The Haunted Tea Set & Other Stories, page 8
Returning to the hallway shaken and angry, I mounted the stairs to the first floor. Another volunteer? A builder? Why was he lurking that way and watching me? I paused to let my nerves settle, and stood hesitating in the slab of pale sunlight thrown across the landing by the mighty Georgian window. The moss green carpet was neatly quartered by its slanting cross-shaped shadow. I decided to finish my tour and complain sharply to Gillian about her colleague’s absurd behaviour later. After briefly inspecting the grandfather clock (walnut, I believe, late 18th century), I pressed on.
Two large doorways faced each other on the first floor landing. The door on the left was open, and bore a sign reading ‘EXHIBITION’. Inside, the varnished floorboards were stained a dark treacle brown, and the walls covered in faded damask of a sickly yellow-green shade. The room was empty, except for black and white photographs in ornate frames which covered every wall. The opus of Sir Eustace Randolph.
Above the fireplace hung an especially large portrait in a black oval frame crusted with carvings. It was a photograph of a dark-haired woman in a white dress, in her early thirties I guessed. I noticed a filigree ring on her left hand. Sir Randolph’s fiancee? She had a gentle face. Her eyes seemed rather sad, almost pleading, and it was hard to turn mine away.
I took my time studying each wall. While I wasn’t in raptures as Gillian seemed to expect, they were, I confess, very good photographs. They were all portraits of women, ranging in age. Some were elegant, dressed in smart jackets and crinolines. Some were nude, sheathed in gauzy, sparkly fabric, or clutching a fan of curled feathers. Others wore plain day dresses with muddy hems, battered aprons, or even rags. One was holding a cloth, as if interrupted while washing up.
In many I recognised the painted country park from the studio below, the chair, the plinth. Others sat or stood in unfamiliar settings, in unknown rooms and corridors. Many were standing, and had an air of having just walked into the frame. A few were blurred, the dark spaces of their eyes and mouths stretched gaping over shuddering faces. Evidently they had moved after the lens cap came off, fixing them forever in motion. Had they fidgeted? Or were they simply surprised?
The more I looked at the photographs the more it seemed that every one had a melancholy expression, more than the usual solemnity of a Victorian portrait. Their frozen faces formed a silent chorus of pain. I was reminded of another room in a grand house I had visited once, in which every wall was hung with severed heads: deer, bison, antelope, musk ox, a moose... Their glossy black eyes shone with the same vigilant sadness.
My curiosity about the former owner of Eagle House was developing into a strong dislike. I left the room feeling haunted, angry, and restless. But I needed something more concrete than an eerie feeling for the article, and I was sure Gillian would clam up again. I turned back towards the stairs and noticed that the door on the other side of the landing was standing slightly ajar. There was no laminated sign, no blue arrow, no label. Feeling a small thrill of adventure, I laid my hand flat on the heavy wooden door and pushed it open.
As I entered the room I started. Another antique camera stood in the corner, pointing directly at the doorway. It had me square in its sights. I felt reluctant to move closer while it watched me, and I paused on the threshold.
The room was heavy, and had a faint coppery smell. The walls were deep crimson and the floorboards dark, though mostly covered by a rug, worn and faded like the rest. The only object in the room besides the camera was a small silver picture frame on the marble mantel.
I should have turned and left, but a good journalist is nothing if not tenacious, and I was determined to uncover the mystery of Eagle House. So I stepped forward towards the fireplace, and peered at the photograph in the frame.
It was me. Myself. The back of me, leaving the drawing room half an hour earlier.
From the corner of the room came a familiar dull whisper. I looked up and gaped in terror. The black cloth behind the camera held the form of a figure hunched low, two suited legs and shoes growing beneath it. I couldn’t move, even as I saw a hand reaching out from the cloth, grey fingers fondling the lens cap.
