The House on Cold Hill

by James, Peter

  Was it his glasses, catching the sunlight at an odd angle? He removed them, and put them on again, and the lights had gone.

  Strange, he thought, looking around. He hadn’t imagined them, surely? To his left was the long, windowless hallway leading to the front door. To his right was the small door on the far side of the atrium, which had two glass panes, and opened onto the rear terrace.

  His glasses must have caught the reflection of some rays of sunlight, he decided, as he climbed back up to his office. He settled back down to work. Just as he did, Caro rang again. ‘Hi, Ols, did the new fridge turn up?’

  ‘No, it hasn’t turned up yet. Nor has the bloody electrician or the sodding plumber!’

  ‘Will you chase them?’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ he said, patiently. ‘The plumber called me back and is coming in an hour. I’ll chase the others.’ Caro had two secretaries at her disposal, plus a legal assistant. Why, he wondered, frustrated, did she never use them to help out?

  He dutifully made the calls then returned to his work. Shortly after 1.00 p.m. he went back downstairs to make himself a sandwich. As he entered the atrium again, he felt a stream of cool air on his neck. He turned, sharply. The windows and the door to the rear garden were shut. Then he saw tiny flashes of light around him. They were a familiar precursor to the severe migraines he occasionally suffered from. They were different from the spheres he had seen earlier, but maybe those had been another manifestation of the same symptoms, he realized. He wasn’t surprised, with all the stress right now. But he didn’t have time to be ill.

  He went through the kitchen into the scullery and down the stone cellar stairs. A radio at the bottom was blaring out music, and the two builders were sitting, drinking tea and eating their lunch. One was tall, in his early thirties; the other was shorter and looked close to retirement. ‘How’s it going?’ Ollie asked.

  ‘The damp’s pretty bad,’ the older one said, unwrapping a Mars bar and giving a sharp intake of breath. ‘You’re going to need a damp-proof membrane down here, otherwise it’s going to recur. Surprised no one ever done it.’

  Ollie knew very little about building work. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘We’ll get the guv to give you a quote.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Thank you. Might as well get it done properly. Right, well, I’ll leave you to get on with it. I’ve got to shoot out later and pick up my daughter from school. What time are you off?’

  ‘About five,’ the younger one said.

  ‘Fine – if I’m not around, just let yourselves out and shut the front door. See you tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ the older one said. ‘We’ve got an outside job and if the weather holds the guv may want us on that for a couple of days. But we’ll be back before the end of the week.’

  Ollie looked at them, biting his tongue. He remembered beating their boss, Bryan Barker, down on price on the agreement that his workmen could do outside jobs as and when the weather permitted.

  ‘OK, thanks,’ Ollie said, and went back upstairs, swallowed two Migraleve tablets then made himself a tuna sandwich. He sat at the refectory table with a glass of water, and as he ate he flipped through the newspapers he liked to read daily, the Argus, The Times and Daily Mail, that he had picked up on his way home after dropping off Jade at school.

  When he had finished his lunch he climbed back up to his office, relieved not to have developed any more migraine symptoms, so far. The tablets were doing their stuff. He stared for some minutes at a photograph of a white 1965 BMW going almost sideways, at high speed, through Graham Hill Bend at Brands Hatch. It was one of a series of images of the car, which had a strong racing pedigree, for sale on the Cholmondley website. Then he heard the front doorbell ringing. It was Chris Webb, his computer engineer, with an armful of kit, who had come to sort his internet out.

  He let him in, gratefully.

  A few hours later, after collecting Jade from school and returning to work, he heard Caro’s Golf scrunch to a halt on the gravel outside. Jade had long been up in her room, closeted with her mountain of homework, and Chris Webb, hunched over the Mac up in his office, was still hard at work sorting out his new connection. Chris looked up, mug of coffee in one hand, cigarette burning in the ashtray Ollie had found for him.

  ‘It’s the curvature of the hill that’s your problem,’ he said.

