The Ghost Writer (31 page)

A
S IT TURNED OUT, THERE WAS INDEED A STREAM AT
the foot of the hillside, marking the boundary between forest and fields, into which she emerged a good deal scratched, with her dress covered in burrs and grass seeds. And though it was a long way round, by following the direction of the water she did, eventually, reach a familiar point on the riverbank, and from there proceeded mechanically homeward. But the sense of desolation at finding the pavilion so despoiled would not leave her; she felt almost as if she were to blame for its decay; yet how could that be? Trying to recall exactly where the dream had begun was like unpicking a piece of work in search of a nonexistent join; there had been nothing insubstantial about the pavilion as she had first seen it, new and brightly painted on the sunlit slope. She cast her mind back along the forest path, to the field in which she had remembered the angel; but found to her great distress that she could not now think of him without recalling the hideous bat-like figure with its loathsome smile; it was like watching black ink being spilt upon that pure white plumage, and feeling both responsible and powerless to prevent it. At least she knew for certain that she could never marry Mr Margrave ... but then she recalled, with horrible clarity, her mothers threat of destroying herself, and the sick feeling that had grown in her; and the name upon the volume had been Rosalind Margrave: did that mean she was foredoomed to marry him? Yet the woman had seemed so kind, and smiled upon her so tenderly; and so her thoughts circled round and round until she arrived back at the house, very late, footsore and plainly distressed, to find Caroline, now recovered, anxiously awaiting her.

Rosalind had imagined herself falling into her friends arms and telling her everything, but found that she could not. It had always been understood between them that Rosalind's mother was "difficult", but loyalty, and perhaps pride, had constrained Rosalind's confidences on this score. Nor had she felt able to disclose to Caroline the full extent or immediacy of the financial calamity hanging over the house in Bayswater, for fear of seeming to appeal to the Temples' charity on her mother's behalf. The beginning of her dream—wherever that might have been—seemed too strange, and the end too horrible, to relate. And so, beyond the comfort of her friend's embrace, Rosalind confined herself to saying that she had definitely resolved to reject Mr Margrave but was a little uneasy about how her mother might receive this news, and had consequently taken a wrong turning and wandered further than she had meant. To which she found herself adding, at the dinner table, that she thought she had seen a small pavilion on the far side of the wooded hill over there, without being specific about where she had seen it from, or how close.

"How very odd," said Mrs Temple. "You must have walked a very great distance, Rosalind; and besides, when I last walked that way, the forest had quite swallowed it up—what remained of it."

"There was a little wind in the trees," Rosalind ventured, hoping her hands were not perceptibly trembling.

"Fancy—I had not thought of it for years. Dear Walter was always so distressed, I had got out of the habit of mentioning it for his sake ... it was built for his elder sister Christina—before you were born, Caroline. Christina married very young, and most unwisely"—Rosalind thought she detected a glance in her direction—"and her husband treated her cruelly. He made her—that is to say, she became ill—and came home to her family here. Grandfather Charles had the pavilion built for her there because she so loved the prospect from that hillside—it was quite open then—and she would walk there every day to sit when the weather was fine enough, until she became too weak. Walter was so devoted to her, and so distressed by the manner of her—by her death, he could not bear to speak of it, or be reminded of her—grief takes some people that way, men especially—and when Grandfather Charles died, not very long after Christina, the pavilion fell into disuse, though I should rather have kept it up myself, but poor dear Walter..."

"Rosy, you are very pale," said Caroline.

The thread was effectively broken, but Rosalind went upstairs more troubled than before. Caroline, plainly sensing that more was wrong than her friend was prepared to acknowledge, did her best to coax Rosalind into further confidences, but in vain. Despite her exhaustion, Rosalind lay awake for what seemed hours, and when eventually she did fall asleep, it was to find herself back in the walled graveyard, staring into a newly dug pit from whose depths something that shimmered with a bluish phosphorescence was rising towards her, so that she woke with a cry of terror and lay trembling until a soft light came into the room. For a moment Rosalind imagined that her angel had come back to comfort her, until she saw that the white-robed figure was only Caroline bearing a candle, but her friend stayed with her, and she was comforted, and repented of the "only".

