‘Thank you for laying the table,’ said to Mrs Rachels when she entered the kitchen an hour later.
She shook her head. She began to say that she hadn’t laid the table but then she changed her mind. I could see from her face that she and her husband had been discussing the matter of the bath the night before. She could hardly wait to tell him about the breakfast table. I smiled at her.
‘A funny thing happened the other night,’ I said. ‘I woke up to find Victor Silvester playing a tune called “Looking for Henry Lee”.’
‘Henry Lee?’ Mrs Rachels said, turning around from the sink. Her face, usually blotched with pink, like the skin of an apple, was white.
‘It’s an old song of the fifties.’
It was while saying that that I realized what was happening in the house. I naturally didn’t say anything to Mrs Rachels, and I at once began to regret that I’d said anything in the first place. It had frightened me, finding the bathroom like that, and clearly it must have frightened the Rachels. I didn’t want them to be frightened because naturally there was nothing to be frightened about. George and Alice and Isabel wouldn’t hurt anyone, not unless death had changed them enormously. But even so. I knew I couldn’t ever explain that to the Rachels.
‘Well, I suppose I’m just getting absent-minded,’ I said. ‘People do, so they say, when they live alone.’ I laughed to show I wasn’t worried or frightened, to make it all seem ordinary.
‘You mean, you laid the table yourself?’ Mrs Rachels said. ‘And had a bath?’
‘And didn’t turn the wireless off properly. Funny,’ I said, ‘how these things go in threes. Funny, how there’s always an explanation.’ I laughed again and Mrs Rachels had to laugh too.
After that it was lovely, just like being back in 17 Lorelei Avenue. I bought Black Magic chocolates and bars of Fry’s and Cadbury’s Milk, all the things we’d liked. I often found bathwater left in and the towels crumpled, and now and again I came down in the morning to find the breakfast table laid. On the first-floor landing, on the evening of March 11th, I caught a glimpse of George, and in the garden, three days later, I saw Isabel and Alice.
On March 15th the Rachels left. I hadn’t said a word to them about finding the bathroom used again or the breakfast laid or actually seeing the children. I’d been cheerful and smiling whenever I met them. I’d talked about how Brasso wasn’t as good as it used to be to Mrs Rachels, and had asked her husband about the best kinds of soil for bulbs.
‘We can’t stay a minute more,’ Mrs Rachels said, her face all white and tight in the hall, and then to my astonishment they attempted to persuade me to go also.
‘The house isn’t fit to live in,’ Mr Rachels said.
‘Oh now, that’s nonsense,’ I began to say, but they both shook their heads.
‘There’s children here,’ Mrs Rachels said. ‘There’s three children appearing all over the place.’
‘Come right up to you,’ Mr Rachels said. ‘Laugh at you sometimes.’
They were trembling, both of them. They were so terrified I thought they might die, that their hearts would give out there in the hall and they’d just drop down. But they didn’t. They walked out of the hall door with their three suitcases, down the drive to catch a bus. I never saw them again.
I suppose, Mr Mockler, you have to be frightened of ghosts: I suppose that’s their way of communicating. I mean, it’s no good being like me, delighting in it all, being happy because I wasn’t lonely in that house any more. You have to be like the Rachels, terrified half out of your wits. I think I knew that as I watched the Rachels go: I think I knew that George and Isabel and Alice would go with them, that I was only a kind of go-between, that the Rachels were what George and Isabel and Alice could really have fun with. I almost ran after the Rachels, but 1 knew it would be no good.
Without the Rachels and my brother and my two sisters, I was frightened myself in that big house. I moved everything into the kitchen: the television set and the plants I kept in the drawing-room, and a camp-bed to sleep on. I was there, asleep in the camp-bed, when my husband returned from Germany; he had changed completely. He raved at me, not listening to a word I said. There were cups of tea all over the house, he said, and bits of bread and biscuits and cake and chocolates. There were notes in envelopes, and messages scrawled in my hand-writing on the wallpaper in various rooms. Everywhere was dusty. Where, he wanted to know, were the Rachels?
He stood there with a canvas bag in his left hand, an airline bag that had the word Lufthansa on it. He’d put on at least a stone, I remember thinking, and his hair was shorter than before.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I would like to tell you.’ And I tried to tell him, as I’ve told you, Mr Mockler, about George and Isabel and Alice in 17 Lorelei Avenue and how we all went together for a walk with our dog, every Sunday afternoon in Richmond Park, and how on Christmas Eve my mother always gave a party. I told him about the stained-glass pane in the window, Moses in the bulrushes, and the hide-and-seek we played, and how my father and I always shared the old boot in Monopoly. I told him about the day of the accident, how the tyre on the lorry suddenly exploded and how the lorry went whizzing around on the road and then just tumbled over on top of them. I’d put out cups of tea, I said, and biscuits and cake and the little messages, just in case they came back again – not for them to eat or to read particularly, but just as a sign. They’d given me a sign first, I explained: George had turned on my wireless in the middle of the night and Isabel had had baths and Alice had laid the breakfast table. But then they’d gone because they’d been more interested in annoying the Rachels than in comforting me. I began to weep, telling him how lonely I’d been without them, how lonely I’d been ever since the day of the accident, how the silence had been everywhere. I couldn’t control myself: tears came out of my eyes as though they’d never stop. I felt sickness all over my body, paining me in my head and my chest, sour in my stomach. I wanted to die because the loneliness was too much. Loneliness was the worst thing in the world, I said, gasping out words, with spit and tears going cold on my face. People were only shadows, I tried to explain, when you had loneliness and silence like that, like a shroud around you. You couldn’t reach out of the shroud sometimes, you couldn’t connect because shadows are hard to connect with and it’s frightening when you try because everyone is looking at you. But it was lovely, I whispered, when the children came back to annoy the Rachels. My husband replied by telling me I was insane.
The letter finished there, and Mr Mockler was more astonished each time he read it. He had never in his life received such a document before, nor did he in fact very often receive letters of any kind, apart from bills and, if he was fortunate, cheques in settlement. He shook his head over the letter and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket.