Writer's Life (3 page)

"Mina," I said now. "I love you."

She sighed and closed her eyes, and then snapped them open and stared at me. "Daniel, I wish you wouldn't..." Her plea was heartfelt.

"Sorry. Had to tell you. Sorry if that disturbs you. You know, most women like to be told that they're loved."

"Well, I'm not most women-"

"I'm not going to leave you, Mina. You can tell me that you love me, and I won't walk out, hurt you again-"

"Oh, Christ!" She sat up and stared across at me. "Why do you have to analyse? Why now? Everything's been fine, hasn't it? I'm here, with you. What more do you want?"

What more did I want?

Perhaps it was possessive of me to demand her love when I had everything else she could give me? Perhaps she was simply being honest when she admitted that she could not extend to me something that she claimed she no longer believed in. Perhaps I was an insecure, thoughtless bastard for demanding that she should open her heart.

"I'm sorry. I just wanted you to know."

She sat and stared at me, as if at a wounded animal. In a small voice she said, "I know, Daniel. I know."

~

Mina's professed inability to feel love for me can only be a reaction to what she went through with her husband. She denies this—but is this denial her way of not admitting me past her defences, of not allowing me a glimpse of her true feelings and emotions?

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

The following week I received an e-mail from a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, informing me that they had located three novels by Vaughan Edwards. I sent a cheque and the books arrived a few days later.

One of the novels was his very last,
The Secret of Rising Dene
, published shortly after his disappearance. The biographical details made no reference to the fact that he had vanished, but did give the interesting information that, in '96, he was still living in the North Yorkshire village of Highdale.

That weekend I suggested a drive up into the Dales. I told Mina that I wanted to visit Highdale, where Edwards had lived. After the spat the previous week, things had been fine between us. She made no mention of my interrogative
faux pas
, and I did my best not to rile her with further questions.

"Highdale? Don't we go through Settle to get there? There's that wonderful Thai place on the way."

"Okay, we'll call in on the way back. How's that?"

She laughed at me. "I hope you don't expect Highdale to be a shrine to your literary hero," she said. "He wasn't quite in the same league as the Brontës-"

"Then let's hope that Highdale isn't as trashily commercialised as Haworth, okay?"

Deuce.

She elbowed me in the ribs.

TWO

We set off after lunch on an unusually bright February afternoon, dazzling sunlight giving the false promise of the Spring to come—which would soon no doubt be dashed by the next bout of bitter cold and rain.

The approach road to the village of Highdale wound through ancient woodland on the side of a steep hill. When we reached the crest I pulled off the road and braked the car.

I laughed in delight. The sunlight picked out the village with great golden searchlights falling through low banks of cumulus. Highdale was a collection of tiny stone-built cottages and farmhouses set amid hunched pastures; I made out a church, a public house, and what might have been a village hall, all laid out below us like some sanguine architect's scale model of a rural idyll.

We drove down the incline and into the village and parked on the cobbled market square before the White Lion.

The pub was empty, save for a barman chatting to someone who might have been a local farmer. They both looked up when we pushed through the door, as if unaccustomed to customers at this time of day.

I ordered a dry cider for Mina and a fresh orange juice for myself. While the barman poured the drinks and chatted to Mina, I looked around the snug. It was fitted out much like any typical village pub: a variety of moorland scenes by local artists, a selection of horse brasses, a battalion of Toby jugs hanging in ranks from the low, blackened beams.

Then I noticed the bookshelf, or rather the books that were upon it. One volume in particular stood out—I recognised the Val Biro pen and ink sketch on the spine of the dust jacket. It showed the attenuated figure of a man doffing his Trilby. It was the cover of Vaughan Edwards' third novel,
A Brighter Light
.

The barman said something.

"Excuse me?" I said, my attention on the books.

"I think he wants paying," Mina said. "Don't worry, I'll get these."

She paid the barman and carried the drinks over to the table beneath the bookshelf. I was peering at the racked spines, head tilted.

"Good God," I said. "They're all Edwards."

"Not all of them." Mina tapped the spines of four books, older volumes than the Edwards. They were by a writer I had never come across before, E.V. Cunningham-Price. They looked Victorian, and caught her interest. She pulled them from the shelf, sat down and began reading.

I sorted through the Edwards. There were ten novels, eight of which I had never read, and a volume of short stories. I pulled them down and stacked them on the table, reading through the description of each book on the front inside flap.

I looked back at the shelf. I thought it odd that there should be no other books beside the Edwards and the four Cunningham-Price volumes.

The barman was watching me. I hefted one of the books. "They're not for sale, by any chance...?"

He was a big man in his sixties, with the type of stolid, typically northern face upon which scowls seem natural, like fissures in sedimentary rock.

