Ghosts (13 page)

A robin comes to forage where I dig, a tough-looking type. It watches me with a glint and darts under my feet after its prey. Seagulls swoop and blackbirds fly up at a low angle, fluting shrilly. This morning when I was hoeing between the potato beds a rat appeared, nosing along under the whitewashed wall that separates my garden from the yard. It must have been sick: when it saw me it did not run away, only sat up on its hunkers and looked at me in weary surprise. (Where is that dog?) I thought of Alba Longa, of course, of Carthage in flames, all that. What a mind I have, stuffed with lofty trivia! After a moment or two the thing turned and made off, going at a sort of sideways wallow and dragging its fat pink tail over the clay. Trust me: the quick all around and I find myself face to face with a rat dying of decrepitude. I suppose I should have killed it. I am not so
good at killing things, any more. Will it come back? In dreams, perhaps.

All this, the garden and so on, why does it remind me so strongly of boyhood days? God knows, I was never a tow-haired child of nature, ensnared with flowers and romping on the grass. Cigarettes and dirty girls were my strongest interests. Yet when I trail out here with my hoe I feel the chime of an immemorial happiness. Is it that the past has become pastoral, as much a fancy as in my mind this garden is, perpetually vernal, aglow with a stylised, prelapsarian sunlight such as that which shines with melancholy radiance over Vaublin’s pleasure parks? That is what I am digging for, I suppose, that is what I am trying to uncover: the forfeited, impossible, never to be found again state of simple innocence.

So picture me there in this still-springlike early summer weather, in my peasant’s blouse and cracked brogues, delving among the burdocks, an unlikely Silvius, striving by harmless industry to do a repair job on what remains of my rotten soul. The early rain has ceased and the quicksilver air is full of flash and chill fire; a surprise, really, this drenched brilliance. There is a sort of ringing everywhere and everything is damp and silky under a pale, nude sky. We had a wet winter, summer has made a late start, and the clay is sodden still, a rich, dark stuff that heaves and slurps when I plunge my blade into it. All moves slowly, calmly, at a mysteriously ordained, uniform pace; I have the sense of a vast clock marking off the slow strokes, one by one by one. I pause and lean on the handle of the hoe with my face lifted to the light, ankles crossed and feet in the clay (which is their true medium, after all) and think of nothing. There is a tree at the corner of the garden, I am not sure what it is, a beech, I believe, I shall call it a beech – who is to know the difference? – a wonderful thing, like a great delicate patient animal. It seems to look away, upwards, carefully, at something
only it can see. It makes a restless, sibilant sound, and the sunlight trapped like bright water among its branches shivers and sways. I am convinced it is aware of me; more foolishness, I know. Yet I have a sense, however illusory, of living among lives: a sense, that is, of the significance, the ravelled complexity of things. They speak to me, these lives, these things, of matters I do not fully understand. They speak of the past and, more compellingly, of the future. They are urgent at times, at times so weary and faded I can scarcely hear them.

I have discovered the source of those flies: a bunch of flowers that lovelorn Licht left standing for too long on the window-sill above the sink. Another attempt to brighten the place; that is his great theme these days, the need to ‘brighten up the place’. Chrysanthemums, they were, blossoms of the golden world. Among the petals there must have been eggs that hatched in the sun. The water they were standing in has left behind a sort of greeny, fleshy smell. But imagine that: flies from flowers! Ah Charles, Charles – wait, let me strike an attitude: there – Ah, Charles,
mon frère mélancholique!
You held that genius consists in the ability to summon up childhood at will, or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. I have lost mine, lost it completely. Childhood, I mean. Versions of it are all I can manage. Well, what did I expect? Something had to be forfeited, for the sake of the future; that is where I am pinning my hopes now. The future! Ah.

Flora is sleeping on her side with one glossy knee exposed and an arm thrown out awkwardly, her hand dangling over the side of the bed. See the parted lips and delicately shadowed eyelids, that strand of damp hair stuck to her
forehead. A zed-shaped line of sunlight is working its imperceptible way towards her over the crumpled sheet. She murmurs something and frowns.

