Prospero’s Children

‘A sort of genius loci,’ Will supplied knowledgeably. He was in a beatific mood after the vicar’s wife had donated a packet of Frosties from her larder.

‘That’s it. Pure speculation, of course. Mind you, it’s fairly well grounded in folk mythology. In the past, every house in Yorkshire had its own hobgoblin. The occupants would put out a saucer of milk or a choice morsel of food to keep it sweet, and in return it would look after the house, see off danger and disease, that kind of thing. Much more efficient than a burglar alarm.’

‘Maybe we should get Fern to put out some milk for ours,’ Robin suggested slyly.

‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ his daughter retorted.

‘I don’t know about ghosts,’ Will said, ‘but I heard a weird sniffing noise last night, going along the wall under my window. It was awfully loud.’ Fern glanced at him with suddenly widening eyes.

‘Could be a badger,’ the vicar said. ‘They always sound as if they have a cold in the head. What you want to do is go out in the morning and check for tracks. I’ve got a book in my study with some good illustrations: I’ll show you what to look for.’

By the time they returned to Ned Capel’s house the daylight was failing. The cloud-cover had begun to break up and chinks of fire appeared in the far west above a muffled sunset, while eastwards great lakes of pale green had opened up, with a star or two winking in their depths. The motorcyclist Fern had heard the previous night roared past them on the narrow road, a little too close for comfort, his exhaust rattling and a black visor hiding his face. Their temporary home loomed up ahead of them, its unyielding frontage looking no longer threatening but merely solid, sternly dependable, as safe as a castle wall which would keep them from the night. Fern went straight up to her room and gazed out towards the sunset: twilight dimmed the rugged hillside but she could still distinguish the paler thread of the path and the stump or boulder that resembled a seated man on the bank above, maintaining its timeless vigil over the house. Something like a bird swooped past, its wing-beat too swift for the eye to follow, its flight-path erratic. Then there was another, and another. They made a faint high-pitched chittering unlike any birdsong. ‘Bats!’ Fern thought with a sudden shiver, part fear, part pleasure. She had never seen a bat outside the nature programmes on television and although she was not really frightened of them they seemed to her alien and fantastical, messengers symbolising her transition into another world. The teeming man-made metropolis where she had grown up shrank in her mind until it was merely a blob of meaningless ferment, and beyond it she glimpsed a boundless universe, with pock-marked moons sinking behind drifting hills, and blue voids opening in between, and dusty nebulae floating like clouds across the backdrop of space, and at the last a starry sea whose glittering waves hissed forever on the silver beaches at the margin of being. For a moment she was spellbound, panic-stricken; and then the endless vistas vanished from her head and there was only the hillside climbing to the barren moor and the zigzagging of the bats. The sunset had faded from behind the cloud-wrack and in the softened light details were briefly clearer: Fern squinted at the view, striving after uncertainty, knowing that what she saw was against logic, against sense. The solitary boulder had gone. The path was empty, the slope bare; in an eyeblink, the duration of a mirage, the hunched up rock or stump had disappeared. Fern flinched away from the window with a lurching heart and made herself walk slowly from the room.

Tea had been heavy on scones and cake and accordingly the three of them ate a cursory supper and spent the rest of the evening trying to elucidate the rule-book for a box of Mah Jongg tiles unearthed in the attic.

‘Good thing, no telly,’ said Robin a little doubtfully. ‘Makes you create your own amusements. Stretches the mind.’

‘We’ll have to get a TV here,’ said Will. ‘Also a music centre.’

‘No point,’ Fern said. ‘We’re going to sell. Will, you’re cheating. There’s no such thing as a King Kong.’

‘I’m not cheating,’ Will retorted. ‘I’m creating my own amusements.’

It was well after eleven by the time they went up to bed, worn out by the intricacies of the game. Fern tumbled into a bemused sleep where ivory tiles tap-danced along the table and an elaborate Oriental character uncurled into a bat-winged creature which skittered around the room, bumping into walls and lamp-shades. ‘It’s a dragon,’ said a voice in her ear. ‘Don’t look into its eyes’—but it was too late, she was already falling into the hypnotic orbs as if into a crimson abyss, clouded with shifting vapours of thought, and a single iris dilated in front of her, black as the Pit. Then she crossed into a dreamland so crowded with incident and adventure that she woke exhausted, snatching in vain at the fraying threads of recollection. She had a feeling her dream had possessed some overwhelming significance, but it was gone in a few seconds and there were only the raindrops beating on the window-panes like the tapping of Mah Jongg tiles. She slept and woke again, this time into silence. And then below her window came the snuffling noise, bronchial and somehow eager, as if the animal outside was desperately seeking ingress through the steadfast wall. ‘A badger,’ thought Fern. ‘I’d like to see a badger,’ but a huge reluctance came over her, pressing her into the bed like a dead weight, forcing her back into the inertia of sleep, and when she woke again it was morning.

The hot water had come on eventually but there was no shower attachment so Fern had a quick bath. When she finally nerved herself to look out at the view, the boulder—she had decided to think of it as a boulder since the area was virtually devoid of trees—was back in place as if it had never been gone; she could almost convince herself its absence the previous evening had been a trick of the twilight. Will was grubbing around in the flower-bed below, presumably hunting for badger-tracks as instructed by Gus Dinsdale. In the kitchen, Robin was trying to make toast without the assistance of a toaster. Several charred slices on the table bore mute witness to his failure. Fern packed him off to the bathroom and took over; Will came in from the garden, unashamedly earth-stained, in time to appropriate the first round.

‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Badger-tracking.’

Will set down his slice of toast unfinished, a frown puckering his forehead. ‘No. I can’t understand it. I heard it last night, that same sniffing, really loud, just where the flower-bed is. It had rained earlier, and Gus said damp soil is perfect for holding prints, but there isn’t a mark. Yet I know I heard it. I was sort of half asleep at the time, and I thought about getting up and taking a look, but somehow I didn’t want to, or I was just too tired. I wish I had now. Maybe I dreamed it.’

‘If you did,’ said Fern, ‘then I did too. Both nights.’

‘Perhaps the house is haunted,’ Will said after a pause.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Fern asked.

‘Well, Mr Burrows—Physics—he says Science has proved so many impossible things that it would be a great mistake to rule out the supernatural just because we haven’t sussed it out yet. He got us all talking about it one afternoon: he said he’d had an experience which he couldn’t explain, and Rebecca Hollis told us about her grandmother’s house, and this room which is always cold, and something she’d seen there. She isn’t the fanciful type, either, and she doesn’t boast; she wouldn’t even have talked about it if her best friend hadn’t nudged her into it.’ Absent-mindedly, he took another bite of toast and reached for the Frosties. ‘I rather like that idea Gus had, about the house-spirit,’ he concluded with his mouth full.

‘But the sniffing is outside the house,’ Fern said thoughtfully, ‘and it wants to get in.’

For a minute Will stopped eating and stared at her. She contemplated telling him about the boulder but decided against it; he was only twelve, and the light had been poor, she might have been mistaken. ‘I’m imagining things,’ she said, suddenly impatient with her own credulity. ‘It’s the Yorkshire landscape. Overexposure to nature is bad for city-dwellers. We need to get back to the bright lights of reality.’

‘The lights are man-made,’ Will pointed out. ‘Electricity and neon. Only the stars are real.’

And then: ‘What’s that awful smell?’

‘Damn,’ said Fern. ‘Now I’ve burnt the toast.’

They drove back to London after lunch at the local pub, where surly rustics eyed them sidelong and thick Yorkshire accents made the language barrier almost insurmountable. ‘Interesting house,’ Robin said in the car. ‘Must go through all that stuff some time. Quite a collection. Didn’t see the figurehead, did you, Fern? You ought to have a look. She’s pretty impressive. Next time we’re there—’

‘We really have to sell, Daddy,’ Fern interrupted resolutely. ‘We don’t need the house and we’re not likely to use it very much. It’ll be far too expensive to maintain just as a storehouse for marine antiquities.’

‘Of course. Of course.’ Robin’s agreement was too quick and too hearty. ‘Just a thought. We’ll go back in the summer, sort out, tidy up, sell later. No hurry. Market’s still picking up. Best to wait a bit. Invest some time and effort in the place: makes good business sense. James’ll approve. He’s all for investment.’ James was his accountant.

