by Neil Spring
At hearing him say as much, my anger flared. ‘That “deranged” old man is living in poverty now, Harry, because of what you did – stealing his manuscript, turning it into a book for your own selfish reward. How could you do that?’
‘Because it was necessary.’
‘Judas!’ I spat the word out.
And I understood then why he had done it. It had not been for his amusement, or even for money. He had done it to be noticed. And when the world had stopped paying attention to that, he had taken the next available route to fame. Why show them fraudulent mediums when he could show them a genuine haunted house, fill it with ‘official’, ‘credible’ observers, only to solve the case and lay the offending spirits to rest? It was marvellous and appalling in equal measure. And I was one of the few who knew. One of the few. The thought made me nervous.
‘If it’s any consolation to you, I wasn’t responsible for all of it. How could I have been? The first sightings of the nun were in 1900. I hadn’t even heard of Borley then.’ He began to move towards me slowly, intent in his cold eyes.
‘Harry, wait—’
He kept coming.
‘Harry!’
And then a thought hit me. ‘Who was Joseph Radley?’
The question made him freeze. He paused, frowned. ‘You know very well who he was. Radley was my assistant.’
‘Tell me what happened to him!’ I screamed.
There was a further pause, and then Price said, ‘Joseph Radley was employed by the Society for Psychical Research, though I did not know it at the time. He was a spy, Sarah, a traitor. They sent him here to keep tabs on me, to check my work wasn’t outpacing theirs. And when I discovered the fact, shortly after we first met – well, it made his position here untenable.’
‘Untenable? He hasn’t been seen since! Not by anyone! What did you do to him? My God! What are you?’ But I hardly needed to ask. The answer was staring back at me with dangerous eyes that never wavered, not once.
And as he advanced towards me once more, I knew what I had to do. It was now or never.
So I told him. Finally I told him the one thing I had been incapable of telling anyone, the one secret I had carried with me all this time since that dusty summer of 1929 and that fateful night when we had visited the Rectory for the first time, the night of the seance when afterwards, under cover of darkness, he had come to me.
I told him the truth as plainly as I am telling it now.
That I had been a mother.
That, from the summer of 1929, I had carried his child.
He was staring at me with his mouth wide open. And because he seemed quite incapable of asking me anything, I gave him the answer to the question I knew he wanted to ask. ‘It was a boy, Harry. His name was Robert.’
On hearing this, his face changed, its expression melting from bewilderment to wonder and finally to hope. His eyes darted left to right, as if he expected the child to appear in the far recesses of the room.
Had he known? Marianne Foyster certainly had; but Price? I doubted it. He would not have noticed at the time, for in the months I was carrying his child he was in hospital, recovering from his heart attack. Certainly, if he had known then he had long since buried the truth in the deepest part of his mind where he wouldn’t have to feel the guilt that attended such a thing. I made him acknowledge it now, in the room where we had first encountered one another. He listened attentively, his face powder-white, as I reminded him how, on the night he had come to me pleading that I take him back to London, I had lain awake after he retreated to his room, thinking of him, and shortly before dawn I had gone quietly to his room and slipped into his bed.
I told him how, when the pregnancy was confirmed, I had gone from the doctor’s office on Tachbrook Street and wandered for close to an hour around the streets of Pimlico, my head swarming with confusion at the impossible future that had been forced upon me. I remember I experienced the briefest excitement at the news, and then the crushing fall, hating myself, hating him, for at that time there really was no worse shame than for a woman to be in my predicament. There was absolutely no one I could have told – not my closest friends, not even my mother. And especially not him. He who basked in the public limelight, whose public image sustained him. Who was married.
Price was struggling to catch his breath as the barrage of revelations crashed over him. ‘What happened to the child?’ he managed to gasp at last.
My mouth tightened. I backed away from him.
‘Sarah? Tell me, what happened to the child? My child. Tell me. What happened to him?’
