The Anatomy Of Ghosts

9

The air in the combination room was thick with the fumes of punch and tobacco. Holdsworth’s head was aching, and his eye sockets felt as though they were lined with fine sand. He begged to be excused. At once, Richardson rose from his seat and offered to walk with him.

‘Thank you, but I do not think I shall lose my way.’

‘I am sure you won’t, but should you like a turn or two in the garden before you retire? I find that a little fresh air and healthful exercise clear the head and promote sleep.’

Holdsworth accepted the invitation. Richardson led him outside into a court surrounded by buildings faced in palely gleaming ashlar. On the right were the lofty bay windows of the combination room and the hall. Richardson nodded at the nearer window. It was uncurtained, and the men they had just left were seated at the two tables in a haze of fellowship.

‘They are clubbable fellows, by and large,’ he remarked. ‘One cannot begrudge them their dull potations. But some of them will have sore heads in the morning.’

He took Holdsworth’s arm, and they strolled along the arcade in front of the chapel. There were lighted windows in the building on the other side of the court, directly facing the hall and the combination room. From one of them on the first floor came a burst of laughter and a muffled thumping as though many fists were pounding against a table.

Richardson sighed. ‘Mr Archdale continues to enjoy the pleasures of society.’

A voice began to sing, at first uncertainly but then finding the tune and gaining in volume. Other voices joined in. The sound was not melodious but it was undoubtedly vigorous. The thumping continued, beating time to the song. Holdsworth and Richardson lingered in the shadows under the arcade. The verses were short and many of the singers appeared not to know the words. All of them, however, joined in the refrain with great gusto.

Jerry Carbury is merry

Tell his servant bring his hat

For ’ere the evening is done

He’ll surely shoot the cat.

‘Some of our young men do not treat the Master with the respect he deserves,’ Richardson murmured. ‘That vulgar ditty has attained a lamentable popularity among them. It is unkind indeed – Dr Carbury has a weak stomach, and was once compelled to vomit in public.’

A door opened further along the range, and a gowned man was briefly illuminated by the lantern hanging above the archway. Glancing towards the sound of the singing, he then set off at a fast pace towards the screens at the western end of the hall.

‘Mr Soresby?’ Richardson called. ‘A moment of your time, please.’

The man changed direction and made his way towards them. He was tall and thin, and he did not so much walk as scurry. He doffed his cap and bowed awkwardly to Mr Richardson. He looked towards Holdsworth, who was in the shadows of the arcade. Richardson did not introduce him.

‘Mr Soresby,’ he said gently. ‘Would you oblige me by stepping up to Mr Archdale’s? Pray present my compliments and inform him that he would do me a great service if he would close his windows and moderate the volume of his singing.’

‘I – I believe there is a porter in the lodge, sir. Perhaps it would be fitter if -’

‘I should be so very grateful, Mr Soresby.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

The man slipped away to the doorway leading to Archdale’s staircase. Richardson laid a hand on Holdsworth’s arm, detaining him. Once again, the light above the doorway fell on Soresby’s stooping figure and shabby gown. The singing continued for a few minutes more and then tailed away. To Holdsworth’s surprise, Richardson did not move. Next came a silence, followed swiftly by a great burst of laughter. In another moment, the two sash windows belonging to the room were closed and the shutters were drawn across. This was followed almost immediately by a thumping sound, as if someone had fallen down a flight of stairs, which terminated in a gasp of pain. Richardson made a sign to Holdsworth, and the two men walked away.

The arcade, which ran the entire length of the eastern range, backed on to the chapel in its centre but on either side of this were two bays that opened on to the gardens beyond. Stretching south from the arcade was another range, which the tutor said was known as New Building.

Mr Richardson led Holdsworth on to a path running eastwards into the gathering darkness. Holdsworth’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The flagged path glimmered before them. The stars were beginning to emerge. On their left was the chapel, and then a stretch of water crossed by a humped wooden footbridge.

‘Mr Soresby did not have an enviable task by the sound of it,’ Holdsworth said.

‘He is a sizar,’ Richardson replied. ‘It is not an enviable position.’

‘They are the very poorest of the undergraduates?’

