‘Your grandmother would have broken her heart,’ she said on the second day, fingering a pair of silk curtains fantastically stained by creeping water.
‘Well, it can’t be helped,’ said Caroline wearily. Her long spell of work was catching up with her. She was struggling with a roll of felt, brought down from upstairs and meant for the sofa. ‘The room has had its life, and that’s that.’
Her mother looked almost stricken. ‘You talk as though we were making a tomb of it!’
‘I wish we were! We might get a grant from the county council for that. No doubt Babb could do the conversion.—What a beast this thing is!’ She flung the roll down. ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t mean to be flippant. Why not go back to the little parlour if the sight of all this is upsetting you?’
‘When I think of the parties your father and I hosted here, when you were small!’
‘Yes, I know. But Daddy never did much like this room, remember? He said the wallpaper made him seasick.’
She glanced around, searching for some gentle chore with which to occupy her mother; and finally, taking her hand, she led her to a chair beside the cabinet of the gramophone.
‘Look here,’ she said, opening the cabinet up and bringing out a heap of old records. ‘We might as well do things properly. I’ve been meaning to go through these for ages. Let’s you and I sort through them now, and see what we can throw away. I’m sure most of them are rubbish.’
She meant only, really, to distract her mother from the depressing business going on around her. But the records were all mixed up with other things, pieces of sheet music, concert and theatre programmes, dinner-menus and invitations, many of them dating from the early years of her mother’s marriage or from her own childhood; and the task became an absorbing and rather sentimental one for them both. They sat there for almost an hour, exclaiming over the things they turned up. They found music bought by the Colonel, and old dance-tunes of Rod’s. They found recordings of a Mozart opera that Mrs Ayres had first seen sung on her honeymoon in 1912.
‘Why, I remember the gown I was wearing!’ she said, letting the record sink in her lap and gazing softly into her own memory. ‘A blue chiffon, with handkerchief sleeves. Cissie and I had argued about which of us should have it. One felt one was floating in a gown like that. Well, at eighteen one does float, or we girls did then, we were mere children … And your father, in his dress-suit—and walking with a cane! He’d twisted his ankle. Only twisted his ankle, jumping down off a horse, but he carried that cane about for a fortnight. I think he thought it distinguished. He was a child, too: only twenty-two, younger than Roderick is now …’
The thought of Roderick was obviously a hard one, coming as it did upon her other memories, and she looked so wistful that, after watching her for a moment, Caroline gently took the record from her hands, opened up the gramophone, and set it to play. The disc was old, and the gramophone needle badly wanted replacing: at first all they heard was the hiss and crackle of the shellac. Then, slightly chaotically, there came the boom of the orchestra. The singer’s voice seemed to struggle against it, until finally the soprano rose purely, ‘like some lovely, fragile creature,’ Caroline told me later, ‘breaking free of thorns.’
It must have been an oddly poignant moment. The day was dark with rain again, and the saloon was quite dim. The fire and the purring heaters cast an almost romantic light, so that for a minute or two the room—for all that the paper was hanging from its walls and its ceiling bulging—seemed alive with glamour. Mrs Ayres smiled, her gaze loose again, her hand stirring, the fingers sinking and falling in response to the swells of the music. Even Mrs Bazeley and Betty were awed. They kept up their progress around the room, but did so stealthily, like dumb-show artists, softly unrolling lengths of drugget across the last uncovered strips of carpet, and gently easing mirrors from the walls.
The aria drew to its close. The gramophone needle caught in its groove and gave a harsh repetitive crackle. Caroline rose and lifted it free, and across the ensuing silence there broke the steady drip, drip of water tumbling from the ruined ceiling into buckets and bowls. She saw her mother look up, blinking, as if waking from a dream; and so, to dispel the melancholy, she started up a second record, a brisk old music-hall song that she and Roderick had used to march about to as children.
‘Jolly good luck to the girl who loves a sol-dier!’ she sang lightly. ‘Girls, have you been there?’
