Ghosts

4

I CONFESS I had avoided them all day. Oh, I know I pretended that I recognised in them what I had been waiting for since I first came here, the motley troupe who would take me into their midst and make a man of me, but the truth is I was afraid of them. I am not tough, not worldly-wise at all. It takes courage to expose yourself to the possibilities of the world and I am not a courageous man. I want only comfort, what little of it can be squeezed out of this life on a planet to which I have always felt ill-adapted. Their coming was a threat to the delicate equilibrium I had painstakingly established for myself. I was like a hungry old spider suddenly beset by a terrifying swarm of giant flying things. The web shook and I scuttled off into the foliage for shelter, legs flailing and eyes out on stalks. I saw old Croke walk up the hill and saw him too when he returned, staggering, from the beach where he had fallen, with the boy at his heels. I watched from hiding as Sophie set off into the hills to find the ruins she had come to photograph. I witnessed Felix pacing the lawn in the sun with a hand in his side pocket, smoking a cheroot. Oh yes, I skulked. And when late in the afternoon I screwed up my nerve and ventured back into the house it was I who seemed the intruder.

The kitchen was deserted. The debris of their lunch was still on the table, looking disturbingly like the remains of a debauch. I poured out the tepid dregs of Licht’s chicken soup and ate it standing at the stove. I wanted one of them to come in and find me there. I would nod in friendly fashion and perhaps say something about the weather, claiming by this show of ease that I was the true inhabitant of the house while they were merely transients. No one came, however, and anyway, if someone had, probably I would have dropped my soup bowl and taken to my heels in a blue funk. I have always suffered from a tendency to generate panic out of my own fears and imaginings; I think it is a common weakness of the self-obsessed. There are moments of quiet and isolation when I can feel within me clearly the tiny, ceaseless tremor of impending hysteria that someday may break out and overwhelm me entirely. What is its source? It is the old emptiness, I suppose, the black vacuum the self keeps rushing into yet can never fill. I’m sure there is a formula for it, some elegant and simple equation balancing the void on one side and the endless inward spin of essence on the other. It is how I think of myself, eating myself alive, consuming myself always and yet never consumed.

Some incarnation this is, I have achieved nothing, nothing. I am what I always was, alone as always, locked in the same old glass prison of myself.

Why is it, I wonder, that silent, sunlit afternoons always remind me of childhood? Was there some marvellous moment of happiness that I have forgotten, some interval of stillness and radiance in which the enchanted child lingered on the forest path while his other self stepped out of him and blundered on oblivious into the dark entanglements of the future? I stood in the ancient light of the hallway for a long time, gazing up into the shadows thronging on the stairs, listening for them, for the sounds of their voices, for life going on. I do not know what I expected: cries, perhaps, arguments, sobs, wild laughter. I had got out of the way of ordinary things, you see; life, being what others did, must be all alarms and confrontations and matters coming to a head. I could hear nothing, or not nothing, exactly, only that faint, pervasive pressure in the air, that soundless hum that betrays the presence of humankind. How thoroughly the house had absorbed them, as if they really were the ones who belonged here; as if they had come home.

Flora was waiting on the landing, hanging back in the shadowed corner between the window and the bedroom door. She had thrown a blanket over her shoulders, she clutched it about her like a shroud. The dark mass of her hair was tangled and damp and her eyes were swollen. Through the window beside her I could see far off in the fields a toy dog chivvying a toy flock of sheep. She had to clear her throat to speak.

‘I thought you were Felix,’ she said.

And almost smiled.

