“Look,” he said, “I’m a Javelin,” and he too stretched his arms and ran in circles, banking. Jet noises came from his clenched teeth. Deborah dropped her arms and looked at the drumstick. What had been clean and white from Roger’s teeth was now earth-brown. Was it offended to be chucked away? Years later, when everyone was dead, it would be found, moulded like a fossil. Nobody would care.
“Come on,” said Roger.
“Where to?” she asked.
“To fetch the raspberries,” he said.
“You go,” she told him.
Roger did not like going into the dining-room alone. He was self-conscious. Deborah made a shield from the adult eyes. In the end he consented to fetch the raspberries without her on condition that she played cricket after tea. After tea was a long way off.
She watched him return, walking very slowly, bearing the plates of raspberries and clotted cream. She was seized with sudden pity, that same pity which, earlier she had felt for all people other than herself. How absorbed he was, how intent on the moment that held him. But tomorrow he would be some old man far away, the garden forgotten, and this day long past.
“Grandmama says it can’t go on,” he announced. “There’ll have to be a storm.”
But why? Why not for ever? Why not breathe a spell so that all of them could stay locked and dreaming like the courtiers in the Sleeping Beauty, never knowing, never waking, cobwebs in their hair and on their hands, tendrils imprisoning the house itself?
“Race me,” said Roger, and to please him she plunged her spoon into the mush of raspberries but finished last, to his delight.
No one moved during the long afternoon. Grandmama went upstairs to her room. The children saw her at her window in her petticoat drawing the curtains close. Grandpapa put his feet up in the drawing-room, a handkerchief over his face. Patch did not stir from his place under the piano. Roger, undefeated, found employment still. He first helped Agnes to shell peas for supper, squatting on the back-door step while she relaxed on a lopsided basket chair dragged from the servants’ hall. This task finished, he discovered a tin bath, put away in the cellar, in which Patch had been washed in younger days. He carried it to the lawn and filled it with water. Then he stripped to bathing-trunks and sat in it solemnly, an umbrella over his head to keep off the sun.
Deborah lay on her back behind the summer-house, wondering what would happen if Jesus and Buddha met. Would there be discussion, courtesy, an exchange of views like politicians at summit talks? Or were they after all the same person, born at separate times? The queer thing was that this topic, interesting now, meant nothing in the secret world. Last night, through the turnstile, all problems disappeared. They were non-existent. There was only the knowledge and the joy.
She must have slept, because when she opened her eyes she saw to her dismay that Roger was no longer in the bath but was hammering the cricket-stumps into the lawn. It was a quarter-to-five.
“Hurry up,” he called, when he saw her move. “I’ve had tea.”
She got up and dragged herself into the house, sleepy still, and giddy. The grandparents were in the drawing-room, refreshed from the long repose of the afternoon. Grandpapa smelt of eau-de-Cologne. Even Patch had come to and was lapping his saucer of cold tea.
“You look tired,” said Grandmama critically. “Are you feeling all right?”
Deborah was not sure. Her head was heavy. It must have been sleeping in the afternoon, a thing she never did.
“I think so,” she answered, “but if anyone gave me roast pork I know I’d be sick.”
“No one suggested you should eat roast pork,” said her grandmother, surprised. “Have a cucumber sandwich, they’re cool enough.”
Grandpapa was lying in wait for a wasp. He watched it hover over his tea, grim, expectant. Suddenly he slammed at the air with his whisk. “Got the brute,” he said in trumph. He ground it into the carpet with his heel. It made Deborah think of Jehovah.
“Don’t rush around in the heat,” said Grandmama. “It isn’t wise. Can’t you and Roger play some nice, quiet game?”
“What sort of game?” asked Deborah.
But her grandmother was without invention. The croquet mallets were all broken. “We might pretend to be dwarfs and use the heads,” said Deborah, and she toyed for a moment with the idea of squatting to croquet. Their knees would stiffen, though, it would be too difficult.
“I’ll read aloud to you, if you like,” said Grandmama.
Deborah seized upon the suggestion. It delayed cricket. She ran out on to the lawn and padded the idea to make it acceptable to Roger.
“I’ll play afterwards,” she said, “and that ice-cream that Agnes has in the fridge, you can eat all of it. I’ll talk tonight in bed.”
Roger hesitated. Everything must be weighed. Three goods to balance evil.
“You know that stick of sealing-wax Daddy gave you?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Can I have it?”
The balance for Deborah too. The quiet of the moment in opposition to the loss of the long thick stick so brightly red.
“All right,” she grudged.
Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing-room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children’s books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable-lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother’s calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman.
After the reading, cricket was an anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof.
“A modern horse would have a typewriter,” thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine.
This evening, because of the heat-wave, the routine was changed. They had their baths first, before their supper, for they were hot and exhausted from the cricket. Then, putting on pyjamas and cardigans, they ate their supper on the terrace. For once Grandmama was indulgent. It was still so hot that they could not take chill, and the dew had not yet risen. It made a small excitement, being in pyjamas on the terrace. Like people abroad, said Roger. Or natives in the South Seas, said Deborah. Or beachcombers who had lost caste. Grandpapa, changed into a white tropical jacket, had not lost caste.
