On the fourth night, they decided it was too wet to walk to the pub. Theo brought in some wood and got the fire going, and by the time they’d had dinner, the lamp-lit sitting room was cosy. You could hear the rain on the windows, as loud as if someone was throwing handfuls of rice at the panes, but that just made it nicer to be tucked up indoors. It was November, and so far, it had to be said, they’d been lucky with the weather.
There were six of them. Theo and Helen had been married, what, twenty years now. Back in the day, John was in the same hall of residence as Theo, and Sarah and John had met when they were students as well. They’d gone to different universities but they’d both done a year abroad and ended up gravitating to each other as the only English people in their classes, putting paid, as Theo had enjoyed pointing out in his best-man’s speech, to John’s ambition to meet a ‘sexy French woman’ while he was in Paris.
It was Sarah and John who’d introduced the others to Amal. She was a colleague of John’s at the Institute, and it turned out she was half Algerian, so John could practice his increasingly rusty French on her. She’d still been married to Rafe then, but six or seven years later he’d shipped out, or been given the elbow; they’d never quite established which. Either way, Amal hadn’t seemed sorry to see the back of him.
They’d had a few of these trips away together since they’d all been living in different parts of the country and, each time, whoever organised it would tell Amal that the person she was seeing would be welcome to join them, and each time she’d thanked them and refused, until this time. To everyone’s surprise, in response to the message Theo had sent round, she’d asked if it’d be OK for her to bring someone along.
She’d immediately backtracked and said no, maybe she wouldn’t, she didn’t want any awkwardness, and that’d only encouraged Theo to say no, don’t be daft, there’d be no awkwardness at all, the ‘lucky man’ would be more than welcome. Theo was as curious as the rest of them to meet Guy, who Amal eventually admitted had been on the scene for about three months.
They’d got to know Amal before George Clooney had met his Amal, and they used to joke that their Amal, with her smooth black hair and almond-shaped eyes, was even more gorgeous than the famous one. She and Guy made a handsome couple. He was tall and slim but not skinny, his hair still thick and only touched by grey at the sideburns, his skin pale and unblemished. It was difficult to gauge how old he was, but from things he and Amal said, he must have been a little younger than the rest of them, somewhere in his mid-forties. He could have passed for late thirties; Sarah even wondered if he’d had some help with keeping his forehead smooth and banishing wrinkles from the corners of his eyes, especially given how stressful his job must be. He was a surgeon at a children’s hospital, so not only handsome but caring, unless you believed those TV dramas (like the one George Clooney used to be in) where surgeons always seemed to be enormously egotistical and very keen to get finished for the weekend. But Guy didn’t give off any obvious warning signs. He was very pleasant, very attentive, not only to Amal but to everyone else, remembering immediately how they all liked their coffee, and insisting on treating them to brandies when they’d had dinner at the pub the night before.
He’d turned up with a carry-on size wheeled suitcase and a satchel-type manbag but despite traveling light, he seemed to be equipped for every eventuality. Sarah imagined that if they’d suggested wearing evening dress, Guy would have had a choice of dinner jacket or tail-coat to hand. Even his nightclothes, when Sarah encountered him on the landing on her way to the bathroom, were subtle and understated, neat navy-blue drawstring trousers and a pale grey long-sleeved top, no loud tartan or comedy slogans for him.
‘Where did she find him?’ Sarah had asked Helen, as if Guy were a reasonably-priced jumper and she was planning on getting one for herself.
‘Not sure. Can’t have been work. Not Tinder was it?’
‘No, I don’t think she stuck that for long.’
They’d agreed pretty quickly that they approved of Guy. He didn’t seem put out by the fact that the rest of them had thirty-years-worth of history in common, didn’t demand an explanation of the shared jokes, most of which had become unmoored from their origins a long time ago, the laughter they provoked now no more than a reflex, a way of asserting, we’re still here, still mates after all this time.
It seemed only right, with the rain lashing down outside, to have ghost stories round the fire. Theo and Helen passed the baton on their well-rehearsed but still funny account of the nightmare B&B they’d stayed at on a student trip to Dublin. There’d been a crucifix hanging over the bed and they’d felt obliged to pretend to be married, which was all very funny until the crucifix fell down onto their faces in the middle of the night while Helen was having a bad dream, and she’d woken in fright, convinced there was a poltergeist in the room. Then Sarah recalled the incident during her brief period as a teacher when she’d had the misfortune to be supervising an outward-bound trip. To wind her up, the kids had pretended they could hear strange noises outside, but she’d managed to get the better of them by waiting until they’d finally calmed down and switched the lights off, before sneaking round and howling outside the window.
They were familiar stories, amusing rather than creepy. The fire was giving off a decent amount of heat, but you only had to look away from it for a moment to feel a chill on your face, and the furniture in the dark room was still sufficiently unfamiliar to make you pause occasionally and take a moment to get your bearings, remind yourself that someone had left their coat on the chair next to the sideboard - there wasn’t a person crouching there.
The conversation was beginning to run out of steam when Guy said, ‘I’ve got a story. I suppose it’s a ghost story.’
He was sitting on the end of the sofa furthest away from the fire, his face partly in shadow. Amal was snuggled up next to him, her head resting on his chest, one arm wrapped around his body, and occasionally he stroked her hair, as if she was a cat curled up on his lap.
‘Sounds intriguing,’ said Helen, tucking her feet up onto her chair. Theo picked up the wine bottle from the floor and after helping himself, passed it round so that everyone could top up their glasses.
‘My parents were based in Nigeria when I was a child,’ said Guy, ‘so they sent me to a boarding school. I should say straight off, we’re not talking about a public school. My dad didn’t have a high-powered job, and they’d had to go for the least expensive option. And this was back before there was a national curriculum, or even any proper school inspections, I should think, so it was, well, basic. There weren’t many boarders. About a dozen of us shared a dormitory with metal-framed bunk beds and windows that moved back and forth in their frames a couple of inches when it was windy. We weren’t supposed to keep food in our lockers, but we did of course, because we were permanently hungry, so there were always mouse droppings in the corners of the room. That was pretty disgusting.
‘The school building had been a private house and then requisitioned during the war. We used one of the attics as a common room, and it had scorch marks on the floorboards where someone had tried to light a fire years before, and some old graffiti on the wall left by the servicemen that hadn’t been properly painted over, mildly obscene stuff that some of the boys found fascinating. You can imagine.
‘The only place to play football was the playground, which was concreted, and when we did cross country, the route went along a canal towpath that was always covered in rubbish – drug paraphernalia, I know it was now, though we didn’t realise that at the time – and then we had to cut across a railway line that was part of the intercity route to London. No level crossing; we picked our way over the tracks. It’s amazing no one was ever injured.
‘It was grim, but one saving grace was that we boarders knew we were all in it together and there wasn’t much in the way of bullying, or at least not seriously, not to the extent you often hear about at those sorts of places. This isn’t a story about a kid being killed or killing himself and coming back to haunt us, if anyone was thinking it might be.
‘And the teachers were a rather motley crew, but again, not malevolent. A couple of them, looking back, were almost certainly post-breakdown, people who’d probably not been able to hack it at a proper school, a normal school. But no one was going to get in trouble if we were stuck on the same chapter of the geography textbook for the whole term or if we never actually got the Bunsen burner lit. I’m not sure there even was a Bunsen burner. There certainly wasn’t a chemistry lab. We had science lessons in a normal classroom, and we didn’t do any experiments. The only difference from other lessons was that the bloke wore a white coat over his suit. Chalmers, his name was. He was one of the younger ones. There were a few who must have come more or less straight from university, and they never stayed very long. They were like temps you’d have in an office, passing through on the way somewhere better.
‘And then, when I was fourteen or fifteen, Miss Mansfield arrived.’
Amal had been quite still, but now she uncurled herself and sat up, ran her fingers through her hair and arranged it so that it was hanging in front of her shoulders, like the hair of a model in a shampoo advert. She moved so that her body was resting against the other arm of the sofa from where Guy was, her legs crossed away from him. The expression on her face as she looked into the fire was neutral, but her demeanour made Sarah wonder whether Amal had heard this story before. Sarah wondered what to make of it, Amal’s reaction to Guy mentioning the name of one of his old teachers. She seemed on her guard. Surely she couldn’t be jealous? In any case, wasn’t this supposed to be a ghost story? There didn’t seem to be anything spooky about it so far.
Sarah shifted in her chair, turned so that her cheek was against the back of it, but then moved again, not liking the feel of the tapestried fabric on her face. She looked towards John and then Helen, but they both had their eyes fixed on Guy, hanging, you might have said, on his every word. So far during the trip, he’d been rather quiet, listening with apparent concentration and laughing along, asking the occasional question to keep the conversation moving, but not giving away much about himself.
‘She was a music teacher. Like everything else, that was taught very haphazardly. We had “music appreciation”, when whichever of the masters was free would play us some LPs for an hour. And there was an elderly man, I suspect he’d come over as a refugee after the war, Bernstein his name was, he came in on Wednesday afternoons and gave violin and cello lessons. Miss Mansfield was brought in to teach piano. There was a bashed-up old upright in what’d probably been the drawing room when the school was a private home, but we called it the Hall. It was used for assembly, and we did gymnastics in there if it was too wet for PE outside. There were a couple of ropes that hooked into the beams in the ceiling and a wooden vaulting horse that stacked up in sections, and a sponge landing mat about half an inch thick.
‘I don’t know who taught piano before Miss Mansfield arrived. Maybe no one had. Anyhow, I’d had some lessons when I was younger, and my parents decided to sign me up.
‘This school, it was in Rutland on the edge of a village where some of the masters lived, and I think a few of the others travelled in from Market Harborough. Miss Mansfield had a cottage that was on the other side of the school from the village. It could have been a gamekeeper’s cottage, I suppose. It was right by an area of woodland, and there were no other houses around, and not even a proper road leading there. She came up to the school on a bicycle a couple of afternoons a week, and I suppose she must have taken private pupils as well, to make a living. I don’t know.
‘You can probably imagine, for a load of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys stuck in the middle of nowhere, having this young woman arrive was a real novelty. The only other woman, from what I can remember, was the matron. Thinking about it now, she was probably only about forty, but to us she seemed ancient, and Miss Mansfield was in her twenties. She had long fair hair, flaxen hair, you’d call it. This was the nineteen-eighties, and she used to wear one of those hairbands, a dark green velvet one and that shade still reminds me of her. She had a velvet jacket that was the same colour. Bottle green.’
Sarah’s mouth was dry, and she took a sip of wine. There was still no sign as to how this counted as a ghost story, but there was definitely something creepy about it. Or was it that Guy himself, with his smooth, too-smooth, voice, and his preternatural good looks, was, in fact, creepy? Amal was still staring, unmoving, into the fire, and it seemed to Sarah that her friend’s face was frozen, held effortfully in a calm expression, not relaxed as it’d been earlier.
‘Miss Mansfield and I spent most of my lessons going over and over a Schumann piece, “Träumerei”. I’m sure you’d recognise it. It’s rather lovely, and I more or less got the hang of it, but what I liked best was when I went wrong. She’d get impatient and come and sit next to me on the piano stool and show me how it should be done. She wore rings, and to stop them hitting against the keys, she’d take them off and give them to me to hold for her. One was a thin silver band with a diamond, and the other was thick and heavy, gold studded all round with rubies. It might have been an eternity ring that she’d inherited from her mother or grandmother. I don’t know. But the other one, again, I didn’t understand then, but it was an engagement ring.’
For the first time since he’d started speaking, Guy reached for the glass of whiskey that was on the rug at his feet and drank from it. No one moved or made a sound.
‘I’d sit next to her, clutching those rings so tightly they dug into my palm, with her leg pressing up against mine, and sometimes as she moved, some strands of her hair would brush against my face. She was so wrapped up in the music, she didn’t notice. She wore perfume that smelt of lilacs, or maybe she had one of those things in her wardrobe, a pomander, and it was her clothes that were impregnated with it, I don’t know, but even now, all this time later, when I hear that piece, “Träumerei”, it takes me right back, the upright piano showing its bare back to the drafty room, and I can smell that lilac scent again.
‘I don’t mind admitting what you’ve probably already guessed. I was completely besotted with her. And inevitably, when the other boys started making crude comments, saying things they couldn’t have really understood about how they wouldn’t mind getting their leg over her, I leapt to Miss Mansfield’s defence and they could see immediately what the score was and mocked me mercilessly, asking how my girlfriend was, and other things…Well, they were fourteen-year-old boys, you can imagine. I didn’t really care, because I was getting her attention and they weren’t. That was all that mattered.
‘I’ve mentioned that she lived in a house near the woods. We weren’t supposed to go into those woods unsupervised, not that we took much notice of that, but one afternoon, it was the summer term after Miss Mansfield arrived, Mr Chalmers, the science teacher, took us down there. The pretext must have been nature study of some kind, I can’t remember. He was probably just fed up and fancied getting out of the classroom while the weather was fine. Once we got to the woods, he let us wander off on our own. Maybe we were supposed to stay in groups or pairs, I don’t know, but I realised that this was my chance to see where Miss Mansfield lived, maybe even to have a proper conversation with her, away from the school.
‘I was quite a naïve kid. I was wondering what might happen if I tried to kiss her. I knew in theory what went on between men and women, but it all sounded so improbable… My fantasies didn’t go far beyond what I’d seen on TV, and that didn’t get much beyond kissing, really. When I thought about Miss Mansfield, well, thinking about kissing her was enough, to be honest.
‘It wasn’t too difficult to slip away from the others and find my way to her cottage – although “cottage” suggests something chocolate box, or a fairy tale, and it was much more mundane than that. It looked like a house from a typical 1950s council estate that for some reason had been dropped down there next to the woods.
‘I remember thinking it’d be scary to live there on your own. There was no fence or wall to separate the front garden from the footpath, and so anyone passing could have done what I did – crept up to the window and peeped inside.’
Sarah was aware of a slight movement on her left and glanced towards John, who was shifting a little in his chair. He looked up and caught her eye and, almost imperceptibly, raised an eyebrow. It made her very curious to know what he thought, almost as curious as she was to find out how the story would end.
‘Well, they say no good comes of eavesdroppers, and the same goes for peeping toms. A glance was enough. She had someone with her. I couldn’t make out who. And I couldn’t really make out what they were doing but I knew instinctively that it was something I shouldn’t be seeing. I got away from there as quickly as I could, feeling embarrassed and foolish and then anxious as to how I’d explain where I’d been. As it turned out, I didn’t need to, because when I found my class again, no one seemed to have noticed I’d been gone.
‘I had quite a bit of trouble getting to sleep that night. I wouldn’t want to give the impression I was traumatised by what I saw – it was a shock, no more than that – but I was due to have a piano lesson the next day, and the idea of sitting next to Miss Mansfield, having seen what I’d seen, that worried me. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see her again at all. My image of her had been shattered.
‘Kids are so egotistical, aren’t they? You don’t understand at that age that the whole world doesn’t revolve around you, and you can’t make people be who you want them to be by force of will.
‘I must have drifted off eventually but, almost immediately it seemed, something woke me up. Usually, I was like most teenage boys – it’d take a bomb under the bed to disturb my sleep. I’d got used to not being bothered by other boys talking to themselves or snoring or whatever else they might be doing. But what woke me wasn’t a noise. It was a smell. The smell of lilacs. And when I rolled over onto my back, about to sit up and try and figure out where it was coming from, I felt something, a sensation - ’
He made a gesture with his hand, as if wiping something away from his face.
‘I thought it was a cobweb, or dust falling from the bunk above. But then, perhaps it was the scent of lilacs that did it, I recognised what it was. It was the feel of Miss Mansfield’s hair brushing against my cheek.’
For a moment after he said those words, it seemed to Sarah that they were all holding their breath. The rain on the windows had stopped and the silence was only broken by the logs on the fire crackling and shifting.
‘In the morning… ’
For the first time, Sarah wanted to interrupt. How had Guy felt when that happened? Had he jumped out of bed in horror, woken the other boys? Or had he simply turned over and gone back to sleep? But there’d be time enough to ask questions when he’d got to the end.
‘…we could tell as soon as we went down to breakfast that something wasn’t right. About half a dozen masters lived in but only a couple of them were there to supervise, and when we were on the way back upstairs, we saw a police car on the front path.
‘We went into assembly as usual, and a man we didn’t know was standing with the headmaster. He was a detective, and between them they told us what’d happened.’
Guy reached for his glass again. Was that pause for dramatic effect, or was Guy overcome with emotion, now he was reaching what must be the climax? It was impossible to tell.
‘Miss Mansfield had been discovered that morning by the postman. They didn’t tell us at the time, but she was strangled. The worst of it was that she hadn’t died until some hours later.
‘I never found out for sure, but I’ve always wondered whether that happened around the time I woke up and had such a strong sense of her presence.’
No one said anything. But Sarah was bursting with questions now. Had Guy told the police what he’d seen through the window, whatever, or whoever, that was? Had he stayed on at the school after the events he’d described? Had anyone been arrested and charged with the crime?
Then Amal got up, pulling at her finger as she did so and, as she left the room, slamming the door behind her, she threw something in Guy’s direction. It bounced on the rug and landed near Sarah’s feet. It was a ring, a gold one, studded all round with rubies.