An English Ghost Story (6 page)

She would be happy in this place. Rick too.

Back in the city, she was still a kid because everyone she knew thought of her that way. They looked at her style choices and thought she was playing dress-up, but this was the way she was, was who she was. It wasn’t going to change.

Here, at the Hollow, she would be treated as a young lady.

From her window, she saw Tim dart from tree to tree, finding spots of cover. This was his paradise too.

As she rocked, she remembered caresses. Afternoon sunlight fell upon her, warming her face and hands and throat like soft, warm fingers.

Clear voices told Jordan what she could expect from love.

* * *

S
teven gave the removal men bottles of beer from the cool-box. It was a hot day and they’d unloaded in double-quick time.

The three blokes from the city, sweaty from work, sat on the grass by his drive, blinking in the sunlight. Already, he was apart from them. They were alien but he was at home. He was from the Hollow. He was a Hollow man.

‘Lovely spot you’ve found here, Steve,’ said Ben, the driver. ‘Idyllic.’

Ben’s shifters – a friendly Rasta called Trey and a silent lad, Jimmie – drank their beer and looked up at the towers. This must be totally beyond their experience.

‘Wonderful for kids,’ said Ben. ‘Specially your younger pair. Loads of places for hide and seek. They’re already at it, I see.’

‘Tim’s gone to ground,’ Steven admitted.

They looked past the house, into the orchard.

‘It’s like “how many animals can you see in this picture?”’ suggested Trey.

Steven laughed. Tim was crawling by the fallen tree, keeping close to its shrinking noontime shadow.

‘What’s your little girl’s name?’ Ben asked.

‘Jordan?’

‘No. The littler one. With the straw hat.’

‘Don’t understand your banter, old chap,’ said Steven, stiffer than he meant.

‘She was watching us inside, from the fireplace,’ said Ben. ‘Wasn’t she, lads?’

Reluctantly, Trey nodded. Steven noticed he had crossed his fingers, all eight of them.

‘Pretty little thing,’ said Ben. ‘With ribbons.’

‘Not one of mine, I’m afraid. Must be a stray.’

‘There was no girl,’ said Jimmie. He didn’t have the thin voice Steven had imagined. ‘Just shadows. Playing tricks.’

Ben let it drop. Steven was puzzled. Something was odd here, but he’d have time to hunt it down. He was going to have a lot of time.

He had arranged with his major clients to take things easy for the next month while he got the Hollow sorted out. Then, he would be open again for business and better than ever.

Steven wasn’t a stockbroker, an accountant or an investment counsellor. In the pits of the crash, ejected from the brokerage where he’d worked for most of the eighties, he had found a gap in the money market and made up his own job. He found individuals or institutions with funds to invest and brought them together with individuals or institutions with projects which needed finance. He was an intermediary, a deal-maker. It was a game, really: putting together financial jigsaws. Tatum, his personal assistant, was keeping his city office open, but the business was in Steven’s head and computer files. When he worked it out, he was surprised at how little he needed to be in London. Well over half his clients weren’t city-based. He just hoped there would be enough for Tatum to do to justify her salary. Especially when he took on someone local to handle secretary-assistant chores here.

‘Talk about peace and quiet,’ said Ben. ‘Listen to that.’

A few birds. Tiny tree-shifting sounds. Kirsty pottering about in the house. No traffic, no voices, no car alarms.

‘And breathe the air.’

Steven took in a lungful and didn’t choke.

‘Wait till someone spills a load of cow’s muck on the road,’ said Trey. ‘Then talk to me about your effluents.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Mr Naremore,’ said Jimmie. ‘This isn’t the city.’

‘True,’ said Trey. ‘No clubs, no cinemas, no tube trains, no Saturday nights. Prob’ly can’t get espresso for a hundred mile hereabouts.’

‘Oh yes I can. I’ve brought my own machine.’

Trey laughed, dreads shaking.

‘We’re here to escape from Saturday nights,’ Steven said.

‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Jimmie.

‘I’d go mad inside a week,’ said Trey.

‘Just be careful,’ said Jimmie. ‘Shadows can be deceiving. You need to shine your light all around.’

