Читать книгу Prospero’s Children - Jan Siegel - Страница 7

I

She had been standing in front of the picture for several minutes before she began to notice it. The other paintings in the gallery were purely abstract but as she stared at this one, waiting for her father, passing the time, shapes began to emerge from the field of nondescript colour, vague as shadows on smoke: disconnected fragments of stair, random archways, openings into nowhere, ghostly glimpses of an unfinished labyrinth. Here and there a detail was highlighted, a splinter of sky beyond a broken vault, a segment of window with branching latticework, eye-blinks of clarity which seemed to flicker into being even as her gaze skimmed over them. The artist drew her attention to and fro with a skill that was almost disquieting, letting her roam the boundaries of image, then pulling her gradually towards the focus, where an irregular patch of vividly contrasting colour was set like a gaudy postage stamp at the very centre of the picture. Initially the truncated rectangle, perhaps three inches high, appeared so crowded with microscopic detail that it resembled a vast and complex mosaic, miniaturised until all coherence was lost. But as she studied it, either because her vision became acclimatised or by some contrivance of the artist, the tiny shapes seemed to shift, like a kaleidoscope falling into place, and she found herself looking through a doorway or casement out over a city. Wide streets lined with columns and colonnades, clustered roofs hiding secret alleys, glistening domes, steeples, spires, palaces and terraces, temple-walls and tavern-walls, courtyards, backyards, fountains, gardens. Everything was bathed in the gold of a falling sun, enriching paintwork and stonework, touching the gilding on the domes with pure fire. She did not know what city it was yet it looked both ancient and timeless, a Rome that lived on free of traffic and tourism, a new-built Jerusalem unscarred by warring factions, the seat, maybe, of a higher civilisation, older than history, fresh as the world in which it flourished, whose ruins had since crumbled to dust and whose wisdom had long been forgotten. She was not a fanciful girl, or so she told herself, yet her dormant fancy was stirred: she was pierced by a nostalgia for a place she had never seen, for the fairytale realms she had always rejected.

‘Do you like it?’ inquired a voice behind her. ‘You seem to be rather absorbed.’

She turned abruptly. The gallery was carpeted and the owner—she was sure he must be the owner—had approached so quietly she had not heard him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t decided. It’s very interesting.’

‘So you don’t believe in impulsive judgements.’ The voice was as smooth as pouring cream with a faint intonation of mockery, but whether lofty or merely teasing it was impossible to tell. There was little humour visible in his expression. Glossy pale grey hair framed his face like a steel halo; his café-crème complexion was unlined, creating an effect of careful preservation rather than enduring youth; his eyes were almond-shaped and flecked with glints of yellow light. He was delicately suave, discreetly elegant, gracefully tall. She disliked him immediately, on impulse. ‘It’s an etching,’ he went on. ‘Did you know?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Of course she didn’t. ‘I thought etchings had to be in black and white.’

‘The technique is very complex.’ Once again, that trace of superiority. ‘Bellkush has always favoured the most difficult approach. The effect, I think, is almost unearthly—those diaphanous layers of subtle colour. Almost unearthly. Appropriate, perhaps, to the subject matter.’

‘What is it called?’ she asked, rather as if the question had been wrung out of her.

‘Lost City.’ There was a pause while she felt herself drawn back to the contemplation of that crowded portal. ‘Are you here to buy?’

‘I’m waiting for my father.’ She dragged her eyes away from the picture. He must know who she was: he had seen them arrive.

‘Ah…yes. Robin Capel’s daughter. And your name is?’

‘Fernanda.’

‘How pretty. Also unusual.’ Her name might have been a piece of bric-a-brac which had attracted his wandering attention.

‘I had a Spanish grandfather,’ she explained, lapsing into her routine excuse. It was untrue, but she had always felt such an exotic appellation needed more justification than her mother’s erratic taste. She did not approve of foreign names without foreign blood to back them up.

‘Fern!’ Her father, his discussions concluded, came towards them, wearing his habitual expression of slightly anxious goodwill. The young woman who worked at the gallery followed in his wake. ‘So you’ve met Javier. Er—terrific. Terrific. What were you chatting about?’

