The increasing volume of the music led me to double doors at the end of the house. A thin, flickering light showed in the gap between the doors, and I took a deep breath. Any hint of helicopter-willy and I was fully prepared to go and wrench that Elizabethan bedpost off, just for continuity’s sake. Then I opened the doors.
It was the ballroom. Or, at least, a room that had a long, polished wooden floor and a moulded ceiling that gave the place the feel of a huge secular cathedral. Alcoves in the wall had built-in seating, for that ‘chaperone-free canoodle’ experience, and mirrors reflected the light from candles along the walls.
In a decidedly less historic move, Dua Lipa was playing from a device plugged in at the far end. I stood, amazed.
‘Come and dance.’ Max appeared out of the flickering darkness. ‘Come on, Alice. Let’s have this “fun” you talked about.’
I wanted to say that I couldn’t dance. That I didn’t. That the candles were probably dangerous. That there wasn’t enough light and we might twist our ankles. But I didn’t. I let Imaginary Alice, slender and supple, have her fairy wings.
‘Yes, please,’ I said. I took his hand and stepped out onto the dance floor.
Max could dance. He actually had the long, lithe body that I was trying to imagine for myself. He had long legs and slim hips, and he moved to the beat, even as Dua Lipa segued into The Weeknd, and I stepped into it alongside him.
I loved dancing. It was one of those secrets I kept, because nobody wanted to see plump, shapeless me on a dance floor and the only times I’d dared, people had stopped dancing to watch and tease, after which I’d only danced alone in my room. But that had been school, and things were different now. Now there were no spotty fifteen-year-old boys thinking they’d ‘get a go’ because I’d be so afraid nobody would want me. No girls in carefully drawn-on make-up covering their acne, skin-tight jeans covering their uncertainty. Nobody except Max, who took my hand and led me into dance after dance, with the candlelight shining in his eyes and his hair electrified by the motion. Nothing except Max. Even with the music, he was all I could focus on. He kept those flame-filled eyes on me as we spun and twirled on the slippery floor, dancing out of the light and into the dark and then back again.
Then, with the Jonas Brothers trying to up the pace, we moved in close. Slowly, together, dancing as though they were playing ‘The Last Waltz’, we circled, arms around one another. Max felt hot through his shirt. I couldn’t see his face now as I had my head tucked into the crook of his shoulder, my own skin sticky with the exertion, but I didn’t care. All there was now was the music, the light, and Max, holding me as though this was all he wanted, and I remembered the way he’d held me when I’d cried back in my dusty little living room. As though I mattered.
‘Max?’ I moved my head and looked up at him.
As though he’d been waiting for this, he looked down, smiled slowly, and cocked his head to one side, moving in and down as I moved up and out and our mouths met in the middle in one huge explosion of heat and light that even the Jonas Brothers couldn’t have predicted. Vaguely I noted that they were singing about ‘What a Man Gotta Do’, as we moved backwards into one of the cushioned alcoves, but, as we passed, Max gave the device a swift kick and the machine fell backwards, muffling the music to a background beat.
We managed to fill the space where the music had been. Max treated my body as though it was something to worship, and there wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t go unappreciated, either by fingers, eyes or tongue. I like to think that I returned the favour, at least, he seemed to find everything satisfactory, with his head thrown back and his skin flushing as we crushed the velvet-covered seating into waves and troughs with our vigour and enthusiasm. I didn’t even think twice about how I looked naked, I was too busy taking in the sight of Max’s body, lean and spare, saving up all the memories in case this was a one-off. Trying to lock away the feel of his mouth, the graze of his stubble, the taste of him and the wonderful, amazing way he made me feel as I arched above or beneath him, whispering his name.
When we were an overheated huddled heap at last, slumped together on the floor of the alcove with the cold seating against our backs and our hair tangled over sweaty faces, Max put his arms around me. ‘Told you I knew how to have fun,’ he murmured. ‘And that I’m nicer to my women than Heathcliff. Bet he never made a woman scream.’
‘Not in a good way, anyway,’ I agreed. My head was comfortable against his shoulder and I felt the drowsiness of good sex beginning to drag me into sleep. ‘He was a “one up against the stable wall” man, if ever there was one.’
‘“Lift your skirts, wench, for you are merely a servant and must obey me,” kind of thing?’
