Ghoul Brittania

by Andrew Martin

  I turned to page fifteen, which was stapled to the others. There was a picture of a ‘packet’ of Little Jack’s, only it wasn’t a packet, but a blue tin about an inch and a half square and a quarter inch high. Little Jack’s really must have been little. On the lid was a detailed painting of a blonde boy with curly hair; his tongue was sticking out, and on it was a little round sweet like a pill. Underneath (in red) ran the slogan ‘Stick to…Little Jack’s’. The boy had managed to stick his tongue out without looking at all rude. ‘Angelic’ would be the word for him. Another would have been ‘annoying’. But there’d evidently been a lot more to this kid than met the eye.

  Returning the file to the librarian, it struck me that I didn’t believe the Morley factory had been the tallest building in York. It couldn’t have been as high as the main tower of York Minster: two hundred feet. Anyway, next I asked the librarian for books on the paranormal. He showed me to a shelf, and (this being York) it was all the Yorkshire paranormal, local ghosts. ‘Chadwick’ appeared in the index of only one of the titles, which was more of a pamphlet than a book, and called ‘The Psychic Circles of the North, 1910-1950’. ‘Interest in spiritualism began to decline in the early 1920’s,’ I read, ‘but those two indefatigable investigators, Hart and Meadows, were favourably impressed by a number of young mediums operating in the region at the time, most particularly Saul Chadwick, whose Sunday evening sittings in a large house outside Leeds were the talk of the psychical circles.’

  And there was a photograph of the man from those days. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, but even so, you could see he had a ton of black hair. He had a black goatee beard, and held his hand up to the side of his head, as though he had a bad headache but was putting a brave face on it. This was no doubt his ‘seeing beyond the veil’ expression… and yet it appeared that Chadwick was, as the kiddies say today, ‘the real deal’. When I handed the pamphlet back to the librarian (because you weren’t trusted to re-shelve it in the right place yourself), he said, ‘Find what you were looking for?’

  Well, my reading had set a film spooling in my mind: John Morley and his young wife holding séances to contact the dead boy…Darkness and rain falling beyond the window… Chadwick turns up at the door, holding a black umbrella and looking like something in-between an actor and funeral director…But he delivers the goods: he goes into his trance and against all expectation conjures up the brilliant child….On his death bed, Morley calls in Mr Blundy Senior and sets up the trust to look after Chadwick. Why? For the wife, so that she could keep in touch with the boy. I just knew that somehow.

  But there was another reason as well.

  I’ll now come up to date, or at least to Wednesday last. But first I’d better say how the firm of Blundy as I knew it fell apart, and what happened as a result.

  In March 1977, a few months after my experience in The River House, Nelly Drew quit to get married. She and her husband (an absolute tosser from Heslington) would be honeymooning on a safari in Kenya and then running a sub-post office near Clifton Green. Bob Grafton left at about the same time because he couldn’t get on with Marcus Blundy – he found him far too pushy. A few weeks later, Mr Blundy was drunk in the office at nine o’clock in the morning. He put his arm around me, asking ‘How old are you, Geoff?’ ‘Twenty-two, Mr Blundy,’ I said. ‘You’ve got it all before you, love,’ he said, ‘you’ve got it all before you.’ Marcus had to take him home, and his old man was into semi-retirement from then on. I’m sure what he’d seen behind that closed door in The River House had tipped him over the edge, this even though he’d known what he was in for – had done ever since that original phone call. (Although why that had shocked him so much I couldn’t figure out. Despite being a trustee, he must not have had a full understanding of the purpose of In Re Morley until then). I was rather jealous of whatever he’d experienced in that room at The River House; I also thought he should have been able to handle it. Then again, he had certainly taken it seriously, and that was to his credit.

  After he left the office, I had to rely on rumours and gossip for news of him. I heard that he did eventually convert to Catholicism; that he gave up the drink and was back on an even keel when he died, which he managed to do at midnight on the last day of 1999.

  The New Millennium?

  Quite honestly, I preferred the old one.

