The Seance (15 page)

Everyone assumed that I had fallen while sleepwalking, which I had done often enough as a child for my mother to threaten to lock me in her room, though I had never injured myself before. Mama, indeed, was far from sympathetic: it was, she declared, one more sign of my selfish and obstinate nature that I should contrive to fall down the stairs a week after my sister had accepted an offer of marriage. Sophie’s being the younger only compounded the offence, for if I had worked at making myself agreeable, instead of hiding away with a book, I too might now be engaged. I thought her fiancé a vacuous booby; but I could not deny that I had always been a great trial to my mother.

Though I was, in waking life, far bolder than Sophie, I had been prone to nightmares, as well as sleepwalking, for as long as I could recall. As I grew older, I walked less frequently in my sleep, but the nightmares became more oppressive. There was one in particular, which recurred many times, of a vast, echoing house I was sure I had never seen. It was not at all like the redbrick villa in Highgate where we had always lived, and never exactly the same from one dream to the next, and yet I knew whenever I was there. I was always alone, acutely aware of the silence, feeling that the house itself was alive, watchful, aware of my presence. The ceilings were immensely high, with dark panelled walls, and though there were windows I could never see anything beyond the glass.

Sometimes I would be there only for a brief space and wake thinking, ‘I have been in the house again’, but when the dream ran its full course I would be compelled to move from one deserted room to the next, fearful and yet powerless to stop, knowing that I must come to a flight of stairs – sometimes grand and opulent, in other dreams narrow and
worn – and thence to a room at the end of a corridor: a long room furnished with carved chests and screens in a dark, oily wood, covered with elaborate designs picked out in gold. In one such dream I was drawn further into the room until I came to a low dais, upon which stood a statue of a beast like a panther about to spring, cast in dark, gleaming metal. Cold blue light began to glow around it; a vibration like the buzzing of a gigantic insect filled my body, and I woke to my own cry of horror.

In another sort of nightmare, quieter and yet in its way still more fearful, I would dream that I awoke – it seemed always to be twilight, just before dawn – in my own room, everything in its familiar place, except that my hearing was unnaturally acute: the blood surging in my ears sounded as loud as waves breaking upon the shore. Then I would sense the approach of some malignant being, coming up the passage or hovering at my window; my heart would begin to pound until I feared it would tear itself out of my breast, and I would wake with my heart still beating violently.

A few months before the fall, I was woken, as I thought, in the early morning, by hearing my name called softly. I rose and went to my door in my nightgown, but there was no one in the passage. The voice had sounded like Sophie’s, but when I came to her door it was closed. All was silent. The bathroom door stood slightly open; there was my mother’s room beyond; then the landing and the staircase, exactly as in waking life. I heard my name called again, only this time the voice boomed like a gong inside my head; the light failed as if a candle had been snuffed, and something rushed at me out of the gloom. I screamed and struggled until the light came back with the sound of running feet and I realised that the demon who had seized me was, in fact, my mother.

Mama was justifiably enraged, and I could only agree that I belonged in a madhouse and should certainly be sent to one if I persisted with this hysterical nonsense. It was all very well to say that I could not help it: Sophie had never walked in her sleep, or woken the household with her
screams, so why was I so lacking in self-control? Because I was wilful, obstinate, selfish and contrary, and a great deal more besides. I was accustomed to Mama’s tirades, but this one was so violent, and, I felt, so thoroughly deserved, that I resolved to lock myself in my room and hide the key in a different place each night, in the hope that my dreaming self would not remember where I had put it. As the weeks passed without a relapse, I began to believe myself cured of the nightmares as well as the sleepwalking and gave up locking my door, until the morning when Elspeth, our maid, found me sprawled at the foot of the stairs.

A fortnight or so later – certainly after the doctor had pronounced me well on the way to recovery – I was sitting up in bed reading when my grandmother came into the room and sat down in the chair beside me, looking exactly as she had when I was a little girl: the same elaborate black silk dress and tightly pinned white hair, the same familiar scent of lavender and violet water. The chair creaked as she settled herself in it, smiled at me and took up her work, just as if she had only been gone five minutes, rather than resting in Kensal Green Cemetery for the past fifteen years. I was vaguely aware that Grandmama was supposed to be dead, but somehow this did not matter; her presence at my bedside seemed entirely natural and comforting. And though my own tranquil acceptance of the visit would later seem, to me, as strange as the visit itself, we sat in companionable silence for an indefinite interval until my grandmother gathered up her work, smiled once more at me, and went slowly from the room.

Mama came in so soon after that I thought they must have passed each other in the hall. ‘Did you see Grandmama?’ I asked. I saw from her look of consternation that I had best not pursue the subject, and agreed that I must have been dreaming. As with the strange radiance, Grandmama’s appearance was followed by one of the worst headaches I had ever endured. But I felt certain I had been wide awake.

Even after the strangeness of the experience had become fully apparent
to me, I found I could not think of my visitant as a ghost. My reading in sensational literature had enhanced an already vivid imagination of how ghosts ought to conduct themselves: a hint of transparency and one or two blood-curdling groans was surely the least that could be expected, whereas Grandmama had been – well, just Grandmama. And though nothing like this had ever happened to me before, I had not felt in the slightest afraid.

