She described a woman, with a grey face, dressed in grey silk crinoline, moving across the atrium — exactly what the old man, Harry Stotting, had described to me.
I was stunned — and very spooked. Later, after her parents had left, I decided I had to tell Geraldine. She took it in the pragmatic way she had of dealing with most difficult issues in life. ‘You’ve met several mediums in your research — why don’t you ask one of them to come in and see what they find?’
A few days later, a medium who had helped me a lot during my writing of Possession came to the house, and I took her into the atrium and left her on her own, as she had requested.
An hour later she came up to my study, and yet again described exactly the woman in grey silk crinoline. She explained the pinpricks of light I kept seeing by telling me I was slightly psychic, so while I was not actually seeing the entire apparition, I was picking up some of its energy.
I asked her if there was anything I could do about this, and she told me that the apparition was of a deeply disturbed former resident of the house, and that it needed a clergyman to deal with it.
I felt a tad cynical about her response — but at the same time, I was now feeling deeply uncomfortable in what should have been the sanctuary of my own home. However, there was a vicar I knew who I thought would be able to help.
At the time he was officially the Vicar of Brighton — but with another hat, he was also the chief exorcist of the Church of England. That wasn’t his actual title, which was the less flaky-sounding Minister of Deliverance. A former monk with a double first from Oxford in psychology, and the son of two medics, he was as far from Max Von Sydow’s Father Merrin in The Exorcist as you could get. He is a delightful human being, with whom I had become good friends, and still am to this day. He is a modern thinker, a clergyman who has a problem with the biblical concept of God yet still retains an infectious faith.
Even so, I was a little surprised when he cheerfully entered the atrium, stood still for a couple of minutes, and then loudly and very firmly enunciated into thin air, ‘You may go now!’
He turned to me and said, ‘You should be fine now.’
Well, we were, until a mid-June day in 1994. My novel Host, which had been published the previous year by Penguin in hardback, had just been published both on two floppy discs, billed as the world’s first electronic novel, and in paperback. The thick paperback lay on a beautiful antique wooden chest which we kept in the atrium. I always put my latest book there for visitors to see. On this particular sunny morning, I was having breakfast around 7.45 a.m., while Geraldine was upstairs getting ready for work. Suddenly she called down, ‘I can smell burning!’
I suddenly realized that I could too. I turned around, and to my amazement, the copy of Host, on top of the wooden chest, was on fire!
I rushed over, grabbed the book, ran to the kitchen sink and threw it in, then turned the taps on to extinguish the flames.
There was, of course, a perfectly prosaic explanation: close to the book, on the chest, was a round glass paperweight. The hot June morning sun rays had been refracted through it, much the same way that as kids we used to set fire to things by letting the sun’s rays refract though a magnifying glass. But… the fact it had happened in this room which had had the apparition in it added a very sinister dimension.
The above story was only one of the spooky occurrences we had in this otherwise glorious house. The second happened the first weekend we spent there. It was on the Sunday morning and I said hello to our nearest neighbours, who lived in what had, in former days, been the coach house. ‘I just want to ask you,’ the cheery elderly occupant asked, ‘because my wife and I are very curious. Do you have anyone staying with a young baby this weekend?’
‘No,’ I told him.
‘Ah, must be your ghost again,’ he said, very matter-of-factly.
It turned out that he, and other neighbours across the narrow lane outside the house, would regularly hear a baby crying. We learned that in the 1920s the drawing room floor had been dug up because of damp and dry rot and the skeleton of a baby had been discovered — perhaps stillborn, or possibly even murdered way back in time.
In the grounds was a very narrow lake, a quarter of a mile long, and on the far side was a public footpath. During the decade we lived in the house, several residents of the hamlet and of surrounding villages told us how they had been chased off the footpath at dusk by a Roman centurion! To me, this was the least credible of the stories. But in many ways, one of the most credible was the one I was told the day I was collared by another of my neighbours.
The house used to own many hundreds of surrounding acres. Over time the land was sold off in parcels. Several houses had been built in the 1930s and 1950s along the far side of the lake. One day I was walking Boris along past them when the owner of one — a very down-to-earth factory manager in his forties — shouted, ‘I wish you would keep your bloody ghosts under control!’
He then told me, ‘Last Sunday, we held a christening party for my grandson here. At 4 p.m., all the guests had gone and I went and sat in the conservatory to read the Sunday Times. Suddenly the room turned icy and I shivered. I looked up and saw a monk in a cowled hood staring down at me. I thought at first it was one of my relatives playing a prank on me. I stood up and followed it into the kitchen. But he had vanished. The only person in there was my wife, doing the washing-up. There is no door out of the kitchen. She had not seen or heard anything.’
There was one more very spooky occurrence during our time there. At the front of the house were two sets of classic Georgian bay windows. One was in a spare bedroom, which we called the Blue Room, where we often put up guests, and all the time we lived there, I never felt comfortable entering it. Whenever we went away, we employed a house-sitter. On each occasion, when we returned home the house-sitter would have moved out of this room, giving a lame excuse about not liking the colour, or the morning sun, and slept somewhere else in the house.
As a postscript, I should add something of the house’s history. For much of the twentieth century it was owned by the Stobart family, the most famous member of which, Tom Stobart OBE, was a photographer, zoologist and author. A true adventurer, he was the cameraman who climbed Everest with Hunt and Hillary and took the photos of their ascent, was subsequently shot in the knee in Ethiopia, and tragically died far too young from a heart attack at the local railway station, Hassocks. One member of the family was — reputedly — a strange lady, who became a man-hating lesbian and subjected Tom’s sister Anne, who we befriended in the years before she died from a stroke, to such cruelty as a child she was never able to live a normal life or form normal relationships. Anne told us one day that this relative used to strap her hands to the side of the bed when she was a child to prevent her, should she be tempted, from touching herself.
Was she the grey lady in the atrium?
During the Second World War, the house was used to billet Canadian soldiers. After the war, during the second half of the twentieth century, three couples bought it — and subsequently divorced. We were the third. Was the grey lady in any way responsible?
I will always wonder.
Two Minutes
When he was a small boy, Rod Wexler loved to hang out on Brighton’s Palace Pier — long since renamed Brighton Pier. He liked looking down, through the holes in the metal gridding of the walkway, at the sinister, shadowy dark green water fifty feet below. And he was fascinated by the escapologist, the Great Omani, whose act (which the strange man repeated hourly, on the hour) was to tip a gallon of petrol into the sea below, drop a lighted taper to create a flaming circle, then tie himself up in a straitjacket, jump off the side of the pier into the flames, disappear below the surface, then emerge a minute or so later, triumphantly holding the straitjacket above his head, to a small ripple of applause.