The House On Nazareth Hill
Page 25
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Then I should, Mr Priestley, before it’s too late.’
This sounded to Oswald like a welcome release. He was painfully unbending from behind the desk, having scraped the tops of his thighs on its underside, when he heard a girl’s voice raised in argument behind him. ‘Is that…’
‘I think it might very possibly be.’
If Amy was questioning, perhaps that wasn’t objectionable in itself, but the shrill aggressiveness of the voice beyond the wall dismayed him. It took him a few seconds to realise that she would be looking up from her desk. ‘Is there another way out I could use?’
‘Another?’ said the teacher, and with some disbelief ‘Oh, I see.’
‘I don’t want to begin by handing her an excuse to flounce out when she comes home.’
Mrs Kelly let that hover for an uncomfortable length of time. At last she said ‘If you slip along by Miss Sadler’s room you can sneak out of our door.’
Oswald thanked her with, he hoped, sufficient vigour to encompass the entire interview, and stole into the corridor. A draught helped him close the classroom door with more of a slam than he intended. Once in the passage reserved for the staff he felt somewhat less panicked, but hurried to the imposing door opposite Miss Sadler’s office. As he dodged around the far side of the school from Amy’s classroom and past a succession of glassed-in voices, the wind kept leaping in his face.
He shut himself into the Austin and wound his window tight to exclude a thin chill blade of air. He had the impression that he’d learned all that he needed to know if he could only piece it together, but no thought seemed able to pass through his mind before a bell tuned to the wind made itself audible, heralding the afternoon break at the school and sending him away as fast as he could start the car.
On the motorway gusts of wind did their best to force him out of whichever lane he was struggling to follow. At the exit he encountered a gale which for quite a few seconds felt capable of shoving him back. It kept relenting and then ambushing him while he clung to the steering-wheel and drove across the moor. Then Partington heaved into view ahead, and his foot faltered on the accelerator.
The car had been struck by a gust so fierce it shook the windscreen, but that wasn’t why he felt suddenly uncertain. Nazarill had risen above the huddled streets as though the town was thrusting it out, and against all his expectations the sight made him wonder if bringing Amy to live there had been a mistake. Now that he’d told her of her heredity, how might she feel if, despite the efforts he would make to prevent it, she discovered that Nazarill had once been an asylum?
The car shivered almost to a halt, and he grabbed the gear-lever. He jerked it through its positions, describing some kind of a cross, and having descended to first gear, trod on the accelerator. For the moment there seemed to be nowhere to go except forward into the forbidding wind. He couldn’t just move himself and Amy out of Nazarill, not least because that would be to go back on promises he’d at the very least implied to the Housall representative. But wasn’t Amy’s welfare more important than anything else?
The road dipped and then soared to find the town, which brandished its speed-limit disc at the car. The first houses cut off not only his view of Nazarill but also, it seemed, his ability to reach a decision. He turned the Austin along Moor View, where a slate from a cottage roof lay shattered in the middle of the road. Just as one of his wheels crunched a slate fragment, Nazarill reappeared at the end of the lane. Instantly he knew without question that he had been wrong.
The windscreen trembled again as the car emerged onto Nazareth Row, but the railings in front of Nazarill stood firm. There was no longer any oak to bow and thrash and fling its leaves about; perhaps that was why the grounds appeared so still. When he drove onto the gravel the wind dropped as though the building had breathed it in. Once he’d found his plot in the car park, a new wind raised his hood for him while ushering him around the corner. He slid his key into the lock and took refuge in Nazarill.
Warmth and silence and light as soft as the glow of candles in a church were there for him, bringing him immediate relief from any doubts he might harbour. This was his and Amy’s home, and he need only find a way to make her feel as he was feeling. Praying ought to help, and he began to murmur to himself as he climbed the stairs. He met nobody to interrupt him en route to his door. Beyond it the great eyes of the framed pictures looked awed by his willingness to be shown the right path. He left the lights off and moved through the dimming rooms, eventually falling to his knees at the foot of the bed. ‘Please help me keep her here. I know it’s the best place for her. I thought it mightn’t be, but I see now I was confused. Only if she should find out it used to be what we know it was, please let me think what to do.’
