by Phil Rickman
Jordan did all this for Trinity… or for himself? Doesn’t matter; this is the only part of Knap Hall she’s so far seen that seems to be, if not flourishing, at least holding its own against the entropic haze that seems to hang over the house.
She comes out the other side of the garden next to the smallest barn which, because it’s too far away from the other outbuildings to be part of the Hunter-Gatherer village, is now used as storage for stalls removed from the stables and old bales of hay and straw.
Grayle wanders inside and sits down on a crumbling bale. The anger of Rhys Sebold that perhaps fronts up his inner-anguish hasn’t followed her in here. It feels oddly warm, as if the very last rays of summer have found their way through the knot garden and into this little barn, which is more like a church than the chapel in the walled garden.
In the silence – a rarity at Knap Hall now – she thinks about what Defford’s told her about the strange encounter with Harry Ansell that brought all this about. Wonders if Defford realizes how the house might be changing him, wearing away the boyish enthusiasm she recalls from that first day in March.
Trust me, Grayle, this is going to be the most talked-about television of the winter.
Sure, but talked about how? In what context?
Apprehension cools the sunlight. Within seconds, the phone’s bleeping, and it’s Defford, and she’s never heard him sounding less happy.
22
Guantanamo
HE WANTS HER to go where?
‘South Devon,’ Defford says. ‘Will you be free to do that tonight?’
His tone implies that ‘Will you be free?’ translates as you will be free.
He says, ‘Helen Parrish lives there.’
And…?
‘Where are you now, Leo?’
‘I’m in the house. Finalizing some things. If you come over here in half an hour I’ll put you in the picture, but, essentially, it looks as if Parrish might be about to walk away. Which is hardly what we need at this stage.’
‘You said she was just holding out for more money.’
‘More complicated. Her agent’s in talks with ITV about her presenting a daytime holiday programme aimed at the older viewer with cash to unload. Grey pin-up stuff. Good money, free travel, lavish clothing allowance. So that’s why she’s been stalling.’
‘You said she was washed up, hadn’t worked for over a year.’
‘Yes, I know exactly what I said, Grayle.’ Upper middle-class roots showing as his voice tightens. ‘But even I am not always right. She’s apparently convinced she’s lost one job because of the Diana story and won’t risk losing another. And her agent, as expected, is not being supportive as regards us.’
‘You talked to her?’
‘Kate’s talked to her, briefly, to arrange for you to talk to her.’
‘But— Jeez, Leo, what am I supposed to—?’
‘Image factor. Don’t undervalue your guileless charm. Helen needs reassuring that she won’t be considered in any way unbalanced for seeing whatever she saw.’
‘Like, she’s gonna look at me and realize how freaking normal she is?’
This is not what she’s being paid for. Not even what she’s good at.
‘Drive down to her place in Devon. Tonight, because she’s going on holiday at the weekend – she says. Take her to dinner somewhere. Talk her round, talk about her experience—’
‘We don’t really know what that was, do we?’
‘We know that she was very much affected by it at the time, and still in a state of shock when she talked to colleagues in the restaurant. You’ll be both sympathetic and knowledgeable.’
Grayle stares out the window. It’s already gone five p.m., which means she’d be driving down there in the dark. She does not want to do this.
‘What’s wrong with one of the producers?’
‘At the risk of offending you, Grayle, they’re all too bleedin’ young.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And she’s a journalist, and you’re a journalist. And also, you can offer her another hundred K.’
‘Oh, I see…’
‘It’s delicate,’ Defford says, ‘but she hasn’t yet said no. Kate’s drawing up a new contract, which you can take with you.’
‘I just show up?’
‘She’s expecting you, and she is prepared to talk about it.’
It’s like he’s setting her up as the person who’ll carry the can if this woman pulls out. Well, no way.
Makes her want to join Parrish and Driscoll under the exit sign.
