Ghost Song (38 page)

H
E CHOSE THE TIME
for his first visit carefully, deciding on late afternoon. At this time of year—late November—daylight was almost gone by four o'clock and some of the street lights had come on. The rush hour was already under way so people walked quickly past the theatre without really seeing it.

Caley was pinning his hopes on the copied key fitting the stage door, which was not really visible from the main street. As he went down Platt's Alley a pulse of excitement was beating inside his head and his hands were trembling. Here was the door—there was an inscription carved into the lintel over it; it was weathered but still readable. ‘Please one and please all, be they great, be they small.' This was clearly a quotation or part of a quotation; he would try to trace it when he got home.

He kept a sharp look-out for inquisitive passers-by, and was ready with his story about his wife having left her time-sheet here from yesterday's cleaning session. But no one challenged him, and he was not really surprised when the key turned sweetly in the lock. When you had right on your side, the mundane practicalities fell into place for you; he had noticed that before.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside and the past immediately folded round him like an embrace.

To most people it would be quite eerie to walk through the dark vastness of this old theatre, but Caley knew that despite the shadows and echoes there was nothing in the least frightening in here. He had known there would be ghosts, even before he read Prospero Garrick's book, but he knew they were friendly ghosts of all those people he had read about and longed to know. Bunstable, and Charlie the Clog Dancer. Prospero himself, of course. Was he here now, swirling his silk-lined cape, tipping his top hat as he went, the saucy old boy? And there would be Toby Chance and Frank Douglas, the composer; yes, they would surely be here. Caley had the sudden feeling that if he listened intently enough he would catch the faint strains of Frank Douglas's music, and the whispering echoes of Toby Chance singing the lyrics.

The clues he had hoped for were not there: whatever posters and photographs might once have hung on the walls had long since vanished, and although he found what was clearly a small office, there were no records or ledgers or stored correspondence. But curiously, this did not disappoint him as much as he would have thought. As he went cautiously through the dimness, peering into corners, looking into dressing rooms, into the old wardrobe, into a long bare room with battered chairs and collapsed sofas, he was completely unafraid and aware of a deep contentment. He thought: this is where I belong. I've never belonged anywhere before, but now I know why: this is my place in the world and I've only today found it.

It was those faint echoes of the music that drew him. The long-ago years seated at the old music teacher's piano in the room smelling of biscuits came back to him, and on his third or fourth visit he opened the dusty upright piano in the green room. At first he only placed his fingertips on the yellowed keys, but the next time he played a soft chord.

It was as if a light—a dazzling rainbow light—had been switched on inside his mind. The old instrument was badly out of tune and it was years since Caley had touched a piano anyway. But there was a moment—never to be forgotten, magical and wonderful—when the chord seemed to linger in the silence and he felt the music within his grasp once again.

At the next visit he tried a scale, and at the one after that he played, from memory, one of the simple early exercises he had learned in the biscuit-smelling room all those years ago. It was only then that it occurred to him that although the Tarleton did not seem to hold the clues to his past he had sought, it held something else. The music. He smiled, and had the sudden vivid impression that the people of the theatre had come to stand round the piano, and were nodding and smiling encouragement.

It was infuriating that now he could get in and out of the Tarleton reasonably easily, his time was so limited. Since Mary's death there was no one to question where he went or what he did, but he had to be at his desk in the council offices all day, which only left Saturdays and Sundays. How much better it would be if he did not have that dull, going-nowhere job—if his days were free. The notion of simply handing in his notice was out of the question; this quest and his dreams would sustain him on one level but they would not pay bills or buy food.

The asthma that had begun when he was eighteen still sometimes troubled him. It was not very bad, but it was there. Caley began to exaggerate it, at first just a little, but making sure it was noticeable. Climbing a flight of stairs he would pause halfway up and clutch his chest. If heavy files or boxes had to be carried, he would gasp and reach for the nebulizer. But if asked, he always said he was quite all right, never better, no cause for concern. He was careful to sound over-emphatic when he said this and to use the nebulizer a little more often than before.

The suggestion that he might work shorter hours came after a year. Not retirement of course, said his boss reassuringly, at least, not yet. Caley was still a relatively young man—early forties, wasn't it? But perhaps it would be easier for him to work less hours, and they could see how things went. Of course, once he reached fifty, if the council's medical officer agreed, early retirement with a small pension might be possible.

‘Could I think about it, please?' asked Caley.

