News from Norfolk

“You ain’t doin’ Halloween?” The woman from the village looked curiously at Toby, who was sitting on a half-rotten old bench in front of his cottage, stabbing intermittently at a small pumpkin with what was, in fact, a very expensive, Japanese-made kitchen knife

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“You just don’t seem the type, that’s all” said the woman. Short, unkempt, otherwise nondescript, she set down with a sigh the two heavy bags she was carrying and paused to unwrap a sweet for the grubby small child who accompanied her. 

Toby had seen the woman before. He thought perhaps she lived in one of those new houses by the river. Often she was with the grubby child, but sometimes there was also a largely toothless, mumbling, enigmatic old female to make up the trio. They were often to be seen in the village shop, or on the high road, but sometimes they also walked past his cottage. All the same, Toby, who tended to avoid his neighbours as much as possible, had never spoken with them before. 

“Not the type” the woman reiterated. “Dunno why, really. Some reckon it’s all just American, don’t they? Halloween an’ that?” 

“Well, I suppose my mother is American — was American” said Toby, crisply, still stabbing, albeit a bit more urgently now. “Actually, she’s dead now. Still American though!”

“You’ve gone an’ cut your finger! Here, let me ….”

But it was alright — just one of those stupid finger things where there was a surprisingly large amount of blood for very little actual damage — really just the most minor scratch. He sucked at the wound and then, more out of habitual good manners than anything else, accepted the slightly damp tissue that the woman proffered to him and wrapped it around his finger. He had left bloody fingerprints on the pumpkin, the knife, the bench. Now the blood was coming through the tissue, too. He hid his hand behind his back.

“You’re extremely kind,” he said, by way of thanks for the tissue. “But it’s honestly just a scratch.”

“Are you really doin’ Halloween? Trick or treat an’ that?”

In truth, Toby hadn’t really considered this. He had only acquired the pumpkin on a random whim, and started to carve it as a way of avoiding the paid work he probably ought to have been doing, but there was something disbelieving, even obscurely challenging, in the woman’s manner that seemed to demand resolve. 

“Yes, I’m definitely doing Halloween” he said, almost before he realised he was going to say it. “Trick or treat, the works.” He looked doubtfully at the grubby child. “Indeed, I’m very much here to welcome any little horrors who might wish to knock at my door. With chocolate!”

The grubby child, overwhelmed by all this, dropped her sweet into the dirt of the path and began to wail plangently, while her mother swore a little, entirely without rancour, and started to drag her away, back towards the village. 

“See you later, perhaps” said Toby, by way of dismissal.

“Halloween!” called the woman over her shoulder. “Only I just hadn’t thought it were your sort of thing.”

* * *

Eventually, after washing his still-bleeding finger, dressing it with a clean plaster then throwing the blood-soaked tissue into the fire, Toby returned to the serious business of carving the jack o’ lantern. 

This time he was more careful. He cut a disc out of the top, scraped out the seeds and the slimy, stringy, sweet-scented entrails of the thing, and then made all the deep little incisions that created the grinning mouth, the nasal cavity, the two slightly slanting, triangular eyes. From the disc at the top, he carved out a notch so that the candle, once placed inside the pumpkin, could get enough air to burn properly. This was, he congratulated himself, something that most people didn’t think to do. 

Once completed, the jack o’ lantern was placed on an enamel plate and settled onto the bench. Toby’s little cottage sat alongside a little lane — these days, more a footpath than anything else — that led from the high road to the church. There was a sort of legend that once, long ago, his cottage had been the rectory, although that seemed hard to believe, if only because the cottage itself was so low, small, rudimentary. Nowadays the actual rectory had moved to a new-built bungalow two villages away, as part of some sort of combined benefice arrangement, leaving the Old Rectory, a trim little Regency gem slightly further up the high road, inhabited by some well-intentioned people who, now that the organised religion had more or less abandoned the village, were always trying to organise things themselves.

Still, it was Toby’s cottage that the villagers passed whenever they visited the crumbling old church or indeed its damp, overgrown and largely neglected churchyard, where fastigiate yew trees lurched raucously amongst the leaning gravestones, and owls called through the night. The lights from the little shops on the high road just about reached the front of the cottage. From his window he could see the lane, and beyond it, some beech trees, whose leaves had, at this late stage of October, long since embarked upon their gradual, golden, lavishly photogenic death. 

Toby felt confident that his jack o’ lantern should be visible from the road, even well after dusk — and, as far as that went, visible from the churchyard too.

* * *

Toby’s mother had died back in February — or was it January? He couldn’t remember. Or, rather, he didn’t try very hard to remember, just as he never really tried to think much about his mother. He had learned the news almost casually one Sunday evening, in a Facebook post from a cousin, who, perhaps over-generously, assumed he already knew. 

