The Black Isle (62 page)
He rose sharply from his chair and walked toward me, eyes darting as if he couldn’t bear to look at my face.
“You and I should have been together,” he whispered. “We should have damned the cliché and done the whole thing—got married, had kids, lost our looks side by side. Instead of this. It’s madness that we did this to ourselves.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Nobody understands my jokes here.” He laughed bitterly. “And I mean,
nobody
! I find myself talking to you—this is where I commune with you, just so you know—because talking to your ghost is better than talking to my wife, my servants, my ministers, all of them combined. And sometimes these conversations get to be so intense, so real, it’s almost as if you were
actually
here with me. I finally understood how it is that you manage to live with the dead around you all the time. I reckon it’s very much the same thing. A spiritual connection with someone that nobody else can see or understand, someone who just refuses to let you go. A ghost is like a very persistent
secret
, isn’t it?”
I turned away. I didn’t want him to catch the agreement in my eyes, especially if this parade of feeling was just another of his stratagems.
“I’ve done you wrong, Cassandra. And I’ve done myself wrong because I acted against my own happiness.”
“We wouldn’t have been happy together.” Not with our battling beliefs, not with the cycle of recriminations that was bound to have come following my loss of our child. I knew by now to mistrust such fantasies. “Regret’s a chimera, Ken.”
“
Of course
we would have been happy.” He looked at me, his face gleaming with conviction. “Of course we would! But I ruined it, didn’t I? I’ve begged your ghost for forgiveness a hundred, a thousand times. Your ghost, not the real you, of course…So let me confess to you now, Cassandra,
in the flesh
. I speak with all the certainty in the world when I tell you we
would
have been happy if
I
hadn’t done certain things.”
He clutched my elbow.
“It was I who lured you to that warehouse. It was I who made the roof fall.
I
killed our future together.”
At this, I felt a pang, a swelling, of old, buried rage. Though I could never prove he’d been responsible, deep in my heart I
knew
. How long had I waited for him to say these words, to lay claim to his crime. Yet now that he’d done it, I could only stare at him suspiciously. Was this a penitent’s confession or the plea of a confidence man at the end of his rope?
Before my heart could do anything foolish, I heard my voice say, “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
Gently, I pushed his hand away and walked to the door. Those long-ago things happened not to me but to my lost doppelganger, a headstrong young woman named Cassandra whose sad history I would soon be leaving behind.
“And there’s Issa. What I did to him haunts me all the time. It’ll haunt me till the day I die, and even after that…Don’t let me be a ghost, Cassandra.”
I
had
to flee—now—before Kenneth could spin his terrible web and ensnare me once more. I couldn’t amend his past for him.
“Tell me you forgive me,” he whispered, sobs causing his thin shoulders to shake. “I was so afraid of what you had. I was jealous, insecure.”
He made a grab for me again with his damp, clammy hands. I shook them off more roughly than I’d meant to—they were so shockingly cold.
“Tell me, Cassandra. Just tell me, I’m begging you…I don’t want to be a ghost.”
“It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?” If I could play that scene over again, I would have made my voice kinder than it was then. “What you can still do is go to Forbidden Hill. See it for yourself.”
“But I’m frightened.” He looked at me with plaintive, watery eyes, the eyes I’d once seen on a kitten whose neck was about to be snapped.
“If you
don’t
go, your life’s work will be meaningless. They’ll destroy the Isle.”
He lowered his head. “Yes…there is that.”
When I closed his study door behind me, Violet was waiting. Her face was hard, as if she’d been bracing herself for this final encounter. She saw me to the foyer.
“I’ve spoken to your bank. The full sum is in your account. You can withdraw or transfer any or all of it. There are no strings. It’s clean.”
I nodded. Thanks would have been inappropriate.
“Let’s keep this strictly between you and me.”
Again, I nodded.
As I walked out of the house, I saw Mr. Wee standing in the porte cochere like a guard, free of the dog’s head. It appeared that the man’s impulse to stay had trumped the badi’s instinct to roam, though he was probably one of those genteel house spirits who stayed behind out of duty and decorum rather than any personal feeling. Having learned the hard lessons of involvement during his lifetime, this Mr. Wee didn’t acknowledge me; now cold and unencumbered, he was one ghost who’d endure for centuries.
I went to a bank machine that same night. It was all there.
One had to give Violet credit where credit was due—the woman never told a lie.
