Ghost

by Helen Grant

  “I’ve never seen this before,” she says. “A picture of me. There aren’t any.”

  “They had cameras in 1945 though, didn’t they?” I ask her and as I say it, it strikes me that it’s weird how I’ve fallen into the habit of thinking that’s where she’s from, 1945, like a time traveller instead of someone who grew up now but thinking it was another time.

  “Yes,” says Ghost. “But Grandmother never took any pictures of me. I’ve only seen myself in the mirror.” She looks at the phone again. “I look – different. Still like me, only–”

  “That’s because you’re used to seeing your reflection,” I tell her. “Everything’s the wrong way round. You know, a mirror image. A photo – well, if it’s a good one – that’s what you really look like.”

  “Oh,” she says. She’s silent for a few moments. Then, “I’d like a picture like this...of you.”

  “Don’t you want one of yourself, if you don’t have any?”

  “No,” she says. Then she thinks better of it and says, “Yes.”

  In the end, I make her stand next to me and I take one of us both. I can’t text it to her because she doesn’t have a phone, so I tell her I’ll print it off at home and bring it next time. Then we mess about a bit, taking snaps of each other. Even if she’d never seen a smartphone before the other day, Ghost gets the hang of taking pictures with it pretty quickly. She takes some photos of me in the library and I take a few more of her, and then we go out into the hallway and open the front door to let in a bit of light, and she takes one of me standing underneath the stuffed stag’s head.

  I think about what my friends would say if they saw that one. If I told them I’d been at Langlands, that I hadn’t just seen the outside but I’d been over the inside too. It would be the biggest story ever. It’s impossible not to think about that, the same as it’s impossible not to think about all the things you could buy with the money in the safe. I wouldn’t do it – I’d never do it, any more than I’d pinch the banknotes. I think about it, though. If I showed my friends some of the pictures of Ghost in that old-fashioned dress standing on the staircase with the stuffed stag on one side of the picture, they’d probably think the same thing I did the first time I saw her. They’d think she was the Langlands ghost.

  Ghost looks over my shoulder at one of those pictures. “I should have put something better on,” she says wistfully, sounding like some of the other girls I know for the first time ever. Then she says, “There are better things in the attic.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Come and see,” she says.

  We go up the stairs, and past that bedroom where Dad and I repaired the ceiling. There’s a scruffy-looking door at the end of the passage. Ghost opens it and we peer up a narrow set of wooden stairs towards a faint light at the top.

  Ghost looks at me. “When you first came to the house, I was up there,” she says.

  I follow her up the stairs. I’m not sure what to expect at the top, and when we get there I just stare. It’s crammed with stuff. There are crates and boxes and trunks, the sort people hide bodies in in films. There are square and rectangular things covered with sheets that are probably paintings or maybe mirrors, and a couple of marble statues. The light comes from a window at the far end, and as we pick our way towards it, I see that there’s a bearskin spread out on the floorboards. An actual bearskin, with the bear’s head attached.

  Ghost doesn’t seem bothered. She kneels on the bearskin so that she can open one of the trunks. It’s full of clothes. I can see that straight off, because the thing on top is a heavy cape made of tweed, the sort of thing Sherlock Holmes would wear. Ghost lifts that out and puts it on the floor. Then she pulls out a military jacket, bright red with blue cuffs and a lot of gold braid, but she sees the expression on my face when I look at that, and she dumps it on top of the cape.

  The military jacket is followed by the ugliest pair of tartan trousers I’ve ever seen. Then she hauls out a tail coat, the sort of thing people used to wear in the evening. I laugh at that.

  “No way,” I say.

  Eventually, though, she finds something that’s okay – old-fashioned, but not so much that you’d feel really stupid putting it on: a dark suit, the sort of thing my great grandfather probably wore when he went out on a date with great gran.

  Ghost looks at me, and I look back at her.

  “All right,” I say.

  I was happier that afternoon than any other time I can remember.

  I found a dress in a beautiful shade of deep blue, with panels of gleaming satin overlaid with delicate net, and a shimmering silver trim. There was everything to match in the boxes: shirts, gloves, shoes, ties and cravats, stockings and petticoats. The previous owners of Langlands had parcelled up the costumes of their entire lives in the attic.

  We carried everything downstairs and then I shut myself in my room to dress, while Tom went into one of the other rooms to do the same. I was quicker than he was, unsurprisingly, since I was used to tiny buttons whereas he had probably never seen collar studs in his life before. I waited on the landing, a little anxiously, for him to emerge.

  When he did, I almost gasped aloud. It wasn’t just that the clothes suited him. Tom was good-looking whatever he wore. No; it was because he looked so convincingly as though he came from 1945. It was as though instead of me trying to catch up with him in 2017, he had stepped back into 1945 with me.

  I suppose he saw me staring because he looked rather self-conscious as he came up to me. He gave a half-smile that made my breath catch in my throat, and then he said, “I feel like we’re going out for dinner at the Ritz or something.”

  I didn’t tell him that those weren’t dinner clothes. I didn’t want to spoil the moment, and anyway, he looked so handsome that I didn’t really care.

