‘Get in the car, Budde.’
Her voice was pounding in my head. He is mine. Mine.
‘Flora’s out there.’
‘She can look after herself.’ What about Algie? ‘Get in. Now.’
The engine burst into life. Augusta shrieked in the pouring rain.
Alex drove fast, his hands gripped the wheel, his face dark against the night. Neither of us said a word. Jojo squirmed around in the small space at the back of the car. By the time we reached the vicarage driveway all I could hear was the rain falling on the thin black roof. I thought at first he’d driven off with her, that somehow Augusta was on the car roof, sliding through windows, folding her feathers, her dress, her hair into the cramped front seat, but I was wrong. She flung herself at my window, like the rain, like the wind, a storm rattling against the glass. All I could hear was her deep voice.
Let me in, little Buddey girl. Let me in.
Someone took my wet clothes from me. Someone helped me into bed. Someone laid their jacket over me. Someone made her go away. Someone was there through the night as I slept. He watched over me. He kept me from her all night long.
MIDDLE ROOM, BRIGHTLEY
She does not know when I depart
My words dancing in her heart,
There my ghostly life will yield
The place of crows, the emerald field,
There my words will leave my bones
And bones return to dirt and stones.
The Hard Chair
My bones ached, my mouth was dry. I was desperate for a cup of tea. My father’s voice rang up the stairs. ‘Rebecca? Come and see me in the study please.’
Five minutes later he called again. ‘Rebecca, come down now.’
I dragged myself out of bed. Eleven o’clock, Sunday morning. I was at least three hours late for breakfast. My parents had gone to church with Emily for the nine o’clock service and come back, drank coffee and eaten their crackers and cheese and still I’d slept.
I sat on the parishioner side of my father’s large oak desk. There was a leather-bound rectangular pad of blotting paper inserted in the middle of the desk. I thought it was to soak up the tears if sadness struck. My father wrote all his sermons here in ink, I could see all the upside-down letters on the pad from where I sat in the hard chair. My whole body ached; I was getting sick, a cold, a fever—something had infected me in the cold, the rain, the mist from all that fog.
‘Rebecca.’
I said nothing.
‘Rebecca, I’m surprised you slept through that storm. That was a wild night.’
Father, you have no idea how truly wild it was. Where had she gone now?
My father leaned back in his captain’s chair and balanced the tips of his fingers on the desk. This was my father’s most thoughtful position. The chair had once been part of the captain’s room on board whichever ship it belonged to. The sturdy wooden base of the chair had been screwed down into the ship’s wooden floor to hold it in place on the high seas, to keep the captain from rolling or spilling from the chair, which my father was never in any danger of doing. It had large wooden armrests, a leather seat held in place with shining brass tacks and the cleverest thing—a spring-loaded device upon which the chair could rock backwards and forwards if the chair’s occupant so desired. Which now he did.
The hard-backed chair I sat in was the unyielding chair, reserved for those with appointments to discuss baptisms, marriages, confirmations and spiritual quests. No movement was possible, except a dash out of it.
My father stared at me through his tortoiseshell glasses and rocked backwards and forwards on his chair.
‘I don’t feel well.’ That was my spirited defence.
‘Not surprised. I did say dinner was at six, yet you chose not to return until half past nine. No dinner, soaking wet.
Your mother and I had no idea where you were. We presumed you were with Alex March.’ My father really did not like him.
‘I wasn’t wearing a watch.’
‘Not an acceptable excuse, I’m afraid. We do not want you out cavorting . . .’
‘Cavorting?’
‘Cavorting around the place with someone who is old enough to know better.’
He leaned as far back as the chair allowed, the spring squeaking in protest. ‘You can walk the dog, if you like. But no more staying out half the night and coming back in that state. Leaving all those wet clothes in the kitchen for your mother to clear up this morning.’
‘I didn’t leave it there for Mum to do.’
‘But she did it, because, in case you haven’t noticed, I have been taking services all morning.’
