Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (34 page)

How to Marry a Ghost

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that if I accidentally brushed against him in bed, he screamed in agony.

In American.

His accent seemed to become more transatlantic by the hour.

He began to answer virtually everything I said to him with snappy phrases like “Got it!,” “Gotcha!,” or “You betcha!” He began to bore me to distraction by drawing my attention to the difference between English and American.

“They say ‘al
oo
minum’ instead of ‘aluminium.’ And ‘trunk’ instead of ‘boot.’‘
Zookini
’ instead of ‘courgette.’‘Shrimp’ instead of

‘prawn.’ I mean, that’s not right, is it? Shrimp are tiny and prawns are big, that’s how you tell ’em apart.” I couldn’t help noticing most of his examples were food related. “But even if the bleedin’

word’s the same, they pronounce it all wrong,” he complained.

“They say ‘depot’ to rhyme with ‘deep’ instead of ‘death.’ And the one that really gets me is ‘clerk.’They rhyme it with ‘jerk’ instead of ‘ark.’ And if it’s words of more than one syllable, they put the emphasis in the wrong place. They say ‘
in
surance’ instead of

‘in
sur
ance,’ ‘
dee
-fense’ instead of ‘de
fense
.’ Someone ought to set them straight.”

“Well thank God you’ve arrived to do just that,Tommy.” I had forgotten his ability to soak up language like a sieve. I recalled how astounded I had been when I had discovered he spoke French fluently with no trace of an English accent. I had been less impressed by the discovery that this had come about via an affair with a French woman working at the BBC. Still, this constant ability to surprise me had been one of the things that had made me sit up and decide that I should marry him before someone else did.

But his instant American makeover was a little too sudden for me. I couldn’t quite cope with him becoming Tommy the Marl-boro Man overnight. Rather grudgingly, I noted that he did have

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rather a good American accent—Franny said he sounded New Jersey and rather late in the day I realized he was aping one of his heroes, Bruce Springsteen—but I found I missed his guttural North London mumbling.

Anglo-American language was on my mind.To avoid having to deal with the void left in my life by the absence of work on Shotgun’s book, I had decided to read Martha’s manuscript. One of the first things I noticed, before the real horror of the story hit me, was that as well as setting her story in a 1960s English board-ing school, Martha had adopted English spelling. “Neighbour” instead of “neighbor.” “Travelling” instead of “traveling.” “Centre”

instead of “center.” I reveled in it—or rather I
revelled,
being an English woman—because when reading American books there was always a split second when I thought that U.S. spelling was an annoying misprint before I remembered it was correct American usage. And I marveled,
marvelled,
at her consistency. But wait a second.When she had read her first chapter out loud to me she had done so in an impeccable English accent. Had Martha spent time in England? And wouldn’t she have mentioned it if she had?

Her novel was narrated in the first person and the shy, tentative voice was that of Kit, a fourteen-year-old girl from a quiet unassuming background. She was the daughter of a schoolmaster and his librarian wife, academic bookish clichés, strapped for cash, and anxious that their only child should receive the best education. So when Kit’s wealthy godfather offered to pay for her to be sent to an elite little academy in twenty acres of Sussex parkland they accepted with alacrity. There Kit found herself a forlorn and indigent duckling amidst the other students arriving in Daimlers and Rolls-Royces when her parents drove up in their chubby little Austin A30 and deposited her in the car park on the first day of term.

She was thoroughly shunned and derided by her snotty class-

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mates and just when she was on the point of begging her parents to take her away from St. Mary’s, Martha gave her Iona.

It was a cloudless day and because it was also completely still, with not a speck of wind to blow away the pages, I was reading on the beach. Every two or three chapters, I anchored the manuscript with a rock and wandered into the clear glasslike water that was blissfully warm even though it was the end of September. I didn’t swim because I could wade halfway across the bay and still not be in above my waist.The tide had furrowed the seabed into row after row of sandy ridges that fitted snugly into the instep of my bare feet and I decided wading in the water was the perfect workout.

