Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books)

by Mantel, Hilary

  In the years after the apparition in the garden, I didn’t talk about it much—never, until I was secure in my trade or profession as writer—aware that if I did so I would be questioned, invited to make an analysis, and that any analysis I might make would cut against its phenomenological truth. Sometimes I would laugh and say, I’m like Aunt Ada Doom, I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I say that, like Ada of Cold Comfort Farm, I was never the same afterward, seven going on eight was the point when my sweet nature curdled, and I ceased to expect much good from the world after that.

  I know this is true and a half-truth. When people ask what is the nature of evil, I should like to stand up and say, I can contribute an anecdote. But what my anecdote means, I don’t know. I am left uncertain, with evidence that I can’t add up. Is evil simply—simply?—an outgrowth of human nature, or is it detachable from the human, a force at large in the world like a mercenary for hire, looking for a human master to serve, never without one for long and always worth the whistle? I think of the garden, the broad daylight, the slow-moving sinister aggregation of cells, and ask myself if it was something never seen in nature, like a cancer looking for a host. How long would it last without human attention?

  I read about a company of actors staging Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, who counted among the masked players onstage one extra, a player they did not know; how they ran from the stage screaming, and the audience in panic scattered too. I would like to write their story or make a film of it, but life is not long enough for all the intelligent variations on all the narratives of fear.

  I can talk about the secret garden now and do it in different modes, comic or tragic or satiric. I can write about it, but say twenty drafts are not good enough, suppose the publisher is e-mailing to say he wonders when I’ll be through? Then I lurch out into a new version, comic probably, some new version sprightly and defended; but recovering, each time some fresh sickening detail. When I’m on my own, and I think about it privately, then I scarcely laugh at all.

  Let me go back a little. I pick up my life, six months or so after the devil; I am eight. Annie Connor dies. Not so suddenly; her chest heaves and wheezes, she takes to her bed. Though I see them at dinnertime, my grandad and grandma and Aunt Annie, I would not dream of failing to call on them as I come home from school, to have a cup of tea and a bun. One afternoon I am taken up the stairs at no. 58, and as soon as I see Annie I know by the leaden, pooled blood in the veins of her face that she is dying.

  I toil up the hill to Brosscroft. My mother sometimes watches for me. Just as I can’t hear a straight sentence when it’s spoken, I can’t walk a straight line: she knows that the merest dot in the distance is me, if it is weaving around the pavement.

  My mother’s eyes scour my face. She doesn’t want to be tempted down the hill to Bankbottom, if this is a false alarm; old aunts cough and wheeze, it’s what they do. “Do you think she is dying?” my mother says.

  She looks into my eyes: as on the night when I told her not to switch on the gas. For the second time, she credits me with sense. She shoots down the hill. I am not with her, so I don’t know what happens. But I know a kind of peace is made, between the households: or, less of a war.

  It is a Saturday morning. My mother comes into my bedroom. I have my own room now, at the back of the house, papered by Jack in pink and white. My mother says, “Auntie Annie has gone to live with Jesus.”

  I turn my face away and cry. She means it for the best, but I think it was unnecessary to phrase it like that, as if I were a six year old. Adults want you to know things, then unknow them. But knowledge doesn’t go backward. I would have understood a simple “dead,” and I can’t unsee her livid, mottled face. In a way, I tell myself, it is good to have seen a dying person, and recognized her state.

  I turn to the back of my big ginger catechism and find a prayer which claims it never fails. I pray it. I want my Aunt Annie and I pray that she may come back.

  I know God won’t deliver. He won’t deliver on that sort of prayer and what I’m doing by praying it is blaspheming: kicking his godly and his god-awful shins. He didn’t help me in the secret garden, and I think he couldn’t anyway; I think that whatever I saw that day was more powerful than any bewhiskered prayer-book God, simpering in a white robe: his holy palms held apart, as if He were sizing up a plank. Why didn’t he try, though? He could have done something. He could have showed willing. I wanted him to manifest, and own me, take charge. But he never turned up, in the secret garden; the old bugger never got out of bed. Now, a graceless being, abandoned, I pray silly stuff to spite him. You have these so-called prayers that always work; on the other hand, you know that the past can’t be recalled. Time doesn’t flow backward; all the scientists say so.

  Soon afterward, leaving school at twelve o’clock, I hurtle straight downhill, down the carriage drive and across the road. It is a main road, and the carriage drive comes out on a straight run between two deep bends. But there is little traffic, none of it fast: who would need to speed toward Hadfield?

  I escape by inches. I look back, to the long black car that has squealed to a halt; I shudder once, and bolt for home.

  Big girls have turned back; they are screaming. They pounce on me, as I try to zigzag past them; I want to run up the road to Bankbottom, but they won’t let me. I go rigid; they half-lift me and drag me back toward the scene of the incident, my heels scraping the ground. The driver has put his window down, and is leaning out of it. He is a man with a bald dome, sleek wings of hair at the sides of his head. My own head is ducked by a big girl’s palm, and my face is thrust toward his; he wants to see me, they want to exhibit me. He is shaking. Did you not see me, he says? He is not angry, but guilty, aghast; he is a stranger. His fingers are curling around the wheel to control their quiver. Did you not see me? I pity him. There is cold sweat on his forehead, like the sweat of death.

