Whispers in the Dark

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  After lunch, she was helped out to the garden for the benefit of the sea air, though she kept herself well within the shade, for in those days (and mine too) a tan was something thought most unbecoming in a lady. As the afternoon wore on, however, her little arbor grew quite chilly. The sun, which had been fat with warmth all morning, had taken itself off behind a bank of clouds, clouds that had, by midafternoon, become a solid mass that filled the sky. The sea breeze that had been so delightful when she first ventured into the garden, was now growing petulant and uncomfortable. In the end, she returned to the sitting room, gloomily watching the weather worsen through a window that was soon streaked by heavy rain.

  The squall grew rapidly into a fully blown storm, as it will do in that region. It was dark by teatime, hours before sunset, and my mother was beginning to worry that her family would be obliged to spend the night on Lindisfarne. The hotel manager reassured her, saying there was a comfortable inn on the island where they could put up if need be. She tried to relax, knowing they would never be so foolish as to set out again in weather like that.

  Nor did they. For the boatman, seeing what sort of weather was setting in, had made his mind up to stay at the island, come what may. No one knew quite what happened after that. There seems to have been an argument, during which my grandfather, a headstrong man, had angry words with the boatman, all to no good. They never went near the inn. One of them must have suggested returning to the mainland on foot. Holy Island, as you may know, is connected to the shore by a causeway about three miles in length. People still make miscalculations there, and the new causeway road has “refuges" for hapless drivers caught by high tide, but there was none of that then. They took the old pilgrim route over the seabed, seemingly safe when the tide was out, but utterly treacherous to those unfamiliar with its vagaries.

  No one could ever guess how far they got. Perhaps they were only yards from the shore when the tide, speeded by the storm, rushed in and swept them out to sea.

  The boat returned the next morning and the alarm was raised. Inquiries along the coast drew a succession of blanks, and no one was in any doubt about the outcome. By the evening of the first day it was a foregone conclusion that all had been drowned. The first bodies were found the next afternoon, washed up on the Fen-ham Flats, not far south of the causeway.

  There was another aunt, a spinster by the name of Harriet, who lived in Tynemouth, where she kept a guest house in the summer months. My mother made her way to her, bewildered with grief, and remained with her until she met and married my father. That was three years later. I still remember Harriet, a kindly, silly woman in a high bonnet trimmed with Nottingham lace, eager to please, and a frequent visitor to our home until her death when I was eight.

  My mother had other relatives, none of them close, all of them long since gone to Australia or Canada or South Africa. They were notified of the deaths, according to the formalities of the time, and a few replied in due course, in equally formal letters written in haste between sheepshearing and doing the accounts. My mother told me all about them years later, how dreary those duty letters had been, how she could never hope for more than stilted words and clumsy sentences, how there had never been and could never be a “connection.” And yet how much grief could have been avoided had even one of those exiles shown a little feeling then or later.

  With my grandfather’s death, my mother became something of an heiress. And in time her good looks added to whatever allure her fortune gave her, bringing over a dozen proposals of marriage by the time she was nineteen, all of which, under Harriet’s tutelage and her own presence of mind, she turned down flat. She was never gay, she would not go to balls, she scarcely went to church; but word of her money and her looks was not slow in spreading, and she was pursued. Pursued, but never captured.

  Until my father came on the scene, that is. How often I remember her telling me of their first meeting, and the next, and the next. She was swept off her feet, he made her dizzy. And when he asked her to marry him, she did not hesitate for a moment. She told me all this later, when I was old enough to understand a little. Even then, years later, she was full of him, she could not stop talking about him to anyone who would listen, even to me, his daughter, or to Arthur. It was almost blasphemous, the way she worshiped him.

  We worshiped him, too, of course, Arthur and I, for he was everything my mother thought and, I suspect, much more. Fathers in those days were supposed to be grim and distant creatures who left the care of their children in the hands of wives and nannies. But our father was never a man of his time. He spent hours with us, playing games, reading stories, listening to our worries.