He sensed the cold stone beneath the warmth of Nazarill. Together they suggested a life held in balance. He thought he could detect truth gathering like the darkness; soon it would be clear to him. But there was still a residue of light in the sky, and he was praying drowsily and patiently, when the phone rang.
He dug his elbows into the mattress to lever himself to his feet, and ran to grab the receiver. ‘Priestley.’
‘Dad.’
‘Yes, Amy. What do you want?’ said Oswald, and immediately knew.
‘One of my friends wants me to stay at hers tonight so we can do our homework together.’
Not only had he been right, but he was sure he heard untruth in her attempt to sound casual. He closed his fist on the receiver, its plastic stem as thin as her wrist when he had lifted her to Nazarill. ‘I think not. Let your friend come home with you.’
‘But she lives here in Sheffield.’
‘All the more reason for you not to stay with her.’ As Oswald heard the plastic crack he relaxed his grip. He didn’t need to be violent, just firm. ‘Come home now, please. Dinner will be waiting, and so will I,’ he said, and cut her off.
15 - The whisper of the past
Halfway through the first lesson of that afternoon the English mistress said ‘Miss Priestley?’
Amy was gazing over the thoughts she’d written about illusions in Macbeth, a dagger and Banquo’s ghost and the blood on the hands of, as she’d scribbled it, Mrs Big Mac. Her attention had been hovering somewhere between the blackboard and a similarly flattened image of Carolyn Henderson’s hair piled up to expose the freckly nape of her neck above her broad shoulders at the desk in front. ‘Yes, Miss Burd,’ Amy said.
‘Can I be of any help?’
She’d raised her head enough to halve her chins and opened her mouth until it was almost as round as her face, all of which signified that the question wasn’t just an offer, more the threat of a rebuke. ‘I was thinking about the witches,’ said Amy.
‘Do tell.’
‘They make him see stuff, don’t they? They get into his mind and then he starts not knowing what’s real and acting mad.’
‘I take it we’re referring to the weird sisters and the way Macbeth is prompted by the supernatural.’
‘Them, yes.’
‘Interesting thoughts, best developed in a different essay, perhaps on the question of how much the characters use predestination as an excuse for what they do.’
Until Amy had spoken she hadn’t known she had the thoughts; they didn’t represent what she’d been thinking. Some doubt must have escaped onto her face, because the teacher said ‘You disagree?’
‘I’ll save it if you say.’ Amy thought that was sufficiently agreeable, but Miss Burd looked as though she hadn’t heard an answer. All Amy could produce now was the truth. ‘I’m still thinking about witches.’
‘By all means speak up if it’s an insight the rest of us should have.’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ Amy said, and saw that wouldn’t be enough. ‘I think there used to be some where I live.’
‘I’ve an unhappy suspicion you aren’t talking about insight.’
‘I only just heard about them,’ Amy prote
sted. ‘The Partington Witches. They’re supposed to have used to go up on the hill where I’m living at the moment. Have you heard of them?’
‘I’m quite relieved to say I haven’t. It’s hardly my area of—’
Amy felt close to the panic she was trying to fend off. For a moment the dark in which she’d lain awake until she’d switched her light on seemed to have entered the classroom. She half rose in the trap formed by her desk and its seat, and twisted round. ‘How about any of you?’
Most of her classmates shook their heads and gave her varieties of smile, some of these amused or worse. There was silence until Miss Burd cleared her throat at the pitch of chalk on a blackboard. ‘Miss Priestley.’
Amy subsided behind her desk. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
‘I was about to say that the person to consult is presumably Mr Berrystone.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So if you’re content with that, perhaps we can return to our theme for today.’
