For those catching up, the story thus far: Letters 1, 2, 3, and 4. And for first timers, the bibliomancy.
November 27th, 2023
Madingley Hall, The University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education
He is awake in the dark, thanks to coffee at dinner, so now he is typing this on his phone, coming up with writing prompts for the newsletter and for teaching his introductory students both. Sometimes the best exercises are done on location. Like, ten details about where you are now, as an exercise in descriptive writing:
An ample bed in a warm dark room, somewhere in Cambridge, outside of London—Madingley Hall, a house haunted with many ghosts, as he was told on arrival. Lady Ursula Hynde is the most famous of them, the original lady of the manor and wife to the man who built this Tudor house and whose son 6. tore down religious buildings in the area—presumably Catholic churches, at the time in disrepute—in order to use their materials to complete the house when it was unfinished at the time of his father’s death. Days later in his office, looking over the photos, he will see it. The way the hall looks patched together from outside, a quilt of stonework types. It may not be for this reason but it is suggestive of that reason all the same.
“She walks from the house to the church on Christmas Eve,” his host said, of the ghost. He is a novelist, Joe Mungo Reed. “Wringing her hands. How are you with ghosts?”
“I’m a bit of a medium,” he replied, thinking immediately of the impossibility of conveying what he means. He was possessed once by a ghost when he was involved in a teen coven ritual, in high school. Is there a way to casually say that? Ghosts almost never come up on these sorts of program visits. But he didn’t have to say it once his host just laughed, raised his eyebrows and added, “I’m a skeptic myself.”
Off they went.
The dinner and the talk and the drinks after the talk were all very pleasant. Joe has a strong resemblance to Eddie Redmayne and was very goodnatured about it, and typing this just now, autocorrect offers Eddie Redmaybe, a perfect drag king name for Joe’s alternate universe self.
He checks the internet for facts about the house and the ghosts, intrigued. One site notes that the house is full of secret passages and “priest holes,” used to hide Catholic priests from Protestants back in those days. He has never heard of this word, “priest hole.” It sounds like a dirty joke. But it seems there were at times entire apartments hidden in the house of a sympathetic person, used for hiding a priest from those who sought his death. What it must have been to be a priest hidden in this house, knowing it was built with stolen church materials? Knowing you were hiding, afraid for your life, because Henry VIII wanted a different marriage? Were any of the ghosts priests? Was Lady Hynde then the reason for the priest holes? These were the questions that followed him around the dining room at dinner, up the stairs and into the room where he gave his talk with the wonderful Midge Gillies, who filled in for Jill Damatac, his friend who was meant to be his discussion partner but had fallen ill.
But no ghosts eventually made their way into the rooms of the talk at the University of Cambridge creative writing program or the bar downstairs afterward. No ghosts found him in the room at night as he and Dustin made their way through the short version of their nighttime routines of brushing teeth and taking meds. The light to the room did hesitate to turn on when they first entered, and then with a bzzzt, it lit without controversy. Once the room was dark and they were both in bed, a slight drip was heard, rhythmic, not quite a hum. Dustin noted it as annoying.
“It’ll be worse when it stops though,” he said, trying to think of some dread reason for the drip, though none appeared.
“This room is warmer than our apartment,” Dustin said before falling asleep, not quite a reply. The bed was nicely large and firm, and the comforter and pillows were very comfortable. Dustin said nothing else, as he had already dropped off, and thus his own staring contest with the ceiling began.
High ceiling distracts from the small foot print of the floor, he wrote. Not a very exciting detail and a bit obvious. Soon it was so quiet that the gurgling of his stomach interrupted his thoughts, which to his dismay kept going.
The blackout curtain with a faint light at the edges covers a window they would never open the next day. A pale line runs along the floor by the bottom of the door. A single orange glow near the tiny table near the bathroom—why were all hotels now so lit up at night, even here? This was not the worst, certainly. No desk but this table instead, balancing a phone on top. Almost quaint.
