Ghostwalk (15 page)

“Objective correlative?”

“An object that stands for something complicated—an emotion, a knowledge, an instinct. The ghost oyster seller is the return of the repressed, haunting the court with the smell of oysters. What’s repressed in cerebral Cambridge is sex, except that it’s everywhere, because it’s repressed. In the stacks of the library, in public toilets, alleyways. Drive it out and it’ll find its own corners. I saw a group of Chinese tourists in Great Court the other evening at dusk sniffing the air. Trying to smell oysters. Brilliant. They’d been on Cameron’s boat, I’d swear.”

You were on a roll. “The point is that my oyster-seller ghost works as a historical
metaphor.
My oyster-seller ghost is a metaphor. For a tourist, she’s much more eloquent than any dry-as-dust history book that tells them about what it was like to be a student in the early nineteenth century and all its manifestations of sexual repression. There’s a plaque over in that far corner there, a page from a guidebook for undergraduates published in 1807. It reads: ‘Suspect danger from…those women…who haunt the lanes, and ends, and corners of the town, who are Hebes at night, and Hecates in the morning.’ Isn’t that great? Hebes at night and Hecates in the morning. Beauty and the beast. That’s my kind of night. Sounds more like an advert than a warning to me. What are you, Lydia Brooke? A Hebe or a Hecate?” I’d had enough of the games now.

“She’s a Hecate every time,” said Kit, preparing for a fight. Kit would say that. She had her theories about people. No room for Hebes in her world. All her people, men and women, she would say, were Hecates in one way or another, even if they travelled in disguise, even if they didn’t know they belonged to the Hecate tribe.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Hecate was a witch. I’m not a witch.” I sounded like a child being taunted in the playground.

“You work on witchcraft, though, don’t you?” Was Sarah enjoying my discomfort? You had fallen silent. Your hand was on my thigh. I couldn’t move it without being seen. Why did that make me feel guilty?

“Not exactly. I’m writing my dissertation on the classification of spirit manifestations in the seventeenth century. That doesn’t make me a witch.”

“And how would you classify a ghost who smells of oysters?” Anthony asked. “You have to admit, it’s a stroke of genius.”

“I’ll drink to that,” you said. “The point is that oysters have no smell. But that doesn’t seem to matter.”

That was 1988; sixteen years ago. You and Sarah were already married, though you didn’t tell most people. Six years later you had a Trinity fellowship, a string of accolades and awards, your own lab, and two children, and you were finding your way to my bed most afternoons. Yes, dates were always important for you because, once we were lovers, storytelling became your great art, the way you kept the machinery of two lives moving. If you weren’t already a genius in rewriting the daily acts of the present, you became one. The great skill in lying is not lying, you’d say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.

“The train’s just pulled in at Cambridge Station,” you’d say, phoning Sarah from my bed. “But the taxi queue’s pretty long. It might take me another forty minutes to get home.” You’d make up the names of conferences so that we could travel across Europe. You told her that cars broke down. Trains broke down. The lab went through yet another crisis. Friends got sick. Did Anthony ever know that you’d used him as an alibi for almost two years? There was no bravado in the fabrications, nor were they an act of display. They were just necessary.

You learned to lie on the river. You lied in my bed and from my bed.

Fourteen

A
fter I’d heard the phone ring three times I realised I wasn’t even sure what I was going to ask Dilys Kite. I told myself it was idle and harmless curiosity, but I knew this was an act of desperation—I could see that desperation in my face in the hall mirror, in the way I was clutching the phone. Someone had to be able to tell me what was going on and how it—the lights, the man on the bridge, the cat’s death—all fitted together. Someone who wouldn’t laugh. And Dilys had been there with Elizabeth in those last months from July, when Will left, until September, when Elizabeth died. She must know something, I thought, be able to explain something.

Nonetheless, I had more doubts than certainties about what I was doing even then, even with the phone in my hand. I could always put the phone down right now, I thought; I could always pretend I had the wrong number. I needed to hear that strange high voice again, the precise syllables. I had, in fact, almost put the phone back onto the receiver when I heard her voice calling my name, sharply but from a distance, as if I had fainted and she was waking me, slapping my face hard, waving smelling salts under my nostrils. Lydia. Lydia? She came into focus. Her voice became louder. I put the phone back to my ear.

“Yes?” I said. How strange. It was me who was supposed to be calling her, and in control of the questions. Now everything was inverted.

