The Steps up the Chimney

by William Corlett

  ‘I hope it happens while we’re here,’ Alice told him, ‘then we wouldn’t have to go back to school.’

  ‘I thought you liked school,’ Jack said, concentrating on the road ahead.

  ‘I do,’ Alice replied and lapsed into silence once more.

  The light was fading fast and had reached that uncomfortable gloaming where nothing is quite distinguishable. Jack switched on the headlights. As he did so, a bright streak of red dashed across the road ahead of them, making him brake suddenly.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he asked, with surprise. ‘A fox. I nearly ran into it.’

  ‘I saw it,’ Mary cried.

  ‘And I did,’ Alice added excitedly. ‘Did you, Will? Did you see it?’

  But William remained silent, staring out into the thin light, transfixed by the two bright eyes that stared at him from the secret depths of the ditch at the road’s side. And, as the motor started up once more and the Land-Rover moved forward, so he swivelled round until he was looking out of the back window, unable to break the invisible string that seemed to attach him to them.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ Alice asked later, breaking the renewed silence. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Not much further. The road drops down again and then we turn into Golden Valley.’

  It was already dark when they reached the valley. The rain had stopped and a wind was rattling the branches of the trees. The road was climbing steeply again and there was the sound of running water.

  ‘The brook follows the track all along here,’ Jack explained. ‘It’s a pity it’s dark. But you’ll see it all tomorrow. Listen,’ and an owl hooted somewhere near by.

  ‘Why is it called Golden Valley, Uncle Jack?’ Mary asked.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ he replied. ‘There’s another Golden Valley over towards Hereford as well. Maybe ours was named after the house – or was the house named after the valley? I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe they dug for gold here,’ Alice suggested, excited by the idea. But Jack told her he thought it unlikely.

  ‘Is all this your land?’ Mary asked, staring out of the window.

  ‘No. It probably was once. But now it belongs to the local landlord. We just have two acres.’

  ‘Will we be allowed to explore it, seeing it doesn’t belong to you?’ she asked.

  ‘I expect so. There are lots of footpaths. I’ve got an Ordnance Survey map at the house. Just don’t go causing any trouble, though. I want to keep in with the natives! We’re here,’ and, as he spoke, ahead of them a light glimmered distantly through the trees. He slowed the motor once more in front of a gate. ‘William, can you hop out and open the gate, please?’

  The night air was cold after the enclosed atmosphere. William walked in the light of the headlamps towards the wooden gate and swung it open. As he waited for the Land-Rover to drive through he looked round at the dense trees that reared up on either side of the valley. The wind was loud in the branches and the sound of the brook was overpowering. Then another sound, a soft panting, snuffling, breathing sort of sound, made him look behind him, searching in the darkness for its source. Although he couldn’t see anything, he had a strange and eerie sense that he was being watched.

  ‘Go away,’ he whispered and he noticed that his voice was shaking with fear.

  ‘Hey – William! Hurry up!’ Jack called and William swung the gate closed and scrambled back into the safety of the Land-Rover.

  ‘Brrrh!’ Jack said, driving on. ‘It’s cold enough for snow.’

  By the time they arrived at the house the night was completely dark and it was impossible to see anything except the vaguest outline. A light was burning in the porch and there was an impression of a sprawling building with many darkened windows.

  ‘Welcome to Golden House,’ Jack said and a moment later, as the motor came to a halt, the front door opened and a young woman appeared, her silhouette framed in the light from the hall behind her. Her pale-blonde hair hung in a sheet down her back and stirred in the breeze as she moved. She was wearing a long, loose-fitting garment which failed to hide an enlarged stomach.

  ‘Uncle Jack!’ Mary exclaimed before she could stop herself. ‘Phoebe’s pregnant!’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘didn’t I tell you?’ and then the figure ran out of the door towards them, her arms extended in greeting.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘Supper’s all ready. You must be starving.’ As she spoke she put her arms round Jack’s neck and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Everything OK?’ he asked her. She nodded and smiled.

  ‘I’m not used to being on my own here yet,’ she explained shyly to the children. ‘But, all the same, he worries too much. Now, let me see you. Goodness! You’ve all grown so much. Come inside, quickly. It’s freezing out here,’ and she hurried them into the house leaving Jack to bring the cases.

