The Ghost Writer (28 page)

Which really, when you thought about it, they had been. And whatever Phyllis Hatherley might have done, Phyllis Freeman had paid for it with life in Mawson, no remission for good behaviour. I couldn't imagine my mother living in this house.

As I went to shut the door of the closet, it struck me that there must be quite a lot of unused space in the partition between the two rooms. I tried a panel above the bed and felt it give; pressed more firmly and it swung open. A cupboard, about eighteen inches square, the same depth as the closet. Empty again. Except that something heavy had evidently been kept in here: there were deep parallel scratches gouged into the wooden floor. A child could easily climb right inside; I imagined the girls tapping out messages at night, frightening each other with ghostly noises.

A loud clatter—or was it someone knocking?—sounded through the partition. I was out the door and half-way across the landing in a blind, panic-stricken rush for the stairs before I registered what I had glimpsed through the open door of Anne's room: curtains the colour of dried blood, heaped beneath the fallen curtain-rod.

I
FOUND
I
WAS HOLDING MY BREATH, STRAINING TO IDENTIFY
a faint rustling sound. A branch against the wall? Mice in the ceiling? Best keep moving.

Returning to the corridor, I saw a thin line of daylight, evidently coming from beneath a door at the far end. The room opposite Anne's was empty, unfurnished, and thick with dust; the next looked like Viola's. I opened a small jewelbox on the bedside table and found a gold wristwatch, engraved 'V. from M./ with love/ 7.2.1913'. 'V.H.' was inscribed in several of the books in the bookcase beneath the window, including, I noticed, a battered hardback copy of
The Sacred Fount.
Her clothes, or some of them, were still hanging in the closet, protected by the ghosts of old mothballs: everything from long tweed skirts to furs and several plain but very expensive-looking evening gowns, including one made of a material that shimmered like finely beaten gold, with shoes to match. But again no letters, no papers, no photographs.

The floor creaked more loudly at every tread, until boards were sounding up and down the hall as if invisible feet were moving all around me. I tugged at the end door, which opened inwards. Light from two high windows streamed into the corridor. There was one other door beyond Phyllis's: a boxroom, with only a small square window high in the wall. Trunks, cases, hampers, hat boxes, a golf-cart; more tennis racquets, croquet mallets, chairs with broken backs, a doll's house.

Two doors opened off the landing, on my right: a bathroom nearest the corridor. Bare board floor, porcelain washstand; an imposing claw-footed bathtub, darkly stained, with a greyish bath towel carelessly draped over the side. In the wall cabinet above the basin, a clutter of dried-up lipsticks, tubes, bottles, hairpins. Everything metal was heavily corroded, the labels unreadable.

I tried the other door. Not a closet, but yet more stairs, angling up to the left. I checked the door to make sure I couldn't be trapped, and clambered up. Two drab attic bedrooms, each with a single metal-framed bedstead; flock mattresses and pillows, tinder-brown with age, but no bedding. Plain wooden furniture, washstands with white china jugs and basins, bare boards. The windows were set like skylights into the sloping ceilings. Nothing in any of the cupboards.

B
ACK ON THE LANDING, THE SENSE OF FAMILIARITY TUGGED
at me again. Through the tall slit window in the stairwell I caught a blurred glimpse of the ruined summerhouse far below. The stairs came up on my right, with a railed balcony above the stairwell, extending about twelve feet to a dead end below the left-hand window. There was only one other door, immediately to my left, in the panelled wall that formed the other side of the balcony. Though there was nothing on the wall, I could see several slightly paler rectangles where pictures had once hung. The nearest of these was also the largest, at least five feet high and perhaps half as wide, just to the right of the door.

Pictures. The absence of pictures, or more precisely, portraits. That was what had troubled me in the downstairs rooms. The balcony was not the only place from which pictures had been removed. On several of the walls downstairs I had seen, without paying much attention, the outlines, and sometimes the empty hooks, where pictures had once hung, some of them very large indeed. A few small prints, mostly still lifes or rural scenes, remained. But so far no portraits, no photographs; not a single image of a human face.

I tried the handle of the door. Locked.

Like the door to the studio in
The Revenant.
With the portrait of Imogen de Vere beside it. The resemblance that had been tugging at me all the way along this floor. How could I have missed it? If the garden hadn't been so overgrown, I might have seen the resemblance from the lane outside.

