Chapter five.
Softly she played her sorrow,
Gently she played her anguish,
Softly she played,
Gently she played,
I didn’t sleep at all that night and arrived haggard and washed out at breakfast.
“You look like some sorry thing the cat dragged in,” Florence said. “You were up listening to her last night, weren’t you,” she challenged. There was no point in denying it. I nodded briefly. “Leave it alone,” she said sternly. “Just leave it alone. It’s not healthy for the living to be too concerned with the dead.”
I gave a grim smile. “I live in a haunted house where, every month, a ghost plays beautifully on a broken piano in a deserted room and you expect me to just ignore it?”
Florence paused and then she sighed. “No, I suppose I can’t really expect it but I do, most strongly, advise it. Leave the dead with the dead. They don’t need sleep. They don’t need to pass exams. You do.” She put a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me. “Eat up. You have a lot of revision to do today, or have you forgotten the physics test due next week?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten,” I mumbled as I reached for the pepper.
“Seriously,” Florence said. “Leave it alone. I know she was a beautiful girl and what happened to her was tragic, but leave it be. We can’t change the past and it wouldn’t do to waste your life obsessed with things best forgotten.”
“Okay,” I said, as I started to cut up my bacon, but I knew that I would be back in the drawing room that night. Even though she was dead, Sarah was beautiful; she was talented; and she was in trouble. I knew I couldn’t turn away. I had to at least try and help her.
All that day, I struggled with my physics revision. Lack of sleep meant that my head felt like it was full of cotton wool. I found myself staring at the same sentence for a long time, trying to read it again and again, without any of its meaning sinking in. At both lunch and dinner, I sat quietly and ate with disinterest. Florence didn’t say anything but I could feel her eyes constantly on me. I did really try to study after dinner but it was no good. Eventually, in the first dark of evening, with the west painted red and gold by the setting sun, I gave up and wandered down to the beach. There I sat, waiting for the moon to rise. The evening was clear and still, with neither cloud nor wind, and I sat for a long time with no sound other than the surf breaking on the reef and cry of the seagulls finding a place to roost for the night.
The moon rose slowly and was shining brilliantly when I heard her voice, still distant and strangely disembodied, “You are here again. I cannot help you. Why do you haunt me this way?” I turned to see her sitting beside me on the sand, her hair blowing in a wind only she could feel.
“Sarah,” I said as softly and as gently as I could, “I’m not here to ask for your help, not any more. You can’t help me. Okay, but maybe I can help you. It just feels wrong to me to see you suffer in this way. This can’t be right, you being trapped like this. Maybe, if I can convince you that it wasn’t your fault, you could be free.” I looked at her hopefully, but she kept starring out to sea, her eyes fixed on the rising moon: tears slowly making their way down her cheek.
“It was just a sad, sad accident,” I said earnestly and forcefully. “You did nothing wrong. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that and be free?”
She was silent for a long time and I was afraid she was going to disappear off to the house and start playing. Eventually she said, “But I was in the wrong. The accident that killed Pappa wasn’t really my fault, true, but I died trapped in grief and despair. I twisted the love I had so that what should have set me free, bound me instead. John, I’m dead. I can’t help myself but you still live. For you, grief can still grow into a loving remembrance, despair can give way to hope. Do not follow me, John. Live! Live and love! It would be better, for you, if you didn’t continue to haunt me.”
Then she was gone and a few moments later I heard the first notes from the piano drifting across the garden and the sand dunes. I ran up to the house as fast as I could, the music echoing in my head, but by the time I got there the Last echoes of the music were fading as the moon passed above the grimy windows. The door to the reading room was open and I ran across as quietly as I could. Here the moonlight was still shinning directly through the tall windows and she was there, sitting in the chair, pale and beautiful.
“Sarah,” I said softly. “Your father’s death was an accident. It wasn’t your fault. Can’t you just let it go? Let it go and perhaps you can be free.”
She turned to look at me and I looked into her eyes; pale and misty; full of moonlight and loss; full of hopelessness and an endless despair, My blood ran cold. A shiver ran down my back and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was like looking into a bottomless well of grief and sadness. For a moment, all I could think of was that despair. Nothing else mattered. It was like falling into darkness. I stumbled backwards, my heart racing. For the first time, I truly understood why people are afraid of ghosts. Then the moon passed from view and she was gone. The next night, the moon was well past full. The beach was empty and the piano was silent.
