Element of doubt, p.1
Element of Doubt, page 1
Element of Doubt
Ghost Stories
A. L. BARKER
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Element of Doubt: Ghost Stories by A. L. Barker
Originally published by Vintage in 1992
First Valancourt Books edition 2023
Copyright © 1992 by A. L. Barker
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
Romney
Joe Rigby, as usual, had started to gather up his luggage a little too late. The parcel of boots threatened to burst open and he was so occupied with it, with his canvas holdall and his raincoat, that his stick had to be tossed out to him as the train moved off. It landed clattering on the platform and somehow by then it was no longer the helpful gesture of his fellow-travellers. He picked it up as sadly as if he had been thrown out neck and crop.
On the journey down he had been sizing himself up. It had put him in one of his useless moods. When he surrendered his ticket he felt a pang because there was no return half. What a coward. He had a hotel room at the back of Charing Cross to be homesick for, this was his usual hankering after the known rather than the unknown.
The railway station was on a hill and he could look down into a rich haze, like pollen dust, settling over the village. Sounds of life floated to the top, a motor-bike bubbling, someone hammering, children bouncing a ball. Yet another strange place that was as personal to some people as the hollows in their beds. Somewhere beyond the spinach green woods was the place he was intended to know, though not so well, he thought, as the hollows in his bed.
The bus to Bessemer was waiting in the Market, a high old-fashioned yellow affair with a couple of sacks and a drum of paraffin on the roof. It was almost full already. Joe found a seat next to a little dry seed of a man and piled his luggage on the floor between them. His stick fell and hit his neighbour lightly on the knee.
‘You weren’t at the Board,’ said the little man at once as if the contact had touched him off.
Joe drove his stick into the mound of luggage and it stood up between them like a small pole on a cairn. ‘I’ve just come off the London train.’
‘That’s where we’ve all been, the Board.’
‘Oh? What Board?’
‘What Board?’ The little man moved his hands as if he were throwing up pigeons. ‘Why, the Board. The Board, you know.’
‘Ah.’
His fellow-traveller looked reproving. ‘It meets every three months and I’ve never missed in twenty years.’
‘That’s quite a record.’
The bus began to shake diligently. As it lumbered out of the Market Joe’s neighbour peered wistfully into Joe’s face and touched him like an anxious child. ‘It suddenly came to me that I’d never so much as opened my mouth – except for “Yes” and “No” and “Hear-hear” – all the time I’d been going.’
‘Why,’ said Joe encouragingly, ‘I should think that’s another record.’
‘But it doesn’t do, it doesn’t do at all. People think you’re indifferent. In public affairs there’s nothing worse than indifference. It weighed on me.’ Joe could see how those bottle shoulders had drooped. ‘Day after day. And at night I used to wake up with it on my chest. You see I knew I ought to put in a word. What word and when was what worried me. You won’t credit it,’ he said with pride, ‘but it went on for best part of a year. Then this afternoon, this very afternoon, I spoke up. In front of them all and in the proper course of debate.’
‘Bravo! What did you say?’
‘I said, “Better be safe than sorry”. They’d been arguing, you see, and it put the whole thing in a nutshell. They could see then that I was on my toes.’ He pushed out his gentle jaw. ‘I’m a man of action, public speaking doesn’t come easy to me. But once in a while a man must get the better of his weaknesses. Not for the glory of it, for the sake of his self-respect.’ He locked his arms over his narrow chest with dignity.
Joe looked at him rather bleakly. God help him, he would have been grateful for a teaspoonful of that warming self-esteem. It’s the other thing men live by, thought Joe. That and bread. And after the first stab it dies so quickly. You hardly know it’s gone until someone tells you you’re small beer and you can’t deny it to yourself.
Of course Manning had been nice about it. ‘You’re the sort of fellow for this job. You’re bedrock, Joe, and that’s what youngsters need nowadays more than ever they did. There are too many bright sparks burning themselves out; we don’t want them in the teaching profession. We want – you’ll forgive me, Joe, because you’ll know what I mean – we want to get back to the old-fashioned virtues.’
Joe hadn’t forgiven him. A man of thirty can’t forgive the word ‘old-fashioned’, especially applied to his virtues.
Before the war Joe had been one of the bright sparks. He and his circle at college were about to set the world on fire when it took flame without them. Joe joined the army; within a month he had trodden on a nail. He spent three years in and out of hospital, lost his foot, almost lost his leg. It had damped him down. Irrevocably, it seemed. He was going to teach; later he would take a resident post in some school and that would be his life. He wasn’t really dissatisfied, except when he had these wry days of knowing that he had done nothing worth while.
And never will now, he thought, imagining the conflagrations he might have started in art, science, commerce or politics.
‘How far is it to Bessemer?’
His little neighbour unlocked both arms and wiped a hand round his harsh chin.
‘It’s as far as they go. When they get to the Bessemer crossroads there’s a bit of green with a signpost where the bus turns off. There’s nothing more that way, you see, bar the Priory.’
