The Revenant
When latest autumn spreads her evening veil,
And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,
I love to listen to the hollow sighs
Thro’ the half leafless wood that breathes the gale.
For at such hours the shadowy phantom pale,
Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eyes;
Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies
As of night wanderers who their woes bewail!
from Sonnet XXXII, ‘To Melancholy’
CHARLOTTE TURNER SMITH
I first saw her on a Thursday afternoon.
She was ahead of me on the path out on the marshes, walking fast as if to keep an appointment.
Her hands were dug deep in her pockets and her shoulders hunched.
A blue belted jacket and pleated skirt, white shirt just showing above the collar and shoes suitable for pavements not mud.
Seamed stockings. Later, I realised why she looked familiar and why the look of her struck a false note.
But not then. Not that first time.
That Thursday, I stopped, puzzled I’d not noticed her before.
The path, at this point, was narrow and accessed only from Mill Lane, and though I usually walked down to the estuary in the afternoon, when I could get away, it wasn’t a popular spot.
Although the lights of the lending library were visible on the far side of the field, most local people considered this area west of the Mill Pond too deserted, too overgrown and that November it had rained and rained.
She was too far ahead for me to make out her features and, besides, she didn’t turn round.
But her brown hair, visible beneath the rim of her cap, looked salon curled and from the way she moved, I thought she was about my age.
That, too, stuck in my mind. Those who did come out this way were mostly old men with time on their hands, or farm workers taking a short cut across the fields to the big houses up along. Not girls in their twenties.
I followed her along the path, in that awkward proximity of strangers.
I picked up my pace, feeling my gumboots slip on the mud.
Was I hoping to catch up with her? I’m not sure of anything except that she stayed precisely the same distance ahead.
But when I rounded the bend in the path, she’d vanished.
I stopped again, trying to work out where she’d gone.
There was a trail that cut down through the reed mace to the water’s edge, white stones marking a route over the mud flats at low tide.
The sea was right up, though, and not even a local would reckon you could get across.
I looked behind me, in case she’d doubled back, but there was no sign of her.
What else? An odd smell, like rotten eggs, like seaweed on the shore in summer.
Thursday, 24th November, 1955, an afternoon like any other.
My routine, in those days, rarely altered.
On Monday and Thursday afternoons, I helped out in the library as a volunteer.
It was a debt, of sorts. When I was growing up in Fishbourne, the library was the only place I felt was mine.
We had no books to speak of at home and, besides, my stepfather didn’t think girls should waste time reading.
Didn’t think they were good for anything but cooking and fetching and carrying.
In the library I was let alone. No one shouted at me, nobody took the mickey.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I travelled the world in the company of Agatha Christie and Eleanor Burford and Rider Haggard, dreaming of what I’d be when I grew up.
Nothing came of any of it – Harry’s trouble with the police, then the war put paid to dreams of leaving – I retained an affection for the place.
So when I found myself back in Fishbourne fifteen years later, the library seemed the obvious place to offer my services.
And even now, when I stepped through the big oak doors, and breathed in the familiar perfume of dust and polish, life didn’t seem so bad for an hour or two.
That Thursday the library was closed. A burst pipe had flooded Natural Sciences and we had all been sent home.
So after I’d cleared the table and the dishes were stacked and drying on the draining board, I asked our neighbour, Mrs Sadler – who came in to keep an eye on my stepfather when I was at work – if she wouldn’t mind staying on for a while anyway, so I could slip off.
I went out by the side door, turning the handle slowly so as not to disturb him.
Old habits die hard. Over the main road, quiet in the drowsy part of the afternoon, down Mill Lane and out onto the estuary, where the salt marshes lay spread out like a battered old map.
When we were children, my older brother forced me to climb down the bank into the muddy creek.
I was scared of the filthy, tidal water, but I was more frightened of Harry’s temper, so always did what he told me.
It was different when I managed to get out on my own.