I sat on the step of the reading room, staring at the empty chair in the fading moonlight, the sad and familiar music playing, over and over, in my head. It was strange but, as I sat there, I realised that things weren’t working out at all as Florence and Sarah feared. I wasn’t becoming more and more lost in past sadness with Sarah. Rather, Sarah was freeing me from the past sadness I was already trapped in. For the last month, I had no longer been consumed by my own grief. It was still there, like a persistent tune playing in the background. Yet the time had also been taken up with my concern for Sarah. It was strange. Can you love a ghost? I don’t know but she was beautiful and sad and I wanted desperately to help her.
I slept that night with the sound of her music still playing in my head. It was a constant refrain in my dreams; dreams in which my Mum and Dad were, somehow, standing awash with moonlight; standing on a beach with a piano playing by itself on the sand.
“She’s a lovely girl,” my Mum kept saying, over and over. “She’s a lovely girl. You should help her. I know you can.”
“No I can’t!” I yelled. “I can’t! She’s dead! She’s dead!”
Then Mr. Brown was there, his voice booming across the beach. “Whatever it once was, it isn’t that now. It’s not human, not human…”
“Just make sure you respect her and do the right thing,” my Dad was saying. “Stand by her and be her friend. You can do that, can’t you? Can’t you?”
“No I can’t!” I kept yelling. “I can’t! She’s dead! She’s dead!”
Above it all, Mr. Brown was calling to me, louder and louder, “Stay away! It’s dangerous, dangerous I tell you! Stay away!” While all the time the piano was playing the same, sad music, also slowly growing louder. It all built up; the music, Mr. Brown, even the soft voices of my parents; until it was a kind of scream inside my head.
I clapped my hands over my ears and yelled, “I can’t! I can’t! She’s dead! She’s dead!”
I woke, sitting up in bed and starring wildly into the dark, the last vestiges of my scream dying on my lips. I was shaking and my pyjamas were damp with sweat. I lay back down in bed but sleep wouldn’t come. The thoughts, sounds and images of the dream kept running, uselessly, through my head. It was early morning before I fell into a kind of fitful doze.
I woke, later that morning, washed out and emotionally drained. I didn’t understand any of this but I couldn’t shake these thoughts and images. It wasn’t that long ago that I would have laughed at anybody who believed in ghosts. But then, it also wasn’t that long ago that I had a mother and a father and a future that made some kind of sense.
Florence was very quiet over breakfast, waiting for me to speak, I guess. I didn’t oblige her beyond the functional and superficial. Not because I was being nasty but because I genuinely couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. How co
uld I speak, over bacon and eggs, of something that was so emotional and personal and yet, at the same time, such a tangled mess of mystery, of the unknown, and the impossible?
The rest of my day was pretty normal. I did my study modules all morning and I was happy with my physics revision progress. I took a break about midday to help distribute some hay to the sheep. I also took a quick walk around the garden, just to clear my head. Florence served me lunch in the old kitchen as usual.
“You know, I think if we pruned that old apple tree down in the south corner, we might even get some apples,” I said.
Florence raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so we have decided to speak, have we?” she said. I didn’t bite, so she continued. “Yes, I think that would be a good idea. There’s that apricot tree that’s gone wild as well. You could also have a go at that.” She looked at me sternly. “Only after your physics exam though. Your parents would want me to keep you to your studies.” I nodded. That much, at least, I knew was true.
The afternoon was quiet. I spent most of it studying: learning the Krebs Cycle and watching explanations of simultaneous equations. I took a break before dinner and wandered through the old house, not looking for anything in particular - just looking.
That night at dinner, I asked Florence why we didn’t make more use of the rest of the house, why we lived in the cramped servant’s quarters when there was a whole house full of large, gracious rooms lying empty. She looked at me and shook her head with a kind of sadness.
“This is an old house,” she said, “and it’s full of memories, some of them older than the house itself. Sarah isn’t the only strange thing to walk about at night. It’s best to leave well enough alone.”
I looked at her in surprise. “Do you mean that there’re more ghosts?” I asked. “Exactly how haunted is this place? Maybe we really should ask father Madigan out here.”
She ignored me. “Still, I think it would be a good idea to bring the garden back to some sort of order. I don’t think you could get into too much trouble there.” I stared at her and started to ask my question again but she quickly began talking about where in the garden I should start. So I gave up. When Florence changes a subject, it tends to stay changed. We spent the rest of dinner talking about improvements that could be made to the garden. The house could wait till later.
After dinner, I went down to the beach and watched the moon rise over the sea. It was well past its peak by now and, of course, she didn’t appear, yet still I sat there. A north wind was blowing and the swell from the Southern Ocean was crashing like thunder on the reef. There was a storm coming.
“She’s a lovely girl,” I whispered to the moon, “and it wasn’t her fault. She shouldn’t be trapped like this.” The moon made no response.