Ghosts and Other Lovers Page 9

  “People don’t do that, just leave their children. She’s lying.”

  “No.”

  A hint of steel in that one word; something I’d never heard from Edward. I looked at him in amazement. “Did she say when they went away?”

  “She doesn’t know … she’s only little. She said a long time, but it can’t have been, she can’t have been on her own for long — she’s too tidy, her hair’s been brushed, and someone’s tied a ribbon in it — she could never do that herself. She’s wearing ever such a funny old-fashioned dress with petticoats, a bit like that one in Granny’s picture, remember?”

  The flesh on my arms tried to crawl up to my shoulders, and for a moment I knew the truth.

  At that moment, Edward ran off, calling: “Lucy, Lucy Maria, please come out!”

  Although I wanted to leave, I was more afraid of being alone, so I ran after him, hearing, just ahead of me, his glad shout: “There you are!”

  I found him in the front parlor. The curtains were drawn against the ruinous effects of sunlight, and the atmosphere was dim and vaguely subaqueous, but I could see well enough that he was alone.

  “Here she is, you see, she’s shy of strangers.”

  “Where?”

  “Just here.” He gestured, then frowned. “Lucy? Now don’t be silly, Lucy, I told you she’s a friend — you said you’d come out; you mustn’t hide anymore.”

  I watched him wandering around the ghostly shapes in the dim room, bending and turning as if searching for a hidden child. The doorway I blocked was the only way — apart from the windows, which had not been opened — in or out of the room. No one had passed us in the hall, and there was no one here now. Which meant there never had been.

  “Well done, Edward,” I said. “Points to you. You had me fooled, all right.”

  He turned, frowning slightly.

  “It was a good one, but I’ve rumbled you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your little ghostly girl in the old-fashioned dress. You made her up. And I believed you. My word, you have learned how to tell them, and no mistake!”

  His hand came up in an oath. “It’s no story. She was here. Honestly, I was talking to her just a minute ago. And of course she’s not a ghost — she’s a little girl.”

  Edward wasn’t joking. He really had seen and spoken to a little girl who wasn’t there. My back prickled and I whirled around, terrified something might be creeping up on me from behind, and although there was no one there, once I had started moving I did not seem able to stop, but went running pell-mell for the back door, letting out a low, wailing moan as I ran.

  He called to me to stop, but I couldn’t stop. My role as leader, the need to save face, these things didn’t weigh with me at all in my panic. I didn’t even slow down until I had reached the gates at the end of the drive, out of sight of the house. There I paused, panting, feeling guilty for having abandoned him. But I could not, to save my soul or his, make myself go back. It was pushing my courage to its limits simply to stay where I was and wait as the minutes dragged themselves past.

  At last — it might have been half an hour or more — he came into view, walking slowly, looking bemused by my obvious fear. “She wouldn’t have hurt you, you know. She couldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “But she’s dead, isn’t she? She’s a ghost?”

  “Ye-es,” he said uncertainly. “I suppose. I tried to touch her and my hand passed right through her. There was nothing there. I could see her, but I couldn’t feel her at all.”

  “Oh!”

  He looked at me. “Yes, it frightened her, too. She doesn’t know she’s a ghost. She knows something is wrong, but not what. She has no idea about being dead, no idea at all.”

  “What does she think has happened to her?”

  “She says her family went away without her; she doesn’t know why she didn’t go with them, or how long ago it happened. Before they left, there was something, something about her parents, something someone did to her which frightened her a great deal, which I couldn’t understand, and then she said they all went away, taking another little girl who looked just like her, and they didn’t hear her when she cried.”

  *

  It was Edward now who wanted to go back to the haunted house and I who kept finding excuses. I had another reason for preferring adventures closer to home, as long as it was Edward’s home, and that was his brother, Julian, back for the summer. I liked rainy days the best, days when Edward and I had to play indoors, days Julian often stayed in, too, reading books or listening to the wireless. I was happy just to have him near, to look at him, and when he spoke to me, I was in heaven. One day, I remember, he taught us card tricks.

