The haunting.

ALL OF US are haunted by something in our childhood--an event or a person, an atmosphere or a feeling. I am haunted by a house, the house my parents bought the year I was born. It was a large, crumbling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manor house, with dilapidated seventeenth-century outbuildings, in a south-western French village called Empeaux. It was a deeply unfashionable and eccentric buy at the time--though cheap--for Empeaux was much too remote--a whole thirty-five kilometres from the nearest city of Toulouse--for most people to want to live there.

Set in what seemed to us to be vast overgrown parklands, the house, which my father had named "La Nouvelle Terrebonne", was a beautiful folly, a bottomless pit swallowing money, time and trouble. It chewed up heating fuel like a hungry dragon; it required constant attention from the masons, the tilers, the electricians, the roofers. Such dispensing of money to service it aroused the envy of some of the other villagers, who called us "the Americans" and talked darkly of when the revolution came and they could expropriate us and the owners of the castle up the road.

But it was utterly magical. It was the one place in all the world where our calamitously scattered and tormented family could be together, in a cobbled and more or less cheerful mosaic. In that enchanted Narnia-like space, everything was extraordinary. It was a house my parents had chosen, but my grandmother had nurtured; a house where my parents were happy and relaxed, and where we children could roam, free of Papa's anxious worrying, which in Australia chained us to our immediate surroundings. It was a house full of strange and mysterious stories: of the haunted red room, where a young man had hanged himself a hundred years before; of the well, where a witch had been thrown, centuries ago; of the enormous elm tree outside my parents' bedroom window, planted by one of Louis XIV's ministers.

The stairs creaked, the attic was spooky, the cellar dim and creepy; there were storage antechambers to every room. Each of these storage rooms had its own strange cargo: a huge oak wardrobe full of old fur coats, including my great-grandmother's Canadian wolf-skin coat; pottery jars full of goose and duck confit in the winter; an old wicker doll's pram with my aunt's doll in it, sporting a wig made of her own, blond childhood hair; and in another, the baskets brought back by my parents from Indonesia, full of red and gold and green costumes, filigree jewellery, and two sinuous plaits of black hair--wigs made, so my mother told us in a thrillingly bloodcurdling tone, by cutting off the hair of corpses.

It was a house that breathed presence; a presence that despite the many terrible stories associated with it had a good-fairy benevolence about it. It was a presence that nurtured people, especially children; for this was a house that was not only haunted by the echoes of its earlier people, but that haunted them in turn. My father had christened it "La Nouvelle Terrebonne" after, so I thought then, his father's wealthy family's lost mansion in Terrebonne, a village near Montreal in Canada. Later, though, I learnt it came from his own lost world, the holiday house his grandmother had bought on the Medoc toast before the Second World War, which in retrospect had seemed to be the last place he had been truly happy in as a child, before the war tore his family apart.

EVERY SO OFTEN, when we were back there from Australia, we would get an impromptu visit from someone who had once lived in our Nouvelle Terrebonne; who saw the new name on the plaque on the door and said nothing about that, but wandered, with suspiciously bright eyes, through the house that had once been theirs. "We loved it so," they would always say. "We loved it, and lost it. And we dream about it so often!"

When I was a child, I thought that strange. I loved La Nouvelle Terrebonne, but I did not think of it much when we weren't there. Yet it was a deep pleasure every time to open the front door, race in, see the same things, smell the same smells. It was holiday, it was enchantment, it was adventure, it was the other world, where anything was possible.

Back in Australia, we lived a rather lonely and restricted life at times, enclosed in a European world at home, an Australian one at school, with each not meeting, only parallel. Folded in on the nucleus of family, kept from interacting on weekends and holidays with our friends, by out parents who did not fit in and never would, we had to devise most of our own entertainments. Back in Australia, I would tell stories of fairies and knights and monsters to my brothers and sisters, huddling under a table covered with a velvet curtain so I could conjure up an atmosphere of darkness and mystery.

But in La Nouvelle Terrebonne, and the rural world beyond it, we discovered the actual homes of those fairies and knights and monsters. We headed out on our bikes to neighbouring villages, past deep rustling woods, fountains and castles and ancient churches; we went to school in the little village school across the road where they still had ink bottles and slates; we found eighteenth-century books on the rubbish tip and picked cherries and apricots and greengages and figs in our own parkland.

It wasn't only beautiful, but scary, too, as the best enchanted worlds should be. There was the ghost of that sad young man, and huge rats--which on some nights you'd hear scampering around--lived in the attic. Every night an old owl hooted in the elm tree, sending shivers down my spine; and one morning, a huge, malevolent-looking toad, looking just like a witch in disguise, came hopping in through the kitchen. Papa would sometimes come in from the back garden with dead vipers, their heads crushed and bloody from being struck with the spade.

