The Ghost Writer

The Gift of Flight

The Reading Room of the British Museum is not, I think, the first place in which most of us would seek refuge from a consuming grief, especially not in winter, when fog creeps into the great dome and hangs like a damp halo about the electric lamps. Nor are ones fellow readers always the most desirable company, some being less than fastidious in matters of dress and personal cleanliness, whilst others, seemingly on the verge of madness, conduct whispered conversations with phantoms, or crouch motionless for an entire afternoon, glaring at the same unturned page. Others again lie sprawled in attitudes of abandoned despair or exhaustion, snoring away the hours with their heads pillowed upon priceless volumes until the attendants come to turn them out. There are of course many industrious souls deep in concentration or copying busily, so that the dome seems to echo, at times, to the faint sound of a hundred nibs scratching in unison, but to a troubled mind that sound can too easily suggest the fingernails of prisoners clawing upon stone.

So, at least, it seemed to Julia Lockhart, and yet she was drawn back there by the conviction that the library contained one particular book which would speak directly to her sorrow. It would be like finding a new friend, one whose perceptions were so subtly and delicately attuned to hers as to see further into her heart than she herself was capable of doing. But since she had no idea what kind of book, or by whom, she spent a great deal of her time idly turning the pages of the catalogue, or gazing sightlessly into the black leather surface of her desk, or wandering the circumference of the labyrinth-the image that came most frequently to her mind, given the catacombs filled with shelf upon shelf of books that she imagined stretching away into darkness beneath the floor.

It had been many months since she and Frederick Liddell had parted, and yet the pall of grief had in no way diminished; instead, it had darkened into something quite beyond her experience. A thick veil seemed to have fallen between her and the world; she felt estranged, not only from friends and family, but from herself. She could not work, for all power of concentration had left her. Her husband kept his accustomed round between his chambers, his club, and his chair by the fireside, tranquilly unaware that anything was wrong; her daughter Florence was away at school in Berne; and the chatter of friends, in which Julia had once joined so enthusiastically, now seemed like die gibbering of dead souls in limbo. Yet to all outward appearances she had merely done what so many women yoked to indifferent husbands had done before her. She numbered amongst her own acquaintance women who moved cheerfully and lightly from one lover to the next, and knew of cases in which the children of such unions were accepted by the said indifferent husbands without apparent protest. The code seemed to be that so long as appearances were more or less maintained, women as well as men could do as they pleased. Whereas to Julia the taking of a lover had seemed an altogether momentous step. She had yearned for an intimacy to which she could bring her whole heart, which would release something trapped within her, free a door in her imagination which seemed to have swollen and stuck fast; but until the day she met Frederick Liddell she had come to believe she would die without ever having found it.

Marriage to Ernest Lockhart had been the great disappointment of Julia's life. Yet she had nothing to say against him, beyond an entire absence of passion, and even there, he had not deceived her; she had deceived herself. At twenty, she had allowed herself to be overborne by the romance of marrying a man sixteen years her senior, so assured and cultivated beside, say, young Harry Fletcher who had blushed and stammered every time he spoke to her but who, as she realised far too late, had plainly adored her. Her parents had not forced her; on the contrary, she could still recall her father asking her very earnestly if she was quite sure, and hear herself saying blithely yes, airily convinced that Ernest Lockhart's reserve concealed an answering force of passion. And then to discover her husband so… well, so inept and lifeless, yet so wedded to the shows and forms of marriage, and so incapable of comprehending her unhappiness. Had it not been for her daughter, born within a year of the wedding, she would have left him; as it was, she had worked at her writing and entertained her friends, unable in the end to hate her husband for being what he was, and feeling, as her thirtieth birthday receded, only a dull subterranean anger at the inexorable waste of life.

And then, on a warm spring afternoon at the house of a distinguished man of letters, she had been introduced to Frederick Liddell, whose latest volume of poems she had read only the week before, and very soon found herself deep in conversation with him in a quiet comer of the distinguished mans garden, where they sat upon a bench in the shade of an oak and talked until she had lost all consciousness of time. He was not much over thirty, and looked even younger, for his complexion was as fair and soft as a woman's, and his dark eyes capable, as it seemed to Julia, of a quite feminine subtlety. Even his wavy brown hair seemed expressive in its unruly abundance, brushed across a broad, high forehead, the face narrowing markedly to a strong, rounded chin. His enthusiasms chased one another across his features; in repose, his most characteristic expression was one of gentle melancholy, a mild sadness which Julia found quite irresistible, all the more so because Frederick seemed utterly devoid of guile. She was used to fending off the attentions of practised seducers such as her unhappy friend Irene's husband Hector, with whom, it was said, no woman could safely be left alone for five minutes, but whose oily countenance invariably reminded Julia of Mr Chadband. But she was quite unused to being listened to with such responsive absorption. By the time she discovered that he had read and admired the one tale of hers that had so far been published, Julia felt certain she had made a friend for life.

They spoke a great deal that afternoon of religion, or rather of the impossibility of either believing in any of its prescribed forms, or living without some aspiration beyond the material, without coming to any definite conclusion save that their feelings seemed to be in entire agreement. In poetry they were divided by Julia's preference for Keats against his for Shelley, but this only opened the happy prospect of their reading their favourite passages to one another on some future occasion. From there they progressed naturally to dreams, and Julia found herself telling Frederick of a dream she had had on perhaps half a dozen occasions. It usually began in soft summer twilight, in an open field, a gentle slope covered in long green grass. She would begin to run down the slope, taking longer and longer strides until she could feel her feet just brushing the tips of the grass and remember, with a great rush of joy, that she had been born with the gift of flight. Then she would extend her arms and soar above the fields, feeling utterly at home in the air until the awareness that she was dreaming began to press itself upon her. Always she would struggle to hold onto the dream; for one magical, exhilarating moment she would believe that she had woken and yet continued to fly, until the world dissolved beneath her and she was left alone and bereft in darkness, like the knight-at-arms waking upon the cold hill's side. This was something she had never disclosed to anyone, for fear that if she did not keep it secret, the dream would never come back to her. Yet she spoke of it quite spontaneously to Frederick, and when she had done so, saw that he was greatly moved.

Some years ago, he said, he had fallen in love with a dancer named Lydia Lopez-not her real name, for she had been born and bred in London, but the only one he had ever known her by, just as he had been left only one memento of her, though he did not say what it was. He had gone every night to the theatre where she performed, and sometimes taken her to supper afterwards. Frederick did not describe Lydia very distinctly, other than to say that she was very small and slightly formed, so much so that she could easily have been taken for a child of twelve or thirteen.

One particularly elaborate scene-a favourite with the audience-called for her to be equipped with wings and to soar, suspended from a wire, high above the stage. Frederick had been in the front row on the night when the wire gave way and Lydia fell from the painted heavens; he could still, he said, shuddering at the memory, hear the dreadful thud of her body striking the boards. The curtain was instantly drawn; yet to everyone's amazement and relief, she came out half an hour later, looking a little dazed but apparently uninjured, and took a bow, drawing rapturous applause from the house. But the relief was premature; a few hours later she lapsed into unconsciousness, and she died two days later of a haemorrhage to the brain.

Before Lydia, Frederick confessed, he had fancied himself in love with a different woman every week, but he had never since been able to care for anyone as he had cared for her. 'I did not know how much she meant to me until she was gone/ he said, gazing into Julia's eyes with such open, unaffected feeling that her sympathy went out to him entirely; so much so that she found she had taken his hand in both of hers. She felt, if anything, strangely reassured by this disclosure; and he accepted her invitation to tea at her house in Hyde Park Gardens with such eagerness, and told her with such warmth how delighted he was to have met her, that she went home happier than she could remember being since she had first held her infant daughter in her arms.

Julia knew herself in love with Frederick from that first afternoon, but it was many weeks before she dared hope that her feeling might be returned, for when she saw him next in company she wondered if he were not exactly the same ardent, attentive listener with everyone of his acquaintance. Yet he accepted all of her suggestions for meeting, despite the demands upon his time-he had a small private income, supplemented by a great deal of reviewing-with such eagerness that her imagination would insist upon running far ahead of her. She dared not invite him too often to her house, for she could not bear the thought of their relations becoming the object of common gossip, and so they met in galleries and parks, and sometimes in the Reading Room, always maintaining the pretext that such-and-such would be an interesting thing to do as soon as they found the opportunity. There always seemed to be more to say than they had time for, and as the days lengthened he spoke less often of Lydia; but it was not until spring had passed into summer that she arrived, with a rapidly beating heart, at the entrance to a mansion block towering above a narrow Bloomsbury street, in response to his first invitation to tea.

