Ghosts and Other Lovers (3 page)

We dragged on together for a few more months. It was a hard thing to realize, harder still to confess. It was easier just to let things go on, and to think up excuses to avoid seeing him when I could. Finally I realized how absurd it was, and how unfair to both of us, and I broke things off.

It was more difficult, more painful, and much more protracted than that sounds. David took it much harder than I expected. I don't know whether that was egotism on my part, expecting his feelings to mirror mine, or whether it was a fatal lack of ego, that self-denigrating certainty that no one could really love me all that much. At any rate, his response, his hurt astonishment, his pain, his tears, took me completely by surprise. I had hoped I could just stop seeing him, but he let me know how cruel that was, and I had to agree to the occasional evening together, the meeting in some neutral London pub or café for "a quick drink," followed by dragging, relentless hours in which he tried to talk me back into love with him.

When I refused to see him again, he kept phoning. I got an answering machine, and so he turned to letters. It has always been hard for me to resist words on paper, and the chance to create a neat justification of myself without risk of interruption. Writing seems like the way to truth. If we could each tell our stories unhindered, in our own good time, in our own words, eventually a complete and final understanding would be reached, and we'd be beyond guilt and hurt. Maybe we'd become the friends he said he wanted us to be. But it didn't work. After a while his letters began to seem as much an intrusion as the phone calls had been, and although I still answered them, my replies became shorter.

Then I was invited to spend three months teaching in America. It was only a summer stint, in Seattle, but the money was good and I had friends in California, Texas, and New Mexico, and I figured I could spin it out, with visits, to six months at least. I gave up my bedsit, stored the few possessions I couldn't take with me and didn't care to sell, and I was off, leaving no forwarding address for David.

I stayed away for nearly a year. I can't say I completely forgot about David, but he seldom crossed my mind. My affair with him had taken place in another country, and, it began to seem to me, in another era, in a different existence altogether.

Much happened to me in that year, but the only thing it seems pertinent to mention here is that I began to have a recurring dream. It wasn't an interesting dream, it was just me in a house which wasn't mine and in which I felt I didn't belong. I didn't know why I was there but I wasn't worrying about it, my one concern was simply to find a way out. The dream seldom lasted long, and I always woke up before I found my way out. The house was always the same, and it was not one I recognized. Bare wooden floors, architectural prints and old maps hanging on bare white plaster walls, modern furniture, no mess or clutter, just a few leafy green plants in odd corners . . . It seemed like something I might have seen in a magazine, I was sure it was nowhere I had ever been. There was a feeling attached to the dream, a kind of guilty impatience with being there, which I connected with David, because it was like the feeling I'd had about him since breaking up with him. But toward the end of my stay in America I began to feel that the dream was telling me I ought to go home, that America was the place I had to find a way out of before it trapped me forever. A lot of the houses I saw in California and New Mexico were as soullessly modern and "designed" as the house in my dream.

I was getting homesick for bad weather and good conversation in damp old cluttered houses. I had stayed away too long. Yet London, when I returned to it, was strange and uninviting. There was nowhere I had to go, no one who needed me. I called around to see friends, and found they'd all changed, their lives had moved them to other places while I was away. One had come out as a lesbian, another had a baby, others had changed jobs, relationships, addresses. At one point, walking down Oxford Street, I took the familiar turning and walked along to David's flat. I had no idea what I would say to him, I just suddenly wanted to see him, but the name beside the bell was not his.

Someone I'd met in America had invited me to visit him in Edinburgh, so that's what I decided to do. He worked for an arts magazine and there was a possibility of some work on it for me; anyway, he said there was a lot happening in Scotland just now.

I had never been to Edinburgh before, and I liked it. I liked the sharp, cold, gritty air; the lilting voices; the old buildings; the streets and wynds; the whole atmosphere. It reminded me of how I had felt when I first arrived in London, full of energy and possibilities. It was this I had been missing in America. I stayed for a week and considered staying longer. I talked to some people about a job and to some others about a room.

On my seventh night in Edinburgh I was in a bar, waiting to meet someone. I was early and he was almost certainly going to be late, but every time I heard the street door open I turned around to look. On about the fourth or fifth time it was a woman who came in alone. Our eyes met, briefly, she looked startled, and then some kind of excitement sharpened her features.

