‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Friday it is. I’ll send directions. We’re hard to find the first time.’
‘Can I bring anything?’
‘Just yourself,’ he’d replied. ‘Just yourself.’
I tell you this, and in such detail, so you understand there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was an unexceptional Friday afternoon, nothing to mark it out. I was regretting accepting Bill’s invitation, in the way of those things, but I wasn’t anxious beyond what you’d expect from a man intending to spend the weekend with strangers. I was in good spirits, good health and I’d been sleeping better over the past few weeks.
Once I was out of London, I had a clear run of it and the first hour or so passed uneventfully. Traffic started to thin out. One by one, the commuter husbands hurrying home to their wives. The grey afternoon sky turned pink at dusk, then an inky blue. On road signs, the names of unfamiliar villages, places I’d never heard of and would never visit. As I drove on and on, I thought of all the people I’d never meet, settling down for their supper. A closed up garage on the corner and rows of shops, street after anonymous street of modern new houses on the outskirts of towns.
I made good time. Even so, it already was past nine o’clock by the time I turned off the main road and started to make my way cross country. Bill had promised a scratch meal, since we were all arriving at different times, but I was worried about pitching up after everyone else. I decided I’d stop, if I could, to let him know I was running late.
I didn’t have long to wait. In a village called South Harting, I found a telephone box. The red paint was chipped and, inside, an acrid smell of damp and ash, but the phone itself was working. I dialled the number, waited for the pips and Bill’s voice, pushed the coin into the slot.
‘My wife won’t mind,’ Bill said when I explained I was still a good half hour away. ‘She’ll put something by for you.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he called out.
I imagined him cupping the receiver with his hand and his wife smiling and shaking her head. In the background, I could hear the raised voices of men who’ve had one over the eight.
‘She doesn’t mind,’ Bill said again. ‘We’ll see you when we see you.’
I came out of the phone box and lit a cigarette. I lingered a while to shrug the stale smell off my clothes, tempted by the convivial lights in the White Hart, but I knew I should press on. I allowed myself to finish the cigarette though and stretched my legs. Turning my collar to the cold and damp, I wrapped my scarf a little tighter around my neck, then walked up the High Street towards the church of St Mary and St Gabriel, then back on the opposite side of the road. The air was filled with the scent of coal fires and wood, wet earth and ploughed fields. Squares of light from kitchen windows, an untenanted schoolhouse, it seemed a quintessentially English village.
As I unlocked the car, a customer came out of the Ship Inn, on the corner. I gave him good evening and raised my hat. He looked at me through ale-drenched eyes, bleary with surprise or suspicion, before stumbling away into the night.
‘Please yourself,’ I muttered, a little put out.
I took off my scarf, then checked Bill’s handwritten map again to be sure I had the directions clear in my mind: through South Harting on the Uppark Road, turn sharp left to follow the road up through the woods for a couple of miles. At the top of Harting Down, when the trees started to thin out, look out for a sign to Bill’s village.
I drove past a sleeping row of workmen’s cottages, aware of the dense woodland beyond the outskirts of Harting. Left and left again, my foot lifted from the accelerator on the bends. Fallen leaves, a patchwork of colours of burgundy and copper and gold, lit suddenly by the car’s headlamps. Right and left again, then I was plunged into the utter blackness of the countryside. Abrupt, silent. I fixed my eyes ahead, trying not to notice how the long tall trunks of the high trees loomed over the road or the way the ground fell violently away to the left. The engine was straining as I changed down a gear, then down again.
I’m an ordinary man – no imagination, my ex-wife used to say, proudly at first, then later with disappointment – but as I drove on and up into the woods, it seemed to me the darkness took on a life of its own. It seemed to bend and twist and curl around the car. The gnarled exposed roots of trees were the knuckles of an old man’s hand and the trunks transformed themselves into a marching army. The glint of sharp eyes in the undergrowth, a fox or a badger, vibrated with menace and spoke of something beyond any normal night-time creature. Every branch had a face, a shape, a living purpose.
It was getting colder too. Pockets of low cloud hung in the hollow spaces between the army of pines or floated across the road, as if pushed by some unseen hand. A light drizzle, cloud turning to mist, mist to fog. Faces, contours, eyes, fingers finding shape in the wall of white. Telling myself not to let my wits run away with me, I switched on my fog lamps. It made little difference. I still could see no more than six inches in front of me and the mist still seemed to be full of creatures. The hypnotic swish of the windscreen wipers, along with the rattle of the heater and the straining of the engine, was making me feel dizzy. I swallowed, aware my mouth was dry. Right, then right again, following the turn of the road. Second gear, down to first in places as the track went winding and twisting this way and that. Left, then left again. Another tight bend, the endlessness of the surrounding woodland, another halfformed face staring hollow out of the mist, except this time it was real.
I slammed on the brakes.
‘No!’
Did I shout out a warning or only in my head? I don’t know, only that this time there really was a girl, not an apparition in the mist. Flesh and blood standing in the middle of the road and I was going to hit her. I stamped on the brake again, hands clenched, shoulders braced. The back wheels spun. Slipping, skidding, sliding towards the girl.
