An English Ghost Story (8 page)

On the first page, a girl called Gillian Gilchrist (‘Gill-Gil’) was up late at night on a dare, alone in a disused part of the school. To get into a secret club, the After Lights-Out Gang, she had to creep out of her dorm (what did that mean? a shared room? something like a hospital ward?) and spend a whole night in the West Wing. The rest of the gang – Angela the Boss, Catty Korner and Sarah-Suzanne Symmes – had told her the wing was haunted.

Knowing what to expect, Jordan read the rest of the chapter. Phantoms appeared, but Gillian was ready for them. ‘Stow the rot, fillies,’ she sneered. ‘Can’t fool I with a sheet dipped in chem-lab phosphor. That bloodstain is most unbecoming, Angela. And try to clank your chain with a little more
spirit
, Sarah-Suzanne.’ After several more or less alarming apparitions, Gillian was grabbed by a sinister shadow-figure. It turned out to be the new gym mistress, Miss Ilse Haller.

In the next chapter, it transpired that the After Lights-Out Gang had indeed intended to sneak into the West Wing and terrify Gillian, but were detained by a snap air-raid drill. With Gillian missing at head-count, a search was carried out for her. Now, the gang was in hot water with Miss Beeke, the fearsome headmistress. Also, Gill-Gil was worried that the spooks might have been real.

Jordan assumed that the ghosts would be spies or smugglers in disguise. Miss Haller, who was supposed to be a Czech refugee, was most likely a Nazi spy.

Still, she read on.

The old slang was stranger even than the Rat Pack hipster talk she loved and tried to affect, but it had its own appeal. An all-girls boarding school was as bizarre to Jordan as a nunnery, but she recognised character types among the staff and pupils from the schools she had been at. She wasn’t sure how many of the odd turns of phrase were deliberately comical, but got a sense that Louise Teazle sometimes slyly pulled her readers’ legs. Gillian, an evacuee from ‘reduced circumstances’, suffered the other girls’ snobbery, but showed courage (‘spunk’, not a word Jordan had heard with that meaning) and won acceptance. Sarah-Suzanne, surprisingly clearly a femme lesbian, nurtured a terrific crush on Gillian, which the heroine tried to deal with kindly.

Spies did appear, posing as members of a hockey team from a rival school, and plotted to kidnap Miss Haller, whose father was a scientist Hitler hadn’t been able to force to work on a poison-gas rocket. But the ghosts were real, the spirits of Englishmen who had died defending their country in foreign wars, called up by Gillian herself, unconsciously wishing on a potent magic stone (part of the wall in the West Wing), to defend Miss Haller from the Nazis.

In the final chapter, the ghosts saw off the spies and word came through that Miss Haller’s father had been smuggled out of Germany. Gillian said goodbye to the ghosts, who treated her with strange respect since it was subtly implied that she was destined to die for England in a future war when women would be front-line troops. She was finally initiated into the After Lights-Out Gang, with a midnight feast and a masked ritual.

The book didn’t take long to read. Jordan was left with a sense of having understood only the surface. It was a fast adventure, with a lot of comedy and broad social comment, but she suspected depths. The only men in the book were absent fathers or ghosts. Even the Nazi spies were teenage girls. Whenever Gillian argued with Miss Haller or the After Lights-Out Gang, it was as if Louise Teazle were talking to herself.

The world of the book seemed real to her. An evening had slipped away as she read. It was dark outside her window. She looked at the West Tower of the Hollow. The light was on in her parents’ room but Tim’s window was dark – he must be asleep already.

Ghosts, she wondered. Were there ghosts?

* * *

S
omeone to see you, Mum,’ her daughter announced.

Kirsty looked up at Jordan. She was filling out her simple summer dress a little more. Her bare arms and legs had lost the anatomy-diagram stringiness that had been cause for concern. Her skin was the pale gold of not-yet-ripe eating apples.

A set of white filigree lawn furniture had been discovered in one of the spare rooms. Steven had put the tables and chairs out on the crazy paving where Kirsty liked to sit.

Jordan stepped to one side and let the visitor come through the French windows.

‘You must be Mr Wing-Godfrey?’

‘Bernard, please.’

The president of the Louise Magellan Teazle Society was a middle-aged brown man. Brown hair, eyes, suit, shoes and socks. And brown skin, though he wasn’t Indian or Middle Eastern. He was just a brown Englishman.

