Ghosts (2 page)

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Might that be it?’

She shrugged, smiled, tossed her hair, making an end of
it. She thought how quaint yet dangerous it sounded when a person spoke so carefully, with such odd emphasis.

Softly.

The boys – there are two of them – watched all this, nudging each other and fatly grinning.

‘So strange,’ Flora was saying. ‘Everything seems so …’

‘Yes?’ Felix prompted.

She was silent briefly and then shivered.

‘Just … strange,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

He nodded, his dark gaze lowered.

Felix and Flora.

The dunes ended and they came to a flat place of dark-green sward where the sandy grass crackled under their tread, and there were tiny, pink-tipped daisies, and celandines that blossom when the swallows come, though I can see no swallows yet, and here and there a tender violet trembling in the breeze. They paused in vague amaze and looked about, expecting something. The ground was pitted with rabbit-burrows, each one had a little pile of diggings at the door, and rabbits that seemed to move by clockwork stood up and looked at them, hopped a little way, stopped, and looked again.

‘What is that?’ said the blonde woman, whose name is Sophie. ‘What is that noise?’

All listened, holding their breath, even the children, and each one heard it, a faint, deep, formless song that seemed to rise out of the earth itself.

‘Like music,’ said the man in the straw hat dreamily. ‘Like … singing.’

Felix frowned and slowly turned his head this way and that, peering hard, his sharp nose twitching at the tip, birdman, raptor, rapt.

‘There should be a house,’ he murmured. ‘A house on a hill, and a little bridge, and a road leading up.’

Sophie regarded him with scorn, smilingly.

‘You have been here before?’ she said, and then, sweetly: ‘Aeaea, is it?’

He glanced at her sideways and smiled his fierce, thin smile. They have hardly met and are old enemies already. He hummed, nodding to himself, and stepped away from her, like one stepping slowly in a dream, still peering, and picked up his black bag from the grass. ‘Yes,’ he said with steely gaiety, ‘yes, Aeaea: and you will feel at home, no doubt.’

She lifted her camera like a gun and shot him. I can see from the way she handles it that she is a professional. In fact, she is mildly famous, her name appears in expensive magazines and on the spines of sumptuous volumes of glossy silver and black prints. Light is her medium, she moves through it as through some fine, shining fluid, bearing aloft out of the world’s reach the precious phial of her self.

Still they lingered, looking about them, and all at once, unaccountably, the wind of something that was almost happiness wafted through them all, though in each one it took a different form, and all thought what they felt was singular and unique and so were unaware of this brief moment of concord. Then it was gone, the god of inspiration flew elsewhere, and everything was as it had been.

I must be in a mellow mood today.

The house. It is large and of another age. It stands on a green rise, built of wood and stone, tall, narrow, ungainly, each storey seeming to lean in a different direction. Long ago it was painted red but the years and the salt winds have turned it to a light shade of pink. The roof is steep with high chimneys and gay scalloping under the eaves. The delicate octagonal turret with the weathervane on top is a surprise, people see its slender panes flashing from afar and say, Ah! and smile. On the first floor there is a balcony that runs along all four sides, with french windows giving on to it,
where no doubt before the day is done someone will stand, with her hand in her hair, gazing off in sunlight. Below the balcony the front porch is a deep, dim hollow, and the front door has two broad panels of ruby glass and a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s paw. Details, details: pile them on. The windows are blank. Three steps lead from the porch to a patch of gravel and a green slope that runs abruptly down to a stony, meandering stream. Gorse grows along the bank, and hawthorn, all in blossom now, the pale-pink and the white, a great year for the may. Behind the house there is a high ridge with trees, old oaks, I think, above which seagulls plunge and sway. (Oaks and seagulls! Picture it! Such is our island.) This wooded height lowers over the scene, dark and forbidding sometimes, sometimes almost haughty, almost, indeed, heroic.

The house is a summer house; at other seasons, especially in autumn, it wheezes and groans, its joints creaking. But when the weather turns warm, as now, in May, and the fond air invades even the remotest rooms, something stirs in the heart of the house, like something stirring out of a long slumber, unfolding waxen wings, and then suddenly everything tends upwards and all is ceilings and wide-open windows and curtains billowing in sea-light. I live here, in this lambent, salt-washed world, in these faded rooms, amid this stillness. And it lives in me.