When she gets to the house, the whole sky’s salmon-slicked, sunless but shiny. She’s come early. If she doesn’t have this out with the bastard now, things will only get worse as pre-transmission tension sets in.
The front door’s still kept locked inside its shallow stone porch. You still have to go round the back, through the more modern part, which she doesn’t like, and then – she hasn’t been in here for… must be months – the old part starts playing tricks with your head.
The big room, the chamber, is not so big any more, and its whole shape has altered. A false wall has gone up: distressed panelling, with two mirrors in dark frames. Two-way mirrors, behind which cameramen will prowl, soft-shoed voyeurs. Upstairs, they’ve removed some oak boards for another camera which will show most of the room from above, like the roof’s been taken off a period doll’s house.
It’s like being in a fish tank full of dark water. And now voices are rising, although the room’s empty. She’s startled for a moment before realizing what she’d missed before: the inglenook fireplace is also two-way, one wide stone hearth serving two adjacent rooms. Must always have been like that. Saves on logs.
The other room is reached by a discreet gothic doorway in a corner near the wooden screen. It’s a little brighter and has a long, refectory-type table, where the residents will eat. Two guys are here with Defford: a young carpenter, measuring up, and a grizzled lighting man whom Defford clearly annoys by calling him a sparks. Also his PA, Kate Lyons, a bulky, middle-aged woman with dark red hair in a loose bun. She’s carrying a small stills-camera.
‘…think it’ll probably work, Leo.’ Her voice is ice-pick patrician. ‘If we’re giving them the freedom of the rear hall – which we’ll have to, because of the stairs – then, by leaving just one door unlocked, they’ll also be able to access the walled garden and the chapel without being able to get into the main building. So we’ll need just one more stout door to keep them confined.’
It’s like they’re planning a new Guantanamo Bay. Grayle hovers in the doorway. Nobody acknowledges her.
‘OK, organize it.’ Defford turns to the grizzled sparks. ‘What?’
The sparks is unhappy. He talks about technical stuff, and Defford hears him out.
‘But can you light it like we said?’
‘Leo, that room absorbs light. All I’m saying is we might just need—’
‘No screens, no reflectors!’ Defford smacks two fingers of one hand into the open palm of the other, twice. ‘Off-putting. Screams television. I didn’t say can you light it beautifully, Peter, I said can you fucking light it?’
The sparks looks sullen.
‘As I keep saying and will continue to say,’ Defford tells him, ‘I don’t want to have to use infrared at any stage. I’d rather have candlelight, even if we have to fake some of it. Infrared’s become a cliché.’
‘You said.’
‘Mainly because of two words I don’t ever want to hear in this house.’
The sparks sighs.
‘Most and Haunted.’
‘Well-remembered.’ Defford beckons the carpenter to follow him through the Gothic doorway into the main chamber, where he shows him the holes in the wall of ship’s timber. ‘What d’you reckon?’
‘No big problem,’ the carpenter says. ‘We’ll just pack it around with wood-filler, paint the filler the colour of the oak, and as long as Peter keeps it in shadow…’
‘He
will. And can we conceal those bloody smoke alarms? And make them less… functional?’
This gets him some wary looks. Grayle can’t believe how hands-on practical he suddenly is. She thought all this would’ve been delegated, way back, but maybe it’s all down to programme security, need-to-know. If Hunter-Gatherer doesn’t employ its own tradesmen, has to contract out, he needs to leave as little time as possible for details to leak. He’s also allowed the word ‘fake’ to creep into his working vocabulary. As time gets short, principles are the first to go.
He notices her at last.
‘Grayle, give me ten. We’re organizing a full rehearsal next week – our people assuming the roles of the residents. Which, hopefully, should show up any flaws in the planning. Ten minutes, OK?’
‘Sure.’
She nods, unsmiling, gets out of his way but not out of the doorway. She’s just realized this must be the doorway where, according to Jeff Pruford, Trinity Ansell was standing in the picture taken by the woman from the Midwest. And behind her, behind where Grayle’s standing right now, was a woman whose eyes – according to Jeff Pruford – were full of white hatred.