  Tom looked at me, at the blue dress, and he said, “You look great, you look really...” and he hesitated, thinking of the right word, and I held my breath. “Right,” he said in the end. “It suits you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Tom came closer to me, and I thought for a moment that perhaps he would put his arms around me, and kiss me again. But instead he walked around me, studying me from every angle as though he were looking at something fascinating.

  After a moment he said, “It’s amazing. I don’t know why but you don’t look as though you’ve just dressed up. You really do look as though you’ve stepped out of 1945.”

  So he felt it too. It was almost – almost – possible to imagine that that was what had happened, that we belonged to what I now knew was the past.

  Langlands did that to you. Of course, nearly everything in the house – apart from the few things Tom had brought in – was at least seventy years old. There was a confidence about the place, as though it were a grand old lady who simply refused to accept the passing of time and rejected everything new-fangled. Now that Tom and I were dressed to match the house, I felt the outside world fading away like a dream; it felt less and less probable when compared with the solid experience of me and Tom, here at Langlands, in our plundered finery.

  We went downstairs after that, and took heaps more photographs with Tom’s telephone. He took one of the two of us standing close together, and then he did something so that the colours drained out of the photograph and it became sepia, like the photographs in the library at Langlands.

  “It looks really old now,” he said, seeming pleased, but I said, “Turn it back the way it was.”

  “Why?”

  “I like the colours better,” I said. That was all I could think of to say. The fact was that it disturbed me somehow, seeing the photograph of us together, looking as though it had genuinely been taken a century ago. It made me feel a painful sense of yearning, as though I were far away from home.

  Later, I took Tom all over the house, showing him the rooms he hadn’t seen before, and tel
ling him what I knew of the history of Langlands. We looked down from the windows at the gardens and the forest that fringed them. I made a meal with some of the things that Tom had brought with him, and we ate it in the dining room, laughing at each other from either end of the long table.

  And Tom kissed me again.

  He put his arms around me and bent his head and kissed me so tenderly that a soft and melting warmth seemed to run through my whole body. He didn’t slide his hands under my clothes and across my bare skin as he had before. I think he understood that that day we had a few brief hours stolen from 1945, when love unfolded to a slow and formal timetable.

  That day was beautiful, but it stands out in my memory for another reason: that was the day I first thought seriously that Tom might one day step into my world, instead of I into his.

  The next time Tom came, he surprised me. Two days later, I was standing on the gravel outside the house, cradling a cup of tea in my hands and soaking up the late afternoon sunshine (still best enjoyed from the depths of a woollen coat, even in March), when I heard the distant sound of an engine.

  Since so few vehicles ever came to Langlands, their different tones made a distinct impression on me, and this was one I did not recognise: it was thinner and more droning somehow than the engine of Tom’s car. I stepped back into the shadows under the stone porch, and watched warily.

  The droning sound swelled and then suddenly something burst out from under the trees. I knew what it was. I had seen illustrations of motorcycles in the books in the library and I had even seen one or two modern examples the day we had driven to the coast. Still, it was a surprise to see one come roaring up Langlands’ drive. It stopped before the gravel, and the rider dismounted.

  Tom, I thought, judging by the build and height, but with the helmet over his face it was impossible to be one hundred per cent certain, so I stayed in the shadows, waiting.

  He did something to the machine to make it stand up on its own, and then he took off his helmet. Yes; it was Tom. I set down the tea cup on the edge of a stone planter and went out to meet him.

  The leather jacket he was wearing suited him; he reminded me of the pictures I had seen of wartime flying aces. I remembered the terrible day he had told me that my life was out of time by seventy-two years, and I hadn’t wanted to believe him. I had clutched at the thought that he might have reasons of his own for denying the War.

  You haven’t gone to fight. You might not be an objector – you might be a deserter.

  That was what I had said, and I had offended him. Now that I knew him better, I didn’t think he would run away from a fight. He hadn’t tried to run that day I had confronted him in the hallway with a loaded rifle, although I had seen that he was afraid. He had stayed, and he had told me the truth.

  Now I thought that if it had been 1945, he would have fought bravely. That was how I lived my life in those days: constantly in the conditional tense. If this, then that...if only...

  Now, though, I smiled at Tom and he grinned back, pleased with himself.

  “Surprise,” he said. “I’ve been working on it for a while and I finally got it roadworthy. I can come up here when I like now – I don’t have to rely on Mum lending me the car.” He swung round to glance back at the bike and I looked too.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, without the faintest idea of whether it was a very good motorcycle for 2017 or a very poor one, and Tom laughed.

  “Mum doesn’t think so. She thinks I’ll have an accident on it, so she’s keener than before to let me borrow the car.”

  We went into the house – to the kitchen as usual, since it was warmest there – and without preamble Tom said, “I looked for those two men, like I said I would. Fraser MacFarlane and George Robertson.”

  I just stood and looked at him, waiting.

