by Sally Bayley
‘Polygonum baldschuanicum. Very quick-growing, I think, isn’t it? Very useful really if one wants to hide any tumbledown building or anything ugly of that kind,’ says Clotilde.
‘Ah, yes, but it’s a menace if you want to grow anything else alongside it. Before you can say Jack Robinson your polygonum cover everything.’ Clotilde Bradbury-Scott takes a long look at this old woman. Clearly, she knows her plants. Before long she will be volunteering her services in the garden; she must be gone before that happens.
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People prefer to cover up ghosts, but no matter what you do, ghosts will always go wandering. I met with my first real ghost when I was ten. Her name was Jane Eyre and I found her sitting on the library shelves wearing a tatty brown dress. By then I had run out of Agatha Christie and I was looking for something else. I needed a new friend.
‘Adult Fiction,’ the librarian said. ‘Jane Eyre is Adult Fiction. Does your mum know you’re here?’
‘Yes, she knows. She sent me here!’
‘Mmm. Well …’ The librarian lifted her glasses and peered down her long, thin nose.
‘She says I can’t keep reading all that murder mystery rubbish. It’s high time I took on the classics! Agatha Christie isn’t literature and no one is going to take me seriously unless I start reading something more sophisticated.’
‘Mmm. Precocious … I see. Well, she’s in Adult Fiction. Over there. Now go quietly. You’re really too young to be in there messing about.’
So I crossed the wide, squeaky floor and there, on the other side of that broad wooden stretch I found her in an old brown dress: Jane Eyre, dusty and faded around the edges. Jane Eyre, who is looking for Verity.
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You won’t believe me, but one evening while I was reading something floated down from the glass panels above my head and landed on my page. Whoosh! I turned and there she was. I knew it was her immediately. Who else could it be?
I could see her from the corner of my eye, a small pale face staring right at me. She was wearing the same brown dress and a small velvet scarf around her head. Red velvet was blocking my view of the page; red velvet was speaking; red velvet was speaking the words I was reading:
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
I heard the words enter my brain, and they felt strange. I’d never heard words like this before. Nobody I knew uses words like this. Nobody says drapery when they mean curtains. Drapery is something you hang over something in order to disguise it. Drapery hides things – bodies and knives. Drapery is Jane Eyre behind the red curtains hiding from John Reed (her nasty cousin), who would like to kill her, because John Reed is not a good reader. He’s jealous of curious Jane, his clever cousin. John Reed has no curiosity. He can’t think of anything but his own nasty self! ‘No imagination,’ Mum says. ‘Too caught up in himself. It’ll end badly!’
Jane Eyre is a big reader. She knows that when you read, time just passes. I read and read and time passed, but when I looked up from my book, the strange little person was still there. I wondered where she’d come from. Her face said nothing at all. Her body was thin and her face pale and her hair fell over her face.
‘Slides,’ said Mum. ‘What she needs is some nice tortoiseshell slides. Clip it back, for goodness’ sake, Maze. She looks like a wild thing running about with all that hair blowing about. For goodness’ sake, get it off her face!’
I hated my slides. They pulled my hair so tight I got a headache. But I couldn’t see slides anywhere on Jane Eyre’s forehead, only tiny, furrowed lines. Jane Eyre was too focused on reading to think about her hair.
‘You’re a very serious person, Jane Eyre,’ I said out loud. ‘Maze says it’s good to keep a sense of fun. You mustn’t be too serious before your time. I don’t know how old you are, but you can’t be much older than me, and I’m eleven at the end of the summer as a matter of fact. And Maze says you can’t afford to be too serious too soon. If you’re too serious then no one will want you around. For one thing, you won’t get invited to any parties and no one will want to dance with you at the school fête and you’ll never ever be chosen as the May Queen or get a part in the school play. You’re not tall enough for that. I wasn’t chosen because I’m not as tall as Melissa Marshall and I’m not as pretty as Rachel Green, but I’ve got a good speaking voice, so Miss Bellamy chose me as the school narrator, and I don’t mind that. What about you, Jane Eyre, what will you be?’
But the little person with the pale face just blinked and turned back to her book.
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She stayed for hours. I can’t tell how many. Sometimes I looked up and I saw her mouth moving. I heard her quiet whispers. But she ignored me. She didn’t want to talk. She just kept on reading. (I think I hurt her feelings about the play, but truthfully, she would never get a part.) Jane Eyre, I decided, was a serious sort of person, and serious people never quite relax.
‘Clever people can be very tiresome,’ Maze says. ‘Cousin Norman was an intellectual and he was very taxing. They just can’t switch off. Too much going on upstairs … Norman could never relax.’
But after a while I did. I relaxed right into my book and soon I forgot she was there. Hours passed. Before long it was dark and Maze was coming to bed.
And that is when things began to change. That night there were clear panes of glass running between everyone else and me and I was suddenly quite separate, stuck on a solitary rock, far out at sea.
