The next day I told Mrs Rachels about it, and it was she, in fact, who made me think that it was all rather stranger than it seemed. I definitely remembered turning the wireless off myself before going to bed, and in any case I was not in the habit of listening to French stations, so that even if the wireless had somehow come on of its own accord it should not have been tuned in to a French station.
Two days later I found the bath half-filled with water and the towels all rumpled and damp, thrown about on the floor. The water in the bath was tepid and dirty: someone, an hour or so ago, had had a bath.
I climbed the stairs to the Rachels’ flat and knocked on their door. ‘Is your bathroom out of order?’ I said when Mr Rachels came to the door, not wearing the slippers I’d given them money for. I said I didn’t at all mind their using mine, only I’d be grateful if they’d remember to let the water out and to bring down their own towels. Mr Rachels looked at me in the way people have sometimes, as though you’re insane. He called his wife and all three of us went down to look at my bathroom. They denied emphatically that either of them had had a bath.
When I came downstairs the next morning, having slept badly, I found the kitchen table had been laid for four. There was a tablecloth on the table, which was something I never bothered about, and a kettle was boiling on the Aga. Beside it, a large brown teapot, not the one I normally used, was heating. I made some tea and sat down, thinking about the Rachels. Why should they behave like this? Why should they creep into my bedroom in the middle of the night and turn the wireless on? Why should they have a bath in my bathroom and deny it? Why should they lay the breakfast table as though we had overnight guests? I left the table just as it was. Butter had been rolled into pats. Marmalade had been placed in two china dishes. A silver toast-rack that an aunt of my husband had given us as a wedding present was waiting for toast.
‘Thank you for laying the table,’ said to Mrs Rachels when she entered the kitchen an hour later.
She shook her head. She began to say that she hadn’t laid the table but then she changed her mind. I could see from her face that she and her husband had been discussing the matter of the bath the night before. She could hardly wait to tell him about the breakfast table. I smiled at her.
‘A funny thing happened the other night,’ I said. ‘I woke up to find Victor Silvester playing a tune called “Looking for Henry Lee”.’
‘Henry Lee?’ Mrs Rachels said, turning around from the sink. Her face, usually blotched with pink, like the skin of an apple, was white.
‘It’s an old song of the fifties.’
It was while saying that that I realized what was happening in the house. I naturally didn’t say anything to Mrs Rachels, and I at once began to regret that I’d said anything in the first place. It had frightened me, finding the bathroom like that, and clearly it must have frightened the Rachels. I didn’t want them to be frightened because naturally there was nothing to be frightened about. George and Alice and Isabel wouldn’t hurt anyone, not unless death had changed them enormously. But even so. I knew I couldn’t ever explain that to the Rachels.
‘Well, I suppose I’m just getting absent-minded,’ I said. ‘People do, so they say, when they live alone.’ I laughed to show I wasn’t worried or frightened, to make it all seem ordinary.
‘You mean, you laid the table yourself?’ Mrs Rachels said. ‘And had a bath?’
‘And didn’t turn the wireless off properly. Funny,’ I said, ‘how these things go in threes. Funny, how there’s always an explanation.’ I laughed again and Mrs Rachels had to laugh too.
After that it was lovely, just like being back in 17 Lorelei Avenue. I bought Black Magic chocolates and bars of Fry’s and Cadbury’s Milk, all the things we’d liked. I often found bathwater left in and the towels crumpled, and now and again I came down in the morning to find the breakfast table laid. On the first-floor landing, on the evening of March 11th, I caught a glimpse of George, and in the garden, three days later, I saw Isabel and Alice.
On March 15th the Rachels left. I hadn’t said a word to them about finding the bathroom used again or the breakfast laid or actually seeing the children. I’d been cheerful and smiling whenever I met them. I’d talked about how Brasso wasn’t as good as it used to be to Mrs Rachels, and had asked her husband about the best kinds of soil for bulbs.
‘We can’t stay a minute more,’ Mrs Rachels said, her face all white and tight in the hall, and then to my astonishment they attempted to persuade me to go also.
