Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (36 page)

‘The ante-chapel?’

‘Good God, no! The crypt, if we had one.’

‘There is our wine cellar. That should do.’

‘No thank you! I’m the college wine secretary, remember. I shouldn’t like to meet that thing down there on a dark night.’

One can be afraid of ghosts without believing in them.

A PIECE OF ELSEWHERE

Staying with Auntie Winnie was going to be a treat. That was what I was told, but no valid reason for why it should be had been supplied. Mum’s sudden enthusiasm for Winnie baffled me as I had been under the impression that she disliked her sister. Certainly she considered that Winnie had married, as she put it in her old-fashioned way, ‘beneath her’. Perhaps the change of heart was due to the fact that Winnie’s husband had now left her. Perhaps necessity was also involved. Mum told me that she and Dad needed ‘time alone together to sort things out’, which I didn’t really understand. So, for whatever reason, I was going to stay with Winnie for three weeks in July in a little Derbyshire village called Shadford.

‘You’ll be in the country,’ said Mum several times as she was driving me over to Auntie Winnie’s, ‘that’ll be exciting.’ I had lived all of my nine years in Leeds, and ‘the country’ had till now been the object of the occasional weekend expedition. I thought it was interesting enough; I may even have preferred it theoretically to Leeds, but I can’t say that the prospect of it filled me with breathless excitement. I would have much preferred a fortnight on a hot Spanish beach with my parents, which was what had happened the previous year, but that, apparently, was out.

Auntie Winnie and Mum were twins. They were both disconcertingly like and unlike each other. Winnie was more flamboyantly dressed than my schoolteacher Mum; she dyed her hair blonde and wore it in long, tangled ringlets, but the eyes and nose were the same. Like my mother, she had a habit of turning her head sideways as she looked at you, like a parrot about to preen itself. This, combined with a beaklike nose gave her a slightly avian appearance which was somehow not so evident in Mum: less plumage, I suppose.

Before this time I had only seen Auntie Winnie on our home territory in Leeds. Winnie had spent the previous Christmas with us because her husband had just left her. He had been, and for all I knew still was, according to Mum, ‘a club comedian’. I had no idea what this meant, but my mind conjured up a vague picture of a clown doing something comically violent with a giant cudgel. He was called Percy Pye and I think this was his real name because Winnie was a Mrs Pye. When I asked Mum where Percy Pye had gone to she said contemptuously: ‘I expect he’s run off with a barmaid.’ That produced further strange images in my head as I had inadvertently confused the word ‘barmaid’ with ‘mermaid’.

Since the departure of Percy Pye, Auntie Winnie had earned her living by turning her large house in Shadford into a bed and breakfast establishment. Mum told me that while staying with Auntie Winnie I would have to ‘help out’ and that too would be exciting.

Shadford was a high hill village on the edges of the Peak District. Its houses were of plain grey stone, or stucco white with black weather boarding. Their windows were small, square, and planted in the walls at regular intervals, as in a child’s drawing. In the steep surrounding landscape, dry stone walls enclosed sheep and sometimes cattle. It was hard, unpicturesque country which some, I suppose, might have called beautiful, but bleak never appealed to me.

Auntie Winnie’s house, ‘Dovecotes’, was half way up a hillside and had, I was told, ‘a grand view’ over the Shad valley. When we arrived, there was fitful sunshine, a cold wind and the odd spit of rain. This was the weather which I remember prevailing during my entire stay at ‘Dovecotes’, but I could be mistaken. Memory has a way of being true to the mood rather than the fact.

Auntie Winnie was welcoming enough, but I knew, as children do know instinctively, that I did not really interest or excite affection in her. I saw money change hands between Mum and Winnie and I overheard a subdued conversation. I understood enough to gather that my aunt was being rather patronising to my mother and, because in the past she had been on the receiving end of such treatment from Mum, rather enjoying herself.

‘You two see if you can work things out between you,’ she said to her. ‘That’s the number one priority, isn’t it? And don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll look after young Ronald. Keep him out of mischief. Shan’t I, young man?’

I nodded solemnly. I was a solemn child.

