The Haunt

Audrey Lillian Barker was born at St Paul’s Cray, Kent in 1918, and published nine novels and eleven collections of short stories between 1947 and her death in 2002. Barker’s fiction was highly regarded in her own lifetime, most memorably by Rebecca West who wrote of Barker’s third novel: ‘You should ask your vet to put you down if you do not admire
The Middling
.’
*
Barker won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award in 1947 with her first collection,
Innocents
; and her novel
John Brown’s Body
(1969) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Today, Barker is a marginal figure, often remembered as a ‘writers’ writer’. The label suggests that her writing is in some way difficult, inaccessible to the general reader. This could not be further from the truth. Barker’s stories and novels deal with familiar situations and questions, and are set in unremarkable locations: suburban streets, cul-de-sacs, terraces, parks, hotels, chemists. Barker wrote about the places and people she knew and, I think,
for
the people she knew, literary or otherwise. She avoided overly ‘high-brow’ publications
and, from the outset of her writing career (which began proper in the 1930s at the department of juvenile fiction at the Amalgamated Press), she wrote for ordinary readers. Many of her short stories started their lives in popular women’s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s; more surprisingly, in the 1970s and 1980s over twenty of her ghost stories were published in bestselling horror anthologies. This involvement in mainstream publishing made her a flexible writer, able to adapt her precise, highly readable prose to the demands of various fictional genres.

On the other hand, Barker’s best stories tend to thwart both generic conventions and our expectations. Many of them appear on the surface to be about minor concerns but underneath there is a strangeness, a darkness, a sense that she is, after all, concerned with bigger questions. The singularity of Barker’s prose style has a lot to do with this. The precision with which she uses vocabulary has been recognised, but it is worth noting how often in Barker’s writing the meaning is not clear, or the syntax of a sentence trips up the reader. For a writer so interested in the exact meanings of words (she was an avid reader of dictionaries) it is surprising how frequently in her work the meaning of a word or phrase remains elusive. This sense of ambiguity relates to the position of Barker herself. She wrote both literary fiction and genre fiction, short stories and novels; she was at once connected with the London literary
scene and distanced from it; and she began writing at mid-century, a ‘critically awkward’ era after modernism but before postmodernism.
†

The ambiguity of Barker’s position sheds light on her preoccupation with the child, a figure at once intensely familiar and strangely enigmatic. Barker’s fiction explores how others have imagined childhood as well as the issues at stake in her own writing of the child. For Barker the modern child is firmly built on Romantic foundations. She is interested in Romantic conceptions of innocence and experience, particularly the dialectical interaction between these two states expressed in the work of William Blake. But her focus on the child is as much a response to the intense interest in childhood in her own lifetime. In mid-twentieth-century Britain children occupied an uncertain position: they were viewed with suspicion and uncertainty; and figured variously in discussions about human aggression and morality, as threats to society, as yardsticks showing the corruptive influence of the war, and as symbols of a future about which many were so unsure. Barker’s fiction resists some of the key narratives being told about children in post-war society and culture, and challenges the tendency in literature and child-study to understand the child in terms of abstraction and opposition. But while she is critical of others’ attempts to pin down the child, Barker’s own preoccupation with this figure is clear. Her
oeuvre
is a catalogue of
variations on the theme of childhood in which she writes and rewrites the child again and again, experimenting with different fictional forms.

The supernatural was another of Barker’s interests. In a lecture on ghost stories to the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in 1990, she calls herself ‘a lifelong devotee’ of the genre.
‡
Like the child, the ghost story frames Barker’s writing life. In 1942 she read Sacheverell Sitwell’s book on poltergeists which inspired her ghost story, ‘Fetched’. A story from her first collection, ‘Submerged’ was included in the first
Pan Book of Horror Stories
published in 1959; and her final novel,
The Haunt
, is in part a ghost story. If Barker could ever be claimed as a popular writer, it would be with reference to her ghost stories. One could also argue that it was by way of the ghost story that Barker achieved a move from the margins to the mainstream of the literary scene in the following decade: in addition to her RSL lecture, she had four stories commissioned by BBC Radio Four in 1992 and the same year published
Element of Doubt
, a collection of her ghost stories. For Barker, stories of the supernatural had not lost their power in modern times because of the necessity of ambiguity. ‘They endure’, she writes with typical Barkeresque frankness, ‘because we don’t know all the answers and we’re better off not knowing’.
§

