Ghost Music (18 page)

Kate said, “There's something about London . . . I always think the people here are very secretive. I think the whole city is secretive. All kinds of things go on behind closed doors, but nobody talks about them.”

We leaned on the parapet overlooking the river. “Is David in some kind of trouble?” I asked her.

“You heard him on the phone?”

“Yes . . . it sounded like somebody was trying to put the squeeze on him.”

“He
is
a banker. He must be under a whole lot of pressure, most of the time.”

“I know. But it didn't sound like a business call to me.”

Kate said nothing. I watched her for a while, the way the evening wind stirred her hair. Then I said, “Would you ever leave Victor? Divorce him?”

“For you, you mean?”

“No, for Brad Pitt. Of course I mean for me.”

She was silent for nearly half a minute. Then she said, “It would be good, wouldn't it?”

“It's already good. If you left him, it could be terrific.”

“The trouble is, I can't. Not yet, anyhow.”

“Why not? The guy's an orangutan. And he's a Tony Bennett fan, for God's sake.”

She smiled, and took hold of my hand. “Let's go for a nightcap, shall we? There's a wine bar just up there.”

“So you're not going to answer my question?”

“I thought I already did. I
can't
leave him, Gideon, no matter how much I might want to.”

“What—he has some kind of secret hold over you? He knows that you cheated in your grade school spelling bee? You had ‘necessary' written in ballpoint on the palm of your hand? What?”

We went to a crowded wine bar called Corkers, and sat next to a couple who had obviously had the fight to end all fights, because they spent over a half hour glowering at each other and not saying a word.

Kate said, “I just want you to know that you are more important
to me than anybody I have ever met.
Ever.
And for so many different reasons. And I do want to see much more of you.”

“But you still can't leave Victor?”

She gave me the smallest shake of her head. “No, I can't. And if you understood why, you wouldn't want to see me again.”

“Kate—I'm a very open-minded guy. At least I like to think so. What can you have possibly done that would make me not want to see you again?”

“It wasn't my fault, Gideon. But it's the one thing you couldn't bear.”

“You used to be a man? You had a sex-change operation?”

Again she shook her head, although she gave me a smile, too.

“Please,” she said, “can we just enjoy these moments together as much as we can, without worrying about the past?”

* * *

By the time we returned to the Philipses' apartment, David and Helena had already gone to bed, although they had left a lamp on for us in the living room, and Helena had written us a note saying:

Do help yourself to whatever you want. There is cold chicken in the fridge if you feel hungry.

XXX H.

However, we were both tired and neither of us wanted anything more to eat, so we showered and went to bed, too. We held each other very close for a while, but eventually Kate turned over one way and I turned over the other, and we fell asleep.

I had a dream that I was walking over the surface of a frozen lake. It was almost dark and I knew that I had to reach the other side of the lake before night fell. On my left I could see a dark pine
forest, like the forests that lined the road to the airport in Sweden. Ahead of me, on the bank, there was a cluster of strange tents, of all different shapes and sizes, with a haze of smoke rising above them.

As I crossed the lake, every step made a sharp crackling noise, and I was worried that the ice was going to collapse under my feet. I hurried faster and faster, and the crackling grew louder. I could feel the ice giving way underneath me, and I was sure that I was going to fall into the water and drown.

I opened my eyes. I wasn't crossing a frozen lake at all, but lying in bed, with Kate sleeping next to me. Yet the crackling was still going on, as loud as it had been in my dream. Not only that, the light between the drapes was flickering, as if the streetlamp outside the house was just about to sputter out.

I climbed out of bed and went to the window. When I parted the drapes, I could see the Philipses' bedroom windows, at right angles to ours. Orange flames were leaping and dancing in the left-hand window, and it looked as if their bedroom was ablaze.

I shook Kate's shoulder and shouted, “Kate! Wake up! There's a fire!”

Kate sat up immediately. “What? What did you say?”

“There's a fire in David and Helena's bedroom!”

I dragged the drapes right back, so that she could see it. But when I looked across again, I realized that the fire wasn't inside the Philipses' bedroom at all. It was simply being reflected in the window from outside. In fact, I could see David standing close to the window, staring out. Although it was difficult to make out David's expression behind the flickering flames, I could see tears glistening on his cheeks, as if he were suffering excruciating physical pain.

What was totally weird, though, was that there
was
no fire outside. It should have been right in the middle of the brick-paved patio, between the two stone cherubs, but there was nothing there at all.

“Do you see that?” I asked Kate. “There's a reflection of a fire in that window, right? But no fire.”

Kate came up behind me. “That's not a fire. It's only the streetlight.”

I looked again. I could hardly believe it, but she was right. There was a dancing orange reflection in the Philipses' bedroom window, but it was nothing more than the light from a sodium lamp, on the other side of the street, shining through the branches of a leafless tree.

Without a word, I picked up my pants from the chair where I had hung them, and pulled on my sweater. “Come on,” I said, and went along to the Philipses' bedroom and knocked.

There was no reply. I knocked again, and called out, “David! It's Gideon! Is everything okay?”

I was just about to let myself into their bedroom when the door opened. David was standing there in red paisley-patterned pajamas, blinking at me.

“Yes?” he said. “Was there something you wanted?”

“I saw you at the window,” I said. “It looked like there was a fire.”

“A fire? Where? What do you mean, a fire? I've been asleep.” “I saw you. I saw a fire reflected in the window and you were looking at it, and you were crying. Well, you had tears in your eyes, anyhow.”

“Really?” said David, “I have to admit that I'm mystified. Perhaps what you saw was some kind of optical illusion. You know, like a mirage. We used to see them all the time, when I was in the Sudan. You could see what looked like whole cities sometimes, out in the desert, but they simply weren't there.”