Sophie pointed her camera, deft and quick.

‘Looks like a hotel,’ she said.

‘Or a guesthouse, anyway,’ said Croke, doubtfully.

It is neither. It is the home of Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his faithful companion, Licht. Ha.

They had come to the little wooden bridge but there they hesitated, even Felix, unwilling to cross, they did not know why, and looked up uncertainly at the impassive house. Croke took off his boater, or do I mean panama, yes, Croke took off his panama and mopped his brow, saying something
crossly under his breath. The hat, the striped blazer and cravat, the white duck trousers, all this had seemed fine at first, a brave flourish and just the thing for a day-trip, but now he felt ridiculous, ridiculous and old.

‘We can’t stand here all day,’ he said, and glared accusingly at Felix, as if somehow everything were all his fault. ‘Will I go and see?’

He looked about at the rest of them but all wanly avoided his eye, indifferent suddenly, unable to care.

‘I’m hungry,’ Hatch said. ‘I want my breakfast.’

Pound the bespectacled fat boy muttered in agreement and cast a dark look at the adults.

‘Where’s that picnic that was promised us?’ Croke said testily.

‘Fell in the water, didn’t it,’ Hatch said and snickered.

‘Pah! Some bloody outing this is.’

‘Listen to them,’ Felix said softly to Flora, assuming the soft mask of an indulgent smile. ‘Rhubarb rhubarb.’

His smile turned fawning and he inclined his head to one side as if imploring something of her, but she pretended to be distracted and frowned and looked away. She felt so strange.

Sophie turned with an impatient sigh and took Croke’s arm.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘We will ask.’

And they set off across the bridge, Sophie striding and the old boy going carefully on tottery legs, trying to keep up with her, the soaked and sand-caked cuffs of his trousers brushing the planks. The stream gurgled.

Licht in the turret window watched them, the little crowd hanging back – were they afraid? – and the old man and the woman advancing over the bridge. How small they seemed, how distant and small. The couple on the bridge carried themselves stiffly, at a stately pace, as if they suspected that someone, somewhere, was laughing at their expense. He
was embarrassed for them. They were like actors being forced to improvise. (One of them is an actor, is improvising.) He pressed his forehead to the glass and felt his heart racing. Since he had first spotted them making their meandering way up the hillside he had warned himself repeatedly not to expect anything of them, but it was no use, he was agog. Somehow these people looked like him, like the image he had of himself: lost, eager, ill at ease, and foolish. The glass was cool against his forehead, where a little vein was beating. Silence, deep woods, a sudden wind. He blinked: had he dropped off for a second? Lately he had been sleeping badly. That morning he had been awake at three o’clock, wandering through the house, stepping through vague deeps of shadowed stillness on the stairs, hardly daring to breathe in the midst of a silence where others slept. When he looked out he had seen a crack of light on the leaden horizon. Was it the day still going down or the morning coming up? He smiled sadly. This was what his life was like now, this faint glimmer between a past grown hazy and an unimaginable future.

The woman on the bridge stumbled. One moment she was upright, the next she had crumpled sideways like a puppet, all arms and knees, her hair flying and her camera swinging on its strap. Licht experienced a little thrill of fright. She would have fallen had not the old boy with surprising speed and vigour caught her in the crook of an arm that seemed for a second to grow immensely long. His hat fell off. A blackbird flew up out of a bush, giving out a harsh repeated warning note. The woman, balancing on one leg, took off her sodden shoe and looked at it: the heel was broken. She kicked off the other shoe and was preparing to walk on barefoot when Felix, as if he had suddenly bethought himself and some notion of authority, put down his bag and fairly bounded forward, shot nimbly past her
and set off up the slope, buttoning the jacket of his tight, brown suit.

‘Who is that,’ the Professor said sharply. ‘Mind, let me see.’

Licht turned, startled: he had forgotten he was not alone. The Professor had been struggling with the telescope, trying in vain to angle it so he could get a closer look at Felix coming up the path. Now he thrust the barrel of the instrument aside and lumbered to the window, humming unhappily under his breath. When Licht looked at him now, in the light of these advancing strangers, he noticed for the first time how slovenly he had become. His shapeless black jacket was rusty at the elbows and the pockets sagged, his bow-tie was clumsily knotted and had a greasy shine. He looked like a big old rain-stained statue of one of the Caesars, with that big balding head and broad pale face and filmy, pale, protruding eyes. Licht smiled to himself hopelessly: how could he leave, how could he ever leave?

