The Haunt (7 page)

*

‘Cooee!’ Felicia Soulsby called round the kitchen door. ‘I haven’t come to interrupt, just to see if you’re feeling better.’

Mrs Clapham was operating some sort of pulverizer which had to be worked by hand. She looked round with rancour, and the pulverizer gathered momentum. ‘It must have been awfully upsetting.’ said Felicia.

‘What must?’

‘That business with the casserole – enough to put anyone off their stride.’

‘Nothing wrong with
me
.’

There was a shelf high up, and empty. As Clapham had said, Bettony could not have reached it. Nor could Mrs Clapham, unless she stood on a chair.

Felicia was interested to see that Bettony was back, peeling potatoes. ‘Do you think it detracts from the flavour? Washing potatoes before you peel them?’

‘I’ve told her again and again, hold them under the tap first. She can’t take it in. She can’t take anything in.’ Mrs Clapham looked into the pulverizer and stirred the contents with her finger. ‘He said she was all he could get. He had his reasons.’

‘He?’

‘Clapham.’ A change came over Mrs Clapham’s face. It skewed, as if the wrong string had been pulled. ‘He knew
he could do what he liked and she’d be backward in coming forward.’ Felicia experienced a frisson of distaste but was unsure how deep it ought to go. Mrs Clapham clinched it. ‘Men are all the same.’

‘Of course it’s distracting when anything is misplaced. I get into an absolute tiz if I can’t put my hand on what I need when I’m cooking.’

‘It wasn’t misplaced, it was thrown. By her.’ Mrs Clapham aimed her thumb in Bettony’s direction.

‘It may have been done on her behalf, though not actually
by
her.’

‘Wasn’t nobody else in the room.’

‘I’m talking about a manifestation.’

‘There’s none of that in my kitchen.’

‘You wouldn’t see it but you’d feel the effects. You’d certainly feel those. A teenager undergoing a physical disturbance—’

‘Disturbance? Her?’ Mrs Clapham said bitterly. ‘She’s a pudding.’

Cradling a potato to her bosom, Bettony gouged out its eye.

*

Clapham was not a native of Cornwall. As a young boy he had spent an auspicious holiday there: according to his parents had been allowed to ‘run wild’.

Ernie was never one to run wild. He roved, there was nothing else to do. The countryside bored him. While roving, his habit was to slash grasses and flowers with a stick from the hedgerow, aim stones at anything that
moved and at every empty bottle on the beach until he smashed it.

In this desultory frame of mind he had got as far as the old house down by the creek. The quality of its disrepair intrigued him. The guttering hung awry, the roof tiles bulged like a bedspread, the paintwork was a grim memory. The place looked as if clouting winds from the sea had knocked it off its perch. It was wacky. Ernie got into the garden and amused himself sparring with shoulder-high nettles, felling them with right hooks and left uppercuts. Not looking where he was going, he had a shock when he bumped into a woman in a hammock.

Her eyes were closed; she wasn’t breathing. He plucked a grass stalk and held it under her nose. It didn’t move. She was dead.

She said, not opening her eyes, ‘What are you doing here?’

Undismayed – he had heard of chickens running about with their heads cut off – he said, ‘Nothing.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Ernie Clapham.’

‘As in the junction?’ He fiddled with the grass stalk, waiting. She said, ‘You’re trespassing.’ That was how he met Miss Pendennis, who was to settle his way of life for him. ‘I could prosecute you.’ She was already old, sitting up in the hammock with a stock of grey hair and yellow eyes like a tiger’s.

He turned and ran. She called after him, ‘Come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.’

They never did talk about it, though Ernie went back next day and the next and many days after. There was nothing else to do. She had been a schoolteacher, he could just see her chalking on the blackboard. In the village they resented her living in a big house, setting herself up as a fine lady. People said she had plenty of money but she dispensed no charity, allowed her property to go to rack and ruin, made no friends and few contacts. Ernie came up against hard feelings if he mentioned her. It was easier to keep quiet. He didn’t himself know what to make of her.

When she started calling him Ernest, he said, ‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s cissy.’

‘If it was good enough for Hemingway it’s good enough for you.’

Perhaps there
was
something toffee-nosed about her, but he liked talking to her, he was beginning to find his voice and was agreeably surprised by the strength and variety of his convictions. She came alive listening to him airing them. Her eyes weren’t yellow, they were sort of amber and glowed when she laughed. She didn’t laugh at him, he wouldn’t have stood for that; he was able to join in, even when the laugh was on himself.

She never asked him into the house, she watched from the window and came to him in the garden. One day she said, ‘How do you get into the garden?’

‘Over the wall.’

‘But it’s so high.’

‘I climb into the tree and drop down.’

‘Tree? What tree?’

‘The big oak that hangs over the wall.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘You must stop climbing that tree!’

‘I shan’t hurt it.’

‘Hurt
it? Oh my God!’ She rocked, laughing; it was one time he couldn’t join in.

He said stoutly, ‘What’s up then? It’s only an old tree.’

‘There’s a gate in the wall. I’ll give you the key and you can come in that way.’

‘I like climbing in. No problem.’

‘I want you to promise never to get into that tree again.’

‘Oh sure.’

‘On your word of honour. If you have one.’

Ernie drew a finger across his neck. After that he made a point of looking closely at the tree. There was nothing to see – no more, anyway, than was to be expected: leaves and branches and a hole in the trunk where owls or something lived. She probably thought he would fall. He would show her what a climber he was. Meantime he accepted the key and used the door. There was a name painted on it – ‘Bellechasse’. He asked her what it meant. She said it was French for good hunting.