  Oh, dear. I’ve made him sound an awful prig, almost as bad as Arthur. What will you think of me, Doctor, describing my father like that? You won’t believe me, will you? You’ll say I’m making it all up, compensating for my loss of his affections by creating a fairy-tale prince to take his place. But stuff and nonsense I say. He was a wonderful father, he was the most wonderful father in the world, and Arthur and I loved him uncontrollably. I don’t suppose children do nowadays, I expect they have much lower expectations and suffer from all sorts of neglect. But we were never neglected.

  Father was a busy man, of course, but not like so many of these modern businessmen, always at the office, carrying on with their secretaries, chasing money as though it had just been invented. No, our father worked hard and had a full social life, but he spent time with us whenever he could, which was often. Sundays, in particular, were sacred.

  His great love, his truly great love, was to attend the meetings of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Westgate Road. Once a week, from autumn through to summer, he would kiss us good night and set off in his evening clothes for a lecture on the latest scientific discovery or, for that matter, the works of Homer. He was omnivorous, there was nothing he could not find a use for in that vast brain of his. How clever I thought him, most of all on the two occasions when he was invited to deliver lectures himself. My own father, and all those great men listening to him in their bow ties and stiff white shirts. I thought him the cleverest and the handsomest man among them, a young god. My mother had converted me to her idolatry. Well, he was my god then, and I have never found a better since.

  If they could hear me in church, Doctor, what do you think they would make of me? Eh? An old woman crippled with blasphemies. Weighed down with her idolatry, her worship of a long-dead mother and father, her deification of a brother she will very soon join in death. Perhaps you think, too, how heinous of her, how very improper. I don’t know your mind, of course, you never talk to me about yourself. Perhaps you don’t think it heinous, merely silly or “Victorian,” that all-purpose epithet with which your generation is wont to consign mine to the dustbin of all things sugary and sentimental and hypocritical.

  Well, it’s true, we did suffer from all those things. And worse, much worse. Ours was an age of very proper vices, and I pray we never see another like it. And yet . . . And yet, I was truly happy then. Not merely in retrospect, in the shadow of what happened later, but truly and deliriously happy all of my childhood. I wanted for nothing, I was healthy, I loved and was loved, summer seemed to last for ever, the whole world moved gently and carried me with it, without distress, as though on a sea without waves. And there was Arthur.

  He came to me one day when I was about seven, in floods of tears. He’d seen a man outside beating a horse, the way some people did then, quite thoughtlessly. I don’t know why, but he always came to me first from about that age, when he had any fears or worries. Father was at work, so we sought out Mother in her sitting room. Hannah was with us, of course, she was never far away, but she had already learned the unwisdom of trying to rein her young master in too far.

  That was the thing, you see, the thing I can’t get across. Arthur was pretty and gentle and all of that, and I loved him on account of it, who wouldn’t have? But that was simply the superficiality of Arthur, it wasn’t what I really remember. There
was a force about him, something unstoppable, I mean a real force that no one could bottle up.

  He stormed into Mother’s room that day—barely six years old—opened the door and stormed in, raging, furious, in tears all at once.

  “The poor horse,” he shouted, “he’s beating the poor horse. And when I tried to stop him he only laughed.”

  I remember the bewilderment in my mother’s face. She looked at Arthur, then at me, then Hannah. We did our best to explain, but Arthur was losing patience. There was no time to be wasted. He rushed off suddenly, out of the room, heading for the front door, which was still open, and out into the street, where we found him shouting abuse at the carter.

  I cannot remember now quite how that incident ended, for my memory of it is so focused on Arthur and the fury he displayed. Years later my father would still ask my mother to relate the scene, so disappointed was he to have missed the fun.

  And there was so much fun. No matter that Arthur was a boy and I a girl in a time when boys and girls grew up in different worlds. We were never separate for more than an hour or so at a time. We slept in separate rooms, but not many nights passed when Arthur would not sneak down to my room for a story or a game. We were caught and spanked for it often enough, but we kept it up with a determination that surprises me now.