‘The house isn’t fit to live in,’ Mr Rachels said.
‘Oh now, that’s nonsense,’ I began to say, but they both shook their heads.
‘There’s children here,’ Mrs Rachels said. ‘There’s three children appearing all over the place.’
‘Come right up to you,’ Mr Rachels said. ‘Laugh at you sometimes.’
They were trembling, both of them. They were so terrified I thought they might die, that their hearts would give out there in the hall and they’d just drop down. But they didn’t. They walked out of the hall door with their three suitcases, down the drive to catch a bus. I never saw them again.
I suppose, Mr Mockler, you have to be frightened of ghosts: I suppose that’s their way of communicating. I mean, it’s no good being like me, delighting in it all, being happy because I wasn’t lonely in that house any more. You have to be like the Rachels, terrified half out of your wits. I think I knew that as I watched the Rachels go: I think I knew that George and Isabel and Alice would go with them, that I was only a kind of go-between, that the Rachels were what George and Isabel and Alice could really have fun with. I almost ran after the Rachels, but 1 knew it would be no good.
Without the Rachels and my brother and my two sisters, I was frightened myself in that big house. I moved everything into the kitchen: the television set and the plants I kept in the drawing-room, and a camp-bed to sleep on. I was there, asleep in the camp-bed, when my husband returned from Germany; he had changed completely. He raved at me, not listening to a word I said. There were cups of tea all over the house, he said, and bits of bread and biscuits and cake and chocolates. There were notes in envelopes, and messages scrawled in my hand-writing on the wallpaper in various rooms. Everywhere was dusty. Where, he wanted to know, were the Rachels?
He stood there with a canvas bag in his left hand, an airline bag that had the word Lufthansa on it. He’d put on at least a stone, I remember thinking, and his hair was shorter than before.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I would like to tell you.’ And I tried to tell him, as I’ve told you, Mr Mockler, about George and Isabel and Alice in 17 Lorelei Avenue and how we all went together for a walk with our dog, every Sunday afternoon in Richmond Park, and how on Christmas Eve my mother always gave a party. I told him about the stained-glass pane in the window, Moses in the bulrushes, and the hide-and-seek we played, and how my father and I always shared the old boot in Monopoly. I told him about the day of the accident, how the tyre on the lorry suddenly exploded and how the lorry went whizzing around on the road and then just tumbled over on top of them. I’d put out cups of tea, I said, and biscuits and cake and the little messages, just in case they came back again – not for them to eat or to read particularly, but just as a sign. They’d given me a sign first, I explained: George had turned on my wireless in the middle of the night and Isabel had had baths and Alice had laid the breakfast table. But then they’d gone because they’d been more interested in annoying the Rachels than in comforting me. I began to weep, telling him how lonely I’d been without them, how lonely I’d been ever since the day of the accident, how the silence had been everywhere. I couldn’t control myself: tears came out of my eyes as though they’d never stop. I felt sickness all over my body, paining me in my head and my chest, sour in my stomach. I wanted to die because the loneliness was too much. Loneliness was the worst thing in the world, I said, gasping out words, with spit and tears going cold on my face. People were only shadows, I tried to explain, when you
had loneliness and silence like that, like a shroud around you. You couldn’t reach out of the shroud sometimes, you couldn’t connect because shadows are hard to connect with and it’s frightening when you try because everyone is looking at you. But it was lovely, I whispered, when the children came back to annoy the Rachels. My husband replied by telling me I was insane.
The letter finished there, and Mr Mockler was more astonished each time he read it. He had never in his life received such a document before, nor did he in fact very often receive letters of any kind, apart from bills and, if he was fortunate, cheques in settlement. He shook his head over the letter and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
That day, as he stitched and measured, he imagined the place Mrs Acland wrote of, the secluded house with twenty female inmates, and the lawn and the rose-beds. He imagined the other house, 17 Lorelei Avenue in Richmond, and the third house, the Victorian residence in the Worcestershire countryside. He imagined Mrs Acland’s obese husband with his short hair and his aeroplane fasteners, and the children who had been killed in a motor-car accident, and Mr and Mrs Rachels whom they had haunted. All day long the faces of these people flitted through Mr Mockler’s mind, with old Miss Acheson and Sarah Crookham and Dr Scott-Rowe and Dr Friendman. In the evening, when he met his friends Mr Tile and Mr Uprichard in the Charles the First, he showed them the letter before even ordering them drinks.