There was a moment of silence. ‘You sound like you practise that sentence a lot,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. I regularly exercise my droit de seigneur on Daisy, when she’s not hoovering. And Mrs Plumstead, who comes in to do for us in the flat, she’s not safe either.’ Max sounded as sleepy as I felt. ‘And if you believe that’s true, then I’m glad, because it will let me know that this didn’t feel as though I’ve not had sex for a year.’
‘Wow. A year,’ I said, forgetting that I’d not had anything but solo sex for six years.
‘Yep. And every time I looked at you, I wanted to get my droit out and give it a good gallop, so I hope I get points for restraint tonight. It could all have been over before the end of Post Malone, if I hadn’t thought very hard about fence painting. Oh, and the music is Jenna’s, before you criticise my Spotify playlist.’
I barely heard him. I’d drifted off into a dazed doze, to half-dreams of postcards and waltzes. I think Max may have slept too, because he shook me awake. Enough time had passed for the candles to have dribbled down into stubs and the lighting to have become sinister. ‘Come on, let’s go to bed,’ he said. ‘And I’m not expecting you to finish the night with me if you don’t want to.’
But I did want to. Max’s room was pleasingly ordinary, without a four-poster or an armoire to be seen, just a comfortable, large bed, into which we fell in a tangle of arms and legs, to check that the ballroom hadn’t been an aberration and things could be as good the second time around. Which they were.
They were pretty bloody amazing the third time too, but now it was morning and yesterday’s grey skies had given way to blazing blue. The sun shone into Max’s room at dawn, but was nowhere near as bright as Max himself, bursting through the door with a large jug of coffee and some toast and the air of a man who has achieved a Personal Best.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You’re still here. I thought it might have been a dream.’
‘I was here when you went off to make the coffee. Unless you sleepwalk, that must have been a bit of a clue.’ Embarrassed, for some reason, suddenly, I sat up with the covers pulled to my chin like a 1970s sitcom. ‘But thank you for the coffee. I need it.’
Max gave me the grin again. It was an open, happy grin which contained a bit of naughtiness and a lot of relief. ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you here,’ he said, pouring gigantic mugs full of fragrant coffee. ‘That we’ve finally got round to… err… having all the fun. I didn’t want to rush you into anything but, my God, I’ve been trying to plan for this for weeks.’ The grin stuttered uncertainly. ‘Alice, please, tell me you’ve been wanting to do this too. That it’s not going to be a “thanks for the memories” type of thing?’
He sounded genuinely uncertain. This man, who had stalked with variations through my dreams since I hit puberty, who was the very embodiment of the men that I’d read about in Sheila’s books with swooning heroines on the covers, was uncertain as to whether I, with my wobbly thighs and stomach and lack of waistline, would want him.
‘Well.’ I chewed a piece of toast thoughtfully. ‘I think I can probably lower my standards. In your case.’
A pause. Then the relief flooded back onto his face, and he was laughing until the coffee in his mug began to slop onto the bed. ‘Oh, Alice,’ he said. ‘Oh, Alice. I do l… need you.’
‘Quite right too,’ I nodded, but I’d heard it. That little slip. It was too soon for the L word, for me anyway. Grant and I had said it, but now I realised that what we’d had wasn’t love. Not really. We’d said it because it was expected of us. Now, with Max, nothing was expected. We could take our time and he seemed to feel that too.
I went home later that afternoon. I had four weeks of facing Sheila’s questions about whether or not I’d started wetting myself yet to get through, and I didn’t want to run the risk of Grant and Jenna walking in on Max and me pretending to work whilst touching one another at every opportunity.
We hadn’t seen them all weekend, in fact. They were probably off having fun, I thought, and then the memories of the fun I’d had with Max came sweeping back, and I had to put the car windows down and drive with the cool of the darkening air on my cheeks for a while. Max had got lectures to prepare and give, I had windows to plan. We were old enough and wise enough to know that real life continued outside Hatherleigh Hall, and we couldn’t spend days in bed, however much we wanted to.
To tide me over, I’d brought a bag full of papers from the stack with me. It bulged complacently on the back seat of the car, and then in the armchair, where I dropped it as I came in. I could sort here as well as at the Hall, and I might as well spend my evenings doing something useful, rather than reliving Saturday night and wondering whether Max would have changed his mind about me before Friday night.
He wouldn’t, if the messages I’d had from him during my drive home were anything to go by. They were light-hearted messages, not blow-by-blow accounts of what he’d like to do to me next time we met – although I wouldn’t have turned my nose up at those either, but they might have indicated that this whatever-we-had was purely sexual. These messages were funny, observational, little updates of how his life was going, to which I replied in kind from lay-bys and viewpoints, where I’d stopped whenever I’d heard the buzz of his incoming messages. I might have cast caution to the winds in the ballroom, but here I was Sensible Alice again, and being prosecuted for using my phone whilst driving was Just Not Me.
