Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

Alan Collet stood just outside a front room window his chin on the window sill. A shaft of morning sunlight fell full on his blond hair and the effect was startling, as if his head were a round golden ornament, grinning and grotesque, left there by a passing practical joker.

  “Jemmy? She’s coming in at the front door and I am right behind her.” He vanished.

  By the time Alan and Jemima appeared in the dining room doorway, Tony had dredged up a martyred smile from somewhere. Jo floated up from the terrace, arms wide in welcome. “Don’t mind the pet bear,” she said. “It’s got a sore head.”

  “Yes, but Bear wants a kiss,” Tony said, and bent to claim one from Jemima. “There, Rog. Beat you to it.”

  Roger’s face flamed, but it amounted to a dare and so he said, “ ‘Morning, Jemmy,” and planted a quick kiss at the corner of her mouth.

  Jemima was special: small, blonde and blue-eyed, she made up in earnestness for Alan’s flamboyant and sometimes highly irritating good cheer. Not that she was any less fun-loving, but she did take everything and everyone seriously, and for this children in particular, and everyone in general, loved her. “Tell me more,” she always said, as if she didn’t know enough already to make Roger’s head swim. Alan, like Tony a member of the National Theatre Company, had met Jemima at a large, anonymous party after the formal cornerstone-laying at the company’s new Bankside site. Jemima had, Roger understood, something minor to do with the rough architectural drawings for the new complex. “Inking in the spelling corrections,” she claimed. It might have been true.

  “Awful of us to appear so hard upon your rising,” Alan observed blithely, “but Jemmy’s been at me like a dog at a flea from the moment I told her about your tarted-up Tudor chimney. If you’ll settle for giving us breakfast instead of brunch, we’ll stand you to a lunch out. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Jo agreed readily. Tony, still looking distinctly bleary, pressed his fingers to his temples. “Tudor? You’re right. 1603 could be either Tudor or Jacobean, couldn’t it? ‘Tudor’ sounds much the better.”

  Jemima was already on her knees inside the fireplace. “Call it ‘Elizabethan’—it’s that even if it was finished after Queen Bess died that March. Jacobean styles were a while in growing. They didn’t come south from Scotland in King Jamie’s baggage.” She scrambled out. “Your fireplace is splendid. How did you find it out? Tell me everything!”

  When they had, Pippa’s sketchbook with the measurements and rough floor plans was produced and passed around with the bacon and eggs and coffee. Jemima pored over it, nodding like an eager dippy-bird. “Oh yes, I think so. Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “Yes what?” demanded Pippa, not one to hold her breath for long. Sammy, who had found his way downstairs to her shoulder, peered at the drawings too.

  “Yes, I think I can see something of the shape of the original house. Something seems to be missing, but my guess is that even more has been tacked on. Look.” On a fresh page she quickly sketched out a more accurate plan of the ground-floor arrangement, shading in the fireplace and wall areas of the two larger rooms. “Here and here, you see…” Jemima pointed to the lines representing the rear wall with the French doors, and the interior wall parallel to it. “Here are two walls of the same thickness, but the front wall appears by your measurements to be much lighter. Now you almost never see that heavy an interior wall in a small house even if it is a bearing wall. My guess is that this wing of the house originally looked like … this. The room we’re in would have been the ‘hall,’ the main room.” She handed a second rough sketch across the door-table.

  “That might have been the front wall of the house?” Tony asked blankly. “The one Alan and his breakfast are propping up?”

  Alan was sitting beside the door into the front room with his back against the wall. He turned to look at the doorway. “It is a bit thick, isn’t it? Makes a nice effect with the step) coming up, though. You wouldn’t want to go and knock the front rooms off, would you? I mean, restoration is all very well, but that’s a bit much.”

  “Yes,” Tony said drily. “A bit.”

  “But we can look, can’t we?” Roger asked anxiously. “Just to know if it’s so?”

  Jo smiled. “Roger’s right. At least I’d like to know. What’s a little plaster and woodwork in a good cause?”

  “Not much,” Tony agreed resignedly. “But if you must chip holes in my house, do so gently. My head is already splitting.”

  “Absolutely. Swear.” Alan finished off his coffee and crossed his heart. “We brought some tools down on the off-chance we might be allowed in on the fun. I’ll go fetch ’em.”

  “And I’ll get dressed,” Jo said, swishing off hastily in her dressing gown.

  Among the Sunday papers and gear in the jump-seat of the old MG (the sledge-hammer, Alan insisted, was Jemima’s too) was a large pad of drawing paper and a flat case of drawing instruments, so that while Alan and Roger made a timid beginning with hammers and chisels in the front room on a patch of plaster near the doorway, Jemima set about translating the measurements Tony and Jo and the children had made into more precise ground plans.

  “Pa?” Roger’s croak came after only ten minutes. “Pips, where’s Pa?”

  “He’s outside. What’ve you found?” Pippa came plunging down the two steps from the dining room. “That’s it, isn’t it? The old house?” At Alan’s nod Pippa raced for the nearest window to shriek, “Tony? Daddy? They found it!”

  Tony, sprawled in one of the lawn chairs in a patch of sunshine in the middle of the driveway, raised the section of the Observer that covered his face and blinked.

  “Daddy? Good heavens, has it come to that? Well, what have they found?”

  “The front of the house!”

  That brought him out of his chair in a hurry. What Roger and Alan had found beneath the thick plaster was a brick wall—or the first small patch of it. A brisk rubbing with the wire pot-brush used on the stone fireplace brought one brick in the herringbone pattern alive in a warm, dark red that Jemima pronounced undoubtedly Elizabethan. Tony was quite revived.

  Jemima went to stand between the two front windows for a wider view of the wall and suggested that not only could the door between the two rooms have been the principal entrance of the early house, but the built-in glass-fronted book cases might have been fitted into the original window openings. Tony would have taken the sledgehammer to them on the instant but held off at Jo’s protest that the doors and shelves were well worth salvaging.

  “The door. Do the door first,” Pippa proposed, enjoying this grown-up game wholeheartedly.

  “I don’t know,” Roger said nervously. He was a little wary of the high enthusiasm Tony and Alan looked like working up between them. He peered up at the heavy, ornate lintel that repeated along its top the castle crenellations of the house’s roofline. “It looks pretty solid.”

  Alan tapped up and down the frame with the hammer. “Looks and is. It doesn’t actually have to be solid, though. Might just be good solid workmanship. Let’s have a go.”

  “I think you’re out of your tiny mind. But—” Tony took a deep breath. “Where’s the wrecking bar?”

  After the first long shard of wood ripped off, leaving an ugly scar, there was a bad five minutes during which it began to look as if they had made a terrible mistake. Jo covered her eyes. The doorpost would not loosen, and only after several careful cuts had been made with a saw at the top and bottom of the door frame could the two men, pulling together on the heavy bar, rip the woodwork loose. Roger caught hold of it while they slipped the bar further in. At the chink of metal on stone, Tony’s eyes danced.

  “Did you hear that?” He panted, “Josie, my puss, I think it’s safe to uncover. Look.”

  At the next heave the face of the doorpost ripped away, revealing underneath it a warm expanse of weathered stone. The woodwork was, like the plaster, only a casing, a cold formal mask on a warm, homely face.

  “Bingo!” Jo whispered.

  Alan, Jemima and
the Nicholases, more or less scrubbed clean of plaster, trooped off to lunch at the Apprentice in a high humour. Tony was still a bit hollow-eyed, but cheerfully insisted that his headache had disappeared in the excitement, declaiming with his hand on his heart, “ ‘I have—as when the sun doth light a storm—buried this sigh in wrinkle of a smile’ ” For a while as they worked it had looked as if the great door lintel itself, well out of reach, would have to wait for a ladder, but with each attack on the casings of the doorposts below it had been loosened a little, and in the end toppled free with a great crash while everyone was queued up in the kitchen or bathroom to wash. It left a stone lintel as simply and elegantly arched as the great fireplace, and carved at the centre of that shallow arch was a monogram—TG or GT—bracketed by the numbers of the same date that was carved on the fireplace:

  “If you do the work yourselves, the restoration could take two or three years,” said Jemima, waving a fork over the remains of her salad. “But then there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t take almost that long if you had a builder in to do it. The roofing and re-wiring you can’t do, of course, but otherwise so long as you don’t mind living in a muddle you can save thousands.”

