“Well, but . . . who have you sold it to?” spluttered Michael.
“Gordon Way.”
“Gordon Way! But for heaven’s sake, Mother, he’s . . .”
“He’s very anxious to be seen to patronize the arts. And I think I do mean patronize. I’m sure you’ll get on splendidly, dear. Now, if you don’t mind . . .”
Michael stood his ground.
“I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous! I . . .”
“Do you know, that’s exactly what Mr Way said when I showed him these figures and then demanded that you be kept on as editor for three issues.”
Michael huffed and puffed and went red and wagged his finger, but could think of nothing more to say. Except, “What difference would it have made to all this if I’d said treat me as the editor of one of your magazines?”
“Why, dear,” said Lady Magna with her sweetest smile, “I would have called you Mr Wenton-Weakes, of course. And I wouldn’t now be telling you straighten your tie,” she added, with a tiny little gesture under her chin.
Rap tap tap rap tap tap.
“Number seventeen, was it, guv?”
“Er . . . what?” said Michael, shaking his head.
“It was seventeen you said, was it?” said the cab driver. “ ’Cause we’re ’ere.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, thank you,” said Michael. He climbed out and fumbled in his pocket for some money.
“Tap tap tap, eh?”
“What?” said Michael handing over the fare.
“Tap tap tap,” said the cab driver, “all the bloody way here. Got something on your mind, eh, mate?”
“Mind your own bloody business,” snapped Michael savagely.
“If you say so, mate. Just thought you might be going mad or something,” said the cabbie and drove off.
Michael let himself into his house and walked through the cold hall to the dining room, turned on the overhead light and poured himself a brandy from the decanter. He took off his coat, threw it across the large mahogany dining table and pulled a chair over to the window where he sat nursing his drink and his grievances.
Tap tap tap, he went on the window.
He had sullenly remained as editor for the stipulated three issues and was then, with little ceremony, let go. A new editor was found, a certain A. K. Ross, who was young, hungry and ambitious, and he quickly turned the magazine into a resounding success. Michael, in the meantime, had been lost and naked. There was nothing else for him.
He tapped on the window again and looked, as he frequently did, at the small table lamp that stood on the sill. It was a rather ugly ordinary little lamp, and the only thing about it that regularly transfixed his attention was that this was the lamp that had electrocuted his father, and this was where he had been sitting.
The old boy was such a fool with anything technical. Michael could just see him peering with profound concentration through his half moons and sucking his moustache as he tried to unravel the arcane complexities of a thirteen-amp plug. He had, it seemed, plugged it back in the wall without first screwing the cover back on and then tried to change the fuse in situ. From this he received the shock which had stilled his already dicky heart.
Such a simple, simple error, thought Michael, such as anyone could have made, anyone, but the consequences of it were catastrophic. Utterly catastrophic. His father’s death, his own loss, the rise of the appalling Ross and his disastrously successful magazine and . . .
Tap tap tap.
He looked at the window, at his own reflection, and at the dark shadows of the bushes on the other side of it. He looked again at the lamp. This was the very object, this the very place, and the error was such a simple one. Simple to make, simple to prevent.
The only thing that separated him from that simple moment was the invisible barrier of the months that had passed in between.
A sudden, odd calm descended on him as if something inside him had suddenly been resolved.
Tap tap tap.
Fathom was his. It wasn’t meant to be a success, it was his life. His life had been taken from him, and that demanded a response.
Tap tap tap crack.
He surprised himself by suddenly punching his hand through the window and cutting himself quite badly.
15
SOME OF THE less pleasant aspects of being dead were beginning to creep up on Gordon Way as he stood in front of his “cottage.”
It was in fact a rather large house by anybody else’s standards, but he had always wanted to have a cottage in the country and so when the time came for him finally to buy one and he discovered that he had rather more money available than he had ever seriously believed he might own, he bought a large old rectory and called it a cottage in spite of its seven bedrooms and its four acres of dank Cambridgeshire land. This did little to endear him to people who only had cottages, but then if Gordon Way had allowed his actions to be governed by what endeared him to people he wouldn’t have been Gordon Way.
He wasn’t, of course, Gordon Way any longer. He was the ghost of Gordon Way.
In his pocket he had the ghosts of Gordon Way’s keys.
It was this realization that had stopped him for a moment in his invisible tracks. The idea of walking through walls frankly revolted him. It was something he had been trying strenuously to avoid all night. He had instead been fighting to grip and grapple with every object he touched in order to render it, and thereby himself, substantial. To enter his house, his own house, by any means other than that of opening the front door and striding in in a proprietorial manner filled him with a hurtling sense of loss.
He wished, as he stared at it, that the house was not such an extreme example of Victorian Gothic, and that the moonlight didn’t play so coldly on its narrow gabled windows and its forbidding turrets. He had joked, stupidly, when he bought it that it looked as if it ought to be haunted, not realizing that one day it would be—or by whom.