Hehad warned her about the stairs, apologising for his preference for living as high above the street as possible, but she was still surprised by how many flights there were, and though the day was cool and cloudy, she was quite dazzled by the light when he ushered her into his sitting room. There were tall casements on either side of narrow French windows, through which Julia glimpsed the iron railing of a small balcony. The room was not large; two armchairs and a sofa arranged upon a Persian carpet took up much of the floor, and there were bookshelves ranged along the other walls. Julia would have liked to look around, but Frederick immediately invited her to be seated; his manner was more formal than usual, and his constraint affected her, so that instead of the sofa she took the right-hand armchair, whereupon Frederick excused himself to make the tea, and left her alone in the room.

From this she deduced that she was, as she had hoped, to be the only guest, and sat willing herself to feel less agitated and more at ease. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness she became aware that she was not, after all, quite alone, for on a desk at the window nearest to her chair stood a framed photograph, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a young woman who could only be Lydia. She was both like and unlike the Lydia of Julia's imagination: at first glance the face appeared rounded and child-like, especially in the set of the lower lip and chin, but there was also a subdued sensuality which became more apparent the longer one looked into the dark eyes that gazed so directly back, the eyes of a woman fully aware of her power to charm-or mesmerise. "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" the words echoed suddenly in Julia's awareness, and left her wishing she had not recalled them.

She was still absorbed in contemplation of Lydia's portrait when Frederick returned with the tea-tray. But he did not seem to notice, and instead launched into an account of how he had that morning read and reviewed four three-decker novels without cutting a single page, delivered his copy, and sold all four in pristine condition in Fleet Street in time for lunch. Julia felt a certain pang at the thought of judgement being passed so lightly upon all those months or years of hard authorial labour, but reminded herself sternly that Frederick was obliged to earn most of his own living by his pen, and had not the luxury of Ernest Lockhart's twelve hundred a year, which prompted a pang of quite another sort. They started several other topics, but none of them seemed to catch fire; perhaps it was the effect of Lydia's cool, steady gaze, which Julia could neither dismiss entirely from her consciousness nor allude to directly; at any rate the constraint seemed to grow between them until she sat miserably wishing she had not come. The room, too, was very close; she could feel herself becoming flushed and overheated as her unhappiness increased, until she was obliged to ask Frederick to open a window. He sprang from his chair in a welter of apologies and threw open the French windows, letting in a welcome draught of air. Unable to bear the pressure of Lydia's regard an instant longer, Julia rose and went to join him in the doorway.

She had never been-at least she felt she had never been-so high above the ground. The balcony appeared to her no larger than a window-box, with a small semicircular floor of pressed metal, and two hooped black horizontal railings curving out into empty space. The higher of these was only a little above her own waist. Even standing in the doorway, she seemed to be looking straight down into the abyss. Julia had stood close to the edge of a precipice without feeling anything like the fear that gripped her now; the sheer, vertiginous chasm beneath her feet seemed to be drawing her irresistibly towards the brink; in another second she would surely pitch head-first over the rail and into the void. All of these impressions raced across her mind in the space of a single glimpse, during which she was also aware of Frederick turning towards her and opening his mouth as if to speak, but ridiculously slowly, so that he reminded her of some great bird ponderously opening its beak. With the same absurd slowness, she saw herself reaching for his arm to save herself from falling, suspended between terror and a strange impulse to laugh at Frederick's gathering her in such a leisurely fashion into his embrace that she seemed to have time to reacquaint herself with every nuance of his expression before feeling, at last, the pressure of his lips upon her own. The sensation of vertigo remained; perhaps they had indeed fallen, but it did not seem to matter, for she felt quite weightless, and might as easily have been floating up as down.

That evening she walked alone around the banks of the Serpentine and felt the world to be a blessed place. She knew, dimly, that the gulf between her present situation and the life she imagined herself living with Frederick might prove impassable, but she could not give him up now; perhaps her husband would bow gracefully to the inevitable; in the meantime she felt perfectly content in the warmth of the suns diminishing rays and the certainty that Frederick loved her, and would tell her so again before tomorrows sun had set. But with the next morning's post came a note which said only: "Dear Mrs Lockhart, I very much regret that I shall be unable to keep our appt this afternoon; I can only plead the most pressing and unexpected business, and pray that you will accept my most abject apologies. Believe me, yours very sincerely, Frederick Liddell."

Julia had always appreciated his tact and discretion, but the notes formal brevity, and worse, the absence of any indication as to when, or even if, she might expect to hear from him again, chilled her to the bone. In vain she struggled to reassure herself with the thought that Frederick had, after all, to earn his living as best he could; for if such demands had never before prevented him from seeing her, how could they possibly have done so now? The rest of the day crawled by beneath an ever-darkening cloud of apprehension and despair. After a sleepless night of torment, Julia could bear no more; as soon as her husband had departed for his chambers she sent Frederick an unsigned note saying she would call at his rooms at three o'clock.

He was waiting at the street door when her cab arrived. One glance at his face confirmed her worst fears. In silence they trudged up flight after flight of stairs to the room that had witnessed such extremities of rapture. As the memory flooded back to her, Julia turned towards Frederick as if praying to be woken from a nightmare. To her horror, he actually recoiled before checking himself with a forced, mechanical courtesy that set the final seal upon her humiliation. Bright sunshine streamed mockingly through the tall casements; the French windows were closed.

"Frederick; tell me what has happened."

Her lips were so numb with misery that she could barely utter the words.

"I fear-I find I am hot free," he stammered, "that is to say… that my affections are after all engaged… I had hoped to overcome

… that it would not… but I find I cannot…" He trailed off hopelessly.

"Do you mean-that there is someone else?"

"Yes." His eyes looked like the eyes of a dead man.

"Then why did you not tell me so before?"

"I did. But I had hoped…"

She did not understand until she realised that he was gesturing towards the portrait by the window. For a long moment Julia stood transfixed by Lydia's cool, implacable gaze, unwilling to comprehend what she had just heard.

"She is dead, Frederick. Whereas I…" But she could not go on.

"To the world, yes, but alas, not to me."

"And you feel you have betrayed her," said Julia bleakly.

"Yes," said Frederick. "I am most dreadfully sorry…"

Her tears would no longer be denied; she went blindly from the room and left him to his self-recrimination.

As the months passed, Julia felt herself more and more irretrievably exiled from the life she had formerly led. The longing to speak of her sorrow remained as acute as ever, but there was no one, not even her closest friend Marianne, upon whose discretion she could absolutely rely. Perhaps it Was pride that made the idea of being talked about so intolerable to her; more particularly, the idea that anyone should know that her life had been laid waste by a rejection that, to some women of her acquaintance, might have meant little more than a loss at croquet. Julia was herself bewildered by the extent of the desolation that had befallen her; it was like wandering through the abandoned ruins of a once-thriving city. "Vet so far as she could tell, most of her friends were scarcely aware of the change in her. It was very strange to look in the mirror and see the same face and form that Frederick had once called beautiful, thinner and paler, but otherwise unaltered.

Her dream of flight had not returned; instead she had been several times visited by a nightmare of finding herself high up on a shattered wall of stone, like the ruin of some great abbey whose roof had long since collapsed. Far below, mounds of fallen brickwork and rubble lay heaped upon the outlines of foundations and the remnants of other walls, with grass and weeds growing over them. At first the top of the wall on which she knelt would be relatively broad, though jagged, but in seeking a safe way to descend she would find the way becoming narrower and more precarious, the stone crumbling beneath her hands until she saw that she had crawled to the very end of a broken arch where she could only cling to a rotten tongue of stone, petrified by fear of plummeting down amidst great shards and fragments of masonry, feeling the very fabric of, the world dissolve within her grasp.

