Ghosts (9 page)

She rose from the couch, smoothing the lap of her dress, and crossed the room and stood with one hand on the doorknob and the other still holding her jacket closed at her throat.

‘What a fraud you are,’ she said.

‘A fake, yes,’ he answered swiftly, pouncing, with his fierce, tight-lipped smile, ‘but not a fraud. Ask the Professor: he knows about such things.’ He advanced a step towards her eagerly and stopped and stood with his hands in the
pockets of his jacket and his head thrown back, looking at her along his nose and smiling genially, the cheroot held in his teeth and his curved mouth oozing smoke. ‘What do you say,’ he said, ‘shall we fight?’

She hesitated, her eyes lowered, looking at the spot where he was standing. She pictured herself striding forward without a word and beating him to his knees, could almost see the blood-dark shadow in her head and feel the irresistible exultation shake her heart; she would cross the space between them at a run, one arm drawn back like a bow, fleet-footed, winged, taking a little skipping step halfway, the floor like firm air under her tread, and then feel the crack of fist on flesh and hear his laughter and his cries as he fell in a clatter with limbs askew, like a wooden doll. She trembled, and turned abruptly and went out, letting the door shut behind her with a ragged click.

Felix turned to Croke with eyebrows raised and empty palms helplessly upturned and lifted his shoulders and sighed.

‘Listen,’ Croke said, ‘you look like a man that would know: that thing at Benediction that the priest holds up, what is that called?’

He demonstrated, lifting clasped hands aloft. Felix studied him carefully and then slowly smiled and wagged a finger in his face.

‘Aha,’ he said, with a reproving laugh, ‘trying to pull the wool from under my feet, eh?’

Flora’s dream has darkened. She wanders now in a wooded place at evening. The trees encircle her, stirring their branches and murmuring among themselves like masked attendants at a ceremony. Above her the sky is bright, lit with the smoke-blue, tender glow of springtime, but all is dimness and false shadow where she walks, circling the circle
of trees, searching in vain for a way out. People are indistinctly present, posed like statues, Sophie and the children, old Croke in his straw hat, and someone else whose face she cannot see, who stands in the centre of the clearing, motionless and hanging somehow, as if suspended from invisible strings, a glimmering figure clad in white, grief-stricken and in pain, who does not stir or speak. Felix approaches her astride a pantomime donkey, stumping along on his own legs with the stuffed animal clamped between his knees. He puts his face close to hers and laughs and crosses his eyes and flaps his pink, pointed tongue suggestively. She notices that the donkey, though it is made of some sort of thick, furred stuff, is alive; it looks up at her pleadingly and she recognises Licht, sewn up tight inside the heavy fur. She flees, but there is no way out, and she hears Felix at her heels, his laughter and the jingling of buckles and poor Licht’s harsh gasps of complaint. At last she runs behind the motionless, whiteclad figure and finds that it has turned into a hollow tube of heavy cloth, and there is a little ladder inside it that she climbs, pulling the heavy, stiff tunic shut behind her. There is a musty smell that reminds her of childhood. In the dark she climbs the little steps and reaches the hollow mask that is the figure’s face and fits her own face to it and looks out through the eyeholes into the broad, calm distances of the waning day and understands that she is safe at last.

