by Paul Magrs
‘Don’t do it, Brenda,’ he says, apropos of nothing. ‘You mustn’t do it.’
The words are coming out of him as if he’s possessed. A sleepwalking vamp? Even-darker forces seem to be echoing through him. ‘What are you on about, you silly boy?’
‘The thing you’re getting into,’ he intones. ‘It’ll be the end for us all.’
Now I get a funny intimation as he says this. Like someone’s stepped on one of my various graves. His strange warning is close enough to what we heard in Paris to give me pause for thought. I step closer to him, threateningly, I hope. ‘Who sent you? Who’s been telling you to come and give me this warning?’
He’s backing away now, looking stricken. ‘Don’t do it,’ he goes. ‘Stay at home. Forget about it.’ Then he gives a little kick in the air with his clumpy, filthy trainers and floats off above the guesthouse rooftops.
It’s been a very frustrating encounter indeed. I don’t mind people giving me dire warnings, but I do like them to be a bit more specific.
Anyhow, I hurry home because by now it’s getting late and I’m tired. I’ve been missing my sleep lately on account of Effie’s nocturnal ramblings and her telling of the tales in my sitting room. Tonight I could just do with a good ten hours of sweet oblivion.
§
My house is quiet as I let myself in. As I came past the front I saw there were no lights burning in the Red Room. The Hoffmanns must be having an early night, ready for their departure tomorrow morning. They’ve been a funny pair. Very quiet and polite, perhaps a bit aloof. But I’ll never forget finding those papers amongst their stuff. I’ll never get over that sensation that they were watching me for some reason, and noting down my every utterance and deed.
As I hurry up to my attic dwelling I’m thinking that it doesn’t matter now. Who cares if they were making notes on me and being as sneaky as they were. They’ll be gone tomorrow. I never have to think about them again.
However, as soon as I’m in my sitting room I realise something dreadful has been going on. Someone has been up here this evening. They have stepped uninvited into my home and they’ve been through my stuff. It’s as if I can see their footprints in the thick pile of the carpet, or detect the minute traces of their sneaky movements in the dust patterns. I start to examine surfaces and furniture… and for once I’m glad of the extra, inexplicable muck. I can see that someone has been poking about in my belongings, shifting things, looking under nicknacks and books. Peering behind paintings and going through the cupboards. Luckily, anything at all valuable I own is stowed away in a safe behind a painting by Turner. With my heart pounding I check this out, and am glad to see that, though the intruders found the safe, they weren’t able to open it.
At once I know that it is the Hoffmanns who have been up here tonight while I was out. They crept in here together, these people I have trusted and looked after, and they were determined to sate their bizarre curiosity about me. Goodness knows what they were hoping to find.
I can feel my panic building. Recently I have been too complacent. Too open and casual and trusting. Time was, I used to be much more secretive. I would never put myself in a position where a stranger could discover all the truth about me. I sit there and curse myself, sipping a restorative cup of spicy tea. Luckily my guests don’t appear to have gone up into the attic. Perhaps they didn’t have time, or it never occurred to them to look. I dread to think what they would have thought about what’s hidden up there.
All of a sudden I am seized with an idea. No, it’s not even an idea. It’s a determination. An impulse. I get up on my feet and I put my mug carefully aside and I know what I am about to do.
I thunder out of my quarters and down the stairs.
There’s just one, very clear thought in my head: ‘I’m not having this.’
I reach the second floor and I hasten to the door of the Red Room. There’s not a squeak coming from within.
All I can think is that I’ve had it now. I’ve had enough. I’ve had my fill of vampires and hunchbacks and who knows what else getting on at me. Trying to make me feel anxious and fretful. Seeking to undermine my wonderful, peaceful life that I have achieved. And even here at home, where I should feel safest and most content, I’ve got snooty bloody academics going behind my back and rummaging amongst my things. Well, I suddenly realise, I’m not going to put up with it.
