So we played mah-jong, I with half a mind on the game, half on my astonishing encounter and Freda’s almost equally astonishing indifference to it. When I later tackled Gordon on the subject he was even more dismissive. I had the impression Freda and Gordon were trying to block the whole ghost idea out of their minds; that their lack of interest was not natural but willed.
When the Trantings came for Bridge the following evening I managed to have a few words in private with the Commander. Remembering it now, I am fairly sure that Commander Tranting had contrived to make himself available to me. I asked him about the ghost of Halton House and described my experience. He nodded.
‘I haven’t bumped into it myself, though I’m not dismissing it. I’ve seen too many strange things to be anything but an agnostic. I believe Gordon and Freda got Halton cheap because of it. Well all I know is that it takes many forms. This face or mask that you saw is a new one on me, not that I’m doubting you. But whatever it is it always appears in the same place at the window in that gallery.’
‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t know if ghosts are a “who”. They may be just a “what”, if you see what I mean. The only thing I do know is that bad things have happened in this house, and that gallery was always part of the story.’
‘What sort of bad things?’
‘Suicide, I believe. Always a dodgy business, suicide. I’ve never known a suicide that didn’t cause more agony than it cured.’
I wanted to ask him what he meant by this last comment, but just then we were summoned to the Bridge table. Two days later I found myself unexpectedly relieved to be back at school.
**
At the end of the following term Gordon left Stone Court. He was, in fact, ‘asked to leave’, but he went quietly. When he told me half way through the term that he was going to be dismissed I wanted to get up a protest, but he forbade anything of the sort. He said that my academic progress was far more important than his career at Stone Court which would have come to an end quite soon anyway.
A fortnight into the term Gordon had been found guilty at Canterbury Magistrates’ Court of driving under the influence of drink. Having discovered this Mr Capstick told J.V., the Headmaster. He added that a convicted felon was not fit to be a member of staff and that consequently Gordon must leave at once. J.V. was disposed to be lenient, but Capstick was implacable. A compromise was reached whereby Gordon should leave at the end of term. Even now, though I can appreciate Capstick’s position a little better, I cannot help feeling that vindictiveness played a part in his actions. I am also not so sure that Gordon minded going as little as he pretended to.
Out of defiance, and perhaps some loyalty, I wrote to him regularly over the next two terms. He wrote back, always taking care to type the address on the envelope so that no-one at the school would recognise his handwriting and confiscate the letter. His news at first seemed to be excellent. Using some money he had ‘scraped together’, as he put it, he had set up a small school at Halton House for teaching foreign students English. There were, apparently, plenty of foreign students in need of just such a facility. He sent me an elegant brochure for ‘Halton College’ which I forwarded to my parents in Athens. In her next letter back my mother wrote: ‘Daddy asks if Mr Barrymore has got permission from his landlord to use Halton House as a school.’ I passed the warning on, but neither I nor Gordon took it seriously.
The following Summer I took the scholarship exam and, much to my surprise, succeeded. Stone Court granted itself a half holiday to honour the achievement and Gordon wrote me a jubilant letter of congratulation. At the end of the letter, almost as a postscript, he wrote: ‘Alas, Halton College has had to close its doors for the time being. Some nonsense in the lease about not using H.H. as a place of business. I’m sure it’ll all sort itself out, but at the moment Freda and I are in a bit of a tight spot.’
As I had won my place at Winchester, I was granted a good deal of time off during my last weeks at Stone Court. I decided as a priority that I must visit Freda and Gordon. One Saturday I rang up Halton House and Freda answered the phone. She seemed delighted to hear from me, almost too delighted, and I said I would bicycle over for tea. I remember thinking as I rode over that the weather was as sultry as the day I had seen the face in the window of Halton House. When I came into the drive I did look up at the first floor window and thought I saw not one but two white objects staring at me from behind the glass. It was only for a moment though, because there was Freda in her lounger calling to me from the terrace. It was three in the afternoon and there was a gin and tonic on the table beside her.
She greeted me effusively and sat me down. ‘Now, tell me everything,’ she said. I did my best. I was as anxious to hear about her and Gordon’s ‘tight spot’, but whenever I tried to turn the conversation towards the subject she demanded more news of Stone Court. She was thinner than when I had last seen her and her hand, as she lit a cigarette, shook a little. I noticed that the wrist was bandaged.
When my news was finally exhausted I asked her where Gordon was.
‘Oh, in Canterbury on business, darling. He’ll be back shortly. I told him you were coming. He’s dying to see you. We’re probably going to have to leave Halton quite soon.’
‘Why?’
‘The money, darling. It’s gone!’ The withered, fleshless hand which held her cigarette described a vague arc in the air as if she were trying to show how ‘the money’ had flown. ‘It’s all been rather ghastly. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’ On an impulse I reached out and grasped her cigarette-free hand, so very small and fragile. I took care not to touch the bandage on her wrist. My action made me suddenly feel years older.
‘You are a darling,’ said Freda. ‘You’ve got a look of Michael. Did I ever tell you that? He was a love. He really was. Love of my life. . . . You know, when the money runs out I don’t know that there’s much point in going on. I don’t want to live on charity. I’ve never done that. I know it sounds awful, but I just don’t see the point of going on living. I simply don’t. Have I shocked you?’
