Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  Yes. It was there. Only, this time, he said, it drew aside to let him pass. It smiled at him, as if it were saying, “Go in, if you must; you’ll see what’ll happen.”

  He had no sense that it had followed him into the room; he felt certain that, this time, it would let him be.

  It was when he approached Pauline’s bed, which had been Rosamund’s bed, that she appeared again, standing between it and him, and stretching out her arms to keep him back.

  All that Pauline could see was her bridegroom backing and backing, then standing there, fixed, and the look on his face. That in itself was enough to frighten her.

  She said, “What’s the matter with you, Edward?”

  He didn’t move.

  “What are you standing there for? Why don’t you come to bed?”

  Then Marston seems to have lost his head and blurted it out: “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?” said Pauline from the bed.

  “Can’t sleep with you. She won’t let me.”

  “She?”

  “Rosamund. My wife. She’s there.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “She’s there, I tell you. She won’t let me. She’s pushing me back.”.

  He says Pauline must have thought he was drunk or something. Remember, she saw nothing but Edward, his face, and his mysterious attitude. He must have looked very drunk.

  She sat up in bed, with her hard, black eyes blazing away at him, and told him to leave the room that minute. Which he did.

  The next day she had it out with him. I gathered that she kept on talking about the “state” he was in.

  “You came to my room, Edward, in a disgraceful state.”

  I suppose Marston said he was sorry, but he couldn’t help it, he wasn’t drunk. He stuck to it that Rosamund was there. He had seen her. And Pauline said, if he wasn’t drunk then he must be mad, and he said meekly, “Perhaps I am mad.”

  That set her off, and she broke out in a fury. He was no more mad than she was; but he didn’t care for her; he was making ridiculous excuses; shamming, to put her off. There was some other woman.

  Marston asked her what on earth she supposed he’d married her for. Then she burst out crying and said she didn’t know.

  Then he seems to have made it up with Pauline. He managed to make her believe he wasn’t lying, that he really had seen something, and between them they arrived at a rational explanation of the appearance. He had been overworking. Rosamund’s phantasm was nothing but a hallucination of his exhausted brain.

  This theory carried him on till bedtime. Then, he says, he began to wonder what would happen, what Rosamund’s phantasm would do next. Each morning his passion for Pauline had come back again, increased by frustration, and it worked itself up crescendo, towards night. Supposing he had seen Rosamund. He might see her again. He had become suddenly subject to hallucinations. But as long as you knew you were hallucinated you were all right.

  So what they agreed to do that night was by way of precaution, in case the thing came again. It might even be sufficient in itself to prevent his seeing anything.

  Instead of going in to Pauline he was to get into the room before she did, and she was to come to him there. That, they said, would break the spell. To make him feel even safer he meant to be in bed before Pauline came.

  Well, he got into the room all right.

  It was when he tried to get into bed that – he saw her (I mean Rosamund).

  She was lying there, in his place next the window, her own place, lying in her immature childlike beauty and sleeping, the firm full bow of her mouth softened by sleep. She was perfect in every detail, the lashes of her shut eyelids golden on her white cheeks, the solid gold of her square fringe shining, and the great braided golden rope of her hair flung back on the pillow.

  He knelt down by the bed and pressed his forehead into the bedclothes, close to her side. He declared he could feel her breathe.

  He stayed there for the twenty minutes Pauline took to undress and come to him. He says the minutes stretched out like hours. Pauline found him still kneeling with his face pressed into the bedclothes. When he got up he staggered.

  She asked him what he was doing and why he wasn’t in bed. And he said, “It’s no use. I can’t. I can’t.”

  But somehow he couldn’t tell her that Rosamund was there. Rosamund was too sacred; he couldn’t talk about her. He only said: “You’d better sleep in my room tonight.”

  He was staring down at the place in the bed where he still saw Rosamund. Pauline couldn’t have seen anything but the bedclothes, the sheet smoothed above an invisible breast, and the hollow in the pillow. She said she’d do nothing of the sort. She wasn’t going to be frightened out of her own room. He could do as he liked.

  He couldn’t leave them there; he couldn’t leave Pauline with Rosamund, and he couldn’t leave Rosamund with Pauline. So he sat up in a chair with his back turned to the bed. No. He didn’t make any attempt to go back. He says he knew she was still lying there, guarding his place, which was her place. The odd thing is that he wasn’t in the least disturbed or frightened or surprised. He took the whole thing as a matter of course. And presently he dozed off into a sleep.

  A scream woke him and the sound of a violent body leaping out of the bed and thudding on to its feet. He switched on the light and saw the bedclothes flung back and Pauline standing on the floor with her mouth open.

