Ghosts (5 page)

I bring the household rubbish up here on to the ridge to burn it. I like burning things, paper especially. I think fire must be my element; I relish the sudden flare and crackle, the anger of it, the menace. I stand leaning on my pitchfork (a wonderful implement, this, the wood of the shaft silky from use and the tines tempered by flame to a lovely, dark, oily opalescence), in my boots and my old hat, chewing the soft inside of my cheek and thinking of nothing, and am excited and at the same time strangely at peace. At times I become convinced I am being watched, and turn quickly to see if I can catch a glimpse of a foxy face and glittering, mephitic eye among the leaves; I tell myself I am imagining it, that there is no one, but I am not persuaded; I suppose I want him to be here still, someone worse than me, feral, remorseless, laughing at everything. The heat shakes the air above the fire and makes the trees on the far side of the clearing seem to wobble. Between the trunks I can see the sea, deep-blue, unmoving, flecked with white. The stones banked around the fire hum and creak, big russet shards with threads of yellow glitter running through them. I recall as a child melting lumps of lead in a tin can, the way the lead trembled inside itself and abruptly the little secret shining worm ran out. I used to try to melt stones, too, imagining the seams of ore in them were gold. And when they would not break nor the gold melt I could not understand it, and
would fly into a rage and want to set fire to everything, burn everything down. Timid little boy though I was, I harboured dreams of irresistible destruction. I imagined it, the undulating sheets of flame, the red wind rushing upwards, the rip and roar. Fire: yes, yes.

I have other chores. I draw wood, of course, and tend the stove, and check that the water pump is running freely and that the septic tank is functioning. These used to be Licht’s jobs; he took a great satisfaction in handing them over to me as soon as I arrived. I had not the heart to let him see how I enjoyed the work that he thought would be a burden. I could rhapsodise about this kind of thing – I mean the simple goodness of the commonplace. Jail had taught me the quiet delights of drudgery. Manual work dulls the sharp edges of things and sometimes can deflect even the arrows of remorse. Not that convicts are required any more to do what you would call hard labour. I have a theory, mock me if you will, that modern penal practice aims not to punish the miscreant, or even to instil in him a moral sense, but rather seeks to emasculate him by a process of enervation. I know I had ridiculously old-fashioned notions of what to expect from prison, picked up no doubt from the black-and-white movies of my childhood: the shaved blue heads, the manacled, ragged figures trudging in a circle in the exercise-yard, the fingernails destroyed, like poor Oscar’s, from picking oakum – why, even leg-irons and bread and water would not have surprised me – instead of which, what we had was Ping-Pong and television and the ever-springing tea-urn. I tell you, it would soften the most hardened recidivist. (Perhaps when I am finished with Vaublin I shall produce a monograph on prison reform: here as elsewhere, though it may be slower, the spread of liberal values goes unchecked and cannot but do harm to the moral fibre of the race, which needs its criminals, just as it needs its sportsmen and its butchers, for that vital admixture of strength, cunning and
freedom from squeamishness.) Of course, in prison there were deprivations, and they were hard to bear, I will not deny it. I had thought it would be women I would want when I got out, women and silk suits and crowded city streets, all that rich world from which I had been isolated for so long, but here I was, pottering about in this rackety house on a crop of rock in the midst of a waste of waters. I had my books, my papers, my studies, playing the part of Professor Kreutznaer’s amanuensis, supposedly aiding him in the completion of his great work on the life and art of Jean Vaublin for which the world, or that part of it that cares about such things, has grown weary of waiting. The fiction that I was no more than his assistant was one that, for reasons not wholly clear to me, it suited us both to maintain; the truth is, before I knew it he had handed over the task entirely to me. I was flattered, of course, but I did not deceive myself as to his opinion of my abilities; it is true, I have a capacity to take pains, learned in a hard school, but I am no scholar. It was not regard for me but a growing indifference to the fate of his life’s work that led the Professor to abdicate in my favour. No, that’s not right. Rather it was, I think, an act of expiation on his part. He like me had sins to atone for, and this sacrifice was one of the ways he chose. Or was it, on the contrary, as the weasel of doubt sometimes suggests to me, was it his idea of a joke? Anyway, no matter, no matter. My name will not appear on the title page; I would not want that. A brief acknowledgment will do; I look forward to penning it myself, savouring in advance the reflexive thrill of writing down my own name and being, even if only for a moment, someone wholly other. If, that is, it is ever to be finished. I am happy at my labours, happier than I expected or indeed deserve to be; I feel I have achieved my apotheosis. My time is wonderfully balanced between the day’s rough chores and those scrupulosities and fine discriminations that art history demands, this saurian stillness before the shining
objects it is my task to interrogate. In these soft, pale nights, while a grey-blue effulgence lingers in the window, I work at the kitchen table at the centre of a vast and somehow attentive silence, doing my impression of a scholar, sorting through sources, reading over the Professor’s material, in Licht’s exuberant typewriting, and writing up my own notes; collating, imbricating, advancing by a little and a little. It is a splendid part, the best it has ever been my privilege to play, and I have played many. I am in no hurry; the lamplight falls upon me steadily, my bent head and half a face, my hand inching its way down the pages. Now and then I pause and sit motionless for a moment, a watchman testing the night. I have a gratifying sense of myself as a sentinel, a guardian, a protector against that prowler, my dark other, whom I imagine stalking back and forth out there in the dark. Where can he be hiding, if he is still here? Could he have got back into the house, could he be skulking somewhere, in the attic, or in some unused room, nibbling scraps purloined from the kitchen and watching the day gradually decline towards darkness, biding his time? Is he in the woodpile, perhaps? If he is here it is the girl he is after. He shall not have her, I will see to that.