Fields and fog flashed before my eyes. Fields and fog and ghosts. I was tired of sitting on that hard chair. I pictured her standing in the middle of the road, black arms stretched into the sky, the night indistinguishable from where she began and ended.
‘You can walk the dog. You can clean the house. You can do Saturdays at the pub. But that is all. Do you understand, Rebecca?’
‘Yes, I understand, Father.’
‘One last thing.’
‘What?’
‘Someone’s been nicking my best paper. Do you know anything about that?’
‘It’s not me, is it? I have a journal, don’t I?’
Outside my father’s study the sun beckoned. It was a normal-looking day. Everything in the house was normal. Kitchen, table, kettle, fridge, pantry, sink, normal. Father giving it to me straight, normal, normal, normal. Emily playing the piano in the dining room, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to do.
‘Where did you get to last night, Rebecca?’ said my sister, as innocent as an angel.
‘Have you been taking Dad’s paper?’
‘No! Don’t blame me just ’cause you’re in trouble.’
‘Shut up, Emily.’
Not a single cloud, raindrop, ghost or donkey in sight. Hot tea slid down my throat. Lots of sugar. When in doubt, walk.
The churchyard was deserted. The oak trees full of budding green leaves. Muddy puddles everywhere from the rain. A pool of murky water in the middle. I climbed through the low branches of the yew tree that scraped along the ground and sat in the tree’s ancient sprawl staring at the sky. Silence pressed against my head. Perhaps nothing I’d seen was real. I’d just been having a snog in the barn and the field was full of fog. Two donkeys lived in the field. The trees were full of crows. Flora had been out walking. Full stop. End of story. All right, Father, I will walk the dog. Clean the house. Work at the pub. Wash the dirty glasses. Nothing more.
The Madness of May
Monday after college I cycled round to Flora’s cottage, leaned my bicycle against the fence and shooed half a dozen curious brown chickens out of my way.
‘Flora? Flora?’ I really wasn’t feeling well.
‘Come in, come in, have a nice cup of nettle tea—oh, not nettle, dear, nice cup of something else, I think. And a piece of cake. Will that sort everything out?’
‘No, it won’t.’ I put my head in my arms.
‘My cake’s not so bad, dear, surely? Oh, there, there, come on now.’
She gave me a glass of water and lit her old stove and plonked the kettle on the flames. I sat up, sniffling and blowing my nose with a wet tissue.
She pushed the cake tin towards me. ‘Help yourself, dear.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Brightley’s always odd at this time of year. Spring madness I call it. All this new life. Eggs and no eggs, lambs and sheep, birth and death, foxes and wolves. And badgers.’
She helped herself to a piece of fruitcake and bit into it. ‘When you live in a village like Brightley, dear, you can spot a wolf very easily.’
‘Wolves?’
‘Yes, dear, they come in all shapes and sizes. But that’s not why you’re here.’
I sneezed and blew my nose. She placed an odd-smelling cup of tea in front of me and dipped a teaspoon into a jar of sticky honey. ‘A few sips of this and y
ou’ll be right as rain.’
Flora sipped her tea and ate her cake and we sat at her weathered old kitchen table. I wondered who else had sat here over the years. The cottage groaned in the warm English spring.
‘It’ll be all right. It always is. Take Arthur, my brother.
Very funny feeling when I first saw him, dear; he was walking down the garden path, same as ever.’
‘But he always did that, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did, dear—when he was alive.’
‘And he did the same when he was, well, after he’d died, is that right?’
She patted my hand. ‘Gave me goosebumps the first time I saw him. Oooh, I can still remember that. Goosebumps? Funny isn’t it? No one eats geese these days, they should call them chicken bumps.’
‘So what’s the fog in the field. The other night. What’s going on there?’
She poured herself another cup of strange tea, stirred in some more honey and sipped. Her nose poked over the edge of her cup. ‘Well, dear, that field used to be covered in woodland. And that field was where the first ever place of worship used to be. Years and years ago, no sign of it now. The world was very different then. There were wolves in Brightley, and deer, and probably bears too.’