‘Indeed they are. The statutes laid down that they should be supported partly from the foundation but that they should also earn their keep through working as menials. That has largely changed, I am glad to say. But when I entered this college as a youth of sixteen, they still waited upon the fellows and fellow-commoners as they ate, and then they dined from the scraps left over. Some of them would even act as private servants to the fellows. Even now, many are poor devils who scrimp and save to take a degree, who are not too proud to run errands to make ends meet. Yet we may be sure that among them are those who will go on to earn distinction both in the University and in the wider world. In point of fact, I was once a sizar myself.’

The night was very still. The revelry in Chapel Court had died away and they might have been in the depth of the country. Most of the windows of New Building were in darkness. They passed under the shadow of a great tree.

‘Soresby serves as my library clerk – you will meet him again tomorrow.’ Richardson gestured at the shadows above and around them. ‘By the way, we are beneath the Founder’s oriental plane. We are very proud of it here. Sir Walter Vauden planted it with his own hands. Some say it is the greatest tree in Cambridge, and certainly there is none quite like it.’

‘There was a wager concerning a plane tree.’

Richardson chuckled. ‘Members of this college take notice of plane trees wherever they find them. That one is in Herodotus. The Emperor Xerxes conceived an admiration for it and ordered it to be adorned with gold.’

‘Is this water called the Long Pond?’ Holdsworth asked.

‘Yes.’

Holdsworth waited but Richardson made no mention of the body that had been found in it earlier in the year.

The pond curved to the left and the path came to a gate set in a wrought-iron screen. Richardson unlocked it and they passed through.

‘This is the Fellows’ Garden,’ he said. ‘The ancients would have called it a hortus conclusus.’

‘An enclosed garden?’

‘Just so. Enclosed and inviolate.’ Richardson’s voice was so quiet now that the other man had to strain to hear it. ‘The college itself becomes a fortress at night when its gates are locked. But here, in the Fellows’ Garden, we are doubly enclosed, and so doubly inviolate. Look to your left, my dear sir, through that opening among the branches on the other side of the water. There you see Dr Carbury’s private garden. It runs all the way from here up to the Master’s Lodge.‘

Holdsworth stared through the gap at the further bank. Directly ahead was a lighted window on the first floor of the Lodge. The window was open, and the sound of raised male voices came faintly through the still night air. Beside him, Richardson was as rigid as a dog scenting game.

As they watched, a figure appeared at the window. Holdsworth saw only a fuzzy silhouette, outlined by candlelight in the room behind, but the shape was almost certainly Carbury’s. The lower sash scraped downwards and hit the sill with the sound like the rapping of a gavel.

Carbury tugged the curtains across the window. The light vanished.

‘Ah,’ said Richardson, letting out his breath in a lingering sigh. ‘And now all is darkness.’

Out of the darkness.

‘Georgie? Georgie?’

The voice pulled Holdsworth towards consciousness. Maria. This was his first thought, instantly suppressed.

It was still dark. Am I dreaming? He was too warm, his body shrouded in the bedclothes. His mouth was dry, which was not surprising after so much wine at supper. And he was uncomfortably aware of another source of discomfort, as shameful as it was urgent. He was as stiff as a ramrod.

‘Georgie? Come to Mama.’

Let me consider this analytically, he thought, I am not an animal.

His wife returned to his sleeping self more often now than just after her death. Sometimes it was only the echo of her voice or a smell lingering in the air – or even a painfully sharp awareness of her absence, as though she had very recently been there. Or not there, depending on how you looked at it. Because that, surely, lay at the heart of the thing: it was not really she who was or had been there. It was a personalized emptiness – a sort of enclosed nothing, a longing for something that no longer existed, or not in this world.

But still – one could give a name even to an irrational sensation. Why should he not call this one Maria? It was a species of philosophical shorthand.

He tried to turn his body in the bed but the blankets still held him fast. All the abortive movement achieved was the application of sweetly uncomfortable pressure to his membrum virile.

My love, forgive me. My prick misbehaves.

Somewhere between waking and sleeping, he sensed Maria’s presence. He fancied he saw her outline, just for a moment, a shadow among shadows between the bed and window, but somehow darker than the shadows that surrounded it.

He was breathing too fast, and he couldn’t suck in enough air. He tried to slow the rhythm but something stronger than his will increased the tempo instead. Soon his nightshirt was drenched with sweat. He shivered, and once he had started he could not make himself stop.

