Roots of Evil(68)

Edmund only left the bedroom on two or three brief occasions during the evening – once to heat some soup for his father and once to make a glucose drink, both of which his father refused, turning his head away on the pillow. Each time he returned to the room he did so with a beat of apprehension, more than half-expecting to find his father dead. Could you die, purely by wishing it?

Towards midnight the house slid down into a cold and haunted state that no longer seemed to be in the real world but in some desperately lonely wilderness. Was this the place his father had inhabited during all those appalling attacks of melancholia? This silent desolation? Edmund went round the house, turning up all the heating and switching on all the lights, but it did not seem to make much difference. The rooms began to smell of despair and ghosts.

Ghosts…

Shortly before one a.m. his father began the fearful head-turning that Edmund found so eerie. He constantly turned his head this way and that, as if he could sense the presence of something invisible creeping across the room, and as if he was trying to find it, not with his sight, but with his instincts.

‘What’s wrong?’ Edmund had been half dozing in a chair near the window.

‘Did you hear something?’ His father had pushed himself up on the pillows, and there was a feverish colour across his thin cheekbones. Edmund heard with a chill that his father’s voice sounded different. It sounded old. The two antibiotic pills he had managed to get him to swallow had had no effect; his breathing was like the slow creaking of a lump of thick yellowed leather.

‘It’s raining like fury outside,’ said Edmund. ‘I expect that’s what you heard. Try to go back to sleep. Or if I make a cup of tea could you drink it?’

His father shook his head impatiently and dismissively. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear? It sounds like someone creeping up the stairs.’

‘I can’t hear anything—’ He’s hallucinating, thought Edmund. But despite himself he crossed to the partly open bedroom door and looked into the deep well of the stairs. Nothing. He came back and sat on the side of the bed, and his father’s hands reached for him with the sudden frightening strength he sometimes displayed. ‘You imagined it,’ said Edmund. ‘There’s no one here except us.’

‘I’m not imagining it. I’m going to die tonight, Edmund. And they know I am. That’s why they’re here now. That’s what I’m hearing.’

An icy finger traced its way down Edmund’s spine, but he said, ‘They?’

‘The murdered ones. They walk, Edmund – that old belief’s perfectly true. The murdered ones really do walk. That’s why I’ve never been able to forget.’

‘Ashwood,’ said Edmund, softly. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You were there that day, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ The voice was no longer old and sick; it was younger, more vigorous. He’s going back, thought Edmund. In his mind he’s going back to those years.

‘I never forgot what happened that day,’ said this eerily younger voice. ‘That’s the trouble, you see. You think that in time you’ll be able to put it behind you, but you can’t. All the time, for all the rest of your life, you have to watch everything you do and you have to measure everything you say, in case someone finds out…’ He broke off, and Edmund waited, not speaking. ‘I was articled to a firm just outside Ashwood village – you never knew that, did you?’

‘No,’ said Edmund obediently.

‘I’ve never talked about it. Or have I?’ A look of puzzlement crossed the thin face. ‘Have I talked about it, Edmund?’

‘No,’ said Edmund again. No point in saying Deborah had talked about it to him and to Lucy; that she had liked remembering those meetings at Ashwood, which had led to her marriage to the older brother, William Fane.

‘The firm I was articled to did a lot of work for the studios. Contracts for the actors, details on the leasing of the land. It was quite interesting. I used to be taken to Ashwood quite often, to take notes, to gain experience.’

Edmund could feel the memories crowding in, and he could see his father as he must have been in those days: young, charming, eager, his hair the colour of honey with the sun in it, his eyes vividly blue…

‘Lucretia had come to live in England after the war,’ said the voice that was no longer his father’s. ‘I think she had bought a house near to Ashwood – Essex or Sussex, somewhere like that. The first time I saw her I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was perfect, Edmund – skin like porcelain or ivory, and that black hair like polished silk. And a shining quality, as if she was perpetually surrounded by light. You didn’t actually see it, but you felt it. She could light up a room just by walking into it. But she was mischievous as well. Come to bed, she said, and I went. It was like being under a spell – I sometimes thought she was a witch, but I would have done anything for her.’


He paused again, his mind still deep in the past. ‘A long time afterwards I married your mother – an old childhood friend, someone I had known all my life. A marriage based on friendship it was, and I thought it might help me to forget. It didn’t, of course. After Lucretia, no other woman could ever—’ Sanity flared in his face, faded away, and then struggled pallidly back, like an electrical current flickering on and off in a thunderstorm. Edmund wanted to tell him not to speak, to try to forget, but his father’s memories were winding their tendrils around his own mind now, pulling him into that same past.