Then, I could kick my heels. Bright days when the sun bathed the Downs in the distance in a chill yellow light.
Stormy days when black clouds scudded along the horizon, the smell of bonfires heavy in the air.
The soft days of spring, when pink ragged robin and southern marsh orchids pricked the green, or the white flowers of lady’s smock, identified from the Collins Guide borrowed from the Natural History section in the pocket of my regulation school coat.
We left Fishbourne when I was twelve, too young to understand the whispers or the way neighbours fell silent when Harry stepped into the Woolpack Inn.
I knew there was talk – about him, and my stepfather too – but my mother never explained and I was too timid a girl to ask.
Then Harry signed up – moment he could, couldn’t wait to get away – and went to war.
Never came back. When we came back to Fishbourne, I realised there had been rumours about the pair of them, Harry and my stepfather, even before it happened.
I never wanted to come back to this corner of Sussex – it rubbed it in how little I’d made of my life, to end up back where I’d started and been so unhappy – but my stepfather was insistent and my opinion wasn’t taken into account.
I understand now that, as his mind started to unravel, something drew him back.
These days there was a footbridge over the creek. Sometimes I stopped there a while, the wooden handrail greasy beneath my fingers, and told myself that, despite it all, things were better now. Pretended that time and the war had buried the past.
Wiped the slate clean.
For the last week of November, my stepfather’s health kept me indoors.
I couldn’t go to work, couldn’t even get out to the shops.
We were locked together, he and I. One of those things.
I’d always been scared of him, and he’d never shown any affection for me, but now Mum was gone it fell to me to look after him.
Duty, just the way it was. There was no one else.
So it wasn’t until the following Thursday, December 1st, that I went back to the marshes.
I changed into my boots as I left the library, wrapped my indoor shoes in brown paper and put them in my handbag, then set off along the same path.
It was a blustery day and the gulls were shrieking out at sea.
Only as I got out onto the marshes did I realise I’d been half looking out for the girl I’d seen the week before.
I suppose I’d been hoping we might talk.
All the women my own age were married and had children or husbands to keep them occupied.
The neighbours were nice enough, to pass the time of day with in the post office or the shop, but I had no friends.
I kept hoping, but there was no sign of her and, as I climbed up to the flint sea wall, I had a knot of disappointment in my stomach.
Just someone to talk to.
That afternoon, I walked all the way to Oak Pond, where an old rowing boat lay abandoned in the silted water, and the trees hung low.
I smoked a cigarette and thought about some domestic worry or another, before turning back.
I’d been gone longer than usual and so I hurried, knowing Mrs Sadler would be ready with her lips pursed and her hat and coat at the door.
Four o’clock. I remember glancing at my wristwatch.
Then, on the far side of the silent expanse of water, I saw something flash.
At first, I thought it was the library, but realised it was too far over for that.
A light, right out in the middle of the marshes where Cornmill House had been.
In Victorian times there had been several mills on the eastern side of Fishbourne Creek, powered by wind or by the sea, though they were mostly gone now.
The water cornmill and the house attached had all but burned down during the First World War and the high tides each spring had done the rest. Its black and rotting features had been a childhood landmark, a draw for brave or foolish boys to explore.
By the time we were back in Fishbourne, it had gone.
Pulled down last year, Mrs Sadler had told me.
After fifteen years, it still attracted too many gawpers, too many ghouls.
A shrine, of sorts. And I remembered back to how newspaper reports at the time claimed Cornmill House was being used as a rendezvous long before it became notorious.
Smugglers evading the excise men, ghosts, enemy spies.
It was another occasion I’d taken refuge in the library, poring over a local history book and mugging up.
Drawings, maps of underground passages, rumours, I knew the history of the house backwards though I’d never been inside.
My brother Harry boasted he and his friends used to go in, dare each other to stay all night.
Seen writing on the walls and blood on the stairs, he’d said, smears on the glass where smugglers had kept their prisoners in the old days.