‘Are you all right?’ Alice says softly and touches her lolling arm.

‘What?’ Flora sits up straight and stares about her blankly with wide eyes. ‘What?’

‘Are you all right?’ People waking up frighten Alice, they look so wild and strange. ‘They sent me up to see if you were better.’

Flora closed her eyes and plunged her hands into her hair. She was hot and damp and her hair was hot and damp and heavy. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment and then sighed.

‘I’m not better,’ she said. ‘I feel shivery still. I must have got a chill. Will you bring me a drink of water?’

She flopped back on the bed and stared vexedly at the ceiling, her dark hair strewn on the pillow and her arms flung up at either side of her face. The undersides of her wrists are bluish white.

‘It was raining but it’s lovely now,’ Alice said.

‘Is it?’ Flora answered from the depths. She was trying to remember her dream. Something about that picture: she was in that picture. ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at the print pinned on the wall beside her, that strange-looking clown with his arms hanging and the one at the left who looked like Felix, grinning at her.

Alice had the feeling she often had, that she was made of glass, and that anyone who looked at her would see straight through and not notice her at all. She is in love with Flora; in her presence she has a sense of something vague and large and bright, a sort of painful rapture that is all the time about to blossom yet never does. She wished now she could think of something to say to her, something that would make her start up in excitement and dismay. She could hear the wind
thrumming in the chimneys and the gulls crying like babies. She thought of her mother. A cloud switched off the sunlight. In the sudden gloom she began to fidget.

‘That man made sausages for us,’ she said.

A faint smell of frying lingered.

‘Who?’ Flora said. Not that she cared. She lifted her knees under the blanket and hugged them; she reclined there, coiled around the purring little engine of herself, with the restless and faintly aggrieved self-absorption of a cat. Suddenly she sat up and laughed. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Did
he
cook – Felix?’

Alice put her hands behind her back and swivelled slowly on one heel.

‘No,’ she said witheringly. ‘The one that lives here. That little man.’

The sunlight came on again and everywhere there was a sense of running, silent and fleet. Flora pulled the coarse sheet over her breast and snuggled down in the furry hollow of the mattress, inhaling her own warm, chocolatey smells. She no longer cared whose bed it was, what big body had slept here before her. Blood beat along her veins sluggishly like oil.

‘Tell them I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Tell them I’m asleep.’ The soft light in the window and the textured whiteness of the pillow calmed her heart. She was sick and yet wonderfully at ease. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the day around her, birdsong and far calls and the wind’s unceasing vain attempt to speak. She was a child again, adrift in summer. She saw the sun on the convent wall and the idiot boy on the hill road making faces at her, and below her the roofs shimmering, the harbour beyond, and then the sea, and then piled clouds like coils of dirty silver lying low on the hot horizon. ‘Tell them I … ’

*

Outside the door Alice paused. Through the little window above the landing she could see the shadows of clouds skimming over the distant sea and the whitecaps that from here looked as if they were not moving at all. Outside the window on the next landing there was a big tree that shed a greenish light on the stairs. She glanced down through the shifting leaves and thought she saw someone in the garden looking up at her and she turned hot with fright. Hatch had said this place was surely haunted. She hurried on.

The kitchen had the puzzled, lost look of a place lately abandoned. Only Licht was there, sitting at the strewn table with his head lifted, dreaming up into the wide light from the window. At first when he saw her he did not stir, then blinked and shook himself and sat upright.

‘She said to say that she’s asleep,’ she said. He nodded pleasantly and smiled, quite baffled. ‘Flora,’ she said with firmness.

‘Ah. Flora.’ Nodding. ‘Yes.’ His gaze shied uncertainly. He was thinking there was something he should think. The noise of the wind had made him feel dizzy, as if a crowd had been shouting in his ear for hours, and he could not clear that awful buzzing sensation in his head. For an instant he saw himself clearly, sitting here in the broad, headachey light of morning, an indistinct, frail figure. Over the oak wood a double rainbow stood shimmering, one strong band and, lower down, its fainter echo. ‘Flora,’ he said again. Dimly in the dark of his mind the lost thought swirled.