I walked up the fields to the oak ridge. I noticed that my hands were shaking; nothing like a visitation to set the adrenalin coursing through the blood. The rain had stopped but the grass was thick with wet. Another dark cloud stood hugely above the trees like an ogre with arms outstretched. The little wood was green as green, and there were bluebells and wild garlic and even a nosegay of primroses here and there, nodding on a mossy bank or lurking coyly in the
rotted bole of a storm-felled oak. The trees were lacily in leaf, at just that stage when Corot loved to capture them. All very pretty, and plausible too, yet I could not help thinking how all of it seemed laid on for someone else, someone milder than I, less tainted, without that whiff of brimstone that I suspect precedes me wherever I go. In the clearing my fire of yesterday was smouldering still; I soon got it back to life. Presently the rain started up again, tentatively at first, pattering on the dead leaves above me and then coming down in whitish swathes, billowing brightly through the trees and hissing in the fire. I stood with my head bowed and my arms hanging at my sides and the rain ran over my scalp and into my eyebrows and trickled down my face like tears and fell in heavy drops from my chin. Sometimes I like to abandon myself to the elements like this. I have never been one to worship nature, yet I recognise a certain therapeutic value in the contemplation of natural phenomena; I believe it has to do with the world’s indifference, I mean the way the world does not care about us, about our happiness, or how we suffer, the way it just bides there with uplifted glance, murmuring to itself in a language we shall never understand. Even such a one as I might learn humility from that unfailing example of endurance and small expectations. Nothing surprises nature; terrible deeds, the most appalling crimes, leave the world unmoved, as I can attest. Some find this uncanny, I know, and lash out all round them, raging for a response, though nothing avails, not even the torch. I, on the other hand, take comfort from this universal dispassion –

But stop, stop; I have begun to generalise again. That is what the philosophic mode will do to you. Nature did not exist until we invented it one eighteenth-century morning radiant with Alpine light.

Anyway, I am standing in the rain with my head bowed, in my penitential pose. All at once, though I had noticed no
flash, a terrible crack of thunder sounded directly above my head, making the trees rattle. It gave me a dreadful fright. What a thing that would be, to be struck down by a bolt out of the blue, or the grey, at least. So much for the world’s indifference then; that would be what you might call a pathetic fallacy, all right. Or perhaps lightning would galvanise me into life, poor inert monster that I am? Then, by God, the world would want to watch out, oh yes.

The rain crashed down and almost at once began to ease. A storm in May; how well that sounds, to say it. I thought how my life is like a little boat and I must hold the tiller steady against the buffeting of wind and waves, and how sometimes, such as this morning, I lose my hold somehow and the sail luffs helplessly and the little vessel wallows, turning this way and that in the swell. Such formulations please me, as if to picture the world in this way were somehow to subdue it. (Subdue? Did I say subdue? Perhaps I am not so insouciant in the face of nature’s heedlessness after all.) Yes, a little skiff, and I in it, out over depthless waters.

When the shower had passed and the sun came out again I took off my shirt and strung it between two sticks by the fire to dry. The breeze fingered my bared back, giving me gooseflesh. I looked at myself; I noticed that I was beginning to develop breasts; I laughed, and hunkered down by the fire for warmth. The flames faltered among the wet wood and the smoke stung my eyes. When Hatch and Pound came upon me even Hatch hung back at first, uncertain of this big, half-naked, red-eyed, dripping creature, the wildman of the woods, squatting with his arms wrapped round his knees and watching them from under half-closed lids. Circumspectly then they advanced and stood beside me and we stared all three into the fire. Around us the wind swept wetly through the trees and the leaves dripped and the damp sunlight flickered. Each fresh gust brought with it faintly the
sound of the sea: the far, faint thud of waves and the hiss of water running on the shingle. I closed my eyes and the past was like a melody I had lost that was starting to come back, I could hear it in my mind, a tiny, thin, heartbreaking music.

‘What’s this place called?’ Hatch asked.

‘The Land of Nod,’ I said, and they laughed without conviction and then lapsed again into silence.

I studied them with covert attention. Hatch was sly and unhappy and Pound was sharper than he looked. Pound’s mother was supposed to have accompanied them on the boat trip but something had come up. He frowned into the fire, gnawing his lip. I wondered what his mammy would say if she knew her plump little boy was consorting unchaperoned with the ogre himself in the wild wood now. Sometimes I wonder if it was wise of the authorities to free me like this. But perhaps they knew me better than I know myself? I am harmless, I’m sure. Fairly harmless. No longer dangerous, anyway. Or not very.

Hatch said nothing; Hatch had no mother.

A strong gust shook the trees and the wet leaves clattered.

‘This is worse than at home,’ Pound said with sudden vehemence and kicked the embers at the fire’s margin. ‘Nothing to bloody do.’