  He went to her and held her. She was cold to the touch and shaking with terror, and her jaws dropped as if she was palsied.

  She said, “Edward, there’s something in the bed.”

  He glanced again at the bed. It was empty.

  “There isn’t,” he said. “Look.”

  He stripped the bed to the foot-rail, so that she could see.

  “There was something.”

  “Do you see it.”

  “No. I felt it.”

  She told him. First something had come swinging, smack across her face. A thick, heavy rope of woman’s hair. It had waked her. Then she had put out her hands and felt the body. A woman’s body, soft and horrible; her fingers had sunk in the shallow breasts. Then she had screamed and jumped.

  And she couldn’t stay in the room. The room, she said, was “beastly”.

  She slept in Marston’s room, in his small single bed, and he sat up with her all night, on a chair.

  She believed now that he had really seen something, and she remembered that the library was beastly, too. Haunted by something. She supposed that was what she had felt. Very well. Two rooms in the house were haunted; their bedroom and the library. They would just have to avoid those two rooms. She had made up her mind, you see, that it was nothing but a case of an ordinary haunted house; the sort of thing you’re always hearing about and never believe in till it happens to yourself. Marston didn’t like to point out to her that the house hadn’t been haunted till she came into it.

  The following night, the fourth night, she was to sleep in the spare room on the top floor, next to the servants, and Marston in his own room.

  But Marston didn’t sleep. He kept on wondering whether he would or would not go up to Pauline’s room. That made him horribly restless, and instead of undressing and going to bed, he sat up on a chair with a book. He wasn’t nervous; but he had a queer feeling that something was going to happen, and that he must be ready for it, and that he’d better be dressed.

  It must have been soon after midnight when he heard the door knob turning very slowly and softly.

  The door opened behind him and Pauline came in, moving without a sound, and stood before him. It gave him a shock; for he had been thinking of Rosamund, and when he heard the door knob turn it was the phantasm of Rosamund that he expected to see coming in. He says, for the first minute, it was this appearance of Pauline that struck him as the uncanny and unnatural thing.

  She had nothing, absolutely nothing on but a transparent white chiffony sort of dressing-gown. She was trying to u
ndo it. He could see her hands shaking as her fingers fumbled with the fastenings.

  He got up suddenly, and they just stood there before each other, saying nothing, staring at each other. He was fascinated by her, by the sheer glamour of her body, gleaming white through the thin stuff, and by the movement of her fingers. I think I’ve said she was a beautiful woman, and her beauty at that moment was overpowering.

  And still he stared at her without saying anything. It sounds as if their silence lasted quite a long time, but in reality it couldn’t have been more than some fraction of a second.

  Then she began. “Oh, Edward, for God’s sake say something. Oughtn’t I to have come?”

  And she went on without waiting for an answer. “Are you thinking of her? Because, if – if you are, I’m not going to let her drive you away from me… I’m not going to… She’ll keep on coming as long as we don’t – Can’t you see that this is the way to stop it…? When you take me in your arms.”

  She slipped off the loose sleeves of the chiffon thing and it fell to her feet. Marston says he heard a queer sound, something between a groan and a grunt, and was amazed to find that it came from himself.

  He hadn’t touched her yet – mind you, it went quicker than it takes to tell, it was still an affair of the fraction of a second – they were holding out their arms to each other, when the door opened again without a sound, and, without visible passage, the phantasm was there. It came incredibly fast, and thin at first, like a shaft of light sliding between them. It didn’t do anything; there was no beating of hands, only, as it took on its full form, its perfect likeness of flesh and blood, it made its presence felt like a push, a force, driving them asunder.

  Pauline hadn’t seen it yet. She thought it was Marston who was beating her back. She cried out: “Oh, don’t, don’t push me away!” She stooped below the phantasm’s guard and clung to his knees, writhing and crying. For a moment it was a struggle between her moving flesh and that still, supernatural being.

  And in that moment Marston realised that he hated Pauline. She was fighting Rosamund with her gross flesh and blood, taking a mean advantage of her embodied state to beat down the heavenly, discarnate thing.

  He called to her to let go.

  “It’s not I,” he shouted. “Can’t you see her?”

  Then, suddenly, she saw, and let go, and dropped, crouching on the floor and trying to cover herself. This time she had given no cry.

  The phantasm gave way; it moved slowly towards the door, and as it went it looked back over its shoulder at Marston, it trailed a hand, signalling to him to come.

  He went out after it, hardly aware of Pauline’s naked body that still writhed there, clutching at his feet as they passed, and drew itself after him, like a worm, like a beast, along the floor.

