Naomi's Room Read online

  Jonathan Aycliffe was born in Belfast in 1949. He studied English, Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies at the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and lectured at the universities of Fez in Morocco and Newcastle upon Tyne. The author of several ghost stories, he lives in the north of England with his wife. He also writes as Daniel Easterman, under which name he has penned several bestselling thrillers.

  By the same author (writing as Daniel Easterman)

  The Seventh Sanctuary

  The Ninth Buddha

  Brotherhood of the Tomb

  Night of the Seventh Darkness

  The Last Assassin

  Naomi’s Room

  Jonathan Aycliffe

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published by HarperCollins, 1991

  This edition published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2012

  Copyright © Denis MacEoin, 1991

  The right of Denis MacEoin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-509-7 (ebook)

  For Beth,

  a spine-warmer if ever I met one

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to everyone involved in this venture into the supernatural: my sceptical but always delightful editor Patricia Parkin; my wife Beth, whose own fascination with ghost stories encouraged me to attempt the genre; Alan Jessop Sr, who proved a most amiable and knowledgeable guide to Spitalfields; the resourceful Chris Jakes of the Local Studies department of the Cambridge Public Library, who steered me through maps and guides with great clarity; and Roderick Richards of Tracking Line, who sorted out my Metropolitan from my City police.

  Naomi’s prayer on pages 22–3 is taken from a genuine case history cited by Harris Coulter in his fascinating study Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality: the Medical Assault on the American Brain (pp. 74–5).

  1

  I found them yesterday, quite by chance. The photographs. The ones we took at Christmas all those years ago. And the later ones, the photographs we took in Egypt. Memories of an entire winter. I had thought them lost or destroyed. Perhaps I had wanted it that way.

  They were in a box in the loft, a tin box that had once held a cake from Betty’s Teashop in Harrogate. A ginger and walnut cake, the sort you have with a slice of Wensleydale and a cup of China tea. I don’t know how the photographs came to be inside: I am sure I did not put them there. And I know that Laura could not have done so.

  In any case, I shall make quite sure this time, I shall burn them. I have a little bottle of kerosene, quite enough for my purpose. I shall take them out to the garden this evening and light a small fire near the ash tree and consign them to the flames. The past is long ago consumed. It will not matter. Perhaps the act of burning will give me a little peace. How sweet that would be. A little peace. Outside, the sun is the colour of yellow marble. There is frost on the wall.

  Was it quite by accident that I found them? Or was I led there by a reactivation of memory, a guiding instinct that had lain dormant year after year until now, in the cold days of my life, something wakened it? It is precisely twenty years since those events, the events the photographs in part record. It all started and ended here in Cambridge, in this house, in these rooms. The walls remember just as well as I. Why should those happenings not find their echoes here?

  I dreamed my dream last night again. It has not visited me in many years. Is she here again? Will she be here with me tonight? I shall go to church today, I shall light bright candles against the possibility.

  That ash tree in the back garden was much smaller then. I was thirty, Laura twenty-six. We had been married five years. And Naomi, Naomi was four. The college favourite, the Dean’s pet. I had just been awarded my fellowship, and we had moved from the college flat off Huntingdon Road to this house in Newtown. Your life seems so directed when you are thirty, the years are taken care of, there is a patina on things, there are fewer edges from which to slip. The house was to be our home for as long as we could imagine, until my professorship at least. There would be a second, perhaps a third child. There would be a Christmas tree in winter, tea in the afternoons, toast by an open fire, the sound of a piano in the late evening, notes like snowflakes falling through the still evening air. Your life seems so directed when you are thirty.

  I had written my thesis on the meaning of Christmas in Gawain and the Green Knight. The University Press had offered to publish it once I’d knocked it into shape. I made love to Laura almost every night, there was a fire inside me. And Naomi used to play on the landing outside my study, laying her plastic dolls with a child’s care beside my door, singing to them in an unsteady voice:

  Oranges and Lemons

  Say the bells of St Clement’s.

  I heard her sing it again last night, in my dream.

  The winter of 1970 was cold in Cambridge. Throughout November there was heavy rain. Gales blew. The fields were soaked and flooded. The beginning of December was dry, its second half cold with showers of snow. Frost dripped from bent trees, mist curtained the Backs most days, snow lay in driven patches on the roofs of the colleges. The walls of my study were warm with the red and green and brown spines of books. Old leather, the gleam of gold letters. I spent a lot of time indoors, reworking my thesis, preparing lectures, playing with Naomi.

  Most days, she and I would walk down Trumpington Street together as far as Pembroke, where I picked up any mail that had been sent there for me. Afterwards, it was a walk of only a few yards to Fitzbillies for cakes. She loved their Chelsea buns, great sticky buns that she would hold in a tiny fist with a curious dexterity. Then we would set off home, hand in hand, along half-empty streets, Naomi swinging a paper bag gaily by her side. It grew dark early. We passed lights behind mullioned windows, fires in grates, the sorcery of the cold season. I remember her best by lamplight, my daughter, in a yellow coat and a red muffler.

