Some Old Lover's Ghost

For two days, frost had fringed the reeds and the grass with a silvery filigree. Filaments of ice on every leaf and branch reflected the remains of the dying sun. Ice clung to the walls of the dike. Around the stems of the plants at the water’s edge an opaque, whitish glaze hid the rotting vegetation beneath. But where the current ran free a mist rose, small curling wisps like steam from a boiling bath, as though the black heart of the water ran warm.

The dike gouged a channel through the flat East Anglian landscape. To either side of it fields fell away, vast and featureless, their boundaries marked by a pathway of twin ruts or a straggle of stunted bushes. The sun touched the church tower and the bare branches of the trees that surrounded it, and then moved slowly to the empty land beyond, delineating the long ridges left by the plough. All was still: no breeze rustled the frozen grass or flicked aside a swirl of dead leaves to reveal the bare bones of the earth beneath.

As he walked along the bank of the dike, his breath made grey clouds in the chill evening air. It seemed to him that though this land had been stolen from the sea by man, and though the marks of man’s stubbornness and ingenuity were visible in the
deep scars of the dikes and waterways, yet there was never a sense of ownership, only of borrowing. The low horizon, the vastness of the sky, reduced humanity to small, bustling insignificance. If a god existed, then that god interceded, through flood and tempest, only as a reminder of impotence. When landscape itself was impermanent, then what chance had fragile bones and flesh? Others had believed they had mastery of this place; others had been expelled by the greater armies of water and tide.

Looking ahead, he saw the house that stood by itself a mile or so from the church. As the rays of the setting sun touched them, the panes of glass in the windows flared with red and gold light, and the four-square walls lost their dreariness, so that the house seemed to come alive again. He stood still, remembering, the words
if only
searing his frozen heart just as the dike seared the cold earth. Then the sun sank below the horizon, and the house retreated into the shadows.

He turned back, retracing his footsteps. It was quite dark now, a thin filament of cloud covering the face of the moon, the stars not yet bright. Conscious of the water to one side of him he moved carefully, wishing he had brought a torch or lantern. Just the thought of falling into the dike – a cracking of ice and then no sound at all – made him shudder. Drowning was the worst death: the water in your lungs, your mouth, your nostrils, choking you. Like being buried alive.

The sound of a step, and a gasping breath where he had believed himself to be alone, made him almost lose his footing. His heart lurched against his ribcage, and he looked to left and right, wide-eyed, half expecting the swirls of steam that rose from the water to have acquired shape and substance, to have become small ghosts, the will-o’-the-wisps that haunted the Fen.

But then the cloud thinned, and the moonlight showed him the dog, scrabbling at the sloping wall of the dike. Paws clawing the iron-hard earth, wet nose sniffing for secrets.

Stooping, he gathered pebbles and flung them at the creature until it yelped and ran into the darkness.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

After Toby had gone, I took the bouquet of flowers he had given me and flushed them one by one down the lavatory. Their petals floated on the surface of the water, smooth and pink and perfumed. Then I went to the dreary little room at the end of the corridor, and stared out of the window. It was raining, a dark, thin October drizzle that sheened the streets beyond the hospital. The television was on, but I didn’t hear it. I heard only Toby’s voice, saying,
I don’t think we should see so much of each other, Rebecca
.

I had been unable to stop myself whispering, ‘Please, Toby. Not
now.’
I had seen him flinch. Then he had said, ‘It just hasn’t felt right for a while. But because of the baby—’ and he had reddened, and looked away, and I had heard myself say coolly, ‘Of course. If that’s how you feel.’ Anything rather than become an unwanted, burdensome, pitiable thing.

I turned away from the window.
EastEnders
was on the television, and a very young girl in a shabby dressing gown was curled in front of it, smoking. She offered me a cigarette, and I accepted one, though I hadn’t smoked since university. On the side of the packet was written a slogan,
SMOKING CAN DAMAGE THE HEALTH OF YOUR UNBORN CHILD,
but that didn’t
matter any more. My poor little half-formed child had been, like the flowers, disposed of. I lit the cigarette, and closed my eyes, and saw petals floating on the water, pink and foetus-shaped.

After I was discharged from hospital I went back to my flat in Teddington. I rent the ground floor of one of the many Victorian villas that line the streets of west London. The rooms – kitchen, bathroom, and bedsitting room – had a dusty, unfamiliar look. There was a heap of letters by the front door, and the answerphone was blinking frantically. I disregarded both, and lay down on the bed, my coat wrapped around me.