I shook my head in denial, but she had. Not long after this a car came up the drive. It was an old Morris Oxford estate car with the half timbered effect at the back. It lurched to a halt.
‘The Jag had to go,’ said Freda laconically.
I might not have recognised Gordon as he got out of the car, had Freda not called to him. Like Freda he had lost weight so that his clothes hung loosely on him. The hair had greyed; his face was pale and he had shaved off his moustache, perhaps to avoid being recognised by creditors. But he greeted me with great warmth and we enjoyed half an hour of jokey conversation. It was almost like the old days.
Then, quite suddenly, a silence fell. I sensed that they were tired and didn’t want to talk any longer so I got up to go. They made a half-hearted attempt to keep me there, but I said I had to get back. ‘Well,’ said Freda. ‘You know where we are, so do just drop in any time. But give us a ring first.’ I said I would certainly come back.
The following week, which was my last at Stone Court, I tried several times to ring them, but their telephone had been cut off. In the end I decided to bicycle to Halton House and find out what had happened. It might be my last chance of seeing them.
The Morris Oxford was in the drive when I got there. It was about three in the afternoon, a dull day with the sky paper white. I rang and knocked several times but there was no reply. I walked onto the terrace and saw that one of the French windows was ajar. Entering the house, I was met with gloom and silence. There were signs that a packing-up operation had been started, then abandoned. A few sticks of furniture remained. Some pictures had been propped against a wall. A crowd of empty bottles were huddled in a corner, as if holding a melancholy meeting.
I walked through the sitting room into the hall where stood three half-filled packing cases. A glass lay smashed beside one of them. On the hall table was a vase and against it leaned a piece of white cardboard on which in re
d pencil was scrawled the words: DON’T GO UPSTAIRS.
I looked at the message and the message looked at me. Was I its intended recipient? Why should I not go upstairs? I do not know how I arrived at the conclusion that I should disobey the instruction but I did.
It was very quiet in the gallery and the door of Freda’s bedroom was open. Looking into the room from the gallery, I could not see the bed because it was behind the door and facing the window which looked out onto the back lawn of Halton House. In front of the window was Freda’s dressing table, bare except for the silver framed photograph of Michael which had been positioned so that it faced the bed directly instead of slanting inwards to one side as it usually did. The other photograph, of Freda herself, had been put face down on the floor beneath the table.
I went into the room. A man and a woman, fully dressed, were lying side by side on Freda’s bed. Their clothes were those of Gordon and Freda, but their faces were unrecognisable. They were dead white and their gaping mouths were wrinkled, lipless holes. I noticed that on the bedside table were two pairs of false teeth, together with two tumblers, some empty pill bottles and an empty bottle of gin.
As I took in this scene slowly I was at first no more than perplexed until I noticed their eyes. They had sunk so deeply back into their sockets that they were barely visible. They were little more than black holes, like those in the death mask I had seen staring at me from the gallery.
I only have the word of others for what happened next. Apparently Commander Tranting, who had been worried about Gordon and Freda and had come to check up on them, found me wandering in the garden of Halton House. He summoned the authorities, then took me back to his house where I stayed the night. It was he who told me that the Barrymores had committed suicide by taking an overdose and that the phenomenon of the white face and sunken eyes was a known symptom of barbiturate poisoning.
Others were indignant on my behalf against Gordon and Freda. ‘How selfish of them,’ they said. ‘How cruel when they knew he would go looking for them!’ But I was not angry with them because they had, after all, tried to warn me.
**
In the following years I pursued academic excellence with a fanaticism that troubled even my ambitious father. What drove me, I don’t exactly know. Many factors may have played their part, but I was conscious, whenever I thought about it, of a fear of the outside world. I was afraid that unless I applied myself I would not be able to control life and that its tides might take me where I did not want to go. It would be neat to conclude that this fear was connected with the fate of Freda and Gordon, but at the time all that seemed part of another life. I hardly ever thought about it, and whenever I began to I stopped myself.
It was after I had finished my final exams at Oxford, had got the required First, and was beginning to research for my doctoral thesis that the dam burst. I became possessed by a feeling of utter futility. I was afraid that even if I were to be offered an academic post I would be unable to take it up because I had no faith in learning, no faith in anything for that matter. I felt tired the whole time and I found it hard to distinguish between reality and my own dreams and visions. My mind created a wall of illusion between myself and the outside world. I called this state my ‘inside world’ and it contained visible, sometimes tangible horrors.
The worst of these horrors was the white face, the same black-eyed, lipless death mask which I had seen in the window of Halton House. There were days when I could not leave my flat in North Oxford in case I caught sight of the thing gaping at me through some window on the other side of the street. At night it was worse because then it got out from behind the windows and I would spot it peering at me over hedges or between bushes as I walked up the Banbury Road.