* * *

K
irsty put a bowl of apples, which Tim had gathered, on top of her new chest of drawers, the Weezie chest. She remembered how it went, and recited to herself.

‘“The top drawer always had the same thing in and the bottom drawer never had the same thing twice and the middle drawer was always a jumble of surprises.”’

She pulled open the top drawer. It was empty. And the bottom drawer. Empty too. The middle drawer was stuck. She had to scrape a seal of paint with a nail-file before she could jiggle it open. It was crammed with bent, rusty wire coat hangers. A jumble, certainly, but not really surprising. She took out the hangers and twisted them into a modern artwork which she shoved into one of the Sainsbury’s bags they were using for the rubbish. Hanger-hooks speared through the plastic like claws.

So much for Weezie’s magic chest of drawers.

When she was a little girl, Louise Teazle must have had more imagination than Kirsty’s children. Of course, she had grown up to be a writer. She had to have imagination. Sometimes Kirsty wondered what was wrong with her kids. Shouldn’t they be crazier? They were both far too responsible. At Jordan’s age, she’d been a wild woman, with biro-tattooed knuckles and safety-pin piercings. Her daughter’s watchwords were ‘neat’ and ‘nice’. There was hope for Tim, though, when he grew out of this military thing.

A magic chest of drawers shouldn’t be empty. She pulled out the bottom drawer and popped in an apple. She hadn’t noticed but there was an old newspaper lining the drawer, faded to match the brown of the wood. The headlines were about Chairman Mao and Christian Barnard. She shut the drawer.

Pleased with herself, she put apples in the two other drawers.

Weezie, she remembered, had to feed her chest of drawers with cake, to keep it magic. Louise’s mother (‘Mama’) must have gone spare if she really did that, left pieces of cake in with the linen to mould.

She looked out of the window.

Jordan sat in her rocking chair in her own bedroom window, in the opposite tower. She looked like Norman’s mother in
Psycho
, which made Kirsty giggle. Steven was in the drive, bonding with the removal men over beer. Tim was in the orchard, creeping up on an invisible enemy.

From here, she could see her whole family.

Knowing where everything was calmed her. Vron said Kirsty was deathly afraid of letting things get away from her, that she needed perspective. That was one of Vron’s metaphors, but here it was literally true. All along, what she had needed was not Temazepam or primal scream therapy but a tower tall enough to look down from, to be sure everything was all right.

She wanted an apple. An apple from the orchard.

There were some still in the bowl, but she decided to take one out of the chest.

She opened the top drawer. There was no apple.

She felt inside, reaching and finding that the drawer had no back. The apple must have fallen.

The middle drawer was stuck again, so she pulled out the bottom drawer. Two apples lay on the newspaper. She laughed, realising the magic had worked. The top drawer, which had been empty when she first pulled it out, always had the same thing in it. Nothing. The bottom drawer, which had also been empty, never had the same thing twice. First it was empty, then it had one apple, now two apples. Of course, there was an explanation. The apple had fallen from the top drawer to the bottom. All magic was like that, she supposed: it came with an explanation.

She gave the middle drawer a wrench, not really expecting a jumble of surprises. The drawer came open, and she looked down at a pool of apple sauce.

* * *

T
ime to make a full report to the PP. Tim snapped off a salute, and ran down the intel he had gathered from his recce.

Dad nodded. Usually, he barely took in Tim’s reports. Today, first day of the new mission, he paid attention.

‘There are no hostiles within the perimeter,’ Tim reported. ‘This is a safety zone.’

‘That’s good to know, Timmy.’

‘The IP is friendly.’

‘International pachyderms?’

‘Indigenous population.’

Dad flashed a proper smile. ‘Of course.’

‘I’ll run information-gathering sorties over the next week, so we know what animal life we’ve got around the place.’

‘Did you run across a little girl in a straw hat?’

‘No, PP. Should I have?’

Tim was genuinely puzzled.

‘Not really. You can stand down now, Timmy.’

Tim let his breath out and slumped a little.

‘You look tuckered out, soldier. Better hop off to the bathroom and get that camouflage off before the MP catches you. There’ll be an inspection later. Best not have dirt under the fingernails.’