Mrs Bazeley and Betty, relieved, began to move about more freely, picking up the pace of their work to match the clip of the music.
‘Now, there’s a fine old song,’ said Mrs Bazeley approvingly.
‘You like this one?’ called Caroline. ‘So do I! Don’t tell me you saw Vesta Tilley singing it on your honeymoon?’
‘Honeymoon, miss?’ Mrs Bazeley pulled in her chin. ‘I never had one! Only a night at me sister’s, at Evesham. Her and her husband went in with the kids, for Mr Bazeley and me to have the room. After that we went straight to me mother-in-law’s place, where we never even had so much as a bed to ourselves—no, not for nine years, until the poor old lady died.’
‘Good gracious!’ said Caroline. ‘Poor Mr Bazeley.’
‘Oh, he never minded. He kept a bottle of rum by the bed, and a jar of black treacle; he gave his mother a spoonful of them o’nights, and her slept like a dead un.—Pass us that old tin box there, Betty, there’s a good girl.’
Caroline laughed, then looked on, still smiling, as Betty handed Mrs Bazeley the box. It held a number of narrow sandbags, used in the house for stopping up draughts, and known in the family as ‘snakes’: they were very familiar from Caroline’s childhood, and she watched with a touch of nostalgic pleasure as Mrs Bazeley crossed to the windows of the saloon and began to lay them down on the sills and over the gaps between the sashes. She even, finally, went over and drew a spare sandbag from the box, taking it back to the heap of records so that she could turn it in her hands as she went through the last of the papers and discs.
She was vaguely aware, in time, of Mrs Bazeley making a soft exclamation of annoyance, then calling to Betty for water and a cloth. But it was another minute or two before she thought to look over to the window again. When she did look, she saw the two servants kneeling side by side, alternately frowning and rubbing gingerly at some spot on the wainscot. She called out, more or less idly, ‘What is it, Mrs Bazeley?’
‘Well, miss,’ Mrs Bazeley answered, ‘I don’t quite know. I can only think as it’s some mark left here by that poor little girl that was bit.’
Caroline’s heart sank. She realised that the window alcove they were looking at was the one in which Gillian Baker-Hyde had been sitting when Gyp had snapped at her. The wainscot and floorboards there had been badly splashed with blood, but that whole area had been thoroughly washed down along with the sofa and the carpet. She supposed now that some stain had managed to escape notice.
Something in Mrs Bazeley’s voice or manner, however, made her curious. She let the sandbag fall from her fingers and went to join her at the window.
Her mother looked up as she moved away. ‘What is it, Caroline?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing, I expect.’
Mrs Bazeley and Betty drew back to let her see. The mark they’d been rubbing at wasn’t a stain, but a number of childish scrawls on the woodwork: a jumble of Ss, done apparently in pencil, randomly placed, and roughly or hastily drawn. The effect was like this:
‘God!’ said Caroline under her breath. ‘As if tormenting Gyp wasn’t enough for her!’ Then, catching Mrs Bazeley’s eye: ‘I’m sorry. What happened to that little girl was frightful, and I’d give anything to undo it. She must have brought a pencil with her that night. Unless she took one of ours. I suppose it was the Baker-Hyde girl? Do the marks look fresh to you?’
She moved slightly as she spoke: her mother had been drawn across the room by her words, and was standing at her side. She was gazing at the scribbles, Caroline thought, with an odd expression, hal
f in great dismay, half as though she wanted to go closer, perhaps run her fingers over the wood.
Mrs Bazeley wrung out her wet cloth and started to rub at the scribbles again.
‘I can’t say how they look, miss,’ she said, puffing as she worked. ‘I know they’re harder to get off than they should be! They weren’t here though—were they, Betty?—when we did out the room in the days before that party.’
Betty looked nervously at Caroline. ‘I don’t think so, miss.’
‘I know they weren’t,’ said Mrs Bazeley. ‘For I went over this paint-work myself, every inch of it, while Betty done the carpets.’
