Aria Remains
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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‘Edward, are you still there?’

Connie spoke in little more than a whisper, leaning from inside the spare bedroom they had always planned would eventually be a nursery. She looked down the dark hallway, trying to distinguish his shape amidst the gloom.

‘Edward?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Edward replied, sounding annoyed. ‘Honestly, I have no idea why you feel the need to whisper, it’s only the two of us here.’

‘But is it?’ Connie asked. ‘That’s the point - we’re supposed to be listening for her.’

‘I have no idea why you think this so-called ghost is a woman.’

‘It’s because I…’

‘Oh, yes, smelled her perfume, that’s right. How could I forget?’

It was clear that Edward couldn’t be less interested, less inclined to help his wife in her search for the spirit she had become convinced was sharing their home. Throughout the weeks since they had been interrupted while listening to their radio drama the idea had taken hold of Connie like an illness, had become something of a passion, and she had determined to replace her, to try to help her move on from what she assumed was her earthly snare. She couldn’t deny that it caused her some trepidation, that the idea of being haunted chilled her, and so had brought the subject up as often as possible in the hope of securing Edward’s help. Finally, realising he would hear no end to it until he agreed, they had decided that they would spend the Sunday night of the Bank Holiday weekend searching for any sign of her presence.

‘So, what do you want?’

‘I was just making sure you were nearby,’ Connie said, still slightly regretful that she had felt the need to ask for his help, his fortification. It was not, however, this search for the spectre, something she would have found the nerve to achieve alone. He had joined her in the doorway and she was stroking his arm. ‘I am grateful for your help, and you know that I’ll pay you back, make it worth your while.’

She gave him a coy, provocative smile which, as was usual for Edward, he misinterpreted completely.

‘You’ll make the spotted dick tomorrow?’

Connie sighed.

‘Yes, the spotted dick. Now, did you bring up the steps?’

Edward nodded, smiling at the thought of his favourite desert, then gestured with his head.

‘Just over there.’

‘Then let’s get up to the attic. I dread to think what we’ll replace up there, it’s been so long. I expect it’s in a bit of a state.’

Edward set the steps, removed the hatch and went up, pausing as his head reached the level of the floor above.

‘It’s rather dark,’ he reported. ‘Have you got a good hold of the steps?’

Connie, who had been distracted by what she thought was a shadow further along the landing, rushed back noiselessly and took hold of them, telling him that yes, of course she had. He ascended to the top, then disappeared from view.

‘Well?’ Connie asked after a few moments.

‘Damn and blast,’ Edward said.

‘What is it? Are you all right?’

‘Banged my head on a blasted beam. Did you replace the hand torch?’

‘Oh, yes, sorry, I did. Hold on just a minute.’

Connie moved quickly along the landing and into the spare room, where she had earlier found the torch behind dusty boxes that contained dozens of sheets of an unfinished manuscript she had begun writing while still a school, a story that had come to her in a dream about a man who wanted to establish his own town but was denied by the forces of nature that would not allow any kind of break from the past because there could be no evasion from tradition. She returned, held the small hand torch up to the hatch and waited for Edward’s hand to reach down and take it. Neither spoke for a time, Connie listening to Edward’s footsteps on the creaking floor above, looking up and down the hallway in nervous anticipation. Eventually she asked if he had found anything.

‘Yes, actually,’ he replied, passing a medium-sized, stained and slightly misshapen cardboard box through the hatch. ‘No sign of any spooks, but there’s this old box I didn’t recognise. Any idea what it is?’

Connie took the box from him, tried to see what might be inside and then, not recognising it and being unable to discern anything other than it seemed to contain papers of some kind, she decided it would be worth putting to one side, to investigate in the morning.

‘No,’ Edward said a little while later, ‘no, definitely nothing ghostly up here. I’m coming down now.’

’Shall I come up and have a look?’ Connie asked the hatch.

‘No need, it’s just spiders, dust and those old iron garden chairs up here.’