“Lydia Brooke. We expected you much earlier than this,” she said. I saw I had soil under my fingernails from digging the little grave down near the roses. The mirror framed a face with pale skin and darkened, hollowed-out eyes. Lydia was looking thin.

“I’m sorry. It’s late to be calling,” I began.

“Will you take tea?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“On Wednesday, when you visit. You’ve forgotten?”

“Forgotten what?”

“You
have
forgotten.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” I had begun to think I might hang up after all. This was like a Pinter conversation—jigsaw shards that didn’t seem to fit together, with so much more underneath. I remembered the tattoo on her right arm, the chiselled hair. Who was this woman to be talking to me like this? What was I doing ringing her? I repeated myself: “I don’t understand. Have we made some kind of appointment? This is Lydia Brooke—we met at Elizabeth Vogelsang’s funeral a few weeks ago. I am doing some work for…I am doing some work on Elizabeth’s book…”

Did she perhaps think I was somebody else?

She continued. Still in control but more emollient now. “Yes, hello, Lydia Brooke. We know you are working on Elizabeth’s book. That’s why you are calling.”

“I don’t understand. How could you know that?”

“If you have forgotten, of course you won’t understand. You want to come to see us. And we would very much like to see you. Wednesday would be best for us. Wednesday afternoon at around four o’clock. Would that suit you?”

In the mirror, the woman who looked like Lydia Brooke put her hand to the back of her neck. The surface of the mirror was so old that its glass was both flecked and watery. I watched how its rippled surfaces distorted her face as Dilys talked. Haunted, willful, maddening, the light was playing tricks again. As I watched, the surface of the mirror began to undulate, shoaling, burnished, as if it were a pool into which I sought my reflection at the very moment that someone behind me had dropped a stone into the silvered water. Someone was behind her, or between her and the mirror, his face overlaid on hers, mouth open, asking a question that she can’t hear. The man in the red gown, with the white hair. The man with the question on his lips. He was there in the ripples of the mirror, at the centre of a series of waved circles rippling outwards from a glass centre, her face and hair and eyes over his, washing outwards to the chipped oval frame. Then it was gone, her face all back in place, still, sharp, outlined.

I blinked, but my eyes would not clear. They hurt. It was as if I was now looking through water.

“How did I get here?” I asked Dilys.

“Precisely.”

“Pardon?”

“That is precisely what we will help you find out,” she said, briskly. “How you got here. Do you know where to find us?”

Elizabeth’s address book was lying open in front of me on the hall table. I had marked the place with the snail-bitten doilied sheet from her notebook.

“Prickwillow, River View, Padnel Bank?”

“Yes, that’s right. Prickwillow is up past Ely—you’ll need to take the A10 north and then take the ring road underneath Ely and out to the east, taking the signs to Soham and then to a village called Queen Adelaide. Take the road to Prickwillow, then turn left into Padnel Bank just before you reach the bridge over the river. We’re about halfway down the row of bungalows.” I wrote down the details. Couldn’t trust my eyes or my memory now.
Padnel Bank. Prickwillow.

We? Us? I wondered who Dilys Kite might share a house with. Husband, sister, a family? Perhaps they all lived in the village—one great spilling family, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—and the half-blind clairvoyant. The Happy Family Kites: Mister Kite, Mistress Kite, Miss Kite, and Master Kite, flight-sight makers. But perhaps Dilys, with her tattoo and twinsets, was very undistinguished in Prickwillow, just one of the local characters. Perhaps she organised coffee mornings and church fetes, arranged the church flowers, minded the grandchildren, played darts in the pub on Wednesday evenings. No, not darts. A half-blind person with psychic powers couldn’t play darts, surely? But perhaps she baked cakes. Apple and blackberry pies. Or sewed lavender dolls for the local crafts market.

In Newton’s time a half-blind woman who had visions would be branded a witch, hounded, taunted by day, visited by night along the back wooded paths. She would have lived on the outskirts or beyond the village boundaries, in the woods, where she could be called upon by villagers seeking exorcisms, spells, and potions. Love potions for already lovesick girls. Chants to quiet the spirits of dead children who had settled on their mothers’ hearts. Spells for the harvest, for the spirits of the corn or the sky or the waters. Incantations. Predictions.
Tell me when the rain will fall. When will my mother die? Why has my crop failed? Give me a potion to appease the spirits. Give me a poison for the man who has taken my daughter’s maidenhood. Make me a rainstorm.

