Night After Night (20 page)

The Ansells’ bedroom, sitting room? A TV antenna cable snakes across wide, bare boards. No furniture, all the wood is in the walls: light oak panelling with a door inset, closed. The air
is of desolation. If she felt apprehensive about intruding on the remains of a marriage, she isn’t. With the stripping of the room, something’s been vacuum pumped out of here. She imagines the stone-faced Ansell she’s seen in Cheltenham striding around, pointing at this, pointing at that: out, out, all of it.

And then turning it over to Defford, who told Grayle outside the chapel about his early encounters with Trinity Ansell at parties and Cheltenham Races. How, when Trinity first began to show up in the Cotswolds it was with her old lover William Fraser, the actor. It was the later stage of that relationship, lots of moodies and fall-outs. Then Defford went to America, and the next time he saw Trinity it was with Harry Burgess, in those heady, summery, early days of
Cotsworld
.

By then, Defford had produced
Living with the Royals
for CBS, now showing in the UK on Channel 5. They’d shot some stuff around Tetbury, close to Prince Charles’s place, High-grove, and
Cotsworld
ran an editorial criticizing them for being invasive. Defford was furious. He cornered Ansell at a party, asked him what his beef was.

The answer put their relationship on to a whole new level, laid the foundations for what was happening here now.

‘He didn’t have one.’

Defford springing off the chapel wall, grinning, admiring Ansell’s editorial instincts.

‘Didn’t have a problem with us at all. He just knew his readership – the way local people liked to feel protective about the Royals. Like Charles and Camilla and Anne were their valued neighbours. A kind of snobbery – Harry loved that about Cotswold society. Played up to it. I wouldn’t say we became mates that night, but I think we got to know how we could be useful to each other.’

Defford was to encounter Harry Ansell several times in the next couple of years, before attending the celebrity memorial service for Trinity, at Gloucester Cathedral.

And then, months later, at one of those black-tie dinner parties at a peeling manor house near Stroud, the host a now-wealthy Labour peer who used to be in TV and once worked alongside Defford on the BBC
Newsnight
programme. Defford speculating to Grayle that this was the first time since losing his wife that Ansell had been persuaded to appear at any kind of social gathering not connected with his business. Defford remembering how everybody was walking on eggshells. Only a dozen guests, and four of them singles so Ansell wouldn’t feel out on the edge.

Over dinner, a woman, making conversation, asked Defford what he was working on, and he, having had a few drinks by then, told her he was looking for an unknown haunted house.

Biting his tongue when he saw that Harry Ansell had overheard, but the obvious connection that haunting has with death and loss didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. When the subject got picked up and bounced across the table, it came out that the manor house itself was said to have a spectral presence – an old lady in a Victorian nanny’s outfit who only appeared when there were children in the house.

‘Any use, Leo?’ The peer scenting money. Defford telling Grayle how he took a certain pleasure in regretting that a dead nanny didn’t quite do it for him.

But Harry Ansell wasn’t so easily dismissed.

‘I popped out to the terrace for a smoke, and there he was.’

Defford well remembers how Ansell looked that night. He’d lost weight but not substance. Grayle guesses he looked like a grey wolf during a lean winter, intent and purposeful. ‘Driven’ is Defford’s word.

Driven by what? Losing Trinity was losing everything. She never wrote a word for
Cotsworld
, but she sold that magazine just by existing in the background, a conduit to life in an English paradise. Trinity’s name had not come up once over dinner, but as they gazed down over Stroud, Defford told Ansell how very sorry he’d been.

There are, of course, different kinds of sorrow, and Defford’s must have been coloured with a kind of excitement he’d find hard to conceal when Ansell said,

‘I have a haunted house.’

Something was telling Defford not to follow up on it too quickly, but, because they were alone, he felt he could go on talking about Trinity.

‘Hell of a loss,’ he told Harry Ansell. ‘A light gone out.’

There was silence. Defford recalls Ansell crushing his cigarette into the wet, dead foliage of something in an ornamental urn and saying,

‘What if it hasn’t gone out?’

