Ghosts (11 page)

Anyway, one day a couple of weeks after our first meeting I went up to the cottage and she did not answer my knock, though the door stood open as always, and when, with my heart in my mouth, I had climbed the stairs to what I knew was her bedroom, I found her lying neatly on her back in the narrow bed with the blanket pulled to her chin and her eyes open and all filmed over and a cocky fly strolling across her cold forehead. At first, in my surprise and numbed dismay, I had the crazy thought that it was not she at all, but an effigy of herself she had left behind her to fool me while she made good her escape. (I was not too far off the mark, I suppose.) The fly on her forehead stopped and wrung its
hands as if in energetic dismay and then flew off in a bored sort of way, and I leaned over her and closed her eyes – now
there
is a creepy sensation – and quietly withdrew. I discovered that I was holding my breath. At the front door I debated with myself whether or not to shut it, but decided in the end to leave it open, since that was her way; besides, it is the practice in these parts, when someone dies, for the house to be left open to all-comers. Do I imagine it, or did the goat give me a soulful, commiserating look as I walked off down the path?

What I felt most strongly was resentment. It was as if she had played a tasteless practical joke on me, had tricked me, first luring me on and then abruptly vanishing. I had needed her, and she had let me down. But what had I needed her
for
? I brooded on the question without really wanting to find the answer, touching it gingerly, with the barest tips of thought, as if it were one of those lethal lumps the precise depth and dimensions of which I would not care to discover. Forgiveness, as I’ve said, absolution, I was aware of all that; but that was what I had wanted, not what I had wanted her to represent, as a being separate from me. (Oh God, this is all so murky and confused!) Look, here, let me come clean: I could not rid myself of the belief that she had seemed some sort of hope, not just for me, but for – well, I don’t know. Hope. I am well aware how foolhardy it is to say such things, but there you are: it’s true, it’s what I felt. The trouble with death, I realised, is that it is really not an ending at all; it leaves so much unfinished, and so much unassuaged. You keep thinking that the one who died has just gone away, has walked off in the middle of things and will come back presently and take up where you both left off. I cursed myself for not having searched her house that last day, when I had the opportunity; no one would have known, I could
have delved into every corner, investigated every last cranny in the place. However, I know in my heart that I would have found nothing, no cache of family papers, no eyebrow-raising diaries, no bundle of dusty letters done up in a blue ribbon. She had jettisoned everything but the barest essentials. Compared to hers my life was still awash with the flotsam of former, sunken lives. I entertained the hope that someone would turn up and surprise us at the funeral, a leathery old colonial, say, who would talk about kaffirs and gin slings and that time that new chap went mad and shot himself on the steps of the club, but in vain; Sergeant Toner and I were the only mourners. As the priest droned the prayers and shook holy water on her coffin I realised with a start that I had not even known her Christian name.

Another dead one; dear Jesus, I do keep on adding to them, don’t I? Well, that’s life, I suppose. I think of them like the figures in one of Vaublin’s twilit landscapes, placed here and there in isolation about the scene, each figure somehow the source of its own illumination, aglow in the midst of shadows, still and speechless, not dead and yet not alive either, waiting perhaps to be brought to some kind of life. That’s it, let us have a disquisition, to pass the time and keep ourselves from brooding. Think of a topic. Ghosts, now, why not. I have never been able to understand why ghosts should be considered something to be afraid of; they might be troublesome, a burden to us, perhaps, pawing at us as we try to get on with our poor lives, but not frightening, surely. Yet, though the fresh-made widow weeps and tears her breast, if she were to come home from the cemetery in her weeds and veil and find her husband’s spirit sitting large as life in his favourite armchair by the fire she would run into the street gibbering in terror. It makes no sense. I can think of times and circumstances when even the ghosts of complete
strangers, no matter how horrid, would be welcomed. The prisoner held in solitary confinement, for instance, would be grateful surely to wake up some fevered night and find a troupe of his predecessors come walking through the wall in their rags and beards and clanking their chains, while Saint Teresa would have been tickled, I suspect, to receive a visit to her interior castle from some long-dead hidalgo of Old Castile. And what of our friend Crusoe in his hut, would he not have been happy to be haunted by the spirits of his drowned shipmates? The ship’s doctor could have advised him on his ague, the carpenter on his fencing, while the cabin boy, no matter how fey, surely would have afforded a welcome change of fare from Friday’s dusky charms.

