‘A house fire at Angelfield,’ I explained briefly, ‘about sixty years ago.’
The boy showed me the shelf where the holdings for the relevant period were shelved.
‘I’ll lift the boxes for you, shall I?’
‘And the books pages too, from about forty years ago, but I’m not sure which year.’
‘Books pages? Didn’t know the Herald ever had books pages.’ And he moved his ladder, retrieved another set of boxes, and placed them beside the first one on a long table under a bright light.
‘There you are then,’ he said cheerily, and he left me to it.
The Angelfield fire, I learned, was probably caused by an accident. It was not uncommon for people to stockpile fuel at the time, and it was this that had caused the fire to take hold so fiercely. There had been no one in the house but the two nieces of the owner, both of whom escaped and were in hospital. The owner himself was believed to be abroad. (Believed to be… I wondered. I made a quick note of the dates: another six years were to elapse before the ldd.) The column ended with some comments on the architectural significance of the house, and it was noted that it was uninhabitable in its current state.
I copied out the story and scanned headlines in the following issues in case there were updates but, finding nothing, I put the papers away and turned to the other boxes.
‘Tell me the truth,’ he had said. The young man in the old-fashioned suit who had interviewed Vida Winter for the Banbury Herald forty years ago. And she had never forgotten his words.
There was no trace of the interview. There was nothing even that could properly be called a books page. The only literary items at all were occasional book reviews under the heading, ‘You might like to read…’ by a reviewer called Miss Jenkinsop. Twice my eye came to rest on Miss Winter’s name in these paragraphs. Miss Jenkinsop had clearly read and enjoyed Miss Winter’s novels; her praise was enthusiastic and just, if unscholarly in expression, but it was plain she had never met their author and equally plain that she was not the man in the brown suit.
I closed the last newspaper and folded it neatly in its box.
The man in the brown suit was a fiction. A device to snare me. The fly with which a fisherman baits his line to draw the fish in. It was only to be expected. Perhaps it was the confirmation of the existence of George and Mathilde, Charlie and Isabelle that had raised my hopes. They at least were real people; the man in the brown suit was not.
Putting my hat and gloves on, I left the offices of the Banbury Herald and stepped out into the street.
As I walked along the winter streets looking for a cafe, I remembered the letter Miss Winter had sent me. I remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed round the rafters of my rooms under the eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn’t she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me – Tell me the truth – had been uttered by a man who was not even real.
I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.
Ruin
From Banbury I took a bus.
‘Angelfield?’ said the bus driver. ‘No, there’s no service to Angelfield. Not yet, anyhow. Might be different when the hotel’s built.’
‘Are they building there, then?’
‘Some old ruin they’re pulling down. Going to be a fancy hotel. They might run a bus then, for the staff, but for now the best you can do is get off at the Hare and Hounds on the Cheneys Road and walk from there. ’Bout a mile, I reckon.’
There wasn’t much in Angelfield. A single street whose wooden sign read, with logical simplicity, The Street. I walked past a dozen cottages, built in pairs. Here and there a distinctive feature stood out – a large yew tree, a children’s swing, a wooden bench – but for the most part each dwelling, with its neatly embroidered thatch, its white gables and the restrained artistry in its brickwork, resembled its neighbour like a mirror image.
The cottage windows looked out onto fields that were neatly defined with hedges, and studded here and there with trees. Further away sheep and cows were visible, and then a densely wooded area, beyond which, according to my map, was the deer park. There was no pavement as such, but that hardly mattered for there was no traffic either. In fact I saw no sign of human life at all until I passed the last cottage and came to a combined post office and general store.
Two children in yellow mackintoshes came out of the shop and ran down to the road ahead of their mother, who had stopped at the post box. Small and fair, she was struggling to stick stamps onto envelopes without dropping the newspaper tucked under her arm. The older child, a boy, reached up to put his sweet wrapper in the bin attached to a post at the roadside. He went to take his sister’s wrapper, but she resisted. ‘I can do it! I can do it!’ She stood on tiptoe and stretched up her arm, ignoring her brother’s protestations, then tossed the paper towards the mouth of the bin. A breeze caught it and carried it across the road.
‘I told you so!’
Both children turned and launched themselves into a dash – then jolted to a halt when they saw me. Two blond fringes flopped down over pairs of identically shaped brown eyes. Two mouths fell into the same expression of surprise. Not twins, no, but so close. I stooped to pick up the wrapper and held it out towards them. The girl, willing to take it, went to step forward. Her brother, more cautious, stuck his arm out to bar her way, and called, ‘Mum!’
The fair-haired woman watching from the post box had seen what had happened. ‘All right, Tom. Let her take it.’ The girl took the paper from my hand without looking at me. ‘Say thank you,’ the mother called. The children did so in restrained voices, then turned their backs from me and leapt thankfully away. This time the woman lifted her daughter up to reach the bin, and in doing so looked at me again, eyeing my camera with veiled curiosity.
Angelfield was not a place where I could be invisible.
