Ghosts and Other Lovers Page 10

  She stared at him. “I am Lucy Maria.”

  I looked at him, looking at her.

  Softly he said, “You lost something in that house, long ago. Something very valuable got left behind.”

  For a long moment they sat with gazes locked. Then, stiffly, with great determination, she stood up and reached for the little silver bell on the mantelpiece beside the clock. “I don’t know what your game is, Mr. Templeton, but it isn’t going to work. I am neither so foolish nor so rich as you seem to think.” She picked up the bell and rang it.

  Confused and humiliated, I stood up beside Edward, unnoticed by either of them.

  “This isn’t a con game, and I’m not asking you for anything. I’m telling you this for your own sake. There is something in that house you can ill afford to live without.”

  She laughed a little, not sounding amused. “I have done without it for seventy years.”

  The maid came in. Miss Toseland said, “My visitors are leaving.”

  “You have lived without it, of course, but perhaps you wouldn’t like to learn later that it had been destroyed through carelessness, or that someone else, not you, had profited by it… .”

  “Someone like you?”

  Edward gave her his steadiest gaze. He was the very picture of the honest Englishman, the man everyone instinctively trusts. When I read Conrad’s Lord Jim, I pictured Edward’s face. He said, “I thought it only fair to tell you. Before you rent the house again, to me or anyone else, go there yourself, first. Go through every room. Satisfy yourself that you know what is there. Don’t leave it to someone else, no matter how much you trust him.” He turned to me then, putting his hand lightly at my waist. “We’ll go now. I’ve said what I had to say.”

  “Wait.”

  We were at the door. Edward turned back.

  “You won’t tell me what it is, this valuable thing?”

  He shook his head. “It would be better if you saw yourself.”

  “And if I ignore your advice?”

  “I shall do as I planned and rent it through your agent.”

  “The honest thief?” There was a pause. Then, to the maid she said, “Tell Bayley to bring the car around. My visitors will be traveling with me.” When the maid had gone she said to Edward, “I should tell you that my chauffeur is also a skilled pugilist. I always feel quite, quite safe with him.”

  “I’m sure you should.” Edward was smiling and relaxed.

  “Would you point out this valuable object to me personally, once we’re in the house?”

  “I think you’ll find it yourself without any difficulty. But of course if you need my help, it’s yours.”

  She left us alone in the sitting room while she prepared to go out, and I pounced on Edward at once.

  He seemed surprised. “I thought you understood. Miss Toseland is Lucy Maria.”

  “But she’s not dead!”

  “Not physically, no. But the ghost in the house is her soul. Something must have happened to her when she was a child, just before the family moved. I wish I could remember what she told me. Perhaps an illness or some violence from which she almost died … or maybe it was a spiritual death, some shock which split her. Miss Toseland lived, but she grew up without a soul.”

  I found it remarkably easy to believe her a woman without a soul. “But what was all that about a treasure? She’ll never rent it to us now. And why on earth should you want her to go to the house?”

  “To bring them together again. She can rescue Lucy Maria; she’s her only hope. If they can be reunited.”

  “And if they can’t?”

  “We won’t have lost anything by trying. A rich old woman will think I’m mad, or a failed confidence trickster. If she asks again I might pretend to believe some painting there is by an old master.” He smiled and stroked my cheek. “It will work. I feel certain this is the right thing to do.”

  *

  We had never approached the house in a car before, but it made no difference. I felt the fear as we passed the gates at the end of the drive, and I clutched Edward’s fingers, seeking reassurance.

  “How strange to return,” murmured Miss Toseland.

  “Why did you never come back before now?” asked Edward.

  “There was never any reason. The house belonged to my father, until his death, and then to my brother. When it came to me in due course I had no personal use for it; as a rental property it was better left in the hands of a competent agent.”

  The chauffeur stopped the car in front of the house and got out.

  “Is it as you remember?” asked Edward.

