Ghostly: Stories

by Audrey Niffenegger

  ‘Ah, the children!’ I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. ‘I wonder whether they’ll come out for me.’

  There was a murmur of voices – Madden’s and a deeper note – at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant-farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.

  ‘Come to the fire, Mr Turpin,’ she said.

  ‘If – if you please, Miss, I’ll – I’ll be quite as well by the door.’ He clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realized that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘About that new shed for the young stock – that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in … but I’ll come again, Miss.’ His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.

  ‘I think not,’ she answered levelly. ‘The new shed – m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?’

  ‘I – fancied p’raps that if I came to see you – ma – man to man like, Miss. But –’

  His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again – from without and firmly.

  ‘He wrote what I told him,’ she went on. ‘You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks – even in Mr Wright’s time. And he used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the heart out of the farm.’

  ‘I’m – I’m getting some minerals – superphosphates – next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I’ll go down to the station tomorrow about ’em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight … That gentleman’s not going away, is he?’ He almost shrieked.

  I had only slid the chair a little farther back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.

  ‘No. Please attend to me, Mr Turpin.’ She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him – his plea for the new cow-shed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.

  I ceased to tap the leather – was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed – when I felt my relaxed hands taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers …

  The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm – as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all-faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest – a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.

  Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.

  I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.

  What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.

  ‘Now you understand,’ she whispered, across the packed shadows.

  ‘Yes, I understand – now. Thank you.’

  I – I only hear them.’ She bowed her head in her hands. ‘I have no right, you know – no other right. I have neither borne nor lost– neither borne nor lost!’

  ‘Be very glad then,’ said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

  ‘Forgive me!’

  She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.

  ‘It was because I loved them so,’ she said at last, brokenly. ‘That was why it was, even from the first – even before I knew that they– they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!’

  She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.

  ‘They came because I loved them – because I needed them. I – I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?’

  ‘No – no.’

  ‘I – I grant you that the toys and – and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but – but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little.’ She pointed to the gallery. ‘And the passages all empty … And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose –’

  ‘Don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t!’ I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

  ‘And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don’t think it so foolish – do you?’

  I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

  ‘I did all that and lots of other things – just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn’t know that they were not mine by right till Mrs Madden told me –’

  ‘The butler’s wife? What?’

  ‘One of them – I heard – she saw. And knew. Hers! Not for me. I didn t know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because –…. Oh, you must bear or lose, she said piteously. There is no other way – and yet they love me. They must! Don’t they?’

  There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

  ‘Don’t think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but– but I’m all in the dark, you know, and you can see.’

  In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.

  ‘You think it is wrong, then?’ she cried sharply, though I had said nothing.

  ‘Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right … I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only …’

  ‘Why?’ she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. ‘Oh, I see,’ she went on simply as a child. ‘For you it would be wrong.’ Then with a little indrawn laugh, ‘And, d’you remember, I called you lucky – once – at first. You who must never come here again!’

  She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.

  ‘PLAYMATES’

  A. M. BURRAGE (ALFRED MCLELLAND BURRAGE, BRITISH, 1889–1956)

  First published in Burrage’s 1927 collection Some Ghost Stories.

  A. M. Burrage was a copiously productive writer of stories for boys and of romantic fiction for women’s magazines. He is best remembered for his horror stories and for his unusually frank First World War memoir, War is War. ‘Playmates’ is an empathetic study of the gap between the perceptions of children and adults and of the resilience of children, even in very unusual circumstances.

  PLAYMATES

  A. M. Burrage

  Although everybody who knew Stephen Everton agreed that he was the last man under Heaven who ought to have been allowed to bring up a child, it was fortunate for Monica that she fell into his hands; else she had probably starved or drifted into some refuge for waifs and strays. True her father, Sebastian Threlfall the poet, had plenty of casual friends. Almost everybody knew him slightly, and right up to the time of his fatal attack of delirium tremens he contrived to look one of the most interesting of the regular frequenters of the Café Royal. But people are generally not hasty to bring up the children of casual acquaintances, particularly when such children may be suspected of having inherited more than a fair share of human weaknesses.


  Of Monica’s mother literally nothing was known. Nobody seemed able to say if she were dead or alive. Probably she had long since deserted Threlfall for some consort able and willing to provide regular meals.