Disappointed but not surprised at this refusal, Connie took hold of the steps as Edward’s feet appeared and then, once he was halfway down them, she asked him to extinguish the torch before going back down the hallway. The rest of the night passed without incident and, unsatisfied but tired, Connie agreed that they should turn in as the grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway struck two.

Unable to sleep as well as she had hoped, she was already awake and sitting in the drawing room, the cardboard box on her lap, by the time the clock reported the sixth hour of the new day. She brushed and blew the dust from the top, carefully opened the age-softened flaps and looked inside, replaceing a sizeable stack of envelopes and letters, receipts, a scrapbook, a pair of partly-filled stamp albums and some postcards. She spread them across the carpet, sank to her knees and looked through them, not recognising any of the names on the correspondence but surprised at the dates on the receipts. Most were from the 1930s, although one or two were even older. Largely handwritten, they spoke of the sale of potatoes and meat, petrol and dog food. Did that mean, she wondered, that the box had been here since then? She and Edward had married four years earlier and had only been renting the house for two. She tried to remember who had lived here previously. She knew it had been an elderly woman, but was uncertain whether she had moved away or had been called to a better place, carried in the arms of angels.

Sensing the grubby feel of the old papers she wiped her hands across her apron, deciding she would ask Edward when he awoke. Meanwhile she decided to investigate further, gathering the selection of letters and shuffling them into a pile. Most were written in a shaky, scrawling hand she could barely understand, picking out the occasional word or phrase but largely having no real idea what they were about. Daphne may or may not have hurt her back, Peter or Petra could have been looking forward to seeing Jenny or James at Christmas, and Robert - maybe Rupert - had some terrific news, although it was unclear what, exactly, that news was. She was, however, able to decipher the dates, replaceing it hard to believe that the great majority of them were from the middle of the previous century. This can’t, she told herself, all be the paperwork of just one person; must have been handed-down, passed through the generations.

She turned to the photographs. Black and white, slightly blurred, stained with the same aged brown tint as the other items, they appeared to feature a diverse group of people in a variety of places. Some showed a young couple at the seaside or in a cafe, while others caught moments of older people drinking tea or looking at landscapes. As she looked more closely, however, she did see something unusual. In every single image, most often in the background, sometimes half-obscured, she could just make out the figure of the same elderly woman. Usually alone, occasionally with a small dog, in all of them she was either too far away or the photo was too blurry for Connie to be able to see any details, to make out any of her features.

She looked through them all again, trying to spot anything that might reveal when they were taken, hints given by the clothes people were wearing or perhaps signs showing price lists in the cafe or at the beach. She brought them closer to her face, squinted at them, even made use of Edward’s reading glasses but nothing she saw spoke of any particular era. All she could feel confident about was that none seemed to be in any way contemporary. Finally, she pushed the postcards into a small pile and picked them up.

The handwriting looked the same as that of the letters, and again Connie could barely decipher anything, other than dates ranging from the mid 1800s to the 1930s. It was only when she reached the final card in her pile that she saw something different.

In a clear, neat cursive were the words,

’Meet me at the usual place, Tuesday 21st at 7pm.’

There were no names and no other information. The front of the card was plain without even an address, yet it had been stamped and postmarked, although the ink was too blurred to interpret. She found the same on the other postcards, then remembered the envelopes that had also been in the cardboard box. Examining them she found they, too, had no address, all having clearly been through the postal system and all bearing smeared, unreadable postmarks.

How could this be? she wondered. How would it be possible for letters and cards to be delivered when they bore no address? She considered that, perhaps, there had only been one or two houses close to the one to which these had all been consigned, that the postman knew who they were meant for, but even then, they spanned such a period of time, surely they couldn’t all have been for the same person. For the same house.

She looked again at the mysterious card, wondering about the details, the circumstance of it. Who was it from? Where was ‘the usual place’? Did they actually meet? Maybe it had been an ongoing tryst, a passionate affair. Young lovers, denied their ardour by disapproving parents, doing all they could to be together. On the other hand, maybe they were spies, maybe intelligence officers, on the hunt for Nazi interlopers, meeting in secret, preparing their trap. She shook her head; no, the card seemed far too old to have only been written sometime during the last ten or fifteen years.

