Rare Visitors

By Michael Martin

When Richard Pakehurst’s distraught grandson, Hugo, visits him in his beautifully situated, crumbling mansion house on the banks of Beaulieu River, he is forced to confront his own past: the bad blood of the family, the curses brought on by past misdeeds: cursed forever by violating the Old Gods, trespassing on and plundering ancient lands. The family has a history of trespass and misuse. Now unkempt and hungover, handsome grandson Hugo has come to apologise for the shame he has brought upon the family. While Richard Pakehurst waits for Hugo to confess his sins, he tells him how the family is already steeped in illegitimacy and shame and shows him evidence of his great grandfather, Godfrey Pakehurst’s, shameful conduct with the love of his life, and the family’s lethal involvement in pursuit of a lost Peruvian treasures buried on a Pacific island. When Hugo finally confesses to his sins they are worse than Richard dreaded: his grandson is quite as bad as any of his ancestors. It must all end. Richard commits the family’s past to an incriminating book and leaves it to Fate to end the family curse and see justice done. Fate duly obliges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Martin
• Release date: Feb 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301824922

Michael Martin

Michael Martin, a Mennonite pastor turned blacksmith, is founder and executive director of RAWtools Inc. and blogs at RAWtools.org. RAWtools turns guns into garden tools (and other lovely things), resourcing communities with nonviolent confrontation skills in an effort to turn stories of violence into stories of creation. RAWtools has been featured in the New York Times and on Inside Edition and NPR. Martin lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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Rare Visitors

Michael Martin

Copyright © Michael Martin 2011

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter01 Marianne

Chapter02 Hugo

Chapter03 Piers

Chapter04 Godfrey

Chapter05

Chapter06

Chapter07 Extract from The Old Gods

Chapter08

Chapter09

Chapter10 Extract from The Old Gods

Chapter11

Chapter12 Extract from The Old Gods

Chapter13

Chapter14 Extract from The Old Gods

Chapter15

Chapter16 Extract from The Old Gods

Chapter17

Epilogue August 17th 1999

‘Ill gotten gains with the Grandson die.’

Ancient quotation.

Godfrey Pakehurst 1864 - 1938

Piers Pakehurst 1891 - 1961

Richard Pakehurst 1918 -

Gerard Pakehurst 1940 - 1995

Hugo Pakehurst 1973 - 1995

Chapter 1

Marianne

I first saw Marianne in 1993; it was July. I was sitting on the teak bench beneath my favourite old oak surrounded by rhododendrons when she suddenly emerged from a side path. I had been staring up at the vast green canopy above, savouring the delicious shade, dwelling in the past, as ever, and when I looked down again I saw a beautiful, but unfamiliar young woman moving toward me with lithe purpose, as if she was the lady of the house and I the interloper. For a moment time was suspended and I thought I saw the ghost of Isabella approach me.

It seemed as if the woman knew just where to find me among the maze of paths. She addressed me by name:

‘Mr Pakehurst?’

Her sudden appearance had struck me dumb and I was further surprised that she knew my name. I seldom have visitors, invited or otherwise, and never, to my knowledge, has any uninvited visitor trespassed so deep into my private domain, let alone such a beautiful visitor.

‘Mr Pakehurst, I was wondering if I could photograph the house and gardens: so beautiful.’

She was well spoken; her pretty voice assertive and precise.

‘Why yes: a day like this, the sky so blue, the gardens so green with just the faintest cooling breeze from the river . . .’

She regarded me with an indulgent smile: what a silly, dazed, old man I must have appeared to her. I quite forgot that she had asked me a question. She soon prompted me.

‘Some photographs, for a calendar of Beaulieu, could I possibly?’

‘Yes, yes, but of course. Yes certainly. Ah . . . now?’

‘That would be too presumptuous.’

‘No, no, by all means, while the weather . . . ’

‘Well, if I could take some photographs today and then, perhaps, if I could return through the Autumn and then later, if there is snow or even ice on the river?’

‘And the Spring, oh you must capture this place in the Spring too, when everything is so lush and wild here by the river: almost like the jungle.’

She went back for her camera and then rushed around the garden photographing flowers, trees, shrubs: everything that took her immediate interest. But there was so much more she had missed; I led her round, recommending other shots. After that she photographed the main house from all sides, then she photographed the coach house and the old cottage where the gardener and his family used to live in my grandfather’s day. She photographed the old belvedere by the river bank and she took in the views up and down the Beaulieu river and finally took snaps of the rotting green stumps in the river, all that remains of the old jetty. I did not register it at the time, but there was nothing very special or professional about her small camera. On reflection it is obvious that she was making a most comprehensive study of King’s Orchard, as if for some private record.

