by Will Maclean
‘Off he goes … And … He’s gone. Right, you. Go and get us alcohol.’
‘What, now? It’s not even—’
Seb grinned. ‘No time like the present. Besides, it’s the countryside. The locals are bored. Trust me, if I lived here I’d start drinking at dawn.’
The day grew even warmer as I trod the winding pathway through the woods, the sunlight slanting through the oak and birch, the sandy soil sparkling like a cache of diamonds.
The village stretched along the single road that ran its length; you could almost see through the place and out the other side. There was the clutch of houses whispering in conspiracy; there was the small triangular lawn where the road branched off. Small details – the colours and names of houses, the concrete garden gnomes – returned to me from my first visit here. The good weather had brought people out, and the village wore an almost holiday air. The villagers – all old, as far as I could tell, although at seventeen my concept of ‘old’ began somewhere around thirty– smiled benignly at me, or tilted their heads in acknowledgement as I passed.
In the tiny shop, I filled a wire basket with various genuine supplies – Sally had given me a list – cheese, bread, apples and milk. Underneath these, I hid five bottles of red wine, selected according to price and alcohol content, an approach a million miles away from my original idea of impressing Sally with my refined good taste. My thinking was that the woman behind the counter would ring up the non-alcoholic items first, and so, even if she doubted my age, wouldn’t want to cancel the transaction and start all over again, and might just turn a blind eye to the wine.
At the till, the woman gave me a perfunctory smile without making eye contact, and began to ring up the items at the top of the basket. The cheese. The bread. The milk. The apples thudded into the metal bowl of the scale to be weighed. We could now both see the five identical bottles lining the bottom of the basket. The till lady expertly transferred the apples into a paper bag, spinning it by its corners to twist it shut. My heart pounded.
She looked at the bottles, then at me.
‘I shouldn’t be selling you this,’ she said.
‘Wh-why?’ I stammered.
She nodded at the wall to her right, where a clock read 11:55.
‘It’s before one.’ She looked at my clearly terrified expression and her face darkened. ‘Licensing laws.’
‘Oh.’ I had not expected this. Should I wait? Come back? Go and look at the fourteenth-century rood screen for an hour?
The till lady’s large face broke into a laugh. She had been pulling my leg. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t!’ she said cheerily, and rang the first bottle up.
The high street was just as I had left it, and the sun was still shining. I was still unable to process that I had just walked away with five bottles of red wine, at noon on a Wednesday. For it to be that easy seemed to speak of a colossal administrative error somewhere in the universe. I was still wondering when the inevitable correction would occur, and what form it would take, when I heard a voice calling after me.
‘Hey! Hey, you there!’
I stopped dead. I felt curiously relieved that the whole ordeal was over.
‘Hey!’
Yet the voice was not that of the till lady. It was too educated, too layered, too rich. I turned around.
The woman from the bookshop. Hattie Wells. She was wearing a pencil skirt, pinstriped blouse and blue suit jacket. Her large glasses, with their pink transparent frames, sat on top of her head. She smiled, although she looked flustered.
‘It’s Tim, isn’t it? I saw you from the shop.’
‘It is.’ I smiled weakly. ‘It’s Hattie, isn’t it?’
‘It is. You’re still up at Yarlings, then?’
‘I am.’
‘Excellent. I tried telephoning a couple of times, but no one answered. Do you have a minute?’
Hattie Wells’s bookshop was even less like a commercial premises – and more like the parlour of a mad aunt – than I recalled. Precarious stacks of randomly-ordered books stretched up to the ceiling, beyond all reason, past the spider-plants and the ornaments and the carriage clock. The French bulldog looked up at me vaguely as the doorbell clanged, then returned to resting her chin on her tartan blanket. Hattie Wells made a great show of clearing a pile of papers and a squeaky dog bone from a chair, and motioned for me to sit. I played with the handles of the plastic shopping bags, and wondered what this was about. Hattie Wells settled into her chair behind the desk, steepled her fingers and stared at me.
