Ghostwriting (13 page)

Caroline turned a full circle on the heels of her calf-skin boots. Her mouth was open in what he took to be amazement.

As he looked around the room, he too shared some of that emotion.

Dozens of brilliant canvases stared at them like windows to other worlds, other times. Most of them portrayed Emmeline, her youthful beauty, her innocence, her joy at the fact of being alive.

He moved to a canvas of Emmeline disporting herself on the lawn, gloriously naked, beaming up at him... Bull-clipped to the top right corner of the canvas was the faded black and white photograph of the original pose.

Caroline said, “She was well respected in her field.”

He nodded, made to reply, but the affirmative caught in his throat. He coughed, then said, “Yes. Yes, she was.”

“I did a little investigation. She had exhibitions in many of the top galleries.” She fell silent. The air was heavy with the weight of her unasked question:
What happened?

He reached out, touched the accretion of oils that represented Emmeline’s naked flank. Beneath his fingertips the paint felt like old scar tissue.

A week after Emmeline’s death, he had entered the studio and arranged her work. He had placed all the early paintings of her naked at the front of the stacks, leaving her more recent work – the portraits he considered a record of her descent into madness – concealed.

He said, “This is the first time I’ve looked at these in years.”

She smiled at him. “It must be hard.”

“Silly. It was nearly forty years ago.”

They left the studio and he pulled the door shut behind him.

As they made their way to the library, she said, “And you never felt like selling the place, starting anew, after...”

He looked at her. What had she been about to say? “To lose this place, that would have been...” He shook his head. “No. No, I could never have done that.”

“Do you think her ghost haunts the house?” she asked.

Not
this
house, he thought. He smiled, sadly. “I sometimes wonder,” he said.

He persuaded her to have dinner with him that evening at the Three Horseshoes in the village, and, as there was a last train back to London at eleven, she readily agreed.

~

He could not recall the last time he had enjoyed a meal, or such company. The conversation was easy; they discovered preferences in common, shared interests. Caroline laughed at his feeble attempts at humour, and he genuinely found her wit infectious.

She let slip at one point the fact that she was ten years divorced, and his heart flew like a love-sick teenager’s.

At one point he said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying... but from the very first time I saw you, I thought your face very familiar.”

She laughed. “I wonder if you’ve caught me on television, Charles.”

“Television?”

“I combine journalism with acting. I did a lot of stage work in my early days, but lately I’ve had a few minor TV parts.”

He smiled. “That must be it. I do admit I watch rather too much television.”

He accompanied her to the station in a taxi, then saw her aboard the London train. By the time he returned home, staggering in the silvering moonlight, it was midnight and he was drunk.

He stumbled through the house, laughter alternating with curses, and found himself on the threshold of the studio. He propelled himself through the door, grabbed the closest canvas and tossed it behind him, then moved onto the next one.
You bitch
, he said to himself,
you evil, selfish bitch!

He stopped, panting, the paintings scattered across the room.

The canvases behind the nudes stood revealed, and he wondered if this was what he had meant to do all along, to punish himself, to exacerbate his guilt and self-loathing.

Emmeline’s last work showed a woman who was a tragic ghost of her former youthful self, a wraith tormented by psychological demons. He turned full circle, staring at the revealed portraits; they showed close-ups of her face, horror-stricken, her eyes terrified...

Staring out at him in accusation.

~

The following day, his heart in his mouth, he rang Caroline and suggested, tentatively, that as he was due to come up to London on business in a few days, well... perhaps she would care to meet him?

“That would be delightful, Charles!”

After that he saw her two or three times a week for the next month.

He travelled down to London and she visited him in Suffolk, staying the night in his small, cramped bedroom. After the first night together he opened up his parents’ old room, got a woman in from the village to give it a once over, and he and Caroline slept in the very double bed in which he had been born.

He told himself that he was happy for the first time in forty years.

~

He led her from his study and across the lawn.

