Ghostwalk (31 page)

Thirty-three

C
ameron’s late,” Kit said as I helped her and Maria carry the plates into the kitchen on New Year’s Eve. The conservatory, where Kit had jewelled her long dining table with ivy, gold, cinnamon-scented candles, pink ginger lilies, and bowls of oranges and figs, looked like a scene from a Caravaggio painting. Opulence and sacrifice. A New Year about to turn. A dinner party.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” I said. “He would have been here by now.” I checked my phone. There was a text. I felt the pleasure again as a chemical rush through my veins. It said, “Got as far as the Plough and Fleece but Leo is with me. The gods are not with us tonight. Will text later.” I turned my phone off.

When I came back to the table I said, “Cameron sends his apologies.”

“He’s not got this virus that’s going round?” Tom said.

“No, he’s at another party and thought he could get away, but it turns out he can’t.”

“Run out of alibis? Not Cameron, surely,” Anthony said wryly.

“There’s money in alibis,” Kasia said.

“Can we change the subject?” Anthony looked in my direction when I spoke, waiting to see how far I might be pushed.

“Oh no, you misunderstand,” Kasia answered quickly. “I’m not sitting in judgement. I just find it interesting, that’s all. I have several friends who are in your…” She trailed off, suddenly aware that everyone around the table was listening.

“Situation?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What situation is that?” Tom leaned forward curiously.

“Women having affairs with married men.” Anthony knew he was wounding me, but he was too drunk to care. Now Kit was watching me, too. Anthony continued, just as Kit turned up the volume on the CD player so that Madeleine Peyroux’s mournful voice broke across our words singing a Leonard Cohen ballad. “Kasia was just saying that she has several friends who are having affairs with married men…like Lydia.”

Dance me to the end of love…

“Cameron’s married?” Tom said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, it’s something Cameron forgets too, sometimes,” Anthony said.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin…

“How many affairs do we have between us around this table, I wonder?” I said.

“Lydia…” Kit was wary, Maria watching closely.

“Well, if everyone’s going to be sanctimonious about it…” I said, tracing the patterns of down on the purple skin of an abandoned fig on my plate.

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in…

This wasn’t about affairs, wives, and mistresses. None of that mattered. A paralysing drug, an arms industry, espionage, networks that stretched everywhere, infiltrated everything. I peered for a moment into the mechanisms that kept everything going around you, the oiled levers and coils and wheels. And you at the middle of it all, throwing the switches, alone in the labyrinth, working machines you could no longer control.

Dance me to the end of love…

“Lydia, cigarette?” Anthony’s eyes gave nothing away. “Yes, take me outside,” I wanted to say, but didn’t. We stepped out into the night. There was a bonfire in a brazier on the patio, which made me remember another fire I had stood next to once.

“I thought you needed rescuing,” he said, passing me a cigarette. “Don’t stand too close to the fire. Your coat’ll catch on the sparks.”

“I thought he was your friend,” I whispered, cigarette and wood smoke stinging my eyes.

“He is my friend. I’ve known him for a long time. I adore him. He’s extraordinary. He’s…”

“Clever?”

“Yes, he’s very clever. The cleverest man I’ve ever met. And the most elusive.”

“How long have you known about us?”

“Since the beginning.” He sounded apologetic.

“Ha. The
beginning.
When was that? You know I can’t remember a beginning anymore…Did he
tell
you?”

“He had to tell someone. He was in a bad way. I’ve had to rescue him several times since. He’ll have a breakdown eventually, you know, splitting himself like he does between you and Sarah. Leaving you, coming back to you.”
And the rest. And all the rest.

“He didn’t leave. I did.”

“Whatever…It doesn’t matter in the end, does it? You always come back. So does he. He was outside, Lydia, a few minutes ago, in the car. He texted me. I was to tell you that he was waiting for you. I didn’t get it in time to tell you.”

“Why didn’t he text me?”

“Because you switched your phone off.”

“What did he say?”

“He wanted me to tell you that he loves you. That he only had ten minutes and that he had to go. He’s put an envelope through Kit’s door, apparently.”

“It’s too late,” I said. “It’s much too late.”

“You’re just tired, Lydia. It’ll all—”

“I know. Don’t tell me. It’ll all look different in the morning.”

