In the kitchen they did not reply when Miss Bell said she’d pack and go. They didn’t look at her, and she knew they were thinking that she wouldn’t be able to keep her word. They were thinking she was hysterical and frightened, and that the weight of so eccentric a secret would prove too much for her.
‘It’s just that Mrs Abercrombie wanted to change her will, dear,’ Mrs Pope said.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Apse.
They spoke gently, in soft tones like Miss Bell’s own. They looked at her in a gentle way, and Tindall smiled at her, gently also. They’d be going against Mrs Abercrombie as soon as she was dead, Tindall said, speaking as softly as the others had spoken. They must abide by what had been in Mrs Abercrombie’s heart, Mr Apse said.
Again Miss Bell wondered what she would do when she left the garden, and wondered then if she had the right to plunge these people into unhappiness. With their faces so gently disposed before her, and with Plunkett out of the room, she saw for the first time their point of view. She said to herself that Plunkett would return to normal, since all her other knowledge of him seemed to prove that he was not a wicked man. Certainly there was no wickedness in Mrs Pope or Mr Apse, or in Tindall; and was it really so terrible, she found herself wondering then, to take from Mrs Abercombie what she had wished to give? Did it make sense to quibble now when you had never quibbled over Dr Ripley’s diagnosis of hypochondria?
Miss Bell imagined the mound in the shrubbery beside the other mound, and meals in the kitchen, the same as ever, and visitors in the garden on a Sunday, and the admission charges still passed on to the Nurses. She imagined, as often she had, growing quite old in the setting she had come to love.
‘A quiet little funeral,’ Mrs Pope said. ‘She’d have wanted that.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Apse said.
In her quiet voice, not looking at anyone, Miss Bell apologized for making a fuss.
To Dr Ripley’s surprise, Plunkett took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. He blew out smoke. He said:
‘Neglected gallstones: don’t wriggle out of it, Doctor.’ His voice was cool and ungracious. He regarded Dr Ripley contemptuously. ‘What about Bell’s hand? That woman near died as well.’
For a moment Dr Ripley felt incapable of a reply. He remembered the scratch on Miss Bell’s hand, a perfectly clean little wound. He’d put some iodine on it and a sticking-plaster dressing. He’d told her on no account to go poking it into her flower-beds, but of course she’d taken no notice.
‘Miss Bell was extremely foolish,’ he said at length, speaking quietly. ‘She should have returned to me the moment the complication began.’
‘You weren’t to be found, Doctor. You were in the bar of the Clarence Hotel or down in the Royal Oak, or the Rogues’ Arms –’
‘I am not a drunkard, Plunkett. I was not negligent in the matter of Miss Bell’s hand. Nor was I negligent over Mrs Abercrombie. Mrs Abercrombie suffered in no way whatsoever from gallstone trouble. Her heart was a little tired; she had a will to die and she died.’
‘That isn’t true, Doctor. She had a will to live, as this letter proves. She had a will to get matters sorted out –’
‘If I were you, Plunkett, I’d go and lie down for a while.’
Dr Ripley spoke firmly. The astonishment that the butler had caused in him had vanished, leaving him unflustered and professional. His eyes behind their spectacles stared steadily into Plunkett’s. He didn’t seem at all beyond the work he did.
‘Your car skidded,’ Plunkett said, though without his previous confidence. ‘You were whistled to the gills on Christmas booze that day –’
‘That’s offensive and untrue, Plunkett.’
‘All I’m saying, sir, is that it’d be better for all concerned –’
‘I’d be obliged if you didn’t speak to me in that manner, Plunkett.’
To Plunkett’s horror, Dr Ripley began to go. He placed his empty sherry glass on the table beside the decanter. He buttoned his jacket.
‘Please, sir,’ Plunkett said, changing his tone a little and hastening towards the sherry decanter. ‘Have another glassful, sir.’
Dr Ripley ignored the invitation. ‘I would just like to speak to the others,’ he said, ‘before I go.’
‘Of course. Of course, sir.’
It was, Dr Ripley recognized afterwards, curiosity that caused him to make that request. Were the others in the same state as Plunkett? Had they, too, changed in a matter of hours from being agreeable people to being creatures you could neither like nor respect nor even take seriously? Would they, too, accuse him to his face of negligence and drunkenness?
