Property of a Lady(16)
‘The bad thing,’ said Beth as they went down the stairs. ‘The really bad thing—’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s frightening to say it.’ Her lower lip trembled. ‘It makes it real if you say it.’
‘No, it doesn’t. Saying a thing shoos the fright away. Sit by the fire and tell me.’
‘He had no eyes,’ said Beth, thrusting a clenched fist into her mouth. ‘That man who got into my room. He was trying to find me, but he couldn’t because he had no eyes.’
No eyes. How had Beth known something so macabre and so deeply distressing? Because when Brad was killed, skidding on that patch of ice so that the tanker smashed into his car, the impact had driven one of the tanker’s splintered wheel arches straight through the car’s side. His eyes had been shattered – Brad’s dear lovely eyes that smiled with such love and life. . . . His brain had bled out through the eye sockets while the ambulances tried to get to him through the motorway pile-up.
Beth had never known about the injuries, of course. Somehow Nell had managed to make Brad’s death sound smooth and clean to her. They had discussed what might happen when somebody died; Nell, who had never really sorted out her own beliefs in that direction, had tried to give Beth a child’s outlook on reincarnation, which seemed to her one of the happier theories, and which, for Beth, could be likened to plants that died in the autumn, but came up again the following spring, bright and new.
But the only people who had known what the tanker’s huge metal struts had done to Brad were Nell herself, their GP in London, and the coroner’s office.
And no one in the world knew about Nell’s own nightmares, in which Brad, his face shredded, his eyes torn away, tried to fumble his blind way back to find her.
The photograph of Charect House showing the woman at the attic window had bothered Michael in a low-key way for several days, but he managed to push it to the back of his mind. He also managed to ignore the nagging memory of the shadowy figure he had glimpsed on the stairs.
Michaelmas term went amiably along its well-worn tracks, enlivened here and there by various college activities. Michael gave a paper to the Tolkien Society, which seemed to be well received, and was guest speaker at a Students’ Union debate – the topic was the relevance of romanticism in the modern world, which made for some lively discussion. Afterwards, some of his students bore him off to the Turf Tavern, where inordinate quantities of beer were drunk and huge platters of seafood risotto circulated. Michael finally managed to extricate himself on the grounds that he had a faculty meeting at nine next morning and should get an early night. This was received with derisive hoots, and somebody started a limerick on the subject of faculties. Michael grinned, waited until the second verse was boozily completed, joined in the applause, then dropped an extra twenty-pound note into the drinks kitty before making good his exit. He reached his rooms shortly before midnight to find that Wilberforce had left a dead mouse on the step, which had to be disposed of in the incinerator in the basement. By the time he had dealt with this it was a quarter to one when he finally got to bed. Still, it had been a good evening, and it was nice that the students were so friendly.
It was during the first week of November when Jack Harper emailed again about the Shropshire house.
Michael—
Can you possibly find time to drag yourself away from your ivory tower again and make another journey to Marston Lacy? We need a reliable account of what’s actually been done to Charect House so far. The builders went in three weeks ago, but they keep sending terrifying letters and faxes about planning restrictions, and admonitory notices relating to Listed Buildings, and asking if we know the true condition of the windows and the roof. If the surveyor’s report can be trusted, the Georgian windows are infested with coniophora puteana, and the roof has merulius lacrymans. That’s wet rot and dry rot respectively to the likes of you and me.
But we’re staying with the plan to spend Christmas in the house – Liz has ordered camp beds and oil lamps and says it will be the greatest fun to eat picnic meals and dine by candlelight and we won’t even notice the rubble and the mess. Also, it will be a good reason not to spend the holiday with the cousins. Personally, I’d rather have the cousins or even Liz’s godmother for the winter solstice than camp out in an English ruin, however elegant it might be.
So you’d better let me have the phone number of that place you stayed (Capering Cow? Prancing Bullock?) because I’m blowed if I’ll eat sandwiches on Christmas Day.
Still, the efficient Ms West emailed to say she bought the long-case clock and the rosewood table at the auction, so at least we’ll be able to tell what time of day it is.
Anyway, here’s the thing. I dare say you’re knee-deep in students – do they still ask you to their parties, and if so, do you know how rare that is? My students here would be dismembered in slow stages before they’d ask me to have so much as a cup of coffee, but then I’m a slightly balding, becoming paunchy, married man, and even in my youth I never looked like Keats, preparing to starve with romantic intensity in his garret.
So if you could abandon the students again I’d be forever in your debt. (I’m in everybody else’s, so one more won’t make much difference.) I need to be sure they aren’t wiring the electricity into the septic tank just for the fun of it, or installing the heating plant in the roof so it crashes through the ceilings one night like the falling mountain in Gilgamesh’s nightmare. Talking of nightmares, Ellie is still having those God-awful dreams, poor little scrap. One of the things that helps her, though, are your stories about Wilberforce. Last night she fell asleep smiling after Liz read the latest episode of how Wilberforce went on his holidays, but the mice sabotaged his luggage and towed the train off the track so he ended up in Oswaldtwistle instead of Devon, and with no swimming trunks. Where the hell is Oswaldtwistle, by the way? And did you ever try writing kids’ books? I bet Wilberforce would outsell Harry Potter.