Eglantine Page 9

  I was expecting to be awakened as soon as Delora came upstairs. I didn’t see how she could sit in the next room with Richard Boyer and not start talking in her cockatoo voice about motorway tolls, or her ex-husband, or renovating old houses. So I was very surprised when I woke up the next morning at about half past five and realised I had slept all night through.

  Outside, the light was pearly and dim. Bethan was snoring. Quietly, I got out of bed and slipped onto the landing, which was deserted. The door of Bethan’s bedroom stood open, but there was no one inside. An empty cup stood on the card table, and Richard’s video camera was turned off.

  I looked around at the white walls. Ray had painted over them, the day before, and they didn’t appear to have been touched since then. At a glance, I couldn’t see any new lines of script. But I didn’t linger, because at that moment I heard the faint sound of voices from downstairs.

  I don’t think I’ve ever made it from the upstairs landing down to the kitchen so quickly.

  ‘Well?’ I gasped, throwing myself through the kitchen door. ‘What happened?’ Even as I spoke, I realised that something must have happened. I could tell, just from the atmosphere in that room. It wasn’t tense or excited, though – don’t get me wrong. On the contrary, it was incredibly peaceful. Pale sunlight slanted through the window. Cups of coffee steamed gently on the table. Delora and Richard were sitting opposite Mum and Ray, and they all looked terribly tired, but not distressed. They looked tired in a good way.

  Mum reached for me.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she said, putting her arm around my waist.

  ‘What happened? Oh!’ I had spotted the exercise book lying open in front of her. ‘Is that -?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mum smiled. ‘It’s the story. The whole story.’

  ‘You mean, from beginning to end?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I dragged the book towards me. The writing wasn’t familiar – it must have been Delora’s. But the words were certainly familiar. Once there lived in a bleak clime a white-bearded king.

  Hurriedly, I flicked through the pages until I reached the last one. Morning came, I read, and still the princess stood on the lofty cliff. She saw spars and pieces of the wreck in the sea below. She climbed, by a winding path, down the cliff-side to the beach. She saw Osric lying dead. She saw the men dead around her – in each eye a reproach, and each clammy mouth seeming to say, It is thou!

  She cast herself into the pounding waves, and was never seen again.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I murmured, as my eyes filled with tears. ‘So it was like Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘I was only a conduit,’ Delora replied dreamily. ‘I allowed her inspiration to break through from the spirit realm. It was blocked there. The last lines couldn’t push through, because they hadn’t manifested themselves here before.’

  ‘It was like Frederick Thompson,’ Richard added. ‘Like Mrs Curran. I got it all on film. She was amazing, absolutely amazing. The room was pitch black.’ He and Delora beamed at each other.

  I read the last paragraph. But now, it said, if I should relate that the lady’s disappointed affianced went back to his father’s realm, where the two made war upon the white-bearded king – ah, how dreamy, and alien, and far away would it not seem? And this because the tale of the lovers is complete. Loves are immortal, just as lovers are. Tales of these, and of these alone, are ever new – because love never dies.

  The End.

  ‘Is there any more writing on the walls?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that I could see,’ Richard replied.

  ‘Are you sure? Have you checked?’

  ‘You have a look, Allie,’ Ray suggested, in a weary but contented kind of way. ‘You’ve got better eyes than we have.’

  So I went back upstairs to Bethan’s room. Before I left the kitchen, however, I stopped in front of Delora. She must have been smoking, because I could smell it on her breath.

  ‘Did you actually see Eglantine?’ I inquired awkwardly. ‘Did you – I mean, did you speak to her?’ Suddenly, I realised how much I would have loved to speak to her myself. I so badly wanted to ask her questions, look at her face, find out why her story had been the most important thing in her life.

  But Delora shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know, love,’ she said in her husky voice. ‘I don’t know if I spoke to her. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember a thing.’

  ‘You don’t remember any of it?’

  ‘Nope. Never do. It’s like I go to sleep, and wake up when it’s all over.’