‘The pictures.’ The man answered for her.

‘I’m afraid you must have found my daughter’s taste a bit—well, conservative. She’s a very down-to-earth young lady, you know. Likes sitters in portraits to have all their features in the right place, trees to be the proper shade of green—that sort of thing. Only abstract painter I’ve ever known her to admire is Mondrian. She says he’d make nice kitchen wallpaper.’

‘That would be a very expensive kitchen,’ said the man called Javier. Robin and the woman both laughed.

‘Daddy, don’t make me sound so boring,’ Fern said, wanting to leave.

‘Just a joke, darling. Oh—I’d like you to meet Alison Redmond. We’re definitely going to collaborate on the witchcraft book. She’ll organise several of the artists here to do the illustrations. It should be a big success. Alison, my daughter Fernanda.’

They exchanged a polite handshake. Close up, the woman was not so young: her face was long and pointed with an incongruously full mouth adorning its thin structure and pale narrow eyes between heavily mascaraed lashes. Her off-blonde hair was waist-length and worn loose. Had Fern not been too prosaic for such comparisons she would have thought her father’s future collaborator resembled a witch herself.

‘Terrific,’ murmured Ms Redmond. Possibly Fern imagined the same elusive mockery in her voice that she had detected in Javier’s smooth accents. For a moment, seeing her father standing between them, she was visited with the illusion that he was somehow trapped, hemmed in by two predatory figures, the man with his superior height and superior smile, the woman with her warmth of manner and coldness of eye. The impression of danger, though fleeting, disturbed her because it seemed out of all proportion to the actual threat. In the six years since her mother died Fern had monitored her father’s love-life with the skill of an international statesman, dismissing a succession of unsuitable candidates out-of-hand. The menace here was surely similar, the standard hazard of marauding huntress and hapless prey; she had dealt with it a hundred times, and she had never before experienced any doubts or premonitions. But then, Fern did not believe in premonitions.

Robin shook more hands in farewell, while she resisted an irrational urge to drag him away.

That was the beginning, she decided long afterwards. The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture. The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound. The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change. She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it. Her father’s easy-going manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother. She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex. Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises. University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage. She thought of herself as grown up but behind the sedate façade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control. That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone—the raw material of an adult.

The day after their visit to the Holt Gallery they collected her brother from school and drove out of London to see the house. That was the next thing. The house. On the death of a distant relative Robin had inherited a property in a remote part of Yorkshire, and before putting it on the market his accountant had suggested he might like to take a look at it. ‘Good idea,’ Robin had responded. ‘Could do with a break. Nice for the kids. They’re a real pair of townies: need a taste of the country. Never know, might decide to keep it, do it up a bit, that sort of thing. Use it for weekends and holidays. Good idea.’ Perceiving too late the pitfalls ahead, his accountant’s heart sank visibly. Robin Capel had a flair for turning potential assets into costly liabilities. Fortunately, Fernanda could be counted on to veto the additional expense. Robin ran a small but lucrative publishing company producing coffee-table books of the type bought by the illiterate as a substitute for reading, but although he was an excellent editor with a genuine enthusiasm for the banal, financial management was beyond him.

‘We never take a holiday in England, Daddy,’ Fern pointed out en route north. We generally rent a villa in Tuscany in the summer and go skiing in France or Switzerland in winter. You can’t ski in Yorkshire and they don’t make very good Chianti. It just isn’t sensible to keep a place we’ll hardly ever use.’

‘You’re obsessed with being sensible,’ said William from the back seat. ‘Women go through life with a shopping list, and when someone gives them anything that isn’t on it—even if it’s something really precious—they simply throw it out of the basket.’

‘Who said that?’ Fern asked sharply.

‘Mr Calder. History.’

His sister shook her head. ‘You’re slipping, Will,’ she said. ‘Last time you made a nasty remark about women you attributed it to the English master. You can’t expect me to believe all your teachers are male chauvinists.’

