The Ghost Writer (15 page)

I moved on to the desk. Writing paper in the top drawer, pens, pencils and rulers in the second, envelopes in the third. And at the back of the envelope drawer, a packet of unused aerograms so ancient they belonged in a museum. Australia. 9d. Slipped in amongst them was a stiff blue envelope, unsealed, which also looked very old; the dark brown glue on the flap was cracked and flaking.

Inside the envelope was a black and white photograph of my mother with me, only a few months old, perched on her knee in one of those miniature flying suits that babies wear, beaming up at her and waving one chubby hand in obvious excitement. I didn't recognise the room, or the sofa she was sitting on. She was smiling at me, looking amazingly youthful, far younger than she appeared in her wedding photograph. And different. For a start, her hair was much longer than I could recall; longer and curlier and more abundant. Her dress—I didn't know enough about fashion to say exactly, but it was more stylish than anything I could remember her in; and sleeveless, which she didn't usually wear, even in summer.

And there was something else unusual, apart from her looking so extraordinarily young and carefree. In the albums in the sitting room we had innumerable photographs of me at every possible stage of development, but nearly all of them were of me and my father, or of me alone. My mother's dislike of being photographed had extended even to being photographed with me; in the ones in which we both appeared, she was invariably looking away from the camera so that you could not see her face. Of all the photographs of her—of us—I had seen, this was by far the most joyful. So why had she hidden it away at the back of a drawer?

I went through the packets of envelopes much more carefully, but there was nothing else in the drawer. Taking the photograph with me, I wandered out of the study and up the hall to her bedroom, not really knowing why. I went over the dressing-table again, removing all the drawers and checking the underside of each one. Nothing but dust, and a reel of white thread which had fallen down inside the cabinet.

The kitchen steps were still where I had left them, beneath the right-hand cupboard. Could she possibly have been looking for this photograph? I remembered the horror creeping over her face, that last afternoon in the sunroom.

I had to keep you safe.

From whom? Or what?

You shouldn't he here. She'll see you.

Who would see me? I caught myself glancing uneasily towards the door. Not Viola, surely? I couldn't recall the very last thing she'd said.

Take me back to my room, Gerard. Bring me the steps. Go away and make the soup.

I climbed up for another look at the top cupboard. There were faint marks like scratches on the dusty floor of the cupboard. But the dust was otherwise smooth and undisturbed. The floor was just a sheet—no, two half-sheets—of plywood, the underside presumably forming the top of the wardrobe. I pried at the edge of the right-hand half and it lifted out of the frame.

Only I was not looking down through the wardrobe, but into a shallow recess. In which lay a large sealed envelope. Inside was a thick wad of typewritten sheets. 'The Revenant'. Below that, in the lower right-hand corner of the tide page, 'V.H. 4 Dec 1925' in a clear, spiky hand. I checked the envelope again and found a small printed slip:
With the author's compliments.

Still standing on the top step, I began to leaf through the typescript. As I turned to descend, a photograph slid from between the pages and fluttered to the floor.

I
HAD IMAGINED THAT IF
I
EVER SAW HER AGAIN, RECOGNI
tion would be instantaneous and complete. But it was not quite like that. The dress with shoulders gathered like the wings of angels, the swan-like carriage of her head, chin slightly lifted, gazing off to the left, the dark mass of hair drawn back in what I now knew was called a chignon—all seemed exactly the same, yet I felt sure something had changed. Well of course she looks different, I told myself,
I've
changed. I was ten when I last saw her. I hadn't heard, then, of chignons, or fine bones, or classically proportioned features: we didn't talk like that at Mawson Primary. Nor had it struck me that she wore no jewellery at all, neither necklace nor earrings. The back of her dress was secured at the neckline by a plain velvet bow.

Of course I hadn't met Alice then, either. This woman didn't look like my imagination of Alice; she was beautiful, but in a more spiritual, less sensuous way. Yet she reminded me of someone; someone I'd seen very recently.