Doubtless if she had been able to speak openly to anyone, she would not have come to haunt the Reading Room, or to believe that somewhere in the labyrinth was hidden that one book, whatever it might be: not a work of philosophy or theology, for Julia had had little taste for abstract thought even in happier days, and could now make no more sense of philosophical discourse than she could of Sanskrit. She imagined a voice speaking plainly and directly out of the wilderness into which she had stumbled; for someone must have crossed it before her, and found exactly the wisdom she so painfully lacked.

To be entirely candid with herself, she was also drawn to the Reading Room by the hope of seeing Frederick. But the hope had so far proven vain. Recently, while consulting the catalogue, she had overheard an exchange between two men, evidently acquaintances of Frederick's, the one remarking that Liddell had become a complete recluse these days, to which his companion replied that poor old Freddy must be immersed in the composition of some great work. They had laughed at this, in a way that Julia found very troubling, so that she had returned to her place and sat for an indefinite time gazing sightlessly at the volume before her.

The truth was that she still loved him, though she wished she did not. She had tried to hate him and failed; she could not even hate Lydia, for how could she blame a dead woman for what had happened? Indeed she felt herself increasingly surrounded by people who preferred the company of the deceased to that of the living. Her husband, as he had grown older, had become ever more fascinated by his departed forebears; then there was poor Aunt Helen who had spent the greater part of her life going from one'seance to the next, constantly receiving messages from her adored fiance Lionel who had been lost to fever in the Crimea nearly half a century before. Julia had lately accompanied her aunt to a few of these gatherings, and had been depressed by the mingled accents of credulity and fraud, not to mention the thought of all those others thronging the great city in pursuit of phantoms. And now there was Frederick, lost to the memory of Lydia; and Julia herself was scarcely in a better case. She had often selfishly wished they had fallen from the balcony that afternoon; she would have died in bliss instead of being condemned to linger in a world where, as it seemed to her, so many of the living moved like ghosts among the seekers of the dead.

Such were her thoughts on a sombre afternoon late in February, when the fog hovering in the dome seemed thicker than usual. Julia was on the verge of packing up to leave when a book was delivered to her place; she did not see by whom. It was not, however, the edition of Clare's poems for which she had earlier lodged an application, but a plain octavo volume with black boards; so plain, in fact, that it bore neither a tide nor an authors name upon its spine. Puzzled, she opened it, to be confronted only by the heading, "Chapter One"; yet there was no sign of damage or missing pages. It appeared to be a novel; indeed a novel set in Bloomsbury, for it began with a description of a furious altercation between two cabmen in Great Russell Street. One of the men wore a dirty red kerchief, the other a white; as the dispute grew yet more heated, the two men descended from their respective boxes and fell to pushing one another about the pavement, and then to blows, whereupon both were forced to give way by "the approach of an immense woman, dressed entirely in black and bearing in her arms what appeared from its shape to be a child's coffin, incongruously wrapped in brown paper and tied with string"-but when Julia went to turn the page she found that it had not been cut. Curious to know how the narrative would proceed, she looked about for an attendant. At once a tall, nondescript man whom she could not recall seeing before approached; he had evidently observed her difficulty, for with a murmured "Pray allow me, madam" he took up the volume and disappeared through a side door.

Julia sat for some minutes waiting for him to return, but he did not, and her faint curiosity dwindled away to nothing. The pall of melancholy settled once more about her; she collected her belongings and left the Reading Room. Outside, the sky was dark and lowering it looked as if rain, or even snow, might begin to fall at any moment, so she hastened across the courtyard and requested the constable at the gate to secure her a cab. None were in sight as she stepped onto the pavement of Great Russell Street, but then she saw two appearing round the Montague Street corner. She heard the constable whistle; the cab at the rear swung out and attempted to pass the one in front; the vehicles seemed to touch, and the next moment the two cabmen were embroiled in a furious exchange of oaths. One leapt down from his box; the other followed; Julia thought she saw a flash of red at the latter's throat, but it was not until a vast woman, clad in voluminous layers of black, emerged from a doorway bearing a large, strangely shaped parcel in her arms and forced the struggling cabmen to part, one on each side of her, as she set out across the road, that the full import of what she was seeing struck Julia like a physical blow. In the same instant she heard the constable addressing her and, half turning, saw that a third cab had emerged from Museum Street and drawn up immediately behind her.

"Best get in, ma'am," said the constable. "I'll 'ave to see to that there embrocation."

Numbly, Julia obeyed. As her driver turned his horse, she had just time to see the two cabmen retreating towards their vehides at the approach of the constable, and the woman's immense back departing in the direction of Southampton Row.

Ten o'clock the next morning found her once again at the Reading Room, though she had never before arrived so soon after opening time. The day was raw and foggy, the heating barely sufficient to dispel the bone-numbing chill of the journey, but Julia was conscious only of her need to recover the anonymous black volume, which meant finding the man who had brought it to her, for she could not recall even seeing a press-mark. Since waking early from a troubled sleep she had been prey to increasing doubt as to whether she had actually read the account of the scene in the street, or had merely been confused by an especially striking instance of the experience the French term deja vu. Like others of her acquaintance she had occasionally found herself, for the space of a few sentences, in the midst of a conversation which seemed oddly familiar, but nothing remotely like yesterday's experience had ever befallen her.

The search for the tall, nondescript attendant proved, however, hopeless. She found herself entirely unable to describe him with any accuracy, save that he was tall and had been clad, she thought, in a grey suit of some kind; her memory simply refused to summon him as anything more than a blurred outline of a man. The attendants on duty did their best to accommodate her; three possible candidates were summoned from the nether regions for her inspection, but without result. They were however adamant in maintaining that the delivery of a volume without a press-mark was an impossibility; author and tide might conceivably be dispensed with, but a book without a press-mark, madam, would be like a soul without a name upon the Day of Judgment: it could never arise, and would be lost for all eternity. Julia could see the force of this; she could see, too, that to persist would merely confirm their evident belief that the book had been delivered to her only in a dream (she had, of course, said nothing about what had followed in the street) and so she returned, bewildered, to her place.

Sitting in the same seat as she had occupied the previous afternoon dispelled the doubts that had gathered overnight; the book had certainly been delivered to her; she could visualise the words at the foot of that first page, see herself trying to turn to the next and finding the opening uncut. Several times she walked the circumference of the room, searching for the attendant in grey, but with no success. The fog hanging about the dome seemed even thicker than it had yesterday, and readers unusually scarce; apart from a motionless figure several seats away to her left, she had a whole row to herself. To quieten her mind, she set about writing a full account of her experience, and became quite absorbed in the attempt to recall and record every detail. The damp air grew closer and stuffier; she could feel the warmth rising from the heat-pipe beneath the desk as she wrote on, half mesmerised by the steady scratching of her own pen. After an indefinite interval, she became aware, as she reached mechanically for the inkwell, that the scratching of her pen had become the only sound within her hearing; and she looked up to find herself entirely surrounded by fog.

Her first thought was that someone must have left a door or window open, but that was plainly absurd: she had never seen fog of this intensity inside a building before; it must be some freak of nature. She sat within a little cocoon of light shed by the electric lamp above her place; there was only the usual faint halo about the shade, but the edge of the fog-bank swirled to within two feet of her on either side, and overhead. Cold wisps of it curled across her desk, bearing a strange, ashy, sulphur-salt smell, as of a huge sea-creature suddenly emerging from the depths. She was-or had been-perhaps two-thirds of the way out from the central circle where the catalogue was kept; all she had to do was get up and make her way carefully to her left, and then left again around the circumference of the room until she reached the main entrance. But what would she do then? The fog must be even more impenetrable outside, and besides, there was something profoundly unnerving about it, something that made her very reluctant to leave her small circle of light. Perhaps she should call out; but why could she not hear anyone else calling for assistance? There had been other readers in neighbouring rows; and was it not the attendants' duty to go about and reassure those who might otherwise fall prey to panic? Yet still there was no sound other than the faint, muffled susurration of the fog-bank.

But surely fog did not make any sound? That soft rustling away to her left was not the fog; it was someone coming stealthily up the row towards her. Julia held her breath, listening. The rustling came closer, and ceased; the swirling wall of fog remained utterly opaque; then she heard the faint scrape of a chair-it sounded like the chair immediately to her left-being drawn out, followed by the almost inaudible creak of the seat as someone, or something, settled themselves upon it.