  ‘Curvature?’

  ‘There are phone masts on the top of the Downs, but the curvature of this slope effectively shields you from them. The best solution,’ Webb said, ‘would be to demolish this house and rebuild nearer the top of the hill.’

  Ollie grinned. ‘Yep, well, I think we’ll have to go with another option. Plan B?’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  Ollie hurried downstairs to greet his wife, opening the front door for her and kissing her. Even after fourteen years of marriage, he always felt a beat of excitement when she arrived home. ‘How was your day, darling?’

  ‘Awful! I’ve had one of the worst Mondays of my life. Three clients in a row who’ve been gazumped on their house purchases, and one nutter.’ She was holding two large plastic bags. ‘I’ve bought a load of torches, as you suggested, and candles.’

  ‘Brilliant! We’ll put torches around the place. Glass of wine?’

  ‘A large one! How was your day?’

  ‘Not great either. One distraction after another with the builders, the electricians, the plumber. And the architect called to say that our planning application to have a new window in our bedroom has been turned down because the house is a listed building.’

  ‘It’s only Grade 2. Why?’

  Ollie shrugged. ‘Every generation who’s owned this place over the past two hundred and fifty years has made changes to it. Why do they sodding think in the twenty-first century that now has to stop?’

  ‘We can appeal it.’

  ‘Yes – at a cost of thousands.’

  ‘I need that drink.’

  He led the way along the hall and through the atrium, then into the kitchen. He took a bottle of Provence rosé out of the fridge and opened it. As he poured he said, ‘Want to take a walk around the grounds? It’s such a beautiful evening.’

  Peeling off her jacket and slinging it over the back of a chair, she said, ‘I’d like that. How’s Jade? How was her first day at school?’

  ‘She’s fine. A bit quiet and still sullen, but I get the feeling she secretly quite enjoyed it. Or that it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She’s doing homework.’

  He said nothing about Jade’s insistence that her grandmother had come into her room last night.

  While Caro went upstairs to see their daughter, Ollie carried their glasses out onto the rear terrace, where their outside dining table and chairs were set up, and onto the lawn. Caro came back down. ‘God, it’s so glorious – if we could get the pool cleaned up we could have a swim on evenings like this next year!’ She smiled. ‘You’re right – Jade does seem to have got on OK today.’

  ‘Yes, thank heavens! The local pool company’s coming on Friday,’ Ollie said. ‘To give me an estimate on what it will take to replace the damaged tiles and get the heating up and running again.’

  ‘Good! Can’t believe how warm it is – half past six in the evening!’

  The sun was still high in the sky over the fields to the west. Caro gave him a hug and kissed him. ‘I was really worried about moving here,’ she said. ‘But driving out of Brighton tonight, it was such a joy to leave the city – I think we’ve made the right decision.’

  He smiled, hugged her back and kissed her. ‘We have. I just love it. I think we’re going to be so happy here.’

  ‘We will be. It’s a happy house!’

  7

  Tuesday, 8 September

  The following morning brought the start of an Indian summer heatwave. Ollie, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and trainers, again dropped Jade off at school. She’d found her first day OK, but was still not happy about being separated from all
her old friends. He returned home, relieved that the Migraleve tablets he had been taking seemed to have warded off any migraine. He had a lot to do on his client’s website this morning.

  But no sooner had he sat down in his office, than his distractions continued, starting with a visit from the boss of the building contractors, Bryan Barker, who read out a litany of doom and gloom that further inspection of the house had revealed, in his irrepressibly cheerful way that made everything seem somehow less bad than it really was.

  Barker started with the rot in the cellar, then the damp beneath all of the windows on the front facade, which took the brunt of the weather, then the leaking roof. They could do it all in one go, Barker told him, or do it piecemeal, but that would be a false economy. Then, almost by way of reducing the impact, Barker mentioned Ollie’s Specialized hybrid bike that he had seen in one of the outbuildings and invited him to join a regular weekly boys’ bike ride around the area.

