Starlight (Vintage Classics) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Gladys and Annie Barnes are impoverished sisters who have seen better times. They live in a modest cottage in the backstreets of Highate with Mr Fisher, a mild but eccentric old man living secretively in the attic above them. Their quiet lives are thrown into confusion when a new landlord takes over; a dreaded and unscrupulous ‘rackman.’ He installs his wife in part of the cottage in the hope that there she will recover from an unspecified malady. With a mounting sense of fear, Gladys and Annie become convinced she is possessed by an evil spirit…

  About the Author

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She worked for various newspapers including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  Cold Comfort Farm

  Bassett

  Enbury Heath

  Nightingale Wood

  My American

  Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

  The Rich House

  Ticky

  The Bachelor

  Westwood

  The Matchmaker

  Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

  Here Be Dragons

  White Sand and Grey Sand

  The Charmers

  To

  A. C. B. W.

  in

  perpetual love

  STELLA GIBBONS

  Starlight

  The fated people – the worshippers and poets, the magicians and lovers – who live by the light of the stars

  1

  ‘Well, what’s he like? Hurry up, can’t you? Lord knows it’s miserable enough, stuck here all evening … I been looking for you since the church went seven.’

  Gladys Barnes did not hurry up. She just glanced through the open door into the bedroom she shared with her sister, who was sitting up in their big double bed. Annie was wearing two thickish old coats, and a woollen balaclava helmet shrouded her untidy silvery head; her eyes glared with eagerness through her glasses.

  ‘I’m putting my slippers on, should think you could see,’ Gladys’s tone was repressive, but less hurried, less nervous, than usual; this was always so, after her Sunday evening church-going.

  She unlaced her shoes without haste, and put them side by side under the table. She untied a scarf from her head and folded it and laid it in a drawer, and slipped on a large wool cardigan and settled it about her. Then, and only then, did she look again at her sister.

  ‘For ’eaven’s sake, Glad,’ said Annie, in a voice suggesting the control, with difficulty, of seething impatience.

  ‘S’pose I can take me things off, can’t I?’ Gladys advanced into the bedroom with an unhurried step, unlike her usual blundering bustle. ‘Pillows all upside down again,’ she observed, whisking away the warm untidy nest they made and shaking them, in spite of protest, into coolness and plumpness.

  ‘You can’t half be unkind, Glad,’ Annie said resentfully, ‘you know I don’t never get out not to see anyone nor hear a bit of news.’

  ‘If I don’t,’ Gladys said awfully, ‘I ought to, by this time.’ She sat down in an old Windsor chair, which she pulled out so that she was beside her sister. Then stooped, with difficulty for she was stout, and picked a thread off the worn rug.

  ‘’Ave everything comfortable, then we can enjoy ourselves,’ she observed.

  ‘Oh do get on, Glad, you aren’t half a trial.’

  Gladys leant back, with folded hands. ‘Like a cup of tea? I could do with one.’

  ‘I don’t want no tea, I want to hear what he’s like and what the vicar said and everything … I don’t know though, p’raps it would be nice. You can tell me while you’re making it.’

  Gladys’s desire to tease, concealed beneath all this picking up of bits of cotton and plumping of pillows, had apparently died away. But she did not move.

  ‘I’ll just ’ave a bit of a sit down. My legs don’t half pay me,’ she observed.

  ‘Tisn’t all that far.’ Annie was now leaning comfortably back against the pillows, and the glare from behind her glasses had subsided.

  ‘I don’t know, must be half a mile. More like three-quarters.’

  ‘Three-quarters! You and your three-quarters, it’s not more than half, if that. I used to run along there in no time. I remember one Christmas Eve I was late for that service they always have, what’s it called, the one with the candles. They have the church all dark, and walk round it singing, lovely it used to be, and then they light it up again –’

  ‘Pascal candle.’

  ‘No that’s Easter, Glad. Something – something – I shall forget my own name next.’

  ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue, too.’ There was a pause, while both sisters gave quiet attention to the matter.

  The room was small and low. It was lit by a central light, weakly shining from the middle of a ceiling dark brown with age, under a torn shade equally grimed, and furnished with pieces frail with age and the battering of many moves, spread over the seventy-odd years of the sisters’ joint life. The wallpaper’s pattern was almost indistinguishable, and older; even older. Gladys and Annie alleged that it was bunches of pink roses tied with blue ribbons. The bed and its shiny blue coverlet was just, but only just, clean.

  Dust, grease, dimness. Yet the room was cosy. Thin red curtains kept out the foggy night at the square window, and Gladys, the one who went out to work every day, knew that, from outside, they made a faint but heartening ruby glow; the little, old, broken gas-fire burned with an opulent roasting flame. It ate shillings, fair ate them, was the sisters’ verdict, but what could you do?