  Everton knew Threlfall no better than a hundred others knew him, and was ignorant of his daughter’s existence until the father’s death was a new topic of conversation in literary and artistic circles. People vaguely wondered what would become of ‘the kid’, and while they were still wondering, Everton quietly took possession of her.

  Who’s Who will tell you the year of Everton’s birth, the names of his Almae Matres (Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford), the titles of his books and of his predilections for skating and mountaineering; but it is necessary to know the man a little less superficially. He was then a year or two short of fifty and looked ten years older. He was a tall, lean man, with a delicate pink complexion, an oval head, a Roman nose, blue eyes which looked out mildly through strong glasses, and thin straight lips drawn tightly over slightly protruding teeth. His high forehead was bare, for he was bald to the base of his skull. What remained of his hair was a neutral tint between black and grey, and was kept closely cropped. He contrived to look at once prim and irascible, scholarly and acute; Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, with a touch of old-maidishness.

  The world knew him for a writer of books on historical crises. They were cumbersome books with cumbersome titles, written by a scholar for scholars. They brought him fame and not a little money. The money he could have afforded to be without, since he was modestly wealthy by inheritance. He was essentially a cold-blooded animal, a bachelor, a man of regular and temperate habits, fastidious, and fond of quietude and simple comforts.

  Nobody is ever likely to know why Everton adopted the orphan daughter of a man whom he knew but slightly and neither liked nor respected. He was no lover of children, and his humours were sardonic rather than sentimental. I am only hazarding a guess when I suggest that, like so many childless men, he had theories of his own concerning the upbringing of children, which he wanted to see tested. Certain it is that Monica’s childhood, which had been extraordinary enough before, passed from the tragic to the grotesque.

  Everton took Monica from the Bloomsbury ‘apartments’ house, where the landlady, already nursing a bad debt, was wondering how to dispose of the child. Monica was then eight years old, and a woman of the world in her small way. She had lived with drink and poverty and squalor; had never played a game nor had a playmate; had seen nothing but the seamy side of life; and had learned skill in practising her father’s petty shifts and mean contrivances. She was grave and sullen and plain and pale, this child who had never known childhood. When she spoke, which was as seldom as possible, her voice was hard and gruff. She was, poor little thing, as unattractive as her life could have made her.

  She went with Everton without question or demur. She would no more have questioned anybody’s ownership than if she had been an inanimate piece of luggage left in a cloak-room. She had belonged to her father. Now that he was gone to his own place she was the property of whomsoever chose to claim her. Everton took her with a cold kindness in which was neither love nor pity; in return she gave him neither love nor gratitude, but did as she was desired after the manner of a paid servant.

  Everton disliked modern children, and for what he disliked in them he blamed modern schools. It may have been on this account that he did not send Monica to one; or perhaps he wanted to see how a child would contrive its own education. Monica could already read and write and, thus equipped, she had the run of his large library, in which was almost every conceivable kind of book from heavy tomes on abstruse subjects to trashy modern novels bought and left there by Miss Gribbin. Everton barred nothing, recommended nothing, but watched the tree grow naturally, untended and unpruned.

  Miss Gribbin was Everton’s secretary. She was the kind of hatchet-faced, flat-chested, middle-aged sexless woman who could safely share the home of a bachelor without either of them being troubled by the tongue of Scandal. To her duties was now added the instruction of Monica in certain elementary subjects. Thus Monica learned that a man named William the Conqueror arrived in England in 1066; but to find out what manner of man this William was, she had to go to the library and read the conflicting accounts of him given by the several historians. From Miss Gribbin she learned bare irrefutable facts; for the rest she was left to fend for herself. In the library she found herself surrounded by all the realms of reality and fancy, each with its door invitingly ajar.

  Monica was fond of reading. It was, indeed, almost her only recreation, for Everton knew no other children of her age, and treated her as a grown-up member of the household. Thus she read everything from translations of the Iliad to Hans Andersen, from the Bible to the love-gush of the modern female fictionmongers.

  Everton, although he watched her closely, and plied her with innocent-sounding questions, was never allowed a peep into her mind. What muddled dreams she may have had of a strange world surrounding the Hampstead house – a world of gods and fairies and demons, and strong silent men making love to sloppyminded young women – she kept to herself. Reticence was all that she had in common with normal childhood, and Everton noticed that she never played.

