Spectral Shadows

by Robert Westall

  She was going up to give Miss Yaxley a piece of her mind. She shovelled the sovereigns viciously back into the churn, and was just marching to the door when another thought struck her.

  Was there anything else?

  She searched the rest of the mantelpiece with the grim thoroughness of a police inspector. It was as well she did. A teapot with a chipped spout. Full of greasy five-­pound notes. Over a thousand pounds!

  She shoved the lot into a tote bag, washed her hands, put on makeup and set out. As she went out the front gate, Mr. Gotobed was giving Jane a lesson in hedge-­laying.

  ‘Hack away from yourself or you’ll have your fut off in a minute. Sideways, away from ye’. Like this!’

  ‘Won’t be long – just nipping up to the village,’ she called. In a tone of cold fury that made Tim peer over the hedge at her, his face wrinkled up in bafflement.

  ‘Oh, you’ve brought Sepp’s watch,’ said Miss Yaxley, picking it up with a satisfied tightening of her lips. ‘It was his father’s watch before him.’

  Rose banged the milk-­churn down on the table.

  ‘An’ his sovereigns! He always liked sovereigns, did Sepp. Collected them when he was a boy. Said they’d never rot!’

  Rose banged down the teapot, with a force that threatened further damage to it.

  ‘An’ his petty cash!’ said Miss Yaxley.

  ‘A thousand pounds,’ said Rose, ominously.

  ‘He was never short of a dollar, Sepp.’ Miss Yaxley calmly shoved the money back into the teapot, and put the lid back on. She was showing no emotion at all. Rose felt so weird she almost let Miss Yaxley get away with it, as she matter-­of-factly stowed the stuff on her own mantelpiece.

  ‘I think I’m owed some explanation. My children might have . . . !’

  ‘I saw you had an honest face,’ said Miss Yaxley. ‘Or I wouldn’t have let the cottage. I knew you’d be up . . .’

  ‘That’s not the point. They’ve been lying there seven years. With the back door open. Anyone could’ve taken them, young tearaways . . .’

  ‘We don’t have young tearaways round here.’

  ‘You amaze me.’

  ‘Anyway, nobody round here would touch Sepp’s things.’

  ‘Why NOT?’

  ‘It was wi’ the lawyers. In the hands o’ the lawyers. Sepp wasn’t legally dead, til this June. We couldn’t touch none of his stuff. Would be agin the law.’

  ‘Then why didn’t the lawyers take charge of the valuables?’

  ‘Pro’bly they didn’t know he had any.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’

  ‘They never asked me.’

  Rose felt she was being led round in circles. She grasped for any solid fact in this madness. Desperation made her ruder than she ever usually was.

  ‘Would you mind telling me what exactly happened to your brother, Miss Yaxley?’

  ‘He just . . . went. Went out one morning an’ never came back. I don’t even know what morning it was. He always came up for his tea Fridays, and he didn’t come that week. Second week he didn’t come, I told the poliss.’

  ‘Didn’t the police search?’

  Miss Yaxley shrugged, head down. ‘They did, but . . . Sepp went out on the marshes a lot. Caught things. Tide can be treach’rous. Seven years you have to wait, before you can declare un dead. If there’s no body.’

  ‘But surely you could clear up his house?’

  ‘Got enough to do here. Sepp an’ me weren’t that close.’

  It was like beating your head against a brick wall, Rose thought. It was like being in the mist again. It was as if Miss Yaxley were speaking to her from a different land, where different rules applied. Where city people, police, even the law itself were a stupid uncomprehending nuisance. An older time . . .

  ‘I find all this totally incredible,’ she said.

  ‘Ain’t none of your business, is it? You come down here in your big motor with your two pretty children . . . what are we to you? You can go or stay as you like. Though what you find to do round here . . .’

  There was faint disgust in Miss Yaxley’s voice. The disgust of the rural for the urban. The disgust of the real for the unreal. The same disgust she herself felt for car phones and computers and yuppies. She felt the ground move beneath her, felt herself being pushed out of . . .

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said abruptly. ‘It is none of my business.’

  ‘No bones broken, moi dear.’ Miss Yaxley too seemed to regret the clash, and want to make amends. ‘Thank you for bringing Sepp’s things. The money will come in nicely.’