‘Get out of the way!’
A thud of something beneath the car and I was thrown forward, hard against the steering wheel. After noise, silence. After movement, stillness. It took me a moment to realise the Morris Minor had come to a halt and I was still on the road, safe. Apart from a sharp pain in my ribs, I was all right.
What about the girl? Had I hit her?
I fumbled with the catch, my shaking fingers failing to get purchase, but in the end managed to fling open the door and stumble out into the night. I could barely see my hand in front of my face. But I called out, praying for an answer from another human voice.
‘Where are you? Are you all right?’
The fog muffled everything, footsteps, twigs underfoot. I traced my way round the car, hand sliding across the metal so as not to lose my footing and go tumbling down, round to where I thought the girl had been standing. I crouched down to look under the car, dreading what I might see beneath the chassis, but there was nothing except a heavy branch caught in the front number plate.
My relief was short-lived. The ground fell steeply away, I could see that now. Had she tried to get out of the way and fallen down the wooded hillside? I called out again.
‘Are you hurt?’
Then, suddenly, I saw her. Standing, silent, in a gap between the trees. Hardly visible in the mist, hardly there at all.
‘What in God’s name are you playing at?’ Fear turned swiftly to anger now I could see she was safe. ‘Out here alone, at this time of night, you could have been killed.’
I saw how young she was, no more than seventeen or eighteen, and somehow that shocked me. Thin arms and legs, long drab hair framing a thin, pale face. A cheap dress with a narrow belt and rather old-fashioned shoes. Indoor shoes, not right for walking.
‘You could have been killed.’
She stepped back, as if now only noticing me for the first time, and raised her head. Dark eyes, dark. No light in them.
‘Yes,’ she said. A quiet voice, barely audible.
‘Well,’ I said. She looked such a sorry little thing.
I waited, thinking she’d explain why she was there or where she was going, but she said nothing more.
‘Here,’ I said, taking off my jacket and draping it over her thin shoulders. ‘You’re shaking. You’re cold.’
She didn’t thank me, merely stood there as if barely aware of the action or the weight of the material.
‘Are you trying to get home? Did your lift let you down?’
She didn’t look the type to have a boyfriend, but what did I know? I pulled the branch out from under the car.
‘Well,’ I said again. ‘No harm done, I suppose.’
Although I wanted to press on, I knew Bill wouldn’t worry and I couldn’t leave her.
‘You’d better let me drop you home,’ I said. ‘Where do you live, nearby? Harting?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Harting it is,’ I said, hoping the car would start. ‘I’m Tom, by the way. And you?’
At first, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then, softly, she did.
‘Mary. Mary Starr.’
‘Pretty name,’ I said, more to fill the silence than anything else. ‘Come on then.’
With surprising speed, Mary seated herself behind me. I was conscious of her dark eyes on the back of my head as I found reverse and turned to go back down the hill. She didn’t make a sound. I glanced at her in my driving mirror.
‘Won’t be long,’ I said.
It was cold inside the car and I fiddled with the dial on the heater, but it didn’t seem to be working. I could feel the weight of her sadness pressing down on me too. I wished the whole business was over and I was sitting in Bill’s brightly lit sitting room with a whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
‘Smoke?’
Mary gave no sign she’d heard me.
‘You won’t mind if I do?’
I shrugged and lit a cigarette anyway.
The drizzle had stopped and there was no fog at the bottom of the hill, but I was relieved all the same when I saw the lights at the edge of the village. I glanced again in the mirror. Mary was still, motionless, fingers twisting the shabby material of her dress, swamped by my jacket. I drove past the church, with its copper spire, past the houses, waiting for her to give me directions to where she lived. I was forced to brake as a fox shot across the High Street in front of us.
‘Will this do?’
When she still didn’t answer, I pulled over by the telephone box, where I’d parked earlier, killed the engine and twisted round in my seat.
She wasn’t there. The car was empty.
I got out, at that moment more annoyed about my jacket than worried about the girl.
‘Mary?’ I called out to the empty street.
I strode into the Ship Inn, determined to find out where Mary’s family lived. After everything I’d done for her, I wasn’t inclined to let it go. It wasn’t just the jacket, but my wallet and pocket diary too.
‘Anyone know where the Starr family lives?’
Again, is it memory playing tricks that recalls an intake of breath in the public bar, the sharp glances crossing from the landlord to the old men on the table beside the fire?
‘It’s Mary I’m after,’ I said.
‘Again,’ someone muttered, but a glare from his companions silenced him and he hunched back into his beer.
‘Ten yards up to the right,’ said the landlord. ‘End of the path.’
Moments later I was back on the street and walking up a narrow lane to a row of cottages. I knocked on the door, then stood back to wait for someone to answer.
‘Mrs Starr, is it?’ I said, when a woman appeared. ‘Sorry to disturb you so late.’ Thin and with an air of abject defeat, she had the look of someone old before her time. ‘I gave a lift to your . . . to Mary,’ I said.
A flash of alarm in her eyes, then despair.
‘Oh no,’ I thought I heard her say.
