Walking with Ghosts (2 page)

Still, why should Sam Turner worry? It meant work for the business, paid work. And the thing was about work from Jill, she paid well, and she paid quickly.

The job would consist of straightforward leg work, interviews with the dead woman’s associates, maybe a little surveillance on Edward Blake. Sam wouldn’t need to get too involved himself, Geordie and Marie could handle it easily enough.

Two weeks, maybe two and a half. He’d be able to spend more time with Dora.

It would have been too complicated to go into with Jill Sheridan, but Dora, Sam’s wife, had known the murdered woman. They hadn’t been close, but Dora had been upset when India Blake had disappeared, and shocked when the dead body was discovered. Dora had followed the case closely, sometimes reading extracts from the newspapers to Sam when he got home in the evenings.

He stopped in at Betty’s for coffee instead of going straight to the office. Sam was still surprised that he was married at all. He’d watched himself getting closer to Dora, talked himself out of it a dozen times, then watched himself making up his mind to go through with it. He and she had recognized the lawlessness in each other. That’s what they called it. Whatever it was, they shared a bond.

And now she was falling apart.

He had watched his wife at night rowing out into a fjord. Before the disease took her strength, they had stayed in a wooden cabin near Tromsø, courtesy of a satisfied client. He remembered her strength. The water was slate grey, with a faint touch of blue. There was a line of silhouetted trees on the opposite bank, edged with scarlet, but fading out into pink and blue. No sound. Total silence. She’d pulled away from the shore with strong, rhythmical strokes. Sculling across the glassy surface of the water. She was a silhouette. In the distance an oyster catcher had called out in the wilderness.

2

You were a child then. You were a girl in pigtails, thin, your ribs and collar bones sticking out of you like primitive scaffolding. You did not fit. And they told you over and over that you did not fit. And you believed them, because they had all the answers, and even if they had not told you you would still have known that you did not fit, because they all did fit, and you were different.
Not fit to
...
Not fit for...

What was it all about? That time? Your childhood? You should be able to make sense of it. You feel a deep need to look there for the meaning which has reverberated throughout your life. The meaning, or the lack of meaning.

You knew he was dying. He had been dying for as long as you could remember. They took you into a curtained room and pushed you towards his bed, and he was your father, your dying father, and he was thinner than you. Badly shaved, prickly and yellow, with hollow jaws, and stinking breath and long gnarled fingers with calloused nails that should have been shorter, and you had to let him hold your hand and go so close that it looked as though you kissed his cheek. Though you never kissed him. Never once; only brushed your lips so close to his face that your heart thumped against your flimsy ribcage. My God, Father, you think now. If you’d known, if it had been possible for you to know then what you know now, then you would have kissed his lips. His dry, flaking lips. And he would not have died so soon, for your lips then were like a knot of juicy grapes, the spittle of the vine. And your lips now are like his were then, and you are kept alive by love.

You are confused. You are grateful, but you are confused. The world has gone through so many contortions. And it is not because you are so old. It is rather because everyone else is so young. It is because the thing that crouches inside you is so elemental, so mindless, so ageless beyond age, so weighty and cud-chewing, so liable to charge an imaginary rag. You have to keep it at peace. You have to dominate it. You are a matador. You have to pray.

You have the facility of perfect recall. You are a daughter of the earth. You can remember the details of your mother’s womb, your reluctance to leave its warm-sea-saltiness, your horror at that first tug-of-war. Since then you have become a virtuoso of birth. Now, for as far as your eyes can see, there stretches an infinity of sand.

Sam’s hand smoothes your brow. His two eyes are twinkling in the darkness above you, slightly out of horizontal, like Aries. It is night and you are coming back. The pains are dulled again. You have come through another tug-of-war. The desert is still there, waiting, but here in the oasis the night is cool.

‘There,’ he says. ‘It’s better now.’

And you feel your head nod assent, and your lips rustle as you try to speak. Sam moves above you and you feel his fingers pressing the sponge to your mouth. The cold water is like light, it sends messages of hope to every nerve in your body. You do not tell him when you have had enough, you do not flicker your eyes or alter the tempo of your breath. He takes the sponge away. He knows.

You can feel Geordie’s dog, Barney, settled at the end of the bed, by your feet. And you wonder about Geordie. Where he is, what he’s doing.

Your fingers move on the quilt and Sam takes your hand in his own and you hope he can see the smile that is like a song in your blood, and any doubts you might have sink away, down through the mattress, down further through the floor, as his chuckle unfolds itself into the room.

‘It’s past, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘You’re feeling better.’

You move your lips and he gives you the sponge again, and finally you can speak: ‘What time is it?’

‘Four o’clock. The night is young.’ He chuckles again. ‘Can you sleep now?’

‘Where’s Geordie?’ you ask.

‘At home in bed. It’s late.’

You close your eyes. Yes, you can sleep. You let yourself slip away. Sam is holding your hand. He has a grip of you. It is four o’clock in the morning. You are no longer confused. You are grateful.

As a part of history, you are connected with events and people of the past. On the day you were born Rudolf Hess invaded Scotland by parachute; clothes rationing was already in force. The previous year the British army was evacuated from Dunkirk, three hundred and thirty-five thousand, four hundred and ninety men huddled on the beach under constant attack; and the following year the siege of Leningrad was lifted. Lady Day had her first taste of hard drugs. You were destined for history.

Your mother was a historian, a secret historian. Her account of the Great War is still among your papers in the bureau. You have failed to edit it for more than thirty years. The truth is, you never wanted to edit it because it was hers. You were jealous of her, as she was jealous of you. Her only achievement, as far as you are concerned, is that she was a cousin of Dylan Thomas (and your earliest memory is of being kissed by him).

