by Gene Kemp
In the beautiful stone hall at the foot of the stairs the owners and the parents and Fran confronted each other. Then the four grown people advanced with their hands outstretched, like some dance.
‘The house has always been in my family,’ said the woman. ‘For two hundred years.’
‘Can I go out?’ asked Fran.
‘For over fifty years it was in the possession of three sisters. My three great-aunts.’
‘Mum – can I? I’ll stay by the car.’
‘They never married. They adored the house. They scarcely ever left it or had people to stay. There were never any children in this house.’
‘Mum –’
‘Do,’ said the woman to Fran. ‘Do go and look around the garden. Perfectly safe. Far from the road.’
The four adults walked away down the stone passage. A door to the dining room was opened. ‘This,’ said the woman, ‘is said to be the most beautiful dining room in Kent.’
‘What was that?’ asked Fran’s mother. ‘Where is Fran?’
But Fran seemed happy. All four watched her in her white T-shirt running across the grass. They watched her through the dining room window all decorated round with frills and garlands of wisteria. ‘What a sweet girl,’ said the woman. The man cleared his throat and went wandering away.
‘I think it’s because there have never been any children in this house that it’s in such beautiful condition,’ said the woman. ‘Nobody has even been unkind to it.’
‘I wouldn’t say,’ said Fran’s mother, ‘that children were –’
‘Oh, but you can tell a house where children have taken charge. Now your dear little girl would never –’
The parents were taken into a room that smelled of rose petals. A cherrywood fire was burning although the day was very hot. Most of the fire was soft white ash. Somebody had been doing some needlework. Dogs slept quietly on a rug. ‘Oh, Fran would love –’ said Fran’s mother looking out of the window again. But Fran was not to be seen.
‘Big family?’ asked the old man suddenly.
‘No. Just – just one daughter, Fran.’
‘Big house for just one child.’
‘But you said there had never been children in this house.’
‘Oh – wouldn’t say never. Wouldn’t say never.’
Fran had wandered away towards the garden but then had come in again to the stone hall, where she stopped to look at herself in a long dim glass. There was a blue jar with a lid on a low table, and she lifted the lid and saw a heap of dried rose petals. The lid dropped back rather hard and wobbled on the jar as if to fall off. ‘Children are unkind to houses.’ She heard the floating voice of the woman shepherding her parents from one room to another. Fran pulled an unkind face at the jar. She turned a corner of the hall and saw the staircase sweeping upwards and round a corner. On the landing someone seemed to be standing, but then as she looked seemed not to be there after all. ‘Oh yes,’ she heard the woman’s voice, ‘Oh yes, I suppose so. Lovely for children. The old nurseries should be very adequate. We never go up there.’
‘If there are nurseries,’ said Fran’s father, ‘there must once have been children.’
‘I suppose so. Once. It’s not a thing we ever think about.’
‘But if it has always been in your family it must have been inherited by children?’
‘Oh cousins. Generally cousins inherited. Quite strange how children have not been actually born here.’ Fran, who was sitting outside on the steps now in front of the open door, heard the little group clatter off along the stone pavement to the kitchens and thought, ‘Why are they going on about children so?’
She thought, ‘When they come back I’ll go with them. I’ll ask to see that painted man down the passage. I’d rather be with Mum to see him close.’
Silence had fallen. The house behind her was still, the garden in front of her stiller. It was the moment in an English early summer afternoon when there is a pause for sleep. Even the birds stop singing. Tired by their almost non-stop territorial squawks and cheeps and trills since dawn, they declare a truce and sit still upon branches, stand with heads cocked listening, scamper now and then in the bushes across dead leaves. When Fran listened very hard she thought she could just hear the swish of the road, or perhaps the sea. The smell of the early roses was very strong. Somewhere upstairs a window was opened and a light voice came and went as people moved from room to room. ‘Must have gone up the back stairs,’ Fran thought and leaned her head against the fluted column of the portico. It was strange. She felt she knew what the house looked like upstairs. Had she been upstairs yet or was she still thinking of going? Going. Going to sleep. Silly.
She jumped up and said, ‘You can’t catch me. Bang, bang – you’re dead.’