But that was not all that happened on Marianne’s first visit here. If all she had done was to take her photographs and go then I might have been charmed to have such a pretty young woman rushing enthusiastically around my garden, but, old and foolish as I am, I would not have lost my head. No, something else occurred which swept my feet away from under me. After her hectic photographic session she led me back to where she had found me, beneath the oak tree. I invited her to sit and she sat down beside me. She thanked me effusively for letting her photograph so freely and then she gave me a most peculiar look and said:

‘Do you think they would approve?’

‘They?’ I wondered if she was making some vague whimsical allusion to what my few remaining relations might make of her presence in the garden, but I was quite wrong.

‘Oh I can feel them here watching us.’

I still did not grasp what she meant.

‘Ah, who exactly?’

‘A woman, a powerful presence.’ She gasped, her hand went to cover her mouth and she said: ‘dreadful, dreadful things once happened here.’

I felt the air leave my body as if I had been crushed. Just a few hours earlier I had been sitting at peace in my garden, at peace with my past. I fought for breath to speak: I was taken in.

‘This, this woman, is she: how is she?’

Marianne looked at me as if I was an idiot then laughed.

‘Why, she is dead.’

‘Yes I know, but . . . ?’

‘You know?’

‘I mean, whoever it is you sense here, whoever they are, they must surely be dead: there is no-one else here but us.’

‘There are others.’

‘Others, who?’

‘A sad old man, and another: an angry man, lost forever, wretched, ruined. There is a fondie too.’

‘A fondie?’

‘A fool, a simpleton, he is here too, lost, bewildered, forever.’

‘Who, who can that be?’

‘You know who the others are then?’

‘Of course not. No.’

‘And somewhere here there is a particular place . . .’

She stood up and took my hand. Suddenly I felt very afraid. I wanted to stay seated but I had an awful fascination to discover if she really knew the place. She led me along the rhododendron paths past the derelict gardener’s cottage to one of the many burgeoning spreads of rhododendrons in the garden. She crouched down low and was about to the enter the bushes: she even knew the way in. I stopped her. It was too much.

‘Wait.’

‘But I am drawn in there.’ She said.

‘Well I am not.’ I said decisively. She had proved her point, though I could not see how she could possibly know about the rhododendron glade beyond. Strangely, it never occurred to me that trickery of some kind might be involved. I walked us back to the seat beneath the oak, a place where I had always felt safe, but now I was not so sure; had Isabella always been watching me there? That was a chilling thought. I sometimes sensed my grandfather’s presence but never Isabella’s. I could not have lived another moment in King’s Orchard if I had ever sensed the presence there of Isabella.

‘What are these feelings you have? Do you have them wherever you are?’

‘Seldom. And never so powerful as here.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

‘I wonder why that should be?’

Of course I was so riddled with guilt that I had no way of knowing or even suspecting that she was tricking me, and tricking me she surely was, with a few facts and guesswork that missed her intended mark entirely and quite by chance struck another resounding chord with me instead. There was no way then that I could have suspected I was part of a game.

Marianne never said, of her own volition, another word about the ‘presences’ and I certainly never encouraged her again to talk about them. After she’d gone I wandered around the garden and even though I was shaken and made hypersensitive, try as I might, I did not sense Isabella’s presence. But in spite of that I could not dismiss the claims made by my remarkable visitor. I could not think what she would have to gain by them? She’d asked for nothing other than the freedom to photograph.

Marianne had taken enough photographs for a calendar dedicated to King’s Orchard, let alone to Beaulieu, and yet she came back for more photographs a month later, and more the next month - always unexpectedly - but always on a beautiful day. I never saw any of the photographs. I never did see the supposed calendar. Those next two visits she made were brisk and efficient, she allowed only brief pauses in the garden for conversation and then she would sweep on with her camera. But in those brief conversations I discovered that she was intelligent as well as beautiful, and of course I thought she was also clairvoyant: clearly an extraordinary young woman. I felt privileged that she had come into my life. She told me she had travelled on what one might once have called ‘the hippy trail’. I gathered that she had read a great deal, but selectively. She had not been to university and she admitted that she was not conventionally well read.

I expected her to visit again in the October, though she had not actually said she would and I had not actually invited her. Several glorious Indian summer days came and went and I discovered myself padding around all day in eager anticipation, almost excitement, at the prospect of her visit but as soon as I realised that I scolded myself. I was seventy five and she was not even thirty: what was I thinking? But what could she have possibly been thinking? ‘Here is a wealthy old fool to dupe in his large house?’ Perhaps she did see me that way but I think I would have sensed it if that had been her only motivation. I suppose I had some vague idea that the ghosts she claimed to have sensed had summoned her in the first place and continued to lure her back. I had no idea why they should do that, other than to make a fool of me, or worse.