In the kitchen the others rose to their feet when he entered.
‘Doctor’s here to have a word,’ Plunkett said. He added that Dr Ripley had come to see their point of view, a statement that Dr Ripley didn’t contradict immediately. He said instead that he was sorry that Mrs Abercrombie had died.
‘Oh, so are we, sir,’ Mrs Pope cried. ‘We’re sorry and shaken, sir.’
But in the kitchen Dr Ripley didn’t feel their sorrow, any more than he had felt sorrow emanating from Plunkett in the drawing-room. In the kitchen there appeared to be fear in the eyes of quiet Mr Apse and in the eyes of Mrs Pope and the softly-spoken Miss Bell, and in the eyes of Tindall. It was fear, Dr Ripley suddenly realized, that had distorted Plunkett and continued to distort him, though differently now. Fear had bred greed in them, fear had made them desperate, and had turned them into fools.
‘Dr Ripley’ll see us through,’ Plunkett said.
When he told the truth, they didn’t say anything at all. Not even Plunkett spoke, and for a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the soft weeping of Miss Bell.
‘Her wishes were clear,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘She died when she knew she’d made them so, when she received the letter this morning. Her wishes would have been honoured in law, even though they weren’t in a will.’
They stood like statues in the kitchen. The weeping of Miss Bell ceased; there was no sound at all. They would none of them remain in the house now, Dr Ripley thought, because of their exposure one to another. In guilt and deception they had imagined they would remain, held together by their aberration. But now, with the memory of their greed and the irony of their error, there would be hatred and shame among them.
He wanted to comfort them, but could not. He wanted to say that they should forget what had taken place since Mrs Abercrombie’s death, that they should attempt to carry out her wishes. But he knew it was too late for any of that. He turned and went away, leaving them still standing like statues. It was strange, he thought as he made his way through the house, that a happiness which had been so rich should have trailed such a snare behind it. And yet it seemed cruelly fitting that the loss of so much should wreak such damage in pleasant, harmless people.
Mrs Acland’s Ghosts
Mr Mockler was a tailor. He carried on his business in a house that after twenty-five years of mortgage arrangements had finally become his: 22 Juniper Street, SW17. He had never married and since he was now sixty-three it seemed likely that he never would. In an old public house, the Charles the First, he had a drink every evening with his friends Mr Uprichard and Mr Tile, who were tailors also. He lived in his house in Juniper Street with his cat Sam, and did his own cooking and washing and cleaning: he was not unhappy.
On the morning of 19 October 1972, Mr Mockler received a letter that astonished him. It was neatly written in a pleasantly rounded script that wasn’t difficult to decipher. It did not address, him as ‘Dear Mr Mockler’, nor was it signed, nor conventionally concluded. But his name was used repeatedly, and from its contents it seemed to Mr Mockler that the author of the letter was a Mrs Acland. He read the letter in amazement and then read it again and then, more slowly, a third time:
Dr Scott-Rowe is dead, Mr Mockler. I know he is dead because a new man is here, a smaller, younger man, called Dr Friendman. He looks at us, smiling, with his unblinking eyes. Miss Aches
on says you can tell at a glance that he has practised hypnosis.
They’re so sure of themselves, Mr Mockler: beyond the limits of their white-coated world they can accept nothing. 1 am a woman imprisoned because I once saw ghosts. I am paid for by the man who was my husband, who writes out monthly cheques for the peaches they bring to my room, and the beef olives and the marrons glacés. ‘She must above all things be happy,’ I can imagine the stout man who was my husband saying, walking with Dr Scott-Rowe over the sunny lawns and among the rose-beds. In this house there are twenty disturbed people in private rooms, cosseted by luxury because other people feel guilty. And when we walk ourselves on the lawns and among the rose-beds we murmur at the folly of those who have so expensively committed us, and at the greater folly of the medical profession: you can be disturbed without being mad. Is this the letter of a lunatic, Mr Mockler?
