The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“You’ll be missin the Captain,” the farmer’s wife said as she opened the door. Her accent was not the local one.

I said, “You talk differently,” and she said, “Well, I would do. I come from Stennersceugh. It was a Danish settlement long since. It’s all of ten miles off.”

Never in my life had I had so much attention paid to me by strangers, nor been told so many intimate things from the heart – of marriages, love and death; of children or the lack of them, fears of sickness, pregnancy; of lost loves and desperate remedies. Three old ladies living by the church, I heard, drank three crates of sherry a week (“It’s the chemist delivers”). A husband had “drowned ’isself in Ash Beck for fear of a thing growing out of the side of his head”.

There seemed to be total classlessness, total acceptance, offence only taken if you gave yourself airs, offered money in return for presents or didn’t open your door wide enough at the sound of every bell. There was a certain amount of derision at bad management – “She never gets out to the shops till twelve o’clock.” “She hasn’t had them curtains down in a twelve-month” – but I met no violence, no hatred. There were threats of “bringin me gun” to walkers on the fells with unleashed dogs, but not one farmer in ten possessed a gun or would have known how to use if he had. Language addressed to animals was foul and unrefined, ringing over the fells and sheep dips and clipping sheds – but bore no relation to conversation with humans or at any rate not with me. “Come ere yer bloody, buggerin little – ’ello there, Mrs Bainbridge, now. Grand day. Comin over for yer tea then?”

Alan had told me that when he came home I’d be used to my tea as my supper and then more tea just before bedtime and I would forget how to cook a steak. However he was wrong again, because it had been dinner I had been invited to at Mealbeck the night of the waving woman, and a much better dinner than I’d ever have got in Aldershot.

Mealbeck is the big Gothic house of two sisters – a magnificent cold, turretted, slightly idiotic house, something between the Brighton Pavilion and the Carpathians. We ate not in a corner of it but the corner of a corner, passing from the tremendous door, over flagged halls, a great polar-bear skin rug and down a long cold passage. At the end was a little room which must once have been the housekeeper’s and crammed into it among the housekeeper’s possessions – a clock, a set of bells, a little hat-stand, a photograph of servants like rows of suet dumplings, starched and stalwart and long ago dead – were a Thomas Lawrence, photographs by Lenare and haunted Ypres faces in 1914 khaki. On the housekeeper’s old table where she must have handed out the wages were some fine silver and glasses fit for emperors.

Good wine, too. The sisters, Millicent and Gertie, knew their wine. They also knew their scotch and resorted to it wordlessly after the best pheasant and lemon pudding I think I’ve ever eaten.

I said, “Oh this has been lovely. Lovely.” We stood under the green moon that did not so much light the fells as isolate them in the long clean lines of the faded day.

“You are from Sussex,” said Millicent. “You must find this very bare.”

“It’s wonderful. I love it.”

“I hope you’ll stay the winter,” said Gertie. “And I hope you’ll come here soon again.”

The two of them walked, not too steadily to the iron gates and I roared off in the little Fiat down the drive and out on to the fell, between the knobbly blocks of the stone walls flashing up in the car lights. I felt minute between the long lines snaking away, the long low undercorated horizon, the clear hard pencil lines cut with a very sharp hard point. Gigantic lamp-eyes of sheep now and then came shining into the headlights. It was midnight. I did not meet a single car between Mealbeck and Naresby and the road rippled up and down, narrow and sweeping and black and quiet. I thought of Alan in Hong Kong. It would be breakfast time. I wished he were with me. Then I forgot him in the emptiness of the road under the moon and the great encircling ball of the stars.

I went flying through High Thwaite, hurtling through Low Thwaite and the same landscape spread out still in front of me – endlessly deserted, not a light in any cottage, not a dog barking, not a cry of a bird. It was just after what appeared to be the loneliest part of the road that I took a corner rather faster than I should and saw the woman standing in her garden and waving at me with a slow decorous arm, a queenly arm. You could see from the moonlight that her head was piled up high with queenly hair. I think I was about two miles on before I really took it in. I was so shaken by it that I stopped the car.