‘It’s the Priory I’m going to.’
To Joe’s surprise, the little man sharpened up like a gimlet. ‘Ah! Are they at it again, then?’
‘At what?’
‘Why, at their – ’ he hesitated and finished oddly, ‘ – hoping. What are they on to now?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘To send from London! That must be Mr. Steen’s idea.’ His excitement suddenly faded. ‘No doubt he’ll find out a great deal, poor soul, but will it profit him? Much better let it rest. Sometimes the only good about the past is that it’s past.’
‘I’m afraid – ’ repeated Joe, but the bus stopped and his neighbour scrambled out over Joe’s knees with a hurried ‘Good-day’.
Joe looked blankly after him. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. Gossip, he supposed, and the wrong end of the stick. But it made him wonder what he was going into. There was always something. His last job had shocked him consistently for the first few weeks until he got used to the family, the big unholy Irish family with a passion for trouble. Dropping into people’s lives he used to think – leaning towards the adventure he had never known – must be a bit like parachuting into enemy territory. People weren’t enemies but they were on their guard, they had their own language and their own policies and he had to live precariously on the outskirts.
He was about to drop in most uncertain territory. He knew next to nothing about Bessemer Priory. Manning had arranged it all, Manning had interviewed Mr. Steen – the Mr. Steen whose past was better past.
Will it be sinister, wondered Joe, or just scandalous?
When the bus put him down at the crossroads and rattled away, he stood with his belongings about him, turning his square mild face with deliberation this way and that. It was very quiet, the cold blue of evening established under the trees creeping and darkening as he watched. There was nothing much to see; the lane where the bus had come, another lane bisecting it where the bus had gone – both masked by a deep scrubby copse – and ahead of him the entrance to the Priory. The gates were open and a green pebble-cobble drive ran away from them into the dusk. Sighing, Joe gathered up his luggage and began to walk.
He was tired. Such thoughts as he now had slipped idly to and fro, taking him immeasurably far from the present and, for that matter, from the future or the past. He dreamed as he walked. He did not hear the bats cheeping nor the companionable scrape of his parcel rubbing on his thigh. When he had walked about half a mile he became aware that his foot ached. He stopped to rest it and at the same moment it occurred to him that Mr. Steen’s drive was unnecessarily long. He looked up with a flash of anger. He saw the Priory.
By some oversight Joe Rigby had never been near one of the stately homes of England. To him they were a phrase in a comic song; he was unprepared. Bessemer Priory broke gently, piercingly on his weariness and fixed the moment for him – one of those private moments that never fade, are never later than yesterday.
In the dusk there was no division between grey lawns and grey walls. The earth put forth Bessemer as a part of itself, a rich hoar budding into stone, and, as the ragged pods of cloister walls showed, as prone to blight or winter as any plant. The fin ger arches of window and doorway were filled with swarming black or with stems of citric-yellow light. Ecclesiastical, austere, the Priory had a benighted air, as if the world had shrunken round it, leaving it more splendid, more solitary, more vulnerable.
Joe was a humble soul and his arrival was unassuming. It did not need to be made more so by the collapse of his parcel of boots on the very threshold. Even as he announced himself – ‘I’m the new tutor,’ – and stepped past a panelled iron door and a sibilant manservant, his two pairs of boots broke out of their paper and clattered on the stone floor with the sound of ten men. With a rustle of shock the manservant hurried to gather them up.
‘Thank God,’ thought Joe, ‘there was no one else to hear.’
But he was wrong. As he stumped after his guide up the stairs, the man, who was some way ahead, stopped and called into the darkness: ‘Now what are you doing there?’ and a child’s voice said: ‘They’ve come for me, haven’t they, Wick?’
‘Nobody’s come for you yet. Get back to bed and maybe they never will.’
Joe distinctly heard a sigh, not the full gusty sigh of a child, but the faint sorrowful breath of someone unutterably tired, unutterably hopeless. The manservant, reaching the first landing, switched on the light and revealed an empty corridor.
‘Who was that?’ asked Joe.
‘Only the child.’
‘Only the child? No one else?’
‘Oh, no one else. The child – and his bad dreams.’ Wick smiled as he ushered Joe towards another flight of stairs.
There was a fire in Joe’s room, a gas fire installed in what must have been a mighty hearth, now partially bricked up. Joe was sorry to see it. Logs, he would have thought, and – forgetting this was a bedroom – a roasting spit would be more in keeping. However, the rest of the room was up to expectation. There was a black Italian fourposter carved with ample nymphs and puffed-up cherubs, there were brocaded chairs and a pear-wood escritoire, an oak linen-fold clothes-press and a round stool with gros-point embroidery worn to shreds by someone’s feet. An arched alcove, richly worked in stone to house a private altar, now held a washhand stand and a china ewer and basin painted with leviathan blue roses.
Wick set down the boots neatly pair by pair and placed Joe’s holdall on a chair. Polite but discriminating, he bent to unpack it.
‘No, leave it, please,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll see to it.’