There are ghosts and ghosts, of course. Banquo was a dampener on the king’s carousings, and Hamlet’s father made what I cannot but think were excessive calls on filial piety. Yet, for myself, I know I would be grateful for any intercourse with the dead, no matter how baleful their stares or unavoidable their pale, pointing fingers. I feel I might be able, not to exonerate, but to explain myself, perhaps, to account for my neglectfulness, my failures, the things left unsaid, all those sins against the dead, both of omission and commission, of which I had been guilty while they were still in the land of the living. But more than that, more important than the desire for self-justification, is the conviction that I have, however preposterous it may sound, that there is an onus on us, the living, to conjure up our particular dead. I am certain there is no other form of afterlife for them than this, that they should live in us, and through us. It is our duty. (I like the high moral tone. How dare I, really!)

Let us take the hypothetical case of a man surprised by love, not for a living woman – he has never been able to care much for the living – but for the figure of a woman in, oh, a painting, let’s say. That is, he is swept off his feet one day by a work of art. It happens; not very often, I grant you, but
it does happen. The fact that the subject is a female perhaps is not of such significance, although it should be perfectly possible to ‘fall in love’, as they like to put it, with a painted image; after all, what is it lovers ever love but the images they have of each other? Freud himself remarked that in the passionate encounter of every couple there are four people involved. Or should it be six? – the two so-called real lovers, plus the images they have of themselves, plus the images that they have of each other. What a tangled web Eros weaves! Anyhow. This man, this hypothetical man, finds himself one day in the house of a rich acquaintance, where he is confronted by a portrait of a woman and knows straight away that at once and by whatever means he must possess it. That is what they mean by love, surely? It is not, mark you, that the woman is beautiful; in fact, the model was evidently a plain, pinched person with fishy eyes and a big nose and too much flesh about the lips. But ah, in her portrait she has presence, she is unignorably
there
, more real than the majority of her sisters out here in what we call real life. And our Monsieur Hypothesis is not used to seeing people whole, the rest of humanity being for him for the most part a kind of annoying fog obscuring his view of the darkened shop-window of the world and of himself reflected in it. He tells himself he will steal the picture and hold it for ransom, but really that is just for the purposes of the plot. His true and secret desire – secret even from himself, perhaps – is to have this marvellous object, to have and to hold it, to bathe in the brightness of its perfected, still and immutable presence. He is, or at least has been, let us say, a man of some learning, trained to reason and compute, who in the face of a manifestly chaotic world has lost his faith in the possibility of order. He drifts. He has no moral base. Then suddenly one midsummer day he comes upon this painting and is smitten. Some other object might have done as well, a statue, for example (I feel we shall have something to say
on the subject of statues before long; yes, definitely I feel that topic coming on), or a beautiful proposition in mathematics, or even, who knows, a real, walking-and-talking, peeing-and-pouting, big live pink mama-doll. Obviously the need was there all along, awaiting its fulfilment in whatever form chance might provide. It is
being
that he has encountered here, the thing itself, the pure, unmediated essence, in which, he thinks, he will at last find himself and his true home, his place in the world. Impossible, impossible dreams, but for a moment he allows himself to believe in them. He takes the painting.

Here the plot does not so much thicken as coagulate.