I turn to the Red Room and smash down the door. With my bare fists. It’s the kind of show of strength that I really don’t like doing, but sometimes when your dander is up there’s no other way. So I batter my way into the Hoffmanns’ room in order to give them their marching orders. I want to scare the living daylights out of them. I want to see them sitting up in bed, terrified, blinking in the light from the hall. Thinking that they’re about to be murdered.
I flick on the lights in the curiously quiet room.
And they are gone.
Their bed is still fully made up. The wardrobe is empty. Everything is spick and span.
They’ve done a flit.
There’s a cheque for the full amount they owe on the dressing table, and no other kind of note. It seems that they were here long enough, and learned everything they needed to know about me. And they got out of here, from under my nose, without giving me the chance to confront them about their subterfuge.
Who were the Hoffmanns really? What was it they were trying to find out about me?
I sink down onto the fancy chaise longue I bought especially for this, my most luxurious room and all of a sudden I feel like having a good cry. Why can’t I just be left in peace?
§
Once back upstairs I ring Effie and fill her in on what’s been going on. That is, the spirit of Sheila Manchu revealing herself, Robert’s qualms about our leaving town for however short a trip, the Walker who accosted me in the dark street with a warning, and finally the funny business with my house guests.
Effie is laconic. ‘Well, you’ve had quite a night of it, ducky. I wouldn’t let it bother you, though.’
Easy for Effie to say. She’s had a nice night in with a boil-in-the-bag in Mornay sauce and a mystery novel, she says. Oh, and her Aunt Maude popped out of her portrait in the dining room to tell her that she – and I – are on the right track. There is, in fact, something vital we need to accomplish in Effie’s old stomping ground of Hawarth. And the sooner we get on with it the better.
‘I’ve booked our tickets for the coach,’ Effie tells me. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow at midday. Is that all right?’
I tell her that I suppose it’ll have to be and put down the phone, hoping I won’t feel travel sick, like I did the last time I took a bus across the moors. Full of bumps, Yorkshire.
§
The coach trip seems to take forever, with several changes in little towns I’ve never even heard of, and lots of bouncing about on the back seat. Luckily, I don’t get sick, but I do get cross because the toilet at the back is a bit narrow and hard to get into.
Funny bunch of people on the bus, too. Just a handful of them, one or two looking shifty when they clap eyes on Effie and I. One pale man with bulging eyes and a greasy quiff looks especially nervous when he sees us. And then I realise – they are all supernatural creatures, attempting to leave our town and move elsewhere. By rights, Effie and I should be trying to stop them. Perhaps that’s what these folk think we are here for.
Except we don’t have time for all that now. We are intent on this mission of our own, into Effie’s past.
She stares out of the tinted window at the rolling moors and the endless skies and sighs very deeply. ‘I think I shall miss being picked up every night by the Limbosine.’
‘Really? Everyone else said it was terrifying. They found its previous victims gibbering in ditches.’
‘Perhaps I’m made of hardier stuff. I felt very secure, sitting in the back seat of that car. It was warm and pl
ush and he’s ever such an attractive man, the Chauffear. I never felt he would do me any harm. Actually, I felt very safe with him.’
So she’s off in a reverie about that phantom driver. I can’t see what could have been so nice about it. I don’t think I’d have put up with all that funny business. Especially not mucking about in my past.
The bus chugs onwards, winding down flat, long roads and twisty turns under shifting grey skies. The landscape changes as we make steady progress across the country. It becomes lusher, greener. We are higher up now. Lone sheep stand by the roadside, chewing dreamily.
We change buses, lugging our overnight bags with us, and the last bus we end up on is an old fashioned thing that must have been going for donkeys’ years. It’s shuddering and jolting for the final few miles. Effie looks a bit bilious, with her handbag open on her lap as she consults a map and the details of the place we’re going to be staying in. Perhaps it’s not just the bouncy bus making her look like that. I think she looks nervous about what she might find in this town of Haworth.
