by Helen Grant
“What? I didn’t. I mean–”
Then at last it dawns on me, and I could slap myself for not seeing it before.
Stay here, Tom, she said. Stay with me.
“Oh God,” I say, putting my hand over my eyes. I thought she was asking me to stay with her now, this evening. Tonight. But actually, she was asking me to stay – forever. At Langlands. She wants us to play house in this creaky, cold, cobwebby old heap with its overgrown gardens and creepy stuffed animals, not to mention the matter of the dead body in the mausoleum. The worst of it is, she’s sitting there thinking this is a real possibility, that I’ll do this, it’s just a matter of getting over my objections about uni and the little matter of my future. And I’m sitting here in a state of blank horror at the whole idea. I’d die before I’d come and live at Langlands. I don’t even understand how she can do it.
“Ghost,” I say carefully, “I didn’t realise what you meant when you told me to stay. I thought you meant tonight. I can’t live here. And you shouldn’t live here, either.”
“Langlands is my home,” she says, fiercely, her eyes glittering with tears.
“I know,” I say. “But you can’t spend your entire life here.”
“I could if you stayed with me.”
I shake my head. “I can’t do that.”
“Why? You said you loved me.”
“I do.” It’s true, but still it feels like a lie when I say it, because it isn’t going to get her what she wants.
“Then you’d stay. You would, Tom. You would.” Now she’s really crying, and I feel horrible, I feel sick inside for what I am doing to her, what I’ve done without meaning to.
“Ghost...it’s not that easy...”
“Why not?”
“Because I have a life out there. In the real world. I have plans.”
“Plans without me in them?”
“I didn’t say that.” I’m slightly nettled now. “I told you, I’ll be here some of the time, during the holidays. It’s not like we wouldn’t ever see each other. But you have to see – living here at Langlands, pretending it’s 1945 for ever, that’s not real life.”
“It’s been my life for eighteen years,” she says.
“I know. But look, how could you go on living here, chopping up firewood to keep warm, and pumping all your own water, when you know there’s a whole different life out there? There are all these things to make life easier, so nobody has to do those things the hard way. You’d be wasting your life if you did.”
“It’s not wasting if that’s what I want to do,” she says stubbornly.
“Yes, but I don’t want to do that. I can’t do that. Can’t you see?” The words sound so brutal, like a bitter medicine on my tongue. I hate arguing like this. I hate hurting her. But what else can I do? I can’t agree to live at Langlands to spare her feelings. I feel sick at the thought of it.
Ghost is silent for a moment. She looks down, her hair falling over her face so I can’t see her expression.
Then she says, very quietly, “Why did you stay tonight then?” Not looking at me. Regretting. Maybe actually ashamed.
Guilt claws at me.
“Because I love you,” I tell her. “I wanted to be with you because I love you.”
Another silence. Then: “Not enough,” she says, in a low voice.
“Ghost–”
“Not enough!” she says, her voice rising. Her head comes up and through the tangle of hair falling over her face her eyes blaze at me. “You don’t love me enough!” She’s screaming at me now, tears running down her face.
I can’t help it. I flinch back. At that moment I’m not exactly sure what I feel. Maybe fear. I think again of the scissors in her hand that time. She’s so desperate I don’t know what she might do.
She forces the hurt back down again, though. She’s shaking with the effort, but she makes one last attempt to regain control. Her hands are curled into fists, the tendons in the wrists standing out.
“Please,” she says. “Please stay with me.”
That moment of silence between us is a tiny piece of eternity, a pendulum swing between what might be and what must be. I have to say it in the end, though.
“I can’t. Not the way you mean.”
I think she’ll rage at me, but she doesn’t. When she speaks, her voice is very low; I barely hear what she says.
“Then go away.”
“Ghost–”
“Go away,” she says again, and this time her voice is louder, her tone firmer. Ghost climbs off the bed, pulling the blanket close around her. Then she shakes back her hair and looks at me with a kind of grim dignity. “Just go,” she says, and I hear her voice crack.
I get off the bed too. It feels weird having this horrible conversation while I’m stark naked except for a sheet. I start picking up my things and putting them on, because I can’t think what else to do, how to stop this happening. She’s so upset and angry I can’t try to talk to her. There’s a vacuum between us, bleak and ominous. I can’t promise to do what she wants, either. I button my shirt and buckle my belt and wonder how it all went so wrong; when I took these things off I thought I was about to die of happiness.
When I’m dressed again I make one last hopeless attempt.
“Ghost, don’t make me go like this. Please. Let’s just talk.”
But she’s shaking her head, her lips pressed together in a hard line to stop herself sobbing again.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s pitch dark out there. How am I even going to find my way out?”