She didn’t know what she meant by it so she said it again out loud. ‘Bang, bang – you’re dead.’
She looked at the garden, all the way round from her left to her right. Nothing stirred. Not from the point where a high wall stood with a flint arch in it, not on the circular terrace with the round pond, not in the circle of green with the round gap in it where the courtyard opened to the long drive, and where their car was standing. The car made her feel safe.
Slowly round went her look, right across to where the stone urns on the right showed a mossy path behind them. Along the path, out of the shadow of the house, the sun was blazing and you could see bright flowers.
Fran walked to the other side of the round pond and looked up at the house from the courtyard and saw the portrait again looking at her. It must be hanging in a very narrow passage, she thought, to be so near to the glass. The man was in some sort of uniform. You could see gold on his shoulders and lace on his cuffs. You could see long curls falling over his shoulders. Fancy soldiers with long curls hanging over their uniform! Think of the dandruff.
‘Olden days,’ said Fran. ‘Bang, bang – you’re dead,’ and she set off at a run between the stone urns and into the flower garden. ‘I’ll run right round the house,’ she thought. ‘I’ll run like mad. Then I’ll say I’ve been all round the garden by myself, and not seen the ghost.’
She ran like the wind all round, leaping the flower beds, tearing along a showering rose border, here and there, up and down, flying through another door in a stone wall among greenhouses and sheds and old stables, out again past a rose-red dove-house with the doves like fat pearls set in some of the little holes, and others stepping about the grass. Non-stop, non-stop she ran, across the lawn, right turn through a yew hedge, through the flint arch at last and back to the courtyard. ‘Oh yes,’ she would say to her friends on their bikes, ‘I did. I’ve been there. I’ve been all round the garden by myself and I didn’t see a living soul.’
‘A living soul.’
‘I didn’t see any ghost. Never even thought of one.’
‘You’re brave, Fran. I’d never be brave like that. Are your parents going to buy the house?’
‘Don’t suppose so. It’s very boring. They’ve never had any children in it. Like an old folks’ home. Not even haunted.’
Picking a draggle of purple wisteria off the courtyard wall – and pulling rather a big trail of it down as she did so – Fran began to do the next brave thing: to walk round the house. Slowly. She pulled a few petals off the wisteria and gave a carefree sort of wave at the portrait in the window. In front of it, looking out of the window, stood a little girl.
Then she was gone.
For less than a flick of a second Fran went cold round the back of the neck. Then hot.
Then she realized she must be going loopy. The girl hadn’t been in a pinafore and frilly dress, with long loose hair. She’d been in a white T-shirt like Fran’s own. She had been Fran’s own reflection for a moment in the glass of the portrait.
‘Stupid. Loopy,’ said Fran, picking off petals and scattering them down the mossy path, then along the rosy flagstones of the rose garden. Her heart was beating very hard. It was almost pleasant, the fright and then the relief coming
so close together.
‘Well, I thought I saw the ghost but it was only myself reflected in a window,’ she’d say to the friends in the road at home.
‘Oh Fran, you are brave.’
‘How d’you know it was you? Did you see its face? Everyone wears T-shirts.’
‘Oh, I expect it was me all right. They said there’d never been any children in the house.’
‘What a cruddy house. I’ll bet it’s not true. I’ll bet there’s a girl they’re keeping in there somewhere. Behind those bars. I bet she’s being imprisoned. I bet they’re kidnappers.’
‘They wouldn’t be showing people over the house and trying to sell it if they were kidnappers. Not while the kidnapping was actually going on, anyway. No, you can tell –’ Fran was explaining away, pulling off the petals. ‘There wasn’t anyone there but me.’ She looked up at the windows in the stable block she was passing. They were partly covered with creeper, but one of them stood open and a girl in a T-shirt was sitting in it, watching Fran.
This time she didn’t vanish. Her shiny short hair and white shirt shone out clear. Across her humped-up knees lay a comic. She was very much the present day.
‘It’s you again,’ she said.