And then he realised; I saw it in the tragic understanding that flowed into his eyes, in the trembling of his hand, the pursing of his lips. I could so easily have stopped then and said nothing at all. I wish I had stopped. But instead I said, ‘I could never have kept the child, Harry. How could I? He’s gone.’
His face crumpled and he emitted a terrible, tortured cry as thunder crossed his brow. His ferocious gaze turned upon me. Then he lunged, approaching with a speed that took me unawares. ‘You took my boy!’ he thundered, grabbing my arm. ‘My boy!’
But he couldn’t hold me for long. Somehow, I slipped free and stumbled towards the door. At the threshold to the room I paused and looked back, bracing myself to run at any moment. But he had stopped following me. And as I watched him groping hopelessly for words, shaking his head wildly, I knew it was no longer necessary for Vernon Wall or anyone else from the Society for Psychical Research to bring Price down. I had done it for them.
‘You know, I think I can hear them now, Sarah. At last. At last I can hear them.’ He was nodding, his eyes glittering with tears. He went, shakily at first then with firmer footing, to his glass cabinet of wonders. When he reached it he rested his hand upon its surface, the glass forming the only barrier between him and signed confessions from fraudulent mediums. He stared at them intently with a look that seemed to say ‘Where did I go wrong?’
‘Hear who?
‘Them,’ he hissed. ‘The ghosts, Sarah. I can hear the ghosts.’ He raised his head up to face me, reaching out with a shivering hand, pointing past me, beyond me, into oblivion. ‘Do you see? There! There they are! I hear them, Sarah.’
His eyes were fixed intently on something, but I saw no one. ‘It’s only your conscience you can hear,’ I said. ‘And I hope you never stop hearing it.’
‘You must believe me,’ he pleaded, and he slid down to the floor, his back to the cabinet. ‘It wasn’t all me. It wasn’t. I might have embellished a few things, thrown pebbles, planted evidence, yes, but the rapping mirror? The cake of soap which jumped off the washstand? The ringing bells, the candlestick which hurtled down the stairs? I couldn’t have done those things – how could I? And the medallion. I assure you, Sarah, that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Or the nun. How could I have invented the story of that apparition, Sarah? How could I possibly have done that?’
All can be achieved by a clever man.
‘You’re nothing but a sham,’ I told him. ‘All you ever wanted was validation, to be famous. And you played everyone off against one another to get where you wanted to be. That’s why you were inconsistent. It wasn’t the truth you cared about, it was yourself.’
He raised his pleading eyes to meet mine. ‘People have never meant much to me. You were the first that did. I could see something wasn’t right for all those years, that you were keeping something back from me. I wanted to protect you,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t you see? I had to make you not like me. You think I haven’t felt it too – the darkness approaching?’
I looked down at him, not knowing what to believe. The man who had brought a glittering luminescence to even the most mundane tales had been reduced to a cowering shadow. His hands were clasped together in a gesture of prayer, his head dropped back, eyes scanning the ceiling. If it was solace he was looking for, from the noise of his conscience or the glaring gaze of God, I doubted he would find it now.
I moved towards the
door.
‘Wait! Where are you going?’
I looked back at him, hardening myself against the pull of his eyes, my head swimming with visions of how different my life could have been without him. ‘It’s like you said, Harry. Pain and loss. The two inevitable consequences of life.’
I should like to say that he said something profound at that moment, anything to redeem himself. Instead he raised his eyes to me and asked, ‘Do you suppose that those who hunt ghosts are hunted, in turn, by them?’
‘Yes, Harry,’ I said coldly. ‘I have no doubt of that.’
Then I went quickly from that place, leaving him desperate and alone with nothing but ghosts for company.