Iona Crichton Stuart didn’t arrive until after half term because she had been away on a cruise with her parents in the Caribbean. Her family, Martha informed us, divided her time between a six-bedroom Belgravia town house in London and a vast estate in Scotland. I scrabbled around in my beach bag for a pencil and began to scrawl frantically in the margin because although she mesmerized the reader the second she appeared on the page, Iona’s over-the-top character, as depicted by Martha, was in danger of becoming a caricature.

When she first arrived, Iona treated Kit with disdain. In the dormitory she was given the bed next to Kit’s and dispatched her to run errands like a slave.
Make my bed for me, will you, while I clean
my teeth. Can I crib your French prep? I’ll never be able to finish it and
play tennis. If you get me an A+ I’ll let you wear my angora cardigan.

And by the way, I’m sorry but I finished that fudge your mother made.

Can she send you some more?

Not that she treated the rest of the girls any better. Iona seemed to regard herself as being a cut above everyone else and it was with a certain amount of satisfaction that Kit observed her classmates vying in vain for the newcomer’s attention.

So when she became the Chosen One, selected by Iona to be

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her pet, Kit’s world exploded into a galaxy of unadulterated bliss.

One rainy afternoon she was the helpless little field mouse on which Iona pounced out of sheer boredom, offering the callow girl her first cigarette, taking her through the steps for the latest dance crazes, the twist, the Madison, and the hully-gully, and showing her the juiciest passages in a well-thumbed unexpur-gated edition of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. But, as I noted in the margin, we did not see Kit’s reaction. Nor were we party to what must have been her agony when Iona ignored her for the next four days before returning to toy with her again.

“Let’s hear the dialogue between them during their burgeon-ing relationship,” I wrote, “and how does Kit describe Iona to her parents when she writes to them? What is their reaction to the growing influence of this exotic creature on their precious daughter? Will their concern hint at the corruption that will follow?”

Martha plunged her novel into more sinister waters without warning. A bizarre scenario unfolded one morning over the breakfast table where a hundred and fifty girls erupted in raucous clamor until they were silenced to listen to the eight o’clock news on the radio turned up to full volume to reach the entire length of the cavernous dining hall.

A man was to be hanged at two minutes past eight at Bedford Prison. James Hanratty had been given a sentence of execution for the murder of a man in a parked car on the A6 road in Bed-fordshire, although he bore little resemblance to the picture of the alleged killer. Two cartridges from the murder weapon were found in a hotel room used by Hanratty the night before the murder.

Martha timed the scene to perfection with the girls half-listening to the broadcast until suddenly the airwaves went quiet and they realized this was the moment he was being hanged. And Iona, sitting beside Kit, began to whisper in her ear.

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“The noose is covered in leather.” She said it so quietly that Kit was not even aware that Iona was talking to her until she felt the gossamer touch of Iona’s fingers on her arm.

“They’re putting a cotton hood over his head while they adjust it around his neck.” There was a pause and Kit held her breath. “Now his legs are being pinioned with more leather straps. And now”—Iona gripped Kit’s shoulders tightly—“the executioner is removing the safety pin from the base of the lever and he’s pushing it away from him to open the trap. It’s too late to stop it now, Kit. Hanratty’s legs are dangling, his feet are twitching and he’s dying, Kit, he’s dying.”

By now Iona’s hand had moved up to caress Kit’s neck and—

Kit screamed and so did I. A mosquito had attacked my left forearm but it could just as easily have been because of what I was reading. Hanging had been abolished in 1964 just before I was born but I knew about the Hanratty case because it was thought to have been a miscarriage of justice. Another man, who had rented the room where the shell casings were found the day
after
the murder, had subsequently confessed.

And then it was the end of term and the girls dispersed to their various homes for the holidays. Martha had Iona register shock at Kit’s nervous invitation to accompany her home to meet the schoolmaster and the librarian. Instead she turned the tables and steamrollered Kit up to Scotland with her, thrusting her headlong into Highland society and lending her appropriate clothes for every occasion. Now it was Kit’s turn to be the caricature—the plain Jane struggling to keep up with every snotty nuance.