  I stared at her, and she smiled back at me. Her eyes were small and brown. They looked older than the rest of her.

  And the rest of her, I should tell you, looked pretty old in that clear morning light. Even her lips had lines on them.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you must be . . . I mean, you’re very clever.’

  ‘Thanks, love.’

  After that, I went upstairs. I looked and looked. I got up on a chair and looked; I got down on my knees and looked. I scanned every centimetre of the walls in Bethan’s room, and after half an hour, I had found only one line of script, written under the window.

  It said, The End.

  CHAPTER # twelve

  It was the end, too. Well – it was and it wasn’t. Eglantine did stop writing, so Bethan was able to move back into his bedroom (which was painted with another two coats of white paint, just to be on the safe side). He was a little reluctant, at first, in case Eglantine was still there, and Mum had to spend one night in the room herself to reassure him. When she reported that she’d had no dreams about choking, he agreed to try out the room himself. After a week of that, he moved all his toys out of my room, and things returned to normal – in one sense.

  But in another sense they didn’t, because people were still interested in Eglantine. Richard Boyer was one of these people. He was very upset when he learned that we had painted over Eglantine’s writing on the ceiling of Bethan’s bedroom. And we couldn’t give him a piece of the bedroom wall to make him feel better, because the wall was made of lath and plaster – not gyprock – and wouldn’t have responded well to being hacked about. So Richard was unable to establish, without doubt, that our mysterious writing had been of a paranormal nature.

  Nevertheless, it was a case that received a lot of attention. Channel Nine even ran a short item on Eglantine, using Richard’s videotape of Delora, and of the single line of script that he had managed to photograph as it slowly appeared on Bethan’s bedroom wall. Delora was interviewed, too. She was wearing false fingernails, painted purple, which must have been about ten centimetres long.

  Anyway, you can imagine what happened next. We were swamped with mail – most of it from weirdos – asking us to interpret their dreams, or requesting permission to visit our house, or describing other examples of haunted rooms. Mum passed all of these letters on to PRISM. In the end, she didn’t even bother to read them. She also had to take down the sign that she had put up over the front door not long after the writing stopped. The sign had said Eglantine, because all the other houses on our street were called something (like St Elmo or Bideawee), and she thought it might be nice to name our house after its absent ghost. (I think she was feeling a bit guilty about Eglantine, now that we were rid of her.) But poor Mum hadn’t counted on all the stickybeaks. We had people knocking on the front door, asking if ours was ‘the haunted house’. We had people hanging around taking pictures, and other people peering through our living-room window. Now, most of the sticky-beaks aren’t quite sure which terrace is ours.

  You must be wondering why Eglantine was suddenly so popular. The fact is, she’s now a famous case, like the Borley Rectory hoax. Two months after she disappeared, there were already three hundred and forty-eight references to Eglantine Higgins on the internet, and soon after that we had a call from the producers of an American TV show called ‘Stranger than Fiction’. We never saw the program that they made about Eglantine, but they did film us all sitting around the
living room and talking about our experiences. (Mum and I did most of the talking; Ray and Bethan just sat.) Because the American show used an Australian camera crew, and Richard Boyer’s videotape, and parts of the Channel Nine program, its episode about Eglantine didn’t cost producers would have bothered to make it. But it was interesting for us, and we got paid for taking part – though I don’t know how much they paid us, because Mum wouldn’t tell me. She did, however, take us out for dinner and a movie to celebrate. So we can thank Eglantine for that.

  Mrs Procter’s old English lecturer did try to identify Eglantine’s story, but he couldn’t find any record of its having been published before. He told Mrs Procter that it might have appeared in some magazine that doesn’t happen to exist any more, but I doubt it. Personally, I think it was Eglantine’s own story. I think she was an honest-to-goodness writer, who had to tell her story no matter what. It makes sense, don’t you think? She wasn’t murdered in our house, or buried in an unmarked grave, so what other reason would she have had for haunting us?