Felix was mounting the slope swiftly, swinging out his legs in front of him and sawing the air with his arms.

‘Look at him,’ Croke said, chuckling. ‘Look at him go.’

From the bridge it seemed as if he were swarming along on all fours. The nearer he approached to the house the more it seemed to shrink away from him. Licht was craning his neck. The Professor turned aside, patting his pockets, still humming tensely to himself.

Below, the lion’s peremptory paw rapped once, twice, threefour times.

Here it is, here is the moment where worlds collide, and all I can detect is laughter, distant, soft, sceptical.

At that brisk and gaily syncopated knock the house seemed to go still and silent for a moment as if in alarmed anticipation of disturbances to come. Licht lingered dreamily at
the turret window, watching the others down at the bridge. Then another knock sounded, louder than before, and he started and turned and pushed past the Professor and rattled down the stairs in a flurry of arms and knees. In the hall he paused, seeing Felix’s silhouette on the ruby glass of the door, an intent and eerily motionless, canted form. When the door was opened Felix at once produced a brilliant smile and stepped sideways deftly into the hall, speaking already, his thin hand outstretched.

‘… Shipwrecked!’ he said, laughing. ‘Yes, cast up on these shores. I can’t tell you!’ Licht in his agitation could hardly understand what he was saying. He fell back a pace, mouthing helplessly and nodding. Felix’s sharp glance flickered all around the hall. ‘What a charming place,’ he said softly, and threw back his head and smiled foxily, showing a broken eye-tooth. He had a disjointed, improvised air, as if he had been put together in haste from disparate bits and pieces of other people. He seemed full of suppressed laughter, nursing a secret joke. With that fixed grin and those glossy, avid eyes he makes me think of a ventriloquist’s dummy; in his case, though, it would be he who would do the talking, while his master’s mouth flapped open and shut like a broken trap. ‘Yes, charming, charming,’ he said. ‘Why, I feel almost at home already.’

Afterwards Licht was never absolutely sure all this had happened, or had happened in the way that he remembered it, at least. All he recalled for certain was the sense of being suddenly surrounded by something bright and overwhelming. It was not just Felix before whom he fell back, but the troupe of possibilities that seemed to come crowding in behind him, tumbling and leaping invisibly about the hall. He saw himself in a dazzle of light, heroic and absurd, and the hallway might have been the pass at Roncesvalles. I should not sneer: I too in secret have always fancied myself a hero, dying with my face to Spain, though I suspect no
ministering angel or exaltation of saints will come to carry me off as I cough out my heart’s last drops of blood.

Felix was describing how the boat had run aground. Daintily with finger and thumb he hoisted skirt-like the legs of his trousers to show a pair of skinny, bare, blue-white ankles and his shoes dark with wet. Head on one side, and that comical, self-disparaging grin.

‘Professor Kreutznaer,’ Licht said in a sort of hapless desperation, ‘Professor Kreutznaer is … busy.’

Felix was regarding him keenly with an eyebrow lifted.

‘Busy, eh?’ he said softly. ‘Well then, we shall not disturb him, shall we.’

The others had shuffled across the bridge by now, dragged forward reluctantly in the wake of Felix’s rapid ascent to the house, as if they were attached to him at a distance somehow; they loitered, waiting for a sign. Sophie sat down on a rock and kneaded the foot she had twisted. Hatch was clutching his stomach and rolling his eyes in a dumbshow demonstration of hunger, while Pound snickered and Alice smiled doubtfully. Have we met Alice? She is eleven. She wears her hair in a shiny, fat, brown braid. She is not pretty. Sophie considered the elfin Hatch without enthusiasm, his narrow, white face and red slash of a mouth; there is one clown in every company.

‘After the war,’ she said to him, ‘when I was younger than you are now, we had no food. Every day for months, for months, I was hungry. My mother rubbed the top of the stove with candle grease –’ with one hand she smoothed large, slow circles on the air ‘– and fried potatoes in it, and when the potatoes were eaten she fried the peelings and we ate those, too.’