Then, one day in early March, I dropped in at the house as usual to find that something had happened. Those mysterious tricks, or ‘parlour games’—as Caroline had once dubbed them—had started up again, in a new form.
She didn’t want to tell me about them at first. She said they were ‘too boring to mention’. But she and her mother both looked tired, and I happened to comment on it; and then she confessed to me that, for the past few nights, they had been woken in the early hours of the morning by the ringing of the telephone bell. It had happened three or four times, she said, always between two and three o’clock; and every time, when they had gone down to unhook the receiver, the line had been dead.
They had wondered, at one point, if the caller could be me. ‘You were the only person we could think of,’ Caroline said, ‘who might be up at that sort of time.’ She glanced at her mother, colouring slightly. ‘It wasn’t you, I suppose?’
‘No, it wasn’t!’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t dream of calling so late! And at two o’clock this morning, as it happens, I was tucked up in bed. So unless I put through the call in my sleep—’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, smiling. ‘There must have been some sort of muddle at the exchange. I just wanted to be sure.’
She spoke as if that put an end to the matter, so I let the subject drop. The next time I visited, however, I learned that another call had come, again around half past two, a night or two before. Caroline had left the telephone to ring this time, lying in bed, unwilling to get up in the cold and the darkness. But at last its hard, hectic clamour had been too much to ignore and, hearing her mother stirring in her room, she had gone down and picked up the receiver—only to find that, as usual, the line was dead.
‘At least, no,’ she corrected herself, ‘it wasn’t dead. That’s the funny thing. There was no voice, but I thought—oh, it sounds silly, but I could have sworn there was someone there. Someone who’d rung particularly for Hundreds, particularly for us. Again, you see, I thought of you.’
‘And once again,’ I said, ‘I was fast asleep and dreaming.’ And since we were on our own this time, I added, ‘Dreaming of you, very probably.’
I put up my hand to her hair; she caught my fingers and stilled them. ‘Yes. But someone called. And what I’ve been thinking—I can’t get the idea out of my mind. But you don’t think it could have been Roddie, do you?’
‘Rod!’ I said, startled. ‘Oh, surely not.’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it? Suppose he’s in some sort of trouble—at that clinic, I mean. We haven’t seen him for so long. Dr Warren just says the same thing every time he writes. They could be doing anything to him, trying any sort of medicine or treatment. We don’t know what they’re doing, really. We just pay the bills.’
I took both her hands in mine. She saw my face and said, ‘It’s only this feeling I had, that someone had rung up, well, with something to tell us.’
‘It was half past two in the morning, Caroline! Anybody would feel like that. It must be just what you thought last time; there must have been a mix-up in the lines. In fact, why don’t you ring the exchange right now, and talk to the girl, explain what’s happened?’
‘Do you think I should?’
‘If it will set your mind at rest, why not?’
So, frowning, she went over to the old-fashioned little parlour extension, and dialled for the operator. She stood with her back to me as she did it, but I listened to her running through the story of the calls. ‘Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,’ I heard her say, her voice artificially bright; and then, a moment later, with some of the brightness gone, ‘I see. Yes, I expect you’re right. Yes, thank you. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’
She set down the telephone and its ear-piece and turned back to me, her frown deeper than ever. Raising her fingers to her mouth to bite at the tips of them, she said, ‘The woman who works the night shift isn’t there now, of course. But the girl I spoke to looked at the tickets—their log, or whatever, where they keep a record of the calls. She said no one telephoned Hundreds this week, no one at all. She said no one called last week, either.’
‘Then,’ I said, after a moment, ‘that puts the whole thing beyond doubt. There’s clearly a fault with the line—or more probably with the wiring in this house. It wasn’t Rod at all. You see? It wasn’t anyone.’
‘Yes,’ she said slowly, still nibbling at her fingers. ‘That’s what the girl said. Yes, it must be that, mustn’t it?’
She spoke as if wanting to be convinced. But the telephone rang again that night. And because when I next saw her she was still irrationally troubled by the idea that her brother might be trying to contact her, to put her mind completely at rest I called up the Birmingham clinic, to ask if there was any possibility of Rod’s having made the calls. I was assured that there was not. It was Dr Warren’s assistant I spoke to, and his tone, I noticed, was less breezy than when I had seen him just before Christmas. He told me that Rod, after seeming to have made some slight but definite progress at the start of the year, had recently disappointed them all by having ‘a bad couple of weeks’. He didn’t go into details, but, like a fool, I made this call with Caroline at my side. She caught enough of the conversation to realise that the news was not good; and after that she was more subdued and preoccupied than ever.
And as if in response to this shift in her anxieties, the telephone calls ceased, and a fresh set of nuisances took over. This time I was there the day they began, having dropped in between cases: Caroline and I were again alone together in the little parlour—in fact I had been kissing her goodbye and she had just stepped out of my arms—when the door opened, surprising us both. Betty came in, made a curtsey, and asked ‘what was wanted of her’.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Caroline, flustered, speaking sharply, brushing back her hair.
‘The bell rung, miss.’
‘Well, I didn’t ring it. It must be my mother who wants you.’
Betty looked confused. ‘Madam’s upstairs, miss.’
‘Yes, I know she’s upstairs.’
‘But please, miss, it were the little parlour bell that rung.’
‘Well, it couldn’t have been, could it, if I didn’t ring it, and neither did Dr Faraday! Do you think it rang itself? Go on upstairs, if my mother wants you.’
Blinking, Betty backed away. When the door was closed I caught Caroline’s eye, wiping my mouth and almost laughing. But she wouldn’t return my smile. She turned away as if impatient. And she said, with surprising force, ‘Oh, this is hateful. I can’t bear it! All this slinking around, like cats.’
‘Like cats!’ I said, amused by the image. I reached for her hand to pull her back. ‘Come here, Puss. Nice Puss.’
‘Stop it, for heaven’s sake. Betty might come.’
‘Well, Betty’s a country girl. She knows about the birds and the bees, and the cats … Besides, you know the solution, don’t you? Marry me. Next week—tomorrow—whenever you like. Then I can kiss you, and to hell with who sees. And little Betty will be busier than ever, bringing us our eggs and bacon in bed in the morning, and nice things like that.’
I was still smiling, but she turned back to me with an odd expression. She said, ‘But, what do you mean? We wouldn’t—we wouldn’t be here, would we?’
We had never discussed the practical side of the life we would have together, married. I had taken it for granted that I would live with her there at the Hall. I said, less certainly than before, ‘Well, why not? We couldn’t leave your mother, could we?’
She was frowning. ‘But how would it work, with your patients? I’d assumed—’
I smiled. ‘You wouldn’t rather live with me in Lidcote, in that dreadful old house of Gill’s?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Well, we can sort something out. I’ll keep the surgery going in the village, perhaps start up some night-system with Graham … I don’t know. Everything will change, anyway, in July, when the Health Service comes in.’
‘But when you came back from London,’ she said, ‘you told me there might be a post for you there.’
She took me by surprise; I’d forgotten all about it. My trip to London felt an age away now; the affair with her had put the whole thing out of my head. I said carelessly, ‘Oh, there’s no point thinking about it now. July will change everything. There might be posts galore after that; or posts for no one.’
‘For no one? But, then how would we ever leave?’
I blinked. ‘Would we want to leave?’
‘I thought,’ she began, and she looked so anxious, I reached for her hand again, saying, ‘Look, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of time for all this sort of thing once we are married. That’s the main thing, isn’t it? The thing we want most of all?’
She said that yes, of course it was … I raised her hand to my mouth to kiss it, then, putting on my hat, I made my way to the front door.
And there I saw Betty again. She was coming down the staircase, looking more confused than ever, and slightly sulky, too. Mrs Ayres, it seemed, was fast asleep in her bedroom, so it couldn’t possibly have been she who had rung for a maid. But then, Betty told me, she had never supposed that it had been: it was the little parlour bell that had rung—she would swear to it on her own mother’s life—and if Miss Caroline and I didn’t believe it, well, it wasn’t fair, to have her word doubted like that. Her voice rose as she spoke, and soon Caroline appeared, wondering what the commotion was. Glad to escape, I left them arguing together, and thought nothing more of it.
By the time I returned at the end of that week, however, the Hall was, in Caroline’s words, ‘a madhouse’. The call-bells had developed a mysterious life of their own, ringing out at all sorts of hours, so that Betty and poor Mrs Bazeley were continually traipsing from room to room asking what was wanted of them, sending Caroline and her mother to distraction. Caroline had examined the junction-box of bells and wires down in the basement and could find nothing wrong with it.
‘It’s as though an imp gets in there,’ she told me, taking me down to the vaulted passage, ‘and plays on the wires to torment us! It isn’t mice or rats, either. We’ve put down trap after trap and caught nothing.’
I looked at the box in question: that imperious device, as I had once thought of it, to which wires ran, like the nerves of the house, through tubes and channels from the rooms above. I knew from experience that the wires were not especially sensitive things, and that sometimes one had to tug at a lever quite vigorously in order to set a bell ringing, so Caroline’s story rather bemused me. She brought me a lamp and a screwdriver, and I poked around at the workings for a while, but the mechanism was very simple, none of the wires was overtaut, and, like Caroline herself, I could find no fault. I could only, with some unease, recall those creaks or raps that the women had heard, a few weeks before; I thought, too, of the sagging saloon ceiling, the spreading damp, the bulging brickwork … I said nothing about it to Caroline, but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Hall had reached a point of dilapidation where one defect was almost setting off another; and I felt more dismayed and frustrated by the house’s decline than ever.
Meanwhile, the call-bells continued their restless, maddening activity, until finally, sick and tired of the whole thing, Caroline took a pair of wire-snippers and put the junction-box out of use. After that, whenever she or her mother wanted Betty they had to go to the head of the service staircase and shout for her. Often they’d simply carry on down to the kitchen and see to the chore themselves—just as if they had no servants at all.
