Property of a Lady

In the end I compromised. I asked the taxi driver to let me down at the end of Blackberry Lane so I could walk the rest of the way. With a faint echo of my childhood, I arranged for him to collect me in an hour’s time.

Blackberry Lane is like any other English country lane. It’s fringed with hedges, and at this time of year there’s the promise of cowslips in the fields and of May blossom and lilac to come. As I walked, my spirits rose, and the lovely evocative line that opens Rebecca was strongly with me.

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again . . . The ruinous Manderley with its iron gates and blackened walls and sad secrets would not be at the end of the lane. But whatever was ahead, it was mine. I was coming home.

Everywhere was so quiet and still, I could almost have believed I had stepped back to the days when Elvira Lee lived here. There are places in England – I dare say all over the world – that have that effect. As if, here and there, something has puckered the fabric of time and tiny shards of the past can trickle out.

I went past the ruined carriageway, pausing to glance along it and sparing a thought for a manor house no longer there. I do know it’s more important for ordinary people to have decent houses and a bit of garden, but it’s such a shame that so many of England’s great houses have been lost – to fire, to flood, to improvidence or debt. If this war that’s coming lasts as long as the war that took my Harry and all those other young men, I suppose even more of them will be lost.

I don’t think Charect House will ever be lost, though. It has such a stubborn air of survival. It stands well back from Blackberry Lane behind overgrown gardens, and it’s one of those four-square red-brick houses built about a century and a half ago. (Which means everywhere will be crumbling or sagging or rotten, and it will probably cost far more money than I shall ever possess to restore it . . .)

Tacked on to the gate was an oblong of wood with the house’s name and a rusting chain that snapped in two when I lifted it. When I unlocked the door and pushed it open, there was the most tremendous feeling of ownership. Again, I thought: I am coming home.

What did I expect from the inside of the house? Gothic gloom, shrouded rooms, dusty sunlight lying across oak floors . . . ? I got that, all right. But I also got the depressing, bad-smelling evidence of forty years of neglect and dereliction. The best ghost stories don’t mention the smell you get from an old, deserted house. They don’t mention the damp, dank stench – decades of ingrained grime and mouse droppings and rusting taps that drip into green-crusted sinks.

(Actually, there was a faint sound of water dripping all the time I was there – there’s something so lonely about the sound of a tap dripping, and this was a particularly insistent, very nearly rhythmic dripping. It seemed to follow me into every room.)