‘Would you care for some tea, Mr Wing-Godfrey?’ asked Jordan, a perfect miniature hostess.

‘As for nectar, my dear.’

‘I’ll fetch some, then. Mum?’

Kirsty declined. She had been drinking iced lemon tea all morning.

‘What a lovely girl you have, Mrs Naremore,’ said Bernard. ‘Shows the Drearcliff spirit, I’ll be bound. I see you’ve been doing your homework.’

Books were piled on the lattice table, the Weezie stories and the first of the school series,
A New Girl at Drearcliff Grange
.

‘I’ve been cataloguing the library.’

Bernard’s eyes gleamed as if Kirsty had mentioned a treasure trove. For him, Louise Teazle’s library must seem a pirate’s cave: first editions of all her books, of course, along with foreign and reprint editions – Kirsty couldn’t recognise all the languages Louise had been published in – and the books she had loved herself. If there were unpublished manuscripts, early drafts or personal journals, they had not shown up so far. Kirsty expected real treasures would be hidden, perhaps guarded. When the Hollow wanted her to find anything, she would be led to it.

‘And I’ve been reading again, refreshing my memory.’

‘You read Teazle as a girl?’ asked Bernard.

Kirsty shrugged. ‘Didn’t everyone?’

‘Most girls, a few boys, until, say, twenty years ago. Even since then, there has been a great deal of interest. She has always been in print. Specialist presses keep her work alive. I have been on television, several times, talking about the Society. Our members are very active.’

Jordan came back with tea and withdrew into the house.

Bernard let out a satisfied ‘Ahhh’ with his first swallow.

‘Didn’t your school friends give you a hard time for liking Louise?’ asked Kirsty. ‘I’d have thought boys even then thought she was soppy.’

‘I came to Teazle late in life, Mrs Naremore. She meant a great deal to me at a trying time. I was confined, against my will, far from home. Her books were, quite literally, my lifeline.’

Kirsty wasn’t fazed by Bernard’s odd admission. She felt she understood this man.

‘Have you been here before?’ she asked. ‘When Louise was alive?’

‘It was not my place to impose on Miss Teazle.’

Even Bernard’s fingernails were brown. Not dirt, not bad health, not even stained. ‘Only now have I, as it were, plucked up the necessary courage.’

‘I hope you’re not disappointed.’

He looked at the orchard. Tim was hidden in there somewhere, as green as Bernard Wing-Godfrey was brown.

‘Our members are most envious that you invited me to the Hollow. It is sacred turf to us, of course. The Avalon of Teazle.’

Kirsty didn’t know how to take that. She ought be made uncomfortable by this odd fellow, but was at her ease. He was reverent of the Hollow. She should extend him a welcome.

‘We were wondering whether you would be averse to opening your home to a select number of us, on a strictly limited basis of course. We would not want to invade or swamp you. We should winnow out the applicants. Only the most presentable would pass. The Society is not without funds. We would, of course, reimburse you any expenses, and indeed be prepared to pay a fee for the privilege of access. I am empowered to gift you with quite a substantial figure. To help with the restoration. We could also provide advice. Some of us have made a deep study of Teazle. We know where everything goes, you see. We know how things should be.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘This table and these four chairs, for instance. You have them at the wrong end of the Puzzle Patio.’

The Puzzle Patio was in
Weezie and the Hopscotch Hobgoblin
. It was also, Kirsty realised, this crazy-paved stretch outside the French windows.

‘They should be over by the tower, near the kitchen door. So Katie the Cook can hand Weezie apple juice through the sink window. More importantly so, when she stands on a chair, she can see through the tree telescope and over the moor to the standing stones.’

‘I’m not sure the stones are real. I think Louise made them up. She was probably thinking of Glastonbury Tor. We can see that from the picture window.’

Bernard seemed saddened by Kirsty’s lack of trust in Teazle. He put down his tea and stood, then tugged Kirsty across the lawn towards the kitchen door. She did not resist.

He turned her round and pointed, between the trees, putting a hand on the small of her back to encourage her to stand on tiptoes. She became as tall as a child standing on a chair.

‘The branches of that tree make a fork, a sight-line. The tree telescope. See the mump with the stones.’

‘You’re right.’

