The Chandelier Ballroom (33 page)

Where she was now, Jennifer had no interest in finding out. But she could still remember how the house had looked when they’d been friends – elegant and beautiful, with delicate spindly-legged furniture in the style of the 1930s, with pictures and photographs on all the walls. All that had been replaced by the more robust, chunkier look still surviving from the utility days of wartime, which five years on still filled the house, the Burnleys having obviously chosen to overlook the introduction of a gentler, 1950s’ style.

Had Joyce and Arnold Johns-Pitman still been here and all been well between them, they’d have kept up with the times. But they’d been younger people, eager to follow all that was fashionable. Eileen and David Burnley, twenty years older, were more set in their ways. Preferring to keep to what they knew rather then go ultra-modern, they had opted for darker, plainer, longer lasting colours where once everything had been bright and flowery.

She noticed it very strongly as Eileen conducted her proudly around the house. In every room the wallpapers were subdued, the soft furnishings plain, every bed, wardrobe, cupboard and sideboard, table and chairs, settee and armchair had that utility look about it, completely characterless.

She suspected this was Eileen’s choice rather than her husband’s. She had come to recognise that Eileen was old-fashioned in her ways, a person naturally very sure of herself, an erstwhile schoolteacher who guided rather than followed. Her husband was obviously the easier going of the two, despite being the breadwinner, and was no doubt wrapped up in his business, she supposed.

Despite its present lack of character she had to admit the house was very warm and cosy. Only in the big room, as Eileen now preferred to call it, the chandelier that had been so talked about in the past still in place, did she instantly feel a chill as they stepped inside, despite the bulky radiators being on. Maybe it was only in her mind, but the room didn’t feel at all natural. The chill could have come from it being such a vast room, or the bleak March air tending to infiltrate through the French windows at the far end. But from what she could recall, it had always been said to have possessed a certain peculiar coldness, ever since the man who’d moved here from the East End of London had killed two people then drowned himself.

Today it felt as chilly as ever. The high ceiling probably contributed to it, though a recently added wide picture rail from which hung quite a few large, framed watercolours of country views gave it a feeling of being lived in. Yet the huge chandelier gracing the centre once more worried her.

‘It wasn’t there when we first moved in,’ Eileen told her, seeing her gazing up at it. ‘Doesn’t it look stupendous? I found it in one of our outbuildings. David doesn’t like it much but I think it’s beautiful. Let’s go back into the lounge. I’ll make us some more coffee then tell you all about it.’

Sitting in the cosy lounge while Eileen went off to make the coffee, Jennifer wondered why her friend, so prim and proper in her ways, should have become so animated as she spoke about the chandelier.

Seated opposite each other across the small, highly polished round table, nibbling at their shortbread biscuits, Eileen looked almost smug as she told her of her discovery, like a child telling of a holiday by the sea. It was unusual for her to talk so passionately as she told her the tale, so much so that Jennifer experienced a tinge of concern for her friend.

‘It’s the one you told me about that day we first had coffee together,’ Eileen said. ‘It was such a surprise finding it. No one mentioned it when we bought the place. Maybe the agent didn’t even know about it. The army must have had it taken down when they were first billeted here and thought it best to put it in storage in case it got damaged. It’s probably quite valuable now, and to think it was sitting there under some old tarpaulin all that time until I found it. I had it cleaned and restored and put back in the big room.’ Gabbling on, she’d hardly come up for breath. ‘Now it’s been restored it looks as new as the day it was bought, don’t you think?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Jennifer said cautiously. ‘I never came here when the Butterfields lived here. But I heard about it of course. The first time I saw it was when the Johns-Pitmans came here to live and I became quite friendly with the wife for a time.’ She didn’t go any further into it, preferring not to get involved in more uncomfortable reminiscences on the tragedy that had happened between those two people. Finishing her coffee she glanced at her watch and said that she really must be going. She had to get home to prepare lunch and do a bit of shopping.

After Jennifer had said goodbye, Eileen suddenly felt the emptiness left at her going. David had gone out to play golf with those of the club he’d joined. He had wanted her to join too, but she had declined, preferring the more gentle company of her ladies’ groups.