  I’d left the firm not long after Bob Grafton, and I bought a filling station off Micklegate with my brother Dave. It hit serious trouble late in 2000, and finally closed on August 14th 2002 (four months ago at the time of writing), not that many people had ever noticed it had been open. One thing we could have done without… the Council kept pedestrianising the bloody streets in the area. It was like one of those puzzles in a kid’s comic: ‘Trace a line to show how Mr Bloggs the motorist can get to Geoff and Dave’s filling station’. And if they couldn’t pedestrianise a street near us, then they’d make it one way. I tell you, it’s only a matter of time before York Council brings in streets that are pedestrianised and one way – that’s the ideal they’re working towards. I used to wonder: is it revenge for all those actions I’d brought against them over their wonky paving stones? At about the same time I broke up with my latest girlfriend, Marina. Her name alone meant trouble, of course. She’d been a sort of experiment: I thought I’d try going out with someone I didn’t much like, on the grounds that it couldn’t be worse than all those times I’d hooked up with someone I was genuinely keen on.

  In all this time The River House remained unoccupied. I knew that much but didn’t often think of it, although one winter’s night in the mid-eighties I stopped and stared at five black people carriers turning out of Skeldergate on to Ouse Bridge. A couple of weeks later, I thought I saw the same convoy hogging all the parking spaces on the corner of St Helen’s Square and Blake Street, and I recalled that Little Jack had been educated in Blake Street. That all set me wondering about the second of the properties kept empty by the trust. Blake Street was a good address: eighteenth Century, elegant, discreet, bang in the middle of York and busy on a working day, with civilised kinds of shops on the ground floors of the buildings, but the flats above… Some of them did seem permanently dark, and the place echoed to the bells of the Minster, which was just around the corner. It seemed a good compliment to Skeldergate. I never heard the water falling in Blake Street, but it’s not far from the river, and it’s amazing what trying to control the finances of a collapsing business can distract you from investigating.

  After the business went under the situation changed, and I became attuned to the possibilities. I kept Blake Street in the back of my mind, but my main focus was Skeldergate. I took to drinking in the pubs around Bishophill, only a couple of hundred yards up the hill from there. My favourite of these is the The Sun in Splendour, a very dark little pub oddly enough, and quiet. It does have electronic screens in the public bar, but there’s usually nothing on them except a few strobing lines and the words ‘No Media Detected’ (thank Christ). It’s part of old York, the shadowy place I loved; and I was now beginning to think of The River House as part of that world, and as the last of the good things in my life rather than the first of the bad ones.

  After a couple of Guinnesses and a read of a paperback, I’ll light up a rollie (I have also not given up suede jackets and longish hair) and descend along gloomy Fetter Lane into Skeldergate, where I’ll stand in front of The River House. I’ve not heard the whistling or the water falling again, but I feel there’s a great potential there, and in these moments the idea that anything called a ‘filling station’ caused me so much bother seems incredible.

  And so we come to early evening, Wednesday last.

  I was walking through Rowntrees Park, which lies a little way downstream of Skeldergate. Darkness was falling fast, and the park keeper was striding about ringing a bell like a sort of medieval lunatic. It was closing time in the park, which overlooks the river at about the spot where the Morley’s factory was located. As I made towards the gates, I kept ha
ving the idea of a life-sized but lightweight version the factory being manipulated on the horizon, like a vast black stage flat being experimented with and held at odd angles. I knew from this to go to Skeldergate, and when I got there I also knew to walk down the slip road that ran by the side of The River House. In the seventies, this just led straight down into the water; today, we Council Tax payers have funded signs reading: ‘You are now approaching the water’s edge’, or ‘Warning: This is A River’, and suchlike. To the left of these is a stone ledge separating the front of the River House from the water – a place where boats might once have moored. I stepped onto this.