I remembered suddenly how when I was young like them I sat in a hazel wood one winter Sunday by a damply smoking fire like this one as night came on and a boy whose name I cannot recall (Reck, I think it was, or Rice) arrived and told us a woman had been beaten to death in her sweetshop down a lane. I pictured the scene, distorted, wavering, the colours seeping into each other, as if I were looking at it all through bottle-glass, and felt fearful and inexplicably guilty. I have never forgotten that moment, that sudden, blood-boltered vision, intense as if I had been there myself. First such stain on my life.

The boys watched me uncertainly, waiting for me to
speak. I said nothing. They must have thought I was cracked. I am, a little. I must be, surely. It would be a comfort to think so.

A squashy, wet, warm smell rose from the greenery around us as the sun dried out the rain, and suddenly summer stood up out of the undergrowth like a gold man, dripping and ashine. Between the trees the lapis glint of sea. The air was gaudy with birdsong.

I left them and made my way down the hillside, carrying a stick; my shirt, still damp, clung to my back. The wind had grown gay and the sun was hot. The house stood below me, closed on itself. I sat down on a rock under a flowering thorn bush. There are times when my mind goes dead, as if something had switched itself off in my head. Some mornings when I wake I do not remember who I am or what it is I have done. I will lie there for a minute or more, unwilling to stir, basking in the anaesthetic of forgetfulness. It is like being new-born. At such moments I glimpse a different self, as yet unblackened, ripe with potential, a sort of radiant big infant swaddled in shining light. Then it all comes seeping back, spreading like a slow, thick liquid through my mind. Yet sometimes even when I am fully awake, in the middle of the day, I will imagine for a second, as if I were walking in a dark place and suddenly stepped through a patch of sunlight, that none of it had happened, that I am what I might have been, an innocent man, though I know well I have never been innocent, nor, for that matter, have I ever been what could properly be called a man. Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature streaming up out
of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.

While I sat there on my hard rock under the may-tree the house below me as I watched over it began to come alive. Licht appeared in the yard with slops for the chickens, and above him, on the first floor, the french windows opened with theatrical suddenness and Sophie stepped out into the sunlight on the balcony with her camera. Dimly at a high-up window I could see Felix loitering, his long swarth face and glittering eye. Alice was climbing the stairs, I saw her on successive landings, a small, solemn figure resolutely ascending, first to the right, then to the left, and then the frosted glass of the lavatory window whitened briefly as she entered there and shut the door behind her. The Professor was pacing the turret room, a moving darkness against the light of the windows all around him, and now, as he turned, the weathervane on the roof turned with him in the breeze, and I smiled at this small coincidence that only I had seen.

It was Flora I was vainly watching for, of course, the rest of them might have been so many maggots in a cheese for all I cared. Oh yes, I had spotted her straight away, with my gimlet eye, the moment I had walked into the kitchen and seen them sitting there barefoot with their mugs of tea. She sprang out from their midst like the Virgin in a busy Annunciation, calm as Mary and nimbed with that unmistakable aura of the chosen. What did I hope for, what did I expect? Not what you think. I have never had much interest in the flesh. I used to be as red-blooded, or red-eyed, at least, as the next man, but for me that side of things was always secondary to something else for which I cannot find an exact name. Curiosity? No, that is too weak. A sort of lust for knowledge, the passionate desire to delve my way into womanhood and taste the very temper of its being. Dangerous talk, I know. Well, go ahead, misunderstand me, I don’t care. Perhaps I have always wanted to be a woman, perhaps
that’s it. If so, I have reached the halfway stage, unsexed poor androgyne that I am become by now. But the girl had nothing to do with any of this. (By the way, why so coy about using her name? Want to rob her of her individuality, eh? – want to turn her into
das Ewig-Weibliche
that will lead you on to salvation, is that it, you sly old Faustus? … What have I said?) Sophie would have been more my vintage, with her camera and her fags and her tragic memories, but it was the girl I singled out. It was innocence I was after, I suppose, the innocent, pure clay awaiting a grizzled Pygmalion to inspire it with life. It is as simple as that. Not love or passion, not even the notion of the radiant self rising up like flame in the mirror of the other, but the hunger only to have her live and to live in her, to conjugate in her the verb of being.