Happily Ever After

Chapter 9

9

WUTHERING HEIGHTS – WUTHERING HEIGHTS, EMILY brONT?

Between having frightened Hugo, Lady Tanith’s ‘misunderstanding’, and my minor falling-out with the gardener, I kept my head down for a few days. I worked diligently enough to keep everyone at bay, and cleared acres of floor space in the library, getting all the books entered on the system as the newly liberated light streamed in through the big window and made my working conditions far more pleasurable. I even tolerated The Master coming to sit under the table, with occasional breaks for rubbing against my ankles while I worked.

But I was tired. Every night now, thanks to Jay, I would lie awake listening out for sounds of Hugo tiptoeing downstairs to let in his ‘secret woman’, or creeping up to the attics to ‘entertain’. The house was given to sporadic noises, wispy sounds from the Yellow Room next door, those footstep-like creaks from overhead, none of which did anything for the state of my nerves. I sometimes sat with my ear against the door, alert just in case a ghostly arm should reach through, to hear nothing more alarming than the raspberry blowing of The Master, puffing air through his fur as he cleaned himself, ineffectually, on my threshold.

The house continued mostly as silent as – well, I tried not to think ‘the grave’. I had to admit that Hugo having a secret lover was more likely than Marie haunting the landing, but from what I knew of Hugo it wasn’t an enormous probability gap. He had failed, totally, to try to seduce me in proper droit de seigneur fashion and instead kept up a light-hearted and chatty relationship, which was at least an improvement on what I got from his mother, who would sit in dark silence in the library at times, like a black hole that’s got lost on its way to a universe.

Jay gave me the occasional wave if he saw me, but now I knew that he didn’t wear his hearing aids when he was working, I didn’t bother to shout a greeting. I’d return his wave, with an inner comment on his dreadful shorts or the brown hairy legs that protruded beneath them, ending in work boots or wellingtons depending on the wetness of that day’s task.

I’d spent one day off walking down towards the village and hoping to meet someone, anyone , from outside the household to talk to. I had failed on both counts. The tiny collection of thatched-roof cottages was deserted, so I had only gone as far as the church.

Without the pressure of the memorial service and the presence of Lady Tanith, the building had seemed more welcoming. I’d always liked churches. There was something comfortingly enduring about the way they sat in towns and villages, overlooked and quite often overgrown, but sensibly there . This one was little more than a squat tower and four grey walls etched with the marks of now-absent windows and the scars of recently removed ivy. From the pathway I could see the silent houses beyond, uniform in their thatch and fencing. There was something of the Midwich Cuckoos about them, a slight tinge of the sinister and I’d turned away, poked once or twice around the graveyard which hadn’t helped matters at all because it had only reminded me further of the presence of the dead, and gone back to the house.

The weather turned hot, not that we really noticed inside the dampness of Templewood, which sucked all the heat from the air and turned it into a vaguely plaster-scented chill permeating the entire building. The Master went outside and spent his days lounging under the edging shade of the bushes, airing his surprisingly pale stomach and blinking in the unaccustomed daylight. I hated to admit it, but the library was lonelier without him, and as another day trailed miserably to another end, I made myself a sandwich in the kitchen and went to bed early to lie in my pyjamas in the moist heat of my room.

I had almost stopped noticing the noises now, but with the oppressive humidity preventing me from sleeping, everything seemed so much more sinister tonight. The slow, furtive tread overhead, audible as each board creaked beneath an anomalous weight and then settled back into position, was unignorable. The soft and sinister brush-against-the-wall from the Yellow Room, with the hint of assignation and whisper of stifled laughter that I could no longer ascribe to rats, unless they were rodents of inordinate good humour and long fur, made my flesh prickle.

I’d borrowed a Bible from the library and it sat fat and complacent beside the bed, unopened. While I had no religion whatsoever, other than occasionally offering up prayers to any deity which might control recalcitrant bus engines, I had the hope that the ghosts would have been devout believers when alive. The Bible, therefore, was my first line of defence, should anything non-corporeal come floating through my bedroom door. It would also have come in handy should anyone corporeal but unwanted feel like having a go at me – Mrs Compton sprang to mind – and it came in useful as a very small bedside table too. I had had great intentions of taking the Bible and starting a ghost hunt one evening, but ghost hunting was only fun if there was someone else to back up assertions that the noises couldn’t possibly be a haunting. Alone in the dark, listening to the relentless tread, the occasional sound from downstairs which might have been rodents knocking furniture or might have been a phantom dinner party and my own breathing, had taken away any desire I’d had for brave and affirmative action.

Now, here I was, wondering yet again what I was doing. My lack of action on the exorcising of ghosts was matched by my failure to locate Oswald’s diaries. I flapped around on the mattress, thinking. I’d tapped all the panels, opened all the cupboards and found nothing, all the while having Oswald stare down at me from his painted chair, as though dissatisfied with everything he saw.

