His hands began to throb as he pulled them apart, his thighs burst into prickling as he sat back on his haunches. When he gripped his knees and shoved himself up in the dark, his legs and lower body proved to have been holding so many aches in reserve that he gasped. He staggered to the light-switch, and as soon as his eyes had stopped trying to blink away the light, limped to the window.
He didn’t know if he was hoping that his prayer or just the hour had brought Amy home. When he parted the curtains, however, he could see no sign of her. Beyond the drive the illuminations danced above the marketplace as if to invoke the year that would snuff them out. For a moment they held his attention, and then he noticed movement close to the building. He craned towards the window, his body shrinking away from the spidery corner of the pane, just in time to glimpse a thin bald figure in clothes as black as the shadow it was dragging across the gravel. Then the figure vanished into Nazarill.
Oswald limped rapidly to his bedroom and, grabbing his keys, managed to run along the hall. As he emerged into the corridor, a confusion of voices met him, and he thought they had something to do with the intruder until he saw that Lin Stoddard was shooing a boisterous family—twin pink plump-faced girls followed by their ruddier and even more rotund parents—out of her door. ‘Quick march or we’ll miss it,’ she cried. ‘Mr Priestley. This is Mr Priestley, our next-door neighbour, I expect you figured that out. You’re coming down to let the new year in, aren’t you, Mr Priestley? You’ll dance with me even if old misery won’t.’
Leonard lurched after her, his hands on their daughter’s shoulders. ‘I never said I wouldn’t dance when it gets to midnight. You know I always do.’
It was clear that all the adults had devoted some time to drinking, and Oswald saw it would be quickest to follow them downstairs without describing what he’d seen. He was locking his flat when Beth Griffin appeared in the doorway of hers, nervously fingering her high forehead. ‘We didn’t know you were in, Ms Griffin,’ Lin declared. ‘You should have wandered over. Come down with us for the ceremony.’
The homeopath responded with a hasty smile which she then covered with her fingertips, and Oswald left her to the revellers. He went fast but quietly down the stairs to the middle floor. There was no sound from below, nor from the corridor ahead, all of whose doors stayed shut. Eight people who sounded like far more came downstairs faster than he had, and he was turning to hush them when Lin stared beyond him and gaped.
Oswald swung round. The bald figure in black had come upstairs behind him and was waiting to be recognised. Having recovered, Lin said ‘Why, Amy, you look—’
‘She looks good,’ said Beth.
‘Different, I was coming to.’
‘She looks that,’ Oswald said, and clamped his teeth together. Amy wasn’t quite bald—her scalp and the back of her neck were covered with enough stubble to retain the colour of her hair—and yet he felt there could be no repealing what she had done to herself. He gazed at her until Lin said ‘About turn, Amy, if you want to celebrate with us. We’re going on the lawn.’
‘May as well,’ said Oswald’s balding alien child, and led the way downstairs. As she pulled the glass doors open, the town began to clamour as though it had been waiting for her. Cars hooted, a rocket hissed up from the market car park to explode into glittering above the moor, the church commenced ringing its bells or at least playing a tape of them, so amplified they sounded softened by rust. Nearly every door on Nazareth Row opened, discharging celebrators, as Lin urged the Nazarillians onto the grass. ‘Hands,’ she directed, stretching out hers to be caught, and as soon as an arrangement with ambitions to be a circle was complete, led the singing while she danced with a vigour that shook her words almost to pieces. ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot…’
In the rush Oswald had ended up between the twins. Beth Griffin was opposite him, dancing close and retreating, with Amy on her left. He kept trying to catch Amy’s eye as she glanced first towards the stump of the oak as if she thought the dance should be taking place around it, then at the windows of the ground floor. People were pointing across Nazareth Row at the ring of dancers, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that they were pointing at her. The song speeded up as it reached its final chorus, the dancers rushed at one another across the tangle of their inky shadows and fell back and collided again, their feet drumming on the turf that glared with dew. A second rocket whooshed up its trail of sparks above the market as the dancers cluttered to an end. Amy let go of Beth and Leonard, and stared at the building again. ‘Are we everyone?’