  Arthur, dear Arthur, exquisite and fearful Arthur, you hate all this, don’t you? My reminiscences, my praise. You always hated fluff, didn’t you? I can still see you, after tea with the Misses Singleton, screwing up your face and shouting “What a load of fluff and twaddle.” Your favorite words. Are you there now, mouthing those old rebukes at me, “fluff and nonsense,” “fluff and stuff?

  I can see him so clearly, Doctor, God forgive me if seeing the dead is a sin: his eyes, his hands, his fingernails. Lying in bed, that lime he was ill with jaundice, and it was my job to see he stayed there; setting fire to cook’s hat, and taking a beating for it, and coming to me afterward, not in tears, but in delight at what he had done, for it had been such a particularly monstrous hat, and he had so hated it, as he must hate all this; sucking sweets in church, and all the while a rapt, angelic look on his face; running like a hare at the seaside, a strand of seaweed in one hand, streaming behind him; rolling colored eggs down the hill on the town moor at Easter, one after another, so they would crack at the bottom.

  The best times were at Christmas, a time of year that Arthur loved above all others. It snowed at Christmas every year, or so my memory tells me. We were great believers, Arthur and I, like all children of our creed and class in those days, and everything was jumbled up in a glorious mental confusion: the baby Jesus, the Wise Men bearing gifts, Santa Claus, angelic voices, Donner and Blitzen, the fairy on top of our tree.

  The magic has gone now, and not merely because I am so much older. They have taken the heart out of Christmas, i try as best I can to fill all this emptiness with memories, but I don’t suppose anyone notices. My great-grandchildren are greedy for loud games and television, they want rooms full of toys, they think Father Christmas is a bit of a joke. I remember sitting in the window of my father’s study, overlooking the garden, with Arthur beside me, watching the sky grow radiant with snow and with that strange pearllike light it brought. There was a fire in every room, burning with resinous logs, and candles, and holly we had picked ourselves, and ribbons we had tied, and a tree heavy with lights that flickered in the darkness. All gone now, all vanished, all packed away in the trunks and boxes of memory.

  I’ve never lied to you, Doctor, I’m incapable of it, I could never tell a deliberate untruth. I do admit there are things I have never told you, things I’ve thought best to hold back; but I’m telling you now, aren't I? When I say we were happy and at peace, I do mean exactly that. There were worries, I know that very well, my parents had more than their share. But I was unaware of them, and I am glad of it. I had a childhood, I had the best brother in the world, nothing can ever take that from me, nothing. Not even the thing I fear most.

  I don’t mean death, Doctor, pray do not misunderstand me. You think I fear dissolution, but you’re wrong. You think I dread the coming of darkness, but it isn’t so. I’ve known a greater darkness than that. I know there are worse things to fear. You’ll see, Doctor, I’ll show you, I’ll tell you everything, you know I will.

  CHAPTER 3

  What did you mean yesterday when you said I must “set down the bare facts”? Did you think I was pulling your leg, spinning a tale of happy families, covering up some physical or sexual abuse? You’ve never liked the fact that I can talk back, have you, Doctor? That I’m not like your other old ladies, perfectly happy to be sent home to suck on pills or slip on rubber drawers for incontinence. It unsettles you that I have a degree, that I had a profession, that I can speak up for myself, doesn’t it? Well, doesn’t it?

  You’re all the same, you doctors, you think God made you out of different clay. The least show of independence on the part of your patients, and you think you’re about to lose control, may have lost it already. Well, in this case, I have no intention of reassuring you. You have lost it. I’ll tell my story as I want to tell it, and no more interference from you. If you’re carping at this stage, God knows what you’ll be like once I get to the bits that matter. So from now on I’m keeping this record to myself. You’ll only see it when it’s finished, and I’ll only talk with you about it then.