The Haunt
was A. L. Barker’s final novel, the last book of a writing career in which early interruptions – the war, earning a living – meant that the majority of her books were published when she was over fifty. The novel took seven years to complete. Beginning it in 1992 as a collection of short stories, Barker continued to write, revise and edit
The Haunt
throughout difficult circumstances, including demands from her agent and publisher for a novel, and several episodes of severe ill-health: she fell and fractured her pelvis in January 1997 and suffered her first stroke in 1994. The novel was finally published when Barker was eighty-one and living in a nursing home in Sutton, Surrey.

Barker’s struggles with ageing and form are played out on the page, not only in her characters’ experiences but in the novel’s construction. Set in the Cornish countryside,
The Haunt
contains a number of narratives that gradually overlap. Newly retired Owen and Elissa Grierson have recently moved from Wimbledon in search of ‘a new life’. Owen forms a problematic attachment to their neighbour Angela Hartop and her young son, James. Nearby, a group of guests stay at the Bellechasse hotel: painter, Charlie Olssen; Senga, a journalist from London; Maurice Piper, an agony uncle; and Gilbert Eashing, a disabled antiquarian researching funerary sculpture. In a short flashback section, hotelier Ernie Clapham encounters the troubled Miss Pendennis.

Connecting these human life stories, a historical
narrative of Cornwall as an ancient place of ‘primordial forests’ runs through the novel. Its original title, ‘The Place’, indicates its key preoccupation. It focuses on the relationships between ageing, identity and place. Barker builds up layers of intertextuality: Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
echoes through the pages of
The Haunt
; the work of Romantic writers such as Blake and Wordsworth is also evoked; the flashback section of Barker’s novel alludes to Penelope Lively’s short story, ‘The Darkness Out There’. The novel is conscious too of the process by which narrative is created. Unlike most of Barker’s other novels it does not have chapters, instead sections are separated – or held together – by asterisks.

Some sections of
The Haunt
depict ageing as a solitary and difficult experience, others are more positive. Each older person in the novel is paired with a child: Owen with James; Eashing with Bettony; Miss Pendennis with Ernie. This pairing of youth and age allows Barker to explore her favourite theme, the impact of innocence on experience. In
The Haunt
, the insecurity of old age is compared to the vulnerability of youth; both are marginal positions, other to adult identity. Owen’s experience is more complex. During an expedition in the wood, he experiences a moment that resembles an epiphany or a rite of passage, except that Owen is not moving into a state of adulthood but entering a new stage of life. Retirement is thus figured as a transitional period that has some
parallels with adolescence in the sense that both are eras in which individuals forge new identities.

Kate Jones

Kate Jones is shortly to complete her doctoral thesis on A. L. Barker at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The project, which examines representations of the figure of the child in Barker’s fiction, will provide the first full-length introduction to her work and life. In 2011 Kate was awarded a dissertation fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas in Austin; the award enabled an invaluable research visit to the HRC’s A. L. Barker archive.

When the Griersons moved from Wimbledon to Cornwall it was more a flight of fancy than a leap in the dark. They thought they were going to a new life. ‘Begins at sixty,’ Owen said.

‘It will be like turning a page,’ said Elissa. ‘We’ll find a village, not touristy: it needn’t be thatched.’

‘Miles from a superstore?’

‘Heaven!’

Owen had just retired and hoped the change might compensate for the other radical change of not having a job to go to.

They found a place inland, a few houses clustered round a church and a general store. Beyond the village was a small hotel, the Bellechasse, in a sequestered corner overlooking creeks and the bay.

At the end of an unmade lane were two bungalows, one up for sale. ‘Bijou’, the agent called it. They couldn’t see anything gemlike about it: it was solid, slate-roofed, 1960-ish vernacular. Owen thought, What more should you expect of bricks and mortar?