He pretended to think for a week, and then accepted the reduced hours, along with the reduced salary. It meant he would have to be careful with money for the next few years, but the new arrangement would allow more time to pursue his quest.

But the visits still had to be made with extreme care. Caley knew you could come to know people by sight, not necessarily speaking to them, but recognizing their faces in the street or on buses or the Tube. At first he tried to vary his appearance when he made the journey, which was not very easy because he did not have many clothes, but he tried wearing a scarf or a pair of spectacles, or even carrying a parcel. He thought no one gave him so much as a second glance.

But the resonances from Prospero Garrick's book were still with him, and it was this that gave him his real idea.

‘He creeps through the darkness, still clothed in the long overcoat and muffler he always wore in life…a wide-brimmed hat pulled well down to hide his face.' That was what Prospero had written, and although it was most likely an extravagant description of some perfectly ordinary local character coupled with Prospero's own taste for the melodramatic, remembering the words the spark of an idea flared deep in Caley's mind. He found his notes from Prospero's book; in the closing chapter which Prospero had called ‘Curtain Call', there was another reference to the Tarleton ghost. Reading it again, the words seemed to leap off the page and seize him by the throat.

‘In summary,' wrote Prospero, ‘since all theatres have seen comedies and tragedies, loves and deaths and murders, to my mind it is little wonder that they all also have their ghosts. They are the shades of the player kings and queens, the phantoms of pantomime, the wraiths of melodrama. They are the torch-bearers who hand down the traditions and the memories, from the early mummers, through the rowdy Elizabethans and the mannered Restoration players, down through the flamboyant Victorians rewriting the Bard to suit their own purposes… All the way down to the present time.'

It was so flowery that at the time Caley had very nearly skipped the whole section. But he had diligently written it all down, and now he was glad, because towards the end was that other mention.

‘Even the dear old Tarleton's ghost,' wrote Prospero, ‘that curious figure that seems to date from the start of the Great War and hid its face as it crept along Platt's Alley—even that was believed by some to hail from an older era. It had been seen before, say those greybeards whose memories are long and whose discourse is vivid and even loquacious, and who is to say they may not be right? Perhaps the Tarleton's ghost is a twice-born ghost. Who can tell? Not I.'

Caley closed the notebook thoughtfully. The impression was that Prospero had talked to one or two very elderly people who had contributed vagrant glimpses of their own pasts—although that might be as much due to a liberal hand with a whisky bottle as to a reliable memory. Originally Caley had not been very convinced about those earlier reports of the ghost, but rereading them now, it occurred to him that if the Tarleton's ghost had been seen twice, it might be seen a third time. It might, in short, cover Caley's own visits to the theatre.

The figure seemed to have been best known in 1914. How well known had the story been in those years? And how long-lived a tale had it been? There would not be anyone alive now who would have actually seen that figure prowling those fog-bound streets, but memories in this part of London went back a long way and 1914 was just about touchable at one or two removes, so that older people might have heard the stories. A person of seventy or seventy-five might remember parents talking about the mysterious figure. Someone of Caley's age might remember grandparents doing so.

To use the legend might draw attention to himself, which was exactly what he was trying to avoid. But even while he recognized the danger, he knew he was going to do it anyway: the prospect of identifying with the Tarleton's past in this way strongly attracted him. And he did not think there was much of a risk: if people saw a muffled figure walking into Platt's Alley most of them would not take any notice—you saw all kinds of oddly dressed figures nowadays and people were too busy to care anyway. One or two gullible souls might say, half-jokingly, half-nervously, that the Tarleton's ghost had been seen again, but they would be met with guffaws or jibes about one too many in the pub last night.

In his time away from the office he scoured musty-smelling secondhand clothes shops and theatrical costumiers, to find a long dark overcoat and the right kind of old-fashioned deep-brimmed hat, eventually tracking down both garments in a street market. They were exactly what he wanted—to the casual eye he looked like one of those old Viennese professors you saw in 1930s films. At worst he looked eccentric but not over the top. Most important of all, he did not look in the least like the Caley Merrick most people knew.

Putting the things on for the first time was an extraordinary experience. Whoever he had been, that dark-clad figure—whether he had been a real person or a ghost or simply a figment of somebody's imagination—wearing these things brought him and the past abruptly closer. I'm donning a mantle, he thought. I'm taking on the cloak of some long-ago actor or performer who perhaps died here, or did something here that left a strong imprint. A musician, perhaps? This last idea sent delight through him.