‘Dinner is over, of course,’ said Wick, straightening, ‘but I have instructions to serve yours in your room and to see that you have everything you require.’ He reached out and shifted an ashtray a quarter of an inch on a side-table, implying that he foresaw he had time to be particular because here was one who would not require much. ‘Mr. Steen would like to see you in the library tomorrow morning at eleven.’
‘Thank you.’ Joe sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. ‘Was I expected tonight?’
‘Mr. Steen, I believe, thought you would not arrive until tomorrow morning. Miss Barbary gave provisional instructions in case you should come this evening.’
‘Miss Barbary is Mr. Steen’s daughter, I suppose?’
‘His stepsister.’ Wick rustled like a leaf. ‘Mr. Steen has – one son only. I will attend to your dinner at once.’
‘Wick – it is Wick, isn’t it?’
‘Sir?’
‘Who was the child?’
‘The child?’
‘On the landing.’
‘That was Master Harry.’ Wick slipped out, smiling.
Joe took off one shoe and went with it to the window. He drew the curtains aside.
There was a thin rind of moon above the trees. Lawns, park and fumy woods were lamp-black now and smeared in with an impartial thumb. The density of the sky was only slightly less, still for the moment adulterated with the last of the light. Soon there would be nothing to choose between earth and heaven.
Master Harry and his bad dreams. Who did he think was coming for him?
Bessemer Priory, by the craftsmanship and the fair measure of godliness which had gone into its building, by bitter histories that had fired and sweetened it, was well equipped to humble the proud and still the turbulent. Joe was neither, yet he could not fail to be influenced. Taken down another peg or two, he was perilously modest; his natural gentleness became a waking dream. He peopled the place with so much of its ecclesiastical past that the sight of a housemaid or even of Wick during his first tentative explorations would have shocked him inexpressibly.
But he saw no one. At nine o’clock in the morning only sparrows whittling in the ivy broached the stillness at Bessemer. Joe had breakfasted in his room as, apparently, was the Continental custom of the elder Steens. When he came downstairs to where the boy had waited last night he saw how out of place a child would be.
The light, coming in here through a stained window, was left with nothing of sun or morning in it; they were thick splendid church colours, lozenges of blue and green and blood scarlet. This lower corridor was like a nave. From the capital of each arched doorway leaned out a homely or angelic face.
Joe wondered where the boy was. There was nothing to trace him by, or to hint at his existence. But then the Priory was not a child’s house.
He went down into the hall. Himself and the dust – creeping soundlessly, dazzlingly in a shaft of sunlight – were the only things that moved there. He compared this entrenched serenity with the riotous mornings of his Irish family; their sound and fury began before one sun-up and hardly ended by the next one. Stone, he thought, was more likely to enter into you than iron. Who wouldn’t try for a shell as hard and beautiful as this? He let his eyes travel to the very limits of it. In the vaulted roof, at the intersections of the ribs, the bosses were cut into brittle flowers. And it was at that moment that he thought of the great fallibility of the shell, the hollowness which the enemy can inhabit as well as the friend.
Last night, and again this morning, he had an odd impression that there might be an enemy here. It was quite impersonal, as if something had been imposed on this place which should have been open to nothing but its own dissolution. For no reason except that he owned the Priory, Joe was inclined to blame Mr. Steen. When they met he saw at once how wrong he was.
Steen was no enemy. A more unharmful man it would be impossible to find. His innocuousness was negative since it came from neither kindness nor simplicity, but from indifference. Obviously he gave to affairs and events an adequate attention – no more. He received Joe courteously, looked him over with the dispassion of a man concerned more for the possible habits of a newcomer to his table than the capabilities of one who was to have sole charge of his son’s formative years.
‘I hope you are comfortable in your room?’ He waited politely for Joe’s assurance. Having received it and satisfied himself that Joe, though rugged, was not likely to be crude, he sat back in his chair as if the interview had already served its purpose.
‘I suppose Dr. Manning told you all about me?’ ventured Joe.
‘Indeed, yes. I was quite satisfied. Your function will be to prepare the child for his first public school. How long that will take I have no idea, but naturally I wish it to be accomplished as quickly as possible. You will find his education has been neglected. He can read and write – little else. He is, I believe,’ said Mr. Steen without mockery, ‘rather slow.’
Joe felt a certain sympathy for the boy. One or two people referred to Joe Rigby as ‘rather slow’. He asked, ‘How old is your son?’
Quite an extraordinary change came over Mr. Steen. His smooth cheeks grew grey, his whole face softened dreadfully, those bleak incurious eyes of his filled with the most abject pain and despair.
Joe was appalled. At first he thought Steen had had some kind of seizure. Then he realised it was no physical anguish. This man’s indifference was rigorously put on as a blind and an antidote. He used it against the suffering of his mind.
Joe did not know what to do. If his perfectly ordinary question had brought Steen to this pass, in God’s name what could be wrong with the boy? Fresh in his memory was the sound of that thin voice, ‘They’ve come for me, haven’t they, Wick?’ and the sigh that followed.
