by Helen Grant
A key. It was obvious what it was, but I knew immediately that it didn’t belong to Langlands; there was nothing here it would have opened. Grandmother had a great bunch of keys, although we rarely bothered to lock anything up, and all of them were of a much more robust design, with cylindrical stems. Nor were any of them silver-coloured; they were mostly made of dull brass.
It belongs to them. One of them dropped it.
It’s like we’re being watched. I had the same feeling yesterday when we arrived. It’s a dark day, because of the rain, and inside the house, it’s so gloomy you can hardly see what you’re doing. The air feels thicker in here, like something invisible is pressing in on us.
Well, I say to myself, perhaps it is thicker, there’s that much dust in it. You can smell the house – a smell of old furniture polish and dead flowers and mould. Like something decaying.
We go up to the bedroom we saw yesterday, and right enough, the rain is pouring through the hole in the ceiling. Dad asks Mrs. McAndrew whether there’s any other way we could get at the roof so he can take a closer look – a ceiling hatch leading into the space between the ceiling and the roof, maybe? While they’re discussing that, I wander over to the window to look out.
There’s something on the window sill. A shiny silver key. It looks newer than anything else in this room. It looks like my door key, the one on the keyring in my pocket. I put my hand into my jeans and pull out the keyring, and my door key’s not on it. There’s just the key for the bike and another one I never use, a locker key I was supposed to give back when I left high school.
I glance behind me. Dad is following Mrs. McAndrew out of the room. She’s still talking, in that voice that makes it sound like she’s telling him off, and waving her hands around. I suppose they’re going to look at ceiling hatches.
It’s definitely mine. How did it get here? I didn’t miss it yesterday, but Dad let us in when we got home. Okay, so I could have dropped it in this room, but I didn’t come over here to the window. Someone’s picked it up and put it here, and if it was old Mrs. McAndrew, why didn’t she just give it back to me? And it’s not just my key that’s sitting here on the window sill. There is something else with it. Until I picked the key up, the two things were side by side, like they were put there on purpose.
It’s a coin, an old one, now brown and dull. There’s a man’s head on it. There are words around the edge of the coin, but they don’t make a lot of sense: what does IND IMP mean? The only one I can recognise is GEORGIUS. I guess that’s George. King George. When was that?
I turn the coin over in my fingers. On the back there’s a woman in a helmet with a thing like a pitchfork. ONE PENNY, it says. Underneath the woman’s feet is a date. The date is 1944.
1944, that was the Second World War – we did it at high school. I think about the other thing I heard about back then, only it was from the other local kids, not the teacher, who came from Edinburgh. The Langlands ghost. The girl who died in the War.
I tell myself I’m being stupid. It’s just an old coin, old like everything else in this house. The old lady must have left it here.
But why? I think. Why would she do that?
I have a strange cold feeling about this. The back of my neck prickles; I think I have my hackles up, like a dog at bay.
I think: What if it wasn’t Mrs. McAndrew who left that coin there where I would find it, if I looked around for my key? What if it was someone else?
A coin – that was what I decided on. I gave the matter a lot of thought. I had to leave something, to show that the key had been put there on the window sill on purpose. It couldn’t be anything as obvious as a note. Supposing Grandmother went into the room before the men did, and found it? Or supposing they showed it to her? No; a coin was safer. If Grandmother saw that on the window sill, she might reasonably conclude that one of the men had found it lying about and put it there, or even that it had been there all along, overlooked. There were bits and pieces all over Langlands house – things put down and forgotten by former inhabitants, decades ago.
If they found the key and the coin and said nothing to Grandmother, then–
Then what? I said to myself, as I sat at the top of the attic stairs, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and wondering whether anyone had gone into the damaged room yet. It was a question I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know who would find the things I had left. Didn’t it all depend on that?
For a while, there was nothing to hear except the rain; then I heard the groans that meant that the landing floorboards were protesting under the weight of people moving about. I heard muffled voices, but I couldn’t pick out any individual words.
I hugged my knees, shivering. I was used to Langlands House with its unheated corridors and ill-fitting windows, but it was hard to stay warm sitting still in one place. I dared not move about, though. I imagined the men working in the rooms below under Grandmother’s watchful eye, pausing to listen to the sound of light footsteps overhead. They would glance swiftly at Grandmother: isn’t she supposed to be the only one in the house? Then they would look at each other and wonder...
The men weren’t the problem, though. Grandmother would tell them it was the boards expanding or rats in the attic. The trouble would come later.
No. Better to stay still and silent, at least while I knew they were all on the first floor. I did my best, although by the middle of the day I was so chilled that I crept across the attic and opened one of the trunks that were stored there to look for another layer to put on.