  She must have got up at once and followed them out on to the landing; for, as he went down the stairs behind the phantasm, he could see Pauline’s face, distorted with lust and terror, peering at them above the stairhead. She saw them descend the last flight, and cross the hall at the bottom and go into the library. The door shut behind them.

  Something happened in there. Marston never told me precisely what it was, and I didn’t ask him. Anyhow, that finished it.

  The next day Pauline ran away to her own people. She couldn’t stay in Marston’s house because it was haunted by Rosamund, and he wouldn’t leave it for the same reason.

  And she never came back; for she was not only afraid of Rosamund, she was afraid of Marston. And if she had come it wouldn’t have been any good. Marston was convinced that, as often as he attempted to get to Pauline, something would stop him. Pauline certainly felt that, if Rosamund were pushed to it, she might show herself in some still more sinister and terrifying form. She knew when she was beaten.

  And there was more in it than that. I believe he tried to explain it to her; said he had married her on the assumption that Rosamund was dead, but that now he knew she was alive; she was, as he put it, “there”. He tried to make her see that if he had Rosamund he couldn’t have her. Rosamund’s presence in the world annulled their contract.

  You see I’m convinced that something did happen that night in the library. I say, he never told me precisely what it was, but he once let something out. We were discussing one of Pauline’s love-affairs (after the separation she gave him endless grounds for divorce).

  “Poor Pauline,” he said, “she thinks she’s so passionate.”

  “Well,” I said, “wasn’t she?”

  Then he burst out. “No. She doesn’t know what passion is. None of you know. You haven’t the faintest conception. You’d have to get rid of your bodies first. I didn’t know until –…”

  He stopped himself. I think he was going to say, “until Rosamund came back and showed me”. For he leaned forward and whispered: “It isn’t a localised affair at all… If you only knew –…”

  So I don’t think it was just faithfulness to a revived memory. I take it there had been, behind that shut door, some experience, some terrible and exquisite contact. More penetrating than sight or touch. More – more extensive: passion at all points of being.

  Perhaps the supreme moment of it, the ecstasy, only came when her phantasm had disappeared.

  He couldn’t go back to Pauline after that.

  THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER

  D.H. Lawrence

  David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in Eastwood, Nottingham. His father was a miner, his mother a lace worker. Lawrence qualified as a teacher but left the profession in favour of becoming a full-time writer. His attitudes towards sex, equality, women and different ethnicities continue to make him a controversial figure. Penguin Books’ publication of the unexpurgated edition of his novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 1960 led to an obscenity trial. Lawrence died of tuberculosis. His remains are interred in Taos, New Mexico.

  There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody. Everybody else said of her: “She is such a good mother. She adores her children.” Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so. They read it in each other’s eyes.

  There were a boy and two little girls. They lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood.

  Although they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money. The mother had a small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up. The father went into town to some office. But though he had good prospects, these prospects never materialised. There was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style was always kept up.

  At last the mother said: “I will see if I can’t make something.” But she did not know where to begin. She racked her brains, and tried this thing and the other, but could not find anything successful. The failure made deep lines come into her face. Her children were growing up, they would have to go to school. There must be more money, there must be more money. The father, who was always very handsome and expensive in his tastes, seemed as if he never would be able to do anything worth doing. And the mother, who had a great belief in herself, did not succeed any better, and her tastes were just as expensive.

  And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money
! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll’s house, a voice would start whispering: “There must be more money! There must be more money!” And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. “There must be more money! There must be more money!”

  It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it. The big doll, sitting so pink and smirking in her new pram, could hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it. The foolish puppy, too, that took the place of the teddy-bear, he was looking so extraordinarily foolish for no other reason but that he heard the secret whisper all over the house: “There must be more money!”

  Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: “We are breathing!” in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.

  “Mother,” said the boy Paul one day, “why don’t we keep a car of our own? Why do we always use uncle’s, or else a taxi?”

  “Because we’re the poor members of the family,” said the mother.

  “But why are we, mother?”

  “Well – I suppose,” she said slowly and bitterly, “it’s because your father has no luck.”

  The boy was silent for some time.

  “Is luck money, mother?” he asked, rather timidly.

  “No, Paul. Not quite. It’s what causes you to have money.”

  “Oh!” said Paul vaguely. “I thought when Uncle Oscar said filthy lucker, it meant money.”

  “Filthy lucre does mean money,” said the mother. “But it’s lucre, not luck.”

  “Oh!” said the boy. “Then what is luck, mother?”

  “It’s what causes you to have money. If you’re lucky you have money. That’s why it’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you may lose your money. But if you’re lucky, you will always get more money.”