by Phil Rickman
In fact this was Hattie Chancery, apparently the earliest obtainable photograph of her. It was on the wall next to the door, one of four framed photos in here: Walter and his family in the garden — Walter, formal in wing collar, and his wife Bella in some kind of flouncy crinoline. Also, two scenes of what, presumably, was the Middle Marches Hunt hounding some poor bloody fox into a badger set. And, over the bed, so she might see herself reflected in the mirror when she awoke… the adult Hattie.
‘Where did they get them?’ Jane’s voice was still unsteady. Shock, it seemed, could carry on pulsing through your body for whole minutes afterwards. Already she was despising herself, but that didn’t take it away.
‘On loan from the museum at Kington.’ Natalie lay on her back on the claw-footed bed, smoking a cigarette. ‘A deal. Ben found a really old washtub and stuff like that in one of the outhouses and donated it all. The pictures can go back after this — we’ll get them all copied when the snow goes. But Ben thought the originals might give off the strongest vibrations.’
‘For Hardy?’
‘I mean, Ben thinks it’s all shit really, but if it makes the White Company feel more inspired…’ Nat rolled over and off the bed, stood up and stretched — just the way she had when Jane had first walked in, rising up alongside the gilt-framed portrait hanging over the high mahogany headboard. She wore tight jeans and a black shirt open to a silver pendant. ‘I’m shattered, Jane. Shifting big furniture takes it out of you.’
Jane went to the bottom of the bed and looked up at the woman in the sepia photo-portrait: the coils of glistening hair, the broad face with unsmiling lips like segments of soft white pear, and those pale, pale eyes gazing over your shoulder as if Hattie was disdainfully contemplating the mess left by her own blood on the wall between the windows.
‘How old was she here, do you think?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Thirty?’
‘And Alistair Hardy actually wants to sleep in here?’ Jane could no longer imagine doing that. And the thought of waking up on a wintry morning to those silverskin eyes…
‘I don’t think he knows about it yet. It’s Ben’s idea. He’s become obsessed with the Chancery woman and this room — Stanner’s haunted room — and he’s thinking televisually. So we have to recreate the room pretty much as she’d remember it. Which, I have to tell you, has taken all day. The dressing table, we pinched from Room Seven — I spent about an hour polishing the foul thing. The bed — we had to bring that down in sections from one of the attics.’
‘This was her actual bed?’
‘God knows. It had enough dust on it.’
‘It bloody scared me, Nat. It’s… just unhealthy.’
‘Your face when you first opened the door, Jane, will live with me for a long time.’
‘It was just a big shell when I was last here.’ She looked around again. ‘Rather Hardy than me.’
In fact, Hardy deserved all he got. Jane was still furious at him for using Lucy Devenish. An affront; Lucy’s spirituality was well in advance of all this.
Natalie walked past her and opened the bedroom door. ‘Well, if we find him dead of a heart attack in the morning, it’s an occupational hazard. I can’t say I like him. Let’s go and have some tea.’
Jane looked at her with something between shock and respect. Dead of a heart attack? It was the sort of thing a kid would say, oblivious of the rules of adult decency that obliged you to airbrush your thoughts before you exposed them. Nat was just so cool. It certainly took some kind of cool — or a complete absence of sensitivity to the numinous — to lie there alone on that bed, under that very eerie picture of Stanner’s murderer.
‘Nat…’
‘Huh?’
‘Does Amber know about this… refurbishing?’
‘Some of it. She’s been very quiet all week. I mean, the idea of them summoning spirits in her kitchen — the only place she can really bear to spend time in…’ Nat glanced outside, down the dark steps to the passage. ‘Sometimes I think she might surprise us all and leave him to it.’
‘Leave Ben?’
‘Leave Stanner and give Ben the big option. Could you blame her?’
‘Nat, it would destroy him. He thinks he’s doing all this for Amber.’
‘Yeah.’ Nat smiled with no humour. ‘Aren’t men dangerously delusional sometimes?’
‘And dangerously aggressive,’ Jane said.