‘We’d be overlooked,’ said Elissa.

‘By one other bungalow.’

‘It’s too far from the shop.’

‘When we can no longer drive we’ll walk there hand in hand.’

She would have settled for that. When the agent prised up a corner of the lino on the kitchen floor and showed them beautiful toast-brown tiles beneath, she was quite won over.

‘Of course there’s the garden,’ Owen said, admitting an element of doubt.

‘A nice challenge,’ said the agent.

‘Though you drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet will she always return. Horace, 65
BC
.’

They moved in on a wet day in August. Rain was tipping down, fresher and softer rain than in SW19. Owen was pleased to see how well the gutters dealt with it. This was the first house he had owned.

‘Someone’s watching us,’ said Elissa. ‘A child.’

‘The water-butt fills to a secondary tap which drains directly into a soakaway.’ Owen waved to the child. ‘We’ll have to make ourselves known.’

‘Let’s not be
eager
.’

Elissa wasn’t happy the first day in their new home. Owen had his finer feelings, in thirty years of marriage had learned to pick his way round hers. But the business of the bed, replacing their old double with twins upholstered in midnight blue and silver, headboards to match, easy-glide castors, which he had confidently expected to be a nice surprise, was a miscalculation. He had the beds installed and waiting when they moved in. Afterwards, he saw it her way. He always did, afterwards.

She stared at the beds, from the beds to him. ‘Where’s our bed?’

‘These are ours, yours and mine.’

‘What have you done with our bed?’

‘The rag and bone man took it.’

‘You gave our bed to the rag and bone man?’

Starting to see it her way, he started to bluster. ‘We couldn’t bring it here, could we? It was too big, it would be out of place.’

It had always been a wonder to him how swiftly she could dissolve into tears. To do himself justice, it only happened when she was stricken to her depths and he took care that wasn’t often.

‘Our marriage bed! Owen, how could you!’

He must be the only one who could – her depths went down thirty years. He found a scruple which he hadn’t knowingly taken into account. Now it came usefully to mind. ‘You’re always saying I’m restless and keep you awake. I thought you’d like a bed to yourself.’

‘I never always say anything. Certainly not about you. I don’t nag, I’m not a nagging wife!’

‘Of course you’re not.’

‘You’d tell me if I was?’

‘Look, about the beds—’

‘You don’t want to sleep with me any more.’

He grinned. ‘We might find it stimulating to change beds.’

‘You mean you need a boost!’ She ran from the room.

*

He walked through the garden. It grew breast high, so he did a breast stroke, snatching at the weeds and coming eye to
eye with beetles and bugs as they went about their business. What price a wild garden? Though you drive out Nature … He put his fist through a cobweb with a spider enthroned. It wasn’t going to work. Coming here was a mistake and they didn’t have the time, or the money, for a mistake this big.

He stamped through a bank of thistles, found himself facing a fence and a child, looking over.

‘Hoo,’ said the child.

‘We’re your new neighbours,’ said Owen.

‘Hoo, hoo, hoo.’

It was definitely a hoot.

*

Elissa fretted about the cleaning. Owen said the bungalow shouldn’t need cleaning since it had been redecorated throughout. She took him on a guided tour of paint splashes, fingerprints, dust heaps and cigarette butts left by the workmen.

‘They were supposed to decorate the house, not defile it.’ She was really wound up.

Owen said, ‘We’ll get help.’

He asked the woman who kept the general store if she knew of anyone who would do house cleaning. She shook her head. ‘People don’t want it now.’ As he was going out of the door she said, ‘Of course there’s Mrs Latimer.’

When he told Elissa she said, ‘Latimer? Is she lumpy?’

‘Eh?’

‘Remember that sketch Joyce Grenfell did? She was at her school old girls’ reunion and nobody remembered her until she said she’d been known as “Lumpy Latimer”.’

