Tales of Imagination and Mystery

THE GUIDE-2

Jenny took her camera out of her handbag. “Can we take pictures?” she asked gleefully.

The guide frowned and looked as if she didn’t know what the Jenny was talking about. “Take….. pictures?………No, the pictures must stay here. You can’t take them. They belong to the house. What on earth makes you think you can just take them?”

“No. No. Photographs. with our camera!” She held the camera towards the guide, and the guide looked at it in horror as if it was a dangerous weapon and she had never seen such a thing before. “I have never seen a camera like that!” she muttered, as if totally confused

But before the guide had time to say anything more Jenny stepped back and clicked a picture of the dining table with the guide standing in front of it. The guide was caught with a look of utter surprise on her face, and at the flash she jumped and let out a little scream. Then Jenny turned the camera to show her the picture on the screen. The guide stared at it in astonishment, looked up at Jenny’s face, then back at the screen. Then she frowned, looked at the floor, looked left and right, before a sly look come onto her face, she looked past them, and muttered to herself “Of course… the cameras are different now” then blinked, and was back in this world.

For some reason Bobby had been staring up at her with fear in his eyes since they had walked into the entrance hallway Suddenly on a whim the guide bent down and picked him up, and held him up high, much to the boy’s distaste, and then hugged him to her.

“Oh, what a lovely little boy. I would love to have a little boy like this. Oh, he reminds me so much of my own poor little children when they were that age. It’s such a lovely age. At this age they are little angels. It’s only when they grow older they become little devils…..”

However, despite her nice words Bobby recoiled as far as he could from her embrace, and was struggling to be put down. She appeared not to notice but hugged him to her for many seconds before she finally did let him down, to his evident great relief. He then retreated behind his mother and grabbed onto her dress, looking at the guide with fearful eyes.

“Are your children all grown up, then?” Jenny asked her.

The guide gave her a strange look, and for a second looked confused as if she didn’t know how to answer. Then she looked past them and seemed to be debating within herself how to respond. Then she seemed to come to a conclusion and said dreamily, as if half to them and half to herself, “Oh……..I don’t think they’ll ever grow up…

“But come, I want you to see Evelyn’s diary-room”

She led them out of the grand dining room into another hallway, and turned into a very small room with a small delicate lady’s desk under a window, that had a window box full of flowers outside it. The afternoon sun was shining directly onto the desk where a big diary the size of a ledger lay open.

“This was Evelyn’s little study” she said stopping at the desk “that she called her diary room, because it was where she would come to write her diary. She didn’t just write it at just at night but anytime, just as the mood took her.”

The diary was held open at one double page and fixed between glass in a frame so no-one could touch it. Jenny leaned down and tried to read the handwriting, but the ink was very faded, and the writing was erratic, uneven and troubled, and she could only make out a few words here and there.

But the guide stood over it, looked down on it lovingly, and started to read.

“Peace and quiet. George is away with the children. Oh how I love the silence. The peace. I could cut up big slices of the peace and store it away for when I have none…

“I will only admit to you, my diary, but the sound of my childrens’ voices grates me. I had a dream last night, and it had an atmosphere of absolute joy. And when I woke up, for one house the feeling was still with me. Then the old terrors came again. I had the notion if I opened all the doors and all the shutters and let the wind blow though the house it would blow all the terrors away, so I did. but it made no difference, only some mosquitoes and blowflies blew in! So I closed them all again. Then I rearranged “at this point the guide looked up from the letter and into the distance, but she kept talking as if she knew he words by heart” …all the furniture, the pieces I could lift anyway, so they all faced north west, back toward the old country, . . I have heard if all your furniture faces one way, you will one day go that way. Them the notion came upon me that one of the children had not gone with George, and was hiding in the house somewhere, watching me. So I looked in every room, behind every curtain, under every bed, up every chimney, down in the cellar, in every cupboard, but they were not there…”

“One good thing about them being away is I don’t have to watch for them slipping poison into my food. I know they are trying to poison me. When I am away I can eat with such freedom. Neither do I have to wear my gloves, as I wipe clean everything they might have touched….”

Chris looked at her with an expression of uncomprehension, but Jenny was so impressed with her knowing the diary by heart she seemed to disregard the meaning of the words.

“You must have read that so many times you know it word for word” she interrupted the guide.

The guide went silent, and gazed out the window dreamily. “Yes……I must just remember it..” she muttered.

Jenny looked as though she was enchanted, but Chris’s only comment was “So she was a total fruit loop, eh?”

At this the guide frowned and suddenly looked totally nonplussed, as if that wasn’t the comment she was expecting. She looked down, left and right, and seemed confused, as if searching for an answer.

