The Best New Horror 1

by Stephen Jones

  Miss Molyneaux’s eccentricity was doing good; to the children of the underprivileged workers. For I must explain that although Barlborough is a pretty half-timbered little town, it has its black spots, and most of them are centred round Barton Road.

  She came in, closed the door behind her decisively, and shook hands firmly with our madam chairman, without giving her the option to shake hands or not. She then shook hands with the rest of us, with that raised eyebrow of privilege that requires introductions. She followed up the introductions with questions as to our occupations and well-being, and her general thoughts on life. She was definitely interviewing us. In all it must have taken up nearly a quarter of an hour. And we had allowed twenty minutes for each candidate.

  Then she sat down, crossed her legs, and gave us, with a smile, her undivided attention.

  The first thing I noticed was how remarkably fine those legs were . . . Miss Molyneaux was a very fine young woman indeed. Long, glossy hair below her shoulders, expensively cut to look casual. The pearls would be real, and old. A tan not acquired in English weather. A big girl, though not fat, and eyes as bold a blue as those of the first Baron Molyneaux who had crossed with the Conqueror and stolen his bit of England.

  They asked her their usual questions. Did she believe in corporal punishment? She put her head on one side, crinkling up her face in schoolgirl thought.

  “I’m not against it. Not really against it. But I believe in training by kindness. I had a horse once . . .” She kindly explained her theory of animal welfare to Councillor Byerscough, who was not half as senile as he looked, and a near Communist to boot . . . I sat back, waiting for her to lose one vote after another. Pity; she was by far the brightest person we’d seen that afternoon.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. I wasn’t allowing for the weight of prejudice. There were four left-wingers who wouldn’t have voted for her if she’d talked like Ernest Bevin and sung like Caruso. There was the Headmistress, who sat with a look of spreading outrage on her face. But there were also five Tories, shopkeepers mainly, though they called themselves Independents, who were not only almost touching their forelocks to Miss Molyneaux but asking to be remembered kindly to her father. And both sides would have voted to spite the other, if the candidate had been the Queen herself.

  And then there was me. I’d sat quiet, as Miss Molyneaux had swept out with a final gracious smile round the table, and hostilities had commenced. I’d sat quiet as old battles were re-fought, and old wounds, like the Dinner Ladies’ Christmas Present, re-opened. And in the end, deadlocked, they turned to me.

  Which class, I asked gravely, might she be destined for?

  “Upper year, bottom stream,” said the Headmistress, her eyes going remote and frosty, sensing a traitor in her camp. “Our worst problem—they need an experienced teacher who will keep them in hand—not someone fresh from training college, like . . .” She stopped herself just in time. “I can’t upset the whole school system in mid year by moving my staff about.”

  Why did I vote for Dorinda Molyneaux? To begin with, I fancied her. Then, I had slightly cruel curiosity about what she and 4C would do to each other. But above all, I thought Barton Road needed a good shake-up. I longed to set a cat among the mice . . .

  So she got the job, and thanked us graciously. And I earned the Headmistress’s undying hatred.

  School managers do not have a lot of say in the daily running of the school; but Dorinda’s arrival was so spectacular that stories kept reaching me, third-hand.

  The class horror (there’s one in every class) moved in on her quickly. By the end of the second morning, during an altercation concerning a broken ruler, he called her a silly tart . . . Now Dorinda might be opposed to corporal punishment, but the Molyneaux did not get where they are today by not knowing how to cope with English peasants. And the vigour with which “Molly” Molyneaux could hurl a lacrosse ball still lived as a legend in the halls of Roedean.

  The class horror, Henry Winterbottom by name, was back-handed across the ear so hard he teetered on his toes five yards before he hit the painting-cupboard, which was rather insecurely fixed to the wall. Then he fell down, and the cupboard fell on top of him. The noise was heard as far off as the caretaker’s house.