* * *
Notes
1 Corroboration of Price’s suspicious behaviour in connection with the excavations comes from Mr R. F. Aickman, one of the official observers, who contributed an essay, ‘Postscript to Harry Price’, to Mystery. An Anthology of the Mysterious in Fact and Fiction. He writes, ‘Price’s secretiveness could try the patience. Although I was in full communication with him when my friends and I made the visits to Borley recorded in The End of Borley Rectory, Price never informed me that he himself was visiting the place almost immediately before and after my visits, and in order to carry out the vital excavations in the cellars as well’ (p. 272).
2 A thorough examination of the Harry Price Magical Library at Senate House confirms that there were eighty-seven tea chests in all.
3 Animal bones had been found in the grounds of the Rectory before, as the Smiths told Price and Sarah on their first visit to the house in June 1929.
4 The End of Borley Rectory, p. 285.
– 37 –
AFTER THE AFFAIR
There is little left for me to tell. Only the worst of it.
When I was young, Mother warned me that my lies would find me out. I never paid much attention; I heard the adage so often it became something she said rather than a warning to be heeded. But when I look back across these pages, when I think of the awful thing that happened to Price and the distressing ordeal I am now suffering, I think perhaps she was right and I wish I had listened.
Some months after my final confrontation with Price I became unwell. The nightmares that had haunted me all these years, which I had expected to recede with the knowledge of his fraudulent behaviour, did not cease but instead grew into serrated dreams, each worse than the last – visions of a wild windswept moor, a dark rectory and a hooded figure robed in billowing black.
As I lay awake fighting the darkness that came each night, I became fatigued and prone to moments of melancholy, which quickly gave way to a deep depression. I drowned in it. I couldn’t work, couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t even eat. Throughout this time my only companion was Mother, whose mind, over the years, was gradually being taken from me. And it was she who unwittingly, devastatingly, showed me the truth.
‘I have seen this before,’ she said sadly, sitting next to my bed. Her wrinkled old face was a mask of pain, but in all other respects she was having a good day. She was mentally present, lucid, which made a refreshing change from her usual behaviour. ‘All a mother wishes for her family is for them to be happy and healthy. That’s all I ever wanted for you and for your father.’
I looked into her caring eyes, which for the first time in weeks were possessed with nothing else but her own spirit – that same wonderful resilience that had served her so remarkably when she had given her time to the Voluntary Aid Detachment. I remember saying to her: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me; my moods, they’re almost uncontrollable.’ And it was true. I drifted through the world like a shadow of myself, clutching at old familiar pleasures, but all too often I found the simplest tasks – running errands in town, meeting friends, getting out of bed – required the greatest summoning of will. Too often I felt that when I smiled I was inwardly crying.
‘I know, dear, I know. It’s an illness and no one knows its effects better than me.’ She leaned closer and placed a gentle kiss on my forehead, then stroked my hair. ‘Your father suffered so badly with it. I tell myself that daily – that he was ill. That’s why he did what he did … You’re like him, Sarah – my brave little girl.’
‘Then I’ll get better, like he did?’
She gave me a half smile. Then her mouth turned downward and her eyes became dark and drifted into the distance. She was remembering.
‘Mother?’
‘We tell each other everything, don’t we, Sarah, you and I?’
‘Yes, of course … Why?’ Something in her tone made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She was twisting her wedding ring nervously.
‘I’m old now, Sarah. Seventy-three?’ She shook her head, looking wistful. ‘In here’ – she tapped her chest lightly – ‘I’m still your age, full of hopes and dreams. And regret. It’s been so very long. There is something I never told you. Something you have a right to know. Something you need to know.’ She stared beyond me to a faded photograph of my father hanging on the wall. Her expression filled me with a creeping sense of dread.
‘You don’t want to make the same mistakes I did. Perhaps the truth will help you see how fruitless it is to wallow in misery.’
If she was intending to comfort me, it wasn’t working. ‘Mother, please, what—?’
Tears glistened on her dark lashes. ‘Your father, Sarah, died in the trenches, killed by a single gunshot wound to the head.’