So anyhow: I came here, and I settled down, if that is the way to put it. I was content. This was a place to be. I did not travel to the mainland. No one had said I might not do so, but I seemed to feel an unspoken interdiction. If there was such a rule it must have been of my own making, for I confess I had no desire to realight from Laputa into the land of giants and horses. Yes, I was happy to bide here, with my catalogues and my detailed reproductions, polishing my
galant
style in preparation for the great work that lay before me impatient for my attentions. Ah, the little figures, I told myself, how convincingly, how gaily they shall strut!

Did I pin too many of my hopes on this work, I wonder? Could I really expect to redeem something of my fouled soul
by poring over the paintings – over the reproductions of the paintings – of a long-dead and not quite first-rate master? We know so little of him. Even his name is uncertain: Faubelin, Vanhoblin, Van Hobellijn? Take your pick. He changed his name, his nationality, everything, covering his tracks. I have the impression of a man on the run. There is no early work, no juvenilia, no remnants of his apprenticeship. Suddenly one day he starts to paint. Yes, a manufactured man. Is that what attracts me? Something in these dreamy scenes of courtly love and melancholy pantomime appeals to me deeply, some quality of quietude and remoteness, that sense of anguish they convey, of damage, of impending loss. The painter is always outside his subjects, these pallid ladies in their gorgeous gowns – how he loved the nacreous sheen and shimmer of those heavy silks! – attended by their foppish and always slightly tipsy-looking gallants with their mandolins and masks; he holds himself remote from these figures, unable to do anything for them except bear witness to their plight, for even at their gayest they are beyond help, dancing the dainty measures of their dance out at the very end of a world, while the shadows thicken in the trees and night begins its stealthy approach. His pictures hardly need to be glazed, their brilliant surfaces are themselves like a sheet of glass, smooth, chill and impenetrable. He is the master of darkness, as others are of light; even his brightest sunlight seems shadowed, tinged with umber from these thick trees, this ochred ground, these unfathomable spaces leading into night. There is a mystery here, not only in
Le monde d’or
, that last and most enigmatic of his masterpieces, but throughout his work; something is missing, something is deliberately not being said. Yet I think it is this very reticence that lends his pictures their peculiar power. He is the painter of absences, of endings. His scenes all seem to hover on the point of vanishing. How clear and yet far-off and evanescent everything is, as if seen by someone on his deathbed who
has lifted himself up to the window at twilight to look out a last time on a world that he is losing.

