Ghosts and Other Lovers Read online

  “Then what are you saying? That it’s impossible? That things like that can’t happen? Well, they can — they do. I know: it happened to me. I don’t know how, or why, or what it means, but it happened. I remember it; I’ve remembered it all my life. And now that I’ve met Paul, it all makes sense.”

  “God, I don’t believe this,” said Jean. Her mouth was twitching, and her eyes were shiny. I felt furious with her for treating my precious secret so lightly.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” I said coldly. “I know what happened; I don’t need you to—”

  “Oh, you’re so wrong!”

  “What do you know about it? You always think you know so much. Just because you’re always reading those old books, just because you’re older than me — well, there’s some things you don’t know. This isn’t anything to do with you. It happened to me. It’s mine.”

  I’d been silly to think we were equals, to think she would ever accept me as her equal. We were squabbling again. I was reduced to shouting and stubbornness, while she had that horribly distant, superior look on her face that meant she was about to demolish me with facts.

  “You’re wrong there,” she said. “It didn’t happen to you, and it’s not yours. It’s mine. It’s a story that I made up and told you one night when I couldn’t sleep. I was always doing that — you remember — always making up stories. And I found that the best way to keep you awake and listening was if I made up stories about you. So I told you that one day when you were out exploring you found a high wall with a little tiny door in it, just big enough for you to squeeze inside. And behind that wall was a garden, and in the garden there were a woman and a man. And the woman looked strangely familiar to you, although you didn’t know why. Later, when you tried to find the walled garden again, you couldn’t, so eventually you thought you must have imagined it and forgot all about it. Or nearly. Because one day, when you were grown-up and married and living in a house of your own, you went out to walk in your garden, and you saw a little girl staring at you — and it was yourself.”

  I wished I could wake up. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not doing anything. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “You’re not. It’s not. I don’t believe you.”

  “Why should I lie?”

  “I don’t believe you could make up a story as good as that. Not when you were eight — not even now.”

  She laughed. “Oooh, a critic! Well, you’re probably right. It probably was too sophisticated for me, then. I probably stole the idea from a comic book or something I saw on television. Most of the stories I told you I got from somewhere else and just changed the names.”

  I didn’t want to believe her. But her certainty was compelling. And why should she lie?

  “Why do I remember it, then?” I asked. “I don’t remember it like a story — I remember it happening to me.”

  “Maybe you dreamed about it afterward. After all, you must have been half asleep when I was telling it to you … a highly suggestible state.”

  Later, I thought of reasons why Jean might have lied. Jealousy, the unacknowledged desire to spoil things for me because she couldn’t bear to see her little sister happy in love when she herself was so unhappy… . Or maybe she thought she was telling the truth. Maybe, when I was small, I had told her about the garden and because Jean was the storyteller, not me, she remembered it in retrospect as one of her own stories. Maybe she just couldn’t cope with something that contradicted her rational view of the world and had to force it into fiction.

  Whatever her reasons, conscious or unconscious, she certainly spoiled any future I might have had with Paul. I didn’t want to believe Jean, but old habits were too strong. She was my big sister; she knew best. How could I have believed in something as farfetched as time travel or seeing the future? I felt embarrassed; it was as bad as if I’d gone on into adulthood believing in Santa Claus. And because I had told him, as well as because I had based my love on this myth, I felt ashamed to go back to Paul. I treated him very badly. I dropped him flat, treated him like a stranger when I got back to college, and never explained why, never gave him a second chance.

  The man in the garden, though, was not so easily dropped. Faith doesn’t have much to do with facts or logic; it’s more to do with need, and I obviously needed my memory of the garden. Gradually, despite my attempts to disown it, my faith in the garden returned. I didn’t think about it much; I told myself that I’d stopped believing, or I told myself that it didn’t matter — but eventually it came back; it was there again, beneath the things I did and thought and felt, just as it always had been.

  As the years went by I had other boyfriends, and since they didn’t all resemble one another, I don’t know how much any of them resembled the man in the garden, if at all. I had seen that man — if I had seen him — for no more than a few seconds when I was five years old, and never again since. The only thing I knew for sure was that he had been taller than me. And since I am rather small, the fact that all my boyfriends were taller than me might have been no more than coincidence.

  When I was twenty-five, and she was twenty-eight, my sister got married. Her husband’s name was Howard Olds, he was eight years older than she was, and he was rich. That was the most impressive thing about him. He was also a lawyer, and he dabbled in local politics, not very successfully. I thought he was boring and conceited, not particularly physically attractive, and — most surprisingly for Jean, who had always admired intellect above all — not even very bright. I wondered if Jean could have stooped so low as to marry a man for his money. I didn’t know the grown-up Jean very well. Although we had both moved back to Houston after college, we seldom saw each other except at unavoidable family gatherings. This changed after Jean married Howard. Everything changed after my first visit to their house.

  It was a large house in River Bend, a prestigious address in an exclusive neighborhood. It had been built twenty or thirty years ago, a two-story, Georgian-style, brick house set on half an acre of land, well shaded with oaks, pines, pecans, and magnolias. And at the back there was a walled garden.

