Dial a Ghost

The awful moment when the ghosts saw the nozzle of the EEB people come round the door and believed they were finished, had changed them all. In that ghastly moment, Lady de Bone and Aunt Maud had stopped fighting over Addie and sheltered her, and when they came round again the de Bones realized how wicked they had been and glided off to Larchfield Abbey to ask the nuns for forgiveness.

When they came back, a sensible arrangement was made about Addie. She spent the weekend with the de Bones, learning to say upper-class things and keeping her shoulders straight, and the week with the Wilkinsons, so that she stopped being a tug-of-war ghost and became a ghost with two sets of parents, which is a very different thing. And if she was always glad when Monday morning came round and she could be a Wilkinson again, she kept these thoughts to herself.

With the money they got from the visitors, Colonel Mersham and Oliver turned the stables into a Laboratory for the Study of Ghostliness. The Colonel was in charge of the work, with Uncle Henry to help him, and they made a splendid team. Already Helton was becoming the place to go if one wanted to know about ectoplasm and how it worked.

But the rest of the buildings and the gardens and the grounds filled up with Addie’s pets. Every phantom animal who did not understand what had happened to them was welcome and not one was turned away: not the ghost of the meanest water-flea or the skinniest tapeworm or the most beaten-up rabbit or pigeon with gunshot wounds in its side. The duck-bill in the zoo passed on at last and Addie brought it down to live in the shrubbery, and though she never found a phantom sheep she became quite fond of the python, who had been ill for a long time after the gas made him throw up the budgie, and needed careful nursing. And there was one animal so special and so famous that scientists came from all over the world to see it sitting by the fountain: the shining, pop-eyed and beautiful ghost of the golden toad which Colonel Mersham had brought back from the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

If Addie never turned away an animal in need, Oliver opened his home to every human spook without a place to lay his head. He had told the ladies of the adoption agency to send him any ghosts they couldn’t place themselves, and soon the Hall filled up with bloodstained widows and actresses who had fallen through trapdoors and foolish people who had thrown themselves under trains for love.

There was one ghost, though, who did not appear.

However much they called her, poor Trixie never came to them. But one night as they were gathered round the sundial for the Evening Calling, a spectre did appear. A blowzy, raddled old spook with a puffy face and an out-of-date hairstyle who landed with a bump on the sundial.

‘Coo-ee!’ she called, waving a fat arm. ‘It’s me. Don’t you remember me, Eric? It’s Cynthia Harbottle!’

It was the most incredible shock. Eric couldn’t believe it. He’d remembered her the way she was, of course: a thin girl in a gym-slip with marvellous teeth.

‘I told you,’ said Aunt Maud under her breath. ‘I told you she’d be old.’

Eric was speechless. He knew that if you love people you have to do it for always and perhaps he would have tried, but then Cynthia did the most awful thing. She snatched Trixie’s banana, peeled it – and threw the skin on to the neatly swept gravel path.

That finished it. No Boy Scout could ever bring himself to love a person who leaves litter lying about, and in that moment Eric’s passion for Cynthia Harbottle shrivelled and died.

Fortunately she was only passing, and after she went Eric was a new man. He whistled as he worked, he went for long tramps in the woods, and when Oliver’s friends came down from the Home for the holidays, he showed them all the clever things he had learnt to do when he was a Scout: how to make a noise like a corncrake, how to splice ropes, and which kinds of sticks are suitable for skewering sausages and which are not.

‘I expect Frederica Snodde-Brittle would be just as awful if she turned up now,’ he said, trying to cheer up the farmer, and Mr Jenkins had to agree.

It was just six months after the Rid A Spook people had been to Helton that Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering had a visitor who absolutely amazed them.

‘You cannot be serious,’ said Mrs Mannering when the ghost who stood before them told them what he wanted. ‘You want us to find you a home?’

The spook nodded. He had been an ugly man and he was a hideous ghost with his long, gloomy face and messy moustache and tombstone teeth. Not only that, but his forehead was peppered with gunshot wounds.

‘I’m a ghost, aren’t I?’ said Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘I’ve got my rights, same as everyone else.’