What I have written on the form is not even true. When I said we were going away, and going to the Wall because we had been there before as a family, the therapist did not affirm us. Instead, she leaked out careful phrases: the acceptance of routine and a new reality, and looking forwards not backwards, and accepting life as it is with all its mess. But we did not listen: this is the kind of talk to make Simon shudder, and even I, who wanted to go to therapy, am sick of it now. The therapist herself is very tidy, with shiny reading glasses and small, wine-coloured cashmere cardigans, and so is her beige sofa and her carefully neutral room, and I don’t believe that her life contains anything as messy as Alison, who spends most of the sessions hunkered forward on her new boots, picking her pink fringe, picking her painful, pierced nose, sighing like a Border collie kept too long inside.
I tried to tell the therapist about taking Alison to the Rollright Stones when she was six, carsick and whingey, how Simon brought two coat hangers with him. He paced Alison across the scrubby ground between the small mossy stones. He was tall as a druid in his old anorak, she was tiny as a toadstool in her red coat, and sure enough the magic worked: the unfolded coat hangers twitched and crossed in her small fat hands each time she crossed the ley line. They walked across the stones a hundred times and she budded out of her dark mood like a snowdrop from the earth and believed she was a good witch for a year.
‘But Alison is a different girl, now,’ said the therapist. And she is, but that smaller snowdrop girl is somewhere inside her, I believe, and I am sure Simon believes too. I think our beliefs are important and with all that is going on, arson and social workers and therapy-speak, they have been too much overlooked. Simon and I may not believe in God, but we do believe in History. As Simon says, the past is not an escape, it is a world full of lessons; where else can we learn? Simon believes the past heals. He has a particular feeling for the past embodied in a landscape, like the Rollright Stones. He says: landscape has its own mysteries and cures. There are places whose mere names make him push up his glasses and run his fingers through his hair and it makes me happy, correspondingly happy, to see him do this. We say the names together: Malmesbury; Caerleon; Glastonbury Tor.
Simon says: ‘Hadrian’s Wall is better than China. It’s as good as the pyramids.’ And I agree. So we are going, and I write on the form: This is an educational destination, which is true, and, I will supervise homework, which is a lie, and I sign. Probably none of this is necessary, neither the lies nor the truths. Probably, the form will go through on the nod. Probably, the school will be pleased to be rid of Alison for a day or two, in the same way that Alison will accept even this trip to get away from school, and this thought, that someone does not want my daughter, cuts to the core of me.
So we go to the Wall. We drive, and it is a long way and a lonely way, with Simon silent for all of it and Alison plugged into her headphones and peering at her phone with her hood over her head, even when we stop to eat at the service stations. And I have forgotten how, when it rains in the North East, it rains like television, a broken one, the windscreen nothing but dark with flashes. There is no stopping on the way at the Temple of Mithras, as I’d hoped. We get to the hostel at Once Brewed in the dark, run for the door with our coats over our heads.
I’ve forgotten about hostels too, about the women’s dormitory where Alison and I must sleep, sharing the room with two hearty German girls who were going to walk St Oswald’s Way. Alison is still young enough to sleep anywhere, but I lie awake all night under the bulge of her body in the bunk above and think how unfair it is to be so lonely. I am so angry to be stuck in the women’s dorm when I so very much dislike womanish things – periods, piercings, push-up bras – myself. I do not see why it should be me, and not Simon, who has to help her with all this now.
The next day it’s not raining but there is a cloud sitting on the long valley where, according to my memory and the map, we are. Outside the hostel is a perfect whiteout: we can scarcely see the road, and the pub next door looms at us unexpectedly like an untethered mystical castle. It is early, though, only eight o’clock, and in the lost time of our family Simon would have said, ‘It’ll soon clear up, Ali. Tell me when you can see enough blue to make a pair of sailor’s trousers,’ and Alison would have smiled. Then we would have sat and played Go Fish at the varnished pine table, the three of us, with extra cups of coffee and hot chocolate for Alison, waiting till the cloud lifted, or Simon would have played chess with his daughter, with the little portable chess set we kept for such outings, the one with pieces so small he had to put his reading glasses on to distinguish knight from pawn, but Alison doesn’t play games any more, and doesn’t smile and doesn’t believe in sailor’s trousers, and within five minutes of breakfast I find I am unable to sit with her and the tinny scratching of her earphones and I bundle us into the car.
I drive very slowly at first with all my lights on. But the fog starts to lift almost at once, the worn gold hills revealing themselves on either side. ‘Of course, it is a Roman road,’ Simon says, in my ear. ‘You can tell, it is so very straight.’ I smile to hear him, and by the time we get to the turn-off to Housesteads, the weather is fine, really fine, a marvellous day for so early in the spring, the sky blowing itself high and clear, the long valley clearing east and west. We can see the fort written in grey on the ridge of the hill above the car park, the mist just lifting from it.
