The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (80 page)

Nevertheless Mrs Clyrard could have lived in comfort if she had chosen. She was rich, had been married, had had a successful career as a painter, had had children, even, now satisfactorily grown and disposed of; she was a handsome, intelligent, and cultivated woman. Death had removed her husband, it was true, but otherwise she need have had little to complain about; yet all possible amenities had been, it seemed, wantonly jettisoned in favour of retreat into the exile of a Cornish village. Not even romantic exile, for Talland was far from picturesque: it was a small, random conglomeration of ill-assorted, mostly granite buildings, established on a treeless hillside as if they had been dropped there.

Vascoe’s Cottages, of which Mrs Clyrard occupied Number Three, had been a nineteenth-century addition; two pairs of plain red-brick semi-detached labourers’ dwellings, which some hopeful later landlord’s hand had embellished with heavy chalet-type ornamental woodwork, thereby further darkening the already inadequately-lit interiors.

“Oh, that will do for me very nicely,” Mrs Clyrard had remarked with her usual brief smile, on first observing Number Three, over its stout enclosing privet hedge.

“Are you certain?” her friend and prospective landlady Mrs Helena Soames doubtfully inquired. “Are you sure it will be big enough for you –
light
enough? The furniture is rather a job lot, I’m afraid – I could have it taken out, if you would like to put in your own things—”

“No, no, let them stay in store. I can’t be bothered with them. This is admirable. And the furniture will last my time.”

Mrs Clyrard was in excellent health, but she always spoke and acted as if in expectation of imminent death.

She moved herself into the cottage with a minimum of fuss or added impedimenta: a typewriter, some books; quickly learned the names and ways of the local tradespeople and had soon established herself on terms of remarkable cordiality with all her neighbours – the terms being that she listened to – indeed, drew out by some unique osmosis of her own – all their dissatisfactions and complaints, meanwhile herself maintaining a considerable reticence. Complaint is addictive: people came back eagerly, again and again, for more; Mrs Clyrard had all the company she could have wished for. She listened, she made her own dry comments and never disbursed advice; this was the secret of her popularity. She never offered information about herself, or divulged her own feelings. If asked what she did with herself all day – for it was plain that she was neither house-proud nor a dedicated gardener – she replied, “I am writing my memoirs. I have known any number of famous people –” and it was true, she had – “plenty of reputations will have the rug pulled from under them if I don’t die before I have finished.”

Although she frequently and drily referred to her possible death, she manifested no anxiety about the prospect, and seemed not particularly troubled as to whether she finished her memoirs first or not. Very few things appeared to trouble Mrs Clyrard particularly, she found a sour pleasure in her occupations. Meanwhile the years rolled by, bestowing on her no signs of age or infirmity; nor did she manifest any disposition to seek more comfortable quarters than Number Three, Vascoe’s.

“I don’t know how you can endure the poky little place,” Miss Morgan frequently remarked, when she dropped in to complain about Mrs Soames. “It’s so dark and cold. When I was living here with the old lady I thought I should go mad with the inconvenience. It must be the most awkward house in the world. Even with that lift installed—”

The old lady had been Helena Soames’s mother, Mrs Musgrave. For ten years prior to her death from heart disease she had occupied Number Three, Vascoe’s, and Miss Morgan had been her companion. The lift had been installed for Mrs Musgrave’s benefit; it consisted of a metal chair, with a counter-balance, in the stairwell, operated by a small electric motor. Mrs Musgrave’s son, an engineer, had installed it himself. The old lady had sat herself in the chair, been buckled in with a seat-belt; then she pressed a button and was conveyed slowly up or slowly down. The lift, with its ugly metalwork, still remained; but Mrs Clyrard, who had a rooted mistrust of all machinery, saw no occasion to make use of it.

After ten years Mrs Musgrave had died, and Miss Morgan, lacking a function, was removed to the manor to housekeep for the daughter, Mrs Soames – an arrangement which gave little satisfaction to either party.

Almost every day, at teatime, Miss Morgan called in on Mrs Clyrard with some grievance to relate about Mrs Soames’s faultfinding, heartlessness, inconsistency, or sarcasm, to which Mrs Clyrard listened with her usual acute impassivity.

