The Ghost Writer

by John Harwood

  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 clichés, 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 t
he 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.