The photograph in the blue envelope. Side by side, the family resemblance was clear; a resemblance that must have faded very quickly, for I couldn't see it in any of my memories of my mother. And since the woman in the studio portrait was, just as clearly, not my mother, who else could she be but the young Viola?

I turned over the photograph and saw that there was writing on the back: a faint inscription in pencil.

'GREENSLEEVES'
10 MARCH 1949

Greensleeves? If that was the date it was taken, it couldn't be Viola after all. But I couldn't imagine this face inspiring horror in anyone. Not even my mother. All these years I'd assumed she had beaten me for looking at the photograph. But she'd never actually said so. And since she'd already disposed of
The Chameleon
(unless it was hidden somewhere else in the house), I picked up 'The Revenant' again and went through it more carefully. But there was nothing else hidden between the pages. It was just a plain typescript, a fair copy on quarto paper with no corrections or annotations.

One came true.
I took the typescript over to the window and settled down on the floor, my back against the wall, with the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading.

***

T
HOUGH
A
SHBOURN
H
OUSE STOOD
only a few hundred yards from the village of Hurst Green, the surrounding woodland was so dense, and the trees so tall, that Cordelia had often imagined herself living deep in an enchanted forest. As a child, perched high above the lane in her favourite window-seat, she had dreamed away whole days as Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, and other melancholy heroines of romance. No handsome prince had so far appeared, possibly because the sign at the village end of the lane made it look like a private drive. Just beyond the house, to the left, the lane diminished to a muddy footpath. It was, in fact, a right-of-way through the wood, but the villagers seldom used it, and not simply because of the mud. According to local legend, as Cordelia had later discovered, the house was not only unlucky, but troubled by the apparition of a veiled woman in black: the ghost of her own grandmother, Imogen de Vere.

It was a tall, tower-like stone house, perhaps a hundred years old, evidently built, as Cordelia's Aunt Una was fond of complaining, by someone with a passion for climbing stairs. From the rear of the house, the land sloped downwards, and from the upstairs windows you could look out across the garden and above the treetops, over green pastures and wooded hills. But at the front, there was only a narrow forecourt of gravel and then the lane, beyond which the trees grew even higher than the house. By the time she was sixteen, Cordelia had advanced from the window-seat to the sill of the second-floor sitting-room window, where she liked to read on summer afternoons. Aunt Una could never see her leaning against the frame of the open window, so close to the edge that she could look straight down the long vertical fall to the gravel below, without an involuntary squeak of dread. But Cordelia was not in the least afraid of heights.

About ghosts she was not so sure. When she was seven or eight, she and her sister Beatrice had spent many days happily playing at ghosts with the aid of a worn-out sheet begged from Mrs Green the housekeeper, creeping along gloomy corridors and lurking in empty rooms, sending one another into paroxysms of pleasurable terror, until one afternoon it occurred to Cordelia to surprise Beatrice by dressing up as Grandmama's ghost. All she could recall of Grandmama, who had died just before her fifth birthday, was a silent, veiled figure, sitting by the fireside or moving about the garden. It was not polite to mention the veil. As Aunt Una had privately explained, Grandmama always wore it because she had once been very ill, and light was bad for her skin.

Grandmama's room had not been disturbed since the day of her funeral. The door was always locked. But Cordelia had recently discovered that the keys to the bedroom doors were interchangeable. Thinking that her father was safely downstairs in the drawing-room, she stole into the room, which smelt strongly of camphor, and began opening chests and closets to see what she could find. In the bottom drawer of a clothes-press, she came upon Grandmama's black veil, neatly laid out all by itself. She lifted it out and pressed the cool material against her face, breathing in camphor, and some other medicinal smell, and a very faint fragrance of perfume. When she put it on, the front of the veil came right down to her waist, whilst the back—it went all around, like a headdress—almost touched the floor. She could still see, though dimly, but when she looked in the long mirror her face was quite invisible, and because of the angle it seemed as if the veil was hovering of its own accord.