Then my grandson, Hugo’s, twentieth birthday approached. A visit with his father, Gerard, was arranged for the first Thursday of October, and I felt an unfamiliar, awful feeling creep up on me as that day approached. What if Marianne should turn up unexpectedly when my handsome young grandson was here? I realised to my disgust that I was actually experiencing jealousy.

Marianne appeared the day before Hugo’s birthday and I was doubly overjoyed: firstly to see her and secondly to know she would not see Hugo: irrational, ridiculous feelings I know. That day she only took a few photographs. I had not expected her at all; the weather was cloudy, the light was poor. We had only been in the garden a few minutes when a sudden cold wind whipped up off the river and for the first time she accepted my invitation to come indoors but she declined my offer of food or drink. I showed her the few rooms that are still in a fit state to be viewed and then she sank down on to a faded sofa in my sitting room and I sank into my chair and we talked. What about? Do you know, I really could not say, yet we talked on and on so easily about so many things, books and places, as if we had been friends for a lifetime; as if we had no particular ages of our own at all let alone such disparate ages. She made not a mention of ‘presences’; if she sensed them again they clearly did not disturb her. That in itself was a relief.

Marianne left in the early evening and we made no future arrangements but I knew for certain she would come again in November, and come she did. She came just after eleven o’clock on November the 16th and this time she stayed until late in the evening. I don’t know what my housekeeper, Mrs Gilbert, thought that afternoon when she drove away to her home at four o’clock and left us alone together. Fortunately it was one of Mrs Gilbert’s days to work at King’s Orchard and so she was able to cook us both lunch. She made us scones for tea too. We had no supper.

Marianne visited me twice in December but she took no photographs. There was nothing new to see, no frost or snow, the river was not in spate. She must have come just to see me. Then last year she visited even more frequently, but the actual days of her visits were as unpredictable as ever. I saw her for the last time just a few weeks before last Christmas. That last time I saw her we parted the way we always parted: au revoir and not adieu, little did I know that I would never see her alive again.

I think she too had strong feelings, they brought her here, a kind of love, but not necessarily love for me: it could have been King’s Orchard that she loved. And what more could my beloved house do for me than to attract her back again and again, but if she loved my house then surely she would have had strong feelings for me too? The house is as much a part of me as my skin, my personality, we have been together - my house and I - on and off for all of my life. I lost her once for many years, when my grandfather suddenly abandoned her and sold her, but eventually, and for a terrible price, I won her back. We have grown old together and we will probably collapse and die together.

There can be a charm - dare I say a magic - in the patina of age on a once fine man, just as the patina is evident on this once fine old house. But I did conspire in one major element of deceit with Marianne: I do not believe she would have realised, looking at my house in this most desirable of locations on a bank of the Beaulieu River, that thanks to Lloyds I actually have nothing to speak of - the punishment for being a ‘name’ in the wrong Syndicates at the wrong time - I only have tenure for life at King’s Orchard, by Lloyds’ reluctant grace, and barely enough to live on besides. I should be grateful that they think I have so little time left to live that I am not worth hounding out.

I never did tell Marianne the truth about that. If she only visited me because she thought I had money, then so be it, the fact that she visited me at all was all that mattered, whatever the reasons. I suspected that one reason she loved to come here was to escape completely from the rest of her life. She never told me a word about her private life and I never inquired, though she loved to hear whatever I saw fit to repeat about my own past and my family. I confess I embellished upon much of the truth, which is to say that I lied.

Last year I lived for each of Marianne’s visits, I woke up every morning with the fresh enthusiasm and purpose of a child: would Marianne visit me today? I would feel so low immediately after a visit, knowing I would have the longest time to wait for the next one. Each visit was a rarity, a fragment to be treasured, but almost every day a visit from her was a possibility. What did we do when she came? Nothing very much: walk around the garden, sit together, sometimes, but not always, we would talk but we didn’t feel the need to talk. Silences were not awkward; they too were to be savoured. As far as I am concerned I felt a love as deep as any love I have ever felt, all the deeper for the total absence of the mischievous diversions of physical expression. Oh I have had my share of all that in my life, marvellous as some of it undoubtedly was, but I am sure the physical side accounted for more pain in my life than pleasure. One shadow hung over everything, through all the time I spent with Marianne I knew I did not deserve her. Whether or not Isabella hung in judgement over me, I suspected that I would have to pay dearly for the precious gift of Marianne’s presence.

On January 7th of this year, 1995, I discovered that it was my grandson, Hugo, who would levy the payment, who would inflict the punishment for all the pleasure Marianne gave to me. Oh I undoubtedly deserved to be punished for all the sins of my life, but Marianne deserved no punishment, that was an injustice worthy in its turn of the severest punishment.

