Whispers in the Dark (2 page)

He was such a sweet child. Nowadays that’s almost an insult. My daughters find it hard to understand why my grandchildren are such a worry to me. But they dash about so fiercely and watch such violent programs on television. Oh, I know it isn’t fashionable to say such things, but when I see them shouting and yelling, even swearing, I cannot believe they are quite children. Arthur was gentle. He took care of things. And people.

And he was such a pretty child. I don’t mean that he was a pampered, ringleted thing, a little boy off a chocolate box, in a velvet suit, carrying a hoop. There was nothing simpering about Arthur, my father would never have stood for that. He was not mollycoddled or spoiled in anyway, neither of us was. But the gentleness I spoke of, the awareness of others and their feelings, that was something innate in Arthur, something no nurse or teacher inculcated, and it made everyone love him. There were times, when I was small, when I felt quite jealous of Arthur, of the way both men and women doted on him in that rather prim way they had then. But I did not stay jealous long, for I loved Arthur like the rest of them and wanted only the best for him.

He’s dead now, of course, he’s been dead for a very long time. But sometimes I tell myself secretly that that isn’t true, that Arthur is still alive, that he’s here now, in the house, watching me. Watching me quite quietly, the way he used to watch me in bed before I woke. Sometimes I think I could speak to him, just turn my head and say, “Hello, Arthur,” and he would reply the way he used to, all those years ago: “Hello, Charlotte. It’s been a long time.”

I live in a different part of Newcastle now, in Jesmond, among strangers, men and women who pass me in the street and nod, but never say good day. When I was young, a man would doff his hat and nod when he passed a woman of his acquaintance; well, a gentleman would do it for a lady if they passed one another. But not now. That’s another of the things that have changed. Still, I mustn’t grumble. The young man in the post office on Clayton Road is always very friendly.

Jesmond used to be a better place, what some called a “posh” part of town. It was where the well-off lived, Jews and businessmen, solicitors, bankers, that sort of person, the better sort. Many of my parents’ friends lived there. I remember there were plenty of big houses, grand houses three and four stories high, with fine gardens in front set off with railings. Though none was as grand as Kenton Lodge. Most of the railings came down during the last war, of course, and have never been replaced.

It’s all changed now. When people started having small families, they didn't want houses that size any longer. Most were sold off and divided into flats and bed-sitters, but a few remain. I still live in this house facing the park. John and I bought it after we were married. He died here, in this room.

I live here in a little peace and a little pain. I live from day to day, hoping for nothing. John left me well provided for, I have money of my own, quite a lot of money, I do not fear poverty. What is there to hope for at my age? I live now only to remember. And that is the hardest thing of all. Not the remembering, I don’t mean that, remembering is easy; but the enduring of memory, of the sensations memory brings with it.

I was widowed twenty-five years ago. For so much of my life I have been alone. It is not loneliness that frightens me, however; not loneliness, not hopelessness, not weariness. Death will take care of all that soon enough. No, what frightens me is the smell of memories, the sound and taste and feel of them, knowing there is no one else with whom I can share them. Old Simpkins suspects as much. I have hinted at certain things in his presence. That is why he has suggested this therapy. Maybe it will do some good.

I go to St. George’s church on Osborne Road, on Sundays, when I have the stamina for God. There are quite a few of us, old ladies and a few old men, refugees from our oversized houses or our little, tidy flats: a silent, gray tribe full of memories. But none of them share my memories. Only I know what lurks in here. The others would not believe me.

It all began with a sprained ankle. Or so I at one time, looking for ultimate causes, used to think. When my mother was seventeen, she slipped on some broken paving on the Elizabethan walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed, twisting her ankle. She had gone there with her entire family—her mother, father, two sisters, an aunt and uncle, and three cousins—for their annual holiday by the sea. It was not a severe injury, but bad enough to keep her off her feet for well over a week. There was talk of going home, but they had barely arrived, the weather was glorious, and she insisted they stay. She would remain in her room at the Crown Hotel, well cosseted and supplied with romantic novels, and visited from time to time by her relations, as they came and went from their holiday pursuits.