Silence returned. Julia tried to tell herself that it was only another reader, lost in the fog and deciding to sit down until it cleared. But the trembling of her hands belied her. Very slowly, keeping her eyes on the fog-bank between herself and her invisible companion, Julia began to ease herself off her chair, hoping to slip away silently in the other direction, towards the catalogue. Her chair creaked loudly, and as it did so the wall of fog to her left rose up like a curtain.

In that first glimpse, Julia was relieved, though startled, to discover that the chair beside her was occupied by a child, a little girl of no more than eight, with golden curls and pink cheeks, dressed in a starched white frock and petticoats. The reassurance lasted only an instant. There was something fixed and unnatural about the bright, smiling face turned towards Julia, and especially about the eyes, which had been slightly downcast, but suddenly opened wide with an audible click They were the shoe-button eyes of a doll; the face looked as hard and rigid as porcelain; and yet the creature was alive, for it was swinging its legs around with the evident intention of sliding off its chair and coming over to Julia.

All of Julia's hair stood on end; or such was the sensation. The "click" of those eyes snapping open seemed to lodge in her own body with a visceral jolt of terror such as she would not have believed a human being could endure. If the smiling doll-creature touched her, she knew she would die; she could not cry out, for the fear was choking her. Its satin shoes touched the floor; Julia sprang up, knocking over her own chair, and backed away into the wall of fog. Blundering from chair to chair, with still no sign of another human being, she retreated until she collided painfully with what felt like the circular bookcase which housed the catalogue, groped her way along its edge, and lurched into what she hoped was another alleyway of desks, where she stopped and tried to hold her breath and still her pulse enough to listen for the rustle of her pursuers dress.

From the moment Julia left her seat, the fog had closed impermeably about her. If she held her hand so close that her fingers actually touched her face, she could see the outline of it, but beyond that distance she might as well have been immersed in cotton wool, through which filtered a dim, uniform, yellow-grey light. Even in normal circumstances, the Reading Room has a labyrinthine aspect; some have compared it to a spiders web; but because it is possible to see over the tops of the rows of desks and across the central bookcases, these sinister possibilities lie mostly dormant. If all light were to be extinguished, one might imagine that the regularity of its construction, with the rows of desks radiating out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel, would still render escape relatively straightforward. But in fact, merely by pausing to listen, Julia found that she had lost all sense of direction. The strange sea-creature smell confused her senses, and the blood would not stop ringing in her ears. She could not hear, yet she knew that to run blindly would be fatal; the noise of her flight would give her away. Besides-she tried to suppress the realisation, but could not-the creature had found her in spite of the fog. Julia began to tremble uncontrollably.

Noise might be fatal, but to remain waiting for a porcelain hand to insinuate itself into hers was quite unbearable. She took a slow step backwards and bumped against a chair, which scraped; set off in what she thought was the right direction and encountered a cold, vertical surface which she could not identify at all, and from there veered into empty space, losing even her sense of up and down. She felt herself falling; reached out to save herself and clutched at a narrow ledge or flange, which seemed at first solid but suddenly gave way with a rasp, shot from her hand and fell at her feet with a dreadful smash. The creature would be upon her any second; Julia stumbled back into the void, and this time managed to hand herself from chair to chair along the entire length of a row. The noise was frightful, despite the muffling effect of the fog several chairs fell behind her, but she kept on, and when nothing met her hand after the expected interval, threw herself forward with both arms outstretched until she collided with what, she prayed, was the bookcase that ran right around the circumference of the Reading Room. Instinct told her that if she were to follow the curve around to her left, she would eventually arrive at the main entrance, where help must surely be at hand.

Julia stopped again to listen, but her breathing would not slow. Terror had left no room for any thought beyond the desire for escape; she set off again, as fast as she dared, with her right hand brushing along the curved bookcase and her left stretched out before her. In a surprisingly short time she came to an opening, which, she told herself, must be the entrance; she felt her way through, stumbled for some distance in another void, and collided with a wall. No, a door, for it swung away under her weight, and she went on through, quite unable to visualise the foyer in sufficient detail to tell whether she was in it or not. She took a few steps forward, but the floor did not feel right underfoot; it had a hollow, skeletal quality about it; then she brushed against a cold, vertical metal surface, which certainly did not match her recollection of anything in the foyer. Running her hand across the metal surface beside her, Julia realised that it was the end of a bookshelf. Reaching around it, she disturbed a volume which fell over with a thud, and all at once understood where she must be. This was the Iron Library, a maze of shelves crammed with books in their numberless thousands. If she could not regain the door through which she had entered, she would be utterly lost.

But perhaps help was closer at hand than she had thought, for was that not the faint sound of voices? And quite close by; perhaps it was only the muffling effect of the fog that made it sound like whispering. She took a step forward, keeping one hand on the metal surface to her left, and now the sound was even clearer, though oddly repetitive in its cadence, as if someone were whispering the same word over and over. Her hand slid off into space and across to the end of another shelf: and yes, the voice was coming from the aisle between the shelves; it seemed to be rising up from the floor as the fog once more lifted to reveal the doll-child's upturned porcelain smile, the shoe-button eyes opening wide, painted fingers reaching towards the hem of Julia's dress, and the rosebud mouth opening and closing mechanically, whispering "Julia… Julia… Julia…"

Thus began a fearful game of hide-and-seek which drove Julia ever further into the gloomy depths of the Iron Library. The fog had thinned somewhat, so that she could see from one end of an aisle to the other, but that only worsened the terror of seeing the painted smile appearing from around a stack or worse, coming up behind her as she paused, wondering which way to flee. Though the creatures head came no higher than Julia's waist, the thought of turning upon it, or trying to kick it out of her way, only prompted a further spasm of horror; she knew she could not endure its slightest touch, and so could only retreat until she ran up against an iron staircase spiralling up into the foggy darkness overhead.

Her pursuer was not at that moment in sight, but there was no other way back. Shuddering at the image of the doll-child lurking in wait for her, Julia began to climb. But she could not keep the staircase from sounding beneath her feet; her footsteps rang out over the fog-bank which now rolled back below her, so that she could neither see nor hear whether the creature was following. She passed an exit onto a narrow metal gallery and kept climbing higher and higher, with the fog still rising so that it swirled continuously just below her hurrying feet.

Soon she could go no higher; the last turn brought her out onto another gallery, whose floor, like the others in the Iron Library, was a sort of grid, so that one could see through it to the fog drifting just beneath. On one side of her was a sheer dark wall, on the other a handrail, through which, as she paused wondering which direction to take, she could feel a faint rhythmic drumming, as of footsteps coming lightly and rapidly up from below. Julia began to retreat along the gallery as fast as she dared, glancing frequently over her shoulder. There was no sign of the doll-child yet; but she saw that she was coming to a dead end; there was nothing ahead of her but an end-rail, and no more stairs.

A cold gust of air rose about her; the wall of fog rolled back and seemed to dissolve upon the instant, and Julia found herself looking down from a great height, at row upon row of skeletal iron floors plummeting away into darkness. Vertigo seized her as it had on the brink of Frederick's balcony. Simultaneously, the doll-child emerged onto the gallery and trotted purposefully towards her, the painted smile broadening, its tread sounding heavier with every step. Caught between the terror of falling and dread at the creature's approach, Julia pressed herself against the wall. The porcelain arms reached out; the eyes clicked wide open. As a cry of repulsion rose ungovernably in Julia's throat, her fingers found a handle. Part of the wall gave way with a crash, flinging her out upon another gallery, beneath a vast, win-dowed hemisphere which took up her cry and sent it ringing and reverberating across the Reading Room, high above a sea of upturned faces.

The following afternoon found Julia, somewhat to her own surprise, back in the library. Her interview with the Chief Attendant had been long and humiliating: he had looked at her so strangely when she first mentioned the fog that she spoke, thereafter, only of taking a wrong turn and finding herself lost in the Iron Library. When asked why she had climbed the stair, she could only reply that she had mistaken it for the way out. But he was plainly not satisfied: she had, he said sternly, broken several regulations, ignored numerous notices, created a disturbance in the Reading Room, and placed herself in serious danger. The Trustees would have to be informed, and might well decide to suspend her ticket.

What had actually occurred remained unfathomable. Julia had been followed onto the Reading Room gallery, not by the doll-child, but by an attendant who had noticed a woman ascending the staircase in the Iron Library. The only rational explanation she could conceive of was sleep-walking, but she could not quite believe it. There was, of course, the darker possibility that her mind had given way under the strain of prolonged grief. Yet she could not shake off the sense that the anonymous black book and the terrifying encounter in the fog were in some way connected. Besides which she had discovered, in the course of another troubled night, that fear of the doll-child's renewed attentions had followed her home. Until she could discover the meaning of these events, she would not feel secure, and instinct told her that the answer must be sought in the Reading Room, to which she accordingly returned, heavily veiled and in other ways disguised as far as possible.

The afternoon outside was bright and clear, the dome filled with light and entirely free of fog, which at least implied that she would be safe from a renewal of yesterday's terrors. But although an inspection of the upper gallery confirmed that she had been too high above the readers' desks for her features to be easily discerned, Julia felt most conspicuous and ill-at-ease. To inquire any further after the anonymous black book was obviously impossible. But wait: there was, after all, a section of the catalogue devoted to anonymous works, and she might as well look through it as sit uncomfortably wondering whether the voices murmuring on the other side of the partition were murmuring about her.

"Anon", however, proved far more prolific than Julia had anticipated. She had begun her search on the principle of the child's game of "warm or cold", filling out an application for any title which looked remotely promising. But mindful of the notice discouraging readers from requesting numerous books at any one time, and of her already uncertain standing in the Reading Room, she found her progress-or lack of it-so slow that the light was fading from the dome before she had surveyed even a fraction of the tides beginning with "A". It would clearly take weeks or months, with no likelihood of success… but what was this? A Full and True Account of the Strange Events leading to the Death of the Poet Frederick Liddell Esq., on the night of Thursday 2nd March, 1899. 8vo. London. 1899.

The date given was today's, or rather tonights: an impossibility, but there it was, starkly presenting itself to Julia's uncomprehending gaze. The printed entry slip, which looked as if it had only just been pasted in, was set out in the usual fashion, and accompanied by a press-mark which, together with the first few words of the title, Julia had numbly copied onto an application slip and deposited at the issue desk before the import of the words had even begun to sink in. It must be another Frederick Liddell, an inner voice kept repeating, but she knew this to be false; she had looked up his name in the catalogue too often, formerly for the pleasure and latterly for the pain of seeing it printed there. Almost any other reader, confronting the same entry, would have attributed it to clerical error, or at worst an elaborate and distasteful hoax; to Julia, the words emblazoned upon her inward vision seemed like a declaration of the inevitable.

Fifteen minutes crawled by, and then a half-hour. The electric lights came on; the windows in the dome darkened steadily; Julia waited in growing apprehension with her thoughts revolving as upon a treadmill. Should she not go to his rooms and see if he was there, to warn him? But warn him of what? To know exactly where and when the danger lay, she would have to see the book… but then the rational part of her mind would rise up in protest, only to be subdued in turn by a vivid recollection of the immense woman bearing the coffin-shaped parcel, so that she sat paralysed between these warring inner factions until an attendant came to inform her that no record of any such volume could be found. Julia returned at once to the catalogue; she could visualise the position of the entry quite clearly, in the top right-hand quarter of a right-hand page, but realised, when it did not appear in the expected place, that she had absolutely no recollection of its surroundings. Because new entries were constantly being pasted in, their order was not always precisely alphabetical, but she searched many pages in either direction without finding what she sought. This, however, only heightened her sense of foreboding. It was black night outside; she could delay no longer, no matter what humiliation might follow. But if she were not home soon, even her husband might become anxious enough to initiate a search. Hastily scribbling a note to say that she would be dining with Marianne, Julia gathered up her things and rushed from the Reading Room.

The night air was damp and still, with a hint of mist about the street lamps, as Julia rang the bell at the street door below Frederick's rooms. There was a long wait, made even longer by the combined weight of foreboding and painful recall, before the door was opened by an ancient porter.

Her apprehension increased with every one of the seemingly endless flights of stairs, and she was obliged to pause even longer than was necessary to recover her breath before she could summon the courage to knock at Frederick's door. All had been silent within; at the sound of her tapping the silence seemed only to deepen; then there was a muffled thud, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps and a clatter of locks and bolts being undone. Almost worse than the dread of what she might encounter was the resurgence of a hope so long repressed, a hope that flared wildly at the first sight of his face, so pale and gaunt and worn, suddenly radiant with an answering joy. She had crossed the threshold and flung her arms around him-feeling at once how dreadfully thin he had become-and kissed him with all the passion of her resurrected love, before the name he was so tenderly murmuring resolved itself as, undeniably; "Lydia".

Julia disengaged herself and drew back, searching the well-remembered face for some sign of recognition. It was, and yet was not, the Frederick of old: unshaven, clad in a crumpled shirt and trousers and a pair of old carpet slippers, with a frayed green dressing-gown over his shoulders, his hair even longer and more disorderly, but lacking its former lustre. His adoring expression did not change, but he seemed to be gazing through rather than at her face. For a moment she feared that he was blind, until he evidently noticed the open door, which he reached out and closed behind her. As it clicked shut, an expression of bewilderment crossed his face; he looked from her-or rather, from the person he evidently saw in her place-to the door and back again.

"It is finished, and you have come," he said in a strange abstracted tone, "but I expected… I thought you would have…"

He trailed off, glancing towards the French windows, which Julia saw were open to the night. Despite the fire burning in the grate opposite, she felt the chill draught from the balcony. She did not want to understand his implication, nor did she wish to believe him mad. Might he be sleep-walking? And if he stood, as it were, in the midst of a dream of Lydia, might he not be woken…? But even as she opened her mouth to cry, I am Julia, not Lydia, the futility of it overwhelmed her. Dreaming or waking, Frederick had given his whole heart to a dead woman, and there was no room in it for the living; that love was ashes, and would arise no more.

Besides, she had somewhere read or heard that sleep-walkers should not be woken abruptly, but coaxed back to bed and watched until they fell into a true sleep, from which they would awaken with no recollection of the previous nights encounters. There flashed upon her the conviction that she understood the omens of recent days, for had she not come to him tonight, Frederick might well have plunged heedlessly to his death. The first thing, therefore, was to close the French windows; no, first get him safely into bed, then secure them.

"Frederick," she said, gently taking his arm, "you are very tired, and must rest now."

"Yes, I am very tired," he repeated. "But-you will not leave me, Lydia? Not now?" His voice rose and quavered on the last words.

"No, Frederick," said Julia sadly, "I will not leave you. But you must go to bed now, and sleep."

With that she led him slowly across the room, staying as far as possible from the dark doorway opening onto the night, and along the passageway to his bedroom, now dreadfully stale and disordered. He stood obediently, like a child, while she straightened the bedclothes as best she could and turned back the sheet; like a child he sat on the edge of the bed and removed his slippers and dressing-gown, then immediately lay down and composed himself for sleep. His eyes had closed before Julia had settled the bedclothes about his shoulders, and within the space of a minute the rhythm of his breathing had slowed and deepened. She watched him for a few minutes more, recalling how often and how ardently she had yearned to watch over Frederick whilst he slept. Now her prayer had been answered, and all she could feel was a profound weariness of spirit. His breathing slowed still further; Julia would have liked to open the window, but was afraid of disturbing him, and so turned down the gas and went back to the sitting-room.

She had meant to close the french windows immediately, but the staleness of the bedroom seemed to have followed her down the passage, and it was not, after all, especially cold; she would close one side and leave the other open for the moment. But on her way over, her attention was drawn to the desk beneath the right-hand window. A lamp burned beside the portrait of Lydia, placed so that it also illuminated a loose sheaf of papers, which were secured by a crystal paperweight Julia was uncomfortably reminded of a votive offering. The uppermost sheet bore two stanzas in Frederick's small, precise hand: The midnight moth besieg'd the lamp,

The magic casement opened wide;

I heard at last the soft wing-heat

Of my returning bride; And, as I hand still farther out

Upon the unresisting night,

Saw my beloved hovering near,

Enraptur'd with the gift of flight

The ink looked quite fresh, as if this were the final page of a fair copy which had not yet been put into its proper order. Julia drew out the chair and sat down, meaning to examine the rest of the manuscript, but found herself intimidated by Lydia's cool, proprietorial stare, which in the lamplight seemed unnervingly watchful. She stretched out a hand to turn the pictures eyes away from hers, but as she leaned forward, her foot thudded against something hollow beneath the desk. There was, indeed, scarcely enough room for her feet, and she bent down to see what the obstruction was. A window-box? No; too low, and she had felt it move. But its proportions were somehow familiar. A black, rectangular box, about three feet long: some musical instrument, perhaps? Curiosity impelled her to set aside her chair and draw the thing out from beneath the desk. It proved surprisingly light for its size. No doubt it would be locked; but the first of the three silver catches snapped open when she touched the knob; the other two followed suit, so there could be no harm in raising the lid.

