The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) (7 page)

Blake grunts non-committally.

‘And think how great it would be to see Norfolk and meet my Blackstock relatives. We always said we’d travel when we retired.’

‘I haven’t completely retired. There are my classes on the American Pastoral, for one thing.’

‘I know, but they’re evening classes. You could swap with one of the other tutors.’

Blake says nothing and so Nell presses her advantage.

‘And we could have a proper funeral for Daddy. That would mean so much to me.’

Blake waves his hand out of the window, at the maple trees flaring against the mountains, at the white clapboard houses scattered at discreet intervals along the loggers’ road.

‘Why would you want to go to England and miss all this?’

‘Oh, the fall.’ Nell dismisses Vermont’s pride and joy with a shrug. ‘It’s pretty while it lasts but soon it’ll be winter. Snow and cold and not seeing anyone for weeks on end. I bet Norfolk’s real temperate. They never have bad weather in England.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ says Blake, but he knows that he’s beaten all the same. ‘I went to a conference in Cambridge once and there was ice on the inside of the windows.’

There’s no ice on the roads but it’s a grey foggy morning when Nelson and Judy drive out to Blackstock Hall. As they approach the house, the snipe rise out of the grass and zigzag drunkenly overhead. The sheep watch them morosely from their islands, smaller now after the night’s rain.

‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ says Judy as they park by the gates.

‘Get along with you,’ says Nelson. ‘Cathbad would love it. Lots of sea and sky and miserable-looking sheep. He’d say that the place has good energies.’

Judy looks at him suspiciously. She hates people taking the mickey out of Cathbad but, on the other hand, she can’t deny that Nelson is right. Cathbad would love this place.

Nelson, for his part, watches anxiously as Judy heaves herself out of the car and they begin the trek across the field. She’s seven months pregnant but she looks more. He wishes she would go on maternity leave and take it easy, but Judy informs him that she wants to work ‘right up to the last minute’ so that she can make the most of her time after the baby is born. Judy’s the wage-earner in the family, with Cathbad relishing the role of full-time father, though he is apparently much in demand as a ‘spiritual counsellor’ (Nelson doesn’t like to think what that entails).

Nelson has rung ahead and courteously requested an interview with George the elder. ‘Just a chat really. By all means have your son or daughter-in-law there too.’ He can’t complain about that, surely?

It seems that George has decided to make it a family affair. Sally meets them at the door and ushers them into the kitchen where both Georges, Old and Young, are sitting at the table by the Aga.

‘Do sit down, Inspector Nelson and . . .’ Sally looks enquiringly at Judy.

‘This is Detective Sergeant Johnson,’ says Nelson.

‘Well, do sit down, Detective Sergeant Johnson. Goodness me, you look like you could do with a seat. When’s the baby due?’

Nelson suppresses a smile. He has already heard Judy complaining about the way that her pregnancy has made her a public object (‘Complete strangers patting my stomach. It’s outrageous!’) but she thanks Sally politely enough and volunteers that the baby is due early in December.

‘Shouldn’t still be working,’ says Old George. ‘Should be at home getting the nursery ready.’

‘I need the money,’ says Judy dourly.

Sally looks at Nelson rather accusingly (‘making that poor girl work for a pittance’) and offers Judy a cup of tea.

‘Just water, please,’ says Judy.

‘Inspector?’

‘Tea would be grand, thanks.’ Nelson turns to Old George. He’s still a tall man, face shrunken to emphasise a beaky nose and bushy white eyebrows. Nelson thinks that he must be in his late eighties.

‘Mr Blackstock,’ he says, ‘I just wanted to ask you about your brother Frederick. We’re trying to get a picture of him at the time of his death and you’re really the only person who can help us.’

Old George glares at Nelson across the table. ‘Got a letter – no, not a letter, an
email
– from his daughter today. Eleanor her name is. Calls herself Nell. Nell Blackstock Goodheart. What kind of a name is that?’

‘Americans always have lots of names,’ says Sally vaguely, arranging cups on the table.

‘She wants to come and meet us,’ continues the old man. ‘Says they’re making a film about Fred or some such nonsense. She wants to come over with her husband for a family reunion. That’s what she says, “a family reunion”.’

‘How nice,’ says Sally. ‘They can have the Blue Room, though it does leak a bit in winter.’

‘Have you met Nell before?’ asks Judy, managing to sound as if they’re personal friends. This is why Nelson has brought her, of course.

‘Once,’ says Old George. ‘She came over with her mother sometime in the sixties. Her mother, Bella her name was, wanted to see Fred’s “resting place” as she called it. Look at the sea, I told her. He’s under there somewhere. Fish food.’

I’m sure she found that very comforting, thinks Nelson. Young George speaks up suddenly. He looks very like his father, although his hair is grey rather than white and his nose doesn’t quite dominate his face yet. It’s not hard to see that he must once have been as handsome as Chaz.

‘I remember Nelly,’ he says now. ‘She had lots of long dark hair. She took me for rides in her sports car. She was very glamorous.’

‘She must be in her early seventies now,’ says Sally.

‘About fifteen years older than me,’ says George. ‘She was born in the war.’

‘Tell me about Fred,’ says Nelson. ‘I understand he emigrated to America before the war.’

