Prospero’s Children

The building was on three storeys, with eight bedrooms but only one bathroom and an extra loo downstairs. ‘The Victorians,’ Robin explained. ‘Grubby lot. Didn’t reckon too much to bathrooms.’ The cistern slurped and gurgled at the slightest provocation; hot water was not forthcoming. They went to bed unwashed, like the Victorians. Mrs Wicklow had made up the beds in three of the first-floor rooms; Robin chose the front room, Fern and Will slept at the back of the house. Fern lay awake for some time, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a country night. The rain was silent and there was no traffic, although once she heard the grating roar of an untuned engine on the road below, possibly a motorbike. A strange mewing cry must, she assumed, have been some nocturnal creature, maybe a bird: it was only the unfamiliarity of it which disturbed her. She slept fitfully, falling between uneasy dreams, not sure if the snuffling she could hear, along the wall beneath her window, was real or simply another phantom from the shadows of sleep.

In the morning she woke around nine and got up to look at her surroundings in daylight. There was a small garden at the back of the house but the flower-beds were scantily planted and the grass grew in tufts on what might have been intended for a lawn; only weeds and a few hardy shrubs thrived there. Beyond, the bare hillside, treeless and grey with dew, climbed up towards the moors and the sky. Occasional rocks broke the skin of turf, moss-padded, the outthrust bones of Earth; a bridle path skirted the garden and ascended the slope, a shadowy line against the contouring of the land. Above it Fern noticed something which might have been a solitary boulder or stump, curiously shaped, looking almost like an old man sitting hunched up, cloaked and hooded against the weather. It was not actually raining but a layer of pale cloud covered the sky and the air felt damp. A budding inclination to explore the path died when Fern realised she had come without suitable boots.

Downstairs, she found her brother in the kitchen, bemoaning a lack of cereal, while the water boiled away from the old-fashioned iron kettle which Robin had left on the hob.

‘Dad’s gone to the village shop,’ Will reported. ‘I asked him to get me some Frosties. He said he’d bring orange juice, too.’

‘Is there a village shop?’ Fern inquired, transferring the kettle to an unheated surface.

‘Probably.’

Robin returned about three quarters of an hour later with squash instead of juice and no Frosties. ‘Only cornflakes,’ he explained, ‘and porridge oats. Didn’t think you’d like those. Sorry about the juice. Said they’d run out.’

‘No Frosties!’ Will bewailed.

‘You took a long time,’ said Fern.

‘Met the vicar. Nice chap. Name of Dinsdale—Gus Dinsdale. Invited us to tea. Thought we might like to visit Edward Capel’s grave, pay our respects, I suppose. He’s buried here: local churchyard. Anyway, I said fine. Nothing else to do.’

‘A visit to a grave and tea with the vicar,’ said Will. ‘Lovely weekend we’re having.’

They spent the rest of the morning going through the house. Fern found a long-handled broom for the cobwebs and an antiquated vacuum cleaner which made a noise like a small tornado and seemed bent on sucking up the carpets. In the drawing room, she moved the idol to a place where it would not catch her eye every time she opened the door. It was much heavier than she had anticipated and the stone felt rough and chill; she shivered when she set it down. On the first floor, Robin became absorbed in the paintings and estimated that a couple of murky landscapes and the portrait of a little girl with Shirley Temple ringlets clutching a puppy might possibly be worth something. Will, disappointed to find that the vaulted gloom of the cellar contained nothing more promising than a wine-rack with several bottles of superior burgundy, was cheered by the discovery of an attic running the length of the house, colonised by spiders and littered with bric-a-brac, including an iron-bound chest which might have come straight from a pirates’ hoard. His enthusiasm was enhanced rather than mitigated when the chest proved to be locked, with no immediate sign of a key.

‘Looking for it will give you something useless to occupy your time,’ said Fern, who had stubbed her toe on a lurking footstool and was determined to find nothing intriguing in an overcrowded attic. She was too old for treasure hunts.

‘I say,’ said Robin from behind her. ‘Quite a place. Might find all kinds of stuff here—family heirlooms, missing works of art…That chair looks like a Chippendale. Pity it’s broken. Not much light, is there? We need Fern’s torch.’

