Ghosts and Other Lovers (11 page)

And then -- just then! -- I saw myself, the five-year-old in pink pajamas, running across the lawn and then freezing, staring at me, eyes wide and wild as a fawn's.

I felt a moment of disbelief, and then overwhelming despair. Why now? Why did it have to be Howard?

I turned my head to look at him. I was still hoping, I think, that I was wrong, and that it wasn't Howard beside me.

It was Howard, of course, and my glance caught him off guard. I saw how he looked at me, and -- I couldn't help myself -- I reached for his hand. And as our eyes met, I knew that I could have just what I'd always wanted.

But was this really what I'd always wanted?

Nothing was said. If there had been time, we might have stepped behind the sheltering magnolia and fallen into each other's arms. But we heard the smooth, gliding sound of the patio door and moved apart. I think the motion looked casual, not furtive. I greeted Jonathan and even through the blood pounding in my ears I knew my voice betrayed nothing.

I was very aware, all through dinner, of Howard's attention. But it was Jean I looked at, searching for signs of strain, unhappiness, nerves. Nothing. She didn't know. She had no idea of what she was about to lose, and to whom.

When Jonathan and I left that evening Howard -- as he sometimes did -- gave me a brotherly kiss on the cheek. This time, though, his hand rested for a moment on my hip. No touch has ever excited me more or seemed to hold a more passionate promise.

I have been awake all night, thinking. I've been wanting this for so long, and now I can see the ending. I can have what I want, what I've always wanted. Is it enough for me to know that, or does Jean have to know, too? Do I need Howard to be happy? Or can I, now, imagine a new future for myself, without the walled garden?

Lucy Maria

 

I
t is a serious business when a child falls in love. When people talk about love, as they often do, as "sexual attraction," I think of those kissing dolls sold in novelty shops, papier-mâché heads bobbing on springs, drawn toward each other inevitably, inexorably made to connect by hidden magnets. You could imagine, from the language, that sex was a set of magnets buried in human flesh. But isn't there something else involved, an attraction of souls, which is regardless of sex, regardless of age?

 

I think so. When Janet, my six-year-old, wept in my arms for James, the seven-year-old next door, my own heart ached.

I have not, these past eight years, brooded much on the past. Being married with two small children and a house to look after keeps me anchored in the present, with no time for vain regrets. I married Robert on the rebound, as they say, but he is a good man, and we have made a satisfactory life together.

Satisfactory, until now. Now I sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, trapped in the past.

Can it be only coincidence that this afternoon my daughter's unhappiness reminded me of my own past hurt, and that this evening, looking for distraction, I picked up
The Times
and saw an obituary for Mrs. Edward Templeton?

Edward, I thought. Edward, who should have been my husband, is free at last. As a man he had wanted to marry me. But as a child he had given his heart to a funny little old-fashioned girl named Lucy Maria. He promised himself to her when he was a child, and sealed his fate. For what are the desires of adults when weighed in the balance with those of children?

When we were children, living in a leafy London suburb, Edward and I were playmates. It wasn't Edward I loved in those days, but his older brother, Julian. Seven years older than I, away at public school for most of the year, Julian seemed unattainable, but I was determined. I laid plans. Edward, a year younger than I, became my favored friend.

In love with my fantasy of Julian, I was then incapable of appreciating Edward, whom I thought too young. I was the leader in all our games; I was older, and bolder, and sometimes, I am sorry to say, I bullied him. But he was willing to be led by me, even when I proposed we should explore the haunted house.

We had no idea by whom or what it might be haunted, only that it had an evil reputation. It was let to a different family every year, unusual in those more settled days before the war. The house, in its own grounds at the end of a private drive, was also one of the larger ones in our neighborhood. For a few months, in the summer of 1939, the house was empty of tenants, apparently abandoned except for the regular attentions of a hired gardener.

It was a disinclination for naughtiness, not a fear of ghosts, that made Edward unwilling to trespass, yet I taunted him with cowardice, until he gave in. We set off, in broad daylight, with candles and matches to explore the darker recesses of the house, but I didn't really think we would get inside. We would wander around in the shrubbery and peer through windows and I would make us both shiver by claiming to see something moving in the shadows, but the house was sure to be locked.

