A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String

by Joanne Harris

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said. ‘What obsession?’

  Rob repeated what he’d heard. That Michael had gone crazy; that he was living like a recluse, working himself to a shadow. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I needed to shed a few pounds,’ he said.

  ‘But what are you doing it for?’ said Rob. ‘There’s no way you’re going to live here alone. I mean, what is it, ten bedrooms? And what about when you go back to work?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘Who knows? Who cares?’

  ‘Well, anyway, it’s haunted,’ Rob said, with the air of a man proving a point.

  Michael had to laugh at that. ‘Haunted by what?’

  ‘All old houses are haunted,’ Rob said.

  The thought that Rob – who worked in advertising, owned a silver BMW and liked to play squash on Saturdays – could be superstitious made Michael laugh all the more. Some old buildings did have a chill – Michael hadn’t worked in theatres for almost twenty years without picking up the occasional vibe – but the Mansion wasn’t one of them. There were no unexpectedly cold spots; no whispering voices in the dark; not even a hint of a resident ghost. In fact, from a psychic perspective, the Mansion was a blank slate; as thin on atmosphere as the Moon.

  ‘Look, Michael. Annie thinks that perhaps you should get therapy.’

  That killed the laughter at once. Therapy. How typical of Annie, he thought. What did she think he was doing? This was his therapy, Michael said, not sessions with some half-baked kid with a degree in sociology. As for being crazy, maybe she could use some counselling herself – this talk of haunted houses was hardly a sign of rational thought—

  His voice had risen as he spoke. A voice that once reached to the balcony without amplification now cut through the shadows like a scythe. Rob left soon afterwards, leaving Michael with the distinct impression that he’d somehow confirmed every one of his wife’s suspicions about him.

  He checked his mobile. No messages. Reception was down to a single bar. He considered walking into the village to find a clearer spot, but then decided against it. What was the point? Instead, he went to the village library and borrowed some local history books. Fred Lundy and his family had been very prominent locally. Perhaps a history of the village would reveal more about the family.

  It took him three days to read the books during the breaks he took from his work. He learnt that the house had been built by Fred Lundy in 1886: that in 1910 it had been modernized (the stained glass, the murals and the landscaped garden dated back to this time); that Ned had died in 1918, just days before the end of the war, and that Emily had married late, to Mr Travers Peacock. Their son had been Graham Peacock; but the marriage had not lasted long. Travers Peacock had died abroad, and Emily had come home with her young son in ’25, where she had lived until her death in summer 1964. As for Graham Peacock, according to Malbry’s grapevine, he had died a bachelor, leaving his substantial fortune to some kind of charity for the blind.

  So these were the Mansion’s absent ghosts. This ordinary family. A mother, a father, a daughter, a son. Had they been happy? He imagined they had. Even when the baby died, they’d always had each other. Of course, in those days families were different. They faced obstacles together instead of running away from them. Ghosts, if they existed, he thought, were surely unhappy creatures, trying to relive scenes from a past that is unresolved or unsatisfactory.

  He understood that feeling. For years he’d lived like a ghost himself; making himself invisible; speaking other people’s lines; only appearing under the lights; playing his part so perfectly that in the end, he had disappeared—

  Perhaps he was the ghost, he thought. Perhaps that was why the empty old house had welcomed him so warmly. He smiled, remembering what Rob had said. This creepy obsession of yours with this house. What was so creepy about wanting to make a house back into a home?

  Until that moment he hadn’t realized that this was precisely what he was doing. A house was not just the sum of its rooms, its ceilings, its walls, its windows. A house was the sum of the people who had lived, loved, died in it; their names scratched into the woodwork, the tracks of their feet worn into the steps. A house like the Mansion deserved respect; respect for the skill of its craftsmen, their pride and attention to detail; respect for its history and its age and all the work that had gone into its upkeep. In those days, he told himself, there would have been servants living there: a nanny for the children; a housekeeper; gardeners; a maid; a cook. Now there was only Michael left. The thought both pleased and humbled him. He found a specialist wallpaper supplier and replaced the Morris originals. He searched for the kind of furniture that the Lundys would have bought, and had it delivered piece by piece. It was expensive, but worthwhile; the wiring, plumbing and plastering had all been completed some time before, and now he could afford to pay attention to those special details – the glass, the tiles, the wall coverings – that would make all the difference.