He did, however, remember very clearly that in the dull, bruised, strangely elongated days that followed the discovery, he had been quite genuinely preoccupied, not so much with any obvious kind of shock or grief or even regret, but instead with the fear that his mother would now, somehow, be able to haunt him.

It’s not a nice thing to say, but we cannot veer around it now — Toby had disliked his mother, just as she had disliked him in return, her eldest child and her only son. When, in his late teens, he was able to escape her discouraging ambit, finally and definitively, he promptly did so, moving many thousands of miles away, making a new life for himself in a very old land, in which he was, by and large, much happier than he had ever been before. 

And so, for decades, things had stood. Toby ignored his mother’s bad-tempered letters, remained broadly indifferent to the news that she had disinherited him, eventually grew bored of her repeated claims that she would die, that she was dying, that soon she would be dead. 

But then, quite remarkably, Toby’s mother did indeed die, albeit well into her tenth decade. Of course she left everything, as she had always said she would do, to Toby’s sister, Sarah. Sarah’s chaotic lifestyle and endless need for money had meant that while Toby could escape his mother, Sarah had always come back to her eventually, needy and shameless and thick-skinned as ever. 

About this, too, Toby was largely indifferent. Truth be told, he had never had much in common with Sarah. At the same time he bore her no ill will, just a kind of bemused pity. If she could put up with their mother, she deserved everything she got. He just couldn’t have done it himself. 

Toby was not, by nature, superstitious. He had never been interested in ghosts or horror or the supernatural. He was a mild, thoughtful, rather gentle soul, who lived in a shabby old cottage in a fenland village that you wouldn’t have heard of. Although the sort of massive international fame and worldly riches that his mother had always expected for him continued to elude him — this, indeed, had been one of her main complaints about him — nevertheless he made a surprisingly good living as a commercial illustrator, with a sideline in painting pictures of other people’s houses. Sometimes, too, he sold  the odd drawing or watercolour through a friend’s gallery in London. He was very practical — he could sort out a blocked drain for himself, or rewire a mid-century light fixture — nor did he mind living alone at the end of a long dark lane right next to a churchyard.

After his mother died, though, he could not, however he tried, escape the suspicion that somehow, now that death had freed her from the constraints of earthly existence — now that her perpetually wrath-filled spirit was no longer moored to an actual body — he was somehow less safe from her than he had been previously. 

This troubled him, perhaps more so than he realised. 

* * *

Having positioned the jack o’ lantern to his satisfaction — an artist by nature as well as profession, he had travelled up and down the lane more than once to check and recheck the various sight-lines — Toby realised that he had run out of excuses to avoid working. After making  himself a cup of tea and changing that plaster once again — this time he added a folded-up bit of tissue — he returned to his desk, which occupied a central spot in the long, low, single room that constituted the ground floor of his cottage. Which is to say, he called the thing a desk, but in fact his working area was composed of an old oak door laid on top of two old saw-horses that he had scavenged from a skip years before, having a sort of affinity with anything unwanted or neglected. The resulting construction was set right up against a long, leaded window that looked out directly over the path that led up to the church. 

From this vantage point, looking directly west, into the afternoon sunshine, Toby could see anyone who passed either way. Sometimes, on a bright summer’s day, the odd church-spotter, noting how ancient the cottage clearly was, would stare blindly into the window, then jump back with a start on seeing someone looking out. On the other hand, he’d also managed to sell a few pictures that way, mostly to earnest American couples who insisted on coming inside to admire his living conditions in all their tumbledown, ostentatiously Old World glory — the beams, pamment floor, crazed limewashed plaster, the salvaged Bakelite light switches. 

“We don’t have this at home” the Americans would say. Truth be told, though, the magic was as much in their perceptions as it was in anything intrinsic to Toby’s cottage. They never seemed to notice the more prosaic features — the MacBook Air on the desk, the microwave oven, the Japanese kitchen knives in their block — any more than they noticed the sharp little pain that those references to “home” sometimes elicited in their host. 

That afternoon, though, in the dying hours of October, Toby saw neither sunshine nor tourists — only Joe from the village, hobbling past on his daily pilgrimage to visit his late wife’s grave, one or two other people from those cottages by the river, and of course that brisk, efficient, rather annoying woman from the Old Rectory, restocking the food bank in the church porch. Toby waved to Joe, who saluted him. On the other hand, Toby lowered his head and concentrated on his work when the brisk, efficient woman passed, carrying her bags of tinned veg and bottles of washing up liquid and heaven knows what else. She was nice enough, he supposed — and the food bank was obviously a worthy enterprise — but he was not in the mood, then or ever, for that sort of briskness or efficiency. 

He got down to work. His task for the day was the creation of a gouache and ink portrait of someone’s house, intended as a Christmas present for the elderly woman who lived there. Toby was working from photos, which was fine — this was his usual practice with house portraits. On his laptop computer were stored dozens of digital images from a visit earlier in the autumn.

