The fog didn’t lift all day. The flatness of the general surroundings seemed to suck more mist in, until it felt as though the house sat alone in the world; visibility extended only as far as the circle of gravel on which the cars stood. Beyond that, everything might as well have been obliterated. Even sound was muffled and, as darkness drew in early, we closed the curtains in all the rooms in the flat to keep the absence of everything at bay.
The house hadn’t been open today. Now the summer was practically over, it only opened two weekends a month – a timetable guaranteed to cause confusion in the minds of potential visitors, and a probable severe drop-off in numbers. I’d written a note to myself to find out whether it would be possible to extend the opening season in line with, say, the National Trust, until the October half term. Then I’d tried to pretend that I’d never thought this; that forward planning for the house and grounds was nothing to do with me. But I did need to mention it to Max, so I waited for him to come back in from whatever prolonged mission had kept him out for the rest of the day. There was also no sign of Jenna or Grant, and, when I went for a brief wander to try to locate another living soul, the house was deserted.
I stood for a moment on the main staircase. It had been left uncarpeted to showcase the broad oak steps with the ornate banister rail and newel posts so carved that they seemed more air than wood, sweeping downwards to the entrance hall. There was no sound, but somehow the house felt ‘busy’. As though, out of sight around a corner or behind a door, servants were polishing and sweeping and laying fires and carrying tea trays. In the grand rooms, ladies were receiving guests and gentlemen were planning a game of cards or discussing the day’s hunting. As though life carried on simultaneously, with all periods of history running alongside one another, separated by a thin film of reality which sometimes parted to give rise to moments like this.
Somewhere a clock was ticking, a slow, deep tick and an insect buzzed against a window. Below me, on a table in the hall, a bowl of potpourri scented the air with dried orange and rose petals, and occasionally rustled and settled in a draught. And still I had that sense of things, that if I were to turn my head sharply enough, I’d catch a glimpse of crinoline, a peek of green satin doublet, whisking away around a corner.
I berated myself. This was the sort of thing that these grand houses demanded. Whimsy. Fancy. I’d never had an inch of fancy in my life, my imagination was limited to strictly practical forethought and planning. You didn’t keep twenty sturdy young men heading to the right addresses with vans full of glazing by being whimsical. You needed a spreadsheet, a timetable and lists for that.
‘Alice?’ Max’s voice made me jump. He was above me, on the more workaday and less carved stairway that led up to the flat, looking down over the balustrade. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Just listening to the ghosts,’ I said, my practical tone wiping any trace of fantasy from my words.
‘Woodworm, death-watch beetle and rising damp,’ Max replied, heading down the steps towards me. ‘That’s all you can hear,’ he added gloomily as he reached me. ‘With the added probability of lumps of plaster falling off some of the more neglected walls.’
‘How can you live with all this,’ I waved a hand at the stairs, the walls; the portraits and the heavy wood, ‘and not believe in ghosts?’ And then I remembered Jenna and his mother and wanted to bite my tongue off. ‘Sorry.’
He’d changed out of the shorts and was wearing jeans and a shirt. His hair was wet as though he’d just got out of the shower, and I tried not to be swayed by the look of him. I was sensible and practical and him wandering up looking like Lord Byron on his day off was not helping.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s a dichotomy. I want to believe – there’s something in that photo I took of the Fortune House, there’s all those stories from travellers across the moors… and then there’s this place, as you said.’ He looked around where I’d indicated, and his hair flicked a few drops of water onto my skin. ‘But if ghosts are real, then I have to believe that my mother didn’t love me enough to come back and visit me.’ Max put both hands on the banister rail and gazed down over into the hallway. ‘So it’s easier to think it’s all a trick of the light, a mistake rather than spirits.’
‘Maybe your mother thought Jenna needed her more,’ I said softly.
‘Well, she was wrong.’ He seemed to be fascinated by the bowl of potpourri on its side table below us. ‘I needed her too.’
I had a sudden vision of the eight-year-old Max, trying to pretend to be grown-up and deal with his mother’s death, his father’s grief, the lack of real understanding from his little sister. ‘Oh, Max,’ I said. ‘She must have loved you so very much.’
‘And maybe that’s what I’m still looking for.’ He didn’t move. Instead, he kept his head bent, looking down. ‘Someone to love me. Not all this, not what I seem to be; not the illusion of the man with the estate and the PhD. Me.’ He raised his head and looked at me now, and behind his eyes was the scared little boy sent away to school at eight. For a second, the man who’d inherited Hatherleigh Hall, who was doing his best to keep it going, was the illusion and the child was the reality.