  The wind flying off the black river made my perch precarious and, as I looked up, the great house seemed to tilt towards me, but its eyes were blind, all the window shutters being closed. ‘Show me,’ I said, and a slight grating noise started up from the second storey, like something unwinding. The closed shutters there moved inwards, as though being sucked into the house, and after trembling at that point for a count of five seconds, they burst open, smashing against the brickwork on either side and swinging half closed again. Breathing hard – both shocked and not shocked – I edged back along to the slip road, thinking: that was the room in which Chadwick had done his stuff. It was the room from which Little Jack had leapt.

  Why?

  I walked fast, a little wobbly, up the steps to Ouse Bridge, and it was a relief to see traffic, and then I saw something better: Nelly Drew coming over the bridge. I stood still and watched her approach. How very clever of you, I thought, watching her, to have remained so beautiful after twenty-five years. Of course, I had seen her around town since our days under Mr Blundy, so I knew it anyway really.

  She smiled when she saw me, coming out with a lovely, ‘Hello stranger’, but as she drew nearer, she stopped smiling, and said, ‘I hear you’ve gone…’

  ‘Now you’ve rather backed yourself into a corner with that one haven’t you?’ I said, because I was hyper from The River House. ‘I’ve been declared bankrupt, yes, but Walt Disney went bankrupt three times before he built Disneyland. As it happens, I’m working on a similar project myself, so it’s a very good omen…What do you think about lunch tomorrow?’ I added, still being hyper, and knowing very well that she was divorced from her sub-postmaster.

  ‘All right,’ she said, slowly. ‘Where do you want to meet?’ But this she answered herself, and in a way I liked: ‘The Danish Kitchen?’ she said, adding in a charming way, ‘On High Ousegate?’

  How the Danish Kitchen has not become Costa Coffee, I do not know. It is – like my haircut, I suppose – a survivor of seventies York, and I felt that Nelly had chosen it as a symbol of the days when she and I had been (nearly) together.

  The next day, sitting opposite one another on the green banquette seats of the Danish Kitchen on High Ousegate, where the sandwiches come open-topped (well, it’s the authentic Danish way), Nelly told me she did a bit of parttime clerical work for Marcus Blundy.

  ‘What car does he drive? Don’t tell me, a Subaru Impreza.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a bit like a Mitsubishi Evo.’

  Nelly folded her arms and gave me her shrewd look, as if to say: well you haven’t changed at all. But it wasn’t the frowning look, and I noticed that she kept turning sidelong, to show me the few grey hairs near her ear, as if to say: ‘Do you mind?’

  When we’d finished our sandwiches, she sat back in a reminiscing mood, saying, ‘You and your psychic experiences…’

  Since she’d brought up the subject, and to keep her in the Danish Kitchen, I told her about that momentous night in The River House all those years before, and then filled her in on the latest instalments. When I’d finished – by which time we were standing outside the Danish Kitchen – she said, ‘You have a real talent, Geoff. You’re lucky.’

  ‘But I’m bankrupt, as you were anxious to point out.’

  ‘I should think plenty of psychics have been that,’ she said, and I thought: Yes, that’s obviously true, and I pictured a gallery of theatrically dressed fraudsters, all attempting the same far-seeing expressions.

  …But then there was ancient Saul Chadwick with his army of umbrella men, his customised Rolls, and the funds of In Re Morley behind him. He must be good at his job, just as I’d been good at mine in the days of Mr Blundy but not since. Compared to Chadwick’s production in The River House that night, I’d only generated a few flickering indications of the continuing presence in York of Little Jack. I said something of this to Nellie, and she was about to reply as I rolled up a cigarette. Exactly as I struck the match, the Christmas fairy lights strung along High Ousegate were all illuminated, and the co-incidence made Nelly laugh out loud, and forget whatever she was going to say.

  As we set off down High Ousegate, Nelly had what was evidently a new thought, and not connected to what she’d been about to say when I struck the match. She said, ‘What are we going to do about your financial situation, Geoff?’

  A question full of promise, I thought.

  Two days later, Marcus Blundy phoned me. Immediately on picking up, I told him I knew what had happened; that Nelly Drew had suggested he call and offer me work. I told him thanks very much but I wasn’t looking to go back to a solicitor’s office.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to take a call on the other line.’

  So he was keeping me waiting before I could put the phone down on him – that’s the public school man all over. When he came back on, he said, ‘That’s not it. I did see Nelly Drew, and while she was discretion itself, she did let slip something about you.…’

  There was a pause, both on his side and mine.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘The Morley business.’

  ‘Can we meet?’ he said.

  I knew he must have taken over his father’s trusteeship, and I wondered whether he’d decided I knew too much. Perhaps he was going to do me in. But I knew that couldn’t be the plan when he said, ‘How about Betty’s Tea Rooms?’

  As the light fades on an afternoon close to Christmas, Betty’s Tea Rooms is the place to be. Well, perhaps not for the bankrupt.

  Betty’s, which opened in 1920, is traditional in style – all except the prices. The prices are what you might call bang up to date. The cakes come on cake stands, and the waitresses wear lacy caps like doilies on their heads. Even a plate of fish and chips is genteel in Betty’s. It comes with about four chips (very nice, big ones, mind), a fish knife and a slice of lemon in a sort of silver hairgrip.

  The place was packed out – the County set mainly: lawyers, farmers and businessmen, products of the Etons of the North. I took my seat at a window table looking out on to St Helen’s Square, which is beautiful, and where ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ was being played on a species of giant music box superintended by two men in Georgian outfits. This machine is called The York Chimer, and has been a feature of the York Christmas for a hundred years or more. It resembles a highly ornate miniature cathedral on wheels with a mixing handle at the side. The chimer is operated by the members of a York charity who wear the above-mentioned fancy dress and collect donations from the public for the aid of…Well, as I was trying to recall that particular piece of arcania, Marcus Blundy turned up, half an hour late, and talking into his mobile phone.

  ‘Not managed to order?’ he said.

  Sitting down opposite me, with his back to the window, he was obviously thinking: I’m not surprised. The bent paperback and disposable lighter on the table before me struck a jarring note in this setting of buxom waitresses, chandeliers and Christmas trees.

  ‘Tea?’ Blundy said.

  ‘Suits me,’ I said.

  He was beginning to go a bit red like his father, but that might just have been the cold. He looked rich; he probably would drive a Jag, but he wasn’t stylish like his dad. He was still at his mobile phone, possibly sending a text message, or at any rate pressing the buttons in a bloody annoying way.

  ‘What I’d like to know,�
�� I said after watching him for a while, ‘is how old was the medium, Saul Chadwick?’

  Without looking up, Blundy said: ‘You say “was”.’

  ‘He must dead by now.’

  ‘Correct.’ Still tapping away, not looking up. ‘He died in ’88.’

  ‘Well,’ I repeated, ‘how old was he?’

  ‘You don’t want to know how old he was,’ said Blundy.

  ‘You’re a trustee now, I suppose,’ I said.

  He nodded and, still playing with his phone, he answered my earlier question.

  ‘Chadwick died aged at least 109, nobody’s quite sure exactly. That’s what the best medical care money can buy will do for you; and a strong constitution; and the mountain air. He was at a clinic in Switzerland in his last years. The trust in his favour has naturally lapsed, but the other element of In re Morley carries on.’

  ‘The part to do with the philosophical society.’

  ‘Right again.’ And, finally putting down his mobile phone, Blundy said, ‘How much do you know about it all?’

  I told him everything I knew, and everything I’d experienced in and around The River House… Because what did I have to lose?

  ‘You feel you’re in psychic communication with the boy?’ said Blundy, and he’d picked a bad time to ask that question, because just then the fat party at the next table were taking delivery of half a dozen knickerbocker glories, and the fat boy was actually rubbing his hands with delight. I’d never seen anyone do that before.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said to Blundy.

  ‘And what’s it like? This feeling.’

  I thought: he’s a trustee of In re Morley, but he’s a sceptic.

  ‘You know when you’re walking down the street, and you think you’re going to meet someone you like, or don’t like? And then you do.’

  ‘And when you have this feeling about the boy: Little Jack…Is it the feeling of being about to meet someone you like or someone you don’t like?’