An English Ghost Story Read Free Page A

had heard of Louise Magellan Teazle but never read her. When younger, she had read Alan Garner and C. S. Lewis. Now, she had lost the habit. There was too much else to do.
    She imagined hiding from Rick in the fireplace and letting him find her. She was sure he would love this place too, when he saw it.
    Brian Bowker showed them every part of the house. The two towers were the most obviously inhabited, connected to the house by the hall and four rather dark, cube-shaped rooms full of fascinating junk. These would need a lot of work to be reclaimed as guest rooms or storerooms. There were two completely fitted bathrooms, and two separate toilets – one outside, in a shed-like structure – which made Tim ecstatic at the thought of ‘a bog for each of us!’ In the West Tower were the kitchen (she saw precisely where her Alessi would look its best), a walk-in larder that was a room in itself, a master bedroom that hadn’t been used since Miss Teazle’s parents’ day, and a maid’s garret which Tim instantly claimed for his own.
    The East Tower was smaller. Louise Teazle had used the ground-floor room as a study.
    ‘Good grief,’ said Dad, ‘that’s an Amstrad.’
    An old word processor stood on a desk between an upright manual typewriter and a daisy-wheel printer. Jordan let her fingers linger on the word processor’s keyboard and got a tiny static tingle.
    ‘You can tell a writer lived here,’ she said.
    The walls were covered with bookshelves, and there were three old wooden filing cabinets.
    Above the study was the bedroom the writer had slept in all her life. This, Jordan realised with a thrill, would be her room. It contained a canopied single bed, a frail-looking rocking chair by the window, an antique writing desk, a wash-stand with a matching basin and jug, a dressing table with an attached mirror and an odd little chest of drawers. Ancient toys and old-lady things were arranged like a museum exhibit. It should have been sad but somehow wasn’t. Jordan believed Miss Teazle had stayed keen throughout her long life, not letting her childhood dim but never finding memory a trap. The bed had new sheets and a duvet, the colourful cover clashing with the pastel designs of the wallpaper. Something to be fixed.
    Brian Bowker took them out through the French windows. Neglected, wild patches had been vegetable and herb gardens. Tiny blue and white flowers grew everywhere, even from the thatch of the roof and between the stones of the paths. Was there a book in the study about which plants were which? If not, she would get one from a library. She wanted to learn about birds and butterflies too. Rick had said to look out for mushrooms, poison ones and druggy ones.
    Tim ran wild like a six-year-old, flashing back a few years to the golden age before his current personality had set in. He even swung from the low branches of a tree, as if raised in a jungle by apes. Mum and Dad laughed, relaxed, not worried about traffic or lurking paedophiles. This was what being a kid must have been like in the old days, when the Beatles were pop stars and television was black and white.
    They called Tim and were shown the barn. The cider-press turned out to be a vast, complicated contraption with interesting wildlife sprouting from its innards and a wooden tub which still smelled of long-pulped apples.
    A workbench was fixed to one wall. Outmoded tools were neatly arranged on hooks above it.
    ‘Are there power points?’ Dad asked.
    The agent pointed them out. ‘Put in when they took out the old generator and hooked the Hollow up to the mains. The place didn’t even have a phone for years.’
    ‘Sounds heavenly,’ said Mum.
    Dad laughed.
    ‘That’s all changed now,’ Brian Bowker assured them.
    ‘The utilities are all in order.’
    Tim was especially taken with what looked like a child-sized tractor but turned out to be a sit-astride grass-mower.
    ‘We’ve tried to keep the place trim since Miss Teazle passed away. A lass