Tim recognised Dad was playing along. The PP only half-understood the mission. Brass were like that everywhere, Tim supposed. But they were over him for a reason. His job wasn’t to question authority.

He made his way to one of the bathrooms.

He would be careful to look out for this little girl in a straw hat. She was probably not hostile, but he couldn’t be sure until he’d cleared her himself.

In the bathroom, he methodically cleaned his face, hands and arms. Then he changed into civvies.

* * *

H
ow could that happen?

It wasn’t exactly apple sauce. There were pips and a stem in there, and shredded peel. She touched it, but didn’t dare taste. It was as if a whole apple had been put in a blender and given a couple of minutes.

A jumble of surprises?

She shut the drawer and pulled it out again.

Still apple sauce, but she found out why the drawer kept sticking. One last hanger-hook, broken off, was caught in the runner. It had come loose now and lay in the apple mess.

She looked in the top drawer. Still empty.

The bottom. No apples, no newspaper. A shiny copper coin. A 1948 half-penny. She shut the drawer and pulled it out again. No apples, no newspaper, no coin. A single, limp, white glove. She took it out and slipped it on. It was elbow-length, with a pearl button at the wrist. It felt warm, as if it had just been worn. She liked the glove. It was elegant, seemly, fitting, and it fitted.

She closed and opened the drawer again, hoping for a match. This time, there was a dried, pressed flower. A rose. That gave her pause. Rose was her middle name, and Vron’s. A word of power between them. When they signed messages ‘Rose’, it signified something of paramount importance. They had called their music venture Rose Records. She picked up the rose with gloved fingers.

It was as if she was being spoken to, with symbols. A very Vron-like way of going about things.

No. She was being silly. The chest must be a conjuring prop. There were hidden blades in the middle drawer, and a false back to the whole thing. When she opened and closed the drawers, she was tripping tiny levers, shifting objects around. It was no surprise Louise would have such a thing. She wrote about magic, so people would have given her magical presents. Had it been made for one of the television adaptations of Weezie?

She opened the top drawer, the one that always had the same thing, nothing. It did not disappoint her. She took the plastic bag of bent coat hangers and jammed it in. The bag barely fitted and she had to bend and break the hangers further, ripping the bag to uselessness, to get the tangle to lie flat enough for her to close the drawer.

She counted slowly up to five and opened the top drawer.

Nothing.

She closed and opened, closed and opened, closed and opened.

The hangers were gone for ever. This was better than a kitchen waste-disposal unit. She found other things that needed to be thrown away – bags and wrappers and ruptured cardboard boxes – and disappeared them.

She picked up the chest of drawers. It wasn’t heavy. It couldn’t contain an intricate mechanism. It wasn’t connected to any hidden chute. She’d humped it here from Jordan’s room and knew it was just a piece of furniture.

It was magic. That was all there was to it.

* * *

S
teven was in charge of the family’s first proper meal at the Hollow. Kirsty had produced a bean salad in Tupperware and a joint of cold ham for lunch, which had been eaten outside with the removal men. Now the family were alone together and could break bread – Delia’s pasta carbonara, actually, but with warmed French bread on the side – at their own table.

Tim set the places. Jordan picked the wine and the music (she had to tell Steven who it was, Julie London). The children collaborated on the carrying-out of bowls and bottles from the kitchen to the big room, which he realised now was to be called the Summer Room. Never before had Steven cooked in a room different from the one where they ate. It meant a whole new tier of jobs to be parcelled out.

Kirsty came down from the tower, in her backless cream evening dress, with one white glove. She had put her hair up.

Steven was stunned.

Tonight, when the kids were in bed, there was another inaugural ceremony to be seen to. When they had got their first flat together, they had christened all three rooms in one night, with dozes between bouts of lovemaking, and had enough left over in the early morning for afterplay in the tub of the tiny bathroom.

Counting the inside toilet, the secret passage, the larder and the foyer but not the outside toilet or the barn-garage (which might bear investigation), there were sixteen rooms at the Hollow. Maybe more, if some of the wardrobes were reckoned and further exploration of the unused store-rooms disclosed secret nooks. At thirty-eight, Steven wasn’t sure if he was up to it in a month, let alone a night. And there’d be awful complications with Jordan’s and Tim’s rooms.