The Book Ghost

by Lorna Gray

  Every action of mine had a peculiar energy to it. I had been walking for about fifteen minutes before Robert broke into my thoughts to ask, ‘Is this the way to the bus?’

  He was with me. His question was given in that way a person has when he knows speech will be unwelcome but feels compelled to breach the cheery charade anyway. He had noticed that I wasn’t leading him back across the fields towards that little church by the river. He had certainly noticed the decisiveness with which I was marching along.

  I confessed far too blandly, ‘I want to take a quick look at the family memorial in the village church. Do you mind? The bus stops there too.’

  That was the last thing I said for some time. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I hadn’t been speaking before. Now I had the surprise of suddenly wishing that I had left him with Jacqueline, or sent him back along that footpath over the fields to the main road; or anywhere, just so that I wouldn’t have to acknowledge that I wasn’t quite calm.

  It took us another twenty minutes to reach the village. The church stood at the heart of an uneven assortment of grand houses and rotten little cottages that ran in a straggling line along the lane. It was built of a strange white stone that shone against the heavy browns of the surrounding wintered landscape. There was no tower. Like the riverside church, this place seemed to have been limited either by wealth or the instability of what was effectively an island in a vast water meadow.

  Inside, the whitewashed nave was so deeply silent that for a moment I was afraid again – I thought I was stepping back into that obscure oppression of the senses. The hush was certainly strong enough to absorb the heavy creak as I pushed the stout wooden door closed behind me. But this time Robert was with me and the silence was the sort that belonged to ancient walls built to withstand the winter outside.

  I drew a steadying breath and finally found my courage. I said quietly, ‘Is that the memorial? On the end wall of this aisle?’

  It was a vast marble plaque with ornate scrollwork, and Walter’s motto – that defiant declaration that he could never die while his monument remained – had been picked out with black pigment against the veined stone.

  My bandaged hand was gripping my collar again, but this time it was definitely for the sake of warmth. This place was cold, like an ice house.

  I remarked with a whisper, ‘Do you think Walter’s inscription is a bit tactless for a church memorial?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Don’t people buried in church generally subscribe to the belief that eternity dwells in the strength of their faith, rather than tangible things like earth and stone? “He who believeth in me shall never die”, and so on?’

  That was all I said. Because Robert was checking how much time we had left before the bus went past and I was noticing that Walter John Ashbrook’s parents were recorded here too. Their mortal remains lay under the great slab at the base, where someone had set a vase of dried flowers. They were lavender and a teasel, and the fragile seedheads of what looked like forget-me-not.

  Walter’s wife was mentioned, and so were his children; three sons and a reference to Janet, the daughter, who had been interred in the fullness of time with her husband elsewhere. The youngest of them had installed this tribute with the note, ‘Given by his daughter with love’.

  The sequence ran on in a different script to include a painfully emotional tribute to the last of the Ashbrooks who had been lost in the Great War. But there was no memorial here to my real target.

  Harriet Clare was as neglected in this place as she had been at the house.

  She wasn’t in the graveyard either. A hasty search identified a shattering cluster of children robbed before their time in 1873, the year of the diphtheria outbreak. Their names swept after me as I moved out into the lane again, a mutter on the wind.

  I barely even noticed when I passed the bus stop sign at the turn where the lane joined the main Cirencester road. I know Robert saw it.

  In a profoundly unpleasant and claustrophobic way, I was certain now that I really wished he had stayed there and let me go on alone. He was like a guard, an increasingly doubtful guard, and I don’t know at what point I had stopped feeling grateful for the way he had picked me up at the foot of the stairs, but I didn’t like this feeling that I was doing anything wrong.

  I thought he was suppressing the urge to start asking me searching questions. I marched on just so that he didn’t get the chance to catch my eye.

  We reached the little church by the river as the cloud crashed in at about waist height. It filled the air with a fine icy rain that stung, and it was as we ducked beneath the brief shelter of an ancient cedar that it finally occurred to me to wonder if Robert’s disapproval was coming from the responsibility of accompanying me like this.

  I remembered at long last that this was not a man who had the nerve for mediating between peace and a rough scene.

  I asked him quite seriously, ‘Are you managing all right? You aren’t feeling restless? You don’t want to leave?’

  ‘Well, it is a touch chilly to be striding about windswept churchyards.’

  He cannot have understood the reference. In fact, the brief flare of my concern was swept away by his simple and uncompromising honesty. After all, he must have known that a person only ever asks after another’s health at a time like this when they wish to either be told that all is well, or told categorically that it very much isn’t. In this instance, this benign airing of his discomfort made it plainly my fault, while leaving it entirely to my temper to decide that he was actually saying that he would stay with me while I did this.

  And now the bus was due and that infuriated me too.

  The riverside church was sinking. It was dark and damp inside, and far too poor to bear a memorial of any sort beyond a few ancient slabs before the altar.

  My race moved into the graveyard. The first short rows yielded nothing except the final resting place of that brave traveller Sampson Murray. He had died a few years before Walter John Ashbrook, but lay alone here amongst all these names I did not know.