  Twelve weeks had passed since he moved in. Summer shuffled into autumn like a hand of cards. The trees began to turn; the nights, which had been mild thus far, grew cold. For the first time since he’d moved in, Michael tried the central heating. He found that it worked reasonably well; a combination of heavy schoolroom radiators and spacious fireplaces. He cleaned and re-leaded the fire grates, with the help of a book from the library on Victorian households. He found a copy of Mrs Beeton in a local antiques shop, and was surprised at how very useful he found her Guide to Household Management.

  Venturing into the village, he found out more about the Lundys. He discovered that they had a family vault in the local cemetery: a blackened obelisk in a gravel square, surrounded by four stone posts connected by a rusty chain. Fred and Frances lay side by side with Emily and Benjamin. Ned’s name was on the monument, but according to local records his remains had never been found. A space had been left for Emily’s son, but Graham Peacock had not been buried in the family vault. For some reason Michael felt this was right. Peacock had not been a Lundy. He had lived in the Mansion, but had not really cared for it; and so the house had rejected him.

  Michael’s curiosity grew. He researched the Lundys in detail. He found that they had close links to St Mary’s, the nearby parish church, and that in 1918 Fred Lundy had commissioned a small stained-glass window in memory of their dead son. A cheque in aid of the church roof ensured that Michael had access to all the local records: birth and death certificates; some correspondence between Fred Lundy and the parish priest; letters thanking Emily for a donation made to the poor. There was also a tin deposit box containing many more letters; some photographs of the family and of the house; household bills from the Mansion; a closely written notebook; postcards from all over the world addressed to Emily Peacock; detailed plans for the construction of a water garden and even some school report cards in the name of Ned Lundy, dated from 1900 to 1904. No one seemed to know or care why these papers had been kept; and a further donation to the church roof gave Michael permanent custody of the tin box and its contents.

  He found it absorbing reading. Everything inside the box connected him more closely with the house and its inhabitants. He now had photographs of them all; a wedding photograph showing Fred in high collar and sideburns and Frances, looking very young, her dark hair in a braided coronet interwoven with ivy leaves. Baby pictures of Emily and Ned; flower basket; sailor suit. Pictures of them older now, in the style of Cameron. There was a family portrait too, taken in 1908; the two of them sitting side by side, with Emily standing behind them, very like her mother, in a pale dress, with loose hair, and Ned in army uniform, slightly out of focus, as if his impatience to be off had made him spoil the photograph.

  Had they known? Michael asked himself. Had they somehow sensed that their circle was about to be broken? Or was it just the interminable exposure time that made their faces so solemn and fixed?

  Fred had been a big man; not unlike Michael Harman himself, with dark hair that might have curled – if h
e had allowed it. Ned had favoured Frances; small-boned and energetic. His school reports mentioned his terrible handwriting – a criticism justified by the scrawled postcards he’d sent from France. He had been a lively, exuberant child; trees all over the garden – as well as the schoolroom mantelpiece – bore the marks of his penknife, and a number of old children’s books overlooked by the house-clearing agency were marked with the same careless scrawl – Edward Albert Lundy.

  Michael liked the sound of that. The garden would have been a haven for boys. He imagined swings; tree-houses; dens; a mongrel dog that went everywhere. Muddy football boots in the hall; the housekeeper’s voice: Master Ned! Come back right now! Kites; jars of tadpoles; frogs. Frances trying to look annoyed, but hiding an indulgent smile. Boys will be boys, Fred. Let him be.

  Autumn turned; the leaves fell. Michael was grateful that all his external paintwork was done. He turned his attention to the garden: cutting back the undergrowth; clearing leaves; mowing abandoned lawns that had long since turned to meadows. His agent wrote, complaining that Michael never answered his phone; he tried his mobile for the first time in a fortnight and found a dozen texts there, which he deleted unread, and returned to his work in the garden.