  “In that case,” said Jo, “what do we knock apart next?” Jemima retrieved her drawing pad from the rosebush’s barrel-tub it was propped against and, as Alan cleared the plates away, laid it on the table. “There’s something suspicious about your lovely fireplace—there.” Her pencil tapped a shaded area. “That’s an awfully thick rear chimney wall between the hearth and your stairwell.”

  Tony leaned back against the terrace railing as if to say, “Come now, this is too much.” The look he gave Jemima was skeptical. “Come, Jemmy, not a priest’s hole!”

  “It could be.”

  Pippa was lost. “What’s a priest’s hole?”

  “A little secret room made for a Catholic priest to hide in. Back when the house was built, it was illegal for them to say Mass, and the Puritans wanted all of them shut up in jail—or hung,” Tony explained. “But I thought those holes were built with an entrance at the back of the fireplace itself; and ours is solid.”

  Jemima shook her head earnestly. “Some of them were, yes. But the entrance could just as easily have been from the stair side. Even through a removable stair tread.”

  Jo finished off her glass of white wine. “I think that Jemima means that we must rip out the staircase next,” she drawled.

  “No,” Roger said. The word came out sharply, before he had a chance to think.

  “No what?” Alan asked quizzically. “No hole or no rip?”

  Roger took a deep breath. “No staircase,” he said and pointed to the drawing. “The staircase was over here, at the other end of the house.”

  “Nonsense,” Tony said. “What gave you that idea?

  “Nothing. I just know,” Roger said evasively.

  Jemima frowned at her floor plan. “It would actually make more sense at the south-east end of the house. Having it hidden behind the fireplace doesn’t really fit. By your date they had begun to make rather a thing of the gracious stairway. If there was a small room where your stairs are now, that thick chimney wall might simply mean back-to-back fireplaces.

  “But there is no gracious stairway,” Tony pointed out.

  “No,” Jemima agreed distantly. With an intent little frown she pushed back her chair, tucked the drawing pad under her arm and was off, threading her way among the tables and out onto Church Street. The others followed like the fascinated children of Hamelin. Jo, bringing up the rear of the procession, squeezed between two back-to-back chairs and said airily to the perfect stranger in one of them, “Do excuse us. We have gone completely mad.”

  Even Roger thought Jemima was being silly about the lost stair. What he had seen (or dreamt, as he had begun to think of it) had taken up almost the whole of his room, leaving only the upper landing—the wide stretch from the present hall door to the window opposite. Certainly now there was nothing in his room but an expanse of floor, but having examined that, Jemima poked around in the kitchen stairway, in the oddly-arranged cupboards beside it, and in the low, dark storage hole off the back of the garage. And growing more excited by the minute.

  “Don’t you see? It not only was here, it is here. Or a part of it is. Whatever happened to the original kitchen and pantry wing—fire, perhaps—when the new front was added and the cellar enlarged for a kitchen, they dismantled the upper railings and did away with the stairway by flooring the space over. But the rest of it is still here!” She snatched up her black felt pen and began rapidly to sketch a broad half-flight of stairs, a landing along an end wall and an upper flight, roughing in sturdy turned newel posts and balusters and a broad rail.

  “Now, look.” With a red pen she fitted the outline of the present interior in and around the Elizabethan stair: the odd cupboards that grew deeper as they climbed, the low-ceilinged box room under the landing floor, and the kitchen stair descending below the flight from the landing to the floor above.

  Jemima stabbed her pen at the space between the vanished landing and Roger’s bedroom floor. “Don’t you see yet? That space is lost. If that landing isn’t in there still, why isn’t your box room ceiling ten feet high instead of five? And that sloping alcove on this side of the box room? That has to be a part of the space under the lower stair.”

  She was right. Roger knew it. And the sketch was such a strange daylight echo of what he had seen by moonlight—the old house shimmering under this one—that excitement swept aside his memory of the violent, unhappy scene he had witnessed on that upper landing.

