Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  I almost yawned at the prospect. This was the stuff of the English tabloids. I would frankly be disappointed if none of Grandfather’s cronies had dispatched the odd orphan or danced naked except for antlers and a cape. It took not the slightest flight of fancy to picture half the board of governors on his Trust engaged in such a thing at this very moment.

  The horrible truth was that I had been excited at the prospect of a more intriguing mystery. It was my loneliness I suppose. There. I will admit to it. I am lonely.

  It embarrassed me where this solitude-induced weakness had led. All that was left was to return to the country the next day and have Grandfather recount some dreary tale why a dreary man in London gets letters every month reminding him about the summer party. A caterer perhaps? The man who provides the generators for the marquees? He’d moved on a year ago and his mail was delivered while the shop stayed open, but since it had closed his letter came back.

  I felt a fool. Looking for adventure when none was present. I glanced down at the map again, and the letters written neatly under their names.

  Olive Channing A-

  Shirley Fog B-

  Callum Dale AB+

  Blood groups. Blood.

  * * *

  I had a good two hours before my direct train, and I used them to return to the shop on Caledonian Road. It was locked and shuttered again. I entered the bookmakers. It was not a smoky and squalid den, but had the feel of a dowdy airport lounge. Two men stood staring at a TV screen high on the wall, an older woman sat at a machine and a young man attended the screened-off counter.

  I approached him.

  ‘May I ask if you knew the gentleman who ran the shop next door?’

  The young man stood up straight, and plucked at his tie. ‘Nah. Sorry, love. I don’ know ’bout that.’

  ‘Do you know when it closed?’

  ‘Nah. Was closed when I started.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I turned to go.

  The woman looked up. ‘You asking about Saheed’s place?’

  ‘The electrical shop. Next door.’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah. Saheed. Been gone two months now.’

  I moved to her and sat down unbidden.

  ‘Why you asking?’

  ‘I had some mail for a man who may have worked there. A Mr Carver.’

  She narrowed her eyes, thinking. ‘Can’t place him. Nah. Saheed was a nice man though. Nice and polite. Do anythin’ for ya.’

  ‘Do you know why he left?’

  The woman rubbed at the back of her neck. She smelled faintly of rose water and urine. ‘Kept gettin’ visitors like.’

  ‘Visitors?’

  She nodded. ‘I never saw ’em. But he said he didn’t care for ’em.’

  ‘Tax men? Gangs?’

  She blinked up at me through smeared spectacles. ‘Visitors. I just said, didn’t I?’

  The two men had turned to look at us, irritated that their concentration on a greyhound race was being disrupted.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said kindly.

  I decided a coffee and cake in the station would be a more valuable use of my time than speaking further to a woman with mental health issues. I left as quietly as I’d entered.

  * * *

  We entertain in grand style only once a year. The summer party is everything. I have little involvement. I have a handful of friends, well acquaintances really, that I formed at Cambridge. I always ask them but they rarely attend. They are married with families and busy lives, or live abroad, and after years of being turned down I mostly leave the guest list to Grandfather, who enjoys the company of celebrities of every hue.

  But what I have been accustomed to is the calmness of Grandfather’s demeanour preceding these events. He is perturbed by very little.

  However, on the occasion of my return from London this was far from the case. My sole living relative was pale, distracted, almost wringing his hands at every turn. His temper was short and his attention shorter.

  In such a mood it was perhaps not wise to bother him with questions about the returned letter.

  However, Grandfather’s mood was so out of character, so tense, so tetchy, that he caught me short in the great hall.

  ‘Sarah!’ he bellowed. ‘Are you completely at a loss?’

  I was not quite sure what to make of this. At a loss? Did he mean idle? A tiny wound I had hitherto been unaware of opened in my heart, but small as it was it was sufficient to change my mood. I replied with ice in my voice.

  ‘Something amiss, Tather?’

  I should say at this point that we have pet names. When he is in my favour he is always Tather, an inheritance from my mispronunciation at toddler level. He in turn calls me Podge, which is exactly as it seems, an affectionately impolite reference to my build. That he had called me Sarah indicated he was annoyed.

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Then perhaps we should have a whisky. It’s not too early.’

  He sat down heavily in the chess chair. I poured our drinks and sat opposite him.

  He gulped his down.

  ‘I have a question for you, Tather.’

  He was barely paying attention, fidgeting and shifting.

  ‘Do we know an Allun Carver?’

  The crystal decanter set was a wedding present to my parents. I was sorry to have lost one of the six glasses as Grandfather dropped it on the hearth, but I was sorrier still to see the raw, primordial fear that rendered his familiar face as unlovely as it was unrecognisable.

  * * *

  Adam had helped Grandfather to his room and he had been quietly resting for over an hour when he appeared at my door. He was still putty white, but there was a new, composed nature to the man.

  ‘Sarah. Let’s walk in the garden.’

  We said nothing at all until we were well away from the house, through the laburnum walk and down to The Pearly Gates, the plot of meadow where all the family dogs have been buried over the years.

  I am patient, and I waited for him to speak first. He continually glanced here and there, as if expecting company, but in such a secluded spot it was unlikely. He looked at me with rheumy eyes.

  ‘We are not as small a family as you think.’

  ‘What do you mean? Since Uncle Oswald and Lottie died there’s only us.’

  ‘No. No. They are legion.’

  ‘Please, Tather, sit down.’

  His madness was frightening me. I guided him to the stone bench we had carved for Meg, the insubordinate wire-haired fox terrier we had both loved, and he sat like a child.

  Grandfather then took my hand, a gesture I had never experienced. It was awkward but the tightness of his grip let me no choice but to endure it.

  ‘I shall keep this simple, Podge. We haven’t much time.’

  I shifted uneasily.

  ‘My great-grandfather. A taste for the slaves we owned back then. Fathered many, many children.’

  ‘Oh please,’ I interrupted, ‘that kind of historical behaviour isn’t a family matter.’

  He squeezed harder, and became stern. ‘Listen. He kept one woman, some witch doctor’s daughter. Brought her to England, kept her in a cottage right under the nose of Lady Bosmaine. They had seven children. Those children, born and bred in England, had many more.’

  ‘Well I imagine that bloodline is well diluted by now, Tather. And illegitimacy is no concern of ours.’

  He hissed a warning through his teeth to be quiet. ‘They had a summer ball. The slave woman, having lost her mind in age and sickness, turned up at the house in a fine dress waiting to be admitted. Lady Bosmaine had her thrashed and thrown out of the grounds.

  ‘When the staff arose in the morning the front steps were adorned with the skull of a baby, woven through with willow twigs and nightshade, smeared with blood, and burned in the sockets was the remains of an invitation to the ball. The woman was found dead by her own hand later that day.’

  I sighed. My only living relative was beginning to go senile. ‘What is this primitive nons
ense? Who is Allun Carver? Tell me now.’

  He dropped my hand. My ire had been noted. ‘We have since held a summer ball now for 123 years at Bosmaine. Following some, shall we say, disturbances, at the balls following the slave woman’s death, on the advice of her son it became the custom to invite those unrecognised family members to the party.’

  ‘Then why have I never been introduced?’

  ‘Only the relatives who have died in the year between balls are invited. They decline.’

  I confess I snorted. ‘Tather, I am telling you honestly now that we are going to see Dr Maston together as soon as we have done with this ridiculous party. But if I’m right you’re informing me that for 123 years the family have been inviting dead people to Bosmaine.’

  ‘Yes, Sarah.’

  I stood up. ‘And how, pray, do we deliver these invitations?’

  ‘We lay them on their graves.’

  ‘And Carver?’

  ‘Not family. Merely the postman. He is informed by another who follows the bloodline, notes the births and deaths, and finds the graves. Carver delivers. We pay them well.’

  He stood up, agitated again. ‘Where is he, Sarah?’

  ‘Gone away.’

  He is a tall man, my grandfather, and as described a man of great personal power and standing. But he shrank before my eyes, diminished to a huddle.

  ‘Then we are undone. We are undone.’

  He wept.

  I was unable to witness this and I paced as he sobbed. When I turned he was sitting again, his head in his hands.

  ‘He left a map.’