T
WO DAYS LATER
, C
AROLINE AND
M
RS
T
EMPLE SAW
Rosalind onto the stopping train to London; or so they assumed. In fact Rosalind had arrived at a desperate, not to say foolhardy resolution: to visit Blackwall Park privately and determine whether it was indeed the place of her nightmare. She knew that the house was currently closed up and deserted, for Mr Margrave was currently embarked upon a long stay in town (the better, she feared, to lay siege to her affections) and did not keep two sets of servants. She was well aware of the dangers, but the compulsion had grown upon her until she could no longer resist it. Her recollection of the dream remained as vivid as when she had woken in the ruin of the pavilion; she felt as if a dark doorway had opened in her mind, letting in a freezing draught from the nether world, and that she would never know peace until she had found a way to force it shut again.

The previous afternoon, she and Caroline had set out to find the pavilion. Rosalind had proposed they retrace her walk across the fields, without saying exactly what she expected to find: the wicket gate was, on close inspection, still there in the corner of the field, but quite overgrown and decayed, and there was no path leading into the forest on the other side, only a huge bank of nettles. Then they had made their way around the foot of the hill, back across the river and along by the side of the stream Rosalind had followed the evening before, but without success. She had neglected to mark the point at which she had emerged, and either the grass had sprung back up around her footprints, or ... but Mrs Temple had said there was, or had been, a real pavilion; she could not have imagined waking in the ruin of it. Yet no matter how far they went, the wooded hillside presented a dense, unbroken aspect. Rosalind could feel her friends anxiety on her behalf, and longed to unburden herself, but still the inhibition remained. She told herself she feared that even Caroline might doubt her sanity; in truth, the doubt belonged to Rosalind herself. No matter how often she cast her mind back over the dream—and she seemed to be able to enter and leave the memory of it at any point—the same bewildered confusion overcame her as to what had been real and what dream, or delusion, or apparition—a word she did not like to follow too far, for she could still feel the softness of the cushions in the brightly painted pavilion, inhale the fresh smell of new varnish, feel the weight of her head in the woman's—Christina's—lap; and if Christina could feel so palpably human and yet be a phantom, then why should the dark vision of Blackwall Park be any less real to Rosalind's perhaps disordered sight?

That was the question that most troubled Rosalind, and the one she felt she must resolve before she returned to London. She did not believe that she would find a row of tombstones; at least she was almost certain she did not. Yet, strangely, she half hoped that there would be
some
correspondence between the actual Blackwall Park and the place of her dream; some tangible sign, a thread to guide her through what was bound to be a painful and difficult confrontation with her mother. Rosalind knew, instinctively, that the slightest shrinking on her part might provoke the sort of display that had overpowered her in the dream; she did not, on reflection, believe that her mother would actually do away with herself, but was by no means confident of her own ability to withstand the threat. These thoughts preoccupied her throughout the journey to Bramley station in Hampshire, which passed without incident. The stationmaster at Bramley seemed puzzled, as well he might, by the young lady's assuring him that she was to meet her aunt and uncle at Blackwall Park, but nevertheless secured for her a dog-cart driven by a taciturn, grey-headed man who conducted her on the final stage of her journey—no more than a mile—in complete silence.

The day was overcast, as in the dream, but milder. Though the road was not the same, there was something about its atmosphere that reminded her of thè dream: it was flat, and for the most part straight, and ran through a series of fields which appeared, from the glimpses through the hedges, to be quite deserted; but perhaps it was only the drivers silence that made her feel that she had passed this way before. All the while Rosalind was watching for a high wall of yellowish stone, so that when the driver turned down a short avenue of elms and she realised this was Blackwall Park, her first reaction was a curious mixture of relief and disappointment. There was no wall; the house was built of grey stone, not yellowish; the windows were shuttered, but it had two storeys, not three. They pulled up on gravel, but brown gravel was common, surely, as was a front door framed by a porch with stone pillars: it was not the same front door, and it was certainly not ajar; yet she was suddenly very apprehensive. What if Mr Margrave had come down after all? She had placed herself in the most compromising position; it would look as if she had secretly sought him out ... how could she not have thought of this? She had been mad to come here; and with that thought the memory of the dream pressed so closely upon her that the smell of damp and mould seemed to rise from the gravel onto which she found herself alighting, telling the driver to wait for her.

Her intellect ordered her to retreat; but her feet carried her along the gravel to the left, around the side of the house, barely noticing an expanse of lawn and shrubbery, onto a flagged path which took her around a conservatory and back towards the rear of the house, where there was indeed a red brick wall, lower than in the dream, partly enclosing a kitchen garden. This garden was quite neat, and not at all rank or overgrown; yet there was a path leading diagonally from a door at the back of the house, through the garden beds towards the far corner of the brick wall, and her feet were again compelled along it until she could see clearly that there were no graves or tombstones anywhere here. Rosalind stopped, confused, and began to retreat. As she did so, the smell of newly turned earth floated up to her from a nearby bed; and something caught at her dress. She glanced down. It was a cucumber frame, and on the corner nearest the path was caught a long thin strip of material; not from the blue travelling cloak she was wearing, but a drab, rusty black. In the same instant she became aware that she was not alone.

At the edge of her vision—for she dared not move—she saw Denton Margrave standing exactly where he had stood in the dream, and for an instant it seemed to her that the sky darkened over. She waited for the ground to open into a pit; the dream rushed back at her with such appalling vividness that she saw the blue light crackle about him, heard the rustle of unfurling wings, and then ... it was like looking out of a fast-moving train which had swiftly and silently reversed its direction: the Margrave-figure shrank back into itself; she seemed to be drawn backwards through the entirety of the dream, all in perfect detail but at such speed that she had not drawn breath before she was back in the sunlit pavilion with the woman showing her the tide page of her book, hearing simultaneously the voice of Caroline's mother at the dinner table, and understanding, at last, what Christina Temple had come back to tell her.

The vision faded; the paralysis ceased; Rosalind's heart gave one dreadful jolt as she turned to face her pursuer, until she saw that he was not Margrave at all, but an elderly man in a frayed, grimy, threadbare suit of black and heavy workman's boots, leaning upon a hoe and regarding her with some bewilderment. They remained silently facing one another until Rosalind had recovered sufficiently to say, somewhat breathlessly but with a composure which amazed her: "Pray excuse me; I have come to the wrong house."

S
TARING OUT ACROSS THE SOMBRE FIELDS AS THE TRAIN
carried her back to London, Rosalind found her thoughts running beyond the impending scene with her mother, Yorkshire would be a kind of exile for her, as well, but she would have work to do. She had her tale to tell, and would find the right way of telling it. Much black ink would have to be spilt; the angel's pure white radiance might never be quite recovered; but she would remain Rosalind Forster, and would one day earn enough to set her mother up in London with a companion, and be free to return to Caroline and Staplefield. So she promised herself, imagining the pavilion restored and glowing with fresh paint and varnish, floating in sunlit air.

I
SAT IN THE WRECK OF THE PAVILION WITH
EVEN
S
TAPLE
field was a lie
and
Alice will be so disappointed
looping through my head. But my mother hadn't lied, not exactly: Ferrier's Close
was
Staplefield. And Ashbourn House; and others, perhaps, I didn't yet know about. So why had she brought me up on the story-book version—in the most literal sense—of her childhood?

Because she couldn't bear to let go of Viola altogether,
said the Alice-voice in my head.

Then what did she do here that was so terrible?

The voice did not reply. From here, the house was invisible; the path curved away into the encircling nettles. When I first saw it, the ruined pavilion had had a certain romantic charm. Now it looked utterly despoiled. Rusting, twisted sections of the cupola roof littered the trampled clearing. The desolation was suddenly unbearable.