'Is it still played with?' said Harriet as they were heading downstairs. 'The doll's house?'
'Oh, Olivia used to play with it all the time,.' she replied. She stopped and turned to Harriet. 'Between you and me, I think she still does.' She reached out and touched Harriet gently on the arm.
Mrs Barnard followed them to the front door and out into the front garden. Just before they reached the gate, Mrs Barnard asked them to wait while she returned to the house for a moment.
'When she comes back out,.' whispered Harriet. 'You keep her busy and I'll nip inside. I fancy a piece of silver from that cabinet we saw downstairs.'
'Right you are,.' said Maud, tappng the side of her nose and winking.
Harriet shook her head.
'Are you tipsy, you old fool?' she hissed. 'You got to keep your wits about you in this game. A couple of sips of sherry and look at you.'
'I could drink you under the table any day of the week,.' Maud hissed back. 'Show a bit of respect.'
Mrs Barnard reappeared and they immediately pulled apart and stood smiling sweetly as she approached. She stood with them at the gate in the shadow of an enormous clipped holly tree and took a bank note from a pocket in her dress.
'Really, there is no need,.' said Maud, taking it from her.
'For your expenses, Mrs Lyons,.' said Mrs Barnard.
'Thank you,.' said Harriet. 'You are very kind.
Oh!' Harriet clutched her stomach and groaned.
'Miss Lyons?' said Mrs Barnard.
'I fear the sherry may have upset my stomach,. ' she said. 'I am not used to drinking. May I use your water closet?'
'Of course,.' said Mrs Barnard. 'Let me show you . . .'
'No!' said Harriet firmly. 'Thank you. I will be quite well. I know where it is.'
Harriet hurried away, holding her stomach.
Maud smiled in admiration.
'Poor girl,.' said Mrs Barnard.
'Yes,.' replied Maud. 'She is a delicate thing really.'
'I expect the excitement of meeting Olivia has something to do with it. I had not realised your daughter shared your gift, Mrs Lyons,.' said Mrs Barnard.
'Harriet?' said Maud suspiciously. 'Gift? I am not sure I follow you, Mrs Barnard,.' said Maud, growing concerned that, for all her apparent naivety, this woman was beginning to suspect something.
'But Harriet saw Olivia in the hall.'
'Your daughter?' said Maud puzzled. 'I fail to see how . . .'
'I do not have any children, sadly,.' said Mrs Barnard. 'Olivia was my sister.'
Maud frowned.
'I don't follow you, Mrs Barnard.'
'Olivia died when we were children,.' said Mrs Barnard. 'As I told you upstairs. Harriet was blessed enough to meet and talk with her spirit.'
Maud looked from Mrs Barnard to the house and back again in utter amazement.
Harriet was surprised to see that the so-called Un-Door was slightly ajar. The whole story had been nonsense! But why - why would they lie about something like that? Perhaps she should have a quick look around.
As soon as Harriet opened the door and stepped in, she was blinded by dazzling light, bursting in from one side of the room as if it were a conservatory. She turned back to the door to leave. But when she grabbed the door handle it would not move. The door was locked.
Harriet turned back to the room to see if there was a connecting door to the other room or some other way out. When she did so, she saw a figure looming towards her out of the blazing light. Beyond her she could just make out other girls sitting in chairs about the room, staring horribly as if in a trance, their faces gaudily painted with rosy cheeks and arched eyebrows, slumped in stiff and awkward poses.
At first she had thought that she could not make out the features of the approaching girl because of the light behind her head, but now, with a terrible, falling feeling, as if she had stepped from a high cliff, she realised that the girl had no features to see. Harriet pounded on the door for help.
'Please!' she shouted. 'Maud! For God's sake! Help me! Help me!'
But that infinitesimal beat on the doll's house door was lost to everyone. Everyone but Olivia.
I was so gripped by my uncle's story that it was some time before I thought to look down at the doll he had placed in my hand before he began.