My house felt different, now I was in it with a different mindset. The clonks and yells from Next Door Right were family life I could smile at, rather than annoyances. Mr Next Door Left’s jaunty wave as the dog dragged him past my window was a friendly observation of me standing there pensively rather than a sarcastic note on my lack of a life.
I couldn’t settle. The house felt chafingly tight around me, like a slightly-too-small bra. I reasoned that it was because I’d been wafting around in the huge, high-ceilinged space of Hatherleigh Hall for the best part of a week, and that the contrast between all that air and the cramped little space of my nineteenth-century cottage was giving me claustrophobia, until I found a mug out of place in the kitchen. I had a ‘favourite’ mug and always used that one. The ‘visitor’ mugs lived in the cupboard over the hob, but when I opened the cupboard where the biscuits were kept, there was a mug. A nondescript, inoffensive mug, one of the Secret Santa gifts that circled the office every year, occasionally containing a selection of cheap chocolates or a mini bottle of Prosecco. But, more to the point, a mug which was never used.
I stood back and stared at it. Its logo, a picture of the North York Moors, stared back. Carefully, considering every move, I picked it up and weighed it in my hand. A normal mug, of normal mug weight, it couldn’t have fallen or flown through a closed cupboard door. Could it? I had a flashback to some of the stories I’d put in chronological order for Max. A dark night. Things that moved. I almost dropped the mug onto the work surface.
Then I began to notice other things. The chair, which I only moved to hoover under, and that only once a year, was slightly out of alignment. I pounded up the stairs and found that the soap in the bathroom had been put back in the dish upside down. A towel hung off centre.
I knew I wasn’t the most diligent person in the world regarding housework; dusting and cobweb removal and tidying away of plates and clothing weren’t top of the agenda while I lived alone. After all, who cared, apart from me, if there were socks in the living room and a plate beside the bed? But these out of place things didn’t come under housework, they came under someone has been here.
I rang Max. This was the first time I’d ever been able to call someone who might have had the slightest interest in my life, and I felt it as I dialled. Besides, I wanted to talk to him, to hear his voice. To know that what we’d shared last night had been real.
‘Hey, Alice.’ He sounded pleased to hear from me too. ‘Can’t keep away, eh?’
‘Someone’s been in my house,’ I said, keeping my voice low, although I wasn’t sure why. They definitely weren’t still here, unless they were standing sideways in the wardrobe.
‘Oh, yes, Jen just got back and she mentioned something about Grant taking her there? Just for a quick coffee, breaking their journey on their way back from… actually, I’m not sure where they went. But they’re back now.’
‘They… Grant brought her here? To my house? How did he get in? He didn’t shove her through the upstairs window, did he?’ The bathroom window didn’t quite lock. It was only accessible by climbing up on the kitchen roof, though, and you’d have to be very skinny to get through.
Max sounded cautious now. ‘I think he’s got a key?’
I put the phone down and dashed to the fruit bowl. It almost never contained actual fruit, being used as a receptacle for all the loose bits and pieces that may or may not come in useful at some future date. My spare keys lived there. Used to live there, anyway.
‘He promised he’d put it back when he was here on Monday. The absolute…’ I ran out of words. ‘And I thought he was improving.’
Now I was angry. Max and I ended the call, and I went through to the living room, where the complacency of the bag of papers made me even angrier. What kind of family kept everything like this? When Mum had died, I’d gone through all her paperwork and thrown away anything that wasn’t relevant, in those first weeks of baffled grief and confusion. Grant hadn’t helped at all, of course, he’d pleaded work, but I’d often come into the spare room to find him LionLording it with his cohort. The utter turd.
I dropped the bag onto the floor, where the insufficient carrier bag seams split and the papers toppled out onto the carpet. On top were the two postcards I’d picked out last night. Old pictures of a long ago London. London. Wasn’t that where Alethia’s brother was meant to have gone?
I turned them over. The first one bore the message ‘I AM HERE’. Carefully printed in capital letters and signed with a firm J. Just the initial, carved so deeply into the postcard that it had embossed its way through to appear in reverse on the side of the double decker in the picture. Addressed to ‘Fortune House Farm, Great Riccalldale, North Yorkshire’. No postcode, but then they didn’t have postcodes then, did they?