One day he came and found her lying in the hammock. It was the middle of a heatwave, the hottest day of the year. ‘The wireless says there’s a storm coming.’ She had her eyes shut, like the first time he saw her. But now the fine lines in
her face had drawn together, making it a mask. She looked a million years old. Ernie felt a twinge of disquiet. He said, ‘Storm makes the wireless crackle. Atmospherics.’

One of her hands was draped out of the hammock and something she had been holding fell to the ground. Ernie picked up a small leather-covered book.

‘Give that to me!’ Suddenly she was wide awake.

‘What is it?’

He was actually handing it over when she pushed it back into his hand. ‘Let’s see what you can make of it.’ The way she spoke, taunting, put his back up.

The book had a bitter smell. He opened it on pages dog-eared and brown at the edges, covered with spidery writing. The words were foreign, nightmarish. Every few pages carried a heading, he guessed it was the date. On some were diagrams and rows of numbers.

‘Well? What do you suppose it is?’

‘Could be a diary.’

‘That’s clever of you.’ She took the book from him, clasped it prayerwise between her palms. ‘It’s the diary of a fighter pilot during the Second World War, a day-to-day record of his missions.’

Ernie said alertly, ‘You talking about Douglas Bader?’

‘This man was German, a Nazi. He doesn’t identify himself because that might have given away information to his enemies. I call him Koenig. He was awarded the Iron Cross First Class.’

‘Pull the other one.’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe me?’

Ernie was seldom troubled by any sense of unreality. But he felt it now, knew he ought to be dreaming and wasn’t. He called her bluff. ‘Okay, so read me some of it.’ She stared at him, very much the schoolteacher, he the biggest bonehead in her class. ‘Where would you get a Nazi’s diary, anyway? It’s a spoof, someone’s having you on.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever gave it to you.’

‘No one gave it to me.’

‘Okay, so what’s in it?’

She opened the book. ‘This is the entry for two consecutive days in September, 1940: “We carried out intensive raids on London as directed by Reichmarshal Goering—”’

‘It’s not even in German!’

‘I am translating for your benefit:
This
was
saturation
bombing.
Our
planes,
“the
choir
of
vengeance”,
went
over
in
relays,
dropping
their
bombs
at
the
rate
of
25
a
minute.
The
East
End
took
the
brunt,
the
docks
were
set
alight
and
fires
lit
up
the
sky.
I
could
feel
–
many
of
us
pilots
did
–
the
repercussion
of
the
heavy
calibre
bombs
from
three
miles
up.
’

She put the book down and stared at Ernie. He said, ‘I’m thirsty.’ She rose without a word and went into the house. He picked up the book, thumbed over the pages and came on a crude drawing of a woman with a dog’s head cradling a machine gun in her arms. When Miss Pendennis returned, bringing a glass of water, he thrust the book at her. ‘What’s this?’

‘The wolf-headed goddess of the dead. The words underneath are “Goddess strikes England”.’

‘Daft!’ Ernie made off, not waiting to drink the water.

The storm came and went, the heat stayed. He went every day to hear her read. Years later, looking back on that time, it was the heat he remembered, the weight of it, clouds reaching into the sky, solids melting and merging. And the company of Koenig. He had got a picture of him without knowing how. The funny thing was – and a bit sickening – the picture of a man in grey uniform with an iron cross round his neck kept leaking into his picture of Miss Pendennis, grey-faced, in rusty black, wearing a torn hairnet. She watched him from under her shaggy brows as she read, twitching the pages as if impatient to get to the end.

Ernie liked best the descriptions of mid-air battles, the dogfights. Each day, when he was alone, he took up where the previous reading had left off. His wanderings ceased to be aimless, now he was scouring the skies for the enemy. He was flying a Messerschmitt-jet with the wolf-headed woman, the goddess of death, painted on his fuselage. He didn’t think much about her, except that it might be as well to have her along. Spreading his arms, he plunged into the long grass, uttering his own lifelike imitation of an engine on full throttle, dodged attacks from heads of cow-parsley, swerved to take avoiding action from bursts of flak from anti-aircraft batteries in haystacks, shot up pylons, circled church spires and skimmed telegraph wires in the best tradition of aerial combat.

She said, ‘What do you make of it?’

‘Great stuff, better than
The
Boys’
Own
Paper.’

‘Stuff? This is real, this is how it was, death and wanton destruction!’ He nodded. She said bitterly, ‘It must be an occasion for applause when the destroyers turn on the instruments of destruction as in this daylight raid on an airfield:
It
was
entre-nous,
so
to
speak
and
we
were
looking
forward
to
a
bit
of
our
own
back.
Our
orders
were
to
attack
from
an
ultra-low
level.
Navigation
was
easy.
After
crossing
the
Channel
we
followed
the
railway
line
inland.
As
we
roared
over,
passengers
on
the
station
platforms
dispersed
like
tealeaves
under
a
jet
of
water.
Shooting
up
people
in
the
streets
is
something
some
of
my
co-pilots
indulge
in.
I
prefer
to
reserve
my
bullets
for
dogfights.
With
the
quarry
in
my
gun-sight
and
my
thumb
on
the
gunbutton
a
Spitfire
is
my
intended,
I
go
after
it
like
a
lover.