She was so ordinary that Fran’s heart did not begin to thump at all. She thought, ‘It must be the gardener’s daughter. They must live over the stables and she’s just been in the house. I’ll bet she wasn’t meant to. That’s why she ducked away.’
‘I saw you in the house,’ Fran said. ‘I thought you were a reflection of me.’
‘Reflection?’
‘In the picture.’
The girl looked disdainful. ‘When you’ve been in the house as long as I have,’ she said, ‘let’s hope you’ll know a bit more. Oil paintings don’t give off reflections. They’re not covered in glass.’
‘We won’t be keeping the oil paintings,’ said Fran grandly. ‘I’m not interested in things like that.’
‘I wasn’t at first,’ said the girl. ‘D’you want to come up? You can climb over the creeper if you like. It’s cool up here.’
‘No thanks. We’ll have to go soon. They’ll wonder where I am when they see I’m not waiting by the car.’
‘Car?’ said the girl. ‘Did you come in a car?’
‘Of course we came in a car.’ She felt furious suddenly. The girl was looking at her oddly, maybe as if she wasn’t rich enough to have a car. Just because she lived at The Elms. And she was only the gardener’s daughter anyway. Who did she think she was?
‘Well take care on the turn-out to the road then. It’s a dangerous curve. It’s much too hot to go driving today.’
‘I’m not hot,’ said Fran.
‘You ought to be,’ said the girl in the T-shirt, ‘with all that hair and those awful black stockings.’
Uninvited Ghosts
PENELOPE LIVELY
Marian and Simon were sent to bed early on the day that the Brown family moved house. By then everyone had lost their temper with everyone else; the cat had been sick on the sitting room carpet; the dog had run away twice. If you have ever moved you will know what kind of a day it had been. Packing cases and newspaper all over the place … sandwiches instead of proper meals … the kettle lost and a wardrobe stuck on the stairs and Mrs Brown’s favourite vase broken. There was bread and baked beans for supper, the television wouldn’t work and the water wasn’t hot, so when all was said and done the children didn’t object too violently to being packed off to bed. They’d had enough, too. They had one last argument about who was going to sleep by the window, put on their pyjamas, got into bed, switched the lights out … and it was at that point that the ghost came out of the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers.
It oozed out, a grey cloudy shape about three feet long, smelling faintly of woodsmoke, sat down on a chair and began to hum to itself. It looked like a bundle of bedclothes, except that it was not solid: you could see, quite clearly, the cushion on the chair beneath it.
Marian gave a shriek. ‘That’s a ghost!’
‘Oh, be quiet, dear, do,’ said the ghost. ‘That noise goes right through my head. And it’s not nice to call people names.’ It took out a ball of wool and some needles and began to knit.
What would you have done? Well, yes – Simon and Marian did just that and I dare say you can imagine what happened. You try telling your mother that you can’t get to sleep because there’s a ghost sitting in the room clacking its knitting needles and humming. Mrs Brown said the kind of things she could be expected to say and the ghost continued sitting there knitting and humming and Mrs Brown went out, banging the door and saying threatening things about if there’s so much as another word from either of you …
‘She can’t see it,’ said Marian to Simon.
‘’Course not, dear,’ said the ghost. ‘It’s the kiddies I’m here for. Love kiddies, I do. We’re going to be ever such friends.’
‘Go away!’ yelled Simon. ‘This is our house now!’
‘No it isn’t,’ said the ghost smugly. ‘Always been here, I have. A hundred years and more. Seen plenty of families come and go, I have. Go to bye-byes now, there’s good children.’
The children glared at it and buried themselves under the bedclothes. And, eventually, slept.
The next night it was there again. This time it was smoking a long white pipe and reading a newspaper dated 1842. Beside it was a second grey cloudy shape. ‘Hello, dearies,’ said the ghost. ‘Say how do you do to my Auntie Edna.’
‘She can’t come here too,’ wailed Marian.
‘Oh yes she can,’ said the ghost. ‘Always comes here in August, does Auntie. She likes a change.’
Auntie Edna was even worse, if possible. She sucked peppermint drops that smelled so strong that Mrs Brown, when she came to kiss the children goodnight, looked suspiciously under their pillows. She also sang hymns in a loud squeaky voice. The children lay there groaning and the ghosts sang and rustled the newspapers and ate peppermints.
