by Babs Horton
There’s a beautiful full moon tonight…
The first full moon since old Benjamin Tregantle had died.
Bloody hell!
With a jolt he recalled old Benjamin’s strange words to him, the very last time they had been together. Benjamin had been away for a few weeks and just got back and they’d been down on the beach collecting driftwood.
“When I’m dead and gone, Arch,” he’d said, “I want you to do something for me, boy.”
“Don’t talk about dying, Benjamin,” Archie had replied.
“Death’s nothing to be afraid of, Archie…You been dead before, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“Course you have. You’re alive now and before you were born you must have been dead, stands to reason. And that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“But I can’t remember before I was born.”
“You’d remember, though, if it were bad, wouldn’t you, you silly young bugger!”
That was the thing Archie had loved about Benjamin, he made you think about things in a different way. He wasn’t like the other grown-ups. Most of them had their minds made up about what they believed but not Benjamin.
“When the first full moon comes after I’m gone, take yourself down to the wobbly chapel, Arch, you might be lucky, find yourself a proper mystery to solve there, a real piece of detective work.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Most of us don’t understand what’s really important but you’ve a good head on you, Archie Grimble. You’re a scholar and a gentleman, the type of boy who could find out things like a proper detective if you put your mind to it and stopped being so afraid of every bloody thing.”
“But no one’s allowed to go in the wobbly chapel, it isn’t safe, and anyhow, it’s locked.”
“There are no secrets locked away in this world that the curious can’t find a key to open up.”
He listened to the sound of the shutters being closed in his mammy’s room, the soft rustle and the breathless puffing as she pulled on her voluminous winceyette nightdress.
He heard the scrape of her rough heels on starched sheets as she climbed into bed, the slither of the threadbare eiderdown as she pulled it up over her enormous bosom. The sound of her false teeth clinking, sinking like a holed boat down to the bottom of the glass that stood on the bedside table. Once she’d had beautiful teeth but the porker had knocked them out over the years.
Mammy settling down in the big, high bed where they’d once slept together on winter nights. That was in the good old days when the hairy porker had been away sewing mail-bags up London way.
He imagined Mammy dosing her eyes. Her red raw hands clasped tightly together. Lisping prayers.
Prayers for Archie’s gammy leg and his wonky eye.
Prayers that his father, Walter the Pig, wouldn’t come back from the Pilchard Inn dead drunk again tonight and start his antics.
Then the hushed secret prayers for her long-dead sister whose name was never mentioned out loud.
Her name was just a lisp of a name, like wind blowing through the long grass of the sand dunes.
Lissia.
Archie opened the bedroom door and stepped out on to the landing. Through the arched window that faced out to sea he could see the full moon. A huge moon bursting at the seams, hovering in the peat-black sky.
It was so beautiful it made the tears prick again.
There was no point in wishing, though. Wishing was daft; it was kids’ stuff.
Oh God, there was no way that he could keep his promise to Benjamin and go down to the wobbly chapel in the pitch dark. It was too terrifying.
There were ghosts that roamed the Skallies at night Loads of them. Donald Kelly had seen one down by the Pilchard Inn. It was naked and it had no head and chains around its ankles.
There was a Spanish pirate too with one eye and hooks where his hands should have been.
But the worst one of all was the Killivray ghost A great big black fellow who came wandering down through the grounds of Killivray House, moaning and sobbing and wringing his hands.
It made Archie feel sick with fright to even think about it.
He’d promised Benjamin, though.
Why had he when there wasn’t a hope in hell of him keeping a promise like that?
And why had Benjamin asked him? He should have asked one of the Kelly boys, they were all daredevils. They weren’t afraid of anything or anyone, except mad Gwennie.
Everyone knew Archie Grimble was a coward. He was famous for it.
Archie Grimble is a bloody big bobby.
Archie Grimble wears nappies and suckson a titty bottle.
He’d promised, though, with his hand on his heart.
“You’ll find a bunch of keys in the porch of my house, on the third hook along from the door; take them and keep them safe. After I’m gone they’ll belong to you. And anything they open, Arch, will be yours.”
The wobbly chapel had been closed up for years because it was dangerous, about to tumble into the sea at any moment. And why had Benjamin got the keys to the chapel? He’d had no time for churches and stuff like that.
It was no good. He couldn’t do it.
But a promise was a promise. You must honour the wishes of the dead.
Archie waited until it was quiet in Mammy’s room. When he was sure that she was asleep he sat down on the side of his bed and put on an extra jersey. It was cold enough inside the house tonight but out in the Skallies it would be perishing.
He pulled a pair of old, darned fisherman’s socks over his boots and up over his calliper so as not to make too much noise.
He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them on his jersey and put them back on. Then he took the tiny silver capsule that contained the battered saint from beneath his mattress and pushed it down into the pocket of his shorts. For good luck.
Finally he made his way awkwardly down the stairs and let himself quietly out of the front door and into the wild windy night.
Up in the nursery in Killivray House Romilly Greswode lay in bed, ears pricked for any noises.