A chill of the spirit gripped him as he made his way silently up the driveway, lined by the looming shapes of yew trees that were far older than the rectory itself. It was a disturbing thought that anybody else might be scared walking up such a driveway on such a night for fear of meeting something such as him.
Behind a screen of yew trees off to his left stood the gloomy bulk of the old church, decaying now, only used in rotation with others in neighboring villages and presided over by a vicar who was always breathless from bicycling there and dispirited by the few who were waiting for him when he arrived. Behind the steeple of the church hung the cold eye of the moon.
A glimpse of movement seemed suddenly to catch his eye, as if a figure had moved in the bushes near the house, but it was, he told himself, only his imagination, overwrought by the strain of being dead. What was there here that he could possibly be afraid of?
He continued onward, around the angle of the wing of the rectory, toward the front door set deep within its gloomy porch wreathed in ivy. He was suddenly startled to realize that there was light coming from within the house. Electric light and also the dim flicker of firelight.
It was a moment or two before he realized that he was, of course, expected that night, though hardly in his present form. Mrs Bennett, the elderly housekeeper, would have been in to make the bed, light the fire and leave out a light supper for him.
The television, too, would be on, especially so that he could turn it off impatiently upon entering.
His footsteps failed to crunch on the gravel as he approached. Though he knew that he must fail at the door, he nevertheless could not but go there first, to try if he could open it, and only then, hidden within the shadows of the porch, would he close his eyes and let himself slip ashamedly through it. He stepped up to the door and stopped.
It was open.
Just half an inch, but it was open. His spirit fluttered in fearful surprise. How could it be open? Mrs Bennett was always so conscientious about such things. He stood uncertainly for a moment, and then with difficulty exerted himself agai
nst the door. Under the little pressure he could bring to bear on it, it swung slowly and unwillingly open, its hinges groaning in protest. He stepped through and slipped along the stone-flagged hallway. A wide staircase led up into the darkness, but the doors that led off from the hallway all stood closed.
The nearest door led into the drawing room, in which the fire was burning, and from which he could hear the muted car chases of the late movie. He struggled futilely for a minute or two with its shiny brass doorknob, but was forced in the end to admit a humiliating defeat, and with a sudden rage flung himself straight at the door—and through it.
The room inside was a picture of pleasant domestic warmth. He staggered violently into it, and was unable to stop himself floating on through a small occasional table set with thick sandwiches and a Thermos flask of hot coffee, through a large overstuffed armchair, into the fire, through the thick hot brickwork and into the cold dark dining room beyond.
The connecting door back into the sitting room was also closed. Gordon fingered it numbly and then, submitting himself to the inevitable, braced himself, and slid back through it, calmly, gently, noticing for the first time the rich internal grain of the wood.
The cosiness of the room was almost too much for Gordon, and he wandered distractedly around it, unable to settle, letting the warm liveliness of the firelight play through him. Him it couldn’t warm.
What, he wondered, were ghosts supposed to do all night?
He sat, uneasily, and watched the television. Soon, however, the car chases drifted peacefully to a close and there was nothing left but gray snow and white noise, which he was unable to turn off.
He found he’d sunk too far into the chair and confused himself with bits of it as he pushed and pulled himself up. He tried to amuse himself by standing in the middle of a table, but it did little to alleviate a mood that was sliding inexorably from despondency downward.
Perhaps he would sleep.
Perhaps.
He felt no tiredness or drowsiness, but just a deadly craving for oblivion. He passed back through the closed door and into the dark hallway, from which the wide heavy stairs led to the large gloomy bedrooms above.
Up these, emptily, he trod. It was for nothing, he knew. If you cannot open the door to a bedroom you cannot sleep in its bed. He slid himself through the door and lifted himself on to the bed which he knew to be cold though he could not feel it. The moon seemed unable to leave him alone and shone full on him as he lay there wide-eyed and empty, unable now to remember what sleep was or how to do it.
The horror of hollowness lay on him, the horror of lying ceaselessly and forever awake at four o’clock in the morning.
He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there, and no one he could go and wake up who wouldn’t be utterly horrified to see him.
The worst moment had been when he had seen Richard on the road, Richard’s face frozen white in the windscreen. He saw again his face, and that of the pale figure next to him.
That had been the thing which had shaken out of him the lingering shred of warmth at the back of his mind which said that this was just a temporary problem. It seemed terrible in the night hours, but would be all right in the morning when he could see people and sort things out. He fingered the memory of the moment in his mind and could not let it go.
He had seen Richard and Richard, he knew, had seen him.
It was not going to be all right.
Usually when he felt this bad at night he popped downstairs to see what was in the fridge, so he went now. It would be more cheerful than this moonlit bedroom. He would hang around the kitchen going bump in the night.
He slid down—and partially through—the banisters, wafted through the kitchen door without a second thought and then devoted all his concentration and energy for about five minutes to getting the light switch on.
That gave him a real sense of achievement and he determined to celebrate with a beer.