Every single piece of clothing I owned had come from these trunks. Whenever something had become too short or too tight for me to wear, or latterly, when I had worn something so long that it was beyond our powers to repair it with sewing and darning, Grandmother and I would come up and select some new items from the trunks and boxes stored in the attic. There were a great many things, ranging from tiny silk robes edged with lace to fit a young baby, to a sombre dark greatcoat of heavy wool, with a cape over the shoulders. Grandmother tended to pick out the plainest, most hard-wearing things she could for me; it was no use, she said, my wearing a tulle dress when I had to collect firewood or pump water or pull up carrots from the kitchen garden. This hadn’t prevented me from seeing some of the treasures folded away neatly in the trunks, with lavender bags that had long since lost all but the faintest trace of their scent tucked between the layers. As well as the tulle, there were high-necked lace blouses and delicate white lawn frocks, and a beautiful violet silk dress with dozens of tiny buttons up the back. There were gloves and underthings and pretty fans, although these last struck me as useless: I could hardly remember a single occasion when it had ever been hot enough at Langlands that I might have needed to fan myself.
The trunk I opened now did not look promising: the first thing I found in it was a black bombazine mourning dress, the fabric stiff and heavy. After I had burrowed down through several layers of gloomy-looking clothing, however, I found something that looked deliciously warm: a thick velvet cape decorated with tiny jet beads and trimmed with black fur. I didn’t care that it looked funereal; I wrapped myself in it and luxuriated in its warmth, rubbing my nose against the soft fur.
Late in the day, when the light was fading from the attic window, Grandmother opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and looked up to find me still swathed in the black cape.
“Goodness me, Ghost,” she said. “You look like a very young widow.”
I was stiff from the cold and sitting so long, despite the cape. I went carefully down the stairs towards her. “Have they gone?”
“Yes,” said Grandmother. “A few minutes ago.”
I hesitated, wondering how to ask what I wanted to know. I didn’t want to seem too eager.
“Have they finished the work?” I asked in the end. I knew they couldn’t possibly have, but it seemed a safe thing to ask.
“No, it’s goi
ng to take a couple of days,” said Grandmother. She looked directly at me as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and for a few seconds we were staring into each other’s eyes.
Then I shivered, and she said, “You look chilled. Come down to the kitchen and have some cocoa.”
I followed her along the passage. It would be time to light the lamps when we got downstairs; already Grandmother was little more than a dark shape moving ahead of me. We passed the room where the work was being done; the door was ajar but there was no time to do more than glance through the crack.
It was not until much later, after we had eaten and I had warmed myself by sitting close to the kitchen range, that I was able to come back upstairs by myself to look. By then, it was completely dark both outside and inside the house, so I had to take a candle with me.
As I made my way upstairs, the flame flickered, sometimes streaming out almost horizontally behind the wick. Langlands was a draughty place; sometimes it seemed as though the old house was sighing. I paused at the head of the stairs and looked down, just in case Grandmother should have decided to leave the warmth of the kitchen and follow me up. But all was still and silent in the hallway below.
I pushed open the door of the room and stepped inside, holding up the candlestick. It was colder in here than it was in the rest of the house, because of the hole in the ceiling. Overhead I could hear something billowing restlessly in the wind, and guessed that the men had put up some kind of temporary covering.
I stood for a moment, eyes straining to see in the soft yellow candlelight, nostrils flaring in the cold air. There was not much to see. The pile of broken stones and twisted metal that had been in the middle of the carpet had been removed; all that remained was an outline in pale dust on the darker background of the Persian carpet. I went over and stood looking down at it, and I could feel the yielding dampness of the carpet under my feet. Once the work was finished, we would have to light a fire in here, to try to dry it out. I looked up at the ceiling, but the light from the candle did not reach far enough to show me the state of the repairs.
I found myself putting off going over to the window where I had left the key and the coin. Now that it came to it, I was afraid I would find that they were exactly where I had left them, unnoticed. Or perhaps the key would have been found and pocketed without any further thought. I lifted the candlestick again, experimentally, and I thought I saw something gleam on the window sill. Oh no. Still there. My heart sank.
Now was the only time to look, though, so I picked my way carefully across the room.
The coin was there on the window sill, that was the first thing I saw. It wasn’t exactly where I had left it – at least I didn’t think so – but it was still there.
I stepped closer and saw that the key had gone. I glanced all along the windowsill and it was not there. Then I looked at the floor and there was no sign of it there, either. So it had really been taken.
I looked more closely, and I could see the tracks of fingertips in the dust on the sill, where someone had picked up the things I had left, then pocketed one and put the other back. I put out a hand and touched the track marks with my forefinger, tracing them. Behind me the covering in the roof shivered in the wind.
Then I saw what I had not seen before. Among the faint marks on the dusty sill with their abstract sweeps and arabesques, one stood out very clearly.
Someone had drawn a question mark in the dust.
It was not such a big thing, a shape drawn in the dust on a window sill; it was gone in an instant when my hand passed over it. But I had stepped over a boundary; I had exchanged messages with someone from outside. It felt as strange as if one of the bewigged and bejewelled ladies in the oil paintings downstairs had suddenly come to life. Writing in the dust was a brilliant idea. Easily executed, easily erased, and if Grandmother happened to see it, it could be passed off as a piece of idle amusement.