  On the mantelpiece there was one of the pink roses given away with a detergent packet; Gladys had put it into a green glass vase. Annie liked a bit of green; always had. The sisters had been born in the country.

  Gladys shook her head at last.

  ‘It’s no use. It’s clean gone.’

  ‘I can’t remember, neither. Put the kettle on, Glad, and l
et’s have our tea.’

  The new curate appeared to have been forgotten. But not so. When the tea had been measured into a brown pot just big enough for the two, and they had suggested having a bite to eat, and said that they really oughtn’t to, and reminded each other that it was only Sunday, there was the week to get through, and then given way as they usually did and set out the sliced bread and the margarine, the subject was reintroduced.

  ‘Go on, Glad, tell us. What’s he like?’

  ‘Young,’ pronounced Gladys, a pleased light in her big blue-grey eyes, as if at something remembered. ‘Around about twenty-six, I’d say. And ever so … severe.’

  ‘Severe! But nice-looking, is he, Glad? The Reverend – Gerald – Corliss. Posh name.’ Annie’s quick, babbling voice hurried out the words.

  ‘I wouldn’t say nice-looking. No, not to say nice-looking. He’s ever so thin.’

  ‘Well that’s not his fault. They have to be.’

  ‘No they don’t not in our church, that’s Roming Catholics.’

  ‘They do fast, Glad, I used to hear Mr Fleming tell us, when I used to go.’

  ‘Course I know some people do. Tisn’t the same.’

  Here there was an interruption to the talk.

  It was so faint that ears less accustomed to being on the alert for the tiniest sound that hinted and threatened an invasion of privacy might have overlooked it. But Gladys and Annie both heard the slow footsteps padding across the floor of the attic above, and both paused, Annie with her bread and margarine and Gladys with her cup, suspended. They exchanged significant nods.

  ‘First time to-day,’ whispered Annie. ‘Asleep, I expect. Didn’t do so well last week, can’t have. I never smelt no fish and chips last night.’

  ‘Think we ought to run up and see?’

  ‘Nar!’ Annie’s sudden violent outward sweep of her hand in rejection of the suggestion, and the harmless shout in her voice, hinted at a girlhood spent in a younger, rougher, yet more innocent London. ‘He likes to keep himself to himself. You know that.’

  ‘I know he’s very funny, you have to admit it.’

  ‘No more mental than what you are,’ Annie said obstinately. ‘On his own, no-one to look after him …’

  ‘A lot’s done for people that didn’t used to be, Annie. For mental people and old folks … and homes and that …’

  Gladys’s voice trailed away and her sister, glancing quickly at her, said, as loudly as her weak voice permitted:

  ‘It’s all that Jean calling him Old Mental. Like her sauce. He’s an educated man. Used to be a teacher, I shouldn’t wonder, and come down in the world.’

  ‘Ought to know better than going out begging, then.’

  ‘It isn’t begging, not downright it isn’t. He works,’ Annie protested.

  ‘Work! Bits of dolls made of straw – who wants them?’

  ‘Go on about the curate,’ Annie said.

  Gladys began on a rambling and roundabout account of the new curate’s first Evensong at Saint James’s, interrupted by questions from her sister about who was there, and what everybody was wearing. This evening, there was also a young girl and her boy to be described, whose banns had been published.

  The other room belonging to the sisters was both living-room and kitchen: the furniture was as battered and the rugs as worn but there was one pretty thing in it: a piano with pleated silk, once green, behind its rosewood rack, and bronze candlesticks blackened with age: in front of the grate were two unbelievably shabby armchairs. Sometimes, Gladys would help Annie to creep out and sit in one: the window in this room looked clear out across the roofs to the Heath and the rampart of Kenwood’s trees, and she could see the Fields, as they called them; ‘up the Fields’.

  Outside on ‘their’ landing was a tap above a slate sink, and under it their rubbish bucket and another, empty now, which would later contain coals. A third bucket, handleless, rusty, but neatly lined with newspaper and containing a few branches of wood with their leaves still adhering stood by the other two, but at a distance. The stairs, narrow and hardly covered in a black shrouding of bare, ancient carpet, went down into a dimness faintly haunted by the smell of cats.

  There was a family on the ground floor, a young woman and her husband and two children and another coming. Gladys took a great interest in Mr and Mrs Simms, while dismissing all their casual attempts at neighbourliness, and unfailingly describing their inquiries as to her health and welfare as ‘nosiness’. This, however, she confided to her sister alone, keeping up with the Simmses a series of hearty, daily, meaningless exclamations and smiles.

  This small house was one of a pair, standing side by side and detached from the others in a row of tall brown brick ones, in a cul-de-sac. To get to Rose Walk, a way must be found through a maze of broad roads lit by the baleful glare of lamps that poured down thin orange light, and then along side turnings where the softer glow of the old lamps shone on small hardware stores, and grocery-dairies that still carried the faintest flavour of the little Welsh-owned milk and butter shops that had kept a cow in the yard at the back fifty years ago: drapery shops selling knitting wool and nylon stockings and an occasional gay cotton dress; newsagents with windows full of pornographic paperbacks and cigarettes – and then the street curved unexpectedly and you faced an upward slope paved with big old slabs of stone. Impersonality was given to the scene by a big block of Council flats opposite, and then, as the eye wandered over the dim sheds and slopes of choked, tortured grass and the general desolation of some railway tracks, it was caught by Rose Walk, tucked away on the left.

  It was a double row of brown-brick houses, half of them bombed and boarded up, and not a whole window in one. At the end stood these two small stout cottages, painted white; thick little places, solid and secretive, with a bearded, coarsely-moulded face looking mockingly down from the wall exactly where the two were joined. The Barnes sisters lived in the far one of the two. Surprisingly, it had a name; it was called Rose Cottage. The other, equally surprisingly, was Lily Cottage, and had been unoccupied for years; even in these times, it was in such bad repair as to be uninhabitable, and this street was not on the Camden Council’s priority list for demolition.

  And all around the pair of cottages, for mile after confused mile, far as the wearied eye could reach, the lights smouldered through the foggy night and the cars crept throbbing along the over-lit roads. The poisoned air stands for thousands of feet above the city: the Wen, the great Wen, that never sleeps.

  2

  Just after the church clock had chimed, footsteps ran smartly up the stairs and paused outside the door of the outer room. A woman’s voice called, ‘Anybody home?’ Then someone knocked.

  As if suddenly pricked with a pin, Gladys sat upright, frowning, all her good-nature gone, while Annie pulled her coats closer and seemed to retreat within the balaclava. A litany of whispers began.

  ‘It’s that Jean.’

  ‘What does she want?’

  ‘Banging up ’ere. No peace.’

  ‘Don’t take no notice.’

  ‘Glad. Glad! It’s me – Jean – are you asleep?’ and more knocking.

  ‘Better go, I suppose.’ Gladys shuffled into her slippers, which she had discarded in the cosiness of Sunday evening, ‘Won’t get no peace till I do.’

  ‘Make it sharp, Glad – don’t let ’er come in here, I don’t want no Jeans round me.’

  Gladys said, ‘No fear,’ nodded reassuringly, and went out through the dark outer room to the door.

  ‘’Ullo – what’s up?’ she demanded.

  ‘Oh there you are, I thought you must be asleep or sunnick.’ Mrs Simms stood in the doorway, the light from the inner room shining dimly on her tower of yellow hair and sharp young face. ‘She was round just after tea. Told me to tell you. She’s sold the ’ouse.’

  She seemed to launch the sentence into the dusk, without preparation, cruelly.

  Gladys actually lurched forwards, as if the words had been a blow on her b
ack, clutching at her cardigan, dragging it round herself. She gave a great gasp, but instantly checked her breath, with a wild backward glance towards the inner room. She shook her head frantically, jerking her thumb towards it, and Mrs Simms significantly nodded. Gladys turned back, blundering across the room, and shut the door, mouthing something reassuring to her sister, then drew the visitor into the living-room, switching on the light. Its weak rays shone on her face, pale as lard, sweaty, fallen with terror.

  ‘She never ’as, Jean! She can’t ’ave – oh God ’ave mercy, Lord help us, what’ll I do?’

  She sank into one of the armchairs and sat there staring wildly up at the young woman. Mrs Simms stood staring back with mixed curiosity and a kind of gloating pity.

  ‘She ’as, though. Told me herself. Said would I tell you and your sister and Old Mental.’ She nodded, jerking her head at the ceiling.

  ‘Oh, Jean, isn’t it terrible – oh God, be merciful to Annie and me and that poor old gentleman –’

  ‘’Ere, who’s a gentleman? Selling dollies round people’s places, he ought to be put away. Well, that’s what she said. All fixed up, it is. She said you’d better go down to the Town ’All about it, the men’ll be coming in any time now to paint the place, she said, and do it up. Not before it was time, neither – Christ, if I’d known the kind of dump Ted was going to land me up in, I’d never ’ave married ’im, baby or no baby.’

  At another time this remark, which confirmed, from her own lips, suspicions as to the age of Mrs Simms’s eldest compared with the time she had been married, would have filled Gladys with a detective’s triumph. Now, she merely uttered a kind of moan and said faintly, as if trying to escape the torture of her thoughts:

  ‘What’ll you do, then – with those two little children – oh, isn’t it awful –’

  ‘Not to worry about us. We got a Council flat. ’Eard last night. Down Hampstead Road, it is, nearer my work. Move in end of the month. Suits me. Near the shops, plenty of company, I can walk to work – no more one and six a day touch on fares.’