Amy didn’t know how she could have felt less content, not least because the history master was the teacher she most disliked. She bent her head to her work to hide her feelings, and when she could think of nothing further to write, began to lengthen all the esses. The door of the adjoining classroom slammed, and she was touched by a draught as though the secret stony cold of Nazarill had come to find her. The night, far too imminent in any case, lurched nearer. She had to discover all she could, in the hope that she would learn something even her father would have to take notice of, and so at the end of the English lesson she went in search of the history master.
He was in the schoolyard, keeping an eye on the girls. His expression, which opined that he was watching a spectacle staged for his benefit, almost made her turn away without approaching him. As he noticed her dawdling towards him he withdrew one hand from the pocket of his green suede jacket and fingered the point of the beard which further sharpened his small neat face.
‘Yes,’ he said in the tone of responding to an offer which, although perhaps only in the circumstances, was acceptable. ‘Yes.’
Amy hugged her breasts as the wind flapped the lapels of her blazer. ‘Miss Burd said I should see you.’
‘And here you are,’ he said with the unnecessariness that was one of his traits she particularly disliked. ‘I take it she said why.’
‘We were talking in class and she said you’d be the person to ask.’
‘As is frequently the case,’ he said without humour. ‘About.’
The curtness of the word suggested he was patronising her question in advance, and only desperation made her blurt ‘Some witches there were supposed to be. The Partington Witches.’
‘That’s your territory, is it not? That’s where we have you from.’
‘Partington.’
‘That cosy retreat,’ he agreed, and pinched his beard as a wind set it bristling. ‘Well, my winged colleague has me right. I do know something about them.’
‘What?’
‘All there is to know, I dare say’
Amy was silent, suspecting this to be the preamble to a poor, hence unbearable, joke. At last she said ‘Such as…’
‘Thirteen individuals whom the people of your village when it was half its size didn’t like to encounter after dark, especially on some nights of the year.’
‘Why, what did they do?’
‘Some, probably no more than concoct old remedies. But some had a reputation for making anybody who crossed them ill with just a look. What they did when they all gathered together, well, how could anyone know? If the villagers were so afraid of them, nobody would have risked spying on them, would they?’
That seemed to Amy much more logical than helpful. ‘So what happened to them, the witches?’
‘Little enough by the standards of the day. One or two may have been strung up from a convenient tree, and the rest seem to have taken the hint and made themselves scarce. You should appreciate all this was supposedly occurring after the official witch-hunts had been ended and something slightly more like sanity was creeping into fashion.’
It was suddenly apparent to her that the emotion he experienced while surveying either history or the present was resignation fending off despair, not that she felt better for the insight. ‘That can’t be all,’ she protested. ‘Someone must know more than that.’
‘You’re assuming there’s more to learn and not less.’
‘How can there be less?’
‘Perhaps your witches never existed. I only heard about them from a grandmother who was half past knowing what she was saying. Perhaps they were no more than a story to frighten small children, the kind of tale I hear you’re good at.’
His words let Nazarill at her. She might as well have been back there, trailing after her father through the downstairs rooms, terrified of what else she might see and yet willing him to be confronted by some sight he would be unable to deny. Once she’d heard a series of effortful breaths beyond a door he was about to open, noises suggestive of a throat trying to clear itself of some of itself. Once she and her father had been preceded through an apartment by a shuffling which had changed in ways that made her think the feet had been wearing themselves closer to the bone with every step. She could tell he’d heard none of this, nor the sound as he’d switched on a light in a room of someone scuttling away on too few limbs, withdrawing spiderlike out of sight through an exit where none was visible. The denizens of Nazarill had been hiding themselves for the moment, so that by the end of her enforced tour so much anger and frustration had been mingled with her fear that her sarcasm had sounded all too indistinguishable from the truth as she’d declared there had been nothing, oh no, nothing even remotely wrong. She’d wanted her father to hear how little she meant it, but she had failed to take into account his need to believe that she did.