‘So,’ she said at length. ‘Tobias Salt.’
‘What about him?’
She frowned down at the Xeroxed pages Graham had given me, then stabbed her right forefinger into the dead centre of the page and pushed it towards me.
‘This document,’ she said, ‘is nonsense.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There never was anyone called Tobias Salt, and if there ever was, he certainly never lived up at Yarlings.’
‘No. You must be mistaken?’ But I knew already that Hattie Wells belonged to that class of Englishwomen who didn’t make mistakes. She shook her head.
‘I’m afraid not. The story was so fantastical, so grotesque, that I was at a loss to account for why I hadn’t heard it before. So I visited the town hall, the local history archive, delved into the parish records, and so on and so forth.’
She looked directly into my eyes. ‘Yarlings was built in 1605. That’s about the only detail in this entire document that’s true. It was built by a man named Geoffrey Swinn, of the Swinn family. However, the house was owned by him and his descendants for the next two hundred or so years.’
‘That’s not possible.’
Hattie Wells carried on speaking, as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘During that time, Yarlings suffers the dramatic and sudden subsidence which ultimately destroys the north wing. The house was empty for years after the last living Swinn, Rebecca, dies. The place is then bought by a Reverend Mountford in the late 1840s, and it’s Mountford who rebuilds the north wing in the reliably awful Gothic Revival style. Mountford tries to make the place into a campaign headquarters for his pet cause, the temperance movement, but his health is failing, and he dies in 1855. After that, it’s bought by the Collmere family, successive generations of whom live there until about five or six years ago. After that, they relocate to London, and rent the place out, sporadically.’
‘But …’ I grasped for something to hold onto as the floor collapsed under me. ‘I mean, you’re sure you’ve got the right Yarlings? There might be other houses in the county with that name?’
‘Oh, I’m sure there are a couple. But none larger than a cottage. It’s also highly unlikely that there would be two houses with the same singular blend of Jacobean and Victorian architecture.’
‘But what about the marks? On the fireplace? I’ve seen them!’ I had run my fingers into the grooves.
With a pen, Hattie Wells flipped open an old volume on her desk, and I saw a line-drawing of a stone hearth with a wooden lintel, not dissimilar to the one in the Great Hall. There was a design carved into the beam. It was a close cousin of the symbol at Yarlings, though perhaps not as ominous-looking, and this time with a date: 1536.
‘They’re common all over Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex – all over the country, to some degree. The hearth was the heart of the home, and it’s logical that people would carve good luck symbols there to protect their household. The carving at Yarlings is likely no more than that.’
I stared at the open book, as if I would somehow find an answer there beyond the obvious. A last, desperate thought struck me.
‘What about the portrait?’
Hattie Wells looked down at the front page of The True History of Tobias Salt. ‘I’ve no idea who that is,’ she said. ‘But I expect, given time, I could find out.’
‘So what does this mean?’ I asked, superfluously.
‘It means that this’ – Hattie Wells prodded the document with her pen, as i
f it were toxic – ‘is balderdash from start to finish. There’s a sprinkling of factual detail, but no more than window dressing.’
‘It’s … lies?’
‘Yes. Not very sophisticated lies, at that. Who gave this to you, again?’
‘The – someone I know.’
‘Well.’ Hattie Wells sat back and folded her arms. ‘I’d say he was playing a prank on you. Trying to scare you. Has there been any supposedly ghostly activity since you came to the house?’
I met her gaze with all of my concentration.
‘None whatsoever,’ I said.
She held my gaze for a second, and then looked away. I exhaled inwardly with the effort.
‘Well,’ she said again. She gave no indication as to whether she believed me or not. ‘In my experience, people often do strange things, for unfathomable reasons. I’m sure your friend has very good motives for fabricating an entirely bogus history for the house, and I’m sure those reasons will become evident in due course.’
‘There’s no chance you could be wrong?’ I said, before I could consider the wisdom of such a question.