  The Head rushed in and extricated Henry from the wreckage. Miss Molyneaux’s teaching career looked doomed to early death. But blows were the coin of affection in the Winterbottom family, the only coin in an emotionally bankrupt household. And besides, the disaster had been so widespread as to bring renown on Henry’s head also. Both he and Miss Molyneaux would linger in legend . . . So he uttered the gallant words, “I just opened the cupboard door and it fell on me, Miss.”

  The Head, sensing she was being robbed of her great opportunity, swivelled her eyes around the class, looking for a dissenting verdict. But the class was too firmly under Henry’s thumb; and Miss Molyneaux’s violence was much too treasured a possession. Not a lip moved. But Henry Winterbottom became from that day on as faithful to Miss Molyneaux as any of her many family dogs.

  And that was the way it went. Miss Molyneaux was used to being firm with dogs and horses, and 4C became her foxhounds.

  From 4C’s point of view, she was the greatest of treasures, a genuine eccentric. Where the earnest little mice would have nagged 4C about bad handwriting, or not handing in their homework in time (death to any child’s soul) Miss Molyneaux gave detailed instructions on how to groom a horse, generously brandishing a curry-comb in huge strokes that carved an invisible horse out of the air.

  Then there were those thrilling moments of silence, after Henry asked such questions as: “Have you ever drunk champagne, miss?” Which were rewarded not only with the news that Bollinger ’48 was the best champagne to buy, but that Miss Molyneaux had actually consumed a whole jeroboam with a feller in a punt on the river at Cambridge, at the incredibly aristocratic hour of four in the morning.

  The Head tried a few sneaky tricks. Classes had to be marched in crocodile to the playing-field a mile away for games. It was said that many such journeys had turned the Deputy-Headmaster’s hair grey.

  But Miss Molyneaux had a good eye and a vigorous disposition. She not only took over the girls’ hockey team, but joined in the boys’ soccer in her flaring-blue tracksuit, laying out the school captain with a magnificent foul.

  Soon, the whole school was eating out of her hand, and to 4C she was a goddess. Several parents complained about requests for ponies at Christmas . . .

  It was at about this time that I came back upon the scene. She nailed me at the Autumn Fayre, held in aid of a school minibus.

  “Their minds need broadening,” she said. “No good teaching history without showing them. I hear you know about old things.” So I turned up one afternoon with the least breakable items from my shop. And, as we’ve learnt to say now, she counted them all out and she counted them all back, heavily thumb-printed. And Henry Winterbottom got the silver saltcellar back out of Jack Hargreaves’s trouser-pocket before I’d even missed it. Henry gave Jack a well-aimed kidney-punch by way of retribution, saying, “You can’t nick off him—he’s miss’s feller, ain’t he?”

  Miss, who also overheard this infant dialogue, had the grace to blush, and I suddenly felt I had a chance. “We ought to take them round a stately home,” I said, ever the good citizen.

  “How nice,” she said, with the kind of smile you give the Spanish chargé d’affaires.

  “But we’d better spy out the land first,” I added. “So you can make up a project. Do you know Tattersham Hall?”

  “No, I don’t know Tattersham,” she said, suddenly sharp. “Who lives there now?” I felt I was moving into a different league.

  “A lot of butterflies.”

  “Oh, that silkworm lot,” she said ungraciously. “They bought out Bertie Tattersham after he’d got the DTs, silly old sod.”

  The Headmistress passed, giving a look that would cheerfully have crucified us both.

  “You free
Saturday afternoon?” said Dorinda. She was never one to wait to be asked.

  I drove up to Barlborough Hall prompt on two. Dorinda was in the formal garden with two rather disreputable Pekinese called Marco and Polo; she was either teaching them to pull up weeds, or instructing the flowers how to grow. Something was certainly getting it in the neck.

  Marco peed on my best cavalry-twill slacks, by way of greeting.

  “Not used to animals, then?” asked Dorinda brutally. “It’s a sign of affection—he’s marking you out as his property.” Obviously, Polo felt hurt about Marco’s pre-emptive strike on my garments; he walked up casually and buried his teeth in the tatty fur round Marco’s neck. Together they rolled into some rather depressed laurels, making a sound like feeding-time at the zoo.

  “They’re great friends,” said Dorinda.