Then, an exciting, intriguing idea struck her. What if everything here, now sorted into piles on the carpet, was related to the spirit that had been haunting the house? That would explain - or would, at least, allow her to not require a specific reason for - the box being found in her attic, with neither she nor Edward having any clue as to its provenance. Yes, she thought, that must be it. It must all be to do with the woman who had recently made manifest her presence to them. She might have been living here for years, long before they arrived, desperate for the box to be opened so she could see all of this again. She might have been trying to get their attention for all this time, only now, frustrated, realising the subtleties she had employed had gone unnoticed, finally deciding she needed to be more blatant.

That was why she pushed over the table.

That was why Connie had been hearing her knocking into things, trying to rearrange furniture.

‘What on earth are you up to?’

Edward’s voice, the deep, rich baritone she had once found so beguiling, startled her to such a degree she almost fell forward onto the carpet.

‘Edward,’ she said breathlessly, balancing herself on her knees once more and resting a hand on her chest. ‘You scared the life out of me.’

She turned to look at him. He didn’t speak, instead gesturing towards the papers and photographs on the floor with his pipe. He looked rather vexed, as though it was unacceptable for Connie to have modified their morning routine. His expression almost seemed to say, ‘Where the devil is my coffee? Why can’t I smell my eggs?’

‘Oh, these are all the things that were in the box we found in the attic.’

’The box I found,’ Edward corrected her, irritatingly. ‘Well, put all that nonsense away now. Time’s rattling on and there are things I want to be getting on with today.’

‘But Edward, just take a look at these.’

Grudgingly, with a pointed sigh and a drooping of his shoulders, he stepped into the room, accepting the letters and photographs Connie handed to him. Shuffling quickly through them, looking disinterested, he glanced at a few before holding them out, wanting her to take them back.

‘Look at them,’ Connie urged him, making no movement to accept them. ‘Look properly. There are no addresses, so how could they have been delivered? And the pictures - did you see the old woman in them? Isn’t that the same woman in every one?’

Edward looked at them again, bringing several of the photos nearer to his face for a better look.

‘Hmmm,’ he said.

’See?’ Connie asked, feeling vindicated.

‘There is something…’ He briefly paused, walking into the room and taking his seat, still examining the photos. ’There is something really rather odd about them, isn’t there? I mean, some of these pictures are obviously from the last century. Look at that chap’s hat and trousers. And that moustache. Some, on the other hand, look like they’re from no more than twenty years ago, yet I think you might be right. I think that is the very same woman in every single one.’

‘How could that be?’ Connie asked, thrilled at his sudden interest. ‘How can she have been in all those pictures, looking just the same, over a period of fifty years?’

‘Do you know,’ Edward said, ‘I could almost swear to the fact that it’s…no, it can’t be, it just…but it does look so very much liker her.’

‘Like who? Who?’ Connie gushed, moving closer to him, resting a hand on his knee.

‘I can’t be sure, and these pictures are rather blurred, but if I were asked to identify her, I would have to say that I do believe it’s old Mrs Tage.’

Connie relaxed back onto her knees, frowning.

‘Who’s Mrs Tage?’

‘Don’t you remember?’ Edward asked, sucking his empty pipe. ‘The lady who lived here before we took the place on? Mrs Tage. Poor old thing. She had been replaceing it more and more troublesome to maintain the upkeep of the house, and so, apparently, her daughter arranged for her to go and live with her. I think I only met her the once. Or, rather, I saw her sitting in an uncomfortable-looking chair as I stood at the front door one day. She looked up at me as though…’ He paused, remembering the scene. ‘As though she were already gone, as though already dead.’

‘I don’t think I ever met her,’ Connie said, feeling deflated that all her ideas, all her hopes of further proof that a spirit was trying to contact her now appeared dashed.