Why David wanted to traipse around a wet golf course on a chilly day like this was beyond her. But he would be home in a couple of hours and she looked forward to that. They’d have a nice lunch which she would now take herself off to the kitchen to prepare, having given Mrs Calder this Saturday off to see a sister-in-law. This afternoon David would read the paper, probably going into the library while she came back into the lounge and read her book. Each in separate rooms but with the knowledge that he was nearby and that was comforting; she wouldn’t feel this unusual loneliness that seemed to have descended on her lately.

It was so odd. She had never felt lonely when she had lived alone, in fact had rather enjoyed her own company. So it was strange to feel this way now she was married.

After a while, tiring of reading, she’d go up to her sewing room which she’d had converted from one of the bedrooms, and finish the patchwork quilt she was making for the WI charity bring and buy sale in April. Later she’d go to prepare dinner and afterwards they’d both go into the lounge and sit by the fire together, curtains drawn cosily against the balmy night winds of March, and listen to the radio before going off to bed.

They had separate beds. Used to sleeping alone all her spinster years, she’d not found it at all comfortable sleeping next to someone. He for his own part seemed quite happy with that arrangement.

Sunday morning he’d be going off to enjoy another round of golf, but she wouldn’t mind then because she would go to church and he’d be home for lunch and share the rest of the day with her.

Monday he’d be in London, but there was the WI in the afternoon and Mrs Calder would be here, as would Evelyn, doing what little tidying there was, with an hour off to be taught how to add faster than she now did.

To Eileen’s surprise, Evelyn was proving a willing learner, far quicker on the uptake than she’d first imagined. So what had gone so wrong with her schooling? But she knew what. She’d come across children like her before, influenced by others into lazy ways, a couldn’t-care-less-about-the-future attitude, seeing it all as a bore. Maybe a result of the war with its many distractions, air raids interrupting what should have been the smooth flow of learning, kids evacuated, sent to isolated parts of the country, breaking the steady rhythm of education – so many things.

But this one-to-one tutoring, although spasmodic, was proving quite beneficial for the girl, at the same time filling up her own days while David was at work. It did her heart good, hoping Evelyn would develop into a worthwhile person, and at the same time gave her pleasure.

Taking on Mrs Calder was one of the best things she’d ever done. Her only concern was that local people still indulging from time to time in talk of past violence connected to this house and curious goings on that were said to have emanated from it might worry the woman when she came here.

For weeks she wrestled with the idea of asking her if she believed the creepy stories, but never did. It did occur to her that Mrs Calder never went into the big room, although she’d have no cause to, but still it made her wonder.

Evelyn, on the other hand, would go in there regularly to dust, vacuum and wash the long windows at the front of the house. She’d catch herself watching her closely, but she seemed quite at ease in there, even singing in her flat little voice as she worked. Eileen would find her up on a set of steps dusting the chandelier while she hummed little snatches of those modern repetitious songs youngsters these days called music. Without any accompaniment it sometimes sounded almost like a sort of incantation. She didn’t like it, but how could she upset her by ordering her to stop singing?

‘You don’t object to cleaning such a big room?’ she probed on one occasion. ‘It is a lot to do.’

‘No, it’s fine with me,’ Evelyn told her in her casual way.

‘It doesn’t bother you at all?’

‘I don’t think so.’ The pretty face had adopted a questioning look.

‘Just that …’ Unable to explain her need to enquire, Eileen broke off, saying instead, ‘It’s a large room and can be a bit chilly in here.’

‘Sometimes,’ Evelyn muttered dispassionately and went on dusting.

It was best not to press her further. She must have heard the stories about this house, but it probably went over her head, as did most things with the young except what affected them personally. They lived for today and their own pleasures and nothing else mattered.

Trying to fathom it she asked Edna Calder one day, ‘What do you think of what they say in the village about this house?’

The woman laughed. ‘Oh, things like that don’t bother me. People love making mountains out of molehills.’

‘So you do believe there have been a few …
molehills
,’ Eileen probed, and again Mrs Calder laughed.

