Pale Shadow of Science

‘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 – of a sashcord frame being thrown up, squealing in its runners as it went.

‘There’s someone up there,’ said my father. He snatched the poker and ran upstairs. Thrilled, I snatched the fire-tongs and followed close behind.

There was no one in the bedroom, except for my sister fast asleep in her bed. The metal-frame window remained closed. My father investigated the walk-in linen cupboard – how I was to fear that cupboard later – and found nothing. Eventually, we returned downstairs.

‘It must have been old Bessie,’ said my mother.

And we laughed. We had a ghost. And it had a name. Old Bessie.

‘We never did anything but good for Old Bessie,’ said my mother. ‘So she won’t harm us.’

Well, it is true that Bessie did us no harm. But she was ever active. Most ghosts are content to live on their reputations, or reappear once a year. Not Bessie. She was always about the house. Cats would not stay with us.

The focus of the trouble was always that room with the linen cupboard, where Bessie had died, where my sister slept. I occupied the other front bedroom across the landing, while my parents slept at the rear of the house, overlooking the garden. In a very short while, my sister was bursting out on the landing in the middle of the night, screaming and crying. A lady carrying a lamp had come out of the linen cupboard, or from behind the wardrobe, to stand over her bed. So my sister always told us. A fierce lady with a lamp.

An ideal solution was discovered to this dilemma. My sister and I should change bedrooms. After all, I was by this time at boarding school, and did not sleep at home most of the year.

So I inherited the room with the linen cupboard. When you opened the linen cupboard door, drawers and lockers confronted you on two sides. On the third side was a window without a curtain, leaving the place vulnerable to the night. I always fell asleep with my gaze directed towards that ominous cupboard.

Did Bessie visit me? She did. I cannot remember whether she frightened me. I do know that I understood that here was ideal subject matter for school where, in the little dormitory, I made the nights terrible as I told them the story of Old Bessie. Boys hid their heads under the blankets in fright.

Living with Old Bessie became increasingly difficult. We told nobody in town about her. She was a disgrace, nudging us like a bad conscience.

When she started to visit us downstairs, it all got too much.

One October evening, at about four o’clock, when the dusk begins to fall with peculiar intensity in Withburga Lane, when farmers go mad from melancholy and shoot their dogs and their wives, my mother was alone in the house. My sister and I were at school. My father had not yet returned home.

Mother was in the kitchen at the rear of the house, baking one of her famous cherry cakes, when she heard someone walking about the bathroom overhead. Assuming that my father had returned early, and surprised that he had not at least called out to her, she went through to the hall.

As she removed her apron, she looked up the stairwell and spoke his name. ‘Bill?’

No response, although she still heard the footsteps. It was dark up there.

‘Bill. Is that you? Are you there?’

The footsteps came out on to the upper landing.

‘Bill? Who is it? Who’s there?’

The footsteps began to descend the stairs.

She stood petrified as they passed by her eyes. Still descending. She could not leave the stairwell. The footsteps came down to hall level. They turned and came towards her.

It was then that she found the power to scream. She dropped her apron and rushed out of the front door into the lane. There she stood, as it grew dark, and waited for half an hour before my father returned. He had to coax her into the house.

‘If Bessie’s coming downstairs, I’m leaving,’ said my mother.

We sold the house. Nobody selling property mentions the fact that it is haunted. Ghosts do not increase the saleable value. We left Withburga, and shortly after that came the family row which exiled us from Norfolk forever.

Mrs Skinner and her ladies listened to the story with intense interest, peering at me through the hatch.

Immediately I had finished, they burst into excited talk. ‘There you are, what did I tell you?’ ‘So Old Bessie’s still about then ….’

Each of them had a tale to tell. They had heard spooky noises. One of them had had to come back at night and had been too frozen with fear to go in. Another had heard footsteps which seemed to walk through the cubicles upstairs. The girl at the hatch, not to be outdone, said, ‘And when you come in of a morning, there’s always – oh, you know, a kind of sinister something … I’ve never liked working here.’

Mrs Skinner told me that she had come back one evening after the offices were closed to do some work for her boss. She had gone upstairs to his room – the very room where Bessie had died – and was working there when she heard someone downstairs. Thinking it must be her boss, she had called out. No answer. When the steps began to come up the staircase, she grew alarmed and went to see who it was. The footsteps kept coming. She saw no one. She represented herself as a lady not easily upset – and indeed I believed it – but she had been so frightened that she had run downstairs and out into the lane, where she had waited until her boss arrived.

As she finished speaking, Mrs Skinner and I both realized at the same time the congruence between her story and my mother’s. We stared at each other.

And as we stared, I saw her expression change from one of a kind of quizzical amusement to one approaching fear. Her lips parted. She could not cease staring through the hatch at me.

Perturbed myself, I said, ‘I must disappear … go and join the funeral party.’

I shut the hatch. I stood there alone. The corridor was chill and empty; its hostility closed in upon me.

As I hurried down the corridor into the open, as I left Withburga, as I moved rapidly down the lane, I knew exactly what the expresion on Mrs Skinner’s face implied. She had become, in that instant, certain that she was talking to the ghost itself.