Property of a Lady(37)

The builder produced a stub of pencil and drew esoteric-looking symbols on the far wall. ‘All yours,’ he said to the two men. Then, to Michael, ‘Stand well clear, squire. In fact, you’d better stand on the stair outside.’

In the muted light from the two small windows the massive sledgehammer swished through the air and, with a boom of sound, landed squarely on the pencil marks. The whole of the wall shivered, and a myriad of spider-cracks appeared in its surface, as if a giant hand had crumpled a sheet of paper. The sledgehammer whirled a second time, and at the second blow, the thin cracks deepened and spread, and plaster dust showered everywhere. As the dust clouds billowed upwards, a small room, shut away for countless years, gradually became visible. At first look it did not seem as if it would add much to Ellie’s playroom – it was barely six by eight – but at least it made the attics lighter, because a tiny window had been behind the wall, a small oblong of glass, framed by crumbling wood. The window was cracked and thick with the dirt of decades, but if you stood on tiptoe and leaned forward you would be able to see down into the gardens below. That’s what she did, thought Michael. One day, a long, long time ago, she stood there, that dark-haired woman, and in some way I can’t begin to understand, years later, the image came out on the photo I took.

But if anyone really had stood in this room and looked down from the window, there was no trace of that now. Michael was conscious of a stab of disappointment. But he stepped through the jagged pieces of wall and into the dusty space beyond. Was there a faint imprint of a hand on the grimed window, as if someone had pressed against it? But there seemed to be nothing except the encrusted dirt of years. He looked out, seeing the outlines of the old shrubbery below, then turned back into the room. The plaster and brick-dust was starting to settle, and the builder and his assistants had gone in search of implements to clean it up. Michael could hear them calling to one another as to the whereabouts of the heavy-duty vacuum cleaner, asking which daft bugger had used it last and not put it back in the hall.

He was about to go back downstairs when he saw that a small section of wall near the window had crumbled away. Fresh plaster dust had showered out, together with some kind of packing, which must have been thrust into the cavity of the partition wall.

It was not packing. It was a sheaf of yellowed papers, covered in writing. Michael’s heart began to race. Even from here he could see that the writing was erratic, the ink faded to sepia, but it looked as if it was just about legible. Was this something more from Alice Wilson?

The men were coming back up the stairs, dragging the vacuum cleaner with them, grumbling good-humouredly about the narrowness of the attic stair.

Michael bent down, picked the papers up and slipped them into an inside pocket.

It was almost three o’clock when Michael got back to the Black Boar, and he suddenly realized he’d had nothing to eat or drink since breakfast at seven. Bar lunches had finished, it seemed, but some sandwiches and coffee could certainly be made up for him. What would he like?

‘Anything,’ said Michael, who wanted nothing more than to get to the privacy of his room and read the papers he had stolen from Charect House. No, stolen was too strong a word. He fully intended to give them to the house’s owner. After he had read them. They would turn out to be just somebody’s old laundry list, of course.

He put them on the bedside table and managed to make himself wait until the plate of sandwiches and pot of coffee had been brought. He was starting to feel slightly light-headed, although he had no idea if this was from ordinary hunger or nervous tension. Just in case it was hunger he gulped down some coffee and crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, then reached for the papers.

He had more than half expected to see Alice Wilson’s familiar writing at the top of the first page – his mind and his eyes were prepared to do so. But the writing was very different to Alice’s impatient scribble. The date was a good thirty years before Alice had come to Charect House.





7th February 1939


This morning I received the letter for which I have waited almost my entire life.

That strange, tragic woman, who dwelled in a sad twilight world for so long, has died, and Charect House is finally mine.

Father always said it would be. ‘One day, Harriet,’ he used to say, ‘one day, we shall be rich. We shall have a beautiful house in a wonderful party of the country. Remember that. Remember there’s only one person who stands between us and our inheritance.’

When I was small I believed it, but over the years the story of the house we should one day own took on the flavour of a dream – another one of Father’s many fantasies. Mother never believed it at all. She died telling me to look after Father because he was a dreamer and dreamers were notoriously impractical.

Sometimes Father tried to explain why we would one day inherit a house and to sketch out the line of descent, although I never really followed it. ‘The Ansteys are an obscure branch of the Shropshire Lees,’ he said. ‘It’s a complicated descent though.’

I don’t know the complexities of the line of descent, but I do know any cousins I might have had – any children born to my father’s generation – were all lost. The Great War took most of the men, leaving the ladies behind in a welter of jingoism and songs about it being a long way to Tipperary. It’s scaldingly sad that thousands of those men never came back, and that an incredibly large number of the girls never found anyone else to love, but clung to letters and photographs of heartbreakingly young men.