden with a small orchard…

  ‘This is Robert Fallon,’ said Madeleine Ferrelyn, and Caley saw that Robert Fallon was the man who had been on the Tarleton’s stage with Hilary that night. Of Shona Seymour there was no sign.

  ‘Please sit down, Mr Merrick.’

  Caley sat facing her, plaiting the fingers of both hands together, then unplaiting them because that was an outward sign of nervousness.

  ‘You said this was about the Tarleton?’

  ‘Yes. You own it, Mrs Ferrelyn.’ It came out awkwardly and in a rush.

  ‘I do own it, although I don’t understand how you know that. Unless the Harlequin office—’ She glanced at Hilary, who said, ‘It’s unlikely. Even I didn’t know it until two days ago.’

  Madeleine looked questioningly at Caley. She did not quite say, what has my ownership of the Tarleton got to do with you, but he knew she must be thinking it.

  He said, ‘I’ve studied that theatre since I was a young man. More than thirty years now. I know so much about it. All its history—I’ve read about the people who performed there and worked there.’ He hoped this was not coming out too humbly; he was trying to keep firmly in mind all those long-ago remarks about being too humble, not pushy enough. But his next words came out with a desperation that even he could not miss.

  ‘Is it true that the restraint has ended at last and that you’re going to reopen it?’

  ‘Perhaps. A bit more than perhaps.’ It came out kindly enough, but it came out firmly.

  ‘I see.’ Caley sat back in his chair. Throughout the journey here he had planned how he would ask that question and that she would look at him kindly and say that since he felt strongly about this they could perhaps discuss it. That would have given him the opening he wanted. But he had not bargained for the presence of Hilary Bryant or Robert Fallon, and with them in the room his courage failed him. I can’t do it after all, he thought.

  Madeleine said, ‘Mr Merrick, I don’t understand. You’ve sought me out without in the least knowing me, and you’ve presumably made a journey to find this house—’

  ‘I’ve come from London,’ he said.

  ‘Which is quite a long way. You’ve come all that way, out of the blue, just to ask that question about whether I’m going to reopen a theatre? I’m sorry,’ said Madeleine briskly, ‘but none of that is credible. What’s this really about?’

  Caley summoned up a remaining shred of resolve, and said, ‘It’s about the man I think was my grandfather.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Madeleine, but Caley thought a wariness had entered her voice.

  He said, ‘I never knew my grandfather—I never knew any of my real family, because I was adopted as a baby. But when I was eighteen I was given a box of papers that had belonged to my family—miscellaneous stuff, but interesting. Among the papers was this.’ He reached into an inside pocket, and from a wallet, took out an old sepia photograph. Handling it with extreme care he gave it to Madeleine.

  She took the photograph and absolute silence closed over the room, and then Madeleine, who had not had any physical reaction to the astonishing events earlier on, looked at the photograph and, giving a cry of unmistakable pain, hunched over, clutching at her heart.

 
; ‘She’s all right,’ said the paramedic, straightening up from Madeleine’s chair, ‘and fortunately she had the GTN spray. You said that seemed to stop the pain?’

  ‘After about ten minutes,’ said Robert. ‘Not long before you arrived.’

  ‘That’s very good. You were right to call us, though. But the ECG is clear, and if the GTN halted the pain so quickly it was almost definitely angina and not another infarct.’

  ‘What…?’

  ‘Heart attack,’ he said. ‘Has there been anything to trigger an attack—unusual exertion or stress of some kind?’

  ‘I’m afraid there has,’ said Hilary.

  ‘Ah. Well, then, I think she’d better come in to hospital, just to be completely sure. Sorry, Mrs Ferrelyn, but you know how it goes.’

  ‘Will you take her now, or could I do that?’ asked Robert.

  ‘I’d like Robert to do it, if that’s all right,’ said Madeleine. ‘Anyway, you’re one of the motorbike paramedics, aren’t you? I’m feeling considerably better, but not quite up to riding pillion.’