‘Why not?’ he retorted, unabashed. At twelve, he was as tall as his sister and slight and supple as a whip. His face had that quality of luminous clarity, common to elves and angels, which the unwary so often mistake for innocence. He changed the subject without apology or embarrassment.

‘If Great-Uncle Edward barely knew you,’ he asked Robin, ‘why did he leave you his house?’

‘No one else to leave it to,’ Robin surmised. ‘He wasn’t really my great-uncle. Or yours. My grandfather’s cousin. Might make him my great-cousin, I suppose. Maybe a couple of greats.’

‘One will do,’ said Fern.

‘He must have been awfully old,’ Will mused.

‘Youngest of his family,’ Robin explained. ‘Lots of sisters. Story goes, he ran away to sea when he was a boy—merchant navy—and didn’t come back till they’d all died. Part of the Capel legend. Don’t know if that’s what really happened. None of the sisters married—unless some of them were widowed—anyway, there were no children. Ned Capel didn’t marry either. Overdosed on women at an early age, I expect. The sisters all lived in that house until they sort of faded away and then he came home and vegetated there too. Must have been about ninety when he died. The sisters were fairly ancient as well. Remember visiting once with my grandparents: I think I was about Will’s age. There were three or four of them left by then: Esme and Deirdre and Irene—don’t recall any other names. Esme—no, Eithne—they called her the baby. Seventy-five at least. Very small with a wrinkled little face all eyes, like a marmoset in flowered chiffon. “I made the seed cake myself,” she told me. Frightful stuff. Tasted of sand.’

‘What’s seed cake?’ asked Will, intrigued.

‘Told you,’ said Robin. ‘Sand.’

They arrived in Yorkshire around ten that evening. Fern, normally a faultless map-reader, was in an edgy mood after losing them twice. Although it was May the weather was cold and a thin drizzle misted the windscreen whenever Robin tried switching off the wipers. The lights of a straggling village glittered through the rain as they crossed the Yarrow and climbed uphill; few lights and far between, lurking behind deep-set windows and close-drawn curtains, not unwelcoming but distant, keeping themselves to themselves. Following directions conveyed by Ned Capel’s solicitors they left the village and continued on into the dark, turning off at last up a steep drive which proved to be more like a cart-track, their rough passage shaking the Audi until its Vorsprung seemed about to come unsprung. The drive widened and levelled out in front of the house and Robin stopped the car. Little of the façade was visible through the rain-swept gloom except for the tall windows, many of them arched, black in the grey wall. The former housekeeper, a local woman, had been informed of their advent but there were no lights showing, no indications that they were expected. The house might have stood unoccupied for years. It looked dour, unfriendly, desolate as the surrounding countryside, hugging itself around the hollow darkness of its dusty rooms. Fern produced a torch and the roving beam picked out the entrance, tag-ends of creeper casting wavering fingers of shadow across the front door. In the blurred lozenge of light this was seen to be of unvarnished oak, splintered and weather-bleached, and as solid as the door to a dungeon. A modern Yale lock had been added, but the key turned reluctantly and the door creaked open under duress, scraping over bare boards. The hall inside was chilly and almost pitch-black. Fern took a long time finding the lightswitch: the skittering beam glanced over the lower treads of a winding stair and flicked in and out of curious niches and past angled doorways, blinking back abruptly from the depths of a stained mirror. Low-wattage illumination did little to improve matters, showing the details of cobwebs trailing from ceiling and lamp-shade and patches of discoloration on walls which might originally have been painted white.

Will gazed about him without enthusiasm. ‘Fern’s right,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of a house we won’t use? I think we should sell.’

‘I must say,’ Robin averred, ‘it looks a bit off-putting. Could move on, I suppose. Find a B & Β. Come back in the morning.’

‘No.’ Fern’s tone did not admit of argument. ‘We’re here and we’re going to stay. You were both so set on coming: well, I don’t intend to run away just because there isn’t a red carpet. Mrs Wicklow was asked to leave us tea and milk and so on. Let’s find the kitchen.’