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By the time I’d finished reading Jane Eyre I knew that you can find missing people inside books. Jane Eyre, who reads a lot of books, calls these natural sympathies. Sympathies are relatives you never knew you had, the ones you always wanted. Sympathies are family ghosts and fairies, and sympathies keep you up at night.
I decided that my sympathies were Jane Eyre and Miss Marple, and once upon a time, a long time before I was born, they had been walking together through an English village looking for Verity.
‘Verity! Verity! Verity!’
But Verity disappeared years ago! Because someone loved her too much.
You can kill people you love, you know. In mysteries, this happens all the time. Miss Marple knows this, and Jane Eyre too, because like Miss Marple, Jane Eyre sees and hears everything; and like Miss Marple, she is genteel.
‘She looks like a lady,’ says Bessie Lee when she finds Jane all grown up. Bessie, who used to help her wash and dress, but not kindly; Bessie, who was too afraid of Aunt Reed to be kind.
‘Just like a lady now, Miss Jane, very proper. Look at you!’
Bessie means that Jane Eyre is small and quiet and demure, so people don’t see her coming round the corner, or across the village green with a basket in her hand. They don’t see her coming in through the back door and climbing up the stairs. Jane Eyre is quiet as a mouse. But she wanders everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere. And what she sees, she doesn’t tell a soul.
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‘Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere, And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green.’
That’s Mum’s favourite part of Shakespeare; she says it out loud sometimes. When I first heard those lines I thought she was speaking about Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, the master of Thornfield Hall; Mr Rochester, the man Jane loves and leaves in the lurch.
But Mum said it was Shakespeare. ‘Only Shakespeare can write lines like that.’
Mum loves her Shakespeare. I think she likes Jane Eyre too, but she knows some bits of Shakespeare off by heart. She had to learn them at school. If she got them wrong the teacher, who
was very strict, rapped her on the knuckles with a ruler. Mum says school back then wasn’t exactly like Lowood School where Jane is sent by horrid Aunt Reed, but something not far off.
Now I think of it, I’m not sure Mum would like Jane Eyre. She has a nose for secrets. Jane Eyre is curious; she listens in. Mum would say she’s a nosey parker, but Jane Eyre knows that plenty of things go on behind closed doors if you listen carefully. Like Mr Rochester’s dog, Pilot, she can sniff out the sinister and strange. Beware all those who house Jane Eyre!
Mrs Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trapdoor. I, by dint of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third story – narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.
‘Mrs Fairfax!’ I called out – for now I heard her descending the great stairs. ‘Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?’
(Jane Eyre)
When you read a book like Jane Eyre, you start to see things, small fragments of this and that that shoot across your eyes like stars. Tiny pictures appear in between the pages as you turn them. You begin to see and hear things: a woman’s smile, a woman’s laugh, a woman with her hands held high, a woman speaking gobbledygook. And then suddenly, without warning, you are in Lancing on Sea a long time ago and you don’t know how you got there. Some strange spirit has carried you away. Jane Eyre! Jane Eyre! Whither wander you?
5
Di
I remember Di. She was the woman who arrived one night when I was five. Di was the woman who came from behind the dark curtains and sat in spirals of smoke. Di was the woman with a baby who cried in the night. Di was the woman with the long, snaky smile. Di was the woman who spoke gobbledygook. Di was the woman in my dreams.
One day, Mum took me upstairs to say hello to Di, the woman with black bullet eyes.
‘She’s your aunt, darling, your Aunt Diane. She’s come to live with us. She’s had a baby. We’re going to look after her. Now say hello nicely.’
What was an aunt, I wondered. I had never heard of an aunt before. What did aunts come from?
‘From Lancing on Sea,’ Mum said. ‘From Lancing on Sea.’
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A few days later, my brother Peter and I found a body in the front room. We came home from school and there was a man lying on the floor. He was thin with a black moustache and black hair and his mouth hung wide open. My brother opened the door and tripped over him.
‘He’s dead! He’s dead! Peter, Peter, it’s a dead body! We’ve found a dead body! Call the police!’
The dead man looked like a large black ant. I felt sorry for him. We could easily squash him and no one would ever know. Here was a poor dead ant, stuck to our hard floor. A giant spider or fly must have come from behind the curtains and strangled him.
Mummy came in and told us off for making such a fuss. The man on the floor was a friend of Aunt Di. Think of him as your uncle, she said. Uncle David. Uncle David is sleeping now, so shhhhh! Now close the door quietly behind you! There’s a baby upstairs!
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When you start a murder investigation you have to have clear plans of the place where the murder happened. Detectives call this the ‘crime scene’. If the crime scene is in a house they draw up careful room plans. Everything that might have happened has to be kept inside closed lines. Nothing must straggle over the edges. Detectives don’t like mess.
But a detective would have found our house difficult to plan. In fact, Inspector Craddock would have hated our house. (Miss Marple thinks Inspector Craddock is hopeless, but she’s too polite to say so.) Still, the inspector has a point: you can’t be a good detective among muddle and mess.