Downstairs in the drawing room a decanter clinked. Crystal on crystal. Whisky on ice. Muffled voices.
A stray dog barked nervously over in the disused stables.
Romilly sniffed the air warily, just the usual nursery smells: mothballs and starch; cold cocoa; goose fat and liniment to ward off chills.
There was just a faint whiff of something different tonight though.
Midnight in Paris.
Mama’s perfume still lingering after a hurried goodnight kiss. Perfume and held-back tears.
More ice clinking downstairs. More whisky.
Papa has been home for two whole nights and he is angry again.
Papa is always angry.
Tomorrow Mama is going away again for the sake of her nerves. And a new governess is coming.
Boo!
Miss Naylor, the old governess, has left Hooray!
Miss Naylor was a bossy britches and smelled of cold cream and damp woollen vests. Once Nanny Bea whispered to Miss Naylor that Mama was a blousy trollop.
Romilly rolled the words around on her tongue.
Trollop. Trollop. Trollop.
Blousy. Blousy. Blousy. .
Mama is a blousy trollop.
Nanny Bea smells of cough drops and dying roses. She wears a hairnet at night and has varicose veins that look like swollen rivers beneath her skin.
Nanny Bea was Papa’s Nanny when he was a little boy and she does not like Mama although she pretends to.
Romilly sniffed again and then drew in her breath sharply.
There it was, the peculiar smell growing stronger, a strong musty whiff of a smell. The smell she dreaded most of all.
The smell of tigers on the prowl.
Nanny Bea said that on a damp day the house still stinks of tiger’s piss that no amount of scrubbing can remove.
Romilly shivered.
Once, when Great Grandpa Greswod
e was alive, Killivray House had been full of wild animals that he had brought back from foreign places.
There were servants with black faces at Killivray then and there were parrots in the drawing room and peacocks on the lawn. Monkeys with red fez hats climbed the shelves in the library and fat snakes coiled in wicker laundry baskets frightened the scullery maids.
And once a baby elephant ran amok, crashing through the rhododendrons and flattening the pergola.
Amok is one of Romilly’s favourite words. She would like to run amok.
She would like to turn cartwheels down the smooth striped lawns, swing through the branches of the horse chestnut trees, kick cow pats and roll over and over in the mud at the end of the far field.
She would like to take off her clothes and run into the cool sea on a hot summer’s day.
All of Great Grandpa Greswode’s animals were dead now; some of them had been stuffed and given awful eyes made of glass.
But sometimes in the night, the animals come alive again and stalk the corridors of Killivray House.
Mama once said they should have had Great Grandpa Greswode stuffed and mounted in the study.
Romilly is glad that they hadn’t. If they had then he may have walked at night too, like the animals did. Great Grandpa Greswode is buried in the overgrown graveyard beneath a giant stone angel with feathered wings. She was put there to keep a lid on him, making sure that he can’t get out.
Charles Lewis Lloyd Greswode.
Romilly stiffened.
From across the room the black and white rocking horse eyed Romilly fearfully, the whites of his eyes bright in the moonlit room.
He could smell tigers a mile off. They spooked him.
The one-eared teddy bear perched oh the window seat stared ahead unfazed.
The tiny light inside the dolls’ house illuminated the lattice window panes.
All was safe inside there.
Romilly wished that she could magic herself so tiny that she could go in through the little front door, climb the stairs, and get beneath the pretty pink gingham counterpane in the spare bedroom.
Inside the house the doll people would be sleeping soundly. The mother and father dolls were cuddled up snugly beneath their pink and blue patchwork quilt.
In the nursery two identical girl children slept in single beds. Sisters. A black and white collie dog was curled up in a basket in the corner of the room.
Up in the attic the two maids were asleep, lying top to tail, their wooden feet and mob caps peeping out from beneath the grey blankets.
The rocking horse creaked fearfully.
The dying embers of the nursery fire glowed behind the fireguard and a stray spark drifted away up the chimney.
The tigers were on the move now. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing to attention and her heart thumped noisily against her flannelette nightgown.
She heard them climbing up the steps from the dark, cobwebby cellars, then the jingle of ladles and spoons as they squeezed through the kitchen…Now the pad of their velvet paws on the worn hallway carpet.
Moving past the drawing room where tempers are frayed.
Where Papa is shouting at Mama.
“The child needs to be here with her mother.”
“She needs to go to school and have friends of her own age.” Mama now, pleading.
“School! Don’t talk to me of school! No child of mine will ever set foot in a damned school.”
“I’ve written to the headmistress of Nanskelly School, an excellent gills’ school. She could go each day in the car.”
“You had no business to make plans for her without consulting me. She will never ever go to school, so get that into your thick head. I will not have her mixing with God knows who and being corrupted.”
“It’s a school, for goodness sake, not a house of correction.”
“She’s doing perfectly well here and here she stays. She has everything mat a child needs.”
“She needs more freedom, more company, more time to be a child. I need more freedom too. We can’t be kept shut up here for ever…”
“Oh, my sweet darling, I think you can.”
“You can’t know what it’s like for us cooped up in this mausoleum of a house. You’re never here.”