She deposited the torch on a table and opened the door to her left, flicking an adjacent switch. A yellow glow sprang into being, no mellow radiance but a tired, sickly, off-colour light, as if the bulbs which provided it were continuously on the verge of expiring. It illumined a long drawing room with a few pieces of cumbersome furniture, the velvet upholstery rubbed raw by past occupants, a carpet mottled with age and dirt, and a wide empty fireplace bringing to her the dreary moan of the wind in the chimney. A grandfather clock ticked loudly, but there were no other sounds. At the far end of the room was an alcove, and peering out of it was the Face. For an instant, for all her resolute nerves, Fern stifled a gasp that was almost a cry. It was the face of a malevolent Buddha, not pensive and serene but gloating, somehow sly, the broad lips half parted in an unholy smile, the eyelids creased at some inscrutable jest, stubby horns protruding above a low brow. One of the light-bulbs flickered and she had the illusion that the idol had winked at her. ‘It’s a statue,’ she told herself. ‘Only a statue.’ Inadvertently, she spoke aloud.

Will and Robin had been investigating other doors but her brother heard her and came back to the hall. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Did you call?’

‘It was the statue,’ she said, ‘It gave me a shock.’

Will pushed past her to take a closer look. ‘It’s hideous,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’ll bet Great-Cousin Ned brought it back from his travels. Sailors always pick up stuff in foreign parts, don’t they? This place could be full of strange things. Some of them might be valuable.’

‘Pirates’ treasure, I suppose?’ said Fern, reassured by his ebullience. ‘Doubloons, and pieces of eight.’

‘I thought a doubloon was something you wore.’ Will had stopped a couple of feet in front of the idol, and suddenly he turned away. ‘Actually, I don’t think I do like it very much. I wonder what it’s laughing at?’

‘I don’t really want to know,’ said Fern.

Robin found the kitchen, at the back of the house. It was stone-flagged, cold but clean, with the barren air of a kitchen where nothing had been cooked in a long while. A jar of coffee, packets of sugar and tea, and a plate of sandwiches in clingfilm stood on the table, looking like the isolated relics of an alien visitation. There was milk in the fridge. They had snacked at a pub on the way, but Will and Robin tucked into the sandwiches, one eagerly, the other absent-mindedly. Fern searched for a teapot to make tea.

‘It’s a depressing sort of house, isn’t it?’ Robin commented between mouthfuls.

‘That’s Yorkshire for you,’ said his daughter.

The building was on three storeys, with eight bedrooms but only one bathroom and an extra loo downstairs. ‘The Victorians,’ Robin explained. ‘Grubby lot. Didn’t reckon too much to bathrooms.’ The cistern slurped and gurgled at the slightest provocation; hot water was not forthcoming. They went to bed unwashed, like the Victorians. Mrs Wicklow had made up the beds in three of the first-floor rooms; Robin chose the front room, Fern and Will slept at the back of the house. Fern lay awake for some time, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a country night. The rain was silent and there was no traffic, although once she heard the grating roar of an untuned engine on the road below, possibly a motorbike. A strange mewing cry must, she assumed, have been some nocturnal creature, maybe a bird: it was only the unfamiliarity of it which disturbed her. She slept fitfully, falling between uneasy dreams, not sure if the snuffling she could hear, along the wall beneath her window, was real or simply another phantom from the shadows of sleep.

In the morning she woke around nine and got up to look at her surroundings in daylight. There was a small garden at the back of the house but the flower-beds were scantily planted and the grass grew in tufts on what might have been intended for a lawn; only weeds and a few hardy shrubs thrived there. Beyond, the bare hillside, treeless and grey with dew, climbed up towards the moors and the sky. Occasional rocks broke the skin of turf, moss-padded, the outthrust bones of Earth; a bridle path skirted the garden and ascended the slope, a shadowy line against the contouring of the land. Above it Fern noticed something which might have been a solitary boulder or stump, curiously shaped, looking almost like an old man sitting hunched up, cloaked and hooded against the weather. It was not actually raining but a layer of pale cloud covered the sky and the air felt damp. A budding inclination to explore the path died when Fern realised she had come without suitable boots.

