Unhallowed Ground

by Gillian White

  ‘And to deliver my presents to the children.’

  Gail sat forward suddenly, the wariness in her eyes like a skin. ‘Would you stay for a cup of tea, Mrs Jefferson?’

  It was something to do with Ray’s belligerent, challenging attitude that made Georgie accept, while truthfully all she wanted to do was leave and come back when Angie was home. She could not allow this man to believe that his presence had driven her out. There he sat with his long legs splayed, a T-shirt tucked into blue jeans and huge trainers on his feet, the laces untied. Both his head and his feet looked disproportionately large compared to the rest of his chunky body, his neck was too thick to support his head and his thighs were almost chubby. Something about Ray’s fleshiness suggested corruption. Gail left the room to turn on the kettle, and the silence that settled was just as intrusive as the pictures that crossed the TV screen, the pictures that pull your eyes all the more when they are without sound.

  But small talk, in these circumstances, would be inappropriate.

  ‘I hear Angie had a brilliant report.’ Yes, she had to speak to break the silence.

  ‘Yep; Not the sort of thing you’d expect from a battered kid.’

  ‘Nobody’s saying that Angie’s been battered, Mr Hopkins.’ Georgie sighed. ‘You know yourself we are only acting in her interests based on the concerns of several professional people.’ But the words sounded weary. She’d had this same conversation with Ray the first time they met.

  ‘And that’s enough, is it? That’s enough to make you feel you can push your way in here and come prying and nosing about, making us feel like God knows what with your nasty bleeding suspicions…’

  Georgie leaned forward, difficult with her legs tucked in, but Ray’s were still taking up half the floor. ‘I do wish we could clear up this antagonism and take a more positive attitude, Mr Hopkins. I have no choice but to come here, it’s my job, and if it wasn’t me it would be somebody else. You know what the specialist report suggested when Angie broke her arm, and all the other numerous instances when she’s turned up at school with bumps and bruises, falling asleep at her desk. Surely we don’t need to work through this again…?’

  ‘I just wish you bastards would get off our backs. How long does this nosing go on before you’re convinced? Months? Years? I’d just like to know how sodding long…’

  ‘Until we feel satisfied…’

  ‘Until you feel satisfied, you mean…’

  ‘All right then, yes, until I feel satisfied…’

  ‘Tell me this then. What would satisfy you, Mrs Jefferson?’ And his voice was laden with contained fury, but on his face was a smile.

  At this point the door was pushed open. Georgie looked up, relieved, expecting Gail with the tea, but it was Angie, still in her nightie; it looked as if she’d just woken up. Confused and nervous, one finger between her lips as if she thought she’d done something wrong, she crossed the room and sat down on the sofa, one eye on her father. In a low, subdued voice she said, ‘I didn’t know there was anyone here.’

  ‘I thought you were running errands,’ said Georgie, glancing at Ray Hopkins.

  ‘If we hadn’t bleeding well said she was out you’d have gone and disturbed the kid.’ His anger was more visible now. His face was hard, the baby chubbiness seemed to have left it. ‘And the kid’s tired out. She needs her sleep. She was late to bed last night.’

  Bewildered, Georgie shook her head. ‘But why didn’t you just tell me that? Why lie at all?’ Was the man speaking the truth? And if not, what was the point of his lying?

  ‘And would you have let her sleep? Or would you have gone interfering upstairs?’

  ‘Oh, it really doesn’t matter.’ How Georgie hated the way difficult discussions in this house took place in front of the children. They were all sitting there with flushed faces, eyes sliding sideways. She could see the concern on Angie’s face, the way the child twisted her hands, tormented, as she turned her head to her mother’s husband and back to Georgie again, trying to work out what was happening, aware of the tension, afraid she had caused it. ‘It doesn’t matter in the least. It’s just good to see her.’ She turned her attention to Angie. ‘When you’re woken up properly, or when I’ve gone, whenever you like, you can open your parcel. Patsy’s and Carmen’s are in the bag, too, perhaps you can give them theirs when they wake up, later on.’