  I am tugging to be away. My child compeers are gathered—well, trust them to be in on a drama! Others are pouring down the drive, so are teachers and nuns. Two big girls have me by the wrists, and are trying to persuade me back up the drive to the school. In silence I pull away from them, teeth clenched. I pull, they pull, till I am in danger of being divided, like the child in the judgment of Solomon. They are fifteen years old, witch great brawny arms, with the woody scent of motherhood rushing from their pores and enveloping me. I make a plot, I devise a ploy; I allow myself to be drawn forward, sweetly, then I spring into the air and hurl myself backward to the length of my arms. Their grips yield: I run. All I want to do is run: to 56 Bankbottom, to my grandma. Inside I’m howling with rage. I’m alive, what’s the problem? What’s new? I live and die by inches.

  My grandma is giving me beans on toast. She sinks on one knee to toast the bread before the fire. I love this meal; but today it dries in my throat. I cannot swallow. Her puzzled face swims after me as I creep back to school for the afternoon.

  Next day—it takes time for the news to reach her—comes the rant from Mrs. Stevens. I am shouted at and held up as an example of a person nearly dead, nearly dead by my own ignorant self-willed dashing. And what do they say at home, what do they have to say about it all, hm, hm? I sit in a sullen, snarling silence. My “best friend” Bernadette raises her hand and says, “Miss, she’s not told ’em.”

  Not told ’em? What? Not carried home to my grandmother the news that I am just a foot or eighteen inches from being ground into the tarmacadam, my arms fluttering and my neck snapped like a pigeon’s? A long “aw—hh” from the class is shouted down by Mrs. Stevens. Now I am accused of being a deceiver, as well as nearly dead. My “best friend” whispers that I’ll have to tell it in Confession: it’s worse than a lie, she says. And before the week is out, a distant relative, seldom seen, turns up at Bankbottom with a highly colored account of the occasion: the screech of tires, the burned rubber on the road, the cry of nuns, the preemptive tolling of church bells.

  This is a child’s life. You have no rights, over your life or dea
th. Every event that happens to you is appropriated by others, who think they know better than you do what is going on in your head. So don’t speak, even under threat, especially under threat; don’t feed them information they can use against you. In the court of public opinion you’re sentenced: toll the dead bell.

  I have my own courtroom, my own trial. A noose for Mrs. Stevens. A noose for my distant relative. A noose for my “best friend.” A noose for Mother Malachy, headmistress of my school, who stood at the gate, gloating over the drama, and propelled those great girls down the drive to tear me apart. But grace for the driver. Grace for the great girls. Grace for me, running; grace for my sealed lips; for my grandma, kneeling before the fire. Except there’s no point in praying for grace or asking for it anymore, since God is obviously looking but not looking in my direction.

  Now that Grandad was retired, he had more time for testing me on spellings. First every day he oversaw my dinner, indulging me—take that piece of the loaf, it is what you prefer. Let’s see you eat this cake; this kind of cake is what we call a Savoy. My sad and nauseous days gave him the more excuse for ingenuity, carving an apple into slices, and laying it out on a plate, tempting and sugared.

  But a day came when he felt his age, and mine too, and then he led me up the steep stair to the garret, a room whistling with cold. There were white planks underfoot, and standing in the middle of the room, under the skylight, was a rabbit hutch. And in it were books.

  Their pages were crisp and sallow, nibbled at the edges by time, or perhaps by rabbits. Their covers, once green, burgundy, and navy blue, now inclined to the condition of black, so ancient and tarry that I thought it would come off on my fingers: not that I gave a bugger, excuse me Father for swearing. I wanted books like a vampire wants blood. My daddy, Henry, took me to the Hadfield library, where there was one bookcase for children, and I had read it upside down and inside out. I had read the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion, and I thought that one day the librarian would notice how I had been depleting them and tear my ticket up.

  My own bedroom at Brosscroft was a room where the sun shone, the only room in the house in which you were safe to put anything down without it being sucked into phantomland. Such books as we had were dumped there. Some had come to Jack in the course of his life: a set of yarns called Out with Romany, country lore and country life. Looking into it made me ask, was Hadfield the country, or the town? It seemed to occupy some no-man’s-land, some place not well-defined in any book. There were very few streets, but very few trees. There were no badgers, curlews, kestrels. There were starlings who settled, their group mind instructing them, with their private glamour which shone out when the sun lit their sequined wings. Scattering, startled, their beaks darting, they bobbed about like debutantes searching for the buffet; even the most hard-hearted women fed them, with crumbs ground from the heels of loaves.

  I read Romany; I learned to love the hedgehog, and the ways of sneaky fox. I read the horrible, foxed, moldy volume of Tennyson, someone’s Sunday School prize: Mariana in the moated grange. I read Steps to Literature: Book Five. It was a small book, its pages yellow and decaying, its greasy cover stamped with the word “Specimen.” Look inside: the subtitle was “Readings on Europe.” It was a book of extracts. I read them all.