“I have business to attend to as well you know.”
“And we all know what sort of business that is!”
“I won’t listen to another word of your ranting. I have already engaged another governess. She will arrive tomorrow. I have arranged for a car to fetch her from the station.”
“I sometimes think that these governesses of yours are really here to keep an eye on me rather than Ronully.”
“Nanny Bea does a good enough job on that score.”
“One day, I swear to God that I’ll leave here.”
“And if you do you know the consequences. You will lose the child and never see her again and you will be, amongst other things, penniless.”
Romilly pulled the bedclothes up over her head and covered her ears with her hands.
The tigers were getting nearer now. They always came when people got angry.
Closer and closer they came. Eyes bright with hunger. Whiskers twitching. Coming stealthily up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs.
They were outside the nursery door now. Their agitated breath rasping, breath thick with the smell of stale blood.
If they pushed against the door it Would open with a soft click. She imagined their sharp claws, ripping through the blankets. The feel of their huge teeth as they sank into her, goose-pimpled skin. The spurt of red blood splattering the white, starched sheets.
She held her breath until the blood pumped noisily inside her ears and her lungs felt like balloons that might pop at any moment.
The tigers were moving away now.
Restless. Hungry.
Pawing at Nanny Bea’s door in the room next to the nursery.
Nanny Bea was too old and tough to eat.
Silence again.
In Nanny Bea’s room milk bubbled over onto the hotplate ring and hissed. She heard Nanny Bea shuffling across the room in her tartan slippers, cursing softly so as not to wake Romilly.
Romilly heard the cap of the bottle removed and the sound of liquid pouring. Nanny Bea’s nightcap. A full mug of brandy laced with hot milk.
Away in Rhoskilly village the church clock chimed mournfully.
She heard the dick of the tiger claws on the bare boards in the attic rooms above her head.
Prowling. Growling. Pacing.
Downstairs a glass is smashed.
Footsteps cross the hallway. The front door is opened and wind rushes into the house and rattles the loose antlers of the stag’s head that hangs on the wall.
The front door bangs shut. Angry heels grinding into the gravel. A car door opens and slams. Roars away down the drive.
She can hear the low rumble of the tigers’ empty bellies echoing through the house.
The grinding of gears as the car moves on.
Then silence.
Out on the landing the stuffed brown bear at the top of the stairs yawns and closes its glazed eyes. She heard the click of his yellow teeth as they knocked together.
Down in the smoky drawing room Mama winds up the gramophone. Now that Papa has gone the elephant’s foot pouffe begins to tap out a tune:
To Bombay a travelling circus came,
They brought an intelligent elephant
And Nelly was her name.
One dark night she slipped her iron chain
And off she ran to Hindustan
And was never seen again!
Perhaps one dark night she and Mama will slip their iron chains, run away to Hindustan and never be seen again.
She lay listening to the moaning of the wind in the chimneys, the far-off crash of the sea on the rocks and the wildcats howling over in the filthy place they called the Skallies. Papa said the Skallies was a blot on the landscape
and if he had dynamite he’d like to blow it to Kingdom Come. It was a place not fit for man or beast It was dirty and dangerous and full of mad people who didn’t wash behind their ears and didn’t know their place.
Romilly and Mama had never been allowed anywhere near there.
She dosed her eyes, heard the soft purring of the tigers, sleeping now like giant pussycats curled up among the junk in the attics. Resting their enormous heads on piles of mouldy theatre programmes, old diaries and journals with pages the colour of saffron cakes.
Downstairs the music continued and Mama laughed loudly then sang along:
The head of the herd was calling far far away;
They met one night in the silverlight
On the road to Mandalay…
In the tiny bar of the Pilchard Inn Nan Abelson threw a log on to the fire and watched as a flurry of sparks escaped up the chimney.
She pulled her old grey cardigan doser around her shoulders and stood looking into the heart of the fire.
The flames danced wildly and the embers glowed with a fierce intensity.
She thought of how she’d loved to sit and stare into the fire for hours when she was a child. She used to watch the pictures in the embers, to breathe in the smells of the different woods: olive and pine; apple and oak.
For a moment she allowed a chink of long-buried memory to bubble to the surface.
She pictured the little house in Bizier…herself as a child carrying armfuls of kindling along the path from the woodshed. Mama standing at the stove in the kitchen, turning to look at her and smiling that sweet lopsided smile. The sound of Papa humming cheerfully in his workshop for the last time.
She closed her eyes, willed herself to stop the memory. It did no good resurrecting the past. The past was done and dusted. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Only the pain remained.
She stirred herself, tried to shrug off the feeling of uneasiness that was growing in the pit of her stomach.
“Another pint of your best when you’re ready, Nan. A man could die of thirst while you’re staring into that fire.”
Walter Grimble’s voice dragged her back from her unsettling thoughts. She went back behind the bar and expertly pulled a pint without looking once at Walter Grimble. She knew, though, that his bloodshot eyes were on her, looking her up and down as though she were a piece of tripe on the butcher’s block.