Licht had put her in my room; his idea of a joke, I suppose. Startling what a transformation her presence had wrought already; nothing was changed yet I would hardly have recognised the place as mine. The air was warm and thick with her smell, the musky smell of her hair and her hot skin. I shut the door behind me. She walked to the window and stood looking out at the dwindling afternoon, thick with slanted sunlight. Although she was on the far side of the room from me I had an extraordinarily vivid sense of her as she stood there with her arms folded around herself and her shoulder-blades unfurled, barefoot, in all her wan, popliteal frailty. I tend not to take much notice of other people — I have mentioned this before, it is one of my more serious failings — and on the rare occasions when I do put my head outside the shell and take a good gander at someone what strikes me as astonishing is not how different they are from me, but how similar, despite everything. I go along imagining myself to be unique, a sport of nature, a sort of tumour growing on the world, and suddenly I am brought up short: there it is, not I but another and yet made of skin, hair, clothed bone, just like me. This is a great mystery. Sex is supposed to solve it, but it doesn’t, not in my experience, anyway (not that nowadays I have anything more than the haziest recollection of that universal palliative). Perhaps that is all I ever wanted to do, to break open the shell of the other and climb inside and slam it shut on myself, terrible spikes and all. What a way that would be to end it all.

‘Have you lived here long?’ Flora said.

I felt nauseous suddenly. My palms were clammy and my innards did a slow heave, as if there were something alive in there. I had a teetering sensation, as if I had grown immensely tall, looming over the room, a great, fat, wallowing thing, a moving puffball stuffed with spores. I was frightened of myself. Not many people know the things they are capable of; I do. I wanted now to take this girl in my arms, to lift her up and hold her hotly to my heart, to feel the frail bones of her ankles and her wrists, to cup the delicate egg of her skull in my palm, to smell her blood and taste the silvery ichor of her sweat. How brittle she seemed, how easily breakable. This is what the poor giant in the old tales never gets to tell, that what is most precious to him in his victims is their fragility, the way they crack so tenderly between his teeth, giving up their little cries like lovers in the extremity of passion. He will never know what he yearns to know, how it feels to be little like them, gay and gaily vicious and full of fears and impossible plans. The human world is what he eats. It does not nourish him.

What she wanted, she was saying, was to stay here, on the island, just for a little while. She was sick, she was sure she was getting the flu. She stood for a moment frowning and biting her lip. The thing was, she said, she had made a mistake and now Felix had the wrong idea and she was afraid of him.

‘He said he’s going to stay on here,’ she said. ‘In this house. He knows something about that old man. He told me.’

Although her face was turned towards the window she was watching me. I still had that sensation of nausea. I felt shaky and almost tearful in what I imagined must be a womanly sort of way.

‘Would he let me stay, do you think?’ she said.

She meant the Professor.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if I ask him.’

I meant Licht.

‘If Felix was gone,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, so stoutly I surprised myself, ‘yes, Felix will go.’

She nodded, still gnawing at her lip.

‘I don’t want to go back to that hotel,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. ‘They’re not nice to me there. They boss me around. The parents expect me to do everything and the manageress is a bitch.’

Stop! I wanted to say, stop! you’re ruining everything. I am told I should treasure life, but give me the realm of art anytime.

She went and sat down on the bed and hugged the blanket around her and stared at her bare feet. A girl, just a girl, greedy and dissatisfied, somewhat scheming, resentful of the world and all it would not give her. But that is not what I saw, that is not what I would let myself see.

Mélisande, Mélisande!

I still had, still have, much to learn. I am, I realise, only at the beginning of this birthing business.

I went downstairs, manoeuvring the way with difficulty in my newly swollen state, the gasping ogre, seeming to flop from step to step like an enormous bladder now, filled to the brim with slow, fat liquid. I was still queasy, still on the verge of tears, no, not tears, but a vast overflowing, an unstanchable flood of gall and gleet, my whole life oozing out of me in a final, foul regurgitation. I stopped at the window on the landing and rested a moment, leaning on the sill. How quickly the dusk was gathering, an oyster-grey stain spreading inland from the reaches of the sea, a darkness slowly, irresistibly descending.

Something had happened in that little room up there that before had been mine and now was hers, a solemn warrant had been issued on me, and I felt more than ever like the hero in a tale of chivalry commanded to perform a task of rescue and reconciliation. There they were, the old man in the tower with his books, the damsel under lock and key, and the dark one, my dark brother, waiting for me, the knight of the rosy cross, to throw down my challenge to him.

