all the beloved ghosts

by Alison Macleod

  In the operating theatre, Mr Bonham and his team have been at work for three-and-a-half hours, when at last he gives the word. Professor Noble can be disconnected from the bypass machine. His pulse is strong. The new heart, declares Mr Bonham, ‘is going great guns’.

  Denis’s dream of Ella at the gate means he can’t finish at the slaughterhouse quickly enough. On the train back into town, he swears under his breath at the eternity of every stop. In the lab, the insertion of the micropipette has been hit and miss. Antony and Günter exchange looks. When they request a lunch break, he stares into the middle distance. When Günter complains that his hands are starting to burn from the fixatives, Denis looks up from the Zeiss, as if at a tourist who requires something of him in another language.

  Finally, when the great window is a chapel arch of darkness and rain, he closes and locks the lab door behind him. There is nothing in his appearance to suggest anything other than a long day’s work. No one he passes on the staircase of the Anatomy Building pauses to look. No one glances back, pricked by an intuition or an afterthought. He has forgotten his jacket, but the sight of a poorly dressed student is nothing to make anyone look twice.

  Yet as he steps into the downpour of the night, every light is blazing in his head. In the dazzle of his own thoughts, he hardly sees where he’s going but he’s running, across Gordon Square and on towards Tavistock . . . He wants to shout the news to the winos who shelter from the rain under dripping trees. He wants to holler it to every lit window, to every student in his or her numinous haze of thought. ‘They close!’

  He saw it with his own eyes: potassium channels that closed.

  They did just the opposite of what everyone expected.

  He assumed some sort of experimental error. He went back through Günter’s contact sheets. He checked the amp and the connections. He wondered if he wasn’t merely observing his own wishful thinking. He started again. He shook things up. He subjected the cells to change – changes of voltage, of ions, of temperature. Antony asked, morosely, for permission to leave early. He had an exam – Gross Anatomy – the next day. Didn’t Antony understand? ‘They’re not simply open,’ he announced over a new ten-pound cylinder of graph paper. ‘They opened.’

  Antony’s face was blank as an egg.

  Günter suggested they call it a day.

  But the channels opened. They were active. They opened and, more remarkably still, they closed.

  Ella was right. He can’t wait to tell her she was. The channels aren’t merely passive conduits. They’re not just machinery or component parts. They’re alive and responsive. The evidence was there all along. Somehow – he doesn’t know how – she allowed him to see it.

  Too many ions inside the cell – too much stress, exercise, anger, love, lust or despair – and they close. They stop all incoming electrical traffic. They preserve calm in the midst of too much life.

  He can hardly believe it himself. The heart ‘listens’ to itself. It’s a beautiful loop of feedback. Its parts listen to each other as surely as musicians do in an ensemble. No, forget the ensemble. The heart is an orchestra. It’s the BBC Proms. It’s more than the sum of its parts.

  And what if the heart doesn’t stop at the heart? What if the connections don’t end?

  Even he doesn’t quite know what he means by this.

  He will ask Ella. He will tell her of their meeting at the kissing gate.

  Ella at eight.

  He waits by the window until the lights go out over Tavistock Square and the trees melt into darkness.

  He waits for three days. He retreats under the eiderdown. He is absent from the slaughterhouse, the lab and the basement.

  A fortnight passes. A month. Then it’s new year.

  When the second movement of the Piano Trio rises through the floorboards, he feels nothing. It has taken him months, but finally, he feels nothing.

  As he comes round, the insult of the tube down his throat assures him he hasn’t died.

  The first thing he sees is his grandson by the foot of his bed, tapping away on his new mobile phone. ‘Hi, Granddad,’ Josh says, as if Denis has only been napping. He bounces to the side of the ICU bed, unfazed by the bleeping monitors and the tubes. ‘Put your index finger here, Denis. I’ll help you . . . No, like right over the camera lens. That’s it. This phone has an Instant Heart Rate App. We’ll see if you’re working yet.’

  ‘Cool,’ Denis starts to say, but the irony is lost to the tube in his throat.

  Josh’s brow furrows. He studies his phone screen like a doctor on a medical soap. ‘Sixty-two beats per minute at rest. Congratulations, Granddad. You’re like . . . alive.’ Josh squeezes his hand and grins.