Maybe he’d had the diaries bound to look like ordinary books? I half sat against the pillows, facing the panelled walls of my room, not seeing those but instead the shelves and stacks of books in the library. How would I know? Except… except, those books wouldn’t have a title page, would they? They might look, on the outside, like ordinary books, but I’d be able to see as soon as I opened them if they were really handwritten memoirs, or whatever Oswald had chosen to note down. As I’d currently logged a few hundred tomes and didn’t relish the thought of having to go back and look at them again, I flopped back with relief. No. I couldn’t have missed them. Maybe they weren’t really in there at all.

I fell asleep, window wide to allow the muggy air to circulate. It also allowed the flash of lightning to wake me a few hours later, followed by a crescendo of thunder that boomed and rolled like celestial dustbin day.

From outside the door I heard The Master cry. It wasn’t his usual ‘I want to come in/out’ yowl, this was more protracted and held what I thought was a hint of distress. Perhaps the cat didn’t like storms?

I shrugged my way around in the bed, trying to get comfortable. The mattress felt hot and sticky against me, the sheets damp and yet still too warm and the air was heavy with dark. Another flicker as lightning danced somewhere in the skies beyond, and the tympanic growl of the thunder, followed by another yowl.

Annoyed, I shouldered myself up to sitting. Well, I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, unless I shut the window and drew the curtains, and I would rather face the storm than worry about what might be hanging from the Virginia creeper trying to peer in when I couldn’t see it, so I got up.

The Master had been sitting pressed up against my door, his fur ruffled with agitation. As soon as I opened the door a crack, he shot through, squeezing his body like a tube of toothpaste in order to fit, fled across the room and launched himself at my bed, where he burrowed under the covers and became nothing but the end of a twitching tail. I was about to go over and scoop him out, but three things stopped me. Firstly, he was obviously disturbed by the storm, and if being under cover made him feel better, then who was I to throw him back into the corridor of despair. Secondly, I owed the cat a favour after his computer-walk the other day. It had saved me from possible daily observation from Lady Tanith, and the thought of having to sit in that stuffy room inputting book details under the weight of her death-stare made me shudder. Thirdly… thirdly, the lightning flash that had accompanied my door opening had shown me a glimpse of what had looked like a female figure, making its way towards the staircase.

The momentary nature of the timing meant that I couldn’t be absolutely certain what I’d seen. After all, I was half-expecting to catch a glimpse of Marie anyway, frozen pre-balcony disaster. Perhaps my mind had simply thrown me an image woven out of deep shadow and sudden light. I saw what I was afraid I might see.

But, the blonde, elegant figure of the woman that I had thought I’d caught sight of, had been heading down the landing. Marie, as Hugo had told me, was haunting the landing and balcony window, the last places on earth that she had seen. I could just about buy into that – especially since these walls seemed to hang on to every mote of dust or fingerprint from the last century, why would they not hold on to memories in the same way? So, if I accepted that Marie was a ghost, that she was held in some kind of loop and doomed to repeat her last, drunken walk up to the balcony – why the hell would she be walking back down the stairs?

Jay’s words about Hugo having a secret lover began to echo around in my head as I stood, undecided. In a place the size of Templewood, with his mother occupying a separate wing and mysterious locked rooms, I had to admit it was a possibility that took on a firmer and more certain shape here in the darkness of the silent hallway.

Footsteps in attics. Strange movements in the room next door that nobody went into. And a tiny part of my vanity that had absorbed more than words from all those books I’d grown up with whispered, the mystery of Hugo not falling for me as the main love interest in his life. Here we were, on this huge estate, no parties, no pubs, no – well, anything? Just Hugo and me. I was choosing to believe that life would follow the traditional route of the classics. Boy meets girl and, in the absence of any real competition other than maybe a scheming rich girl whose father wants the land, he was supposed to fall for me! And, while Hugo was friendly and chatty, it was a superficial kind of friendliness. There had been no long, late night discussions about hopes and dreams, he hadn’t sought to reassure me that my quiet plainness was the perfect antidote to the artificial women he knew already.

He had to marry me, damn it! Otherwise it was a future of a granny annexe over a garage or a quietly rotting makeshift caravan. Love and affection would follow and could take care of themselves. It had worked for all those heroines in the yellow-paged books I’d pored over; arranged marriages had been the norm until relatively recently. A love match would be a bonus, but I would settle for convenience and proximity bringing us together. Love was not for the poor and the undereducated, the basically unquirky girls took what was offered. I just needed Hugo to offer.

I took a deep breath. At least I could clear up this mystery, right now, if I followed Marie down that dark, imposing staircase.

I looked behind me at the inviting comfort of my bed. Clicked once or twice at the wall light, but nothing happened; the electricity was unreliable at best here and the storm had clearly thrown it out again. Under my duvet, The Master was a flattened lump down the middle of the bed, reducing my chances of any kind of sleep to a narrow balance-bar down either side.

Another breath. Right.

I picked up the Bible, although I wasn’t quite certain whether I wanted it as spiritual comfort or a weapon, and leaving the door slightly ajar, I tiptoed along the landing. Past the Yellow Room, around the corner and past Hugo’s room, where the door was closed and all was silent, with no flicker of romantic candlelight showing in the small gap underneath, no music playing and no sign that he had recently been ‘entertaining’. Was Hugo leaving his mysterious lover to find her own way out of the house on what was building up to be a traditionally dark and stormy night? Not very gentlemanly of him, surely. Not good manners. And Hugo’s manners had, so far, appeared to be polished to a high gloss.

I’d waited sufficiently long for Marie to have cleared the staircase, which had half been my intention. I didn’t want to meet an apparition at all, and most definitely not on a rickety-banistered staircase with a five-metre drop to the tiled-floored hallway. So, with my sticky footsteps hushed by the dusty carpet, I tiptoed on down the stairs and into the inky black of the hall.

Another flash of lightning zig-zagged in through the hall windows either side of the tin door, illuminating the entire space in a white flare that burned my retinas. But it had shown me what I feared to see, the back of Marie, a slowly swaying shape in heels along the corridor that led to the kitchen, the darkest part of the house.

My heroines were brave. All those hours in library corners, reading, while Mum and Dad filmed the town; having patient people teach me how the community computer worked so that I could look up some of the more obscure points of literary reference; all these things had shown me that fictional people were brave. They didn’t hesitate to follow ghosts, or track smugglers, or creep into rooms at night in time to extinguish fires in the bed hangings. They had been better than me, stronger, fiercer. They had fought for what they wanted, and got it. But they weren’t me. Their worlds weren’t real, their happiness hung on the turn of a pen, not a moment. Their strength came from authorly imagination, not a life of struggle and endurance, and without it there was no story. This was me. This was real life, and I was terrified.

I heard the rain start, hammering on the roof, a double height above me as the hallway soared up past the landing and onto a small glass dome, inspired, as Hugo had told me, by Castle Howard, and installed by Oswald’s predecessor. It proved to be not quite watertight, and small drops splashed down past me to pool on the tiles at my feet. I gritted my teeth, hugged the Bible to my chest and took a few steps in the wake of the phantom Marie.

Deeper into the house now, and I lost the sound of the rain and the thunder. The odd flash of lightning licked its way ahead of me, scouring the walls with vicious brightness, making me afraid of what I might see. Was Marie making her way to the place of her death? Reliving that last alcohol-soaked party? Or was she more corporeal, finding her way out of the house having given Hugo what he wanted? Maybe her car was parked around the back? Or was she going to walk back to the estate village through the storm, in properly picturesque romance-heroine fashion?

I crept along the passageway, knowing where I was, despite the Stygian gloom, from walking this corridor every morning to get to breakfast. Apart from the regular twenty-first of the month Oswald Day, breakfast was always taken, rather grimly, in the main kitchen, toast and cereal with milk of dubious vintage. I trailed my hand down the wall, feeling that final lump in the plaster that indicated where modern electrics had been inadequately covered over on installation, and then I was standing in the kitchen doorway.

Marie was there. She’d put a saucepan of water on the gas hob and was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

My heart had gone from adrenaline-inspired hefty thumping to full jazz-hands, all-out-cardiac-incident, but when I saw the blue flame under the pan and the glowing end of the cigarette, it steadied back down. No ghost would need to light the gas. Marie was as real as I was, and that gave rise to a whole other lot of questions.

A well-timed lightning bolt jagged the air, illuminating me in the doorway at the same moment as Marie looked up. The cigarette tip curved a light in the resulting darkness, flying up out of her hand and away to glimmer faintly under the table.

‘Fuck me!’

A moment of scampering, and then Marie seemed to realise that I was blocking the only doorway, and she slumped onto one of the stools at the table. The gas burner threw her shadow down onto the scrubbed wood as she leaned forward and gasped, but by then I’d got a handle on the situation.

‘Hugo, what the hell are you doing creeping around in a dress?’

I was quite proud of that. Given that I felt as though I could faint, my blood was so full of adrenaline that I could taste it, and the sound of the storm beyond the narrow windows of the kitchen was adding a shovel full of pathetic fallacy to the scene, I thought I’d been nicely succinct in my summation of the circumstance.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Hugo, crumpling further over the table, his wig sliding around his head to a comedy angle. ‘Oh, shit.’

The wig had gone sideways, so he was peering out from half a curtain of hair, looking pale and frightened. The off-the-shoulder ballgown he was wearing had come down and rested in his armpit, exposing a line of chest hair and a lot of pale, bony sternum.

‘What the hell?’ I said, although, to be honest, it was pretty obvious.

Hugo shot to his feet. ‘I can’t talk about this!’ Suddenly he pushed past me in a haze of French perfume and ran, surprisingly nimble in what looked like designer high-heeled evening shoes, down the corridor and out through the back door into the night.