  “Pa? Please, Pa?”

  Alan picked up the crowbar and caressed it with a grin. “Shall we have a look?”

  Tony surveyed the circle of expectant faces. “If someone will fetch me a couple of aspirins first,” he said faintly.

  “We can start at that rotten spot in my floor,” Roger said, plunging through the front room and on upstairs.

  It did not take long. Through a hole ripped open in a matter of minutes, the shifting beam of light from an electric torch picked out the broad, dust-thick stairs and, in a dusty cobwebbed jumble on the landing, the dismantled upper railings, newel post, and balusters.

  “Gosh, what’s Roger going to do for a bedroom now?” Pippa asked.

  With two-thirds of his bedroom floor ripped up, Roger elected to bed down in the small room Tony had at first mistaken for the kitchen. He was certainly not about to sleep in the master bedroom and chance meeting his apparition again. Vision or ghost, he had actually seen something, and whether he had been dreaming or waking seemed beside the point so long as a part of it had proved to be true. In the newer part of the house he might get a good night’s rest.

  Even so, it was not easy to fall asleep. For a while Roger read the colour sections of the Sunday papers by flashlight in his sleeping bag. Alan had brought them, and after a long day, gone home having had no chance to read even the headlines. Roger, when he had finished reading, lay for a long time in the dark thinking about the beautiful lower stair with the sweep of its wide oak steps, the heavy carved newel posts and turned balusters, and the fine, broad rail. Grime and all, it was beautiful. And yet…

  Roger could not have said when he slipped off to sleep, but it was three by his watch when he was wakened by a loud knocking at the front door, and the reflection on his wall of a light being shone in at the front windows. He sat up, for a moment bewildered, and then stumbled into the front room. Through the window he saw the glow of the POLICE sign atop a small car, and a tall, dark figure in the driveway flashing his light at the windows to attract attention. Roger was still so dazed with sleep that it was another moment before he realized that the knocking at the door ought to be answered. In the dark hall he fumbled at the lock and finally managed to open the door.

  A second tall shadow in the shape of a uniformed police constable stood on the doorstep and flashed a light on him briefly. “Police, son. I’m sorry to disturb yo
u, but does an Anthony Charles Nicholas live here?”

  “Yes.” Roger blinked. “My dad. But—do you want me to get him out of bed?”

  “No.” The constable sounded faintly amused. “We would prefer that you put him back into it.”

  Roger was still trying to grasp what he meant when Jo, still half asleep, came teetering down the dark stairs and groped her way to the door and the beam of light.

  “Tony? Didn’t Tony come down? What’s happened?”

  “Mrs. Nicholas? It’s quite all right,” the tall shadow soothed. “We have him in the car.”

  “In the—” Jo was as blank as Roger.

  “He’s been sleepwalking, I’m afraid. We had a report from a resident and came along to the moorings down by the Apprentice. We found him in a rowboat belonging to one of the cruisers, fast asleep with his eyes open, and about to cast off and row down the Thames. Fast asleep.”

  There is a play to night

  “AND I SAID I MEANT TO ROW TO THE Temple? But I don’t know anyone who lives in the Temple!” Tony found it very little easier to take in the next morning than he had in the middle of the night. “Not only does it not make sense,” he protested, “but I have never in my life gone sleepwalking. Why the devil should I take it up now? And a fool trick like that! I might have drowned myself and not lived long enough to know it.”

  Jo shivered. “Probably not so long as you stayed asleep. But you’d have been bound to capsize if you’d wakened out in mid-channel in the pitch dark. I suppose that’s why the police stopped trying to rouse your attention once they guessed what the problem was. One of them had to wade in after the rowboat, but neither of them fancied the swim they would have had in the dark if you fell overboard.”

  Tony held his mug out for more coffee. “I must have gone to bed too tired and keyed up after all of yesterday’s excitement. My shoulders and arms are stiff as blazes. Maybe I ought to take an hour or two off this afternoon in the tub with a good book. Soak the kinks out.” He looked at his watch. “Did you root out the ABC to check on the trains? My rehearsal call is for ten-thirty, and if you mean to keep the car, you’ll have to run me to the station.”