  Denis has never been so glad to see him.

  On the other side of the bed, his wife touches his shoulder. Her face is tired. The fluorescence of the lights age her. She has lipstick on her front tooth and tears in her eyes as she bends to whisper, hoarsely, in his ear. ‘You came back to me.’

  The old words.

  After a week, he’d given up hope. He realised he didn’t even know where she lived, which student residence, which flat, which telephone exchange. He’d never thought to ask. Once he even tried waiting for her outside the Old Bailey, but the trial was over, someone said. Days before. Didn’t he read the papers?

  When she opened his door in January of ’61, she stood on the threshold, an apparition. She simply waited, her shiny hair still flying away from her in the light of the bare bulb on the landing. He was standing at the window through which he’d given up looking. On the other side, the copper beech was bare with winter. In the room below, the Schubert recording was stuck on a scratch.

  Her words, when they finally came, rose and fell in a rhythm he’d almost forgotten. ‘Why don’t you know that you’re in love with me? What’s wrong with you, Denis Noble?’

  Cooking smells – boiled vegetables and mince – wafted into his room from the communal kitchen.

  Downstairs, the cellist moved the needle on the record.

  ‘You came back to me,’ he said.

  As his recuperation begins, he will realise, with not a little impatience, that he knows nothing at all about the whereabouts of love. He knows only where it isn’t. It is not in the heart, or if it is, it is not only in the heart. The organ that first beat in the depths of Ethel in the upstairs room of Wilson & Jeffries is now consigned to the scrapheap of cardiovascular history. Yet in this moment, with a heart that is not strictly his, he loves Ella as powerfully as he did the night she reappeared in his room on Tavistock Square.

  But if love is not confined to the heart, nor would it seem is memory confined to the brain. The notion tantalises him. Those aspects or qualities which make the human condition human – love, consciousness, memory, affinity – are, Denis feels more sure than ever, distributed throughout the body. The single part, as Ella once claimed so long ago, must contain the whole.

  He hopes his new heart will let him live long enough to see the proof. He wishes he had a pencil.

  In the meantime, as Denis adjusts to his new heart hour by hour, day by day, he will demonstrate, in Josh’s steadfast company, an imperfect but unprecedented knowledge of the lyrics of Jay Z and OutKast. He will announce to Ella that he is keen to buy a BMX bike. He won’t be sure himself whether he is joking or not. He will develop an embarrassing appetite for doner kebabs, and he will not be deterred by the argument, put to him by Ella, his daughter and Josh, that he has never eaten a doner kebab.

  He will surprise even himself when he hears himself tell Mr Bonham, during his evening rounds, that he favours Alton Towers over the Dordogne this year.

  Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld

  It’s a cheek for me to say it, but this is no place for you.

  ‘A cheek’. Not our native usage. I know. After all these years, I pick, I choose. English, North American. North American, English. I imagine you did the same. And wasn’t it sweet to see Ted, in Birthday Letters, celebrating, not y
our 1956 Veronica Lake ‘fringe’, but your Veronica Lake ‘bangs’, or, if I’m being honest, your ‘bang’. A fond concession to our vernacular – even if he got it wrong. More than once. Couldn’t you just swat him with a dish towel and a newly-wed’s grin. My what?

  Your bang.

  Oh, Ted!

  I see you smooth your apron and its scattering of tiny red hearts. He winks at you over the Observer, and you turn away, knowing how grab-able your waist looks from behind. You concentrate on your Tomato Soup Cake recipe. Two cups sifted flour. One tablespoon baking powder . . . You long for the reliability of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup. You feel wistful at the memory of those bright red-and-white cans which you skated on as a child across your mother’s kitchen floor.

  In the distance, near the entrance to the cemetery, three elderly women in dark woollen coats look my way – and yours – their jaws as square as paving slabs. (Don’t ever let anyone tell you there aren’t some advantages in not making it past the menopause.) Above them, above us all, in the strumpety June sunshine, St Thomas’s dark tower rises like a reproachful finger.

  There seems no denying it. You were a handful. It seems there were times when you could have worn out life itself, but the stony digit of that tower disapproves too much.