  “Fraser MacFarlane’s dead,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m sorry. I did an online search...” He must have seen the blank look on my face at that so he went on, “I looked on the internet. There are records on there, the same as paper ones, only easier to get at. There was an article in the local paper about him – local solicitor remembered, something like that. He died a couple of years ago.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “George Robertson I’m not so sure about. He’s retired, I know that. There was a thing about that in the same paper.” He shrugged. “They don’t get a lot of news. I couldn’t find anything to say he’d died. That might not mean anything, though. I don’t know what happened after he retired. If he stayed in the town, someone will know where he is. But if he died in some old people’s home in England it probably wouldn’t get into the paper here, and maybe not down there either, if he wasn’t really known.”

  I looked Tom in the eyes, trying to read his expression.

  “Is that the end? There’s nothing else to find out?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not the end. It’s a small town, Ghost. Someone will know where old Dr. Robertson went. I’ll have to find out the old-fashioned way – by asking around.” He grinned. “Cheer up. We’ll find him in the end, if he’s still alive and kicking.”

  And if he’s not? I thought. Then I’ll never know why Grandmother did what she did. I’ll never know...and I’ll never, ever, stop being angry with her.

  I suppose my feelings showed on my face. Tom looked at me for a moment as though he was considering something, and then he said, “Look, let’s not stay here this evening. Let’s go out.”

  “How?”

  “On the bike, of course. You’ll have to change – you can’t go out on it in that dress.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “How about the town? The shops are nearly all shut so it’ll be fairly quiet. We could get something to eat.”

  I thought about it. “What if we meet people – people you know?”

  Tom shrugged. “We’ll make up some story. We could say you’re from England.”

  “Do I sound English?” I said.

  “Well, you sound...different. Not in a bad way,” Tom added hastily. “You just sound – I don’t know – sort of formal.”

  “Oh.”

  “You could be here working. Maybe a gap year.”

  I didn’t ask him what that was.

  “We should probably think of a name,” he added. “I mean, I don’t think we’ll meet anyone, but if we did, maybe it would be better to give some name other than Augusta McAndrew. Just in case.”

  “Isn’t Augusta a usual name any more then?” I asked.

  “Not really,” said Tom gravely.

  “Sophia?” I suggested cautiously, but Tom shook his head.

  “Beatrice?” I hazarded.

  I saw a muscle twitch at the corner of Tom’s mouth. He said, “Not unless you’re a big fan of the royals.”

  I didn’t ask him why that would be a problem.

  “Florence?”

  At that, Tom gave a great shout of laughter. In fact, he laughed until he was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, while I stood glaring at him with my hands on my hips.

  “You choose then,” I said crossly, when he had calmed down enough to listen.

  “I don’t know,” said Tom. “How about Jess?”

  “That sounds like a boy’s name,” I told him.

  Tom started to laugh again, but stopped himself with an effort. “At this rate we’ll never go out at all. Let’s worry about it later.”

  “All right,” I said warily. “What should I put on?”

  c

  Five minutes later I came downstairs again wearing the trousers Tom had given me, and the leather jacket with a woollen jumper underneath; Tom had said it would be cold riding the motorcycle. I also had a pair of leather gloves that I had taken from Grandmother’s room.

  Tom unfastened the spare helmet from the back of the motorcycle and helped me to put it on. It
was distinctly strange climbing onto the machine.

  “Hold onto me,” Tom said as he started the engine.

  Riding down the track was unnerving. It hadn’t rained the last few days so the ground was hard, but still the motorcycle seemed to bounce and judder alarmingly, and when we went over the grid at the spot where the track came out of the woods I thought I was going to be shaken to pieces. Once we got onto the proper road, though, it was wonderful – exhilarating and frightening at the same time, and totally different from being boxed inside the car. It felt fast. I could feel the wind rushing by and the vibration of the machine on the road and the delirious sense of skimming across a wide-open space with the sky wheeling above us. Where the road curved the sensation was terrifying. I was dizzy with it, gasping and holding onto Tom for dear life.

  At last we came into the town, and as the fields and forest sliding past us turned into houses behind railed-off squares of garden my mood became suddenly sober. I imagined Grandmother driving along this same road into town in the shiny black car I now knew to be hopelessly old-fashioned. I imagined her gloved hands grasping the wheel tightly, her expression one of grim concentration. The places I now saw for the first time must have been as familiar to her as the rooms and corridors of Langlands were to me. Some of them must have had particular significance for her, and I had no way of knowing which. That house, for example, with all the woodwork picked out in a startling shade of crimson – that might have been the home of some great friend of hers, or simply a landmark on the way into town. I would never know. Did she even have friends here? I had no way of knowing that, either.

  And of course, she had died here, in this world I hadn’t shared with her.

  My head was full of these thoughts as we came into the town centre. It didn’t take long. I suppose the distance from the first house on the edge of the town to the square in the middle was less than from Langlands house to the edge of the estate where the grid lay across the road. Tom parked the motorcycle. I took off my helmet, feeling self-conscious as I did so. It was impossible to shake off nearly eighteen years of hiding myself – and yet who was going to recognise me, when there hadn’t been so much as a single photograph of me in existence until a few days ago? And Tom was right, if anyone asked us, I could give a false name. There was really no risk. The unease I felt was like the residue of a bad dream, or the scar that itches long after the wound has healed.