‘Everyone else must be out with their friends,’ Lin said as her daughter peered at the dark windows. When the twins copied their friend, their moist plump hands clasping Oswald’s for reassurance, Lin’s voice sharpened. ‘Nobody is in there, that’s for sure.’
‘That’s so, Amy, isn’t it,’ said Oswald, staring hard at her. ‘You once thought you saw something in there when it was an old ruin, but you were years younger than any of these young ladies. Now you’re of an age to know you imagined it, and I’d like you to begin the year by making it clear that you did.’
‘I imagined it,’ she said as tonelessly as she might have read a stranger’s words out loud. ‘If that’s all you wanted me here for, I’m going in. Good night, or good morning, who cares.’
‘Amy. Amy!’ When she carried on walking away from him, Oswald squeezed the twins’ hands before letting them go and darted after her. He had just reached the gravel when she arrived at the doors and fished her keys out of her canvas handbag, along with an item which a key had snagged. The black object struck the doorstep with a flat thud. She stooped swiftly and crammed the object into her bag, and had barely straightened up when she unlocked the doors and was through them.
Oswald let her go. Time by herself might help her find her way back to the right road. The possession he’d just glimpsed had to make a difference. The church bells toppled into silence as though rust had overtaken them, but as he followed the Stoddards and their guests into Nazarill he continued to hear the peals. He was imagining Amy alone in her room with the Bible she had seemed embarrassed to let anybody see. She could hardly be lost when she had that. He needn’t decide yet whether to mention it or wait for her to acknowledge she had it. For the present it was enough for him to know that their lives were on their way to improving in the new year.
11 - A summons in the night
When the notes of the church bells finished tumbling over one another Hilda took her hands away from her ears, and Harold Roscommon favoured her with the nearest to a smile she’d had from him. ‘His mother used to do that,’ he said.
‘What else was she like?’ Hilda risked saying.
‘Like someone who couldn’t stand summat, just like the rest of us.’ His arthritic hands grabbed the wheels of his chair and turned it expertly round on the narrow pavement of the main road, and she thought he was dismissing her along with the subject until he said, ‘Are you coming back in for another glass of wine? It’ll have to be drank now the bottle’s opened.’
‘Anything I can do to help, I told you that.’
He peered at her over his shoulder, his slack unsunned face having reverted to its standard loose-lipped petulant expression. ‘Don’t go straining yourself,’ he advised her, and wheeled himself rapidly into the hall of the nondescript cottage discoloured by traffic.
As George made to follow she laid a hand on his wiry arm. ‘What sort of an impression am I making, would you say?’
‘Better than he’s letting on.’
‘No need to look so surprised,’ she told him, though his pale-eyed round face habitually did. She had time to soften the set of his mouth with a swift kiss before his father began grappling two-handed with the knob of the living-room door, leaning his weight on it until the chair was in danger of propelling itself away from him. ‘Blasted thing’s shut itself with the wind now,’ he complained. ‘Won’t stay shut when it’s wanted and now it’s the other way.’
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‘Here, father, let me see to it before you—’
Hilda thought the old man looked too stubborn to relinquish his hold, but at the last moment he shoved the chair backwards, almost running over George’s toes on its way to thumping the opposite wall. George twisted the knob and shouldered the door open, and as soon as he’d switched on the light which his father had earlier sent him back to extinguish, the old man sped into the room.
It didn’t feel to Hilda as if they were living there. Apart from the dining-suite and the sofa and matching chairs, many of their possessions were waiting to be produced from the cartons stacked against the indifferently coloured wallpaper. Only the wheel-tracks crisscrossing the thin rucked brown carpet seemed to have staked some claim on behalf of either of the men, and George was engaged in surreptitiously treading the carpet down as his father swung round by the nearest armchair and levered himself into it. ‘I’ve had sufficient,’ he said when George attempted to refill his glass. ‘You youngsters see it off.’