I didn't know what else to say to him. I couldn't really accuse him of being a liar, not in his own home. But I was convinced that I had seen a fire reflected in his window, and I was sure that he had been staring at it, and weeping.

“Okay,” I said. “I'm sorry if we woke you up.”

“Oh, think nothing of it. I'm a very poor sleeper in any case. I usually wake up two or three times a night and have a little read, or have a crack at the
Daily Telegraph
crossword.”

He closed the door. Kate said, “Let's get back to bed. We have a really full day tomorrow.” At that moment, the clock in the living room chimed two. “
Today
, I mean,” she corrected herself.

But I said, “Not just yet. I want to take a look outside, in the backyard. If that
was
an optical illusion, I want to see how it happened.”

I went through to the kitchen and shot the bolts on the French windows. Outside, the night was windy but not too cold. The wind was making the trees thrash around, and it carried the sound of a distant train rattling on its way to one of the London termini, one of the loneliest sounds in the world.

“You should put on your shoes,” Kate admonished me.

“I'm only going to take a quick look around.”

I circled around the backyard. I was trying to work out exactly where the fire must have been located for us to see it reflected in David's bedroom window. I had been pretty much right the first time: it must have been burning right
here
, between these two stone cherubs.

I hunkered down and pressed the flat of my hand against the bricks. They were quite cold, but when I examined them more closely, I saw that some of them were cracked, as if they had been subjected to a fierce heat, and that there was a dark elliptical shape in the middle of them, which could have been a scorch mark.

“I believe that there
was
a fire here,” I told Kate. “The only thing is, it wasn't tonight.”

I stood up. “I definitely saw David crying, too, but David says that he wasn't. He says he was in bed asleep. But suppose what I saw was something that actually took place some other night, instead of tonight?”

We went back into the kitchen. “Is this the same kind of experience I had in Stockholm? You know, when I saw Jack
abducting Felicia? Can I see things that have happened in the past, as if they're happening all over again? Or things that are
going
to happen, but haven't happened yet? Or even things that
might
happen, but never actually do?”

Kate said, “Only you can answer that.”

I shook my head and said, “Don't ask me. I didn't pass seventh-grade math, let alone advanced physics. But I've read about stuff like that. Some couple who lived near Gettysburg swore that on the last night in June, every year, they could hear horses and wagons and soldiers marching past their house, hundreds of them, heading for the battlefield.”

“Gideon, you realize you're talking about ghosts.”

“No, I'm not. Not actual ghostie ghosts, in bedsheets. But it's like time getting out of sequence. Like dropping a deck of cards and putting them back in all the wrong order. I'm sure that might be possible. Well—I've seen it for myself, so it
must
be possible.”

We went back to bed. I was beginning to feel that I was close to understanding what was happening to me—why some events and conversations seemed so oblique and out of sequence. Kate had told me that I had a rare gift, and maybe this was it—an ability to glimpse both the past and the future as if they were happening
now
. Not just glimpse it, in fact, but live it, complete with sounds and smells and feelings.

Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward, but has to be lived forward. Maybe I was the exception to that rule.

* * *

The following day was sunny but much colder. Huge white cumulus clouds rolled across London like Elizabethan galleons in full sail. As she had promised, Kate took me to see Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament.

We behaved like typical American tourists, but Kate wouldn't
let me take any photographs of her. “I don't want to come across them in twenty years' time and be reminded of how young I was, and how happy I was. Life is sad enough as it is, don't you think? So why take pictures that are only going to make your future self cry?”

“Kate—I want to remember this day, that's all, and if it makes me cry, that'll be my tough luck.”

She kissed me. “You'll remember it, I promise you.”

We had lunch at Rules in Maiden Lane, the oldest restaurant in London, sitting on a red plush banquette, surrounded by gilt-framed oil paintings. We ate native oysters and roast pheasant, with golden syrup sponge to finish with, and felt like two characters out of a Dickens novel.

Afterward, we took a walk in St. James's Park. We stopped by the lake, where two park officials were feeding fish to a small but greedy cluster of pelicans. The wind rustled noisily in the horse-chestnut trees, almost drowning the noise of the traffic. I felt as if we had found ourselves in one of those strange 1960s art movies, like
Blow-Up
, in which everything that happens is totally mundane, but inexplicably threatening, too.

Kate said, “What would you like to do tomorrow? We haven't done any shopping yet. We could go to Harrods.”

I was about to answer her when—with a prickling of recognition—I saw the same two men as we had seen yesterday in Kensington Gardens, walking along the opposite side of the lake with the boy between them. As before, one of the men wore dark glasses and a black cap, while the other wore a gray overcoat—although today he also wore a gray scarf, which covered the lower part of his face. The boy was dressed in the same duffel coat, with the hood raised.

“Kate—look. Would you believe it? It's those same two guys, with that boy.”

Kate shaded her eyes and said, “You're right, yes. That's a coincidence.”

Like yesterday, the boy seemed to be unsteady on his feet, and kept stumbling, and every now and then the men grasped his elbows to prevent him from falling to his knees.

We watched them for a while, as they made their way along the path, and then I said, “Maybe I should call the police.”

“Do you think so?” said Kate. She looked around. “Nobody else seems to be worried about them.”

“Maybe they're not. But look at the way that kid keeps staggering.”

“He looks as if he could be disabled. You don't want to embarrass him.”

“I don't know. It all looks pretty damn strange to me.”

Whatever misgivings I had about the two men and the boy, there wasn't very much I could do. Although there was a bridge across the lake, it was too far away, and even if I ran, they would have been long gone by the time I had crossed over to the other side. The boy may have been unsteady on his feet, but the three of them were walking deceptively quickly. Soon they were nearly opposite us, heading east toward the nearest road.