Phyllis, Beatrice. Almost the same sound.

But that couldn't be right, because the typescript was dated December 1925, two years before Anne was born. Viola couldn't have known, then, that she would have two granddaughters. Or that her son and his wife would be killed in an accident. Miss Hamish had forgotten to mention when, or even what sort of accident; she must have assumed I knew.

The date could be wrong. But the story was set in 1925, seven years after the end of the Great War. And if she had been writing after the accident, Viola wouldn't, surely, have exploited her granddaughters' situation so closely. I already knew enough about her to feel certain of that.

And she absolutely couldn't have known that, four years after her death, her eldest granddaughter would become engaged to a man called Hugh Montfort.

Only I didn't know how the story ended. Or how many pages were missing. I had searched the house in Mawson all over again, even taken up the carpet in my mothers room, without finding anything more.

One came true.

What if this door opened on to Henry St Clair's pictures, 'The Drowned Man' on its lectern, the polished wooden cube with the carved rosette? What would I do then?

My concentration was broken by a faint rhythmic sound which seemed, as I became aware of it, to have been going on for some time. As I turned, a board creaked, and the noise ceased instantly. Birds or mice, no doubt—the walls must be full of them—but it had sounded unpleasantly like a nib scratching across stiff paper. Somewhere close by.

Suddenly I was stumbling down the rear stairs, glancing over my shoulder and trying not to run, all the way down to the massive black-painted door to the courtyard. None of the keys looked remotely large enough. Then I saw that the tongue, or whatever that part of the lock was called, was plainly retracted. Which was odd because I had—or thought I had—a clear memory of standing here a couple of hours ago and noticing that the door was locked. Jet lag, presumably. I dragged back the equally massive bolts and hauled the door open, letting in the scents of flowering creeper and warm stone.

T
HE COURTYARD WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN FEET DEEP, AND PER
haps twice as wide; it was hard to tell because the surrounding wilderness encroached on every side. I crunched over dead twigs and leaf litter, past a rotting bench and several stone ornaments, cracked and flaking and pitted with lichen, to the path I had seen from above, hoping to find a way through to the boundary wall, wherever that might be.

The path, gravel with a stone border, had once been fairly wide, but the nettles had advanced so far that I had to clear the way with a fallen branch to avoid being stung. As I descended towards the wreck of the gazebo, I felt an odd prickle of recognition. It was a common enough structure: a wooden octagon, six or seven feet across, like a miniature bandstand, with a waist-high railing and entrances on opposite sides. Most of the roof had collapsed, leaving only a few corroded sheets of metal attached to the remnants of the frame. Traces of dark green paint still clung to the fallen sections.

Prompted by that elusive sense of recognition, I went on slashing and trampling the nettles until, at the cost of a filthy, sweat-soaked shirt and several painful weals, I had cleared a narrow circle around the gazebo. The slope here was quite steep, so that the entrance nearest the house was level with the path, whereas the one on the far side was at least two feet above the ground, with steps leading up to it. Wooden seats, enclosed like window-boxes, had been built around the sides.

As I was clearing away the debris of the fallen roof, I discovered that the middle sections of the seats on both sides of the gazebo were hinged. The lid on the right would not budge; the other one came up with a shriek of frozen hinges. Pale, bloated spiders scuttled away from the light. In the cavity below was a crumbling picnic hamper, black with dirt and mould and swathed in cobwebs. I used a stick to prise open the lid; apart from more dirt and spiders, all it contained was another, smaller box: an old-fashioned metal cashbox, I thought, about eight inches by ten, not very deep, with a handle in the centre of the lid. The rivets were so corroded that the latch came away in my hand.

Inside was a thick buff envelope, containing not jewels or banknotes, or the tide deeds to Staplefield, but a mouldy paperbound volume.
The Chameleon.
Volume I, Number 1, March 1898. Essays by Clement Shorter and Frederic Myers; poems by Ernest Radford and Alice Meynell; and 'The Pavilion, by V.H. As I turned to the beginning of Violas story, a small printed slip fluttered from the pages.
With the author's compliments.
And in faded black ink, in Viola's clear, spiky hand:
for Filly if she can find it.