‘Bears in Brightley?’
‘Yes, dear, you wouldn’t dream of them now but England used to be full of wild creatures. That was where they lived, in the forest, in the trees. All sorts of things went on in those woods. Spirits know about these places, they call them. Spirits like to come home and some places are easier to reach than others. Places have secrets too you know.’
‘How do you know what spirits want? How do you change things, Flora?’
‘That depends. Sometimes you can’t do anything to help anyone. They have to do it themselves. Have some tea, won’t you? It will chase your cold away.’
‘Flora, what do I do? What do they want with me?’
‘Have a think. She’s after someone.’
‘Alex March?’
‘Not quite. You know who he’s like.’
‘Wild George March?’
‘That’s the one; he’s related to him, after all.’
‘What about Algernon?’
‘A little bit tricky but things take care of themselves sometimes. I do hope you’ll soon feel better.’
I cycled home, nose running, Flora’s words percolating in my brain. There were no wolves or bears in England anymore. It was all that time living by herself in that small white cottage. Maybe that’s what Brightley did to you. Made you see things that didn’t really exist.
Not Safe in Your Own Country
My parents sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper, my mother’s tea cup full of outrage.
‘Mum, calm down. Everything’s okay.’
‘How dare he! How dare he!’ said Mum.
‘Whatever next? Kidnapping the royals? It’s disgraceful. They’ll never get away with it,’ said Dad.
‘It was only one man and he didn’t get away with it, did he?’ I said.
‘No, thank goodness, but he had a gun. And he shot people! In the middle of London! They should all get medals for that, very brave. The Queen will give them all medals, you’ll see.’ Mum knew that for a fact, such was her faith in the Queen.
‘He attacked them! In broad daylight!’
‘Calm down, Mother.’
In May 1974, a maniac made a bold but ultimately ill-conceived attempt at kidnapping my mother’s beloved royal newlyweds, Princess Anne and her dashing husband, Captain Mark Phillips.
‘From their own car—in front of everyone. You would think a daughter of the Queen of England would be safe, safe, Rebecca, in her own country driving down The Mall. He tried to snatch them!’
‘Lenin had the whole royal family shot in Russia, Ma.’
‘Terrible stuff,’ said Dad. ‘Using violence to get what you want.’
The socialist revolution so dreaded by my father hadn’t actually happened although my father watched carefully for signs of it. The Right Dishonourable Harold Wilson, as my father called him, was sucking on his filthy pipe, but somehow, England remained steadfastly England and did not turn into Cuba. Still, my father scanned the wide country horizons looking for signs of Bolshevik activity, and when he found none concentrated on sensible things, like mowing the lawn, cycling round his parish boundaries and trying to find out who was nicking his writing paper.
‘I will be really cross if no one owns up,’ he said. ‘It’s expensive and you’re not to touch it.’
‘No use telling me, darling,’ said Mum. ‘Tell the girls.’ But the girls weren’t listening. Emily made me accept ABBA.
She and Linda Burnley had seen them win the Eurovision Song Contest.
‘It is a really catchy tune,’ said Mum when she had finally calmed down.
Emily loved ABBA. They were rapidly replacing David Cassidy in her affections, which was a good thing for all of us. Now she questioned the meaning of their song.
‘Why did they sing about Waterloo Station?’
‘It’s not about a station, it’s the Battle of Waterloo. Don’t you know anything? Waterloo is a metaphor, Emily Budde, a metaphor. It means it’s the greatest challenge of your life, or something like that.’
‘Metaphor this.’
She threw a pillow at me and it hit me in the face.
I grabbed her skinny legs. ‘Guess what I saw the other night in the donkey field?’
‘Donkeys?’
‘Deranged bloodthirsty ghosts.’
‘Liar. Mum says there’s no such thing as ghosts. Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve written to Princess Anne.’
‘As if she’s going to read anything from you.’