He is an inept thief, our lovelorn hypothetical hero. He comes along bold as brass in broad daylight and lifts the lady off the wall, then turns and is confronted at once by a living, flesh-and-blood person (oh yes, lots of flesh, lots of blood), a maidservant, perhaps (pretend this is olden times, when domestics were readily available, not to say expendable), who by bad luck happens at that moment to walk into the room. Well, to shorten a long and grisly tale, without ado he bashes in the maid’s head, not because she is a threat to him, really, but because, well, because she is there, or because she is there and he does not see her properly, or – or whatever, what does it matter, for Christ’s sake! He kills her, isn’t that enough? And he makes his get-away. Such things were commonplace in olden times. Suddenly, however, to his intense surprise and deep chagrin, he discovers that the picture has lost its charm for him. Ashes. Daubs. Mere paint on a piece of rag. He tosses it aside as if it were a page of yesterday’s newspaper. What interests him now, of course, is the living woman that he so carelessly did away with. He recalls with fascination and a kind of swooning wonderment the moments before he struck the first blow, when he looked into his victim’s eyes and knew that he had never known another creature – not mother, wife, child, not
anyone – so intimately, so invasively, to such indecent depths, as he did just then this woman whom he was about to bludgeon to death. Well, he was shocked. Guilt, remorse, fear of capture and disgrace, he had expected these things, welcomed them, indeed, as a token that he had not entirely relinquished his claim to be considered human, but this, this sudden access to another’s being, this astonished and appalled him. How, with such knowledge, could he have gone ahead and killed? How, having seen straight down through those sky-blue, transparent eyes into the depths of what for want of a better word I shall call her soul, how could he destroy her?

And how, having done away with her, was he to bring her back? For that, he understood, was his task now. Prison, punishment, paying his debt to society, all that was nothing, was merely how he would pass the time while he got on with the real business of atonement, which was nothing less than the restitution of a life.
Restitution
, that was the word, he remembered it from when he was a child at school and they told him what the thief must do, which is to
make proper restitution.

Of course, he did not know how to do it, where to begin. He stood aghast before the prospect, baffled and helpless. That moment of ineffable knowing when he had turned on her with the weapon raised was no help to him here, that was a different order of knowledge, the stuff of life, so to speak, while what he needed now was the art of necromancy. The question was how to put into place another’s life, but how could he answer, he who hardly knew how to live his own? A life! with all its ragged complexities, its false starts and sudden closures, the summer solitudes and winter woes, the inexplicable exaltations in April weather, the meals to be eaten, the sleeps to be slept, the blood in its courses, the coat that will go one more season, the new shoes, the old shoes, the afternoons, the nights, the bird-thronged dawns, the old
dying and the new ones being born, the prime and then in a twinkling the autumnal shadows, then age, and then the proper death. That was what he had taken from her, and now must restore. He would need help. Oh, he would need help. And so he waits for the rustle in the air, for the moment of sudden cold, for the soundless falling into step beside him that will announce the presence of the ghost that somehow he must conjure.

As I say, merely a hypothesis.

