An English Ghost Story (2 page)

‘Kew-ell,’ said Tim.

Jordan was caught up in the spell.

Just this once, nothing else mattered. Her mind was settled in. The shock passed and she got comfortable with the feeling. It was like coming home.

They got out of the hunchback in a tangle and overwhelmed the agent. If he expected city folk to keep their cards to their chest and strike a hard bargain, he was surprised.

‘I love it,’ said Mum. The shift was miraculous: suddenly, she was relaxed and open, uncontrollably smiling. ‘I just love it.’

Jordan saw she had been wrong. The spotty agent’s smile wasn’t fake. Of course, he had
known
. He had been waiting by the Hollow for a few minutes, and he was familiar with the property. He could feel it too.

The
charm
.

This was what they needed. A new place, to start all over again, to put the past behind them, to build something. Yet an old place, broken in by people, with mysteries and challenges, temptations and rewards.

They might as well cancel the remaining viewing. ‘I’m Jordan,’ she imagined herself saying to her new friends, ‘I live in the Hollow.’ No, ‘I’m
from
the Hollow.’

Was the Hollow the house or the land? The name was misleading. Weren’t hollows dents in hills or woods? The property rose a little above the surrounding moorfields. An island that had come down in the world, it still refused to sink into the Somerset Levels.

Her arms didn’t feel cold. A million tiny dandelion autogyros swarmed on warm winds.

‘Brian Bowker,’ said the agent, ‘from Poulton and Wright’s.’

His spots were mostly freckles, though some had whiteheads. He looked as if he was blushing all the time, perhaps a handicap in his business. Unlike Rowena Marion, he didn’t try to hide his West Country accent. He didn’t sound like a yokel, though; it was just a way of talking, a burr.

Dad shook hands with him.

‘This is the Hollow,’ said Brian Bowker, standing aside and making a flourish as if signalling stagehands to haul open the curtains.

Tim had to be restrained from running. Jordan did the honours, hugging her little brother with a wrestling hold. Mum and Dad put arms around each other’s waists and a hand each on a child’s shoulder, as if for a family portrait.

‘We’re the Naremores,’ said Dad. ‘I’m Steven, this is my wife Kirsty, and our children, Jordan and Tim.’

‘Pleased to meet you all,’ said Brian Bowker.

‘I think this is it,’ said Mum, out loud.

The agent’s smile became a grin. ‘You ought to look closer; not that I should say that.’

‘We will, old man,’ said Dad, ‘but I think Kirst is right. I can feel it. Have you sprinkled fairy dust about the place?’

For once, Jordan wasn’t embarrassed by Dad. She knew what he meant. It wasn’t just the spring-blossom; the air seemed to
dance
. This was the season of the songs, the happy songs about love blooming with the greenery, not the melancholy songs of faded flowers remembered in fall.

The house stood in the middle of a roughly square patch of land, boundaries marked not by hedges or walls but still ditches from which grew bright green rushes. A moat ran alongside the road and the Hollow had its own bridge, wider than it was long, for access. Mum, cautious after the dispiriting fuss at Clematis Cottage, had parked on the road. That felt wrong: they should have driven through the gate and across the bridge, up to the barn, which was large enough to garage a fleet of cars.

Apple trees grew in what Jordan supposed was a deliberate pattern. The largest lay on the ground, roots exposed like a display of sturdy, petrified snakes, hollowed-out body sprouting a thick new trunk, fruiting branches stretching upwards. Tim was enchanted by this marvel, which had been smitten but survived. He had to be called away from exploring before he disappeared entirely inside the wooden tunnel of the original trunk. A couple of trees beyond the house, at the far edge of the grounds, were too close together, upper branches entangled and entwined, like giants kissing.

‘The property used to be called Hollow Farm,’ said Brian Bowker, consulting his clipboard, leading them along a paved path that wound through the trees. ‘It goes back as far as there are parish records, to the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the surrounding fields were sold off to one of the big local farmers and it became just the Hollow. The householders kept only this small apple orchard. You’ll still get all the cookers and eaters you need.’

Jordan could hear the trees. They moved, very slowly. Each leaf, twig, branch and trunk was rustling or creaking, whispering to her. There were trees all over London, but any sounds they made were too faint to be heard above traffic and shouting. City trees were furniture, but these were living things; worlds in themselves, populated by insects, birds, squirrels.