***

O
F ALL PLACES IN THE WORLD
, R
OS
alind Forster's favourite was Staplefield, a modest country house on the edge of St Leonard's Forest in Sussex, and the home, for much of the year, of her best friend Caroline Temple. Rosalind sometimes thought that wherever Caroline lived would seem the most desirable of all places, but there was no denying the beauty of Staplefield, with its light, airy rooms looking out over meadows and wooded hills to the south, and the sweep of the forest at its back. The two girls had been fast friends ever since their first meeting in town five years earlier, when Rosalind was fifteen and Caroline a year younger; they had been drawn together by a preference for solitude, strange as that may sound, over what usually passed for the delights of society, but were never happier than in each others company. Both were only children, and both had recently lost beloved fathers—George Forster and Walter Temple had died within the same year—and their shared grief had further strengthened the bond between them.

Seeing them side by side you could almost have taken them for sisters, even though Caroline was fair and delicately featured, whilst Rosalind's complexion was quite dark, almost olive. They had a way of walking unconsciously in step, and of addressing one another, at times, as much through a shared language of gestures and facial expressions as through speech. But their situations were very different. Caroline and her mother had only a few hundred a year, but were content with a quiet country life and occasional visits to town; and the house, which since Walter Temple's death they had shared with his elder, widowed brother Henry, had belonged to the family for several generations. Whereas, though Rosalind's mother Cecily lived in Bayswater in much greater apparent splendour, it was all done on debt, as Rosalind was only too anxiously aware, to the point where their fortunes now appeared to hang upon Rosalind's answer to a proposal of marriage from one Denton Margrave. It was to consider this proposal that she had come down to spend a few days with her friend in the country, but though the two were usually inseparable, a severe headache had kept Caroline indoors on the autumn afternoon upon which we meet Rosalind setting out alone to walk in the surrounding fields. Caroline had positively declined to be read to, and insisted that her friend should take - their accustomed excursion for them both, and for once Rosalind had allowed herself to be overruled, for she was restless and troubled, and felt that fresh air and movement would help dispel the cloud of oppression that hung about her mind and darkened her thoughts.

The sky was overcast and still as she left the house and made her way through the kitchen garden and across the lawns. She and Caroline had a favourite walk which took them through several fields and down to the riverbank with its canopy of willows, but today, on impulse, she turned right instead of left, in the direction of a steep, densely wooded hillside perhaps half a mile off. Even in the midst of her trouble, now that she was out in the open her old habit of dramatisation would not be stifled: she found herself mentally rehearsing scenes in which she rejected Mr Margraves proposal, the first on the ground that she had firmly resolved to dedicate her life to Art, the second because she had given her heart irrevocably to Another. Such scenes were constantly presenting themselves to her youthful imagination with the utmost vividness; yet they would generally refuse to manifest themselves on paper when she sat down, as she so often did, determined to begin the work that would at last free herself and her mother from all financial anxiety. And on the rare occasions when she did manage to scribble down one of these dialogues as it passed, it would shortly reveal itself to be a thing of such hackneyed banality that she would hasten to destroy it.

There was another mode of composition, very much slower and more painful, in which she strove to capture the essence of certain events, real or imagined, as precisely as she could, and here she felt she might one day acquire a very different sort of facility, if only she could stumble upon some great conception, something that would absolutely distinguish her work from that of the hundreds of authors whose novels crammed the circulating libraries and bookstalls and jostled one another for notice in the pages of the reviews. At least half a dozen times she had launched herself with high hopes into "Chapter One", and felt her tale to be well under way, only to see a darkness fall across the page, blighting her carefully wrought sentences until her characters lay down, as it were, at the side of the road and simply refused to go on. And then persons from Porlock, usually in the form of her mother, would call just as she saw her way out of the difficulty. There were certain pages, composed almost as if from dictation, with which she was entirely satisfied, but they seemed like the work of another person altogether, and remained in any case unfinished. No; the life of an author was certainly not an easy one. Rosalind had variously accused herself of indolence, of an absolute want of genius, and of lack of experience, the last perhaps excusable at the age of twenty; yet here she was faced with a proposal of marriage from Denton Margrave, and upon her answer depended not only her happiness but that of her mother, for they were poor, and he was rich, and Rosalind was very much afraid she might be on the verge of accepting him for her mother's sake rather than her own. Yet even as she struggled to determine the true state of her own feelings for Mr Margrave, there was a part of her that stood back, and watched, and said that if only she could make fictional capital of her situation, real income might follow, to free her from the jaws of her dilemma.