Last night I had a dream about my father. This is an unusual occurrence. I rarely think of him, never mind entertain him in my dreams. My mother was a dreadful old brute but we were fond of each other, I believe, in our violent, unforgiving way. For my father, however, I seem never to have felt anything stronger than distaste. I mean, I probably loved him, as sons do love fathers, biologically, as it were, but I had as little to do with him as I could. He was a fearsome little fellow, a constant complainer and prone to sudden, ungovernable rages. I always think of him, God forgive me, as Mr Hyde, in his too-big tweeds, stumping along and snorting and stabbing at things with his stick. He died badly, rotting away before our eyes, shrinking to nothing as if he were consuming himself in his own anger. In my dream we were walking together through a huge and echoing administrative building, a place out of my childhood, a town hall or public library or something, I don’t know. Anyway, the light in the dream was the light of childhood, steady and clear and dense with its own insubstantial vastness. Though I could see no one, I could hear distinctly the sounds of the place: the brittle clacking of a typewriter, the laughter of a fellow and a girl larking somewhere, and someone with squeaky shoes walking away very businesslike down a long corridor. Father and I were climbing an interminable, shallow staircase with
many turns: I could feel the clammy sheen of the banister rail under my hand and sense the high, domed ceiling far above me. The old man was stamping along at a great rate, a pace in front of me, as usual, head down and elbows going like pistons. Suddenly he faltered, and I, not noticing, came up behind him and collided with him, or perhaps it was that he fell against me, I do not know which it was. Anyway, for an amazing moment I thought he was assaulting me. What I noticed most strongly was his smell, of hair oil and serge and cigarette smoke, and something else, something intimate and sour and wholly, shockingly other. He clung to me for a second to steady himself, fixing iron fingers on my wrist in a grip at once infirm and fierce, and I seemed to feel a sort of oscillation start up suddenly, as if some enormous, general and hitherto unnoticed equilibrium had collapsed. A clerk put his sleek head out of an office doorway below us and quickly withdrew it again. My father thrust me aside with what seemed revulsion.
I tripped!
he snarled, as if expecting to be contradicted, and glared at the banister, white with fury. He searched his pockets and produced a handkerchief and wiped his hands. We stood panting, as if we had indeed been engaged in a scuffle. A telephone rang nearby, a raucous jangling, like metallic laughter, and someone picked it up and began to speak at once in a low voice, urgently, as if trying to placate the machine itself. And I realised that what we had come there for was my father’s death certificate; this seemed perfectly natural, of course, as such things do in dreams. We went on up the long stairs, and he was very brisk now, cheery, almost, in a pitiful sort of way, trying to pretend nothing of any note was happening, and I was embarrassed for him because I understood that he had already started to die and that death was something that would be shameful for him as a man, like being cuckolded, or going bankrupt. I was hoping that no one would see us there together, for if we got away without being seen we could pretend I did not know
that he was doomed and that way he would save face. Then came a confused and hectic digression which I shall not bother with: how strange, the people that pop up in dreams, like the figures that loom at the shrieking travellers in a ghost train, springing out of the surrounding murk for a gesticulating, mad moment before being jerked away again on their strings. Anyway, after that wild interval my father and I found ourselves presently in an enormous room full of people rushing about in all directions, shouting, waving bits of paper at each other, demanding, beseeching, cursing. Father plunged at once, terrier-like, into the thick of this mêlée, shoving and shouting with the best of them, with me after him, desperately trying to keep up. He was outraged that the officials among the throng were not marked off somehow from the rest, and he kept stopping random passers-by, grasping them by the upper arms and rising on tiptoe and roaring in their faces. You don’t understand, he would yell at them, I’m here for my chit, dammit, I’m here for my chit! But no one listened, or even looked at him, so busy were they craning to look past him, trying to glimpse whatever it was they were searching for with such fierce determination. Somehow I lost him, and now I in my turn found myself running here and there in desperation, shouting out his name and plucking at people and demanding if they had seen him. And then all at once, like smoke clearing, the crowd dispersed and I was left alone in the enormous room. After a long, panicky search I found a little door built flush to the wall and so well camouflaged that it could hardly be distinguished from the panelling, though by some means I knew it had been there for me to find. When I went through I was in another, much smaller room, with a barred window looking out on a sunlit, classical landscape of meadows and hills and bosky glades, dotted about with statuary and marble follies and dainty, sparkling waterfalls. My father was sitting crookedly on a chair in the middle of the bare floor with an
air of bewilderment, stooped and crumpled, peering up fearfully as if expecting a blow; it was obvious that he had been thrust hurriedly on to the chair as I was about to enter. Behind him a group of silent men in starched high collars and black morning-coats and striped trousers stood about in attitudes of stern pensiveness, frowning at their fingernails, or gazing fixedly out of the window. Father had been weeping, his face was blotched and his nose was runny. All his fierceness was gone. It’s
you
, he said to me, in a mixture of accusation and pleading,
you
have to serve your term before they’ll do anything! At that the group of gentlemen behind him sprang at once into action and came forward hurriedly and picked him up, still seated, and bustled him chair and all out of the room, negotiating the narrow door with difficulty, muttering directions to each other and tuttutting irritably. When I opened my eyes and sat up in the dawn light I was lost for a moment in that half-world between sleep and waking, and was convinced I had not been dreaming at all, but remembering; all day there has lingered the uneasy sense of an opportunity missed, of some large significance left unacknowledged. Certain dreams do that, they seem to darken the very air, crowding it with the shadows of another world.