After a minute or two of repeatedly juggling and dropping a can of Foster’s he gave it up. He had not the slightest conception of how he could manage to open a ring pull, and besides the stuff was all shaken up by now—and what was he going to do with the stuff even if he did get it open?
He didn’t have a body to keep it in. He hurled the can away from him and it scuttled off under a cupboard.
He began to notice something about himself, which was the way in which his ability to grasp things seemed to grow and fade in a slow rhythm, as did his visibility.
There was an irregularity in the rhythm, though, or perhaps it was just that sometimes the effects of it would be much more pronounced than at others. That, too, seemed to vary according to a slower rhythm. Just at that moment it seemed to him that his strength was on the increase.
In a sudden fever of activity he tried to see how many things in the kitchen he could move or use or somehow get to work.
He pulled open cupboards, he yanked out drawers, scattering cutlery on the floor. He got a brief whirr out of the food processor, he knocked over the electric coffee grinder without getting it to work, he turned on the gas on the cooker hob but then couldn’t light it, he savaged a loaf of bread with a carving knife. He tried stuffing lumps of bread into his mouth, but it simply fell through his mouth to the floor. A mouse appeared, but scurried from the room, its coat electric with fear.
Eventually he stopped and sat at the kitchen table, emotionally exhausted but physically numb.
How, he wondered, would people react to his death?
Who would be most sorry to know that he had gone?
For a while there would be shock, then sadness, then they would adjust, and he would be a fading memory as people got on with their own lives without him, thinking that he had gone on to wherever people go. That was a thought that filled him with the most icy dread.
He had not gone. He was still here.
He sat facing one cupboard that he hadn’t managed to open yet because its handle was too stiff, and that annoyed him. He grappled awkwardly with a tin of tomatoes, then went over again to the large cupboard and attacked the handle with the tin. The door flew open and his own missing bloodstained body fell horribly forward out of it.
Gordon hadn’t realized up till this point that it was possible for a ghost to faint.
He realized it now and did it.
He was awakened a couple of hours later by the sound of his gas cooker exploding.
16
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Richard woke up twice.
The first time, he assumed he had made a mistake and turned over for a fitful few minutes more. The second time, he sat up with a jolt as the events of the previous night insisted themselves upon him.
He went downstairs and had a moody and unsettled breakfast, during which nothing went right. He burned the toast, spilled the coffee, and realized that though he’d meant to buy some more marmalade yesterday, he hadn’t. He surveyed his feeble attempt at feeding himself and thought that maybe he could at least allow himself the time to take Susan out for an amazing meal tonight, to make up for last night.
If he could persuade her to come.
There was a restaurant that Gordon had been enthusing about at great length and recommending that they try. Gordon was pretty good on restaurants—he certainly seemed to spend enough time in them. He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil for a couple of minutes, and then went up to his workroom and lugged a telephone directory out from under a pile of computer magazines.
L’Esprit d’Escalier.
He phoned the restaurant and tried to book a table, but when he said when he wanted it for, this seemed to cause a little amusement.
“Ah, non, m’sieur,” said the maître d’. “I regret that it is impossible. At this moment it is necessary to make reservations at least three weeks in advance. Pardon, m’sieur.”
Richard marveled at the idea that there were people who actually knew what they wanted to do three weeks in advance, thanked the maître d’, and rang off. Well, m
aybe a pizza again instead. This thought connected back to the appointment he had failed to keep last night, and after a moment curiosity overcame him and he reached for the phone book again.
Gentleman . . .
Gentles . . .
Gentry.
There was no Gently at all. Not a single one. He found the other directories, except for the S–Z book which his cleaning lady continually threw away for reasons he had never yet fathomed.
There was certainly no Cjelli, or anything like it. There was no Jently, no Dgently, no Djently, no Dzently, nor anything remotely similar. He wondered about Tjently, Tsentli or Tzentli and tried Directory Enquiries, but they were out. He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil again and watched his sofa slowly revolving on the screen of his computer.
How very peculiar it had been that it had only been hours earlier that Reg had asked after Dirk with such urgency.
If you really wanted to find someone, how would you set about it, what would you do?
He tried phoning the police, but they were out too. Well, that was that. He had done all he could do for the moment short of hiring a private detective, and he had better ways of wasting his time and money. He would run into Dirk again, as he did every few years or so.
He found it hard to believe there were really such people, anyway, as private detectives.
What sort of people were they? What did they look like, where did they work? What sort of tie would you wear if you were a private detective? Presumably it would have to be exactly the sort of tie that people wouldn’t expect private detectives to wear. Imagine having to sort out a problem like that when you’d just got up.
Just out of curiosity as much as anything else, and because the only alternative was settling down to Anthem coding, he found himself leafing through the Yellow Pages.
Private Detectives—see Detective Agencies.
The words looked almost odd in such a solid and businesslike context. He flipped back through the book. Dry Cleaners, Dog Breeders, Dental Technicians, Detective Agencies . . .
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