  ‘Be careful when you take it to the bank. I think it’s illegal now, to hold so many sovereigns; if you’re not a bullion-­dealer.’

  ‘Not my crime, moi dear. An’ Sepp’s dead, isn’t he? Besides, folks don’t hold with banks much, round here.’

  ‘Can we . . . stay on? At the cottage?’

  ‘Stay as long as you like, moi dear. If that’s what you want.’

  ‘We’ve got a man seeing to us. Nathan Gotobed.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Miss Yaxley. ‘So I’ve heard. He did for Sepp.’ She said it with a hint of . . . Rose could not fathom what she’d said it with a hint of.

  When she got home, Timothy and Jane were still tucking in bits of the newly laid fence.

  But Nathan Gotobed and his terrible billhook were gone. And the hedge was only half-­laid.

  ‘A man came for him,’ said Timothy. ‘They had an argument.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘We couldn’t hear. Did you find out anything else about Mr. Yaxley?’

  She gave him a startled look. ‘Why did you ask that?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said with an airy shrug. ‘We just thought you might have heard some gossip in the shop.’ Jane shrugged inscrutably as well.

  Rose had that awful feeling that everybody was hiding something from her. But she just said shortly, ‘They think he got drowned on the marshes.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Timothy. ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What’s odd, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘I thought he’d wear his rubbers to go on the marshes. And his rubbers are still here.’

  Rose couldn’t settle to dusting again. She felt restless, which disturbed her, because she wasn’t normally a restless person. Perhaps it was just the contrast between the warm sunny day outside, and the dimness of the house. She felt things were going on outside and she was missing them. She rationalised it into a trip to the shop. Jane made strenuous offers to go for her, but Rose said tartly, ‘My turn for a nosy!’

  As she re-­entered the village, her white Volkswagen Golf gave her an appealing look. It seemed terribly stranded and lonely stuck on the grass shoulder where the road ended and the path began. She felt a vague unease at the car being so far from the house, instead of parked in the drive as usual. She always thought it ironical, afterwards, that the first unease she felt was about the car . . .

  She checked the doors and trunk. Locked. But, inscribed on the dusty hood by a small finger, she found the legend

  THIS CAR IS DIRTY

  She smiled a little, because children were the same everywhere. Then she walked round checking the tires. And found scrawled on the trunk-­lid, by a bigger finger, the single word

  YUPPIE!

  Somehow, because the finger had been bigger, it upset her much more. And because she couldn’t have been further from being a yuppie. She got a sense of prejudice, determined ignorance, deliberate unfairness. A sense it was perhaps unfortunate she carried into the shop.

  It wasn’t a big shop, and there had been a pathetic attempt to turn it into a mini-­market, which made it seem even smaller. Where she had hoped to find brass scales, round blocks of real cheese and enamel adverts for Fry’s Milk Chocolate, she found the thin blue and white stripes of Mace, and garish star-­shaped price tags in fluorescent orange. There were one or two women idly contemplating the same old brands with a total absorption that would have done credit to the Buddha
himself. Her approach had obviously been observed.

  The two shopkeepers stood behind their cash-register, as oddly assorted a couple as she’d ever seen. The man was tall and thin, with a balding sallow streetwise face that could never have been born in East Anglia. He had made some attempt to dress sportingly in an Arsenal sweatshirt, but there was dirt down the front of it from handling boxes. His wife was short and stout, with a very humped back under her navy print dress, and an upper lip and chin that had those straggling strands of facial hair that always made Rose want to curl up inside.

  ‘Aha,’ said the man. ‘Tracked us down at last, I see!’ He spoke loudly, for the benefit of the whole shop, with that kind of bumptious flirtatiousness and familiarity that always whines, when tackled head-­on, that it means no harm, just a bit of fun, can’t you take a bit of fun?

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Rose stiffly.

  ‘From London, are we?’ The man’s grin was subtly offensive. Rose supposed that being the only source of groceries in the village, he could afford to offend his customers. She even began to think kindly of the impersonality of supermarkets.

  She snapped, ‘Richmond, actually! How did you know where I came from?’