She resists the urge to move, and inspects the big chamber. The false wall makes the window look bigger, but nobody seems to have cleaned it recently. Flies have died in the greasy film on some panes, reminding her of Lisa Muir: Probably some fungal thing… bacteria…
Defford’s evidently sticking to his determination not to recreate Trinity’s Knap Hall. The Cotsworld picture was a lovely dream, this is the drab reality of Tudor farmhouse living. Defford has talked about starkness and a level of discomfort; how far will he take this? Will there be dry rushes on the stone flags? She notices the electric light fittings have all gone. Is it really going to be lit by sick-smelling tallow candles?
Grayle walks determinedly out of the haunted doorway, goes out into the passage, turns a corner and finds the stone back stairs facing her. Some of the residents will be sleeping up there – on modern mattresses… or something filled with straw so they won’t get much sleep, inducing headaches and foul moods? What a goddamn scam this could all turn out to be.
The stairs, almost certainly the original farmhouse stairs, are a half-spiral, the stone steps forming a slow curve. Flicking at the wall switches, she walks, for the first time, upstairs, to what remains of the Ansells’ apartment. This could be the nearest she’ll ever get to that marriage.
23
The bed
AT THE TOP of the half-spiral, a windowless passage is lit by electric sconce-type lamps, the bulbs so old and low-powered you can see the filaments, like rings of thin children holding hands.
She has three options. A narrow wooden staircase, evidently a replacement, continues darkly to a third floor. A right turn takes you to some of the former hotel rooms, where most of the residents will sleep, but there’s a tape across the passage. At the other end, Grayle’s guessing, doors will be fitted to cut off access to the main stairs. One way in, one way out: no exploring. But with TV cameras running and monitored 24/7, Defford’s probably right not to worry about fire spreading in the night.
A fire door to the left has a sign with PRIVATE on it in polite gilt lettering. This has to be the Ansells’ own apartment. The door’s ajar, raw early-evening light flaking out like old plaster.
Outside Trinity’s sanctuary, Grayle hesitates a moment then shrugs.
On the other side of the door, there’s a short landing then a few steps to an open door exposing this large, square, empty room where the panelling is too perfect to be all original. Two Gothic windows overlook bushes at the side of the house and the path to the knot garden. A partly conifered wood obscures the longer view.
The Ansells’ bedroom, sitting room? A TV antenna cable snakes across wide, bare boards. No furniture, all the wood is in the walls: light oak panelling with a door inset, closed. The air is of desolation. If she felt apprehensive about intruding on the remains of a marriage, she isn’t. With the stripping of the room, something’s been vacuum pumped out of here. She imagines the stone-faced Ansell she’s seen in Cheltenham striding around, pointing at this, pointing at that: out, out, all of it.
And then turning it over to Defford, who told Grayle outside the chapel about his early encounters with Trinity Ansell at parties and Cheltenham Races. How, when Trinity first began to show up in the Cotswolds it was with her old lover William Fraser, the actor. It was the later stage of that relationship, lots of moodies and fall-outs. Then Defford went to America, and the next time he saw Trinity it was with Harry Burgess, in those heady, summery, early days of Cotsworld.
By then, Defford had produced Living with the Royals for CBS, now showing in the UK on Channel 5. They’d shot some stuff around Tetbury, close to Prince Charles’s place, High-grove, and Cotsworld ran an editorial criticizing them for being invasive. Defford was furious. He cornered Ansell at a party, asked him what his beef was.
The answer put their relationship on to a whole new level, laid the foundations for what was happening here now.
‘He didn’t have one.’
Defford springing off the chapel wall, grinning, admiring Ansell’s editorial instincts.
‘Didn’t have a problem with us at all. He just knew his readership – the way local people liked to feel protective about the Royals. Like Charles and Camilla and Anne were their valued neighbours. A kind of snobbery – Harry loved that about Cotswold society. Played up to it. I wouldn’t say we became mates that night, but I think we got to know how we could be useful to each other.’
