Pamela, having decided that humour was her best weapon against my folly, pointed to a massive tangle of briars and made reference to Brer Rabbit.
Mr Johnson was extolling the tranquillity of the surroundings when he put his foot into an ornamental pond whose slime had been camouflaged by weeds. He swore fervently before regaining control and offering Pamela an apology. This she graciously accepted, and then said to me, ‘It looks like a setting for one of your ghastlier efforts. You could re-christen it Usher.’
I could understand her reaction. The neglected old house, with its blind windows and high slated roofs, did have a certain melancholic atmosphere. Still, take any old stone-built house that has been vacant for a year, surround it with a dark wood, and you’ll have something like an illustration for an M. R. James story. ‘How old is it?’ I asked.
‘Two hundred years,’ said Mr Johnson, rubbing his shoe with a handful of rank grass. ‘Give or take a score or two.’ He straightened up. ‘Of course it has been improved from time to time.’
The work of the ‘improvers’ was evident. Some windows had been enlarged, spoiling the original proportions, yet enough of the basic Georgian design remained for the house still to be a pleasure to the eye.
‘It’s certainly a house that several Jacks built,’ Pamela said as we halted before stone steps leading to French windows guarded by a pair of weed-filled antique urns. ‘Fancy adding brick to that stone.’
She waved at the extension into which the French windows had been set. To me it did not look so bad — the brick had weathered and was now mostly covered by ivy — but Pamela was a purist and to her the effect of the grey stonework had been marred by the addition. After a struggle with a protesting lock, Mr Johnson opened a heavy door and we entered a huge, old-fashioned kitchen. After the small noises of the outdoors it was hushed and still, and I noticed Pamela shiver. Again, if I had been describing that moment in one of my books I could have done a good purple passage on how the house seemed to be waiting …
Of course it was only waiting to be redecorated.
Mr Johnson led us into the drawing-room and stood like a benign uncle with his back to the empty fireplace while we walked about raising wraiths of dust.
‘I love these high ceilings,’ I said. ‘To have enough space is the greatest luxury in the twentieth century.’
‘But how do you heat it?’
We went into the large hall and up a curving staircase to the first floor which comprised three bedrooms and a vast Victorian bathroom containing a cast-iron bath standing on lion’s-paw feet. One of the rooms could be converted into an ideal author’s study — in my imagination I saw its walls lined with books — while from the window I would have a pleasant view of the garden area, which gave a sense of enclosure due to the thick ranks of trees which bounded it.
Hundreds of hours of manual work would be needed to redress the neglect which had allowed blackberry to grow with jungle ferocity where once formal flowerbeds had delineated the border between husbandry and nature. The prospect of physical labour did not daunt me. Like a lot of writers I welcomed an excuse to quit my desk after several cramped hours and indulge in a completely different activity.
Leaving Mr Johnson cowering behind a screen of pipe smoke while Pamela gave him a hard time to compensate for my noted lack of sales resistance, I climbed some narrow stairs to the top floor. Here were small rooms whose sloping ceilings followed the angle of the roof, which had once housed servants and lumber. The air was hot and stale and I guessed many years had passed since the windows had been opened.
I tried to open a door disfigured by peeling brown paint — as was every door in the dingy passage — but it was locked fast.
Somewhere an insect hummed. Opening the door of the next room, I was sickened by a carpet of dead birds in various stages of decomposition. The poor creatures had entered through a small hole in a filthy window-pane and once inside had been unable to find their way out again.
In need of fresh air, I went down to the hall and out through a door with panels of stained glass depicting pre-Raphaelite maidens with downcast eyes. I found myself in the front garden; a wicket gate in the tough hedge opened to a pathway leading through the wood. It must have been here that the previous occupant made her last stand against weeds and old age.
I had a sudden picture of young Edwardian ladies in long pastel dresses, escorted by youths in white flannels, blazers and boaters, coming through the wicket gate with bantering laughter. Perhaps they had arrived for a game of croquet on the velvet lawn at the back — with charades and songs round the piano in the evening — unaware that their world was about to be swept into the dustbin of history; that somewhere in the Balkans an assassin was loading his revolver and before long Rodney would die entangled in the wire of the Western Front and Bertie would be disembowelled by a Boche bayonet.
I wondered why I had imagined Edwardians. Why not Victorians — or a Regency party? The house would have been long established when Prinny was building his Arabian Nights palace. It would have been tempting to think I had been influenced by some psychic tremor lingering in the air, but I knew better.
I went back to Mr Johnson.
‘What’s the name of this place?’ I asked.
‘Whispering Corner,’ he answered.
‘I’ll take it.’
*
As I cruised along the motorway at an easy eighty, I reflected on the significance of the moment when I decided to buy Whispering Corner. It must have been at that point that subconsciously Pamela and I realized we would be parting; that now Steve had left home there was only habit to keep us together and that was not strong enough.
Of course I deluded myself at the time, thinking that Whispering Corner would give both our lives a new dimension, but within a week Pamela was planning to visit her old friend Liz in New York. For the next few weeks we were both preoccupied with our projects; she with her preparations for going abroad, I with the business of getting the old house refurbished. Strangely we were more friendly towards each other than we had been for a very long time.
Then one morning I drove her to Gatwick and watched her 747 haul itself into a louring sky before returning to Bloomsbury to start on Ancient Dreams. But the book never got written and Pamela did not return after a month as she had originally planned.
Thinking about the new novel ahead of me I feared a panic attack coming on as I wondered how the hell I could meet my publisher’s deadline, but I managed to quell it by telling myself that in new surroundings I would be able to concentrate on it to the exclusion of everything else for the next three months. I would ignore all other problems and immerse myself totally in my work.
Work — as a terrible slogan once stated — makes us free, and I saw my salvation in Whispering Corner and the house which had inspired its title. For the rest of my journey I turned plot ideas over in my mind without any significant result. This would change, I reassured myself, once I was a literary hermit in the heart of the wood.
I did not start work that day; instead I spent the time settling in and setting up my study overlooking the wilderness garden. It smelled of new paint and I was filled with a sense of anticipation when I put my typewriter on the new desk in front of the window and, like Simenon, sharpened pencils for the forthcoming opus. I had been lucky enough to interview him in my journalistic days and now I remembered him telling me that the actual writing of one of his novels was nothing; he often did it in less than a week. The real writing had already been done in his head over a much longer period, and the whole story was clear when he began to put the words down. And here was I with twelve weeks to get my book written but so far with only its title in mind! It was dark when I finally unpacked the last tea chest which I had sent down from London, and arranged my beloved Hiroshige prints above my bed. Weary, I went down to the kitchen to make a bacon sandwich and fix myself a drink. Like the other fittings the stove was new, the product of a wonderful shopping spree with which I had celebrated th
e purchase of the house. Of course I had not been able to afford to furnish it fully; half the rooms were still empty, but thanks to Hoddy, the hardworking young handyman with the intense eyes, everywhere had been decorated apart from a locked room upstairs for which I had been unable to find the key.
With a glass of brandy in my hand I opened the French windows to the night. There was a scatter of stars and the surrounding trees bad become black shapes against a blue-black sky. It was unbelievably peaceful, the only sound being a night breeze whispering through the leaves. I was to find that this soft southern wind, carrying a tang of sea salt, seemed to catch this particular part of the wood so that the lighter branches of the trees were continually restless. Perhaps it was the rustling of their leaves which had been responsible for the name Whispering Corner.
I finished my drink and went up to my bedroom where I lay on my new bed beneath my new bottle green duvet, and drifted into a sleep which held no nightmares for me that night.
Next morning I was optimistic as I sat at my desk and typed WHISPERING CORNER at the top of a sheet of the pale blue duplicating paper I prefer for my first draft. Beyond the window sunlight filled the tangled garden. On the yet unscratched surface of the desk I had laid out my dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, the Pearlcorder for verbal notes, and ajar of sharp pencils. Everything was poised. The moment had come to begin the novel which had to re-establish me in the best-seller list.
‘Title written,’ I said aloud. ‘Now all that’s required is a hundred and twenty thousand words of vibrant prose!’
My problem was that I still did not have a plot. When I had considered it over my coffee and burnt toast in the stone-flagged kitchen, I had decided to let my main character follow in my footsteps with his arrival at a house based on Whispering Corner, and hoped that the story would develop from there. While making sure it did not become autobiographical, I might as well cash in on my experience to provide an authentic background.
Once I had established my character I would gradually introduce the supernatural clement, not too fast to begin with so that my readers would be lulled into suspending their disbelief. What the supernatural clement would be I did not yet know; I would cross that Vistula when I was over the Rhine.
First I must sketch my character. Let’s call him … I looked round the study in search of inspiration. The names of characters are very important as I believe that certain sounds and combinations of syllables can suggest types of personality. A newspaper I had used for packing caught my eye; the name FALCO was emblazoned in a headline on the sports page. Let’s call him that, and for a Christian name James. I had never used James before.
I gazed down on the garden and in my imagination it suddenly became the setting for the novel’s opening. I began to type fast.
James Falco pushed his way down the overgrown path and suddenly beheld the house known as Whispering Corner. For several minutes he stood on the edge of what had once been a graceful lawn but was now knee-deep with feral plant life. In his late twenties, he had the appearance of an outdoor man — a look accentuated by denims, a tartan shirt and fell-walking shoes. His skin was pleasantly tanned from a recent walking tour along the byways of Normandy. And it had been a walking tour — no hitching for Falco …
I paused. Why no hitching for Falco? And furthermore, what gave him his independence? If he had an ordinary job he would never be able to live at Whispering Corner.
Suddenly I felt an old excitement as my character began to come into focus, to come alive. Dr Frankenstein would have known exactly what I felt like.
I continued typing, and the crisp sound of the old machine was like music.
A freelance artist, Falco was on call to several advertising agencies, and in between commercial assignments he concentrated on his private work. Now his sketchbook — and Falco used his sketchbook as others use cameras — was filled with scenes of forgotten France …
That should fill the bill, I thought.
He wished he had his drawing materials with him so he could capture the old house as he saw it with his vision still fresh. His eyes caressed its ancient stonework, tall brick chimneys like pieces of Gaudi-inspired sculpture and triple gables like dark sails against the pale Dorset sky …
Good. I’d got the location in.
Falco had inherited the house from his aunt, who had died intestate. He carried only a childhood memory of her, a frail woman who wore very old-fashioned clothes. As he grew up he had heard on the disapproving family grapevine that she had become a recluse, living alone in some ‘awful’ place in the middle of a Dorset wood. ‘She'll probably start a witches’ coven down there,’ James remembered his father joking. ‘Remember how she was an ardent spiritualist? And then a Swedenborgian?’
For the first time James began to wonder deeply about his aunt, his father's elder sister who for some reason seemed to be better off than the rest of the family. He vaguely recalled something about her fiancé’s being killed on a bombing raid over the Ruhr in the Second World War.
Looking at the empty house, its windows like blind eyes, so obviously unlived in, he wondered if it reflected her life — eccentric and empty.
Whispering Corner was his now, and he’d bring it — and the garden — back to something of its former glory, not only for his own pleasure and comfort but as a memorial to the lonely lady who had spent much of her life there. It would be a pleasurable task because he had instantly fallen in love with Whispering Corner, and with that came the conviction that here he would do his best work.
I stopped to put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter, and looking back on what I had written I decided to alter the fact that Falco’s aunt had died intestate. Instead she would have willed it to him, ignoring the rest of the family. There might be a specific reason (which I could develop later) as to why she wanted him to have it.
Apart from that change, I was pleased with the start I had made because I felt that if I looked into the garden again it would be possible to see Falco standing waist deep in purple willowherb at the far end of the garden. My old fears about having written myself out were beginning to recede and I had a feeling that the storyline was about to develop.
This was a moment when in the old days I would have lit a cigarette, and I found that my hand was reaching for a packet of Pall Malls that was not there. Although I had given up smoking after a minor heart attack some years ago, there were still times when I longed to tap a king-size out of its glossy red packet.
I resumed typing.
Falco began to cross the garden. Briars clutched savagely at his jeans, reminding him of an illustration he had once drawn for the Sleeping Beauty story in a high-quality fairy tale book — the sort of work he hoped to be able to concentrate on.
Whispering Corner would make a splendid background for such illustrations — Beauty and the Beast, for example. Was it simply because it was empty that he sensed there was a touch of strangeness about the house? Or was the impression merely formed by the neglected garden and the vague notion that its last owner had been a bit odd?
When the place was restored it would have a benign atmosphere. He could picture his friends coming down for long, lazy weekends; eating alfresco at a white wrought-iron table shaded by a fringed garden umbrella. And croquet! He must introduce that as the fun feature of his new home. There was something pleasantly Edwardian about these ideas. He would get himself a striped blazer to play the part.
He suddenly froze. Through the glass of the French windows he could see a man hanging.
3
I was dismayed as I read the last sentence I had typed. It had not been intended. Even though it had been my fingers on the Olympia’s keys, it was as though I had been watching a message from a foreign land appear on a telex machine.
My plan had been for Falco to enter the house and explore it as I had done on my first visit in order to set the basic scene for the book. So why had I written in a hanged man? Who the hell was he? And what effect would he have on Falco?
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After peering stupidly at the words I remembered that I was still the author. I could easily x-out the sentence, or have Falco deluded by his own reflection.
To introduce horror so early, before the reader knew enough about the main character to identify with him, would be a mistake. Or would it? Raymond Chandler said that when he reached an impasse in a novel he had a man burst through a door with a gun. I wondered if I was subconsciously using a similar trick. After all, there was nothing in the opening to make the reader desperate to turn the page.
Perhaps some inbuilt story-telling mechanism had recognized this and tried to remedy it.
I decided to compromise. I’d let the incident remain in such a way that it could be worked into the story later or deleted once I knew what the plot was about.
I resumed typing.
For a moment Falco stood without moving, before it occurred to him that the man might not yet be dead. The thought released him from the paralysis of shock and he ran towards the house, stumbling as long grasses lassoed his ankles.
He made for a white glazed door and, not as yet having a key, hurled himself against it. Amid the cracking of glass and rotten framing the weight of his desperation wrenched it from its hinges and he staggered into a large, cold kitchen. Next he was in a gloomy hallway where dust billowed from under his feet. There were several white-painted doors which he flung open one after another in an irrational panic that he might not be able to locate the room in which he had seen the body suspended like some levitating yogi.
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