Last Christmas came and went and I had not seen or heard from Marianne for several weeks. Then the New Year came and went and still there was not a word. I missed her; I was concerned but not alarmed. What did alarm me though was an unexpected visit from my grandson, Hugo, on January 3rd. His appearance was unwholesome and his subsequent stay was depressing in the extreme, culminating in the terrible confession he made to me. He left some terrible questions unanswered when he went away.

Remarkably, in spite of all the terrible things that have happened this year I find today that I have purpose again in my life. Others have received capital punishment for their sins but I have always been reprieved. In spite of everything I am a very fortunate man.

Chapter 2

Hugo

The morning of January 3rd 1995 was cold but dry; a stiff breeze blew in off the river and across the lawns to the house, the air smelt of salt and seaweed. I heard a distant knocking at the front door. It was not one of the days when my housekeeper, Mrs Gilbert, was due to work so I walked the long corridor to open the door myself and was astonished to see Hugo standing there before me, hollow cheeked, his long hair lank and greasy. His large lips were red and moist and looked rather grotesque against his dark unshaven jowls and ashen pallor. I scarcely recognized my grandson. Hugo was a mess. I had not seen him since the previous October when he and my son, Gerard, visited. We had afternoon tea together. Hugo was typically well groomed and smartly dressed that day.

It was Hugo’s birthday, a rather special birthday, his twenty first. I know that eighteen is supposed to be the special birthday nowadays, but I still think twenty one is more important. It was to be important for Hugo anyway, I had a special treat, not so much a surprise but undoubtedly a treat, in store for him: he was to receive the benefit of the Trust Fund I set up for him when he was born.

That pleasant October afternoon was all forgotten when I saw Hugo standing unannounced on my doorstep looking like a didecoy. I was pleased, in essence, to see him, but at the same time, rather dismayed. He had grown into a fine, tall, young man: the same good looks that I had at twenty one, the same dark brows and bushy hair, the same unpredictable smile often hovering around the heavy lips but that fateful morning as he stood on my doorstep there was no sign of a smile. He actually looked deranged and his previous natural good looks had assumed an unforgivable ugliness, way beyond natural born ugliness: it came from deep within and permeated him.

I invited Hugo indoors out of the cold wind but he hung on for a few minutes outside, as if he might get back into his car and disappear again down my driveway without a word. In the event he did agree to follow me in from the hall and down the long flag stoned corridor into the kitchen, the only warm room in the house. I saw little point in heating the rest of the huge old house when I was on my own, not with my dwindling resources.

I could see Hugo was trembling and I fancied it was not just from the cold. I set a chair for him by the range and put the kettle on to boil. He slumped down into the chair and gasped:

‘I’m done for Grandpa.’ From his expression I was sure he meant what he said.

I used to like Hugo, one does not actually have to like one’s family, love them dutifully perhaps, tolerate them, but liking them is more a matter of choice. I used to like Hugo in spite of his faults. He could be arrogant, he could be witty when he chose to be, he could be charming and most amusing company if he felt so inclined, though he had not felt so inclined in my presence for quite some time previous to this unexpected morning visit.

He’d had little enough to say for himself on his birthday in October and that had been the only time I’d seen him since his previous birthday. So when I say I used to like Hugo, I do not refer to the past simply because he is dead now. I mean that I used to like Hugo up until the last few years, when he seldom visited me and chose to offer so little of himself when he did.

For that matter I have seen very little of my son Gerard over the years; we are not a close family. I daresay Hugo regarded me in the past as a soft touch, but Gerard must surely have kept him informed about the progressive seriousness of my predicament with Lloyds, so I supposed that Hugo had concluded that I would never be a soft touch again, and consequently, not worth visiting or humouring if he did visit.

Thus it was that when Hugo turned up unexpectedly and said: ‘I am done for’, I naturally assumed his problem to be financial and that he had tried every other avenue for funds and was now desperately reduced to calling unannounced on me. Since we had never talked on a personal level about anything, I did not for one moment suspect that he had come to me with a personal problem.

‘Done for then Hugo?’ I mocked, trying to lighten his mood. He gasped again:

‘Absolutely.’

I caught a whiff of his breath; I smelled stale alcohol. More than that, I fancied that he was probably still drunk, drunk at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Hugo’s stepmother, Caroline, had mentioned in dutiful telephone calls to me over the previous few years that Hugo was giving her a few headaches with money; headaches she kept hidden from my son Gerard. If it wasn’t a bad debt then it was apparently money to pay for damages to cars, restaurants or whatever. I resisted the cynical inclination to ask Hugo straight out how much money he needed. Instead I searched for coffee