by Lorna Gray
‘In here?’ I asked as I passed her. Robert was already inside.
I turned to meet her smile as she followed me in through the door. I remarked on a sudden note of understanding, ‘Whose room was this? You’ve been waiting to tell us this all along, haven’t you?’
Then I answered the question for myself. ‘This was Harriet’s?’
She beamed, triumphant. But for a moment, the merest portion of a second, I thought there was a brittle note behind the expression in those shining eyes.
Then she swept it away by sending an expressive hand in a thoughtful curve towards the doorway before conceding, ‘It’s actually disappointingly ordinary in here, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said. The room was utterly empty. The walls were plain and uncomplicated, and whitewashed like all the rest. This space was, in fact, completely devoid of, well, anything significant at all.
It was almost funny. The disappointment was my own fault. Or perhaps Robert's. I suppose I had been braced, after all his cautious words outside, to enter into a further dark encounter with my past. Those fleeting memories of running up the stairs at the Blaze Hotel with my husband had felt like a forerunner to something bigger. And I had known, even without Robert’s warning, that it was only a matter of time before Jacqueline gave me a second brush with the sad story of the girl with the thick dark hair and the dress from a genteel era.
So I suppose I might have been imagining in a small way that I would learn that I shared my grandmother’s somewhat fearsome sensitivity to the world of ghosts. Because, really, if any room should awaken those skills in me, I had thought it would be Harriet’s.
But nothing manifested itself between these plain walls. This narrow little bedroom carried no sense of her life, or her passing. This was a room that had lately housed a number of hospital children, and Harriet’s residence was swept up by the seamless continuity within these unadorned walls, so that one bored child’s presence was indistinguishable from the rest.
She didn’t even come in with the sudden bolt of discovering that Robert was watching me.
He gave himself away by abruptly fixing his attention upon the damaged fireplace as soon as I turned my head. I waited until he looked again. This time he didn’t pretend to hide his question – the one that went with his earlier concern for my welfare – and he received, after a moment, its answer.
We were both amused, actually, because there was nothing wrong here at all.
It was with a better feeling that I turned to join Jacqueline in the doorway. She was gazing out of the windows that lined the narrow corridor.
‘Do you see those doves?’ asked Jacqueline. Her tone made it clear she wasn’t thinking about ghostly memories of any sort. She was thinking about something tied to facts and physical details and she was drawing my attention to the view we had over the coach house.
A screen of trees beyond gave the illusion that these buildings stood alone in a damp landscape, but doves flew in the distance where the woodland tapered southwards.
Jacqueline pointed towards them. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is Bramblemead, where Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s estate manager lived. It’s a farm. You can see it from the drive.’
Suddenly, it was clear to me that some stronger feeling really was driving this tour after all. Beyond her, the workman’s whistle seemed to have stuck upon the same few memorable lines like a gramophone record that kept skipping: ‘Every little girl would like to be; The fairy on the Christmas tree.’
Whereas it was with an entirely different spirit that Jacqueline told me, ‘The estate manager is in that old photograph I have of that collection of gentlemen all standing on the front steps. Sampson Murray is the fellow on the second step down, do you remember him?’
‘I remember beards and top hats,’ I admitted, ‘and very little else.’
She caught my eye. ‘I bet, therefore, that you didn’t notice that he was a black man?’
She was hugging herself as she told me insistently, ‘Absolutely, he was. When Graham Hanley Ashbrook sold the Kenyan estate, he brought Murray back with him. I don’t know on what terms it was done, but as far as I can tell, Murray made his mark just as soon as he’d settled in here.’
The floor creaked as Robert joined us. She told us both, ‘He was running that farm over there, running every part of the estate, even to the point of walking in and out of this house with the same degree of intimacy with the son Walter. And,’ she added a shade sourly, ‘I have that photograph to prove it.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ For a moment I had been cheerfully waiting for Jacqueline to tell me that Sampson Murray had been employed as keeper of the family giraffes. I had even been readying my smile.
But somehow she was making me revisit the memory of my wartime home in Bristol, where houses with rooms to rent had been heavily papered with signs declaring, ‘No Irish, no coloured’.
I was thinking that her hotels mustn’t need any signage of that sort since wealth was a pretty robust barrier. I was afraid she was about to say something foul about Mr Murray’s place in this house now.
She wasn’t of course. She was saying, ‘Don’t you think it infuriating that such a man should have moved here at the height of the Victorian Empire – even within living memory of the era of all those Acts for the Abolition of Slavery – and yet barely a story about him remains? He must have been the first black man to live in these rural parts; I thought he would have left behind a spectacular record. But it turns out that seventy or eighty years is a long time for the memory of a man, regardless of skin colour, when the people who knew him are long-since dead too. Murray travelled across continents but left me nothing except a few surviving references to his name. His descendants own the farm these days.’
She added glumly, ‘There appears to have been a clause in the Will after the last Ashbrook died, which allowed Murray’s son to buy the place.’
‘And that’s a problem for you?’ I was utterly confused now.
‘Only because,’ she replied, ‘I can’t make contact with him.’