They gravitated towards the willow, as if pulled. It was a blistering summer’s day, and they sought refuge in the pool of shade beneath the tree’s canopy. He pulled Caroline towards him and held her.

He looked up, to where the trunk separated to form a thick, right-angled bough, old and strong.

She pulled away from him and stared, shocked. “You’re crying...”

She wiped the tears from his cheeks and said softly, “Here...?”

He nodded.

She led him back across the lawn, into the study, and she held him and said, “I love you, Charles.”

He looked over her shoulder, back towards the willow, and caught a fleeting glimpse of Emmeline’s ghost, haunting him still.

~

A week later, while they were dining at the Three Horseshoes, Caroline said, “Charles, I want to ask you about
The House
.”

His mouth suddenly dry, he nodded. “Ask away,” he said with feigned unconcern.

She was forking her meal absently, avoiding his eyes.

After a silence he thought would last for ever, she looked up and said, “Charles, I think it should be performed again.”

His heart thudded and he felt suddenly dizzy. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I think I do.” She smiled and reached across the table, taking his hand and squeezing. “Charles, I’m not superstitious.”

“And nor am I. What happened... what happened had nothing to do with superstition.”

She held his gaze, said, “Do you really mean to say that the play was
cursed
?”

“I don’t know what else might explain what happened.”

“I do! Coincidence! You’re a rationalist, aren’t you? I’ve read all your books. They aren’t the works of someone who believes in superstition.”

“Those books,” he said deliberately, “everything I wrote in the years after... after Emmeline died and after what happened subsequently... everything was a frantic attempt to make myself believe in a rational, materialistic universe.”

She squeezed his hand. “So what
do
you believe?”

“I just don’t know,” he said.

“It was coincidence,” she insisted.

“That’s what I wanted to believe,
want
to believe, but...” He took a breath, looked across the table at the woman he realised, then, that he loved very much. “Let me tell you what happened, Caroline.”

~

The House
was his third play, and his best.

His first two had been popular and critical successes, and the West End was eager for his next one. It took a year, and was the hardest damned thing he’d ever written. He told himself that that was because it was the truest, the most heart-felt of all his work to date. He’d looked deep into himself, into his relationship with Emmeline – but more, he’d extrapolated from the current state of their relationship and written about how it might be in twenty, thirty years. He’d examined his wife’s personality, her irrationality, and the portrait he’d painted of her had been far from flattering.

“You see, Caroline, Emmeline wasn’t well, even then. What in the early days I took to be delightful quirks of personality, oddities that marked her out from the crowd, that made her ‘artistic’ or ‘anarchic’... well, I came to realise that they were just the early symptoms of her condition.”

He stared at his wine, lifted it to his lips and drank.

“It would be called bi-polar now, I suppose. Manic depression. She swung between suicidal lows in which her view of the world was relentlessly bleak, to ecstatic highs when she would think nothing of working twenty hours straight and producing some her most amazing, life-affirming work.”

He shrugged, smiled across at Caroline. “As a writer, how could I
not
write about what was affecting me most?”

She asked gently, “Why
‘The House’
?”

“I think the house served as a metaphor. Her middle-aged character in the play was obsessed with the house, and it was failing little by little, bit by bit becoming ever more derelict... just as was Emmeline.” He paused, then went on, “She hated the play, of course. Didn’t want it put on.”

He stopped. He didn’t want to tell anyone, not even Caroline, about his arguments with Emmeline over the play.

“It opened at the Lyric just a fortnight after Emmeline died,” he said. “And then...”

She squeezed his hand. “I know what happened. You don’t have to...”

Just after the curtain fell on the opening night, the actress playing the part of Emmeline had collapsed on the stage and died before the ambulance arrived. Cerebral haemorrhage...

“There was no understudy, as it was a small theatre company with limited funds. I wanted the play to be taken off, and it was my insistence, along with the delay there would be in a new actress learning the part, that persuaded the backers to cut their losses and drop the play.”