I’ve wasted my breath with that line of argument. It’s too easily solved. The oil lamp is sitting on top of a chest of drawers and it takes her a matter of moments to light it from the fire with a taper. Her hands are trembling as she does it.
I feel like crying myself now. I pick up my jacket, but I hold it in my hands, not putting it on, not wanting my leaving to be final. There is nothing to do, though. She holds out the lamp, and I have to take it.
“I’ll come back,” I say. “Tomorrow. We’ll work something out.”
“No,” she says.
“I can’t just go like this–”
“Just go!” She practically screams it at me. “Go!”
So I do. I don’t know what else to do. I walk out of the room and down the passageway and the yellow glow of the oil lamp goes with me, lighting the space around me but never really reaching into the depths of the darkness. Down the passageway, past the stuffed bear, down the creaking stairs.
When I get to the hallway below, I set down the lamp on the floor and I’m straightening up when I hear it. A terrible cry, full of anger and pain; a scream of agony, hacking raggedly through the air.
I was not meant to hear it. Nobody was. I stand in the hall in my tiny sphere of golden light, frozen with the horror of it.
Then I go. I walk away from the light, to the front door, which I prise open making as little noise as possible. Outside I can barely see where I’m going. I stumble away from the door. Towards the bike, and home.
When Tom left, I broke. The agony was too much to contain. It burst out of me in a scream that burned my throat; I threw it up like poison. I had never known pain like it. The sharp grief of losing Grandmother, the slow dragging melancholy that came after it, the horror of the day, were nothing to what I felt now. I stumbled about the room, and when I ran into things I felt nothing. If dashing myself against the walls could have blotted out the misery I felt inside, I would have done it.
He said no.
The dreams I had had, of us both here at Langlands, spending our days and nights together, no longer seemed like a beautiful possibility. They were a torment, a gorgeous illusion kept forever out of reach by gibbering demons. Images flashed through my mind, tauntingly. Tom, opening the safe with me, taking the block of banknotes reluctantly from my hands. The day I ran ou
t of the house and threw myself into his arms, before we had even kissed. Tom, in the clothing of 1945, the day we had dressed ourselves from the things in the attic. He had looked so handsome, so perfectly suited to the house, that I had really seen him living here; I had felt the potential of it within my grasp. And it was all nothing. It was dust and ashes. The love we had made was nothing. It meant nothing. Tom had said he loved me, but he wouldn’t stay and I couldn’t go with him, into the abyss of the outside world.
I beat my fists on the mattress where we had lain together. I grasped the sheets with hands like claws and dragged them off the bed, panting and sobbing as I did it. I would have ripped them into flinders if I had had the strength. Instead I trampled them, dragging them across the dusty floorboards.
I tore down the framed photograph of me and Tom from the wall and threw it across the room. I heard the glass shatter. I threw other things after it – the brush and mirror from my dressing-table, a china trinket box, anything within reach.
It was no use. There was no-one to hear my screams, no-one to care about the mess but me. No-one to tell me how to begin to endure the terrible swamping agony that was erupting inside me. My screams echoed through the house and in all of Langlands there was nobody to reply. The rooms were dark and empty. The former inhabitants of the house in their gilded frames were still and silent. The books in the library, slowly crumbling into dust, had nothing to teach me.
I began to see how stupid I had been, how pathetically naive. I had thought myself so daring, hiding in the attic and spying on Tom and his father that first day. Taking risks, later, and letting myself be seen. Tom had been horrified the first time he saw me properly, only a few feet away from him, but I had let myself forget that in my great desire to be loved by him. I should have known that that first reaction – the recoiling from something so different to himself, the strange unnatural girl from the past – was the true one. He could never give up his own world for someone like that. Someone like me. Me, with my stupid name and my old-fashioned clothes and my ignorant questions.
Stupid, stupid.
And I had given myself to Tom. I had fallen back on this very bed and let him undress me. I had lain there shamelessly naked and let him explore every part of me with his eyes and hands and lips. He had made love to me and I had exulted in it, thinking that this was love. And perhaps it had been love, but it was true what I had yelled at Tom; it was not enough.
Remembering how it had been, I blazed with shame. I thought of myself lying under him, gazing up into his sea green eyes, feeling the rhythm of our bodies moving together, and I put my hands over my face as if I could shut out the images that ran through my head. As if my own screams of furious misery could drown out the memory of his groans, my sighs.
Something was breaking inside me. I couldn’t make sense of anything, I couldn’t see any way for any of this to become right again. Everything was wrong, everything was rotten.