  She looked at my Chrysler station-wagon, parked on the rather thin and rutted gravel. “Is it foreign?”

  “It’s illegitimate,” I said gravely. “Its mother was a Rolls, but they left her out one night and she was raped by a rather common single-decker bus.”

  “I suppose it will get us there?”

  “And your best Sheraton commode, six Chippendale dining-chairs and all your family portraits.”

  “Oh, yes, you’re a dealer, aren’t you?”

  Not a propitious start, and the trip got steadily worse. We walked into the entrance-hall at Tattersham, which is lined with dead and glorious foreign butterflies in celluloid boxes, which some people will pay up to four hundred pounds for.

  “Yu-uk!” said Dorinda; a noise of disgust so explosive it would have made Earl Harold flee the field at Hastings. It turned every head in the room.

  “I thought your lot liked dead animals?” I said.

  “Only ones we’ve shot ourselves. Anyway, when . . . if I ever invite you for tea, you won’t find a single dead animal at Barlborough. We are not a ‘lot’—we’re individual people, and I’ve never met the Duke of Edinburgh, either.”

  I had hoped it might be romantic in what the Tattersham people call the Jungle: the old palm-house, still full of palms and little tinkling power-driven waterfalls, but now alive with huge tropical butterflies that will actually settle on your hand.

  “Bloody hot in here. Worse’n a Turkish bath,” said Dorinda. A blue swallowtail from Malaya settled on her shoulder. “Tatty-looking thing,” she observed. “Falling to pieces. Should be put out of its misery.”

  Then she dragged me from room to room, questioning everyone she could lay her hands on about the processes of silk-farming. I left her side for a moment. It was a mistake. I heard her hoot, “You mean they have to kill the poor things, to get the silk? Kill them by boiling them alive? Monstrous. Should be abolished. I’d rather wear nylon knickers, now I know.”

  I got her away from the blushing curator with, as the RAF used to say, maximum boost.

  “Not bringing the kids here,” she announced, as we tumbled down the front steps. “Nothing but a bloody abattoir. What’s that?” She stopped abruptly, so that I banged into her, which was not unpleasant.

  “That’s Tattersham church.”

  “But it’s three miles from the village.”

  “But very close to the Hall. The gentry could walk there without even getting wet. The villagers could walk it in an hour—nothing to peasants.”

  The blue frost of her eyes travelled slowly up and down my face.

  “I wasn’t aware there was a Peasants’ Union, Mr Ashden,” she said at last, “and I wasn’t aware you’d appointed yourself shop-steward. I suppose your father was a docker or something, and you’re not going to allow me to forget it. I suppose you left school at twelve, and worked polishing the gentry’s boots for two shillings a week, and a half-day off every fortnight.”

  “My father,” I said, “is a bank manager in Cottesden, and I took a second in History at Durham.”

  “More the Petty-Bourgeois Union, then?”

  “Do you want to see the church?”

  It might have been the sudden frost in the May of our relationship, but I shuddered as we approached that church. It wasn’t the sort of church I like. It might have been medieval once, but it had been badly got at during the Gothic Revival. The worst thing they’d done was to re-case the outside in some pale, marble-like stone, as smooth and nasty as a marshmallow. The years are not kind to that sort of stone; green algae had gathered in every crevice and ledge, and dribbled its pale-green-ness down the walls. It looked like a hollowed-out tombstone, with windows.

  The door was open. In fact, from the rusted lock and the porchful of dead leaves, I guessed nobody ever bothered to close it; the nearest village was three miles away, and there was no fear of vandals. All the notices flapping on the notice-board were yellow and held on with drawing-pins that had deteriorated into blobs of rust. The vicar, the Reverend Ernest Lacey, lived five miles away, at Tettesden; if it was still the same vicar.

  We pushed on, through the inner door. Inside, purple and blue windows, in the black darkness. We stood for a moment, unable to see even our feet.