The house itself was beautiful — a late medieval, stone-built ex priory in Kent. Looking at the photos, he found himself transported back to that old-fashioned manicured lawn, the herbaceous border just starting to die away with the start of the colder weather, his interview with the woman who had commissioned the project. By accident, he had caught her image in one of the photos, and found himself pausing over it. He remembered her elegant hands, a furtive sort of shyness only half-hidden beneath the wholly aristocratic brusqueness, the note of sadness that shot through everything that afternoon like the blade of a  knife. “Mummy’s not particularly well, so if we could have it by Christmas … not much point if she’s dead, of course, is there?” But there had been a tear in her eye as she said it. 

What must it be like to have a mother one loved, whom one wanted to please, whom one might miss once she was gone? In his dreams, Toby could sometimes fly — swimming fluently through the air with his arms and legs, as one might swim through water — or do other magical things, but try though he might, he had never been able to imagine what it must be like to have a mother, a nice mother, in the way that other people seemed to do so naturally. 

His father, heaven knows, had not been much of a parent either. Indeed, Toby sometime used to entertain himself in idle moments by imagining that his “real” father was actually one of any number of more or less famous men with whom his mother might, during the relevant time-period, have come into contact. But he never, not even once, daydreamed about having a different mother. And this was purely because he could never quite manage the leap of imagining a mother as anything pleasant, wholesome or beneficial. 

He was aware of this failure, and sometimes found himself standing back, as it were, from his own mental processes, and examining them from a slight distance, with what he hoped might be the near-godlike objectivity of an artist framing a subject. Well, he thought, he had got this far without a mother, and now she was dead, and so there was an end to that. Good riddance!

With an effort, Toby dragged his attention back to the late medieval house in Kent. He was about to start setting out his colours when an email notification flashed onto the computer screen. 

More often than not, Toby ignored his sister Sarah’s messages. Having been out of touch for years — for decades, actually, now that he thought of it — the death of their remaining parent had brought on a sort of awkward, fragile rapprochement between the two. On Toby’s side this was driven by a sense of duty. On Sarah’s, the motivation lay in the fact that since their mother’s estate had not yet gone to sale, she was still perpetually in need of money, as well as an audience for her dramas. The former, Toby refused her. The latter he sometimes, rather grudgingly, managed to supply.

Today, though, he was already on edge — he knew he was, although he couldn’t quite work out the reason — and struggling to get down to work. So it was that he read his sister’s email. 

As usual, Sarah’s message was garbled, largely misspelled, full of grammatical mistakes, infelicities and vulgarities. Of course there was a request for money — how could there not be? And of course there was a tale of woe, all of it wholly avoidable, the inevitability of which bored Toby so much that he could hardly work up even a token amount of indignation regarding it. 

But in the course of the email, Sarah also provided a link to the website of the auction house that was tasked with the project of selling off their mother’s possessions, now that Sarah had sorted through them and removed the stray odds and ends that appealed to her, all trivial things that would suit her peripatetic existence and probably soon be lost or sold off along the way.

As usual, Toby deleted Sarah’s email — but not before clicking on the auction house link. 

* * *

“Are you quite all right?”

The brisk, efficient woman from the Old Rectory stood in front of Toby as he slumped back on the bench in front of his cottage, next to the jack o’ lantern. A look of concern flickered across her face.

“What have you done to your hand?”

Toby looked at his hand with curiosity, as if it belonged to someone else. Eventually he replied, although it seemed rather hard work to do so. 

“What, that? No, that’s nothing to worry about. I scratched it earlier, carving this jack o’ lantern. Bloody thing just keeps bleeding, that’s all. I need to put another plaster on it.” 

And indeed, now that he came to look at it, he saw that blood had seeped out from the dressing again and had now got onto Toby’s corduroy trousers and the cuff of his sleeve. 

“It looks a lot worse than it is. I’m fine. Please don’t worry.”

“You don’t look fine. You look — frankly, you look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

Toby reflected on this.

Had he been speaking with the woman who had the grubby child with her, he could, he thought, have laughed the whole thing off, however insincerely, and basically ordered her away. The brisk woman, though, was a very different proposition. He did not know how to make her go away. He felt peculiarly helpless.

“Let’s sort out that dressing and get you a cup of sweet tea” said the brisk woman. And so it was that Toby found himself being herded back into his own cottage, re-bandaged and ordered into an armchair while the brisk woman bustled around the ancient Aga, opening and closing cupboard doors, looking for clean mugs and spoons — and of course taking a not-too-subtle look at the screen still open on his laptop computer, from which glowed the images of items from a forthcoming house sale somewhere in North America. 

“That was the house where I grew up” said Toby, dully. “Those were my family’s things.”