“He’s a white trader,” whispered Deborah. “He’s made a fortune out of pearls.”
Roger choked. Any joke about his grandfather, whom he feared, had all the sweet agony of danger.
“What’s the thermometer say?” asked Deborah.
Her grandfather, pleased at her interest, went to inspect it.
“Still above eighty,” he said with relish.
Deborah, when she cleaned her teeth later, thought how pale her face looked in the mirror above the wash-basin. It was not brown, like Roger’s, from the day in the sun, but wan and yellow. She tied back her hair with a ribbon, and the nose and chin were peaky sharp. She yawned largely, as Agnes did in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons.
“Don’t forget you promised to talk,” said Roger quickly.
Talk . . . That was the burden. She was so tired she longed for the white smoothness of her pillow, all blankets thrown aside, bearing only a single sheet. But Roger, wakeful on his bed, the door between them wide, would not relent. Laughter was the one solution, and to make him
hysterical, and so exhaust him sooner, she fabricated a day in the life of Willis, from his first morning kipper to his final glass of beer at the village inn. The adventures in between would have tried Gulliver. Roger’s delight drew protests from the adult world below. There was the sound of a bell, and then Agnes came up the stairs and put her head round the corner of Deborah’s door.
“Your Granny says you’re not to make so much noise,” she said.
Deborah, spent with invention, lay back and closed her eyes. She could go no further. The children called good night to each other, both speaking at the same time, from age-long custom, beginning with their names and addresses and ending with the world, the universe, and space. Then the final main “Good night”, after which neither must ever speak, on pain of unknown calamity.
“I must try and keep awake,” thought Deborah, but the power was not in her. Sleep was too compelling, and it was hours later that she opened her eyes and saw her curtains blowing and the forked flash light the ceiling, and heard the trees tossing and sobbing against the sky. She was out of bed in an instant. Chaos had come. There was no stars, and the night was sulphurous. A great crack split the heavens and tore them in two. The garden groaned. If the rain would only fall there might be mercy, and the trees, imploring, bowed themselves this way and that, while the vivid lawn, bright in expectation, lay like a sheet of metal exposed to flame. Let the waters break. Bring down the rain.
Suddenly the lightning forked again, and standing there, alive yet immobile, was the woman by the turnstile. She stared up at the windows of the house, and Deborah recognized her. The turnstile was there, inviting entry, and already the phantom figures, passing through it, crowded towards the trees beyond the lawn. The secret world was waiting. Through the long day, while the storm was brewing, it had hovered there unseen beyond her reach, but now that night had come, and the thunder with it, the barriers were down. Another crack, mighty in its summons, the turnstile yawned, and the woman with her hand upon it smiled and beckoned.
Deborah ran out of the room and down the stairs. Somewhere somebody called – Roger, perhaps, it did not matter – and Patch was barking; but caring nothing for concealment she went through the dark drawing-room and opened the French window on to the terrace. The lightning searched the terrace and lit the paving, and Deborah ran down the steps on to the lawn where the turnstile gleamed.
Haste was imperative. If she did not run the turnstile might be closed, the woman vanish, and all the wonder of the sacred world be taken from her. She was in time. The woman was still waiting. She held out her hand for tickets, but Deborah shook her head. “I have none.” The woman, laughing, brushed her through into the secret world where there were no laws, no rules, and all the faceless phantoms ran before her to the woods, blown by the rising wind. Then the rain came. The sky, deep brown as the lightning pierced it, opened, and the water hissed to the ground, rebounding from the earth in bubbles. There was no order now in the alley-way. The ferns had turned to trees, the trees to Titans. All moved in ecstasy, with sweeping limbs, but the rhythm was broken up, tumultuous, so that some of them were bent backwards, torn by the sky, and others dashed their heads to the undergrowth where they were caught and beaten.
In the world behind, laughed Deborah as she ran, this would be punishment, but here in the secret world it was a tribute. The phantoms who ran beside her were like waves. They were linked one with another, and they were, each one of them, and Deborah too, part of the night force that made the sobbing and the laughter. The lightning forked where they willed it, and the thunder cracked as they looked upwards to the sky.
The pool had come alive. The water-lilies had turned to hands, with palms upraised, and in the far corner, usually so still under the green scum, bubbles sucked at the surface, steaming and multiplying as the torrents fell. Everyone crowded to the pool. The phantoms bowed and crouched by the water’s edge, and now the woman had set up her turnstile in the middle of the pool, beckoning them once more. Some remnant of a sense of social order rose in Deborah and protested.
“But we’ve already paid,” she shouted, and remembered a second later that she had passed through free. Must there be duplication? Was the secret world a rainbow, always repeating itself, alighting on another hill when you believed yourself beneath it? No time to think. The phantoms had gone through. The lightning, streaky white, lit the old dead monster tree with his crown of ivy, and because he had no spring now in his joints he could not sway in tribute with the trees and ferns, but had to remain there, rigid, like a crucifix.
“And now . . . and now . . . and now . . .” called Deborah.
The triumph was that she was not afraid, was filled with such wild acceptance . . . She ran into the pool. Her living feet felt the mud and the broken sticks and all the tangle of old weeds, and the water was up to her armpits and her chin. The lilies held her. The rain blinded her. The woman and the turnstile were no more.
“Take me too,” cried the child. “Don’t leave me behind!” In her heart was a savage disenchantment. They had broken their promise, they had left her in the world. The pool that claimed her now was not the pool of secrecy, but dank, dark brackish water choked with scum.
4
“Grandpapa says he’s going to have it fenced round,” said Roger. “It should have been done years ago. A proper fence, then nothing can ever happen. But barrow-loads of shingle tipped in it first. Then it won’t be a pool, but just a dewpond. Dewponds aren’t dangerous.”
He was looking at her over the edge of her bed. He had risen in status, being the only one of them downstairs, the bearer of tidings good or ill, the go-between. Deborah had been ordered two days in bed.
“I should think by Wednesday,” he went on, “you’d be able to play cricket. It’s not as if you’re hurt. People who walk in their sleep are just a bit potty.”
“I did not walk in my sleep,” said Deborah.
“Grandpapa said you must have done,” said Roger. “It was a good thing that Patch woke him up and he saw you going across the lawn . . .” Then, to show his release from tension, he stood on his hands.
Deborah could see the sky from her bed. It was flat and dull. The day was a summer day that had worked through storm. Agnes came into the room with junket on a tray. She looked important.
“Now run off,” she said to Roger. “Deborah doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s supposed to rest.”
Surprisingly, Roger obeyed, and Agnes placed the junket on the table beside the bed. “You don’t feel hungry, I expect,” she said. “Never mind, you can eat this later, when you fancy it. Have you got a pain? It’s usual, the first time.”
“No,” said Deborah.
What had happened to her was personal. They had prepared her for it at school, but nevertheless it was a shock, not to be discussed with Agnes. The woman hovered a moment, in case the child asked questions; but, seeing that none came, she turned and left the room.
Deborah, her cheek on her hand, stared at the empty sky. The heaviness of knowledge lay upon her, a strange, deep sorrow.
“It won’t come back,” she thought. “I’ve lost the key.”
The hidden world, like ripples on the pool so soon to be filled in and fenced, was out of her reach for ever.
A Spot of Gothic
Jane Gardam
Location: Low Thwaite, North Yorkshire.
Time: Autumn, 1980.
Eyewitness Description: “It was just after what appeared to be the loneliest part of the road that I took a corner rather faster than I should and saw the woman standing in her garden and waving at me with a slow decorous arm, a queenly arm. You could see from the moonlight that her head was piled up high with queenly hair . . .”
Author: Jane Gardam (1928—) was born Jean Mary Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, read English at Bedford College and worked for a travelling library before serving in editorial positions on the Weldon Ladies Journal and the literary weekly, Time and Tide. Her early fiction consisted of short stor
ies which won several literary prizes before her first adult novel, God on the Rocks (1978), a coming-of-age story set in the thirties, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Prix Baudelaire in France and was adapted for television in 1992. Her interest in the supernatural has been evident in several of her subsequent collections of short stories, in particular Going into a Dark House (1994) and Missing the Midnight: Hauntings and Grotesques (1997) and her novel, The Queen of the Tambourine (1991), the haunting story of a woman’s fascination with a mysterious stranger, that won the Whitbread Novel Award. “A Spot of Gothic” is, in essence, a tribute to all those who have written gothic fiction, and describes the eerie encounter of a “ghost feeler”, Mrs Bainbridge, in a remote corner of the country, that is so contemporary it could have happened last night . . . or might just happen this evening.
I was whizzing along the road out of Wensleydale through Low Thwaite beyond Naresby when I suddenly saw a woman at her cottage gate, waving at me gently like an old friend. In a lonely dale this is not very surprising, as I had found out. Several times I have met someone at a lane end flapping a letter that has missed the post in Kirby Thore or Hawes. “It’s me sister’s birthday tomorrow. I near forgot” or “It’s the bill fort telephone. We’ll be cut off next thing.” The curious thing about this figure, so still and watchful, was that it was standing there waving to me in the middle of the night.
It was full moon. I had been out to dinner at Mealbeck. I had only been living in the North for two months and for one month alone. I had joined my husband near Catterick camp the minute he had found us a house, which was only a few days before he found that the regiment was being posted to Hong Kong. The house he had found was beautiful, old and tall in an old garden, on the edge of a village on the edge of the fell. It was comfortable and dark with a flagged floor and old furniture. Roses and honeysuckle were nearly strangling black hedges of neglected yew. There was nice work to be done.
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 42