A Spot of Folly

by Ruth Rendell

  The first hint of this we had from local gossip; next the facts appeared in our monthly news sheet, the Shawley Post. Couched in its customary parish magazine journalese it said, ‘Shawley residents all extend a hearty welcome to their new rector, the Reverend Stephen Galton, whose coming to the parish with his charming wife will fill a long-felt need.’

  ‘He’s very young,’ said Eleanor a few days after our discussion of haunting with the Scotts. ‘Under thirty.’

  ‘That won’t bother me,’ I said. ‘I don’t intend to be preached at by him. Anyway, why not? Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ I said, ‘hast Thou ordained strength.’

  ‘Hark at the devil quoting scripture,’ said Eleanor. ‘They say his wife’s only twenty-three.’

  I thought she must have met them, she knew so much. But no.

  ‘It’s just what’s being said. Patsy got it from Judy Lawrence. Judy said they’re moving in next month and her mother’s coming with them.’

  ‘Who, Judy’s?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said my wife. ‘Mrs Galton’s mother, the rector’s mother-in-law. She’s coming to live with them.’

  Move in they did. And out again two days later.

  The first we knew that something had gone very wrong for the Galtons was when I was out for my usual evening walk with our Irish Setter Liam. We were coming back past the cottage that belongs to Charlie Lawrence (who is by way of being Shawley’s squire) and which he keeps for the occupation of his gardener when he is lucky enough to have a gardener. At that time, last June, he hadn’t had a gardener for at least six months, and the cottage should have been empty. As I approached, however, I saw a woman’s face, young, fair, very pretty, at one of the upstairs windows.

  I rounded the hedge and Liam began an insane barking, for just inside the cottage gate, on the drive, peering in under the hood of an aged Wolseley, was a tall young man wearing a tweed sports jacket over one of those black-top things the clergy wear, and a clerical collar.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘Shut up, Liam, will you?’

  ‘Good evening,’ he said in a quiet, abstracted sort of way.

  I told Eleanor. She couldn’t account for the Galtons occupying Charlie Lawrence’s gardener’s cottage instead of Shawley Rectory, their proper abode. But Patsy Scott could. She came round on the following morning with a punnet of strawberries for us. The Scotts grow the best strawberries for miles around.

  ‘They’ve been driven out by the ghosts,’ she said. ‘Can you credit it? A clergyman of the Church of England! An educated man! They were in that place not forty-eight hours before they were screaming to Charlie Lawrence to find them somewhere else to go.’

  I asked her if she was sure it wasn’t just the damp and the dry rot.

  ‘Look, you know me. I don’t believe the Rectory’s haunted or anywhere can be haunted, come to that. I’m telling you what Mrs Galton told me. She came to us on Thursday morning and said did I think there was anyone in Shawley had a house or a cottage to rent because they couldn’t stick the Rectory another night. I asked her what was wrong. And she said she knew it sounded crazy – it did too, she was right there – she knew it sounded mad, but they’d been terrified out of their lives by what they’d heard and seen since they moved in.’

  ‘Seen?’ I said. ‘She actually claims to have seen something?’

  ‘She said her mother did. She said her mother saw something in the drawing room the first evening they were there. They’d already heard the carriage wheels and the doors closing and the footsteps and all that. The second evening no one dared go in the drawing room. They heard all the sounds again and Mrs Grainger – that’s the mother – heard voices in the drawing room, and it was then that they decided they couldn’t stand it, they’d have to get out.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ I said. ‘I don’t believe any of it. The woman’s a psychopath, she’s playing some sort of ghastly joke.’

  ‘Just as Kate was and the Bucklands,’ said Eleanor quietly.

  Patsy ignored her and turned to me. ‘I feel just like you. It’s awful, but what can you do? These stories grow and they sort of infect people and the more suggestible the people are, the worse the infection. Charlie and Judy are furious, they don’t want it getting in the paper that Shawley Rectory is haunted. Think of all the people we shall get coming in cars on Sundays and gawping over the gates. But they had to let them have the cottage in common humanity. Mrs Grainger was hysterical and poor little Mrs Galton wasn’t much better. Who told them to expect all those horrors? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘What does Gordon say?’ I said.

