High Spirits

I

IIt had all begun on New Year’s Eve, when Sal Monroe, the museum display officer, had noted that this year would mark a significant anniversary of ‘The Bomb’.

When Bethan thought about it now, after all that had passed, it was such a small and almost insignificant thing that had led to this moment in time.

“Did you know, Ms Andrews,” Sal had said, as the small party was gearing up for midnight, “that a bomb fell on this very museum seventy-five years ago this year…I mean, next year…in a few minutes?”

“Why yes, Ms Monroe, I did, and if you’re going to talk about work, I’m off.”

Sal had chuckled. “It's not work, my lamb, it’s…interesting…”

“It’s not interesting.”

“Did you know it killed the assistant curator?”

During the war, a V-1 flying bomb, known locally as buzz-bombs, had landed close to the museum. The northeast wing collapsed, and a gas pipe had buckled in the blast and exploded. Fortunately, the rest of the Hall had survived, but it had been a close call

“So, what was the old duffer doing in the museum at night, anyway?” asked Hannah when Bethan commented on this fact to her friend over the remnants of the buffet.

“You know what we’re like, can’t get enough of the place.” Bethan scoffed down a red onion and cheese tartlet and left Hannah to consider what was left on the table.

“Hannah!”

Hannah froze at the sound of Judith Whaley’s voice. Judith was one of the Trustees, a rather stern lady in her sixties who instilled terror in Hannah. The latter could never quite put the finger on what it was that scared her so much, except that in Judith’s presence Hannah became a nervous wreck.

“Did you know it’s seventy-five years since the bomb fell?” Hannah squeaked then immediately mentally kicked herself.

“I hadn’t made the connection, no,” replied Judith as she picked at the fruit used to garnish the cheese board.

Hannah managed a weak smile, dipped her knee, and legged it.

“Did you just curtsy to Judith?” asked Bethan, who wasn’t sure if it was the drink causing her to see things.

Hannah blushed but was saved by the chimes at midnight.

“10…8…9...8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1…HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

Somewhere, up in the attic rooms, the sound of the party filtered through.

“Happy New Year, my darling.”

“Happy New Year!”

“Urgh, if you two are going to get silly, I’m off!”

And so, that little bit of information did the rounds of the room until it finally hit the ears of Rodney Haverstock, the manager of the museum.

With the festivities over, and the museum bereft of the cheer of Christmas and the New Year, it was decided during the January board meeting that some sort of mark of respect should be made for the anniversary and so Rodney and the Trustees holed themselves up for a few hours to beat out a plan of action – get some money from one of the ‘funding streams’, do up the east wing and put on an exhibition. How simple, how straightforward, how totally not going to happen.

“Argh…” The noise was strangled and expressed the utter dismay felt by Bethan once she was in the safe confines of her office. “They are clueless! Bloody stupid, out of touch…arggg...”

Four months later and Bethan had finally been ‘brought up to speed’ about what the Board had decided over port and blue at Rodney’s house back in January, she knew that trouble was coming her way faster than s**t leaving a shovel.

“Well,” said Sal as she resized the image of an Iron Age beaker on her Mac. “You can’t fault their optimism.”

Bethan ripped out her chair from under her pristine desk and sat down with a heavy thump: Optimism? They seriously think they can write up a bid and get it approved in what…a month?”

“So, what have they been doing since January?”

Bethan glowered. “Well, they’ve had to get their heads out of their arses, have several meetings, form groups and subgroups, go through their own weight in biscuits, and that’s all before they’ve written up the bid! It’s April now; next month is the anniversary. It’s not going to happen.”

Sal chuckled and shook her head in an indulgent way. “You have no respect, Bethan Andrews. No respect at all.”

Bethan lamely picked up a report that had been placed on her desk sometime between her arriving that morning and escaping the clutches of Rodney five minutes ago. She read the title but didn’t digest it, and with a disinterested flick, she perused the pages then tossed it aside. She scanned the cramped attic office she shared with Sal. It was cluttered up with old grey metal filing cabinets containing catalogue cards, dusty bookshelves, rolled up maps and all sorts of bits and pieces that she’d never got around to investigating.

It drove Bethan mad.

It seemed her days were spent trying to find stuff. The stores were a mystery; things had a habit of moving around yet nobody would admit responsibility, and the database was useless. She sighed once more and felt like hitting her head on the desk. She’d been in the post for five years, and still she was no further forward than when she’d arrived.