  As I was drawn to Julian, Edward was drawn to his ghost. He argued with me in vain, and finally, one morning when I turned up as usual on his doorstep, his mother told me that Edward had already left — for my house, she assumed.

  Of course I knew where he had really gone. I held out for as long as I could, but, as the summer passed and Edward seemed quite happy to play without me, pride, curiosity, boredom, and jealousy all worked in me to overwhelm my fading memory of fear, and finally I told Edward I would go with him.

  He had stopped asking by then, but he seemed pleased. His love for Lucy Maria was not exclusive; he wanted her to have friends, for others to know and love her as he did.

  The day we went turned out to be the gardener’s day; we caught sight of a stocky, overalled figure as we rounded the curve in the drive and beat a hasty retreat. I wasn’t sorry to put off the visit to another day, but Edward fretted all through the afternoon, and insisted on going back after tea instead of waiting until morning. He said that Lucy Maria was expecting us, and he couldn’t let her down.

  But the scullery window was locked. Not merely shut, as he had learned to shut it so a passing glance would see nothing wrong, but latched shut from the inside. The back door was locked, the front door, too. I was relieved, but Edward was frantic as he ran around the house, trying every window on the ground floor.

  “Can’t your Lucy Maria let us in?”

  “Don’t be silly! If she could do that, she could let herself out, couldn’t she? She’s a soul without a body, she’s helpless, she’s trapped — you don’t understand at all, do you?”

  “How should I understand? I’ve never even seen this creature. For all I know, you made her up, to tease me.”

  He stared at me in disbelief and, I think, dislike; made a tortured sound, and turned his attention back to the problem of the locked house.

  His agony was so obvious I felt ashamed of myself. I had also noticed how low the sun was. I grabbed his arm. “Ned, I’m sorry. I know she’s real, and I’m sorry about the window, but, look, it’s getting late. Let’s go. We can come back in the morning. I’ll come with you, and we’ll have the whole day to find a way in. But we have to go now. If we’re late, they may not let us out tomorrow. It’s not your fault. She’ll understand.”

  “Grown-ups,” he growled, like a curse. “It’s their fault.” But I knew from the slump of his shoulders that he had given in.

  As we walked away from the house he kept looking back and suddenly he stopped. “There she is, she’s watching — see?”

  My eyes followed his pointing finger to a first-floor window and I saw: a little dark-haired girl in a white dress, ruffled pantaloons below, standing very still and looking out.

  “You see? That’s Lucy Maria.”

  I saw. And then she was gone, and I was looking at an empty window, blank as a sightless eye.

  A primitive, unthinking terror possessed me. For the second and not the last time in my life, I ran away from that house, and from Lucy Maria.

  *

  Did Edward go back? Did he manage to get inside? Did he see Lucy Maria again?

  I don’t know. Before I saw him again, before anything could be resolved, it was wartime, and the summer was over. I was packed off, with Mother and the babies, to relatives in Wales.
Edward, too, was evacuated — but I only learned that later. I was not to see him again for many years.

  Edward alone of his family survived the war. His parents were killed in an air raid, and Julian died in action in 1943. I had the news in a letter from my father, who had no idea of my feelings for Julian, referring to him as “the brother of your old chum Edward.” It was curious; I hadn’t seen Julian for four years, and might never have seen him again even if he had lived, but the news hit me very hard; in some ways, I feel as if I never really got over it.

  My formal education came to an end at about the same time as the war. There had been talk about teacher training, but I knew I didn’t want to teach. I lived at home — this was our new home, in Berkshire — and commuted to London to do a secretarial course until I got tired of it, then drifted about between coffee bars and house parties, occasionally working at some undemanding job.

  In 1949 I still spent my weekends at home in Berkshire, but during the week I worked in a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, and shared a flat in Holborn with three other girls. It was in the bookshop, ten years after I’d last seen him, that Edward Templeton came back into my life.