Defford was to encounter Harry Ansell several times in the next couple of years, before attending the celebrity memorial service for Trinity, at Gloucester Cathedral.
And then, months later, at one of those black-tie dinner parties at a peeling manor house near Stroud, the host a now-wealthy Labour peer who used to be in TV and once worked alongside Defford on the BBC Newsnight programme. Defford speculating to Grayle that this was the first time since losing his wife that Ansell had been persuaded to appear at any kind of social gathering not connected with his business. Defford remembering how everybody was walking on eggshells. Only a dozen guests, and four of them singles so Ansell wouldn’t feel out on the edge.
Over dinner, a woman, making conversation, asked Defford what he was working on, and he, having had a few drinks by then, told her he was looking for an unknown haunted house.
Biting his tongue when he saw that Harry Ansell had overheard, but the obvious connection that haunting has with death and loss didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. When the subject got picked up and bounced across the table, it came out that the manor house itself was said to have a spectral presence – an old lady in a Victorian nanny’s outfit who only appeared when there were children in the house.
‘Any use, Leo?’ The peer scenting money. Defford telling Grayle how he took a certain pleasure in regretting that a dead nanny didn’t quite do it for him.
But Harry Ansell wasn’t so easily dismissed.
‘I popped out to the terrace for a smoke, and there he was.’
Defford well remembers how Ansell looked that night. He’d lost weight but not substance. Grayle guesses he looked like a grey wolf during a lean winter, intent and purposeful. ‘Driven’ is Defford’s word.
Driven by what? Losing Trinity was losing everything. She never wrote a word for Cotsworld, but she sold that magazine just by existing in the background, a conduit to life in an English paradise. Trinity’s name had not come up once over dinner, but as they gazed down over Stroud, Defford told Ansell how very sorry he’d been.
There are, of course, different kinds of sorrow, and Defford’s must have been coloured with a kind of excitement he’d find hard to conceal when Ansell said,
‘I have a haunted house.’
Something was telling Defford not to follow up on it too quickly, but, because they were alone, he felt he could go on talking about Trinity.
‘Hell of a loss,’ he told Harry A
nsell. ‘A light gone out.’
There was silence. Defford recalls Ansell crushing his cigarette into the wet, dead foliage of something in an ornamental urn and saying,
‘What if it hasn’t gone out?’
Grayle pads across, finds the door’s unlocked, opening into a short passageway with doors either side, all ajar. She opens them in sequence. What could’ve been a small kitchen has an array of power points and a sink. There’s a bathroom with a pedestal tub in its centre, a toilet, a second bathroom attached to a dressing room with closets, frosted window panes. Only one door, directly ahead, is closed. In fact no, not quite; it’s just darker in the room on the other side.
This is likely to be the bedroom. She can make out walls of panelling and one of plaster, evening-pink and veined with bleached oak and—
Oh, dear God…
—a silent group of people standing there.
Grayle backs out, stumbling, chest hurting from a shrivelled scream. Tries to shut the door but only succeeds in slamming it back with a crash against the wall, folding to her knees just as she identifies the skeleton of a four-poster bed, its canopy and backboard missing, an empty cavity at its base.
She stays down there, releasing trapped breath.
Old houses. The filaments in a bulb become faerie kids dancing in a ring, and four rigid bedposts are black-clad mourners gathered around an open grave.
There’s nothing else in the dim room but the bed, symbol of a marriage collapsed by death. Grayle’s mind inflicts on her an image of Trinity Ansell sitting between the posts at the foot of a vaguely similar bed, richly curtained. Lightly brushing out her long, sheeny hair, swish, swish.
Grayle comes to her feet, pushing numbed fingers through what’s left of her own hair. Only a half-dismantled bed, but it’s unsettling, and she can’t lose the feelings of loss.