The sound of tapping on a window broke my trance, and I sprang backwards onto the landing. Through the doorway of the exhibition room I saw with shock that the portrait of Randolph’s fiancee above the mantel had changed. Or rather the woman within it had changed. Her hands were raised in front of her, palms out as if they were pressed against the glass. I looked at her for a moment in horror, then bolted down the stairs, only to stop short.
There was someone there. But there wasn’t. Although I was alone, the thin cross-shaped shadow which fell across the floor held another. The unmistakable outline of a man, standing in front of the window.
For a moment I stood trembling. Then a great plume of anger arose within me, furnishing me with both courage and adrenaline and I charged down the stairs. I will not forget the sensation of a cold and unseen hand brushing my neck. But I hurtled forward down the second set of stairs and towards the door without looking back, thanking heaven for my sensible shoes.
As I barged out of the front door Gillian jumped up from her folding chair in surprise. I came to a stop on the path and tried to catch my breath.
“What did you think?” she asked, tentatively.
“I saw him. In the red room.”
She looked stunned, and opened and closed her mouth a few times.
“Oh! I’m so terribly sorry. I locked it this morning! He must have... Well, you know how artists are.”
I stared at her. She started wringing her hands again fretfully.
“Will you – will you put it in your article?”
Coherence
I should have known something had changed when I saw my uncle standing on the platform as the train pulled out of the station. He looked perfectly normal – unruly tufts of white hair, crumpled corduroy jacket, mischievous eyes – except that he wasn’t supposed to be there; I was on my way to visit him. Our eyes met as we passed him and he smiled, but when I looked back he was gone.
I checked my phone. No messages. I couldn’t imagine Jasper leaving his cosy cottage to lurk around Waterloo and surprise me, not these days anyway. Just imagination, then. I’d barely managed to wring four hours’ sleep from the previous night, and I’d been thinking about seeing him all week. My brain had summoned him forth a little early, that’s all.
Sinking back in my seat, watching the scenery change from brick walls to warehouses to suburbs and finally to fields, I thought about Ruth. The memory of her face – her face wearing that expression – flared and faded. I remembered where I’d seen that expression before, and for a moment my mother’s face glowed in my mind like an afterimage, before I blinked it away.
Waiting on Jasper’s doorstep a couple of hours later I started to wonder. I rang the doorbell a second time. His health is good, I told myself, there’s no reason to worry. He’s probably just popped out to get something. Gone for a walk.
I waited, admiring the garden; raucous daffodils and a frost of pink blossom on the apple tree. Then I thought of Ruth again and retreated into the tangle of my thoughts.
I need you, Jasper.
No answer.
Letting myself in with my key I dislodged a small pile of letters on the runner. Some charity mailers, a copy of Nature, a gas bill, all dated from the last couple of days.
“Jasper?” I called out, and the word dropped softly into silence.
As I went from room to room the cottage welcomed me with its usual chorus of creaks. When I walked into the kitchen, the shush of my shoes on the flagstones was the only sound. I stood there for a moment, and let the emptiness settle around me. He wasn’t here.
I opened the fridge and found only some elderly butter, sour milk, and a few wilted spring onions. There were no unwashed plates beside the sink. Everything was clean and neat. I checked the boiler: the timer was off. I flicked it on again, and listened to the clicks and hums of warmth spreading through the old pipes. Then I made myself some tea.
As the kettle bubbled, I felt the hairs at the nape of my neck tingle. I turned, but the room was as still and empty as before.
Perhaps he’d gone to meet an old colleague. Or been invited to deliver a keynote. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d double booked himself, though he’d never forgotten me before. I sank into the squashy sofa and called him, feeling icy. It went to voicemail.
“Hi, it’s Alma. Did you forget I was coming to visit today? Let me know when you’ll be back. I’m... I’d really like to see you.”
I hung up, and felt a surge of hot tears. As I blinked them away I noticed a photograph on the table in front of me. A grainy picture on glossy paper, it held my mother, and Jasper, and me, laughing on a beach somewhere in the late 1980s. I must have been around nine, and Jasper looked as I remembered him from those days, when I knew him as my aunt. When his sister still smiled at him. When my mother still knew me. It was an image charged with pain, and its edges bit my fingertips. Why had he left it here?