  I’ll always remember the first time I saw it. Or perhaps I should say, the second time.

  Because, of course, it was the same garden. I knew that, I think, even before I saw it. Jean had invited me for dinner. She was still busy in the kitchen when I arrived, so it was Howard who took me outside to show me around. Inside the walled garden it was very beautiful and peaceful. I could hear birds, distantly, and the wind in the pines. The air was blueing toward night. I looked around and made polite, admiring noises at whatever Howard pointed out, but I wasn’t paying attention to him and hardly heard a word he said. I was far too tense, vibrating inside and out, my nerves and senses all unnaturally sharpened and focused on this moment to which, it seemed, my whole life had been leading. Only one thing mattered. What I was looking for — and praying not to see — was a little girl in pink pajamas.

  She didn’t come. Yet I couldn’t relax. I kept waiting. And when Howard led me back indoors, I don’t know if I was more relieved or disappointed. What a joke, if the little girl I had been had seen me with my sister’s husband! What a bitter joke, when I had believed I was seeing true love, if I had built my whole life around a misunderstanding.

  I must have been a terrible guest that night. I felt such a sense of loss and such undirected bitterness that I couldn’t stop brooding. And halfway through the dinner I could not taste I was suddenly struck by a new fear: did Jean know? Might she guess? Had she recognized the garden? Would she say something? I waited in torment.

  But, of course, she didn’t know. She had probably entirely forgotten the garden fantasy. Years had passed since that last, bitter conversation about it. It was my experience, not hers. It had never been hers. Of course she didn’t remember. At least, I hoped she didn’t. I couldn’t be sure, because I couldn’t ask her without reminding her — and I didn’t want that. If it was forgotten, please let it stay fo
rgotten. At any rate, she didn’t say anything that night or on future nights.

  For there were future nights, despite such a nearly disastrous beginning. I made sure of that. I made friends with Jean and was often invited to dinner. Jean liked giving dinner parties and I became a regular guest. Sometimes I brought a boyfriend, and sometimes she would invite a man for me to meet. I encouraged that, although I never admitted how important it was to me. After the initial shock, I had my faith back again, more strongly than before. I had found the garden I had been looking for. Now, all I had to do was to wait for the right moment to come around again.

  I had made a few wrong assumptions, I could see that now. I had imagined that the garden must be mine, or my lover’s — but why should that be? It was just a place, after all; a place where anything might happen; a place where something special would happen when two times of my life overlapped. I might not meet him there for the first time, but in that garden I would recognize the man who had been meant for me.

  Three years passed, and I was not unhappy. Jean and I became friends and shared many things — although I never risked telling her about the garden. She was already playing her part. I began to like Howard better, seeing how happy he made my sister. He wasn’t as bad as I had thought, or maybe life with Jean had improved him. And he liked me and flirted with me in a way I enjoyed. I flirted back, meaning nothing by it.

  And then, finally, my time in the garden came around again. It was a dinner-party night: Jean and Howard, a couple of neighbors, a junior partner from Howard’s firm and his wife, me and Jonathan. Jonathan was a man I had recently met and been out with twice. We hadn’t so much as kissed yet — maybe we never would. By that time I had developed quite a strong superstition about the garden and liked to bring men there who were still basically unknown to me, before anything had happened. Howard teased me about all my boyfriends; Jean defended my right to be choosy, praised my good sense in not settling for anything less than exactly what I wanted. I had a few affairs, but I couldn’t really, entirely believe in a relationship which blossomed outside the walled garden; I never expected them to last very long or affect me very deeply, and they didn’t.

  Jonathan was supposed to go into the garden with me. That was my plan. We were walking through the house toward the back when he was sidetracked by one of the other guests who shared some mutual interest. I kept going — the other man was smoking a cigar and I wanted to get away from the smell — trusting Jonathan to follow. But when, in the garden a minute later, I heard someone come out of the house and walk toward me, I didn’t need to look around to know that it was Howard.

  And then — just then! — I saw myself, the five-year-old in pink pajamas, running across the lawn and then freezing, staring at me, eyes wide and wild as a fawn’s.

  I felt a moment of disbelief, and then overwhelming despair. Why now? Why did it have to be Howard?

  I turned my head to look at him. I was still hoping, I think, that I was wrong, and that it wasn’t Howard beside me.

  It was Howard, of course, and my glance caught him off guard. I saw how he looked at me, and — I couldn’t help myself — I reached for his hand. And as our eyes met, I knew that I could have just what I’d always wanted.

  But was this really what I’d always wanted?

  Nothing was said. If there had been time, we might have stepped behind the sheltering magnolia and fallen into each other’s arms. But we heard the smooth, gliding sound of the patio door and moved apart. I think the motion looked casual, not furtive. I greeted Jonathan and even through the blood pounding in my ears I knew my voice betrayed nothing.

  I was very aware, all through dinner, of Howard’s attention. But it was Jean I looked at, searching for signs of strain, unhappiness, nerves. Nothing. She didn’t know. She had no idea of what she was about to lose, and to whom.