Dr Stevenson had declared me well enough to get up, and the memory of my grandmother’s visit had faded to the point where I could almost believe it
had
been a dream, when one evening after dinner I saw my father crossing the hall ahead of me. He was no more than ten paces away. I heard the floor creak under his tread, smelt the smoke of his cigar. Looking neither right nor left, he entered his study and closed the door behind him, just as he would have done in life. Again I felt no fear; only an overwhelming impulse to go up to his door and knock. When there was no answer I tried the handle. The door opened readily, but there was no one there, only the familiar cracked brown leather armchairs on the worn Persian rug, the elaborate desk with its feet carved into the fierce faces of tigers which had so fascinated me as a child, the bookshelves crammed with Blue Books and army lists and regimental histories and accounts of old campaigns, the lingering faint odours of tobacco and leather and old bindings. I remained in the doorway for a long time, lost in a trance of recollection.

My father had spent a great deal of his life, or at least the latter part of it, in this room; he had met Mama while he was home on leave after many years’ service with the army in Bengal. He had thick white whiskers, streaked with grey, and a beard which jutted out when he walked, making him look very fierce. His skin was a strange shade of yellow, for he had been very ill with fever, and his bald head shone so brightly that I used
to wonder if he polished it in secret. Once in a while he would take us for a long walk by ourselves; and if we found a quiet field where there was no one watching he would drill us like soldiers, making us march up and down in time, and stand to attention and salute. I loved this game, and used to march Sophie around the back garden until Mama put a stop to it; she did not approve of little girls playing at soldiers.

As the youngest daughter in her family, Mama had been obliged to stay at home nursing her own father, a confirmed invalid, until he died, and by then she was almost thirty. She was very pale and slender, and grew thinner as the years passed, so that her pale blue eyes appeared to grow even larger as the bones of her face became more prominent. The house in Highgate, I came to understand, had been a compromise between Papa, who would rather have lived in the country, right away from London, and Mama, who longed to be part of Society. I had, as a child, no very clear idea of what Society might be, but it seemed that Highgate stood on the outermost fringe of it. We did not want for company: Major James Paget, an old friend and comrade of Papa’s, had taken a house only a few minutes’ walk from our own, and I had been fast friends with their daughter Ada since she was seven years old. But somehow the Pagets did not count as Society.

Ada and I were often taken for sisters, for we were both quite tall and strongly featured, and much darker in colouring than Sophie, who was fair-haired, fair-skinned, and by any conventional standard the beauty of the family. Sophie had always been my mother’s favourite, for she loved balls and parties and gossip, and would happily sit for half a day in front of her mirror, time which I far preferred to spend with my nose buried in a book, as Mama despairingly put it. As I grew older, I came to realise that my parents were deeply estranged, living quite separate lives and avoiding one another as far as possible. So long as the Pagets – a devoted and loving couple to the end – had remained nearby, it had not seemed to matter so much. But soon after my eighteenth birthday James Paget had died suddenly, followed a few months later by my own father.

And now Ada’s mother was living with relations on the Isle of Wight, and Ada herself was married to a clergyman, a hundred miles away in a remote Suffolk village, while I was still at home, restless, unhappy, and constantly at loggerheads with my mother. I had worked at my sketching and playing and was competent at both, but no more; I had tried my hand at a novel and got as far as the third chapter before disbelief in my own creation pulled me up. I had pleaded to be allowed to seek a situation as a governess, but my mother would not hear of it. Sophie’s success in snaring Arthur Carstairs had only heightened Mama’s disappointment in me, whom she was wont to characterise as unfeeling, ungrateful, insolent, obstinate, sullen and contrary. For all the unfairness of her tirades, I could not altogether disagree, oppressed as I was by the sense of my own worthlessness, of life slipping through my fingers.

As with Grandmama’s appearance at my bedside, the apparition of my father was followed, after a peculiarly tranquil interval, by the onset of a blinding headache. I had not made any connection between the first visitation – the word that seemed the least unsatisfactory – and the fall. But now I began to wonder; I had heard people described as ‘cracked’, and perhaps the application was more literal than I had supposed. Could the fall have opened some fissure in my consciousness, admitting perceptions which were meant to be kept out? But that implied that the appearances were in some way real, whereas if no one else could see them ... though of course they could not, if I alone had stumbled upon some special power of sight.

I knew better than to say anything to my mother and sister, and could not bring myself to write of it even to Ada, whom I had told about the fall and the strange radiance afterward, but nothing more; whether because I did not want to trouble her happiness, or for fear of being thought mad, I was not sure. As the days passed without further visitations I tried to
convince myself that nothing more would follow. But something in the quality of my inward life had altered, subtly but unmistakably; it was like walking into a room and feeling that the colour of the walls, or the pattern of the carpet, had changed, without being able to say precisely how. Familiar scents and tastes seemed suddenly heightened; it was springtime, admittedly, but there was more to it than that, a sense of – not exactly apprehension, but of something impending. On several occasions I had, very powerfully, the sensation of knowing what everyone in the room would say for the next few moments. And once, when Mama complained of losing the stone from a favourite pendant, I got up, walked straight to the other end of the house, turned into the drawing-room, reached under a cabinet in the darkest corner, and drew out the lost stone, which was jet. I was quite at a loss to understand how I had done this, and glad that my mother had not witnessed how remarkable the feat had been.