1. Aug, 2021

'Chiming The Hour'

Effie heard the grandfather clocks which lived in the hall begin to strike. Deep, mellow tones and light, tinkling bell chimes rang out not quite together, finishing their roundelays at slightly different instants, so that a vibration of not twelve, but almost thirteen, seemed to hover in the air. Determined, this time, not to miss it, that evanescent, magical fragment of time, she was standing in her nightdress on the stairs, waiting for midnight and what might come after if she watched hard enough. The tall case clocks had fascinated her all her life. There were four of them in a line, collected by her father, for whom clocks of all kinds were a hobby interest. Their dials, pearl faced with delicate, filigree hands and images of sun and moon, or shining white with bold Roman numerals, seemed to Effie to have their own expressions and she had always held long conversations with them as her confidantes, since her brothers were older than her by some years. A barometer hung on the opposite wall and she peered closely at it as the chimes finished and the final, silvery note made its illusory shadow of thirteen. Yes! There! The pressure dials on the barometer, surely, were moving about in answer to some disturbance in their immediacy? Flitting forward into the parlour, where she was sure that moment lay, collected like surface tension on water and sent forward by the chimes, she waited to see it, for lately it had seemed to her that the shudder of another time was carried on the resonance of that shivering air.

All was darkness, the window shrouded by the heavy, velvet curtains and then, in the midst of the delicate, fading echoes, she thought there was a shimmer before her, a transparent quiver of some kind, and she was hovering to step through it when a voice said,

“Good lord, Effie! What are you doing there in your nightgown? I thought I was seeing a ghost!”

It was her brother, Gerald, returning back from whatever night entertainment he had been enjoying and coming quietly in so as not to disturb those sleeping above.

“Oh!” said Effie, disappointed, with her moment broken, when she had just, almost, felt that she might manage to get into the echo time the chimes seemed to open up a chink into.

“What are you creeping about for?” asked Gerald.

“I was hungry.”

“I could eat something myself. Come on then, trouble. You won’t find any food in here,” he said, bluff from good cheer with his fellows.

Effie had to eat bread and cheese she didn’t really want and drink a glass of milk in the deserted kitchen with Gerald. The black arch behind the cold range loomed like an extra doorway into somewhere, all in shadow apart from the candle flame on the table between them. The  gloomy basement room was strange in the dark and the stone flags were cold beneath her slippered feet. She was glad to agree to go back to bed, because Gerald had scattered whatever enchantment might have been.

“Not a word to the folks. I won’t if you don’t,” warned Gerald, who always made her promise like this not to give some peccadillo of his away by making out she was equally culpable in some manner. Since he was so much her senior, Effie rarely, if ever, of course, was.

The following day was restless weather, grey and full of warm but enervating storm winds. Heavy cloud rolled about in the sky in dark billows. Effie had watched it from inside, travelling over the roofs of the houses at hectic speed, leaving trailing tatters of rain in its wake to bluster and then blow over. It was summer but looked and felt like autumn. Over their breakfast boiled eggs and toast, kippers for Father, horrid things, Gerald had winked at her and said he was sure he had heard somebody sleepwalking about the house last night. Their father rattled the broadsheet newspaper he was reading and remarked,

“The only thing I heard was somebody the worse for wear coming in late from his club and banging his bedroom door across the landing.”

Gerald pulled a face, unseen by his father behind the newspaper, making Effie smile while their mother affected not to notice, her mind on higher things. Gerald and Father went out to the umberella works office, the source of their income and comfortable home. Her older brothers worked in it too, but were married and had their own establishments and families now. As Father was wont to say, if anybody complained when it poured with rain, as it did frequently hereabouts,

“Fine weather for ducks, and for us!”

“Fine weather for ducks,” Effie said to herself as she waited, this time, for the hour of mid-day to strike. Only at the stroke of twelve was that infinitessimal little shiver in the air to be felt, never at any other time, although she listened out most carefully.