Hattie Wells regarded my insolence icily over the top of her bifocals.
‘None whatsoever.’
‘Right,’ I said, getting up to leave. I took the Xeroxed pages, folded them up and put them in my pocket. The wine bottles clanked as I picked the shopping bags up. Hattie Wells glanced at me, but said nothing.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s … hugely helpful.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, not looking up. ‘I’ll admit it was disappointing to disprove such a fantastic tale, but it did sound too good to be true.’
‘Of course. Thanks again,’ I said, for want of anything better to say.
I made my way to the door. Hattie Wells smiled briefly at me, but she was already picking up another book, becoming involved with another text, luxuriating in her private library, where she’d almost certainly not sold a book in a long time, and I was fading from sight.
The walk from the house to the village through the summer splendour of the countryside had been, to my mind, quasi-magical; however, I barely noticed the walk from the village back to the house at all. My mind raced with conflicting explanations and thoughts. Most pressing were two huge, unavoidable questions: Why would anybody do this? and Will I tell the others?
To the first question, I had no easy answers. Graham did not seem like the kind of person who was even capable of a practical joke, so that could be ruled out. Had he been misinformed? This also seemed unlikely. Graham’s methods may not have been exactly scientific, but they were thorough, and it didn’t seem probable that he’d fail to check the provenance of the house so spectacularly. Which left the distinct possibility that Graham had made it all up, as something to do with our experiment. And if that was the case, did Sally know? Was she aware that the entire Tobias Salt story was fiction?
The second question was easier to answer. I rounded the last stretch of the woodland path and saw Yarlings, as if for the first time; the ancestral home of the Swinn family, partially rebuilt in the mid-1800s by a teetotal clergyman. A place with no violent, spectral or occult associations whatsoever, no history of being haunted in any way.
Until now.
‘What’s the matter, old chum? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ Seb snorted with laughter at this comment, clapping me on the shoulder. He had been standing in front of the house, smoking. He either saw the outline of the bottles in the shopping bags or heard them clash together as I walked; either way, his face lit up.
‘Mission accomplished?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said.
‘How many?’
‘Five.’
‘FIVE! Good work, Smith. I’ll see you make sergeant for this. Is it too early to start now?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Bloody hell, actually, it probably is. It’s only one o’clock.’
One o’clock, I thought. Was that all?
I headed inside.
42
There was, I decided, only one person I could speak to. After putting the wine in the kitchen, I padded down the corridor and rapped lightly on Polly’s door.
‘Polly?’
‘Come in. It’s not locked. Oh, hi Tim!’ She was doing some sort of embroidery, and put it carefully aside as she stood up to greet me. Polly’s room was in the Victorian wing of the house, about twice the size of mine, with a view onto the small rear lawn and the woods beyond. As well as a wardrobe, there was a writing desk, on which sat some hardback books, a hairbrush, a transistor radio. There was also a large grandfather clock with a loud, stately tick. She saw me looking at it, and smiled brightly. ‘Don’t worry, you get used to it after a while. In fact, I don’t know how I’m going to get to sleep without it when we go home.’ She blinked as she got a proper look at my face. ‘Good God, Tim, what’s wrong? You look terrible!’
I told her. About Hattie Wells, about Tobias Salt, about the Swinn family and the Reverend Mountford, and the entire history of the house, a history in no way supernatural or ghostly. Her eyes grew wider as she listened. When I finished speaking, she was silent for a long while.
‘You’re sure about all this?’
I nodded.
‘And you think this woman is trustworthy? Graham implied the locals were very – protective – about this story.’
‘She doesn’t seem the kind of person who’s even capable of lying, let alone one who has any interest in doing so. As I say, she’s a local history buff, and the Tobias Salt story was catnip to her. She couldn’t wait to investigate him.’
We both fell silent for a while, thinking.
‘So we’ve been lied to,’ said Polly. ‘I mean, I suspected we weren’t being told the whole truth, but this is way beyond anything I imagined.’