But the house, it seemed, would not be so easily subdued, and before another week had passed, a new trouble had emerged. The problem this time lay with a relic of the Hall’s Victorian years—an old speaking-tube, which had been installed in the 1880s to allow the nursery staff to communicate with the cook, and which ran right down through the house from the day-nursery on the second floor, to finish at a small ivory mouthpiece in the kitchen. The mouthpiece was stoppered by a whistle, fastened to it by a slim brass chain, and designed to sound when the tube was blown into at the other end. Naturally, with Caroline and Roderick both grown up, it was a very long time since the speaking-tube had last been put to serious use. The nurseries themselves had been stripped of their fittings at the start of the war, so that the rooms could be occupied by the officers of the army unit that had been billeted with Mrs Ayres. Altogether, in fact, the tube must have lain there, mute and dusty and undisturbed, for fifteen years.
Now, however, Mrs Bazeley and Betty went to Caroline to complain that the disused mouthpiece had started giving off eerie little whistles.
I had the whole story from Mrs Bazeley herself, when I went down to the kitchen a day or two later to see what the trouble was. She said that, at first, they’d heard the whistling and couldn’t imagine what was making it. It had been faint, then—‘Faint,’ she said, ‘and gusty; all blow. Well, just like the sound of a kettle working himself up to a boil’—and they’d concluded doubtfully that it must be the hiss of air escaping from the central-heating pipes. But one morning the whistle had sounded so clearly there could be no mistaking the source of it. Mrs Bazeley had been on her own in the kitchen at the time, putting loaves into the oven, and the sudden piercing blast had so startled her, she’d burnt her wrist. She didn’t, she told me as she showed me the blister, even know what the speaking-tube was. She hadn’t been at Hundreds long enough ever to have seen the contraption in use. She’d always thought the tarnished mouthpiece and whistle ‘part of the electrics’.
It had taken Betty to work the thing out and explain it to her; and so when, a day later, the whistle sounded shrilly again, Mrs Bazeley naturally supposed that Caroline or Mrs Ayres wanted to talk to her from one of the rooms upstairs. She went doubtfully to the mouthpiece, drew out the whistle, and set her ear to the ivory cup.
‘And what did you hear?’ I asked her, following her apprehensive gaze across the kitchen to the now-silent tube.
She made a face. ‘A queer sort of noise.’
‘Queer, how?’
‘I can’t say. Like a breath.’
‘A breath?’ I said. ‘You mean a person, breathing? Was there a voice?’
No, there wasn’t a voice. It was more of a rustling. Then again, not quite a rustling … ‘Well, like hearing the operator,’ she said, ‘over the telephone. You don’t hear her speak, but you know her’s listening. You know her’s there. Oh, it were queer!’
I stared at her, struck for a moment by the similarity between her words and Caroline’s description of the mysteriously ringing phone. She met my gaze, and shuddered; she said she had stuck the whistle hastily back in its socket, and run from the room to fetch Betty, and Betty, after nerving herself up to it, had put her own ear to the mouthpiece, and had also had the feeling of ‘something queer’ being in the tube. That’s when they had gone upstairs to complain about the business to the Ayreses.
They had found Caroline, alone, and told her everything that had happened. She must have been struck by Mrs Bazeley’s words, too: she listened carefully to their story, then accompanied them back to the kitchen and gingerly listened at the tube herself. But she heard nothing, nothing at all. She said they must have been imagining things; or that the whistles were caused by ‘the wind playing tricks’. She hung a tea-cloth over the mouthpiece and told them that, if the noise were to start again, they must simply ignore it. And she added, as an afterthought, that she hoped they would say nothing of this new nuisance to Mrs Ayres.
Her visit didn’t do much to reassure them. In fact, the tea-cloth seemed only to make things worse. For now the speaking-tube became ‘like a parrot in a cage’: every time they found themselves starting to forget about it, and to sink back into their old routines, it would let out one of its awful whistles and frighten them to death.
In any other setting, such a story would have struck me as farcical. But the Hall, by now, had a disconcertingly palpable air of stress of tension: the women in it
were tired and nervous, and I could see that Mrs Bazeley’s fear, at least, was very real. When she’d finished speaking, I left her side, and went across the kitchen to look at the speaking-tube myself. Lifting the tea-cloth I found a bland ivory cup and whistle, fixed to the wall at head height on a shallow wooden mount. A less sinister-looking thing it would have been hard to imagine—and yet, when I thought of the disquiet it had managed to inspire, the very quaintness of the object before me began to seem slightly grotesque. I was reminded uneasily of Roderick. I remembered those ‘ordinary things’—the collar, the cufflinks, the shaving-mirror—which had seemed, in his delusion, to come to crafty, malevolent life.
Then, as I drew the whistle free, another thought struck me. This was a nursery servants’ speaking-tube; my mother had been nursery maid here. She must have spoken many times into this device, forty years before … The thought caught me off guard. I had the sudden irrational idea that, in putting my ear to the cup, I would hear my mother’s voice. I had the idea that I’d hear her calling my name, exactly as I’d used to hear her, calling me home at the end of the day, when I was a boy playing out in the fields at the back of our house.