‘Oh, no, of course you didn’t,’ Edward nodded, still looking at the photographs. ‘You didn’t come to see the place until after she had gone, did you? You were away, you went to…’

‘I went to see my sister,’ Connie reminded him shortly. At the time she had been annoyed that Edward had agreed to rent the house before she had even seen it but there was nothing else she could do, since her sister was experiencing what she later described to Edward as ‘women’s troubles’ and which, despite his assertion that he had heard plenty enough about that, thank you, and required no further explanation, had in fact seen the young woman deprived of any possibility of childbirth and was a dreadful time in which Connie had been quite desperate for her husband’s help and support. As was most often the case, however, his reinforcement of her spirits and commiseration for her concerns was sadly lacking.

‘Yes, of course, that’s it’, Edward was saying, seemingly more ignorant of, and disinterested in, almost everything Connie had to say about virtually anything as each day surrendered to the next, apart from what would be served to him upon his nightly return from his job at the bank. ‘Anyway, I feel almost certain it’s Mrs Tage we have here, and I suppose that would explain why the box is still here. This will all be her bits and pieces, I should wager.’

‘But we’ve never seen it before,’ Connie said.

‘No, well, easily missed, I imagine. We probably have seen it a dozen times without noticing it.’

‘And how could she be in all of the pictures, over all those years?’

‘Ah, well, you have me there. That is rather a head-scratcher. Must be some explanation, I shouldn’t wonder.’

They were disturbed by the grandfather clock, chiming eight.

‘Goodness,’ Connie exclaimed, jumping to her feet and straightening her apron. ‘Eight o’clock? Breakfast!’

She disappeared into the kitchen leaving Edward where he sat, rubbing the end of his pipe against his temple, still studying the photographs. He couldn’t be sure but, as he looked at one particular image with the elderly woman in the background, walking her dog beside the edge of a cliff, she seemed to move very slightly. Just a twitch, a tiny spasm to her arm, but movement nonetheless. Disturbed, Edward tossed the photo to the floor, insisting to himself that he must simply be seeing things, ignoring the chill that ran along his spine.

‘What a lot of nonsense,’ he said under his breath, hurrying towards the kitchen where he would shock Connie by offering to help with the breakfast, then staying by her side for the rest of the day. Connie, with no idea why he should suddenly have become so attentive, unaware of the frigid finger of fear that had traced piercing patterns along and across each bone in his vertebrae and the growing feelings of disconcertion that seized his heart and mind, decided to appreciate his interest rather than sift through his motivations. She hoped they would, however, become a great deal more obvious by the time they were preparing for bed, when she appeared to him, undressed, asking whether he would have her wear the nightdress she had employed during their honeymoon or if, instead, she should simply drop it to the floor. She had earlier, as promised, served him the spotted dick. Now it was his turn to provide her with her own menu of sustenance.

It was at three o’clock the following morning that the fire engines came. Flames tore from the windows of the small terraced house, thrusting their abominable fingers up to the gutters, while a thick line of black smoke billowed from the chimney, filling the sky, obscuring the stars. Hours later, the fire doused, the rooms blackened and charred, a young and thoroughly unprepared policeman discovered two bodies in what had been an upstairs bedroom.

‘I reckon it was the gentleman’s pipe that started it,’ he later told his Sergeant, his hands still trembling with the shock of the incident, spilling the mug of hot tea one of the neighbours had brought him.

The stench of the fire hung over the street for the next two days; the sadness the residents felt lingered a great deal longer. They had been a lovely couple, everyone said. Very quiet, very respectable. Would do anything for anyone. No official explanation for the cause of the fire was ever given, no evidence of the pipe being the point of origin ever found, and everyone thought it extremely odd that the only thing to have survived the blaze was a slightly misshapen, medium-sized cardboard box. It was filled with letters and cards, a stamp album and several photographs, discovered untarnished amongst the devastation in the drawing room.

The box was held at the police station for several weeks and, despite doing all they could to replace out who it might belong to, no one ever came to claim it from them.

It disappeared a few months later, the assumption being that it had been moved to another room or left in another office, and then mistakenly thrown away with the rubbish.