The Anatomy Of Ghosts

30

It was at supper that Frank began to drink. He proposed toasts, he sang songs. He encouraged Holdsworth to match him, glass for glass. Holdsworth thought this must surely be a sign of returning health. It was, he reasoned to himself, natural for a young man to want to drink deeply. Frank, under Jermyn’s care since March, had had little opportunity to do so for three months.

Mulgrave had set up a table for them under the fruit trees. They drank first one bottle, then another. Frank called for a third and ordered a fourth to be brought in readiness. They talked in bursts interspersed with comfortable silences that grew longer as the evening slipped away.

Frank was cheerful enough, increasingly loquacious and as rational as the wine would let him be. His manner see-sawed between that of a lordly host and that of an awkward, confiding boy, but there was more of the latter than the former. He described episodes from his childhood; he dwelled in particular on his long visits to his grandfather Lord Vauden’s home in the West Country. When he spoke of the management of estates, he showed knowledge and enthusiasm. He asked Holdsworth about his apprenticeship, and Holdsworth found himself talking at length of the times he spent on the river with Ned Farmer and of their trips up the Thames.

With the third bottle, they grew quieter. It was still light, but only just. The air was soft and smelled sweet. Water rustled faintly. Mulgrave had gone to his bed in the kitchen. A solitary candle burned in the window of the cottage. There were pinpricks of light in the grey sky.

‘When did it happen?’

Holdsworth looked up. ‘What?’ He could no longer make out Frank’s face. It was as if a shadow had spoken. ‘When did what happen?’

‘Your wife, sir,’ Frank said, his face a blur. ‘Your son.’

Holdsworth did not reply. He heard the chink of glass on glass and the gurgle of wine.

‘You see, I wondered what it must be like to drown when Sylvia died,’ said the voice in the darkness. ‘And I suppose you must wonder, too. I – I do not wish to pain you. I wish to understand.’

‘My wife died last March, my son the previous November,’ Holdsworth said.

‘What were their names, pray?’

Holdsworth stared up at the sky. He caught the glimmer of another star. ‘Maria.’ He drained his own glass and stretched a hand out for the bottle. ‘Georgie.’

‘How did they die?’

Holdsworth told him. He told this rich, spoiled, mad boy things that even Ned had never heard. He told him about the little family on Bankside and the shop in Leadenhall, about the ghost light from the river, and about the day Georgie died at Goat Stairs. He told him about Maria’s search for Georgie and the charlatan who had preyed on her, about The Anatomy of Ghosts, the barrow of second-hand books and the headstone he could not afford until her ladyship had given him her money. In the darkness, his voice might have belonged to someone else, and he himself was standing aside, listening but paying little attention because the story was already familiar.

Frank fumbled with the corkscrew and a fresh bottle. ‘So it’s not to be wondered at, I suppose.’

‘What isn’t?’

He eased the cork out of the bottle with a soft explosion. ‘That you don’t like ghosts.’

‘And now it’s your turn,’ Holdsworth said.

‘My turn to what?’

‘To tell me about your ghosts.’

Frank said nothing. He drank.

‘It’s a night for ghost stories,’ Holdsworth went on. ‘It’s good to let them out and give them air.’

Frank laughed, and the sound erupted from him like a bubble from water. ‘You make ghosts sound as if they were our captives.’

‘Aren’t they, in a way? And a humane regime should allow its prisoners to mingle occasionally in society. Did you see the lady only once?’

‘Can ghosts appear in dreams? Some people say they can. In that case I saw Mrs Whichcote many times both when she was alive and when she was dead. She was very beautiful, you know.’

‘I have seen her portrait.’

‘I saw her ghost only once, though, in the garden.’ Frank’s voice was as slow and relaxed as a sleepy child’s. ‘That is, only once when I was awake.’

As a rational being, Holdsworth knew they were both drunk, that he was tired and Frank was overwrought. Nothing anybody said or thought or did was to be trusted. But, as Frank’s sleepy voice went on, it seemed to Holdsworth that he was not hearing the story that Frank told, he was in some sense living it.

‘Friday, the third of March,’ Frank said. ‘A fortnight after they found her body.’

Holdsworth was there, lodged behind Frank’s eyes, encased in Frank’s skull, trapped in another time and place. He was haunting Frank, perhaps, or Frank was haunting him; he wasn’t sure which. Did haunting flow in both directions? Was it a dialogue?