Whatever it contained was, however, concealed beneath a purple velvet covering. Julia was kneeling alongside the box, and as she reached in to draw aside the covering, she overbalanced so that her right hand slid beneath the purple velvet and encountered something hard. There was a flash of white; she tried to snatch her hand away, but something caught it fast with a hot, piercing sensation, and the doll-child sat up and opened its eyes.

The porcelain fingers gripped like the needle-sharp teeth of a serpent; with her free hand, Julia tried to fend the creature off, but it seemed to leap from its box as she recoiled through the French windows and fell heavily against the balcony railing. She felt the creature dragging her over; for one dreadful instant it hung, smiling, in mid-air before its grip upon Julia's hand was broken and the doll-child went whirling down into the void; whole seconds seemed to pass before Julia heard it smash upon the pavement.

She remained, clinging to the railing, until the worst of the shock had subsided. But the piercing sensation in her right hand did not diminish; one of the serpent-fingers must have lodged in it. Shuddering, she lifted her hand to the light and discovered that the source of the pain was, in fact, a hat-pin, driven deep into the side of her palm. Bunched beneath the head of the pin were several torn folds of white material. Clenching her teeth, she drew out the pin and dropped it over the rail; then she stood up and leaned over to see if she could discern the fragments of the doll by the light of the street lamp below. She was too far up to make anything out, but as she watched, a small figure shuffled into the pool of light and seemed to be stooping over something in the road.

Julia became suddenly conscious of where she was, but vertigo did not follow. She felt she could stay here, leaning on the rail, for as long as she liked. But there was nothing to stay for, and her hand was throbbing painfully. She returned to the sitting room, closed the doors, restored the empty box to its place, and exchanged a final glance with Lydia's portrait. The eyes had lost their wariness; indeed the picture seemed to have faded, to have become simply a photograph of a young woman seeking to make the most of her beauty for the camera. Julia wondered, as she turned away, if she would ever see the poem in print, but it was addressed to Lydia, not to her; all that was left for her to do was to ensure that a doctor would be summoned. Looking in upon Frederick for the last time, Julia saw that he was smiling faintly in his sleep. She left him dreaming of the dead, and went wearily down the stairs to rejoin the world of the living.

I emerged from the story with the sensation of waking from a dream in which I was Julia, and dreadfully cold, and the Reading Room had slipped its moorings and floated out to sea. The dome was palpably revolving; I could feel the sway of the waves as I struggled up from the depths, only to find that I was already awake, with a burning forehead and a deep, shivering ache in every bone. Walking back to Russell Square tube station, I was shaking so hard I had to clench my teeth to stop them chattering. From amongst the press of bodies in the lift, a desolate male voice announced to the world at large, 'Ah'm not happy. Ah feel bad. Ah'm depressed.' 'Aren't we fuckin' all,' muttered a man behind me. Crammed into our filthy metal cage, steeped in the farmyard stench of sodden clothing, we sank in silence into the earth.

For the next ten days I shivered and sweated and coughed, drifting in and out of dreams in which the doll-child appeared several times. Worst of all was a recurring nightmare in which I pursued a fleeting figure, who might or might not have been Alice, through a maze of deserted streets and derelict buildings. Usually she would vanish; once I cornered her in a blind alley and she turned to me with a face of stone. Outside the rain pelted down upon the icy slush, through which I slithered to the chemist for more drugs, or to the nearest cheap restaurant for another oily Indian meal. The Westland affair fizzled and died. The space shuttle blew up. The Iron Lady went on and on.

Three days before I was due to leave, I thought about taking a train from Waterloo to Balcombe, a village about three miles north-east of Staplefield. The least I could do was see the village and ask around. But as I looked again at the tiny black circle marked on the B2114, all I could feel was 'what's the point?' I tried to summon the old sense of wonder and refuge, but it was like feeling for a lost tooth. Without Alice-by now I had convinced myself that I would never hear from her again-Staplefield was dead and gone.

On my last day, a Saturday, a watery sun came out. I took a bus to Hampstead Heath and walked up to the top of Parliament Hill, where I did at last feel some sense of awe at the great sweep of the city below. But the wind was keen and biting, and so cold my fillings began to ache. I descended to the swimming ponds, shuddering at the sight of the icy green water in which some madwoman was actually swimming. Dodging pushchairs and bicycles, I wandered the muddy gravel paths as far as the Vale of Health, and came back along the boundary road.

I hadn't imagined I would welcome the heat and glare of a Mawson summer. When I emerged from customs, my mother hugged me as if I had returned from the dead.

'But you're so thin, Gerard. What's happened to you?'

I told her about the flu, and agreed I should have gone to a doctor. There didn't seem to be much else to say. After breakfast we sat with our coffee under a flowering gum in the back yard. Crimson filaments drifted across the lawn; the sky was a dazzling blue. Breathing the dry, pungent scent of eucalyptus, I couldn't help thinking that it was better to be desolate and warm than desolate and frozen.

'-were you too ill to do anything at all, dear?' my mother was saying.

The only thing I could think of was my walk on Hampstead Heath. Idly watching a pair of rosellas as I talked, I was unprepared for the outburst.

'How could you be so reckless, Gerard? You might have been murdered!'

Her forehead was beaded with sweat, though it had been dry a moment before.

'It was a Saturday afternoon, Mother. There were people everywhere.'

'People get dragged off those paths, all the time. And never seen again. I've read about it. Anything could have happened to you.'

I tried to reassure her, but she would not listen, and shortly afterwards she said she was going inside to lie down. c/o Penfriends International,

Box 294, Mount Pleasant PO,

London WC1

31 January 1986 Dearest Gerard, I'm so sorry, I've only just got your letters (the ones you wrote while you were here) because I've been in hospital. Don't worry, everything's fine now-wonderful in fact. There's a real chance that in a couple of years' time I'll be walking again! I've been on Mr MacBride's waiting list-he's a neurosurgeon-for ages, and I thought it would be months more, but then he had a cancellation on New Year's Day and they whisked me off to Guy's Hospital in an ambulance. Only I didn't know where you were staying because your letter from Mawson with the hotel address in it must have been delayed in the post-it was waiting with the others when I got back yesterday. I would have written much sooner, only there were complications with the dye they injected into my spine for the X-rays-God, those endless hours lying in the scanner, trying not to move, or even breathe-anyway I got terribly sick and spent two weeks on a drip because I couldn't keep anything down. I had a monster headache that never stopped, and my eyesight went so blurry I thought I was going blind-this often happens, apparently, with spinal injections-it's almost back to normal now. I thought of you all the time but I was just too ill to write. I would have told you about the tests only I just couldn't bear to raise our hopes-you know how superstitious I am-until I knew for certain there was something to hope for. And there is, there truly is. Mr MacBride is working with a new laser technique for splitting healthy nerves to replace the damaged ones, and he thinks that in a year or two-it just needs one more breakthrough with the lasers, he says-he'll be able to operate with a ninety per cent chance of success! This must go now to catch today's post; I've told them to send it express. I'm so sorry about the mix-up with letters and that you had such a miserable time in London-I'll make it up to you, I promise. More, much more, tomorrow. I love and adore you with all my heart, and I'm longing to hear from you. Your invisible lover

Alice

If Alice had told me then that I would have to wait another thirteen years… but it was never going to be thirteen years, only 'another year or two at the most'. And the longer I waited, the more I had to lose by not waiting just a few months longer. Alice finished her degree with the Open University and took up teaching English by correspondence to disabled students. Somewhere around the five-year mark, she promised me that we would be together after the operation, even if it failed. Then why not now? 'I want to run into your arms,' she would say, 'and now that we've come so far, please, please can we wait just a little longer?' By the time I persuaded her to go on to email, we had exchanged over four thousand letters through Penfriends International.