At the airport, something was amiss. From the stewardesses at check-in to the Sikh policeman standing by passport control, the staff was languidly, indulgently glum. I was about to lodge a complaint—I was still a demanding Islander—when I saw that the lady behind the courtesy desk was weeping as if her beloved had just forsaken her.
The gate opened late. Until I hobbled through the aerobridge and found my window seat in business class, I worried that every little delay was conspiring to make me miss my flight—perhaps a final treat from Kenneth Kee.
“Good afternoon,” I said to the tense-looking woman in the seat next to me, thankful she wasn’t the talkative type.
She nodded and, as the plane began taxiing, picked up the late edition of the
Tribune
she’d carried onboard, dampened and smeared, it seemed, with somebody’s tears. My farewells all said, I hadn’t bothered to look at the papers that morning, not even out of last-minute nostalgia. But the headline now cried out to me, bold and black:
PRIME MINISTER KEE DEAD
ENTIRE NATION MOURNS
A land mine went off in my heart. Oh, Kenneth, I thought. Poor Kenneth.
Yet even as I was shaking from the shock, I can’t honestly say I was surprised. I’d known this outcome was possible from the moment I entered his study. I’d played out the scenarios in my head. But that his end had
actually
come, that he had failed for the first time to outwit the Fates…I tried to fight back emotions too complex and explosive for me to detail what they were. My tears flowed all the same.
“I know,” said my seatmate. “I’m frightened without him, too.”
She offered me a tissue. I demurred and took her
Tribune
instead. The front-page story was terse, composed in great haste by a nameless hack. The facts were few. The prime minister, they wrote, had been on a late-night surprise “inspection” of the tunnel under Forbidden Hill, so concerned was he for the safety and well-being of his workers. For the tireless prime minister, the writer stressed, this type of impromptu visit was not uncommon. But this time, while he was in the tunnel, a scaffold collapsed. The esteemed leader “could not be saved.” He was killed by his own boundless compassion, the article stated—not as metaphor but as fact.
I read it twice, trying to tease out hints of the truth between the lines. Had Kenneth sacrificed himself or did the spirits take him by force? But as always, the
Tribune
was hermetically sealed within its own propaganda.
I had no doubt he was terrified as he walked into the tunnel. I had no doubt he regretted taking my advice. But I wondered if he’d also been moved by the desecrated graves, if he was at all remorseful.
Did the ghosts show themselves to him? Did he, for the first and last time in his life, see what I always saw? Did the dead smother him as they had almost done me? Was it quick and painless or long and agonizing? Had he saved the Isle?
And if, by some crazy chance I had been in his final thoughts, was it love or was it hate? Would he now become a ghost, as hungry for my blood as the ghosts had been for his?
As we lifted off the earth, I took a deep gulp of air. I could feel the plane battling me, as if I were the cargo pulling it down, tethered soulwise to a tenacious platoon of ghosts. They wouldn’t let me go; not Father, not Daniel, not Mr. Wee, and certainly not Kenneth, whose wrath was fresh-born. As for Taro? The Isle had robbed me of my showdown with him.
The jet engine roared, the walls rumbled, the vents spewed white vapors. I gripped the armrests and did my part, lifting my weight off the seat, making myself as light as gravity allowed.
When the clouds appeared, racing by my window like excited lambs, my tears finally abated.
The plane swooped back over the Island, this time high enough to escape its pull. The city lay below us like an architect’s scale model with all its landmarks faithfully reproduced. Balmoral Hotel in white, city hall in gray, green rectangle for the Padang, pastel patchwork for the warehouse district riding the black eel that was the river. To the north, there was no more “up-country,” only one concrete heartland after another, all centrally planned in Soviet clusters and painted in condescending, calming hues. Each township was a monument to Kenneth’s terrible taste. Salmon pink was a recurrent scheme, as was kelp green, the color of his old MG roadster. These estates were even more hideous from the air than on the ground, and the destruction of the jungle far more advanced than I’d supposed. Except for the verdant patch of the Botanic Gardens and the two nature reserves, every green smudge appeared to be an afterthought; I knew for a fact that most of these were private golf clubs, open only to the very rich.
The plane glided on, higher.