‘I was kissed by Dylan Thomas,’ you have told almost everyone you ever met. ‘He went down on one knee and kissed me on the cheek. I remember being tickled by a day’s growth of beard, and the smell of figs on his breath. He was a relative on my mother’s side, somewhat removed, but he visited us when he was in the neighbourhood.’ You have been a snob about that.

In truth, you don’t know if you remember it or not. You don’t know if you remember Dylan Thomas, or if what you remember is your mother’s memory. Because she told everyone the same story: ‘Dylan Thomas kissed Dora, you know. She was small at the time, but she still remembers, don’t you, Dora? His bristles and a figgy smell, typical childhood observations. He was my cousin, you know, a regular visitor whenever he was in Wales.’ You are like your mother. You have become more like your mother as you have grown older. The last ten years have been a nightmare in that respect. You would not have believed it possible. You feel like her. You turn your head when someone speaks and in a flash you recognize the gesture. It is your mother turning her head. She lives in the tone of your voice. Your characteristics, gestures, inflections of speech, they are all inherited. You are reverting to form. Everything you rejected, burned, left behind; it is all reconstituting itself. You have not escaped. You have run away, but you have not escaped.

You laugh because you can see now what you were running from. It is life’s oldest comedy. Your mother was not so bad. She was like you. A Swansea girl, born and bred. When you laugh at her you are laughing at yourself.

You were special. You were a special child born into a special family. A respectable family. A middle-class family. You had advantages. The house had more rooms than people. A mile away the working classes lived in black shams lit by candles. Further away still lived the miners who communicated in grunts. The miners who lived on roots, and who made Mother tug you into her skirts when they passed in the street.

Already when Dylan Thomas published
Deaths and Entrances
you could read and write and converse about the world, you were more knowledgeable and wise than any miner or any miner’s son or daughter. You told all Mother’s visitors about the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘A triumph of engineering.’ You described the treasures of Tutankhamun. You were a precocious child. Everyone patronized you; but even the adults were a little scared. You could see it in their eyes.

Everything in your childhood was special, but more special than anything else was your education. For your mother the highest learning was history. You spent seven years in a class with five other girls under the personal tuition of Miss Masefield (‘Not, like my namesake, a poet; though, believe me, young ladies, poetry has been for me the most edifying inspiration of my life.’) Miss Masefield hated children and loved knowledge, and her mission in life was to wed the two together. As a child you watched her grow haggard with the struggle.

Apart from Joan, the other girls in the class were stupid. Joan was your cousin, and like yourself, an only child. You agreed to be sisters on the day an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, and you still think of her as your sister now. Together with Joan you looked at the photographs of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, and years later you reminded Joan that Lady Day was serving a prison sentence when the princess and her prince walked up the aisle. Lady Day had taken a cure earlier in the year, but then got herself arrested as a user in Philadelphia. She was sentenced to a-year-and-a-day at the Alderson Reformatory in West Virginia. Joan’s something big in Women’s Lib now. She became politicized late in life, about the same time you were beginning to turn to God.

Joan made it to Oxford too, only she did not stay the course. It was different for you. You were a sticker. You clenched your teeth in the face of the humiliation, the patronage, the sheer bloodiness of a masculine preserve. There was not a day, not a single day at the University when you were allowed to think of yourself as other than a woman, a poor relation of man. Hesketh-Darwin-Jones, your tutor in the history department, was struck dumb by the swish of a skirt. He had chosen academia in preference to the military or the church to avoid the female sex; and, lo, the establishment had betrayed him. He was dumb. He never spoke a word to you in three years. He coughed and stammered and constantly rearranged the features of his face, he pointed at books and scribbled unreadable notes, but he could not speak. Now you can laugh about it. Almost forty years have passed.

Lady Day died when you were in that place. Her life came to an end before you’d ever heard her sing. She slipped away before you’d heard her name. It was years later that you were penetrated by her haggard voice with its plaintive cry. The Classical and the Gothic were your teachers then; it was to be some time before you discovered ‘What A Little Moonlight Can Do’.

And it was at Oxford that you met Arthur. The one place in the world that your mother thought you would be safe from miners was the one place where you met a man with coal dust in his eyes. Arthur. He had coal dust in his soul. Mother never knew. Until her dying day she thought he was the son of a country parson. She should have married him instead of you, she would have managed him better. She would have appreciated his aspirations. That was something you never did, Dora, because while he was climbing up the social scale you were intent on climbing down it. You were searching for the working classes while he was trying to forget them. What a funny couple you were. What a hilarious duo. How you mauled each other. How you marked each other.

And yet it could have worked. You could have sacrificed yourself as other women did. Arthur wanted you to sacrifice yourself and you refused because you thought your own life had meaning, import. You were full of... history. The English Civil War was more important to you than a miner’s son with coal dust in his eyes. You judged his aspirations spurious and let him go. He would never understand why. He did not have the insight. He was a miner’s son. A philosopher, an economist, an idealist in his way. Arthur, the father of your children; a child himself who wanted that you be his wife first and last. Arthur, who reminded you of your vows. Arthur who, in truth, did not want much, but who sought it from you who could not give.

And if his aspirations were spurious, Dora, what about your own? Did you really think it possible that they would give you a Chair? You? A woman? A married woman? A divorced woman? A woman with children? And the working classes; did you think they would listen to you? Yes, you thought all that, and more. You thought you had the answers. You thought your generation would change the world, but in the end you fell back on gin, long black cigarettes, all-night parties, and, and... you are not at all like your mother.