I laughed a soundless laugh and went on, down the stairs.

They were in the hall, ready to depart. They turned to look at me. What must I have seemed?

This toy dog, that toy flock.

We walked down the hill road in the blued evening under the vast, light dome of sky where Venus had risen. The fields were darkening on either side, the bay below us glistered. Everyone had acquired something. Croke his invisible companion that had risen with him from the sand at the sea’s edge and walked at his shoulder now step for step, Sophie her photographs that tomorrow would swim into her red room like water sprites, the boys that sly phantom that had run up swiftly and insinuated itself between them while they fought and would not go away, Alice her image of a girl reclining in a sunny bed.

A moth reeled out of the gloaming and there was a sense of something falling and failing and I seemed to feel the faint dust of wings sifting down. The god takes many forms.

We rounded a bend in the road where there was a little copse and a stream running by and found Felix sitting perched on a dry-stone wall in the dark with his arms around his knees and his face turned to the sky. The others walked on in calm procession, Sophie arm in arm with Croke and holding Alice by the hand and the boys trudging behind them, kicking stones. You see? They have their party favours and now they are going home, after the long day’s doings, Sophie to her developments, Croke to die, the children to grow up and become other people. This is what happens. What seems an end is not an end at all.

‘What a start you gave me,’ Felix said to me amiably, ‘rearing up out of the dark like that. I thought you were Old Nick.’

It was as if all along we had been walking side by side, with something between us, some barrier, thin and smooth and deceptive as a mirror, that now was broken, and I had stepped into his world, or he into mine, or we had both entered some third place that belonged to neither of us. He lit one of his cheroots, bending his narrow face to the flare of the match in his cupped hands. A flaw of smoke shaped like Africa assumed itself into the leaves above him. Behind the tobacco smell I caught a faint whiff of his own unsavoury, stale stink. I found it hard to keep a hold of him, somehow. He kept going in and out of focus, one minute flat and transparent, a two-dimensional figure cut out of grimed glass, the next an overpowering presence pressing itself against me in awful intimacy, insistently physical, all flesh and breath and that stale whiff of something gone rank. He began to sing to himself softly, in a jaunty voice, crowingly.

Allo, allo, who’s yer laidy friend,

Who’s ’at little girl I sawre yer wiv larst night?

He mused a while, gazing into the thickening shadows.

‘I cannot set my foot on board a ship,’ he said, ‘without the memory coming back of sailing to the frozen northern pole. I wonder, have you ever been up there? The tundra and the towering bergs, the sun that never sets: such solitude! such cold! And yet how beautiful, this land of ice! We sailed out of Archangel and due north we ploughed our way, all day, and all the night, for weeks. And then one morning when I looked out from the deck I saw the strangest sight: a figure, in the distance, on a sled, a giant man, it seemed, with whip and dogs, at great speed travelling on the floes, due north, like us. And then another — ’ There he paused, and said: ‘I think you know this story, though?’

A drowsy bird in the branches above us stirred a wing. The stream muttered to itself. Felix considered me with his head on one side.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘don’t I know you? I mean from somewhere else. Your face looks familiar.’

The last light was ascending in the zenith. Stars swarmed. A big white gloating moon had hoisted itself clear of the velvet heights behind us.

‘Time to go, I think,’ he said. ‘I had thought of staying for a bit, but now you’re here there is no need. Definitely de trop, what?’ He lowered his lashes almost shyly and smiled a thin-lipped smile that made it seem as if he were nibbling a tiny seed between his teeth. ‘Anyway, you’re inviting me to leave, aren’t you. Luxe, calme et volupté, eh?’

In the gathering dark the trees kept lisping the same slurred phrase over and over. Felix sighed and unwound his legs and nimbly scrambled down from the wall. ‘Time to go, yes,’ he said, brushing himself off, and linked his arm in mine and together we set off down the hill towards the bay. On the brow of the hill he paused and looked back and laughed and waved a hand and softly cried:

‘Farewell, happy fields!’