Later he had no memory of drinking the mug of tea, although he must have done so. Instead, there remained only the vague suspicion that he had gone on for far too long about what was being sold, how ineptly the items from the house sale had been catalogued — how mid-nineteenth-century kabuki prints had been labelled “exotic rice paper pictures”, hand-painted Limoges vases given to his great-grandfather by the grateful people of a province in the Philippines were being sold as “china pots”, even the rough-hewn table on which generations of lean-faced Presbyterian farmers in western Kentucky had placed the family Bible dismissed as a “cute little coffee table”.

He had talked too much, he knew, about how this was his past, his family’s past, and now it was all slipping away, all the physical remains of it, and how within days that whole past would be thrown to the four winds. His grandmother’s necklaces would be handled by people who didn’t know that his grandmother ever existed, who didn’t know her name or that she’d had beautiful violet-coloured eyes and a delightful sense of humour. His grandfather’s medals would be own by someone who didn’t know any of the funny or scary or sad stories about his grandfather. The bed in which Toby himself had slept and not slept and indeed so often lay awake crying as a child would be sold off to people who knew none of this, cared about none of this, and now there was nothing he could do about any of it, either.

Most of all, he remembered saying, again and again, that all of this was his mother’s fault, all his mother’s fault, and he hadn’t realised until that very moment what a mess she had made of everything, absolutely everything, damn her, damn her, damn her. 

But the brisk woman just listened, and nodded, and said that it was all very sad. She told him that he ought to get that finger looked at, too, just in case it needed to be stitched. And then she left. 

Afterwards, to his shame, he couldn’t remember whether he’d even got up from the armchair to see her out. 

* * *

It was mid afternoon now. Because it was October, the light was starting to fail just a little — giving notice, as it were, that it would be gone surprisingly soon, even though it was still, objectively, still bright enough to work for an hour or two yet.

Toby sat down at his desk. He had thought he would go back to the picture of the house in Kent, but as soon as he picked up a pen and considered his next move, he realised — probably correctly — that the sadness he was feeling would bleed into the image, however much he tried to prevent that, because it always did, somehow — or that maybe, worse still, the taint of recent death would infect it. And because he was basically a kind man, and he felt some sort of indistinct regard for the woman who had commissioned the work, he didn’t want that to happen. 

Anyway he set aside the Kent picture, got out a pad of paper, and picked up his pen again.

Almost without noticing what he was doing, he started drawing the house in which he had spent his childhood — a house he hadn’t visited or even thought much about, at least not consciously so, for more than three decades. 

Unlike the houses he painted for his clients, his own had had been a wholly unremarkable house. Truth be told, although it wasn’t something he went out of his way to broadcast to others, Toby had grown up in a post-war bungalow at the head of a cul-du-sac in a very ordinary, post-war American suburb, a ten-minute drive from the rather unimpressive, ordinary, charmless city centre. In aesthetic terms, spiritual terms, really any terms at all, the house in question could hardly have been more unlike his five-hundred-year-old cottage in the East Anglian fens. And yet for almost twenty years, that bunglow had been the aching centre of his unhappy world, until he had realised that there were other centres, happier and more wholesome, there for the taking. 

It was in those rooms that the great dramas of his early life had been enacted, where he had learned so much about hopelessness and heartlessness, where the seeds of the general pessimism through which he now viewed all human relations had first taken root and flourished.

And yet because this was the only home he had known, there was a sense in which he had also, in some complicated way, loved the place. 

So it was that he drew his way through the rooms, his memory having been sharpened to an almost painful degree by those auction listings. Library, parlour, the room just beyond the kitchen where they took their casual meals and had their casual rows — the more formal dining room, his parent’s room, various bathrooms and minor utility rooms — then the little wing housing Sarah’s room, and his own — there they all were, dressed with the furniture, pictures and miscellaneous items that came flocking half bashfully into his memory, not entirely sure whether they were still wanted after so many years — and of course soon to be dispersed, so that memories of them would be literally all that remained. 

The drawings weren’t bad. Toby was especially pleased with the rendering of his own bedroom — the books on the shelves, the toy soldiers, the framed portraits of his grandfather and great-grandfather in their military uniforms on the walls. But when he decided to add to the picture an image of his old dog, a nondescript terrier who had been by some distance the most reliably sympathetic member of the household, he found himself face-down on the pad of paper, sobbing his heart out. 

And then, because that rightly disgusted him — the self-pity, the bathos, the pointlessness of the whole thing — he took the drawings and tore them into bits and threw them onto the fire, where they burned for a few long minutes with a kind of ardent, desperate, insistent life, before falling away to ash that blew about a bit in the draught then came to rest on the bricks of the hearth, in the way that a pall of grimy snow might blanket a long-forgotten grave.

