As I neared London the traffic was heavy and I was stationary for some fifteen minutes. There was nothing remotely unusual about the place – an uninteresting stretch of suburban road. I was not thinking of the house or the garden or the hand, I was making a mental list of people I could contact with my various client requirements, remembering someone in Rome, and another in Scotland who might well be interested in the fishing books.
I glanced at the stationary traffic in the opposite lane, then in my rear-view mirror at a lorry. It did not matter that I was delayed. I had no appointment to rush to. I was simply bored.
I cannot say that anything happened. It is very difficult to explain what took place, or did not, as I waited in my car. Anyone would tell me that my imagination had been thoroughly wound up and become overexcited and likely to react to the slightest thing, because of the events of the past few weeks, and they would be right. And that is the point. My imagination did not play tricks, I heard, saw, sensed, smelled, felt nothing. Nothing. There was nothing. The strongest sensation was one of nothingness, as if I had been abandoned in some way. Nothing would come near me again, I would not be troubled or contacted. Nothing. I would never feel the sensation of the small hand in mine, or wonder if I was being watched, if something was trying to lure me into whatever lay ahead. Nothing. There was nothing. It had left me, like a fever which can suddenly, inexplicably lift, like the mist that clears within seconds.
Nothing.
I was entirely alone in my car, as the traffic began to nudge slowly forward, and I would be alone when I reached my flat. If I went back to the White House, or to the monastery, I would be alone and there would never again be a child dashing across the road through the storm in the path of my moving car.
Nothing.
I felt an extraordinary sense of release.
Half an hour later, as I walked into my flat, I knew that it had not been a fantasy, or even wishful thinking. I was free and alone, whatever it was had left me and would not return. How does one account for such strong convictions? Where had they come from and how?
Would I miss the small hand? I even wondered that for a fleeting second, because before it had begun to urge me into dangerous places, it had been strangely comforting, as if I had been singled out for a particular gentle gesture of affection from the unseen.
But the one thing I could not forget was the photograph the old woman had shown me of Hugo, his friend and me in the White House garden. I certainly had no recollection of the day or the place, but that was not surprising. I could only have been about five years old – though in the way details remain, I had remembered the Fair Isle jumper so clearly. I would ring Hugo when he was back from the States and ask him about it, though I really had no particular reason for my continuing interest except that coincidence sometimes forms a pleasing symmetry.
A COUPLE OF days later, I had a call from a dealer in New York who had a couple of items I had long been in search of and, as there were various other books I could ask about for clients while I was there, I left on a trip which then took me to San Francisco and North Carolina. I was away for three weeks, returned and flew straight off again to Munich, Berlin and then Rome and back to New York. By the time I was home, several missions having been successfully accomplished, it was late September. I was so involved with work in London for the following week or so that I completely forgot everything that had happened to me and the business of the photograph did not cross my mind.
And then I came in after dining with a potential client from Russia, to find a message from Hugo on my answerphone.
‘Hi, Bro … it’s been ages … wondered if you fancied coming up here next weekend. Benedicte’s playing a concert in the church – you’d like it. Time we caught up anyway. Give us a call.’
I did so and we arranged that I would drive up to Suffolk the following Friday evening. Hugo always had an early start to his school day, so I didn’t keep him long on the phone, but as we were about to ring off, I said, ‘By the way … I don’t suppose you remember this any more than I do – but when we were kids, did we go with the folks to see a garden in Sussex? It was called the White House.’
I do not know what I expected Hugo to say – probably that he had no more idea than I did.
Instead, he said nothing. There was complete silence for so long that I asked if he was still there. When he did reply, his voice sounded odd.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘here.’
‘You don’t remember anything about it, do you?’
Another silence. Then, ‘Why are you asking this?’
‘Oh, I just happened upon a photograph of us there – sitting on a bench outside. You, me and a friend.’
‘No. There was no friend.’
‘So you do remember it?’
‘There was no friend. I’ll see you on Friday.’
‘Yes, but hang on, you …’
But Hugo had put the phone down.
Twenty
arrived in time to change quickly and go along to the church where Benedicte was playing oboe in the concert, both as orchestral member for the Bach and as soloist in the Britten Metamorphoses. It was a fine and rather moving occasion and neither Hugo nor I felt inclined to chat as we walked back to the house. It was a chilly night with bright stars and the faint smell of bonfires lingering on the air. Autumn was upon us.
But it was not only our rather contemplative mood after the music that prevented conversation. I could feel the tension coming from Hugo like an un-spoken warning, something I had not known since the days of his illness. It was almost tangible and its message was clear – don’t talk to me, don’t ask questions. Back off. I was puzzled but I knew better than to try and break down the barbed-wire defences he had put up against me and we reached the house in silence.
The orchestra and performers were being given refreshments elsewhere so we had supper to ourselves, an awkward supper during which I told Hugo half-heartedly about the First Folio and something about my foreign trips, he told me tersely about Katerina’s university plans and that he was wondering whether to apply for headships. If he wanted to progress up the schools career ladder, now was the time. I don’t think I had ever had such a strained hour with my brother and, as we cleared up the plates, I said that I thought I would go early to bed.
