All the same, hauntings were scarcely to be expected in this red-tiled bungalow, which was almost capacious, or so it seemed in those days, on account of its extreme, unnatural elongation. It had been built only thirteen or fourteen years before — about 1900, in fact — by some retired soldier, anxious to preserve in his final seclusion tangible reminder of service in India, at the same time requiring nothing of architecture likely to hint too disturbingly of the exotic splendours of Eastern fable. Stonehurst, it was true, might be thought a trifle menacing in appearance, even ill-omened, but not in the least exotic. Its configuration suggested a long, low Noah’s Ark, come uncomfortably to rest on a heather-grown, coniferous spur of Mount Ararat; a Noah’s Ark, the opened lid of which would reveal myself, my parents, Edith, Albert, Billson, Mercy, several dogs and cats, and, at certain seasons, Bracey and Mrs Gullick.
‘Tell her to give over,’ said Albert, adverting to the subject of Billson and her ‘ghost’. ‘Too much cold pork and pickles. That’s all the matter. Got into trouble with the indigestion merchants, or off her nut, one or the other. She’ll find herself locked up with the loonies if she takes on so.’
‘Billson said she’d give notice if it happened again.’
‘Give notice, I don’t think.’
‘Won’t she, then?’
‘Not while I’m here she won’t give notice. Don’t you believe it.’
Albert shook off one of his ancient bedroom slippers, adjusting the thick black woollen sock at the apex of the foot, where, not over clean, the nail of a big toe protruded from a hole at the end. Albert was an oddity, an exceptional member of the household, not only in himself and his office, but in relation to the whole character of my parents’ establishment. He had started life as hall-boy — later promoted footman — in my mother’s home before her marriage. After my grandmother’s death — the dissolution, as it always seemed in Albert’s reminiscence, of an epoch — he had drifted about from place to place, for the most part unhappily. Sometimes he quarrelled with the butler; sometimes his employers made too heavy demands on his time; sometimes, worst of all, the cook, or one of the maids, fell in love with him. Love, of course, in such cases, meant marriage. Albert was not, I think, at all interested in love affairs of an irregular kind; nor, for that matter, did he in the least wish to take a wife. On that subject, he felt himself chronically persecuted by women, especially by the most determined of his tormentors (given to writing him long, threatening letters), whom he used to call ‘the girl from Bristol’. This preoccupation with the molestations of the opposite sex probably explained his fears that evening of suffragette attack.
In the end, after moving from London to the country, from the country back to London, up to Cumberland, down to Cardigan, Albert had written to my mother — habitually in touch with almost everyone who had ever worked for her — suggesting that, as she was soon to lose a cook, he himself should exchange to that profession, which had always appealed to him, the art of cooking running in his blood through both parents. He was, indeed, known, even in his days as footman, for proficiency in cooking, which had come to him almost by the light of nature. His offer was, therefore, at once accepted, though not without a few privately expressed reservations as to the possibility of Albert’s turning out a ‘handful’. ‘Handful’ to some extent he was. Certainly his cooking was no disappointment. That was soon clear. The question why he should prefer employment with a family who lived on so unpretentious a scale, when he might have found little or no difficulty in obtaining a situation as chef in much grander circumstances, with more money and greater prestige, is not easily resolved. Lack of enterprise, physical indolence, liking for the routine of a small domestic community, all no doubt played a part; as also, perhaps, did the residue from a long-forgotten past, some feudal secretion, dormant, yet never entirely defunct within his bones, which predisposed him towards a family with whom he had been associated in his early days of service. That might have been. At the same time, such sentiments, even if they existed, were certainly not to be romantically exaggerated. Albert had few, if any, illusions. For example, he was not at all keen on Stonehurst as a place of residence. The house was little to his taste. He often said so. In this opinion there was no violent dissent from other quarters. Indeed, all concerned agreed in thinking it just as well we should not have to live at Stonehurst for ever, the bungalow being rented ‘furnished’ on a short renewable lease, while my father’s battalion was stationed in the Aldershot Command.
The property stood in country partaking in general feature of the surroundings of that uniquely detestable town, although wilder, more deserted, than its own immediate outskirts. The house, built at the summit of a steep hill, was reached by a stony road — the uneven, treacherous surface of pebbles probably accounting for the name — which turned at a right-angle halfway up the slope, running between a waste of gorse and bracken, from out of which emerged an occasional ivy-strangled holly tree or withered fir: landscape of seemingly purposeful irresponsibility, intentional rejection of all scenic design. In winter, torrents of water gushed over the pebbles and down the ruts of this slippery route (perilous to those who, like General Conyers, attempted the journey in the cars of those days) which continued for two or three hundred yards at the top of the hill, passing the Stonehurst gate. The road then bifurcated, aiming in one direction towards a few barely visible roofs, clustered together on the distant horizon; in the other, entering a small plantation of pine trees, where Gullick, the Stonehurst gardener (fascinatingly described once by Edith in my unobserved presence as ‘born out of wedlock’), lived in his cottage with Mrs Gullick. Here, the way dwindled to a track, then became a mere footpath, leading across a vast expanse of heather, its greyish, pinkish tones stained all the year round with great gamboge patches of broom: country taking fire easily in hot summers.
The final limits of the Stonehurst estate, an extensive wired-in tract of desert given over to the devastations of a vast brood of much interbred chickens, bordered the heath, which stretched away into the dim distance, the heather rippling in waves like an inland sea overgrown with weed. Between the chickens and the house lay about ten acres of garden, flower beds, woodland, a couple of tennis courts. The bungalow itself was set away from the road among tall pines. Behind it, below a bank of laurel and Irish yews, espaliered roses sloped towards a kitchen-garden, where Gullick, as if gloomily contemplating the accident of his birth, was usually to be found pottering among the vegetables, foretelling a bad season for whichever crop he stood among. Beyond the white-currant bushes, wild country began again, separated from Stonehurst civilisation by only a low embankment of turf. This was the frontier of a region more than a little captivating — like the stables — on account of its promise of adventure. Dark, brooding plantations of trees; steep, sandy slopes; soft, velvet expanses of green moss, across which rabbits and weasels incessantly hurried on their urgent business: a terrain created for the eternal campaign of warring armies, whose unceasing operations justified recognition of Albert’s sleeping-quarters as the outworks of a barbican, or stockade, to be kept in a permanent state of defence. Here, among these woods and clearings, sand and fern, silence and the smell of pine brought a kind of release to the heart, together with a deep-down wish for something, something more than battles, perhaps not battles at all; something realised, even then, as nebulous, blissful, all but unattainable: a feeling of uneasiness, profound and oppressive, yet oddly pleasurable at times, at other times so painful as to be almost impossible to bear.