‘But why?’ I said. ‘There are thousands of places in Britain that are genuinely haunted, with real tales every bit as grim and bloody as Tobias Salt’s fake one. Why not pick one of those, if you want to contact a ghost?’
‘We have to conclude,’ said Polly carefully, with the air of someone picking their way through a maze, ‘that, as far as the experiment we’re involved in goes, that is not its purpose.’
‘What, then? It makes no sense!’
‘Not at the moment. We need more information.’
‘Unless you’re prepared to break into Graham’s study,’ I said, ‘we’re unlikely to get any.’
Polly was quiet again for a while, and then she smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Her smile grew broader. ‘I think I know a way we can find out more. But you’re not going to like it.’
At seven o’clock precisely, we began drinking. Seb counted down the seconds on his watch from ten, and as the chimes of the grandfather clock in Polly’s room reverberated through the house, he cheered, opened the first bottle and started pouring us all a glass.
I had never drunk red wine – or wine of any kind – before. Dad said that wine was something that only old ladies and Spaniards drank, and refused to have it in the house. What was wine like? I took the glass Seb had poured for me, and was about to take a huge slug, as if it were Tizer, when Sally gently put her hand on mine to stop me.
‘I know it’s hardly a vintage, Tim, but you have to take your time with it. Sip!’
‘Yeah, Comprehensive,’ Seb sniffed, pouring a glass for Neil. ‘You’re not in borstal now. Right. Is that everyone?’
‘It is,’ said Polly. ‘Unless you want to pour a glass for Mr Salt?’ She stared at Sally, but Sally didn’t notice either the comment or the stare.
‘Well, in that case, I propose a toast,’ said Seb. ‘To Tim. The one who risked death and dishonour by going to the village and procuring us booze. And you brought that bottle of whisky.’
‘Whisky?’ said Sally.
‘A small bottle,’ I said, hastily. ‘We didn’t even finish it.’
Seb ignored her. ‘Here’s to Tim!’
‘Tim,’ everyone said. I smiled and took a sip. Wine, i
t turned out, was to fruit juice – which I was expecting it to taste like – as chess was to noughts and crosses. Wine tasted deep – stratified, slightly spoiled, like rotten fruit, but exhilarating, like spring water. It didn’t reveal itself all at once, and the taste of it seemed to change even as you were drinking it. It was difficult to enjoy and yet impossible to dislike. I took another sip.
‘To me,’ I said.
Strangely, the early part of what was to be our last night at Yarlings was probably the best time we ever had there. Everyone was relaxed, and the wine made the conversation pleasantly confessional, as we compared our young lives thus far, and the things we’d got up to. As far as alcohol went, it turned out that whilst I was not the most experienced, as I had suspected, neither was I the least, as I had feared. Neil had hardly ever drunk at all, and had very little interest in it; Polly swore that that night constituted the most wine she’d ever had, and that she’d have to be careful.
The conversation turned to love and sex and all matters related, and in this none of us could compete with Seb and Juliet, who were, almost proudly, sexually active. Neil, I suspected, had never so much as kissed a girl, and nothing he said on the matter disproved this; Polly had had one boyfriend at her school, who she called ‘a total idiot’, and said they didn’t even speak any more. Sally was coy on the subject, saying she’d recently met someone she liked very much, but they were taking things slowly. The blood in my body seemed to glow warmly after she said this.
We moved on to miscellaneous wild exploits we’d undertaken, and I found – to my surprise – that I was easily the most accomplished of all present in this area. My apprenticeship in hooliganism under Tony Finch had given me a wealth of stories of adventures hilarious, dangerous and pointless, and sometimes all three, and the first rush of wine my system had ever had evaporated my inhibitions and made me quite the raconteur. The story of Tony Finch and me starting a blaze in our factory, which we then had to control and put out, proved to be the pièce de résistance, and I was surprised at how such an unpleasant and troubling memory could become such a good story.