Grayle pads across, finds the door’s unlocked, opening into a short passageway with doors either side, all ajar. She opens them in sequence. What could’ve been a small kitchen has an array of power points and a sink. There’s a bathroom with a pedestal tub in its centre, a toilet, a second bathroom attached to a dressing room with closets, frosted window panes. Only one door, directly ahead, is closed. In fact no, not quite; it’s just darker in the room on the other side.

This is likely to be the bedroom. She can make out walls of panelling and one of plaster, evening-pink and veined with bleached oak and—

Oh, dear God…

—a silent group of people standing there.

Grayle backs out, stumbling, chest hurting from a shrivelled scream. Tries to shut the door but only succeeds in slamming it back with a crash against the wall, folding to her knees just as she identifies the skeleton of a four-poster bed, its canopy and backboard missing, an empty cavity at its base.

She stays down there, releasing trapped breath.

Old houses. The filaments in a bulb become faerie kids dancing in a ring, and four rigid bedposts are black-clad mourners gathered around an open grave.

There’s nothing else in the dim room but the bed, symbol of a marriage collapsed by death. Grayle’s mind inflicts on her an image of Trinity Ansell sitting between the posts at the foot of a vaguely similar bed, richly curtained. Lightly brushing out her long, sheeny hair, swish, swish.

Grayle comes to her feet, pushing numbed fingers through what’s left of her own hair. Only a half-dismantled bed, but it’s unsettling, and she can’t lose the feelings of loss.

Never felt less happy in Knap Hall but makes herself walk deeper into the room. The main reason it’s dark in here is that the biggest window has been roughly boarded up, a thick wooden frame hammered in tight to the mullion. The only light comes from one much smaller window at a right angle to it, exposing the uninspiring bushes next to the house and the woodland further back that were visible from the first room.

Which suggests the blocked window overlooks somewhere that might identify the location. Could be Sudeley Castle. A deep-set door right at the end, the darkest part, probably leads to wherever they’ve taken up the floorboards for the overhead camera sweeping the chamber below.

It’s all a big TV studio now, or will be in two or three weeks.

A mothy air in here, like it’s whole decades since Trinity Ansell slept in that broken bed. Now her eyes have adjusted, Grayle can see that the carved posts are darkened by an accumulation of grime. Someone has work to do.

The air’s actually laden with fine dust. She coughs. The boarded window has hairline cracks of ruby light. She imagines the boards gone, Trinity standing next to her, both of them gazing towards the last home of Katherine Parr, a couple miles away, a trinket in the trees.

What are you thinking, Trinity?

Did she stand here, knowing she was pregnant? Maybe thinking of KP, pregnant by Seymour of Sudeley, though never by Henry, a fat old king with an ulcerated leg, who had one son,
not destined to make it out of his teens and could’ve used another.

Is it possible Trinity’s baby was not Harry’s?

Talk to me, Trinity.

Haunt me.

No, don’t. Jesus God, ignore that, don’t.

On her desk in the portacabin, she has two biographies of Henry’s last queen, which she’s only flipped through but, in all the portraits, Katherine – small-featured, demure, quite kind-looking – is wearing a red dress. In various pictures inside, she’s wearing different dresses, all red. Grayle remembers one sumptuous number with gold braid and padded shoulders. And rubies, everywhere.

A distant rustle of voices from downstairs tells her the ten minutes must be up by now. Defford will be looking for her, impatient. Always impatient, now. He’s changed. Too many things not going right. Does this place really do stuff to people, or is that just down to the kind of people who wind up here? People and history and suggestion – a word often used by Ashley Palk, editor of
The Disbeliever
, some of whose lectures Grayle’s found on YouTube. Some are hallucinations, some are self-deception, but most so-called ghost experiences are down to suggestion, says Ashley, of the tilted head and mirthless smile. Oh, really, does anybody educated actually think that way any more? How marvellous. Everything is marvellous to Ashley, for whom marvels don’t exist.

There’s movement, woodwork whingeing. Grayle looks sharply back down the bedchamber, wondering if she’s trodden on a loose board. But she hasn’t moved.

‘Who’s that?’

Aware of saying it, she doesn’t hear it. The room looks longer than when she came in, ending in a purply vagueness around the pale rectangle of the doorway through which she entered. A shadow is dislodged from the corner by the door.

