My accomplishments of yesteryear returned, and I soon had a fire going in the range and a kettle on the hob before the open enamel door. I managed very well with some eggs that proved to be quite fresh and some slices of cured ham. There was a big valve radio and I switched it on to have some noise about me: the place was deathly quiet, which I found uncanny—there were not even the usual mice or cockroaches of the country cottage. Maybe my aunt’s herbal knowledge had kept them at bay. Thinking of this, I returned to the front room where she lay, and looked into the curtained alcove. Her equipment was still there. I swung the pans of the scale idly and my eye caught a protruding knothole in the wall paneling. It came out easily into my hand leaving a small black hole. Selecting a dried grass stem from a small bundle on the table top, I poked it into the hole—it went through. So, the old lady had a peephole into the chapel from her seat at the table. I leaned forward to apply my eye to the hole, but of course all was dark within; though, I must say, I felt there was a cautious shifting movement beyond me in the murk. After all, it was now quite dark outside. However, in leaning forward I had put all my weight on the edge of the table, which must have loosed some spring or catch, for an unsuspected drawer appeared—stealthily as it were—without a sound from underneath. It gave me quite a start. The drawer was large and shallow, cleverly concealed to fit flush to the side of the table and remain undetected. In it were several books of the ledger type. Pushing the drawer back I took them to read beside the scullery range, for the room was becoming decidedly chilly. At any rate they might make better reading than Virtue’s Reward or Little Jeremy’s Prayers, offered by the bookcase.
As I crossed to the door I got a severe shock and dropped the books. Aunt Lucy’s head had turned in the coffin and had tensed or contracted into a distinctly malevolent leer, as if she were sharing a secret—and that none too pleasant a one—with me. Startled, but reassuring myself from my ignorance, that such muscular contractions might be quite normal in corpses, I bent and put my ear to her chest (I must admit to a fear that her arms would rise from her sides and clasp me!) but there was no heartbeat of course. I took a small glass dish from the herb table and held its cold surface to her lips and nostrils, but there was no dimming at alclass="underline" that was enough for me… I left the range fire to die out, put out the lights and radio, and scuttled off down the drive to the pub. I had fully intended to visit the Wash House with an electric torch to dispel my childish dread of its gloomy shadows, but now—admitting my unreasoning cowardice to myself—I no longer had any such notion.
Clearly both publican and villagers knew who I was. They weren’t hostile—simply wary and offhand. There was no room to let it seemed. (I almost expected the landlord to add “Leastways not to you.”) A fine situation: either I could go back to the cottage, or phone Sefton and admit that I couldn’t stay with one dead old lady for whom I had previously and arrogantly asserted pity and dutiful affection. Clearly I should get nowhere asking any villager for a bed…
So I went back to the cottage, poked and fuelled the fire back to life and put the radio on loud for company. Jeff and Luke, and the other “Riders of the Range,” investigating a ghost town in the West did not help my mood much, what with the creaking doors and mysterious footsteps: I found some music instead. Then I settled myself in the chimney corner, back to the two walls, to browse through the books. All were painstakingly compiled in longhand, making use of extensive but simple abbreviations. Although not copper-plate, the hand was bold and clear and the first tome proved to be the old girl’s Herbal; clearly a valuable compilation. (I subsequently presented it to the library at Kew.) Aunt Lucy had obviously been an amateur botanist of very practical bent: there were notes of where plants could be found in the locality, sketches of their anatomy and counsel on how to propagate them. There was an extensive cross-indexing of entries and a long list of ailments and cures, some of the latter distinctly odd. The second book was heavier and thicker, and had an alphabetical thumb-index. It was rather like a doctor’s case book, for under family names it contained details of treatments and transactions she had carried out. To my surprise and dismay however, on closer reading it also contained a great deal of intimate, scandalous and often sordid detail about persons in the parish. Clearly her view had been ‘knowledge is power’ and there could be no doubt she had shamelessly and callously exploited the confidence (willing or unwilling) of her ‘clients.’ Thus I could read of Maisie Bassett’s indiscretions, unwanted pregnancy and the conclusion of that little affair, and the subsequent use my Aunt had made of her knowledge; or—again—the ‘threats’ of local doctor and clergy—to whom one hapless victim had obviously confessed; and so on. I’m ashamed to say that the horrible fascination of the pathetic (and very human) errors catalogued in detail, kept me reading. By the time I’d read for several hours, I was feeling extremely tired. In a fit of disgust I threw the book on to the range fire and poked and stoked at it, until the ghastly catalog of human frailties was consumed.
To be quite frank, I did not fancy going upstairs, and arranged chairs before the fire so that I could stretch out; made some more milkless tea and settled down with the final volume.
This appeared to be an attempt at a narrative/journal based on her daily round, but the writing—which started out legible and clear—became much less so, showing clear signs of hasty setting down and lack of care, in contrast to the other books. It deteriorated so that letters were often unformed or words missed out—so fast, I judged, had the writer’s thoughts flowed ahead of the pen. With the heat from the range and the sighing of the fire within (the radio broadcasts having ceased), I drowsed over the lines of barbed-wire script, which blurred before my eyes as if water had poured across the page.
I found myself rethinking some details of my visit of ten years earlier. I had slept in the little front room upstairs where the ceiling sloped down to a tiny window that overlooked the pathways and village lane. In my mind’s eye, I could see that fresh, whitewashed room with rush mats on the floor and rough but comfortable bedding scented with dried lavender heads. There was a biblical picture, “The Light of the World,” over the bed. I knew I had suddenly woken, for the harvest moon shone direct on my face through the open window. I heard a sound outside and climbed up, with some difficulty for my legs were short, into the tiny window recess up in the wall, to look out. The gardens and paths were bathed in ethereal brilliance and there was a slight ground mist. To my surprise, two figures were standing by the chapel, locked in each-other’s arms. A stealthy sound came from the house below me and someone—it could only be my aunt—came out of the front room and into the garden. She came from under the porch into my range of vision, down the chapel path to the herb garden, and toward the couple, making shooing gestures with her hands. They had turned to face her, the man’s arm protectingly round the woman; then I must have blinked or something, for all of an instant they were gone, and my aunt was pacing sedately back to the house. As luck would have it, she looked up and saw me leaning from the window, and that strange grimace I had seen earlier crossed her face. I shot back into bed, overturning the chair with a clatter, and lay quiet; frozen with fear between the sheets. I heard her come upstairs and pause on the landing outside my door, with creaking of floorboards. “Please don’t let her come in,” my child’s mind was praying. Came a further creaking of the boards and a low laugh… and I awoke, with that laugh still held in my ears, to find myself back in the present, a grown man, but upstairs in the dark, crouched on the small bed and clutching a handful of counterpane!