Endless Night (10 page)

T
hat's how our life began at Gipsy's Acre. We didn't find another name for the house. That first evening fixed Gipsy's Acre in our heads.

“We'll call it Gipsy's Acre,” said Ellie, “just to show! A kind of challenge, don't you think? It's
our
Acre, and to hell with the gipsy's warning.”

She was her old gay self again the next day and soon we were busy getting ourselves settled in, and getting also to know the neighbourhood and the neighbours. Ellie and I walked down to the cottage where the gipsy woman lived. I felt it would be a good thing if we found her digging in her garden. The only time Ellie had seen her before was when she told our fortunes. If Ellie saw she was just an ordinary old woman—digging up potatoes—but we didn't see her. The cottage was shut up. I asked if she were dead but the neighbour I asked shook her head.

“She must have gone away,” she said. “She goes away from time to time, you know. She's a gipsy really. That's why she can't stay in
houses. She wanders away and comes back again.” She tapped her forehead. “Not quite right up here.”

Presently she said, trying to mask curiosity, “You've come from the new house up there, haven't you, the one on the top of the hill, that's just been built?”

“That's right,” I said, “we moved in last night.”

“Wonderful-looking place it is,” she said. “We've all been up to look at it while it was building. Makes a difference, doesn't it, seeing a house like that where all those gloomy trees used to be?” She said to Ellie rather shyly, “You're an American lady, aren't you, so we heard?”

“Yes,” said Ellie, “I'm American—or I was, but now I'm married to an Englishman so I'm an Englishwoman.”

“And you've come here to settle down and live, haven't you?”

We said we had.

“Well, I hope you'll like it, I'm sure.” She sounded doubtful.

“Why shouldn't we?”

“Oh well, it's lonely up there, you know. People don't always like living in a lonely place among a lot of trees.”

“Gipsy's Acre,” said Ellie.

“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 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 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 and stayed with us for a weekend. She was enthusiastic about the house, and congratulated us on all our furnishings and pictures and colour schemes. She was very tactful. After the weekend 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!” Ellie 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 apologized 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 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 us 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 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.

“I'd like to meet him sometime, though I don't suppose I'd know what to say to him. I'm not artistic.”

Then he asked us to settle a day to come and have lunch with him and his wife.

“You can see how you like my house,” he said.

“It's an old house, I suppose?” I said.

“Built 1720. Nice period. The original house was Elizabethan. That was burnt down about 1700 and a new one built on the same spot.”

“You've always lived here then?” I said. I didn't mean him personally, of course, but he understood.

“Yes. We've been here since Elizabethan times. Sometimes prosperous, sometimes down and out, selling land when things have gone badly, buying it back when things went well. I'll be glad to show it to you both,” he said, and looking at Ellie he said with a smile, “Americans like old houses, I know.
You're
the one who probably won't think much of it,” he said to me.

“I won't pretend I know much about old things,” I said.

He stumped off then. In his car there was a spaniel waiting for him. It was a battered old car with the paint rubbed off, but I was getting my values by now. I knew that in this part of the world he was still God all right, and he'd set the seal of his approval on us. I could see that. He liked Ellie. I was inclined to think that he'd liked me, too, although I'd noticed the appraising glances which he shot over me from time to time, as though he was making a quick snap judgment on something he hadn't come across before.

Ellie was putting splinters of glass carefully in the wastepaper basket when I came back into the drawing room.

“I'm sorry it's broken,” she said regretfully. “I liked it.”

“We can get another like it,” I said. “It's modern.”

“I know! What startled you, Mike?”

I considered for a moment.

“Something Phillpot said. It reminded me of something that happened when I was a kid. A pal of mine at school and I played
truant and went out skating on a local pond. Ice wouldn't bear us, silly little asses that we were. He went through and was drowned before anyone could get him out.”

“How horrible.”

“Yes. I'd forgotten all about it until Phillpot mentioned about his own brother.”

“I like him, Mike, don't you?”

“Yes, very much. I wonder what his wife is like.”

We went to lunch with the Phillpots early the following week. It was a white Georgian house, rather beautiful in its lines, though not particularly exciting. Inside it was shabby but comfortable. There were pictures of what I took to be ancestors on the walls of the long dining room. Most of them were pretty bad, I thought, though they might have looked better if they had been cleaned. There was one of a fair-haired girl in pink satin that I rather took to. Major Phillpot smiled and said:

“You've picked one of our best. It's a Gainsborough, and a good one, though the subject of it caused a bit of trouble in her time. Strongly suspected of having poisoned her husband. May have been prejudice, because she was a foreigner. Gervase Phillpot picked her up abroad somewhere.”

A few other neighbours had been invited to meet us. Dr. Shaw, an elderly man with a kindly but tired manner. He had to rush away before we had finished our meal. There was the Vicar who was young and earnest, and a middle-aged woman with a bullying voice who bred corgis. And there was a tall handsome dark girl called Claudia Hardcastle who seemed to live for horses, though hampered by having an allergy which gave her violent hay fever.