I felt a sudden, cold apprehension. She was about my own age or a little younger, very well dressed, attractive in a groomed, glossy way, with a look of intelligence. She was exactly the sort of woman I found interesting, and if we'd been at a party, with mutual friends, I would have wanted to be introduced. At first, that is, because as soon as her face changed, I didn't want to know. I didn't like the way she looked at me. I turned away, toward the bar and my drink, and wished I wasn't waiting for someone, so that I could leave, or that he'd already arrived, to provide a barrier, because I just knew she was going to come over and talk to me.

"Excuse me -- this is terribly rude of me, I know but I'm sure you'll forgive me when you know, it is quite fascinating, actually -- did you ever live in Ann Street?" She sounded English. She was definitely younger than I was. The intensity of her gaze was terrible.

"Ann Street?"

"Number Twenty-Seven."

"I don't even know where it is. No. I've only been here a week."

"Well, perhaps you had ancestors who lived there? It is quite an old house, although it's been done up."

"I don't have any connection with Edinburgh. My people weren't Scottish. Sorry. You must have me confused with someone else." I couldn't even ask her what it was about, I so wanted her to get away from me.

"Well, it's very strange. You see, we have a ghost in our house -- I've seen her myself, several times, and she looks very like you."

I heard the street door open and I turned away, hoping for rescue, hoping it would be my friend. It was David. As I saw him, and he saw me, and the woman beside me said, sounding more annoyed than glad, "Oh, there's my husband now. He'll tell you it's nonsense, because he doesn't believe in ghosts," I understood all at once. I was this woman's Jane. It was her house I'd gone to in my dreams, hers and David's. The only thing I didn't know -- and I suppose I never will -- was whether it was David's mournful love which summoned my spirit, or her jealousy.

This unpleasant physical detail was Eustacia Wallace's first impression of the medium, and even after she had a good look at him in the light -- the large, deep-set eyes, the graying beard, the high forehead -- even after she had heard him speak in a well-modulated, educated voice, Eustacia could think only of how much she had disliked the touch of his hands.

She glanced at her sister and saw that, like the others in the stuffy, overcrowded parlor, Lydia Wallace Steen was completely enraptured. She found herself rubbing the palms of her hands on her skirt, and forced herself to stop. If she had been wearing gloves, like any properly brought up young lady -- if she hadn't been such a hoyden as to lose her last pair and too careless to borrow from her sister -- if she had been dressed as the other ladies, dressed as she should be, she would have known nothing of the condition of Mr. Elphinstone's flesh.

Lydia would be horrified -- quite rightly -- if she knew her younger sister's thoughts. Eustacia struggled, as she had struggled so often before, to lift them to a higher plane. Mr. Elphinstone was talking about Heavenly Rapture, Life Eternal, and the Love Which Passeth All Understanding. Eustacia found it hard to concentrate. It wasn't that she preferred to think about Mr. Elphinstone's hands, or about the unpleasant warmth of the room, or about the fact that she hadn't had enough to eat at dinner, only . . . all these things, things that belonged to the real world, had a power that abstract ideas, for all their beauty, lacked. What chance had Perfect Love against a joint of beef or a cold, moist, human hand?

"We imagine the dead, our loved dead, as being like us; as being, still, the people we knew -- our children, parents, siblings, friends, sweethearts. We think of them wearing the same bodies, with no difference, only passed beyond our ken. But, my dear, dear, brothers and sisters," Mr. Elphinstone went on, lowering his voice dramatically, "this is
not so
. Death is a transformation much greater than the birth to which it is sometimes compared. The soul leaves the body at death, achieving a new and wonderful existence. Mortality is burnt away with the flesh. There are no bodies in the afterlife, no flesh in heaven. Do you understand me?"

Heads nodded around the room. Eustacia nodded, too, wondering if there would be refreshments later.

"They are different, the dead. We cannot comprehend how different; we will know that only when we join them. The wisest course is to accept our ignorance, to accept that they are gone from us, God's will has been done, and all is well. . . . But, of course, it is the nature of the living to question and to mourn . . .
not
to accept, but to want, always, to know more. Isn't that why you're here?"