‘In the barn, there’s a cider-press,’ said Brian Bowker, ‘disused since the thirties. It’d cost a fortune to fix, I’m told. A shame. Miss Teazle, the last owner, didn’t work it, but liked having it there.’

The walk was further and the house bigger than Jordan had thought they would be. The house stood on raised stone foundations – Dad said something about a high water table and flood country – and was an obvious patchwork of styles and periods. Matched follies, the towers seen from the road, rose to either side, above a greenish thatched roof, topped by hat-like red tile cones with gabled Rapunzel windows. Aside from the towers, it was a farmhouse built at twice life-size. The ordinary-scale front door looked tiny. Ivy had been encouraged to grow, perhaps to cover the jigsaw-sections of red brick, white plaster and grey stone. Over the centuries, parts of the house had been replaced when they collapsed or people got tired of them. It had grown independent of any architect’s designs or council’s planning permission, evolving to suit its inhabitants.

Brian Bowker unlatched the front door.

‘You might want to put locks on the exterior doors,’ he said, ‘though Miss Teazle never felt the need.’

Dad was horrified.

‘This isn’t exactly a high-crime area,’ the agent said, ‘but times have changed since the old girl was a young thing. It won’t be a big job to make the house secure.’

Brian Bowker stood aside so they could step into a foyer. A combination of veranda and conservatory, it had a pleasant, damp straw smell. The ceiling was so low Dad banged his head on a dangling light-fixture – which would be the first thing to go. It took moments for Jordan’s eyes to adjust to the green gloom. Plants were all around, some overgrowing their pots, extending tendrils across the stiff, brushy doormat. Something like ivy grew
inside
the foyer, twining around a wrought-iron boot-scraper, creeping up a trellis. A row of brass hooks was ready for a burden of coats. Several pairs of boots were tumbled together by the door. A bright yellow pair of wellies looked scarcely worn.

‘Miss Teazle’s things are still here,’ said Brian Bowker. ‘Her relatives in Australia want to throw in furniture and bric-a-brac. A lot of charity-shop stuff, but there might be treasures. She was rich, after all. Now, come on through and see this…’

He touched a section of the wall. A pair of doors slid open like secret panels, with a woody scraping sound. Beyond was cool darkness and a windowless hallway. The agent shepherded them inside and along a cramped corridor to another set of doors, which he pushed open.

As one, the family gasped. Brian Bowker chuckled.

Jordan would not have guessed a room in a private home could be so large. It was fully twenty feet high and twice that long. After the murk of the hall, it was filled with warm, wavering sunlight. Opposite the doors, French windows were inset into a panoramic expanse of picture windows. The view was impressive – not just the orchard, but the expanse of moorland. Facing away from the village, the house might have been at the edge of civilisation.

‘Thanks to Dutch elm disease, you can see a long way from here,’ said the estate agent. ‘From the towers, you can see Glastonbury Tor. That’s all safety-glass, by the way. The original panes didn’t come through the hurricane in 1987.’

That night – a few years before her brother was born – was among Jordan’s first memories. Waking up with the windows of the flat rattling, angry elements threatening to blow them in, roaring winds and car alarms. Snuggling with Mum and Dad on their sofa, away from breakable glass. Then the mess on the streets next morning.

The room had a fireplace taller than Dad, several sets of upholstered furniture, a twelve-foot polished oak dining table, many nook-like retreats and hiding places. A Victorian chaise longue, with dark floral pattern cushions. Just the thing for her to be discovered draped across by Rick, transformed into her gentleman caller.

A brass chandelier hung from stout, bare beams; out of use, sconces dusty and clogged with old candle wax. Streetlight-like freestanding lamps were arranged around the space. Faded carpets, Turkish or Arabian, lay like quilt squares on the flagstone floor.

‘This is the oldest room,’ said Brian Bowker. ‘The hearth and floor are fifteenth century. So is one of the walls. The house has been knocked down and rebuilt over and over. The towers are a nineteenth-century addition. An unusual feature. The big windows were first put in by Miss Teazle, after the war. She was born in this house, never lived anywhere else.’

The last owner of the Hollow had been a writer.