I remember the Wall from here, because we all three walked it during our very best summer, the summer Alison was nine. Just along from the fort is a milecastle with an arched entrance missing only its capstone, and most of the way the Wall is higher than your shoulder, and neatly faced with square cut stones. Suddenly, I’m desperate to be up there in the sun and wind, desperate to be with Simon, out walking. I can see us, both of us in our light expensive walking boots and neoprene jackets, him outlining the place where buildings sleep under a blanket of turf with his long brown hands and the walking pole we bought in Austria.
But Alison won’t come. Alison has changed her mind about the holiday, and the Wall, and seeing anything, and will not put on her walking boots. She won’t even move from the back seat where she is doubled up over her phone to shut out the light. ‘I’m watching a video,’ she shouts, ‘a video.’ And when I pull her she knots herself tight as an embryo, a conch, and is too heavy to lift. When you are with a teenager you become a teenager, just as when you are with a two year old you have tantrums. I hear myself yell: ‘I’ll go on my own, my own.’ And I do, I run up the track in my boots, gasping at the turns, flighting the birds.
And so I am here alone in the fort. There is a fine high sound of larks, and a thin cool wind, and no one here at all: too early in the day and the season for even the museum to be open, to even buy a ticket. I like the museum. There are models of the fort in its different incarnations, and a few small artefacts including a carving of three hooded figures wearing what look like anoraks, and a sign explaining that the coats are good quality woven wool, a very British product.
I decide not to care about Alison for a while. I will calm down and take myself on a tour. I don’t have my guidebook, but I remember. I walk up through the outlines of the town outside the boundary wall of the fort, remembering. In one of these houses they found the bones of a woman and a man, the man with a dagger between his ribs, both hidden beneath the clay of the floor like the body under the patio in Brookside.
I go into the fort through the south gate, past the worn cart tracks and postern hole, and clamber on past the outline of the commanding officer’s house to the hospital. This is my favourite spot. It is so easy to imagine the clean, small, tiled courtyard with its deep-set drainage, its cold larder of medicines and its neat, offset latrine. I can feel what it would have been like to have been brought in here, broken or damaged from fighting, into a cool, lime-washed cell, and lie under a woollen blanket until you healed, or not. The Romans knew about bone setting, and cauterising and stitching wounds: so many things we forgo
t afterwards.
I sit on a stone. And the view from here is magnificent: the Wall thrusting itself east up the backbone of the hill, purposeful and unflinching as a great scaled snake. In the other direction, down in the valley, I see that Simon has finally taken action, and is walking Alison up the track from the car park. He has even induced her to put her coat on and push her hood back, though not, I see, to put her boots on. He’ll take her round to the east gate, I know, insist that she enter the fort from the ‘proper’ side, through the double-arched gateway the Romans planned; the gate that leads you in to face the headquarters with its pillars and offices and gods; the gate built to impress the people and be exactly Roman. Later, they blocked up one of its arches and built a coal store in the passageway; people started to use the south gate more because it was easier, and out of the wind, nearer the vicus, the town, the way people always untidily will.
I like the town, myself: its irregular, un-Roman buildings built into the folds of the hill; its murder victims; its loaded dice and counterfeit coins; all the untidy compromises of it. I like all the evidence of the later, unplanned, inner fort too; everything that happened as the empire decayed: the grim barrack dormitories made over into wooden huts to hold a family each, the chilly open porticos in headquarters closed off against the sea winds and turned into warm little offices for probably corrupt officials. It’s like a family wearing in a home, or a religion settling on some comfortable hypocrisies; or a marriage finding its own perverse, beloved shape.
The bathhouse was built late on, I remember, inside the fort because it was getting too dangerous to go outside for a bath. It is also very small. It takes me five minutes to even find it: it can’t have fitted more than two or three people at a time. But it is so complete that you can still see the stains on the underfloor heating and the place where the boiler fitted. The scorch marks bring them very near: the anxious Romans desperate to remember what warmth felt like; the servant trained to stoke the boiler; the cart loaded with coal bouncing along the military road all the way from Newcastle; the man who drove the cart, whose precious business it was.
Now Alison has come inside the bounds of the fort. She is only a hundred yards from me now, in the latrines in the far corner, but I don’t call out or try to join her: I want to watch her. She’s actually smiling. It’s because her father is there, smiling too, the wind feathering his soft brown hair, the sun wrinkling his soft brown skin, leaning back on the stones, explaining it all to his Ali. How it all works. The cistern of rainwater above the latrine, with its smooth-worn washing stone and still-functional channel, there to power the flush. The latrine itself, with its wash basins and water channel to wash out your sponge, its deep, solid, sloping drain.
The loss of it all, when you think about it, is inconceivable. How can it be that the latrine was allowed to fill up with gravel and mud, and that people simply forgot how to beat copper and set bones and dry corn and make hypocausts? How can it be that in the year 400 there was a coal-fired sauna here, with a copper boiler, and a granary with underfloor heating, and the infrastructure to serve all of it, and then it was all smashed and fell down and nothing was built for a thousand years till some starving Scots made a messy fort from the stone of the south gate, a primitive tower without chimney or internal stair? It must be as Simon always says, the weather must have changed, the climate. Something fundamental must have happened. A death.