  Oh – and there’s one more thing. About three weeks after the Channel Nine program went to air, we received a call from Richard Boyer. Apparently, PRISM had been speaking to a woman who claimed that Eglantine Higgins was her great-aunt. This woman (whose name was Maureen Cameron) had seen the Channel Nine program. Although she normally lived in Queensland, she had come down south to visit a sick relative, and was keen to show PRISM some treasured family heirlooms – if anyone was interested.

  Richard wanted to know if he could invite Maureen over to our house, and show her the room in which Eglantine had died.

  Of course Mum said yes. She couldn’t have said anything else – especially when Richard was so disappointed about the ceiling. So, one Saturday afternoon, Richard brought Maureen Cameron over to visit us, and we all sat down in the kitchen to drink tea (or cocoa) and eat chocolate cake.

  Maureen was sixty-one. She told us this without hesitation when Bethan asked her how old she was. Although she had grey hair, and wrinkled eyelids, and swollen ankles, she didn’t really seem that old – not like my grandmother. Maureen wasn’t deaf or doddery. In fact she was quite sharp and quick. She had small, bright eyes that never stayed still, and she didn’t miss a thing. When she was offered a piece of chocolate cake, and politely declined, she took care to add, ‘Bethan can have my piece. At once.’

  Clearly, she had noticed my brother mooning over the cake. She might even have sensed that sharp words had been exchanged, earlier that afternoon, over a guest’s right to the first piece. The way she watched him, as he stuffed down his portion, made me think that she might have sons of her own.

  ‘My grandmother was born in this house,’ she remarked, after we had all gathered around the kitchen table. ‘But she didn’t remember it very well. Her parents moved when she was quite young.’

  After Eglantine died here, I thought. Mum asked if Maureen wanted to see the room in which Eglantine had very possibly breathed her last, but Maureen shook her head.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t really come for that. I just thought that you might be interested in some of the things my grandmother saved. Some of the things she passed on to me.’

  ‘Do you know much about Eglantine?’ I queried. ‘Do you know what she was like?’

  ‘Not really. I know that she was bookish. Very fond of books. I suppose I take after her in that regard.’ Maureen laughed a little. ‘I’m a retired teacher, you see – classical languages. I’m also very stubborn, which I gather was one of Eglantine’s main characteristics. Oh!’ She opened the album that she was nursing on her lap, and took out a very old, very small photograph. ‘I did bring you a picture of her. It’s the only one I have.’

  There was a general gasp. I don’t know how everyone else felt, but I was awe-struck. It was like seeing a photograph of – oh, I don’t know. Cleopatra, or something.

  It was a brownish photograph, and it wasn’t all that clear. It showed a young woman with her hair piled up on top of her head, wearing a high-necked blouse and a peculiar hat. Her face was smooth and expressionless. (Mum told me later that in old photographs, the subjects had to stay still for so long that they always ended up looking like shop dummies.) I couldn’t see what colour her eyes were, and her hands weren’t shown, but despite this – despite her lack of expression – I got a sense of what she was like. Her face was thin, but not emaciated. Her nose was long. She had a firm chin and high cheekbones and a proud stare, and her eyebrows were very strong and dark. Only her mouth was soft.

  Eglantine, I thought. Eglantine Higgins. There you are at last.

  ‘The name Eglantine is derived from the Latin word for “prickly”,’ Maureen remarked, as we gazed and gazed. ‘From what my grandmother told me, it suited her sister down to the ground.’

  Prickly. I remembered that Michelle had described me in the same way. ‘Why are you so prickly?’ is what she had said. Was I really so prickly? Was I really like Eglantine?

  I thought to myself, maybe I should stop criticising everything. Maybe I should stop scoffing at dumb kids and not spend so much time in the library. Maybe I should be nicer to Bethan.

  After all, I don’t want to end up like Eglantine.

  ‘Do you know if she had any boyfriends?’ I asked. ‘I read something about how anorexia hysterica was often set off by a “romantic disappointment”. Do you know if some boy dumped her, or something?’