One evening I was hurrying back to my flat after a long day in the Bodleian. The need to get home before dark had become an obsession with me so that I was running. When the exertion became too much for me I stopped to lean against a low wall. I remember my right hand reaching out for some support and touching a smooth surface, spongy, and slightly slimy, like the cap of a mushroom that has been kept too long in the fridge. I drew my hand back and saw that I had touched the death mask. There it was, peering at me vacantly over the wall, its mouth working, making vague chewing movements. If it was trying to say something, no sound came. I screamed and ran.
My other visions were less alarming but no less haunting. More than once in that strange borderland between waking and sleeping I saw, or thought I saw something. At first it was no more than a white mist, but I had the impression that, though I knew myself to be in my small flat in the Banbury Road, I was also, on some other level, surrounded by the mist. The sensation filled me with despair, not of a violent, grief-stricken kind, but settled and, in some horrible way, peaceful, like a narcotic sleep.
Slowly, out of the mist, two shapes would emerge. They came towards me out of a great distance. As they came closer, it was not simply their physical presence which encroached on me, but their emotions and agonies. Even before I could see them clearly, I knew them to be Gordon and Freda. They seemed to be asking for my help, but I had no idea what help I could give them, or if there was anything there to help. Each time I confronted their pleadings with my helplessness I could feel their distress and I saw their faces fall into the gaping death masks that I had seen on that almost but never quite forgotten day. As I struggled out of my hideous waking dream, a phrase would keep repeating itself over and over in my head: ‘We thought we were going to end it all.’
My mental condition deteriorated. I became more fearful, more withdrawn, more visionary each day. Eventually a kind friend found me a psychiatrist. His name was Bernard and some swore by him, while others said he was a crank. I only discovered later that, in addition to being a qualified shrink, he also belonged to an Anglican religious order. He listened patiently while I described my terrors to him and their probable origin. When I came to my visions of Gordon and Freda Barrymore in the white mist, he nodded as if he recognised the phenomenon.
‘A white mist? Yes, that often happens with suicides,’ said Bernard.
I was baffled. He seemed to be talking about real events rather than my subconscious. He saw my confusion and explained: ‘When people are somehow in touch with suicides they often have this impression that the suicides are walking through a white mist, a sort of “spaceless” space, infinite, but claustrophobic because everything is the same. It’s an image, of course, but it’s almost certainly a reflection of reality. It means that the suicides have lost their way. They are quite literally lost souls. They don’t know where to go, or what to do.’
‘Even if that’s true, what can I do about it?’
‘Oddly enough, you can do quite a lot. You can pray. The prayers of the living are often a great help to suicides, because they’re still earthbound, you see.’
This struck me as pure nonsense, but my reaction to Bernard’s words was at odds with my impression of him as a person. He was quiet, intelligent, unhysterical. Though I thought what he said was folly, I felt that he was a man whose views should be respected.
‘How do I pray?’ I asked him.
‘I can’t tell you. I’m not an expert. To be honest, no-one is. You just have to try it and find out for yourself.’
I cannot draw any conclusions. I can only say what happened. I attempted to do what Bernard suggested. I spent some time of every day thinking about Gordon and Freda and asked some power in which I did not wholly believe to lead them out of their limbo. As I did so my anxieties began to diminish. One night I had a vision of the white mist again, but the figures of Gordon and Freda were walking away from me, and they were not alone. A third figure was with them, and he wore a uniform.
Now in my waking and dreaming thoughts the death mask has gone; and so have Freda and Gordon Barrymore. All that is left behind is my gratitude to them; and that I cherish.
THE SEVENTEENTH SISTER
I have no way of verifying this story. Father Berrigan died
a few weeks after telling it to me, and I can only say that I have no reason to doubt it. Father Berrigan was a small, emaciated, wiry man who gave off an aura unique to himself: a combination of extreme, almost febrile spirituality and great toughness. He could look severe, but you discovered that whatever severity there was in his nature was inflicted on himself. He had a narrow, intense face and a thin mouth which, when it smiled, showed a beguiling, mischievous side to his complex personality.
He ran the Catholic chaplaincy at the University of Dorset for which I was the Anglican equivalent. Our relations had always been cordial, but it was only after my wife had died that we became close. If there was a chink in Berrigan’s armour, it was the slight unease—I would not exactly call it nervousness—that he exhibited in the presence of women. There was a certain wary respect between my wife and him, but I sensed there could never be anything like a friendship.
Once I was a widower he would come to my house almost every Thursday evening after dinner. He would pour himself and me a large glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey which would then be diluted with an equal measure of water, and we would talk. That the bottle was supplied alternately by one of us was an unspoken part of the ritual, as was the rule that one glass only per evening was allowed. The conversation, while never trivial, was not heavy. University personalities and politics were usually discussed and, as Berrigan’s view of life was ironic rather than censorious, we laughed a good deal. I enjoyed our conversations but, about six months before Berrigan died, I began to sense that there was something he wished to tell me. There were moments when he would swallow a large gulp of Jameson’s, lean forward and take a deep breath, as if about to embark on some serious topic. Then he would check himself, sit back in his chair and make a general, anodyne comment to fill the gap he had created. I wondered if I should urge him to come out with whatever he wanted to talk about. In fact I found that I was nerving myself to prompt him in the same way that he was nerving himself to tell me.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 25