It had taken Leo Rosendale a long time to decide to approach Dr Flint. He did not know Michael very well – his own faculty and the English Literature department did not have particularly close contact – but there had been one or two vaguely friendly meetings in the SCR or in Hall.
English literature was hardly a subject that qualified someone to grapple with Deadlight Hall. No matter how learned Michael Flint was about the Romantic poets, and no matter how many odd experiences he had had, what lay at Deadlight Hall’s dark core was worlds away from elegies in graveyards and cobwebbed mausoleums. But after today’s meeting Leo felt he had done the right thing. Dr Flint was said to be trustworthy and generally well liked by his colleagues and his students. The fact that he bore that strong resemblance to the English romantic poets – Keats before he succumbed to consumption or even Byron before he succumbed to debauchery – would have helped Flint’s popularity, of course. The professor had occasionally wished he had been given the gift of good looks himself, although good looks probably only brought trouble with the opposite sex. He sometimes thought it might be nice to have got married and had children, but these were things that had never come his way and he had not really missed them. There had been Sophie, of course, but she had been lost to him a very long time ago.
He let himself into his own rooms, and sat down to read the advertisement for Deadlight Hall’s new apartments again. There was a photograph of the Hall, which appeared to have been taken either at midnight or in the middle of a thunderstorm, and which made the old house look more like a gothic ghost setting than any house had a right to look. Leo read the description of the proposed flats again, and the comments from the builder, one Jack Hurst, whose firm were doing the work.
‘Unusual old place,’ Hurst had said. ‘But we’re hoping to retain the character of it – although we’re having to rip out some of the original features and fittings, of course.’
The original features and fittings … Such as what lay behind the iron door deep in the basement …? Leo frowned, and threw the cutting into the bin. Too many memories, and most of them so dark.
Or were the memories what nowadays were called false memories – memories that seemed real, but that had never happened? But some of the memories are real, he thought.
During all the years when Deadlight Hall had been empty and derelict and more or less forgotten, he had been able to keep the memories – real, imaginary or simply just exaggerated – banked down; to enjoy his modest, rather quiet life at Oxford. Then, a few months ago, had come this advertisement about the Hall’s renovations. At first, Leo had wondered if he could go along to the house, even present himself as a potential buyer. Would that lay the ghosts and the memories once and for all? But immediately the fear had come scudding in. To go back there, to enter that place again …
Had the builders working there – Jack Hurst and his workmen – sensed anything wrong about the house? Would Michael Flint? Or would Dr Flint return to say he had not heard or seen anything in the least peculiar, and remark what a splendid job the builders were making of the renovations?
Leo got up, opened the locked cupboard on one side of the fireplace of his study, and sat for a long time looking at what lay inside it. The trouble with old possessions was that memories clung to them, and those memories were not always good or happy. Could he discard this particular memory after so many years? Sophie was part of the memory, of course, but he did not need physical possessions to remember Sophie.
He snapped the box shut, replaced it in the cupboard, and with decision reached for the phone to dial Michael Flint’s number.
‘Professor Rosendale phoned after the meeting to say he’s decided to sell what he calls an old memory,’ said Michael to Nell West, later that evening over supper in the little house behind her Quire Court shop. ‘He wondered if you might be interested in helping with the sale of it, so I said I’d ask. I have no idea what it is, this memory.’