Walking with Ghosts

by Baker, John

  ‘And you must be Naiomi,’ she said. ‘Naiomi Leaver.’ They were eventually settled in the leaded bay window. Antique Royal Doulton tea service, probably made by the original Sir Henry. One of those tiered cake stands with scones, tiny silver knives and forks, and cherry jam in an earthenware pot. Marie sipped the tea and swore she wouldn’t touch the scones.

  ‘Did you know India a long time?’ Marie asked.

  ‘I knew her for ever,’ Naiomi Leaver told her. ‘We were at school in Cheltenham, we learned to ski together in Switzerland. Our families were connected, I don’t know how, some dealings between my father and India’s. You know how these things are? Wheels within wheels.’ She leaned forward and swung the tiered cake stand towards Marie. ‘Do eat these scones, won’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’ Marie took one of them, sliced it in two and reached for the cherry jam. What the fuck.

  ‘And you kept in touch?’ she said.

  ‘Very much so,’ Naiomi Leaver confirmed. ‘I saw her the day before she disappeared. We had lunch together, here.’

  ‘And her husband, Edward? You knew him as well?’

  Naiomi smiled. ‘Knew,’ she said. ‘Past tense? I still do know Edward Blake. I’m sure India has gone on to better things.’

  ‘You don’t approve of him?

  ‘I don’t like him, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t like the way he treated India. His women.’

  ‘You knew about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Naiomi. ‘I knew about that. And India knew as well.’

  Marie finished off the scone and looked at another one.

  ‘Please eat them,’ said Naiomi.

  Marie took the one from the middle tier; looked a little fatter than the one at the bottom. ‘You said “women” - plural.’

  ‘Yes. There are currently two. In the past there have been others.’

  ‘And if India knew about these women, I can take it that their marriage was not particularly happy?’

  ‘Surprisingly,’ said Naiomi, ‘it wasn’t a particularly unhappy marriage. Edward likes to keep a couple of scrubbers on the go. He gets off on that kind of thing. Lower-class women, young ones, easy to exploit. I suppose they’ll do anything for a fiver or a pack of cigarettes. India would have minded more if he’d had one woman, a love affair.’

  ‘Are you seriously telling me that India didn’t mind?’

  Naiomi smiled. ‘Yes. She didn’t know that Edward paid the rent for their flats. She would have drawn the line at that. She was keen on counting pennies, was India. Always used to quote that thing about counting the pennies and the pounds looking after themselves. Got it from her father. But as long as she thought it was just sex she didn’t mind. Took the pressure off her.’

  ‘And India,’ said Marie. ‘Did she have any extra-marital affairs?’

  ‘I wondered that during the last few weeks. Before she disappeared. But when I asked her about it, she denied it. I think she’d have told me if she was. We talked about men about sex, about other girlfriends. If something like that had happened, if she’d met someone, she’d have told me.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  Naiomi shook her head. ‘I’m fairly sure.’

  Marie didn’t remember it happening, but when she looked at the cake stand it was bare. The cherry jam was gone, too the pot which had held it was as if it had been licked clean. She dabbed at the crumbs on her plate.

  ‘Have you any idea who killed India Blake?’ she asked her hostess.

  Naiomi shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I can tell you that India was worried about the amount of insurance Edward took out on her. She said, and this was last year, when he took it out, and she was joking, of course, but she said she thought he might be planning to kill her.’

  13

  Sam shifts his head and takes your hand. He is kneeling on the floor, in front of your chair by the window. He has left the door open so you can hear Lady Day singing, ‘I’ll Get By As Long As I Have You’. Johnny Hodges’ alto saxophone oozing a warm, refined balm. When the song is finished Sam looks up into your eyes. ‘It isn’t worth worrying about, Dora,’ he says. ‘It’s all in the past.’

  You stick a smile on your face and ruffle his hair. The past, the present, it is all the same to you. The future, too. Your life is not going to continue for long. The past and the present, they are the only realities, and they are impossible to separate.