  ‘I’ll help you, Uncle Jack,’ William said, turning at the doorway and going back to where he was struggling with all three cases at the same time.

  ‘Thanks. You all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ William replied, avoiding his uncle’s eyes.

  ‘You seemed a bit quiet on the journey.’

  ‘I’m all right, honestly I am,’ the boy said and taking one of the cases he went into the house.

  As Jack followed him in and closed the front door, the moon came out from behind the clouds and cast pale shadows amongst the trees and across the rough grass that skirted the drive. An owl hooted at a distance and, nearer, a strange staccato barking indicated the whereabouts of the fox.

  3

  The First Night at Golden House

  JACK AND PHOEBE had only been at Golden House for a few months and most of the building was still in a terrible state of disrepair. They had, however, made comfortable a section of the centre, around the main hall, and it was here that they intended to live while Jack gradually renovated the rest. The idea was that eventually they would open the house as a hotel.

  The hall that the children entered was the oldest part of the building and dated back to the Middle Ages. It had a stone-flagged floor and a huge fireplace that had been put in during Tudor times, Jack explained to them.

  ‘Before that there would just have been a hole in the roof,’ he said.

  A staircase rose from the hall to a gallery that ran round three sides, with doors leading into the various upper rooms. One was Jack and Phoebe’s bedroom, a second was a huge and antiquated bathroom. All the others were in varying states of chaos. Building materials and paints in one, furniture piled high in another, cobwebs and fallen plaster and the grime and dust of the years in the others.

  A second staircase, narrow and spiralling, behind a door in one corner of the gallery led up to three smaller, low-ceilinged attics, with exposed beams that crossed the rooms like horizontal bars in a gymnasium. Two of these rooms had been prepared for the children. Mary and Alice were to share one and William had the second one to himself. Up here there was also a bathroom and lavatory that had obviously been recently installed.

  ‘Specially for your visit,’ Jack said, with a note of pride in his voice. Then he grinned. ‘I hope it all works. I’ve never actually done plumbing before.’

  The rooms had been painted and there were new curtains at the small dormer windows and matching bedspreads on the single beds. The wooden floors had old rugs on them and there were lamps beside each of the beds.

  ‘Why don’t we ever get rooms of our own?’ Mary demanded crossly. ‘William always does. Just because he’s a boy. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘I don’t mind sharing with you, Mare,’ Alice said in a small voice.

  ‘That’s not the point. I mind sharing with you. I want a room to myself.’

  ‘It’s ever such a big house, Mare,’ Alice whispered, her eyes wide as she looked round at all the dark corners on the landing outside their door.

  ‘You’re such a wimp, Alice,’ Mary said and then she screamed and dived for her bed, as William jumped out of his ro
om with a snarl.

  ‘William! I’ll kill you if you do that again. I swear I will.’

  ‘Don’t, Will,’ Alice said, still using her ‘small’ voice. ‘I don’t like it here.’

  William put an arm round her and hugged her.

  ‘It’s all right, Al. I’ll be next door. And Uncle Jack’s just downstairs.’

  ‘But what if a witch comes in the night?’ Mary whispered, warming to her subject. ‘You wouldn’t hear us if she put a spell on us straight away. She could take us off into one of the other rooms, where Uncle Jack hasn’t even been yet, and she could lock us away and make us sleep for ever and no one would even know where to look for us.’

  Alice sat on the edge of her bed, wide-eyed and hugging herself. As Mary finished speaking she suddenly leaped across the room, wailing and waving her hands in front of her. Alice shot back up the bed and pulled the eiderdown over her head.

  ‘Mary,’ William said, using his big brother voice, ‘you’re scaring Alice.’

  ‘No she isn’t. I think she’s stupid,’ Alice said, her head still under the eiderdown.

  ‘And the witch would come each day and fatten you up,’ Mary continued, kneeling on the bed in front of the crouched figure under the eiderdown. ‘And she’d come and prod you every so often to see if you were ready to EAT!’ As she shouted the word eat, her hands dived under the eiderdown and she started to tickle her sister.

  ‘Stop it, Mary. Stop it!’ Alice pleaded, shrieking and giggling helplessly at the same time.

  ‘Mary, I’m warning you!’ William said and he dived on top of her, pulling her off Alice.

  This unexpected onslaught knocked Mary off balance and she started to topple off the bed. Grabbing Alice, she tried to steady herself, but instead all three of them landed on the floor with a bump and lay there panting and exhausted.

  ‘Ugh. I feel sick now,’ Alice groaned, and she started to laugh again.

  ‘Hey, you lot!’ they heard Jack calling up the staircase from the gallery below. ‘Supper.’

  ‘Ugh! Supper! I’ll be sick,’ Alice moaned, then she got to her feet and ran for the door. ‘Mary doesn’t want any supper, Uncle Jack. She’s lying down,’ she yelled.

  ‘You liar, Alice!’ Mary said, scrambling to her feet just as Jack came into the room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, anxiously. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Take no notice of them,’ William confided in him. ‘They’re all right really.’

  ‘She was lying down,’ Alice said.

  ‘Little things please little minds, Alice,’ Mary said, tucking her blouse into her waistband. But Alice had already left the room and was clattering down the stone stairs.

  The table was laid in the kitchen, a large room situated at the back of the house through a door from the hall. It had an old cast-iron kitchen range, in which a fire glowed. Two wooden-backed armchairs stood on either side of the hearth, with bright cushions on their seats. There was a dresser, its shelves crowded with crockery, and cupboards for the pots and pans. Along one wall a stone trough served as a sink and beside it there was a cold water pump. An old-fashioned, electric water heater was fixed to the wall beside it, with a pipe leading from the pump. In the wall behind the sink, a long, low window looked out into the dark night.

  ‘We meant to have so much finished before you arrived,’ Phoebe apologized, ‘including curtains in here. Sorry! But there’s always so much to do. Now, Mary, if you sit there, with William beside you and Alice here, beside me.’

  As she spoke she brought a soup tureen to the table and started to ladle out bowls of steaming broth. Jack meanwhile was cutting a loaf of brown bread.

  ‘What’s your favourite food?’ Phoebe asked.

  ‘Sausages and baked beans,’ Alice replied at once.

  ‘Hamburgers,’ William and Mary chorused in unison.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Phoebe exclaimed. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to hate it here.’

  ‘We’re vegetarians,’ Jack explained.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Mary said after a moment, feeling that someone should speak.

  ‘What’s a vegetarian?’ Alice asked.

  ‘What d’you think, idiot,’ William said, looking distinctly embarrassed.

  ‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why I asked.’

  ‘They just eat vegetables,’ William said in a half whisper, as though hoping that he wouldn’t be heard.

  ‘Ugh!’ Alice shrieked. ‘But I hate vegetables!’

  ‘We do eat other things,’ Jack said with a laugh. ‘Rice and lentils and cheese and . . .’

  ‘Delicious soup, Aunt Phoebe . . . I mean . . . Phoebe,’ Mary said, trying to ease the situation and making it worse with her mistake. Then she blushed.

  ‘You can call me Aunt Phoebe, if you want to,’ Phoebe said, smiling.

  ‘But you’re not, are you?’ Alice interjected, blowing on a spoonful of hot soup. ‘You’d have to be married to Uncle Jack in order to be our aunt, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Phoebe replied and she glanced at Jack, as if looking for support.

  ‘When’s the baby expected?’ Mary asked, trying once again to make polite conversation.

  ‘At the end of January,’ Phoebe replied.

  ‘But . . .’ Alice couldn’t stop herself saying, although William was staring at her dangerously. She closed her mouth, willing herself not to speak any more.

  ‘But what, Alice?’ Phoebe asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she mumbled.

  The soup was followed by macaroni cheese, with jacket potatoes and salad, and the rest of the meal passed without too many awkward moments except when William asked if there was any ketchup.

  ‘Oh dear. There’s some home-made chutney, would that do?’ Phoebe asked, hopefully.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ William told her and wished that the ground would swallow him up.

  ‘It’s quite nice, Will,’ Alice told him, tucking into her plateful and wanting to be reassuring.