Twice a week I report to Sergeant Toner, the island’s only civic guard, a taciturn and stately figure. His dayroom in the barracks reminds me strangely of the schoolrooms of my childhood: the dusty floorboards, the inky smell, the wood-framed clock up on the wall ticking away the slow, sunstruck afternoons. Sergeant Toner moves with vast deliberation, rising from his desk in a rolling motion, as if he were shouldering great soft weights, nodding to me in sober salutation. A kind of monumental decorum marks these occasions. We speak, when we speak, mainly of the weather, its treacheries and unexpected beneficences. The Sergeant leans at his counter, his meaty shoulders hunched and his pink scalp gleaming through the stubble of his close-cropped, sandy hair, and writes my name into the daybook with the stub of a plain, sweat-polished pencil tethered to the counter on a piece of string; that pencil must have been here since the days when he was still a recruit. He breathes heavily, so heavily that once in a while, seemingly without his noticing it, a slurred word will surface, a fragment of his inner musings which he involuntarily extrudes in a sort of rasping sigh.
Ah, dear Christ
, he will murmur, or
Wednesday
, or, on one memorable occasion,
Puddings
 … He honours the niceties of our predicament, maintaining a careful distance between us. In the beginning I had worried that he would be impressed with me, in a professional way, that he might look on me as a sort of celebrity to be watched over and shown off – after all, it is not every day a man of my notoriety swims into his ken – but the very first time when, nervous as a schoolboy, I came to report to him, he repeated my name to himself thoughtfully a couple of times and then – though he had been expecting me, of course, and knew all
about me, having been thoroughly briefed, as they say, by the authorities – he asked gently, with that fastidiousness and sense of tact which I have come so much to admire in him, if I would please spell it for him. When I had done so, and he had carefully written it into his book, we observed a brief silence, with eyes downcast, in acknowledgment I suppose of the solemnity of the occasion. ‘Ah yes,’ he said then with a sigh, ‘yes: life means life, right enough.’ This is something that has been dinned into me over the years, yet coming from him, and the way that he put it, it had a certain weight, a certain grandeur, even, and for a moment I saw myself as a person of consequence; a serious person, deeply flawed and irremediably damaged, it is true, but someone, all the same: definitely someone.

I need these people, the Sergeant, and Mr Tighe the shopman in the village, even Miss Broaders, she of the pink twinsets and tight mouth, who presides over the post office. I needed them especially in the early days. They had substance, which was precisely what I seemed to lack. I held on to them as if they were a handle by which I might hold on to things, to solid, simple (yes, simple!) things, and to myself among them. For I felt like something suspended in empty air, weightless, transparent, turning this way or that in every buffet of wind that blew. At least when I was locked away I had felt I was definitively there, but now that I was free (or at large, at any rate) I seemed hardly to be here at all. This is how I imagine ghosts existing, poor, pale wraiths pegged out to shiver in the wind of the world like so much insubstantial laundry, yearning towards us, the heedless ones, as we walk blithely through them.

Time. Time on my hands. That is a strange phrase. From those first weeks on the island I recall especially the afternoons, slow, silent, oddly mysterious stretches of something
that seemed more than clock time, a thicker-textured stuff, a sort of sea-drift, tidal, surreptitious, deeper than the world. Look at this box-kite of sunlight sailing imperceptibly across the floor, listen to the scrape of the curtain as it stirs in the breeze, see that dazed green view framed in the white window, the far, narrow line of the beach and beyond that the azure sea, unreal, vivid as memory. This is a different way of being alive. I thought sometimes at moments such as this that I might simply drift away and become a part of all that out there, drift and dissolve, be a shimmer of light slowly fading into nothing. It was coming into the season of white nights, I found it hard to sleep. Extraordinary the look of things at dusk then, it might have been another planet, with that pale vault of sky, those crouched and hesitant, dreamy distances. I wandered about the house, going softly through the stillness and shadows, and sometimes I would lose myself, I mean I would flow out of myself somehow and be as a phantom, a patch of moving dark against the lighter darkness all around me. The night seemed something on the point of being spoken. This sense of immanence, of things biding their time, waiting to occur, was it all just imagination and wishful thinking? Night-time always seems peopled to me; they throng about me, the dead ones, yearning to speak.