Fern’s grip tightened on the AA Road Atlas.

‘We’ve got to go back,’ Will insisted. ‘The house-spirit will be waiting for us.’

Fern was not entirely sure he was joking.

II

The summer holidays had arrived before they found time to return to Yarrowdale. Robin was seeing a fair amount of Alison Redmond, apparently in the course of literary collaboration; but Fern did not perceive any reason for undue anxiety. Although they dined out together almost every week he never brought her home, and in his daughter’s experience serious intentions always involved getting on terms with the children. On her own terrain, she could demolish all invaders: her sweet, aloof smile quelled both patronage and gush, camaraderie wilted in the face of her perfect manners, domestic aspirants blenched at her competent management and delectable cuisine. As a child, she had used a cultivated artlessness to undermine overconfidence; when she grew older, she honed her conversational skills at the dinner table until she knew to a nicety how to wrong-foot her opponents and expose, as if by accident, pretension, bossiness, self-importance—even when such defects were not really there. Will, an indifferent ally, usually left her a clear field. Robin was the charming, helpless type of man who invariably attracted forceful women wanting to mould him to suit their own inclinations, an ambition that would only work as long as he was unaware of it. Once these plans had been revealed, resistance would set in, and Fern, who had been moulding him for years, knew she had won another unobtrusive skirmish. She wanted her father to marry again eventually, but only to someone who would make him comfortable, whose authority would be gentle, who would refrain from pushing him down roads he did not wish to travel. She had almost decided in favour of Abigail Markham, a thirtysomething Sloane currently employed by Robin’s publicity department in a low-key capacity, who combined a certain serenity of outlook with a pleasant scattiness over dress and social engagements. But Robin’s penchant for her company seemed to have abated under Alison’s influence. Fern, keeping a routine eye on him, trusted the friendship would not outlast the germination of the book.

Attending a party at the gallery with her father, she noticed Alison greeting him with an extra inch of smile and a sideways glitter of her pale eyes. She wore several clinging, drooping, fluttering garments of some vague shade between beige and taupe which echoed the dark fairness of her hair, and her overfull mouth was painted a deep red so that it blossomed like a rampant peony against the whiteness of her skin. There was a bizarre fascination in her sidelong gaze, the point-edged smile that never came close to laughter, the sinuous fingers that punctuated her every gesture, the rippling motion of the material that wrapped her body, as fluid and as neutral as water. And her strange, dull, endless hair, veined with hues of shadow, enfolding her like a cloak: Fern wondered what treatment had made it grow so long—too long, surely, for European locks—and what had leeched the colours of life from its waving masses. It might almost have provided her with a mantle of invisibility, effective by dusk and dark, hiding her from wary eyes as she stole abroad on some unspecified but nefarious business. ‘Nonsense,’ Fern scolded herself. ‘What is the matter with me? I’m seeing too many ghosts lately. This is the West End, this is an art gallery, this is a room full of people drinking cheap champagne and chattering about the decline of the image. There are no spectres here.’ In passing, she glanced at one of the champagne bottles. Long after, she knew that should have warned her, evidence rather than intuition: the champagne was not cheap. She had been attending and sometimes assisting at such parties since she was fourteen and she knew quite well that no normal person wastes good drink on a crowd.

‘And what do you think of the pictures tonight, Fernanda?’ The voice at her side caught her unawares. For the second time.

‘It’s a bit difficult to study them properly with so many people around,’ she said after a moment, mentally putting herself on guard. She had not noticed the pictures yet.

‘Of course,’ Javier Holt responded smoothly. ‘The problem with a private view is that it isn’t private and nobody gets to view anything.’ His face looked like a mask, she thought, a perfect mask of some seamless metal with topaz eyes and hair of spun steel. The focus of her apprehension shifted. At least Alison Redmond was a living hazard, whereas Javier Holt appeared dead, suavely, immaculately dead, and the spark that animated him might have come from elsewhere, controlled by a pressing of buttons, a turning of wheels.

‘You seemed very intent nonetheless,’ he went on. ‘If not the pictures, what were you studying?’

‘People,’ said Fern coolly. ‘You have an interesting selection here.’

He smiled automatically. ‘Anyone in particular?’ He obviously knew who had claimed her attention.