  Angie rested her questioning eyes on Ray Hopkins.

  ‘Go on then,’ he told her roughly. ‘Open it. Mrs Jefferson’s brought you a present. You might as well open it.’

  Reluctantly Angie slid off the sofa, her long nightdress trailing at her heels as she approached the bag. The atmosphere was toe-curlingly awful, but there was no way, now, that Georgie could turn it round. When Gail arrived with the tray she rested it on the coffee table and resumed her place on the sofa. Angie, the present in her arms, went to snuggle up beside her.

  The child unwrapped the parcel with an oddly neat precision, finding the joins, removing the Sellotape, folding it after her, making no mess. All the while she licked her lips and occasionally glanced at her mother for reassurance. Georgie sipped her tea and attempted to make conversation, to take the spotlight off the poor child, but the other two adults in the room refused to respond. They just continued to stare at Angie, watching her every move, and when she pulled the doll from the wrappings she took control of the whole situation with her broad smile and her exclamation. They were all back to acting again. And little Angie was taking the lead. No-one was more aware of the fact that it was important she do well.

  She did.

  She became engrossed in the unpinning of the clothes from the case, laying them, one by one, on her knee, admiring every outfit while she rocked the doll in her arms. At one point she held up the doll for general admiration, and Georgie’s heart sank when she noticed the doll’s expression matched that of the child: bright, pert and moulded in plastic.

  Just like the smouldering doll in the woodshed.

  The whole incident was so disturbing there was no sleep for Georgie that night. Even Lola stayed awake and alert. Dawn seemed a long way off and she wished she had a phone; it was five thirty in the morning but she longed to talk to somebody sane.

  Her fear subsided and Georgie built up the fire, made a comforting hot drink and took some final decisions as to which of Stephen’s pictures she’d keep. She was tempted to keep most of them. Either it was the effect of the booze as it gradually warped his brain, or Stephen had been experimenting with anew and primitive style, but a few of his paintings were quite inexplicable. Angrily done, in a chaos of colour, it looked as if the paint was applied with the heel of a hand or a fist daubed with oils. These were unnerving to put it mildly. They were messy, with no centre, no beginning and no end; it was hard to know where to rest the eye without that feeling of riot in your forehead.

  Although Georgie didn’t want these, she felt she ought to take them. Because if, at some point, this was Stephen’s message to the world, then she, as his sister, should take them on board, and not reject them because they were worrying.

  Despite a search she’d found no personal letters. Not one. Just the usual bills and receipts, a menu from a Chinese restaurant, mail-order catalogue forms for paints and canvas from a company in Exeter. There were odd shopping lists which he must have given to the sour Mrs Buckpit, and there was a sheath of order forms, spares, which he’d obviously used for his generous monthly supplies of gin. All these she had sorted out earlier, boxed up and put beside the dustbin for eventual collection.

  She was glad that someone related had done this.

  There was nothing among his personal effects that Georgie wanted apart from a few books and tapes. She wished she did, she wished there had been something she could have felt fond of, some ornament, some jar or lamp which might have meant something to Stephen and which struck a chord with his long-lost sister. Sadly there was nothing like that, nothing that would go in her flat.

  So when, later that mor
ning, Georgina Jefferson left Furze Pen Cottage with her weekend case and a bootful of paintings, she left the memory of the burning doll firmly behind her. She had no intention of ever returning. She thought she would never see Wooton-Coney or Stephen’s cottage again.

  TWELVE

  AS GEORGIE DROVE AWAY a pale-blue sky stretched over the valley and a low sun lit the boggy moorland and wrapped it in mother-of-pearl. A brief joy jumped out of nowhere and swamped her. What is the mischief of the gods, she thought, that throws us these moments of promise? Or is it not a promise at all, more like the blooming of a flower, merely its own justification?

  She approached the solicitor’s ill-lit, Dickensian office with a swing in her stride and was astonished to hear his news. ‘We have received an extremely generous offer for the cottage. Unfortunately it arrived on Friday, so there was no way we could contact you.’

