I could hear Sally and Evan talking softly, even though I was really trying not to, I really didn’t want to hear them being private. Evan was saying, “I don’t think money’s going to be the problem. The Lovells are in this for the long haul—they’ll lay out whatever it takes to bring the farm back to life. I’m not at all bothered about that.”
“But it’s all going to take twice as long as you thought,” Sally said. “Because of the house. That’s the bother, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t get used to the way she sounded, talking to him—not like my goofy New York single-mom Sally, more like an older person, so thoughtful and mature it always made me feel strange. Evan laughed a little and said, “Well, it’s my fault, I should have stashed you lot back in London with Charlie, and come down here alone, until I got things put shipshape. I knew that, damn it. I just wanted you with me.”
I heard them kissing then, and I curled up tight and pulled that cold, floppy pillow over my ears. I didn’t expect to sleep at all, but I did, straight through, and I had one weird dream after another, all of them full of people I didn’t know. Sometime in the night Sally sat by me on the bed for a while, unless that was a dream, too. I should have asked her then, but I wasn’t about to, and now she can’t remember. But I think she did.
Okay. The first months were solid nightmare, and it’s no good my pretending they weren’t. And I was a big part of the nightmare, maybe the biggest, I know that. I’m not going to go on and on about it, I’m just going to say that I was absolutely miserable, and I spread it around, and if everybody else at Stourhead wasn’t absolutely miserable, too, it wasn’t my fault. I did the very best I could.
But I had help. There was the house itself, to begin with. If I ever knew a house that truly did not want to be lived in, it was the Manor back when we arrived. I don’t just mean stuff like that sidewalk-colored water coming out in smelly burps, or the wood stove smoking up the kitchen every time Sally tried to cook something, or the weird way the electricity was hooked up, so you could turn on the light in my bathroom and blow every fuse in the west wing. Or the Horror Of The Septic Tank, which I am not going to describe, ever. That’s not what I mean.
Since that last sentence, I’ve been sitting here for half an hour, figuring how to explain how all of us were always tripping and falling over nothing at least once a day, as though those beautiful old floors absolutely hated the feet that walked on them. I’m talking about the way you could hear ugly little murmurs in the two chimneys, even when there wasn’t any wind, and the way some corners just ate up light, just stayed cold and shadowy forever, never mind how many lamps you plugged in. And I’m talking about the quick, scratchy footsteps everybody heard right above the Arctic Circle, one time or another, and nobody wanted to mention; and about that east-wing window that wouldn’t reflect the sunlight. We couldn’t even find the room it belonged to, that’s how the Manor was.
Julian was wildly excited about all this at the beginning. He ran around saying, “It’s a haunted house, how splendid—I’ll be the only boy at school living in a real haunted house!” But there were a couple of rooms on the second floor that Julian absolutely would not go into, from the first day. Everybody else did—there didn’t seem anything weird or scary about these two at least—but Julian just stopped right at the door, like I’ve seen Mister Cat do sometimes, and nobody could get him to take another step. He kept mumbling, “It feels funny, I don’t like it.” When Evan tried to talk him into going in, he cried. When Tony teased him about it, Julian hit him. Of course he says he doesn’t remember any of that now.
Oh, there was a caretaker, by the way—I forgot to put that in. His name was Wilf, he looked exactly like the Pillsbury Doughboy in weird rubber overalls and hip boots, and he wandered up from the cellar the first morning we were there, totally and permanently hungover. He had a shuffly, wincing style of walking, as though his head were made of glass, just about to roll off his shoulders and shatter into a million bits. He was supposed to be there just for a couple of weeks, to show Evan where things were around the house and the farm, but he hung on after that, and you couldn’t ever quite get rid of him. Evan fired him once or twice a week, but he didn’t pay any attention.
Evan and Sally worked like crazy people. Evan got rid of the wood stove as soon as he could find someone to haul it away, and we actually did sort of live on pizza and takeout from Sherborne until the Lovells—the family who own Stourhead Farm—put in a new electric range. Which meant replacing all the wiring in the whole Arctic Circle, but they never hassled Evan about that. Besides the electricity, they paid to have the plumbing redone—so between one thing and another the house was a total ruin for months, with tools and torn-out boards all over everywhere, and nests of wires hanging out of the walls, and the men Evan hired to help him tramping around growling at each other, scattering pipe ashes on the floors and taking tea breaks every ten minutes. They mostly had ponytails and big thick yellow mustaches, and I never could tell them apart.
They also quit a lot. Most of the time it was over ordinary stuff like the pay or the hours or the tea breaks, but not always. One guy quit because his tools kept disappearing on him, and I think he tried to sue the Lovells about it. And there was one who just didn’t show up for work one morning, and he never did come back for his tools. Later on, he wrote Evan and Sally a letter, trying to explain, but it was mixed up and misspelled, and full of ramblings about sad voices, and music he couldn’t hear, and about “puddles of cold air,” and something like invisible fur brushing his neck all the time. There were a couple of others who talked about the voices and the cold air, too, and a man who said he kept smelling vanilla the whole time he was rewiring the Arctic Circle, and it made him so nervous he had to stop. Evan said most of them drank, and just kept hiring new ones.
Tony said, “Maybe we really do have a boggart,” but he said it out of range of Julian’s feet. The two of them are going to hate this, because it makes them seem as though they were fighting all the time, but back then they were. Julian was always the person who started hitting and kicking and crying, but Tony usually had it coming, one way or the other. That’s the way I remember it, anyhow.
“Well, it just might be,” Evan said. The weirder the question, the more seriously he answers it; that’s another way Evan is. “There’s certainly something playing tricks in the kitchen lately, and if it isn’t you two—”
“It’s not, it’s not!” Julian rumbled, and Tony said quickly, “Well, I just took a couple of the chocolate biscuits, but I didn’t knock all those bottles down—”
“And I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t draw those pictures in the flour!” Julian was shaking his head so hard it actually made me dizzy to look at him. “And I didn’t throw the eggs around, and I didn’t make the horrible mess under the sink, and the fridge wasn’t my fault—”
Evan sighed. “I wish I could blame that on a boggart.” We’d already had two different refrigerators put in by then, and neither one could keep stuff cold for more than a day. There wasn’t a thing wrong with them—each time all the food went bad, Evan had an old man come down from Salisbury, but all he could ever figure was that the electricity was screwed up some way. Which didn’t make any sense, with the new wiring; but the last time he came, the Salisbury man rubbed a finger alongside his nose and closed one eye (I’d read about people doing that, but I’d never actually seen it), and told Evan, “There’s some houses, ones that was here before the electric, they don’t like the electric. They’ll be fighting it, squeezing at it, trying to choke it off all the time. It’s fighting the electric, this house, that’s what’s happening.” Evan called somebody else the next time, but it didn’t make much difference.