I thought of Toby. I had first met Toby Carne eighteen months ago, in South Kensington. There had been a sudden heavy rain shower, I had had no raincoat, and when a gentleman had drawn level with me and offered to share his umbrella, I had thankfully accepted. I say ‘gentleman’, an old-fashioned term, because Toby had looked, to me, every inch the gentleman – Burberry and black city umbrella; short dark hair just touching his collar; old but expensive leather briefcase. I had guessed him to be around ten years older than me, and I had walked beside him, forgetting to dodge the puddles, hypnotized by his sudden smile and by the unmistakable interest in his eyes. When he suggested going for a drink to escape the rain, I accepted. By the time we parted, he had my name and telephone number. I had not expected him to phone, but he did, a few days later. I’d made him laugh, he explained. I was refreshing, different.

Toby had been my adventure. He had come from another world, and I had believed that our relationship would transform me. And it had, for a while. With Toby, I had lost weight, had worn smarter clothes, and had my long hair lightened. I had worn high heels and had not tripped over them, and I had bought expensive make-up, the sort that stays where you put it on. I had visited Toby’s parents’ house in Surrey, and had pretended that I was used to sofas whose cushions did not fray, and bathrooms with matching towels. Together we had visited Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels; together we had dined in expensive restaurants and been invited
to fashionable parties. He introduced me to his lawyer friends as ‘Rebecca Bennett, the biographer’; they tended to look blank, which he noticed after a while. He suggested I write a novel; I explained that I needed the solidity of history. He proposed, late and drunk one glorious summer’s night, that we try for a baby, and when, a couple of months later, I told him that I was pregnant, he toasted the infant with the best champagne, but did not suggest that we move in together. And when, several weeks after that, I began to lose our baby at a dull but important dinner party, he seemed put out that I had chosen such a time, such a place.

I had considered my remaking, which he had begun and I had colluded with, to be permanent. With one sentence –
I don’t think we should see so much of each other –
he had reminded me of what I really was. My ‘difference’ had become tiresome or, worse, embarrassing. And I hadn’t made him laugh for ages.

In the days after I came home from hospital, I did not leave the flat. I drank cups of tea and ate, when I could be bothered to eat, the contents of ancient forgotten tins that gathered dust at the back of the kitchen cupboard. I neither answered the telephone nor opened the post. The dull ache in my belly, a memento of the miscarriage, slowly faded. The panicky feeling, the sense that everything was falling apart, persisted. I slept as much as I could, though my dreams were punctuated by nightmares.

Then Jane turned up. Jane is my elder sister. She has two little boys aged one and three, and a cottage in Berkshire. A mild but persistent mutual envy has always been a part of our relationship. Jane hammered on the door until I opened it, then took one look at the frowsty squalor and at me, and said, ‘Honestly, Becca, you are hopeless.’ I burst into tears, and we hugged awkwardly, the products of a family not much given to displays of physical affection.

I spent a week with Jane, and then returned to London. You must begin to pick up the threads, she said, as she saw me onto the train. But it did not seem to me that there were any threads
left to pick up. The life I had planned had been Toby and the baby and a continuation of the career I had struggled for throughout my twenties. I had lost both Toby and the child and, though I sat dutifully at my desk and stared at my word processor, I was not able to write. I could think of nothing worth writing about. Any sentence I attempted to assemble was clumsy and meaningless. Ideas flickered through my head and I scribbled them down in a notebook, but the next morning they always seemed shallow, empty.

Jane and Steve invited me to stay with them at Christmas. The noise and enthusiasm of the little boys filled in the gaps made by my mother’s death, four years ago, and my father’s cantankerousness. Back in London, Charles and Lucy Lightman dragged me off to a New Year party. I’ve known Charles Lightman for years. He and his sister Lucy both have pale green eyes and the sort of fine, light brown hair that keeps to no particular style. Charles and I met at university, but now he has his own production company, Lighthouse Productions, which specializes in television programmes with an archaeological or historical interest. The previous summer we had worked together on a documentary,
Sisters of the Moon
.

At the party, the ritual beginnings of courtship – the
What do you do?
and the
Shall I get you a drink? –
seemed forced. In the bathroom, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. Round face, short mousy hair (I’d had it cut a few weeks before, and could no longer be bothered colouring it), light blue eyes expressing a dazed bewilderment and defencelessness that seemed to me inappropriate to my thirty-one years. I stared in disgust at my inept reflection, and then grabbed my coat and went home. But I thought, as I curled up in bed to escape the sounds of revelry on the street outside, that I was doing better. It was weeks since I had cried myself to sleep, weeks since I had felt a stab of pain at the sight of a dark-haired man, or a baby in a pram. I was teaching myself not to feel. I was teaching myself well.

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