‘Alison,’ said Fern with a pose of candour, a hint of defiance.

‘Naturally. Your father seems very taken with her. She is a most unusual woman.’

‘She moves like water,’ Fern said, ‘like a twisting stream, all bright deceptive reflections, hidden currents, dangerous little eddies. She might be very shallow, she might be very deep. She’s much too unusual for my father.’

‘I am sure she knows that,’ Javier responded with that faint mockery in his tone.

Fern was not entirely reassured.

It was something of a relief to be leaving for Yorkshire. Fern’s two closest friends were going on holiday early and although she would miss London it was hot enough for the country to have its attractions. Robin might spend part of the week in the metropolis on business but long weekends at Dale House, rifling among the hotch-potch of Ned Capel’s collection, would provide both distance and distraction from urban perils. He evidently anticipated the visit with a brand of schoolboy pleasure which even exceeded Will’s. Fern found it more difficult to analyse her own emotions when she saw Yarrowdale again: there was no obvious surge of gladness, rather a feeling of acknowledgement, a falling-into-place of her life’s pattern, as if she had returned to somewhere she was meant to be after a careless and unscheduled absence. The grim façade of the house seemed to relax a little; recognition peered out of the empty windows. She went up to her room and, with a doubt bordering on fear, scanned the hillside for that strange-shaped boulder. It was there in its place, a silent Watcher, maintaining surveillance through all weathers, unmoving as the rock it resembled. But it is a rock, Fern reminded herself, afraid to find she was no longer afraid; it was never gone; I imagined that.

She slept undisturbed by birdcall or badger and in the morning, encouraged by a lightening breeze and a brightening sun, they walked the half mile or so to the coast. Yarrowdale was not one of the Dales, being situated on the edge of the moors between Scarborough and Whitby, where a series of steep valleys wind down to a rocky shore buffeted by the storms from the North Sea. That day, however, the sea was blue and tranquil, the waves tumbling gently onto the beach and melting into great fans of foam, while a coaxing wind seemed to take the fire out of the noonday heat. The Capels strolled along the wide sweep of beach and smelt the sea-smell and removed their shoes to paddle at the waves’ edge—‘The water’s freezing,’ said Fern, and ‘Got to be careful swimming,’ Robin added. ‘Mrs Wicklow’s right: currents are chancy round here.’ There were few people, no litter. Scavenging gulls skimmed the shoreline in vain: their lonely cries sounded harsh as screams and desolate as the ocean’s heart. Yet to Fern they seemed to be a summons to an unknown world, a growing-up unlike anything she had planned, where her mind and her experience would be broadened beyond the bounds of imagination.

* * *

On Monday Robin set off for London with a car full of paintings which would undoubtedly prove to be worth a fraction of his optimistic valuations, something that would in no way damage his hopes for the rest of Great-Cousin Ned’s jumble. Mrs Wicklow had agreed to assist with cooking and housekeeping and Gus Dinsdale’s wife had promised to drive Fern to Whitby for essential shopping. Will had started on cleaning the ship’s figurehead. As Mrs Wicklow had said, there was a sizeable section of ship attached. ‘See,’ Will told his sister, ‘she’s got a name. When I’ve got the rest of those barnacles off we should be able to read it. I wonder how old she is?’

‘This is really a job for a professional,’ Fern remarked.

‘We haven’t got a professional. Anyway, I’m being careful.’ He proceeded to notch a kitchen knife against a particularly stubborn crustacean. ‘She’s been on the sea-bed a while. She must have survived much rougher handling than anything she’s getting from me.’

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Fern, abandoning her careful indifference to succumb to the lure of a mystery.

After about an hour of rather awkward chipping the name emerged, semi-obliterated but legible. Fern had known what it would be all along, with the strange prescience which comes from that region of the brain they say is never used, a zone of thought still unconscious and untabulated. Seawitch, ran the lettering. The carving did not resemble Alison, for all its flowing hair and parted lips: the improbable bosom was outthrust, the belly a sleek curve, the face as knowing as Dodona. Nonetheless, Fern was unsurprised. Her awareness was touched with an elusive familiarity, but whether from the future or the past she could not tell.

‘She’s wonderful,’ said Will. ‘Those tits look like nuclear warheads.’