I said this afternoon to Miss Acheson that Dr Scott-Rowe was dead. She said she knew. All of us would have Dr Friendman now, she said, with his smile and his tape-recorders. ‘May Dr Scott-Rowe rest in peace,’ said Miss Acheson: it was better to be dead than to be like Dr Friendman. Miss Acheson is a very old lady, twice my age exactly: I am thirty-nine and she is seventy-eight. She was committed when she was eighteen, in 1913, a year before the First World War. Miss Acheson was disturbed by visions of St Olaf of Norway and she still is. Such visions were an embarrassment to Miss Acheson’s family in 1913 and so they quietly slipped her away. No one comes to see her now, no one has since 1927.
‘You must write it all down,’ Miss Acheson said to me when I told her, years ago, that I’d been committed because I’d seen ghosts and that I could prove the ghosts were real because the Rachels had seen them too. The Rachels are living some normal existence somewhere, yet they were terrified half out of their wits at the time and I wasn’t frightened at all. The trouble nowadays, Miss Acheson says and I quite agree, is that if you like having ghosts near you people think you’re round the bend.
I was talking to Miss Acheson about all this yesterday and she said why didn’t I do what Sarah Crookham used to do? There’s nothing the matter with Sarah Crookham, any more than there is with Miss Acheson or myself: all that Sarah Crookham suffers from is a broken heart. ‘You must write it all down,’ Miss Acheson said to her when she first came here, weeping, poor thing, every minute of the day. So she wrote it, down and posted it to A. J. Rawson, a person she found in the telephone directory. But Mr Rawson never came, nor another person Sarah Crookham wrote to. I have looked you up in the telephone directory, Mr Mockler. It is nice to have a visitor.
‘You must begin at the beginning,’ Miss. Acheson says, and so I am doing that. The beginning is back a bit, in January 1949, when I was fifteen. We lived in Richmond then, my parents and one brother, George, and my sisters Alice and Isabel. On Sundays, after lunch, we used to walk all together in Richmond Park with our dog, a Dalmatian called Salmon. I was the oldest and Alice was next, two years younger, and George was eleven and Isabel eight. It was lovely walking together in Richmond Park and then going home to Sunday tea. I remember the autumns and winters best, the cosiness of the coal fire, hot sponge cake and special Sunday sandwiches, and little buns that Alice and I always helped to make on Sunday mornings. We played Monopoly by the fire, and George would always have the ship and Anna the hat and Isabel the racing-car and Mummy the dog. Daddy and I would share the old boot. I really loved it.
I loved the house: 17 Lorelei Avenue, an ordinary suburban house built some time in the early 1920s, when Miss Acheson was still quite young. There were bits of stained glass on either side of the hall door and a single stained-glass pane, Moses in the bulrushes, in one of the landing windows. At Christmas especially it was lovely: we’d have the Christmas tree in the hall and always on Christmas Eve, as long as I can remember, there’d be a party, I can remember the parties quite vividly. There’d be people standing round drinking punch and the children would play hide-and-seek upstairs, and nobody could ever find George. It’s George, Mr Mockler, that all this is about. And Alice, of course, and Isabel.
When I first described them to Dr Scott-Rowe he said they sounded marvellous, and I said I thought they probably were, but I suppose a person can be prejudiced in family matters of that kind. Because they were, after all, my brother and my two sisters and because, of course, they’re dead now. I mean, they were probably ordinary, just like any children. Well, you can see what you think, Mr Mockler.
George was small for his age, very wiry, dark-haired, a darting kind of boy who was always laughing, who had often to be reprimanded by my father because his teachers said he was the most mischievous boy in his class. Alice, being two years older, was just the opposite: demure and silent, but happy in her quiet way, and beautiful, far more beautiful than I was. Isabel wasn’t beautiful at all. She was all freckles, with long pale plaits and long legs that sometimes could run as fast as George’s. She and George were as close as two persons can get, but in a way we were all close: there was a lot of love in 17 Lorelei Avenue.
I had a cold the day it happened, a Saturday it was. I was cross because they kept worrying about leaving me in the house on my own. They’d bring me back Black Magic chocolates, they said, and my mother said she’d buy a bunch of daffodils if she saw any. I heard the car crunching over the gravel outside the garage, and then their voices telling Salmon not to put his paws on the upholstery. My father blew the horn, saying goodbye to me, and after that the silence began. I must have known even then, long before it happened, that nothing would be the same again.