Nat eyed her, a warning look. It was a one-off. We don’t want Ben to get a reputation, do we?
‘Look…’ Jane glanced away from her, determined to get this out. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot…’
‘Well, don’t. It won’t help anybody.’
‘Been finding out about Hattie Chancery.’ Jane glanced warily at Hattie’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘I mean… you do know what she did in here, don’t you?’
Natalie came back into the room. ‘Ben’s still letting Amber think she shot herself outside somewhere. I mean, Christ, they sleep just up the passage. Who told you?’
‘Gomer. And he told me about Hattie and all her men. What she did with them on the top of Stanner Rocks. All the aggression she had inside her. And the booze.’
‘If you believe all that.’
‘I kind of do.’ Jane looked at her. ‘Don’t you?’
‘You’re asking me what I believe?’ Natalie supported her bum against the dressing table, stretched her long legs out, stared at Hattie. ‘I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.’
Jane, her back to the door, looked at the bed. It had a faded old mauve coverlet on it, with a fringe. She said, not looking at Nat, ‘When I was here, for that one night, I came back and found the quilt and the sheets had been pulled off and thrown back against the headboard. No, really, it happened. And I didn’t even know whose room it had been then.’
Nat made no comment.
‘OK.’ Jane turned to Natalie. ‘Maybe Amber or somebody had been about to change the bedding and forgot and went away and left it. There could be a whole bunch of rational explanations, and I hope one of them was the truth. But I also had a really bad dream in here. I mean really bad. And also—’
Nat said quietly, ‘Um, Jane…’
‘I mean, if you consider what happened last weekend… put that together with Hattie — goes up Stanner Rocks, shags some guy, comes back and smashes her sick husband’s head in. With a couple of the rocks she kept as like trophies? And then you think of Ben — OK, volatile, but basically this artistic, nonviolent bloke — who just loses it completely. On maybe the same spot? It was a horrendous attack. If you and Amber hadn’t been here, let’s face it, he might’ve killed that guy. And you know that’s true. He might be on remand now for murder.’
‘Jane, I don’t think this is a particularly—’
‘What got into him? You have to ask. Because if that was the real Ben—’
‘Jane—’
‘—Then maybe it would be a good thing if Amber did leave him. Maybe he’s the wrong kind of person to be here. You know?’ Jane blinked. ‘What’s wrong?’
Natalie was looking over Jane’s shoulder. Apologetically.
Jane stiffened, her shoulders hunching. She shut her eyes for a moment, opening them, in anguish, to a long, unsmiling face in the left-hand mirror of the dressing table.
‘Erm…’ She turned slowly, towards Ben, with her shoulders still up around her ears, forcing what she guessed would be a sick and cringing smile, holding out the camcorder like an offering. ‘Like, I… just came to… to get some, like, atmos shots?’
Inaugurated in 1980, on the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the White Company was originally called The Windlesham Society, after Sir Arthur’s last home in Sussex. The name was changed after the words ‘White Company’ were repeatedly received at spiritist meetings throughout Britain, both clairaudiently and through automatic writing. Finally, Sir Arthur himself conveyed to the eminent channelist, Mr Ali
stair Hardy, that he would consider it an honour to be patron of a society named after an especial favourite amongst his novels.
The Society now comprises of both committed spiritists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. In 1993, the outline of a planned Holmes story, The Adventure of the White Shadow, was channelled to Mr Hardy and later drafted in full by Mr Mason W. Mower, of Connecticut.
Merrily wrinkled her nose. The idea of a society combining committed spiritualists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts sounded slightly unlikely, if you considered that Holmes was the creation of Conan Doyle’s rational, scientific side.
But, then, wasn’t spiritualism considered to be rational and scientific? Wasn’t that the whole point — that they were proving the fact of life after death without the excess baggage?
Meaning religion. Merrily fingered her small pectoral cross on its chain.
It was easy to say that the Church was just jealous because these guys were offering direct experience. There were many people no longer scared of death because their departed loved ones were saying, We’re here for you. And even if it was faked, was that all bad? The main spiritualist wave had come after the First World War — all those grieving families who didn’t know how their sons and husbands had died, had no bodies to bury. A means of bringing closure.