  ‘Can you drive her in?’ said the paramedic to Robert. ‘I can get an ambulance if not.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Robert.

  ‘There’s no need to break the speed limit, but within a couple of hours. Ask for emergency assessment. They’ll do bloods and so on, Mrs Ferrelyn, and probably another ECG.’

  ‘I know the routine by now,’ said Madeleine drily.

  ‘I know you do.’ He patted her arm. ‘I’m fairly sure it’s a false alarm this time,’ he said, ‘but let’s make sure.’

  After he went there was a rather awkward silence. Then Hilary said, ‘Madeleine, I’ll pack an overnight bag for you, shall I? If you tell me where things are.’

  ‘That would be kind. But there’s no rush for a moment, Hilary dear. First, I’d like you to see the photograph.’

  She turned to Caley, who said, ‘Are you sure? The paramedic said to go to the hospital fairly soon.’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Madeleine, and Caley looked at her for a moment, then passed the photo to Hilary.

  Hilary took it with interest, and Robert leaned forward to see it as well. It was a shot of a young man of around twenty, standing outside a building Hilary recognized as the Tarleton, and it was possible to make out a poster on the theatre’s wall advertising a Marie Lloyd benefit night.

  ‘This would be 1910 or thereabouts?’ said Hilary to Caley.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I told you I was eighteen when I first saw this. I looked a lot different then, of course—more hair for one thing.’ For the first time a glint of humour showed. ‘But allowing for the different clothes, I might have been the young man in that photo.’ He paused, then said, ‘The name is written on the back.’

  As Robert took the photograph and turned it over, Madeleine said, ‘You don’t need to look on the back. I didn’t need to, either. I know who it is.’

  And Robert said, ‘Frank Douglas.’

  ‘I’d better tell you the truth before Robert carts me off to be stuck with needles and photographed from all angles,’ said Madeleine.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ began Hilary. ‘You’ve just had an angina spasm.’

  ‘I do have to,’ said Madeleine, her eyes still on the quiet figure of Caley Merrick seated opposite her. ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only if you’re well enough, though. But if you can—it would mean so much to me.’

  ‘To me, also.’ She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was subtly different, almost as if it was a much younger woman’s. ‘I was seventeen,’ said Madeleine, ‘and I was unbelievably naive—today’s seventeen year olds would never believe how naive I was. I was in my last term at school. A place in Dorset it was—I was very happy there.’ Hilary saw with relief that there was no longer the frightening bluish look round her lips, but thought they must make sure she really did get to the hospital within the hour.

  ‘My parents were abroad,’ said Madeleine. ‘But I was used to that—I’d grown up during the war years, remember, and my father was touring with ENSA. My mother usually went with him. She died right at the end of the war, and from then on my father travelled even more—but he always came back to England for school holidays, or I joined him wherever he was. That year he was in Italy, working with some theatre company. I was going to spend the summer with him—he said I’d learn some Italian and enjoy the sunshine.’ She paused, but Hilary thought it was not a pause of pain or weakness; it was more that she was trying to arrange the memories in order.

  ‘Before the term ended, I had an affair,’ she said. ‘An older man—his name isn’t important, he was a temporary member of staff at the school, giving us a series of talks on music. That was the starting point, of course. I told him about my father, and he was interested.’

