Hold my hand … came a whisper in my mind.
I shook it out and jumped up onto the stone balustrade edging the terrace. Behind me, the lake showed little dots of starlight. The moon was thin, lost beyond Summerland’s chimney-pots.
I hummed one of Connie’s boogie-woogie songs as I danced along the balustrade like a trapeze artist.
‘Imagine I’m clapping,’ said the ghost. One transparent hand against another would hardly make a good round of applause. He’d made the point, not me. I don’t go around telling ghosts they’re dead. It’s not polite.
‘I am not good at dancing. Tonight is my first time.’
‘You’ve never danced before?’
‘Only quiet steps, on a carpet. Like this …’ I showed the ghost how I had marked out the basics of a waltz with Mama tapping the rhythm with her fingers against my arm.
‘That was one crazy waltz you just did.’
‘That was jump and jive.’
‘Not bad.’
‘Connie Snow was singing. She is nicht von dieser Welt.’
Out of this world. A ghost would know all about that. He must be one of the air force boys, drifted back to a place that had been familiar before death. Now he’d haunt Summerland like the others – nights, months, years, decades, until he was as fine as dust motes in a sunbeam, then … gone.
‘I must have missed hearing Connie Snow. I’ve missed … a lot,’ the ghost said. Then, ‘You’re not scared of me?’
‘Of course not. I don’t care how you are.’
Did I imagine a ghostly smile at that?
‘That was your mantra just then. I don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.’
‘Always I have to be careful,’ I explained, now feeling anything but. ‘Always I have to remember what to say, what not to say. Keep quiet. Be still. Be a good girl. Tonight there was music and …’
‘And suddenly you felt free.’
‘Yes. Free. You understand.’
‘Not really. I’ll never feel free. Never!’
There was no echo. The word hung in the air then drifted into silence. I was alone.
Bad luck follows good, as surely as day follows night.
My mama didn’t like me thinking that way. It’s all good really, she’d say, each time a fresh disaster overtook us. We just don’t know it yet. We need to wait until we can see it differently. ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’, Liebling.
I crept round to the back of the house and let myself into the kitchen with the key Sophie Rover kept hidden under the boot scraper at the back door. Unfortunately Mrs Rover herself was waiting in the kitchen, frying pan at the ready.
‘What the bloody hell, Brigitta! I thought you were a burglar. Do you have any idea what time it is? Where have you been? I had Angela here in a right pother because you’d done a runner, and Mrs Goose on the blower to Lady S. And Ribble came round to make a missing persons report. Even Colin Oakley turned up saying he’d go drag the lake for your body … looking like he wouldn’t mind if he found one at that.’
I heard a torrent of words and names. It seemed best to say nothing. Eventually she ran out of anger and put the frying pan down.
‘Well? Where have you been?’ she said finally. Then, because she was Sophie Rover she had to ask, ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I had fish and chips,’ I announced with pride. ‘With salt and winegar.’
‘I’ll salt and winegar – vinegar – you! What were you thinking, jumping off the bus like that, not a word to any of us?’
The music and the magic trickled out of me. I hadn’t been thinking, that was the whole point. I’d been living.
‘Oh, don’t look like that, you big sausage. You’re young, you’re supposed to be stupid. I should know – I got put on jankers so many times in the army, for coming back to base after curfew, not wearing my hat straight, not saluting an officer …’
‘Jankers?’
‘When you’re in trouble. There are punishment duties. Maybe a spell in the clink – that’s a prison cell.’
Now I was fearful. ‘I can go to prison for fish and chips?’
Mrs Rover laughed. ‘You might wish you were locked up safe in the police cell when Lady Summer has a go at you. She wants to see you in the morning, first thing. Now get upstairs quietly. We’ve the patient to consider now, asleep in his own bed for the first time in forever.’ She shivered. ‘They reckon he’s recuperating. Looks half dead to me.’
I knew all about being half dead. My night in the dance hall was a taste of life. I couldn’t let it happen again. I had things to do.
