“Know him! Better far than all the Reverend Parsons put together know him.”
Mrs. Tope’s care has spread a very neat, clean breakfast ready for her lodger. Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner-cupboard door; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls to with an appetite.
It was disappointing that the last sentence was complete. She’d hoped that it might have ended in mid-sentence, or part-way through a word, though the use of the present tense added an intriguing tension to those final words.
Appetite.
The last word written.
When she’d read The Last Addition to the Score she’d imagined something to do with music, the last few notes added to something appropriately Schubertian and Unfinished, but now saw that all it meant was “twenty.” This was not as promising, though still intriguing: twenty-one lines drawn in chalk. Perhaps she didn’t want to read the incomplete novel after all. (“I’m brooding on Drood,” she thought to herself.) The explanation for those chalk lines could never be as interesting as the puzzled speculation, the not knowing. The stained glass windows were wiped clean as she wielded the magic wand of Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent; the Shakespeare Castle was utterly destroyed; the tapestries were unthreaded like a wiped-clean blackboard with all the chalked words gone.
The thing was …
The thing was that when blackboards were wiped clean – the waving goodbye motion of the hand with the cloth – the words being erased were already committed – ha! – to memory, and could not be forgotten, learned by heart, written troubles of the brain.
There was no dot-dot-dot after the point at which The Mystery of Edwin Drood had come to a premature stop, but there was a row of nine stars below the last line. Then there were no more words, and silence began in blank white paper.
32
Japan, the country to which Ben was traveling, was a country without shadows, even on days of sunshine, a country without clouds, even when it rained.
She had studied the prints in Grandpapa and Grandmama Brouwer’s house, the ones Grandpapa had brought back with him from the time when he had been in Japan. The artists ignored clouds and shadows (and perspective), and this was how she had found herself – as a girl – imagining the country. She didn’t know whether all artists followed the same conventions, but, in those she knew, far and near seemed to exist – like past and present – in the same place, at the same moment, and that which was far away assumed as large a shape as that which was near, as in a child’s drawing.
Ben, blinking in the bright light, held his hand up above his eyes as he looked up into a cloudless sky, shapes forming within his eyes as the sun dazzled. Around him were the people without shadows, the Japanese, their parasols hiding their faces. They were ladies of Japan: on many a vase and jar, on many a screen and fan, they figured in lively paint, their attitude queer and quaint.
They did not appear to see Ben.
It was as if he – also – were a cloud, or a shadow.
33
She had the feeling again, as she saw her pale reflection in front of her, and – she had been back at the window for no more than a few minutes – went to her writing journal where it lay on the bed, her pen lying within the hollow between the opened pages.
She read again what she had written most recently. She always dated what she wrote, so that she knew the day on which she had written it. This was her nearest approach to a diary.
I saw another ghost last night. They come at twilight, the in-between-time, not in full darkness, gathering like starlings in a public square as the light fails, but in silence, with none of the gregarious groupings and noise of the birds. They live in the mirrors. Sometimes – & always one at a time – they emerge from the mirror, & walk into the room.
Her head slightly on one side, concentrating to hear that distant dictating, she unscrewed the top of her pen, and began to write in the blackest of black ink.
As if restless, they never stay long in one place, wandering about as if searching for something, something they’d lost & were anxious to find again. They make a sound like moths’ wings …
She paused, listening more carefully, and then added two insertion arrows in the incomplete final sentence. After They she wrote never speak, but they, and before sound she wrote rustling. Without any further pause, she completed the sentence she had started.
…fluttering against glass, as if drawn in toward illumination as daylight fades. It makes them seem insubstantial & brittle, as if they were made out of thin paper, rising up out of the pages as the words were read …
She inserted of a book after pages, and added as the pages were turned at the end of the sentence.
One particular ghost comes again & again, never losing that intensity of searching, the eyes fixed intently upon the floor in front of her, as if what she sought might be there. She leans right down, as if that which she seeks is small, and precious to her. She never sees me. None of them ever sees me. It’s as if I’m not there, as if I’m the one faded & half effaced.