  ‘Are you here?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘Yes, Sam. I’m here with you.’ The past is not a forbidden country. It is familiar territory. It is not a landscape you love, Dora, but it is a landscape you know. The present is unknown. It is the land in which Sam is king, and in which you feel yourself a guest. He loves you, this Sam. You have no doubt about that, and you are happy to be his guest. Only, only... you cannot help feeling that happiness has come too late. If he had arrived ten years earlier you would not have been a guest, you would have been a queen.

  He twists the ring on your finger. ‘You remember Diana’s coming today?’ he says.

  ‘Oh.’ You don’t remember, Dora. You don’t know what day it is. You who knew everything. Now you think about it, there is a vague memory. Sam will be going to work; and Diana will come to make sure you don’t fall out of bed.

  ‘It’s Geordie’s birthday.’ You bite your tongue as the words leave your lips. It is not Geordie’s birthday.

  Sam smiles and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ll be seeing Geordie, but it’s not his birthday.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ You remember now. Geordie’s birthday was a long time ago. It was in the spring. You went for a walk with him and Janet and Sam in the park. Now it is autumn, soon to be winter. Saturday. Something always happens on Saturday.

  You close your eyes and put one foot into the world of sleep. This is as close as you get these days. In the real world (if it is real) Sam releases your hand and gets to his feet. You are aware of him standing over you, and though your eyes are closed you can see the expression on his face. It is an expression of tenderness. It is an expression that streams out of him and into you, that settles on the surfaces of your body and seeps through the pores and into the bloodstream, your bones, into every crevice of your body, and warms you.

  He stands still while part of you drinks in his life forces, and the other half of you walks in dreams. Large limpets cling to your body, beneath the skin. As you take strength from Sam, they appropriate it, using it for themselves. They suck you dry, becoming fatter and firmer while you become thinner, frailer; they light up like beacons, illuminating the desert of your body. They have no purpose, Dora. They are insane.

  Sam moves towards the door. He stands for a few minutes, looking back at you before going downstairs. You can read his mind. He is happy that you sleep. He hopes you will gain strength and live for ever. But that is not how it will be.

  You slip into darkness and the events of your life unfold themselves in reverse order. As time regresses you become lighter and younger. Everything is reversed. You are hanging m the pear tree while Arthur brushes the flies from your eaten eyes. You are a girl in the countryside leaping a stile; you leave the ground and fly, you do not come down on the other side, your movement is arrested in the air. You leap the stile for ever and ever. You never come down. You hover in a rush of leaping skirts and legs, your head thrown back and the wind in your hair, completely free of the earth. And down below there is everyone you ever knew, alive or dead, and they look up with amazement, waiting. Waiting.

  This is your private land, Dora. Yours alone. A land you share with no one. Not even Sam. Because you have beaten the limpets and the eggs. They might eat you alive now, they might suck the life out of you, but it will do them no good, because they cannot live without you. When they take the last ounce of strength, you will be released. Then there will be Arthur again, quiet and repentant; your mother writing the history of the stars, your
father with his yellow skin, and Dylan Thomas, too, sucking figs. You will be separated no longer, not even from Sam. He will remain behind, but you will wait for him beyond time.

  You open your eyes when the large disc under your arm goes into spasm. It passes quickly and you stare at the avenue. The old trees beginning to lose their golden leaves. You strain your ears for the sound of Sam downstairs, but there is nothing. The house is silent. You wait and watch the avenue.

  Diana trips along the opposite pavement. She has developed a strange, quirky walk, swinging both arms in the same direction at once, not forwards and backwards, but from side to side like a sailor. She’s been walking like that for years now, since she was eighteen. It started as a nonsense and has developed into a facet of character. You wish she wouldn’t do it, but you don’t say so. She would take no notice, anyway. She does what she wants to do. She is independent, thank God.

  Diana does not look up at your window. She thinks you might be there, and then she would have to wave. Or perhaps she does not even think of looking up? Which is it, Dora? Is Diana avoiding you or not? You do not know. You cannot make up your mind. Questions like these make you tired.