I brought the tiny figure up to my face and studied it afresh. The rosy firelight glow warmed up the features of the face and made the detailed painting even more startling. The features of the girl's face seemed impossibly, unfeasibly real.
'So, Edgar,.' said Uncle Montague. 'Does that tale in any way alter your views on contact between the living and the dead?'
'Well,.' I said. 'I would have to say that, respectfully, it does not. It is, after all, merely a story.'
'Merely a story?' said my uncle with a sudden violence that made me drop the doll into my lap. 'Merely a story? Is that what you think? That these tales are my inventions?'
'Well . . . yes . . . I rather thought they were. I am sorry if I have offended you, sir.'
'No, Edgar,.' said Uncle Montague with a sigh. 'I am sorry to have snapped at you. What else would you think? I shall take that from you now.' He held out his long hand towards the doll. 'A lady does not like to be stared at.'
I gave him the doll and he walked over to the cabinet, putting it back where it had been. Again, he turned his back to me and looked out of the window. I could see that I had wounded his feelings in some way, but I was not sure how. Surely he did not expect me to accept these stories as true. How could they be?
'Come and look at this, Edgar,.' said Uncle Montague.
He had moved over to examine a group of framed prints near the window. I got up to join him and as I walked towards him I had the strangest feeling that there was someone outside by the window, someone who ducked out of sight as I approached. I peered out but there was nothing to be seen.
My uncle was looking at a framed engraving of some sort of sculpture. It had the rather stilted quality of ancient engravings, but nevertheless it rendered its subject with enough skill to make it quite a startling image.
The sculpture itself took the form of a horned devil and even to my untrained eyes it had a medieval look about it. So it proved to be.
Initially I thought it was a gargoyle, as it was the kind of grotesque one frequently sees jutting out of a church tower, but on closer inspection I could see that the thing was carved in wood. I could also now see that it was part of the fabric of a church pew.
Quite why anyone - the original woodcarver or the engraver - would want to take the trouble to portray anything quite so odious was beyond me, but my uncle stared at it as if it were a portrait of a favourite granddaughter.
'Is the engraving valuable, sir?' I asked.
'The engraving?' said Uncle Montague. 'No, Edgar. It is not particularly valuable. It is the subject matter that is significant.'
'But what is it, Uncle?'
'Why, Edgar, it is a demon, of course.'
'Yes, Uncle,.' I said. 'I meant to ask why it was so significant.'
'That is its significance,.' he answered more solemnly. 'It is a demon.'
I waited in vain for my uncle to elaborate upon this opaque statement.
'Is there some story connected with this engraving, Uncle?' I asked, after the pause had become uncomfortably long.
'How perceptive of you, Edgar,.' he said. 'But would you really want to hear another of my foolish inventions?'
'I have not called them foolish, sir,.' I said. 'And I would very much like to hear another of your stories.'
Uncle Montague chuckled softly and laid his hand upon my shoulder.
'Then let us sit down once more and I shall tell you a tale concerning our curious friend here.'
We returned to our chairs. Again, I could have sworn that I heard footsteps outside the window and the sound of whispering - of children whispering. My uncle seemed oblivious to it and so I took it to be my imagination, excited by my uncle's stories, playing tricks on me.
'But I wonder if this tale may be too disturbing for you,.' said Uncle Montague, seeing me peering towards the window, turning to the fire and prodding at a log with the poker.
'Really, Uncle,.' I said, pushing out my jaw. 'I am not as timid as you seem to think.'
Uncle Montague lay down the poker and turned to me with a warm smile - a smile that quickly faded from his face as he linked his long fingers together and began this new story.
Thomas Haynes first saw the tinker outside the bank in Sidney Street. His parents were inside, dealing with some dull financial matter, and Thomas was waiting in the street, watching the tide of Cambridge life flow past.
As he was standing there, the tinker shuffled by, dressed in a long frayed top coat and dusty wide-brimmed hat, his filthy hands gripping the spars of a rickety barrow, filled to overflowing with a seemingly random collection of rugs, clothes, shoes, scrap metal and broken furniture.