Hilda resigned herself to a final glassful of the sweet red German wine he’d insisted George bought. She was hoping George might join her on the sofa, but when he sat in the remaining armchair she fed herself a fast swallow of the wine. ‘May I take it you aren’t in any hurry to move in?’
The old man let his lip droop further. ‘We aren’t.’
‘Aren’t…’ When that brought her no clarification Hilda said ‘Aren’t moving in?’
‘That’s what I said. I thought he’d have told you renting this is only temporary till we find a place.’
‘I wasn’t sure if that was still the plan.’
The old man peered at her from beneath his unkempt eyebrows. Eventually he said ‘What’s the idea?’
‘Father…’
‘If she’s got a better one, let her spit it out.’
‘I just think it’s a waste, Mr Roscommon, you spending your savings on renting, please don’t be offended, somewhere so inferior to where you were.’
‘Owned by a friend of his mother’s, this house is.’ It was unclear whether this was meant to abash criticism or to suggest he was being charged a favourable rent, and Hilda was silent until he said ‘On top of that, once we’ve sold our piece of that joint on the hill we can afford somewhere even a woman should be proud of.’
‘You wouldn’t consider moving back?’
Both men’s expressions became self-parodic, and George lowered his glass so hastily from taking a sip that a spot of red bloomed on his shirt-front. ‘Hilda, I think that’s a bit too—’
‘I didn’t mean into the same flat. Even the same floor, I can see that wouldn’t be very attractive. Only there’s an empty flat next to mine, and I don’t think the Housall people would dare to object if you wanted to exchange that for yours. They were round the other day to find out if there was anything we wanted doing. We could get them to put a ramp down one side of the stairs. They should have in the first place, or a lift for people with difficulties.’
‘You mean what us cripples call cripples.’
‘Father, Hilda’s only trying—’
‘I don’t know what she’s trying,’ the old man said, then lowered one eyebrow as though to be ready to wink. ‘Or maybe I do,’ he said to her. ‘Can’t you stand having that next door?’
‘What, Mr Roscommon?’
‘Whatever you think’s there.’
‘Why, I don’t think I think—’
‘Fair enough, I don’t want to scare you out if you can live with it,’ he said, though he sounded at least as impatient as reassuring. ‘But I know what I saw, and I hear I’m not the only one who did.’
‘You couldn’t have heard that about me.’
‘Not you, the girl. The one who talked to me after I found the photographer and that thing with a mouth you could stick your whole hand in.’
‘Don’t get yourself worked up just before you go to bed, father.’
‘Not being heeded is what works me up. You weren’t even there, you were up with your lady friend.’
‘I did try to tell you I was sorry, Mr Roscommon, but we weren’t to know…’
‘Nobody wants to know owt these days, seems to me. If they can forget it they will. Not that girl, though. She was on the wireless saying what’s up there.’
‘The way I understood it, father, what she actually said—’
‘Was she saw something moving about in one of the rooms downstairs that shouldn’t have been alive and maybe wasn’t, either. You were there when Lottie said she heard that on whatever show it is with the music-hall style of feller she likes. If they strung him up in public I’d help pull on the rope, but that’s by the way just now. If you want to hear what the girl saw, Miss Ramsden, you know where to find her.’
‘She mightn’t want to, father. She’s still living there, remember.’
‘That wouldn’t be why I’d worry. If the place is acquiring that kind of reputation, won’t it make it harder for you to sell your flat?’
‘Maybe. Don’t fret.’ The old man turned on her an unexpectedly sympathetic look. ‘Like as not I’ll run out before my savings do, and then he can keep you all the company he wants. He can do it now, I’m not stopping him. I’m old enough to see after myself if I have to.’
‘Mr Roscommon, I hope you know if there’s any way I can help—’
‘Thanks anyway. One fussing round me’s enough. And don’t put that face on, you look like his mother when I raised a hand to him. Can’t stand slop, never could.’