I heard a rustling noise and looked up to see Jasper disappearing through the wall opposite me. Or the back of him, at least. I felt as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over me, the nerves in my body jangled like a smashed piano. Then I heard the same noise coming from the kitchen and my shock telescoped into a point of icy fear. I followed the noise, as quietly as I could. The rustling stopped and started again, and I heard the soft thud of a cupboard door and the clash of cutlery in the drawer. When I reached the doorway, mind blank with dread, I saw Jasper hunched over the counter, one shoulder twitching. And I smelled Chinese food.
“...What?” I said, and he turned around, holding a wine bottle crowned with the splayed legs of a corkscrew.
“Sorry I’m late. I got us a takeaway!”
“But I... I saw you...” I stumbled.
“Ah. I can explain. Listen, are you vegetarian at the moment? I couldn’t remember so I got some tofu just in case...”
“Jasper!” I shouted, surprising us both. I ran forward and threw my arms around him, burying my face in his woolly shoulder. “I thought you were dead.”
“Me? Never!” he laughed, but squeezed me tight.
I tried to take in what he was telling me.
“You’ve found a way to control... particles?”
He shook his head. “Not control; allow. Allow them to harmonise. It’s like...” he gestured with his chopsticks. “Like a dance without steps. Like a tune which can’t be played from a score, only discovered as you play it.”
His face was flushed and his eyes bright and full of emotion. I was struggling to understand. The word I kept rolling around my tongue like a mint was ‘impossible’. But I’d seen him walk through the wall, with my own eyes. I’d seen him in London when he couldn’t have been there.
“But how...” I tried. “How does it work?”
“We’ve talked about quantum properties – particles in two states at once, or entangled across great distances – yes?”
I nodded.
“And I told you how these properties have been found in biological processes: in enzymes, in photosynthesis, in birds’ migration?”
I nodded again, dimly remembering a long speech he’d given me about robins on one winter walk.
“Well they’re in us too. They are us. We’re quantum beings, Alma,” he said, his voice cracking with feeling. “I think I always knew. Even as a young student, I felt it. But I had to get out of the lab and the lecture hall to understand, to really understand. One day it just hit me!” He laughed, and ran a hand through his white hair. “And it all made sense. I felt it. And I found that if I just let go, I could do this.”
He said the word at once from two directions. I looked over my shoulder to see a perfect copy of Jasper – no, Jasper himself – standing in the doorway of the kitchen at the same time that he sat at the table with me. When I yelped and buried my face in my hands the other Jasper disappeared.
“Oh my dear, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I was trembling. “It’s just a lot, Jasper,” I whispered, and he nodded.
“Let’s go next door, I want to hear about you.”
We sat together in the living room, surrounded by lamps which sprouted like luminous mushrooms from shelves and tables piled high with books, and I told him about Ruth.
“When I confronted her about ghosting me she just said ‘I don’t know you any more.’ So I asked her: is it because of what I told you? About needing to figure myself out? And she gave me this look, I – I can’t describe it... We’ve been friends for a decade. We’ve had rows before. But this was so different. It was like... disgust. She looked disgusted. By me.”
“I’m so sorry she let you down, Alma.”
“She never used to care at all if someone was non binary, or trans, or whatever.” I blew my nose. “What really gets me is I’m not even sure! I just wanted some space to work things out, but apparently I have to declare the pronouns that she’ll then refuse to use.”
Jasper waited as my thoughts swirled, and the deeper pain surfaced.
“I don’t know how to tell Mum,” I said, in a whisper, and he nodded again.
“She loves you, Alma.” He said, slowly. “And I hope that if you tell her your truth she has the courage to accept it and accept you exactly as you are.”
“But what about you?”
