The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (48 page)
Read The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) Online
Authors: Peter Haining
“The law no longer says guilty or not guilty, in matter of divorce.”
“Well, it should!” She is passionate. “He should pay for what he did to me and Wendy. He destroyed our lives.”
The ghost is lulled by the turning wheel of her thoughts, so steady on its axis: he drowses; responds to a spasm of despair, an act of decision on the man’s part, one morning, as he leaves Anne’s unsatisfactory bed. He dresses silently: he means to go: never to come back. He looks in the mirror to straighten his tie and sees Anne’s face instead of his own.
He cries out and Anne wakes.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Don’t go.”
But he does, and he doesn’t come back.
The gap between what could be, and what is, defeats him.
Anne has a job as a waitress. It is a humiliation. Maurice does not know she is earning. Anne keeps it a secret, for Vanessa would surely love an excuse to reduce Anne’s alimony, already whittled away by inflation.
The decorators are back in Aldermans Drive. The smell of fresh plaster has the ghost alert. Paper is being stripped from walls: doors driven through here: walls dismantled there. The cat runs before the ghost, like a leaf before wind, looking for escape; finding none, cornered in the small back room, where animals never go if they can help it, and the shadows swing to and fro, and the tiny crossed bones from a dead sparrow are lodged beneath the wainscot.
“Get out of here, cat!” cries Vanessa. “I hate cats, don’t you? Maurice loves them. But they don’t like me: for ever trying to trip me on the stairs, when I had to go to the baby, in the night.”
“I expect they were jealous,” says the man with her. He is young and handsome, with shrewd, insincere eyes and a lecher’s mouth. He is a decorator. He looks at the room with dislike, and at Vanessa, speculatively.
“The worst room in the house,” she laments. “It’s been bedroom, dining room, nursery. It never works! I hope it’s better as a bathroom.”
He moves his hand to the back of her neck but she laughs and sidesteps.
“The plaster’s shockingly damp,” he says, and as if to prove his opinion the curtain rail falls off the wall altogether, making a terrible clatter and clash, and the cat yowls and Vanessa shrieks, and Maurice strides up the stairs to see what is happening, and what was in the air between Vanessa and Toby evaporates. The ghost is on Anne’s side – if ghosts take sides.
How grand and boring the house is now! There is a faint scent of chlorine in the air; it comes from the swimming pool in the basement. The stair walls are mirrored: a maid polishes away at the first landing but it’s always a little misery. She marvels at how long the flowers last, when placed on the little Georgian stair-table brought by Vanessa for Maurice on his fifty-second birthday. The maid is in love with Maurice, but Maurice has other fish to fry.
Further forward still: something’s happening in the bathroom! The bath is deep blue and the taps are gold, and the wallpaper rose, but still the shadows swing to and fro, against the wall.
Audrey has spilt red wine upon her dress. She is more beautiful than she was. She is intelligent. She is no longer married or an actress: she is a solicitor. Maurice admires that very much. He thinks women should be useful, not like Vanessa. He is tired of girls who have young flesh and liquid eyes and love his bed but despise him in their hearts. Audrey does not despise him. Vanessa has forgotten how.
Maurice is helping Audrey sponge down her dress. His hand strays here and there. She is accustomed to it: she does not mind.
“What are those shadows on the wall?” she asks.
“Some trick of the light,” he says.
“Perhaps we should use white wine to remove the red,” she says. “Remember that night so long ago? It was in this room, wasn’t it! Vanessa had it as a dining room, then. I think I fell in love with you that night.”
“And I with you,” he says.
Is it true? – He can hardly remember.
“What a lot of time we’ve wasted,” he laments, and this for both of them is true enough. They love each other.
“Dear Maurice,” she says, “I can’t bear to see you so unhappy. It’s all Vanessa’s doing. She stopped you writing. You would be a great writer if it wasn’t for her, not just a Hollywood hack! You still could be!”
He laughs, but he is moved. He thinks it might be true. If it were not for Vanessa he would not just be rich and successful, he would be rich, successful, and renowned as well.
“Vanessa says this room is haunted,” he says, seeing the shadows himself, almost defined at last, a body hanging from a noose: a woman destroyed, or self-destroyed. What’s the difference? Love does it. Love and ghosts.
“What’s the matter?” Audrey asks. He’s pale.
“We could leave here,” he says. “Leave this house. You and me.”
A shrewd light gleams in her intelligent, passionate eyes. How he loves her!
“A pity to waste all this,” says Audrey. “It is your home, after all, Vanessa’s never liked it. If anyone leaves, it should be her.”
The flowers on the landing are still fresh and sweet a week later. Maurice will keep the table they stand upon – a gift from Vanessa to him, after all. If you give someone something, it’s theirs for ever. That is the law, says Audrey.
Vanessa moves her belongings from the bathroom shelf. She wants nothing of his, nothing. Just a few personal things – toothbrush, paste, cleansing cream. She will take her child and go. She cannot remain under the same roof, and he won’t leave.
