Tales of Imagination and Mystery

THE GUIDE-3

She continued to walk around the room, picking up and talking about various weird and wonderful toys and games that the children had, and in every case there was some complicated story why if their mother happened to be around they never really got the proper use out of them due to a whim of Evelyn’s.

Then she led them out and back into the corridor and into the next room. “This is the master bedroom” she announced.

It was a large room, with a magnificent four-poster double bed with sumptuous curtains that could be drawn all around it. The extravagant nature of the furnishings indicated that it was intended there should be no other bedroom in the house that could equal it. But for some reason the guide, as she walked up to the bed and stood by it, wore a rather a dubious expression. The bed was so high it was above her waist.

“That wouldn’t be any good for someone your size” commented Jenny. You’d be hard put to climb into it!”

In answer, the guide raised her finger as if to make a point, and pulled over a small chest that was next to the bed. She pulled out what looked like a drawer, but was revealed to be a small set of steps that folded down. She pulled it up to the bed, and promptly walked up it and jumped onto the bed, where she lay flat on her back with her arms outstretched and her feet apart.

“This was where Evelyn and George slept. Though Evelyn used to prefer to go up and lie on the roof in the summer under the stars, or even go out and lie in the garden and talk to the trees. …When he was away she would le for hours like this, glorying in the feeling of being alone….”

She seemed to go into a reverie, then she suddenly sat up, with a sly grin on her face, and pulled all the curtains round her. They waited, and there was just silence.

“What’s she doing?” Jenny whispered to Chris.

“Perhaps she’s undressing” suggested Chris facetiously, curling his lip as if that wasn’t something he relished the idea of seeing.

Then suddenly the French windows that led to a balcony opened and the guide stepped from there into the room. Jenny‘s jaw dropped. “How on earth did you get out there?”

But the guide simply said as if there nothing untoward “And sometimes instead of going down into the garden Evelyn would go out and lie on the balcony on hot nights under the stars, especially if George had been in the liquors.

“But come with me so I can show you the grand ballroom.”

They followed her out, Jenny gaping, Chris frowning, and went down another flight of stairs into another hallway and came into a room that was larger than any of the ones they had been in and even more ornate. There were magnificent chandeliers hanging from the ceiling A heavy, gilt picture rail ran all the way around. The ceiling was domed with skylights round the edge of the dome. The wallpaper was sumptuous. There were heavily carved and ornate chairs around the perimeter of the room. There was a magnificent mirror about ten feet long and six feet high hanging from one wall in a massive gilt frame. Opposite was a peculiar kind of small stage projecting from the wall about halfway up.

“This was the grand ballroom, where dances and entertainment were staged” explained the guide, standing right in the middle of the floor for effect. “Take a look at this wonderful mirror”

She indicated an enormous mirror with a heavy, gilt frame hanging off the wall.

“It took four men to lift into place. Imagine how wonderfully the images of the dancers as they came and went in all their finery reflected in the mirror. And look at the figures carved all way round the frame. They tell a story”. Chris and Jenny stood in front of it following the carving round with their eyes, trying to decipher what the story was.. Suddenly the guide’s voice seemed to come from somewhere behind but above them.

They turned and she was standing in the peculiar “stage” that jutted out from the wall opposite the mirror, like the box at a theatre. They hadn’t heard her move, and she seemed to have got up there in a remarkably short space of time.

“And this is where the orchestra played. They would have a trio of two stringed instruments, usually a cello and a violin, and a flute, and the music would waft over the heads of the dancers, and reverberate round the dome of this magnificent room.”

“How on earth did you get up there so quickly?” asked Jenny.

The guide pointed to the doorway, then moved her arm in a circle to indicate there was a way up into the “stage” if you went out that door and turned left.

“The musicians didn’t drag their instruments through the ballroom” she explained. “They had their own entrance”.

“But how did you get up there in such a short apace of time?” insisted Jenny. “And we didn’t even hear you.”

The guide only beamed at her with a look that seemed to challenge her to find her own explanation.

“I am quick! And I can be very silent!”

“You weren’t silent when you were showing off that secret passage.”

The guide raised her eyebrows and gave Jenny another peculiar smile as if to say again “I challenge you then to work out why that is!”

“Evelyn had a favourite song she liked the orchestra to play, Greensleeves” she went on. “But her husband, George Hardy, insisted they couldn’t play that all evening just to please her, so when her husband and children were away, she used to pay the orchestra to come back, sit up here, and play Greensleeves over and over for hours on end, while she just sat in the middle of the room on one of those chairs listening to it!

“Unfortunately she was rather overweight and short and quite clumsy, so she wasn’t built for dancing, but she loved to listen to that song. Sometimes she would just sing along with it while they played, and sometimes she would just listen, moving her foot up and down in time to the music.”

“For hours on end…the same tune…?” repeated Chris, as if he wanted to confirm he had heard right.

“Yes. She loved that tune!” explained the guide.

