The Seance (9 page)

I had taken a cottage in a picturesque spot by the Aldringham road, about a mile from my father’s house and certainly well away from the sound of waves breaking upon shingle, but also rather isolated, leaving Phoebe with only our housekeeper – a kindly woman, but no conversationalist – for company during the day. Within weeks of our arrival, we knew that she was with child, a joy tempered by her increasing homesickness, which she tried in vain to conceal. Arthur came to stay; a relief on the one hand, but his visit also cast a shadow, for he plainly thought me cruel in keeping Phoebe from her family. And so we decided that she should spend the last months of her confinement at Orchard House,
little imagining that they would be the last months of her life. I let the cottage go and returned to my father’s house, fully resolved to leave the firm and seek a situation in Aylesbury as soon as the child was born. But my father was so pleased to have me at home again that I could not bring myself to tell him, and there matters stood until late one winter’s evening I had a wire from Orchard House urging me to come at once. Phoebe’s confinement had begun prematurely, and continued all that night, while she grew weaker and weaker until a surgeon was sent for. She died, and our son with her, an hour before I arrived.

Useless to dwell on that extremity of grief, or upon its terrible sequel, which is quickly told. I remained at Orchard House a week after her funeral, until the unspoken thought in all our minds – if only I had never crossed their threshold – became too painful to endure. Five months later, in August of the same year, Arthur went climbing in the Welsh mountains and was killed in a fall.

Returning to Aylesbury for the burial was the hardest thing I had ever done. Useless to say to his parents – so ravaged by suffering they were scarcely recognisable – that I would sooner have cut off my right hand, sooner have died; it would not bring Arthur or Phoebe back, or answer the questions that hung like daggers above our heads. Why had Arthur, in the depths of mourning, left his parents alone to go climbing on a whim? His companions swore that he had slipped while prospecting a rock-face, but I saw in them the shadow of my own suspicion: that whether or not Arthur had deliberately chosen to end his life, he had embarked on that fatal ascent without caring whether he lived or died.

In the long darkness that followed, the thought of ending my own life was constantly at my elbow. I could not shave without being gripped by the impulse to draw the blade across my throat. Guns beckoned from gun racks, poisons from shelves, and always there was the sound of the sea, and the image of myself swimming out into the icy deep until my strength failed and I sank beneath the waves. But the thought of what it would do to my father – haunted as I was by the memory of the Wilmots’
ravaged faces – always restrained me; that, and as Hamlet says, the dread of something after death: the lines were often in my mind. Gradually I became aware of how heavily the spectacle of my grief was weighing upon my father, and so to emerge from black night into a grey twilight of the spirit. I resumed my place in the office, and began, almost unwillingly, to take notice of the world around me, and then to draw again, mere pencil sketches at first, until I found myself roaming further afield in search of new subjects. But my life, or so I imagined, was effectively over, and another four years would pass before anything happened to disturb this melancholy conviction.

Perhaps it is only the indelible impression left by the story of Peter Grimes in
The Borough
, but I have noticed that many visitors find something oppressive, even sinister, about the country to the south of Aldeburgh, to which I was drawn, I think, for that very reason. The keep at Orford, especially when framed against a louring sky, was one of my favourite subjects, and from Orford it was only another three miles across a lonely stretch of marshland to the edge of Monks Wood. You can walk that way many times without meeting another human being, attended only by the lonely cries of seabirds and occasional glimpses of a grey and tumbling sea. Because of the way the land lies, the forest remains hidden until you crest a slight rise and find your way barred by a dark expanse of foliage. I was gazing at this prospect on a chill afternoon in the spring of 1864, and wondering whether the dogs were really as savage as I had once believed, when it occurred to me that I now had a legitimate reason to visit the Hall.

I prevailed upon my father to write to Cornelius Wraxford – from whom we had not heard for several years – introducing me as his new man of business and requesting an interview. A week later came the reply: Mr Wraxford would continue the association for the time being, but saw
no necessity of meeting. So far as my father was concerned, that was the end of it. But my old curiosity had been roused, and I began to make enquiries. I had a friend in the poaching line – a man I had met red-handed while I was out sketching very early one morning, and had not betrayed – and in a quiet corner of the taproom at the White Lion I learned that so much of the outer wall had now collapsed that the few remaining dogs were kept chained by the old stables at the rear of the house. The keeper – who acted mostly as groom and coachman – was given to drink, and seldom ventured forth at night, or so my informant had heard; the poaching fraternity, he told me, still gave the Hall a wide berth, especially after dark.

The moon that night was almost at the full, and after I left the White Lion I stood for a long time on the strand, watching the play of light upon the water. I had thought that I would never again hear the sound of waves upon shingle without being overwhelmed by grief and remorse, but time had worn away the edge and the lines that came to me were not ‘Break, break, break’ but ‘the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast . . .’ The night was mild and clear, and it struck me as I stood there that it would be an interesting exercise to sketch the Hall by moonlight. Business was quiet, and my father was always happy to grant me sketching leave, and so I set off the very next day.