The doorbell rang. Merrily groaned. The thought of an hour with Dexter Harris was not enticing.
She stood up, pulling on one of Jane’s old fleeces over her cowl-neck sweater. Half her wardrobe these days consisted of the kid’s cast-offs. No fire in the sitting room, so she’d have to keep Alice and Dexter in the kitchen, and it wasn’t too warm in there either, despite the Aga. She went through to the hall, meeting the eyes of the jaded Jesus hanging on to his lantern of hope in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, Uncle Ted’s house-warming present.
To prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.
Slipping the catch, tugging the front door out of its frozen frame, she thought what a disappointment it must be to Conan Doyle, if he was still watching, that the great spiritual revolution had crumbled so quickly into the ruins of Crank City. The front door shuddered and the white night came in from the open porch in tingling crystals of cold.
For a moment, it was surreal. The front garden of the vicarage was like some kind of fairy-tale bedchamber, the lawn a lumpy white mattress, bushes squashed into piles of pillows, a night light glimmering from the village square through the bare trees.
Very much a part of this tableau, he unwound his scarf and a frieze of snow.
‘Um, I wondered if I might sing a carol.’
‘God!’ She laughed in delight, looking down the drive towards the snowbound square. ‘How did you—? Where’s your car?’
‘How would you feel about “Ding Dong M—?’
‘You’re insane!’
‘And there are medical records to prove it,’ Lol said.
26
White High
Lol sat barefooted on the rug in the scullery, defrosting his toes by two bars of the electric fire. The lights were out, but the door to the kitchen was ajar a couple of inches. His frayed blue jeans were somehow soaked despite his wellies, and there were wet patches on the dark green sweatshirt with white stencilled lettering. He sat there alone, watching the snow widening the window ledge outside, and he felt wildly happy.
The lettering on the sweatshirt said Gomer Parry Plant Hire, commemorating the days he’d spent as an unskilled labourer in the wake of Gomer’s disastrous fire. Another small breakthrough: if it makes you a little anxious, do it. A chance to shovel tons of earth with your bare hands before playing live on stage for the first time since your teens. An impossible polar expedition in a clapped-out, sixteen-year-old Vauxhall Astra, to be with the person you love? Do it.
The old Astra had slithered over snow-blinded hills, hugging a council grit-lorry down to Leominster. Tunnelling through the suffocated lanes, Lol had passed two abandoned cars, snow-bloated, and gone chugging on impossibly until the old girl finally gave up, rolling away into the cascading night.
But she only gave up — there was a God — on the hill that was already evolving into Church Street, Ledwardine, vainly spinning her wheels before sinking back, exhausted, into the Community Hall car park. Lol had climbed out like he was emerging from a trance state, and bent to kiss her cold grille thanks and goodnight before walking up to the vicarage on a white high.
On the deserted square, a Christmas tree stood in front of the squat-pillared market hall, the whole scene loaded with snow, the fairy lights reduced to gauzy smudges of colour like ice lollies in a deep-freeze. Lol had looked back for a sign — a For Sale sign on Lucy’s old house — as if the sudden enchantment of the night might have tossed it back onto the market.
No sign there, no lights. Maybe there was a forbidding, black-lettered sign somewhere that said he didn’t belong here, but right now he didn’t care. He sat in the glow of two faintly zinging orange bars and half-listened to Merrily in the kitchen, dealing with some people who had arrived soon after him. Best they didn’t see him; it would have been all over the village by morning. The way things had turned out, even his car wasn’t here. Snow was good at secrets.
From the kitchen, he heard about arrangements for what seemed to be a memorial service. There was an elderly woman with a croaky voice that he recognized at once. Salt and vinegar with that, is it? And a guy called Dexter who managed to be both gruff and whiny. Sounded like routine parish stuff.