She offered a reserved smile. ‘Enjoy your walk,’ she said, and then she turned to follow her children, who were already running back along the street towards the cottages.
I watched them go.
The children ran, swooping and diving around each other, as though attached by an invisible cord. They switched direction at random, made unpredictable changes of speed, with telepathic synchronicity. They were two dancers, moving to the same inner music, two leaves caught up in the same breeze. It was uncanny and perfectly familiar. I’d have liked to watch them longer, but fearful that they might turn and catch me staring, I pulled myself away.
After a few hundred yards the lodge gates came into view. The gates themselves were not only closed but welded to the ground and each other by writhing twists of ivy that wove in and out of the elaborate metalwork. Over the gates, a pale stone arch sat high above the road, its sides extending into two small single-room buildings with windows. In one window a piece of paper was displayed. Inveterate reader that I am, I couldn’t resist; I clambered through the long, wet grass to read it. But it was a ghost notice. The coloured logo of a construction company had survived but beneath it, two pale grey stains the shape of paragraphs and, slightly darker but not much, the shadow of a signature. It had the shape of writing, but the meaning had been bleached out by months of sunshine.
Preparing to walk a long way around the boundary to find a way in, I had only taken a few steps when I came to a small wooden gate set in a wall with nothing but a latch to fasten it. In an instant I was inside.
The drive had once been gravelled, but now the pebbles underfoot were interspersed with bare earth and scrubby grass. It led in a long curve to a small stone and flint church with a lychgate, then curved the other way, behind a sweep of trees and shrubs that obscured the view. On each side the borders were overgrown; branches of different bushes were fighting for space and at their feet grass and weeds were creeping into whatever spaces they could find.
I walked towards the church.
Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it. The church was positioned at the apex of the gravel curve; as I drew closer my eye veered away from the lychgate and towards the vista that was opening up on the other side of me. With each step the view widened and widened, until at last the pale mass of stone that was Angelfield House appeared and I stopped dead in my tracks.
The house sat at an awkward angle. Arriving from the drive, you came upon a corner, and it was not at all clear which side of the house was the front. It was as though the house knew it ought to meet its arriving visitors face on, but at the last minute couldn’t repress the impulse to turn back and gaze upon the deer park and the woodlands at the end of the terraces. The visitor was met not by a welcoming smile but by a cold shoulder.
This sense of awkwardness was only increased by the other aspects of its appearance. The house was of asymmetrical construction. Three great bays, each one four storeys high, stood out from the body of the house, their twelve tall and wide windows offering the only order and harmony the facade could muster. In the rest of the house, the windows were a higgledy-piggledy arrangement, no two alike, none level with its neighbour whether left and right or up and down. Above the third floor, a balustrade tried to hold the disparate architecture together in a single embrace, but here and there a jutting stone, a partial bay, an awkward window, were too much for it; it disappeared only to start up again the other side of the obstacle. Above this balustrade there rose an uneven roof line of towers, turrets and chimney stacks, the colour of honey.
A ruin? Most of the golden stone looked as clean and as fresh as the day it had been quarried. Of course the elaborate stonework of the turrets looked a little worn, the balustrading was crumbling in places, but all the same, it was hardly a ruin. To see it then, with the blue sky behind it, birds flying around its towers, and the grass green round about, I had no difficulty at all in imagining the place inhabited.
Then I put my glasses on, and realized.
The windows were empty of glass and the frames had rotted or burned away. What I had taken for shadows over the windows on the right hand side were fire stains. And the birds swooping in the sky above the house were not diving down behind the building, but inside it. There was no roof. It was not a house, but only a shell.
I took my glasses off again and the scene reverted to an intact Elizabethan house. Might one get a sense of brooding menace if the sky were painted indigo and the moon suddenly clouded over? Perhaps. But against today’s cloudless blue the scene was innocence itself.
A barrier stretched across the drive. Attached to it was a notice. Danger. Keep Out. Noticing a join in the fence where the sections were just lodged together, I shifted a panel, slipped inside, and pulled it to behind me.
Skirting the cold shoulder I came to the front of the house. Between the first and second bays, six broad, low steps led up to a panelled double door. The steps were flanked by a pair of low pedestals, on which were mounted two giant cats carved out of some dark, polished material. The undulations of their anatomy were so persuasively carved that, running my fingers over one, I half-expected fur, was startled by the cool hardness of the stone.
It was the ground floor window of the third bay that was marked by the darkest firestaining. Perched on a chunk of fallen masonry, I was tall enough to peer inside. What I saw caused a deep disquiet to bloom in my chest. There is something universal, something familiar to all in the concept of a room. Though my bedroom over the shop and my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house and my bedroom at Miss Winter’s are all very different, they nonetheless share certain elements, elements that remain constant in all places and for all people. Even a temporary encampment has something overhead to protect from the weather, space for a person to enter, move about, and leave, and something that permits you to distinguish between inside and outside. Here there was none of this.