There was such a raw honesty in his face that I found I’d reached out and touched his cheek. My heart was scalded by his emotions, particularly since his words were echoing my own dreams, which had begun to feel slightly desperate as I’d inched into my thirties. Someone to love me, for me. Not for my ability to cook a meal or run a spreadsheet. ‘We’re a right pair, aren’t we?’ I whispered.
He closed his eyes slowly, then put his hand over my wrist. ‘We are.’ His voice was as quiet as mine. ‘A pair of lonely people, hoping we’re doing the right thing.’
A moment of quiet, into which the clock ticked the passing seconds. His cheek was warm from the shower, the pricks of stubble soft against my palm and I could feel the flicker of a muscle working under the skin. Then he dropped his hand away from my wrist. I moved my hand too, and we were just two people standing on a staircase.
‘I’ve handed my notice in at work,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to work another month, but I can come over at weekends to help with sorting the papers.’
He blinked at me. ‘Really? That’s amazing, Alice, thank you so much.’
‘And I can deflect and distract Jenna so you can get on with writing.’
‘Again, thank you. There’s going to be a lot of organising of my notes too. It’s not going to be an easy job.’
I gave him a stern look. ‘I can always rescind my notice, you know. According to Mr Welsh, the world is crying out for an admin assistant who knows her way around Crittal fixtures and work ratios.’
Max laughed. ‘Would you like to move in here? Or will you commute?’
I thought of my little house, of Mr Next Door Left and Mrs Next Door Right, of the gossip and the dust and the tiny yards and the rumble of passing traffic. ‘I’d like to keep my room here, if that’s all right. But I’ll rent out my house, I’m not quite ready to part with it.’ Besides, the steady income from rent would be useful. I could save it up and then if the whole of this ‘thing’ with Max, whatever it was, fell apart, I’d have money and a home to go to. I wasn’t so much burning my bridges as rattling a box of matches in their vicinity.
‘I’ve said it before, but you are my absolute saviour, Alice,’ Max said cheerfully. There was no undercurrent of sadness now to his voice and I didn’t know whether to be sorry or not. That long moment on the stairs with Max, vulnerable and lost, seemed to have been several years ago now. Then I started to wonder whether I wanted someone to mother, but my midnight musings were most definitely not maternal towards Max, and I had to march briskly up the stairs to try to shake the feeling.
Back in the flat, Max gave me a handful of paper. ‘These are all the first-person reports of anomalous experiences regarding the Fortune House,’ he said. ‘Please could you sort them into chronological order for me? Then I can use them as the backbone for the structure of the book itself.’
‘I thought you needed me to go through Alethia’s papers?’ I glanced over at the mound, now flat-topped where I’d worked through the first couple of centimetres of detritus.
‘I do. But if I’ve got these in order, it will help me with the organisation of the book. Alethia’s papers are just filler and anything I get from them will be more easily cross-referenced if everything’s in date order. Like I said, there are often reports of disturbances in and around houses when there’s building work taking place or major disruptions. If we can find receipts from building firms or even a note about wallpaper designs, then we can try to match it to sightings. D’you see?’
I had to remind myself, again, that Max didn’t think ghosts were real. But, by the time I’d read my way through some of the eerie tales from observers, and the fog had squeezed the last of the light out of the day, I was about ready to believe in ghosts, the bogeyman and Father Christmas. There was something about sitting alone in a darkening room with this sort of material that knocked the cynic in me on the head and let in someone who jumped at every creak.
Max brought me a cup of tea and I nearly screamed the house down when the door opened to let in nothing but a puff of steam. He followed swiftly afterwards with a quizzical look. ‘What’s up? Sorry, did I startle you?’
‘I’ve put these in order,’ I said, handing him his papers and turning on all the lights. ‘And now I need to go and read about muck spreaders and egg-bound hens for a while, if that’s all right.’
He looked down at the buff file I’d given him. ‘Wow. You’ve even written on the front how many stories there are inside. You’re so organised it hurts.’
‘Organised and, now, terrified. That one about the noises in the basement… brrrr…’
‘Oh, half of them will be made up. Another third will be misperceptions, misunderstandings and just plain insanity. Only a tiny proportion will have a hint of “What was that?” about them. Sadly, it’s human nature to embellish stories, which is what makes my job so hard.’ He put the file down. ‘Well, this part of my job, anyway. Lecturing in psychology to students is hard by definition.’
