THE LAST HOME GAME.... by D.F.Lewis and Gordon Lewis
The lad was green. But only a head short of me. I took him to his first soccer match as soon as I judged him fit enough to withstand the cut and thrust of the touch-line. I had christened him Tom after Finney, not that I’m particularly religious.
He was my nephew. I’ve got no kids of my own and Tom equally had no parents. The story about them (my brother and his wife) is a long one and I have no intention to tell it here. This story is about Tom and myself. I am more hands on than Gordon Banks as far as fatherhood is concerned. The local match I took him to watch was a needle one. I supported Rovers and got Tom to support Rangers in the hope of sparking a manly rivalry. The early kick around reminded me of when I sported studs myself, roaming the goalmouth like a good ‘un. You see, one of the players in that match (Tom’s first to watch) was a spitting image of my younger self, the acclaimed new signing from across the valley.
The match ended in a draw, the teams having scored two goals each. Leaving the ground was more subdued than usual. No cries of ‘We are the champions’ and such like chants. But there was an argument between Torn and me. He seemed to think that the equalizer the Rovers scored in extra time should not have been allowed.
There was the usual trouble getting away from the ground and by the time we set off across the fields the argument was forgotten.
Arriving home there was the usual ‘Who won?’ from my wife Sarah. When she knew the result she seemed to be pleased that there would not be the usual discussion of the rights and wrongs of the match.
* * *
The days passed by without any significant happenings until the day I received a letter from a firm of solicitors in the distant town of Elmsford. It seemed they wanted to talk to me about a Great Aunt of mine who had passed on leaving a will in which I was named as a beneficiary. The time that passed to the day I was to travel to the firm’s offices were days of much speculation as to what the reading of my aunt’s will would reveal.
The solicItor’s offices were surprisingly modern, not at all the dusty musty place one expects. I was kept waiting for a while and I began to get fidgetty especially as there was no one else in the waiting room.
A door opened and a man who introduced himself as Mr Grantham ushered me into his office. Once I was seated he faced me across his desk to quietly tell me I was the sole beneficiary of Miss Agnes Fisher’s last will and testimony, and the bequests included her property, goods, chattels together with all her monies, stocks and shares etc.
There was a proviso however... I had to occupy her rambling old house for at least two years. I was to receive £50,000 immediately to defray the cost of moving from my present address and settling in the old mansion.
I remembered that I once visited the old place when I was just a youngster. All I could remember about the house was that it was reputed to be haunted. I remember too, that it was a place that looked the part of a place that deserved to be haunted.
Still in a state of shock when I arrived home I acquainted Sarah with what happened in Elmsford. She was stunned by the news. Tom was excited with the news and said he was looking forward to living in a haunted house. Sarah was less enthusiastic but soon accepted it when she knew what was involved.
***
When we eventually arrived at Argylle House, I was surprised how unfamiliar it was. The old turret that had stuck in my memory was now replaced with a shorn-off cornerstone. Mrs Boscombe — who welcomed the three of us into a cheery firelit study — explained that the turret had become unstable over the years... forcing my Great Aunt to have it scaffolded and finally removed brick by brick by local gypsies.
Tom was so excited he was allowed to wander off on his own. Hopping, he went out into the corridor. Yipping with delight, too. Nothing often fazed kids like that. Mrs Boscombe assured us that all the disused rooms in the house were firmly locked. Yet that didn’t stop him from getting lost...
She winked and smiled as she spoke of domestic matters. Of course, she had not been at Argylle House when I visited it as a youngster. That would have now made her well over a hundred. Yet, why did she seem so familiar to me? Later that night, I compared notes with Sarah and felt unacccountably relieved to discover that she also found Mrs Boscombe familiar — an impossibility since Sarah had only arrived in my life fairly recently.
