An Affair to Remember by Virginia Budd

Durlston family had owned and farmed the land at Brown End since the Middle Ages, some said for much longer than that, but during the agricultural slump in the 1870s Harold, struggling with rock bottom prices, had been forced to diversify and branch out into the building trade. Doing this had proved so successful, he decided to demolish the ancient farmhouse his family had inhabited for centuries and build a modern house on the site. Luckily, he didn’t demolish everything: bits and pieces of the old house remained, including the inglenook fireplace in the sitting room. The farm buildings too were left, together with the great yard, whose crumbling walls had been pronounced by the local archaeological society to be partly Roman, the Tudor barn and the small copse behind it, the latter inhabited for time immemorial by a colony of rooks. Harold Durlston died in 1920 aged nearly ninety, both his grandsons having been killed in the first World War there was no one left to inherit, and in 1923 Brown End, together with its three hundred acres, was sold at auction – the times being what they were – at a knock-down price. In the years since then it had had a fairly chequered career. Most of the land, apart from a few acres round the house, was sold off in the thirties, and during World War Two, Suffolk being a military zone, the house had served as HQ for a contingent of the US army. Post-war owners came and went. Some doing a bit of gentrifying of the property, others leaving it to rot, but seemingly no one able to make a go of it or stay there very long, and when the Woodheads bought the house it had been empty for nearly five years. The locals said there was a curse on the place; that was why no one stayed, but when questioned were unable to say what the curse was or who had made it. This, among many other things, Sel told her, was one of the reasons why he had bought the house; there was nothing he loved more than a good, old fashioned mystery.
    “I hope you’re not afraid of ghosts, dear,” he’d asked, as they bid each other goodnight, “so far we haven’t seen any, but there’s no doubt the place has atmosphere.”
    “No,” she’d said, “I’m not afraid of ghosts, in fact I’m pretty sure they don’t exist, but I see what you mean about the atmosphere.”
    She does too, and as she draws her bedroom curtains, shutting out the darkening landscape, and prepares for her first bath in her quite gorgeous bathroom, she’s aware that in some part of her, a part that hasn’t yet declared itself, she knows its cause.
     

 
    Chapter 5
     
    “That new girl of Sel’s who arrived today, there’s something odd about her; she comes out with these weird things and there’s this funny aura.” Jack Fulton and Clarrie Woodhead are smoking a post coital cigarette in the front of Jack’s green Volvo, parked by the Grove at the top of Dog’s Head Hill, where only a few hours earlier Beatrice and Sam had met by the smoking, broken down Mini. The Mini has gone, towed away by Sid Brockly from the Half Moon Garage on the Belchester road, only wheel marks in the grass remain to show it was ever there, plus the butt end of a cigarette left by the Major.
    Jack’s right leg is beginning to get a touch of cramp; he surreptitiously looks at his watch; as always with his love life, Jack’s on a tight schedule. “Funny aura, pet, what can you mean? You know old Jack only understands words of one syllable. Anyway, ‘take people as you find them’ has always been my motto, and it hasn’t let me down yet. Talking of auras, did I ever tell you about the nun and the stamp collector?” Clarrie giggles, somehow or other Jack manages to bring out the silly schoolgirl in her. Odd, really; looking back she didn’t think she’d ever been a silly schoolgirl. There never seemed to have been time in her life to be silly, even at school, until now, that is. Perhaps that was his attraction; he gave her the youth she’d somehow missed out