Then she looked out the window again and said “She used to love this little diary-room. She used to look out at that beautiful garden, feel the sun on her, and dream of what it would be like to be single again…”

“Did she write that in her diary?” asked Jenny, still totally enthralled, and ignoring her husband’s remark.

The guide looked confused again, as if she didn’t understand the point of the question, and said after frowning for a few moments “No”.

“Then how can you know what she was daydreaming about?”.

Once again there was a look of confusion on the guide’s face.

“Because I know her so well…..everything about her……” she said eventually.

The she leaned over and read more,

“The beauty of having my husband and the children away is I don’t have to wear gloves. When they are here I wear them because I can’t abide touching anything they might have touched. When they are gone I scrub thoroughly all the bannisters, all the door handles, all the chairs, and anything else their filthy little hands might have touched, then I throw away the cloths I used, and I can take off my gloves and walk around bare-handed…”

Jenny then pointed to a pair of delicate white ladies’ gloves in a flat glass case beside the diary.

“Are those her gloves?” she enquired of the guide.

The guide surveyed them thoughtfully, then said “Evelyn couldn’t bear to touch anything her children might have touched, so she wore these white gloves constantly, except when her husband had taken the children away from home…….”.

“I think that’s called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” remarked Chris in a matter-of-fact tone, interrupting her.

“Oh, you’re into your big words again, are you?” protested Jenny. “She put her hand on the guide’s arm. “Don’t worry about him, dear, He never wanted to come in here in the first place.”

But the guide stopped reading to stare out the window again as if Chris’s words had set her thinking.

‘She must have had very small hands” Jenny then remarked, looking at the gloves.

The guide looked back from the window, and down at the pair of gloves, and then placed her hand over the glass above one of the gloves. It matched the size of the glove exactly.

“Yes” she said softly. “She did have very small hands…very small, delicate hands….how could those little hands have harmed anyone?”

Then she snapped out of her reverie and a playful glint came into her eye. “Step back into the hallway and then keep on walking” she said to them. They did so and walked on a few paces, and the guide said “I’m going to play a trick on you. Keep looking forward, don’t look back at me.”

They did as she told them, and suddenly they heard a scamper of feet, turned round, and she was gone. But then they heard footsteps behind the wall to the left of them, and then below them, and then above them and then to the other side of them, and then from where, well, they just couldn’t tell, and then suddenly a door burst open at the other end of the hall, and the guide burst out throwing her hands wide and beaming.

“Di-da!!” She bowed as if she was taking an encore on a stage. Then she resumed her old stance with her hands clasped in front of her and her feet pointing outwards.

“I warned you this was a real rabbit warren of a house! I just wanted to prove it!”

“A secret passage?” exclaimed Jenny. “I love secret passages. I wish we had one in our house!”

“No!. But there ways and means of getting around here that only I know! But come and let me show you the childrens’ room”

She led them further on down the hall, then up some stairs, and into a large room that had a cot, one simple single bed, a larger canopied bed and a low table with small, childrens’ chairs around it, a small blackboard, a small school desk, a bookcase, and all sorts of childrens’ toys of the period, including a magnificent carved rocking horse.

The guide started picking up toys and talking about them. “These were the building blocks. The boys loved these! They would build castles, and forts, and grand houses, and barns and mountains, and bridges and all sorts of things…they were very clever…”

Then the guide looked sideways slyly at Chris and Jenny. “And then Evelyn liked to come in and knock them all down! So they’d have to start all over again!”

She opened her mouth and laughed, and for the first time Chris and Jenny saw she had a mouthful of rotting and broken teeth.

Chris nodded and looked round the rest of the room. “Fruit loop!” he said again, but somehow Jenny was only more fascinated and remarked. “She sounds like a real character!”

Then the guide looked down at Bobby, still clinging to Jenny’s dress and looking at the guide with the same horror. “So it wasn’t any point building them in the first place, was it?”.

Then she walked over to the magnificent rocking horse, obviously hand-carved. It was so big the top of its head was just about at the same level as hers.

“The children loved this as well” she said. Then a cloud seemed to come over her face. “Their father, George Hardy, made it himself. He was a master with his hands“. She said it with a kind of resentment, as if it was hurtful to her to admit the possession by him of any sort of talent. She ran her hands over the horse, and indeed it was carved as nearly as possible to resemble hair and the bone structure of a real horse.

Then she brightened up and looked at Bobby.

“Would you like this horse, Bobby?” she said.

As if he was afraid not to answer her, Bobby said plaintively “Yes”

She bent slightly and leaned down towards him. Her voice suddenly took on a tone of vicious spite. “Well, you can’t have it! And Evelyn didn’t want her children to use it! Because it was made by her husband. And whenever she found them riding on it…!”

For a second a storm cloud of anger passed over her face, then she was back to her engaging smile.