by J. C. Grey
When I return, he is muttering again, so I clean the blood from his hair and go on with my story.
‘The spirit in the house and I, we seemed to have an unspoken agreement to live companionably in the house, although he was curious about me and—when I was feeling better—I began to feel curious about him. I think he is a boy of about five or six, named Louis, and that his mother was a young woman named Evelyn St John, who gave birth to him out of wedlock and was quietly shipped off to England.’
I laugh low. ‘It sounds very Victorian, but it happened. As late as the seventies, single women were still routinely being pressured to give up their illegitimate children.
‘Last night when you arrived, Louis had just confirmed his name to me. It was a big step for him as he had been let down by so many over the years. It was a sign of trust. And then you came, and I think he became angry that he’d lost my attention.
‘Instead of responding to his gesture, I was with you. The destruction of the armoire was him dealing with his anger—and maybe a lure to get me away from you. Or maybe he wanted to show me how he had been kept hidden from view.
‘When I went up there this morning, it was the first time I’d done more than sense his presence. I could see his shadow and feel him when he leant against my knee. He wanted me to stay with him.’
Will you be my new mummy?
I falter. In my head, I can hear his lisp as he asks the question that stops my heart, and makes me want to hold him close. Even now, with time to think, I am not sure if my response was to Louis’ innocent question or because something in me that I can’t even name believes the little ghost can in some way make up for the two tiny souls that are beyond me.
Marc frowns in his sleep, so I continue, not wanting him to move his face unnecessarily.
‘But you called me, and I wanted to go to you. And it made Louis angry that I wouldn’t stay with him, and when he is angry, things happen.’
I hold my breath as Marc’s eyes move beneath his lids, hoping he will wake and smile at me. But eventually he is still again, so I stroke his hand and resume, explaining about the fall and how he came to be in hospital. I tell him that he will be all right and that his parents will return tomorrow.
‘While they’re with you, there are some things I need to do. You see I made a promise.’ Uttering a brief laugh, I smile at him. ‘I know I haven’t often stood by my promises, but I’m trying. I don’t know what will happen, but I have to try.’
‘Em.’
His voice is faint but clear, although his eyes are still closed. Slowly, so slowly, his right one opens a crack.
‘Marc.’ I brush away a single tear. ‘There you are. I was so worried.’
‘Em.’ He says something else that I can’t make out so I lean close.
‘You found what you were looking for,’ he murmurs and I realise he has been listening.
I smile into his good eye. ‘Yes. Yes, I think I have.’
‘Good.’ He smiles and then his eye closes, his hand relaxes in mine and he sleeps as I watch over him.
Present day, morning
It is still early when I park the car in Lammermoor and hope that Robert Sanders’ hardware store is open. It is, although when I open the door and walk in, he is not in the shop. Instead, the younger man who served me the first day I came in here when I bought the padlock sits behind the counter.
He looks up quizzically and offers a polite smile.
‘Can I help you?’
I give him a tight smile. ‘Actually, I was wondering if I could have a word with Mr Sanders.’
He looks confused. ‘I’m Kevin Sanders … but you must mean my father. Just a second.’
Before I can say anything he moves out from behind the counter and that is when I see he is in a wheelchair.
He disappears through a doorway and, even as I hear him call for his father, another piece of the puzzle falls into place. When Robert appears alone a minute or two later, I look at him with sympathy.
‘Your son,’ I say. ‘Kevin. He was the one who fell from the window.’
His eyes slide away but he nods.
‘I’m so sorry.’
Again he nods and neither of us speak for a moment. Then Sanders sighs and starts to talk.
‘He was just a boy then. Not long out of school and needed work. The new owner of the house, Mrs Banks, had plans to turn the house into a boutique hotel. My father tried to warn him. I did, too.’ Sanders’ voice breaks and he stops to collect himself. ‘Next thing we knew he’d been rushed to hospital.’
‘What happened?’