“You must see it’s for the best, Vanessa,” says Maurice, awkwardly. “We haven’t really been together for years, you and I.”
“All that bed-sharing?” she enquires. “That wasn’t together? The meals, the holidays, the friends, the house? The child? Not together?”
“No,” he says. “Not together the way I feel with Audrey.” She can hardly believe it. So far she is shocked, rather than distressed. presently, distress will set in: but not yet.
“I’ll provide for you, of course,” he says, “You and the child. I always looked after Anne, didn’t I? Anne and Wendy.” Vanessa turns to stare at him, and over his shoulder sees a dead woman hanging from a rope, but who is to say where dreams begin and reality ends? At the moment she is certainly in a nightmare. She looks back to Maurice, and sees the horror of her own life, and the swinging body fades, if indeed it was ever there. The door opens, by itself.
“You never did fix the catch,” she says.
“No,” he replies. “I never got round to it.”
The train beneath the overpass was nearly through. The past had caught up with the present and the present was dissolving into the future, and the future was all but out of sight.
It was 1980. The two women, Anne and Vanessa, sat together in the room in Upton Park. The damp patch was back again, but hidden by one of the numerous posters which lined the walls calling on women to live, to be free, to protest, to re-claim the right, demand wages for housework, to do anything in the world but love. The personal, they proclaimed, was the political. Other women came and went in the room.
“However good the present is,” said Anne, “the past cannot be undone. I wasted so much of my life. I look back and see scenes I would rather not remember. Little things; silly things, even. Wendy being late for school, a lover looking in a mirror. Damp on a wall. I used to think this room was haunted.”
“I used to think the same of Aldermans Drive,” said Vanessa, “but now I realize what it was. What I sensed was myself now, looking back; me now watching me then, myself remembering me with sorrow for what I was and need never have been.”
They talked about Audrey.
“They say she’s unfaithful to him,” said Anne. “Well, he’s nearly sixty and she’s thirty-five. What did he expect?”
“Love,” said Vanessa, “like the rest of us.”
4
PHANTOM LOVERS
Sex and the Supernatural
A Spirit Elopement
Richard Dehan
Prospectus | |
Address: | Mon Desir, Guernsey, Channel Islands. |
Property: | Eighteenth-century mansion house standing in its own spacious grounds, screened by lofty red-brick walls, with a wrought iron gate entranceway. Tastefully decorated in yellow-white. |
Viewing Date: | April, 1915. |
Agent: | “Richard Dehan” was the pseudonym of Clotilde Mary Graves (1863–1932), who was born in County Cork, Ireland and became popular with readers on both sides of the Atlantic for her humorous novels and stories of witchcraft and pagan religions, including |
When I exchanged my maiden name for better or worse, and dearest Vavasour and I, at the conclusion of the speeches – I was married in a travelling-dress of Bluefern’s – descended the steps of mamma’s house in Ebury Street – the Belgravian,
not
the Pimlican end – and, amid a hurricane of farewells and a hailstorm of pink and yellow and white
confetti
, stepped into the brougham that was to convey us to Waterloo Station, en
route
for Southampton – our honeymoon was to be spent in Guernsey – we were perfectly well satisfied with ourselves and each other. This state of mind is not uncommon at the outset of wedded life. You may have heard the horrid story of the newly-wedded cannibal chief, who remarked that he had never yet known a young bride to disagree with her husband in the early stages of the honeymoon. I believe if dearest Vavasour had seriously proposed to chop me into
cotêlettes
and eat me, with or without sauce, I should have taken it for granted that the powers that he had destined me to the high end of supplying one of the noblest of created beings with an
entrée
dish.
We were idiotically blissful for two or three days. It was flowery April, and Guernsey was looking her loveliest. No horrid hotel or boarding-house sheltered our lawful endearments. Some old friends of papa’s had lent us an ancient mansion standing in a wild garden, now one pink riot of almond-blossom, screened behind lofty walls of lichened red brick and weather-worn, wrought-iron gates, painted yellow-white like all the other iron and wood work about the house.
“Mon Desir” the place was called, and the fragrance of potpourri yet hung about the old panelled salons. Vavasour wrote a sonnet – I have omitted to speak before of my husband’s poetic gifts – all about the breath of new Passion stirring the fragrant dust of dead old Love, and the kisses of lips long mouldered that mingled with ours. It was a lovely sonnet, but crawly, as the poetical compositions of the Modern School are apt to be. And Vavasour was an enthusiastic convert to, and follower of, the Modern School. He had often told me that, had not his father heartlessly thrown him into his brewery business at the outset of his career – Sim’s Mild and Bitter Ales being the foundation upon which the family fortunes were originally reared – he, Vavasour, would have been, ere the time of speaking, known to Fame, not only as a Minor Poet, but a Minor Decadent Poet – which trisyllabic addition, I believe, makes as advantageous a difference as the word “native” when attached to an oyster, or the guarantee “new laid” when employed with reference to an egg.