From inside the small house, a man’s rough voice, slurred with drink.
‘Who is it?’
‘Go away,’ she whispered, trying to close the door. ‘Leave us alone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, a little nettled by her rudeness. ‘I haven’t explained myself properly. I picked up Mary on Harting Hill not five minutes ago. I’m sure it’s a mistake, but when she got out of the car, she forgot to give my jacket back.’
‘She’s not here,’ the woman said. ‘How could she be?’
‘I pulled up in the square,’ I said, ‘and she just hopped out. Five minutes ago, ten at most.’
Again, the drunk bellowing from the front room.
‘Who the hell is it?’
‘Go, please go,’ she said, desperate this time. ‘She’s not here.’
I didn’t want to cause trouble between this downtrodden woman and her husband.
‘At least tell me if she’s not here, where else might she be?’
For an instant, the haunted look in her eyes gave way to something else. Grief, perhaps. Resignation, maybe.
‘The church,’ she said softly.
This caught me out. ‘So late?’
‘Where else would she be?’
I heard the sound of a bolt being shot, then a heartrending sob. I raised my hand to knock again, then let it drop. The woman was clearly terrorised by her brute of a husband. Perhaps Mary was too scared to go home?
I walked back to the High Street. The Ship Inn and the White Hart had called last orders and one or two rag-taggle farm workers were calling their goodnights into the damp night air.
One of the black wrought-iron gates into the churchyard was ajar, as if someone had recently slipped through. I pushed it open, thinking Mary might have taken refuge here after all. But the door stayed shut when I rattled the heavy cast-iron handle. I stepped out into the graveyard. Neat headstones closer to the church, rather more overgrown in the corners. Yew and mulberry and evergreen hedges. By an imposing flint wall, a row of older gravestones like broken teeth, a little crooked and sinking back into the earth.
I sensed movement. I narrowed my eyes and tried to adjust my vision to the darkness. Another fox? A sound in the undergrowth, little more than that.
‘Mary?’
I skirted the building and walked towards the sound. The bottom of my trousers grew damp with the dew from the grass and the cold night air slipped beneath my collar, but I paid no attention.
‘Mary, is that you?’
I rounded the corner and found myself in a more secluded section of the graveyard. Stone angels and crosses, the flat tombs of an older age, and a few modern headstones. I could see no one, just shadows, phantasms in the intermittent moonlight.
No one.
But there was something moving, swaying in the breeze, something hanging on one of the gravestones. My jacket. I walked forward, then leant down to take it from the headstone. Forced myself to read the inscription, though I feared what it was going to say.
MARY STARR
3rd OCTOBER 1931 – 27th OCTOBER 1951
IN GOD’S CARE
Bill tells me they found me there in the morning, clutching my jacket to my chest. I had a slight fever, a chill from spending the night out of doors. I wasn’t ill, but not quite right either.
A local had seen my car still parked in the square, remembered me asking for directions to the Starr’s house and put two and two together. It wasn’t the first time, you see.
Bill came to fetch me – his number was on the map still lying on the passenger seat of the car. I stayed with him for a few days until I felt well enough to drive back to town. He told me the whole story. Mary had been seen before, always on the same stretch of road, always on the anniversary of her death. A local girl, Mary Starr, killed on Harting Hill ten years before. Hit and run in the days before there were such things. Or had she simply lost her footing and fallen? No one was sure. A sweet girl, innocent, who had gone for a drive with a local boy and without her father’s permission. When the boy wouldn’t take no for an answer and put her out of the car, Mary had no ch
oice but to walk home in the worst storm they’d suffered for years. He raised the alarm when rumours spread that Mary had never arrived. Rain and mudslides, flooding on the lower roads, her body not found for days.
This happened some time ago. And although I was haunted by thoughts of Mary lost on the hillside, the memory of that night and my role in bringing her home is less troubling now.
Several years have passed. I married again, happily this time, and we have a wonderful daughter. Bright, charming, works hard at school. My wife says I am overprotective, and perhaps I am. From time to time, when we drive down to spend a weekend with Bill and his wife, he teases me about it too, though he understands.
I don’t believe in ghosts, never did. All the same, each time I pass through South Harting, I stop at the church. To lay flowers on the grave of a girl I once met.
Author’s Note
This story, written for the collection, was inspired by an experience I had more than thirty years ago.
I was driving home to Chichester, in Sussex. It was late at night, I hadn’t long passed my driving test and as I went through the village of South Harting, The Specials were singing ‘Ghost Town’ on the radio.
When I turned to go up Harting Hill, a mist descended. I allowed myself to become completely spooked and started to worry what I’d do if the car broke down and I was stuck there on my own. This was 1981 and there were no mobile phones.
The car didn’t break down. The mist lifted. Nothing happened. But I’ve never forgotten that journey and the illogical sense of threat in the darkness.
THE PRINCESS ALICE
Deptford, south-east London
September 1998
The Princess Alice
The bosun pipes the watch below,
Yeo ho! lads! ho!
Then here’s a health afore we go
A long, long life to my sweet wife an’ mates at sea;
And keep our bones from Davy Jones, where’er we be