‘Stupid. Just a silly thing.’ Sanders shakes his head. ‘He was working on a ladder, sanding a window frame in one of the bedrooms. Something startled him and he fell.’
‘Did he … did he say if he felt it was deliberate?’
Sanders shakes his head. ‘Always said it was an accident. Just an accident. But after everything else …’
‘I’m sorry.’ It seems such a useless thing to say but Sanders nods and makes eye contact. ‘Heard you had some trouble of your own.’ The tone of his voice screams I told you so.
‘Yes, there was an accident.’
‘You look all right.’
‘I wasn’t the one hurt, but my husband was.’
‘As I said, accidents happen in that place.’ He sounds a little like Louis. I told you.
‘That’s not what I came to talk about.’
‘I don’t have anything more to say.’ He turns his back on me and begins stacking shelves.
‘You see, that makes me think you know more than you’ve told me.’
He grunts.
‘You were a young, impressionable boy back in the late fifties,’ I muse. ‘Proud when your dad took you to work at the fanciest house in the area. And when you saw the beautiful Evelyn, you fell a little in love.’
He snorts, keeping his back to me. ‘That’s ridiculous. I was seven or eight years old.’
‘She was polished, shiny, a creature from another world. It’s no surprise you had a crush on her.’
At that he turns. ‘Maybe I did. So what?’
‘And then, after Evelyn treating you like a little brother for months and the dazzle of the party preparations, suddenly you weren’t allowed to go to work with your father in the school holidays anymore. No chance to say goodbye to your goddess. But I think you tried, didn’t you?’
Sanders laughs. ‘You have a very vivid imagination, Ms Reed.’
I drag a stool up to the counter and make myself comfortable to show him I have all the time in the world to explore this. ‘I’m right though, aren’t I?’
‘What if you are?’ He spends several minutes lining up products on the shelf behind the counter, making sure the display is perfect, before sighing. ‘All right, look I went there. One evening when I was supposed to be in bed, I crept out of the window and walked from the town all the way to the house. Fat lot of good it did. I never got to speak with her.’
Disappointed, I feel my shoulders slump. I had been so certain he knew more.
‘Saw her though.’
My eyes shoot up to meet his. ‘You saw her? How long after the party was this?’
‘Not long, a few weeks.’
‘Was she all right?’
A faint smile curves his mouth, and his eyes are blurred with memory. ‘She was glowing, more lovely than ever. But I hadn’t picked my time very well. I thought I might catch her out in the garden. She’d told me she liked to walk there after dinner, when the scent of the summer roses was strongest. But she was in the house with her parents. I could hear her father shouting and her mother crying, and I crept as close as I could to hear what they were saying.’
I hold my breath, wondering if my theory is close to the mark.
‘I didn’t understand it, only that her parents were angry with her and that she was being sent somewhere.’
‘To England?’
‘No, to Sydney. When the Brigadier told her she had t
o go, she was furious, and stood up. She pushed her chair so hard it fell over and that’s when I saw that she was—’
He stops abruptly and puts his head in his hands. Even now, more than half a century later, his disappointment is palpable. The goddess was mortal after all.
‘Pregnant?’
Sanders nods. ‘My mother was expecting my sister at the time so I knew what it meant when a woman’s belly starts to grow.’
‘So she was sent away to Sydney to have her baby. Did she come back?’
Sanders clutches his hands together. ‘A while later, I heard my father tell my mother that he thought he’d seen her there one day and he was sure there was a baby in the house. He’d heard it crying. Not long after, the story about Evelyn moving to England started to get about.’
‘So she was packed off overseas to put the past behind her and little Louis stayed under wraps at Lammermoor House,’ I murmur.
‘Who?’ Sanders asks.
‘Louis, Evelyn’s son.’
He looks surprised. ‘I never knew his name. I didn’t think much about it after she was gone. Lammermoor House wasn’t the centre of my world anymore. And then Dad was injured.’
‘In the garden.’
He nods. ‘Dad was burning leaves one autumn. He … well, it got out of control.’
‘That must have been terrible, for him and your family.’
‘He lost a leg.’ Sanders looks around. ‘Couldn’t work as a gardener any more so he opened the shop. I took it over in the eighties, and now Kevin helps out. I’m sixty-six. I’ve been thinking I’ll retire soon.’
‘How long had your father worked at Lammermoor House at the time of the accident?’
Sanders thinks. ‘A good while—ten, twelve years, I suppose.’
‘He would have burnt leaves regularly, as part of his duties?’
Pursing his lips together, Sanders frowns. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at, Miss.’
‘Yes you do. How did the bonfire get out of control?’
‘He said the wind changed. He took his eye off the fire, and the wind blew a spark onto his clothing. It was an accident. There’s no reason for it to be anything else.’
I look closely at his face but it is closed. I don’t think I will get any more from him today, or probably ever. Sometimes, the full truth is just too hard; I know that only too well.
Getting down from my stool, I glance through the dusty windows. The street outside is busy with people shopping and running errands. I need to be on my way, to do what I have returned to do.
‘The accident, the fire, it was in 1965 wasn’t it?’
Sanders nods. ‘Yes.’
Louis would have been six years old.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.
‘Not you who should be sorry, but there are some who should.’ His bitterness doesn’t sound as though time has softened its edges. ‘My father worked for the St Johns for more than a decade and when he was injured, that was it. No help, no nothing. Not even a card when he was in hospital.’
‘They don’t sound like very warm people, the Brigadier and his wife.’
He gives a hollow laugh. ‘You could say that again. When I was a boy, I probably blamed Evelyn for being weak, for letting herself be taken advantage of. But now … well, I reckon she was just after a bit of love. Who doesn’t want that?’
As I close the door of the hardware shop behind me, I wonder if Evelyn found the affection she sought, either with Louis’ father or later in England. I hope she did because otherwise the terrible price her little son had paid was all for nothing.
Twenty-six
Present day, morning
I do not know what I am expecting to find when I drive in through the open gate of Lammermoor House. It seems that after yesterday’s dramatic events, the house should—in some way—have changed irrevocably, that it should have been razed to the ground in the incendiary aftermath of a child’s rage. Or, alternatively, that yesterday has served as an exorcism of sorts, lifting the heavy weight of sorrow contained within its walls.
As I head up the driveway, I notice with surprise that the shrubs I cut back such a short time ago are already tipped with the spring green of new growth. The air is milder too, for winter.
The front door is ajar, which is just as well as I had forgotten to pick up the house key yesterday in my rush to follow the ambulance. When I walk in, I could be doing so after nothing more than a shopping trip to town. It feels exactly as it has done for the weeks and months I have lived here—of dust and damp and of a gathering of shadows, waiting to be released.
I close the door, firmly, and stand on the tessellated tiles of the entry, listening to the sighs and groans of the old house. All appears as I left it. I put my head around the door of the drawing room where the couch is rumpled from my abandoned night with Marc. Heat quivers through my body. Given all that has happened since, maybe sex was not such a bad idea after all. Perhaps our instincts know more about love than our rational minds.
After shaking and folding the sheets and blankets, and piling them up on the chaise, I put my fully charged mobile phone on the table to fulfil my promise to Louis. Then, I pick up Marc’s bag and place it in the entry hall so that it will be found easily, even if I am not able to take it to him myself.
As I wander through the house, there is no sign of the little ghost. In the kitchen, the fridge hums and the cold tap drips. I turn it off tightly. I open the back door and stand on the long verandah, looking out over the garden. Sunlight pierces through the cloud cover, one of those ‘hand of God’ moments that makes it seems as though the mortal world is being blessed by the immortal one.
I am not one to believe in signs, but today I may make an exception. Perhaps this is the end—and even if it is, every end marks a beginning, doesn’t it?