‘Have you never been back since you were a child?’
She looks up at me blankly and then realizes I’m asking her a question. ‘What? Oh, no. Er, no, Brenda. When the war was over and all the evacuees could be sent home, I went trooping back to Whitby with barely a backward glance. I don’t remember much more of it… Everything is a bit of a blur.’
I nod understandingly. ‘I wonder if it will all come flooding back, once we get there.’
‘I’m sure it will.’ Then she rings the Bed and Breakfast she chose on the interweb to warn them we are about to arrive.
And fairly soon we’re stepping off the bus into a town that I would call quaint. Everything is built out of dark stone and there’s a chilly dampness in the air, as if it’s just been raining hard, or is about to. Effie stands at the bottom of the sloping high street and takes a long hard look at it all. I want to ask her allsorts of questions, about whether it looks and feels like the same place, but I leave her to her quiet epiphany.
Next thing, the bus races off and we’re wandering the streets looking for our guesthouse. Effie takes charge as she marches up to the front of ‘Villette’ and rings the bell.
Well. As guest houses go, it’s just about all right. It’s on the economical side and reasonably clean, I would say, as I cast a professional eye about the place. It’s a bit chintzy for my taste, with china animals set out on doilies. All of that kind of thing. The owner, Mrs Harris, seems pleasant enough as she shows us up to our room at the very top of the house.
It’s the kind of place where I think I’m going to be smashing things with every step I take. It’s all too dainty and fragile for a great big lumbering lummox like me.
Mrs Harris is the sporty type, and she’s wearing some kind of jogging outfit. She pauses before our door and she lowers her voice as she says, ‘Now, I wasn’t sure if you ladies wanted to share a twin or a double. So what I’ve done is put you in a twin, but if you feel so inclined, you’re perfectly free to push the twins together. Is that all right?’ She simpers at us and Effie, I notice, is giving her a hard stare.
Once we are alone in the room – where once again, everything is trimmed and chintzed to within an inch of its life – Effie barks out laughing crossly. ‘What did she mean about the beds? What was she talking about? Why would we want to push them together?’ Effie’s flinging things out of her overnight bag and messing the room up already, stamping her identity on the place.
I cough embarrassedly. ‘It’s the modern world, Effie. She was being what they call politically correct.’
Effie just about snarls at me. ‘What?’ Then realization dawns. ‘You mean she thinks we’re… lady lesbians?’ She cracks out laughing at this and has to sit down on the bed.
I don’t know what to say. At first I feel like joining in, but then I feel a little bit put out as Effie says, ‘Me? And you? Is that what she thought? No offence, Brenda, but…! I mean…! Hahahahaha!’
‘I don’t see what’s so funny about it. Some people have said that I’m a very striking looking woman.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ chuckles Effie, wiping her eyes. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to turn my head any time soon.’
‘Well, yes, likewise,’ I say awkwardly.
Her face suddenly drops. ‘Do you think that’s what other people think? Do you? Because we go about so much together? Do you think people go assuming things like that about us?’
I sigh at her. ‘Do you care what other people think?’
‘Well…’ she purses her lips and I can see very well that she does indeed care about such things. ‘Oh, what a world we’re in. When two perfectly innocent ladies can be thought to be having unnatural relations all over the place when everyone’s back is turned.’
‘I don’t think it’s unnatural,’ I say, putting a couple of magazines on my night table. Some light reading for our little trip: three back issues of ‘The People’s Fiend’. ‘At least, no more unnatural than anything else about us.’
Effie shrugs. ‘That’s true enough. But still, I think we’ll leave the twins where they are, don’t you?’
I readily agree and prepare to take a little nap after our shaky journey. Effie goes to freshen up in the miniscule en suite. It’s already past tea time and she wants to get out to explore.
§
So the first time I really see this town is under cover of darkness. But that suits us. We don’t want to be standing out as we amble up and down the cobbled streets. We’re not just any old tourists. We’re here for a purpose.