  One day, the Christmas lights went on in Sidney Street. This was to be Naomi’s first proper Christmas. Her excitement was infectious. Laura and I went out to Deers, the nursery on the corner of Huntingdon and Histon Roads, and brought home a tall tree. With Naomi’s help, we covered it with lights and tinsel. A Burne-Jones angel stood at the very top, her russet hair grazing the ceiling, ringed by coloured lights. Naomi would stand for what seemed like hours watching reflections of the room in a large silver ball that turned slowly on the lowest branch. One night she fell asleep at the foot of the tree, a piece of blue ribbon clutched tightly in her hand. On the radio, carols were playing. I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day . . .

  On Advent Sunday, we went to the Wren chapel in college for the carol service. Naomi walked between us, solemn-faced like a Victorian child, tiny hands in a huge fur muff. The voices of the choir had a strange quality that year. I have never heard them sing like that since. It w
as as though they themselves were not singing, but through them generations of choristers had access once again to song. In the intervals, the congregation would burst into fits of stifled coughing. But in those moments of singing no one moved. All about us, stained glass melted in the light of perfect candles.

  We were not particularly religious. Both Laura and I had been brought up as Anglicans, but our faith was a sporadic thing, a celebration of Christmases and Easters, weddings and burials. But in those moments of Advent, in the high chapel, wrapped by exquisite song, we almost believed. I believe now, but for different reasons. It is not the beauty of glass or the light of the world that have brought me to faith. It is fear. Simple, complete, and perfect fear.

  Naomi could hardly be put to bed that night. She wanted me to sing to her, to teach her carols for the child Jesus. She was one of those children who can be taken to concerts and religious services without cause for embarrassment. Her manner was serious, even solemn at times. And beneath that, a laugh so light it seemed without substance. Even at play she would be solemn, then the laugh would break through, transforming her face. I loved her so much. More than I loved Laura, I think. Perhaps fathers always love daughters in that way.

  There are so many photographs, more than I had remembered. I have laid them on the kitchen table in long rows, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I am in very few of them, I was usually the photographer. Here is one of Laura in front of King’s College, smiling like a tourist. Behind her I can make out a fine sprinkling of snow on the Parade and on the short strip of grass in front of the college wall. You can just make out the east window of the chapel in the background.

  Here is Naomi standing by that Christmas tree, a jumble of unopened presents by her feet, the blue ribbon in her hand. That was taken by someone else, I can’t remember who, Galen perhaps, or Philip. It shows all three of us, Laura, Naomi, myself, at a Christmas tea in the senior common room. That must have been about a week before term ended. I seem to remember a conversation about metaphor. That would have been Randolph.

  I was lecturing on Beowulf that term, to a second-year group. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I held tutorials in my room at college, a fine old room overlooking the college garden. Pembroke is a college mercifully off the tourist trail, it has none of the architectural grandeur of King’s or Trinity or John’s. Americans and Japanese avoid it. But there are some visitors who come for the chapel, Wren’s first commission, and a very few who seek a sort of peace there, as though they had come to a cloister in a moment of need.

  I still have that room, I still see tutees in it, at moments I still rise from my chair and look through my window on to one of the world’s quiet places, but I have no peace. I am uncloistered. My moment of need has been and gone.

  Laura spent the days with Naomi. She had given up her job at the Fitzwilliam Museum shortly before our daughter was born. It hadn’t been much of a job, mainly cataloguing and fetching papers for readers. She had a first-class degree in Art History, had been offered a place to carry out postgraduate work at Newnham, but had opted instead for marriage and motherhood. The plan was that she would reapply and start work on her PhD as soon as Naomi started school. She had her subject already: sexuality in the paintings of Balthus. We made so many plans, we were architects of our own lives.

  This is a photograph of myself, one of the only ones from that period. I’ll burn it along with the rest. In for a penny . . . I hardly recognize myself: long black hair to the shoulders, a weak beard, a slightly arrogant expression, the smugness of a young don who knows he cannot put a foot wrong. I led a charmed life: a beautiful wife, a perfect daughter, a tenured post in one of the great universities. A photograph taken of me today would show none of those things. I no longer have such presumptions on life, my expectations are quite different. But I haven’t let anyone take my photograph in years.

  It’s getting late. I’ll burn the photographs tomorrow. I know I should go to bed, but I can’t bring myself to do so, really I can’t. This house is too large for one person, there are too many noises for my peace of mind. I should have moved back into college rooms years ago. Twenty years ago. We are all fools, we betray ourselves for such small reasons. I thought memories were important. A sense of place.

  Very well, let me admit it, I’m afraid to go up there, afraid of what I may hear. Or see. She may be there. I didn’t go to church after all, I didn’t light my candle. I can pray here, of course, I can light a candle in front of the little statue of Our Lady I keep in the drawing room. But that will not help, it will not drive my fears away. Or the dark. Or the noises in the house.

