The Ghost Writer

by John Harwood

  'GREENSLEEVES'

  10 MARCH 1949

  Greensleeves? If that was the date it was taken, it couldn't be Viola after all. But I couldn't imagine this face inspiring horror in anyone. Not even my mother. All these years I'd assumed she had beaten me for looking at the photograph. But she'd never actually said so. And since she'd already disposed of The Chameleon (unless it was hidden somewhere else in the house), I picked up 'The Revenant' again and went through it more carefully. But there was nothing else hidden between the pages. It was just a plain typescript, a fair copy on quarto paper with no corrections or annotations.

  One came true. I took the typescript over to the window and settled down on the floor, my back against the wall, with the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading.

  ***

  The Revenant

  PART I

  THOUGH ASHBOURN HOUSE STOOD only a few hundred yards from the village of Hurst Green, the surrounding woodland was so dense, and the trees so tall, that Cordelia had often imagined herself living deep in an enchanted forest. As a child, perched high above the lane in her favourite window-seat, she had dreamed away whole days as Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, and other melancholy heroines of romance. No handsome prince had so far appeared, possibly because the sign at the village end of the lane made it look like a private drive. Just beyond the house, to the left, the lane diminished to a muddy footpath. It was, in fact, a right-of-way through the wood, but the villagers seldom used it, and not simply because of the mud. According to local legend, as Cordelia had later discovered, the house was not only unlucky, but troubled by the apparition of a veiled woman in black: the ghost of her own grandmother, Imogen de Vere.

  It was a tall, tower-like stone house, perhaps a hundred years old, evidently built, as Cordelia's Aunt Una was fond of complaining, by someone with a passion for climbing stairs. From the rear of the house, the land sloped downwards, and from the upstairs windows you could look out across the garden and above the treetops, over green pastures and wooded hills. But at the front, there was only a narrow forecourt of gravel and then the lane, beyond which the trees grew even higher than the house. By the time she was sixteen, Cordelia had advanced from the window-seat to the sill of the second-floor sitting-room window, where she liked to read on summer afternoons. Aunt Una could never see her leaning against the frame of the open window, so close to the edge that she could look straight down the long vertical fall to the gravel below, without an involuntary squeak of dread. But Cordelia was not in the least afraid of heights.

  About ghosts she was not so sure. When she was seven or eight, she and her sister Beatrice had spent many days happily playing at ghosts with the aid of a worn-out sheet begged from Mrs Green the housekeeper, creeping along gloomy corridors and lurking in empty rooms, sending one another into paroxysms of pleasurable terror, until one afternoon it occurred to Cordelia to surprise Beatrice by dressing up as Grandmama's ghost. All she could recall of Grandmama, who had died just before her fifth birthday, was a silent, veiled figure, sitting by the fireside or moving about the garden. It was not polite to mention the veil. As Aunt Una had privately explained, Grandmama always wore it because she had once been very ill, and light was bad for her skin.

  Grandmama's room had not been disturbed since the day of her funeral. The door was always locked. But Cordelia had recently discovered that the keys to the bedroom doors were interchangeable. Thinking that her father was safely downstairs in the drawing-room, she stole into the room, which smelt strongly of camphor, and began opening chests and closets to see what she could find. In the bottom drawer of a clothes-press, she came upon Grandmama's black veil, neatly laid out all by itself. She lifted it out and pressed the cool material against her face, breathing in camphor, and some other medicinal smell, and a very faint fragrance of perfume. When she put it on, the front of the veil came right down to her waist, whilst the back-it went all around, like a headdress-almost touched the floor. She could still see, though dimly, but when she looked in the long mirror her face was quite invisible, and because of the angle it seemed as if the veil was hovering of its own accord.