Everything seemed on fire outside on Kit’s patio. The flames from the brazier made everything look like it was blazing—the shrubs, the wall, the trellis, trees. An immense conflagration.

Anthony was piling more logs and branches into the brazier.

“Everything’s burning now,” I said. “Everything.”

“Yes,” Anthony said. “We’ll burn our way into the New Year. It’s going to be a good year. You’ll see. All will be well.”

Thirty-four

I
still have the letter you put through Kit’s door on New Year’s Eve. Handwritten in black ink on thick, cream-coloured paper, it has two folds, beautifully symmetrical. The tickets were bought from Bennett’s Travel Agency on King Street at five
P.M
. on the 29th of December. I put them in the box you bought me with the heron embossed on the lid, with all the things you gave me that autumn and winter: the silk scarf, the bronze statue of Venus, the oyster shells, the copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and of Walter Pater’s
The Renaissance
with the autumn crocus leaves pressed inside. You wrote:

Dear Lydia, here’s an air ticket to Venice. I know it’s a crazy idea but it’s been so dark of late. I just had this feeling that we should find some winter light for ourselves. Grasp it before it gets taken away. I’ll meet you at five o’clock at Cambridge Station on the morning of the 5th. Can’t get away before then—things to sort out with Sarah. Bring a warm coat. Venice can be cold in winter. Text me if for any reason you can’t make it. C.B.

There’s the finest of strands catching the sun at my window, a single spider’s thread. The window here has been scratched, and where the sun catches it, in the cut, the colours bleed like stained glass.

There was thick fog that morning. It was four forty-five when I reached the taxi rank next to the pub on the High Street in Chesterton, so I was surprised to see another man waiting there.

“You going to the station?” I asked. “Shall we share the ride?” He nodded in answer and took a step back into the shadows. A few minutes later the two of us occupied the back seat of a taxi threading through Cambridge streets, which were empty except for the red lights of occasional cars ahead of us, streaked and starry. The streetlamps above us across Elizabeth Way Bridge made veils of lit fog. The taxi driver slid the glass panel across between him and us—it was too early to talk.

In the silence I thought of you on the station platform, how I would reach out to touch your arm, imagined how we would talk, at first, of inconsequential things, as the train pulled south through the dawn towards Stansted Airport. I wouldn’t ask how you had managed to find five days away from work in early January to travel to Venice or how your lab would allow you to do so at this precise moment without additional security measures. Nor would I ask about your Christmas or ask after Sarah and the boys. That was understood. Best not to ask. I always told myself that you would do the same if our situations were reversed. There are some things best not said, at least not yet, not until that room with a view over water, not until Venice. And then, what then? You would have a plan. You would have worked out what to do—some new machinery for flight. We’d find a way out. Everything was possible now.

I switched on my phone. There was a text from you, marked by a tiny green envelope, sent earlier that morning: dated the 5th of January, three
A.M
. “I’m at Trinity,” it said. “Just finishing off some paperwork in the office. Loose ends.” “The Crimson Room.” You were reading “The Crimson Room.” Or had been. I saw the desk lamp and the pool of light it made and you in it, reading the white sheets of a photocopied manuscript. Cameron Brown reading in a pool of light.

“Shame about the fog,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “Apparently there’s a meteor shower up there somewhere, or so the papers said yesterday. We’d be one of only a handful of Cambridge people awake to see it. If it was visible, that is.”

“Yes, I know,” the man in the black coat answered, looking out his window and peering up towards the sky. “They are spectacular. Never the same.” He’d seen several? How could that be—was he lucky?

“What would we see?” I asked, studying the texture of his skin, the curve of his profile in the half-light, struggling to remember something. “What would we see if we were standing out there looking up at the sky and there was no fog?”

“Sharp points of light all radiating out from one still centre, in jagged lines. A little like an abstract scientific drawing.” His voice had a richness of timbre that reminded me of stringed instruments, sad and slow like a cello.

“Like fireworks?”

“No, not like fireworks—much more chaotic and delicate. Not like a shower at all. More like a storm or thousands of dandelion seeds lifted by the wind at once and pulled in different directions.” Still he did not turn towards me.