‘I remember her from when I was a girl,’ said Mum.

‘The Weezie books when I was little, then the Drearcliff Grange School series. Old-fashioned even then, but we all read them. I see things in this room that were in the stories: that’s the fireplace Weezie hides in when she plays sardines. Louise Teazle must have done that when she was a girl, hidden in there. And written about it later. I expect all writers do that, fill their books with bits of their lives.’

Jordan had heard of Louise Magellan Teazle but never read her. When younger, she had read Alan Garner and C. S. Lewis. Now, she had lost the habit. There was too much else to do.

She imagined hiding from Rick in the fireplace and letting him find her. She was sure he would love this place too, when he saw it.

Brian Bowker showed them every part of the house. The two towers were the most obviously inhabited, connected to the house by the hall and four rather dark, cube-shaped rooms full of fascinating junk. These would need a lot of work to be reclaimed as guest rooms or storerooms. There were two completely fitted bathrooms, and two separate toilets – one outside, in a shed-like structure – which made Tim ecstatic at the thought of ‘a bog for each of us!’ In the West Tower were the kitchen (she saw precisely where her Alessi would look its best), a walk-in larder that was a room in itself, a master bedroom that hadn’t been used since Miss Teazle’s parents’ day, and a maid’s garret which Tim instantly claimed for his own.

The East Tower was smaller. Louise Teazle had used the ground-floor room as a study.

‘Good grief,’ said Dad, ‘that’s an Amstrad.’

An old word processor stood on a desk between an upright manual typewriter and a daisy-wheel printer. Jordan let her fingers linger on the word processor’s keyboard and got a tiny static tingle.

‘You can tell a writer lived here,’ she said.

The walls were covered with bookshelves, and there were three old wooden filing cabinets.

Above the study was the bedroom the writer had slept in all her life. This, Jordan realised with a thrill, would be her room. It contained a canopied single bed, a frail-looking rocking chair by the window, an antique writing desk, a wash-stand with a matching basin and jug, a dressing table with an attached mirror and an odd little chest of drawers. Ancient toys and old-lady things were arranged like a museum exhibit. It should have been sad but somehow wasn’t. Jordan believed Miss Teazle had stayed keen throughout her long life, not letting her childhood dim but never finding memory a trap. The bed had new sheets and a duvet, the colourful cover clashing with the pastel designs of the wallpaper. Something to be fixed.

Brian Bowker took them out through the French windows. Neglected, wild patches had been vegetable and herb gardens. Tiny blue and white flowers grew everywhere, even from the thatch of the roof and between the stones of the paths. Was there a book in the study about which plants were which? If not, she would get one from a library. She wanted to learn about birds and butterflies too. Rick had said to look out for mushrooms, poison ones and druggy ones.

Tim ran wild like a six-year-old, flashing back a few years to the golden age before his current personality had set in. He even swung from the low branches of a tree, as if raised in a jungle by apes. Mum and Dad laughed, relaxed, not worried about traffic or lurking paedophiles. This was what being a kid must have been like in the old days, when the Beatles were pop stars and television was black and white.

They called Tim and were shown the barn. The cider-press turned out to be a vast, complicated contraption with interesting wildlife sprouting from its innards and a wooden tub which still smelled of long-pulped apples.

A workbench was fixed to one wall. Outmoded tools were neatly arranged on hooks above it.

‘Are there power points?’ Dad asked.

The agent pointed them out. ‘Put in when they took out the old generator and hooked the Hollow up to the mains. The place didn’t even have a phone for years.’

‘Sounds heavenly,’ said Mum.

Dad laughed.

‘That’s all changed now,’ Brian Bowker assured them.

‘The utilities are all in order.’

Tim was especially taken with what looked like a child-sized tractor but turned out to be a sit-astride grass-mower.

‘We’ve tried to keep the place trim since Miss Teazle passed away. A lass from the village comes in every couple of weeks to mow the orchard and hack the weeds. This is a very fertile patch. Miss Teazle had a pair of goats to nibble the grass, but they’re gone now.’

‘Frisky and Whiskey?’ said Mum. The agent looked baffled. ‘Those were the goats in the Weezie books.’

Dad raised his eyebrows. Mum wasn’t embarrassed.

‘It all comes back,’ she said, tapping her head.