  Panic seized her, and she fled into the corridor, only to confront a huge, dark figure blocking the way to the stairs. Her own shriek was drowned by a hoarse yell of terror, booming and echoing around her as she tore at the constricting veil and saw that the dark figure was in fact her father. Worse than her own fear, worse even than the beating that followed, was the memory of that cry, and of his face, momentarily frozen in horror before rage came to his rescue. Later he told her that he was sorry to have beaten her; he had lost his temper, he said, seeing her in Grandmama's veil. Though he was usually very indulgent, Cordelia found the apology troubling; she knew she had been terribly wicked, and deserved her punishment, and it seemed to her that Papa was trying to convince her-and perhaps himself-that he had not been frightened. She knew that Papa, a soldier, was as brave as a lion; Aunt Una was always saying so, yet she dared not ask what had so alarmed him. There were no more games of ghosts, and she was plagued for many months by a nightmare in which she was pursued and finally cornered by a malevolent, shrouded figure, who appeared in many guises but always became, in the instant before she woke in terror, her grandmother in the act of raising her veil.

  She was, at the same time, fascinated by the portrait-the only surviving likeness of Imogen de Vere-which had hung on the second-floor landing for as long as she could remember. It showed a woman of great beauty, apparently in her early twenties, though she must have been about thirty-five when it was painted, against a dark, indistinct background. Her face, lit from above, was partly in shadow, accentuating the darkness of her large, luminous eyes. She wore an emerald green gown, cut high at the neck; her heavy, copper-coloured hair was loosely pinned up, with a few escaped strands curling across her forehead. The artist (who had not signed his name to the portrait) had captured some elusive quality in her gaze-an intense serenity, or perhaps a serene intensity of feeling-which compelled your eyes to return again and again to hers.

  Though Cordelia did not doubt that the woman in the picture was, or had become, her grandmother, she found it curiously difficult to associate the face that so compelled her imagination with the veiled figure of memory-or nightmare. By the time she was fully grown, Cordelia had only to pause in front of the picture to feel that she was resuming a wordless intimacy which had accompanied her all through her childhood. Somehow her sense of communion with the portrait had become entwined with her feeling for her lost mother, whom she had never known: Frances de Vere had died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to Beatrice. It was not a matter of physical resemblance, for the photograph on Cordelia's dressing-table was of a shy, fair-haired girl, smiling tentatively at the camera. She looked about sixteen years old, and had died before her twenty-fourth birthday.

  Imogen de Vere herself had died when she was not much more than fifty. Over the years, Cordelia had gradually assembled fragments of her grandmothers history; she had deduced that Imogen must have separated from her husband at about the time of the onset of her illness, and with her only child Arthur (Cordelia's father) who was then twelve or thirteen years old, come to live at Ashbourn House with her cousin Theodore Ashbourn and his sister Una. The illness-a mysterious and virulent disease of the skin, which no doctor had ever been able to diagnose-had plainly been far more severe than Cordelia had once believed. Imogen de Vere had spent the last fifteen years of her life at Ashbourn, permanently veiled and in constant pain. She slept badly, and would roam about the house in the small hours. Uncle Theodore had sometimes seen her wandering the garden by moonlight; she seemed to find relief in movement, and had walked miles every day until her final illness. So it was hardly surprising that many of the inhabitants of Hurst Green would swear to having seen a veiled figure peering from an upstairs window, or gliding amongst the trees of Hurst Wood, long after Imogen de Vere had been laid to rest in the village churchyard.

  O
N A CHILL, GREY AFTERNOON LATE IN FEBRUARY, SOON after her twenty-first birthday, Cordelia was standing in front of the portrait, lost in sombre reflection. Beatrice had declined, reasonably enough in view of the weather, to come out for a walk, but then a little later Cordelia had seen her disappearing along the lane in waterproof and Wellingtons. As children, they had played together constantly, but their intimacy had not survived the death of their father, who had fought unscathed through four years of war only to lose his life a month before the Armistice. Cordelia, who was then thirteen, had tried to comfort her sister, but Beatrice had refused all consolation. She would not speak of her father, or remain in the room if his name was even mentioned, and if she wept for him, she did so alone. Nor would she tolerate any inquiry as to her feelings, which seemed to alternate between listless apathy and a sullen, silent anger at everyone and everything around her.

