Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “She told you to phone the police?”

  “Yes, and she was right. I should have called the police. But what would I have said? We hadn’t seen anyone in the garden or in the house. There were no footprints. Someone had got into the garden, found the cat, and killed it. It was terrible. An act of brutality. But we couldn’t add anything to what the police already knew.”

  There was now a lot of noise in the courtroom. I heard a woman say something about irresponsibility. Yes, I know now how stupid it was not to have reported the cat’s death. The police might have been able to trace the wire around his legs or find some fingerprints on the gate. But at the time Pepys was just a dead cat. None of us knew how it was all going to spiral. That there were to be human lives at stake as well as animal ones.

  “How did she seem—emotionally?”

  “She seemed agitated and upset.”

  “Was she fond of the cat?”

  “Yes, I think she was. We all were. Pepys was a very affectionate cat.”

  Distortions. A few words here and there. A few words to pull a story in new directions. It doesn’t take significant untruths to do that, just a few words like drops of arsenic into wine. Why did I do it? I had no plan. But I had an instinct to do what I could to slow the process down. I couldn’t do much. But I could be a stone in the stream. I would be like one of Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators, I thought. I would be seductive and mendacious in the courtroom.

  You learned about lying on the river when you were working as a punt chauffeur. To lie on, to lie under, to lie close, to lie in wait for.

  That was around the time when we first met. You had a postdoctoral fellowship; I had just started working on my Ph.D. I knew who you were, of course; you had something of a reputation. Not for womanising, but for general misrule. Then there were the stories people told about how brilliant you were. People always wanted to talk about your brilliance as if it explained your misrule. Someone who knew you, a geneticist, I think, had used phrases like cutting edge and paradigm shifts and, yes, everyone used the word clever about you. Elizabeth said that once: “Oh yes,” she said, “my clever son.” It had a sting in it, that word clever.

  In your postdoctoral days you had short hair, which made you look aggressive. Funny that. Most undergraduates had long hair. We were at a pub called the Fort St. George. It was a Friday night in October and I was with Kit. We’d bought our drinks and were looking for a table. There weren’t any; the pub was dark, candlelit, like a series of smoky caves by the river. Kit saw Sarah sitting with you and Anthony in a corner by the fire—the best seats—and she walked over and introduced us. Anthony found some stools.

  When I told you I was doing a history Ph.D. you laughed and said you were a historian too. “Ask me about any aspect of Cambridge history,” you said. “I am a punt chauffeur, the very best kind of historian. I know everything there is to know about that stretch of the river and the colleges along it. Just that—nothing more.”

  “I guess,” I said, “that makes you a liminal historian with a fluvial specialism.” Kit glared a warning at me, but I was thinking of you standing on the end of the long sliver of a boat, pole in hand, slipping it deftly into the depths of the water, pushing against it, muscles flexed, propelling the boat forward.

  “I like that,” you said, and repeated the phrase. “A liminal historian. Limen. Threshold. A historian of thresholds. Go ahead, Lydia Brooke, ask me any question. A pound for every question I can’t answer.” You laid out five pound coins on the table. Anthony went to get another round of drinks. There were oars from famous boats lining the walls like primitive weapons. Crossed.

  “OK,” I said. “When was Trinity founded?”

  “My college. Far too easy: 1546. Founded by Henry the Eighth.”

  “How are we to know if that’s right?” Kit asked.

  “It just is. You’ll have to believe me.”

  “Hah,” said Kit. “Trust Cameron Brown? That will be easy.”

  You ignored her taunts, downed your pint, and pulled off your sweater, brushing the sleeve across the candle flame. It didn’t catch. Sarah caught her breath. Her eyes were on me. What was she looking for? What was she looking at? Me caught in the beam of your charm. I dared not catch her eye. What did she see that I hadn’t even begun to guess? I reached for your cigarette box.