At last, I thought I was beginning to understand her frustration.
After a moment while her gaze still ranged over those distant trees, she added, ‘I think I met the son in question roaming about in that woodland when I first moved here – he was aged at least eighty-five and just as unassuming as his father. But I didn’t know then what I know now about the Ashbrooks, so I didn’t think to tackle him.’
‘Well,’ I suggested, ‘can’t anyone in the village introduce you?’
She cast me a sideways glance. ‘I refer you to my earlier statement about the lack of local stories.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t mean to say that the people in this neighbourhood are strangely silent about the present day black man in their midst. I think they’re trying to help. But all I can get from them is the reoccurring encouragement to find Murray’s son at Bramblemead. So you should know that I’ve been to Bramblemead – and the farmhouse there is a ruinous cowshed.’
She was glowering at those distant doves once more when she added, ‘There is a great-grandson – the young folk in the village do know him, at least. But he’s still out on manoeuvres in the Far East, so who knows what he’ll be able to tell me when he gets back.’
I didn’t quite understand after all. I said, puzzled, ‘Tell you what? Do you want to ask him to confirm your theory about the giraffes?’
‘No,’ she said so crossly that she made me jump. ‘I want to speak to Murray’s extremely elderly son about the girl who died when he was a boy. I want to ask him about Harriet.’
Jacqueline had already swept away along the corridor and I followed with Robert just behind. The movements of her hands weren’t at all graceful now.
She was saying fiercely, ‘Do you know what diphtheria does – did – back then? My children are vaccinated so it’s becoming less common, but all they had in Harriet’s time was hopelessness and the cries of plaintive parents begging to understand how a sor
e throat could kill. Six of the village children contracted it within a matter of days in 1873. Four of them died.’
Suddenly, she wasn’t telling me this. She was stopping at the top of the stairs and reaching past me to draw Robert forwards. She was gripping his sleeve and saying accusingly, ‘You know what it is, don’t you? And can you guess what Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s son and heir did while Harriet Clare was suffocating? He went away. Walter’s account ledgers say that he went off on some business trip to London and didn’t come back until all traces of the infection were gone. It’s the only part of these people that I can’t reconcile myself to. It’s so … so cold. How could he do it to her? How could he leave a poor parentless girl of thirteen to the care of servants, until her presence had faded from every record in this house?’
Her voice caught on a shrill note as she told Robert fiercely, ‘I’m a parent and it’s inconceivable. I wish I’d never looked in the wretched archives.’
I had my hand out upon the rail that shielded us from the drop over the stairwell. My grip was so firm it hurt. I released it. Oddly, it was seeing the reaction on Robert’s face that made me begin to understand the impact of mine. I saw the shape of his mouth barely change from its usual steady interest but I knew he was surprised. I was certain he was sensing the tug of his years of doctoring, just as I had felt her claim upon my widowhood. It was the effect Jacqueline created with her passion. And now I thought that she had to be completely unaware she was doing it. She didn’t know Robert. She couldn’t know how this appeal would affect him.
Jacqueline was hurrying Robert down the staircase into the light falling from that impressive arched window. It overlooked the stable yard and she was describing the legacy Graham Hanley Ashbrook had passed to his son. She was explaining the continuity of many generations who had cared for this house. However, the script didn’t follow quite the same pattern as before. Instead of using this window as a means of directing his mind to the myth embodied by that coach house, the legacy she was speaking about was the ownership that had passed through generations, and the memorial that Walter’s children had installed in his name.
By the time I had reached the landing of the first floor, she and Robert had already moved onwards to the turn. Jacqueline was quoting softly, ‘A man dies not while his world, his monument remains.’
It was the inscription I was supposed to be including in her book.
She was adding, ‘There’s a note that says that the memorial was installed by his daughter. It lists all his children’s names. By convention, it ought to have been put up after Walter’s death by his son, but some years had passed by the time the monument was installed. It’s possible that the son and heir had died by then as well; I need to check the dates. But Janet Ashbrook – the daughter – may well have been the last of them.’
They were so far ahead of me now that I was free to linger for a moment on the second step down from the first floor. I heard her tell Robert, ‘At the time of Harriet’s death, the daughter was living almost entirely in London. I’d understood that Miss Ashbrook was already married but the occasional reference to “Miss Ashbrook” in various letters implies that she came here more frequently in the years after Harriet’s death until abruptly a single melancholy line recorded that she was married and she wouldn’t be staying in this house again. If she was banished,’ she added grimly, ‘it doesn’t paint a very cheerful picture of Walter’s idea of fatherhood, does it?’
I didn’t really hear what Jacqueline said next. She had passed down into the entrance hall below me and I was pausing with my hand on the banister rail.
Then some change in the pattern of my thoughts intensified and grew clearer. I followed the impulse back along the landing towards the open door of Walter’s bedroom.
Somewhere in that wide expanse downstairs, Jacqueline was saying, ‘Perhaps the daughter felt differently about her exile, because she certainly cared enough to have the memorial to her father installed in the parish church.’
I heard Robert’s voice; a question. Then her reply, ‘No, not the little church you passed on your way here, but the more distant one in the nearest village. You can just see it from one of the east windows.’