Beams had fallen, some at one end only so that they cut the space diagonally, coming to rest on the heaps of masonry, woodwork and other indistinguishable material that filled the room to the level of the window. Old birds’ nests were wedged in various nooks and angles. The birds must have brought seeds; snow and rain had flooded in with the sunlight, and somehow, in this wreck of a place, plants were growing: I saw the brown winter branches of buddleia, and elders grown spindly reaching for the light. Like a pattern on wallpaper, ivy scrambled up the walls. Craning my neck I looked up, as into a dark tunnel. Four tall walls were still intact, but instead of seeing a ceiling, there were only four thick beams, irregularly spaced, and beyond them more empty space before another few beams, then the same again and again. At the end of the tunnel was light. The sky.
Not even a ghost could survive here.
It was almost impossible to think that once there had been draperies, furnishings, paintings. Chandeliers had lit up what was now illuminated by the sun. What had it been, this room? A drawing room, a music room, a dining room?
I squinted at the mass of stuff heaped in the room. Out of the jumble of unrecognizable stuff that had once been a home, something caught my eye. I had taken it at first for a half-fallen beam, but it wasn’t thick enough. And it appeared to have been attached to the wall. There was another. Then another. At regular intervals, these lengths of wood seemed to have joints in them, as if other pieces of wood had once been attached at right angles. In fact there, in a corner, was one where these other sections were still present.
Knowledge tingled in my spine.
These beams were shelves. This jumble of nature and wrecked architecture was a library.
In a moment I had clambered through the glassless window.
Carefully I made my way around, testing my footing at every step. I peered into corners and dark crevices, but there were no books. Not that I had expected any – they would never survive the conditions. But I hadn’t been able to help looking.
For a few minutes I concentrated on my photographs. I took shots of the glassless window frames, the timber planks that used to hold books, the heavy oak door in its massive frame.
Trying to get the best picture of the great stone fireplace, I was bending from the waist, leaning slightly sideways, when I paused. I swallowed, noted my slightly raised heartbeat. Was it something I had heard? Or felt? Had something shifted deep in the arrangement of rubble beneath my feet? But no. It was nothing. All the same, I picked my way carefully to the edge of the room where there was a hole in the masonry large enough to step through.
I was in the main hallway. Here were the high double doors I had seen from outside. The staircase, being made of stone, had survived the fire intact. A broad sweep upwards, the hand rail and balustrades now ivy clad, the solid lines of its architecture were nonetheless clear: a graceful curve widening into a shell-like curl at its base. A kind of fancy, upside-down apostrophe.
The staircase led to a gallery that must once have run the entire width of the entrance hall. To one side there was only a jagged edge of floorboards and a drop to the stone floor below. The other side was almost complete. The vestiges of a handrail along the gallery, and then a corridor. A ceiling, stained but intact; a floor; doors even. It was the first part of the house I had seen that appeared to have escaped the general destruction. It looked like somewhere you could live.
I took a few quick pictures and then, testing each new board beneath my feet before shifting my weight, moved warily into the corridor.
The handle of the first door opened onto a sheer drop, branches and blue sky. No walls, no ceiling, no floor, just fresh, outdoors air.
I pulled the door closed again and edged along the corridor, determined not to be unnerved by the dangers of the place. Watching my feet all the time, I came to the second door. I turned the handle and let the door swing open.
There was movement!
My sister!
Almost I took a step towards her.
Almost.<
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Then I realized. A mirror. Shadowy with dirt and tarnished with dark spots that looked like ink.
I looked down to the floor I had been about to step onto. There were no boards, only a drop of twenty feet onto hard stone flags.
I knew now what I had seen, yet still my heart continued its frenzy. I raised my eyes again, and there she was. A white-faced waif with dark eyes, a hazy, uncertain figure trembling inside the old frame.
She had seen me. She stood, hand raised towards me longingly, as though all I had to do was step forward to take it. And would it not be the simplest solution, all told, to do that and at last rejoin her?
How long did I stand there, watching her wait for me?
‘No,’ I whispered, but still her arm beckoned me. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her arm slowly fell.
Then she raised a camera and took a photograph of me.
I was sorry for her. Pictures through glass never come out. I know. I’ve tried.
I stood with my hand on the handle of the third door. The rule of three, Miss Winter had said. But I wasn’t in the mood for her story any more. Her dangerous house with its indoor rain and trick mirror had lost its interest for me.
I would go. To take photographs of the church? Not even that. I would go to the village store. I would telephone a taxi. Go to the station and from there home.
All this I would do, in a minute. For the time being, I wanted to stay like this, head leaning against the door, fingers on the handle, indifferent to whatever was beyond, and waiting for the tears to pass and my heart to calm itself.
I waited.
Then, beneath my fingers, the handle to the third room began to turn of its own accord.
The Friendly Giant
I ran.
I jumped over the holes in the floorboards, leapt down the stairs three at a time, lost my footing and lunged at the hand rail for support. I grasped at a handful of ivy, stumbled, saved myself and lurched forward again. The library? No. The other way. Through an archway. Branches of elder and buddleia caught at my clothes, and I half fell several times as my feet scrabbled through the detritus of the broken house.