The postcard of Buckingham Palace had the same writing: ‘DOING WELL. I AM HAPPY NOW. J’. John had clearly been a man of few words. But these were proof that he had gone to London, anyway. Which meant he wasn’t the body under the house. Damn. I’d been so sure.
But now I needed to know who it was, what had happened to someone in that house, to give Max the closure he wanted, the end of his book and a proper conclusion to the story of a house which had frightened so many people through the years. As Max had said, some of those stories could have been over-imagination; the dark of the moors and the austere bulk of the house would have lent themselves to that sort of thing. Some of the stories would have been pure invention for a warped kind of fame or self-aggrandisement of the teller, those who had always wanted to write a book but lacked the wherewithal, perhaps. But some were so inexplicably mundane that imagination surely couldn’t play a part and the sheer pointlessness gave them a forgettability that anyone in search of making themselves a name would have at least given a layer of creeping horror; fog, a dog howling, a mysterious cry.
We had ghost stories. We had a body, mysteriously buried. I had a pile of paperwork which might or might not hold the key. And, talking of keys, I also had an ex-husband who still had my front door key. I went and put the chain on the door, in case. Then, putting the postcards aside on their own separate pile, which I mentally labelled ‘possibly of interest’, I started sifting through the papers.
Extract from Walking Holidays on the North York Moors by Norah-Jane Garfield, privately published in 2017.
We had taken a walking holiday, following part of the Coast-to-Coast path, and on this day we were crossing the bit of the moor from where the path joins the Lyke Wake Walk near to where the Fortune House stands. We had been warned by the walk leader not to stray from the path as the landowner did not like walkers, so we were all carefully keeping to a fairly well-trodden way through heather and bracken, and were climbing a long slope of maybe 1 in 12 towards our lunch stop at the crest of the hill.
It was a gloomy day and there were seven of us on the walk, including my husband and myself, all of us fit and keen walkers, suitably attired. I was walking at the front of the group, following the guide and talking about the local landscape. He had pointed out some feature or other and, as we were well ahead of the main group, we stopped on a convenient ridge to turn and look out over the dale. As such, we could see the rest of the group straggling behind us up the hill, which was steep and a difficult climb.
All of a sudden, my guide exclaimed, ‘Who on earth is that?’ and pointed. At the back of the group, and climbing the gradient in a smooth, untroubled way as though it were flat ground, was a young man we didn’t recognise. As I say, all our group were suitably dressed for a long walk through moorland, with good all-weather jackets and trousers and heavy walking boots and gaiters. The young man following us wore a flat cap and tweed jacket. I did not see his lower half, the undergrowth being sufficient to obscure it. Momentarily I believed him to be a local, or another walker who had simply attached himself to the back of our group, but his movement soon disabused me of that belief. He was not bending forward to accommodate the slope, nor showing any sign of physical effort, but rather was moving almost as though pulled on a trolley in a kind of ‘gliding’ movement.
There was something unnatural about his motion. The track was steep, broken by rocks and roots, and even the more experienced walkers in our group were finding it hard going to reach the top. This man seemed almost to be floating up the hillside. As we watched, one of the walkers towards the front of the group stumbled and our attention was diverted for a second, and when we looked back at the rear of the group, the stranger was gone.
I should point out that we were on bare hillside, with nothing but undergrowth. There was nowhere for the man to have gone, apart from collapsing to lie completely flat, whereupon the heather may have concealed him. He could not have left the dale without us seeing him.
After a moment, the guide, who had up until now been a stalwart and phlegmatic man, collapsed onto the turf, white and shaking. I was worried by his appearance, he looked most unwell, and he was muttering something about not believing it until he saw it, and how it was the ghost of the Fortune House, or some such. I, still thinking that the man had been flesh and blood and perhaps playing a trick or joke on walkers, went back down the slope to search the ground where the man had vanished, expecting to find him hiding among the bracken and laughing to himself. There was nobody. I investigated the path we had followed for any signs of apparatus which could have produced the ‘smooth gliding’ effect, such as tracks of wheels or any kind of pulley, and there were none. On questioning the rest of the group, nobody else had seen our mysterious follower, even my husband, who had been the rear guard and, as such, within only a couple of feet of the man as we had watched from above. Even to this day, my husband swears that there was nobody else in our group, and only the fact that both the guide and I had seen him and described him in a similar way prevented him from thinking that I had had a touch of the sun on that day!