‘How,’ she thought, ‘did I end up here?’

How indeed?

Life for Bethan had always been pretty sweet. She’d come from a respectable family who had always followed the middle ground. Her father had his own business, and the family lived in a detached house constructed out of Cotswold stone, squat, and rambling, on the edge of a picturesque village, which formed part of the estate of Lassiter Hall, and the family’s firm was run from a converted chapel at the heart of that community.

Bethan had grown up running in and out of the ancestral home of the Farrington’s. Their only son, Tom, was as much a feature of the Andrews house as Bethan was of his.

Bethan soon became aware of an unspoken familial expectation that she and Tom would marry.

Bethan adored village life; the comings and goings of the neighbours, the almost compulsory get-togethers at events, often based around the Church calendar such as Mothering Sunday, Easter, Harvest Festival, the Midnight Mass, and morning worship on Christmas Day.

Then there was the annual village fete held on the green, with bunting fluttering from canvas tents, the baking stall, the refreshment tent with urns of tea and coffee and plates of scones and cake, the coconut shy, the donkey rides; it was so, so very English.

When the time came to move onto higher education, Bethan had made her first-choice university on her first-choice course. She approached life at uni as with everything else - enthusiastically.

Tom had followed her lead and registered on a business course. Unlike her, he was not academically minded and spent most of his time at university getting pissed, being late for lectures and being called in for progress meetings.

Bethan finished her undergrad course with a first and, barring a bit of a hiccup in her personal life, had moved onto a post-graduate course in museum studies gaining a distinction. From there she’d landed a job at a moderately-sized London museum as an assistant curator with a view to starting a PhD. That part, at least, had not yet happened.

It had never occurred to her that others had to work hard to get even half of what she had. She was also aware of the comments made behind her back by other staff members who knew that the competition for their level of jobs was high and had, wrongly, assumed that she’d got her job through the ‘old boys network’.

She ignored them, but she was certainly aware that others, especially new acquaintances, viewed her and her job with an envious eye; their judgement based on various movies and TV shows that made it all seem romantic and, somehow, glamorous.

‘Ooh, I’d love to work in a museum.’ They’d gasp, with a distinctly misty-eyed look.

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ she wanted to say. ‘The pay’s crap, the job security is rubbish, there’s never enough funding, and you spend your days appeasing everyone instead of doing the work you aren’t paid enough for.’

She never said it, of course, because in her heart she loved her job and would put up with almost anything to stay in the sector. So, she’d just smile and nod and make the right noises whilst they indulged in their fantasy of spending days amongst priceless treasure with some kind of Indiana Jones/National Treasure mash up racing through their minds.

Sadly, the pressure on the money pot began to strike down museums left, right and centre, like a cultural Angel of Death.

When it hit her museum, and she found herself out of a job she initially felt the pull of home and the security of going to work at her father’s firm.

He’d been keen to get one of his girls interested, after all, what would happen when he retired? He didn’t like the idea of his life’s work ending with him. The idea soon faded in Bethan’s mind.

After a brief spell at home and much soul-searching, she applied for a job and ended up in Plimpton Market and a backwater museum that had survived. Just.

“We know how this is going to play out, don’t we?” Bethan said at last.

“We do?” Sal sounded absent-minded, and Bethan glanced over. Sal was patting down the paper on her desk and lifting documents.

“Of course. They will put in a half-arsed bid, get rejected and then come to me and say, “do it anyway.”

“So, what’s your point?” Sal slumped back in her chair, clearly defeated. Whatever it was she was trying to locate was lost in the mess of her own making. She viewed Bethan over the top of her computer screen.

“The point is, why didn’t they just cut to the chase and let me crack on?”

Sal hauled her frame out of her chair and walked casually over to the kettle. En-route she lifted Foamex boards, plastic mounting blocks and rifled through boxes containing various tools and paraphernalia associated with her work. She’d clearly lost something of great import.

Sal got down their mugs and filled them with water. “So, why didn’t you, if you knew this, start putting together everything you needed to be one step ahead of them.”

“I just assumed they’d forgotten about it.” Bethan sighed. “I should have known they were holding it all back.”

Sal nodded. It was typical of the management style of the museum and one that annoyed her greatly. They should see how bloody lucky there were to have such a person as Bethan on their team. Other museums would give their right arm for her.