He’s not sure who he expects to answer but it’s Old George who speaks up, his harsh old voice softer now, reminiscent. ‘Fred never liked the place,’ he says. ‘Said it was unhealthy, unlucky. He got that from our mother. She was American, you see. She married m’ father when he went to the States before the First World War. She was an heiress, very wealthy, and she used to say that Pa had only married her so he could waste her money on this house. She might have liked Norfolk at first, I don’t know, but by the time I was born she was always complaining about it. She was fanciful, you see. She said that nothing good would ever come of living on reclaimed land, land that should, by rights, be at the bottom of the sea. She said that the sea wanted the Blackstock lands back and one day it would come for us all. She used to say that she could hear the sea sprites singing at night. When Fred died, she said that was their revenge.’

Nelson and Judy don’t look at each other. Nelson thinks that Old George’s mother sounds not so much fanciful as plain mad. It’s all bollocks, he tells himself. Besides, the sea sprites got it wrong, Fred hasn’t spent all these years at the bottom of the sea. His bones have lain somewhere else entirely. But where?

‘When did Fred leave for America?’ asks Judy.

‘1938,’ says Old George with remarkable promptitude. ‘I remember Pa saying that war with Germany was coming and he’d done it to get out of fighting. There was a bit of a row about that. But he did fight, didn’t he?’

Judy and Nelson agree that he did.

‘How old were you when he left?’ asks Nelson.

‘Twelve,’ says George. ‘I was born in 1926, the year of the General Strike.’

‘Were you sad?’ asks Judy. ‘Did you miss him?’

For the first time Old George seems at a loss. He looks at his son and daughter-in-law as if expecting them to know the answer.

‘Well, naturally,’ he says at last, ‘if you’re used to having someone about, then you do, well,
notice
when they’re gone.’

‘Did you ever see him again,’ asks Judy, ‘after 1938?’

‘No,’ says Old George. ‘We knew he’d got married because he told us in a letter but none of us ever saw him again. We didn’t even know there was a child until after he was killed. Bella wrote and told my parents.’

‘How did you find out that he was killed?’ asks Nelson.

‘Bella got the telegram,’ says George. ‘She was next of kin. Ma was upset about that. Bella telephoned to tell us. I remember being excited. People didn’t make transatlantic calls in those days.’

Excited, thinks Nelson. Not exactly the usual reaction to news of your older brother’s death. But, then again, he knows that the mind is a funny thing and maybe the teenage George’s first reaction
was
excitement. Maybe he is just being honest.

‘What about your other brother,’ says Nelson. ‘Lewis, wasn’t it? I think you said he was a prisoner of war in Japan?’

‘Yes. He was with the Royal Norfolk Regiment. He had a terrible war really. In France and then the Far East. We thought he was dead too for a while. Then we got the news that he was a prisoner of war. Ma was so happy. Later she said it might have been better if he had been killed.’

That’s quite some statement, thinks Nelson. He wonders what it was like for the young George, spending the war years with his parents in this lonely house, both brothers presumed dead. Aloud he says, ‘He suffered a great deal, you said.’

‘He wasn’t recognisable when he got home. For a while he didn’t seem to recognise us either. Then he went away for treatment, and when he came back he seemed better. Quiet, kept to his room a lot, but basically OK. Then, years later, when I was working in London, he just disappeared.’

Old George blinks once or twice, almost as if, when he opens his eyes, he expects to see his older brother standing there, in front of him.

‘Disappeared?’ echoes Judy empathetically.

‘Yes. He used to like walking across the fields very early with his dog. Then his dog died. Very sad but not unexpected. He was very old. Well, on the morning after Bingo died, Lewis set off for his walk on his own. He never came back.’ His voice trails away. Sally leans over to pat the old man’s arm. ‘It’s OK, Dad.’ Young George seems lost in a world of his own.

‘Do you have any pictures of your brothers?’ asks Nelson. Judy shoots him a look, probably thinks he’s being a bit insensitive, coming out with it like that, but Old George actually seems pleased by the change of subject.

‘Yes, I sorted some out. Where are they, Sally?’

‘Here.’ Sally crosses over to the dresser and reaches for a cookery book. ‘I put them in here, just to be on the safe side.’

Of course, thinks Nelson, far safer in a Delia Smith book than in a photo album. Still, from what he’s seen of the house, he supposes he should be grateful that the photographs have surfaced at all.

Three pictures emerge from Delia’s Spanish Pork with Olives. The first shows two young men in cricket whites, arms across each other’s shoulders. In front of them, holding a bat, is a boy in shorts and a school cap. George with his older brothers. The second shows one of the young men in khaki, a spaniel at his feet. Nelson assumes that this is Lewis, possibly with Bingo, the dog whose death caused such a violent reaction in its owner.

The third photograph shows a man in an American Air Force uniform. He has a thin moustache and Chaz’s gap between his front teeth.

‘Bella sent us that one after Fred was killed,’ says George. ‘Ma used to have it on her bedside table.’

‘They were very handsome,’ says Judy. ‘You look just like them. You both do,’ she adds to Young George.

‘Thank you,’ says the younger man. ‘There is a pretty strong family resemblance. Chaz looks just like Dad did when he was younger.’

It is true that, in the pictures, the young men look strikingly alike but the camera was too far away to catch actual features and expressions. You are left with an impression of dark hair and wide grins, a certain swagger and confidence. Black shadows, white sun, no room for the subtleties of technicolour. Only the dog looks as if he has any presentiment of disaster. He squints anxiously at the camera, head on one side as if he alone can hear the sound of gunfire.

‘So you never heard what had become of Lewis,’ says Nelson, looking at the picture of the man and the dog.

‘No,’ says Old George. ‘Someone saw him down by Devil’s Hollow at sunrise but, after that, nothing. No body, nothing. Ma went on hoping for almost ten years but, in the end . . .’