  How very peculiar. ‘But, Mr Selby, it’s not even on the market.’

  The gnarled old man with the manic white Einstein hairstyle, stretched out a palsied, papery hand and passed the letter across. The threadbare office held the faintest smell of cheese and beer, or did that come from Mr Selby? Bespectacled and earnest, he sat at a large roll-top desk Uttered with yellowed papers and files. The marks on his face, the age marks, were like ink spots used by psychiatrists. Georgie settled in a worn leather chair next to a spluttering gas fire that did little to raise the temperature. The walls were hung with sporting pictures with stale jokes underneath, as stale as the office itself. ‘As you will see, this document fails to tell us who the prospective purchasers are. For some reason they do not wish to declare their interests at this stage, thus they are working through solicitors themselves. But it must be someone who knows the cottage, and knows it is about to be disposed of.’

  But who on earth would possess such knowledge? She had only just decided herself. With frozen hands Georgie leafed through the letter. Old Tom Selby was right. The offer was generous and she would be a fool to ignore it. Mr Selby wheedled home his message, his wheezing voice crackling like paper. ‘In the distressed condition the cottage is in, and the amount that would need spending on it to bring it up to scratch, there is little doubt, Mrs Jefferson, that you should consider this offer very seriously indeed. And, as you see,’ he pointed with a restless forefinger, ‘the interested party would like an answer fairly quickly.’

  ‘Perhaps we should start the ball rolling.’ After the weekend she’d just experienced Georgie agreed wholeheartedly with the wizened old man in the dusty old suit.

  ‘I will put the matter in hand immediately.’

  His face cracked into an uncomfortable smile and it was obvious that Thomas Selby was eager to get the whole business concluded.

  ‘It would certainly be much easier to sell it like this rather than go through the trauma of adverts and viewers.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, rubbing his hands, which must have been as cold as her own. ‘A most convenient offer. I wish all my work was as simple as this. A most satisfactory conclusion to the whole rather sad affair. As we have already discovered, the residents of Wooton-Coney are rather eccentric and cannot be relied upon, indeed, the lady of the farm, Mrs Buckpit, was even reluctant to hold the key. We could not have expected much help from that quarter.’

  ‘Well.’ Georgie sat back, relieved. ‘That’s settled then. And with the recovery of the furniture I think I can say that the whole weekend has been extremely constructive.’

  ‘An unsavoury business.’ Mr Selby’s reaction to Cramer’s untimely removal of the furniture had been grave. ‘And one, of course, of which we were completely unaware, I hope you understand.’ He spluttered his disapproval and waved his arms like a tired swimmer.

  Georgie wondered if she should mention the fire. Naturally it still worried her. Not only the fire itself and whether it was deliberate or not, but the bizarre discovery of the doll—not the sort of item which Stephen might have inadvertently picked up with his other bits and pieces. As far as Georgie knew there were no children in Wooton-Coney. It did not feel as if the place had ever had children…

  But what was the point of mentioning it? Mr Selby could hardly offer twenty-four-hour protection of the place when she’d gone, and the police were unlikely to make regular calls on so isolated a home. There was no sign that an arsonist had attempted to torch the place before, and Georgie tried to put it down to one of those inexplicable incidents that happen in life without reason. She was going back to London. She had more immediate concerns on her mind. It was important to keep things in proportion, and she was glad to be relieved of responsibility for Furze Pen Cottage, visiting at awkward times, showing people round…

  So she left the key with Tom Selby and set off on the long journey home, with Lola asleep in the passenger seat.

  Selling houses. Sale agreed. Sold. Four years ago, and selling her childhood home had felt like selling her past. All the hiding places went with it, the dens, unseen, unlabelled in the particulars, so many hidden things excluded from the brochure, not just the rising damp.

  And she had found herself closing her eyes in certain rooms, as if the smartly dressed couples with the critical eyes could somehow sense an atmosphere, ghostly conversations seeping from the sepia walls, quick footsteps, voices hard with hate, hard smiles. All the furniture was still inside. Well, Georgie herself didn’t want it, and it was all exactly the same; in all the years they’d never changed a thing save for the odd renewal of curtains and covers. Even in this new adult role Georgie was still the child in this house, controlled, hidden, polite, smiling with her hellos and goodbyes and gagging on the mothballs.

  And it was while she had waited there to show prospective purchasers round, alone in all that neat brown silence, that she’d felt the worst of the weariness that dragging house always gave her. The smell of pipe smoke still filled the house, not present as an actual cloud, but more like a ghost, a strong, stale smell. Black umbrellas, brown walking sticks and cream, lacy tray cloths—tight, formal things, so innocent in themselves, but they came together in that creaking house to make such a sad song. Even the rattle of the curtains took her back, the full feel of the banister underneath her hand, almost tacky with polish, and the slightly slippery rugs on the floors on long brown landings. All very Fifties.

  The dining room was the worst place of all, and she realized that, in spirit, she had always loitered here at the door, unwilling to venture further. She had always seen this place from the threshold.

  She could have been a courier on a coach, reciting the past as they drove through it all, waving a casual hand at her childhood. ‘This is where they used to eat,’ she could have told them abstractedly, as if her parents were long extinct, as if she was speaking of some rare and ancient tribe of man. Shining with wax, the dining room table was monarch of the room and everything else subservient to it. ‘At all other times of day they spoke to each other and saw each other no more than necessary. They were polite and passed. But not so in the dining room. This is where we were summoned by a gong, the one you passed in the hall earlier. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Human suffering amid the mahogany. We all emerged from our private dens and here, at the door, we put on our faces, collected our voices before we sat down. See that chair at the side of the table, well, that chair was mine, while Father sat at the top and Mother at the opposite end. I, as you appreciate, sat between them. Sometimes I passed their words, at others I passed the salt.’

  The silence was violence.

  Conversation was ominous.

  ‘Food was irrelevant but we had to eat it. I can never remember being hungry. I wanted something but it wasn’t food. Brown gravy in gravy boats and brown slices of meat which Father carved with that same knife there, the one with the brownish, ivory handle.’

  Georgina could have gone on and said, ‘Look, there’s my old silver napkin ring with my name inscribed on the side. It was given to me by an aunt at my christening. I wonder if she gave one to Stephen.’

 
Dear God, those endless meal times. The general comments were safe, and most of it was general comment interspersed with chewing. But when three or four pieces of comment were strung together to make conversation, that is when the going got tough, the jaw began to ache, looks were exchanged, throats were cleared and the sound of silver scraping on crockery grew unbearably loud.

  ‘My mother would dab at the corner of her mouth with a napkin, she did it so much there were sore places there.’ This was not the room they thought they saw. ‘And her green raffia bag from Madeira was invariably placed beside her feet, that side of the chair. By the end of the meal the handkerchief which she kept up her sleeve would be out, creased, sweaty and tattered.’

  This is how it would go:

  ‘I met Isabel Evans in town today. We had coffee. She asked to be remembered.’

  And Harry Southwell would lift his eyes from his plate to murmur, ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘They’re moving to Bath, apparently.’

  ‘Well, his family come from there.’

  ‘They’ve always been a close family.’

  This irrelevance would be digested.

  ‘I have ordered the logs. They are coming tomorrow,’ her father might announce.

  ‘So someone will have to be in,’ Sylvia would say, brittlely, dabbing at her mouth.

  ‘I just assumed that somebody would be.’

  An angry flush flew over her cheekbones. ‘It might have been nice to have been consulted.’

  A heavy sigh from Harry’s end. ‘I cannot consult you on every damn issue…’

  ‘It just would have been…’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Sylvia…’

  ‘And why are we still ordering logs from the Turnbills when there’s that new man…?’

  ‘If you would like to order the logs, dear, then you must say so. I would quite happily delegate that responsibility any time

  ‘Oh, do stop being so absurd…’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I ought to have realized…’

  ‘But you don’t realize, do you, Harry, that’s the trouble, you never have realized…’