  ‘Music,’ said Caley softly, and she looked at him and smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was a musician. I should like to tell you it was all deeply romantic, but it wasn’t really. It was hasty and furtive—he was torn with guilt afterwards and I was embarrassed.’ She made a dismissive gesture with one hand. ‘We don’t need any sentiment about that. But after he had gone—and I never knew where he went—there was the consequence. I was to have a child. Well, today that wouldn’t have mattered much, no one gives it a second thought, do they? They have the child and carry on with whatever they were doing, somehow weaving the child into the pattern of their life and adjusting where necessary. Or they have an abortion. But this was 1950: an illegitimate child was a deeply shameful thing and abortion was illegal. I was horrified and I had no idea what to do. In retrospect, I know I could have told my father—he wouldn’t have given a hoot for any scandal and would have supported me to the hilt. But I didn’t realize that at the time. You don’t always think very logically at seventeen. So I wrote to one of the dancers who had sometimes stayed with my parents: her name was Elise Le Brun—it wasn’t her real name, of course, but it was what she was always called. She was getting on for seventy by then, but she was one of those indestructible Cockneys. She always said she could tell a few tales about her youth, although she never told them to me—but my father said she had been quite a girl in the old Tarleton days. Whatever she had been, she was kindness itself to me,’ said Madeleine. ‘I stayed with her—my father thought I had cancelled the Italian trip because I wanted to spend that summer with a school friend—and Elise got me into a nursing home for the birth.’ She looked at Caley. ‘Forgive me for what I did afterwards,’ she said, ‘but I was half bullied, half coaxed into it.’

  ‘You gave the child away for adoption,’ said Hilary. She could not quite associate this unknown child from that long-ago hasty love affair with the quietly spoken man she had known slightly at the Harlequin offices, but the facts were gradually becoming clear.

  ‘Yes. Elise helped with that as well; she came from Southwark herself—she’d lived around the Tarleton since she was small, I think. She knew of two families who loved children and would like an extra one. She swore to me that they were kind and good, and that although they weren’t very well off they were reasonably comfortable.’

  ‘They were,’ said Caley. ‘They were kind and warm and no one in the family ever wanted for anything.’

  ‘I was distraught at the prospect of giving you away,’ said Madeleine, her eyes on him. ‘But I couldn’t see what else to do. And I trusted Elise—I even had a romantic idea that it would be nice for you to be near to the Tarleton—that you’d hear some of the tales about it, even that you might meet people my father had worked with.’ She gave a half smile. ‘It’s teenage girls’ magazine stuff, isn’t it? But I told you I was naive and it was how I saw it. I managed to make over a little money to you—some that my mother had left me and that I inherited when I turned twenty-one—so you would have a little money of your own.’

  ‘They never told me where that came from,’ he said. ‘It was just a bank account—money on deposit in m
y name. But I thought it could only be from—from you and I was grateful. It felt like a link.’ He paused, and then said, ‘I had the other link, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The box of things that had been my father’s. The day before they took you, I remember I snatched up photographs and old playbills and things more or less at random, and stuffed them into an old shoe box. I think I wanted you to know there was a link to that theatre.’

  ‘I did know,’ said Caley. ‘I knew from when I was eighteen. I’ve spent most of my life tracing the links and finding out about the people.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘I used to go into the Tarleton quite often. I managed to get a key…’

  He stopped uncertainly, and Madeleine at once said, ‘If you got hold of a key I don’t care how you did it.’

  ‘I liked going in there,’ he said, ‘I liked the feeling that I was encased in the past, that all the memories and the history were there. It ought to have been eerie, but somehow it never was. I found it friendly. Welcoming. There’s an old piano in the green room—out of tune, but playable. I’d learned the piano as a child, but there’d been no piano in my life for years. I began to play again.’

  And, thought Hilary, as well as that, you used to sing very softly when you walked through the theatre. Robert and I heard you that night. And I heard you again when you walked up the drive to this house earlier on. But I don’t think I’ll ever mention it and I don’t think Robert will, either. How immensely sad this is.

  ‘I never wanted you to reopen the place,’ said Caley. ‘I loved it so much as it was, with its memories and its history. I know that sounds mad, but it’s how I always felt. I never minded the piano being out of tune or the building being dark and empty.’

  ‘I remember Rinaldi—the Tarleton’s stage manager—once telling me it was a place that had its own magic,’ said Madeleine, and he looked at her gratefully.

  ‘It has, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘And as the years went along and nothing ever happened, I thought it would never be opened. I thought I was safe.’