Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ British 2nd Division. Our sixteen-day journey was over. A journey into war lay ahead.

       Old Bessie

      THIS IS A TRUE STORY, AND A GHOST STORY. YET I DON’T believe it myself.

      What is a true story? It is a tale whose lies you cannot detect.

      What is a ghost story? It is this – and with it comes entangled much of my life.

      Earlier this year, I had the responsibility for carrying out the last wishes of my grandfather’s second wife. That is to say, of my step-grandmother whom I called (for simplicity and other reasons) my Aunt. She died in the spring, almost fifty years after my grandfather, at the age of ninety-five.

      My Aunt Dorothy was the reason – or one of them, for life is never that simple – why our family broke up in a spectacular way. My grandfather was a strong-willed, self-made man, to whom his descendants owe a great debt. When he took a young second wife at the age of seventy, everyone was scandalized. In those days, in a country town in the mid-thirties, such a step was regarded as little short of treasonable. Particularly by a family which stood to lose financially by the union.

      As a child, and as an adult, I loved my Aunt. She was among the best people I ever knew. I was glad to honour her wish to be laid to rest beside my grandfather’s bones, although to do that entailed a journey half across England to the dark dull heart of Norfolk.

      Few people attended the funeral service. I spoke a short encomium over the grave. Then our little party climbed back into the cars to head for the only presentable hotel, where I was standing everyone lunch. I had reached that time in life, that position in the family, where it was taken for granted I would provide. How different from when I had lived as a boy in this miserable little town, when I was neglected and allowed to run wild.

      On the way to the hotel, my wife dropped me by the council offices. The rest of the party went on their way while I went to pay the gravediggers’ fees.

      Afterwards, on a whim, I walked to see the house where we had lived before we left the town in disgrace. The house stood down St Withburga Lane and was in fact called Withburga House. It faced across to the churchyard and to the church with its square tower.

      There was the house still, much altered, covered with a thick stucco, and half the size I remembered it. It was now the HQ of the Brecklands District Council, or some such absurd name. The house and I confronted each other, to see how we had fared over forty years. Its fate was no worse than mine. We both survived, in our fashion.

      To be truthful, I had never liked the house. I had been frightened there, at a tender age. This was where my lifelong habit of insomnia began, in the bedroom overlooking the old graves.

      Our garage had been knocked down to allow for a small yard at the side. I walked round and looked over the high wooden gate into our old walled garden.

      It was just as it had been, that summer we left. The terrace by the house, the old wash-room, converted into a summerhouse, the central flowerbed planted with annuals, the rustic work, the heavy laburnum at the far end, the lawn. Everything maintained.

      My father made that garden. When we bought Withburga, it had been in a state of decay. Restoration had been needed inside, while the garden, a wilderness, had had to be restarted from scratch. My father had thrown himself into the work with his usual energy, digging, sowing, planting, and mixing concrete for paving and to support rustic pergolas. Staring over the gate, back into the past, I could imagine him still at work there, doing the sort of thing he liked best.

      The front door of the house had been blocked off. One entered by the side, where once there had been no door. All was quiet. I wandered down a bare corridor. It was chill, unwelcoming. I saw that our old rooms had been partitioned into cubicles. Here was the kitchen, a kitchen no more. Here was our breakfast room, where the sun once filtered in on to the tablecloth, the china, the bowl of stewed apple. Here my sister’s dolls house had stood, one memorable Christmas … now there were instead three little rooms, each with a chair and a pencil on a string.

      At the far end of the corridor was one of those hatches which has a button-bell outside it, against which a notice says ‘Push for Attention’; when the bell is pushed, it calls forth a girl who opens the hatch and says ‘Yes?’ With a sense of unreality, I pushed the bell. The hatch opened, and a girl said yes.

      ‘I used to live here,’ I said. ‘You are sitting in my dining room.’

      She looked at me in some anguish. I was dressed in a black suit, with a black tie, and a black overcoat to protect me from the East wind.

      ‘I’ll get Mrs Skinner,’ she said.

      There were three other women in our dining room, but Mrs Skinner entered from an adjoining room and bid me good-afternoon. She was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties, well-dressed with an elegant figure. She seemed to belong in that little menage no more than I did.

      I told her of our family connection with the offices. She was interested. So were the other women. They stopped their work and sat with hands on laps, listening as I talked to Mrs Skinner through the hatch. Both of us craned our necks in order to see the other properly.

      ‘Our lounge was on the other side of the old front door,’ I said.

      ‘That is now my office – or part of it is,’ said the elegant Mrs Skinner, I thought with more reserve than she had shown so far.

      ‘Have you ever heard anything strange in there?’ I asked.

      The women all looked at one another. An older woman at the back of the office, who did her hair in a bun, said, with a nervous laugh, ‘Oh, we’ve all heard strange things in this place. Some of the girls will tell you it’s haunted.’

      ‘It is haunted,’ said the girl at the hatch.

      ‘It is haunted,’ I agreed.

      So I related the story of Old Bessie.

      Withburga had been the home of a spinster, Bessie Someone, who had lived there in increasing decrepitude with an aged companion. My mother, given to good works, used to go to see Bessie regularly, taking her a cake, a trifle, or one of her fine steak-and-kidney puddings, wrapped in a cloth. Bessie died eventually. My father bought the house from Bessie’s executors.

      Our builders moved in. They ripped out a back staircase and put in a new bathroom. They re-roofed the house. They pulled out all the rotting sashcord windows and installed metal ones in their stead. They repainted and redecorated. Then we took up residence, my parents, my sister and I. My sister would then have been four or five, and I eight or nine.

      Almost at once, we started hearing the sounds. It was a winter’s evening. I sat with my parents in the living room, in the room that was to become – at least in part – the elegant Mrs Skinner’s. My sister was asleep in the bedroom above, in the room where old Bessie had died.

      We heard footsteps overhead. In the centre of the living-room ceiling was a light whose china shade was supported by three chains. The footsteps were perfectly distinct. As they passed the centre of the room, the chains rattled on the lamp.

      All three of us, motionless, followed the trail of the steps with our eyes, as they progressed to the bedroom window. There was a pause. Then the sound – the unmistakeable sound – СКАЧАТЬ