Downstairs, she found her brother in the kitchen, bemoaning a lack of cereal, while the water boiled away from the old-fashioned iron kettle which Robin had left on the hob.

‘Dad’s gone to the village shop,’ Will reported. ‘I asked him to get me some Frosties. He said he’d bring orange juice, too.’

‘Is there a village shop?’ Fern inquired, transferring the kettle to an unheated surface.

‘Probably.’

Robin returned about three quarters of an hour later with squash instead of juice and no Frosties. ‘Only cornflakes,’ he explained, ‘and porridge oats. Didn’t think you’d like those. Sorry about the juice. Said they’d run out.’

‘No Frosties!’ Will bewailed.

‘You took a long time,’ said Fern.

‘Met the vicar. Nice chap. Name of Dinsdale—Gus Dinsdale. Invited us to tea. Thought we might like to visit Edward Capel’s grave, pay our respects, I suppose. He’s buried here: local churchyard. Anyway, I said fine. Nothing else to do.’

‘A visit to a grave and tea with the vicar,’ said Will. ‘Lovely weekend we’re having.’

They spent the rest of the morning going through the house. Fern found a long-handled broom for the cobwebs and an antiquated vacuum cleaner which made a noise like a small tornado and seemed bent on sucking up the carpets. In the drawing room, she moved the idol to a place where it would not catch her eye every time she opened the door. It was much heavier than she had anticipated and the stone felt rough and chill; she shivered when she set it down. On the first floor, Robin became absorbed in the paintings and estimated that a couple of murky landscapes and the portrait of a little girl with Shirley Temple ringlets clutching a puppy might possibly be worth something. Will, disappointed to find that the vaulted gloom of the cellar contained nothing more promising than a wine-rack with several bottles of superior burgundy, was cheered by the discovery of an attic running the length of the house, colonised by spiders and littered with bric-a-brac, including an iron-bound chest which might have come straight from a pirates’ hoard. His enthusiasm was enhanced rather than mitigated when the chest proved to be locked, with no immediate sign of a key.

‘Looking for it will give you something useless to occupy your time,’ said Fern, who had stubbed her toe on a lurking footstool and was determined to find nothing intriguing in an overcrowded attic. She was too old for treasure hunts.

‘I say,’ said Robin from behind her. ‘Quite a place. Might find all kinds of stuff here—family heirlooms, missing works of art…That chair looks like a Chippendale. Pity it’s broken. Not much light, is there? We need Fern’s torch.’

They came down finally at lunchtime when Mrs Wicklow arrived carrying a covered dish. Her greeting was abrupt and her face only slightly less stony than that of the idol but the dish emanated an agreeable aroma of steak-and-kidney and Fern concluded that her attitude was not actively grudging, it was simply that she was resistant to change and unused to the incursion of strangers. ‘Solicitors told me t’ Captain was your great-uncle,’ she said to Robin over their meal.

‘Well, not exactly…’

‘We decided he was our great-cousin,’ Will said, ‘with an extra great for Fern and me.’

‘You must miss him,’ Fern offered.

‘He was a good man,’ Mrs Wicklow conceded, ‘but tired. He was old and he didn’t like it. He couldn’t go walking the way he used to. Folks say long life is a thing to wish for, but I’m not so sure. It can’t be pleasant to outlive your friends. T’ Captain, he wasn’t t’ same since his dog died.’

‘Was he really a captain?’ Will asked.

‘He was that. Been all over the world, he had. I don’t know as how he ever really took to it, being what he called a landsman all the time. Of course, we’re near the coast here. He’d go down to look at t’ sea often and often, and come back sad about the eyes. Can’t say I trust it myself, t’ sea: it can seem so blue and gentle, but t’ water’s always cold and tricksy underneath.’

‘He must have collected a lot of things on his travels,’ Will said opportunely. ‘I don’t suppose you know where I could find the key to that big chest in the attic?’

‘Could be anywhere.’ Mrs Wicklow achieved a shrug. ‘House is full of stuff. Most of it’s rubbish, if you ask me; he wasn’t one for throwing things away. T’ key’ll be tucked in a drawer in t’ study or bedroom if you’re that set on it.’