‘Well, I’m beggared,’ remarked Mr Uprichard, a man known locally for his gentle nature. ‘That poor creature.’
Mr Tile, who was not given to expressing himself, shook his head.
Mr Mockler asked Mr Uprichard if he should visit this Mrs Acland. ‘Poor creature,’ Mr Uprichard said again, and added that without a doubt Mrs Acland had written to a stranger because of the loneliness she mentioned, the loneliness like a shroud around her.
Some weeks later Mr Mockler, having given the matter further thought and continuing to be affected by the contents of the letter, took a Green Line bus out of London to the address that Mrs Acland had given him. He made inquiries, feeling quite adventurous, and was told that the house was three-quarters of a mile from where the bus had dropped him, down a side road. He found it without further difficulty. It was a house surrounded by a high brick wall in which large, black wrought-iron gates were backed with sheets of tin so that no one could look through the ornamental scrollwork. The gates were locked. Mr Mockler rang a bell in the wall.
‘Yes?’ a man said, opening the gate that was on Mr Mockler’s left.
‘Well,’ said Mr Mockler and found it difficult to proceed.
‘Yes?’ the man said.
‘Well, I’ve had a letter. Asking me to come, I think. My name’s Mockler.’
The man opened the gate a little more and Mr Mockler stepped through.
The man walked ahead of him and Mr Mockler saw the lawns that had been described, and the rose-beds. The house he considered most attractive: a high Georgian building with beautiful windows. An old woman was walking slowly by herself with the assistance of a stick: Miss Acheson, Mr Mockler guessed. In the distance he saw other women, walking slowly on leaf-strewn paths.
Autumn was Mr Mockler’s favourite season and he was glad to be in the country on this pleasantly autumnal day. He thought of remarking on this to the man who led him towards the house, but since the man did not incline towards conversation he did not do so.
In the yellow waiting-room there were no magazines and no pictures on the walls and no flowers. It was not a room in which Mr Mockler would have cared to wait for long, and in fact he did not have to. A woman dressed as a nurse except that she wore a green cardigan came in. She smiled briskly at him and said that Dr Friendman would see him. She asked Mr Mockler to follow her.
‘How very good of you to come,’ Dr Friendman said, smiling at Mr Mockler in the way that Mrs Acland, had described in her letter. ‘How very humane,’ said Dr Friendman.
‘I had a letter, from a Mrs Acland.’
‘Quite so, Mr Mockler. Mr Mockler, could I press you towards a glass of sherry?’
Mr Mockler, surprised at this line of talk, accepted the sherry, saying it was good of Dr Friendman. He drank the sherry while Dr Friendman read the letter. When he’d finished, Dr Friendman crossed to the window of the room and pulled aside a curtain and asked Mr Mockler if he’d mind looking out.
There was a courtyard, small and cobbled, in which a gardener was sweeping leaves into a pile. At the far end of it, sitting on a tapestry-backed dining-chair in the autumn sunshine, was a woman in a blue dress. ‘Try these,’ said Dr Friendman and handed Mr Mockler a pair of binoculars.
It was a beautiful face, thin and seeming fragile, with large blue eyes and lips that were now slightly parted, smiling in the sunshine. Hair the colour of corn was simply arranged, hanging on either side of the face and curling in around it. The hair shone in the sunlight, as though it was for ever being brushed.
‘I find them useful,’ Dr Friendman said, taking the binoculars from Mr Mockler’s hands. ‘You have to keep an eye, you know.’
‘That’s Mrs Acland?’ Mr Mockler asked.
‘That’s the lady who wrote to you: the letter’s a bit. inaccurate, Mr Mockler. It wasn’t quite like that in 17 Lorelei Avenue.’
‘Not quite like it?’