When I was twenty-two, Mr Mockler, I married a man called Acland, who helped me to get over the tragedy. George would have been eighteen, and Anna twenty and Isabel fifteen. They would have liked my husband because he was a good-humoured and generous man. He was very plump, many years older than I was, with a fondness for all food. ‘You’re like a child,’ I used to say to him and we’d laugh together. Cheese in particular he liked, and ham and every kind of root vegetable, parsnips, turnips, celeriac, carrots, leeks, potatoes. He used to come back to the house and take four or five pounds of gammon from the car, and chops, and blocks of ice-cream, and biscuits, and two or even three McVitie’s fruitcakes. He was very partial to McVitie’s fruitcakes. At night, at nine or ten o’clock, he’d make cocoa for both of us and we’d have it while we were watching the television, with a slice or two of fruitcake. He was such a kind man in those days. I got quite fat myself, which might surprise you, Mr Mockler, because I’m on the thin side now.
My husband was, and still is, both clever and rich. One led to the other: he made a fortune designing metal fasteners for the aeroplane industry. Once, in May 1960, he drove me to a house in Worcestershire. ‘I wanted it to be a surprise,’ he said, stopping his mustard-coloured Alfa-Romeo in front of this quite extensive Victorian façade. ‘There,’ he said, embracing me, reminding me that it was my birthday. Two months later we went to live there.
We had no children. In the large Victorian house I made my life with the man I’d married and once again, as in 17 Lorelei Avenue, I was happy. The house was near a village but otherwise remote. My husband went away from it by day, to the place where his aeroplane fasteners were manufactured and tested. There were – and still are – aeroplanes in the air which would have fallen to pieces if they hadn’t been securely fastened by the genius of my husband.
The house had many rooms. There was a large square drawing-room with a metal ceiling – beaten tin, I believe it was. It had patterns like wedding-cake icing on it. It was painted white and blue, and gave, as well as the impression of a wedding-cake, a Wedgwood effect. People remarked on this ceiling and my husband used to explain that metal ceilings had once been very popular, especially in the large houses of Australia. Well-to-do Australians, apparently, would have them shipped from Birmingham in colonial imitation of an English fashion. My husband and I, arm in arm, would lead people about the house, pointing out the ceiling or the green wallpaper in our bedroom or th
e portraits hung on the stairs.
The lighting was bad in the house. The long first-floor landing was a gloomy place by day and lit by a single wall-light at night. At the end of this landing another flight of stairs, less grand than the stairs that led from the hall, wound upwards to the small rooms that had once upon a time been servants’ quarters, and another flight continued above them to attics and store-rooms. The bathroom was on the first floor, tiled in green Victorian tiles, and there was a lavatory next door to it, encased in mahogany.
In the small rooms that had once been the servants’ quarters lived Mr and Mrs Rachels. My husband had had a kitchen and a bathroom put in for them so that their rooms were quite self-contained. Mr Rachels worked in the garden and his wife cleaned the house. It wasn’t really necessary to have them at all: I could have cleaned the house myself and even done the gardening, but my husband insisted in his generous way. At night I could hear the Rachels moving about above me I didn’t like this and my husband asked them to move more quietly.
In 1962 my husband was asked to go to Germany, to explain his aeroplane fasteners to the German aircraft industry. It was to be a prolonged trip, three months at least, and I was naturally unhappy when he told me. He was unhappy himself, but on March 4th he flew to Hamburg, leaving me with the Rachels.
They were a pleasant enough couple, somewhere in their fifties I would think, he rather silent, she inclined to talk. The only thing that worried me about them was the way they used to move about at night above my head. After my husband had gone to Germany I gave Mrs Rachels money to buy slippers, but I don’t think she ever did because the sounds continued just as before. I naturally didn’t make a fuss about it.
On the night of March 7th I was awakened by a band playing in the house. The tune was an old tune of the fifties called, I believe, ‘Looking for Henry Lee’. The noise was very loud in my bedroom and I lay there frightened, not knowing why this noise should be coming to me like this, Victor Silvester in strict dance tempo. Then a voice spoke, a long babble of French, and I realized that 1 was listening to a radio programme. The wireless was across the room, on a table by the windows. I put on my bedside light and got up and switched it off. I drank some orange juice and went back to sleep. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder who had turned it on.
The Collected Stories Page 68