‘Which was the Captain’s room?’ Will pursued.

‘One Mr Capel has now,’ Mrs Wicklow said. She had done some investigative bed-making before serving the pie.

‘Er—make it Robin,’ their father interjected. ‘Mr Capel…bit formal.’

‘Mr Robin, then.’

‘Might not all be rubbish, you know,’ Mr Robin remarked, discarding any further attempt at informality. ‘There are some good pictures, although I expect those came to him through the family.’

‘I don’t mind pictures,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s that heathen idol in the drawing room I don’t like. Evil-looking object, I told t’ Captain to his face. Unchristian. He said it amused him. There’s different kinds of God, he used to say, all over t’ world. That’s not a kind I’d want in my prayers, I told him, nor any respectable person.’

‘I don’t care for it much either,’ said Fern.

‘And then there’s that woman,’ Mrs Wicklow continued, obscurely. ‘Carved out of a whole tree, according to t’ Captain, painted up as bright as life, and showing her all just like in t’ Sunday papers. She came from a shipwreck, he said, back in t’ old days when ships had a real lady up front for t’ sailors to warm to, only she doesn’t look much like a lady to me. T’ prow, that’s what they call it. He kept it in t’ barn next door, and a big piece of t’ ship with it.’

‘We haven’t looked in the barn yet,’ said Will, glancing compellingly at his father, his interest in sea chests temporarily in abeyance.

‘We ought to go and see,’ Robin affirmed. ‘A ship’s figurehead—sounds pretty exciting.’ His eyes were as bright as his son’s.

Fern stayed in the kitchen, although her offer to help with the washing up was firmly rejected.

‘Funny thing, what your brother was asking,’ Mrs Wicklow resumed. ‘There was a young woman over from Guisborough, not long before t’ Captain died. Something to do with antiques. They’re all crooks, so I hear. Wanting him to sell stuff, she was. He sent her about her business. Anyway, I was doing t’ drawing room when they came downstairs, and I heard them talking. She was asking about keys.’

Later that afternoon they paid a brief visit to the churchyard, where Ned Capel lay in the lee of a dry stone wall, with the turf plumped up like a pillow over his grave. It was a quiet place hollowed into the hillside, with the petals of a hawthorn drifting across the ground like a spring snowfall. ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea,’ Fern quoted, and for an instant she felt, irrationally, that she too had come home—home to the grimness of Dale House and the wild country waiting in the wings. ‘Is it supposed to be haunted?’ she asked the vicar, over tea.

‘Extraordinary question,’ said Robin. ‘Didn’t think you believed in ghosts.’

‘I don’t. It’s just—when we arrived, the house appeared, not exactly menacing, but reserved, sort of sullen, unwilling—or afraid—to let us in. I almost fancied…’ She checked herself, remembering her vaunted distrust of fancies.

‘I’ve never been too sure about hauntings,’ said the Reverend Dinsdale. He was younger than Fern had expected, probably under forty, with a friendly bony face and a long neck in which a mobile Adam’s apple fluctuated expressively. ‘I can’t really imagine a human spirit is going to mope around the same old place for centuries just because it was murdered there, or something equally nasty. All the more reason to move on, I would have thought. On the other hand, some houses have a definite personality. I’ve often wondered if it’s the buildings themselves which remember—and maybe sometimes the memory can be strong enough to reproduce an old image, a sound, even a smell, so that human senses can detect it Perhaps there’s a kind of house-spirit which lives in such places, a degenerate form of something that was once akin to mankind, craving the company of the living even while it resents them, reminded of what it might have been.’

‘A sort of genius loci,’ Will supplied knowledgeably. He was in a beatific mood after the vicar’s wife had donated a packet of Frosties from her larder.

‘That’s it. Pure speculation, of course. Mind you, it’s fairly well grounded in folk mythology. In the past, every house in Yorkshire had its own hobgoblin. The occupants would put out a saucer of milk or a choice morsel of food to keep it sweet, and in return it would look after the house, see off danger and disease, that kind of thing. Much more efficient than a burglar alarm.’