  But, believe me, I’m telling the truth. About everything. My childhood was happy, and that’s all there is to it. If that seems abnormal to you, so much the worse for you and the profession that made you think that way. But if it makes you happy, I’ll mention the one cloud that hung over us. A thin, wispy thing it seemed at the time.

  It didn’t quite make itself clear to me at first, mainly, I think, on account of my mother’s lack of family. By the time I was seven or eight, I knew all about that, what had happened to my grandparents. And then, when I was eight, Aunt Harriet died. She had never really got over her sister’s death, all their deaths, never got the water out of her dreams. She had a stroke, but I think she drowned in her sleep, beneath seas of her own making.

  I remember a great sense of isolation after that, for my father had no family either, or at least very little. I think it may have been what drew him to my mother in the beginning, a sense of affinity. There had been no tragedy in his life to match hers, no tidal change of that angularity or speed, but something had happened and we knew it, even as children. His parents had died sometime before, his mother first of tuberculosis, his father two years after that of a heart attack, a rare enough thing in those days. He had been an only child, and on his father’s death already established in business and free to live his own life.

  There was talk—we overheard it sometimes, when they thought we weren’t listening—about an aunt, cousins, distant relations of whom we had never heard. By the time I was ten, I knew there had been some sort of breach, a rift that went back well before my father’s time to that of my grandfather and, for all I knew, even further still. He never talked of it openly, this break, this estrangement, whatever it was. Of his own parents, he spoke freely and often enough, trying to make us love them a little through his stories and the photographs in his album. Or, if not love them exactly, at least know them, form images of them as though seen through his eyes. He had loved them deeply, felt their loss immeasurably.

  But one day—I must have been about nine—I asked a foolish question. I had been at a birthday party that day, I remember, a dreary enough affair, all frilly dresses and pink bows and merciless games that ended in tears. Louisa, the little girl in whose honor the party had been held, had introduced me to no fewer than six "cousins,” and I had experienced one of my first real pangs of jealousy.

  “Do I have any cousins, Papa?”

  I remember the question, thinking it and asking it, as though it were moments ago. The stillness that followed, then my father’s outburst, quite incomprehensible to me. It was one of the very few times I can reme
mber him losing his temper. He came to me later, when I was in bed, and apologized. I’ve already told you, he was not a typical Victorian father.

  He said he had not been angry with me, but with circumstance. Yes, he told me, there were indeed cousins, but he had never met them. There had been a split in his family a long time ago—he did not say precisely when—and contact between the two sides had never been resumed. It was not his fault, not his cousins’ fault either, for that matter; but neither side seemed to have the will or the need to bridge the gap. In another generation, he thought, even the original quarrel would have been forgotten. By then, the very memory of a relationship would have faded, and it would all become a matter of genealogical interest. It was my first long word, “genealogical,” and I never forgot it.

  I asked him about the original quarrel to which he had referred, but he merely smiled and said it was a grown-up matter, he would tell me later, if I still wanted to know, when I was a young lady and able to understand such things. He never did, of course. But I found out myself in time.

  And that. Doctor, is all I can tell you. Very few arguments, other than those built around childhood tantrums. No mysteries, other than that pale question mark concerning my half-cousins. We were a very happy family until . . .

  Until my father died. I was eleven and Arthur nine and a half. I still remember. . . I still remember the door of the nursery opening, and Mother sending Hannah away, closing the door after her, her eyes so full she could not have been able to see. And the horrible knowing of something wrong before she ever spoke, and the knowing everything must change from that moment.

  Arthur was very quiet afterward, and all that night. We spent the night together in my bed, with a light lit against the darkness, and we scarcely slept. I had cried myself dry. I had listened to my mother weeping, alone in her room. He had died of a heart attack, prematurely, just like his own father. They had brought him home from the factory, when we were out of the way, and men in black had come to lay him out. He was down there now, I knew, laid out in his coffin, wearing his best clothes, to all appearances sleeping.