He looked into her eyes. “So soon after Emmeline’s death, and then the tragedy of... I couldn’t take the grief. I wanted nothing to do with the damned play. It was easier all round if we just pulled it.”

She said quietly, “But Birmingham rep persuaded you to allow it to be staged a year later.”

He stared across the bar to the horse-brasses hanging beside the ingle-nook fireplace. “They did. I should never have listened to them. But I was greedy. I needed the money for the upkeep of the house.”

He relented, and the play was staged, and an hour after the opening night’s performance the leading actress was knocked down by a bus outside the theatre and killed instantly.

Caroline said in a soft voice, “Coincidence, Charles.
Coincidence
.”

He stared down at their hands entwined between them. “After that I wanted nothing more to do with the play. My agent sold the rights for a song, but on my insistence he made a stipulation that the play shouldn’t be staged before the end of the century.” He smiled. “I never thought I’d be around long enough for that date to come about.”

“It’s now 2010,” Caroline said. “Don’t you think that sufficient time has passed to allow it to be staged again?”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s successful production would... I think it would help you, Charles. Free you, unleash you from the demons.”

He smiled, bitterly. “I think you’re being a little melodramatic, Caroline.”

She held his gaze. “Well,” she said at last, “I do act, after all.”

A combination of facts tumbled in his mind, and something clicked. He said, “You want to stage the play?”

“My ex-husband was the producer who bought the rights of
The House
from your agent. He thinks the time has come to stage it again. He’s assembled a company and it’s now in rehearsal at the Metro.”

He stared at her. “And?” he asked.

“And the agreement he and I had, back then, was that if ever he did restage the play, then I should play the part of Emmeline. He contacted me a while ago, honouring that agreement.”

He felt suddenly frozen as he stared across the table at her. “You... you had this planned all along, didn’t you?”

“Charles...” she began. “I admit, when I first approached you, I wanted to get your permission to have the play performed. And then I got to know you.” She stopped, reached across the table and gripped his hand. “What we have together now, Charles, I value so much.”

“I don’t know whether to believe you, or feel betrayed.”

She smiled. “I hope you will believe me, Charles, but I’ll also understand if you feel a sense of betrayal. But I assure you, none is meant.”

His heartbeat seemed to fill the room. He said, “I can’t let you do it.”

“Charles, I want to prove to you that the deaths were nothing more than coincidence. I want to
help
you. I don’t believe in mediaeval superstition. The only way to banish such belief is to stage the play.”

He felt desperation surge within him. “Caroline, I beg you. You don’t know what you’re saying. Two deaths... I don’t want a third on my conscience. You didn’t know Emmeline, her strength of character. She...” He shook his head, knowing full well that he was sounding irrational. “She was insane, and she...”

She stared at him. “What? She cursed the play? Charles, that’s nonsense!”

“I beg you, Caroline. At least think about it.”

“Don’t you think I haven’t given it a lot of thought already?” She was gathering her things together. “I must go. There’s a train at ten.”

“Stay the night!” he pleaded.

She touched his hand. “I must go. I have rehearsals in the morning.”

“Caroline, I love you...”

That stopped her. Standing, she reached out and touched his cheek. “And believe me, I love you, too, Charles, which is why I’m doing this.” She paused, then said, “The play opens a fortnight tonight. I’ll be in touch immediately after the curtain. Trust me.”

He watched her stride from the bar, a combination of depression and desperation opening up within him like a pit.

~

He hit the bottle over the course of the next week.

In the days before the play was due to open, he tried to phone her every hour. Each time he was diverted to her answerphone and he left ranting, incoherent messages pleading with her to think again, to abandon the project. He said that if she cared nothing for her own life, then at least consider his own peace of mind. And he begged her to contact him.

He heard nothing from Caroline and he renewed his barrage of calls. He rang the theatre, demanding to be put through to her, and when his request was refused he asked to speak to the director or producer. Evidently reception had been primed and, ever so politely, he was informed that the people he wished to speak to were either absent or busy with rehearsals.