  “May I roll one?” I leaned forward to smell the acrid fragrance of the tobacco. A gesture to give me something to do, I thought, to give me a reason to get out of your gaze, but that was not how you wanted it. You were slightly drunk.

  “Please do. I love watching women roll cigarettes. Especially if they have long fingers like yours.” Even in this low light I knew my rising colour would be visible to Sarah. I pulled out a cigarette paper from the packet.

  Kit rounded on you. “I’ve heard you lot down there on the punts, making up stories. The dates are almost always wrong.”

  “My dates are never wrong,” you said. “I take a great deal of pride in the accuracy of my dates. I just embroider some of my stories, that’s all. Improve on history. The tourists want to be entertained, so we entertain them.”

  “Does anyone ever challenge you?” I asked, putting the rolled cigarette to my lips. You leaned forward and lit it with the candle from the table. One of my hairs caught the candle flame and hissed.

  “Not so far. Academics wouldn’t dream of hiring a punt chauffeur, so we’re usually safe from challenge. Plausibility is the key.”

  Sarah was scornful and irritated. “Plausibility? That’s ridiculous. Most of your stories aren’t at all plausible. You just romanticise everything. That’s what the tourists buy into. They’ll never challenge anything you say so long as it’s beautiful or fascinating.” She turned to me. “He made up a story about Trinity Great Court being haunted by the smell of oysters. Told the tourists that Great Court was haunted by the ghost of a fifteen-year-old oyster seller who’d been Byron’s lover and whom he’d taken swimming in the well there. Now how plausible is that?”

  “She caught a cold and died, leaving the smell of oysters perpetually in the dusk of Trinity Great Court,” Cameron interrupted self-mockingly. “But it’s almost true. Byron did smuggle girls into his rooms at Trinity. As often as he could. He was an iconoclast. God. Imagine how suffocated Byron must have been here. So the spirit of my story is true.”

  Anthony passed me another pint of bitter from the tray he carried from the bar, and a pickled egg in a paper cake case.

  “Ever had one of these before?” he asked, grinning. “Speciality of the house. Egg, vinegar, and beer. Perfect combination. As is Cameron’s story. The smell of oysters is an objective correlative for sexual repression. It’s perfect.”

  “Objective correlative?”

  “An object that stands for something complicated—an emotion, a knowledge, an instinct. The ghost oyster seller is the return of the repressed, haunting the court with the smell of oysters. What’s repressed in cerebral Cambridge is sex, except that it’s everywhere, because it’s repressed. In the stacks of the library, in public toilets, alleyways. Drive it out and it’ll find its own corners. I saw a group of Chinese tourists in Great Court the other evening at dusk sniffing the air. Trying to smell oysters. Brilliant. They’d been on Cameron’s boat, I’d swear.”

  You were on a roll. “The point is that my oyster-seller ghost works as a historical metaphor. My oyster-seller ghost is a metaphor. For a tourist, she’s much more eloquent than any dry-as-dust history book that tells them about what it was like to be a student in the early nineteenth century and all its manifestations of sexual repression. There’s a plaque over in that far corner there, a page from a guidebook for undergraduates published in 1807. It reads: ‘Suspect danger from…those women…who haunt the lanes, and ends, and corners of the town, who are Hebes at night, and Hecates in the morning.’ Isn’t that great? Hebes at night and Hecates in the morning. Beauty and the beast. That’s my kind of night. Sounds more like an advert than a warning to me. What
are you, Lydia Brooke? A Hebe or a Hecate?” I’d had enough of the games now.

  “She’s a Hecate every time,” said Kit, preparing for a fight. Kit would say that. She had her theories about people. No room for Hebes in her world. All her people, men and women, she would say, were Hecates in one way or another, even if they travelled in disguise, even if they didn’t know they belonged to the Hecate tribe.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “Hecate was a witch. I’m not a witch.” I sounded like a child being taunted in the playground.

  “You work on witchcraft, though, don’t you?” Was Sarah enjoying my discomfort? You had fallen silent. Your hand was on my thigh. I couldn’t move it without being seen. Why did that make me feel guilty?