‘Well, then it must have been that child,’ said Caroline. ‘It was naughty of her; very naughty indeed. Do the best you can to remove them, will you?’
‘I’m doing it!’ said Mrs Bazeley, indignant. ‘But I’ll tell you something. If this is pencil, I’m King George. This is stuck fast, this is.’
‘Stuck? It isn’t ink, or crayon, is it?’
‘I don’t know what it is. I could almost fancy it’s come up from under the paint.’
‘Under the paint,’ repeated Caroline, startled.
Mrs Bazeley looked up at her for a second, struck by her tone; then she saw the clock, and tutted. ‘Ten more minutes, now, and there’s me time done. Betty, you shall have to try soda on this after I’ve gone. Not too much, mind, or you’ll blister it …’
Mrs Ayres turned away. She had said nothing about the marks, but it seemed to Caroline that her pose was a burdened one, as if this unexpected reminder of the party and all it had led to had put the final gloomy seal on her day. With slow and fumbling gestures she gathered together her things, saying she was tired and meant to rest for a while upstairs. And since the saloon had now well and truly lost its glamour, Caroline also decided to leave it. She picked up the box of rejected records and followed her mother to the door—looking back only once to the patch of scrubbed wainscot, with its indelible swarm of Ss like so many wriggling little eels.
This was on the Saturday—probably at just about the time I was delivering my report to the London conference, with the whole affair with Caroline still niggling darkly at the back of my mind. By the end of that afternoon the work on the saloon was finished, and the room was effectively sealed up again, its shutters fastened and its door closed; and the scribbles on the wainscot—which, after all, were very small annoyances in the wider scheme of the family’s misfortunes—were more or less forgotten. Sunday and Monday passed off without incident. Both those days were cold, but dry. So Caroline was surprised, on passing the door of the saloon on Tuesday afternoon, to hear from the room beyond it a regular soft tapping sound, which she took to be the drip of rainwater. Dismayed to think that the ceiling must have sprung some mysterious new leak, she opened the door and looked inside. The tapping ceased as she did it. She stood still with her breathing softened, peering into the lightless room, just about making out the strips of torn paper on the walls, and the odd, lumpy-looking pieces of wrapped-up furniture, but hearing nothing more. So she closed the door and went on her way.
Next day, re-passing the saloon, she again heard the noise. A rapid drumming or pattering it was this time, so unmistakable that she went right into the room and drew back a shutter. As before, the noise had stopped by the time she had quite opened up the door: she checked the bowls and pails that had been left out to catch drips from the ceiling, and made a quick inspection of the drugget-covered carpet, but all was dry. She was just deciding to give the thing up, baffled, when the noise started again. This time it seemed to her to be coming not from inside the saloon at all, but from one of its neighbouring rooms. A soft but smart rat-tat-tat she said it was now, like a schoolboy idly drumming with a stick. More baffled and intrigued than ever, she went back out into the passage and stood listening again. She pursued the sound to the dining-room, but there it again abruptly fell silent—only to restart a few seconds later, this time apparently on the other side of the wall, in the little parlour.
She found her mother in there, reading a week-old newspaper. Mrs Ayres had heard nothing. ‘Nothing?’ asked Caroline. ‘Are you sure?’ Then: ‘There! Do you hear that?’ She held up her hand. Her mother listened, and after a moment agreed that, yes, there was certainly some sort of sound. A ‘knocking’, she called it, as opposed to Caroline’s ‘tapping’; she suggested it might be the result of air or water being trapped in the central-heating pipes. Doubtfully, Caroline crossed to the room’s ancient radiator. It was tepid to her touch and quite lifeless, and even as she drew her hand away from it, the knocking grew louder and clearer: it seemed now to be over her head. So distinct a sound was it, she and her mother were able to ‘watch’ its progress in the ceiling and the walls: it travelled from one side of the room to the other like ‘a small hard bouncing ball’.