“Look, tell me to butt out if you want, but why don’t you go ahead with the exhibition with what you’ve got. Why do we need the money? I can make the display panels, and I bet you a pound to a penny we have loads of things in store that can be cobbled together with a bit of imagination.”

Bethan was sceptical, but ideas were brewing.

Sal brought over the drinks, and they sat down at Bethan’s table.

“So, what do we know?” she asked.

“Well, we know that Alec, the assistant curator, was in the building and he died.”

“Fab, so, we lost one of our own. How about an exhibition about him?”

Bethan frowned. “Okay, but how does that fit in with the bomb?”

“It killed him,” Sal replied brightly, perhaps too brightly for such a macabre matter.

“I don’t see it.”

Sal sipped her tea and leaned back. “Okay, how about the impact on the town, so you could have one or two cases on Alec and then how the bomb changed the face of the town, which it did because we’ve now got those hideous houses.

Bethan brightened up. “You’re brilliant,” she said, and with a determined push back of her chair, she stood up, kissed Sal on the cheek and, in a quick movement, extracted the pencil Sal had tucked into her wildly swept up hair and presented it to her.

“Think you might be looking for this?” With that, she quickly walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Sal paused from her task, teabag in mid strain.

“To the paper archive,” replied Bethan. “See what I can find out about old Alec Edwards.”

Bethan left the office, and the door slammed closed behind her.

“It always was about you, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, do give it a rest, old girl.”

“Only when they exorcise me…”

“I think it’s brilliant!”

“You think everything is brilliant.”

“Well, if you’re going to be mean about it!”

Somewhere in the museum a light bulb blew, in a rather spectacular manner, and landed with a heavy crash onto a case full of medieval tiles.

“Bulb’s blown again,” yelled Seth, the conservation officer, to anyone within earshot. He’d been working on the case just next door and had jumped about half a foot when the crash happened. “Reckon Gloria is up to her tricks again.”

“If he calls me Gloria one more time I swear I shall possess him.”

***

“So, to sum up,” Bethan said slowly as she studied the reporter from the local daily rag leisurely take down her every word.

He clearly styled himself on some ace reporter from The Globe or The Daily Planet or whatever they were called in the comics and graphic novels about gangsters and prohibition. He wore a sharp suit, but he had pulled his tie loose. His hair was slicked back with gel, and he had those horrid pointy-toed shoes on. Bethan loathed pointy-toed shoes. She thought they made men look like wide-boys or, even worse, estate agents.

“We’re trying to find out as much information as we possibly can about Alec Edwards’ personal life. Memorabilia, diaries, photos, letters, anything anyone may have that can give us an insight into his life outside this museum.”

‘He’s wearing a trilby. He’s actually wearing a trilby,’ thought Bethan as she stared at the offending item of headwear that perched cockily on the back of his greasy hair.

“And you don’t have any of these?” said the reporter as he lazily worked a piece of gum around his mouth and without looking up from his dog-eared notebook.

Bethan stared at him and blinked hard. She tried to work out if he was doing it for effect or if he was stupid. She drew a deep breath.

“No, as I said, Mr Edwards was our assistant curator. He was responsible for most of the objects we have in our collection.”

“Right, right, and what, he had ‘em in his house or something?” The reporter sniffed as he cast an uninterested glance around as he nodded and then looked up at her.

She did, in fairness, have some killer heels on but, frankly, she would have towered over him in flats. He stood with his legs wide apart as if this would keep his thin frame from blowing away in a stiff breeze.

“No,” Bethan dragged the word out in the hope that he would pick up the inference that she was pissed off at him by her tone. “He was part of the local excavation group and a keen collector himself. What he located he donated to the collection here.”

“Right, right.” There was a pause and then: “This place haunted?” He jabbed at the air with his stubby pencil.

“Absolutely not!” Bethan tried hard to keep the outrage out of her voice, but it seeped in somehow. She also felt herself bristle and extend her height by quite a bit. She must look like Godzilla to him.

He didn’t seem fazed and continued: “It’s just that this bird down at the paper, right, reckons, like, there’s some kind of ghost thing going on.”

“Well, she’s wrong,” retorted Bethan with a clipped tone. She wanted this horrible little man gone. “There are no ghosts here!”

“D’you hear that, Pol?”

“I’ll show them!”

And with that, a large, heavy sign which explained opening times and sundry information fell backwards.

The reporter stared, his jaw slack, the gum hanging precariously on the end of his tongue. Bethan held out her hand convinced his gum was going to hit the floor.

