Property of a Lady(46)

The logs duly arrived midway through the morning, and I’ve built a fire in the library hearth. It smoked furiously for about ten minutes, but now it’s settled down to a very pleasant crackle and the room is nicely warm.

I’ve even set the old clock going. The hinges of the door protested like a soul in torment, but they aren’t rusted and the pendulum with its weight turned out to be perfectly workable. When I touched it, it moved at once, and (I know how fantastical this sounds) it was as if a heart was struggling into life after a long stillness. And then the rhythmic ticking began, and I reached up to move the hands to the correct time and closed the door.

I dare say a good deal of craft went into that clock, but I don’t much like it. To my eye it’s Victorian workmanship at its most florid. It has one of those vaguely macabre faces over the main dial – a swollen moon-face, which I suppose marks the passing of the moon’s cycle. The sphere representing the moon has been lightly marked to indicate features – like children’s books with the Man in the Moon smiling benignly down from the night sky. The face is half visible, which I suppose means it was midway between moons when it stopped. Still, at least the ticking seems to have smothered the dripping tap. Perhaps it’s ticking exactly simultaneously with it.

Regarded as a spyhole into the house’s earlier occupants, the contents of the boxes are fascinating. I’m trying to make notes of it all as I go along. I’ve just found some letters from a Mrs W. Lee, who had entered into a somewhat vituperative correspondence with the fishmonger over an order of herring that appeared to have been dubious. I can’t imagine why such letters were preserved, but it’s interesting to speculate who Mrs W. Lee was. There are also a few old concert and theatre programmes from performances at one or two local theatres, with notes made in the margin by a neat, masculine-looking hand. The writer compares one performance of The Bells unfavourably with Henry Irving’s appearance in the same piece, which he had apparently seen in London a few years earlier. Personally, I shouldn’t have expected a small provincial theatre to even come close to Sir Henry’s incandescent acting, but it all makes absorbing reading.

There’s something soporific about a firelit room and a ticking clock, and despite Sir Henry and the herring, I’m having to fight the compulsion to drift into a half-doze . . .

It’s so restful in here. Not entirely silent, but then no house is ever entirely silent. As I make these notes, I’m hearing voices, just very faintly. They’re a long way off, though. Children, perhaps, playing somewhere in a field. Or would children be at school at this time on a weekday? Whatever it is, it sounds as if they’re singing . . .

It’s rather a nice sound – it makes me think of peaceful, soothing things. Warm honey running off the spoon into a dish. Dappled sunlight coming through the trees on a green and gold summer’s afternoon, and bees humming among the flowers. Soft rain in a forest in autumn, and the scent of chrysanthemums . . .

I think someone tapped at the door a few moments ago, but it was a soft, light tap and I was so comfortable and so drowsy that I couldn’t be bothered to wake up enough to see if anyone was there. If it was important, whoever it was will come back.

I don’t think the singing I can hear is children. It’s a single voice – a man’s voice . . . I can’t quite hear the words, but it sounds like one of those old-fashioned chants . . .

Black Boar: 6.30 p.m.

I’m not at all sure I shan’t destroy these pages, but for the moment it’s calming to write down what happened at Charect House this afternoon.

Sleep is a curious thing. It’s a like an ocean. There are shallow parts and very deep parts, and there are currents that can pull you into very strange places indeed . . . The only explanation I have for what happened to me this afternoon is that one of those strange currents had me in its arms and took me to a curious, none too comfortable, place.

At first I enjoyed the gentle undertow that tugged at my mind. At one level I knew I was falling asleep, that I was on the borderlands of dreaming, but it didn’t seem to matter. I even thought: perhaps Harry will be in the dream. He is, sometimes. He comes walking towards me, smiling, holding out his hands, and he looks so dashing in his uniform, and I’m so proud of him and filled with such soaring delight at seeing him after so many years . . .

At first I thought he was in the dream, and I think I smiled as I lay back in the deep old chair. It felt as if he was closer to me than ever before, and when I turned my head slightly, I became aware of a hand moving lightly over my face, tracing the features, exactly as he always did. If I opened my eyes he would be there – this time he really would, and the bloodbath of the Somme would never have happened . . .

That was when I opened my eyes.

And oh God, oh God, standing over the chair, his face inches from my own, was a man I had never seen in my life – a man with a very pale face and black shadows half-concealing the upper part of his face. He was leaning over me, and his hands were crawling over my face like spiders . . .

I didn’t scream, but it was a close thing. I gasped and started back though, and at once he flinched as if he had been burned. In that moment, I made to jump up from the chair, but it overturned and I fell backwards in an awkward jumble. By the time I scrambled to my feet, he had gone, but the door into the hall was swinging softly and slowly shut. Exactly as if someone had just gone through it and had pushed it closed.