“I do wish
you
would have me for your companion, dear Mrs Clyrard,” Miss Morgan, who had a slight stammer, often sighed out. “I am s-sure we should get on so well! I would be so h-happy to look after everything for you while you wrote your memoirs and would not dream of asking for a s-salary; all I want is a home.”

“My dear woman, what possible use would I have for a companion in this tiny box of a house? I am almost too much company for myself.”

Wispy, myopic little Miss Morgan would take herself off, pleading, “Think it over, dear Mrs Clyrard – do think it over!”

In the evenings Mrs Clyrard often heard the other side of the case: her friend Helena generally dropped in for a glass of sherry and a grumble about Miss Morgan’s self-pity, inefficiency, forgetfulness, untidiness, tendency to martyrdom, and general inadequacy. Mrs Clyrard made no comment on that either. Nor did she see fit to intervene when Mrs Soames’s patience finally ran out and she dismissed the unsatisfactory housekeeper, who, being far too old by now to secure another post, went lamenting away to live with her married sister in Lanlivery, after a final and unavailing plea to Mrs Clyrard to take her in.

More time went by. Mrs Clyrard lent a non-committal ear to the outpourings of other neighbours: of harassed parents who could not deal with their young; of rebellious teenagers who could not endure their parents; of betrayed husbands; of frustrated wives and of disillusioned friends who had fallen out. Her own private life remained as apparently tranquil as ever; her excellently coiffed iron-grey hair turned a shade paler, her hawklike profile was unchanged. She wrote a few pages a day at the desk in her upstairs study, cooked light meals for herself, waged her usual guerilla war against the inconveniences of her house and continued in her customary state of sardonic composure.

But presently – and how it happened Mrs Clyrard was not precisely aware, for the change came by such gradual degrees – her equable daily routine became disrupted; not seriously, but just enough to be noticeable.

The form taken by the disturbance was this: Mrs Clyrard, seated upstairs in a state of recollected tranquillity at her typewriter, would suddenly find her concentration broken by an odd urge to go below and perform some slight unnecessary task in the kitchen. Sometimes her more rational self was able to withstand the trivial impulse; but sometimes it was not and almost before she was aware of the process she would find herself at the kitchen sink washing teacloths, or cleaning the leaded glass panes in the front door (which made no difference to the light, for the untrimmed privet hedge grew within six feet of it), or polishing shoes, or defrosting the refrigerator.

This was very annoying, but Mrs Clyrard had no intention of submitting to it. She was a woman of total practicality. If she felt a twinge in a tooth, she consulted her dentist; if she detected a rattle in her car, she referred it to the garage. Possible psychic phenomena weighed no more and no less in her estimation than failures in the electrical system or mice in the pantry: as she would call in an electrician or a cat for the latter inconveniences, for the former she had recourse to an exorcist. Fortunately she was acquainted with one: an old friend of hers, a rural Dean, living in semi-retirement in Bath, still took an active interest in paranormal occurences, and occasionally officiated at a ceremony to remove some unwelcome or disturbed spirit.

Mrs Clyrard wrote and invited him for a visit, arranging to have him accommodated at a nearby guest-house, since she detested having people staying in the cottage.

When he arrived she lost no time explaining the nuisance to him.

“Somebody is trying to occupy my mind – or my house,” she said matter-of-factly, though with a considerable degree of irritation. “I should be very much obliged if you could deal with it for me, Roger.”

The Dean, delighted with the odd problem, promised to see what he could do. To assist him, he fetched over a medium from Bath – a city much plagued by psychic phenomena, possibly due to its enclosed, low-lying and damp situation.

The medium, Mrs Hannah Huxley, a portly, blind lady, acquiesced with the Dean in taking the problem as a most serious challenge. They turned back the carpets, they inscribed formulae and diagrams repellent to invading spirits on the floors of all the rooms, they recited incantations, they lit candles and sprinkled water, they performed various rituals involving the doors, the windows, the curtains, the mirrors, the stairs, the fireplace, the lights. At one point during the proceedings, which were long, and to Mrs Clyrard somewhat tediously repetitious, Mrs Huxley went into a trance.