Hilda lifted the glass to her mouth, then stood up instead, not only to hand the drink to George. ‘This can be yours to finish. It’s time I was heading for bed.’
‘You’ll be round again, I reckon,’ the old man muttered at his shoes.
‘I’m glad you think so.’ To repeat her seasonal wishes to him now would seem like sarcasm, and so Hilda preoccupied herself with donning her heavy overcoat while she made her way out. A passing Astra stuffed with merrymakers blew a fanfare at her as George followed her onto the token doorstep and eased the door shut. ‘Try not to take any notice,’ he murmured. ‘He knows he’s said too much, only he can never take it back.’
‘Which are you saying was too much?’
His round face appeared to be trying to sort out an expression. ‘Well, if you don’t—I think I’d have felt—’
‘Come here.’ She dug her fingers into his shock of blond hair and pulled his face close to hers. ‘I can put up with worse if I have to. Like he said, and I wouldn’t if he hadn’t, it won’t be for ever.’ She gave George a fierce kiss and then a long soft one which reached deeper into his mouth and earned them a cheer from a carload of revellers. ‘That’s your first of the year,’ she eventually told him, and stepped back. ‘Don’t leave it too long to collect your next instalment.’
‘I’ll be up one evening this week.’
‘Just for once, bring me some flowers.’
‘I would have. I always thought you’d have had enough of them at work or you’d have felt insulted that I’d bought any somewhere else.’
‘They’re an insult I can take. And if you grow some for me that certainly won’t be an insult.’
‘That’s what I’ll do,’ George said in a voice almost as pleasantly surprised as his face.
This seemed an ideal moment for her to be on her way, while they’d arrived at an understanding which felt like the start of their future. She crossed the road and smiled at him until he closed the door, and as she walked up the nearest lane she sensed the smile resting on her lips. Even when a thought penetrated her euphoria, her mouth shrank only gradually. George’s father had suggested more than he knew. It might indeed have been possible for him to have heard that she’d encountered something odd in Nazarill.
George mustn’t have found it worth mentioning. Most probably he didn’t even remember by now, but she did. She remembered telling him as they came downstairs from Oswald Priestley’s get-together that she thought she’d seen Teresa Blake’s
cat roaming the corridors—but while waiting to be photographed in front of Nazarill she’d learned that the animal had never been let out by itself until the day it had died.
Someone blew a party hooter in a house on the lane, and she imagined the mouthpiece poking out its puffed-up tongue. Perhaps she would encounter some of her fellow tenants celebrating in the corridors, and she could join them for a drink. There was no sound from Nazarill as the alert facade responded to her approach over the gravel, but then nobody would have their windows open when it seemed to have turned so cold that, despite the illumination brighter than day and her heavy coat, she’d begun to shiver. When she unlocked the glass doors, however, there was silence within too.
Surely someone was awake in the building, but she couldn’t think who would be. She was suddenly aware how little they knew one another—how ready everyone was to close themselves into their rooms once they were home. The doors sounded their hollow note behind her, and she hurried along the corridor, which she might have thought was dimmer than usual. No doubt it appeared so in contrast to the brightness she’d just quitted, and that explained why the gloom was patching her eyes, obscuring the sight of the doors she was passing. She didn’t need to see them clearly to know they must be shut, and she was ashamed of herself for wishing she could.
Her feet collided with the lowest stair, and she almost fell before locating the handrail. The stairs faded into visibility as she stumbled up them, and by the time she reached her corridor she was able to see all six of its closed doors. There was no point in wishing George still lived downstairs, never mind living up here; she ought to have known that his father would never agree. The wish only made the stretch of corridor between the stairs and her apartment feel like the ground floor: empty of people yet not quite deserted enough, and altogether too dim. She pulled her keys out of her coat pocket, then grabbed them with her other hand to muffle them. It must have been an echo which had caused their rattling to seem to have wakened a similar noise, although she hadn’t previously noticed an echo. ‘Stop being daft,’ she told herself furiously, and dashing past the unoccupied flat, twisted the key in her lock and snatched open the door.
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 18