  As the builder spoke, pound signs with several rows of noughts after them flashed, constantly, through Ollie’s mind. Then the electrician arrived with a story of equal doom and gloom. The current electrics in the house were, in his view, a serious fire hazard, and if they weren’t replaced could invalidate the insurance.

  Their plumber, who appeared at the same time, a chatty Irishman called Michael Maguire, told him the results of his inspection yesterday. Much of the piping was lead, which would eventually give them all brain damage from the drinking water if they left it in situ. It would be wise to replace the lot with modern plastic piping. The painter’s news was no more encouraging. It seemed that the property development company had employed a total bodger of a builder, who, instead of having walls stripped down, had merely painted over them – possibly just to tart this place up in order to sell it.

  The warnings had all been there, in those stark pages of the survey. But they had been panicked into making a decision when the estate agents informed them there was another buyer in the frame. Ollie had convinced Caro there would be no urgency to do the work – they could do it bit by bit over a few years. That no longer seemed to be the case. It had been a financial stretch to buy the house and they thought they had budgeted sufficient for the first year to carry out the renovations. Now, after listening to Barker, Ollie realized they were going to have to add thousands to this figure – and somehow find the money. They were in this financially up to their necks. To make things worse, the market had turned in the time since they had exchanged contracts and if they tried to put it back on the market they would be facing a substantial loss. They had no option but to make it work.

  And they damned well would!

  In the middle of his discussions with the painter, a neighbour appeared, asking him for a subscription to the local parish magazine – which he agreed to. It was close to midday before, almost brain-dead, he began work again on the Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, Purveyors of Horseless Carriages to the Nobility and Gentry since 1911, website, making sure the pages were clear and readable on tablets and on phone screens. Next, he checked all the links worked – the client’s email address, the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages.

  At 1.30 p.m., finally satisfied, he emailed a link for the test site to his client, then took a break and went back downstairs to make himself some lunch. When he reached the atrium he stopped and looked around for any sign of the lights he had seen here yesterday, but all he could see were a few dust motes in front of the windowpanes in the door. The pills had done the trick, he thought, relieved.

  He made himself a Cheddar and Branston pickle sandwich, poured himself a glass of chilled water from the fridge, and carried them, together with the morning’s copy of The Times, out onto the rear terrace, blinking against the brilliant sunlight. He set everything down and went back inside to find his sunglasses. As he did so, the front doorbell rang. It was a large delivery of flat-pack wardrobes.

  Ten minutes later he returned to his lunch. As he read the paper and ate his sandwich, he looked up occasionally, watching a pair of ducks paddling across the lake. Afterwards, he walked round the side of the house, down the drive, and out through the front gates, deciding to stroll down towards the village and look around before returning to work.

  As he headed down the narrowlane, which had no pavement and was bounded by trees and hedgerows on both sides, breathing in the country scents, his phone vibrated. It was an email from his new client, Charles Cholmondley, saying he loved the website and would come back to him later in the day, or tomorrow, with his amendments. Ollie felt suddenly incredibly happy. Cold Hill House was going to be a lucky home for them. Sure, there was a massive amount of work to be done, but his new business was on its way. Everything was going to be fine!

  As he passed a small, dilapidated Victorian cottage on his right, with an overgrown front garden, he saw an elderly man in a baggy shirt, grey trousers and hiking boots striding up the hill towards him, holding a stout stick, and with an unlit briar pipe in his mouth. He had a wiry figure, white hair styled in an old-fashioned boyish quiff, a goatee beard and leathery, wrinkled skin. As they drew close, Ollie smiled. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the man replied in a rural Sussex burr, removing his pipe. Then he stopped and pointed the stem in the air. ‘Mr Harcourt, would it be?’

  ‘Yes?’ Ollie said, still smiling.

  ‘You’re the gentleman who just bought the big house?’

  ‘Cold Hill House?’

