'Ah, you know the local name, do you? But the house that was there before was called The Towers. I don't know why. It hadn't got any towers, at least not in my time.'
'I think The Towers is a silly name,' said Ellie. 'I think we'll go on calling it Gipsy's Acre.'
'We'll have to tell the post office if so,' I said, 'or we shan't get any letters.'
'No, I suppose we shan't.'
'Though when I come to think of it,' I said, 'would that matter, Ellie? Wouldn't it be much nicer if we didn't get any letters?'
'It might cause a lot of complications,' said Ellie. 'We shouldn't even get our bills.'
'That would be a splendid idea,' I said.
'No, it wouldn't,' said Ellie. 'Bailiffs would come in and camp there. Anyway,' she said, 'I wouldn't like not to get any letters. I'd want to hear from Greta.'
'Never mind Greta,' I said. 'Let's go on exploring.'
So we explored Kingston Bishop. It was a nice village, nice people in the shops. There was nothing sinister about the place. Our domestic help didn't take to it much, but we soon arranged that hired cars should take them into the nearest seaside town or into Market Chadwell on their days out. They were not enthusiastic about the location of the house, but it was not superstition that worried them. I pointed out to Ellie that nobody could say the house was haunted because it had been just built.
'No,' Ellie agreed, 'it's not the house. There's nothing wrong with the house. It's outside. It's that road where it curves round through the trees and that bit of rather gloomy wood where that woman stood and made me jump so that day.'
'Well, next year,' I said, 'we might cut down those trees and plant a lot of rhododendrons or something like that.'
We went on making plans.
Greta came down and stayed with us for a week-end. She was enthusiastic about the house, and congratulated us on all our furnishings and pictures and colour schemes. She was very tactful. After the week-end she said she wouldn't disturb the honeymooners any longer, and anyway she'd got to get back to her job.
Ellie enjoyed showing her the house. I could see how fond Ellie was of her. I tried to behave very sensibly and pleasantly but I was glad when Greta went back to London, because her staying there had been a strain on me.
When we'd been there a couple of weeks we were accepted locally and made the acquaintance of God. He came one afternoon to call upon us. Ellie and I were arguing about where we'd have a flower border when our correct, to me slightly phoney looking, manservant came out from the house to announce that Major Phillpot was in the drawing-room.
It was then that I said in a whisper to Ellie:
'God.'
She asked me what I meant.
'Well, the locals treat him like that,' I said.
So we went in and there was Major Phillpot. He was just a pleasant, nondescript man of close on sixty. He was wearing country clothes, rather shabby, he had grey hair going a little thin on top and a short bristly moustache. He apologised for his wife not being able to come and call on us. She was something of an invalid, he said. He sat down and chatted with us. Nothing he said was remarkable or particularly interesting. He had the knack of making people feel at their ease. He touched quite lightly on a variety of subjects. He didn't ask any direct questions, but he soon got it into his head where our particular interests lay. He talked to me about racing and to Ellie about making a garden and what things did well in this particular soil. He had been to the States once or twice. He found out that though Ellie didn't care much for race meetings, she was fond of riding. He told her that if she was going to keep horses she could go up a particular track through the pine woods and she would come out on a good stretch of moor where she could have a gallop. Then we came to the subject of our house and of the stories about Gipsy's Acre.
'I see you know the local name,' he said, 'and all the local superstitions, too, I expect.'
'Gipsies' warnings in profusion,' I said. 'Far too many of them. Mostly old Mrs. Lee.'
'Oh dear,' said Phillpot. 'Poor old Esther: she's been a nuisance, has she?'
'Is she a bit dotty?' I asked.
'Not so much as she likes to make out. I feel more or less responsible for her. I settled her in that cottage,' he said, 'not that she's grateful for it. I'm fond of the old thing though she can be a nuisance sometimes.'
'Fortune telling?'
'No, not particularly. Why, has she told your fortune?'
'I don't know if you can call it a fortune,' said Ellie. 'It was more a warning to me against coming here.'
'That seems rather odd to me.' Major Phillpot's rather bristly eyebrows rose. 'She's usually got a honeyed tongue in fortunes. Handsome stranger, marriage bells, six children and a heap of good fortune and money in your hand, pretty lady.' He imitated rather unexpectedly the gipsy whine of her voice.
'The gipsies used to camp here a lot when I was a boy,' he said. 'I suppose I got fond of them then, though they were a thieving lot, of course. But I've always been attracted to them. As long as you don't expect them to be law-abiding, they're all right. Many a tin mug of gipsy stew I've had as a schoolboy. We felt the family owed Mrs. Lee something, she saved the life of a brother of mine when he was a child. Fished him out of a pond when he'd gone through the ice.'
I made a clumsy gesture and knocked a glass ashtray off a table. It smashed into fragments.
I picked up the pieces and Major Phillpot helped me.
'I expect Mrs. Lee's quite harmless really,' said Ellie. 'I was very foolish to have been so scared.'
'Scared, were you?' His eyebrows rose again. 'It was as bad as that, was it?'
'I don't wonder she was afraid,' I said quickly. 'It was almost more like a threat than a warning.'
'A threat!' He sounded incredulous.
'Well, it sounded that way to me. And then the first night we moved in here something else happened.'
I told him about the stone crashing through the window.
'I'm afraid there are a good many young hooligans about nowadays,' he said, 'though we haven't got many of them round here – not nearly as bad as some places. Still, it happens, I'm sorry to say.' He looked at Ellie. 'I'm very sorry you were frightened. It was a beastly thing to happen, your first night moving in.'
'Oh, I've got over it now,' said Ellie. 'It wasn't only that, it was – it was something else that happened not long afterwards.'
I told him about that too. We had come down one morning and we had found a dead bird skewered through with a knife and a small piece of paper with it which said in an illiterate scrawl 'Get out of here if you know what's good for you.'
Phillpot looked really angry then. He said, 'You should have reported that to the police.'
'We didn't want to,' I said. 'After all, that would only have put whoever it is even more against us.'
'Well, that kind of thing has got to be stopped,' said Phillpot. Suddenly he became the magistrate. 'Otherwise, you know, people will go on with the thing. Think it's funny, I suppose. Only – only this sounds a bit more than fun. Nasty – malicious – It's not,' he said, rather as though he was talking to himself, 'it's not as though anyone round here could have a grudge against you, a grudge against either of you personally, I mean.'
'No,' I said, 'it couldn't be that because we're both strangers here.'
'I'll look into it,' Phillpot said.
He got up to go, looking round him as he did.
'You know,' he said, 'I like this house of yours. I didn't think I should. I'm a bit of an old square, you know, what used to be called an old fogey. I like old houses and old buildings. I don't like all these matchbox factories that are going up all over the country. Big boxes. Like beehives. I like buildings with some ornament on them, some grace. But I like this house. It's plain and very modern, I suppose, but it's got shape and light. And when you look out from it you see things – well, in a different way from the way you've seen them before. It's interesting. Very interesting. Who designed it? An English architect or a foreigner?'
I told him about Santonix.
'Mm,' he said, 'I think I read about him somewhere. Would it have been in House and Garden?'
I said he was fairly well known.