  I looked up as I always did at the sound of the bell that rang whenever the door opened, and thought he was an unlikely customer. A broad, open, very English face, fair hair, clear blue eyes untroubled by the clouds of intellect — I not only knew the type, I knew him.

  “Julian.” Maybe the news of his death had been a mistake, and all the years I’d lived since no more than a dream.

  I don’t know if he heard me. I’m not even sure I spoke aloud. He came further into the shop, to where he could see me. I was staring at him, as unselfconsciously as a child and as unable to stop. I was afraid he would vanish.

  “It is you,” he said, and the sound of his voice broke the dream. “Remember me?”

  “Edward,” I said. “Of course.”

  “I saw you last week, in a Soho coffee bar, and I thought I knew you, but I couldn’t think how. Then I remembered … but by then you’d gone. Somebody said he thought you worked in a bookshop, so I’ve been searching ever since.”

  “I can’t think how you recognized me. It’s been ten years.”

  He looked me up and down, and I felt myself responding to his gaze. “Mmmm. You’re bigger now, of course, but otherwise you’re just the same, only prettier. How could anybody forget those eyes? Anyway, you recognized me too — don’t deny it.”

  I didn’t feel like explaining who I had seen in his face. “Well, now that you’ve found me, what are you going to do with me?”

  “Take you out to dinner — for a start.”

  There were a couple of other boys I was dating at the time, but Edward was soon the only one. Within a few months he had proposed marriage, and I accepted. We did talk about the past, in the way that lovers always do, marveling at the twists and turns of fate which have brought them together, but I never told him of my love for his late brother, and he never mentioned Lucy Maria. It seems strange now, but I had put the whole haunted house episode completely out of my mind.

  It was as part of our search for a home to share that Edward suggested we take a look at the suburb where we had first met as children. I objected that it was inconvenient, unattractive, too expensive, too far from our friends… . Laughing, he stopped me.

  “All right, all right, we can’t live there. But let’s go and have a look at the place for old times’ sake … a romantic walk together along the paths where we used to play. I haven’t been there since before the war, and I wonder how it survived. What do you say?”

  I said yes, because it was obviously what he wanted. It seemed a small concession.

  “Remember the haunted house?” he asked, after we had looked, from a distance, at his old house and mine — both of them, we agreed, much smaller than we remembered.

  Haunted house. The words gave me a queer little shock and I shook my head in automatic denial, before I’d had time to think.

  “Don’t you? That’s funny. I thought you’d never forget it. I thought you might never get over being so frightened. The things that children think will last forever… . So you don’t mind if we go there now?”

  I began to remember. “Not inside.”

  “I’m not proposing we trespass, no.”

  At the sight of the posts which marked the end of the private drive I felt a premonition, or a memory, of fear.

  “You were such a brave girl, much braver than I was. I could never understand how you could be afraid of her.”

  “You mean the dead can’t hurt us? Maybe not, but people have always been afraid of ghosts. They don’t belong in this world, they’re intrusions. They can’t be trusted. Isn’t that reason to be afraid?”

  “She wouldn’t have harmed you, or anyone,” he said. “She couldn’t.” And he walked faster as we came in sight of the house, so that I had almost to run to keep up, and when he stopped, suddenly, I almost ran into him.

  He didn’t notice, transfixed by something he had seen. I followed his gaze, knowing already, so that when I saw it, too, I didn’t know if it was with my present eyes or in memory.

  “Lucy Maria,” I said.

  Then she was gone.

  He turned to me. “You saw her too?”

  I was shaking, but he didn’t notice. I managed to nod, unable to speak.

  “Poor Lucy — still trapped here, still alone—”

  He ran to the house, but the curtains were drawn at the front so he ran around to the back. I noticed, as I followed, that the lawn was overgrown and the shrubberies looked a little wild. It wasn’t a wilderness; it was still being tended, but obviously not as carefully as ten years ago. It was hard to be sure, with the curtains all drawn, but it seemed likely that the house was unoccupied, and that the pattern of temporary rentals continued, with occasional gaps.