* * *

In a different world, Toby might have made a reasonable priest. He was, of course, basically godless, at least at the conscious level, as were and are so many of his social class and generation. Yet at the same time he not only enjoyed the business of formal ritual, but was also very good at it, bringing to it both an artist’s aesthetic sensibility and a workman-like attention to detail. 

So it was that as dark started to shroud the little lane leading up past the cottage, transforming the fastigiate yews of the churchyard into tremulous giants and making the high road seem much further away, with its sodium street lamps and automotive noises, than it actually was, Toby lit the candle and placed it inside the jack o’lantern, where it guttered fitfully for a while before gaining confidence and eventually — encouraged by that notch cut out of the top — burning rather well. He took the various bags of cheap mini chocolate bars he’d purchased earlier that day from the village shop — there were quite a lot of them, more than he had remembered — and decanted them into a pyrex bowl, before changing his mind and sliding them out into an old slipware charger instead. He only half-drew the curtains across that main big window, the one over his desk, to make sure that the cottage didn’t look too forbidding. 

Then, for want of anything better to occupy the time, he did some washing up, including those mugs and spoons from the brisk woman’s visit, and of course the sharp little Japanese kitchen knife. By way of dinner, he ate one of the mini chocolate bars from the slipwear charger, hoping it would settle his stomach, although in fact it made him feel even more queasy.

And then he sat down to wait.

* * *

In the silence — for the village was very silent that evening, even the high road, which usually ran loud with late-afternoon school run and commuting traffic — Toby still felt very much on edge. From somewhere deep within his fingertip, under the bulk of the improvised bandage, his wound throbbed and burned. Perhaps, he reflected, that brisk woman was right after all. Tomorrow, if his finger were no better, he’d go into the town to get it looked at. 

The house soon filled with shadows. His laptop computer cast a vaguely cerulean glow across the far side of the room. The thought crossed Toby’s mind that he could look again at that auction site — followed by the further thought that once the sale was finished, quite soon now, he would never have the chance to look at those items again. 

Was Toby a bad person, because he so obviously minded the loss of a table, a picture, the casual but to his own mind lapidary logic of a well-worn interior, so very much more than he had minded the actual death of his own mother? He wondered about this, briefly, drumming his wounded finger hard against his other hand, if only because there was something satisfyingly distracting in the pain. 

His mother, clearly, had thought he was a bad person. 

This reflection wasn’t, by the way, yet more tedious self-pity on Toby’s part. For it was a matter of record that the one thing Toby’s mother had left to him — her eldest child, her only son — was a letter, a message from beyond the grave, posted to him by an oblivious or self-absorbed Sarah on their late mother’s instructions, a few weeks after their mother’s death.

In the letter — the last he would ever see, he congratulated himself as he read it, in that familiar, much-dreaded handwriting — Toby’s mother had, as he had known she would, taken this final opportunity to reprise all the old favourites. She had assured him that he was indeed a terrible person, selfish and cold, a squanderer of all his natural talent and her own hard work, vulgar and embarrassing, a failure in every possible way — and also, by some distance, the worst disappointment of her life. 

That letter was another thing that had gone onto the fire. With it went any remaining hope that the story of Toby and his mother might, even at that late hour, have been redeemed by the simulacrum of some sort of happy ending.

Yet was he really a bad person? Once again, he would try to stand back from himself, as it were, and look at the situation with something aspiring towards objectivity. For this — precisely this — was the coldness his mother had identified in him, which was probably more real than some of those closest to him might have imagined. 

When your mother dies, he thought to himself, sitting there on the eve of All Hallows, drumming his bloody finger hard against his other hand because it passed the time, no one ever stops to ask what you feel about it.

They don’t ask, because they assume you feel all the normal things. Or possibly, if they know that you didn’t get on with your mother, they assume that you feel nothing.

But that isn’t how it works.  

What did I feel, when I heard?

Relief, of a sort — that she couldn’t ever hurt me again, although I guess with that letter, she tried her hardest. A kind of triumph, really — because she’s dead now, and I’m not! But also a kind of loss, because I must somehow have held on to some worn little shred of hope that somewhere, deep down, she loved me as other people’s mothers apparently love their children. 

Yes, there was a sense in which part of my life ended with her death — of which that auction sale, so incompetently catalogued, so blithely destructive, is the outward and visible sign.

But there was also a sense that I’ve only now, with her death — with the end of all those things, all her disapproval and disappointment and her voice that I can still sometimes hear inside my head — truly begun to live. 

* * *

Some time passed, and then there was a knocking at the door, intermixed with suppressed laughter. Toby rose, collected the sweets on their charger, and opened the door.

He was genuinely taken aback by what he saw.

In front of him was the grubby child. She had, however, been kitted out in a hand-me-down white satin princess dress. There was something oddly funereal about the cheap white satin, which had snagged in places. She had also been adorned with makeup — dead-white powder, tubercular blue eyeshadow, mascara that had already smudged enough to produce, even on such a plump little face, the impression of sunken eye sockets. A wild blur of scab-coloured lipstick concealed her half-open mouth.

On top of all this, though, had been applied yet more makeup — stage blood, painted-on livid bruises — all topped with a pseudo-bloody bandage wrapped round her head. Toby supposed that the effect must have been intended to replicate the look of an accident victim, a zombie, an undead toddler.

All the same, though, he was unnerved by the spectacle. He felt quite faint. 

Perhaps sensing his confusion, the small child attempted to explain the situation to him. “I dead” she proclaimed, before bursting into raucous laughter, then running to hide, shy yet clearly delighted, behind her mother, who was standing a few feet away.

“My lord, you gave me a start!” said Toby, rather unnecessarily. 

“Babe, didn’t we do you proud!” crowed the woman. “Only look at the man! You gone an’ scared him half out of his wits!”

“You certainly did” said Toby, recovering slightly. “Well done! Top effort all around.” And then he remembered about the chocolate on the charger, which he was holding in his visibly trembling hands. “Here, little one, come and have some sweets. You’ve certainly earned them.”

The tiny creature came capering out from behind her mother, but grew shy on approaching the chocolates. Toby leaned down a bit to make it easier for her to take some. He still felt light-headed. He forced himself to look at the whorish lipstick, those apparently sunken eyes, the lavish impasto of the stage-blood, and reminded himself quite consciously that none of this was real — that it was all just for fun, all just done in play. 

Meanwhile the child still seem daunted by the array of sweets set out before her. She eyed them carefully, as if making a choice on which the entirety of her future happiness might hinge. After what seemed an enormously long pause, during which Toby could feel the blood pulsing in his own temples, she reached out a grubby little hand. She extracted a miniature Mars bar, which she then clutched, desperately, to her oddly exposed little chest. 

She looked up at him as if to reassure herself that what she had done was licit. There was something so vulnerable in her look that he suddenly felt a huge surge of compassion. 

“You are very polite” he said to the child, in what he hoped were encouraging tones. He was feeling slightly better now. “Here, take a few more. No one ever comes up this path on Halloween. My house is literally the scary old house up the dark lane, next to the churchyard. You’re the first who’ve ever made the effort, after all these years.”

This was true, although of course in previous years, he’d never put out a jack o’ lantern, because in truth, under normal circumstances, he wasn’t really that type to do that sort of thing.

The child looked at her mother, and then at Toby, and then approached the charger again, but at this point she caught sight of the bloody bandage on Toby’s finger. This, too, clearly delighted her. She was evidently a cheerful, light-hearted little thing. Pointing to Toby’s finger, then to her own head, and then to Toby’s finger again, she tried to express what she evidently saw as a thoroughly happy congruence, a pleasing chord sounded for their mutual benefit amid the music of the spheres.

“Oow un me!” she said, looking right at Toby and then back at her mother. 

The adults both laughed, and the child did too. Then after a little pause, she reached gingerly into the charger and, after brief reflection, took another chocolate bar. 

“Take more, please” said Toby.

“Yeah, babe — come on, the man says you can take more of them” said the woman. She spoke pleasantly enough, but now with just the faintest hint of impatience. “Hurry up, babe, come on. You know we can’t leave Nan on her own too long.” 

As the child still seemed shy, the woman herself grabbed a few chocolate bars and stuffed them into the bag she was holding, with a sidelong look at Toby. Her look, though, was quite different from that of her daughter. It was as if the woman were daring him to object to what she was doing, but also as though she couldn’t quite help herself — as if she really wanted, indeed possibly really needed, those chocolate bars.

It was only then that it occurred to Toby, with a sort of sickly surge of revelation, that what he had assumed to have been the woman’s recreational stroll to the churchyard earlier — just a pleasant autumn walk — must have been, in fact, a visit to the food bank in the church porch. That, of course, would explain those big, heavy bags. For some reason, however, this insight embarrassed him, as if he’d caught a glimpse of something intimate, even vaguely indecent. How little, he reflected, he really knew about this woman — about any of his neighbours.

“Here, have them all” he said to the woman, and held out the charger towards her — and she held out her bag, and let him pour them all in, every last one.

This miraculous turn of events clearly amazed the child, who began to leap about in an antic fashion. “I dead! I dead dead dead!” she sang, to no one in particular, as a shiver went through the fastigiate yews, and an owl called out from the churchyard, seeking companionship. 

Toby looked first at the child, still dancing around in her vile white gown and her ghoulish makeup, and then at the woman. He had noted the latter’s impatience. He worried that she would be angry at the little girl. 

Imagine his surprise, then, when on turning towards her, he found the woman’s generally rather sullen face illuminated, however briefly, with a burst of what can only have been frank maternal pride as she regarded, there in the not-at-all dangerous darkness, her tiny, capering, artificially ghastly-looking child.