  ‘He’s keeping an open mind, but he says he’d like to spend an evening there.’

  In spite of the Lawrences’ fury, the haunting of Shawley Rectory did get quite a lot of publicity. There was a sensational story about it in one of the popular Sundays and then Stephen Galton’s mother-in-law went on television. Western TV interviewed her on a local news programme. I hadn’t ever seen Mrs Grainger in the flesh and her youthful appearance rather surprised me. She looked no more than thirty-five, though she must be into her forties.

  The interviewer asked her if she had ever heard any stories of ghosts at Shawley Rectory before she went there and she said she hadn’t. Did she believe in ghosts? Now she did. What had happened, asked the interviewer, after they had moved in?

  It had started at nine o’clock, she said, at nine on their first evening. She and her daughter were sitting in the bigger of the two kitchens, having a cup of coffee. They had been moving in all day, unpacking, putting things away. They heard two doors close upstairs, then footsteps coming down the main staircase. She had thought it was her son-in-law, except that it couldn’t have been because as the footsteps died away he came in through the door from the back kitchen. They couldn’t understand what it had been, but they weren’t frightened. Not then.

  ‘We were planning on going to bed early,’ said Mrs Grainger. She was very articulate, very much at ease in front of the cameras. ‘Just about half-past ten I had to go into the big room they call the drawing room. The removal men had put some of our boxes in there and my radio was in one of them. I wanted to listen to my radio in bed. I opened the drawing-room door and put my hand to the light switch. I didn’t put the light on. The moon was quite bright that night and it was shining into the room.

  ‘There were people, two figures, I don’t know what to call them, between the windows. One of them, the girl, was lying huddled on the floor. The other figure, an older woman, was bending over her. She stood up when I opened the door and looked at me. I knew I wasn’t seeing real people, I don’t know how but I knew that. I remember I couldn’t move my hand to switch the light on. I was frozen, just staring at that pale tragic face while it stared back at me. I did manage at last to back out and close the door, and I got back to my daughter and my son-in-law in the kitchen and I – well, I collapsed. It was the most terrifying experience of my life.’

  Yet you stayed a night and a day and another night in the Rectory? said the interviewer. Yes, well, her daughter and her son-in-law had persuaded her it had been some sort of hallucination, the consequence of being overtired. Not that she had ever really believed that. The night had been quiet and so had the next day until nine in the evening, when they were all this time in the morning room and they heard a car drive up to the front door. They had all heard it, wheels crunching on the gravel, the sound of the engine, the brakes going on. Then had followed the closing of the doors upstairs and the footsteps, the opening and closing of the front door.

  Yes, they had been very frightened, or she and her daughter had. Her son-in-law had made a thorough search of the whole house but found nothing, seen or heard no one. At ten-thirty they had all gone into the hall and listened outside the drawing-room door and she and her daughter had heard voices from inside the room, women’s voices. Stephen had wanted to go in, but they had stopped him, they had been so frightened.

 
Now the interesting thing was that there had been something in the Sunday Express account about the Rectory being haunted by the ghosts of two women. The story quoted someone it described as a ‘local antiquarian’, a man named Joseph Lamb, whom I had heard of but never met. Lamb told the Express there was an old tradition that the ghosts were of a mother and daughter and that the mother had killed the daughter in the drawing room.

  ‘I never heard any of that before,’ I said to Gordon Scott, ‘and I’m sure Kate Cobworth hadn’t. Who is this Joseph Lamb?’

  ‘He’s a nice chap,’ said Gordon. ‘And he’s supposed to know more of local history than anyone else around. I’ll ask him over and you can come and meet him if you like.’