  When Jonathan and I left that evening Howard — as he sometimes did — gave me a brotherly kiss on the cheek. This time, though, his hand rested for a moment on my hip. No touch has ever excited me more or seemed to hold a more passionate promise.

  I have been awake all night, thinking. I’ve been wanting this for so long, and now I can see the ending. I can have what I want, what I’ve always wanted. Is it enough for me to know that, or does Jean have to know, too? Do I need Howard to be happy? Or can I, now, imagine a new future for myself, without the walled garden?

  Lucy Maria

  It is a serious business when a child falls in love. When people talk about love, as they often do, as “sexual attraction,” I think of those kissing dolls sold in novelty shops, papier-mâché heads bobbing on springs, drawn toward each other inevitably, inexorably made to connect by hidden magnets. You could imagine, from the language, that sex was a set of magnets buried in human flesh. But isn’t there something else involved, an attraction of souls, which is regardless of sex, regardless of age?

  I think so. When Janet, my six-year-old, wept in my arms for James, the seven-year-old next door, my own heart ached.

  I have not, these past eight years, brooded much on the past. Being married with two small children and a house to look after keeps me anchored in the present, with no time for vain regrets. I married Robert on the rebound, as they say, but he is a good man, and we have made a satisfactory life together.

  Satisfactory, until now. Now I sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, trapped in the past.

  Can it be only coincidence that this afternoon my daughter’s unhappiness reminded me of my own past hurt, and that this evening, looking for distraction, I picked up The Times and saw an obituary for Mrs. Edward Templeton?

  Edward, I thought. Edward, who should have been my husband, is free at last. As a man he had wanted to marry me. But as a child he had given his heart to a funny little old-fashioned girl named Lucy Maria. He promised himself to her when he was a child, and sealed his fate. For what are the desires of adults when weighed in the balance with those of children?

  When we were children, living in a leafy London suburb, Edward and I were playmates. It wasn’t Edward I loved in those days, but his older brother, Julian. Seven years older than I, away at public school for most of the year, Julian seemed unattainable, but I was determined. I laid plans. Edward, a year younger than I, became my favored friend.

  In love with my fantasy of Julian, I was then incapable of appreciating Edward, whom I thought too young. I was the leader in all our games; I was older, and bolder, and sometimes, I am sorry to say, I bullied him. But he was willing to be led by me, even when I proposed we should explore the haunted house.

  We had no idea by whom or what it might be haunted, only that it had an evil reputation. It was let to a different family every year, unusual in those more settled days before the war. The house, in its own grounds at the end of a private drive, was also one of the larger ones in our neighborhood. For a few months, in the summer of 1939, the house was empty of tenants, apparently abandoned except for the regular attentions of a hired gardener.

  It was a disinclination for naughtiness, not a fear of ghosts, that made Edward unwilling to trespass, yet I taunted him with cowardice, until he gave in. We set off, in broad daylight, with candles and matches to explore the darker recesses of the house, but I didn’t really think we would get inside. We would wander around in the shrubbery and peer through windows and I would make us both shiver by claiming to see something moving in the shadows, but the house was sure to be locked.

  It was Edward who noticed the open window at the back.

  I stared up at the dark space between white sash and white sill and thought it was like a partly opened mouth.

  “It’s too high,” I objected. “And anyway, it’s probably fixed so it won’t open any wider, the way our kitchen window is.”

  “You fit in through your kitchen window. I can give you a leg up here just like I do there.”

  To me that half-opened window looked like a trap. Set by whom? The house was empty, so who could have left it
open?

  As if he read my thoughts Edward said, “Probably the gardener makes his tea in the scullery there. He must have a key to the house. He probably forgot he’d opened the window. Give us a leg up, and I’ll go through and let you in by the door.”

  His sudden keenness worried me more than the open window. The balance of power was shifting between us. Not wanting to let him see me afraid, I braced myself and offered him my clasped hands for a step up. He vanished headfirst into the house.

  Would it have made any difference in the end if I had gone first? Would she have shown herself to me, or kept hidden?

  I’ll never know. Edward went into the house, leaving me alone for … two minutes? Five? It wasn’t very long, but a great deal can happen in a minute, the shifting of a fate, one’s whole future life altered because of a look, a few whispered words.

  He was looking livelier than his usual rather serious self when he opened the back door. “Here, you’ll never guess: there’s someone already in the house — a little girl.”

  I looked around the bare, empty back hall, cross that some other child had beaten us out. “Who is she?”

  “Miss Lucy Maria Toseland, she says. She’s a funny little thing — but you’ll see.” He raised his voice, calling. “Lucy?”

  I pushed past him into a room full of heavily shrouded furniture and felt that uneasy prickle which accompanies the game of hide-and-seek.

  “Come out,” I said, rather sharply.

  “Don’t frighten her,” said Edward, behind me. Then, coaxing, “You needn’t be afraid, Lucy. She’s a friend.”

  There was no response. I moved farther into the room and began to look behind the furniture, not touching anything.

  “I don’t think she’s in here now,” said Edward. “She must be in another room.”

  “Why is she hiding?”

  “She might be frightened. She’s very young.”

  “What’s she doing here, then, all by herself?”

  “She says she lives here. Her parents went away and left her.”