And now Mr Berrystone had elected himself spokesman for her father—for almost everyone she knew. ‘Have a care,’ he said. ‘Watch out or you’ll finish up frightening yourself.’
Rather than respond as she thought he deserved, she was turning away quickly when he said ‘Before you rejoin your peers, some words along the lines of thank you, Mr Berrystone, for racking your brains might seem in order.’
‘Is that what you did?’ she was about to retort when she saw in his eyes that he had. ‘Thank you for telling me what you knew,’ she said, but any sincerity she intended was swamped by her realisation that now she was unable to avoid remembering last night, she couldn’t bear the prospect of going home.
She wandered through the crowded windswept schoolyard until she located a friend who would surely be able to help. ‘Lorna, is your Cathy back at university?’
‘Went on Monday. I’ve got the bathroom for all the hours I want again.’
‘Is her room spare?’
‘Till Easter. Come and stay soon if you like.’
‘How about tonight?’
‘I don’t expect they’ll mind. They won’t have to, will they? Is it your dad, why you want to stay?’
‘It’s just something I have to work out,’ Amy said awkwardly, wondering how she would deal with going home tomorrow. Time enough to decide that when tomorrow came, she thought, only to spend the afternoon trying. At last school was over, and she was on her way to Lorna’s, stopping at a phone box by the school to call in case her father was at home.
The bell began to pulse as though the heart of Nazarill was stuttering into life, and she had the sudden awful thought that it wouldn’t be her father who answered. Then his voice said ‘Priestley.’
‘Dad,’ she said with more warmth than she had for a while.
‘Yes, Amy. What do you want?’
Amy pressed a knee against the door, which she’d already closed firmly to keep out the wind, so that Lorna wouldn’t overhear her lying. ‘One of my friends wants me to stay at hers tonight so we can do our homework together.’
‘I think not. Let your friend come home with you.’
His tone hadn
’t been particularly welcoming to start with, and now it was sharp and chill as the wind that was probing beneath the door. ‘But she lives here in Sheffield,’ Amy said, shivering.
‘All the more reason for you not to stay with her. Come home now, please.. Dinner will be waiting, and so will I,’ he said, and left her with a hollow droning that merged with the moan of the wind around the booth.
More would be waiting than he knew. She didn’t have to go home just because he said so; he wouldn’t be able to find her until she returned to school. She snapped her purse shut and let it fall into her bag on the metal shelf by the phone, then she sucked in a breath which hurt her teeth and heaved the bag wide open. She’d left the Bible in her room.
She’d fetched it during the worst of the night, not knowing whether she meant to search its margins for an explanation or to hold it as a defence against whatever might have been making its way through the dark of Nazarill. Eventually, in the midst of one of the dozes into which she’d been unable not to lapse, she had allowed the book to slide down the quilt onto the floor, which was presumably where it lay now.
She felt as if she’d tricked herself, or Nazarill had. The writing in the margins of the Bible was evidence which she couldn’t risk leaving in Nazarill, even if she wasn’t sure what danger it might be in. At least with her father waiting she wouldn’t be alone when she went home. She stuffed the bag under her arm and heaved the shuddering door open. ‘You were long enough,’ Lorna complained, brushing her brick-red hair over both shoulders with her fingertips to clear her periodically spotty face. ‘Let’s run. Listen to my teeth.’
‘Sorry about them,’ said Amy as her friend displayed their chattering. ‘And sorry, but I can’t come after all.’
‘Why not?’
A harmless lie was less complicated than the truth. ‘My dad’s not well. He’s just got me.’
‘See you Monday, then,’ said Lorna, and dashed off.
Amy turned from the phone box in time to see the bus pull up, halted by Bettina or Deborah or Zoe, all of whom were flashing their passes at the driver. The next bus wasn’t due for an hour, if then. She displayed her laminated rectangle containing herself from last year, a pressed specimen, and as the doors fluttered shut she levelled a glare at the three girls on the back seat before sitting diagonally opposite the driver.