* * * 

Once the child and her mother had gone back down the lane towards the village, having taken with them all his chocolates and, in doing so, vindicated his decision to “do” Halloween, one might have imagined that Toby would have extinguished the light in the jack o’ lantern, taken a deep breath and called it a night. 

This is not, however, what happened. For while, as we have seen, Toby wasn’t normally superstitious, his apparently casual failure to blow out that candle — the fact he didn’t lock his front door, go upstairs to the little upstairs room and retire to bed — surely hints at something else.

For instead of going up to bed, Toby returned to his chair, and waited, and wondered whether it mattered that all the sweets were gone, and indeed speculated, in a disjointed sort of way, what else he could possibly offer to anyone else who came calling that night — crisps? toast?

For if the sweets had been a sort of apotropaic pay-off, a way of bribing the darker shadows of All Hallows Eve to stay away from his cottage, then he had probably made a mistake by spending them all too early in the evening. A few hours still separated him from the moment when the chimes of the old church clock would strike midnight, and the eve of All Saints would have passed. Or did he need to wait until dawn? Once again, he wasn’t quite certain. He wished that he knew these things. Well, at least he still had the jack o’ lantern. 

It would seem that he was determined to wait out those hours, whatever they were, awake and vigilant. 

Did he doze as he sat there? Probably he did. At the very least, the time seemed to pass with an odd sort of lurching gait. There was nothing he wanted to read. He dared not listen to music lest it deafen him to sounds in the lane outside. 

Once again he considered looking at his computer — at that auction website, where his past lay splayed out, stripped of its names and its stories, naked and available, at the mercy of passing strangers — but then realised the futility of this. In a few more days, it would all be sold off, Sarah would get the money which she would then proceed to lavish on the latest unsuitable boyfriend(s), after which she would be back with her badly-drafted pleas for cash transfers. The ordinary little bungalow would, itself, be sold. Life would go on. And then it would be as if his mother had never been. 

He had, in odd moments of weakness after his mother’s death, checked the obituary notices in her local paper. He had kept this up for weeks. Nothing, though, had appeared. Perhaps Sarah hadn’t got round to producing one, supplying the biographical précis and the usual flattering photo. For that was how it worked in his mother’s home town, as he remembered — obituary notices were supplied by the families themselves, larded with fulsome and often improbable praise for the qualities of the deceased — how kind and generous they had been, how much they were loved, how much they were missed. 

On reflection, Toby could quite see why Sarah, never very creative at the best of times, might have struggled with that one. 

Thinking back, he didn’t remember hearing about a funeral, either — not that he would have been invited — not that he would have gone even if he had been. Perhaps that, too, had seemed too much for Sarah. Or perhaps, in the end, there hadn’t even been any friends to invite to a funeral? Toby felt rather neutral about this. 

Unlike Sarah, who lived for today, and who probably couldn’t even have named her own long-dead grandparents, Toby had quite a feeling for the past — a kind of tenderness for anything old, imperfect, a bit knocked about by life and experience, but somehow persisting on regardless. Although he hadn’t been born in his village — although he had come to it in his late 30s, in fact — he knew the names on the tomb slabs in the church, on the lurching gravestones outside it, even the names that only turned up in the works of antiquarian authors, long forgotten by everyone else. 

Arguably, indeed, he knew his dead neighbours better than his living ones. Because that was the thing about the dead, wasn’t it? One was never quite sure where one stood with the living. With the dead, in contrast, one knew where one stood — or so, at least, Toby had assumed.

Yet that evening, he found himself returning again and again to that quite remarkable realisation, which seemed more potent that night than it had been at any point in the past — that his mother was dead, that she had left nothing much behind, and that the time would soon come when she would be totally forgotten. This pleased him.

Does that sound unkind? Probably so. Either way, though, while the dispersal of his family’s material history saddened him, as he turned it round in his mind, the notion of his mother’s oblivion increasingly brought him a kind of triumphant, definitive peace. Her taunts, her greater and lesser snobberies, her unerring instinct for whatever could make him feel most vulnerable and indeed most wounded — all of these were gone. His mother had haunted him long enough. She could go, now. He didn’t need to fear her any more.

He was thinking of this, and then about how his finger still hurt, and idly wondering whether he really did need to do something about it after all.

He might even have dozed off for a moment.

He might even have been dreaming a little. 

And then all of a sudden, for reasons he couldn’t properly explain to himself afterwards, Toby was aware of someone, or something, outside his front door. He sat up in his chair, completely awake. From where he was sitting, he had a good view both of the door, and of the long window, only half covered by the curtain pulled incompletely across it. But because the lights were switched on inside the house, however dimly, and because it was dark outside, he realised with a jolt that whoever, whatever was out there — he couldn’t see out, but they could undoubtedly see in.