Alice imagined taking him by the shoulders and shaking him; she wondered if his head would rattle.

‘She said to say she’s still not well,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ Childe Someone to the dark tower came. ‘I hope she …’

The unwashed crockery was still in the sink, the breakfast things were on the table.

‘Will we wash up?’ Alice said.

Licht shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘leave that, that’s someone else’s job.’ He looked at her sidelong with a crafty smile. ‘We had a maid one time who had a dog called Water, and when my mother complained that the plates were dirty, Mary always said,
Well, ma’am, they’re as clean as Water can make them.’
He laughed, a sudden, high whoop, and slapped the table with the flat of his hand and then grew solemn. ‘Poor mama,’ he murmured. He stood up. Hop, little man, hop. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you something.’

The rainbows were fading already in the window.

The house was quiet as they climbed up through it and she imagined figures lurking unseen all around her with their hands pressed to their mouths and their eyes slitted, trying not to let her hear them laughing. She walked ahead of Licht and had a funny sensation in the small of her back, as if she had grown a little tail there. She could hear him humming busily to himself. The thought of her mother was like a bubble inside her ready to burst. Everything was so awful. On the boat that morning Pound had come into the lavatory when she was there and offered her sweets to pull down her pants and let him look at her. She was a little afraid of him, but she felt sorry for him, too, the way he bared his front teeth when he frowned and had to keep pushing his glasses up on his sweaty nose. His breath smelled of cheese.

On the first landing Licht stopped and cocked his head and listened, his smile fixed on nothing. Who did he look like, in that long sort of frock-coat thing and those tight trousers? ‘All clear!’ he whispered, and winked and shooed her on. The White Rabbit? Or was it the March Hare. For she was Alice, after all.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘was the boat trip nice?’

She was not sure what she should answer. She thought he might be making fun of her. He was walking beside her now, leaning around so that he could look into her face.
There were little webs of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, very fine, like cracks in china.

‘It was all right,’ she said carefully. ‘Then it ran on to that sandbank thing and we all fell down. I think –’

‘Ssh!’

They crept past the room where Flora was asleep. He wondered if she had taken off her clothes. A slow, dull ache of longing kindled itself anew in his breast.

Again he stopped and listened.

All clear.

They gained the topmost storey.

In the turret room Alice stood with her hands clasped before her and her lips pressed shut. Everything tended upwards here. The windows around her had more of sky in them than earth and huge clouds white as ice were floating sedately past. Something wobbled. She had a sense of airy suspension, as if she were hovering a foot above the floor. She imagined that as well as a tail she had sprouted little wings now, she could almost feel them, at ankle and wrist, little feathery swift wings beating invisibly and bearing her aloft in the glassy air. She could see all around, way off to the sea in front and behind her up to the oak wood. It seemed to her she was holding something in her hands, a sort of bowl or something, that she had been given to mind.

‘This is Professor Kreutznaer’s room,’ Licht said, with a hand on his heart, panting a little after the climb. ‘This is his desk, see – and his stuff, his books and stuff.’

She advanced a step and bent her eyes dutifully to the muddle of yellowed papers with their scribbled hieroglyphs and the big books lying open with pictures of actors and musicians and ladies in gold gowns. It all seemed set out, arranged like this, for someone to see. There was dust on everything.

‘Does he look at the stars?’ she said.

‘What?’ He had turned his head and was gazing out of the windows into the depths of the sky.

‘The stars,’ she said, louder. ‘At night.’

Reluctantly he came back from afar. Alice pointed to the telescope.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘And the sea.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘The clouds.’

She stood before him, blank and attentive, waiting. He touched a fingertip to the back of the swivel chair and it flinched.

‘He used to only look at pictures,’ he said, frowning. ‘He was an expert on provenance.’

She nodded.

‘Providence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘No no:
provenance.
Where a painting comes from, who owned it, and so on. You have to know that sort of thing to prove it’s not a fake. The painting, I mean.’

‘Oh.’