It was Edward who noticed the open window at the back.

I stared up at the dark space between white sash and white sill and thought it was like a partly opened mouth.

"It's too high," I objected. "And anyway, it's probably fixed so it won't open any wider, the way our kitchen window is."

"You fit in through your kitchen window. I can give you a leg up here just like I do there."

To me that half-opened window looked like a trap. Set by whom? The house was empty, so who could have left it open?

As if he read my thoughts Edward said, "Probably the gardener makes his tea in the scullery there. He must have a key to the house. He probably forgot he'd opened the window. Give us a leg up, and I'll go through and let you in by the door."

His sudden keenness worried me more than the open window. The balance of power was shifting between us. Not wanting to let him see me afraid, I braced myself and offered him my clasped hands for a step up. He vanished headfirst into the house.

Would it have made any difference in the end if I had gone first? Would she have shown herself to me, or kept hidden?

I'll never know. Edward went into the house, leaving me alone for . . . two minutes? Five? It wasn't very long, but a great deal can happen in a minute, the shifting of a fate, one's whole future life altered because of a look, a few whispered words.

He was looking livelier than his usual rather serious self when he opened the back door. "Here, you'll never guess: there's someone already in the house -- a little girl."

I looked around the bare, empty back hall, cross that some other child had beaten us out. "Who is she?"

"Miss Lucy Maria Toseland, she says. She's a funny little thing -- but you'll see." He raised his voice, calling. "Lucy?"

I pushed past him into a room full of heavily shrouded furniture and felt that uneasy prickle which accompanies the game of hide-and-seek.

"Come out," I said, rather sharply.

"Don't frighten her," said Edward, behind me. Then, coaxing, "You needn't be afraid, Lucy. She's a friend."

There was no response. I moved farther into the room and began to look behind the furniture, not touching anything.

"I don't think she's in here now," said Edward. "She must be in another room."

"Why is she hiding?"

"She might be frightened. She's very young."

"What's she doing here, then, all by herself?"

"She says she lives here. Her parents went away and left her."

"People don't do that, just leave their children. She's lying."

"No."

A hint of steel in that one word; something I'd never heard from Edward. I looked at him in amazement. "Did she say
when
they went away?"

"She doesn't know . . . she's only little. She said a long time, but it can't have been, she can't have been on her own for long -- she's too tidy, her hair's been brushed, and someone's tied a ribbon in it -- she could never do that herself. She's wearing ever such a funny old-fashioned dress with petticoats, a bit like that one in Granny's picture, remember?"

The flesh on my arms tried to crawl up to my shoulders, and for a moment I knew the truth.

At that moment, Edward ran off, calling: "Lucy, Lucy Maria, please come out!"

Although I wanted to leave, I was more afraid of being alone, so I ran after him, hearing, just ahead of me, his glad shout: "There you are!"

I found him in the front parlor. The curtains were drawn against the ruinous effects of sunlight, and the atmosphere was dim and vaguely subaqueous, but I could see well enough that he was alone.

"Here she is, you see, she's shy of strangers."

"Where?"

"Just here." He gestured, then frowned. "Lucy? Now don't be silly, Lucy, I told you she's a friend -- you said you'd come out; you mustn't hide anymore."

I watched him wandering around the ghostly shapes in the dim room, bending and turning as if searching for a hidden child. The doorway I blocked was the only way -- apart from the windows, which had not been opened -- in or out of the room. No one had passed us in the hall, and there was no one here now. Which meant there never had been.

"Well done, Edward," I said. "Points to you. You had me fooled, all right."

He turned, frowning slightly.

"It was a good one, but I've rumbled you."

"What do you mean?"

"Your little ghostly girl in the old-fashioned dress. You made her up. And I believed you. My word, you
have
learned how to tell them, and no mistake!"

His hand came up in an oath. "It's no story. She was here. Honestly, I was talking to her just a minute ago. And of course she's not a ghost -- she's a little girl."