There and then, on the evening of 3 March, Frank was in a trance-like state in which his inert body seemed suspended in a heavy, clinging fluid. He bobbed just below the surface of consciousness, buoyed up by a sense of frantic excitement. His mental processes were in a ferment of activity. Frank knew, however – or Holdsworth knew, or both of them did, then and now – that after supping with Whichcote that evening he had taken several cups of coffee, along with wine, punch and laudanum, and all these things had something to do with his state of mind.

Frank was in his bedroom at Jerusalem, and it was cold.

At last the discomforts became too much for him. He rolled slowly out of bed, as slow and fumbling as an old blind man, and pushed his feet into slippers. He went into the sitting room, where the fire still gave out a little warmth and light.

The air was stuffy with the fumes of stale alcohol. He staggered towards the fireplace, drawn towards the orange glow, but faintness overwhelmed him and he was forced to stop and cling to the table. Nausea rose in his throat. His own unworthiness washed through him, rising like bile.

Sylvia would not leave him alone. It was worse, far worse, now she was dead.

Frank blundered across the room, seizing his gown and cap automatically from the hook on the wall as he passed, opened the inner door and unbolted the oak. His feet found the head of the stairs of their own accord. He stumbled downwards, drawn by gravity, and cannoned into the wall of the half-landing.

The cold enveloped him. But he was still carrying his cap and gown. With chattering teeth, he put them on. Holding the gown tightly around him, he negotiated the rest of the stairs, opened the door, slipped on the step and fell flat on his back upon the cobbles of the court.

He lay there for a moment, growing even colder. He was mildly surprised that he did not feel more pain. As the damp seeped into his bones, he considered life from this new horizontal perspective. Chapel Court was cold, monochrome and regular. To his left, a lantern hung over the archway leading to the main gate and the porter’s lodge. Otherwise the only light came from the moon and the stars. Above the buildings was a black world with silver inhabitants, unimaginably far away. The weight of it all crushed everything into cold and unimportant dust.

He raised himself on hands and knees. He picked up his cap, settled it on his head and stood up.

Philip Whichcote had been right. What did it all matter? What did anything matter?

Frank Oldershaw had been nothing and he would be nothing again. His presence or absence, his actions or words or thoughts, were all alike meaningless. The stars would shine in their cold, black nothingness whatever he did or didn’t do. If Bishop Oldershaw’s God were somewhere out there, He didn’t matter, for He didn’t care a jot for what He had made and the world didn’t care for Him.

Frank heard the rasp and crack of a latch from the direction of the porter’s lodge. He slipped into the shadows of the chapel arcade along the eastern range of the court. He waited, but no other sound came from the lodge. There was a faint scraping, creaking noise from the other side of college or perhaps further afield. That sound stopped, too. He was aware that in some part of his being he was growing colder, but the knowledge was unimportant. Cold was a necessary part of this strange amoral world where clarity of thought was possible, and where sin did not exist so there could never be any need for forgiveness.

He slipped from the arcade into the gardens. There were no lights here apart from those in the sky. On his right, thirty yards beyond New Building and partly screened by a line of bushes, was the Jericho, the undergraduates’ boghouse. He walked in the other direction, into what seemed the deeper darkness beyond the east end of the chapel. The wet grass soaked into his slippers. Shadows shifted around him. He thought he saw something moving on the bridge. But as soon as he saw it, it was gone.

Something or someone?

Nonsense, there was nothing. He stood as straight as he could, holding out his gowned arms with their sleeves like black wings. He glided slowly over the grass.

‘Now,’ he said aloud. ‘Now I know, I can do anything.’ He sucked in the cold air and drifted towards the Long Pond. ‘I can do anything,’ he said again, more loudly than before. ‘I am free. I am God. I am the Holy Ghost.’

He crouched on the bank of the pond. The moon shone up from the black water. He palpated the surface with his fingers. His fingertips sent tiny ripples travelling away from him. The stars’ reflections danced, and the moon swayed and fragmented, disintegrating into scores of lunar shards, a million moons above other planets.

‘I am God,’ he repeated, watching the moving universes he had made. ‘I am the Holy Ghost.’

He straightened up and a sound emerged from his mouth that was partly laughter and partly his teeth chattering. He came to a decision: he would walk down the Long Pond to the gate of the Fellows’ Garden and then back. He would stare at all the universes in the pond. Then at last he would return to his rooms, climb into bed and sleep without dreaming. And when he woke up, Sylvia would be gone for ever and everything would be all right.