Tom, we believed had been esconced in one of the servants’ bedrooms. Mrs Boscombe — a cheery, ginger-dyed mop of a lady — had seen to all the ministrations concerning the boy’s settling down for his first night here. Mrs Boscombe was the only item remaining that could possibly be described — at a push — as a servant.
Sarah and I had not seen Tom again that night since his initial foray into the maze of corridors. Football had seemed such a down-to-earth activity. A hobby that had been so healthy and character forming. I couldn’t quite put out of my mind the appearance of that youngster I’d seen playing on the occasion of Tom’s ‘first match’. That player had been so like me when I first visited Argylle House all those years before. I think I forgot to tell you how he scored both goals for the Rovers... with his head. Diving at the keeper’s feet. A brave soul.
As I fell asleep, eventually, next to Sarah, I speculated on the distance we had travelled both physically and spiritually… from the simple pleasures of soccer, followed by laughter, and a cold walk home across fields and stiles for piping hot stew and dumplings. Tom had been such a handful, full of questions about his parents — a live wire with odd moments of sadness. Now a once forgotten Great Aunt had changed all that — brought us face to face with a completely different environment of thoughts and ambitions. I couldn’t help but think that things had taken a turn for the worse. The missing turret appeared that night in my subsequent dream, drifting in and out of mist. I could even hear Tom’s high-pitched snores from whever he’d been billeted. Or so I imagined. Thus the house slept until morning.
I slept fitfully in spite of the long first day at Argylle House. If indeed, the house was haunted, the ghosts were not the noisy variety such as the poltergeist element. Apart from the occasional snore from Sarah the house seemed as quiet as the grave.
Mrs Boscombe hadn’t mentioned anything about the house being haunted, so I decided to bring up the subject at the first opportunity. As she was housekeeper only until Sarah took over the reins, I was determined to find out all I could from the lady before her stay in the house was over.
Sarah, Tom and I breakfasted in the kitchen, it being the only place that was heated. While we ate we decided the day should be spent in settling
in. We were to inspect all the rooms to see whether they were locked or not. Armed with a big bunch of the house keys we started from the cellar and gradually climbed up through the house to the topmost rooms in the attic. It became evident to us that the rooms above should remain locked, because the rambling place was much to big for us.
Mrs Boscombe was a bit hard of hearing which made having a conversation with her difficult. However I managed to draw her out on the subject of the house being haunted.
“They do say there be something in it” she said, “but I have not seen or heard anything, but Miss Agnes used to say she bad seen the ghost of a man on the top landing of the house peering down to the hail below.
Yet, there was something about Tom, that first full day at Argylle House, that didn’t please me, an intangible undercurrent; in fact, whatever it was made me unaccountably sad, though I didn’t realise quite how sad at the time
— until I experienced it again through the forces of hindsight many years later. Tom, somehow, that day, seemed less perky, slightly older in the face (even during the course of a single night), with a look of knowing in his eyes: a look I had never witnessed him make before. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have joked and ruffled his hair (as was my avuncular wont) — then questioned him about football and other trivial matters.
But we were all so concerned about the new abode and its domestic arrangements. All I could manage to utter was a cursory “Did you sleep well Tom?”
“Yes, thank you , Uncle,” he answered purposefully, then biting his tongue.
It is simply my retrospective view that had added nuances to the conversation. I forget now, however, where it ended up. Oh yes, Sarah asked Tom about the T-shirt he was wearing for breakfast. She claimed to have never seen it before. It bore a strange fairy-like creature with sugar-glass wings and
a sun like a sliced blood orange. Tom mumbled something about a bottom of
a trunk and Sarah wondered if weren’t damp.
Mrs Boscombe didn’t give it a glance — as if she already knew more about it than met the eye. She simply bustled around… from the kitchen into the future.