  Of course. Thoughtless of me. The view from the Underworld must be limited; like the view round a pillar in a back row of the stalls. Only – yes – your ‘pillar’ is big, broad and everlasting.

  Think back.

  Through the dandelion spores of the centuries and across the buttercupped lane, the most ancient graves nestle closer to the church than yours, as no doubt you recall from Sunday afternoon strolls with Ted, and Christmas Day trudges through the snow and the mud with the in-laws.

  How wrong you must have looked here.

  When I arrived in 1987, I discarded every bright skirt and top I’d packed. I was afraid of blotting the streetscapes of England with too much colour. Like you, I learned how to be less vivid. I found Topshop, a houndstooth skirt and a dark, oversized cardigan.

  Ahead of us, a mother and her two young daughters, both in pink crocs, are running in a careless hopscotch across the slabs of the dead. I want to cheer at the twenty-first-century triumph of those Crocs, here of all places, but – yes – I understand. The living are thoughtless, running across graves, canoodling at kissing gates, making brass rubbings, and – you’re quite right – being overfamiliar.

  Today, a rock balances on top of your headstone. Beneath it lies a crushed daisy. Under the daisy are words in blue biro on a torn scrap.

  I make Cakes too.

  Life is a Dream.

  Death is the reallity.

  You wouldn’t have bargained on this downturn in circumstances: on the ghetto of Deadland, the utter voicelessness, and now, to add insult to injury, misspelled poetic offerings from God knows whom. You couldn’t have imagined it – not really, not you, not after Mademoiselle magazine, Cambridge camaraderie and vol-au-vents with the Eliots.

  Let’s change the subject.

  Down the church path and through the gate, this bit of the village greets modernity with unexpectedly wide, perpendicular streets. Lawnmowers drone and dog walkers genuflect, their hands ritually sheathed in plastic. Somewhere a mobile incants ‘The Birdie Song’. Wild roses blow. The foxgloves rise, their pink mouths electric with bees. In suburban-esque gardens, clumps of forget-me-nots insist as delicately, and as forgettably, as they do every year. (They are pale things compared with the wild alkanet that has colonised your grave.) Near the start of the footpath, ferns uncurl, tentative as new foetuses, while a man in long shorts and socks is, even here, on the blunt edge of a dark valley, washing and waxing his Ford.

  If you watch carefully, you’ll see the scenery of this village shake when the wind blows too hard. The symmetry of the newer streets is a hard-won make-believe. At the village’s heart, the soot-dark ginnels and archways still remember an emptiness – a wind-shot summit, the strange glow of moorland – while at the edge, the trees won’t grow upright. They know the truth, as do the drystone walls that tremble at the lure of gravity. Down the sheer wall of woodland, among the wych elm and oak, an odd shoe, a glinting wine bottle and a baby’s rusting pushchair are only the most recent sacrifices. The giddy swoop of the valley, the mesmerism of the river and the lush, leafy-green darkness can’t help but draw everything down, down, down.

  It must take a collective act of the villagers’ will not to give in, not to be seduced, not to wobble too far in their stoical perch high on this hilltop.

  This is not the place for you. You need sea level. You’re a long way from the Cape Cod trance of Nauset’s crashing rollers. Right now, there’s no imagining you – wishing you – up to your elbows in rock pools, your hands rising with sand dollars, starfish and fiddler crabs. At night, you won’t don your red bikini for a swim in the flashing phosphorescent surf. The sand dunes and their long grasses won’t be disturbed by your body holding fast to his.

  To your right, your neighbour is Horace Draper, the dearly loved husband of Emily, who lived his span of eighty-five years. To your left is Francis Joseph Carr, who left this world in November 1960, just days before Kennedy was elected to office. As Francis breathed his last, you squinted at a flickering black-and-white set in a shop window on Regent’s Park Road, transfixed by the sight of the President-elect and Jackie standing on the brink of the decade outside their Hyannis Port home. You’d never say it, you’d only hope it, but weren’t you and Ted almost as winsome in literary London? Your first collection was just out with Heinemann. The BBC was paying Ted well. Your kitchen calendar at Chalcot Square was marked by plans for appleseed cake, banana loaf and home-made waffles. In little over a week, you’d record ‘Candles’ and ‘Leaving Early’ for the Poet’s Voice. You’d done the undo-able: you were the American sweater girl who’d become a British poet. England had let you moult your gung-ho, straight-A self.