  Joseph Lamb lives in a rather fine Jacobean house in a hamlet – you could hardly call it a village – about a mile to the north of Shawley. I had often admired it without knowing who lived there. The Scotts asked him and his wife to dinner shortly after Mrs Grainger’s appearance on television, and after dinner we got him on to the subject of the hauntings. Lamb wasn’t at all unwilling to enlighten us. He’s a man of about sixty and he said he first heard the story of the two women from his nurse when he was a little boy. Not a very suitable subject with which to regale a seven-year-old, he said.

  ‘These two are supposed to have lived at the Rectory at one time,’ he said. ‘The story is that the mother had a lover or a man friend or whatever, and the daughter took him away from her. When the daughter confessed it, the mother killed her in a jealous rage.’

  It was Eleanor who objected to this. ‘But surely if they lived in the Rectory they must have been the wife and daughter of a rector. I don’t really see how in those circumstances the mother could have had a lover or the daughter could steal him away.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t much sound like what we’ve come to think of as the domestic life of the English country parson, does it?’ said Lamb. ‘And the strange thing is, although my nanny used to swear by the story and I heard it later from someone who worked at the Rectory, I haven’t been able to find any trace of these women in the Rectory’s history. It’s not hard to research, you see, because only the rectors of Shawley had ever lived there until the Loys rented it, and the rectors’ names are all up on that plaque in the church from 1380 onwards. There was another house on the site before this present one, of course, and parts of the older building are incorporated in the newer.

  ‘My nanny used to say that the elder lady hadn’t got a husband, he had presumably died. She was supposed to be forty years old and the girl nineteen. Well, I tracked back through the families of the various rectors and I found a good many cases where the rectors had predeceased their wives. But none of them fitted my nanny’s story. They were either too old – one was much too young – or their daughters were too old or they had no daughters.’

  ‘It’s a pity Mrs Grainger didn’t tell us what kind of clothes her ghosts were wearing,’ said Patsy with sarcasm. ‘You could have pinpointed the date then, couldn’t you?’

  ‘You mean that if the lady had had a steeple hat on she’d be medieval or around 1850 if she was wearing a crinoline?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Patsy.

  At this point Gordon repeated his wish to spend an evening in the Rectory. ‘I think I’ll write to the Master of Lazarus and ask permission,’ he said.

  Very soon after we heard that the Rectory was to be sold. Noticeboards appeared by the front gate and at the corner where the glebe abutted Shawley Lane, announcing that the house would go up for auction on October 30th. Patsy, who always seems to know everything, told us that a reserve price of £60,000 had been put on it.

  ‘Not as much as I’d have expected,’ she said. ‘It must be the ghosts keeping the price down.’

  ‘Whoever buys it will have to spend another ten thousand on it,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘And central heating will be a priority.’

  Whatever was keeping the price down – ghosts, cold, or dry rot – there were plenty of people anxious to view the house and land with, I supposed, an idea of buying it. I could hardly be at work in my garden or out with Liam without a car stopping and the driver asking me the way to the Rectory. Gordon and Patsy got quite irritated about what they described as ‘crowds milling about’ in the lane and trippers everywhere, waving orders to view.

  The estate agents handling the sale were a firm called Curlew, Pond and Co. Gordon didn’t bother with the Master of Lazarus but managed to get the key from Graham Curlew, whom he knew quite well, and permission to spend an evening in the Rectory. Curlew didn’t like the idea of anyone staying the night, but Gordon didn’t want to do that anyway; no one had ever heard or seen anything after ten-thirty. He asked me if I’d go with him. Patsy wouldn’t – she thought it was all too adolescent and stupid.

  ‘Of course I will,’ I said. ‘As long as you’ll agree to our taking some sort of heating arrangement with us and brandy in case of need.’

  By then it was the beginning of October and the evenings were turning cool. The day on which we decided to have our vigil happened also to be the one on which Stephen Galton and his wife moved out of Charlie Lawrence’s cottage and left Shawley for good. According to the Shawley Post, he had got a living in Manchester. Mrs Grainger had gone back to her own home in London, from where she had written an article about the Rectory for Psychic News.

  Patsy shrieked with laughter to see the two of us setting forth with our oil stove, a dozen candles, two torches and half a bottle of Courvoisier. She did well to laugh, her amusement wasn’t misplaced. We crossed the lane and opened the Rectory gate and went up the gravel drive on which those spirit wheels had so often been heard to crunch. It was seven o’clock in the evening and still light. The day had been fine and the sky was red with the aftermath of a spectacular sunset.

  I unlocked the front door and in we went.

  The first thing I did was put a match to one of the candles, because it wasn’t at all light inside. We walked down the passage to the kitchens, I carrying the candle and Gordon shining one of the torches across the walls. The place was a mess. I suppose it hadn’t had anything done to it, not even a cleaning, since the Loys moved out. It smelled damp and there was even fungus growing in patches on the kitchen walls. And it was extremely cold. There was a kind of deathly chill in the air, far more of a chill than one would have expected on a warm day in October. That kitchen had the feel you get when you open the door of a refrigerator that hasn’t been kept too clean and is in need of defrosting.

  We put our stuff down on a kitchen table someone had left behind and made our way up the back stairs. All the bedroom doors were open and we closed them. The upstairs had a neglected, dreary feel but it was less cold. We went down the main staircase, a rather fine curving affair with elegant banisters and carved newel posts, and entered the drawing room. It was empty, palely lit by the evening light from two windows. On the mantelpiece was a glass jar with greenish water in it, a half-burnt candle in a saucer and a screwed-up paper table napkin. We had decided not to remain in this room but to open the door and look in at ten-thirty; so accordingly we returned to the kitchen, fetched out candles and torches and brandy, and settled down in the morning room, which was at the front of the house, on the other side of the front door.

  Curlew had told Gordon there were a couple of deckchairs in this room. We found them resting against the wall and we put them up. We lit our oil stove and a second candle, and we set one candle on the windowsill and one on the floor between us. It was still and silent and cold. The dark closed in fairly rapidly, the red fading from the sky, which became a deep blue, then indigo.

  We sat and talked. It was about the haunting that we talked, collating the various pieces of evidence, assessing the times this or that was supposed to happen and making sure we both knew the sequence in which things happened. We were both wearing watches and I remember that we constantly checked the time. At half-past eight we again opened the drawing-room door and looked inside. The
moon had come up and was shining through the windows as it had shone for Mrs Grainger.

  Gordon went upstairs with a torch and checked that all the doors remained closed and then we both looked into the other large downstairs room, the dining room, I suppose. Here a fan-light in one of the windows was open. That accounted for some of the feeling of cold and damp, Gordon said. The window must have been opened by some prospective buyer, viewing the place. We closed it and went back into the morning room to wait.

  The silence was absolute. We didn’t talk any more. We waited, watching the candles and the glow of the stove, which had taken some of the chill from the air. Outside it was pitch dark. The hands of our watches slowly approached nine.

  At three minutes to nine we heard the noise.

  Not wheels or doors closing or a tread on the stairs but a faint, dainty, pattering sound. It was very faint, it was very distant, it was on the ground floor. It was as if made by something less than human, lighter than that, tiptoeing. I had never thought about this moment beyond telling myself that if anything did happen, if there was a manifestation, it would be enormously interesting. It had never occurred to me even once that I should be so dreadfully, so hideously, afraid.

  I didn’t look at Gordon, I couldn’t. I couldn’t move either. The pattering feet were less faint now, were coming closer. I felt myself go white, the blood all drawn in from the surface of my skin, as I was gripped by that awful primitive terror that has nothing to do with reason or with knowing what you believe in and what you don’t.

  Gordon got to his feet and stood there looking at the door. And then I couldn’t stand it any more. I jumped up and threw open the door, holding the candle aloft – and looked into a pair of brilliant golden-green eyes, staring steadily back at me about a foot from the ground.

  ‘My God,’ said Gordon. ‘My God, it’s Lawrence’s cat. It must have got in through the window.’