  She passes out of sight, below the house, and you hear Sam’s voice in the hall.

  ‘Diana. You’re early.’

  ‘How is she?’ Diana’s voice is bland, but with something elastic in it. A masculine voice.

  ‘Sleeping at the moment,’ says Sam. ‘A bad night, but she’s better now.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t let me stop you. I’ll check she’s all right.’

  You count her footsteps on the stairs. Nine, ten, eleven, and the handle turns on the door. It is your daughter, Dora. She comes over to you, her hair in an uncombed afro style. Maybe it’s not called that any more. You don’t know, and you’re not going to ask. She wears no make-up, and the hem of her skirt dips and rises in all the wrong places. Her shoes are like boats. She puts her face close to yours and pretends to kiss you. Fifty-odd years too late you feel a pang of pity for your father.

  ‘I hear you had a bad night.’

  ‘Not too bad. Sam was with me.’

  Diana flings an old doctors’ bag she uses as a handbag on to the bed, and Barney lifts his head from the quilt to see who is disturbing his rest. ‘You’re a lucky woman,’ Diana says. ‘To have a man like that.’ She smiles and sits on the floor at your feet. She pulls her skirt over her knees and crosses her legs. You catch a glimpse of her knickers, and your memory goes spinning back in time.

  She was twelve when you began the affair with Smiley Thompson. You had started work again, lecturing in History at the University of York. Smiley was a senior lecturer, ten years older than you, a small man with glasses and a "honing cranium. He was married, of course. Everyone after Arthur was either married or passing through. Smiley was married, and between girlfriends.

  A few days after the Iron Lady sank the General Belgrano Smiley stopped you on the steps of the library. ‘Dora, I’m getting a petition together over this fiasco in the Falklands. Would you like to help?’

  Help? He is asking you to help, Dora. Would you like to help Smiley Thompson? Help the children who were blown up on their training ship? You, Dora, who cannot help your daughter, Diana? You, who cannot stop your own son from screaming the night away. Do you want to help?

  ‘Yes, of course. What do you want me to do?’

  Not much really. He wants to talk. He wants you to listen. There are signatures to collect from members of staff, petition forms to draft and duplicate. It is straightforward work, leg work; but if other universities can be pulled in, the weight of an academic statement could push the government towards a negotiated settlement.

  And listen, Dora, to that voice inside. That voice that has murmured away since they cut Arthur down from the pear tree. It is raving away inside your head as you accost your colleagues with the petition. You are useful, Dora. You have a function. Listen to that voice. You are needed. If your children reject you (and they do reject you, Dora), if you can be of no further use to them, at least you can function for the world.

  You enter into a week of change. You wear your head high. After how many years? Smiley is waiting outside the lecture hall for you, he leaves messages, he telephones you in the evening. You are busy, too busy to think or to worry. The past recedes into a dim bundle of events, and as it does So the future unfolds. The days shorten in relation to the vast amount of life you pack into them.

  And though Billy kicks and screams through the night and Diana prowls like a sullen ghost through the house, you are infected by a germ of happiness. Well, that is what you call it during the day. At night you know it is something else. It is an escape. But an animal in a trap tries to escape. It is its nature. You were not the first, Dora. And you will not be the last.

  ‘People are allowed to be happy, Dora,’ Smiley tells you as his hand moves over your knee. You watch his fingers playing with the hem of your skirt, three of them disappear under it, then emerge again and come to a hesitant rest.

  The week has brought you to a small private hotel on the edge of the park. You have passed it hundreds of times, and never given it a second glance. It is where the more athletic staff of the University bring their particularly ambitious female students. Smiley has used the place before, he is known here. He calls the proprietress Julie.

  ‘It’s a place I would not take my wife,’ Smiley explained earlier. ‘A place where two adults can be alone. Where they can relax. Where they can get to know each other.’

  The prude in you was outraged, Dora. But not enough to say so. The lonely woman in you was so much stronger, so much more present, that the other was cast into shadow.