How small this teardrop island really was, even after its multiple expansions. To its south lay the broccoli heads of another land, lusher, larger, fed on darker soil. It seemed to be edging across the strait as I watched, a mother waiting to reclaim her child. And in the waters to the north and east, yet other isles, younger, smaller, and manifold, each a wellspring of viral fecundity, all creepers and thorns, ready to infect the Black Isle should its coast draw any closer.
Alas, poor Kenneth, your Isle has drunk its fill!
Without you, the Isle has lost its greatest distinction—the gifted mendacity, the calculated overreaching so necessary for a tiny port to become a beacon of success. From my God’s-eye view, I could tell its shine was already fading. The somnambulists would carry on, of course, cheap carbon copies with none of your vision or verve, and certainly none of the history that gave rise to your vision and verve.
I gave the place twenty-five years, fifty at most, before it vanished back into the swamp.
“Good-bye, my dirty Island,” I said. “Please help me to forget you.”
T
HE PROFESSOR IS WITH ME.
She’s heard the rest of my testimony—sitting through the final chapter in a state of hand-wringing tension.
This morning, we’re all caught up. On the same page, as it were. Her eyes are bloodshot, either sleep-deprived or moved, quite likely both.
“How do you stand it,” she asks, “living in Tokyo?”
“The language barrier helps. I’m not bothered or excited by what they twitter on about here. It’s all noise to me.”
A glint enters her eyes. “You’re talking about ghost chatter, aren’t you?”
“I’m talking about the living
and
the dead. That’s how the mind works, you know. Don’t understand something? Out it goes. At a certain point in one’s life, curiosity goes away. Sociability fades. I’m an old woman, Miss Maddin—I mean,
Professor
. I ask for only two things in this life: peace and regularity.”
She smiles. “I believe there’s a third.”
“And what is that?”
“Posterity.”
“Overrated, I now think.”
“All right. Then you won’t mind me doing this.” She collects my microtapes and plops them into her blazer’s ample pockets.
“Only if you give me what’s promised.” I stand up.
“Of course.” She smiles. From another unseen pocket—the woman’s full of secret slits—she withdraws a flat silver box, the type that held cigarettes when people still smoked. “For your spells.”
I take the curious thing from her. Peace offering? I open the lid carefully. Instantly, a plume of fine powder flies into my face. The rest remains static, crumbs and clumps in varying shades of gray.
I know this material too well: bone ash.
“I never really knew my father,” she says. “But it did occur to me that his ashes might bring him to you.”
Suddenly, I understand everything.
His ashes, hence his ghost.
I shut the box, blow the dust from my trembling hands, and look at her properly, with new eyes.
Here before me is a
living
ghost. Kenneth’s narrow, close-set eyes, Violet’s pale complexion and bushy brows. The calculation of the one, the indignation of the other. Anybody could have seen it, felt it. Why hadn’t I?
“Do you hear me, Cassandra?”
I have to squeeze both my elbows to keep from twitching. Kenneth’s spirit, his ashes, his child—all three have entered my fortress. His triad of posterity.
“Were you too entranced by the significance of your own story to
see
?” Agnes Mary Kee shakes her head, now impatient. “Of course, a ton’s been written about my father. But all of it’s either hagiography or abuse. He’s always a deity or the Devil, nothing in between, never just a man.
“About a year ago, I was appointed head of the Black Isle’s Board of National Memory, meaning I’m now the custodian of the Isle’s history. The official history, that is. I think Papa would have been tickled. But how do I safeguard the national memory when I still have huge gaps in my own?
“When I was little, your name was whispered around our house like a curse. But my parents refused to tell me who you were, which only made you more mysterious. The phone my father used, next to the pantry—that was an extension. I listened in upstairs. I never forgot your voice, your name, and your adorable repartee…Lady Midnight.” She laughs. “Am I embarrassing you?”
“Too late for that now.”
“As soon as I had the power, I tracked you down. Because of your age, I had to act fast. Memory, after all, isn’t eternal. I dropped hints—mutilated your sacred book, phone calls in the middle of the night—signs to get you in the mood for confession.”
“And you sent your father’s ghost.”
“That was a bonus. I’m glad it worked.”
“So what do you really want from me, Agnes Mary?”
Hearing her name, her voice grows quiet, conciliatory. “You could have stopped him, you know. Saved him. Yet you did nothing.”
“Your father would have perished whether I’d shown up or not.”