  “Not exactly. I’m writing my dissertation on the classification of spirit manifestations in the seventeenth century. That doesn’t make me a witch.”

  “And how would you classify a ghost who smells of oysters?” Anthony asked. “You have to admit, it’s a stroke of genius.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” you said. “The point is that oysters have no smell. But that doesn’t seem to matter.”

  That was 1988; sixteen years ago. You and Sarah were already married, though you didn’t tell most people. Six years later you had a Trinity fellowship, a string of accolades and awards, your own lab, and two children, and you were finding your way to my bed most afternoons. Yes, dates were always important for you because, once we were lovers, storytelling became your great art, the way you kept the machinery of two lives moving. If you weren’t already a genius in rewriting the daily acts of the present, you became one. The great skill in lying is not lying, you’d say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.

  “The train’s just pulled in at Cambridge Station,” you’d say, phoning Sarah from my bed. “But the taxi queue’s pretty long. It might take me another forty minutes to get home.” You’d make up the names of conferences so that we could travel across Europe. You told her that cars broke down. Trains broke down. The lab went through yet another crisis. Friends got sick. Did Anthony ever know that you’d used him as an alibi for almost two years? There was no bravado in the fabrications, nor were they an act of display. They were just necessary.

  You learned to lie on the river. You lied in my bed and from my bed.

  Fourteen

  After I’d heard the phone ring three times I realised I wasn’t even sure what I was going to ask Dilys Kite. I told myself it was idle and harmless curiosity, but I knew this was an act of desperation—I could see that desperation in my face in the hall mirror, in the way I was clutching the phone. Someone had to be able to tell me what was going on and how it—the lights, the man on the bridge, the cat’s death—all fitted together. Someone who wouldn’t laugh. And Dilys had been there with Elizabeth in those last months from July, when Will left, until September, when Elizabeth died. She must know something, I thought, be able to explain something.

  Nonetheless, I had more doubts than certainties about what I was doing even then, even with the phone in my hand. I could always put the phone down right now, I thought; I could always pretend I had the wrong number. I needed to hear that strange high voice again, the precise syllables. I had, in fact, almost put the phone back onto the receiver when I heard her voice calling my name, sharply but from a distance, as if I had fainted and she was waking me, slapping my face hard, waving smelling salts under my nostrils. Lydia. Lydia? She came into focus. Her voice became louder. I put the phone back to my ear.

  “Yes?” I said. How strange. It was me who was supposed to be calling her, and in control of the questions. Now everything was inverted.

  “Lydia Brooke. We expected you much earlier than this,” she said. I saw I had soil under my fingernails from digging the little grave down near the roses. The mirror framed a face with pale skin and darkened, hollowed-out eyes. Lydia was looking thin.

  “I’m sorry. It’s late to be calling,” I began.

  “Will you take tea?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “On Wednesday, when you visit. You’ve forgotten?”

  “Forgotten what?”

  “You have forgotten.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” I had begun to think I might hang up after all. This was like a Pinter conversation—jigsaw shards that didn’t seem to fit together, with so much more underneath. I remembered the tattoo on her right arm, the chiselled hair. Who was this woman to be talking to me like this? What was I doing ringing her? I repeated myself: “I don’t understand. Have we made some kind of appointment? This is Lydia Brooke—we met at Elizabeth Vogelsang’s funeral a few weeks ago. I am doing some work for…I am doing some work on Elizabeth’s book…”

  Did she perhaps think I was somebody else?

  She continued. Still in control but more emollient now. “Yes, hello, Lydia Brooke. We know you are working on Elizabeth’s book. That’s why you are calling.”

  “I don’t understand. How could you know that?”

  “If you have forgotten, of course you won’t understand. You want to come to see us. And we would very much like to see you. Wednesday would be best for us. Wednesday afternoon at around four o’clock. Would that suit you?”