‘Maybe we should get Fern to put out some milk for ours,’ Robin suggested slyly.

‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ his daughter retorted.

‘I don’t know about ghosts,’ Will said, ‘but I heard a weird sniffing noise last night, going along the wall under my window. It was awfully loud.’ Fern glanced at him with suddenly widening eyes.

‘Could be a badger,’ the vicar said. ‘They always sound as if they have a cold in the head. What you want to do is go out in the morning and check for tracks. I’ve got a book in my study with some good illustrations: I’ll show you what to look for.’

By the time they returned to Ned Capel’s house the daylight was failing. The cloud-cover had begun to break up and chinks of fire appeared in the far west above a muffled sunset, while eastwards great lakes of pale green had opened up, with a star or two winking in their depths. The motorcyclist Fern had heard the previous night roared past them on the narrow road, a little too close for comfort, his exhaust rattling and a black visor hiding his face. Their temporary home loomed up ahead of them, its unyielding frontage looking no longer threatening but merely solid, sternly dependable, as safe as a castle wall which would keep them from the night. Fern went straight up to her room and gazed out towards the sunset: twilight dimmed the rugged hillside but she could still distinguish the paler thread of the path and the stump or boulder that resembled a seated man on the bank above, maintaining its timeless vigil over the house. Something like a bird swooped past, its wing-beat too swift for the eye to follow, its flight-path erratic. Then there was another, and another. They made a faint high-pitched chittering unlike any birdsong. ‘Bats!’ Fern thought with a sudden shiver, part fear, part pleasure. She had never seen a bat outside the nature programmes on television and although she was not really frightened of them they seemed to her alien and fantastical, messengers symbolising her transition into another world. The teeming man-made metropolis where she had grown up shrank in her mind until it was merely a blob of meaningless ferment, and beyond it she glimpsed a boundless universe, with pock-marked moons sinking behind drifting hills, and blue voids opening in between, and dusty nebulae floating like clouds across the backdrop of space, and at the last a starry sea whose glittering waves hissed forever on the silver beaches at the margin of being. For a moment she was spellbound, panic-stricken; and then the endless vistas vanished from her head and there was only the hillside climbing to the barren moor and the zigzagging of the bats. The sunset had faded from behind the cloud-wrack and in the softened light details were briefly clearer: Fern squinted at the view, striving after uncertainty, knowing that what she saw was against logic, against sense. The solitary boulder had gone. The path was empty, the slope bare; in an eyeblink, the duration of a mirage, the hunched up rock or stump had disappeared. Fern flinched away from the window with a lurching heart and made herself walk slowly from the room.

Tea had been heavy on scones and cake and accordingly the three of them ate a cursory supper and spent the rest of the evening trying to elucidate the rule-book for a box of Mah Jongg tiles unearthed in the attic.

‘Good thing, no telly,’ said Robin a little doubtfully. ‘Makes you create your own amusements. Stretches the mind.’

‘We’ll have to get a TV here,’ said Will. ‘Also a music centre.’

‘No point,’ Fern said. ‘We’re going to sell. Will, you’re cheating. There’s no such thing as a King Kong.’

‘I’m not cheating,’ Will retorted. ‘I’m creating my own amusements.’

It was well after eleven by the time they went up to bed, worn out by the intricacies of the game. Fern tumbled into a bemused sleep where ivory tiles tap-danced along the table and an elaborate Oriental character uncurled into a bat-winged creature which skittered around the room, bumping into walls and lamp-shades. ‘It’s a dragon,’ said a voice in her ear. ‘Don’t look into its eyes’—but it was too late, she was already falling into the hypnotic orbs as if into a crimson abyss, clouded with shifting vapours of thought, and a single iris dilated in front of her, black as the Pit. Then she crossed into a dreamland so crowded with incident and adventure that she woke exhausted, snatching in vain at the fraying threads of recollection. She had a feeling her dream had possessed some overwhelming significance, but it was gone in a few seconds and there were only the raindrops beating on the window-panes like the tapping of Mah Jongg tiles. She slept and woke again, this time into silence. And then below her window came the snuffling noise, bronchial and somehow eager, as if the animal outside was desperately seeking ingress through the steadfast wall. ‘A badger,’ thought Fern. ‘I’d like to see a badger,’ but a huge reluctance came over her, pressing her into the bed like a dead weight, forcing her back into the inertia of sleep, and when she woke again it was morning.