Those pursuits included a long-planned boat trip to Lindisfame, or Holy Island, if you prefer, not far off the coast, a few miles to the south of Berwick. It was, I think, the third day of my mother’s invalid existence, and already she had grown tired of the four walls of her room and taken up residence on an antique chaise longue in one of the sitting rooms downstairs. She was by now fretting a good deal at her confinement and growing bored of smoldering glances and base betrayals. I believe she came close to insisting that they take her with them after all, but it was out of the question. The trip would involve much climbing up and down steep steps in order to get in and out of the boat, not to mention some very brisk walking once they got to their destination. Reluctantly she agreed to stay behind.

After lunch, she was helped out to the garden for the benefit of the sea air, though she kept herself well within the shade, for in those days (and mine too) a tan was something thought most unbecoming in a lady. As the afternoon wore on, however, her little arbor grew quite chilly. The sun, which had been fat with warmth all morning, had taken itself off behind a bank of clouds, clouds that had, by midafternoon, become a solid mass that filled the sky. The sea breeze that had been so delightful when she first ventured into the garden, was now growing petulant and uncomfortable. In the end, she returned to the sitting room, gloomily watching the weather worsen through a window that was soon streaked by heavy rain.

The squall grew rapidly into a fully blown storm, as it will do in that region. It was dark by teatime, hours before sunset, and my mother was beginning to worry that her family would be obliged to spend the night on Lindisfarne. The hotel manager reassured her, saying there was a comfortable inn on the island where they could put up if need be. She tried to relax, knowing they would never be so foolish as to set out again in weather like that.

Nor did they. For the boatman, seeing what sort of weather was setting in, had made his mind up to stay at the island, come what may. No one knew quite what happened after that. There seems to have been an argument, during which my grandfather, a headstrong man, had angry words with the boatman, all to no good. They never went near the inn. One of them must have suggested returning to the mainland on foot. Holy Island, as you may know, is connected to the shore by a causeway about three miles in length. People still make miscalculations there, and the new causeway road has “refuges" for hapless drivers caught by high tide, but there was none of that then. They took the old pilgrim route over the seabed, seemingly safe when the tide was out, but utterly treacherous to those unfamiliar with its vagaries.

No one could ever guess how far they got. Perhaps they were only yards from the shore when the tide, speeded by the storm, rushed in and swept them out to sea.

The boat returned the next morning and the alarm was raised. Inquiries along the coast drew a succession of blanks, and no one was in any doubt about the outcome. By the evening of the first day it was a foregone conclusion that all had been drowned. The first bodies were found the next afternoon, washed up on the Fen-ham Flats, not far south of the causeway.

There was another aunt, a spinster by the name of Harriet, who lived in Tynemouth, where she kept a guest house in the summer months. My mother made her way to her, bewildered with grief, and remained with her until she met and married my father. That was three years later. I still remember Harriet, a kindly, silly woman in a high bonnet trimmed with Nottingham lace, eager to please, and a frequent visitor to our home until her death when I was eight.

My mother had other relatives, none of them close, all of them long since gone to Australia or Canada or South Africa. They were notified of the deaths, according to the formalities of the time, and a few replied in due course, in equally formal letters written in haste between sheepshearing and doing the accounts. My mother told me all about them years later, how dreary those duty letters had been, how she could never hope for more than stilted words and clumsy sentences, how there had never been and could never be a “connection.” And yet how much grief could have been avoided had even one of those exiles shown a little feeling then or later.

With my grandfather’s death, my mother became something of an heiress. And in time her good looks added to whatever allure her fortune gave her, bringing over a dozen proposals of marriage by the time she was nineteen, all of which, under Harriet’s tutelage and her own presence of mind, she turned down flat. She was never gay, she would not go to balls, she scarcely went to church; but word of her money and her looks was not slow in spreading, and she was pursued. Pursued, but never captured.