  The old woman was staring up at the house. “I don’t remember.”

  The chauffeur opened the door for her but she did not move. I could see that she didn’t want to get out, didn’t want to go in.

  “Does it frighten you?”

  That made her move. “The impertinence!” Resting on her servant’s arm, she got out and we scrambled after. She marched up to the house and unlocked the front door with hands that scarcely trembled.

  In the front hall she looked at him challengingly. “Where will I find this treasure?”

  He cocked his head as if listening. “Upstairs. In the nursery, maybe.”

  She snorted. “Nursery, indeed!” She turned toward the stairs and, swifter than the chauffeur, he sprang to her side, offering his arm.

  I felt a pang, the register of a betrayal, and I looked at the chauffeur as if we shared it. His face was unreadable, and he didn’t look at me, but at his mistress, who allowed Edward to help her mount.

  At the top of the first flight she had to rest. She was breathing heavily, and with the hand not clutching Edward’s arm she reached toward her throat uncertainly. “I feel … I … is it not dark in here? Is it not cold? Bayley, get my — I feel … I …”

  We were all looking at her. We all saw it happen. The taut parchment of her face seemed to crumple and shred, and the black ice of her eyes melted into something warmer and brighter. Then she laughed: the clear, high, sweet trill of a happy child. She laughed, and she jumped up and down and clapped her hands for joy.

  “Oh, Ned,” she cried, in a child’s voice, not Miss Toseland’s cold, refined tones, “you’ve done it — I always knew you would! I’m free!”

  And she flung herself at him, hanging on his neck like someone much smaller, and covered his face with kisses.

  Bayley must have thought she’d gone mad. His mouth hung open slightly as he stared.

  I knew better. And, as I watched my fiancé holding another woman close to him, allowing her kisses, welcoming them, smiling with a foolish, fond delight, I also knew worse.

  This was what he wanted. This, more or less, was what he had planned, or at least hoped for.

  My eyes met his. His smile was tempered a little — he must have seen my anguish — as he said softly, “I have to take care of her. You do see that? I promised her. She doesn’t have anyone else to love her. You understand?”

  I did understand. That added to the horror of it. I couldn’t even blame him. He had loved her as a child and he loved her still. I understood, and I loved him, but I couldn’t live with him. I turned around and ran for my life.

  *

  It was my mistake to believe that all ghosts are of the dead. The living, too, leave ghosts behind them. If it is true the dead can’t harm us, the same can certainly not be said of the living.

  Sitting in my kitchen all alone as the night wore away and morning came on, I thought about the living and the dead in my life, eight years after Edward had gone, as I thought, out of my life forever. I wondered where he was now, what he was thinking, how he was feeling with Lucy Maria dead. It had been another mistake, I realized, to think that I was “over” him, or that he was out of my life, or ever could be, until both of us were dead. I was so lost in my thoughts that I did not notice the sounds of movement from another part of the house until my husband appeared in the doorway, in his dressing gown, asking sleepily if som
ething was wrong.

  I stared at him. For a moment he looked like a ghost to me, and I thought that if I waited he would disappear.

  The Extra Hour

  An extra hour, that’s all I want. One more hour in every day for me, for writing. Then I could finish my book, and — well, that would be a start.

  Of course, I could be working on finishing it now, moving it along a little bit more, advancing another page or two or three toward the end. David thinks I’m up here in my corner of our partially converted loft, working on my novel instead of drinking wine and watching a video with him, instead of grading papers, or ironing, or any of the other more useful or sociable things I could be doing, and what am I doing? This isn’t writing, it’s doodling. I don’t deserve an extra hour. I have one — one hour, almost every night, all to myself, my writing time — and look at how I waste it, daydreaming and doodling. If I had another hour, wouldn’t I waste that, too?