My bedroom was at the back of the house and, though it was the smallest conceivable of spaces to sleep in, I liked it. Auntie Winnie was apologetic not about the room’s size, but that it couldn’t be at the front with its ‘grand view’ of the Shad valley. Actually, I preferred to look out of my window at the little back garden that sloped steeply upwards towards a hill dotted with sheep. I felt safer with this: I was closed snugly in rather than being victimised by grandiose panoramas.

The garden itself was barely more than a rectangle of lawn with a few shrubs and a treelike device for hanging up linen to dry. Just in front of the back of the house was a paved area known as ‘the patio’. It was a dreary little space on which occasionally you would see Auntie Winnie’s guests sitting in wicker garden chairs and smoking as they contemplated the hillside. The patio may have seemed to me unnecessarily urban for a house in the country, but, for whatever reason, I did not like the look of it.

I soon conformed to the daily routine. Every morning, while Auntie Winnie cooked in the kitchen I would take out toast, tea and plates of eggs and bacon to the guests. Then, having had our own breakfasts, Auntie Winnie and I would change the linen in the bedrooms and tidy them. This I rather enjoyed because it allowed me to satisfy an already burgeoning fascination with the lives of other people. I remember one particularly interesting occasion when Auntie Winnie discovered a couple of lurid paperbacks while she was hoovering under the bed.

‘Mucky books!’ she said. ‘I shall have to ask Mr Ramsey to leave.’ Auntie Winnie, despite her more eccentric appearance, was just as strait-laced as my mother.

The afternoons I had to myself. I have no idea what Auntie Winnie did in them, but I wandered the countryside rather disconsolately, dreamed my way over hills and through woodland, and skimmed stones in the Shad, a wide, shallow, trickling brook. When it rained I lay on my bed rereading
Treasure Island,
an activity which I rather preferred to my outdoor expeditions.

The only variant to this regime came on Sundays when in the afternoon we went into the nearest big town which was called Crowforth to attend a meeting of Auntie Winnie’s Spiritualist Church. Mum had mentioned her sister’s Spiritualism to me on a number of occasions with disapproval, as if it were an odd and dangerous activity. I was therefore excited and a little apprehensive about my first visit to the church, as I imagined I was about to involve myself, albeit under duress, in something wicked.

I had convinced myself that whatever ceremonies would be performed were likely to take place in darkness, illumined perhaps by the mysterious light of a few candles. It was disappointing to find myself in a brightly lit hall remarkably similar to the Methodist chapel to which Mum would occasionally take me on Sundays. There was even a harmonium and hymns whose words were unfamiliar but whose tunes I knew well. The congregation was mostly female, middle aged and respectable, just like the Methodists; the sermon contained the same brand of enervating platitudes. Following the sermon there was a time during which the preacher, Mr Barbel, said he would deliver some messages from ‘beyond’.

I had hoped that these messages from beyond the grave might have offered some kind of thrill, but again I was to be disappointed. Those who had passed over seemed to be unusually preoccupied by the minor ailments of their friends and relatives in the congregation. When they offered information about themselves it was of the blandest possible kind: that they were happy, that they were surrounded by flowers, that they had been reunited with their pet animals.

Only one message among many was notable, not for its content, but for the effect that it had on Auntie Winnie. Towards the end of the session Mr Barbel said:

‘Now I have a message here from a gentleman. He won’t give his name, but he has a message for someone in this hall. Something about a patio. Does that ring a bell with anyone here?’ My aunt, seated beside me, said nothing, but I saw and felt her stiffen in her seat; her features became drawn and rigid. ‘Something about a patio. “Have you finished it?” he’s saying. Or perhaps, “Are you sure it’s finished?” A humorous gentleman this. Anyone connect to a humorous gentleman asking about a patio? No? Well then, now I have a lady on the other side and I’m getting the letter M, and she’s saying something about a caravan, or is it a bungalow. . . ?’

After the service which I think lasted for the best part of two hours, Auntie Winnie introduced me to the ‘minister’, Mr Barbel, a small gravel-voiced man with thick pebble glasses and a permanent air of truculence.

‘Nice to see you again, Mrs Pye. So this is your young nephew Ron, is it?’ I had never been called ‘Ron’ before in my life and felt rather indignant about it. ‘How do you do, young man. Do you have the gift?’