It was early in the afternoon before I stood once more upon the ridge overlooking Monks Wood. From there I made my way northward along the edge of the forest until I came to a rutted track, and plunged beneath the canopy. A few minutes later I passed between the crumbling pillars which marked the boundary of the estate. The original oaks had been much overrun by firs, which grew very close, shutting out the light. As I went deeper into the wood, I became aware that the usual chatter of birds seemed strangely muted, and if there was game afoot, it kept well out of sight. The conviction that I had taken a wrong turning grew upon me until, without any warning, the path swerved around the trunk of a gigantic oak and emerged on to a ragged expanse of long grass and thistles which must once
have been lawn. On the far side of the clearing, perhaps fifty yards off, stood a large manor house, in the Elizabethan style, with drab greenish walls cross-hatched by blackened timbers and crowned by numerous gables. The sun was already sinking toward the treetops on my left.

The path continued on through the wilderness towards the front entrance, with a branch leading away to my left towards a tumbledown cottage, perhaps the keeper’s abode. Behind the cottage was a row of decrepit outbuildings, half hidden by the encroaching trees; and further off still, glimpses of stonework and a steeply sloping roof, presumably the chapel. Wraxford Hall, my father had told me, had once possessed a park of several acres, but the forest had swallowed everything except the house and its immediate surroundings. There was no sign of life; all was still and silent.

I turned my attention to the main house. Symptoms of long neglect were apparent even at this distance: sagging timbers; jagged cracks in the mortar; a wild profusion of nettles and saplings growing right up against the wall in places. All of the windows were shuttered, except for a row along the first floor, which appeared to be at least thirty feet above the ground. It struck me that these might be the windows of the gallery from which the boy Felix Wraxford had fallen seventy years before. The shutters along the second floor were much smaller; and protruding above these were the attics, each in its own gable and all on different levels. Silhouetted against the brightness of the sky were a dozen or so crumbling chimneys, and jutting above each of these I saw what appeared to be a blackened spear, aimed at the heavens. These were lightning rods; my first glimpse of the Wraxford family’s strange obsession.

It is difficult now to separate my first impressions from the knowledge of what was to follow. I felt at once fearful and exhilarated; my accustomed melancholy vanished like smoke upon the wind. The house seemed preternaturally vivid in the afternoon light, as if I had stepped from the waking world into a dream in which I was
meant
to be here and nowhere
else. I settled my back against the trunk of the great oak, got out my tablet and my colour box and set about making the best use of the remaining daylight.

An hour passed, with no sign of life; I began to wonder if the dogs were only a figment of my friend’s imagination. Perhaps Cornelius himself had died – but no, we had had his letter only the previous week – yet what did we really know of his movements? He could have closed up the house and gone away immediately after writing to us. Or perhaps there was another, more modest dwelling in a different part of the wood ... Slowly the twilight deepened until I could no longer tell one colour from another. I set my materials aside and ate the food I had brought while the outlines of rooftops and chimneys, the spectral branches of the lightning rods, faded with the last glow of evening until the Hall was no more than a dark mass humped against the blackness of the forest.

A pale glow through the foliage behind me heralded the rising of the moon, and I saw that for its light to fall upon my page I would have to work in the open. Convinced by now that the estate was deserted, I gathered my things and moved cautiously forward into the starlight. About thirty yards from the house I stumbled over the remnant of a low stone wall, where I settled myself with my tablet and pencils. The air was still and cold; somewhere in the distance a fox barked, but no answering cry arose from the blackness opposite.

Minute by minute, the clearing brightened; the Hall seemed to be inching its way upward out of darkness. As the moon rose higher, the proportions of the house appeared to alter until it loomed above me like a precipice. I reached down for my tablet and, as I straightened, saw a light spring up in the window immediately above the main entrance: A flickering, yellow glow that began to move to my left, passing from one window to the next until it came to the farthest, then slowly back about half the distance it had come, before it halted and steadied.

All of my childhood terrors swarmed up at the sight, yet in that sinister
progress I saw the completion of my picture; saw that if I could master my fear for long enough to fix the scene in memory I might at last realise a vision that was truly my own. I began working feverishly, even as my skin crawled in anticipation of a malign face rising up against the glass; or the shout – or shot – that would signal my discovery. The light glowed steadily, wavering every so often as if someone had passed close by, for there was not a breath of wind. It is old Cornelius, I told myself, moving about his domain; so long as his lamp is lit, he will not see me. I seemed to have become two people: the one appalled at my folly and pleading for release, the other indifferent to everything except the task in hand.

Around midnight, when the moon was at its highest, I had done all that I could. Still the light burned in the window; I gathered up my things and withdrew into the shadow of the trees. I had brought a lantern with me, but that would mean announcing my presence to whatever might be abroad in Monks Wood, and after a hundred yards of stumbling in near-darkness, I went a little way off the path, wrapped myself in my greatcoat and huddled at the foot of another massive oak. There I lay listening to the creepings and rustlings in the thickets around me, the occasional hoot of an owl, drifting in and out of uneasy dreams until I woke in grey twilight.

For the next five days I scarcely left my studio. I neglected my father shamefully, but the picture would not be denied; whenever I lay down to seek a few hours’ sleep it floated before my inward eye, beckoning, insisting. I worked with an assurance I had never possessed – or rather been possessed by – constantly running up against the limits of my technique and yet guided by a vision so compelling it seemed almost to make virtues of my limitations, until the morning when I set down my palette for the last time and stepped back to admire what looked like the work of someone far more gifted than myself. It was a scene at once melancholy, sinister and beautiful, and in that long moment of contemplation I felt like the God of creation; I looked upon my work and knew that it was good.