Even so, I went to bed happy.
Autumn sun pushed through a gap in my bedroom curtains the next morning. I dressed quickly, putting on my new bra, with only a minimal bit of padding in each cup. I didn’t want people commenting that I’d sprouted bosoms overnight.
Lady Summer wasn’t in her study, and for once the door was partly open. I knocked quietly then slipped inside. How long did I have before she returned? I went straight to the telephone on the desk, lifted the receiver and dialled ‘0’ for the operator, as I’d seen people do.
‘Number, please?’ came a clipped voice.
‘I …’ My voice came out all croaky.
‘Hello. Number, please?’
‘I do not haf – have – the number. It is a name.’
‘Oh. What’s the name you want, miss?’
‘Not miss. Mister. He is …’
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say the name out loud. It was too dangerous. Someone could be listening. What if …?
‘What are you doing?’ Lady Summer was in the doorway.
Slowly I slipped the receiver back into the cradle. Should I tell her? Trust no one.
‘The telephone. It was ringing. I answer it. Wrong number.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I should dismiss you immediately. Leaving all my parcels on the bus! Running away goodness only knows where, to do goodness knows what with God knows whom! No decent girl would behave in such a way. I should have known you’d bring disgrace on yourself. I only let you stay here because I felt pity for you, a foreign girl from … from one of those places.’
Something made me lift my gaze from the carpet. Some defiance that training should have buried far deeper. I looked Lady Summer straight in her immaculately made-up face.
‘You have no pity. You want me to stay here because your house is old and dirty. Because I clean for no money.’
‘How dare you! You work for your bed and board, and by the way you’re filling out, I can tell you’re eating plenty. Food’s not free, you know, whatever handouts you may have had from the Red Cross, merely because your parents were too careless or stupid to look after you themselves.’
How dare she talk about my parents? She knew nothing about it, the spiteful old witch.
‘As you have looked after your son?’ I spat out, gloriously rebellious in my anger. ‘I am not your prisoner. I am prisoner of no one, never again! I go now!’
And I went. Trembling. Nails digging into my palms. A crescendo of drum beats and cymbal crashes playing in my head.
Church bells were ringing for the Christian Sunday service. In the kitchen Mrs Rover was hard at work preparing a big dinner. There were smells of her signature dish, meatuntooveg, but I was angry, not hungry. Mrs Rover took one look at my face and said, ‘I know what you need. Follow me.’
But before she’d gone more than a step, another woman burst into the kitchen. She was wearing a nurse’s white cap, a blue uniform and a crisp white apron. Something slimy and cream-coloured was spattered over her clothes and sliding down her face. Bits dropped in spots on the kitchen floor.
‘Forget this for a lark!’ the nurse bellowed. ‘I took our patient a nice bowl of rice pudding and the little sod threw the whole lot back at me! Said he didn’t need a nanny or a nurse and I was to get out and stop staring at him like he was in a circus freak show. The cheek of it! I was told this would be an easy job with a poor cripple boy, not
some violent maniac!’
Mrs Rover drew herself up tall. I could picture her as a sergeant major on a parade ground, or marching at the head of a military band. ‘We were told the agency would be sending a professional nurse, not someone who’s put out by a bit of pudding.’
‘Well!’ said the nurse. ‘If that’s the way of it, I resign!’ She turned on her heel, skidded on cream and slammed the door behind her.
‘Lightweight,’ muttered Mrs Rover.
I fetched a rag and wiped up the mess. Once I’d been so hungry I would have licked the whole lot off the floor.
‘Leave that. Come with me. Sunday roast can wait.’
She took me to a room called the drawing room, though I couldn’t see any paper or pencils. Together we rolled up a carpet, dragging it from under a lovely Bechstein upright. So Summerland had two pianos that nobody played. During the war there were times when I would have killed to play a piano. For our first years in hiding, Mama and I had done silent fingering of notes and chords on keys scratched on wood or in the dirt, humming the notes since we couldn’t actually play them. Then we snatched hours at night, stroking the keys of the well-polished piano at the Trautwein house – every note in silence, matching hand movements to imagined music. All those nights barely daring to breathe in case the Trautweins woke up from their bed. All those beautiful unplayed tunes.