  Grandfather sat up straight. ‘Oh, my dear girl. My love!’

  I have never been embraced by him like that, and I hope never to be again.

  * * *

  I had little idea of how I would feel on approaching the grave. It was a modest affair in a tiny village churchyard south of Market Harborough. It was an unlovely place, a 19th-century church of no great merit bounded on both sides by unpleasant modern bungalows. Olive Channing had, by all accounts on her newly carved granite stone, been the beloved wife of Ernest, himself deceased, and mother to two loving children who missed her dearly.

  There were some withered chrysanthemums on the grass and an ugly white plastic bowl of fake violets, still tied around with tattered purple ribbon. That this woman, this ordinary, unremarkable nobody of a person could in any way be connected to the Bosmaines seemed ridiculous.

  What did any of these imposters even look like? Had the rogue gene survived the journey intact, or were my hundreds of dead relatives part of a giant human kaleidoscope?

  I took the invitation out of my bag and looked at it with distaste. Had I not been foolish enough to have intercepted the postman that rainy day only a week ago, I would have been sheltered from this preposterous superstition that has blighted my otherwise robustly sane grandfather for his entire life.

  But now I was drawn in. Curiously I found myself beginning to anger. By what right did these individuals deserve to have such cloak and dagger fuss made over their mere existence? They had their own families. Considerably more than I had. Husbands, wives, children, siblings, the company of warm, loving, living relatives.

  And while I was playing on my own these people, who history claims share my blood, were being part of something I could never enjoy. Even in death they were joined, invited in some stupid ritual to still be part of the bigger picture, a piece in the jigsaw from which I still felt excluded.

  Did Grandfather expect me to keep this going after his own death? Was I bound now to carry on paying our mysterious servants to follow this ritual until my own death when the Bosmaine line ends with me?

  I am too old to bear children now even if I wished. On reflection, over the grave of this plain woman, it seemed all I had was our history. There is no future.

  I felt hot tears prick my eyes and I bowed my head as I bent down to the grave.

  * * *

  Wednesday’s grim trip to those gravesides seems a long time ago now that I am standing in the lily-bedecked library with a very fine glass of Médoc in my hand. Grandfather is quite himself again. He is dressed magnificently in white tie and is delighted that we have a minor young royal here for this year’s event, with the young ladies going perfectly mad over him in the garden.

  The party has become quite The Thing amongst smart sets over the last few years and I find myself as pleased about this as much as Grandfather. I am not in much demand at any party but I stare with quiet satisfaction out of the window down the lawn to the far woods. The weather has been a friend all day and the high summer sun is only now setting behind the tall beeches, throwing the great trunks into deep shade against the pinking sky.

  As my eyes adjust I notice some guests have strayed into the trees. I smile at the state their party shoes will be in when they emerge. They have little idea how muddy it can be, even in the driest of weather. We have guests who, when shooting for pheasant in the season, often emerge from that same coppice, covered head to foot in muck as though from the trenches. It will be no less brutal to taffeta than to Harris tweeds.

  I lower my glass a little and squint. There are three, I think, but I wonder at what they are doing. They’re coming this way, back to the house, slowly. Their gait is unusual. Are they injured? I hope no incident has occurred. This is an important night for us both.

  I feel my heart beat a little faster, though I’m not certain why. I put down my glass to go and find Grandfather. It takes some time to locate him, and the candles are being lit as it grows darker. For some reason I feel a little panic. Eventually I find him, standing in the entrance hall behind the great pillars, greeting some late evening arrivals with much slapping of backs. He sees me, and his face falls.

  Do I look concerned? I walk slowly towards him, the desire to be at his side stronger than it has ever been. To be together. A family. I reach him and lift my hand to hold his.

  The door knocker sounds. Instead of opening the door wide and standing back in greeting, Adam slips through the narrow gap so that we cannot see our new arrivals. Grandfather is looking at me.

  Adam is talking to someone. We only hear his voice. It is rising in anxious agitation. It is loud enough for us all to hear: ‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask to see your invitations.’

  Grandfather’s eyes are black holes, of disappointment, accusation, and naked, visceral fear.