  Thus she had remained for many months, and it seemed to Cordelia that her sister had never entirely recovered; or at least, that relations between them had never been the same. Perhaps they had simply grown apart, even in small things: both, for example, were avid readers, but Cordelia would always set her book aside for a chance of conversation, whereas Beatrice, who read only novels, had become even less tolerant of interruptions. In the game of animal comparisons Cordelia liked to play in the privacy of her own imagination, her sister had always been a cat. Beatrice had inherited their mothers almond-shaped eyes; her face narrowed markedly to a small, determined chin, making her cheekbones look more prominent than they really were. Now, at nineteen, she was more than ever the cat that walks by itself: watchful, silent, aloof, disdainful of petting, the kind that will settle only on the lap of its own choosing. Cordelia had sometimes accused herself of clinging to a romantic ideal of sisterly intimacy; yet she could not shake off the feeling that a door had been closed against her at the time of Papa's death, and never reopened.

  Beatrice would not concede that anything had altered between them, but there was something about the very adroitness with which she had learned to evade her sister's overtures that seemed to say: "You have wounded me very deeply, though you profess not to understand what you have done; so I will not quarrel; there would be no point; of course we shall stay friends, but I shall never completely trust you again. As for the door you accuse me of closing, you are quite mistaken; it is you who have closed it; or perhaps there never was a door, only a blank wall, which is no more than you deserve." Cordelia had racked her memory and her conscience; she had privately asked her aunt and uncle, whether they knew of anything she had done to offend her sister, but no, Beatrice had said nothing against her. "You must not take it personally," Uncle Theodore had said only recently. "Your sisters nature is very different from yours; she turns inward, away from others, as you turn towards them. I don't think she has ever got over your fathers death. You must not blame yourself for what is none of your fault."

  His words came back to her as she stood on the chilly landing. The mention of her father-and a certain unease in Theodore's tired, kindly, slightly bloodshot eyes (a beagles, or a bloodhounds; she had never quite decided)-had stirred an old, obscure suspicion that his death was somehow the cause of the estrangement. As if summoned by Imogen de Vere's intent, shadowed gaze, her thoughts were drawn along a path from which she had always turned uneasily aside, as she had once avoided the corridor that led past Grandmama's bedroom.

  Papa had blamed Beatrice for their mother's death. Not consciously, she felt sure; and perhaps "blame" was too strong. He would have been shocked, no doubt, if anyone had confronted him with the idea. But just as she had always known that she was Papa's favourite, so she had become aware of a certain constraint in his manner towards Beatrice. Whenever he came home on leave, the two girls would be allowed to wait, if they were not at school, at the front gate, and run along the lane to greet him as he appeared at the turning. Cordelia, being the elder, would always reach him first, and fling herself into his arms, and he would swing her high into the air and onto his shoulder. But with Beatrice he was never quite as spontaneous; sometimes he seemed almost to recoil for an instant, though the shrinking would be as swiftly checked, and it seemed to Cordelia that he never sought Beatrice out, whereas he would often come looking for her when he wanted a game (which was how he had caught her wearing Grandmama's veil that afternoon). Everyone else in the house, including Mrs Green, had made a special pet of Beatrice, and yet Cordelia had never felt any the less loved; on the contrary, she was proud to be included in a sort of adult conspiracy to spoil Beatrice (though nobody had put it quite like that), especially when Papa was away with his regiment. They had kept up the conspiracy through four anxious years of war, until the arrival of the letter from the War Office, the dark winter of grieving, and Beatrice's retreat into sullen, resentful silence.

  The suspicion that her father had, however unconsciously, held Beatrice responsible for the loss of their mother, did not begin to trouble Cordelia until after his death. The more she struggled against the idea, the more firmly it took root, until she felt compelled to question her aunt. But instead of offering the hoped-for reassurance, Aunt Una had looked very grave, and talked of how deeply Papa had loved their mother, and how he had married her as soon as they had both turned twenty-one and no longer needed their parents' consent-though Grandmama, she added hastily, had given them her blessing; they had been married from Ashbourn House… and of course it had been a terrible blow to Papa, losing their mother so young, but Cordelia must always remember that he had loved both her and Beatrice very dearly, and try not to think such troubling thoughts.