‘Where is my nice pair of scissors?’ Mum yelled down the hallway. ‘Which of you little swines has got my sewing scissors? Can’t I leave anything out without you getting your filthy hands on it!’
Fortunately, Miss Marple has an excellent memory so she doesn’t need to draw up plans. She can draw her own lines around things. Miss Marple can remember what lamp was on when the gun went off. She can recall which door was open and which was closed. She can remember exactly who was there and who wasn’t, precisely how the curtains sat on the carpet, who sneezed just before the light went out.
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Everything I know comes from reading. Everything I’ve found out comes because of Miss Marple and then Jane Eyre.
After I found Jane Eyre nothing was the same again. She was always there, always looking and hearing the things no one else dared. Let me show you what I mean.
One night, in her small room at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre hears a strange gurgling sound coming from the room above her. She stirs and opens her eyes, but she can’t see anything in front of her except smoke! Smoke is filling the hallway outside her room, smoke is pushing its way beneath her door, smoke is filling up her lungs.
Jane leaps out of bed and races down the hall; she flies towards Mr Rochester’s room and shouts through the door. ‘Master, Master, wake up! Wake up! Your room is on fire!’
Lucky for Mr Rochester, Jane is a quick thinker. Quick as a flash, says Maze, fast on her feet, that one. Doesn’t miss a trick. And Jane is practical, too. She drags Mr Rochester out of bed and takes him to safety, to the hallway (the gallery, the Victorians call it, where pictures of dead ancestors hang) outside her room. Mr Rochester knows that, without Jane, he would be dead.
‘Dead as a dormouse,’ Maze says about the brown furry thing the cat has brought in. Mr Rochester might not be dead as a dormouse exactly, but he’d be dead as something without Jane. That night he takes her into his confidence forever; that night Jane becomes his fairy-friend.
The next morning Jane starts asking some serious questions on behalf of her new friend.
‘I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one,’ she announces to Mr Rochester’s servant Grace Poole the following morning. ‘It can’t have been Pilot, because Pilot can’t laugh.’ Pilot is a dog.
Grace lifts her needle, takes a new ball of thread, waxes it, pokes the end through and carries on sewing. Her face doesn’t flinch, not even a bit. Jane is furious. Last night Mr Rochester told her that the strange laugh was Grace Poole. Grace Poole must have tried to burn Mr Rochester in bed. Jane is sure of it! She saw his bed: the curtains around it were burnt to a cinder. Mr Rochester is lucky to be alive! Grace Poole is a monster! She should be locked up!
‘I am certain I heard a laugh.’
‘Have you told Master that you heard a laugh?’ asks Grace quietly. ‘You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the gallery?’
‘On the contrary,’ says Jane Eyre, who is beginning to get huffy. ‘I bolted my door!’
‘And you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night?’
‘I have often omitted to fasten my door. I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be dreaded at Thornfield Hall?’
‘I always think it is best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence.’
Jane looks at the placid face of the woman in front of her. A Quaker woman couldn’t produce more serenity than this woman with her needle. Why has she not been taken into police custody for her criminal behaviour? Mr Rochester was nearly burned alive in his bed last night by this fiend with her uncanny laugh!
Jane pauses for a moment. Grace is hiding something. It was a woman’s laugh she heard, she is certain, the laugh of an angry witch. A woman burying bones at nightfall.
6
Behind Closed Doors
Some houses have no chance in hell of becoming homes. Thornfield Hall is one of these. It is home neit
her to Jane Eyre nor Mr Rochester; both come and go from it like fairies.
‘In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!’ says Jane Eyre to the housekeeper soon after she arrives.
‘Why Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.’
In our house, rooms were never ready. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to dust and pull back the curtains, to hoover up the filth or scrub down the surfaces. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to let in the light.
Mr Robinson was the only person we could ever imagine visiting. Mr Robinson who lived on the third floor, right at the top, with his wife, Mrs Robinson, who we never saw. Mr Robinson was the only person who would poke his head through our door if we left it open; Mr Robinson suddenly standing in our front room with boxes of farm eggs in his arms; Mr Robinson suddenly at the window with his long scraggy dark hair and cracked-tooth smile.
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But anyone can barge into your dreams.
One night, Jane sees a woman in her room, a woman with long dark hair. Birds circle around her head; wings cover her lips and eyes, her nose and mouth, her face.
Suddenly Jane sees a garish red face and startling black eyes bearing down on her. A dark cavern opens up, and at the back of the cavern is a red serpent lifting its head and hissing. The woman begins to scream. She drops to the floor and begins to writhe. She writhes and she writhes and then she opens her mouth wide.
Jet-black rocks tumble from her mouth. Black rocks spill across the room and hit Jane on the face. Before long there is nothing but the cold dark and black sea, the sound of waves against her ear.