  He was talking about sex. For some time you failed to understand that. How could you have been so dumb? Whose fault was it that you were so dumb? Arthur’s? Your mother’s? You were a widow, the mother of two children.

  But sex had never entered your life. It was an occasional Saturday night occurrence with Arthur. Something else he did to you, something else you had to submit to. It never occurred to you that it might be a pleasure. You never thought about it seriously. Dylan Thomas enjoyed it, apparently, but he was a man.

  And Smiley was a man. He chased you around for a week, every time you turned a corner he was there. He enthused about the number of signatures you had collected. He took you by the shoulders and laughed, kissed you on both cheeks when the University of Durham asked for a supply of the petition forms. He sent a bunch of daffodils to your door with a note: Thanks for all your help. Love, Smiley.

  And then it was sex. It had not occurred to you, Dora, but you were quick enough to respond. He was not another Arthur, after all. He was Smiley. He was a compassionate and concerned human being, and he had lifted a veil for you, shown you a glimpse of another life, an involved and busy life which would release you from the guilt of your marriage, your children, and your conscience.

  Poor Dora. Arthur’s ghost is never far away. Living, he was ever present, and now he’s dead you feel his silent gaze every time you look at Smiley Thompson.

  And look at Smiley, Dora. Just look at him with his baggy-knit crew-neck sweater and his paisley-patterned cravat. Look at the shining dome of his head and his huge, almond-shaped eyes: the eyes of a thoroughbred horse. He has dressed for the occasion. He is presenting himself to you, a neatly packaged gift. You notice the broad check of his cotton shirt protruding from the neck of his sweater, his manicured nails, and the stiff whiff of aftershave.

  ‘A girl like you shouldn’t be alone.’ You sip at the gin and tonic and listen to the resonance of his voice. You are not a girl, Dora. He is wrong about that, but you concentrate on the sound, on the deep timbre of his voice, letting it enter you and then recede again to its origin deep within his chest. What he has to say comes back into you again, warm, obliterating the frozen loneliness of your life. Now he swims away again, separate, paisley-patter
ned, silent and Predatory.

  He reaches for your glass and removes it from your hand. The pink flesh beneath his nails pulses bright. He brings his face to yours, his breath beneath your ear. His lips lightly pressing your cheeks, eyes, forehead. His arms enfold you. He whispers hungry words into your hair.

  Your fingers are entangled in the wool of his sweater, and you let your head fall backwards and feel his mouth on your neck, first on one side, then the other. His hand cups your breast and in spite of yourself you hear a long, ancient growl escape from your throat. A growl you never knew you possessed. Smiley cups the other breast and emulates the sound. You laugh nervously, a quiet, conscious laugh that is a counterpoint to the harmony and the rhythm of these two physical bodies. Your laugh is an agony. A quick agony that inserts itself into the ecstasy of the moment.

  Smiley laughs as well, he laughs and growls again from the back of his throat. He pulls apart the folds of your dress and moves down your body. You groan and sigh in response to his movements. You quickly brush unwanted tears from your face and lift his sweater over his head, unknot the cravat, and pick at the buttons on his shirt.

  It is a game, Dora, and you enter into it like a child, like a pup in spring sunlight. Smiley’s body is smooth, and brown, and warm. The texture of his skin ripples beneath your fingers and you discover the spastic quickness of your movements as the heart in your breast heaves and throbs with an ever faster beat.

  Smiley tantalizes. He shows you where he will go, and then recedes, only to advance more slowly on his target. You play the same game, quick to notice every shade, every nuance of pain or pleasure in a stream of breath or half arrested movement. His finger catches the elastic at your waist and releases it. He moves over your thighs and takes your foot in his hands, holding it close to his cheek, brushing the surface of your skin with the tip of his tongue. In a moment he is traversing your thighs again, the heel of his hand grazing the mons Veneris, and then onwards to circle your erect nipples, your lips, your ears, your eyes.