* * *
Years somehow passed. Not even in stories, could one imagine the time thus telescoping. Servants came and went. I recall a Miss Albion (a shamefully dishevelled lady with pinched features and long, sweeping skirts), someone who tended to help Tom with his lessons for a while, we being too far from a school for him to travel. Presumably, the Authorities had not got wind of our arrival in the area and we became too dilatory in our own way, to care much. Anyway, I also recall a tall gentleman by the name of Accrington — a moustachioed military figure who often hung around the corners of the downstairs hall and on the upstairs landing. He was, I suppose, Argylle House’s factotum, hired by Mrs Boscombe before she left us. Yes, you’re right Mrs Boscombe did leave us in the end — without too much fuss and bother, but not without me noticing a tear in her eyes as she gave our Tom a last glance.
Tom, indeed, when we come to face it, grew quickly — too quickly by half, if you ask me. During puberty, though, he still made me have a kick-around with him in the stable area, a healthy activity but strangely spiritless, trying hard to pretend we were still Finney and Lofthouse. But my own aging bones soon put paid to all such shenanigans.
Those obligatory two years (and more) at Argylle House had passed quickly by, and as the conditions on my Aunt’s will were honoured and I inherited all her estate lock, stock and barrel. As a family, Sarah, Tom and I had grown quite fond of the estate — so much so — we decided to settle down there. The top floors were opened up but there had been no sign of a ghostly apparation. Perhaps the ghost was there to haunt Aunt Agnes and when she died it simply faded away into oblivion, its last ties with being earthbound were no more.
Over the years since that first day, Tom’s private education had been very thorough and as he approached the end of his teenaged years he was ready to move on to an university. Gone were the days of bantering about football; he was now an adult, ready to go out into the world to make his own way in life. I had officially adopted him years before and was proud to call him my son, for the boy had grown to be a young man of stature. So familiar had we become he had stopped calling me uncle and I believe he was proud to call me Dad, but strangely he called my wife Sarah, I suppose because she was so much younger than me.
Though those days of his final education passed by all too quickly, his times spent at home during those university years were always looked forward to and they passed quite amiably; a diversion in the work entailed in running my estate. A job perhaps ready made for Tom to take over in my later life.
I often now gaze into the future. Tom’s university life petered out and he returned here. The world was not the place he expected, I guess. I see Tom as old as myself, sharing, perhaps, with his own son the magic of soccer. I will never see it for myself and I am rather dismayed that Tom is an only child. And being back at Argylle House is not conducive to romance...
One day, I see my own Sarah, growing strangely younger, as she does, by the day, mooning along the first floor landing, as if seeking company. Perhaps she longs for an erstwhile Mrs Boscombe who used to trip along thereabouts in the busy-body fashion that was typical of her, still young enough to dance a quiet jig to herself when she thought of the people she had once known and loved.
Accrington still works at the bottom of our long garden. I’m told he has a potting shed down there which he has managed to make weather-proof for all seasons. Miss Albion often pops in here for a convivial cup of tea. She looks remarkably ancient for her years, these days. I think she is headmistress at the nearest school, the school which Tom should have attended, could have attended, given the new trunk road that the Authorities have pushed past Argylle House, between the two new towns that have swamped Elmsford. Even now, I can hear the insidious hum of its traffic from the garden, when I venture out there.
Sarah and I have separate rooms, now. I can’t recall how this first transpired.
I often wander around the various corridors — then at my favourite spot, near the part of the roof where the missing turret was once rooted, I stand and peer from the smeary window. I kick my heels… watching a sunset, as three figures, one the spitting image of my younger self, then growing more like Tom than me, another being a younger version of Sarah, the third a fairy-like shape that carries a ball under its wing. Sometimes, when the scene repeats itself, the third figure is more like a tall gangling shadow. I often see gypsies amid the green blur of the distance beckoning. I cannot explain everything, I cannot, indeed, explain anything.
Inevitably I weep, scuffing the skirting-board, as I do. I feel that Aunt Agnes is not far away, after all… still teaching me how to head my head into an open goal. All rovers and rangers need their last home game...