  “In a certain village in La Mancha, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen … .”

  “It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles … .”

  “Once she did hold the gorgeous East in fee …”

  “I have sat for hours at my window inhaling the sweetness of the garden, and musing on the chequered fortunes of those whose history is dimly shadowed out in the elegant memorials around …”

  I am mad about this book. Like Washington Irving at the Alhambra, I issue forth at midnight to get it. I wake up before dawn to read its single scene from Julius Caesar: the scene where Antony pitches the mob against Brutus. The scene is prefaced by an extract from Plutarch, so I am keyed in on the story line. I like the story, all of it: the violence, the polemic. I wish I had written it myself. Brutus, of course, was in the right. Antony had the best use of words. Beware words; beware the slick. “If you have tears …” Beware the sentimental crowd.

  So this, I think, is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a thing which I have heard people mention. In my opinion, it deserves all the applause people heap on it. I learn the death of Caesar by heart. I murmur it, in times of stress, as the pious murmur the Rosary.

  One day, my breath held, hurrying, I go down into the yellow room, my old bedroom shared with my father. I look in the drawer of the little cabinet beside his bed. There I find my book of tales of King Arthur, which has been missing for as long as I can remember. I am overjoyed. I fall back into the stories. I now like the ones I used to miss out. I like the Grail. I imagine how the knight lies rigid in his bed while the chalice, half hidden in its veils and airy wrappings, glides slowly across his field of vision. In the back bedroom of my grandmother’s house at Bankbottom—my mother’s old bedroom, an empty room where I am allowed to play—I have sometimes seen similar shadows, objects that are unnameable, that float and are not solid, objects through which the wall behind them can be glimpsed. They seem to me domestic things, plates and cups, bowls: as if they were echoes or shadows of the objects in daily use in the kitchen below. In time I realize that anything in this room can become translucent. I spend a great deal of time there, mostly alone, pursuing no particular game, just being. Sometimes my old friend Evelyn comes to play. We peddle backward on an old child’s bicycle that leans by the wall. My grandmother labors up the stairs with our favorite meal of banana sandwiches. The room, when Evelyn is in it, is entirely solid.

  Winter: it is dark by half past four, and the curtains are drawn in the front room at Brosscroft. The evening is silent; Jack has gone to nightschool; my father, Henry, is somewhere else, at the jazz club or the library. By the light of the low-slumbering fire the brothers are undressed, and taken upstairs to bed. Their clothes come off in three effortful tugs, from their shoes and socks upward. It is my task to pick up after them, to strip vest from T-shirt and turn the arms of their jerseys the right way out: then uncrease and smooth them, spread them out to life size, as if I were making little boys from wool. I shake out their tiny socks from their scattered shoes, line up the four shoes in pairs, then put everything tidily away in a deep drawer by the fireside. Sometimes when they have gone, I sit gently on their rocking horse, which is really a springing horse, which bounces on a metal frame; I am too old for this toy, and the thought that I might be seen riding it brings a blush to my cheeks.

  I am nine; knight errantry is behind me, and my progress is complete, from hero to zero. I am going to become a woman, though I cannot imagine of what sort. A little girl, flat-chested, can’t imagine her body will ever change. One day she becomes conscious of the brushing of her blouse against her skin. She puts her fingers there—I do—and feels enraged at the thought of what is to come. The whole process is beyond control. You have no choice in it. My body is getting the better of me, though people seem to feel I am responsible for what it does. Now I am worse than blushing Margaret; my small blood vessels are unstable, and if anyone speaks to me, if anyone looks at me, my shame thuds crimson into my face. I can’t help this, and the more I try to help it the worse it goes; it seems to drive my mother and Jack into a frenzy of irritation.

  I listen; above I hear ponderous footsteps, I know the boys are not in bed yet. Cautiously, I let out my breath; I let the horse spring, beneath me: I trot it for a quarter of a mile. My fingers brush its reins and bridle, most unconvincingly rendered in painted metal. I raise my eyes, and they rest on the drawn curtains of our front room at 20 Brosscroft. Against a background of silver gray, the curtains have a repeating design—of windows.

  They are Mediterranean windows, with gay blinds and plants spilling
from pots and wrought-iron baskets. I appraise them; my cold northern soul flips in my chest. I want to live behind those windows and to be warm. There are two patterns of window, one rectangular and one arched, and I can’t choose between them; the rectangle is more elegant, the arch more enticing. At 20 Brosscroft, firelight gutters, drafts suck at the flames, the Glass Place rattles, the garden yields up its dead secrets. But at the Alhambra, as Steps to Literature assures me, “the garden beneath my window is gently lighted up, the orange and citron trees are tipped with silver, the fountains sparkle in the moonbeams, and even the blush of the rose is faintly visible.” I imagine my life behind those windows, the texture of my life: I carry the sun inside me as I move through the shaded, scent-drenched rooms.