They came down finally at lunchtime when Mrs Wicklow arrived carrying a covered dish. Her greeting was abrupt and her face only slightly less stony than that of the idol but the dish emanated an agreeable aroma of steak-and-kidney and Fern concluded that her attitude was not actively grudging, it was simply that she was resistant to change and unused to the incursion of strangers. ‘Solicitors told me t’ Captain was your great-uncle,’ she said to Robin over their meal.

‘Well, not exactly…’

‘We decided he was our great-cousin,’ Will said, ‘with an extra great for Fern and me.’

‘You must miss him,’ Fern offered.

‘He was a good man,’ Mrs Wicklow conceded, ‘but tired. He was old and he didn’t like it. He couldn’t go walking the way he used to. Folks say long life is a thing to wish for, but I’m not so sure. It can’t be pleasant to outlive your friends. T’ Captain, he wasn’t t’ same since his dog died.’

‘Was he really a captain?’ Will asked.

‘He was that. Been all over the world, he had. I don’t know as how he ever really took to it, being what he called a landsman all the time. Of course, we’re near the coast here. He’d go down to look at t’ sea often and often, and come back sad about the eyes. Can’t say I trust it myself, t’ sea: it can seem so blue and gentle, but t’ water’s always cold and tricksy underneath.’

‘He must have collected a lot of things on his travels,’ Will said opportunely. ‘I don’t suppose you know where I could find the key to that big chest in the attic?’

‘Could be anywhere.’ Mrs Wicklow achieved a shrug. ‘House is full of stuff. Most of it’s rubbish, if you ask me; he wasn’t one for throwing things away. T’ key’ll be tucked in a drawer in t’ study or bedroom if you’re that set on it.’

‘Which was the Captain’s room?’ Will pursued.

‘One Mr Capel has now,’ Mrs Wicklow said. She had done some investigative bed-making before serving the pie.

‘Er—make it Robin,’ their father interjected. ‘Mr Capel…bit formal.’

‘Mr Robin, then.’

‘Might not all be rubbish, you know,’ Mr Robin remarked, discarding any further attempt at informality. ‘There are some good pictures, although I expect those came to him through the family.’

‘I don’t mind pictures,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s that heathen idol in the drawing room I don’t like. Evil-looking object, I told t’ Captain to his face. Unchristian. He said it amused him. There’s different kinds of God, he used to say, all over t’ world. That’s not a kind I’d want in my prayers, I told him, nor any respectable person.’

‘I don’t care for it much either,’ said Fern.

‘And then there’s that woman,’ Mrs Wicklow continued, obscurely. ‘Carved out of a whole tree, according to t’ Captain, painted up as bright as life, and showing her all just like in t’ Sunday papers. She came from a shipwreck, he said, back in t’ old days when ships had a real lady up front for t’ sailors to warm to, only she doesn’t look much like a lady to me. T’ prow, that’s what they call it. He kept it in t’ barn next door, and a big piece of t’ ship with it.’

‘We haven’t looked in the barn yet,’ said Will, glancing compellingly at his father, his interest in sea chests temporarily in abeyance.

‘We ought to go and see,’ Robin affirmed. ‘A ship’s figurehead—sounds pretty exciting.’ His eyes were as bright as his son’s.

Fern stayed in the kitchen, although her offer to help with the washing up was firmly rejected.

‘Funny thing, what your brother was asking,’ Mrs Wicklow resumed. ‘There was a young woman over from Guisborough, not long before t’ Captain died. Something to do with antiques. They’re all crooks, so I hear. Wanting him to sell stuff, she was. He sent her about her business. Anyway, I was doing t’ drawing room when they came downstairs, and I heard them talking. She was asking about keys.’

Later that afternoon they paid a brief visit to the churchyard, where Ned Capel lay in the lee of a dry stone wall, with the turf plumped up like a pillow over his grave. It was a quiet place hollowed into the hillside, with the petals of a hawthorn drifting across the ground like a spring snowfall. ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea,’ Fern quoted, and for an instant she felt, irrationally, that she too had come home—home to the grimness of Dale House and the wild country waiting in the wings. ‘Is it supposed to be haunted?’ she asked the vicar, over tea.

‘Extraordinary question,’ said Robin. ‘Didn’t think you believed in ghosts.’

‘I don’t. It’s just—when we arrived, the house appeared, not exactly menacing, but reserved, sort of sullen, unwilling—or afraid—to let us in. I almost fancied…’ She checked herself, remembering her vaunted distrust of fancies.

‘I’ve never been too sure about hauntings,’ said the Reverend Dinsdale. He was younger than Fern had expected, probably under forty, with a friendly bony face and a long neck in which a mobile Adam’s apple fluctuated expressively. ‘I can’t really imagine a human spirit is going to mope around the same old place for centuries just because it was murdered there, or something equally nasty. All the more reason to move on, I would have thought. On the other hand, some houses have a definite personality. I’ve often wondered if it’s the buildings themselves which remember—and maybe sometimes the memory can be strong enough to reproduce an old image, a sound, even a smell, so that human senses can detect it Perhaps there’s a kind of house-spirit which lives in such places, a degenerate form of something that was once akin to mankind, craving the company of the living even while it resents them, reminded of what it might have been.’

‘A sort of genius loci,’ Will supplied knowledgeably. He was in a beatific mood after the vicar’s wife had donated a packet of Frosties from her larder.

‘That’s it. Pure speculation, of course. Mind you, it’s fairly well grounded in folk mythology. In the past, every house in Yorkshire had its own hobgoblin. The occupants would put out a saucer of milk or a choice morsel of food to keep it sweet, and in return it would look after the house, see off danger and disease, that kind of thing. Much more efficient than a burglar alarm.’

‘Maybe we should get Fern to put out some milk for ours,’ Robin suggested slyly.

‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ his daughter retorted.

‘I don’t know about ghosts,’ Will said, ‘but I heard a weird sniffing noise last night, going along the wall under my window. It was awfully loud.’ Fern glanced at him with suddenly widening eyes.

‘Could be a badger,’ the vicar said. ‘They always sound as if they have a cold in the head. What you want to do is go out in the morning and check for tracks. I’ve got a book in my study with some good illustrations: I’ll show you what to look for.’

By the time they returned to Ned Capel’s house the daylight was failing. The cloud-cover had begun to break up and chinks of fire appeared in the far west above a muffled sunset, while eastwards great lakes of pale green had opened up, with a star or two winking in their depths. The motorcyclist Fern had heard the previous night roared past them on the narrow road, a little too close for comfort, his exhaust rattling and a black visor hiding his face. Their temporary home loomed up ahead of them, its unyielding frontage looking no longer threatening but merely solid, sternly dependable, as safe as a castle wall which would keep them from the night. Fern went straight up to her room and gazed out towards the sunset: twilight dimmed the rugged hillside but she could still distinguish the paler thread of the path and the stump or boulder that resembled a seated man on the bank above, maintaining its timeless vigil over the house. Something like a bird swooped past, its wing-beat too swift for the eye to follow, its flight-path erratic. Then there was another, and another. They made a faint high-pitched chittering unlike any birdsong. ‘Bats!’ Fern thought with a sudden shiver, part fear, part pleasure. She had never seen a bat outside the nature programmes on television and although she was not really frightened of them they seemed to her alien and fantastical, messengers symbolising her transition into another world. The teeming man-made metropolis where she had grown up shrank in her mind until it was merely a blob of meaningless ferment, and beyond it she glimpsed a boundless universe, with pock-marked moons sinking behind drifting hills, and blue voids opening in between, and dusty nebulae floating like clouds across the backdrop of space, and at the last a starry sea whose glittering waves hissed forever on the silver beaches at the margin of being. For a moment she was spellbound, panic-stricken; and then the endless vistas vanished from her head and there was only the hillside climbing to the barren moor and the zigzagging of the bats. The sunset had faded from behind the cloud-wrack and in the softened light details were briefly clearer: Fern squinted at the view, striving after uncertainty, knowing that what she saw was against logic, against sense. The solitary boulder had gone. The path was empty, the slope bare; in an eyeblink, the duration of a mirage, the hunched up rock or stump had disappeared. Fern flinched away from the window with a lurching heart and made herself walk slowly from the room.

Tea had been heavy on scones and cake and accordingly the three of them ate a cursory supper and spent the rest of the evening trying to elucidate the rule-book for a box of Mah Jongg tiles unearthed in the attic.

‘Good thing, no telly,’ said Robin a little doubtfully. ‘Makes you create your own amusements. Stretches the mind.’

‘We’ll have to get a TV here,’ said Will. ‘Also a music centre.’

‘No point,’ Fern said. ‘We’re going to sell. Will, you’re cheating. There’s no such thing as a King Kong.’