I went back along the road the very next day and at first I could find no sign of he house at all. Or at my rate I could net decide which one it was. It was not the townsfolk-country-cottage belt so

A Spot of Gothic

by Jane Gardam

Part II

I went back along the road the very next day and at first I could find no sign of he house at all. Or at my rate I could net decide which one it was. It was not the townsfolk-country-cottage belt so that there was not much white paint about, lined curtains, urns on yard walls - and any one of several little isolated farms could have been the eerie one. In the end I turned back and found the bridge where I'd stopped. I got out of the car again as I had before, and walked back a mile or two until I came to a lane going alongside a garden end. All I could see from the road was the garden end - a stone wall and a gate quite high up above me and behind that a huge slab-stoned roof so low that the farmhouse must have been built deep down in a dip.

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 of 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 yon."

"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.

~*~

It was no story.

Or rather it is the most detestable, inadmissible story. For I don't yet know half the facts and I don't feel I want to invent any. It would be a story so easy to improve upon. There are half a dozen theories about poor Rose's hanging and half a dozen about the reason for her growing isolation and idleness and seclusion. But Rose - Rose had always been very well-liked and had very much liked living here. Gertie and Millicent said she had fitted in round here as if she were country born. She had
been one of the few southerners they said who had seemed to belong. She had loved the house - a queer place. It had been the heart of a Quaker settlement. Panes of glass so thick you could hardly see out. She had grown more and more attached to it. She didn't seem able to leave it in the end.

"The marriage broke up after the War," said the doctor. We were sitting back after dinner in the housekeeper's room among the Thomas Lawrences. 'He was always on the move. Rose had no quarrel with him you know. She just grew - well, very taken

with the place. It was - yes, possession. Greek idea – possession by local gods. The Romans were here you know. They brought a Greek legend or two with them."

I said, 'How odd, when I saw her I thought of the Greeks, though I hadn't known what I meant. It was the way she moved - so old. And the way she held her hands out. Like - well, sort of like on the walls of Troy"

"Not Troy," said the doctor. "More like hell, poor thing. She was quite gone. You know - these fells, and the little isolated houses, I'm not sure how good for you they are, unless you're farming folk."

Millicent said rubbish.

'No,' he said, "I mean it. D'you remember C. S. Lewis's hell? A place where people live in isolation unable to reach each other. Where the houses get further and further apart?'

"Everyone reaches each other here," I said. "Surely?"

The doctor was looking at me and I noticed he was looking at me very hard. He said, "What was it you said?"

"Everyone reaches each other - "

"No," he said. "You said you saw her."

'Yes I did. I saw her on the way home from here, the right before she died. Then I saw her again the next day, the very afternoon. That's what is so terrible. I must have seen her, just before she - did it. I must be the last person to have seen her."

'I wonder," he said, "if that could be true." Gertie and Millicent were busy with coffee cups. They turned away.

'"Could be true? But it is certainly true. I know exactly when. She asked me the time that afternoon. I told her. It was just after three. She seemed very - bewildered about it. You called upon her hardly a quarter of an hour later. She'd hardly been back in the house a quarter of an hour."

"She'd been in it longer than that," he said, "When I found her she'd been dead for nearly three weeks. Maybe since hay- time".

I went to Hong Kong.

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