This realisation revolted him. He rose to draw the curtains closed. But as he reached over his desk towards the window, a face came unsteadily into view. It was the face of a very old woman — death-white skin, sunken cheeks, bulging eyes — a terrible, toothless, vacant, familiar grin. She was staring in at him, staring right into his face, with only the glass and a few feet of space between them. 

Afterwards, Toby remembered forming the thought in his mind, very slowly, very deliberately: 

I hadn’t realised she looked like that. I hadn’t realised she ever looked so old, so thin, so frail.

I was afraid of her for all these years, and yet she was only old, and thin, and frail.

She was only some toothless old woman.

Damn her, damn her, damn her. 

* * *

“I’m so sorry” said the woman. “Nan just ain’t right in the head these days. I’m so sorry. She must have given you a right fright.”

“Don’t worry” said Toby, his voice rather throaty and unreliable. “Please don’t worry.”

They were standing outside the house, there in the near-dark, the light from the little jack o’ lantern flickering obliviously, the door to the house still open as Toby had left it. 

“She just goes a-wandering, that’s the thing. Sometimes she’s fine, she’s sharp as can be sometimes, but then sometimes …” 

The woman’s words trailed off. She was holding the elderly woman by the hand, having first taken off her own coat and eased it onto the older woman, covering up the thin night dress, adorned with a very faded portrait of a puppy and the legend “home is where my dog is”, which was apparently all that the older woman, walking barefoot, had been wearing.

“Honestly, it does my head in, it really does. Nan, you know not to go a-wandering!”

The old woman smiled at her toothlessly, vacantly. She mumbled something inaudible. 

Meanwhile the little child was still capering around a little, but haltingly, in a tired sort of way, quite different from the way she had capered before. Toby reflected that it must have been very long past her bedtime, assuming that she even had a bedtime. 

“I dead, I dead, I dead” the child was saying, very quietly now, half to herself. She was still wearing her hideous makeup, more smeared than ever. “Look Nan! I dead!” 

The woman saw Toby looking at the cheap shiny dress, the makeup, the indistinct little figure dancing about. “She wouldn’t let me take ‘em off her, you see,” the woman explained, once again apologetic. “She were that happy, what with all the sweets and that. And then we had to come out agin’ an’ look for Nan.” 

The older woman, meanwhile, was beaming at the little child, and the younger woman was looking at them both, in a way that was — what? Toby found himself trying to find the word for it. Bemused? Just a bit exhausted, really? But there was clearly something affectionate, there, too — resigned, but affectionate. She loved them both, those two, irrespective of everything that was or wasn’t wrong with them. 

“We’d better not keep you any longer. I really am so sorry.”

“Really, please don’t worry.”

And with that, the three visitors turned and walked back up the lane to the high road. The woman was leading the old lady, holding her arm, and after a little while the child ran round to the other side and took the old lady’s other hand. Toby stood and watched them until their three shapes blended into one, then turned away, along the edge of the high road, towards those new houses down by the river, about which Toby knew almost nothing at all. 

* * *

Toby considered, briefly, blowing out the candle in the jack o’ lantern, but decided to keep it burning. It wouldn’t do any harm there on that enamel plate. Overnight, he knew, the candle would burn down to nothing. On the morrow, he would put the pumpkin on the compost heap, where, over the weeks that followed, it would first degrade, stage by gradual stage, into a slick of foetid mush, then in time it would rot down to nothing. He imagined all of this. The certainty of this was soothing to him. 

Then he went back inside, and closed and locked the front door. He decided that the time had come to go to bed. It had been a long day, and tomorrow, he really wanted to finish the painting of the house in Kent, if only to please the woman who’d commissioned it. 

Also, he should probably seek out that brisk, efficient woman who lived in the Old Rectory and apologise to her for being so useless earlier. He wondered whether there was anything in the larder he could donate to that church porch food bank. Well, perhaps he could buy something relevant from the shop. He would have to ask the woman what it was that people wanted, then he’d buy some of that, whatever it was.

First, though, before going upstairs, Toby wanted to change the dressing on his finger. He did this next to the kitchen sink, because the light was better there. 

Carefully, queasily, he removed the old plaster. He had to look away for a moment, because for some reason, the sight of his own blood had always, even as a young child, made him feel faint. But he also needed to know whether he should think about going to Kings Lynn to get it stitched tomorrow. He steeled himself to take a look. 

In the harsh artificial light, his finger looked blanched and shrivelled — oddly naked, actually, like some new-born thing — with the wound itself still red, raw, faintly shocking. It still ached and throbbed. He felt a bit sick, again, looking at it like that. It was worse than he’d realised, that wound, and would take quite a while to heal.

It had, however — and he noted this with a degree of surprise so profound that it amounted almost to pleasure — at long last stopped bleeding.