  On Regent’s Park Road, you strain to read Kennedy’s lips through the glass, to hear the New England burr of his words. Jackie smiles up at you, squinting into the Cape Cod sun. You can almost feel the sea-spangled light on your face. You can almost smell the salt marshes off the Nantucket Sound. JFK lifts Caroline into his arms. You jiggle Frieda in her pram and raise the hood against the drizzle. The parcel of pork loin is a reassuring weight in the shopping bag that dangles from your arm.

  Did you know then? Did Ted? Already your marriage had failed.

  Alkanet grows on disturbed ground. It can sting like nettles. Though classified as a weed, it is not so coarse that it lacks a Latin designation. Pentaglottis – ‘five-tongued’ – sempervirens – ‘always alive’.

  The only bouquet at your grave today is a spray of red-and-white carnations, but their blooms have withered in the bushy, two-foot-high shadow of the alkanet. Its tiny flowers have the dark plutonic brilliance of blue LED bulbs. Once upon a time, its huge taproot was cultivated by monks for cloth the colour of Christ’s wounds, and, earlier still, by Egyptian priestesses to henna their hair. Red is of course your signature colour, the trademark hue of your tulips and poppies; of the bleeding cheeks, sliced thumbs and pulpy hearts you could not resist.

  (Sssh. Lie low. Don’t move. No rising up. The three Fates of Heptonstall have trained their eyes upon us.)

  I don’t see it at first amid the stalks of alkanet: a neat willow basket propped on your grave and packed with solid earth. Soil and mulch from someone’s New England garden, or so says the smeared gift card.

  I resolve not to look in the basket; not to intrude on your privacy and hers. Except I do. When the dark woollen backs of the Fates are turned, I hunker down and reach inside. And behold! It’s as if the Welcome Wagon ladies have been.

  First, a few silver coins – for the ferryman naturally. Will you need them now? I wonder. You’re no longer that new soul waiting for the ferry, mistaking it for the 11 a.m. from Hyannis to Nantucket. I imagine you used to enjoy that journey simply for the
to-and-fro of the ride itself. It would have offered you a rare release from purpose, from the need to get somewhere in life. Perhaps you like to ride the ferry, even now.

  Next, a plastic ballpoint pen, red.

  Drawing pencils and a pencil sharpener.

  A chunk of pink rock. No, pink glass. Sea glass, if I’m not mistaken. Worn smooth.

  A string of beads, white against the dark earth.

  A string of black beads looped around the basket’s handle.

  A key ring with a pendant of tarnished silver. No key.

  A three-inch female nude in red clay. She’s big-breasted, big-bottomed.

  Two red gummy children, sticky with the warmth of June.

  An overturned red wine glass. Because you and Ted never were the types to reach for a plastic planchette. You doubted that Parker Brothers could point the way to the spirit world.

  My childhood Ouija Board sat on a basement shelf beneath the Monopoly and Scrabble. I still remember the injunctions the kids down the street breathed into my ear. If the planchette falls from the board, a spirit will get loose. If you try to burn the board, it will scream. Never ask it when you’re going to get rich or when you’re going to die. Never, never use the planchette when you’re alone.

  I lift the glass from the basket. I dispense with formalities: the ring of paper letters, the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’, and a partner’s fingertips on the base of the glass. Speed is of the utmost, for the Fates are coming my way, bearing garden spades and plastic floral features. Perhaps they are the sisters of Horace Draper, aged eighty-five. I, on the other hand, am disturbing a grave. Or at least a basket.

  I hold the rim of the glass to my ear, as if I were listening for our crashing Atlantic three thousand miles away.

  At first I hear nothing but the buzzing of the tinnitus I’ve had since dinner at a noisy Carluccio’s the other week. The stalwart Fates trudge past, eyeballing me but saying nothing. Knitting needles and grey yarn poke from the pocket of the eldest. Overhead, swallows scissor the reams of sky, and something in the atmosphere opens.