“I’m frightened,” I said, speaking a thought I didn’t know I had.

“Of course you are,” she said in a motherly tone. “You would be very foolish not to be frightened now. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Can you explain? Will you be able to explain?” I had been drawing on the piece of paper near the phone—scrolled shapes, triangles, boxes, joined by cross-hatched shapes around the few words I had written. But there among all the scrolls was the word NABED. Capitalised. The word I had seen on the green metal hoarding near the Leper Chapel on the day of Elizabeth’s funeral. The first word of the coded sequence that Newton had written on the flyleaf of his notebook:

Nabed Efyhik, Wfnzo Cpmkfe.

“Do you know what NABED means?” I asked Dilys just as she was bringing the phone call to a close.

“If you want to ask questions you will have to bring something of the person you want to speak to.”

“Something? What kind of something?”

“Something that belonged to them. Something that carries them.”

“With her smell on it? Like a walking stick or a piece of clothing?”

“No, smell doesn’t matter; it’s spirit that matters. Whatever object you choose must have her spirit on it. But there’s no point in bringing anything of Elizabeth’s. You won’t be able to talk to her yet. We’ve tried. It’s too early.”

“Elizabeth?”

“You can’t speak to Elizabeth yet.”

“Him then?” Him? Who did I mean? The man in red on the bridge in the smudge.

“You’re ready to talk to
him
? We wouldn’t advise that yet. Not at all. Too early. You will have to talk to the boy first.”

“The boy?”

“Yes, there’s about two weeks now, only two weeks left.”

“What boy?”

I heard Dilys speaking to someone—or some people—in the same room. I heard her say, “She’s asking ‘What boy?’ She’s forgotten.” There was a murmur of disappointment and frustration. The voices sounded like a Bible group or an old people’s home. How many of them were there, I wondered, and all waiting for me to call?

“If it’s the boy you want to speak to, we have something of his. You won’t need to bring anything.”

“Wednesday at four o’clock then?”

“Yes, Wednesday at four. We look forward to seeing you, Lydia. Very much.” I might have been booking a bed-and-breakfast, I thought.

As I pulled up to the kerb outside Dilys’s house, I reached over to turn off my phone. Your text came through as I touched it, and a memory of you flicked across some nerve in my brain, a nerve you would have a name for. Another text. Now there were several every day. Oh yes, something understood. A pitch of intimacy ratcheting up. I remembered how you did that. Back then, all those years ago, when you began to seek me out for the first time, it was cigarette papers, then postcards, then letters. You left flowers and other objects on my doorstep: a piece of amber with a cockroach sealed inside, a Roman brooch, a book of poems by Neruda. I resisted at first. You were married. You had children. I turned away and refused to reply. So you stopped. And in the silence that rang round my head when I looked for objects on my doorstep and found none, you broke me down, made me ache for you. One week after the silence began, I drove out to your house and placed a single oyster shell on your doorstep. Later that night, I heard your car draw up outside Sturton Street. Kit let you in, though it was past midnight.

Now that we were lovers again and now that you could send texts and picture messages, your powers of seduction were at their strongest. Not that you would for a moment admit that you were engaged in an act of renewed seduction with, or for, me. No, not that. There was a curiosity driving both of us—the bodkin pressing on the eyeball—a compulsive desire to know what would happen
—this
time. I’d said, hadn’t I, that despite a night in your bed, we could walk away? It meant nothing. But with a text here and there, stolen moments, e-mails, it took no time at all for us to be back in the spell we had always made in and around each other.

I opened up the little envelope on my phone, into the in-box, where your name, Cameron, sat listed with fourteen other Cameron messages, a sequence broken only by texts from Kit and Maria. You had written to me only minutes before: “I couldn’t find you in the library. Everything all right? Back in the lab now. CB.”

“Working up in the stacks,” I texted back. “Sorry to have missed you. LB.” Well, I couldn’t have written: “In Prickwillow visiting a half-blind psychic,” could I?

I never lied to you, exactly. They were sins of omission. I was airbrushing constantly by that October, brushing out people from my stories, brushing out lights, mirrors that turned to water, dead cats, coincidences, missing words, and now a fenland clairvoyant. It was very important that you didn’t see. I could protect you from it. And I would because I could.