My thoughts and my prayers seemed like a kind of world to me, a world full of God, with my father and Mrs Ashburton in their eternal lives, and the happiness that was waiting for the Reverend Throataway in his. It was a world that gradually became as important as the reality around me. It affected everything. It made me different. Belle Frye was still my friend, but I didn’t like her the way I once had.
One wet afternoon she and I clambered into Challacombe Manor through a window that someone had smashed. We hadn’t been there since the night of the tennis party, when we’d found Mrs Ashburton crying and she’d given us pieces of chocolate. We’d run out into the night, whispering excitedly about an old woman crying just because a party was over. I wouldn’t have believed it then if someone had said I’d ever think Belle Frye silly.
‘Whoever’s going to live here?’ she whispered in the dank hall after we’d climbed through the window. ‘D’you think it’ll just fall down?’
‘There’s a mortgage on it. Lloyd’s Bank have it.’
‘What’s that mean then?’
‘When the war’s finished they’ll sell the house off to someone else.’
All the furniture in the drawing-room had been taken away, stored in the cellars until someone, some day, had time to attend to it. People had pulled off pieces of the striped red wallpaper, boys from the Grammar School probably. There were names and initials and dates scrawled on the plaster. Hearts with arrows through them had been drawn.
‘Anyone could come and live here,’ Belle Frye said.
‘Nobody’d want to.’
We walked from room to room. The dining-room still had a sideboard in it. There was blue wallpaper on the walls: none of that had been torn off, but there were great dark blots of damp on it. There were bundled-up newspapers all over the floor, and empty cardboard boxes that would have been useless for anything because they’d gone soft due to the damp. Upstairs there was a pool of water on a landing and in one of the bedrooms half the ceiling had fallen down. Everywhere there was a musty smell.
‘It’s haunted,’ Belle Frye said.
‘Of course it isn’t.’
‘She died here, didn’t she?’
‘That doesn’t make it haunted.’
‘I can feel her ghost.’
I knew she couldn’t. I thought she was silly to say it, pretending about ghosts just to set a bit of excitement going. She said it again and I didn’t answer.
We crawled out again, through the broken window. We wandered about in the rain, looking in the outhouses and the stables. The old motor-car that used to be in one of them had been taken away. The iron roller that Dick had rolled the tennis court with was still there, beside the tennis court itself.
‘Let’s try in here,’ Belle Frye said, opening the door of the summer-house.
All the times I’d come into the garden on my own I’d never gone into the summer-house. I’d never even looked through a window of Challacombe Manor itself, or poked about the outhouses. I’d have been a bit frightened, for even though I thought it was silly of Belle Frye to talk about ghosts it wouldn’t have surprised me to see a figure moving in the empty house or to hear something in one of the stables, a tramp maybe or a prisoner escaped from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp five miles away. The Italians were black-haired men mostly, whom we often met being marched along a road to work in the fields. They always waved and were given to laughing and singing. But even so I wouldn’t have cared to meet one on his own.
In the centre of the summer-house was the table that had been covered with a white cloth, with sandwiches and cakes and the tea-urn on it, for the tennis party. The tennis marker was in a corner, placed there by Dick, I suppose, after he’d marked the court. The net was beside it, and underneath it, almost hidden by it, were two rugs, one of them brown and white, a kind of Scottish tartan pattern, the other grey. Both of these rugs belonged in our farmhouse. Could they have been lying in the summer-house since the tennis party? I wondered. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen them last.
Facing one another across the table were two chairs which I remembered being there on the day of the party. They were dining-room chairs with red plush seats, brought from the house with a dozen or so others and arrayed on one side of the tennis court so that people could watch the games in comfort. These two must have been left behind when the others had been returned. I was thinking about that when I remembered my father hurriedly putting them into the summer-house at the end of the day. ‘It’ll maybe rain,’ he’d said.
‘Hey, look,’ Belle Frye said. She was pointing at an ashtray on the table, with cigarette-butts and burnt-out matches in it. ‘There’s people using this place,’ she said, giggling. ‘Maybe an escaped prisoner,’ she suggested, giggling again.
‘Maybe.’ I said it quickly, not wanting to pursue the subject. I knew the summer-house wasn’t being used by an escaped prisoner. Our rugs hadn’t been there since the day of the tennis party. They were part of something else, together with the cigarette-butts and the burnt-out matches. And then, quite abruptly, it occurred to me that the summer-house was where Betty and Colin Gregg came when Colin Gregg was on leave: they came to kiss, to cuddle one another like they’d been cuddling in the rhododendrons after the tennis party. Betty had brought the rugs specially, so that they could be warm and comfortable.
‘I bet you it’s an Eye-tie,’ Belle Frye said. ‘I bet you there’s one living here.’
‘Could be.’
‘I’m getting out of it.’
We ran away. We ran through the overgrown garden on that wet afternoon and along the lane that led to the Fryes’ farm. I should have turned in the opposite direction after we’d left the garden, but I didn’t: I went with her because I didn’t want her silliness to spoil everything. I thought it was romantic, Betty and Colin Gregg going to the summer-house. I remembered a film called