She stood once more in the front parlour room, this time in daylight, as the sun finally came out, and as the last of the mid-day chimes sounded, the musical box cascade of dainty notes fading. Effie thought, when she looked very hard, that she could see that shimmer in the air. There was a flash of something bright and for a fragment of a second, somebody looked back from the other side of that film of liquid air between. A baby laughed faintly and then she heard and saw nothing, as the the clock chimes fell silent.

“Effie! It is time for us to go to your grandmother’s for lunch!” her mother called from somewhere.

Effie went out to find her mother putting on her hat and coat in front of the mirrored coatstand.

“Who lived here before we did, mamma?” she asked.

“Here? Why, nobody! Your grandfather, Edwin Moss, built it and your father has lived in this house since he was a young boy.”

“Somebody did. They had a baby, because I heard it crying just now.”

“Heard it…? What nonsensical fancies you do have, Effie!” her mother exclaimed impatiently.

“Maybe it was the house that was here before this one then. Perhaps it was a castle!”

“A castle! In the city suburbs? The only castles round here are factories, child, and the kings of them, let me tell you, are polluting every river in the city. Now get your hat on. You know what mother’s like.”

Grandmamma was a stickler for the formalities of dress. To arrive without a suitable hat on was virtually to have been seen gallivanting about naked outdoors. Effie’s mother, Phyllis, moved in philanthropic circles and flirted with suffragette notions but this cut no ice with Grandmamma, who said that, for all her outlandish ideas, you didn’t see Emmeline Pankhurst speaking in public without a hat on. It was a moot point as to how true this was and Grandmamma was highly unlikely to have been present to witness it, but as with most of such pronouncements made by her, it was scarcely worth arguing with. After one particular day when Phyllis had arrived without a hat on, it was a statement often made. A practical woman, Phyllis knew when to make a stand and when not to, so as to spare her energies for what mattered in life. In common with many such women with noble aspirations, being busy with what busied her and made her feel important herself, she had little time to spare for paying any attention to Effie’s daydreams, as she called her daughter’s imaginings.

Effie was used to being swept along in her wake and today was no exception. It was a busy afternoon. After lunch there was shopping with Grandmamma and all the busy traffic of people, horsedrawn trams and cabs up and down the central city streets. Her mother was chafing to get away in time to hear a lecture, and so it was rather stressful being hurried from haberdashery to upmarket merchant and deliver Grandmamma back home and then Effie, so that Phyllis could go out again. Effie had tea with Father and Gerald, since Mother wasn’t back yet. She and Gerald played spillikins and then Father and Gerald went to play billiards, and she fancied she could hear the quiet clack, clack of balls hitting together as the game went on in the library below her bedroom. She liked to hear it, the alcoves on either side of her bedroom chimney breast always being full of gaping shadows where she imagined somebody was standing watching her. Effie listened out for the clocks chiming. Her mother came to say goodnight, her clothes full of the outdoors, the soot smell of smoke fallen from chimneys mingling with that of the warm, rushing wind and iron smelling rain.

“Was it a good lecture?” asked Effie.

“Oh, yes! Most instructive!” said Phyllis. “Food for thought, definitely.”

This was her mother’s favourite description of a talk she had enjoyed. If she had not, it was ‘one for a rainy day’, meaning that she would think about it later. One of life’s natural enthusiasts, very little was wasted on Phyllis. Effie’s father (Edwin like his own father but known as Ned in the family), said it was her robust optimism which had attracted him, since given the family business, he had been born under a cloud, as he liked, jokingly, to put it. In fact, of the two of them, it was Ned who generally liked to laugh about life, while Phyllis found it a matter to be forged ahead with, because there was always the next thing to be involved in. Now that most of the family was grown, she had more time to improve her mind, and other people’s too while she was about it. The house settled into its bedtime routines, and after those, Effie listened to eleven in the silence and got up to sit at the bottom of the stairs in moonbeams through the fanlight, listening for midnight. Somebody on the other side of that last chime was looking back for her and she meant to go to them if she could. The carpeted treads kept Effie’s footsteps quiet, so nobody would hear her, not even crosspatch Madge, who would be asleep in the attic by now. Madge was always telling Effie off for being in the way, it seemed to her.

She was in the way of dusting, tidying, cooking or clearing up in the kitchen, ‘looking after you’, Madge would tell her, shooing her off. ‘Maid of all work, that’s me’ she said often. “Now out of my way, Effie, I’ve windows to shine.”

The truth was that Madge, a tense and spare woman, was one of those who was ‘always on the go’ and could rarely, if ever, be prevailed upon to sit down, even to gossip with next door, who always had a juicy morsel to pass on about her family upstairs, which Effie loved to catch the odd snippet of. ‘Oh, I haven’t got time to sit down now, Lily’ Madge would say, disappointingly, as Effie edged in to hear more. Even when Madge laughed, it was in the kind of high speed staccato which sounded as if the energy of it might send her bouncing from wall to wall. She and Phyllis got on well, because neither of them felt that there was time to waste, whereas Effie felt that time was being wasted if you didn’t at least sit down and think about it, or even nothing, every now and again. If crosspatch Madge caught her sitting on the stairs she would make more fuss than anybody, thought Effie, even if she wasn’t actively making somewhere untidy right now by her very presence. As these thoughts drifted through, midnight began to chime in slow, deep ponderous strikes counterpointed by those cymbeline like notes in a little, musical tumble which lasted that slight moment longer. Once more, Effie stood in the middle of the front parlour and, instead of waiting to see, stepped straight forward into the instant of unreal time, where now, she heard a baby crying, and was sure that she was needed.

                                                             ***                                                 

“Come on, Caro, it will be a great project for us!” Tom had said persuasively, surveying the big, Victorian house, in an abandoned and near derelict state, with his own mind already very clearly made up.

“Oh, Tom!” she had groaned. “You’ve only just finished doing up the one we’re in.”

“Yeah but, that’s done now – you know I like to have something on the go. So do you.”

“We’ve got Lulu on the go now,” she reminded him. “I’d like a room I can very boringly sit in with our baby being warm and comfortable, not looking at a romantic ruin and grotty ceilings, thank you.”

Lulu was their nickname for toddler Lucy, who at nearly two was deeply attached to a rag doll made for her by Caroline’s mother, called ‘Looby Loo’ after the old Andy Pandy children’s television series she had watched as a child herself. Caro had had one too back in the day. Lulu was how Lucy referred to both herself and the doll, and the name had stuck.

“Downstairs is perfectly liveable in” Tom said. “It’ll be like being in a bungalow for you. First job, a downstairs bathroom where the old scullery room was. We’ll have the middle room as a bedroom, lovely and light with that side bay and it’s private with the wall and hedge outside the garden. (The garden ran from the front down the side and round the back of the building). One room’s great for the kitchen anyway, and we can use the front room as the living room. All south facing. Lovely. You won’t even have to think about upstairs. I’ll get weaving up there. Think about it. So many rooms! Full cellar space and attic. Bedrooms galore, playroom, library, big bathroom upstairs, office for you, office for me, brilliant garden out there.”

She was attracted by it, she had to admit. The reservations put forward by her parents,

“What’s up with where you are? That took long enough, didn’t it?”

“Why does he need to be moving into a building site every two minutes?”

“It’s not a house, it’s practically open air living!”

“Dangerous now you’ve got little Lulu,” were all things she had thought herself but, given that they were the ones saying them, she overruled it all, first mentally and then verbally.

Before she knew it she had agreed and that had quickly snowballed into doing it. The just made pristine end of terrace was history and this was where they were living, or ‘camping’ as her mother put it. Caro dreamt of being buried by rockfalls on mountainsides and this, she knew, was no coincidence. The truth was, she didn’t really like being alone here when Tom was out at the day job which paid for the slow but painstaking renovation work he was undertaking. Draughts ran through the place like mice, making attic doors bang when nobody was in the house except her and Lulu downstairs. Worse, when it was windy, the bolted cellar door rattled as if somebody were trying to get out. Below, the York stone flagged rooms ran the length of the house, the brick arch where a range had once stood a lonely curve of shadows, for the house had lain empty so long it had been looted long ago for whatever treasures it might have held. In the hall, a line of paler outlines showed where some furniture had once stood, the wallpaper faded from crimson red flock to shabby mauve where it still existed. In upper rooms, holes were in ceilings and rudimentary bulbs hung on one dangling wire were all that had been put in as yet by way of lighting. Caro especially disliked the turn on the top attic staircase, where the empty room behind you made it feel a hand might thrust at the small of your back from the darkness and push you down. With thoughts of a future bedroom for Lulu, they had found a room still with nursery bars on the window, which had obviously been the children’s bedroom in the house’s past and once done up, would be ideal for her.

Caro was glad to have their rescue mongrel for company when Tom was out and Ferdie, a soft and grateful creature, was always with her and Lulu. Today, he was lying peacefully on the floor in the middle of a pool of sunlight while Caro changed Lulu’s nappy on the bed. The baby thought this was a great game and enjoyed being tickled while she kicked and wriggled. Ferdie suddenly stood up and growled. Caro could see him in the big mirror on the wall behind the bed, clearly reflected staring at something in the middle of the room, his hackles right up. He stalked a few paces forward, then with a whimper, fled out of the door into the kitchen. Caro could see nothing but, as she looked back into the mirror, she saw some shimmer of light reflected and beyond that, the broad bay window embrasure, only, it seemed to have a cushioned window seat in it and for a brief instant, baby Lulu still laughing, she thought she saw the figure of a young girl in a long blue dress silhouetted against the light, with ribbons in her ringleted hair, perhaps twelve years old and standing looking back out at Caro? The shimmer dazzled and a sun flash in the mirror illuminated the empty room behind her.

Caro blinked and looked again, into the mirror and then turning to look behind herself. Of course, there was nothing there. The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ like girl must have been a trick of the light and her imagination had made something out of it momentarily. But what about Ferdie? She called him but no questing, whiskery muzzle poked round the door and when she had finished changing Lulu and went to find him, he would not be coaxed back in. Ferdie had never done this before as far as Caro could remember, either here or in their last house. Still, who knew what dogs could see or hear that we could not? Whatever it was, he had identified it as some threat to be growled at and strange enough to run from. Caro decided that it was definitely time for an outing in the stroller for Lulu, and a walk for Ferdie.

When Tom came home from work she told him about it, but Ferdie by now was behaving perfectly normally, pottering in and out of all the rooms with them. To be on the safe side, Tom went to check out the cellar (a place Caro avoided when alone) in case anyone had got in from the ground level entrance to the cobbled area at the back of the house, although it was thoroughly locked and bolted, inside and out, for security, and had a solid door. There was no sign of anything, though, and so they dismissed the incident as Caro had done herself, as something the dog had picked up on that she couldn’t hear.

“Probably just a rat,” said Tom cheerfully, prompting a shivery,

 “Ew don’t,” from Caro.                                      

                                                         ***

Tom had gone out to see friends for drinks, it being Caro’s turn to babysit Lulu, who was one of those children who still couldn’t be left with anybody else. Caro was in the kitchen washing up a few pots and half watching a Netflix with a glass of wine, waiting for him to come back, when she heard the baby crying next door. Caro hurried in to see Lulu standing in her cot, pointing to the middle of the room and shaking and crying with toddler age night terrors. Poor Lulu seemed quite beside herself, whereas earlier she had played and played in her cot quite contentedly with the rag doll which was at present her favourite toy. Caro could see nothing. She looked into the big, ballet class mirror which hung on the wall and reflected everything in the room, remembering that moment earlier in the day and what she had thought she had seen in it. She and Tom had had acquired the old ballet school mirror from some salvage place and here, out of its context, it had an eerie grandeur, especially by night. A car headlight swept across the ceiling and over the mirror but that was all she could see there this time. Caro gave up trying to get the baby to sleep again and took her into the kitchen to warm a bottle for her. It was a long time before Lulu settled down again and she was still awake when Tom came in.

                                                           ***

Effie went back up to her nursery room and thought she knew what to do now. The baby wanted her to play, that was all, and the lady couldn’t really see her. She fetched out the rag doll she was told she was too old to play with herself (not that Effie agreed) with its china painted face and rosebud mouth. Smoothing out the tatty hair, she said to herself that this time she would take the doll with her and play with the little girl in the cot, who must be lonely in that big, broken looking house with nobody else to play with, she thought. As usual, she was left to her own devices in the morning after a few lessons with mother, who then went out on one of her missions, so at mid-day, Effie took the doll and waited for that vibration in the air to happen, that infinitessimal stroke of thirteen and, this time with surety, she stepped through it. The baby was in her cot and looked pleased to see her, and together they played for a long time with the dolls, the baby chattering back to Effie but not yet in real words. Effie was puzzled by what she could see in the big mirror on the wall, for her own reflection was quite distorted, so that she seemed to be herself and then an old lady, the image flicking back and forth. Effie could see nothing else there really and when she turned and walked back into the room’s centre, the baby having fallen asleep, she found herself in her own front parlour, where it was still mid-day, the doll in her hand.

A thought came to her that perhaps, like her father, she would live in this house all her life too but if she did, she would never be lonely now, because she knew how to get to the other time and see that baby who needed her for company and often, after this, she did. Effie always seemed to be the same but the baby grew into a small girl, a different age when she visited again, and less of a baby, their games morphing into dollies’ tea parties which were quite as engaging for both of them. Sometimes, Effie heard Mother say to Father that it was going to be difficult when Effie grew up properly but Father said things like, ‘not to worry’, and mentioned ‘trust funds’ and ‘plenty of others to look after her in the family if we’re gone’. Sometimes Mother tried to explain things to Effie that she had learned about at her lectures but most of it was beyond Effie’s grasp, so that Mother said, ‘never mind’, and took her energies out to other people in that direction, as she always had done, leaving Effie to trail after Madge and annoy her instead.

When Lulu was older, and the house was all renovated, her parents ready to move on again perhaps, she told Caro, who teased her about still loving to play with the rag doll rather than anything else at all, that it was because that was what the other girl liked when she came.

“What other girl?” Caro asked.

“The big girl. Only sometimes she forgets. Then she’s  scary and old,” Lulu had somewhat bafflingly replied. She was still only six and just the age for an imaginary friend, although this seemed a rather sophisticated one for her to have conjured up, so Caro dismissed it as Lulu’s fancy, the day when the dog had growled so oddly and the toddler night terrors of old long forgotten by her now.

“Did you ever find out much about this house before you got it at the auction?” Caro asked Tom one day, as they were deciding on whether it was too big really and they might like to live outside the city for a while, but both wanting to stay there because there was something about it.

“Only what we knew then. It was built with this whole row by a Victorian umberella manufacturer originally. Name of Moss. And at the auction, they said the trustees had no legatee for it now that the daughter it had been left in trust for had died. Do you remember when we came, and I talked to the old lady over the road who was still here? She said Miss Moss lived here till well into her nineties with a companion and then after she was taken off into a home eventually, it just stood empty for years because she was the last of the family. Wars and things, I suppose, in those days.”

“Oh, yes. I remember now,” said Caro. “Well, I don’t know about moving again. I feel we belong here now. And Lulu loves it.”

“I know. We’ll think about it,” agreed Tom, and there, for the present, they left things at that.