‘I already know this!’ I said, sitting up. ‘I do know how Father died.’ And somewhere in my head a voice said, ‘How can you know it? You never read the telegram, did you, Sarah? You were never allowed to read it.’
‘Sarah, please – let me get this out. I may not have long, and when I’m gone you will want to know.’
I drew in a breath, alarmed that I might unwittingly have prompted this detour to the past.
‘You remember, before the Schneider seance all those years ago at the Laboratory, we spoke, you and I?’
‘You said there was something I needed to know before the experiment could proceed.’
‘That’s right. And during the seance a message came through for us.’
An image flashed through my mind: Schneider writhing and convulsing in the seance chair. ‘Yes, I remember. An apology. He said he was sorry. He said he loved us. But none of that was real. Harry showed he was a fraud.’
‘Your father was one of life’s casualties, Sarah. The gunshot which killed him was fired by his own hand. I’m sorry,’ her voice cracked. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I’m so sorry. Your father took his own life.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I pleaded. ‘Please don’t.’
Mother’s hand stifled her broken sobs. ‘Will you ever forgive me, Sarah? I should have told you, I know I should, but how could I?’
I flinched at this awful news, and even as my bottom lip began to tremble, Price’s voice from that time, the day after the seance, the day I had walked out on him, the day he had betrayed me by announcing his intention to denounce Schneider as a fraud, was inside my head: He said your father was a weak man … He called him a coward.
A flash of understanding.
I thought back to that fateful night, to before the experiment – Price announcing his intention to photograph the seance with the greatest rigour he had ever applied; Schneider’s uncompromising cooperation; Price’s mounting hostility to our guest as it dawned on him that other researchers, rival investigators, were keen to test Schneider too, to bask in the reflected glory of his talent.
Then I remembered something else: the rapidity with which Price had rushed to judgement on Schneider’s probity; the photo graphs he had shown me, clearly depicting Schneider’s hand freeing itself from his grasp. I remembered the spasmodic way in which Schneider’s body had moved, and the panic in Price’s eyes when he had realised it was a power that he alone was unable to constrain. Had Schneider really cheated? Or had Price, in exposing the fake, been the one using trickery to create the false imp
ression that Schneider was a fraud? Exposing Schneider helped put him on the map, validated his work. Could he have released Schneider’s hand deliberately just to take the limelight? It was possible. As for the photographs, Price was skilled in the practice of photographic exposure; he could easily have tampered with them.
‘Then Rudi Schneider might have been telling the truth?’ I asked Mother, realising that the young medium’s apology during the seance had come not from him but through him, channelled by my dear father in the world beyond.
Mother nodded, smiling. ‘There,’ she said, wiping a tear from my face. ‘You see, Sarah, there is hope for us yet.’
I wanted so badly to believe that as I shut my eyes against further tears and Mother wrapped me in her arms, stroking my hair and whispering gentle words of reassurance.
But even though she had been honest, a part of me rebelled at the idea of accepting that all would be well. Because as I pondered her confession and everything that had happened since my first visit to the Rectory – her changing behaviour, her moments of hypnotic detachment, the recurrent tap-tap scratching in the walls – I knew the only reasonable conclusion was that something was very wrong with our lives; a canker that had grown beneath the skin of our family.
I opened my eyes and looked up into her kindly face. ‘Vernon Wall tried to stay in touch with me. You opened his letters and kept them. Didn’t you?’
She turned her head with embarrassment.
‘It’s all right,’ I said soothingly. ‘I’m not angry.’
‘It’s a dreadful thing, Sarah’ she sighed, ‘not to know your own mind. To let other people down because you don’t know yourself any more. I didn’t know what I was doing, my love. Sincerely. Some days, I still don’t.’ She shook her head as her voice cracked with fear. ‘I don’t want to go mad. You will you look after me, won’t you?’
‘We’re a team, remember?’ I cupped her face in my hand. ‘I’ll get better and I’ll look after you, whatever happens. I promise.’