  ‘Garage name on your car’s big enough,’ said the man.

  Was he the one whose finger had written ‘Yuppie’?

  ‘Anyway,’ said the man, ‘those of us from south of the river must stick together among these local yokels.’

  Rose sensed the female backs behind her stiffen; the silence in the shop had become electric.

  ‘I like country people very much,’ she said.

  ‘Jack Sydenham from Battersea,’ he said, sticking his hand out.

  ‘Six boxes of Swan Vestas,’ said Rose, nodding at the tobacco shelf behind the counter. The hairy-backed hand faltered, despaired, and fumbled for the matches.

  ‘Big smoker, then?’

  ‘Oil-­lamps to light.’

  ‘Yes, he didn’t have many mod cons, did old Sepp Yaxley. Settling in all right, though, are you?’

  ‘Quite comfortably, thank you.’ Rose was startled at the haughty frostiness of her own voice.

  ‘Saw you going up to see old Miss Yaxley. Yer bag was heavier going in than it was coming out again!’

  ‘Just a few things Miss Yaxley wanted.’

  She felt the silence in the shop deepen, if that were possible.

  ‘You haven’t found his crock o’ gold, have yer? Old Sepp was famous for the crock o’ gold he had stashed away.’ The man’s eyes were shining, his lips slightly parted, as if he was enjoying playing with fire.

  But before Rose could say, ‘I think that’s Miss Yaxley’s business,’ the woman behind the counter said, ‘We need some more Lilt, Jack. Go and get me a case of Lilt from the back. I’ll see to the lady.’

  It seemed an inoffensive enough remark to make, but the tone was dismissive. The light went out of Jack’s eyes, and he went without a word. Did Rose hear breaths quietly let out, all round the shop? What was it with Sepp Yaxley?

  The woman was pleasant enough, in her way, and brisk and helpful.

  ‘Don’t these other ladies want serving first?’ asked Rose politely.

  ‘Oh, they won’t mind, moi dear.’ The woman’s voice was truly Norfolk. ‘They’re only passing the time o’ day.’ She grabbed Rose’s tote bag, where it lay on the counter, and filled it briskly and efficiently with groceries.

  She also took a good look inside it. She was subtler than her husband, but she didn’t bother to be all that subtle . . .

  Rose left the mini-­market vowing to shop in Cley in future. She went back to the car, and hovered unhappily. She wished she could take it home with her. She glanced in through the windows. There wasn’t much to see. Just magazines on the back shelf. A Good Housekeeping of her own, an Indy of Timothy’s, a Jackie of Jane’s. And Jane’s spare pair of headphones for her Walkman. But Rose suddenly saw the objects as prying alien eyes must have seen them. A rich bitch and her two overprivileged spoilt brats . . .

  ‘Hallo,’ said a small voice at her elbow. It was a little girl, of the type given to accosting strangers with a knowing charm. The child dimpled. ‘You’re the lady from the Cunning’s house, aren’t you?’

  ‘The Cummings’ house?’ Rose frowned. Had there been someone called Cummings living there, before Sepp Yaxley?

  ‘No, no,’ the child frowned in unconscious mimicry of her. ‘Not the Cummings’ house – the Cunning’s house.’ She gnashed her teeth over the n’s in a way that was almost animal.

  ‘You mean the Cunninghams’ house?’ persisted Rose. She always believed in being patient with children.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said the child. ‘The Cunning’s house.’

  Rose gave up. Was everyone a bit mad in this village? She walked on back down the path. The child watched her go a long time, putting her thumb in her mouth.

  The child had done her best. It was a pity that Rose knew little of the older customs of East Anglia.

  After supper, she walked up to Wallney again, to ring Philip. Bracing herself for the encounter. Making his voice say, inside her head, the things he would say, and practising her smooth calm answers.

  ‘Rose, what the devil are you up to?’

  ‘Having a holiday!’

  ‘What’s your phone number?’

  ‘We haven’t got a phone number!’

  ‘Then how the devil am I supposed to get in touch with you, if something comes up?’

  ‘Why not write? Or drive up and see us?’

  ‘Now look, Rose! If this is another of your crazy schemes . . .’