But as I turned, Hugo said, ‘There’s something you ought to know. Have a whisky.’
We went into his study. By day this cosy room which overlooks the garden and the path to the river is flooded with light from the East Anglian sky. Now the curtains were closely drawn. Hugo switched the gas fire on, poured us drinks. Sat down. He stared into his glass, swirling the topaz liquid round, and did not speak.
I knew I should wait, not try and hurry him but after several silent minutes I said, ‘You remember all that stuff I told you … panic attacks and so forth?’
Hugo glanced at me and nodded. His expression was wary.
‘You were right – they just stopped. Went. It all stopped. Whatever it was.’
‘Good.’
Then I said, ‘You’d better tell me.’
He swirled the whisky again, then drank it quickly.
‘The other boy,’ he said. ‘I was there, you were there. On the bench. Then you say there was another boy? A friend, you called him. How old was he?’
I tried to bring the photograph to mind. I could see my boy-self, in the Fair Isle jumper. Hugo – I didn’t remember Hugo clearly at that age, one never does, but it was Hugo.
‘So far as I remember … younger than either of us, which made me wonder how he could have been a friend one of us had brought. Short hair, short grey trousers … oh, you know, like us. Just a younger boy like us.’
‘What was his face like?’
I tried again but it was not clear. I had only seen the photograph once, although I had stared at it hard, in my surprise, for some moments.
I shook my head.
‘There was no other boy,’ Hugo said.
I opene
d my mouth to say that of course there was another boy, he had not seen the photograph and I had, but Hugo’s face was pale and very serious.
He got up and poured us both a second whisky and, as he handed me mine, I noticed that his hand was shaking.
‘The story,’ he said at last, ‘is this. We went twice. To that place.’
‘The White House? That garden? What do you mean?’
‘Mother took us. I was at prep school … at Mill-gate. I was out for the weekend. She brought you. It was an outing.’
I remembered little about Hugo being away at school then, though there was always a strange sense of loss, a loneliness, a hollowness at the centre of my everyday life, but by the time I was old enough to understand what it meant I had gone away to school myself, and Hugo was at Winchester.
‘A boy drowned.’
I heard the words in the quiet room but it took me a moment to make sense of them.
‘A boy …’
‘He was the grandson – of the woman. That woman.’
‘Denisa Parsons?’
‘Her grandson. He was small – two? Something like that. Quite small. He drowned in the lily pond. In the garden.’
I looked at my brother. His eyes seemed to have sunken back into their sockets and his face was now deathly pale.
‘How do you know this? Did someone tell you? Did mother …’
‘I was there,’ Hugo said. His voice was low and he seemed to be speaking half to himself. ‘I was there.’
‘What do you mean, “there”? At that place? Do you mean in the garden? Were we all there?’
‘No. You and mother had gone to some other part – there were high hedges … arches … you’d gone through. You were somewhere else.’
He took a sip of whisky. ‘I don’t remember very much. I was by myself in the garden where there was – a big pool. With fish. Golden fish. Then there was – the boy. He was there. I don’t remember. But he drowned. The rest is – is what we were told. Not what I remember. I remember nothing.’ He looked directly across at me and his eyes seemed suddenly brilliant.
‘I remember nothing.’
I heard Benedicte’s car draw up outside and, after a moment, the front door. Hugo did not move.
‘One thing,’ I managed to say after a moment, ‘one thing doesn’t make sense. The child. The little boy fell into the pool and drowned, but what has that to do with the other boy with us in the photograph? The boy on the bench. We were both older. I don’t know why she took us back – do you?’
He shrugged. ‘I remember nothing.’
‘Not the second visit? But you were older – what, eleven?’
‘And how much do you remember of when you were eleven?’
There were footsteps across the hall and then the wireless being turned on low in the kitchen. My brother stood up.
‘Hugo.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You started to say something, you can’t leave it. You said there was no boy in the photograph. But I saw a boy. I saw him as clearly as I saw you. As I saw myself.’
He hesitated. Then waved a hand dismissively. ‘Some tale,’ he said. ‘Always is some tale. About a boy who comes back to the garden – that boy.’
‘What do … a boy who comes back?’
‘Come on. I don’t believe in ghosts, nor do you.’
‘Oh, as to that … you know what happened to me. Hugo …’ I went and put my hands on his shoulders, almost shaking him in my rising anger – for it was anger, anger with him for knowing something and trying to keep it from me. ‘Tell me.’
He waited until I had let my hands drop. Then he said, ‘A boy – that boy I suppose. He was said to go back to the garden – ghosts do that, don’t they, so the tales go? Return to the place where whatever happened – happened. He was supposed to. That’s all. Just a tale.’
‘But the boy who was drowned was small – two years old. This one in the photograph was older … it can’t be the same. This boy in the picture was a real boy, not a ghost.’
‘How do you know? How do you know what a ghost looks like? White and wispy? Half there?’ He laughed, an odd little dry laugh. ‘The ghost went back there every year and every year he was one year older. He was growing up – like a real boy.’
‘That’s not …’
‘What? Not possible?’
I fell silent. None of the things that happened were possible in any normal, rational person’s world. But they had happened.
‘How do you know all this? You lied to me.’
‘Did I?’
‘When I first told you about the small hand in mine, about …’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, that? I shouldn’t think that’s got anything to do with it, should you? That was just you having a bit of a turn. Coincidence. No, no, forget about it. But if you want to know, the whole story is on the Internet. One of those spook haunting sites. I happened to be looking one night – for the boys. We’d been reading The Turn of the Screw… you know how it is. You start browsing around …’ He laughed the short laugh again. ‘Can’t remember what it was called but you’ll find it there. The White House ghost … all good fun.’
He drained the last of his whisky, picked up both glasses and went towards the door without saying another word. I sat on for a moment. I heard his voice, then Benedicte’s, low brief snatches of talk.
I felt suddenly exhausted and my head had begun to ache. I wanted to piece together what Hugo had told me, join it up with the things that I had witnessed in the garden to make a whole picture, but they were as disconnected as jigsaw bits in my mind. I was too tired. They would come together, though, I didn’t doubt it.
I might look up the story on the Internet, but something about the way my brother had talked didn’t ring true. I believed he had found the story on a website, but not by accident when looking up Henry James.
THE NEXT MORNING, Hugo had gone across to school by the time I came down for breakfast, and in the afternoon he was refereeing a football match, which he did for fun, not because he was on the sports teaching team. Benedicte and I went out into the Suffolk countryside looking at churches, and ended up at a bookshop which also served teas. Over a pot, and some excellent scones, I asked her if Hugo had mentioned my brief spell of panic attacks, and whether he ever had a recurrence of them himself.
‘No and no,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘Adam, poor you. People often laugh at such things, but they are truly awful. No, his breakdown was over and done. But I wonder, now you say this, if there was anything connecting you?’
‘Runs in the family, you mean?’ I shook my head. ‘I doubt it. A lot of people have what I had.’
‘And have you an idea why you had? Is there not always a reason?’
I hesitated, then shrugged.
She smiled. ‘Well, it is all over now I hope?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘That’s good. Because for Hugo too … nothing ever came back. He is now very strong and sane.’
WE DROVE HOME through the darkening lanes, talking a little about music and books, more about Katerina and her prospects for getting into Cambridge to read medicine, and as we did so I felt a strange sense of lightness and well-being. The ghost story my brother had told me had explained a great deal. That the small child who had accidentally drowned should have returned to the place and wanted to be with other children seemed natural and I knew people had taken ‘photographs’ of ghosts. I had even seen one, a whole-school photograph with a ghostly master on the far end of the back row – though I confess I had always thought it some sort of fake. But those fakes, easy now with digital cameras, were once not so readily accomplished and as far as I could remember the boy had not looked in any way ghostly in the photograph the old woman had shown me. If he had, surely I would not just have accepted him as a third boy – our unknown ‘friend’.
As I drove, I thought of the small hand, which I now believed to belong to the drowned boy. I had ventured into that place and he had caught hold of me. Had he f
ound me every time I went near water and especially near pools? It seemed so. But why did he urge me forward? Why did I feel such fear of what might be about to happen? I shivered. It seemed beyond belief that he had such ghostly will and power that he could urge me to fall into water and drown and so join him. But what other explanation was there?
We turned into the town and drove down past the main school buildings towards the house.
Well, it was over. The ghostly power had faded. The only puzzle that remained was my visit to the White House when I had met the old woman. Had she been a ghost too? No, she had been real and substantial, though odd, but then, surviving alone in that near-derelict place would drive anyone mad. The drowned child had been her grandson and perhaps he haunted her too, perhaps she felt the small hand in hers, perhaps he took her down those gardens which led out of one another, to the place where the pool had been and that was now just a fairy ring in the ground. Poor woman. She needed help and care and company, but the world often throws up slightly deranged people like her, living on in a dream world, clinging to the past among ruins of its places. Presumably she would die there, alone, starving or ill, or in the aftermath of some accident. I wondered if I could return and talk to her again, persuade her to accept help, even to leave that dreadful, melancholy place in which her whole past life was bound up but which was not somewhere a once handsome, successful, celebrated woman should end her days. I determined to do that. And perhaps at the back of my mind was the thought that I would ask her, gently and tactfully, about her grandson, and whether the photograph was indeed of him as he might have been a few years after his death. And if she was visited by the small hand.
Even though it had left now, and I was quite free and quite unafraid, I could not yet forget the feel of it holding mine, or the effect its power had had on me.
AS WE WENT in I started to wonder if I could make the journey down to Sussex again. In any case, I expected to have news for Sir Edgar Merriman about his psalter, though I might have to take another trip to New York first. New York in the fall has a wonderful buzz, the start of the season in the auction houses, lots of new theatre, lots of good parties, the restaurants all full, but the weather still good for walking about. I felt a small dart of excitement.