"Well, by rights they're not for sale, like. They're for the enjoyment of the customers, if you know what I mean. Tell you what, though—take a couple with you, if you promise to bring them back."

"I'll do that. That's kind-"

"You're not locals, then?"

Mina looked up. "Almost. Skipton."

"Local enough," the barman said. "Hope you enjoy 'em."

"I'm sure I will." I paused, regarding the books and wondering which two volumes to take with me. Mina looked up from her book. "I wouldn't mind taking this one, Daniel."

I selected the volume of stories,
The Tall Ghost and other stories
, and returned the others to the shelf.

I finished my drink and moved to the bar for a refill. I indicated the books. "He was a local, wasn't he? Did he ever drop by?"

"Mr Vaughan?" the barman asked. "Every Monday evening, regular as clockwork. Sat on the stool over there." He indicated a high stool placed by the corner of the bar and the wall. "Drank three Irish whiskeys from nine until ten, then left on the dot of the hour. Very rarely missed a Monday for over twenty years."

"You knew him well?"

"Mr Vaughan?" He grunted a humourless laugh. "No one knew Mr Vaughan. Kept himself to himself, if you know what I mean. Spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. Reckon that's how he preferred it. Lived here nigh on forty years, and never said boo to a goose."

"Strange," I said, sipping my juice.

"Well," the publican said, "he was a writer chappie, you know?" He tapped his head. "Lived up here most of the time."

Over at her table, Mina was smiling to herself.

"He had a place in the village?" I asked.

"Not far off. He owned the big house up the hill on your left as you come in, set back in the woods. Edgecoombe Hall."

The very title fired my imagination. It seemed somehow fitting, the very place where Vaughan Edwards would have lived his sequestered, writer's life.

I decided I'd like to take a look at the place. "Who owns it now?"

"Edgecoombe Hall?" He shook his head. "No one. It's been standing empty ever since Mr Vaughan went and disappeared."

I nodded, digesting this. If it were a big house, with a fair bit of land, and perhaps dilapidated, then I imagined that no local would care to touch the place, and Highdale was just too far off the beaten track to make commuting to Leeds or Bradford an option for a prospective city buyer.

"Why's that?" I asked.

The publican shrugged. "Well, it's not exactly brand spanking new," he said. "A bit tumbledown, if you know what I mean. And the ghost doesn't help."
At this, Mina looked up from her book. "The
ghost
?" She had scepticism daubed across her face in primary colours. She gave me a look that said,
if you believe that
,
Daniel...

"Only reporting what I was told, love. Don't believe in 'em meself. Old wives' tales."

Despite myself, I was intrigued. "The ghost of Vaughan Edwards, right?"

He shook his head. Behind me, I heard Mina sigh with mock despair. "That's where you're wrong, sir. The Hall was haunted—if you believe in that kind of thing—long before Mr Vaughan bought the place. Stories go way back, right to the turn of the century—and I mean the century before last. 1900s. Ghost of a young girl haunts the place every full moon, so they say. Many a local claims to have clapped eyes on it."

I drank my orange juice and considered Vaughan Edwards. The scant biographical information I had come across had never mentioned whether or not he had ever married.

I asked the publican.

"Married? Mr Vaughan?" He chuckled. "Never saw him with a woman—nor anyone else, for that matter. Bit of a recluse."

"So he lived alone in the Hall?"

The publican laughed. "Alone, if you don't count the ghost."

I noticed that Mina had finished her drink and was gesturing to go. I signalled
one minute
and turned to my informant. "You don't happen to know anything about how he disappeared?"

Mina sighed.

The publican said, "Strange do, all things considered. His car was found in the woods, not a hundred yards up from the Hall, on the track leading to the escarpment above the river. A local youth found it and notified the police. They investigated, found he wasn't at the Hall, then traced his footprints on the path leading to the drop." He shrugged. "Strange things was, his footprints stopped before they reached the edge." He paused, considering. "'Course, he could always have stepped off the path and walked to the edge through the bracken."

"You think that's what he did? Threw himself off the escarpment into the river?"

"Me?" He gave my question due consideration. "I don't rightly know, sir. He didn't seem the kind to do a thing like that, but then who can tell? You see, his body was never found, which struck me as strange. The river's fast flowing, but there's a mill dam about two miles south of here. The body would've fetched up there, all things considered."

"So if he didn't kill himself," I asked, "then what happened?"

"Aha," the publican said, "now that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn't it?"

He paused, watching me. "Funny thing, though," he went on.

"Yes?"

"About a week before he disappeared, he brought in this carrier bag full of books. A dozen or so of his own and four or five others by the Cunningham chappie. He just dropped the bag on the counter and said that the far shelf needed filling, and that was it. Not another word."

I nodded. "Strange."