Panic seized her, and she fled into the corridor, only to confront a huge, dark figure blocking the way to the stairs. Her own shriek was drowned by a hoarse yell of terror, booming and echoing around her as she tore at the constricting veil and saw that the dark figure was in fact her father. Worse than her own fear, worse even than the beating that followed, was the memory of that cry, and of his face, momentarily frozen in horror before rage came to his rescue. Later he told her that he was sorry to have beaten her; he had lost his temper, he said, seeing her in Grandmama's veil. Though he was usually very indulgent, Cordelia found the apology troubling; she knew she had been terribly wicked, and deserved her punishment, and it seemed to her that Papa was trying to convince her—and perhaps himself—that he had not been frightened. She knew that Papa, a soldier, was as brave as a lion; Aunt Una was always saying so, yet she dared not ask what had so alarmed him. There were no more games of ghosts, and she was plagued for many months by a nightmare in which she was pursued and finally cornered by a malevolent, shrouded figure, who appeared in many guises but always became, in the instant before she woke in terror, her grandmother in the act of raising her veil.

She was, at the same time, fascinated by the portrait—the only surviving likeness of Imogen de Vere—which had hung on the second-floor landing for as long as she could remember. It showed a woman of great beauty, apparently in her early twenties, though she must have been about thirty-five when it was painted, against a dark, indistinct background. Her face, lit from above, was partly in shadow, accentuating the darkness of her large, luminous eyes. She wore an emerald green gown, cut high at the neck; her heavy, copper-coloured hair was loosely pinned up, with a few escaped strands curling across her forehead. The artist (who had not signed his name to the portrait) had captured some elusive quality in her gaze—an intense serenity, or perhaps a serene intensity of feeling—which compelled your eyes to return again and again to hers.

Though Cordelia did not doubt that the woman in the picture was, or had become, her grandmother, she found it curiously difficult to associate the face that so compelled her imagination with the veiled figure of memory—or nightmare. By the time she was fully grown, Cordelia had only to pause in front of the picture to feel that she was resuming a wordless intimacy which had accompanied her all through her childhood. Somehow her sense of communion with the portrait had become entwined with her feeling for her lost mother, whom she had never known: Frances de Vere had died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to Beatrice. It was not a matter of physical resemblance, for the photograph on Cordelia's dressing-table was of a shy, fair-haired girl, smiling tentatively at the camera. She looked about sixteen years old, and had died before her twenty-fourth birthday.

Imogen de Vere herself had died when she was not much more than fifty. Over the years, Cordelia had gradually assembled fragments of her grandmothers history; she had deduced that Imogen must have separated from her husband at about the time of the onset of her illness, and with her only child Arthur (Cordelia's father) who was then twelve or thirteen years old, come to live at Ashbourn House with her cousin Theodore Ashbourn and his sister Una. The illness—a mysterious and virulent disease of the skin, which no doctor had ever been able to diagnose—had plainly been far more severe than Cordelia had once believed. Imogen de Vere had spent the last fifteen years of her life at Ashbourn, permanently veiled and in constant pain. She slept badly, and would roam about the house in the small hours. Uncle Theodore had sometimes seen her wandering the garden by moonlight; she seemed to find relief in movement, and had walked miles every day until her final illness. So it was hardly surprising that many of the inhabitants of Hurst Green would swear to having seen a veiled figure peering from an upstairs window, or gliding amongst the trees of Hurst Wood, long after Imogen de Vere had been laid to rest in the village churchyard.

O
N A CHILL, GREY AFTERNOON LATE IN
F
EBRUARY, SOON
after her twenty-first birthday, Cordelia was standing in front of the portrait, lost in sombre reflection. Beatrice had declined, reasonably enough in view of the weather, to come out for a walk, but then a little later Cordelia had seen her disappearing along the lane in waterproof and Wellingtons. As children, they had played together constantly, but their intimacy had not survived the death of their father, who had fought unscathed through four years of war only to lose his life a month before the Armistice. Cordelia, who was then thirteen, had tried to comfort her sister, but Beatrice had refused all consolation. She would not speak of her father, or remain in the room if his name was even mentioned, and if she wept for him, she did so alone. Nor would she tolerate any inquiry as to her feelings, which seemed to alternate between listless apathy and a sullen, silent anger at everyone and everything around her.