Mrs Latimer arrived on a mountain bike. She mopped
her armpits. ‘It’s my son’s. I borrowed it thinking to save my legs. I could always ride a bicycle – push the pedals to move and stop pushing on a gradient and float down like a bird. A hundred and fifty quid this cost and it won’t even free-wheel.’

‘You were in the wrong gear,’ said Owen.

‘Would you like to sit down?’ said Elissa.

‘It’s my belief we should have stopped while we still could. Now look at us.’ Looking at her, Owen thought that far from being lumpy, she was shaped like a rugger ball. She directed a critical stare round the room. ‘The mess we’re in.’

‘It’s the workmen,’ Elissa said, flushing.

‘I’m talking about the globe. Aerosols, factory affluences, motorway madness.’ Mrs Latimer sat, knees apart, affording a glimpse of navy directoire knickers. ‘What have you in mind, madam?’

‘Mind?’ Elissa disliked the ‘madam’.

‘What would you want me to do?’

‘Just help me tidy up.’

‘Let us look at the terms of employment,’ said Mrs Latimer in much the same tone as Magnus Magnusson said ‘Let us look at the score-board’. ‘I will come for a fixed period, to do regular household tasks at the basic rate and anything extra at a rate to be mutually agreed.’

‘What’s the basic rate?’ said Owen.

‘Five pounds an hour, six-fifty for scrubbing or getting up ladders.’

Elissa looked at Owen. ‘I don’t know—’

‘Sort it out between yourselves. I must see about getting a grass cutter.’

‘You want a sickle,’ said Mrs Latimer.

*

He drove to a superstore which advertised as a Gardeners’ Mecca. He was deeply shocked by the quantity and variety of things deemed necessary for a garden: stuff to promote growth and stuff to inhibit it, glasshouses, plastic furniture, urns, gnomes, bird-baths, strimmers, secateurs, pruners.

‘I want something to cut grass.’

‘Manual or propelled?’ said the salesman.

‘Something I can sit on and watch doing the work.’

‘Electric or petrol engine?’

‘I think a reaper and binder – it’s very tall grass.’

The salesman did not return Owen’s smile. ‘We don’t supply agricultural machinery. But I can show you a seventeen-inch petrol mower with a four-horsepower engine, maximum cutting width, automatic bagging—’

‘How much?’

‘That depends on the model. We have an easy-pay scheme: a deposit secures, thereafter monthly instalments over one year or two, whichever is convenient.’

Owen sighed. ‘Show me some shears.’

*

Charlie Olssen was working on his favourite view across Wimbledon Common, three birch trees coming together at the edge of the pond.

He had painted them in all seasons, as cobwebs balancing a quarter-inch of snow on each twig, and in high summer had tried to catch just one of their silver shudders on canvas. They put him in mind of girls not wanting to get their feet wet.

Lumsden breathed over Charlie’s shoulder. ‘I seen that poster you did on the Underground. At Chalk Farm. It gets to me.’

Turning, Charlie saw a lanky youth with a pigtail, wearing a singlet and broken sneakers. Charlie said, ‘I’ve never done a poster for the Underground.’

‘I’d know your work anywhere, your name’s all over it.’

‘What name’s that?’

The youth, who couldn’t know, said, ‘Girl and dolphin, woman and fish, the story of evolution.’

Someone set off the anti-theft device in a parked car. It bleeped distressfully. A man kicked the car and walked on. Charlie murmured, ‘Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings?’

‘I’m an artist too,’ said the youth.

People did say that; once a woman had brought Charlie her ink-blot drawings. Lumsden had followed him home and at Charlie’s door said could he come in and talk.

‘What about?’

‘Painting. How you do it.’

‘I don’t know how I do it.’

‘I may be using the wrong sort of brushes.’

Charlie said, ‘Primitive artists did lovely jobs with feathers and chewed sticks.’

‘I can’t get my colour temperatures right.’

‘Experiment. We all have to.’

‘What with?’

‘Try mixing. Some colours are bigger than others.’

‘Show me.’

‘Not now. I’ve got to pack.’

‘Pack?’

‘I’m going to Cornwall.’