  He found even more neglect than he had feared: walkways buried under mouldering leaves; toppled statues; roses gone wild; a Japanese-style water garden – presumably the one for which he’d seen the original plans – overgrown by ancient rhododendrons. A little wooden summerhouse stood in a tangle of briars; pushing his way inside, he found a box containing paintbrushes, dried-out watercolours and a sketch pad, ruined by damp, with a name – Emily Geraldine Lundy – in careful brownish print on the cover.

  So, Emily liked to paint, did she? Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. His own daughter, Holly, had liked it too – he’d had a picture of hers for years, pinned to his dressing-room mirror. He wondered what Holly would make of this place, and realized, with a stab of guilt, that he had barely thought of her – or of Ben, or Annie – for weeks.

  How could he have forgotten so fast? No, not forgotten, precisely – but as he searched for the pain of his loss, he found only distant memories: his first glimpse of Annie, in the front row of some little regional theatre; his daughter’s finger around his own; Ben’s eyes, so blue and so trusting. But these, he saw, were now overlaid with memories that were not his own, but which stood out with a clarity that defied all comprehension. Ned in a sailor suit, climbing trees; Emily in her summerhouse, frowning in concentration over a watercolour of the Japanese garden in spring. And Frances. Lovely Frances with her loosely braided hair, still slim in spite of two children; smiling; happy; radiant; running down the avenue with an armful of roses—

  A sound from behind him made him flinch. ‘Frances?’

  He turned, and for a moment saw her as Orpheus saw Eurydice: pale face, dark hair, blurry with nostalgia—

  Then he recognized Annie. Annie in jeans and an overcoat, hair newly cropped. He’d liked it better long, he thought – the way she’d worn it when they first met.

  ‘Who’s Frances?’ Annie said.

  Michael tried to explain. But already he sensed her indifference. Annie had come to deliver a speech, and she wasn’t going to leave until he’d listened to it all.

  In a way, it reminded him of the lecture he’d already had from Rob. She mentioned his obsession; his weight; the fact that he wasn’t answering calls. Michael explained about the lack of mobile reception at the house; Annie gave him a narrow look and once more mentioned therapy.

  He offered to show her around the house. Annie declined the offer. She seemed to think that to walk through the door would be to lose the upper hand; she had no interest in his work, she said, still less in his research. He asked after the children; she said that once he began to see sense, they could come to some arrangement. She left him, for the first time in weeks, feeling helpless; angry; in pain; but by the end of the afternoon he’d regained his equilibrium. A child’s swing, hanging from the branch of an old laburnum tree, brought him back to reality; the chance discovery of a stone bench half hidden in a drift of leaves gave him something else to fix: and soon the memory of his wife and the cruel words she had spoken were blurred into something approaching forgetfulness.

  That night he lit a bonfire in the circular firepit beyond the Japanese garden. In it, he burnt the garden waste that he had accumulated that day, as well as certain mementoes of his former life: his Olivier; some scrapbooks; the box of newspaper clippings that he had accumulated (mostly without even reading them) over the course of his career. He burnt them without a pang of regret. In fact, he felt as if the final layer of his old skin had shed itself, effortlessly, painlessly, leaving him new and whole again—

  He hung pictures of his children on the nursery wall; but they seemed out of place, somehow. Too colourful; too modern. He replaced them with his photographs of Emily and Ned Lundy: Ned at eight or nine, shock-haired, long before the Great War arrived to take him away; Emily at twelve or thirteen, artistically posed in a white dress, hair caught up with a ribbon. He found himself admiring the magic of photography; not the disposable digital kind, but the kind that had fixed these portraits of the Lundy children so beautifully out of time. What came next – her marriage, his war – none of that mattered any more. It was all forgotten now. The children need never grow up here; and Frances need never grow old or die. Her portrait was already hanging in the parlour, above the fireplace; a portrait of Frances at twenty-nine, long hair in a luxuriant knot; dark silk dress; embroidered shawl. In spite of her dress, Michael thought her face looked very modern; her eyes seemed to smile as he looked at her, and to follow him around the room.