Effie peers up at curtained windows and into dark shops. Everything seems boarded up for the night. Hardly a single soul is abroad as we make our way up the hill towards the parsonage at the top of the town.
There is noise and light and life coming from a pub at the edge of the graveyard. Suddenly I long to be in there, amongst other people. From the sounds of it they’re having a singsong. But Effie is frozen stiff, standing outside a mini-market and staring at the upstairs window.
‘This is it,’ she tells me, in a hollow voice. ‘This is where we lived. My new aunties and myself. This was their shop.’
It looks like any shop, anywhere. It’s lit up inside with fluorescent bulbs and its goods are arranged in aisles, all monitored by little cameras. The signs on the windows are telling us about cheap booze and lottery tickets.
‘What became of your aunts?’ I ask her gently. ‘Did they stay here all their lives?’
Effie turns to me and I’m startled to see tears standing in her eyes. ‘That’s the worst thing. I don’t even know. Aunt Maude didn’t know, when I asked her. I feel so terrible that I never found out. I didn’t care enough to find out what became of them. And they were so good to me!’
I pat her shoulder lightly. And again, I have an inkling that I know how she feels. I, too, have walked away from those who have cared for me, and I’ve forgotten about them. I never heard the rest of their stories. It seems both Effie and I have made a habit of never casting a backward glance.
‘Let’s go to the pub,’ I urge her. It’s unseasonably cold at the top of this town. It’s like the graveyard itself is emanating a horrible chill.
Inside, The Branwell is raucous with music and chatter. The locals are out in force tonight, enjoying themselves and huddling together, in defiance of the cold and dark. They’re an older bunch and they’re entertaining themselves in the old-fashioned way, with music they’re making themselves. Accordions, fiddles, bongo drums. Someone’s even rattling at an old washboard. The music they make is discordant and harsh, and almost everyone in the place is singing a crude folk song together.
Of course, the whole joint falls silent when Effie and I step into the room. We squint in the sudden brightness and realise that every pair of eyes is upon us. Just for a moment. Then it’s as if they all collectively decide that
we are not really worthy of their attention, and they go back to their rollicking song.
Effie raises an eyebrow, ‘Odd. Why are they singing sea shanties so far inland?’
I bustle her towards the bar. I don’t care what they sing, so long as they leave us in peace. As I lean across the bar to catch the barman’s eye Effie is glancing about the place shrewdly, and suddenly recognizes an old friend.
‘Of course I know who you are,’ the old man cackles. He’s ruddy-faced and impossibly old-looking. He looks as if he’s been carved out of limestone as he sits there on a high stool, hugging a terrier to his chest. ‘You’re the little girl, aren’t you? The one that Valerie and her friend Deirdre took in. During the war. I remember you, lass. I can picture you now, at the VE celebrations. They put you in charge of the refreshments table at the big dance and you looked ever so proud.’
Effie flushes with pleasure and turns to me. ‘Brenda, meet Jack. I can’t believe we’ve bumped straight into him! A friendly face!’
I buy us a round – three pints of Guinness and a whisky chaser for Jack, plus some ale in a saucer for his dog. I can’t help thinking that Jack’s face isn’t actually all that friendly. He has an expression a bit like a walrus’ and when he looks at Effie I can see something that I don’t like. It’s hard to decide what it is. Fear, perhaps? But why would he be scared of her? She was just a little girl when he knew her.
The Guinness tastes good, cold and fortifying as we stand there, trying to make conversation over the folky hullaballoo of the music. Jack raises his voice to regale us with tales of the old days in Haworth, and how everything is changing for the worse, as far as he can tell. He complains about the tourists tramping through the small town endlessly, making a mess and a bother, and how things used to be so simple and peaceful round here. As he talks I realise that the small band of musicians are getting people up one at a time to sing. It looks like no one can escape from being pressganged. I cast anxious glances at Effie, hoping we can leave before anyone asks us to join in.