  But when she rang the number, a neatly arranged pile of silver on the shelf of the phone-­booth beside her elbow, she got only the answering machine again, and all her witty replies died within her.

  Coming back, a little vexed but not yet alarmed, through a slight rising mist, she saw a cat sitting on the wall. A tabby cat. Not the one Mr. Gotobed had thrown clods at, then . . .

  She went out of her way to woo it, as a kind of defiance of all the invincible ignorance that Wallney stood for. She did what the best cat-­books told you to do with a stray cat, to avoid alarming it. She did not look at it directly. She yawned and stretched her arms gently above her head; anyone watching her would have thought her a lunatic.

  But the only one watching her was the cat. And on the cat, all her efforts were wasted. It made no attempt to flee, but continued sitting solidly on the wall. Its ears neither went down in alarm, nor pricked in curiosity. It needed no assurance that she was harmless. From long instinct, it knew she was harmless. It let her get within a foot; it let her put out her hand to stroke, with apparent indifference.

  She was shocked at how solid it was; at the hardness of the muscles under its dark tiger-­stripes. She was shocked at the intricate mangling of its torn ears, at the brutal massiveness of its wedge-­shaped head.

  It did none of the things that cats are supposed to do. It did not rub its cheeks against her hand, or offer its chin; it did not knead its paws on the wall-­top, or arch its back. It certainly did not purr. Its eyes studied the flight of birds across some distant field.

  In the end, it made her feel irrelevant and powerless. It offered her no threat of violence, but she came to think it was not a nice cat. She even grew a little nervous of its dark indifference to humankind.

  She finally went on her way, much put out. Thinking it was another bit of that massive ignorance, that brutal imperviousness that was Wallney.

  The cat watched her go. Watched her turn in at the gate where it knew she lived. Then, as if satisfied, it dropped down into the field behind the wall, and went about its own business.

  Four

  It was good to be home. There was a huge fire glowing in the kitchen range; a little too hot for comfort, but the kids’ willingness was warming, too, after Wallney. They looked up from the books they were reading, and the fire shone on the pleasure in their faces at her return.

  ‘I wen
t up to turn down the beds,’ said Jane. ‘There’s a mouse in my bedroom.’

  ‘What did you do?’ said Rose in a flurry. She always felt irretrievably split about mice. You read in magazines that their urine gave children diseases, yet they were so timid, furry and defenceless. She had never had to cope with a mouse in her married life. Mice did not come where Philip was . . .

  ‘It was sweet,’ said Jane. ‘I took it up some cheese. I thought it might be starving. I mean, what’s it had to live on round here all these years? But it wouldn’t come out of its hole for the cheese.’

  ‘She bunged the cheese down the hole in the end,’ said Timothy. ‘The lump got stuck. The mouse can’t get out, now.’

  ‘It can eat its way out,’ said Jane.

  ‘How would you like to have to eat your way out?’ said Tim. ‘If you opened this door in the morning, and somebody had dumped a ton of liver pâté on the doorstep?’

  ‘I expect it will survive,’ said Rose hurriedly, before World War III could develop. ‘Want to play something before bed?’ She moved over to the heap of boxes; Monopoly, Othello, Trivial Pursuit Genus II that went with them on every holiday.

  ‘Can we play Dirty Scrabble?’ asked Jane. ‘Only Daddy won’t let us at home.’ Rose shuddered; they knew so many appalling words she had never known till she went to university. And Jane always objected to Tim’s scientific Latin ones, sticking to awful Anglo-­Saxon herself. They never said them out loud, it was true, but as you went on playing, the words already laid down stared at you so, and made you giggle. And it was wrong to giggle; it let down the grownup side.

  ‘It was a fieldmouse,’ said Jane. ‘I know, cos their tails are longer.’

  ‘Tripe,’ said Timothy. ‘It was just an ordinary house-­mouse. Fieldmice don’t invade a house till winter . . .’

  ‘How do you know, Clever Dick? It might have been a harvest mouse, the sort the Romans brought.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a harvest mouse, even in a book?’

  ‘All right,’ said Rose hastily. ‘Dirty Scrabble it is.’

  It was their last happy evening.

  At lunch the next day, Jane said, ‘Mr. Gotobed’s going to build you a rockery . . .’