  Unlike most young animals, she did not take naturally to playing. Perhaps the instinct had been beaten out of her by the realities of life while her father was alive. Most lonely children improvise their own games and provide themselves with a vast store of make-believe. But Monica, as sullen-seeming as a caged animal, devoid alike of the naughtiness and the charms of childhood, rarely crying and still more rarely laughing, moved about the house sedate to the verge of being wooden. Occasionally Everton, the experimentalist, had twinges of conscience and grew half afraid …

  * * *

  When Monica was twelve Everton moved his establishment from Hampstead to a house remotely situated in the middle of Suffolk, which was part of a recent legacy. It was a tall, rectangular, Queen Anne house standing on a knoll above marshy fields and wind-bowed beech woods. Once it had been the manor house, but now little land went with it. A short drive passed between rank evergreens from the heavy wrought-iron gate to a circle of grass and flower beds in front of the house. Behind was an acre and a half of rank garden, given over to weeds and marigolds. The rooms were high and well lighted, but the house wore an air of depression as if it were a live thing unable to shake off some ancient fit of melancholy,

  Everton went to live in the house for a variety of reasons. For the most part of a year he had been trying in vain to let or sell it, and it was when he found that he would have no difficulty in disposing of his house at Hampstead that he made up his mind. The old house, a mile distant from a remote Suffolk village, would give him all the solitude he required. Moreover he was anxious about his health – his nervous system had never been strong – and his doctor had recommended the bracing air of East Anglia.

  He was not in the least concerned to find that the house was too big for him. His furniture filled the same number of rooms as it had filled at Hampstead, and the others he left empty. Nor did he increase his staff of three indoor servants and gardener. Miss Gribbin, now less dispensable than ever, accompanied him; and with them came Monica to see another aspect of life, with the same wooden stoicism which Everton had remarked in her upon the occasion of their first meeting.

  As regarded Monica, Miss Gribbin’s duties were then becoming more and more of a sinecure. ‘Lessons’ now occupied no more than half an hour a day. The older Monica grew, the better she was able to grub for her education in the great library. Between Monica and Miss Gribbin there was neither love nor sympathy, nor was there any affectation of either. In their common duty to Everton they owed and paid certain duties to each other. Their intercourse began and ended there.

  Everton and Miss Gribbin both liked the house at first. It suited the two temperaments which were alike in their lack of festivity. Asked if she too liked it, Monica said simply ‘Yes,’ in a tone
which implied stolid and complete indifference.

  All three in their several ways led much the same lives as they had led at Hampstead. But a slow change began to work in Monica, a change so slight and subtle that weeks passed before Everton or Miss Gribbin noticed it. It was late on an afternoon in early spring when Everton first became aware of something unusual in Monica’s demeanour.

  He had been searching in the library for one of his own books – The Fall of the Commonwealth of England – and having failed to find it went in search of Miss Gribbin and met Monica instead at the foot of the long oak staircase. Of her he casually inquired about the book, and she jerked up her head brightly, to answer him with an unwonted smile:

  ‘Yes, I’ve been reading it. I expect I left it in the schoolroom. I’ll go and see.’

  It was a long speech for her to have uttered, but Everton scarcely noticed that at the time, His attention was directed elsewhere.

  ‘Where did you leave it?’ he demanded.

  ‘In the schoolroom,’ she repeated.

  ‘I know of no schoolroom,’ said Everton coldly. He hated to hear anything mis-called, even were it only a room. ‘Miss Gribbin generally takes you for your lessons in either the library or the dining-room. If it is one of those rooms, kindly call it by its proper name.’

  Monica shook her head.

  ‘No, I mean the schoolroom – the big empty room next to the library. That’s what it’s called.’

  Everton knew the room. It faced north, and seemed darker and more dismal than any other room in the house. He had wondered idly why Monica chose to spend so much of her time in a room bare of furniture, with nothing better to sit on than uncovered boards or a cushionless window-seat; and put it down to her genius for being unlike anybody else.

  ‘Who calls it that?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s its name,’ said Monica smiling.

  She ran upstairs, and presently returned with the book, which she handed to him with another smile. He was already wondering at her. It was surprising and pleasant to see her run, instead of the heavy and clumsy walk which generally moved her when she went to obey a behest. And she had smiled two or three times in the short space of a minute. Then he realized that for some little while she had been a brighter, happier creature than she had ever been at Hampstead.