“The wind,” she snapped and secretly thanked the stars that he managed to keep the gum in his mouth. Otherwise, it may have touched her hand.

“I see,” the reporter said as he glanced about for the cause of this mysterious ‘wind’ that had appeared inside the entrance foyer, and with a jaunty flick of his wrist, he closed his notebook and smiled, exposing a gold tooth. “Think I can make tomorrow’s copy for evening addition.”

“I’m very grateful,” Bethan said, though she didn’t feel it. The man was a twit. She escorted him to the door and waved him off.

“So, how did that go?” As if Sal needed to ask; she knew that Bethan hated talking to the press.

“We’ll see.” Bethan flicked through the pile of yellow ‘whilst you were out’ notes to see who was worth calling back. “He was a chump. I doubt it will make any sense. And whilst we’re at it, can we get some new signage? That old wooden stand fell again today. It’s dangerous.”

“I’ll see what the budget says.” Sal smiled.

The office door opened and suddenly the room was filled with a deep, baritone voice: “Bethan, my beautiful Bethan.”

Bethan smiled. “Evening Billy. How're tricks?”

“Aw, you know, I’ve got to keep moving else I’ll stop and never start again.”

Billy was the night security guard and had worked the night shift for as long as anyone could remember. He was a source of knowledge for the museum staff, recalling every exhibition staged, where excavations had happened, and who was who in days gone by.

In the day and age of sophisticated alarm systems and almost instant police response, Billy was a leftover from the old days of museums.

The thought of turning him out to grass would be like taking the museum’s most prized possession and putting it up on eBay.

Billy had been born in Jamaica, but when he was around two years old, his parents brought him to England so that his father could find work.

Raised in the East End of London, he had come to Plimpton Market quite by accident when he got lost en-route to somewhere else. He fell in love with the museum and persuaded the Trustees to hire him as a night security guard.

Quite how he’d swayed it remained a mystery, but he did, and from that day in the late 70’s he’d been turning up every evening. No one could recall him taking a day off or being sick. He was just Billy. He was, it seemed, the one constant in the whole place, and he was universally admired and loved.

“So, my lovely ladies, how has your day been?” Billy crossed the office, dropped a kiss on to Sal’s head and made himself his ‘arrival coffee’ as he called it and then folded his arms and took them both in with his steady gaze.

“Billy,” said Bethan slowly. “Do you…you know, I mean have you…Is this place haunted?”

Billy threw back his head and rocked with laughter. “Oh, my dearest child, why of course it is haunted. It is haunted by the spirits of the past and by all things that have gone before.”

He poured the boiling water into his cup and stirred it as he chuckled.

“I’m serious, Billy,” she said, breaking into a smile; it was hard not to, his chuckle was infectious. “We had a reporter in; that smarmy chap, you know the one. He asked and then when I said no, that flaming sign fell over again.”

“Bethan, there is nothing for you to be afraid of in this place. I have worked here nearly all my life, and my hair turned white because of age not because of being scared.” He picked up his cup and smiled again. “Now, it is time for you to go home, and for you to go home, and for me to do my job.”

With that, he gave a slight nod of his head and left Bethan and Sal to tidy up their work and leave.

***

Through the quiet of the evening, Billy did his rounds, checked that all the doors and windows were secure, that nothing was inside that shouldn’t be, and read his paper. The occasional noise reached his ears – a tap, a knock, a thump, and he shook his head and smiled to himself. Some nights the noises were louder and more frequent, and he thought that maybe there was another spat going on.

On his first few nights, he’d been alarmed by the noises, but his pride in doing a good job overcame any fear he held. At first, he didn’t know how many spirits resided in the Hall and assumed, like so many, that such a place must hold a veritable supply of them from all ages.

As the months went on, he became aware of the smell of perfume, a light floral scent that wafted through the Hall as if a young lady had just walked that way. Sometimes he felt certain that if he turned the corner, he would see her there. He never did… well, not really.

Occasionally, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, a shape of a man standing by one of the cases as if looking at it intently.

Most often though, it was the laughter of a child that reached his ears, and he would smile and turn the page of his newspaper safe in the knowledge that ‘they’ were around.

As the years passed by, Billy and the occupants of the Hall developed an easy tolerance for each other. He replaced the items that had been moved about, cleared up any mess and in the morning, he’d call out his goodbyes and thank them for their company, then walk the short distance to his house in the lane behind the museum. They didn’t bother with him, and he never went looking for them.