  Then the family tombs began to loom towards us out of the darkness. They reared up to left and right, the whole length of the wall, a flowering of white marble pillars and marble faces lying on gilt cushions, trophy of shield and sword and trumpet, and pot-bellied exulting cherub with dust piled in his navel. They crowded inwards across the black-and-white tiled floor, like a crowd at a road accident, bare white marble arms outflung pleadingly in frozen futile gestures; white marble eyes seeing nothing, but seeming to know a great deal. Between them, the space for the living, a few short box-pews, seemed to cower and shrink. Even if that church was packed, the dead would surely outnumber the living.

  IN THE FAMILY VAULT UNDER THE ALTAR

  ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF

  JOHN ANSTEY ESQUIRE

  SECOND SON OF THE LATE CHRISTOPHER

  ANSTEY ESQUIRE

  AND ONE OF HIS MAJESTY’S COMMISSIONERS

  FOR

  AUDITING PUBLIC ACCOUNTS

  WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE 25TH NOVEMBER

  1810

  So many wanting to be remembered, and so few coming to remember them. It struck me that the ignored dead might get angry, like tigers in a zoo that have been left hungry for too long.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful,” breathed Dorinda. She was staring at a grille that bordered the altar; a thing that the blue window behind reduced to a skeleton, but which on closer inspection still disclosed a lick of gilt. I went up and fingered it. Very fine wrought-iron work, of curiously individual design. It closed off a pointed arch, and seemed to my bemused gaze to be almost woven out of odd-shaped distorted crosses, overlapping, and weaving through each other.

  “It is by Tijou?” whispered Dorinda, awed for once.

  “Too late for Tijou—Tijou’s your 1680s—St Paul’s. This is more your 1760s. Still, a good piece of blacksmithing.”

  “Peasant! But the children could make rubbings of the patterns on it—they could copy out the words on the tombs, and draw the cherubs. And Henry would love to draw all those spears and shields.”

  “And there’s a couple of monumental brasses, I’ll bet.” I pulled back a faded red carpet, unpleasantly damp to my fingers, to reveal a six-foot knight and his lady, engraved flat in brass, inlaid in the black-and-white marble of the floor.

  “Oh, this would make a lovely project—we could have an exhibition in the school hall. But how can we get them here?”

  She turned to me, flushed with enthusiasm, mouth open. I wanted to kiss her, but settled for saying, “Well, the school’s getting the minibus soon. Can you drive it?”

  “Of course.”

  “And if I bring my illegitimate Rolls, I can park twelve into that.”

  “Will it be safe?”

  “Never lost a grandfather-clock yet, and they’re worth money.”

  “Oh, let’s do it, Geoff!”

  One part of me was elated; she’d never called me �
��Geoff” before. But the other half of me, the antique-dealer, was doubtful.

  This church felt wrong. I do not say this lightly. Dealers are undertakers of a sort. When a man dies, the undertaker comes for his body, and quite often the dealer comes for the rest. How often I have been left alone to break up the home a man has built up over fifty years, and sell the pieces where I can. As I break up the home, I know the man. I have known a cracked teapot yield enough evidence of adultery to satisfy ten divorce-court judges. I learn that he was mean from his boots; that trapped for ever inside the sepia photographs are seven of his children. From his diary, that he believed in God or the Devil or Carter’s Little Liver Pills. I deal in dead men’s clocks, pipes, swords and velvet breeches. And passing through my hands, they give off joy and loneliness, fear and optimism. I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England.

  And this church felt wrong . . . I tried to temporise. “It’s . . . not a good example of the style. I have a friend, a vicar, with the most beautiful church. He’s studied it for years. He’ll explain everything to the kids . . . it’s got bells they can ring . . .”

  She set her chin stubbornly. “No. I found this. If you won’t help me, I’ll come on my own. Hire a coach . . .”

  I disliked the idea of her and the kids being here alone even more. So against my better judgement, I said “OK.”

  Then she said, suddenly more sensitive than I’d known her, “You don’t like the place, do you, Geoff?”

  “It feels wrong.”

  “We’re not going to feel it; we’re going to draw it.” And the brave invulnerable smile came back, like a highwayman putting on his mask. I think, in that moment, I fell in love with her.