‘Well, there were those crimes that were committed, but spooks and hauntings if that’s what you’re referring to, Mrs Burnley, no, I don’t. But I am the down-to-earth sort. And naturally an old house like this has a history.’

‘You mean they say it’s always been haunted.’ She hadn’t meant to say it like that, but Edna Calder gave an easy shrug.

‘Nothing anyone knows of, not until that chap from East London got here and did in his fancy woman and her lover. I think that started it off.’

She turned back to rolling out the suet dough for the delicious meat pudding she was doing for that evening’s meal, happy now to just chat. ‘You know the back of this house has been here since the early 1800s. It was quite a big house then. I was told that it was sold around 1910 to people called … I think it was Darnell, or something like that. It was them that built this part on to it and made it even bigger and renamed it Crossways Lodge. Then it was bought in the late twenties, early thirties, after the Wall Street Crash, by that couple from the East End of London. I remember him well when I was young, trying to turn himself into a country gentleman – made that big room too by knocking three rooms and the hallway into one.’ She gave a chuckle as she moulded her dough around the inside of a basin to be filled with pieces of beef.

‘People saw him as a silly old fool trying to be what he wasn’t. Some reckoned he was a bit of a rogue in London but he seemed harmless enough here. That was until he took up with his fancy bit and his wife left him. He drowned himself, you know, dead drunk. But he wasn’t as harmless as people thought, not after finding those two bodies. Could only have been him who’d done it. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the rights of that. But from then on, the place does seem to have been curs—’

She broke off sharply, the word unfinished, and Eileen felt a shiver ripple along her spine recalling Jennifer Wainwright telling of someone she’d known having seen something that had caused her to go mad and kill her husband, at her trial raving on about a ghostly visitor.

As she left Mrs Calder to her work, she told herself sternly that she wasn’t the sort to get carried away by such tales, yet something switched her mind to Evelyn as a sound came from upstairs.

Making as little noise as possible, she crept up the stairs following the sound. It was coming from her and David’s bedroom. Bursting into the room she found Evelyn on hands and knees in front of the fire grate. On the dressing table lay a duster, a tin of Silvo and a cloth with which she had been polishing the silver ornaments, now all sparkly clean. The bed had been made, nightdress and pyjamas neatly folded.

As Evelyn turned quickly at the sound of someone coming into the bedroom so abruptly, Eileen experienced a stab of guilt, knowing she’d been half hoping to catch the girl either taking advantage by peeping into places where she had no business to or idling away gazing out of the window. Instead, the room was clean, tidy and as bright as a new pin.

Recovering from the interruption, she smiled brightly up at Eileen, a blackened polishing rag in one hand, a tin of black-lead in the other.

‘Everything all right, Mrs Burnley?’

Eileen hesitated. ‘Yes.’ What could she say? ‘I just need a cardigan.’ But she was already wearing one. ‘A different cardigan,’ she corrected.

Evelyn got to her feet. ‘It’s alright, Mrs Burnley, I’ve just finished here,’ she said almost apologetically. ‘It took me a bit longer than usual.’

Eileen said nothing as she took off the cardigan she was wearing and blindly selected another, only to realise that it didn’t even match her jumper, blue on pink, ridiculous!

‘I like the brown one you was already wearing much better,’ ventured Evelyn with no hint of embarrassment.

Eileen hesitated, completely confused. ‘I think you’re right.’

Evelyn didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Anyway, I think I’m just about done up here, Mrs Burnley. If there isn’t nothing else, I’ll go down and see if Mum wants a hand.’

With that she gathered up her cleaning tools and headed from the room, leaving Eileen gazing blankly after her.

After a while, following the girl’s course down the back stairs, she paused at the bottom to hear Mrs Calder’s rather high, piercing voice. ‘Well, I just hope you weren’t being cheeky to Mrs Burnley up there, that’s all.’

Evelyn’s voice was small and meek – ‘No, Mum, I wasn’t’ – so different to the confident voice of a moment ago, one that could have come from any mature woman speaking to an equal. Now she was the child again and Eileen suddenly felt for her.