We were interrupted by the arrival of another customer. "Usual, Bill?" the publican called, and moved down the bar to pull a pint of Tetley's.

Mina took the opportunity to hurry me from the place. I picked up the Edwards collection, thanked the landlord and followed Mina outside.

As we drove up the hill and out of the village, she said, "You really believed all that rubbish, didn't you?"

I glanced at her. "What rubbish?"

"All that about the ghost."

"I don't believe it—but then again I don't necessarily disbelieve."

She said, "I don't know..." under her breath.

"What's wrong with keeping your options open, Mina? 'There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio...' Look at it this way, how many things were dismissed as impossible a hundred years ago, which have come to be accepted now?"

"Ghosts aren't one of them," she said.

I sighed. I often found her world-view severely limiting, and it irritated me when she took to mocking my open-mindedness.

I wondered if she had always been a sceptic, or if having to concentrate wholly on the practicalities of day to day survival during the traumatic separation from her husband had fostered in her such a narrow perspective. She would give credence to nothing that she could not see before her, that she could not grasp.

I drove slowly up the hillside, looking through the trees for sign of Edgecoombe Hall.

"Couldn't you see that he was leading you on, Daniel?" she continued.

"The publican?"

"He was spinning a yarn. I wonder how many times he's told the same story to visitors?"

I shook my head. "I don't think so. He said himself that he didn't believe in ghosts."

"And that story of Edwards' disappearance-"

I turned to her, wide-eyed. "Don't tell me, Mina—you refuse to believe in that, too?"

She struck my arm with playful truculence. "He was going on as if he might have survived—I don't know, staged his own disappearance. The chances are he left his car and went for a walk, went too near the edge and fell into the river."

"So why was his body never discovered?"

She shrugged. "Search me. Maybe it got snagged on the river-bottom."

"Surely it would've been discovered by now."

"So what do you think happened then?"

I smiled to myself. She loved certainty. I shook my head. "I just don't know," I said, knowing it would exasperate her. "Ah... Look."

I braked and pulled into the side of the road. Through the winter-denuded sycamore and elm, set perhaps half a mile from the road, I made out the gaunt towers of a Victorian building.

"Edgecoombe Hall, I presume. Mind if we take a look?"

She surprised me. She was staring at the severe outline of the Hall, something speculative in her gaze. "Why not?" she said at last.

I drove on a little further, looking for the opening to the driveway in the overgrown hedge of ivy and bramble.

"There," she called, pointing to a gap in the hedge. Once, many years ago, two tall stone pillars, topped with orbs, had marked the entrance to the grounds; now the pillars were cloaked with ivy. Wrought iron gates hung open and awry, their hinges having rusted long ago.

I turned the car into the pot-holed driveway and proceeded at walking pace through the gloomy tunnel between overgrown rhododendron and elderberry bushes.

Edgecoombe Hall hove into sight, more stark and intimidating at close quarters than when seen from the road. It was a foursquare pile with mock-Gothic towers at each corner, its façade having long ago given up the ghost against the creeping tide of ivy. Only the double doorway and a couple of upstairs windows were free of the verdant mass.

It struck me as the appropriate domicile of a lonely and reclusive writer. I almost expected to see a massive, haunted oak tree in the middle of the lawn, or the ghostly face of a young girl peering timidly out through an upper window.

I stopped the car before the plinth of steps rising to the entrance. Mina lay a hand on my arm and pointed.

A small truck, laden with timber, was parked around the far corner of the Hall. "Perhaps someone has bought it after all," she said. She peered at the façade and pulled a face. "Certainly needs work."

We climbed out. The sun was setting through the trees to the west, slanting an intense orange light across the lawn and illuminating the ivied frontage of the building. I moved away from the car, stood and took in the atmosphere of the place.

Far from intimidating, the Hall seemed to me a place of melancholy. Perhaps it was merely that it was in a state of such disrepair, had seen far, far better days. But I imagined the Hall as it might have been, shorn of ivy and pristine, and it came to me still that it would have been a dour and eldritch place.

A steady tattoo of hammer blows sounded from within the Hall, and it cheered me that someone was at least making a start at renovation.

"Daniel," Mina said. "Look."

She was pointing at the ground, the gravelled drive that swept around the front of the building. I joined her.

A series of fissures radiated from the Hall, wide where they issued from the wall and narrowing as they crossed the drive. I noticed great cracks in the grey brickwork beneath the ivy.

"Looks like it's been hit by an earthquake," she said.

I approached the façade, where I guessed a window might be positioned behind the ivy, and pulled away the clinging growth. I came to a mullioned pane and peered within. A bright spear of sunlight fell over my shoulder and illuminated the room. To my surprise it was furnished: bookshelves lined the walls, and elephantine armchairs and sofas were positioned before the hearth.