Wylding Hall

Chapter 5

Nancy O’Neill

I was Will’s girlfriend for two years, from before their first album to a year or so after Wylding Hall. I was an outsider — I wasn’t from the folk scene, or any music scene at all. I was in art school at the Slade and saw an early show that Windhollow did there. It was in the cafeteria, not a proper stage or anything, and only about thirty people in the audience. But I was impressed, mostly by Will’s looks. He was quite tasty: long curly red hair and a mustache. A big man. I made him get rid of the beard after we started dating.

Guys in the trad scene tended to wear flannel shirts and corduroys; I think the intent was that they should look like manly working men. Rock and rollers were more peacocks, all very Carnaby Street and Granny Takes A Trip. Will was an early adapter of that peacock finery — all of them in Windhollow were. When I first saw them at the Slade, he was wearing floppy suede boots and a pirate shirt. No gold earring — I think Bowie was the first to do that.

Anyhow, Will was very striking and a real catch. If you were an art student in those days, it was very cool to have a musician boyfriend. And I wasn’t so bad myself! I was jealous of Arianna, of course, but she was gone so quickly it scarcely mattered.

It’s sad now to think of it. We might have been friends, Arianna and I. But that was pre-women’s lib, at least for me — my consciousness had yet to expand. We could be very immature, fighting over a bloke: he’s mine, no, he’s mine. I didn’t do much of that, but I’m ashamed to say I thought it, even with Lesley.

But only at first. Les was always one of the lads. She could drink anyone under the table, and did. We became good friends, Les and I — lost touch over the years, but we never fell out or anything like that. I’d love to see her again.

Will and I hit it off from the start. He didn’t give me much cause to be jealous. There were groupies in the folk scene, but it wasn’t like rock and roll, with fourteen-year-old girls jumping all over you.

Still, I was put off when they all went down to Hampshire for the summer. Their manager, Tom Haring, made it clear that I would not be welcome, and neither would anyone else who wasn’t part of the band. Will and I talked every weekend, and he came up to London once, just for the night. I didn’t go down until they’d been there about a month. I think it was around the end of June.

Now I can’t say this without sounding all, you know, woo-woo. But there was a very, very weird vibe at Wylding Hall. I’m sensitive to that kind of thing; you can laugh all you want, but I’m a professional psychic, and I’ve managed to make a very good living from it for the last thirty years.

Wylding Hall was a bad scene. Or, no, scratch that. “Bad” isn’t the right word. We’re not talking good and evil, Christian morality, sort of thing. This went much deeper than that. There was a sense of wrongness, of things being out of balance — again, not something you would necessarily be aware of if you were just to walk into the house. No overturned furniture or broken glass, nothing like that. Just the normal amount of mess you’d expect in a group house where a bunch of teenagers and twenty-year-olds were living. That’s how old I was — twenty — lest you think I was some mad old woman skulking about.

But as soon as I walked into that old house, I could tell something was wrong. Even before I arrived, I knew. I’d caught a ride from London as far as Farnham, then hitchhiked the rest of the way. Got picked up by a lovely old man who was a farmer in the village there; he supplied them with food, driving a truck that seemed as old as he was.

“Going to Muck Manor, then?” he asked. “Hop in. I’m going there myself.”

He had a basket of eggs and veg he was bringing down to the folks at Wylding Hall. It was a lucky thing for me — I would never have found the place by myself, and his was the only car I saw the whole time I was there. He was very friendly, not at all the old man shaking his fist that Ashton makes him out to be. His wife had died a few years before, and I think he was lonely.

But he seemed — not exactly suspicious — but reserved, when it came to everyone at Wylding Hall. I don’t even think it was them so much as the fact that they were staying at the house. He and Will actually got on very well, Will told me after, and I saw that when the farmer dropped me off. Mr. Thomas, that was his name. Really just a lovely old man.

He told me they should be careful what they got up to at the house. I thought he meant they’d all been smoking dope or hash, which certainly they would have been. I told him not to worry, things like that were sure to be exaggerated, besides which cannabis wasn’t really a drug but a medicinal herb. See, I was ahead of my time in that, too.

“None of my business what they put in their pipes,” he said. “Or down their throats. But that lad keeps walking in the woods? He should be careful.”

I said, “The gingery one?” I assumed he meant Will. I was just starting to get very much into earth magic, and Will and I had talked about how much it tied into some of the older music he was tracking down.

But he meant Julian. “No, the tall lad, the one whose face you can’t see for his hair, the one won’t talk. I see him in the woods when I’m out after the milking, before sun’s up. Looking at trees and stones.”

“There can’t be anything wrong with that,” I said. I was a bit surprised — I thought maybe Jon had gone off with a guy from the village or Ashton had brought in some girl, or they’d had a bonfire and been boozing and making a row singing. That sort of thing.

But the old man was adamant. “He should stay away from the wood. All of them. There’s old stone walls there and pits, they’ll take a fall and kill themselves. Get lost if the mist comes over.”

“Well, I’ll be sure and tell them to be careful.”

“Care won’t do it. Care killed the cat.”

There was no point arguing, so I changed the subject. He was perfectly friendly when he dropped me off. Will came running out, and Les and the rest of them, everyone happy to see me. Julian, too — he was very cheerful, laughed, and took the basket from Mr. Thomas and thanked him. Mr. Thomas didn’t say a thing, didn’t blink an eye or look askance. Everyone was perfectly cheerful and good-natured and loose; the farmer stood around chatting for a bit, and then he drove off in that claptrap truck.

As soon as he left, I could feel it. It was a beautiful day, bright sunlight and very hot, everything smelling of sun and roses from the overgrown bushes in front of the house‚ gorgeous blood-red roses; they hadn’t been trimmed back in years.

But I felt a sort of paralyzing cold. Not from the wind: it was as though it my body had suddenly turned to cold metal. I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk; just stood there staring out the drive toward the trees.

Yet the sun remained, and the butterflies hovering above the flowers, and Will and the rest all laughing and going through the basket to see what the farmer had brought them.

Yet it was so cold, I literally could not move. I couldn’t even shiver, or uncurl my fingers. You know the saying, “My blood froze”?

Well, this was far worse than that — worse than anything I could imagine. It was as though my entire body had frozen solid. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn’t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn’t even there.

And that was when I realized: This is what it’s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just the world turning and going on without you and you’ll never be part of it again.

I screamed then — really screamed, so loud they all jumped and Lesley let out a shriek and I saw her face go white.

“Nancy!” Will rushed over and grabbed me. I was sobbing and couldn’t talk, just gasped as I tried to catch my breath. “Are you all right, what happened?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, I don’t know”—that’s all I could say. Will looked at the others, and they all stared at me until at last he walked me inside and sat me down in the front room. After a few minutes, it was clear I wasn’t going to keel over dead, and at that point everyone loosened up and began to laugh.

I did too — not a very convincing laugh, but I’d given them a shock and I felt bad about it. Lesley pulled over a chair and sat beside me.

“What was that, Nancy? A sort of fit?”

I shook my head, finally nodded. “Yes, no. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Here.” She pulled out a flask of whiskey and handed it to me. “This will help what ails you.”

That was her answer to everything. But at that moment, I was glad to take it.