  No I wouldn’t. One hour isn’t enough to do anything — but two can be. I’ve had two hours up here, writing like a demon, going downstairs feeling spent and satisfied and with something to show for my time. If I had two hours every day —

  But it’s just not possible. There aren’t enough hours in the day, or not enough energy in my body. I tried the traditional surviving-on-less-sleep routine, but I couldn’t sustain it. Somebody, maybe not me, would have died. If I didn’t have a job already — but I do, and I’m good at it (which I might not be at writing) and we need the money, and when I’m home I want to be with my family. After all, I wanted this family — nobody forced me to get married and procreate. Trying to carve out another hour for myself, insisting on it, would be unfair to David and the kids, and even, ultimately, to myself, my deepest needs.

  But I need to write, too. Or I think I do. These conflicting needs wouldn’t be so in conflict if there was just one extra hour in every day, an hour I could have just for myself. I wish… .

  Two

  I heard a clock strike the hour. I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that I reacted as if it were an alarm. I jumped up without pausing to wonder where the clock was, whose it was, or what strange time it kept until I was on my way downstairs. And then I saw a door where one shouldn’t have been.

  It was just at the turn of the stairs, in the wall we share with the house next door. If there really was a door there it would open onto the Corkindales’ staircase, and my first thought on seeing it was that our neighbors had knocked through to our property, and I was furious.

  How dare they — and I put my hand on the knob, and it opened.

  I was so astonished by what I saw that I walked straight in. The door swung silently shut behind me. No room like this was in the Corkindales’ house, or in any house along our road. This was a room from my dreams.

  My daydreams, I should say: if I were a rich and famous author, this was the study I would have.

  The walls were paneled wood, lined with books or hung with paintings. Gold velvet draperies at the far end concealed either a window or another door. On the floor were Oriental rugs in luscious, luxurious shades: apricot, cinnamon, crimson, and teal. There was a deep leather armchair with a reading lamp standing behind it, a chaise longue, and an elegant walnut escritoire, but what caught my attention was the plain oak table with everything needed for writing: a jar of sharpened pencils, a stack of notebooks, a dictionary, a directional lamp.

  Wherever this had come from, wherever I was, I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. I went straight to the table and sat down on the chair in front of it and picked up the notebooks. They were full of blank pages and smelled delicious. I chose a pencil and took possession of the room in the only way possible: I began to write.

  It wasn’t my novel. I started a new story. It seemed right.

  I didn’t manage to finish it, quite, but I wrote pages and pages. I don’t know how long I wrote, because I wasn’t wearing a watch, and although it was the sound of a clock striking which had brought me there, I didn’t see one in the room. I just wrote until I was too tired to go on, until I didn’t feel like writing anymore. Then I closed the notebook, stood up, and walked through the door and back down my own familiar staircase and into the sitting room where David was still watching his video.

  He looked up at me in surprise. “You’re down early. Not inspired?”

  “What do you mean? I wrote ever such a lot; I thought you’d be in bed by now.” Then I saw the time on the video recorder and did a mental double-take. According to it, I’d been upstairs for half an hour.

  It was then that the strangeness struck me full force. I rushed out of the room and back up the stairs where — of course — I could find no mysterious door.

  But the story I wrote in that room exists, and it didn’t before. I don’t have the notebook, but I remember it perfectly well. I know I can write it again, and as a second draft it will be even better.

  Where did that story come from? When did I write it? The only possible explanation seems to be that I fell asleep at my desk. I must have nodded off and dreamed the whole thing in about five minutes.

  Three

  I’ve finished the story — “Wings” — and it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

  I’m ditching the novel. It doesn’t interest me anymore; there’s something static, predetermined about it. For a long time I’d been telling myself I was only tired because I’d been thinking about it for so long, but I’ve decided that if it bores me it would bore anybody else, too. Liberation!