“We have a different relationship than you do. It’s been a long time. Maybe she’s changed. Maybe she’ll be able to change, now.” He shrugged.
I tilted my head towards at the photo on the table. “You’ve been thinking about her.”
He smiled, and picked up the photo. “Yes. I went to see her.”
“Really? She didn’t tell me.”
“No, ah,” he scratched his chin. “I saw her, but she didn’t see me. We didn’t speak. But I left her this photo, on the mantelpiece. And she saw it. And she cried. So I know that she feels it too, the part of me that’s still connected to her. Even after 30 years I feel her,” he said, and tapped his chest. “Here.”
We sipped our wine in silence for a moment, thinking about her.
“I just want to know who I am,” I sighed. “It’s so hard to explain. I’m a woman, and I’m not a woman, but I'm not not a woman. I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.”
I started to cry and he put his arm around my shoulders.
“You know,” he said gently. “Feynman once said ‘The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be'.’ Is there a way to go forward, making all the choices that feel right for you, without choosing one door to go through?” He handed me a tissue. “You’re a wave – you can go through all of them at once!”
“Easy for you to say,” I sniffed. “You’ve got superpowers now.”
“I’ve always had them, and so have you,” he said. “I understand that now. The trick, I think, is to embrace the paradox.” I looked at him, blankly. “Listen, when a particle is in a quantum state, we say it has ‘coherence’. It has the potential to act the way classical physics tells us it will act – like a tiny tennis ball! – and it has the potential to act as a wave. It can do both. It can do both, at the same time. But,” he continued, raising a finger. He was deep in teaching mode now. “This particle may have interactions which force it into the classical mode. The wave function collapses, and it becomes a tennis ball. We call this ‘decoherence’. You understand?”
“Not really.”
He shook his head and waved a hand, as if wafting away a skein of smoke. “It doesn’t matter. What I mean to say is that I know you are confused right now. You feel overwhelmed by different paths, different choices, different versions of yourself. You exist in a state of potential and infinite complexity. But that is natural, and beautiful. Nothing needs to be resolved, nothing needs to be fixed. That’s where the power is. Don’t let what Ruth said turn you into a tennis ball. You don’t need her permission to be who you are. Nor your mother’s, nor mine. Only your own.” He paused. “Yes?”
“Yes,” I said. The cold weight I had been carrying around inside me since I’d spoken to Ruth lifted a little.I realised suddenly how tired I was.
Jasper stood up, and began clearing away our glasses. “Ah, I’ve been lecturing you again. I’m sorry. I’ve made up the spare room. Get some rest, and let’s see how things look in the morning.”
I woke up late. Jasper was nowhere to be found, but a half empty cafetière of coffee waited on the kitchen counter beside a note saying “Back soon. Stay as long as you like.”
I took my mug outside and sat on the worn iron seat under the apple tree. I breathed in the scents of the garden, my mind resting in that happy place where you have simply given up trying to make sense of it all. For now, I felt content knowing that Jasper had a new world to explore. He was probably outlining a new book already. Or was he? I wondered whether he might keep this one discovery to himself. I’d been so wrapped up in my troubles I hadn’t asked what he was planning to do next. Whatever it was, I certainly needed to have to have a word with him about the ethics of sneaking around and surprising people.
It was thrilling to think that every leaf in the garden, every blade of grass, every photosynthesising cell was quietly doing the impossible. And so was I; we were all thrumming with impossibility.
It felt good.
I drained my coffee and set the mug down beside me, then pulled my phone out.
“Hi,” I typed, and the cursor blinked expectantly. “Sorry it’s been a while. I hope you’re doing ok.” Blink. Blink. “Can I...” Delete. “Want to get a coffee some time soon?” Blink. “x”. Sent.
I nudged the empty mug experimentally with one hand. My phone buzzed.
“That would be lovely. How about next weekend? Mumxxx”.
I breathed out softly, and put my phone away, then passed my hand through the mug just once before I picked it up and went back inside.