She avoids my gaze, gathering her nerve. When she feels sufficiently prepared, she squares her shoulders, draws a deep breath, and gestures for me to sit back in the sofa. It seems she, too, has a story, one rehearsed and refined over years.
“I was sent away to boarding school in England when I was ten. The painting you saw of me at the house—that was done a week before I was put on the plane, kicking and screaming. Mummy couldn’t wait to be rid of me.
“Papa didn’t like children. You were right about that. You were also right that he was afraid of them; he felt they could see through him. He did like me, but that was vanity. I worshipped him. He always said I was more his than Mummy’s, and she
hated
that. But that’s neither here nor there. I was sent away to school and eventually I landed in Balliol, his old college at Oxford. I don’t know what kind of strings Papa had to pull, because I was never a very good student. I always had this gnawing doubt about whether I’d got in on my own merit or because I happened to be the daughter of Kenneth Kee. But I went along with it because I knew how much it meant to him: If he had gotten me in, it meant he’d had to make some odious pact with
somebody
, and I wasn’t going to humiliate him by rejecting the spot.”
“You think like your father,” I say.
She nods vaguely, taking it as neither compliment nor swipe.
“I always felt in the way. Even when I went home to the Black Isle for the long holidays, nobody quite knew what to do with me. Papa was always busy. Mummy…well, Mummy was a sad case. She was so madly, I wouldn’t say in love, rather in
awe
of him that she let him speak to her as if she were a half-wit. It was painful to watch, and eventually, even I had nothing but contempt for her. So once I was done with university, having claimed the degree Papa never got for himself, I decided to find a job in Europe and remain there, sparing myself being caught in the family…dysfunction.
“I moved to London. I had a normal life, which I cherished more than anything. That ended on October thirty-first, 1990. You see, it was still All Hallows’ Eve over there when my mother called. I was throwing a costume party, dressed up as a ghost and horrifyingly drunk. A ghost—what an irony! I was flown home, of course, for the state funeral. Closed casket, fawning speeches by his enemies. Just horrendous. Mummy looked like a corpse herself. A mummy. Most of the reporters didn’t even recognize her at first because she’d been kept in the shadows for so long.
“After the service, I was trapped alone at the house with her. Without Papa filling all the rooms, it was suddenly just the two of us, and the emptiness shocked us both. He
really
was gone. She was in tears the whole time, but fierce, angry tears this time. I’d never seen her as forceful or furious as on the night of the funeral. She began raving endlessly about this diabolical, larger-than-life force who’d tried for years to bring our family down, this enchantress who killed Papa. That mysterious name from my childhood came up again. Lady Midnight.
“My mother, you may know, never drank. But that night, she popped open all the remaining bottles of Papa’s champagne. We sat at the dining table drinking, just the two of us, virtually strangers, surrounded by maybe forty or fifty bottles of Dom Pérignon and a house that seemed to grow darker by the minute. As we got drunker and drunker, she gave me the history lesson of my life. She told me how you’d connived to marry into our family by seducing her naïve brother, and how during the war, while her father was doing all he could to protect the family, you led the Japanese straight to the house. She held you responsible for her father’s and her brother’s deaths and said that if it hadn’t been for you, she wouldn’t have had to endure those three years…
“After the war, she found solace in her church. But even then, you wouldn’t leave her in peace. You’d show up uninvited at family celebrations like an evil fairy godmother. And, of course, there was your special friendship with Papa.
“You see,
you
were our family curse. Papa’s death only convinced her you were even more dangerous than she feared. Because you’d even murder the
prime minister
. She believed she and I were next. ‘Don’t let her win,’ she whispered in my ear that night, clutching me with her ice-cold hands. ‘Don’t give in to that demoness.’
“After she’d completely exhausted herself, she begged me to sleep with her, on Papa’s side of the bed. She was terrified of being alone in their room. She said the house was haunted, that she saw shadows everywhere. She said she needed to be held and caressed. By this time, her voice was hoarse and mascara was running down her cheeks. I was terrified. I thought she’d gone insane. Of course, I refused her. Then she begged to sleep in my bed with me, and I refused her again.
“I told her to turn on all her bedroom lights and take a sleeping pill. I knew she had a huge collection of those things—all politicians’ wives do. Later that night, while I was sleeping in my old room, I felt a cold shudder rip through the house. I don’t know how else to describe it. A wave of air came up and brushed against me, making my skin prickle. That was my first, and still my only, supernatural episode. Instantly, I had a sick feeling. I ran to Mummy’s room, which was lit up bright as day, with every light switched on. And there I found her—hanging from the chandelier.”