‘Leo? Is that—?’

The pale rectangle narrows. It’s the oak door itself, slowly closing, sliding quietly into the light-space, the wooden latch falling –
thock
. And then a shift into silence, and the silence is a fabric that wraps itself damply around her, and she can feel, as it touches her, its quick decay.

A tipping sensation inside her head and chest, an outpouring of cold and a connection across years to being in a cab bound for the airport after leaving her father’s apartment with its framed blow-up of Ersula in her academic gown. A weight of misery settling around her heart like sludge, a wanting for it to be over.

Life. Please. No more.

She’s aware of standing beside the barricaded window, watching, in the slats of sunset, specks of dry dust falling and gathering, motes of misery, all the misery in the room coagulating around her, a smog of sorrow, and it has a vague smell, the distant stench of last year’s dead leaves, slimed and skeletal and never coming back. A sick little airless cry is trapped far inside her, as a last vibration of panic inhabits her hands and arms like pins and needles before it becomes an acceptance of the inevitable, and she watches something assembling raggedly between the posts of the bed.

Oh Christ, she’s really seeing this…

She’s still standing up, but something inside her is on its knees, naked and desperate, too utterly dejected to cry out. She can only see, through eyes she wants to close and can’t, not four bedposts but five, and the fifth is a man with his arms by his side, a thin shadow joining him to the blackness above like an umbilical cord from his head into the vaster shadows of the ceiling. The weight of the body slowly bringing the face around for her and the eyes are like capsules of egg white, a liquid desperation, and Grayle feels she might die of fear and this all-enshrouding misery.

24

Two camps

MARCUS HAS LOST
weight which, considering his cardiac history, can’t be a bad thing. He has only two remaining chins and his cheeks are not so red. But his eyes are still burning with the same angry light under the dense grey hair.

‘Strikes me, Lewis, that if it’s reasonable to assume a double agent walks away with twice the money, this is going to make you sickeningly fucking rich.’

Quite comforting, it is, to detect the old sulphur in his voice.

‘Comparatively speaking, Marcus,’ Cindy concedes. ‘Comparatively speaking.’

Setting down his mug of Earl Grey, gazing with a genuine affection across the desk of dented beech-wood, which is far too big for this place. Here in the second bedroom, which serves as Marcus’s office, extra shelving has reduced the window to little more than a slit.

Better than a caravan, mind.

Marcus scoops up his manuscript, slams it in a drawer of the desk, Cindy raising his arms in protest, bangles jangling.

‘I’m not going to steal your ideas, Marcus, I do retain some ethics.’

‘Really? Where’re you keeping them these days?’

Cindy smiles, eases his chair away from a stack of books. Apart from the English bull terrier, Malcolm, they’re alone in the bungalow. The good Sister Anderson is working late at the clinic, which can only help preserve their relationship.

Cindy sighs.

‘Opposite poles, we are, Marcus.’

Opposite poles, however, of the same planet. Neither of them will ever join the British Humanist Society or buy a subscription to
The Disbeliever
. And a cause which they support equally is the welfare of little Grayle Underhill.

‘Come to meet Mr Driffield, I have. We’re having dinner.’

‘Who?’

‘The television producer?’

‘Defford?’

‘That’s the man.’

‘And you’re going like that?’

‘Brand new skirt, Marcus. Vera Wang.’ He couldn’t afford a pair of knickers by Vera Wang, but the chances of Marcus having heard of the woman… ‘Anyway, dinner’s at his house, near Stow. Can’t be seen together in public, obviously.’

Marcus sits back, polishing his glasses.

‘All right, start by explaining the double-agent business. I was too dazzled by your tawdry jewellery to take it in.’

Cindy considers what Marcus knows, what he needs to know and what it would be better to conceal. He knows, for example, about Cindy’s long-term friendship with Trinity Ansell, though not about the diary or its content. Knows how Cindy played young Jo to get himself invited into the house, also that Jo and her boss are keeping Cindy a secret from the rest of the production team, including Grayle, until the eve of transmission. He does not, however, know why.