  The old man gripped his walking stick hard, letting it support some of his weight. His rheumy eyes were like molluscs peeping out beneath spiky fringes of white hair. ‘Cold Hill House, that would be it. How you getting on with your lady, then?’ He stared hard at Ollie.

  ‘Lady?’ Ollie retorted. ‘What lady?’

  He gave Ollie a strange smile. ‘Maybe she’s not there no more.’

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to frighten you, not when you’ve just moved in.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m frightened enough already – by the estimates I’m going to be getting from the builders!’ He held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you – you’re local?’

  ‘You could say that.’ He nodded and pursed his lips, but made no attempt to take the proffered hand.

  Ollie withdrew his hand, awkwardly. ‘It’s a delightful contrast to Brighton, I have to say.’

  The old man shook his head. ‘Not been to Brighton.’

  ‘Never?’ Ollie said, surprised.

  ‘I don’t like big cities, and I don’t like to travel much.’

  Ollie smiled. Brighton was less than ten miles away. ‘Tell me – you said you don’t want to frighten me. Is this lady something I should be frightened of?’

  The old man gave him a penetrating stare. ‘I’m going back some years now – I worked for Sir Henry and Lady Rothberg, when they owned this place, when I was a young man. Bankers they were. I were one of the gardeners. One day they asked me if I could do a bit of caretaking for them while they were abroad. They used to have live-in staff and that, but Sir Henry lost a lot of money and had to let them all go.’ He hesitated. ‘That room they called the atrium, that still there?’

  ‘The oak-panelled room with the two columns? The one you go through before the kitchen?’

  ‘That used to be the chapel when it was a monastery, back in the Middle Ages – before most of the house, as it is today, was built.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ Ollie said. ‘I didn’t know there was anything remaining of the monastery.’

  ‘Sir Henry and Lady Rothberg used it as a kind of snug – because it was next to the kitchen, it were always cosy in winter from the heat from the oven, and it were cheaper than heating the bigger rooms in the house just for the two of them.’

  ‘They had no children?’

  ‘None that survived childhood, no.’

  ‘How sad.’

  The old man did not react. He went on, ‘They were going away for a few days and asked me
to house-sit for them, to look after the dogs and that. They had a couple of them old-fashioned wing-back chair things in there. On the Sunday night I was sitting listening to the radio, and the two dogs, in the kitchen, began growling. Wasn’t a normal sound, it was really eerie, set me off shivering. I can still hear it, that sound, all these years on. They came out into the atrium, their fur standing on end. Then suddenly they both began backing away, and I saw her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘The lady.’ The old man nodded.

  ‘What did she look like? What did she do?’

  ‘She was an old lady, with a horrible expression on her face, all dressed in blue silk crinoline, or something like that, and yellow shoes. She came out of the wall, walked towards me, flicked me in the face so hard with her fan it stung my cheek, and left a mark, and vanished into the wall behind me.’

  Ollie shivered, eyeing the man carefully. ‘Bloody hell. What happened then?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t hang around. I took off. Just grabbed my things as fast as I could and left. I phoned Mr Rothberg, told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t stay there no more.’

  ‘Did he ask you why not?’

  ‘Oh, he did, and I told him.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He weren’t very happy. But he said I wasn’t the first to have seen her, the lady. I found that out for myself.’

  ‘What – did you find out?’

  ‘Well . . .’ the old man stopped and pursed his lips, then he shook his head. For the first time, Ollie saw fear in his eyes. ‘Like I said – it’s not my place to frighten you. Not my place.’ He began walking on.

  Ollie hurried after him for a few paces. ‘Please tell me a bit more about her?’

  The old man shook his head, continuing to walk. Without turning his head, he added, ‘I’ve said enough. I’ve said quite enough. Except for one thing. Ask about the digger.’

  ‘Digger?’

  ‘Ask someone about the mechanical digger.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ollie called out.

  But, shaking his head, the old man carried on.