‘She cannot forget Lorelei Avenue. I’m afraid she never will. That beautiful woman, Mr Mockler, was a beautiful girl, yet she married the first man who asked her, a widower thirty years older than her, a fat designer of aircraft fasteners. He pays her bills just as she says in her letter, and even when he’s dead they’ll go on being paid. He used to visit her at first, but he found it too painful. He stood in this very room one day, Mr Mockler, and said to Dr Scott-Rowe that no man had ever been appreciated by a woman as much as he had by her. And all because he’d been kind to her in the most ordinary ways.’
Mr Mockler said he was afraid that he didn’t know what Dr Friendman was talking about. As though he hadn’t heard this quiet protest, Dr Friendman smiled and said:
‘But it was, unfortunately, too late for kindness. 17 Lorelei Avenue had done its damage, like a cancer in her mind: she could not forget her childhood.’
‘Yes, she says in her letter. George and Alice and Isabel –’
‘All her childhood, Mr Mockler, her parents did not speak to one another. They didn’t quarrel, they didn’t address each other in any way whatsoever. When she was five they’d come to an agreement: that they should both remain in 17 Lorelei Avenue because neither would ever have agreed to give up an inch of the child they’d between them caused to be born. In the house there was nothing, Mr Mockler, for all her childhood years: nothing except silence.’
‘But there was George and Alice and Isabel –’
‘No, Mr Mockler. There was no George and no Alice and no Isabel. No hide-and-seek or parties on Christmas Eve, no Monopoly on Sundays by the fire. Can you imagine 17 Lorelei Avenue, Mr Mockler, as she is now incapable of imagining it? Two people so cruel to one another that they knew that either of them could be parted from the child in some divorce court. A woman bitterly hating the man whom once she’d loved, and he returning each evening, hurrying back from an office in case his wife and the child were having a conversation. She would sit, Mr Mockler, in a room with them, with the silence heavy in the air, and their hatred for one another. All three of them would sit down to a meal and no one would speak. No other children came to that house, no other people. She used to hide on the way back from school: she’d go down the area steps of other houses and crouch beside dustbins.’
‘Dustbins?’ repeated Mr Mockler, more astonished than ever. ‘Dustbins?’
‘Other children didn’t take to her. She couldn’t talk to them. She’d never learned to talk to anyone. He was a patient man, Mr Acland, when he came along, a good and patient man.’
Mr Mockler said that the child’s parents must have been monsters, but Dr Friendman shook his head. No one was a monster, Dr Friendman sai
d in a professional manner, and in the circumstances Mr Mockler didn’t feel he could argue with him. But the people called Rachels were real, he did point out, as real as the fat designer of aircraft fasteners. Had they left the house, he asked, as it said in the letter? And if they had, what had they been frightened of?
Dr Friendman smiled again. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said, and he explained at great length to Mr Mockler that it was Mrs Acland herself who had frightened the Rachels, turning on a wireless in the middle of the night and running baths and laying tables for people who weren’t there. Mr Mockler listened and was interested to note that Dr Friendman used words that were not easy to understand, and quoted from experts who were in Dr Friendman’s line of business but whose names meant nothing to Mr Mockler.
Mr Mockler, listening to all of it, nodded but was not convinced. The Rachels had left the house, just as the letter said: he knew that, he felt it in his bones and it felt like the truth. The Rachels had been frightened of Mrs Acland’s ghosts even though they’d been artificial ghosts. They’d been real to her, and they’d been real to the Rachels because she’d made them so. Shadows had stepped out of her mind because in her loneliness she’d wished them to. They’d laughed and played, and frightened the Rachels half out of their wits.
‘There’s always an explanation,’ said Dr Friendman.
Mr Mockler nodded, profoundly disagreeing.
‘She’ll think you’re Mr Rachels,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘come to say he saw the ghosts. If you wouldn’t mind saying you did, it keeps her happy.’
‘But it’s the truth,’ Mr Mockler cried with passion in his voice. ‘Of course it’s the truth: there can be ghosts like that, just as there can be in any other way.’
The Collected Stories Page 69