Graceful Abaddon

Harrod Jumps (3-4)

Chapter Three

To Jude's surprise, school holidays started that weekend. She had been wrong again. Georgia took leave from the National Trust. She and Heather took the train from Coventry. They were to spend a week at nanna and granddad's. They slept in the guest room nearest the road.

Heather, only ten, relished the extended stay in Bures. It was a good thing too. Jude and Peter would have some company for a while now. Peter, she guessed, was not in the best of health himself; it wasn't fair to leave him with a crazy old woman who might spill her marbles. Venturing this to Georgia, she hoped for laughter and consoling disagreement. Her daughter, whose tree-trunk thighs bespoke the scars of her divorce - Georgia, who hadn't been to church since she turned eighteen and refused to baptise Heather - she gave Jude an empty look. A clouded, somewhat saddened look that said nothing. "Mum," she sighed, shaking her head. "Mum".

July unfurled with proselytising spirit. Judith donned her mud-dried gloves, their warmth of sweat like balm. She led Heather through the meadow past the house and haggard buckthorn bush. Though just twenty yards off Colchester road, her house was kept from prying eyes, engulfed in tangled shrubs that reached five meters at their highest.

Originally a grind-mill, snug upon the Stour bank, this modest brick-and-mortar house displayed a strange amalgam. Since 1870, a string of changes subjected Harrod Jumps (for this was its mysterious name) to what might be described "the domestic mutations of a madman". If a house could be schizophrenic, Harrod Jumps would certainly qualify. Its original structure of crude, discoloured mud-brick was where the animals once worked. No longer hay-strewn, cleared of its miserly workhorse aura, this was now the dining parlour. The east wall facing the river was removed, giving way to an insulated sun-room extending over the shallow, reedy water.

Peter sat, spring mornings, by the floor-to-ceiling windows spying darting streaks of shiny silver flash beneath the floor. He dunked scotch fingers in his tea, sucked the soggy buttercream and watched the ducks dip bottoms-up and snatch little fish. In recent years the fish had vanished. The ducks preferred the grassy banks, as crickets weren't affected by the gunk that ran off from the freeway.

On the south end of the mill, an ugly boxlike structure was affixed. This section - erected 1893 (preceding the sun-room by Peter's father) - was renovated again before the turn of the century, when a curate of the Anglican church across the river took residence with his ailing wife and six children. Said renovations consisted of a second storey installation, with a teak stairwell graced with ornate carvings based on Foxe's Book of Martyrs, culminating with the upended crucifixion of Saint Peter in Rome. The three bedrooms and schoolroom of this floor remain now (the latter, albeit, turned playroom). Two extensions post-1900 other than the sun-room were the garage on the south side and the workshop built as a wedding present for Heather's ex-husband, rendered storage space for useless junk since 1998.

Given the antiquity of the place - the fact that at least two of the curate's children plus wife died of influenza - and that the building was never left alone, it disappointed Jude the place wasn't haunted. That was not to say it hadn't secrets, but nothing supernatural could be noted in its past. Such was nonsense to Peter anyway, practical and void of fancy as he was. Jude, however, would have loved a ghost to roam their halls. She liked M.R. James just as much as the next book geek.

Book geek, she thought. Heather was ahead of her, prancing through the bushes like a fawn. "Don't get too far ahead, sweetheart!"

The tranquil sounds of summer in her garden forest lulled her mind into the past. I'm a tragic book geek. Who was it said that - oh yes, the youngster at the doctor's office. Handsome fellow, though why he chose to wear foundation? ... fairy boy. "Fairy boy," Peter called him. Behind his back of course. She was not a homophobe.