He perched himself on the back of the sofa, while I decorously drank my tea at the desk. He’d rested the folder on the corner and I found it hard to tear my eyes away from it. ‘Do you think they believe in ghosts?’ I asked, nodding towards it. ‘Those people who saw “something”? Some of the reports are so matter of fact, even when there’s a huge amount of the inexplicable going on.’
Max sighed. ‘It’s proven that some people are more prone to seeing “things”, whether it’s ghosts or whether they have a mindset that turns eye-floaters into beings, and anything they don’t understand becomes demons and spirits.’ He picked up the file again. ‘That’s practically the synopsis for the next book,’ he said cheerily, tapping my hard work against the desk edge. ‘Going into the whys and wherefores of the psychology of belief in the supernatural. But, in the absence of having seen anything definitely spooky at the Fortune House myself, this is all I have to go on for now.’
‘Why are you so determined to write about the place?’ I leaned back a little in my chair, then felt that this made me look like a Bond villain about to unleash the lasers, and put my elbows back on the desk again. ‘Surely writing a book about Haunted York would get more revenue and coverage?’
Max seemed to stiffen slightly. ‘I promised Alethia,’ he said. ‘I mean, after the incident with her chasing me out armed with pans, we became really good friends, and she wanted to get to the bottom of why the house had a reputation for being haunted. She grew up there and it didn’t have any kind of reputation then, apart from her father being a persistent late payer of bills and a bit handy with his fists, and her mum making the best parkin in the district.’
His gaze wandered off for a moment, towards the still vast pile of papers. ‘I liked Alethia,’ he said softly. ‘She left home at fifteen, but she came back when she inherited the house, to try to make a go of it in her mum and dad’s memory. She’d be horrified to see it now, all ruins and holes. And I hate to think what she’d make of the skeleton under the house. I’m tempted to leave the discovery of the body out, but I can’t because it might be the reason for the whole “haunted house” reputation, which is the point of the book. But if I leave it in, it starts to turn what was a simple exploration of the stories linked to the house into some big mystery, which will be impossible to solve. No nice, definite ending for the book, you see.’
‘But if there is a secret about the Fortune House, she’d want it to be uncovered, surely?’ I put my mug down on the desk, then worried that it might be an antique and nudged a couple of handwritten sheets of paper under the cup in case of tea-rings. ‘If the body they found is part of the reason that the house had its haunted reputation, then you’re still doing what she wanted, aren’t you? She’s not around to be upset if it turns out to be her brother, and it’s far too late for anyone to be accused of involvement in his death.’
His expression lightened. ‘God, I never thought of it like that,’ he said. ‘How do you do it, Alice?’
‘It’s easier to see things when you’re on the outside.’ I was aware that my tone had taken on a slight sarcasm. ‘When you’re too close to something it’s really difficult to work out what’s actually going on. At school…’ I stopped.
‘Go on.’
What the hell. He seemed to like me. Now was the time to see whether he really did, as he’d put it, like me for me, or for the image I presented. ‘I wasn’t particularly popular at school.’ I could feel my face getting warm at the memory. ‘I couldn’t hang out, I always had to get home to help Mum and we didn’t have a lot of money, so I wasn’t trendy, didn’t have the latest gadgets. And I was… am… not exactly going to be swapping clothes, either. I was… am… big and plain and they never let me forget it.’
‘Oh, Alice.’ Max sounded almost defeated.
‘But it meant I was looking in from the outside, and that’s not always a bad thing when the inside is a bunch of teenage boys who’ll say and do almost anything to get a girl to have sex with them, and girls who regard being the girlfriend of the most popular boy as the pinnacle of educational achievement,’ I went on, without reacting to him. ‘I worked hard because there wasn’t much choice. I could see through what was going on for most of the rest of the pupils, and, even though there was little chance of me ending up married at seventeen with three kids before twenty, I knew that there was more to life than that.’
I took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to be a veterinary nurse, you see. I knew I’d never make a vet, not clever enough, but I could assist. So I studied and worked and I was looking at places I could go to college – and then Mum got really ill. I couldn’t get any work experience at the vet’s because they wanted me during times when Mum needed me. Welsh’s Windows offered me a place, and they were more flexible with hours and – well, the rest is history and—’ I waved a hand at the scale model of a modest mountain range that was forming against the study wall, ‘now, an immense amount of paper-sorting.’