A pause.
Something not quite right.
She changed the period after None of them ever sees me into a comma, added an insertion arrow, and wrote just as they never seem to see each other. They swarm, they gather, but they are always alone, not seeing their surroundings, but seeing only something within themselves.
Without pausing, she altered the period after half effaced into a comma, and added & as if they exist alone, without me, though I feel that it is my presence that gives them shape, as if they were the reflection I make in the mirror – she was writing more and more rapidly, the unseen dictator speaking with increasing urgency and speed – a self I cannot recognize & have never seen before, something hidden emerging from an inner room, the Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass room beyond the one visible in the mirror, & never seen.
After a short pause, she crossed through & never seen.
She paused.
She paused.
In the space above the first line – it was the top of the left-hand side of a double-page spread – she wrote The Shape of the Clouds.
Scribble, scribble, scribble, she thought.
She paused.
She paused.
She knew she hadn’t written five hundred words yet for that day. Five hundred words would fill two pages of the journal, and her handwriting was just starting to reach down the right-hand side. She sometimes wrote a great deal more than five hundred words; she never wrote fewer.
She waited a little while longer, in that listening stance.
After a while – it was one of her drawing-to-a-close actions at the end of each day – she began to count the words she had written, her lips moving, the whispered numbers just audible. A further pause, and then she replaced the journal and the pen exactly where they had been, and went back to the window.
There was an ink stain on the side of her face. She touched it, feeling the blackness entering inside her.
There was a Young …
– Young! –
…Lady in White,
Who looked out at the depths of the Night;
But the birds of the air,
Filled her heart with despair,
And oppressed that Young …
– Young! –
… Lady in White.
The crows, the starlings, the choughs, the parrots, the herons, the hawks, the owls, the peacocks, the woodpeckers, the finches, the ravens, the lapwings, the magpies: all the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing as they swarmed upon her, she become another St. Francis, vanishing beneath the falling feathers.
Soon it would be time to put out the lamp and go to bed. It would be time to dream again.
How she had longed for one day of cloudless skies, one night of dreamless sleep. She had thought – as a young child – that clouds were not there in the nighttime, that they
swarmed away to sleep like birds, but they were always there, hidden in the darkness, vague shadows obliterating the stars, blurring the changing shape of the moon, absorbing the muted circle of light.
She stood at the window. With her left hand she gripped one of the iron bars, and with her right hand she picked up her hairbrush.
“One, two, three …”
She had written three hundred and thirteen words.
Three hundred and eighteen words if she included the title.
She always included the title.
The day had not been entirely wasted.
She had to write at least a hundred and eighty-two words before she could go to sleep.
She rested her bowed head against the upraised arm, her face hidden, her eyes closed.
“… four, five, six …”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to avoid one of those long, exhaustive, look-how-hard-I’ve-worked lists of references, but I am anxious to acknowledge how grateful I am to the many writers I consulted during the writing of this novel, especially the novelists, poets, dramatists, and song-writers from whom I quote, or to whom I make reference. Any reader will recognize how essential a part they play in this novel, and how much I owe to them. The dream interpretations are taken from What’s in a Dream by Gustavus Hindman Miller (1901). Harry Graham’s poem “Tender-heartedness” (from Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes) is quoted by kind permission of the Trustees of Mrs. Virginia Thesiger. I am not conscious of having quoted from any other copyright text, and apologize if I have inadvertently done so. I have tried to be true to the period about which I have written, though I have adapted some things to suit my purpose. I am grateful, also, to the friendly and efficient staff of the North Yorkshire Library Service – especially Ivy Summons, Shena Hugill, and Liz Luxmoore – for their tireless and interested help in finding what were sometimes elusive texts for me during my research. Numerous other people have helped and encouraged me, and I owe particular thanks to Gerard Galloway, and – most of all – Paul Barton.
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