  I went upstairs earlier, just to see that everything was all right. Against my better judgement. The house was miraculously full of silence, I gulped it in like a man reaching air after confinement, I was greedy for it. There was nothing reassuring about the silence, nothing comforting. It always began in silence.

  I made the mistake of looking down. I should not have done that. I looked at the floor. There was something on the carpet, just outside the old nursery door, Naomi’s door. A length of blue ribbon. I didn’t touch it, of course. It might still have been warm.

  2

  Christmas that year came slowly, hesitantly, as though on the brink of an untoward disaster, a birth without star or manger. I remember it with preternatural clarity, each day of the season printed on my memory, the way hours and minutes are unnaturally imprinted on the recollections of the sick and the convalescent. It came with open wings, with quiet bursts of music, with falls of the purest snow. It was a descent, a down-turning of nature, the world in reverse order: heaven made earth, spirit become flesh, God struggling to be man. Even then I thought of it in such terms, I watched it make its way towards us like a white ship bearing an unspeakable cargo. I saw three ships come sailing in . . . It was her favourite carol.

  She came to my dreams again last night. She was singing. The same song. Always the same song. This morning, I woke to find myself stiff in the armchair in front of a cold fireplace. It was after ten o’clock. An untouched cup of cold coffee stood on the floor beside my chair. How unrefreshing sleep like that is. I have a class this afternoon, but I think I may cancel it. My concentration is not good today. I may be catching a cold. The photographs are still in the kitchen where I left them.

  Writing these thoughts down is helping me a little. I should have kept a diary then, it might have given my memory some peace. I might have been able to say to myself, Look, it’s all down there in black and white, there’s no need for you to remember, let it go. Yes, I might have said that. But I don’t think my memory would have paid much attention. It’s rather like that old trick I learned in school. You tell someone, ‘Whatever you do, forget about the monkey.’ They can’t, of course, it’s the one thing they can’t do. You ask, ‘Have you forgotten about the monkey yet?’ and you know they haven’t, it has lodged in their mind. The act of forgetting has itself become the trigger for memory. Some things are like that, they lodge in your mind for ever. Trying to forget just makes it worse.

  I realize I have written almost nothing about Laura, as though she were in some way unimportant. How could that be? I loved her. We met towards the beginning of her second year. She was at Newnham, I was in the early stages of my postgraduate career. Someone had started an early music consort, Musica Antiqua Cantabrigiensis it was called. They had modelled it on the Dutch Syntagma Musicum Ensemble, and, like it, drew their inspiration from Praetorius’s famous book, playing music of the years between about 1050 and 1650. I played the crumhorn, shawm, and bass recorder, Laura sang in a clear alto voice. Basiez moy, ma doulce amye, Par amour je vous en prie Non feray . . . And so we met.

  Between love-songs of Provence and hymns to the Virgin, in cold college halls and dusty churches, through the white expanse of a long midwinter, we exchanged glances. Before spring we became lovers. I remember a warm room and our clothes heaped on the floor, the first touch of her flesh against mine, the torn cry in that perfect voice
as I entered her. It seems so strange to contemplate now, that I was ever passionate.

  We married shortly after her graduation. Musica Antiqua Cantabrigiensis, like so many other ensembles of its generation, had ceased to exist, but its members re-formed in honour of that day. They played and sang for us in the parish church in Wiltshire where Laura had been christened.

  Baci soavi e cari

  Cibi della mia vita

  C’hor m’involtate hor mi rendete il core.

  Per voi convien ch’impari

  Come un’alma rapita

  Non senta il duol di morte pur si more . . .

  Kisses sweet and tender

  The food of my life,

  That steal my heart then give it back to me.

  You should understand

  How a soul that has been ravished

  Feels not the agony of death, and yet it dies . . .

  She wore a white dress with a long, long veil dotted with little golden flowers. Her hair was arranged like that of the charmante et belle Enide in the romans by Chrétien de Troyes: a golden thread woven into long gold hair, a fillet of multicoloured flowers set lightly on her head. I have a photograph, a single wedding photograph, locked in a drawer in my bedroom. Sometimes I take it out and look at it. Each time it seems to fade a little more. Long hair like gold, dried flowers like a wreath.

  We honeymooned in Venice, where the women have blonde hair and there are pathways into the past. It was summer and the streets were full and the canals filled with tourists in gondolas. We noticed none of those things. Laura showed me instead the reckless artistry of the city: the riches of the Accademia, the churches and the palaces, the mosaics of St Mark’s, the Ca’ d’Oro, the long, drifting vistas of the grey lagoon.

  In return I read to her at breakfast and late at night, long passages of prose and verse in which the city was reshaped and reinterpreted. In the days we would walk for miles, searching for the things we had read about the night before. And every evening we would return to our hotel and close the great shutters of our room and lie naked in the copper shadows, our bodies throwing off the heat of the long day. First our hands would touch, then our lips, then our bodies, and on the mottled wall shadows coupled in the dim light. Naomi was conceived thus, to the sound of water eating stone.