He had spoken of his first novel to the students tonight and an essay he wrote about the writing of it. In the Q&A he’d said it felt like London had woken him up. It does feel true. But woken him up to what?
It wasn’t like that the first time. He has almost no memories of when he first visited London in 1990. He barely remembers the trip. When he writes to Steve, the friend he visited, and asks what he remembers, Steve offers a few details: he lived in an apartment in Peckham with three other gay roommates. They went to the Bell and danced. Steve went home with someone. London hadn’t really done much for him then. By contrast, other places on the same trip feel etched in his brain: Edinburgh, Inverness also. And Berlin. Even the train ride from Berlin to Amsterdam, before the ferry he took to London. Trying to stay up all night on the ferry so as not to fall asleep on the bench. The two young men from Florida who went with him to the They Might Be Giants concert in Edinburgh, who seemed like they were in love and triangulating with him. The couple making out drunkenly late night on a Berlin subway, then sitting back, both of their mouths smeary clownfaces, left behind by the lipstick, like a scene he would see in a movie years later.
He writes all this on his phone in the dark without dropping his phone on his face, and then finally sleep comes for him.
*
They get up late, almost too late for breakfast. After a quick shower, he assembles an English breakfast out of the materials on the buffet line, gets a filter coffee, and sits down again in the dining room of Madingley. He’s almost disappointed there were no ghosts. Dustin does much the same. A young woman they spoke to the night before is a few seats away and as she stands up, she says, with a smile, “I had a dream about you two last night. I had a dream that you had four dogs.”
Dustin says, “I had a dream we had four dogs the night before last.” He is a little amazed at this coincidence.
After she says goodbye, he wonders about this possibility of four dogs in his future and so he asks Dustin, “What kind of dogs?” They have a friend with three, one of Dustin’s best friends. Three Jack Russell terriers. Another friend of Dustin’s has a kind of dog rescue in her home, five to seven dogs at any time. This isn’t anything he wants for his life.
“Two beagles, two Golden Retrievers,” he replies, and then adds, “I would never get a beagle, not with all the baying.”
They agree that the baying would be unhappy and leave the breakfast, which is closing. A young poet teaching in the program leads them on a tour of the gardens, Alycia Pirmohamed. Designed by Capability Brown, one of the most famous garden designers of the 18th century, the hedges are fiercely trimmed, impressively so. The topiaries also.
All gardens are designed to offer views to a guest or the gardner, as if they are being offered pictures—vignettes even—as they proceed through them. At this scale the vignette is orchestral, symphonic, operatic, balletic.
The garden is fading into the late fall, a few blooms caught by the frost. He takes photos of the roses, compulsively. What will he do with them, he always wonders, and yet cannot stop himself., and he knows the answer: he will look at them later with the same longing he feels, it seems, for just about any rose. Even the last frozen buds, unlikely to bloom.
The program has a taxi waiting for them that takes them to town, where they walk the last half hour through the village and exit on a train back to London.
*
The next morning on his commute to QMUL to teach class, he gets on the Picadilly. There is a man with a bouquet of roses on the seat next to him, though they are not the sort he loves—grocery store roses, victims of a hot house somewhere. Some shopping bags sit by his feet. But there he sees an adorable dog quiet, peaceful in a crowded train. He admires a certain kind of aloof dog, like this one. He also knows this is the kind of dog who makes you want to have a dog, the dog so well-behaved you think, I too could have this dog.
He does a search to be sure once he leaves the train and has signal, and yes, it is much as he suspected. A beagle.
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I loved this. My great grandmother was head house maid and my great grandfather head gardener at Madingley Hall between the wars. After they got married Colonel Harding, who owned the hall then asked then to take on the pub in the village, the Three Horseshoes. My grandma grew up there, she played the piano in the bar to entertain the soldiers billeted in the village in WW2. My grandfad walked into the bar one day, saw her at the piano and told all his friends that she was the girl he was going to marry. Many happy family memories in Madingley.
Think how much safer our youth would be if priests either stayed in their holes or made their own priestly glory holes for use with each other.