  As for Fred Lundy, somehow he felt even closer to him than to the rest of them. His presence was everywhere in the house; everywhere in the garden. Most of the letters in the deposit box had been from Fred himself; bills; instructions to workmen; letters to and from his various textile mills, as well as the local orphanage, founded and financed by the Lundys. The letters revealed Fred Lundy to be a man of some education; a generous employer; a man who showed surprising humility in spite of his status in Malbry. He took a genuine interest in the people who worked for him; worked to improve conditions for them; spoke with real passion about the terrible plight of the poor, and especially of their children—

  And then there was the notebook he’d found among the papers in the box. Fred had been a lay preacher, and sometimes spoke at St Mary’s, or gave little speeches during his visits to the orphanage. The notebook was filled with ideas for these, as well as what seemed to be random thoughts, scribbled down as they occurred, alongside more mundane reminders: delivery dates; personnel changes; family occasions; birthdays.

  The world outside is a cruel place, Michael read as he turned a page. The comfort of a family, of a home where he is cherished and loved, is all a man really needs in this world. With it, he is invincible. Without it, all his influence is nothing more than a fall of rain, that colours the paving stones for a while, and is gone as soon as the sun shines.

  And there, a little later:

  A home is not bricks and mortar. A home is made of those things that endure when the bricks and mortar are gone.

  Then, later still:

  Above all, a man should live surrounded by the things he loves.

  This man, he began to realize, was something of a kindred soul; a man who lived on in every brick and piece of oak in the Mansion. He hung Fred’s portrait above the fireplace in the library; his favourite room, lined with leather-bound books; a place where a man could sit quietly in an armchair by a fire and breathe in the scent of leather and smoke—

  Michael took to smoking a pipe. He’d never smoked before, but now it somehow seemed very natural. The smell of pipe tobacco was as fragrant and evocative as the scent of burning leaves. He only smoked in the library. Somehow, to smoke in the kitchen, or, worse, in Frances’s parlour, would have been inexcusable.

  Please, Fred. T
hink of the children. Only in the library.

  Winter came. His sideburns grew long. He ordered more books on interiors. He scoured the nearby salvage yard for original doorknobs, hinges, taps. He furnished the schoolroom with toys and books he found in local antiques shops. He even ordered a Christmas tree – a twelve-foot spruce that, when it arrived, grazed the parlour ceiling – and spent a happy morning decking it with pine cones and antique glass baubles. He didn’t feel at all odd doing this; in fact, he found it hard to believe that his children were not outside throwing snowballs, or building a snowman, or wassailing, or picking holly to make a wreath, while his wife oversaw the baking. In fact, he could almost smell the rich scents of plum cake and butter pastry; of brandy and apples and marchpane.

  He wondered if Annie would call, or if she really intended to keep the children from seeing him until he’d accepted therapy. That was ridiculous, of course. Michael could sue for access. But the truth was, he didn’t like the idea of leaving his home. That world of legal representatives and banks and agents belonged to a past that he had managed to escape. The thought of entering it again seemed tiresome and unnecessary. Besides, there was still so much work to do. A house like the Mansion was never finished; every completed task revealed two more that needed attention. He did not begrudge the time spent. In fact, he was grateful for it. In his old life he had always been at the mercy of stage directors; producers; writers; critics. Here, at the Mansion, he was in charge. Here, he was accepted.

  He’d been half expecting Annie to call. He bought Christmas gifts for the children. A doll for Holly; a kite for Ben; oranges for both of them. For Annie he bought a bangle from a local antiques shop: a bangle in white gold and sapphires, delicate as a band of lace. He wrapped the gifts and placed them underneath the Christmas tree; lit candles; waited – but for what?

  Outside, snow fell. The advent calendar on the wall – a Victorian original – showed only six days to Christmas. At the hall piano, Michael sang Christmas carols; in twenty years, he’d never done that with his other family. He was slightly shocked at himself that he’d begun to think of Annie that way; but his present life was so different from the one that they had shared—