Inside, I climb the main stairs to the first floor, trailing my hand along the smooth bannister, feeling the give of the wood beneath my feet, wondering if I am setting myself up for disaster. But if the ghost boy wants to punish me some more, he does not take his opportunity to repeat yesterday’s near-tragedy. Perhaps he has something else planned, but probably not. Small boys are not usually planners, I suspect.
Before me, the narrow stairs to the attic reach up into the gloom. I cannot even make out the top from here in the greenish light. I shout his name, but only the house responds with a faint echo.
Picking my way through the detritus of smashed wood and glass, I go into the master bedroom dressing room and try the door to the little bedroom. It is locked. I knock and call his name.
‘Louis? Are you there?’
I crouch down and put my eye to the keyhole, but from my limited view, the room appears to be empty and the rocking horse is still.
‘Louis, if you open the door I’ll read you a story.’
The door remains firmly shut, though I wait for some minutes, and eventually I leave. Perhaps he has forgotten. Like the child he once was, perhaps he has forgotten his demand and my promise and is absorbed in his little attic world, busy playing with his train set or sitting cross-legged on the floor trying to sound the words to his storybooks.
After poking my head into the bathroom and the other bedrooms, I return downstairs to fetch a broom and spend the next hour piling the wood from the armoire and stairs into a heap, and sweeping up the broken mirror. It reminds me that I need to clean the cut on my toe. In fact, I need to shower and change my clothes, having borrowed the jeans and shirt I am wearing from the nursing staff after turning up at the hospital dressed in a robe.
Downstairs, I wrap the glass in newspaper and place it in the bin. Then I collect clean clothes and take a long hot shower. The cut stings but in a good way. I wrap a clean tissue around it and carefully pull on a sock to hold it in place, before dressing in my own leggings and loose brushed cotton dress.
When, I have put on a laundry load, including the borrowed garments I head for the library, thinking to find Jane Eyre to take to hospital
to read while Marc sleeps. I open the door and freeze.
I had thought the rest of the house untouched by the child’s fury. How wrong I have been.
It is as if a whirlwind has been through it. Books have been spilled from the lower shelves and lie in heaps on the floor, pages and jackets hanging loose. The curtains have been wrenched from their rail to fall in tatters, and chairs up-ended. The reading lamp has been knocked from the table, the bulb smashed against the hearth. On the window-seat, the stuffed bear sits, its belly gaping and stuffing spilling out, as though it has been disembowelled.
‘Louis.’ I breathe his name as if he might still be in the room, but of course he is long gone, and I have no way of reaching him unless he chooses to be reached. I rush across the hall to the drawing room, but my phone sits where I left it. He is keeping his distance, rejecting all my overtures. Sulking, perhaps, now that his fury is spent.
Sighing, I phone Gordon and learn that Marc has been awake and spoken lucidly to the doctor, who has whisked him away for a CT scan.
I tell my father-in-law I plan to return later in the afternoon so that he and Yvette can head back to Sydney if the tests show nothing sinister. Even if they are clear, Marc will stay in hospital tonight but may be well enough to be discharged tomorrow or the following day. I remember to phone Will, who as usual is with James. They are more than a little surprised to hear from me and there are none of the usual jokes when I tell them about Marc’s ‘accident’. They promise to drive up tomorrow.
When I am done, I return to the library to start putting it to rights. There is nothing I can do about the curtains, so I throw them in the bin, along with the shattered light bulb. It does not take me long to right the chairs and lamp, and return the books to the shelves.
Near the bottom of the pile, I find the military book with the bookplate, and shake my head. It is a book written for an adult, not a young child. The more I think about the Brigadier, the more I despise him. He seems to have not had a clue about rearing a little boy.
Poor Louis. I imagine him, as a five-year-old, anticipating the great occasion of his birthday. Perhaps he was hoping for a bicycle or a go-cart or a board game, and instead he gets a book he cannot even read. I can see his face alight with excitement as his grandfather hands him the gift, the eager unwrapping and then the disappointment as he realises what it is. Perhaps that is why it is down here with the other adult books, and not in the attic playroom.