Frank could have taken the path, but he kept to the grass, feeling obscurely that the cold and the wet were in some manner connected to the value of what he was doing. His eyes had adjusted to the dark. On the other side of the water, he made out the tops of the trees in the gardens, black outlines against the sky like the tips of feathers. Black feathers, he thought, to match his own black wings. That must mean something too: for they had sacrificed a black cock one evening at the club, and it was meant to bring good fortune.

Where the pond curved, he passed into the greater darkness of the Founder’s tree, whose cascading branches crouched down to the ground like a spider’s legs. Hands outstretched, he walked slowly under its canopy.

His left hand touched something. He stopped, his mind racing to grapple with this unexpected piece of information. What was it? His mind defined it with negatives: not cold, not wet, not hard. His hands dropped a few inches and, for the briefest of moments, he touched a thick velvet material, beneath which was the outline of a woman’s breasts, rising and falling like black water beneath his fingers. And there was something metallic under his fingertips, curving this way and that, not much larger than his thumb.

Frank screamed, a high-pitched sound like the scream of a woman or a child. There was a confusion of violent movement. He turned.

Black on silver. Not a man – a woman.

Frank screamed again. He began to run, blindly into the great spider blackness under the oriental plane, where it was too dark to see anything.

The ground gave way beneath him.

The Holy Ghost walks upon the water.

‘What’s that?’ Holdsworth sat up with a start. ‘Over there.’

They were the first words that either of them had spoken for several minutes, perhaps longer. Frank Oldershaw raised his head, which had been resting on the table, pillowed in his arms. The air was cooling and there was now very little light in the garden, apart from the candle in the window of the cottage, and the stars.

They listened in silence. They heard the faint rustlings from the water and the leaves. An owl hooted.

‘A duck,’ Frank said. ‘Perhaps a fox.’

Holdsworth rose to his feet and walked slowly down the garden to the millpond. He crouched on the bank, made a scoop of his hands and washed his face. He knew he must be drunk but he did not feel it now. The story that Frank had told lingered like a dream. He looked at the sky, as Frank had done on the night he had seen a ghost, and remembered Maria standing in the yard of the Bankside house a few weeks after Georgie’s death. He found her there one night, standing in the December cold and staring upwards. She had moved her head from side to side like a sailor searching for land. It had been a murkier sky than this, but even over Southwark there had been stars.

‘What are you doing?’ he had said.

‘Looking for Georgie,’ Maria had replied.

He had brought out a cloak, which he placed around her shoulders. Maria believed that Georgie was in heaven, and she believed too that Georgie had a location, somewhere in the stars, and that it was a place as real as the house on Bankside. If she looked hard enough she would see it. Like everyone else, she looked up into the immensity of the night sky and put whatever she wanted there.

He went back to the table. ‘Your head was full of fancies that night,’ he said to Frank. ‘The wine, the laudanum, the coffee, your dreams while you were asleep – each of these will fill a man’s head with monsters. And how much more likely is it if you take them in combination? You must see how probable it is that your ghost was nothing more than a creature of the imagination rather than some strange aberration from the natural order of things.’

Frank touched his sleeve. ‘You feel that? I felt the stuff of the cloak she wore. Soft to the touch – velvet.’

‘Others wear velvet. Perhaps it was a real person you touched.’

‘No, sir, no – there was a clasp on the cloak – in the form of the letter S. S for Sylvia, in the form of a snake. It was quite unmistakable, it was there under my fingers. Besides, I saw someone on the bridge. I’m sure of it. I saw Sylvia.’

Holdsworth sighed. ‘But if it really were Mrs Whichcote’s ghost, why should she choose to walk at Jerusalem?’

‘She did not come to Jerusalem, sir. She came to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because without me she would still be alive.’

A breeze had blown up, making the leaves rustle more loudly in the trees. All of a sudden, Holdsworth felt very tired. Frank was talking nonsense, but at least he sounded entirely rational. Was that progress?

‘So is that all it is?’ he said. ‘That is your ghost?’

Frank did not reply.

‘If we can find a way to lay the lady to rest, then all will be well?’

‘Things can never be well,’ Frank said. He got up from the table and walked slowly up the path towards the cottage. He muttered as he went, ‘You understand nothing. The ghost is only part of it. What does the ghost matter, for God’s sake?’