  He knows what I have done.

  MURIEL GRAY

  Muriel Gray is a broadcaster and author of three horror novels, plus many short stories. She is chair of the board of Glasgow School of Art and a board member of The British Museum. She lives in Glasgow.

  ASTRAY

  NINA ALLAN

  Here is something I remember: me and my friend Lynsey in the apartment in Wiesbaden, scaring ourselves senseless watching a video of a horror movie called And Soon the Darkness. We were ten years old, and we were watching it because it had Michele Dotrice in, who we both knew as Betty Spencer from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. We had no idea beforehand that it was a horror film. The movie was about two friends who go on a cycling holiday through northern France. The woman played by Michele Dotrice ends up being murdered by a local policeman. Not the kind of thing our parents would have wanted us watching, Lynsey’s parents especially, but we were alone in the apartment and no one even knew we had the video. What frightened me most about the movie was the music, a French pop song they kept playing. It was so catchy, so happy-sounding. The music fooled you into thinking everything was going to be all right in the end, only it wasn’t. I can see Michele Dotrice’s bicycle lying on its side in the grass with its wheel spinning, even now.

  * * *

  It’s an offence to open an item of mail that isn’t addressed to you, did you know that? Even junk mail – credit card offers and mail order catalogues, the unsolicited nuisance letters that keep being delivered long after the person who they are addressed to has moved on. Most people just th
row them away, I suppose – they’re probably not aware that it’s illegal to open them. I’ve sometimes wondered if anyone has ever been prosecuted for perusing a copy of the Next directory that wasn’t addressed to them. It’s unlikely, though it is theoretically possible. You’re supposed to send them on, those dead letters, or mark them ‘return to sender’ and feed them back into the postal system without checking their contents.

  The term ‘dead letter office’ was actually coined by the United States Postal Service in 1825. In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, all undeliverable mail – that’s unaddressed mail, letters directed to an address that no longer exists, or with an address that has become indecipherable – ends up at the National Returns Centre in Belfast. Why Belfast, I have no idea. National Returns Centre is an ugly, obfuscatory term that could only have been invented by British bureaucracy. Dead letter office is semantically more accurate, and a lot more poetic.

  * * *

  I bought this flat because it is close to a bus stop, because it still has its original 1930s parquet floors and because the garden is enclosed by walls and completely private. Buses stop frequently – there is one every fifteen minutes or so – and reach the city centre in under twenty minutes. Also, the flat has a spacious entrance hall and the internal doorways and access corridors are wide enough to accommodate my wheelchair, on those infrequent occasions when I am forced to use it.

  * * *

  I used to collect stamps as a child. Not in that obnoxious Stanley-Gibbons-always-to-hand manner so beloved of public schoolboys and insane kings, although the rituals and motivations I attached to my own version of the hobby would probably seem just as arbitrary and obsessive from an outside point of view. It was not so much the stamps as the letters that were important to me, and I was less interested in rare New Zealand commemoratives or the Apollo-Soyuz First Day Cover than in the stamps that happened to come my way by chance. My mother and father were both in the army, which meant that one or the other of them was always away and we never got to live in the same place for more than three years. They argued over my schooling. Mum thought it would be better for me – more settled – if I went to boarding school. There were a lot of free scholarships for army kids, at least there were back then, and by Mum’s reasoning a boarding school would have provided me with a stable community, somewhere I could call home, even when my actual home was in a state of flux. But Dad had hated his own boarding school experience so much he couldn’t bear to consider it, so I went where they were based, a long catalogue of place names that included Wiesbaden and Salisbury and Cyprus, Northallerton and Northern Ireland, Paderborn and then Cyprus again. I attended twelve different schools in all. Kids are meant to hate that kind of disruption, aren’t they? I’m sure I pretended to hate it from time to time, just because I knew it was expected, but in reality it suited me just fine. Run up against a teacher you hated, or the school bully or the school molester or any other breed of tedious lowlife, and you would know from the very first moment that they had a limited shelf life. An expiration date. Which made it so much easier for you to tell them to go and stuff themselves. And any friends you happened to make that genuinely mattered? Well, you could always write to them.