  ‘No,’ Maureen replied. ‘I’m afraid not. As I say, I don’t know much about her. She did like her romantic poetry, though.’

  We looked through Eglantine’s album. It wasn’t a photograph album, but a large book full of scraps and cuttings. She had cut poems and pictures out of newspapers and magazines. She had even pasted down a sheet of music. The song was called ‘Marble Halls’, and the first verse went like this:

  I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls

  with vassels and serfs at my side,

  and of all who assembled within those walls

  that I was the hope and the pride.

  I had riches all too great to count

  and a high ancestral name.

  But I also dreamt which pleased me most

  that you loved me still the same.

  When I read those lyrics, I thought about Princess Emilie. And I wondered, had someone loved Eglantine? Or had she loved someone? Someone who was way beyond her reach?

  It was clear that we would never know.

  Eglantine had managed to finish the story about Emilie, but her own story – Eglantine’s story – would remain incomplete for us, because she had left no letters or diaries. We had only her album, and two stories written out in a hand that was instantly recognisable. One of these stories was completed, and it was called ‘The Adamantine Tower’. The other was called ‘Emilie and Osric’.

  I hardly dared pick it up.

  ‘This is the one,’ I breathed. ‘Look, Mum. This is it. The original.’

  ‘Show me,’ said Richard. Reverently, he turned the pages. On the last page, the writing was smeared and unsteady. It stopped in the middle of a sentence: Beyond the . . .

  Had the pen fallen from her fingers? Had she been too weak to hold it any longer? Had she died shortly afterwards?

  I had to blink hard, and swallow. Gently I touched the last, incomplete word.

  ‘God,’ Richard murmured. He looked up. ‘You know, these documents might become quite valuable,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of interest in Eglantine. You might even find that someone decides to publish her stories. Some fringe publisher interested in the occult.’

  ‘Well,’ said Maureen, drily, ‘Eglantine would have been pleased about that, I daresay. Gran used to tell me that books were her passion.’

  Maureen agreed that Richard could borrow Eglantine’s album and stories, for a while. She also suggested that he add Idylls of the King to his collection. Then, at Mum’s suggestion, she went outside to look at our backyard, because apparently she was something of
a gardener – and when it came to gardening, Mum needed all the help she could get. They wandered out into the watery sunshine together, leaving Bethan to finish off the chocolate cake, and Ray to go back to his studio, and Richard to pore over Eglantine’s documents.

  I went outside too, I don’t know why. I think perhaps I wanted to get away from Eglantine. Her presence seemed to hover over her album, and it was a smothering presence.In fact, it was so strong that I was half afraid she might move back into Bethan’s bedroom.

  She didn’t, of course. She never has. Bethan pounds around there now as if she never existed; he’s stuck football posters up on the walls and hung model aeroplanes from the ceiling. But we still haven’t quite rid ourselves of Eglantine. Because as Maureen was walking around the garden, commenting on the diseased lemon tree and the unruly jasmine, and the condition of the grass, she stopped suddenly in front of a sprawling old rose bush.

  ‘Well, would you look at that,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What?’ asked Mum.

  ‘That rose.’

  ‘It was here when we bought the place.’

  ‘Oh, I can see that it must have been.’ Stooping, Maureen sniffed at one of the blossoms. ‘It’s a sweetbriar rose,’ she went on. ‘Rosa rubiginosa. The odd thing is, I’ve never seen one flowering at this time of year. Not ever.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Just look how old it is. It’s very, very old.’ Maureen fixed Mum with her bright, penetrating gaze. ‘Do you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if my great-grandmother planted this?’

  Mum blinked. ‘You mean it’s that old?’ she exclaimed. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I can’t. Not really. It’s just something about the name.’ Gently, Maureen cupped one of the fragile pink flowers in her hand, and gazed down at it. ‘A lot of people don’t call this sweetbriar,’ she explained. ‘A lot of people call this eglantine.’

  Then she plucked the rose from its branch, and gave it to me.