I gasp. I didn’t know. I hadn’t even guessed. Vi, poor, raging Vi.
“No doubt you never heard. The whole thing was covered up, of course. The
Tribune
didn’t report her death till days later, and even then they said she’d died of heartache from missing her great husband. That ‘fact,’ as everyone knows it, has become part of our national lore. The national lore I’m now supposed to protect.
“I arrived back in England an orphan. It turned out that my father had been horribly in debt. He’d sunk his own money into some of the Isle’s bigger projects, thinking he’d eventually reap profits. But he was a politician, not a businessman. He’d expected I would inherit my mother’s money, but, well, you already know the end of that story: She’d given whatever was left of it to
you
.”
She pauses to let that thought sit with me—and it does, painfully. I lean forward to touch her arm but she pulls away.
“Our house was absorbed by the state. Nobody asked about the prime minister’s daughter because he’d never discussed me. Maybe if I’d been a son, things might have been different. As it was, I didn’t really exist. Those people you saw at my christening, none remembered me. People have a very short memory on the Isle.
“I worked very hard to make things right. And as you can well imagine, I developed a very keen taste for history. Everything I told you about myself and my work is true. I became a specialist in the history of the Black Isle. I bided my time. And when the Board of National Memory was formed, I felt it was the perfect time to reclaim my place in the sun. I thought I would finally be able to find this Lady Midnight and solve the mystery surrounding Papa’s death. Naturally, the Board was only too thrilled to have me, the daughter of the late, great Kenneth Kee. As always, I wondered whether I’d won the position on my own merit, but this time, I was determined not to be troubled by doubts. Nobody was as qualified as I was on the subject of the Black Isle.
“My husband, a good Canadian named Ernest Maddin, left me after five years of marriage. No children, luckily. He said I’d become possessed, haunted by imaginary demons. But I’d heard your voice on the phone. I knew you were real. And honestly, my mother didn’t have much of an imagination—she couldn’t have made you up.
“And now we’re finally united. Shadow and shadow. If you worry I’m here to seek a nation’s revenge for the murder of its leader, put your mind at rest. I’m here for entirely selfish reasons.”
Again I ache to rebuff her talk of “murder,” but as I’d learned with other dark souls, I have to let her finish.
“I even remember you at my christening. Not that I saw you, but I
felt
you—I felt the discomfort you created in my mother. She was never quite the same after that. All through my childhood, she was jittery and paranoid, always looking over her shoulder. Whenever we left the house, she held on to me for dear life, convinced that somebody would try to whisk me away. Only much later did I realize it was you she feared. Lady Midnight again. You had a hold over my father that she knew she could never equal, and because of that, you were
always
there. Lady Midnight, Lady Midnight, Lady Midnight.”
She grabs a couple of tissues from her pocket, fluffs them into a bouquet, and buries her face in it.
“I’m grateful to learn your side of the story, Cassandra. But I hope you’ll understand how…impossible it is for me to forgive you.”
I wait for her tears to slow. “I’m sorry, child.”
She chooses not to hear me. After wiping her face clean of tissue bits, she checks her wristwatch. When she speaks again, her tone is different—flat, frightening, like a civil servant of the Black Isle. “You may want to pack an overnight bag.”
“What for?”
“I’m taking you for a change of scenery.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Then you refuse. I’m not going to force you. But when I told you I had what you’ve been searching for, when I said this would be a fair exchange, I didn’t mean the ashes.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“Bring a coat. It’s going to be cold down there.”
We take a taxi to Tokyo Station, a redbrick neo-Palladian curiosity smack in the glass and steel Marunouchi district. It brings to mind some of the colonial buildings we have on the Black Isle, except being Japanese, it looks as if it were put up just yesterday by a dollhouse manufacturer.
I’ve never been here. I’ve never felt the need to leave this city.
Agnes Mary Kee navigates us through its crowded, serpentine pathways to a platform for the Shinkansen bullet train, one of those duck-billed marvels that’s taken the epic journey on the Tokaido Road, made famous by those Hiroshige woodblocks, and reduced it to a mere three hours. I worry for an irrelevant second that she intends to throw me in front of it, but no, we hop on. The train leaves exactly on time.