  I was diving along the next row – all uselessly modern – when the bus clattered into view.

  It came with a curse for me. I wasn’t ready to leave this place and every movement seemed to be taking longer and longer. The feeling of panic grew stronger when Robert left me and crossed the fifteen yards or so to the kerb to put out his hand as a signal for it to stop.

  ‘Lucy!’ The hard call of my name carried across the grey stones and snatched at my attention. I had been struggling back to Murray’s badly weathered inscription when I blindly turned my head.

  Robert was tramping back through the dirty ground to the limit of the graveyard. The bus had slowed to a halt beyond him.

  Now I saw his face clearly for the first time. His urgency was a shock for me. Robert was a serious and characterful man with cheeks cast to harsh angles by the bitter air until he looked pale and cold. The flaps of his coat were guttering wetly. It was a shock for me to see that the energy that had been flowing through my veins was being reflected in the stark purpose of this man. He really didn’t want to stay here.

  ‘Lucy. The bus!’ His hand swept out towards the road where the conductor was itching to close the doors.

  Even while I began to obey his call, from somewhere I mustered the intelligence to say impatiently, ‘You’re acting as though wishing to visit this part of the Ashbrook story in person is a thoroughly unnatural thing to do, and it isn’t kind. I shouldn’t have to justify myself.’

  ‘No?’ he retorted. ‘In that case I shouldn’t have had to notice that something has been upsetting you ever since we left that house.’

  Then he added more persuasively, ‘We can come back.’

  The lack of answers amongst these graves matched my numb mind, and my frozen limbs. The only heat in me came from the urge to keep on searching. But his determination to get me away was a burning plea of his own. It snatched at me. He sharpened my focus and intensified it. Fo
r a moment, a deeply alien moment, the tug of his wishes almost tore my mind.

  He almost unleashed an aspect of my nature that would have made him get on that hateful bus alone. It was so close. I very nearly snapped out the unforgiveable. I felt it curling in my mouth. Only, I knew nastiness would just force him to bear his responsibility and burden me with his presence until one of us was worn down to an apology. There was no way Robert was going to abandon me in my distress, so I knew that ultimately the apology would come from me.

  Dignity made me get on the bus, but I couldn’t look at him.

  I didn’t glance at him when the conductor took my ticket, nor when I stepped along the narrow channel between the rows to take the first available seat by the nearside window. I certainly didn’t acknowledge him when I felt the springs give as he claimed the seat beside me.

  And I wasn’t looking at him now.

  He didn’t want to speak to me either. The temper ran both ways. And suddenly I was turning my head to the misted glass while the verge ran away outside, and my eyes were burning because I had the burden of knowing his retreat into silence stemmed from the shock of my mood, and this was my fault too.

  I didn’t want this feeling. The scenery was growing infuriatingly blurred. This was reaction, I suppose. It was slowing dawning on me that I had spent the past hour obeying a blind compulsion to go chasing after gravestones.

  It felt like I was drawing my first breath after waking from the influence of that awful moment upstairs in the house, where I had been compelled to call out my husband’s name. And yet I didn’t even know why it should be so disturbing, except that since then the only emotion I seemed to have experienced was rage.

  And now the bus was jarring unpleasantly over a pothole. This was reality. This was the flood of every normal emotion returning after the wild hunt, when the world reduced itself to the scale of a bus ride with an ordinary, rattling crowd of people. There was a woman two seats behind who was telling her neighbour all about her Christmas present to her husband. It was going to be a maroon jumper from a second-hand shop because the clothing coupons were needed for socks.

  It was suddenly hard to draw a steady breath. I rummaged impatiently in my bag for an absent handkerchief and then I gave up. I focussed very hard on blinking, and did not look at Robert.

  It seemed an extension of that simple determination when, between one stinging second and the next, I felt Robert move beside me. His hand passed over his lap to draw my attention. It wasn’t a mark of further blame. It was simply a gesture of solidarity.

  That loosened the controls as nothing else would. It hurt. I placed my hand in his and gripped him. I kept my head turned to the glass and took the gift of calm from him while the strain kept bursting upon me in waves. It would ebb and I would think I had managed to win this battle and then it would crash in again and make my eyes burn.

  It was about ten minutes later that I realised I had made another fool of myself. Robert hadn’t been offering me his hand at all. He had been meaning to pass me a folded and unused handkerchief.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said and practically flung his hand away.

  Now every part of me was livid after all this time of feeling chilled to the core. I was blazing, really, because nothing had changed. I hadn’t woken from anything. And still I didn’t have a blasted handkerchief so that in the end I had to ask for his after all.

  Then the bus was stopping in Cirencester and we had to climb down and walk across the town to the stop where the northbound bus would depart. We had an hour between buses but I was hardly going to suggest a cup of tea today. My eyes had dried at least, but I gripped my collar to keep out the cold and scurried along as if I might leave him behind. In fact, I truly expected him to leave me now, I was behaving so appallingly.

  But his question when it came was a restrained note of grim perseverance from about a step behind me. ‘Would it help you to talk about it?’