Mrs Rover hoisted one end of the rolled carpet onto her shoulder. I got the other end and we processed past the fifteen military toilets, out to the yard.
‘The rain’s just mizzling – perfect. Help me hoist it over the washing line, that’s right. Now for the fun part.’ She grinned. ‘Tell me who you want to murder!’
I was reaching for my knife just as Mrs Rover waggled a carpet beater at me instead.
‘Set the beater flat side to the carpet and whack it like this, like this, like this!’ With each stroke the twisted cane walloped clouds of dust from the carpet. ‘Go on, you try. You look like you need to let loose a bit. Not like that! Not little fairy taps … Hit it! That’s it. Harder!’
I did as she said, whacking the carpet harder and harder in my fury.
‘Whoa – steady, steady, don’t bring the whole washing line down. Brigitta! Stop now – enough!’
She wrested the carpet beater from me. I couldn’t wiggle out of her arms. She had me pinned. For some reason tears were running down my face. I was shaking with emotion. Anger. Grief. More anger. How awful, that once you let one bit of emotion out more came cascading after it, far messier than one thrown bowl of rice pudding.
Slowly Mrs Rover loosened her grip. ‘You poor beggar,’ she murmured. ‘What’s been done to you?’
It was raining hard when Lady Summer came to my bedroom.
Knock knock.
‘Come in,’ I said.
She paused in the doorway, fiddling with the single strand of pearls at her throat. ‘I have never been to the servants’ floor. It is … bare.’
I shrugged. What did it matter to me? My suitcase was packed; I was ready to leave. I’d been busy with my dictionary, prepping a speech that would strip that smug expression from Barbara Summer’s face. It was time to tell her why I’d come to Summerland.
She got in first. ‘I may be that I was a little harsh to you earlier. I have since been informed that you were at least in decent company last night. Colin Oakley from the village said he found you safe at the Salvation Army taking Bible lessons. Girls your age can’t be too careful in town after dark. Didn’t your mother teach you that?’
Ha! That was almost funny, given the lessons I’d learned from my mama. Once Berlin fell to rampaging Russians, she wasn’t around to teach me any more, but she’d drummed enough skills into me to survive in daylight or after dark.
‘I knew a girl,’ Lady Summer continued, ‘good-looking like you – very like you in fact. She gave up so much for love, or whatever she thought it was, that she lost her family, her reputation, her money. Such a waste.’
Now I paid attention. ‘What happened to her?’
The pearl-twisting became a little more agitated. ‘What do you think? She got saddled with a wishy-washy pauper husband and a brat of a son.’
‘And then …?’
The necklace snapped. Pearls sprayed all around. She watched them bounce and skitter across the floorboards. I dropped to my knees and began picking them up one by one, pouring them – dust and all – into her cold hands.
‘Never mind about that – the girl. It was all a long time ago. I only speak of it as a warning to behave more appropriately. As your employer, I feel a certain responsibility.’
‘My employer?’ My face must have shown surprise.
‘I have decided you may stay. You will have wages, and I will arrange for ration books. Summerland has been neglected too long. I am determined to return it to its former glory, albeit on a budget.’ I truly couldn’t speak, it was so unexpected.
After she’d gone I flipped through my dictionary again, looking up wishy-washy and pauper. Oh. Now I didn’t know whether to be grateful or furious.
Stay or go? Go or stay? It wasn’t as if Summerland was home or anything. No one would miss me. On the other hand, I had nowhere else to live, and Summerland was the only place I knew.