None of it was as I had thought it would be. I do not know what I had expected — some sort of tussle, I suppose, a contest on the road, maybe even fisticuffs, and then me pushing him protesting down to the boat, his nose bleeding and his collar sticking up and his heels furrowing the dust. What did I think I was, the avenging angel of the Lord? No, Felix would not fight, he would go quietly, or pretend to. I know his type, I know it only too well.

‘And you are going to stay here, are you?’ he said. ‘You have it all worked out?’ He laughed in the dark. We could see below us now the lights of the harbour and the dark bulk of the waiting boat crouched at the jetty. We heard the noise that the island makes, that deep, dark note rising through the gloom. We paused to listen, and Felix struck a dramatic pose and inclined an ear and shouted out softly in a stage-actor’s voice, making it seem uncannily as if it were someone calling to us from an immense distance:

‘Thamous! Thamous! The great god Pan is dead!’

And laughed.

We walked on.

‘You know I too knew the Professor, long ago?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. As you are now so I was once, his friend, his confidant.’ He squeezed my arm against his side and I felt the meagre armature of his ribs. ‘Tell me,’ he said in a confidential tone, ‘do you respect him? I mean, is he a great man, do you think? I thought so, at first. Alas, we all have our weaknesses. You realise that painting is a fake? Yes, more of gilt in it than gold, I fear. Poor Miss Behrens was taken in. Do you know her too? What a coincidence! She does not know she bought a fake. I may tell her, or I may not. What do you think? Which is better, ignorance or enlightenment? The Professor was the one who verified it. And made a killing on it, of course. Not for the first time either.’ He chuckled. ‘Curious phrase, that, don’t you think — a killing?’

We had reached the harbour, and walked out now along the pier still arm in arm. The boat reared gently at its moorings, sending up a soft puttering of smoke from the rusted stack. The skipper was in his lighted wheelhouse, the others stood about the deck, dim shadows of themselves, like the Pequod’s swarth phantoms, fading already. A storm lantern hanging in the bow shed a frail, apricot glow around which the night seemed to gather itself and find a brief definition. Felix stopped on the dockside and released my arm only to take my hand in both of his.

‘I say, old chap,’ he said in his actor’s voice with a fake sob in it, ‘look after the girl for me, will you? She likes a bit of rough stuff, but these things can go too far, as you well know.’

I should have seen him go. I should have waited until he was safely on board and the boat under way. When I had walked back along the pier and turned he was still standing where I had left him on the dock, waving one hand slowly, like a mechanical man. Was he smiling?

No riddance of him.

Flora has decided she is recovered. She is getting ready to leave, I can feel it, the change in her, like the season changing. She is ruffling her feathers, testing the buoyant air. I shall be glad to see her go — glad, that is, as the hand is glad when the arrow flies from the bow. If she were to remain I should only engrey her life. Better that, you will say, than if I had incarnadined it, but that is not the issue. There was never any question but that I would lift her up and let her go; what else have I been doing here but trying to beget a girl? Licht of course will be heartbroken. We shall stand on the windy headland, he and I, bereft together, and watch her skim away over the waves. The Professor will hardly notice she is gone. I think he is the one whose heart is really breaking. I make no mention to him of the Golden World and its clouded provenance; we have both made killings, he in his way, I in mine; there is no comparison. I am still puzzling over the problem: if this is a fake, what then would be the genuine thing? And if Vaublin did not paint it, who did? Who was his dark double? Perhaps the Professor will tell me, in his own time; I think I detect a speculative something in his filmy glance these days; I fear a deathbed confession. Maybe he painted it himself? He does have a touch of the old master to him; I can just picture him in velvet cap and ruff, peering from under the murk of centuies, one bleared, pachydermous eye following the viewer round the room and out the gilded door: Self-portrait in the Guise of a Dutchman. Well. He does not mention Felix, any of that. Matters go on as before, as if nothing had happened. My writing is almost done: Vaublin shall live! If you call this life. He too was no more than a copy, of his own self. As I am, of mine.

No: no riddance.