Silence. I couldn’t even look at Max and kept my eyes very firmly trained on the far corner of the room, where a cupboard that looked as though the sixteenth century had mated with an IKEA catalogue was lurking with one door ever so slightly open. Everything in me wanted to rush over and close that door.
Eventually Max moved. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
I felt my heart rise into my throat. He sounded sad, as though what I’d just said had changed everything, and the slow sinking of my stomach, in direct counterpoint to my heart, made me realise that I couldn’t bear that to be true. Whatever it was in me that had been stopping me from surrendering to emotion and lust and Max’s overt admiration of me dissolved, as I realised I wanted him. Hell, I really liked him. I wasn’t ready to call it love, I’d need more time, more shared experience before I could ever call it that, but I was certainly teetering on the edge of falling in love with Max Allbright.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, apart from a strangled kind of mew. I had to meet his eye now and so I pushed everything back down. I was used to that. Whatever he said now, whatever his reasoning for being sorry – if telling him about my feelings of isolation growing up had made him look at me differently, made him feel differently about me – well, there was still my old job, my house, I could go back to my old life, if this was all over. No harm done, apart from another dent in the bodywork of my self-esteem.
Max’s expression was unreadable. He looked as though he were swallowing hard. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and he sounded a bit choked.
‘Why are you sorry?’ I decided that businesslike and down to earth was the best way to handle this. Hell, I was invested in all this Fortune House research now, the paperwork was perhaps not fascinating but it was definitely interesting. If Max had been put off by my outsider status, my lack of experience during my formative years, and had decided that a relationship with me was now out of the question, it didn’t matter. I’d got a job to do here, and I’d do it until we found out what the hell the deal was with the body and the ghosts, and then I’d flee for the hills and get a small yappy dog and join the WI and forget this ever happened.
Another moment of quiet. Even the air was quiet, not a rustle or a rattle to be heard anywhere. ‘I’m sorry that my life has been so – privileged,’ Max said, eventually, very softly. ‘I’ve got a tendency to feel hard done by because I was sent away to school and my sister had a comparatively cushy life and I have to work hard to keep the estate going. But now I say it out loud, it all sounds so “woe is me, boo-hoo”, while your life has actually been hard and you never really say a word about it. Now I feel slightly stupid and a bit… I don’t even know what the word is.’
‘Overdramatic?’ I suggested. ‘Hyperbolic?’ I could feel the smile rising to my face. He hadn’t been put off. My school days as an outcast hadn’t made him think differently about me, it had made him realise how fortunate he had been despite the death of his mother, and that was a lot easier to deal with, especially since all my organs were now dancing the dance of relief.
‘Yes, yes, all right, don’t rub it in.’ There was that light of mischief in his eyes now, as they met mine. ‘Whatever it is, I’m sorry, all right?’
‘Upper-class? Posh?’ I carried on.
He laughed aloud now. ‘I refuse to apologise for centuries of lineage, because none of that is my fault. I’m just the one at the sharp end now, trying to keep it all together, with not quite enough money and a load of undergraduates who thought psychology would be a nice soft option to study while they worked out what to do with the rest of their lives.’
‘What does Jenna do for a living?’ A complete change of subject seemed to be in order. I didn’t want to tease him too much, I’d learned long ago that there’s a fine line between teasing and bullying and, whilst I thought Max would be very hard to bully, I didn’t want him to think that I could lapse into being on the wrong side of that line. I’d spent far too long on the other side for that to be a happy thought.
‘Jen?’ He seemed slightly taken aback by the conversational derail. ‘She builds and maintains motorbikes. She’s got a workshop down in the old stables.’
‘Oh.’ That seemed to be the end of that. ‘I just wondered.’
‘She’s more practical than I am. Good with her hands. That whole family trait seems to have passed me by and left me with not much more than knowing my way around debunking Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.’
‘You’re painting that fence,’ I reminded him. ‘For the last several months.’
‘Painting fences doesn’t require much actual skill, though. Just the ability to keep upright, not die of boredom and put the paint on the right end of the brush.’ Max still had that mischievous look in his eye. As though he were also relieved, somehow. ‘Even a posh git can manage that. It’s hardly assembling the space shuttle.’ Then he straightened his face. ‘And I really am sorry, Alice. I didn’t know. About your life, I mean. I wondered why you were stuck in that job that you were clearly much too intelligent for, why you didn’t look for something a bit more challenging, but I can understand it now.’