  “Maybe we could rent it,” he said.

  “Us? Live here?” The idea was nightmarish.

  “Then she wouldn’t be alone. We could take care of her.” His eyes glowed. “I made a promise when I was a boy that I would come back and save her. And if I couldn’t help her escape I would stay with her, and look after her, and make sure she was never lonely again. God, how could I have forgotten?” He shook his head, looking rueful. “I thought it was a dream, or a kid’s game. But it really happened. She’s real. You know she is; you saw her, too, in the window. She’s still waiting.”

  He looked at me hopefully. “Oh, do say yes, darling! You’re not afraid, are you?”

  I was afraid, but, as always with him, ashamed to admit it.

  “She can’t hurt you and — don’t you see? — we can help her. We were helpless when we were children, but not now!” He grasped my icy fingers and held them in his warm hands, willing me to feel what he felt.

  I looked into his pleading, eager, loving eyes. Loving someone is wanting what they want. I said, rather feebly, “But what if she doesn’t like me? She didn’t, you know.”

  “Nonsense! She’ll love you when she gets to know you, just as I do! She’ll be like our own child.”

  I knew I would not have refused if Edward had been pleading on behalf of some living, displaced child. For we had talked about adopting war orphans, about sharing our home, our love, and our good fortune with those who had none, creating a family around us immediately, without waiting for the children who would be born. It might have seemed odd to anyone else that the first child we adopted was a ghost, but this ghost was real to us, a part of our shared childhood. I couldn’t pretend not to believe, and I had no justification for my fear of her. Really, if I examined it, wasn’t my chief emotion jealousy? He had loved her. Something in his passion stirred the memory of Julian, and the long nights I had wept and prayed and wished to have been allowed to save him, or at least to do something for him before he died. Like mine, Edward’s childhood sweetheart was dead. We both had our dead … and we had each other. It wasn’t fair of me to be jealous. Why not be generous
?

  “If it’s not too expensive,” I said.

  “Darling!”

  He embraced me. Over his shoulder, I looked at the house, wondering if Lucy was watching. I shut my eyes and kissed Edward back.

  *

  The owner of the house was a Miss Toseland. I wondered if she was a sister or a cousin, or perhaps a posthumous niece, of Lucy Maria. She employed an agent, of course, to deal with property affairs, but Edward wanted to see her personally. I wasn’t sure why. She agreed, reluctantly, to receive us at her home in Hampstead the following Friday morning.

  She was an intimidating figure. Not tall, but rigidly upright, a woman in her seventies with snow-white hair and eyes so dark they seemed as black as her old-fashioned dress. Like birds’ eyes, I thought: there seemed no human feeling behind them at all.

  To my astonishment, Edward was not intimidated by her coldness, and we had scarcely been seated in her gray and lavender sitting room before he’d told her the house was haunted.

  “I don’t believe in that spiritualist nonsense,” she said. “So if you’ve come to try and convert me, or to try and get money out of me for some scheme, you may as well leave now.”

  “I’m not a spiritualist, but I’ve seen something, and I am curious to know if the phenomenon has been reported before.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Did you ever live in the house?”

  “I did. As a small child. Our family left to live abroad in 1879 and we never returned. I have not set foot in that house since the day my parents carried me out of it, seventy years ago. So you see, Mr. Templeton, it is quite useless to ask me about any so-called spiritualist phenomena in that house.”

  “You had no experiences yourself, as a child, living there?”

  “I have no memories of that time. I was, of course, very young when we left.”

  “Did you have any sisters?”

  “Several,” she said dryly, and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  “Lucy Maria?”

  “I beg your pardon?” She looked startled; it was the first emotion she had shown.

  “Was one of your sisters called Lucy Maria?”