‘You’re much too young to notice such things,’ his sister said loftily.

‘You’re just jealous,’ said Will.

That evening Mrs Wicklow left around five. Fern made omelettes and they ate in the kitchen listening to Will’s ghettoblaster pumping out the latest from the Pet Shop Boys. Even when Robin was with them, they never sat in the drawing room: it was always a degree colder than the rest of the house and the stone idol squatted there wrapped in its secret gloating like a diminutive Moloch. Fern did her best to keep the door closed, hindered by Mrs Wicklow’s penchant for opening both doors and windows at every opportunity, in order, so she said, to let in air. ‘There’s air in here already,’ Will had pointed out, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be breathing.’ But Mrs Wicklow believed air had to be specially admitted.

The sky had clouded over and by the time they went to bed the night outside had grown very dark. ‘We ought to have candles,’ said Will, ‘guttering in the draught, making huge spidery shadows on the wall.’

‘Don’t talk about spiders,’ said Fern.

Slightly to her surprise, she fell asleep immediately, untroubled by nightmares.

She woke abruptly in the small hours to find herself sitting up in bed, intensely alert, her nerve-endings on stalks. The curtains were half drawn but the space between was merely a paler shade of black, barely discernible against the velvet dark of the room. There was no wind and the absolute quiet, without even a distant rumour of traffic, was something to which she had not yet become accustomed. The silence had a quality of tension about it, as if the night itself were holding its breath, waiting for a board to creak, a pin to drop, the warning screech of a bird. Fern’s pulse beat so hard that her whole body seemed to shake with it. And then came the snuffling, just as she had expected, horribly familiar and so loud it might have been directly below her window-sill. The rasping, stertorous breath of some creature that left never a print, an incorporeal hunter who had no existence except to scent its prey. The reluctance that held her back she recognised as fear, a fear that was not only inside her but all around her, a dread that was part of the room itself: she had to thrust it aside like a physical barrier. The floor made no sound beneath her tread; the window, thanks to Mrs Wicklow, was already ajar. She leaned out into the night.

There was something at the foot of the wall, something that was darker than the surrounding darkness, a clot of shadow whose actual shape was impossible to make out. Not a badger: the white bands on its mask would have been visible at that range. Besides, although she had no idea how large a badger was supposed to be she was sure this must be larger, larger than a fox, larger than a sheepdog. It moved to and fro, to and fro, as if worrying at the wall; then suddenly it stopped, and the sniffing was accompanied by a furious scrabbling, the unmistakable sound of paws burrowing frenziedly in the soil, as though seeking to unearth the very foundations of the house. Afterwards, Fern knew she must have made some slight noise to betray her presence. The thing below her froze, and lifted its head. She saw neither form nor feature, only the eyes, slanting ovoids filled with a glow that mirrored nothing around them, a livid flame that came only from within. The terror that rushed over her was beyond all reason, a wild, mindless force not pushing her back but pulling her down, down towards the ground and the waiting eyes. With a vast effort of will she wrenched herself free—and then she was back in her room, latching the window with unsteady fingers, and the silence outside was unbroken, and a board creaked in welcome as she stumbled across to her bed. She thought of going to her brother’s room to see if he was awake and what he had heard, but a great tiredness overwhelmed her and she decided it could wait till morning. Now she needed to sleep…and sleep…and by daylight the horror would be a matter for nightmare and the flower-bed would be pocked with the tracks of some mongrel stray.

But it rained before dawn, and any prints there might have been were washed away.

Fern went to the window as soon as she got up, and there was Will searching the ground, still in his pyjamas and slippers: the latter would be soaked through. ‘Come in and get dressed,’ she called. And: ‘Have you found anything?’

‘No. The rain was too heavy.’ His upturned face was curiously solemn despite a lavish smudge of dirt. ‘You heard it too?’

‘Yes. Come on in.’

He disappeared through the back door and Fern’s gaze lifted automatically to the path straddling the hillside. In the grey morning light there could be no mistaking what she saw. The Watcher had gone.

‘It wasn’t a badger,’ said Fern over breakfast. ‘There were no markings. It was big, and dark: that’s all I could see.’ She didn’t want to mention the reasonless terror that had tried to drag her from the window. Fern disliked both terror and unreason.