The Brightley Lights were going to have to stay a secret, I could see that. I thought about telling someone, anyone, but I could not think of the right words to say. In July, in two months’ time I would be seventeen. It would be almost a year since the first time we had come to see the vicarage and I was growing old in Brightley. Longing was legal and I could marry anyone I liked. No one could stop me. The gate was open. Spare key pressing in my pocket, I whistled for Jojo. I was going to walk the dog, that’s all I was going to do. Walk the bloody dog.
Dog, Ghost, Boyfriend
I felt as if only the outline of myself was walking around the place. Jojo? Here, boy. Maybe he was in the garden—yes, that’s where he’d be, he had a secret kennel there that no one had told me about. The manor house was all old glamorous beauty from the front, the sort of house you’d gasp at if you saw it in a magazine. You’d think to yourself lucky bastard who lives there.
Empty dovecotes, long grass which hadn’t been cut for weeks and was wild with all the new spring growth. What did this man care about? Did he care about me? At the bottom of the garden, a tangle of bushes and straggly trees, some with blossoms still on the branches. No car in the driveway. Still no dog. At the back of the garden was a broken fence, a few overgrown bushes and not much else. Here was a man who cared not about his fences. It was very dark there, a few midges and flies buzzed about in the gloom. Twigs and branches snapped under my feet. Jojo? One last call.
A large cheerful dog barked and raced over to me, jumping and kissing me all over. I was kneeling in the grass with Jojo licking my hands. Jojo barked a few times but there was nothing of interest to keep him barking here except an odd smell of damp earth, a scent he was beginning to recognise. He crashed about under the trees, lifting his great handsome head from time to time to sniff the air.
Two small black shoes approached me through the grass.
What do you think you’re doing?
Rustle of darkness. Come, she said, pulling me to my feet.
Come.
Augusta and I alone in the gloomy garden.
‘What do you want, Augusta?’
No one could see us unless they peered through the broken fence or stood at the far bedroom window, and I didn’t care if
anyone was doing that.
Come, she said reaching into my thoughts. Away from here. Here is nothing for me. We must go into the house, let us find him. Come, little Buddey girl. Let me in.
Rebecca Budde, what are you doing now? I took the key from my pocket, and opened the front door.
Up the stairs we climbed, her and me. I wasn’t looking at her, she didn’t smile at me, her hair did not curl around my hands. I was whistling a tune in case he was there. Hello, hello, hello, fancy seeing you here. And he turns to me all welcoming and kind and he says, Rebeccah, sweetheart, your lips are a rosy hue, your eyes see the far horizon. Your face is the one I have been searching for. And I turn to him and say Oh, hi Alex, here we both are—for what purpose, I ask myself, unless it is to be naked, glimmering under the moon?
Shut up, Rebecca Budde, I say to myself, but Augusta seems to like this.
Go on, she says, but I’m already thinking, Shut up and leave the house and stop looking at these private personal photos I should not be looking at in the top drawer in the bedroom with his belts and cufflinks and belongings.
Augusta’s happy just being in the house. She shouldn’t be here and I sort of know that but, then, neither should I. He didn’t say not to let her in here, did he? And now we’re here it seems churlish to make her leave. After all, we are quite companionable in our illegal activities. We’re upstairs and the house is quiet, not a single sound, except for me rifling through Alex March’s drawers and Augusta floating around happily, because finally, finally here she was, in the manor house.
There they were as children, Sophie and Alex, arms around each other, both with fair hair, although I could see Alex was always darker. Childhood in silver frames. Sophie and Sebastian squinting into the sun, Sophie holding a baby in a long christening gown, one hand protectively over her face. Sebastian with hair.
Older people, Mr and Mrs March, all of them in the garden, sunlight on their faces, smiling at the camera. Lucy as a toddler, wearing puffy shorts and a hat and clutching the neck of a small dog, a whole generation sitting behind her. Alex with his arm around a beautiful dark-haired girl. Skinny hips. Arm slung casually over her shoulder, her hand holding his. Cool beautiful people. That same knowing look on his face. I shut the drawer. My heart was thumping. If I met him on the way down the stairs I would say, Hey I was looking for your dog. That’s all.
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