The next night there were three of them. ‘Meet Uncle Charlie!’ said the first ghost. The children groaned.
‘And Jip,’ said the ghost. ‘Here, Jip, good dog – come and say hello to the kiddies, then.’ A large grey dog that you could see straight through came out from under the bed, wagging its tail. The cat, who had been curled up beside Marian’s feet (it was supposed to sleep in the kitchen, but there are always ways for a resourceful cat to get what it wants), gave a howl and shot on top of the wardrobe, where it sat spitting. The dog lay down in the middle of the rug and set about scratching itself vigorously; evidently it had ghost fleas, too.
Uncle Charlie was unbearable. He had a loud cough that kept going off like a machine gun and he told the longest most pointless stories the children had ever heard. He said he too loved kiddies and he knew kiddies loved stories. In the middle of the seventh story the children went to sleep out of sheer boredom.
The following week the ghosts left the bedroom and were to be found all over the house. The children had no peace at all. They’d be quietly doing their homework and all of a sudden Auntie Edna would be breathing down their necks reciting arithmetic tables. The original ghost took to sitting on top of the television with his legs in front of the picture. Uncle Charlie told his stories all through the best programmes and the dog lay permanently at the top of the stairs. The Browns’ cat became quite hysterical, refused to eat and went to live on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser.
Something had to be done. Marian and Simon also were beginning to show the effects; their mother decided they looked peaky and bought an appalling sticky brown vitamin medicine from the chemist’s to strengthen them. ‘It’s the ghosts!’ wailed the children. ‘We don’t need vitamins!’ Their mother said severely that she didn’t want to hear another word of this silly nonsense about ghosts. Auntie Edna, who was sitting smirking on the other side of the kitchen table at that very moment, nodded vigorously and took out a packet of humbugs which she sucked noisily.
&
nbsp; ‘We’ve got to get them to go and live somewhere else,’ said Marian. But where, that was the problem, and how? It was then that they had a bright idea. On Sunday the Browns were all going to see their uncle who was rather rich and lived alone in a big house with thick carpets everywhere and empty rooms and the biggest colour television you ever saw. Plenty of room for ghosts.
They were very cunning. They suggested to the ghosts that they might like a drive in the country. The ghosts said at first that they were quite comfortable where they were, thank you, and they didn’t fancy these newfangled motor cars, not at their time of life. But then Auntie Edna remembered that she liked looking at the pretty flowers and the trees and finally they agreed to give it a try. They sat in a row on the back shelf of the car. Mrs Brown kept asking why there was such a strong smell of peppermint and Mr Brown kept roaring at Simon and Marian to keep still while he was driving. The fact was that the ghosts were shoving them; it was like being nudged by three cold damp flannels. And the ghost dog, who had come along too of course, was carsick.
When they got to Uncle Dick’s the ghosts came in and had a look round. They liked the expensive carpets and the enormous television. They slid in and out of the wardrobes and walked through the doors and the walls and sent Uncle Dick’s budgerigars into a decline from which they have never recovered. Nice place, they said, nice and comfy.
‘Why not stay here?’ said Simon, in an offhand tone.
‘Couldn’t do that,’ said the ghosts firmly. ‘No kiddies. Dull. We like a place with a bit of life to it.’ And they piled back into the car and sang hymns all the way home to the Browns’ house. They also ate toast. There were real toast crumbs on the floor and the children got the blame.
Simon and Marian were in despair. The ruder they were to the ghosts the more the ghosts liked it. ‘Cheeky!’ they said indulgently. ‘What a cheeky little pair of kiddies! There now … come and give uncle a kiss.’ The children weren’t even safe in the bath. One or other of the ghosts would come and sit on the taps and talk to them. Uncle Charlie had produced a mouth organ and played the same tune over and over again; it was quite excruciating. The children went around with their hands over their ears. Mrs Brown took them to the doctor to find out if there was something wrong with their hearing. The children knew better than to say anything to the doctor about the ghosts. It was pointless saying anything to anyone.