Edward wasn't joking. He really had seen and spoken to a little girl who wasn't there. My back prickled and I whirled around, terrified something might be creeping up on me from behind, and although there was no one there, once I had started moving I did not seem able to stop, but went running pell-mell for the back door, letting out a low, wailing moan as I ran.

He called to me to stop, but I couldn't stop. My role as leader, the need to save face, these things didn't weigh with me at all in my panic. I didn't even slow down until I had reached the gates at the end of the drive, out of sight of the house. There I paused, panting, feeling guilty for having abandoned him. But I could not, to save my soul or his, make myself go back. It was pushing my courage to its limits simply to stay where I was and wait as the minutes dragged themselves past.

At last -- it might have been half an hour or more -- he came into view, walking slowly, looking bemused by my obvious fear. "She wouldn't have hurt you, you know. She couldn't hurt anyone."

"But she's dead, isn't she? She's a ghost?"

"Ye-es," he said uncertainly. "I suppose. I tried to touch her and my hand passed right through her. There was nothing there. I could see her, but I couldn't feel her at all."

"Oh!"

He looked at me. "Yes, it frightened her, too. She doesn't know she's a ghost. She knows something is wrong, but not what. She has no idea about being dead, no idea at all."

"What does she think has happened to her?"

"She says her family went away without her; she doesn't know why she didn't go with them, or how long ago it happened. Before they left, there was something, something about her parents, something someone did to her which frightened her a great deal, which I couldn't understand, and then she said they all went away, taking another little girl who looked just like her, and they didn't hear her when she cried."

 

 

It was Edward now who wanted to go back to the haunted house and I who kept finding excuses. I had another reason for preferring adventures closer to home, as long as it was Edward's home, and that was his brother, Julian, back for the summer. I liked rainy days the best, days when Edward and I had to play indoors, days Julian often stayed in, too, reading books or listening to the wireless. I was happy just to have him near, to look at him, and when he spoke to me, I was in heaven. One day, I remember, he taught us card tricks.

 

As I was drawn to Julian, Edward was drawn to his ghost. He argued with me in vain, and finally, one morning when I turned up as usual on his doorstep, his mother told me that Edward had already left -- for my house, she assumed.

Of course I knew where he had really gone. I held out for as long as I could, but, as the summer passed and Edward seemed quite happy to play without me, pride, curiosity, boredom, and jealousy all worked in me to overwhelm my fading memory of fear, and finally I told Edward I would go with him.

He had stopped asking by then, but he seemed pleased. His love for Lucy Maria was not exclusive; he wanted her to have friends, for others to know and love her as he did.

The day we went turned out to be the gardener's day; we caught sight of a stocky, overalled figure as we rounded the curve in the drive and beat a hasty retreat. I wasn't sorry to put off the visit to another day, but Edward fretted all through the afternoon, and insisted on going back after tea instead of waiting until morning. He said that Lucy Maria was expecting us, and he couldn't let her down.

But the scullery window was locked. Not merely shut, as he had learned to shut it so a passing glance would see nothing wrong, but latched shut from the inside. The back door was locked, the front door, too. I was relieved, but Edward was frantic as he ran around the house, trying every window on the ground floor.

"Can't your Lucy Maria let us in?"

"Don't be silly! If she could do that, she could let herself out, couldn't she? She's a soul without a body, she's helpless, she's trapped -- you don't understand at all, do you?"

"How should I understand? I've never even seen this creature. For all I know, you made her up, to tease me."

He stared at me in disbelief and, I think, dislike; made a tortured sound, and turned his attention back to the problem of the locked house.

His agony was so obvious I felt ashamed of myself. I had also noticed how low the sun was. I grabbed his arm. "Ned, I'm sorry. I know she's real, and I'm sorry about the window, but, look, it's getting late. Let's go. We can come back in the morning. I'll come with you, and we'll have the whole day to find a way in. But we have to go now. If we're late, they may not let us out tomorrow. It's not your fault. She'll understand."