Chris turned away to look at the rest of the room again and remarked again, with an air of great finality “A total fruit loop!”.

“How do you know that about Greensleeves?” asked Jenny. “Did she put in her diary?”

The guide looked into the distance with the same wistful look she exhibited when she seemed to be debating how to answer a question.

“No, she never wrote that in her diary” she murmured dreamily.

“Did someone write her biography?”

This made the guide give a little laugh.

“No”.

“Well how do you know it?”

The guide suddenly looked confused again, and seemed to be debating within herself how to answer, until she said

“I know it, because … I know it…That’s all”

She ran her hand round the inside of her collar again, then rubbed her left wrist with her right hand, and her right wrist with her left hand, then suddenly snapped back out of it, and exclaimed

“I must show you the cellar! Go out through that door” she pointed to the end of the ballroom “opposite to where you came in!”.

They walked out, and into another hallway, then the guide appeared from a doorway on the right. By now they were so used to her disappearing and then reappearing from nowhere they didn’t remark on it. She led them down some wooden stairs that had two flights, opened a door, and they were in the cellars.

“This was George Hardy’s favourite part of the house’ she said, when they were all down, and her voice echoed back off the cold stone walls that surrounded them. “Because this was where he kept his wine, and his spirits, and his beer. Sometimes he would come down here to drink, and get so drunk he couldn’t walk back upstairs. That suited Evelyn, of course, because…..” the guide suddenly lowered her eyes, and looked very introspective, and took her typical pose with her hands clasped in front of her “……because if he came upstairs in that state, there was no knowing what evil he might perpetrate on her and his children.”

Chris and Jenny looked round, The cellars were extensive and divided into several alcoves, with curved archways. There were racks of empty wine bottles, and large empty barrels on their sides to simulate what they would have looked like 150 years ago. There was a sensation of coldness, and dampness, and mustiness.

“So he had what we call these days ‘a drinking problem’, then” opined Chris.

The guide looked at him as if she thought he was being flippant. “He was a bad man at the best of times, and the liquors only made him worse”.

She then turned, lifted her skirt so she wouldn’t catch it, and started back up the steps.

While Chris and Jenny went to follow her, Chris made a motion of holding his nose and pointing at her back, and Jenny shrugged and nodded in answer. “Have you noticed how she stinks” Chris hissed to her. “I think she never changes out of that dress!”

When they got back to the hallway the guide said “I want to show you the day room. This was Evelyn spent a lot of her time, when she wasn’t writing her diary.”

“Or wrecking the kids’ toys” chipped in Chris.

They walked in to the dayroom. It was a sumptuously furnished, large rectangular room, lit by an enormous bay window that wend right down to the floor at one end. It had more natural light than any other room they had been in. There were folding tables where cards could be played, a spinning wheel, a tapestry frame, a sewing table, and a very antique square-shaped piano.

“This is where Evelyn used to spend her afternoons” the guide explained. “The children were banned from this room. It was her room. Only the servants were allowed to come in to dust it, or bring anything she required. She loved to spin on the wheel, and do tapestry, or knit, or sometimes just read, and sometimes play solitaire with herself, and sometimes” she looked doubtfully at the piano “play music”

She surveyed the piano for a few more moments and then said. “This is very different from a modern piano. It can’t be properly tuned, because the frame is wooden, and if the strings were stretched to concert pitch the frame would break, and it wouldn’t stay tuned anyway.”

“Do you play?” asked Jenny.

The guide seemed to debate the point within herself, then in answer to Jenny’s question she sat down on the stool, and gingerly put her fingers on the keys, and played, in a sort of hesitating, fumbling way, like a child who has just succeeded in learning one tune “Greensleeves” Then she played it again. Then she played it again. Then she sunk back and stared at the instrument sullenly.

“As you can hear, it doesn’t sound anything like a modern piano, or even sound as it would have one hundred and fifty years ago, due to being so worn and out of tune” she bemoaned.

“Play something else” urged Jenny cheerily.

But the guide just sat looking mournfully at the instrument.

“That’s all I can play” she said finally. “But I like that song so much …It’s the only song I want to play. Why should I play other tunes if I like only that one? I just wish the piano sounded as sweet and melodious as it did 150 years ago….”

Something just occurred to Jenny. “Evelyn seems to have been a rather solitary person. Didn’t she have friends that came and visited her?” she inquired.

The guide looked into the distance with the dreamy, ambiguous look again, ran her fingers round inside her collar, rubbed her wrists, and said “The people in the village were very strange, the ladies, and the men, all were very strange. Every one of them. Evelyn tried, but she couldn’t befriend them. They were ……….just very strange…… not like her… not like her at all…very strange…..”

“Well, not everyone’s as normal as Evelyn was” said Chris sarcastically.

But in answer, Evelyn only looked into the distance through the French windows and nodded, and said, as if the sarcasm was lost on her, “Quite…quite….”.

“I don’t know how you remember all this you’ve told us” said Jenny. “You must have spent hours being taught this history”