  Years later, she had learned from Uncle Theodore that the reason they had never seen their grandparents on Mama's side, and the reason Papa had never so much as mentioned them, was not because they were dead, but because they had never forgiven him for the death of their only daughter. They had blamed him, in other words, just as he had blamed Beatrice.

  But why should Beatrice have turned against her, Cordelia, on account of their fathers death? For that was what had happened, she was sure of it. That subtle note of accusation… as if Cordelia had somehow betrayed her sister; but how? By having been his favourite? Or had Beatrice divined the reason behind Papas reserve and taken the burden of Mamas death upon herself?-and then assumed that Cordelia blamed her too? Such a heavy burden… but why should she assume that? And spurn all reassurance? It is not fair; why does she hate me so?

  Cordelia again became conscious of her surroundings, realising that she had spoken the words aloud. The face of Imogen de Vere seemed to coalesce out of its dark background, glowing as if lit from within. "No, it is not fair," she imagined the portrait replying; "do you think it was fair that I lost my beauty overnight?" Of course not, any more than the loss of Papa had been fair; but knowing that half the families in the kingdom had lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers had not made their own loss any easier to bear. It had not been fair of Mama's parents to hold Papa responsible for her death. Or to refuse to acknowledge their own granddaughters because of it. "Unto the third generation…" But Papa had not sinned; and besides, the last of her belief-at least in the omnipotent God of the Scriptures-had died with him.

  Aunt Una and Uncle Theodore had done their conscientious best, making sure that she and Beatrice had been christened and confirmed, but Cordelia felt that neither of them really believed. Even Mr Gathorne-Hyde, the present vicar, did not sound as if he believed his own sermons about God's mysterious ways and the gift of free will. A poisoned, maleficent gift, that allowed men to slaughter one another wholesale. Or a single child to starve. Beatrice had refused to enter a church since the day the War Office letter arrived. Yet Cordelia still occasionally attended. More often, she would slip into St Mary's when it was empty and stand for a while in the dim silence, which seemed to echo even when the church was completely still, breathing the smells of ancient timbers and stone, musty cassocks and snuffed candles and dried flowers, "hoping it might be so"-without even knowing
what "it" might be.

  LAST AUTUMN, SHE HAD GONE WITH UNCLE THEODORE to visit Percival Thornton, the father of one of Papa's dead comrades. Robert Thornton had died only a few months before Arthur de Vere, and the families had kept in touch. Their visits, though inevitably painful, meant a great deal to Mr Thornton, a widower who lived quite alone. Each time they saw him, he looked thinner, greyer and more stooped; his grief was visibly consuming him. Roberts medals, brilliantly polished, were displayed in a mahogany case in the parlour; his dress uniform, immaculately brushed, hung beside his bed in his old room, and the house was crowded with photographs of Robert at every stage of his short life, most of them taken by Mr Thornton.

  There was a settled ritual to these visits. They began with an inspection of various mementoes, followed by tea, which Cordelia always insisted on preparing, and then a stroll in the garden if the weather was fine. But on this occasion, it seemed to Cordelia that he was striving to conceal an unwonted, almost feverish anxiety. She noticed, too, that since their last visit his hands had become curiously blotched and stained. As they were finishing their tea, he asked, rather hesitantly, whether he might show them a photograph.

  They were naturally expecting yet another portrait of Robert, but the picture he brought out showed only a vacant bench which stood against the hedge at the rear of Mr Thornton's garden, beside an ornamental fountain-a tiered array of stone dishes, each wider than the one above, with a cherub at the top, though the water had long ceased to flow: the dishes were filled with autumn leaves. Dappled sunlight, evidently filtering through the branches of an overhanging tree, was falling upon the bench.

  Cordelia had moved over to sit on the arm of her uncles chair; Mr Thornton remained hovering on the other side. She could feel his agitation increasing as the seconds passed, and neither she nor Uncle Theodore could find anything to say.