Anyway. I walk down to Alison. She is sitting on a wall, softly kicking her trainers on it, holding up her face to the bit of sun. Her eyes are shut, but when I come over she opens them.
‘Mum,’ she says, ‘Dad was here.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I saw him.’
‘I miss him,’ said Alison. ‘I miss my dad. Do you miss him? What do you feel? I don’t know what you feel.’
What do I feel? In all the months since Simon’s death, she has not once asked me that.
I tell her I feel like a body stabbed and buried under the clay of a ruined house, or like a postern hole worn in a stone, empty, or like a young soldier shivering in the lime-washed cell of the hospital, or like a wool cloak with a stiff hood, hung up on a peg, empty, empty.
‘Sorry, Ali,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry he died.’
‘I didn’t set fire to the bin on purpose,’ she says. ‘I was actually trying to put the fire out.’
But I knew that already. It is still early, so after a while my daughter and I walk out on the west side of the fort and start following the Wall to Steel Rigg. On the way we can see the milecastle with its nearly perfect arch, and the sycamore that grows in Sycamore Gap, and the beautiful wild country stretching out to Kielder that in Roman times teemed with game. The wild Picts are gone now, and the wolves, and the beaver and the otter, and the deer flying through the woods from the huntsman like seeds blown from a palm, and now Simon, my husband, Ali’s father, is gone too; but the cliffs, and the high sky and white clouds, and the land and the water and the Wall thrusting through it; all of that is still there.
The town of Falmouth . . . is no great ways from the sea. It is defended on the sea-side by tway castles, St Maws and Pendennis, extremely well calculated for annoying every body except an enemy . . . The town contains many Quakers and salt fish – the oysters have a taste of copper, owing to the soil of a mining country – the women . . . are flogged at the cart’s tail when they pick and steal, as happened to one of the fair sex yesterday noon. She was pertinacious in her behaviour, and damned the mayor. (Lord Byron, Falmouth, 1809)
I put down the book to visit the bathroom.
I was alone that night. For the three nights of our wedding party, Tamara and I had decided to follow the custom of sleeping separately until the night of the wedding. It was her idea – to create a space where we longed to be, and then to find it.
I’d been drinking with our friends. I’d gone to bed late. I couldn’t sleep, so I was sitting propped up on my pillows, reading about the history of the place.
As I opened the heavy square-panelled door to the bathroom, I heard a voice say, ‘Go through and don’t come back.’
I turned on the bathroom light. Stood still. No sound.
It was an old-fashioned bathroom with a tall sash window pushed up a little at the bottom. I pushed it up further, feeling its weight, and leaned out into the night. The night was blustery and restless. The wind like a conversation you can’t hear. No stars. A little way off, towards the castle itself, I saw a wavering light, dim and unsteady.
I smiled – it must have been a couple of our guests zigzagging home from drinking. I must have heard them through the window. It’s so quiet here. That’s why the voice seemed so close, even though the light seems far away.
But the sea and the night make things mysterious, don’t they?
My wife was born in Falmouth. That is why we chose to marry at Pendennis Castle. The castle and its pair at St Mawes face each other across the mouth of the River Fal, like stone giants guarding a hoard.
Henry VIII built a blockhouse either side of the estuary to cross-fire any enemy ships slinking through the water. Henry worried about the war-ish Spanish and his daughter Elizabeth saw off the Armada, but it was Bonaparte, with his eyes on the prize of a coastal landing, who galvanised the British into building up their bullish garrison here, the booming guns aiming their cannonballs at history. The seafloor of the bay is thick-deep with them. Pendennis was defended by twenty-two 24-pounders and fourteen 18-pounders.
‘It’s a castle not a burger-chain.’
‘Tamara, that’s what they call them – pounders.’
‘I like to think of all those tin soldiers eating mayo and fries with their 24-pounders.’
‘Are you making fun of history or making fun of me?’
‘You. That’s why we’re getting married – so that I can laugh at you for the rest of my life.’
Morning. Drinking tea in her room. She’s sitting up in bed and I am in a chair by the window.
‘There’s noth
ing you can tell me about Pendennis Castle that I don’t know. My dad was a tour guide here for years.’
‘I’m sorry he can’t be here today.’
‘He’ll be here in spirit.’
‘Maybe he will. It’s Hallowe’en.’
‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’
She came and sat on my knee, kissing me. Her eyes are grey, like the sky over the sea today, and behind them, not always visible, but always there, is the sun.
‘Someone came into my room last night.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
She said – ‘The rain was heavy and it woke me – or I think it was the rain. I knew that someone was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at me.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘We all know when we’re being looked at.’
‘You were dreaming.’
‘I wasn’t dreaming. It was Dad.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Who else would it be?’
I’m thinking, This is ridiculous. She doesn’t really believe in ghosts and neither do I. Yet what harm can it do if she believes her father came last night to wish her well? And the fact is that none of us has the slightest knowledge of what happens after we die.
Materialists are no better informed than mediums.
Eight Ghosts Page 7