I wished there was someone I could talk to. Perhaps one of the ghosts – that wistful one from the terrace? I waited until midnight before creeping out of my bed to find him. He wasn’t out on the terrace, or with the other ghosts in the ballroom. He hadn’t joined the gang silently sliding on a tea tray down the main stairs. Ursula wasn’t mopping round his spectral feet on the backstairs. He surely wouldn’t be haunting Mrs Rover, Miss Baggs or Lady Summer? I paused outside the closed door to the patient’s rooms. No sounds from within. I’d yet to see the legendary Joseph Summer, shot down over Germany and returned to his stately home mashed up and bad-tempered. Now that he’d seen off one nurse with a bowl of rice pudding, would they get him another? None of my business. He could rot for all I cared.
I was just about to tiptoe into the blue guest bedroom – empty, because Lady Summer was too haughty to have guests – when I sensed something behind me. There he was. My ghost. Not in uniform like the other airmen, just wrapped in a dark robe. He beckoned me to follow him, so I did, through an unlocked door, up a spiral of stone steps and onto the Summerland roof. He lingered in the moon-shadow of a chimney-stack while I roamed around turrets and crenellations admiring the view. It was so beautiful.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said in his soft voice. ‘Everything you see belongs to the Summer family. Land, cattle, church, pub. Every fish in the river, every rabbit in the woods. None of that seems relevant now.’
‘Summerland is special. It must be nice to belong.’ The dead haunted places that mattered to them after all. ‘I have no home. I belong nowhere.’
‘Rubbish. You belong wherever you are. You’re like a snail – you carry your home with you.’
‘A snail?’
‘You know … What is it in German?’
‘You know German?’
‘A few words. You are German, aren’t you? That’s what they said.’
Ghosts gossiped? It felt strangely nice to think of this one talking about me.
He snapped his fingers. ‘Got it! Snail is escargot in French.’
‘Schnecke?! You are not eating me with garlic!’
‘Too bad,’ he said, laughing. ‘You look tasty.’
Suddenly awkward, I set off, practising my dance steps as well as I could remember them from last night. When memory failed, I made up my own. Why not?
‘I like it up here,’ I said eventually, heading back to look for patterns in the stars. ‘The air is free. There are no walls and no eyes.’
‘Except that owl …’
Something wide and white-winged flew past. I didn’t hear so much as a feather frond.
‘Like a ghost,’ I said.
The ghost sighed. ‘I miss flying. Not that it was anything like as graceful
as that owl. Bloody noisy in fact. Pretty smelly too, when you factor in seven men in a Halifax bomber, the stink of fuel and Pongo’s cheesy feet. Pongo was the navigator. Daft as a brush, but damned good at his job.’
‘You were the pilot?’
‘Nothing so heroic. Bomb aimer. A bit of brain work and a lot of lying down staring into darkness.’
‘Bombs?’ I echoed.
He didn’t notice my tension. ‘I flew over Summerland in a Halifax once, from RAF East Summer. What a racket a low-flying heavy bomber makes! I swear the roof tiles rattled. I suppose was proving I was a man or something. I was just a kid really.’ His voice trailed off a little. ‘That was only last year.’
‘What is it like, to fly?’
‘Flying? Magic! From up in the air everything’s in miniature. Ribbon roads and toy railways.’
‘What about houses and people?’
‘Rooftops are like postage stamps. People are invisible.’
‘That is good for you,’ I snapped. ‘You don’t see where the bombs fall or what they hit!’ I marched off towards the door back into the house, angry and upset.
‘Hey, don’t go …’
Of course I went. It was that or stay and try punching a ghost.
Yorkshire Parkin
Out came my knife. I stabbed hard but the flesh was tougher than I expected. Once I’d gouged out as much of the innards as I could, I carved eyes and a jagged mouth on the turnip front.
Mrs Rover took the entrails saying, ‘This’ll do nicely in tomorrow’s beef stew.’ She swapped them for a stub of candle, which I set inside the excavated turnip. Then she put a match to the candle and the lantern was complete. When she switched off the room light, flame flickered through the gruesome face, casting strange shadows around the kitchen. Two other turnip lanterns were lit beside it.
‘Yours is the worst,’ said Andrew Goose, his four-year-old eyes full of admiration for my handiwork.
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