I hadn’t noticed before that the workmen had gone out. It was time they had their lunch. I had the floor to myself and a glimpse of views over the stable yard and the parkland. And now, as I stepped through the door into that overlooked bedroom that belonged to Walter, I had that view to the east along the lime avenue.
These details were all monuments to the Ashbrook men. And through Jacqueline’s lecture about the memorial in the village church, she was undoing every idea she had given me of the role we have in building our own legacy for the dead by remembering them.
What did it matter that I had learned the Ashbrook names, when their house cared nothing for the memory of all the other people who had passed beneath its gaze? The inscription on the family memorial implied that a man built his own monument, so what did that say about the legacy of those who had no wealth, no property? My husband didn’t even have a grave. Archie had been buried at sea in the tomb of his sinking ship, and, like that estate manager and Harriet, we were all forgotten people here.
Only it wasn’t quite true. I knew it wasn’t true. Because, regardless of the Ashbrook taste for permanence in the form of stone and bricks and mortar, for me things might have been becoming a little more free, a little closer to my happier nature since I had rediscovered my power to speak of my husband.
I had less fear of calling to him now. I knew my strength, and the relationship that had underpinned it all. It was the same strength that in this quiet, thoughtful moment had led me to visit Walter John Ashbrook’s bedroom.
I think I must have done it with a defiant idea of assuring myself that rooms weren’t everything to the memory of a man.
It was a perfect invitation for the shock of silence that met me.
It was the silence of emptiness. Of daylight and of the drifting consciousness of someone else’s thoughts. The sense of it came as an assault. Far more physical than the one that had trapped my hand in the doorframe. Because he was here. I couldn’t see him, but he forced a disbelieving question from me.
‘Archie?’
Silence answered.
Because no one was here in this bright, whitewashed room but a fierce absence of life.
It crowded round like deafness while instinct sent my heartbeat hammering across the floorboards. It consumed my husband’s friendliness. I should never have tried to put a name to it. I’d called it to me.
This space became a hostile void. Unkind, unhealing; the weight of it crashed in from the corners. It swept like a flood through this house, pursuing the whisper of my footsteps as I turned and hurried for the stairs.
It came with me as I ran downwards. It blinded me and travelled a few yards ahead. I had a giddying sense of being half enclosed and half breaking free into fresher air. I was made dizzy by the way my eyes knew that I was racing onwards, and yet my mind behaved as if I were being snatched backwards into a return to that memory of racing up the staircase in the Blaze Hotel with my husband.
I was descending still. It was impossible that there should be any doubt about it, but I only knew this because I had a hand – my left, not the one my husband had gripped – out on the broad banister rail. It was stone and it ran like ice beneath my palm in a swoop towards the ground floor. It was blacker down here; duller out of the glare from that high window. The silence swept up from the space of the entrance hall like a barrier. It flung me back like grief. It stopped me with a thump upon the last step.
Then, at last, my senses met something I could put real words to.
The stout crown of the newel post caught me in the crook of my elbow. This too was stone. Glorious Victorian reconstituted stone dressed up to look like grey marble. The newel post snatched at me as my leading foot slipped over the lip of the last step. I saved myself by sort of crumpling over the heel of my traili
ng leg. I sat down hard upon the stairs with a suddenness that punched the air out of me.
I wasn’t sitting there for long. A fresh shadow swooped in along the foot of the stairs and this one was familiar and it took hold of me to haul me to my feet. I went gladly into the curve of Robert’s arm. I turned there against him, fingers knotting into a tangled grip upon the fabric of his coat. The staircase behind was desolately empty. I barely spared a thought for the curious presence of his companion hurrying out of the library just beyond.
I felt the strength of Robert’s hold on me. I clung to him for shelter from the maddening effect of this house, and begged him on a grim whisper to explain, ‘How did you know to warn me?’
Chapter 15
Robert hadn’t been warning me about anything. I realised in the next moment that his concern about my fitness to make this trip had been nothing more than friendly care for my hand.
I felt his confusion by the way that his grip slackened so that he might study my face while he tried to answer my question. He asked, ‘What did I warn you about? Did you hurt yourself just now?’
‘No, not at all,’ I said with remarkable steadiness, and stepped back to claim the support of the banister rail once more. This time it held me and the space around us had returned to its ordinary shabby self.
Sorry,’ I said hastily. ‘I must have tripped on the stairs in the process of hurrying after you.’
I used the edge of that bandaged hand to sweep the hair from my face. I did it because I was overheating all of a sudden and I was worrying him terribly, and, besides, there was something horribly corrupt about clinging to a man, when I had lately been thinking wild thoughts about the memory of another.
Jacqueline didn’t really know me well enough to guess at any of that. She thought I was tired and said that we had better go and find lunch if we were to have time to dissect her final edits before Robert and I had to meet the bus.
I believe I chattered my way through the soup and the innumerable questions about giraffes – she hadn’t forgotten them after all – and then I was free and hurrying along the lane that passed before the gatehouse through more of that interminable wind.