But she was also the observer and what she witnessed over that summer, on the grouse moors and in the ballrooms, pre-

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pared the ground for the horror that was to follow. Iona set her cap at a boy who stubbornly resisted her temptations. Instead he was besotted with another girl who, as luck would have it, was also a student at St. Mary’s. Back at school for the autumn term, this girl wasted no time telling everyone about Iona’s humiliation, flaunting the letters the boy wrote to her at every opportunity.

And that was when Iona murmured casually to Kit as they were walking into the gym one day, “Of course you don’t have to cover the noose in leather.All you need to hang someone is rope.”

Martha didn’t explain how—or indeed why—Iona came to know so much about hanging and I scribbled more notes in the margin. However, in the buildup to the book’s grisly and melodramatic outcome, Martha handled Kit’s mixture of sheer terror, blind submission to Iona’s malevolence, and growing excitement with brilliant sensitivity. Through Kit’s eyes the reader was led through every harrowing step as the girl who had stolen the object of Iona’s affections was lured to the gym on the pretext of a midnight feast, intoxicated, and hanged.

It was Kit who befriended the girl at Iona’s instruction and it was Kit who suggested the midnight feast to her, leading her by the hand through the pitch-black of the gym to the picnic she had prepared at the far end. It was Kit who motioned the girl to sit cross-legged on the floor, with her back to the place where Iona stood, waiting in the shadows beside the noose hanging from the bar. It was Kit who lighted the candle and encouraged the girl to eat the sausage rolls and Crunchie bars that Kit had sneaked out of the school to buy, and to drink glass after plastic glass of vodka and Coke from Iona’s secret stash of alcohol.

Iona might have masterminded the murder but Kit was every inch her willing accomplice, helping to heft the drunken girl onto the chair and holding her steady while Iona secured the noose.

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Iona might have been the one who kicked aside the chair but Kit cleared away the picnic and wiped the chair clean of prints like the good little slave that she was. It didn’t matter if they left their mark on the rope, said Iona, it was a climbing rope they had touched legitimately many times before in gym class.

And then I cursed Martha out loud to the surprise of a passing seagull waddling along the water line. The end of the book was missing. The story stopped dead after the body had been found, the detective had arrived, and Iona appeared to be on the brink of pointing the finger at poor little Kit.

I stomped back to the cabin in a rage and called Martha.There was no reply and I left a message on her machine. “Martha, the end of your book is missing. I need to know what
happens
! Call me as soon as you can.”

But she didn’t call back and the next day I woke up thinking I would drag Tommy along the beach to her trailer for an early morning walk. I’d beard her in her den and make her hand over the final pages. But when I rolled out of bed I stepped on Tommy’s passport. Distributing the contents of his suitcase around the cabin was clearly not enough for him. Now he had up-ended his knapsack on the floor beside the bed in search of God knows what and his passport had somehow landed over on my side.

I picked it up and flicked through it to look at his photo—

as you do—and blinked. I found myself staring at a moody and expertly lit head shot of the hulk whose bloated seminaked body was rising and falling under the covers beside me. Lying on his stomach, he had a pillow over his head and all I could see was a bit of stubbled chin resting on one of his huge paws.

I looked again at the picture. There were shadows in the hollows below his cheekbones and you could see every single one of his incredibly long eyelashes. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize

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him. I’d seen him look like this—hair immaculate, freshly shaved, a suit and tie—but only at weddings and funerals and Very Special Occasions. This wasn’t a passport photo, it was a glamour shot.

I whipped the pillow off his head.

“Oy!” His arm shot out and grabbed it. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”

I put his passport photo within an inch of his nose. “Where on earth did you get this taken? Doesn’t look like it comes from one of those little booths the rest of us go to when we need a passport photo.”