He stopped, apparently expecting an answer. There were uneasy shiftings from his listeners, and Eustacia took advantage of this to scoot her chair a little farther away from the fire. A thin, elderly woman in rusty black silks cleared her throat gently, and Mr. Elphinstone let his dark eyes rest on her. "Yes, Mrs. Marcus? Tell us why you have come."

"You know."

"Yes, I know, but tell us."

"It's my son, Nathanael. He died at Bull Run. He was only eighteen. My only boy . . . I never knew the moment of his passing; I waited a long time before I heard of his death, and even then I couldn't be certain. . . . For years I -- But finally . . . I thought I had accepted it. Two years ago my husband passed on. And since then I have thought more and more about our Nathanael . . . worrying about him. Waking up nights fearing he was cold, or hungry, or hurting. Mr. Marcus could always take care of himself, and I was beside him at the end. But Nathanael was only a boy, and he died on a battlefield -- I'll never really know
how
he died. I keep thinking, if only I could have been with him at the end, to mop his brow or hold his hand -- to give him some little comfort. . . . If only I could see him once more, to know that he's not in pain, and he's not unhappy. . . . Just to see him once more . . . just to have a message from him, would make such a difference."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Elphinstone softly. "Yes, of course. Touch and sight and hearing are all so important to us, the living. We cannot communicate without our senses; without them we cannot even
believe
. And the dead, who have passed beyond that, still feel our needs and attempt to give us what we want . . . they attempt to touch us, speak to us, communicate. Yet how can they communicate without a body? How can they speak, how can they touch without flesh?"

Mr. Elphinstone's burning eyes fixed upon Eustacia. She went hot and cold. What did he want from her? Everyone was waiting for her to answer. There was no escape. She opened her mouth and out popped: "Ghosts."

"Ghosts?" He smiled gravely. "But what are ghosts? Of what are they formed? The dead have no material substance. They do not block the light.
They cannot be seen
. And if they are to communicate with us in some way, in any way, physical substance is required. Where is it to come from? Nothing comes from nothing, as the poet said. And they must have something if we are to know them. From whence does it come? Why, dear people; dear, dear friends: it comes from me." His smile became positively beatific; his face seemed to shine. "I am uniquely gifted to give our dearly departed a brief, a transitory, yet not entirely unsatisfactory, semblance of life. Certain mediums are gifted in this way with the ability to produce a substance known as
ectoplasm
, an emanation from my very flesh which clothes the fleshless spirits and allows them, however briefly, to live and speak to their loved ones. It is not God's will that they should be returned to
this
life, when he has lifted them to a greater one, but neither is it God's will that those they have left behind should suffer unduly, or doubt His promise of eternal life. It has been said, truly, 'Seek and ye shall find; Ask and it shall be given.' So now, dear friends, dear seekers, I ask you to watch and wait as I offer myself unselfishly for the use of any spirits hovering near."

The lamps were extinguished as he spoke, and the room was lit only by firelight. Lydia touched her arm and whispered: "Watch
him
."

Mr. Elphinstone's eyes were closed. He sat like a statue. The others, having been here before, knew what to look for, so they were aware of what was happening before Eustacia noticed anything unusual. It was only by their rustlings and murmurings, and by Lydia's clutching hand that she understood it was not a trick of her eyes in the dim light: there was a whitish vapor issuing forth from the region of Mr. Elphinstone's knees, upon which his hands rested.

But it wasn't only a vapor. It seemed to have more mass and solidity than that. Now he raised his hands to chest-level and it was obvious that this amorphous, shifting, cloudy-white stuff adhered in some way to his hands, grew out of them, perhaps. To the sound of gasps and moans and sighs from the assembly, the shining cloud between Mr. Elphinstone's unmoving hands began to shape itself, to take on form. A human form, although small. A head, a neck, shoulders, arms . . . That was a face, surely? Eustacia wasn't sure if there were facial features to be discerned in the flickering light, or if she was unconsciously making pictures, as one did when watching clouds.