The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Now nobody stood at the gate – more of a look-out post, a signalling post above the road. There were tangled flowers behind it. There was no excuse for me to go up the lane that must have led to the house and it was not inviting. I thought of pretending to have lost my way or asking for a drink of water but these things you grow out of doing. I might perhaps just ask if there were eggs for sale. This was quite usual. Yet I hung back because the lane was dark and overgrown. I sat down instead on a rickety milk platform meant for churns but all stuck through with nettles and which hardly took my weight. It must have been years since any churn was near it. I sat there in the still afternoon and nobody passed.

Then I felt I was being watched. There was no sound or snapping twig, no breathing and no branch stirred but I looked quickly up and into a big bewildered face, mouth a little open, large bright mooning eyes. The hair was waved deeply like an old Vogue photograph and the neckline of the dress was rounded, quite high with a string of pearls. The hands of the woman were on the wall and I think they were gloved – neat pretty kid gloves. The trappings of the whole figure were all the very soul of order and confidence. The figure itself, however, almost yearned with uncertainty and loss.

“Whatever time is it?” she said.

“About three o’clock.” I found I had stood up and turned to face her. For all the misery in the face there were the relics of unswervable good manners which demanded good manners back; as well as a quite curious sensation, quite without visible foundation, that this body, this dotty half-bemused memsahib had once commanded respect, inspired good sense.

“It’s just after three,” I said again.

“Oh, good gracious – good gracious.” She turned with a funny, bent movement feeling for the wall to support her as she moved away. The face had not been an old woman’s but the stance, the tottering walk were ancient. The dreadful sense of loss, the melancholy, were so thick in the air that there was almost a smell, a sick smell of them.

She was gone, and utterly silently, as if I had slept for a moment in the sunshine and had a momentary dream. She had seemed like a shade, a classical Greek shade, though why I should think of ancient Greece in bleak North Westmorland I did not know.

As I stood looking up at the gate there was a muffled urgent plunging noise and round the bend of the road came sheep – a hundred of them with a shepherd and two dogs. The sheep shouldered each other, fussing, pushing, a stream of fat fleeces pressed together, eyes sharp with pandemonium. The dogs were happily tearing about. The shepherd walked with long steps behind. The sheep new-clipped filled the road like snow. They stopped when they saw me, then when they were yelled at came on careering drunkenly round me, surrounding me and I stood knee deep in them and the flat blank rattle of bleats, the smell of sheep dip and dog and man – and petrol, for when I looked beyond I found a land-rover had been crawling behind and at the wheel the doctor with the tweed hat was sitting laughing.

He said, “Well! You look terrified.”

“They were so sudden.”

“They’ll not hurt you.”

“No. I know – just they were so – quiet. They broke in—”

“Broke in?”

“To the silence. It’s very – silent here, isn’t it?” I was inane.

He got down from the car and came round near me. “You’ve not been here long, have you? We haven’t been introduced. I’m the doctor.”

“I know. I’m—”

“Yes. I know too. And we’re to know each other better. We’re both to go dining out at the good sisters’ in a week or so. I gather we’re not supposed to know it yet. We are both supposed to be lonely.”

I said how could one be lonely here? I had made friends so fast.

“Some are,” he said. “Who aren’t born to it. Not many. It’s always all right at first.” We both looked together towards the high gate and he said, ‘Poor Rose. My next patient. Not that I expect to be let in.”

“Is she—?”

“A daughter of the regiment like yourself. Well, I mustn’t discuss patients. I call on her now and then.”

He walked up the side lane waving the tweed hat and left me. As he reached the point where the little lane bent out of sight he turned and cheerfully waved again, and I turned too and walked the two miles back to my car. As I reached it the land-rover passed me going very fast and the doctor made no signal and I could not see his face. I thought he must be reckless to drive at that lick on a sheep-strewn road but soon forgot it in the pleasure of the afternoon – the bright fire I’d light at home and the smell of wood smoke and supper with a book ahead. No telephone, thank God. As I turned into my yard I found I was very put out to see Mrs Metcalfe coming across it with yet another great basket of beans.