I had a life, of sorts, and friends, up to a point. But never any real intimacy; sooner rather than later, every friendship ran up against the wall behind which Alice lay hidden. So long as I keep her secret, I would tell myself, she will be healed, we will be together. As in those fairy tales in which all will be well so long as a certain question is never asked, or a prohibition disobeyed. Never enter my chamber during the hours of darkness.

In all this time, my mother and I kept to our undeclared agreement: she didn't ask about Alice, and I didn't ask about her past. It never seemed worth moving out of the house because I never meant to wait thirteen years. Everyone at the library assumed I was gay, but too timid to leave the closet-at least that was what I assumed they assumed. Quiet, polite, still living at home with his mother, never seems to go out, never talks about himself: no one, I imagined them saying, could possibly be that boring. Not even Gerard. I went on working at the library and staying at home with Mother, while the longed-for breakthrough in microsurgery shimmered on the horizon, always just another year away.

Not leaving my mother alone with her legion of terrors became part of my bargain with God-a God I didn't believe in, but a bargain nonetheless: I'll look after Mother if you'll make sure Alice is healed. Looking after Mother meant, above all else, not leaving her alone at night. Her conviction that the danger was out there, like the snake in the woodpile, had never wavered. She had endured, rather than lived, nearly four decades in Mawson, but I had never seen her bored; she had been too absorbed in her vigil, too intent on catching the slightest whisper of snakeskin over bark. Call it paranoia, chronic anxiety syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder or common-or-garden neurosis; no matter how many labels you stuck on it, the serpent had been real to her. As her seventieth birthday approached, I noticed that she was losing weight and colour, and that her skin had taken on a greyish tinge. But she refused to see a doctor. She went on listening to inaudible sounds until the tumour had grown too large to ignore.

A fortnight after the oncologist told me there was nothing more he could do, Mr MacBride put Alice on his waiting list. I said nothing to my mother. In just under two months, if all went well, Alice would walk out of the hospital. In the last week of July, about when my mother was expected to die.

'You've been a good son to me, Gerard. '

I did not feel like a good son. I had resented her devotion too often and too bitterly for that. We were speaking as usual in cliches, the tireder the better. The silence between us had always been more profound than anything we had managed to say to each other. Now it filled the house like the hum of defective wiring.

She was propped up on the daybed in the sunroom, her book face down on the blanket, looking out over the garden. Drifts of fallen leaves had gathered around the trunks of trees, against the garage wall, along the back fence. This time last year, she would have wanted them all swept away. Afternoon sunlight slanted across the floor; I had already closed the window against the encroaching chill.

I was home on leave from the library, doing what little cooking was required. Now that she needed morphine to sleep at night, my mother would accept nothing solid, only soup and fruit juice and hot drinks. When darkness came, I would help her up the hall to her bedroom. She could still walk, with difficulty.

I reached across from my chair beside the head of her bed, and touched her hand. She did not turn back from the window, but her cold fingers closed over mine, and we stayed like that for a while, watching the crimson leaves stirring beneath the flame tree. It struck me, not for the first time, that she might have been happier with no son at all.

Her fingers twitched; she was drifting into sleep. I reached over with my other hand and picked up her book, so that it would not slide off and wake her. A battered Pan paperback: Josephine Tey, To Love and be Wise. She must have read that one a dozen times. From bargain tables and goodwill stores she had amassed a vast collection of detective stories, all English and nothing after the 1950s: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Marjorie Allingham, Josephine Tey, Freeman Wills Crofts, Ernest Brahmah, J.J. Connington and more. She would alternate these with anything from Daphne Du Maurier to Elizabeth Bowen or Henry James, but beyond 'I think you'll like this, dear', or 'not as good as so-and-so, I thought', she never discussed her reading, which-or so I sometimes imagined-had come to revolve more and more around the lost country-house world of her childhood with Viola at Staplefield.

The sun was sinking into the canopy of our flowering gum, the tallest of all the trees we had planted. I could remember our back yard as a summer dustbowl, the year the town's reservoirs threatened to run dry and hoses were banned. The dead grass had blown away with the topsoil before the end of the holidays. Our parched saplings, surrounded by cylinders of wire netting to keep off the rabbits, were kept alive by surreptitious buckets of water. My mother would sometimes doze in here in the afternoons, blinds drawn against the glare, pedestal fan rattling in the doorway; she used to say it might be hotter out here, but it wasn't as airless as her bedroom.

The fingers clasping mine twitched again. Her face was still turned away from me. As it had been that afternoon when I tiptoed up to the door to see if she was safely asleep. Sitting here beside my mother, day after day, I had tried several times to recall the face in the photograph. Sometimes I felt sure I was remembering perfectly, the light falling across her neck, the mass of dark brown hair-but how could I know that when the picture had been black and white? Then the certainty would dissolve and I would be left with only the memory of vividness, not the face itself. As with Viola and Staplefield-there had been a tall house, and a pavilion on a hill, a friend called Rosalind, a picturebook village-and that was all I could recover. Oh and a wicket gate, whatever that looked like. And a walk through some woods with badgers and some other creature-rabbits? hares?-and an old man with a cart who delivered… milk, eggs? Surely there must have been more, far more?

And then the stories had ceased. She had looked ten feet high in the bedroom doorway, Medusa hair flying, incandescent with fury. But why, Mother, why? Why would you never talk to me about Viola?

'I loved her,' said my mothers voice.

The hair on the back of my neck bristled. Her face was still turned away from me. Had I spoken aloud? Was she talking in her sleep?

'You loved Viola?' I asked, keeping my voice low and my hand still in hers.

'Yes… loved me too.'

'Then why-why couldn't we talk about Viola, you and I?'

The papery fingers tightened a little.

'I had to keep you safe.'

'Mother I am safe; I'm here with you.'

She stirred; her head turned slowly towards me. Her eyes did not open; her expression remained calm.

'Then talk to me now,' I said after a pause. 'About Viola-' but what could I ask her? My mind had gone blank. 'Tell me-did she always live at Staplefield?'

Unease crept over her face. I sat very still and waited until her expression grew calm again.

'Viola wrote stories. Tell me about them.'

'Ghos' stories. She wrote ghost stories.'

The voice had grown more animated. Her eyes flicked open, stared directly at me, and closed again.

Then she said something that sounded like, 'one came true'.

'Did you say, one came true? How? What do you mean?'

No answer.

'Mother, what came true?'

Her grip on my fingers tightened. Her eyelids fluttered, her breathing quickened. Again no answer.

'Mother, who was the woman in the photograph I found? Was it Viola?'

Her eyes shot open, glaring.

'NO!' It came as a hoarse shriek. She sat bolt upright. The unseeing eyes settled on my face.

'Gerard? Why are you here?'

'Mother, come back-you're having a bad dream-'

'You shouldn't be here. She'll see you- '

Her face was convulsing again.

'Mother, wake up!'

Recognition came back. She sank down amongst the pillows.

'Gerard.'

'You were dreaming, Mother.'

She lay silent for a while, breathing harshly.

'Mother-what did you mean, in your dream, she'll see you?'

A quick, uneasy glance.

'How did you know?'

'You were talking in your sleep.'

'I dreamed you were asking me questions, like you used to when you were-what else did I say?'

'You said-you said the woman in the photograph wasn't Viola. Who was she?'

She didn't reply. A different kind of horror was creeping into her expression. As in that moment when you still can't believe you could possibly have done something so appalling. The gas left full on, a child alone in the house.

'Gerard, I'm very tired. I want you to take me back to my room now.' She spoke the words stiffly, through a mask of dread.

'Is the pain very bad?'

'Yes.' But it didn't look like physical pain. We made our slow way up the hall.

'Gerard,' she said when I had settled her into bed, 'bring me the kitchen steps.'

I looked at her, nonplussed.

'The kitchen steps. In case-in case I need to get up.'

'Mother, you've got the buzzer, how can they possibly help-'

'Just bring them.'

'If you insist. But you must promise me-'

'Gerard!'

Bewildered, I went to fetch them: three aluminium steps with a vertical handle to grasp as you climbed up.

'Thank you, dear. Leave them next to my bed-table.'

Her bed was still where it had always been, its headboard centred against the boarded-up fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling cupboards had been built into the alcoves on either side of the chimney. Her bed-table was on the right-hand side of the bed, nearest the door.

'Mother, if there's anything you want me to get down for you-'

'No, dear. What I'd like, if you're not too tired, is for you to make us some more of that nice vegetable soup. I'll have a sleep now. Close the door as you go out.'

She did look utterly exhausted. Reluctantly, I left the room. For several long minutes I hovered outside the door. Not a sound. I eased the handle open and looked in. She was breathing heavily through her mouth. I stood there watching for what felt like many minutes more, but she did not stir.

Something must have alerted me, because I was already through the kitchen door and running when the crash came. I found her on the carpet beside the overturned steps. The topmost cupboard door was half open.

At the hospital they told me she had a depressed fracture of the skull, just above the left eye. All they could do was put her on a drip and wait to see if she recovered consciousness. I sat beside the bed with her hand resting in mine and talked to her as the nurses came and went and the night hours crawled by. Once or twice I thought her dry, rice-papery fingers twitched very slightly in response. Towards morning I must have dozed off, for without any perceptible interval I became aware that her hand had grown colder, and that the only sound of breathing in the room was mine.

A week after the funeral, I was sorting through the papers in the study. The furniture had not altered since my father had died: a five-drawer olive green army surplus filing cabinet, a very small three-drawer desk and a wooden chair filled the entire space.

I was still on leave. Friends from the library would phone and ask if they could call by, and I would make them tea or coffee and agree that it must be very hard for me having been so close to my mother, and what a wonderful person she had been, and feel guilty about counting the days until I could be with Alice.

All of my mother's clothes and shoes had already gone to the goodwill shop. The books were packed and stored. As soon as probate was granted, I would put the house on the market. I had worked my way from the front rooms, starting with my mothers bedroom, right through to the sunroom, without finding a single fragment of her thirty-four years in England. But something of her would be making the return journey. I had decided to scatter her ashes-her cremains', as the funeral director insisted on calling them-at Staplefield. I was trying to persuade Alice to be there too, but she thought this was something I should do alone

On returning from the hospital, I had gone straight to my mothers room to find whatever it was she had died trying to reach. But there was nothing in the top cupboard except the dust of years and the desiccated shells of millipedes. Each of the enclosed alcoves had a wardrobe-style door from floor to head height opening on to hanging space, and a smaller rectangular door to the high cupboards above. The high cupboards were simply enclosed storage boxes. I looked in the one opposite, but that too was empty. I found nothing on the floor or under the bed, and nothing but clothes in the wardrobes on either side. Or in the bottom drawer of her dressing-table, where I had seen the photograph, and later 'Seraphina'; I had found it unlocked and empty. If she had managed to remove anything from the cupboard before she fell, she must have swallowed it.

I had deliberately put off opening the filing cabinet in the study, saving it until last; so long as I hadn't looked, I might still find something. There were papers here all right. Masses of them. My father had evidently filed every piece of official correspondence he had ever received, receipts for every bill he had ever paid; and my mother had followed his example religiously. Thirty-six years of electricity bills, stamped and receipted and filed in strict chronological order. A folder full of notices dating back to 4 January 1964, warning the householder that the supply of electricity would be interrupted on such and such a day. Ditto for water and council rates, insurance, tax returns, car service, registration, driving licences, medical bills. Receipts, instructions, guarantees, and full service history for every appliance they had ever owned. All of my old school reports. On and on. It looked as if the only papers my mother had not kept were personal letters, assuming she had ever received any. Or anything that might indicate she had ever lived anywhere but Mawson.

I moved on to the desk. Writing paper in the top drawer, pens, pencils and rulers in the second, envelopes in the third. And at the back of the envelope drawer, a packet of unused aerograms so ancient they belonged in a museum. Australia. 9d. Slipped in amongst them was a stiff blue envelope, unsealed, which also looked very old; the dark brown glue on the flap was cracked and flaking.

Inside the envelope was a black and white photograph of my mother with me, only a few months old, perched on her knee in one of those miniature flying suits that babies wear, beaming up at her and waving one chubby hand in obvious excitement. I didn't recognise the room, or the sofa she was sitting on. She was smiling at me, looking amazingly youthful, far younger than she appeared in her wedding photograph. And different. For a start, her hair was much longer than I could recall; longer and curlier and more abundant. Her dress-I didn't know enough about fashion to say exactly, but it was more stylish than anything I could remember her in; and sleeveless, which she didn't usually wear, even in summer.

And there was something else unusual, apart from her looking so extraordinarily young and carefree. In the albums in the sitting room we had innumerable photographs of me at every possible stage of development, but nearly all of them were of me and my father, or of me alone. My mother's dislike of being photographed had extended even to being photographed with me; in the ones in which we both appeared, she was invariably looking away from the camera so that you could not see her face. Of all the photographs of her-of us-I had seen, this was by far the most joyful. So why had she hidden it away at the back of a drawer?

I went through the packets of envelopes much more carefully, but there was nothing else in the drawer. Taking the photograph with me, I wandered out of the study and up the hall to her bedroom, not really knowing why. I went over the dressing-table again, removing all the drawers and checking the underside of each one. Nothing but dust, and a reel of white thread which had fallen down inside the cabinet.

The kitchen steps were still where I had left them, beneath the right-hand cupboard. Could she possibly have been looking for this photograph? I remembered the horror creeping over her face, that last afternoon in the sunroom.

I had to keep you safe.

From whom? Or what?

You shouldn't he here. She'll see you.

Who would see me? I caught myself glancing uneasily towards the door. Not Viola, surely? I couldn't recall the very last thing she'd said.

Take me back to my room, Gerard. Bring me the steps. Go away and make the soup.

I climbed up for another look at the top cupboard. There were faint marks like scratches on the dusty floor of the cupboard. But the dust was otherwise smooth and undisturbed. The floor was just a sheet-no, two half-sheets-of plywood, the underside presumably forming the top of the wardrobe. I pried at the edge of the right-hand half and it lifted out of the frame.

Only I was not looking down through the wardrobe, but into a shallow recess. In which lay a large sealed envelope. Inside was a thick wad of typewritten sheets. 'The Revenant'. Below that, in the lower right-hand corner of the tide page, 'V.H. 4 Dec 1925' in a clear, spiky hand. I checked the envelope again and found a small printed slip: With the author's compliments.

Still standing on the top step, I began to leaf through the typescript. As I turned to descend, a photograph slid from between the pages and fluttered to the floor.

I had imagined that if I ever saw her again, recognition would be instantaneous and complete. But it was not quite like that. The dress with shoulders gathered like the wings of angels, the swan-like carriage of her head, chin slightly lifted, gazing off to the left, the dark mass of hair drawn back in what I now knew was called a chignon-all seemed exactly the same, yet I felt sure something had changed. Well of course she looks different, I told myself, I've changed. I was ten when I last saw her. I hadn't heard, then, of chignons, or fine bones, or classically proportioned features: we didn't talk like that at Mawson Primary. Nor had it struck me that she wore no jewellery at all, neither necklace nor earrings. The back of her dress was secured at the neckline by a plain velvet bow.

Of course I hadn't met Alice then, either. This woman didn't look like my imagination of Alice; she was beautiful, but in a more spiritual, less sensuous way. Yet she reminded me of someone; someone I'd seen very recently.

The photograph in the blue envelope. Side by side, the family resemblance was clear; a resemblance that must have faded very quickly, for I couldn't see it in any of my memories of my mother. And since the woman in the studio portrait was, just as clearly, not my mother, who else could she be but the young Viola?

I turned over the photograph and saw that there was writing on the back: a faint inscription in pencil. 'GREENSLEEVES' 10 MARCH 1949

Greensleeves? If that was the date it was taken, it couldn't be Viola after all. But I couldn't imagine this face inspiring horror in anyone. Not even my mother. All these years I'd assumed she had beaten me for looking at the photograph. But she'd never actually said so. And since she'd already disposed of The Chameleon (unless it was hidden somewhere else in the house), I picked up 'The Revenant' again and went through it more carefully. But there was nothing else hidden between the pages. It was just a plain typescript, a fair copy on quarto paper with no corrections or annotations.

One came true. I took the typescript over to the window and settled down on the floor, my back against the wall, with the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading.