I reached the top of the stairs. As I fumbled for the light switch, I thought I caught a glimpse of a figure darting away from me along the landing. I drew in my breath, feeling not so much the threat of being attacked as the terror of being silently observed, in a lonely place, by someone I had not known was there.
I was somehow convinced the figure had been a woman.
Finally, I managed to get the lights on.
“Hello,” I said, though my voice came out as a choked whisper. The landing was empty. The door to my room was standing slightly ajar.
I crossed the landing and peered inside. The bedroom seemed as empty as the hallway. A vaporous, tungsten light hung in the room’s angles and corners like shreds of spider silk, and through the top right hand pane of the window I could see the flat white plate of the moon rising above the estuary.
I told myself that this was the explanation, that the light I had seen from the garden was simply the moon’s reflection in the window glass. I flicked the light switch by the door, banishing the moon to outer darkness, then closed the curtains and sat down on the bed.
The room was the same but different. The bed and the wardrobe occupied the same positions they had always done, but the glass-fronted bookcase had been moved to the opposite wall, and at some point during the years of my absence someone had taken down the small framed aquatint of a steam train crossing a viaduct that had been in the room ever since I had been brought there on the evening following my parents’ funeral. Years later I discovered that the print was an original Ravilious. The knowledge that my uncle had placed this valuable object in my room, just because he thought I might like it, that its colours and subject matter might be reassuring to me, and regardless of its monetary value, made me respect and love him all the more.
The disappearance of the picture made me sad. I looked once more around the room, wondering what else might be missing. I leaned forward, running my hand over the polished walnut surface of the bedside cabinet, sliding out the little drawer, remembering how easily it flowed upon its runners at the start of every summer, how by September it would scarcely open, crammed solid as it was with the usual vacation detritus: paperback horror novels, half-filled exercise books, innumerable cellophane envelopes of foreign commemoratives.
The drawer opened easily now. It seemed, at first, that there was nothing inside it at all, then I noticed a single sheet of ruled notepaper, yellow with age and with a single line of writing across the top.
My dearest Johnny, it read. Today when I went to the village –
It was Anka’s writing. I knew it at once, from the hundreds of notes and amusing postcards she had sent me when I was at school. There was no date, nothing to tell me exactly when it had been written, although I supposed it must have been shortly before she died or I would have been bound to have come across it on a previous visit.
I wondered what had made her stop writing the letter, what had happened to her in the village. She was still a young woman when she died, not yet fifty, and as I stopped being a child and passed into puberty it was Anka who formed the basis of my first tentative and guilty sexual fantasies. It was not just that she was beautiful, with the pale skin and very fair hair typically associated with Scandinavians. She was also fun to be with, had a ribald sense of humour and enjoyed playing practical jokes. Those girls of my own age that I encountered – the sisters of friends or day pupils at the school I attended – seemed with their chapped lips and adolescent inarticulacy to be ignorant and coarse by comparison, and in any case I had no idea how I might go about approaching one of them. Anka I could talk to and touch, because talking and touching had always been a part of our relationship. I had even seen Anka naked once, when I barged into the bathroom just as she was stepping out of the shower. I was fourteen at the time and had never seen a naked woman outside of the fleeting glimpses offered to me by the airbrushed photographs in the ladmags that some of the senior boys kept stashed in their lockers. My cheeks flared up like a forest fire but Anka just laughed, and coiled herself sedately in a pale blue towel.
There was also a second incident, soon after my sixteenth birthday. I was in bed with a summer cold and feeling rather sorry for myself. Uncle Denny, as so often, was away on business, but Anka kept me well entertained, and I found I was glad we had the house to ourselves. I sensed a new dimension in our togetherness, something that had not been there before, something exciting and vaguely dangerous. One afternoon – we had been eating our lunch off trays and listening to the radio – Anka slipped off her sandals and climbed up on the bed with me. She leaned back against the headboard, her eyes closed, her shoulder pressing lightly against mine as she began telling me about the people she had known, the life she led in Denmark before she met my Uncle Denny and came to England.
“I was an artist, a sculptor,” she said. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you? My bronze of ‘The Young Lucifer’won first prize at my graduation show. Shall I open the window wider? You’re feeling a little feverish.”
She rested her hand against my forehead as if to check my temperature then moved it slowly across my face, stroking my lips and eyelids with the tips of her fingers. “You know it’s strange, but you remind me a little of my Lucifer. It’s something about your mouth, I think. You have a beautiful mouth, Johnny, did you know that? Your lips are fuller than the lips of most men. They are like rose petals.”
She pressed her palm against my mouth, then slid her hand sideways so that her little finger rested in the crack between my lips. Her other hand, whether by accident or on purpose I did not know, was pressing down on the duvet close by my groin. Sweat burst out on my forehead and under my arms and my penis began to get hard. I lay there, motionless apart from my swelling member, frantically insisting to myself that whatever happened next would be all right, because Anka was not really my aunt, she was just my uncle’s wife, and my uncle’s second wife at that.
Then suddenly the pressure on the bedclothes vanished and she was gone. I heard her running lightly downstairs, and then seconds later the sound of car wheels crunching on gravel. I remembered then that Uncle Denny was due back from Amsterdam that evening; apparently he had caught an earlier flight.
Everything seemed normal at dinner. Uncle Denny was in a talkative, jokey mood as he often was after a trip, and Anka played along just like always. But at some point during the night I was woken by the sound of them arguing.
“You’re not to touch the boy,” said Uncle Denny. He sounded cold, angry, utterly unlike himself.
“Your precious brother’s precious son,” Anka said. She made a strange noise, something between a cry and a laugh, and then fell silent. I think my uncle might even have struck her. It was the only time I ever heard them fighting, and for some reason it terrified me. I screwed my eyes shut and pulled up the covers, trying to block out not just the sounds but the sense of what was happening. A short time after that I went back to sleep.
My uncle left on business again three days later. I both hoped and feared that Anka would use this opportunity to pick up where she had left off, but she acted as if the whole strange episode had never happened.
I watched Newsnight and then went to bed. I thought of phoning Ginny to let her know where I was, should she need to contact me, but in the end I decided against it. I knew I was just looking for excuses to call her. If Ginny needed me for any reason she would ring my mobile. I thought I would have trouble sleeping, but the worry proved groundless. I woke just after eight, feeling rested and curiously optimistic about things, filled with a sense of wellbeing I hadn’t experienced in months, and certainly not since Ginny moved out. I supposed the change of scene was doing me good.
I ate breakfast in the kitchen and afterwards began my inspection of the house. I had planned to make a detailed inventory, but I quickly realised that such a task would take me weeks and possibly months to complete. It wasn’t just the number of things, it was the difficulty of categorizing them. Some, like the Mackintosh chair in
my uncle’s office and Anka’s pretty little Sheraton writing desk, were valuable antiques that I knew should be put into secure storage until I decided what I wanted to do with them. Others – my uncle’s books, the photographs of him and my father as students at Oxford – were less of a worry in financial terms, but no less vital in the matter of what they meant to me personally.
The problem was it was all of a piece. It was not the individual objects that carried significance, so much as Southshore as a whole, as an entity. I wandered through the rooms, picking things up and putting them down again, and the longer I went on the less I felt able to make a firm decision about anything.
I began to develop a theory that there was no secret hidden in the house, just this poignant physical detritus of time’s passing. I could keep everything, or keep nothing, it would make no difference. The time had come to let it go, to turn it over to the auctioneers.
My uncle’s odd request was really quite simple: he had wanted me to let the house die with him.
This idea was so liberating it was like a weight being lifted from me. If I had been the kind of person that believes in ghosts, I might almost have concluded that Uncle Denny was somewhere close by and approving my decision, but in reality I supposed it was simply the relief that comes with any resolution of a difficult problem: I had decided in effect to give up on it, and I was glad.
I heated some soup for lunch and reviewed my plans. I had reckoned on being at Southshore for some weeks. There were a couple of sales I would need to attend later in the month, but other than that, my business did not necessitate me being in London. Indeed, I had welcomed the time away as an opportunity to take stock, to recuperate at least in part from the aftermath of my breakup with Ginny. In the light of recent events, however, there seemed little point in staying on. A day or two should now be sufficient, just long enough for me to organize the removal and storage of the more valuable pictures and furniture. I also wanted, if I could, to contact the cleaning woman my uncle had hired and arrange for her to continue her weekly visits. The rest could stay as it was until the house was sold. There were a few things, some small keepsakes, that I wanted to take back to London with me, but these were barely enough to fill a cardboard box and I thought I would probably find one of those in the store cupboard on the landing. I went to look, but discovered the door to the cupboard was locked. I could not remember it ever being locked in the past, but dismissed this as a minor annoyance. The key would be here in the house somewhere, it was bound to be. I could hunt for it later.
I washed up the dishes and tidied the kitchen then decided I would take a walk into the village. St Lawrence didn’t offer much in the way of shopping facilities, but there was a post office and general store which sold most of the basics, enough to tide me over until I left. I also felt the need for some fresh air. I had been stuck inside all morning, and it wasn’t until I opened the front door that I realised how bright and warm the day was. I took the short cut into the village, a narrow footpath skirting fields and then cutting down through the new estate into what passed for the High Street.
Like my bedroom at Southshore, the village was the same and yet different. The pub had been completely refurbished, the telephone box by the garage had disappeared. The post office store, though, was still there and still doing business.
“Did you find everything you needed?” said the woman behind the counter. “We were ever so sorry to hear about your uncle.”
“Yes, thank you. At least he had a good long innings.” I smiled, doing my best to seem friendly, but not wanting to get drawn into conversation. Although I knew it was inevitable, I still found I couldn’t get used to the idea of people talking about me behind my back. I was glad I had already made the decision to go back to London.
“We were all quite shocked, actually,” the woman persisted. “Especially as Annie said she saw him the other week.”
I stared at her, not comprehending. “What on earth do you mean?”
The woman shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Anne Mellors, the lady who does the cleaning. She saw lights on up at the house. She thought your uncle was back for good.”
“I’d like to have a word with Mrs Mellors, actually. I’d be grateful if you’d ask her to call.”
I gathered up my purchases and left, not waiting for the woman to reply. I knew my behaviour would seem rude to her, but I felt unable and unwilling to excuse myself. Not only were the locals talking about me, they were trying to make fun of me, too. Perhaps it was something they did to all Londoners. I wouldn’t have minded that so much – I was leaving anyway. What enraged me about their little haunted house joke was that it had been made at my uncle’s expense. I even found myself wondering if it had been this Mrs Mellors who had somehow switched on the upstairs light the evening of my arrival, but of course that was stupid. In any case, if they were trying to scare me they would have to do better than that.
I stormed back across the fields feeling furious, and wondering how I could get my own back, but by the time I reached the house my anger had cooled. In a year the house would be sold, and none of this would matter anyway. I resolved to forget all about it.
I booted up the computer in my uncle’s office so I could check my emails and deal with some of the more urgent correspondence, then spent the rest of the evening watching television. I went to bed at around one o’clock, so tired that I fell asleep with the light on. Half an hour later I woke with a start, unsure for a moment of where I was, and then uncomfortably aware of the lamp shining full on my face. I leaned over to switch it off, and in the fleeting afterglow I caught a glimpse of a woman, standing beside the bed. I snapped the light back on immediately but there was no one there.
I fell asleep again and dreamed of Ginny, a row that ended in sex, a petulant, angry coupling that felt like a continuation of our fight. As I struggled in her arms I became aware that strands of her hair had become caught on my shirt buttons, that I was tied to her and could not get loose. The hair, though, was not short and dark like Ginny’s own, but long and light, glass-coloured, and as I looked down at her, spread on the bed, I saw the woman I was with was not Ginny after all, but Anka.
I tried to roll away but there was no room to move.
“It’s okay,” Anka said. She reached up and touched the side of my face. “It’s okay, Johnny.”
I could hear her voice, so clearly it was as if she was actually there in the room with me, and I could smell her breath, the woody, aniseed scent of a particular garden herb she liked to nibble. Her hands gripped my buttocks, pulling me astride her. I bent to kiss her, grinding my mouth down on hers and closing my eyes. I came almost at once. Ginny and I hadn’t made love in almost three months and my orgasm hit me so hard it was like hoof beats against my skull. I tried to wake up, then realised I was already awake. The inside of my thigh was sticky with semen.
I waited for it to get properly light and then I called Ginny.
“Don’t laugh at me, Gin,” I said. “But I think the place is haunted.”
She sighed. “What are you calling for, Johnny? I thought we’d agreed.”
It was strange, but the sound of her voice, so familiar, so familiarly irritated, was enough to bring me back to reality. It was also enough to remind me that the Ginny I still missed was not the Ginny that now actually existed, no matter how much I tried to fool myself. The connection between us was broken. It had been stupid to call.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a bit weird, I suppose, being back here after all this time.”
“And I’m sorry about your uncle. He was a nice man. Go back to London, Johnny. You can leave all this stuff to the lawyers, make them earn their fee for a change.”
“That’s what he said, too. Uncle Denny, I mean.”
“Well, there you are, then.”
There seemed nothing more to be said. I said goodbye and ended the call. I felt both wretched and foolish, wretched for having to be reminded yet again that it was over between u
s, foolish because if I had wanted to look an idiot, calling my ex-wife at the crack of dawn and raving about ghosts seemed the perfect way of going about it.
I got myself up and dressed, then called the solicitor in Maldon and told him it was my intention to sell the house as soon as it had passed through probate. When he asked if I intended to live there or rent it out in the meantime, I said no. I added that I was concerned about my uncle’s pictures, and asked if he could recommend anyone to store them for me.
“I’m glad you brought that up,” he said. “The current period of insurance has almost expired, and the policy your uncle put in place is very expensive. It would make a lot more sense to put the paintings and antiques under separate cover.” He said he would email me some details later that morning.
When I had finished dealing with the solicitor, I began gathering together those few of my uncle’s possessions that I intended to take back with me to London. There weren’t many. The two days I had spent rifling through drawers and cupboards and picking over the remnants of the past had given me a distaste for the whole business and I was tempted to leave as I had come, empty handed. In the end though I knew there were some things I would regret forever if I didn’t save them, and it was these things – the university photographs, and pictures of my parents on their wedding day, an early pastel by Ivon Hitchens, the six Royal Copenhagen mugs – that I put together on the kitchen table ready to pack. This brought me once again to the problem of what to pack them in. There were some bin liners under the sink and in the understairs cupboard I found the old nylon carry bag Anka had always used for her vegetable shopping, but neither of these were really suitable and I resigned myself to hunting down the key to the locked store cupboard.
House of Fear Page 18