Until my father came on the scene, that is. How often I remember her telling me of their first meeting, and the next, and the next. She was swept off her feet, he made her dizzy. And when he asked her to marry him, she did not hesitate for a moment. She told me all this later, when I was old enough to understand a little. Even then, years later, she was full of him, she could not stop talking about him to anyone who would listen, even to me, his daughter, or to Arthur. It was almost blasphemous, the way she worshiped him.

We worshiped him, too, of course, Arthur and I, for he was everything my mother thought and, I suspect, much more. Fathers in those days were supposed to be grim and distant creatures who left the care of their children in the hands of wives and nannies. But our father was never a man of his time. He spent hours with us, playing games, reading stories, listening to our worries.

Oh, dear. I’ve made him sound an awful prig, almost as bad as Arthur. What will you think of me, Doctor, describing my father like that? You won’t believe me, will you? You’ll say I’m making it all up, compensating for my loss of his affections by creating a fairy-tale prince to take his place. But stuff and nonsense I say. He was a wonderful father, he was the most wonderful father in the world, and Arthur and I loved him uncontrollably. I don’t suppose children do nowadays, I expect they have much lower expectations and suffer from all sorts of neglect. But we were never neglected.

Father was a busy man, of course, but not like so many of these modern businessmen, always at the office, carrying on with their secretaries, chasing money as though it had just been invented. No, our father worked hard and had a full social life, but he spent time with us whenever he could, which was often. Sundays, in particular, were sacred.

His great love, his truly great love, was to attend the meetings of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Westgate Road. Once a week, from autumn through to summer, he would kiss us good night and set off in his evening clothes for a lecture on the latest scientific discovery or, for that matter, the works of Homer. He was omnivorous, there was nothing he could not find a use for in that vast brain of his. How clever I thought him, most of all on the two occasions when he was invited to deliver lectures himself. My own father, and all those great men listening to him in their bow ties and stiff white shirts. I thought him the cleverest and the handsomest man among them, a young god. My mother had converted me to her idolatry. Well, he was my god then, and I have never found a better since.

If they could hear me in church, Doctor, what do you think they would make of me? Eh? An old woman crippled with blasphemies. Weighed down with her idolatry, her worship of a long-dead mother and father, her deification of a brother she will very soon join in death. Perhaps you think, too, how heinous of her, how very improper. I don’t know your mind, of course, you never talk to me about yourself. Perhaps you don’t think it heinous, merely silly or “Victorian,” that all-purpose epithet with which your generation is wont to consign mine to the dustbin of all things sugary and sentimental and hypocritical.

Well, it’s true, we did suffer from all those things. And worse, much worse. Ours was an age of very proper vices, and I pray we never see another like it. And yet . . . And yet, I was truly happy then. Not merely in retrospect, in the shadow of what happened later, but truly and deliriously happy all of my childhood. I wanted for nothing, I was healthy, I loved and was loved, summer seemed to last for ever, the whole world moved gently and carried me with it, without distress, as though on a sea without waves. And there was Arthur.

He came to me one day when I was about seven, in floods of tears. He’d seen a man outside beating a horse, the way some people did then, quite thoughtlessly. I don’t know why, but he always came to me first from about that age, when he had any fears or worries. Father was at work, so we sought out Mother in her sitting room. Hannah was with us, of course, she was never far away, but she had already learned the unwisdom of trying to rein her young master in too far.

That was the thing, you see, the thing I can’t get across. Arthur was pretty and gentle and all of that, and I loved him on account of it, who wouldn’t have? But that was simply the superficiality of Arthur, it wasn’t what I really remember. There was a force about him, something unstoppable, I mean a real force that no one could bottle up.

He stormed into Mother’s room that day—barely six years old—opened the door and stormed in, raging, furious, in tears all at once.