“An entanglement,” I said, a nameless sense of dread rising. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

He turned to look at me then, so that I saw his face fully for the first time. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, his face stiff and unsmiling. I struggled for a moment, searching his face, half remembering.

“What have I forgotten?” I said in that first moment of recognition, feeling my pulse race, inhaling the thick, smoky aroma of sulphur and balsam as he met my gaze, matching my question with his own, asking, in a voice that was barely audible now, only:

“Did you forget?”

As he turned away, I remembered letters that had appeared on a mirror once and heard the biblical verses they marked: “I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood shall pursue thee,” letters that filled the air with the taste of poison.

“Can you stop? Please let me out here,” I said to the taxi driver, my voice high-pitched, banging my hand on the glass panel to make him hear, barely controlling an urge to open the door and take my chances jumping from the moving car.

“We’re here, love,” he said. “Cambridge Station. You all right?”

The fog had given way to soft rain. The man in the black coat headed off down Station Road while the taxi driver lifted my bags from the car.

“Off somewhere nice?” he asked as I passed him the fare.

“What?” I said, bewildered, watching the dark figure diminish to a vanishing point, occasionally illuminated as he passed under the streetlights.

“Never mind. You have a good trip, eh?”

“Thank you,” I said.

Floating not into darkness but into a darker obscure.

Checking my watch, I gathered myself back into the morning. A man in a taxi who for a moment in the dark I had thought I recognised. A trick of the brain. Déjà vu. Nothing more. Nearly time. You were expected at five
A.M
. I bought two single tickets to Stansted, checked on the next train, and stood in the lit-up entrance of the station to watch for your car. I might have been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising my eyes to some faint green twilight.

I ran over the few words I had exchanged with the stranger, struggling to understand.

What have I forgotten?

Did you forget?

Did I forget? Did I?

“No. I’ve stuck to the bargain,” I said aloud.

A few minutes before, I had seen you reading your mother’s chapter in a pool of light in your rooms in Trinity College; now I couldn’t see you at all. You were nowhere. You were gone. In that hole that had been ripped in the night, ripped through past, present, and future, in that hole I could do nothing but remonstrate with Ezekiel, my voice loud and high and desperate, echoing in the empty station entrance.

“There
is
no record. I’ve changed the story. You know that. There’s nothing left.” But I was lying now even to ghosts, phantasms, tricks of the fog. Ezekiel knew that as well as I did. I had
not
erased the last written record, as I had promised. I had sent you a photocopy of “The Crimson Room” with a note that read:

Cameron. Read this. Your mother’s last chapter. It went missing but I found it again. She worked it out. She worked it all out. When you’ve read it, shred it. That’s important.

There were no chapel bells to strike the fifth hour as it came and went.

I had wanted you to see Elizabeth’s version of “The Crimson Room,” wanted you to know where your mother’s story had led, her last brilliant discovery. You would shred it. There would be no record, once you had done that.

“There’ll be no record,” I said again. “He’ll shred it…Ezekiel? Are you listening to me?” I ran my finger across the scar on my cheek, pinching the skin there to stop my knees from buckling under me. A boy, running for a train with his mother, turned to look at me, a woman talking to the air.

Hand grenades have pins, not stoppers. And sometimes they take longer than you think to go off.

At five-fifteen I texted you: “Held up?” I wrote and waited, holding my breath for one of your usual text replies: “Five minutes” or “En route.” When none came, I knew.

Taxis gathered to wait for the next train in from Stansted. I watched the few early-morning travellers spill out from the station, tanned families returning from Christmas holidays at ski resorts, academics travelling alone, a few lone businessmen in suits, carrying briefcases. I watched them queue for taxis and watched the taxis disappear. It was cold.

It was five-twenty when I phoned. I left a voice message: “Cameron. I don’t know what to do. Call me. There’s no way we can catch that plane now. Did I perhaps miss you? Did you mean for me to meet you somewhere else?”

By seven
A.M
. Sergeant Cuff, standing beside your body at the bottom of Staircase E in Trinity College, behind the cord of striped red plastic marking off the edges of the “incident,” had recorded my words on your phone in his notebook, next to a note that recorded the seven cuts to your face. “Voice message from ‘L.B.’: 5:20
A.M
., 5 January.” The words were written out, my words, with that dying fall: “Did you mean for me to meet you somewhere else?”