And there were family quarrels too, between my father and his parents and sisters--wild, dark quarrels whose convoluted roots stretched back into violent and troublesome pasts. But even those had for me the status of romance and legend, part of the otherworld of La Nouvelle Terrebonne. In that world, Australia receded to the status of a vague dream, just as Empeaux was whisked away to the land beyond enchantment when we were back in Sydney.

It was familiar, this going in and out of worlds; this changeling existence that was a part of all our lives. And then one day it was gone. And so was La Nouvelle Terrebonne. We all thought it would last forever, that it would be the one place we could all come home to. And indeed my grandmother and aunt, on their deathbeds, asked to be buried in the village cemetery, thinking that thus they'd always be close to us. But for my parents, the enchantment had faded long ago. Those heating bills, village envies, and constant repairs--and other, less tangible things--had worn them down, and they sold the house.

But that was when the weird part began. For we children, now grown up, became just like those melancholy ghosts, those visitors from the past, who came to the door when we were kids and asked if they could take just a little peek at the house they'd loved. Now it haunts us; haunts our dreams, and none more so than mine. It shames and disturbs me sometimes, that this house should still have such a hold on me.

EVERY TIME I go back to France, I have to go back to Empeaux, and stand in front of La Nouvelle Terrebonne, and burn with bittersweet memory and obscure anger. It feels like coming back to a love I have never renounced; but a love now physically closed to me. The old pleasure is there, but painful; and how furtively one creeps around it, not quite daring to go in, not able just to turn one's back on it. All the changes that have been visited on it make me feel angry and bereft; how dare the new owners out down those old fruit trees, not whitewash the walls, and put in those ugly blue tiles! And how clearly each part of the house is etched on my memory, much more than any house I have lived in since! I could walk through it blindfolded, and talk in detail about every nook and cranny, every secret place in it.

Standing there ready to flee if the new owners might appear, I touch the walls furtively, peer in through the gate, and remember every worn step that led down to our "park". I'm trying to conjure up the good-fairy presence, trying to get her to pay attention to me. But that's part of the house's spell; once you are gone, she turns her attention to the next people. Lump in throat, I pluck a rose petal from an old bush growing at the front, a bush that my grandmother planted, long ago. For good measure, I take a sprig of lavender too, thinking at least I'll have something real from the house, not just photographs.

I go to visit my grandmother's and aunt's grave, and stand there remembering them sitting in the garden--my blond grandmother with a glass of something light and fragrant and sophisticated in her hand, my dark, anxious-eyed aunt, dragging furiously on her cigarette--and I feel numb, unable to articulate anything, me who normally can always find words. I tell my husband and children stories about it all while we stand in the main street of Empeaux, the target of twitching curtains and curious stares. I can see in my family's eyes that they are indulging me, that to them La Nouvelle Terrebonne--which still sports that name on its door--is a nice house, but nothing more. And why should it be?

FOR A LONG TIME, the house haunted me in a kind of bittersweet way, with the sweetness uppermost. It was dream, lost world, melancholy and joy together, regret. I came to understand that this house, this place, this landscape of green hill and peaceful river and deep woods and little villages was my creative wellspring, the source of my haunting made concrete, the bricks-and-mortar manifestation of why I began to write. It was enough, for a few years, to know that.

Then the dreams became too troublesome, the regrets began to bite too deep, too bitterly. A haunting needs exorcising. Aren't we always told that? I will write a book about it, I thought. The story of a house, the story of a family. I will tell it in many voices, for it is a house of many stories. I will talk to my brothers and sisters and parents, for of course everyone has felt the house differently. It will be a wonderful project, recreating that old harmony, putting back together the exploded mosaic. We will find again our lost world, the good fairy will smile on us all again. And the past will live again for us all, brightly ...

But nothing is as it seems. And my bright and hopeful project soon became beset with darkness, as once again, the ghosts and vipers and toads and rats crawled out of the nooks and crannies of the lost world. I was not prepared for some of the disconcerting revelations that came in the wake of my idea. Not even my childhood theory of the naming of the house would survive. Exorcism, I soon came to realise, is no simple or pleasant or even exciting matter, but a painful personal ordeal. And at the end, you may not even want to go the whole way, but prefer to live with the haunting. You may not want to really gaze full upon the faces of your ghosts. For it is better to live with them than in a world emptied of presence, a world of emptiness because it has been too well analysed and understood.

Sophie Masson's latest novel is Snow, Fire, Sword (Random House Australia).