  In the mirror, the woman who looked like Lydia Brooke put her hand to the back of her neck. The surface of the mirror was so old that its glass was both flecked and watery. I watched how its rippled surfaces distorted her face as Dilys talked. Haunted, willful, maddening, the light was playing tricks again. As I watched, the surface of the mirror began to undulate, shoaling, burnished, as if it were a pool into which I sought my reflection at the very moment that someone behind me had dropped a stone into the silvered water. Someone was behind her, or between her and the mirror, his face overlaid on hers, mouth open, asking a question that she can’t hear. The man in the red gown, with the white hair. The man with the question on his lips. He was there in the ripples of the mirror, at the centre of a series of waved circles rippling outwards from a glass centre, her face and hair and eyes over his, washing outwards to the chipped oval frame. Then it was gone, her face all back in place, still, sharp, outlined.

  I blinked, but my eyes would not clear. They hurt. It was as if I was now looking through water.

  “How did I get here?” I asked Dilys.

  “Precisely.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That is precisely what we will help you find out,” she said, briskly. “How you got here. Do you know where to find us?”

  Elizabeth’s address book was lying open in front of me on the hall table. I had marked the place with the snail-bitten doilied sheet from her notebook.

  “Prickwillow, River View, Padnel Bank?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Prickwillow is up past Ely—you’ll need to take the A10 north and then take the ring road underneath Ely and out to the east, taking the signs to Soham and then to a village called Queen Adelaide. Take the road to Prickwillow, then turn left into Padnel Bank just before you reach the bridge over the river. We’re about halfway down the row of bungalows.” I wrote down the details. Couldn’t trust my eyes or my memory now. Padnel Bank. Prickwillow.

  We? Us? I wondered who Dilys Kite might share a house with. Husband, sister, a family? Perhaps they all lived in the village—one great spilling family, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—and the half-blind clairvoyant. The Happy Family Kites: Mister Kite, Mistress Kite, Miss Kite, and Master Kite, flight-sight makers. But perhaps Dilys, with her tattoo and twinsets, was very undistinguished in Prickwillow, just one of the local characters. Perhaps she organised coffee mornings and church fetes, arranged the church flowers, minded the grandchildren, played darts in the pub on Wednesday evenings. No, not darts. A half-blind person with psychic powers couldn’t play darts, surely? But perhaps she baked cakes. Apple and blackberry pies. Or sewed lavender dolls for the local crafts market.

  In Newton’s time a
half-blind woman who had visions would be branded a witch, hounded, taunted by day, visited by night along the back wooded paths. She would have lived on the outskirts or beyond the village boundaries, in the woods, where she could be called upon by villagers seeking exorcisms, spells, and potions. Love potions for already lovesick girls. Chants to quiet the spirits of dead children who had settled on their mothers’ hearts. Spells for the harvest, for the spirits of the corn or the sky or the waters. Incantations. Predictions. Tell me when the rain will fall. When will my mother die? Why has my crop failed? Give me a potion to appease the spirits. Give me a poison for the man who has taken my daughter’s maidenhood. Make me a rainstorm.

  “I’m frightened,” I said, speaking a thought I didn’t know I had.

  “Of course you are,” she said in a motherly tone. “You would be very foolish not to be frightened now. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Can you explain? Will you be able to explain?” I had been drawing on the piece of paper near the phone—scrolled shapes, triangles, boxes, joined by cross-hatched shapes around the few words I had written. But there among all the scrolls was the word NABED. Capitalised. The word I had seen on the green metal hoarding near the Leper Chapel on the day of Elizabeth’s funeral. The first word of the coded sequence that Newton had written on the flyleaf of his notebook:

  Nabed Efyhik, Wfnzo Cpmkfe.

  “Do you know what NABED means?” I asked Dilys just as she was bringing the phone call to a close.

  “If you want to ask questions you will have to bring something of the person you want to speak to.”

  “Something? What kind of something?”

  “Something that belonged to them. Something that carries them.”