A rusting birdcage hung from a hook and chain, clunking against the side of the barrow with every step the tinker took and Thomas was amazed to see a thin, bedraggled monkey, wearing a gaudy waistcoat and tiny red fez, suddenly emerge from under a blanket and come to the side to inspect him.
The tinker stopped in his tracks and turned to face Thomas. His eyes twinkled in the shadow of his hat and narrowed. A strange expression played across his face, as if he recognised him, though Thomas was sure they had never met.
Thomas was unnerved by this unwanted eye contact and was about to retreat into the bank when at that very moment his parents stepped out. They were about to walk on and go for lunch, when his father noticed the tinker's barrow still standing beside them.
'Good Lord,.' he said, reaching towards something among the bric-a-brac. The monkey dashed towards him, baring his teeth and Thomas's father pulled back his hand.
'Filthy creature!' he hissed, shooing him away. The monkey ran chattering to the tinker, jumping on to his shoulder and staring back at Thomas's father malevolently. The tinker did not move.
'I say!' said Thomas's father. 'I say - you there!'
The tinker still did not move.
'The impertinence of the man,.' muttered Thomas's father. 'You there!' he shouted, slapping the side of the barrow. The tinker flinched slightly and turned slowly round. His grim and unpleasant face wore the beaten and fragile expression Thomas had seen many times on his grandmother's face during one of her migraine attacks.
'What can I do for you, governor?' he said in a comically loud voice, as if he were calling from the other side of a river rather than two feet away.
'The poor man's clearly a little deaf, dear,.' said Thomas's mother, putting her hand to her mouth to hide her smile.
'There's something in your cart here,.' shouted his father. 'Your monkey . . .'
'Pablo won't hurt you, sir,.' shouted the tinker.
'Don't be afeared.'
'Very well, then,.' shouted Thomas's father, feeling a little self-conscious at the volume of their conversation. He reached in gingerly and grabbed a carved wooden figure. He held it up and inspected it carefully.
Thomas leaned forward. The carving resembled a rather elaborate bookend, fashioned into the shape of a horned demon with folded bat's wings, crouched on its haunches with its hand to its face in the pose of someone whispering, its long saturnine face frozen into a wide grin.
'What is it, Father?' said Thomas, fascinated and revolted in equal measure.
'I believe it to be a medieval bench end, Thomas,. ' said his father, turning it over in his hands admiringly. 'They sit at the end of pews in some old churches. Do you remember the ones we saw in Suffolk last year?'
Thomas remembered now. There had been elaborate carvings of animals and figures in medieval dress. But there had been nothing quite like this.
'Not for sale,.' shouted the tinker.
'How did you come by this?' said Thomas's father imperiously.
'It's not for sale,.' repeated the tinker even more loudly, already beginning to turn away.
'Do not adopt that impertinent tone with me,.' said Thomas's father. 'I have a good mind to fetch a policeman!'
'It still won't be for sale,.' said the tinker over his shoulder, pulling on the barrow and moving away towards the market.
'How dare you!'
'Rupert, please,.' said Thomas's mother. 'You are causing a scene. People are staring.'
Thomas looked about and saw that people were indeed looking their way and two urchins, one with no shoes on his feet, were pointing and giggling. Thomas's father bristled, his face reddening, and he stroked his moustache with his thumb and forefinger a number of times before smiling at his wife.
'Very well, then. Who's for lunch?' he said, his humour restored, clapping Thomas on the shoulder as they walked on.
But over lunch, Thomas's father soon returned to the subject of the tinker and the demon bench end.
'What is the world coming to,.' he said wearily, 'when something like that can simply be removed from a place of worship without any redress whatsoever?'
'It was rather ugly if you ask me,.' said Thomas's mother.
'Grotesque, I will grant you,.' said his father, 'but all the more fascinating for it. But he should not have it. It was part of the fabric of a church, darling.'
'And what about all those beastly things at the museum?' teased his mother. 'Were they not ripped out of temples and tombs and such like?'