Kirsty felt light, as if she might drift upwards. From just this spot, looking through a tunnel-like curl of branches, she saw, miles off across the moor, a hillock with five upright stones around an altar-piece.

She leaned to one side and tried to look around the tree. Another tree was in the way. She leaned to the other and the side of the barn cut off the view. She walked out on the lawn, past the tower, almost to the ditch. The land sloped slightly and a far-off copse blocked view of the stones.

It was remarkable.

‘Here is where the table should be,’ said Bernard.

She went back to the patio and found herself agreeing with him.

‘The full resources of the Society are available, Mrs Naremore – Kirsty, may I call you? We feel you have been chosen by Dame Fortune to be custodians of this place that is so special to us all. We owe you our support, our help, our labour.’

He kissed her on both cheeks and left.

If she didn’t hear the cough of his car leaving the drive or see his empty cup on that wrongly placed table, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he had never been there.

By now, she knew a ghost when she saw – or sensed – one.

* * *

O
n the long table in the Summer Room, Mum had laid out an array of oddments she had found in the storerooms. Jordan supposed the stuff ought to be called Teazleiana. Mum had brought the collection out to show her visitor. Colouring books and diaries, cuddly Weezie dolls, a spinning top with Weezie’s ghost friends painted on it, Weezie and Drearcliff Grange jigsaws, a Gloomy Ghost money-box, Drearcliff badges and boaters, a Weezie whistle. The playthings of her grandparents’ generation. No game cartridges, action figures, boxer shorts, videos, pogs, graphic novels, collectible cards, temporary tattoos.

She picked up a stereoscope, a device like a set of plastic binoculars with a slot for a rectangular card. Holding it to her eyes, she saw Weezie dancing with the stones in sharp, unmoving 3D relief. There was a set of cards, showing other scenes from the books. Another item struck her; a circular picture under glass, an illustration of the After-Lights Out Gang, four girls in askew boaters. When she picked it up, the faces fell away, leaving blanks.

It was one of those hand-held games, not like Tim’s beep-beep-beep Game Boy (not heard from so much these days) but an old-fashioned puzzle. The girls’ features – eyes and smiles – were on loose pellets which had to be rolled
just so
to plop into their proper places, dimples in the blanks. Getting features on faces was easy, but usually with mismatched eyes or a smile in an eye socket. The four friends – Gillian, Angela, Catty and Sarah-Suzanne – had differing eye colours and smiles, naturally.

Having rearranged the faces in comic strangeness, Jordan shook the game and tried again. This time, almost without trying, she set everything right. She put the game down, quitting while she was ahead.

She went outside. The brown man was gone. For someone obsessed with Louise Teazle, he hadn’t lingered. It was a shame he hadn’t seen the toy and tie-in collection. Perhaps he intended to come back for a closer look, to stay longer.

Mum was preoccupied with something else, a new project.

‘Help me carry the table across the lawn, Jordan. I think it’ll be happier over by the kitchen door.’

Jordan knew she was right.

The garden table wasn’t heavy, but awkward. Jordan walked backwards and Mum edged forwards. They got a rhythm going and the job was done in no time. When set down, the table found grooves in the grass, like the features had found the dimples in the girls’ faces. It might almost have taken root.

There were four chairs to shift too. Jordan and Mum walked over to the crazy paving, where the table had been, and picked up a chair apiece. When they were back at the table’s proper place, the other two chairs were waiting for them.

They looked at each other, and all around, smiling.

* * *

A
fter several LRPs, Tim had determined the IP were friendlies. Each time he trailed back to Green Base, fresh tribute was laid out, a token of gratitude for his vigilance in protecting this little patch. Five apples piled like a pyramid of cannonballs, a circle of wild flowers threaded stem to bud like a necklace, a chipped stone arrowhead. This morning, it was a bird’s nest with three pale blue pebbles he took at first for eggs.

He whistled with admiration.

The IP were good, better than he could hope to be. Part of the scenery, they never showed themselves outright. They could stand against a tree or the side of the garage, or even lie flat on the green grass, and seem to be entirely natural, a stain on the wood or a low hillock. He was winning their hearts and minds but wasn’t sure they’d ever step into the open. They had long memories. Not everyone who had occupied this position had been as careful as Tim, as well-disposed towards the locals. Battles had been fought. He found old shrew-skulls and flattened cartridge cases, even burn-marks on the trees. The IP were wary of any new forces on the big board.