Slowly the dream, if that was what it was, filled with grey light, a sort of illuminated mist that cloaked as much as it revealed. He was no longer in his bed but standing in the Fellows’ Garden and looking down at the Long Pond, just as he had with Richardson a few hours earlier. The transition did not strike him as in any way strange. He looked down and there was Maria, floating face upwards on the water, her body submerged an inch or two below the surface. Despite this apparent handicap, she was speaking, or rather he heard her voice quite distinctly.

‘Georgie,’ she cried. ‘Georgie, I am here now. Come here, my little one.’

Maria, who had drowned in the Thames, was now drowning in the Long Pond. In the logic of the dream, the water was the same, and perhaps all times and places flowed through the same essential nexus of circumstance, and you saw one or the other – in this case the Long Pond at Jerusalem in May or the Thames at Bankside in March – according to your perspective on the matter. In the dream, this speculation seemed entirely rational and he wondered why he had not thought of it before.

‘Come out!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll drown. Take my hand. Quick.’

But Maria did not hear. She was still calling for Georgie, and telling him that Mama loved her own boy, and that he was Mama’s little sugar plum.

He shrieked wordlessly at her.

‘Georgie, Georgie.’ Her voice was fainter now. ‘Mama’s own little boy.’

Her body was no longer there. Indeed, now there was nothing left except the thick, black water of the Long Pond, and it was rising higher and higher.

‘Georgie?’ The voice was no more than a whisper on the edge of silence. ‘Georgie?’

Holdsworth groaned. His ears hurt, and he had the curious sensation that his skin had been stripped away from the bleeding flesh beneath. His hands tingled. Underlying everything was still the disgusting, desperate desire to copulate.

Stiff as a ramrod.

‘Maria?’ he muttered. Something puzzled him, but he could not pin it down, a monstrous and unspeakable anomaly of some sort. ‘Maria? Maria?’

It was only then, as he said her name for the third time, that he realized what the anomaly had been. It was quite inexplicable that he had not noticed at the time. The face he had seen distorted in the water had not been Maria’s face. The voice had been Maria’s. But the face had belonged to Elinor Carbury.

Pain lanced into his chest. An iron band tightened around his ribs. It tightened, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He opened his mouth to scream but the rising tide of black water now covered his mouth. As his lips parted, the darkness flowed inside him. His body convulsed.

He wrenched himself from the blankets. He was falling. A jolt ran through him.

Full consciousness flooded over him, and he knew that he was in the bedchamber at the Master’s Lodge, lying on the bare boards between the bedstead and its surrounding curtains. His left elbow, which had borne the brunt of his fall, was exquisitely painful. He flailed with his arms and succeeded in finding the gap between the curtains. A cooling draught brushed his cheek. And there was a little light, too – a faint vertical line where the shutters failed to meet across the window.

Dear God – Elinor Carbury? He pushed the thought of her away. He despised himself and his treacherous, sin-ridden body.

A nearby clock with an unfamiliar set of chimes struck the three-quarters. Holdsworth stood up, steadying himself on the bedpost. He tore off his nightcap and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He shuffled across to the window and opened the shutters. His body ached. To the east there was a pallor in the sky, an easing of the darkness. Thank God, it would soon be day. His erection slowly shrivelled.

The air was chilly. The window seat had a strip of cushion running along the top. He perched on it, drawing up his legs, wrapping the hem of the nightshirt under his feet and hugging his knees like an overgrown child.

Outside the window, light crept back into the gardens of Jerusalem. He grew steadily colder. He made an irrational decision, again like a child who invents a purpose because even an invented purpose is better than none: that he would permit himself to return to bed as soon as he saw or heard another human being, an incontrovertible sign of life and sanity returning to the world.

He had not long to wait. Through the glass of the window came the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels on stone. He craned his head and caught sight of a hunched figure trundling a little barrow along the flagged path at the back of the Master’s Lodge. It was a man in a long dark coat and a slouch hat. He was making his way to a cluster of outbuildings on the left, near the northern boundary of the college.

The night-soil man. There was no one else it could be. The man who had found Sylvia Whichcote in the Long Pond.

The night-soil man. There was no one else to see. Not Maria. Not Elinor Carbury.