At first, idly browsing the Cwn Annwn passages from Mrs Leather, Lol wasn’t aware of what Merrily was saying, just the soft and muted colours of her voice. Luxuriating in the proximity of her, recalling an old Van Morrison song from Tupelo Honey, about a woman in the kitchen with the lights turned down low.
It was quite a while before raised voices began to suggest that there was unpleasantness here.
‘No, what’s she’s saying,’ Alice from the chippy said, ‘is that we needs a proper funeral for the boy. With the full rites.’
Merrily said, ‘Well, not—’
‘That’s fucking creepy!’
‘Dexter!’
‘Funeral for a kid that’s already been in his grave for near twenty year?’
‘It’s not—’
‘You’re telling me that en’t creepy?’
‘It’s not a funeral,’ Merrily said, ‘and I honestly don’t think you’d find it creepy. However, it’s only an idea, a possibility.’
‘You got no right. Should never’ve gone round askin’ questions, rakin’ it all up. It’s in the past.’
‘It’s in you!’ Alice shrieked. ‘Don’t you see that?’ Her voice steadied. ‘Been like this all night, he has, vicar. I don’t know what’s the matter with him.’
Merrily said, ‘Dexter, first of all, we don’t have to do this, not if you don’t want to. And we don’t even have to do it in a church.’
‘Then where’s the bloody point?’
‘All I’m trying to say is that the Eucharist — communion — is a very powerful way of tackling these things, in which… we believe that Jesus himself is personally involved. And it can sometimes draw a line under things, create order and calm, where there’s been long-term unrest, ill feeling, distress… conflict.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘this is what we want.’
‘Alice asked me if there was any way I could help, and I’m sorry if it isn’t what either of you were expecting. If you don’t think it’s the right thing, you don’t have to have anything to do with it.’
‘But,’ Alice said, with menace, ‘you’ll be letting your family down if you don’t.’
‘No!’ An ache in Dexter’s voice. From the scullery, Lol could feel him wanting to beat his head on the table.
Alice said, ‘En’t no reason the rest of us can’t go ahead without him, is there, vicar?’
‘Well, we could, but that wouldn’t—’
‘What about Darrin?’ Dexter said. ‘He gonner be there?’
‘Bring out the truth?’
‘Well, it… it can bring peace.’
‘And what if everybody don’t want the truth out?’
Merrily didn’t reply. Alice shouted, ‘We all wants the truth!’
‘Well, mabbe Darrin don’t! Mabbe the truth en’t what Darrin wants at all, look.’
Nobody spoke for a while. Chairs creaked, small movements of unrest. Then Dexter started mumbling. Lol couldn’t make out any of it. Then Alice said, raw-voiced, ‘What’s this? You never—’ And Dexter mumbled some more, and Alice said faintly, ‘No. Dear God.’
Dexter’s voice came in again, no longer gruff, raised up in panic.
‘He’s like, “Get your fuckin’ foot down, you big useless—” ’
‘Dexter!’
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Go on. Please.’
‘I was bigger than Darrin, but he was real nasty, look. Stuck his knife in the back of my hand once. Had an airgun, shot a robin in the garden. Things people thought were nice, he’d wanner destroy. So like, when we gets into the Fiesta, there’s a kiddy’s picture book on the seat, and he picks it up and rips it in half, throws the bits out of the window. Roland, he starts crying, Darrin’s leanin’ over him and pinchin’ him, telling him we’re going to London. We en’t stopping till we gets to London, and we en’t never comin’ back. Never see his mam and dad again.’
‘Oh God in heaven, Vicar, stop him!’
‘Weren’t no stoppin’ him, Alice. More the kid’s screechin’, more he’s gettin’ off on it. Excited! Gettin’ more excited the further we goes. I’m like, “Don’t you wanner go back now? How we gonner get back if we goes too far?” Darrin’s goin’, “Keep your fuckin’ foot down, you fat wanker, we’re goin’ on the motorway, we’re goin’ to London.” ’
Alice was moaning, ‘Oh, dear God, no, oh dear God.’ Lol sensing a rhythm, as if she was rocking backwards and forwards, doubled up in anguish.