“Did your husband,” she suddenly inquired, emerging from this condition as abruptly as she had gone into it, “did your husband die of a head injury, Mrs Clyrard?”

“Certainly not,” said Mrs Clyrard with asperity, startled, and not best pleased at this intrusion into her private affairs. “He died of intestinal carcinoma.”

“That’s odd. I have distinct evidence of a presence quite close to you who has at some time suffered from a head injury. Are you quite sure that you can think of no such person?”

Mrs Clyrard moved a step or two aside, distastefully, before replying again, “Absolutely not.”

Her faith by now somewhat diminished, she watched in ironic silence as the Dean and Mrs Huxley came to the conclusion of their ritual, having now apparently located the intrusive entity.

Kindly, cajolingly, uttering mellifluous Latin phrases formed for the purpose of coaxing such undesired visitants from their lodgings, the Dean walked slowly, backwards, beckoning, to the front door, opened it, waited, and recited a final prohibiting admonition, before closing the door and returning to the fireside.

“There, it’s gone!” he said with a beaming smile. “It can’t come back inside now.”

It
? thought Mrs Clyrard, on an impulse of strong protest; how can that vague, unhappy, intrusive, indefinable emanation be compressed into and pinned down by such a brusque, particular little monosyllable as
it
?

“Poor thing, it simply hated to leave,” the Dean went on. “No, I’m afraid it didn’t want to go in the very least. Did you hear it whimpering?”

Mrs Clyrard had not.

Stifling her scepticism, however, she civilly thanked the Dean and his colleague, refreshed them after their exertions with tea and cakes from the village shop, conversed for a polite hour, and finally, with relief, saw them to the door and said goodbye. Still sceptical, but in a cool spirit of scientific investigation, she went upstairs for an experimental hour’s writing. – And the Dean had been completely right, perfectly justified in his confidence: there was nothing to disturb her concentration; she found she could work in untroubled peace for the whole hour. Not a single thought of the tea-things waiting unwashed downstairs so much as slipped over the edge of her consciousness.

When Helena Soames presently arrived for a glass of sherry, at half-past six, Mrs Clyrard was in a highly self-congratulatory state of mind and, contrary to her usual reticent habit, related the story.

“But I still can’t imagine who the person suffering from a head injury can be,” she concluded.

“Oh, can’t you?” said Mrs Soames, who had listened with the greatest interest. “But it’s perfectly obvious, my dear. It must be poor Miss Morgan.”

“Miss
Morgan
? Did she have a head injury? I never knew of it.”

“It was over before you came to the village, of course. In fact it happened while Miss Morgan was looking after my mother in this cottage; after Edward had installed the chairlift. Miss Morgan had strapped Mother in and then – stupid woman – stuck her head over the banister to say, ‘Is there anything you want me to bring you, Mrs Musgrave?’ Of course the counter-balance came down, hit her on the head and knocked her silly. She was never quite the same after that, but then she hadn’t been too bright to start with. Luckily Mother died not long afterwards.”

“Miss Morgan – yes, of course,” said Mrs Clyrard reflectively, remembering the doleful little woman’s plea to be allowed to return to the inconveniences of Number Three, Vascoe’s – “I’d be so happy to look after the house for you while you wrote your memoirs. I wouldn’t
dream
of asking for a salary. All I want is a home.”

“It simply hated to leave,” Roger had said. “It didn’t want to go in the very least.”

Looked at through those eyes the dark and poky sitting-room with its Tottenham Court Road furnishings momentarily took on the appearance of a warm and happy haven.

“Miss Morgan,” Mrs Clyrard said again. “What became of her?”

“Oh, she went to live with that married sister in Lanlivery. The sister had always despised her. Miss Morgan didn’t want to go, but what could she do? At her age she couldn’t get another job. Anyway, evidently it was a disastrous arrangement, for about six months later I heard that she drowned herself in a brook. All for the best, really; as I said, she’d never been quite with it after that accident. Well,
you
must have noticed it – she used to come wailing round to you often enough.”