I was baffled. ‘He means, Ronnie, do you have a psychic gift?’ said Auntie Winnie. I shook my head.

‘Well, we shall see. I believe we are coming up to you on Tuesday evening to conduct a development session.’ My Aunt looked rather shocked by this. ‘Had you forgotten, my dear?’ asked Mr Barbel.

‘No! No! That’s fine!’ I think she had forgotten.

On the way home I asked Auntie Winnie what a ‘development session’ was. She explained that it was a Spiritualist meeting in which those who were training to be mediums tried out their powers in the presence of an experienced practitioner like Mr Barbel. I asked if I could attend this development session at her house and Auntie Winnie told me that I couldn’t but I could help hand round the tea and sandwiches before it began, then I would have to go to bed.

They came on Tuesday at about seven o’clock, five of them, three women and two men: heavy, clumsy looking people, in the bleakness of middle age, with lugubrious, hungry expressions and protuberant eyes. Perhaps my memory has made them more homogeneous than they actually were, but I know that when, last of all, Mr Barbel arrived he seemed positively sprightly by comparison. He ruffled my hair and patted my bottom which I did not like, and called me ‘laddie’ which I liked even less.

The session was held in Auntie Winnie’s private sitting room, a smallish, square parlour, crowded with ornament. The curtains had been drawn and all the light came from a reproduction Tiffany lamp with a multicoloured glass shade, that bathed the proceedings in a spangled semireligious glow. The furniture had been cleared to the edges of the room except for a circular table covered with a dark blue cloth and seven chairs. I took round the sandwiches to the guests, most of whom looked at me as if I were an alien and slightly threatening creature, like a piranha in a fish tank. I was quite relieved to be dismissed, but not before Mr Barbel had permitted himself another pat on my behind.

I did not linger outside the door to hear what might be going on. The atmosphere in that room had oppressed me and I was looking forward to an uninterrupted session with
Treasure Island
. As it happened, my bedroom was situated directly above Auntie Winnie’s parlour and I thought I could hear a vague murmur of their proceedings filtering up through the floorboards, but when I lay down on the floor and put my ear to it I could hear no better.

I believe I fell asleep while reading with my bedside light on, but when I woke up it was utterly dark. It was less a darkness than a complete absence of the visual. I stretched out for the switch of the bedside light and clicked it several times but with no result. I wondered if I had gone blind. I got out of bed and went to the door which would not open; the door handle would not even move and there was no scratch of light coming from under it. I went to the window and drew open the curtains, but beyond the windows was pure blackness and the panes of glass were cold to the touch. Now, numb with fear, I felt my way back to the bed and it was then that I heard the voice.

‘Hello. Anybody there. Who’s that? Eh? Eh? Don’t you start, Mrs Woman. I’m a caution, a regular caution. A piece of elsewhere, that’s me. Eh? Eh?’

The voice was unctuous and well-practised, as if it had said these words countless times. It was a low, beery voice, with a northern accent, not Leeds, though. Perhaps it was Bradford; I couldn’t be sure. Terror had sharpened my mind which was racing its way through possibilities and impossibilities.

‘Anybody there? Why don’t we all hold hands and try and contact the living. Eh? Eh?’

I tried to answer but breath only came out. I was dumb and blind.

‘Here’s one. Here’s one. Fellow walks into a bar. He says “I’ll have a pint of blood, please.” Barman says: “What you mean, blood? Who do you think you are, a vampire?” He says: “No, I’m a Yorkshire pudding and I’ve come in to batter meself to death.” How about that, lady? She’s not talking. Here’s one. A little monologue. A little monologue entitled she was only the landlady’s daughter but you got her behind with the rent. Nice slice of rump. I love it. A little monologue. I like the girls who do; I like the girls who don’t, I hate the girl who says she will but then she says she won’t, but the girl I like the best of all and I think you’ll say I’m right is the girl who drinks a pint of blood and who cuts up things at night. Did I say blood, lady? I’m a severed arm, me. I’m all cut up about it. I’ve gone to pieces. Pieces of elsewhere. Hello?’