Next morning Charlie put his painting gear and a change of clothes in the car. Well-stacked clouds were emptying over NW3. When he switched on the ignition the engine groaned: the groans grew feebler, Charlie fancied he heard a death-rattle. He was no mechanic: the working of an egg-whisk baffled him. His diagnosis was that something must have come loose. He looked, briefly, stirred the tangle of wires with his finger, shut the bonnet and got back into the car as rain began to trickle into his collar.

Something appeared close against the windscreen – large, with a yellow halo. It dipped and swayed. Charlie made out a face distorted by raindrops. He wound down the window and Lumsden, wearing a yellow sou’wester, put his head through the opening. ‘I’ve brought some of my paintings to show you.’

‘Sorry, I haven’t time—’

‘They’re my most recent work. I’m trying to use colour the way you and Van Gogh do – so it gets to your guts.’

Charlie said, ‘I can’t stop now.’

‘I’ll come with you and we can talk on the way.’

‘No one’s going anywhere until this car starts.’

‘Let me give it a shove,’ Lumsden said obligingly. He stowed his pack on the back seat and went round to the rear of the car. Charlie released the handbrake. The car’s front wheel was against the kerb. He shouted, ‘Push!’ Pulling on the steering, he managed to free the front wheel and the car moved. Being on a down gradient, it started to roll, picked up speed. Charlie engaged gear. The engine roused, sluggish but self-motivated;
the car completed the downhill run and began to struggle up. Came a cry from behind. Charlie put his foot down, switched on the wipers and was away with a splutter and a cough, the rain reducing to a clear fan on the windscreen.

Driving along Tottenham Court Road he spared a thought for Lumsden. It had been a narrow escape, but as someone said, if you answer every call for help you say goodbye to a life of your own. And he needed to think. He should have done it before setting out. Faced with the stern realities of a two-hundred mile drive in a dodgy car, already it was looking like weakness which had got him going.

He stopped for breakfast at a roadside café. It was crowded, but at one table a girl sat alone, reading. He said, ‘Do you mind?’

She shrugged. Charlie swept crumbs off the chair and sat down. She said, ‘Are you following me?’

‘Well, no.’

‘You waved to me on Battersea Bridge.’

‘I came over Putney Bridge.’

‘And tailed me from Barking. In a red Volvo.’

‘My car’s a blue Escort. I haven’t come from Barking.’

She laid down her book, an Erle Stanley Gardner, and looked at him.

Charlie looked at her. By the way she had put on eye-shadow and tied up her head in a spotted kerchief he would have said she was hippie. Her skin was covered in freckles, a golden confetti concealing all evidence of character and experience. A perfect camouflage of a human face.

The waitress came for his order. He said, ‘Bacon, sausage, mushrooms, toast—’

The girl interrupted. ‘Was it an excuse to get into conversation?’

‘Mushrooms are off,’ said the waitress.

‘Tomatoes, then. And toast and tea. We’re into conversation,’ he said to the girl. ‘What do you want to talk about?’ He was reminded of Lumsden and his colour calories. It would cost a fortune to post back his canvases and anyway Charlie didn’t know his address.

‘You talk,’ the girl said, ‘I’m a good listener. Like the cats.’

‘What cats?’

‘I have a postcard of three French cats with their paws folded, looking at the camera. The caption says it’s more important to listen well than talk well. The cats are listening, but each cat has a different expression: one’s doubtful, it’s saying, “Do you really think so?” The next one’s resigned, says, “I suppose that’s true.” The third’s superior – “I have always known it.”’

‘Why French cats?’

‘All cats are smart, French cats are smartest. And the caption’s in French.
“Bien
écouter
importe plus
que
bien
parler”
.’

She took her finger off the Erle Stanley Gardner and it promptly shut. ‘Softbacks will be the death of literature. Shall you read a book if you have to sit on it to keep it open?’

‘I only read the
Digest.
’

‘I’m talking about
books
– classics, Eliot, Austen, the Brontés …’

The waitress brought his breakfast. He poured the last of a bottle of brown sauce over his plate and speared a sausage. ‘So why aren’t you reading
Wuthering
Heights
?’