The hot water had come on eventually but there was no shower attachment so Fern had a quick bath. When she finally nerved herself to look out at the view, the boulder—she had decided to think of it as a boulder since the area was virtually devoid of trees—was back in place as if it had never been gone; she could almost convince herself its absence the previous evening had been a trick of the twilight. Will was grubbing around in the flower-bed below, presumably hunting for badger-tracks as instructed by Gus Dinsdale. In the kitchen, Robin was trying to make toast without the assistance of a toaster. Several charred slices on the table bore mute witness to his failure. Fern packed him off to the bathroom and took over; Will came in from the garden, unashamedly earth-stained, in time to appropriate the first round.

‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Badger-tracking.’

Will set down his slice of toast unfinished, a frown puckering his forehead. ‘No. I can’t understand it. I heard it last night, that same sniffing, really loud, just where the flower-bed is. It had rained earlier, and Gus said damp soil is perfect for holding prints, but there isn’t a mark. Yet I know I heard it. I was sort of half asleep at the time, and I thought about getting up and taking a look, but somehow I didn’t want to, or I was just too tired. I wish I had now. Maybe I dreamed it.’

‘If you did,’ said Fern, ‘then I did too. Both nights.’

‘Perhaps the house is haunted,’ Will said after a pause.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Fern asked.

‘Well, Mr Burrows—Physics—he says Science has proved so many impossible things that it would be a great mistake to rule out the supernatural just because we haven’t sussed it out yet. He got us all talking about it one afternoon: he said he’d had an experience which he couldn’t explain, and Rebecca Hollis told us about her grandmother’s house, and this room which is always cold, and something she’d seen there. She isn’t the fanciful type, either, and she doesn’t boast; she wouldn’t even have talked about it if her best friend hadn’t nudged her into it.’ Absent-mindedly, he took another bite of toast and reached for the Frosties. ‘I rather like that idea Gus had, about the house-spirit,’ he concluded with his mouth full.

‘But the sniffing is outside the house,’ Fern said thoughtfully, ‘and it wants to get in.’

For a minute Will stopped eating and stared at her. She contemplated telling him about the boulder but decided against it; he was only twelve, and the light had been poor, she might have been mistaken. ‘I’m imagining things,’ she said, suddenly impatient with her own credulity. ‘It’s the Yorkshire landscape. Overexposure to nature is bad for city-dwellers. We need to get back to the bright lights of reality.’

‘The lights are man-made,’ Will pointed out. ‘Electricity and neon. Only the stars are real.’

And then: ‘What’s that awful smell?’

‘Damn,’ said Fern. ‘Now I’ve burnt the toast.’

They drove back to London after lunch at the local pub, where surly rustics eyed them sidelong and thick Yorkshire accents made the language barrier almost insurmountable. ‘Interesting house,’ Robin said in the car. ‘Must go through all that stuff some time. Quite a collection. Didn’t see the figurehead, did you, Fern? You ought to have a look. She’s pretty impressive. Next time we’re there—’

‘We really have to sell, Daddy,’ Fern interrupted resolutely. ‘We don’t need the house and we’re not likely to use it very much. It’ll be far too expensive to maintain just as a storehouse for marine antiquities.’

‘Of course. Of course.’ Robin’s agreement was too quick and too hearty. ‘Just a thought. We’ll go back in the summer, sort out, tidy up, sell later. No hurry. Market’s still picking up. Best to wait a bit. Invest some time and effort in the place: makes good business sense. James’ll approve. He’s all for investment.’ James was his accountant.

Fern’s grip tightened on the AA Road Atlas.

‘We’ve got to go back,’ Will insisted. ‘The house-spirit will be waiting for us.’

Fern was not entirely sure he was joking.