  ‘I love jacket potatoes,’ Mary said, valiantly.

  However, the pudding, it was agreed all round, was ‘brill’. Mary said so and Alice said so and William nodded and asked for a second helping. It was a treacle and banana tart and Phoebe said she’d made up the recipe.

  ‘She’s really great at puddings,’ Jack said, helping himself to another portion. ‘You wait till you taste her chocolate mousse.’

  ‘Did you notice?’ Mary said when the girls were in bed and William was sitting on the floor between them wrapped in the eiderdown from his own room. ‘He’s obviously madly in love with her.’

  ‘Ugh! How revolting,’ Alice protested.

  ‘How was it obvious?’ William said. ‘I don’t think it was obvious at all.’

  ‘Women notice these things,’ Mary told him smugly.

  ‘You’re not a woman, Mary,’ Alice rounded on her, impatiently, ‘and anyway, if they’re so in love – why don’t they get married? William – what’ll happen to the baby, if they’re not?’

  ‘Nothing,’ William replied. ‘It won’t make any difference’.

  ‘Except – it’ll be born out of wedlock,’ Mary said in a dramatic whisper.

  ‘What’s wedlock?’ Alice asked, nervously. It sounded pretty gruesome.

  ‘Being married, that’s all. Don’t listen to Mary, she’s in one of her funny moods. You don’t have to be married to have babies,’ William told her.

  ‘I know that,’ Alice wailed, in an exasperated voice. ‘But all the same . . . well, I mean, if it doesn’t matter, then why does anyone get married?’

  The three of them considered this for a moment.

  ‘I used to think you had to be married to have babies,’ Mary then said.

  ‘You don’t though, do you?’ Alice asked uncertainly.

  ‘No. Of course you don’t.’

  ‘That’s what I just said, Mary. Don’t be such a know-all.’

  ‘Shut up squabbling, you two,’ William interrupted them. ‘
Of course you don’t have to be married to have babies. But in the old days it was a sin if you weren’t. Only now people don’t believe that so much. Or, at least, some do and some don’t.’

  ‘Isn’t it confusing?’ Alice sighed.

  ‘All the same,’ Mary said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder why they haven’t got married.’

  ‘Ask them,’ William said, trying to end the discussion.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Mary protested. ‘I’d be embarrassed.’

  ‘I will. I don’t mind,’ Alice said.

  ‘No, Alice. Just leave it,’ her brother advised her. ‘Anyway, Mum said they were going to get married eventually.’

  ‘But that was ages ago, and they still haven’t.’

  ‘Maybe they want to get the house right first,’ William suggested, without much conviction.

  ‘But that’ll take for ever and the baby will be out of wedlock.’ Alice started to sob, dramatically, and then she yawned noisily.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ William said, getting up and crossing to the door. ‘It’s freezing in here.’

  ‘It’s lovely and warm in bed,’ Mary said, drowsily. ‘Good night, Will.’

  ‘Night Mare!’ William said with mock terror, cracking one of their oldest jokes. ‘Night, Al.’ But Alice was already asleep. He switched off both the lamps and tiptoed to the door.

  The landing was in darkness, as he crossed to his own door, but thin moonlight filled his room with an eerie white haze. He went to the little window and looked out into the night. At first he could see nothing, but gradually, as his eyes grew accustomed to the half-dark he saw the steeply pitched tiled roof of the house and below it a corner of the moonlit garden. Further off, a bank of wind-tossed trees rose towards a starry sky. Clouds moved fast across an almost full moon, which shone down from somewhere so near above him that he felt as if he could open the window and reach out and touch it. Then, as he was about to leave the window and go to his bed, a dark shape fluttered into view in front of him, making him pull back, startled and for a moment afraid. The shape came to rest out on the sloping roof just below the window. After a moment’s fearful confusion, he realized that it was a great, dark bird. It folded its wings close to its body and then slowly turned its head, as though on a pivot. Two huge, white-ringed eyes stared at him and blinked. William remained poised and breathlessly watching until the owl, with a long, sad, ghostly sound, half flute-whistle, half human sigh, turned its head once more and, stretching its wings, floated away on the moonlit air out of his sight.