  I turned my head. I said bitterly, ‘Of course it wouldn’t help to talk. What on earth do you think you’re playing at, anyway? You said I was formidable and why would you say something like that, when you know perfectly well that I’m not? You keep building me up and then asking me questions that prove I’m pathetic. It’s as if you actually want to make things worse. When I’m fine as I am, thank you.’

  His reply came a little later. ‘You say that word a lot.’

  ‘Which word?’

  ‘You’re “fine”.’

  ‘Whereas you say absolutely nothing.’

  This was a repeat of an old lie.

  After an inward battle with the truth, I stopped in the windswept street where we were to catch the next bus. I turned to him and finally conceded, ‘Very well, you say all sorts of things; it’s just that I don’t always understand you. For example, everyone keeps saying that you’re going to leave us, but here you are. Perhaps you should go, Robert. At this moment, and there’s an end to it.’

  It was a truly nasty thing to say, for both of us. And revealing too.

  For him, it was enough to make him turn aside slightly, with hands thrust into the deep pockets of his raincoat. In this dingy light, he was looking, I don’t know – remote, I suppose. For me, my remark was a deeper echo of my brutal wish to be left alone in the churchyard, only I had been too wise to speak it there.

  Now, all of a sudden, I had chosen this moment to regain my voice; and all I had done with it was speak to him in a way that came close to repeating the act of taking his hand on the bus – it was another terrible mistake.

  It stung, just knowing what he might read in that statement, and I couldn’t have honestly said whether I was bracing to cringe away from a cold reply, or one of care.

  As it was, he didn’t leave, and he didn’t speak. He did nothing very much, in fact, except turn his mind to the few cars which were running past on the dregs of their rationed petrol between the horse-drawn delivery wagons.

  Robert’s steadfast refusal to argue with me was somehow steadying. He gave me room to hope just a little that the break of my temper into speech might be my release after all; when I had at least attempted to answer his question. He had asked me to explain what was upsetting me and, in this very poor way, I suppose I must have begun.

  It certainly allowed me to try again when someone needed to squeeze past behind. Joining him in his contemplation of the thin traffic, I finally confided bleakly, ‘People are going to say that the plight of the dead girl is making me confront my memories of losing Archie, aren’t they?’

  At last, my voice was more like my own.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied while a bus approached – it wasn’t ours. ‘They’ll be more likely to say that she’s dredging up memories of your own abandonment after your parents gave you away. Finding her grave would mean unearthing proof that Harriet – and by extension, you – were wanted after all, wouldn’t it?’

  I stiffened.

  I supposed I deserved this rather damning reply. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be an alternative explanation for my agitation – that I was reacting to the more distant bruise from my childhood.

  But it didn’t quite fit, anyway, because I was certain that Robert knew I would find this second theory considerably easier to dismiss. He knew my aunt and uncle, after all.

  He allowed himself to meet my eye. ‘Lucy,’ he added firmly, ‘I’m trying to say that I’m with you all the way. But what do you want to do?’

  He hadn’t meant the barb at all.

  Suddenly, I was able to breathe and notice that dusk had fallen. I thrust my hands deeply into warm pockets and confessed in a completely new voice, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what I want to do. Nothing, probably, except beg to never have to go back there?’

  And then, because I didn’t think he was really asking about Harriet at all, I told him, ‘I had a very strange little turn upstairs in that house.’

  My lips were dry. And so was my voice when I added plainly, ‘In a way you really have been mak
ing things worse when I go there, because you persist in putting thoughts of my loss in my head. I wish you didn’t keep feeling that you need to ask me how I am. I don’t really think of myself as vulnerable as such, so it shocks me to perceive that you do. And it shocks me even more to think that you may be right to worry. Because there was a moment when I was alone in that end bedroom, when I felt I had to say Archie’s name.’

  ‘Did he answer?’

  The fearsomely direct question sent a cold touch across my skin.

  I shook my head. ‘No. No one was there at all. Nothing but silence. Unless ghosts speak with the opposite of sound? And, honestly, I don’t want him to communicate with me. It’s true.’

  I saw Robert’s doubt. His features were being lit by the unsympathetic glare of passing headlights.

  I told him quickly, ‘I don’t want to feel that Archie is near my side. I don’t want to be brought to the point of believing that I have to reach out to the dead for the answers to this life.’

  I faltered. I had stumbled into the type of honesty that left ripples in the mind.

  It was, I suppose a little bit of proof of why I always said that people shouldn’t be pushed into speaking about such dark things as their war experiences. Only now I was realising that I had only ever really meant that I shouldn’t be made to talk about my own. This was like the rudeness I had thrust at him before; this was the sort of confession I would never be able to retract.

  It certainly was unstoppable now. I blundered into adding earnestly, ‘I am sorry, by the way, about how I’ve been behaving. I mean in general rather than just today. I keep growing so frustrated and I’m afraid that it does, in its way, stem from Archie. You see, you’re the first man I’ve been friends with since him.’

  ‘You’re feeling guilty?’ Robert’s question was brusque. And for good reason, because this was the sort of terminology that was the usual reserve of lovers. He braved it anyway when he asked flatly, ‘You feel as if you need to remain faithful to your husband?’