‘Can you?’ I asked, a bit stiffly. I wasn’t quite sure I could really understand it myself, other than being too lazy to be bothered to move and there not exactly being a plethora of jobs for someone who never got as far as A levels.
‘You value consistency. An unsettled upbringing as a young carer has given you a fear of the unknown, probably instilled by your parents. And your schoolmates’ lack of understanding of your circumstances has made you crave stability and a close social connection.’
‘All right, spare me the psychology lecture,’ I said sharply. ‘My upbringing wasn’t that tragic. I was fed, I was warm and I was loved, and a lot of other people had it worse.’
‘You’re right, and that’s what links us all here, isn’t it?’ Max got up off the arm of the sofa and came to stand by the desk. ‘You, me, Alethia. We all had “duty” fitted as standard. You caring for your parents, me with this bloody great house and the estate, and Alethia came back to take on her parents’ place out of duty.’
‘There doesn’t have to be a “theme”, Max.’ I tried to sound gentle. ‘This really isn’t a psychology lecture. You don’t have to strain to give us all something in common – we’re just people doing what we think is best and right.’
He laughed, a ringing laugh that felt out of place amid all this solemn furniture. ‘Oh, Alice, you are wonderful! I know you can’t see it, but you really and truly are. You’ve always got the right words to puncture my pomposity and sense of over-importance.’
‘I just think,’ I said carefully, ‘that having all this – the house, the estate, all the responsibility – it’s made you lose your sense of wonder at the world a bit.’
‘You mean I’ve got no sense of fun?’ He frowned. ‘I showed you the Boobie Room, right?’
‘That wasn’t fun, that was four hundred years of tits and minge.’ I surprised myself with this. ‘Do you know how to have proper fun?’ I wasn’t even sure what constituted ‘proper fun’ myself. I’d tried to persuade Grant into it, until it turned out that his idea of fun was weekend-long gaming sessions while I’d been thinking more of city breaks and cocktail bars.
Max looked as though he were thinking deeply. Finally, he stood up dramatically. The lamps which lit the study illuminated him from one side, his other side was turned to the night outside the window and the resulting shadows made him look taller. Darker. And, I hated to admit it, more handsome. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘right. You want fun? There’s limited fun to be had in a house this old in the middle of the night, but I’ll see what I can do. Give me ten minutes and then come down the main staircase.’
‘What?’ All my internal organs rattled. I wasn’t sure if it was anticipation, anxiety or just hunger, but he was already on his way out, closing the door so firmly that the draught scuttled through the paper pile like a mouse. ‘Oh, hell,’ I said to the desk. ‘I’ve provoked him into spontaneity. This isn’t going to be pretty.’ As long as it wasn’t going to consist of him prancing about with his trousers round his ankles, trying to get his willy to ‘helicopter’… and then I mentally kicked myself. This was Max, not Grant.
I tidied up the desk. I tried to impose some order on the heap of papers on the floor, but couldn’t do more than kick at the edges until it looked a bit straighter. Postcards slithered from between layers and I picked them up absent-mindedly, putting them down on the desk with only the most cursory of glances. One was a picture of Piccadilly Circus, featuring an old-style London bus, the other showed Buckingham Palace looking austere. They reminded me of something, but I wasn’t quite sure what, and anyway, it had to have been more than ten minutes now.
I crept out of the study, along the corridor and down the servants’ staircase to the top of the main stairs. There was no sign of Max and only the faintest glimmer of illumination from the emergency lighting along the long hallway on the lower floor, but a faint drift of music, half-heard like fairy pipes, came to meet me.
I followed it. Past the huge windows, outside of which the darkness pressed, I moved as though in some kind of enchantment, or that’s what I told myself anyway. This wasn’t me, sensible Alice, trundling along through the bland, visitor-friendly passageways of Hatherleigh Hall, it was someone else, my inner me. The slim, ethereal person I’d always been assured lived inside me, who skipped and trod lithely through life, distracted by butterflies and colours and phrases from fiction. Called by the music to the land of my faery origin.
I tried a little skip, but my bust slumped heavily and it hurt, despite my scaffolding of a bra, so I stopped. Nope, it was definitely me. Nothing otherworldly going on here, and I was responsible for everything that happened from here on in. The thought made me nervous at the same time as sending a stinging pulse of excited adrenaline through my blood.
Fun. Max said he could be fun. Was that what I wanted?
The heat in my heart said yes.