  There’ll have to be a new novel, but just now I haven’t a clue about it. I’m going to write another story next, semi-fantastic, yet at the same time very ordinary, full of the quotidian, about a woman who loses her place in her own life — as if life were a book one read. About time and memory, fear and desire, the tricks the mind plays — like the way I dreamed myself into “somewhere else” in order to find the time I needed to write. I haven’t felt so excited about writing in ten years.

  Four

  It happened again. I went back.

  I was working on “Irrevocable Decisions” — which isn’t the neat, sweet short story I’d thought it would be, but just keeps growing — as I had been all week. Two nights running I’d been up late with it, well past my usual hour, and lack of sleep was telling on me: I nearly dozed off on my way to school. Luckily, David was driving. He said I must have an early night for once, and when he couldn’t talk me into giving up my hour at the desk, he made me take an alarm clock up with me.

  Hateful things, they are. I didn’t want to be interrupted in mid-flow, I didn’t want to be shocked out of my writing dream, so I wrote against time, obsessed by the presence of the clock all the while I struggled to lose myself and forget it.

  I did manage to lose myself in the writing, but I was still so keyed-up to expect an interruption that when I heard a clock strike I jumped up without really noticing that this sound was not the irritating electronic buzz of a travel alarm.

  Only halfway down the stairs did I remember, when I saw the door again.

  Full of pleasure and anticipation I went through and straight to my table. I picked up notebook and pencil and, set free from time, returned to my story.

  I wrote until my vision blurred and my handwriting was a pained and drunken scrawl. I longed to put my head down and close my eyes. Maybe a short nap would help.

  As I stumbled across the room to the chaise longue I thought that when I woke I would be stiff from sleeping at my desk in the corner of the loft. I should go downstairs now — but I was too tired to go any further.

  Against my expectations, against what seemed like reason, when I awoke I was still there in that room. It was as if I’d only dreamed I’d lost something, and woke to find it was still mine. I was so happy. I jumped up and went back to the writing table, back to work, as invigorated as if I’d had a full night’s sleep.

  But although I was eager to get on with my story, I was thirsty. I really fancied a cup of tea. If this was my
ideal study, I thought, there must be a kettle, and likely an emergency stash of food. So I got up to have a look.

  Maybe the presence of a white china tea-set on top of a low cupboard had struck a subliminal chord. Inside the cupboard I found an electric kettle, two bottles of still water, containers of powdered milk and loose tea, and a tin of digestive biscuits.

  “All right!”

  I filled the kettle and plugged it in. While I waited for it to boil I investigated the bookshelves. It was pretty amazing I’d managed to resist their lure for this long. Most of the books were duplicates of my own, downstairs, but there were also some volumes I’d always wanted and never managed to afford: the OED, all of Pevsner, the letters of Henry James, lots of big, glossy art books, and just about every useful or interesting reference work I could think of.

  In spite of the powdered milk, my cup of tea tasted especially delicious, the way it does when it’s most welcome — after hiking up a mountain with friends, or after a dismal journey in the rain. It was as good as that first cup of tea after Rachel was born. When I’d finished it I went back to work. The ending was in sight. Many of the sentences I wrote were clumsy, crippled in some way, but I knew it didn’t really matter. This was only a draft, a sketch. I would take more care when I rewrote; now, the important thing was to finish.

  I didn’t linger afterward. I wrote “The End” in huge letters, and then left the room, clutching the precious notebook to my chest.

  But as soon as I was back on the stairs the notebook, like the door, had gone.

  Only the story was still there, achieved, finished, in my head — and I knew I would be able to write it again from memory.

  It feels so real, what happened to me, but it must be imaginary. No time passes while I am away. I don’t actually go anywhere. So what happens? Maybe, just as I come to the turn of the stair, I suffer a sort of brain-wave, fall into an incredibly rich, vivid, real-seeming dream for what feels like hours, only to snap back to consciousness a few seconds later, and continue going down the stairs, under the mistaken impression that in that gap I’ve written forty pages, had a nap, and consumed one cup of tea and six digestive biscuits …