Property of a Lady(38)
I’m one of those girls. I have my own sepia photograph of someone who might have married me if he hadn’t been killed on the Somme, and my own might-have-been daydreams. He still smiles out of the photograph at me, and I often smile back and say goodnight to him as I get into bed. Harry, that was his name. Harry Church. He used to say we were destined to be together because even our names fitted. Harry and Harriet.
But it’s sentimentality to talk like that, and it’s over twenty years ago since he died. And if I didn’t meet anyone else I could care about, I’ve had a good life so far. Nor is it over by a long way, because I’m only just turned forty, and if this new war is coming, as everyone says, I dare say there will be ways in which I can be useful.
And now, after all these years, there’s Charect House.
The solicitor’s letter says, with an unmistakable note of apology, that the place is not in a very good condition, due to its having been empty for a very long time. That sends me into a whole new set of romantic daydreams, visualizing a grey grange or gloomy manor house, dripping with cobwebs, occupied by insubstantial wraiths or unhouseled souls, sobbing with loneliness . . .
It takes me back to that strange haunted woman inhabiting her own mist-shrouded half-world for so many years.
I make no apology for those last two paragraphs, since I feel I can be allowed an outbreak of romantic Gothicism on the occasion of inheriting the tumbledown home of my ancestors. When I finally walk up to it, I shall be like the heroine of that splendid book by Daphne du Maurier I read at Christmas – Rebecca. ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again . . .’
On a more practical note, I have arranged to travel to Shropshire next week. The solicitor’s letter requests me to provide suitable proof of my identity – birth certificate and passport were suggested as being acceptable. But I’ve never possessed a passport because I’ve never been outside England. I’ve always dearly wanted to see other lands and meet other races, but with that vulgar little man Adolf Hitler rampaging greedily across Europe, occupying Czechoslovakia as if he considers it his own back garden, it doesn’t look as if I’m likely to get my wish for a good while.
So I’m taking my birth certificate as proof. It’s a bit ragged at the edges because of being stored in a tin box all these years, but it states, quite clearly, that Harriet Anstey was born in the county of Cheshire on the 10th day of April, in the year 1898.
Harriet Anstey, thought Michael, lowering the papers for a moment. For a moment he could almost see her, bright-eyed and intelligent, walking along Blackberry Lane to the house. The lane would have looked much as it looked now, and she would have been excited and slightly amused at her own romantic expectations. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .’ But for Manderley read Charect House, thought Michael, and for Rebecca read Elvira.
He saw it was half-past four, and with extreme reluctance he put the papers carefully inside his suitcase, locked it, and prepared to go along to Nell’s shop. He nearly forgot the laptop, which they had arranged he would bring to check on emails from Jack, but remembered in time and went back upstairs.
THIRTEEN
Nell was making a pot of tea when Michael arrived, and Beth was toasting teacakes with careful concentration. You could not, she explained seriously, burn teacakes or they would taste horrid.
‘I love toasted teacakes,’ said Michael, going over to help her watch the teacakes turn the required shade of golden brown. ‘I expect you’re glad to be home, aren’t you?’
‘I had trifle in hospital,’ confided Beth. ‘It was nice, but not as nice as Mum’s.’ A tiny frown creased her brow. ‘I didn’t like that man carrying me away,’ she said.
Michael glanced at Nell and saw that although she was apparently concentrating on pouring milk into a jug, she was listening intently. He said, ‘I should think it was pretty grim.’
‘Yes, it was pretty grim.’ She appeared to like the expression.
Michael said, ‘Did you know who he was?’
‘No. I don’t know, akcherly, how he got me,’ said Beth. ‘On account of I know about not speaking to strangers or getting in cars and stuff like that, and I never do. I jus’ remember him carrying me down a road and singing to himself.’
‘I think it was a really bad dream,’ said Nell. ‘I think you were sleepwalking.’
‘It sounds like it,’ said Michael, following her lead.
‘Sleepwalking’s pretty important, isn’t it?’ said Beth hopefully.
‘It is, rather.’
‘I didn’t much like it, however,’ said Beth. ‘I most of all didn’t like it when he sang ’bout the dead man’s hand.’ She looked at Nell from the corners of her eyes. ‘I don’t s’pose there’s any such thing, really, is there? I mean, you couldn’t have a dead man’s hand that opens doors that’re locked?’
‘Definitely not,’ said Nell at once.
‘Or that sends people to sleep? That’s what he sang. “Sleep and be dead for the dead man’s sake.”’
She glanced nervously at Nell, and Michael, seeing Nell’s hesitation, said, ‘It’ll have been part of an old song. Country places like this have really old songs – people hand them down from their grandparents, and they’ve handed them down from their grandparents. Some of them are actually quite interesting. It lets us know what people sang hundreds of years ago. I quite like knowing what people used to sing.’