What shall I say in return?
Of course, I was going to reply; it never even entered my head that I wouldn’t. But as I stood there with the wax from the candle slowly running down the candlestick and congealing on my fingers, I wondered what my answer should be. If I committed myself so far as to write my entire name on the windowsill and Grandmother saw it, I would have incriminated myself quite clearly. No; I dared not do that, not yet.
After some further thought, I reached out and wrote A with my fingertip – simply that, the letter A, for Augusta. I wrote it at the side of the window sill, close to the shabby brocade curtain, where it was only obvious if you were looking for it. Then I rubbed my dusty fingers clean on my dress, feeling vaguely guilty.
It was time to leave. No point in risking being caught in here when Grandmother came upstairs. It would only make her suspicious. I took one last look at my handiwork, the initial drawn out in the dust. Then I shielded the candle flame with my free hand and slipped out of the room as silently as I could.
The passage outside was completely dark. The blackness at the head of the stairs was so absolute that it was clear Grandmother was still shut up in the warm kitchen; otherwise I would have seen the faint glow of the lamp she carried when she came up to bed.
I went to my own room and closed the door. I set the candlestick down on the bedside table and began to get ready for bed. It was never a task I wanted to linger over – the room was high-ceilinged, and even if we lit the fire, it rarely became properly warm. The moment between taking off my clothes and pulling my nightdress over my head was always gruesome. I put on a robe too before I started undoing my hair from its long plait. Unbraided, my hair fell to below my waist and it took some time to brush it out. Sometimes this task irritated me, but tonight I brushed mechanically, hardly aware of what I was doing.
All I could think about was that question mark drawn in the dust. Did he write it there – the younger one? I imagined him standing there by the window, head bowed, tracing out the shape with his forefinger. Thinking about it made me feel hot and cold with a strange guilty excitement, as though I had been caught eavesdropping on someone.
But was it him? Or could it possibly have been the older man? I wished I knew more about the way people behaved. It seemed to me that Grandmother was more serious than I was, and less tolerant of anything unexpected. I could not imagine someone old exchanging cryptic messages with an unknown person for the fun of it. This didn’t mean that every older person was like Grandmother, though, nor that every younger person was as consumed with curiosity as I was.
I went on thinking about it after I had climbed into bed and blown out the candle. It was the last thing I recall thinking about as I gradually became warm in my cocoon of blankets and drifted off into sleep, and it was the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes the next morning.
I awoke to the sound of rain rattling against the window panes. The downpour had not stopped.
From the attic window I saw the men arrive again, but this time they parked close to the corner of the house, out of my line of vision. I watched for a long while after that but saw nothing more, and heard nothing but the rain on the roof.
Eventually, driven by frustration, I crept down to the bottom of the attic stairs and pressed my ear to the door. You could never say that Langlands was entirely silent, with all the creaks and groans the old house made, but it was as silent as it could ever be. I pulled the door open and stepped out into the passage.
The damaged room was empty, as expected. I approached the window from the side, keeping behind the curtain where I could not be seen from outside. Then I looked out.
I could see Grandmother’s umbrella below me. In front of her, and evidently conversing with her, was a bald-headed man, clearly the one I had seen from above the day before. He was old, but not as old as Grandmother, I judged. It was difficult to form an opinion about his appearance though because the rain was coming down very hard on his bare head; his exposed skin shone with wet. I saw tha
t he was holding a hat or cap clutched in his hands; his knuckles were white and glistening in the cold rain. Grandmother, of course, would be dry under her huge umbrella.
Until now, I had gained most of my understanding about the way human beings treat each other from Grandmother – and from the books in the Langlands library, which were an unreliable source of information; the people in those were constantly having surprise proposals of marriage or discovering mad spouses in the attic or encountering other situations which seemed to have no relevance to me at all. Grandmother insisted on doing things “properly”, even in our limited world; we said “please” and “thank you” and on special occasions – which were rare – we dressed for dinner. There were a good many other little rules and regulations. Generally, Grandmother had given me to understand that she was a pattern of propriety and good breeding.
Now, however, I looked down at the broad span of the umbrella protecting Grandmother from the elements, and the man standing in front of her with his hat off and the rain streaming in torrents down his exposed face; I waited for her to tell him to stop or come indoors, or at least for her to conclude the conversation and let him finish the work as quickly as he could. Still she stood there talking, and the cold rain ran down so that he blinked against it, and licked his lips.
This is wrong. Grandmother is wrong.
I would not have done what she was doing. I would have said, “Forget the hole in the roof, come inside and get dry.”
I would have been kind, and Grandmother was being unkind.
I stood and watched until at last she became tired of whatever she was saying, and the umbrella moved away towards the front of the house. The man had already turned back to his work, and so I dared to come forward, right up to the window, and look down.