This was sometime in the afternoon, after Mrs Bazeley had gone home; but now, naturally, they thought of Betty, wondering if she mightn’t simply be at work in one of the rooms upstairs. When they rang for her, however, she came straight up from the basement: she had been down there for half an hour, she said, preparing their tea. They kept her with them in the little parlour for almost ten minutes, during which time the house was perfectly silent and still; but no sooner had she left them than the knocking started again. This time it was back out in the passage. Caroline went quickly to the door, and looked out to find Betty standing bewildered in the middle of the marble floor while a soft, crisp drumming sounded from the panels of the wall high up above her head.
They were none of them afraid, Caroline said, not even Betty herself. The sound was queer, but not menacing; it seemed to lead them almost playfully, in fact, from one spot to another, until the pursuing of it along the passage began to feel like ‘a bit of a lark’. They followed it right out into the hall. This was always the chilliest place in the house, and today it seemed almost like an ice-box. Caroline rubbed her arms, glancing up the draughty staircase.
‘If it means to go upstairs,’ she said, ‘then it can go on its own. I don’t care about the idiotic thing that much.’
Rat-tat-tat! went the drumming loudly, as if in indignant response to her words, and after that the sound seemed grudgingly to ‘settle’ in one spot, giving the bizarre impression that it was coming from a shallow laburnum-wood cabinet that stood against the panelled wall beside the staircase. The effect was so vivid, Caroline felt wary about opening the cabinet up. She caught hold of its handles, but stood well back as she turned them—half expecting the thing to spring open, she said, like a jack-in-the-box. But the doors swung harmlessly towards her, revealing nothing but a few odd bits of ornament and clutter, and when the tapping sounded again, it became clear that it was coming not from inside the cabinet, but from somewhere behind it. Caroline closed the doors, and moved to peer into the slender dark space between the cabinet and the wall. Then, with an understandable touch of reluctance, she lifted her hand and slowly slid her fingers into the gap. She stood still, her breath held, her palm flat on the dry wood panel.
The knocking came again, louder than before. She started back, alarmed but laughing.
‘It’s there!’ she said, shaking her arm as if to drive pins and needles from it. ‘I felt it in the wall! It’s like a little hand, rapping. It must be beetles or mice or something. Betty, come here and help me with this.’ She took hold of one side of the cabinet.
Betty looked fearful now. ‘I don’t want to, miss.’
‘Come on, it won’t bite you!’
So the girl moved forward. The cabinet was light but unwieldy, and it took the two of them a minute to shift it. The tapping faded again as they set it down, so that when Mrs Ayres, struck by the sight of something on the newly exposed wall, drew in her breath, Caroline heard her very clearly; and she saw her make a movement—stretch out her hand, then draw it back to her bosom as if in fright.
‘What is it, Mother?’ she said, still struggling with the placing of the cabinet’s feet. Mrs Ayr
es didn’t answer. Caroline made the cabinet steady, then went to her mother’s side and saw what had startled her.
The wall was marked with more of that childish scribbling: SSS SSSS S SU S.
Caroline stared. ‘I don’t believe it. This is simply too much! She couldn’t have—That child couldn’t possibly have—Could she?’ She looked at her mother; her mother didn’t answer. She turned to Betty.
‘When was this cabinet last moved?’
Betty looked really frightened now. ‘I don’t know, miss.’
‘Well, think! Was it after the fire?’
‘I—I think it must have been.’
‘I think it must have been, too. Didn’t you wash this wall, along with all the others? And you saw no writing then?’
‘I don’t remember, miss. I don’t think so.’
‘You would have seen it, wouldn’t you?’
Caroline moved right up to the wall as she spoke, to examine the marks more closely. She gave them a rub with the cuff of her cardigan. She licked her thumb, and rubbed with that. The marks remained. She shook her head, utterly perplexed.
‘Could the little girl have done it? Would she have? I think she went to the lavatory at some point, that night. She might just, perhaps, have slipped out here. She might have thought it funny, making a mark where we wouldn’t find it for months and months—’
‘Cover it up,’ said Mrs Ayres abruptly.
Caroline turned to her. ‘Oughtn’t we to wash it?’