October 7th – Dinah Mulock – ‘The Last House in C____ Street’ (1856) – Read it here.
I really loved this little story! It’s ostensibly a ghost story, but really a reflection of life for an older woman when she was young, the twists in life that come unexpectedly, and the circumstances for an oldest daughter when her mother dies in childbirth.
The framed narrative, making it a reminiscence, worked for me, and I liked that closure of knowing what happened, especially the additional twists of fate in the last few paragraphs, which honestly made it feel more realistic to me and the ghost sighting more believable in the story’s context.
I appreciated the very unsentimental tone of the ending, and the soft sorrow of the story itself.
As this is such a warm story, and such a human one, I wasn’t sure what my response to it would be. I was really struck by the domesticity of it, and the way grief can strike unexpectedly. It’s a very common story, too – I know people who have had similar visitations from their relatives at the moment of those relations’ deaths, where they came and sat on the end of the bed, usually.
I thought I’d do a short, sad piece from Pagham-on-Sea, mixing in the themes of lost love and seeing a ghost at the time of their passing.
Olive looked up from her book, eyes smarting in the lamp light. She hadn’t been watching the time, and the night had drawn in. Her sisters were out at a dance in a town nobody knew them, and wouldn’t be back until late. Olive had put the youngest children to bed some time ago. She hadn’t been asked to, exactly; it was an understanding that since she didn’t like dance halls, she wouldn’t be going.
Two rooms were given over for the nursery, and Sir Peter had at least handsomely provisioned it with cots and toys, but that was all they could expect from him and more than Olive wanted to take.
It was a cold night, and the fire had burned down. She had been so engrossed in her book, she hadn’t noticed, but it wasn’t just the words that caught her attention. Between the leaves was a photograph, one of the only photographs in Olive’s possession, of a tall, moustachioed man in spectacles and military dress, standing to attention in front of a bedsheet background. It had been taken on the High Street, and he had queued for two hours. Of all the people to whom he could have presented this keepsake, it had been Olive.
Olive was sure it was one of the only things her sisters didn’t know about. She and Mr. – Cpt. – John Moon met in the library each Tuesday. Her younger sister despised the library, and had better things to do than read all day. Her older sister loved to read, but would never do so in public, as she preferred to read romances in secret and pretend they were grimoires. Olive didn’t understand such fancies; she liked to keep the peace, though, and so she never brought it up. Being caught out in any sort of deceit, no matter how trivial, always made Belle terribly cross.
Mr Moon was a very normal, very polite man. He had nothing occult or esoteric about him, and he liked children, which was just as well. Olive told him she was a widow, and refused to disclose her age, and he took the rather large number of her fatherless mites in his stride, even though the oldest batch of sextuplets were now twenty-one. He didn’t ask for anything, except to occasionally take her for tea.
Olive had waved him off on the train when his regiment were called up, and he said cheerily that it would all be over by Christmas.
She still kept up the old routine; on Tuesdays, she went to the library, and one Friday a month she went to tea. The tea shops were not what they were, given the War, but for Olive it was less about the light sandwich and tasteless buns, and more about the sitting with a book by the window, at the table they had always reserved, and thinking about nothing in particular.
She knew he wasn’t coming back when he walked by the window at their appointed time, and gave her wave. “Can’t stop,” he mouthed through the thin pane of glass at her, regretfully. “Bought it at Wipers.”
Olive didn’t remember anything except his sad, apologetic smile, and the way her heart froze and her mind took over with pedantry as its only survival mechanism.
“It’s Ypres,” Olive said out loud, and realised she was talking to herself, and the lady on the nearest table said, “Pardon?” in a friendly way, thinking Olive was talking to her.
Olive had pushed her glasses further up her nose to hide her confusion, and shook her head. “It’s Ypres,” she said to her book, numb with the shock of it, and never went back to the tearooms again.
Now, with the book open on her knee and Cpt. Moon’s first, last, and only photograph resting between its pages, Olive felt that cold numbness seep through her again. “It’s Ypres,” she said softly into the gloom of the sitting room, and put another log on the fire.
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