Grandmother had taught me that there was a War on outside the borders of Langlands, a great and terrible War with the capacity to turn living human beings into a mist of blood and bone fragments, a machine with no purpose but to destroy. She made me fear invasion, even here at Langlands – the crunch of booted feet on the gravel outside, the thunderous battering at the door, rough voices in the hall, the brutal savagery of soldiers.
And she was right. The Outside had invaded Langlands and laid everything waste. It took Grandmother first, spirited her away and never gave her back to me. It even defiled my memory of her; it told me that she was wrong to try to protect me from what was out there. It told me that she was a liar.
And then, when I was alone here, isolated, the War came to me. Tom came to the house. I met him with a loaded rifle but no shot was ever fired. He disarmed me with words, with stories. With the propaganda of his time. I saw that now. He invaded my home, and at last he invaded me, my body, naked and shuddering.
That wasn’t the worst, though. The very worst thing was knowing that he had taken over the inner me. I had told him I loved him; I had craved his love in return. I might just as well have been a cringing prisoner of war, kissing the hand that held the bloody sword and begging for my life.
The rage that possessed me then was terrible. It was as though a demon had slipped inside my skin. I was angry at Tom for infecting me with such savage pain; I was angry with myself for being so stupid as to let him into my heart and my body. I could not tell where the anger against Tom became rage with myself; I could not see which one had the upper hand. I blazed with a fury so white hot that it seared away everything that was human in myself.
And then – Tom came back.
I’m sitting astride the bike, about to turn the keys in the ignition, when I realise I can’t do this. I can’t just walk away like this.
I know I could go back in the morning, in daylight, when Ghost has had a chance to calm down and things may not look so desperate to either of us. I could do that, yes. Part of me wants to do that. But it doesn’t feel right.
She was so upset that I’m afraid of what she might do. It’s not like I can kid myself there’s anyone else there for her. She’s completely alone. Even if she wouldn’t purposely harm herself, she might neglect herself. She’s hardly eaten a thing all day and the house is freezing cold and dark. Am I really going to leave her there like that?
I let go of the keys.
Am I the kind of person who sleeps with a girl, and then, when she’s crying her eyes out, just walks away without a backward glance? I think about this. She told me to go away, but I’m not sure I can.
In the end, there’s a kind of inevitability about it. I get off the bike and trudge back to the house. What am I going to say? I don’t know. I just don’t want to leave it like this.
The oil lamp is still burning in the hallway, its faint yellow light visible through one of the front windows. Otherwise the place looks grim.
I crunch over the gravel and enter the stone porch, my footsteps ringing on the flagstones. When I get to the great oak door I hesitate for a moment before knocking loudly, twice, to let her know I’m back. Then I push open the door a few inches and call her name.
“Ghost?”
Silence. I hear the wind sighing through the trees that press close around the house, and nothing else.
The door creaks dismally as I push the door right open and step inside. The first thing I see is the lamp, exactly where I left it. That blaze of gold in all the gloom draws the eye. Beyond it, the staircase, empty.
I turn and shut the door, cutting off the cold draught and the sound of the wind. In that moment, when the door closes and silence descends, I hear it: the tiniest creak; someone putting their weight on a loose board. I look up, towards the sound.
“Ghost?”
And then I see her, emerging from the black shadows at the corner of the staircase, where the light from the lamp can barely reach. She is wearing a nightdress that reaches almost to her ankles and as she comes forward it makes a light patch in the darkness. She is silent, staring at me with those big dark eyes between the curtains of dark hair that hang limply, as though wet. Her beautiful face is streaked with tears, giving her a faint resemblance to a damaged waxwork, gorgeous but tainted. I notice all of this, but then my gaze drops from her face to her hands and I see something else, something that makes my stomach turn over with cold terror.
She’s holding the rifle.
Ghost stares down at me, and her face crumples, her lips twisting as she tries to stop herself crying. She raises the rifle and aims it at me with trembling hands; I can see them shaking from here.
“Ghost, don’t shoot.”
I can hear the tremor in my own voice. The gun could go off in her hands without her meaning to do it, the way her finger is dancing all over the trigger.
“I came back to talk,” I call up to her. I can’t tell whether she’s taking in what I’m say
ing. She begins to descend the stairs, moving slowly, still keeping the rifle trained on me. I hear the treads creaking under her feet.
“Please,” I say. “Put the gun down.”
For a moment, I really think she’s going to do what I say. She lowers the rifle a little, but then she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and I see that she was only clearing her vision. Up comes the barrel again, a movement as grim as the swing of an executioner’s axe.
My mouth is dry, my chest tight as though all the air has suddenly been sucked out of the room. My heart is pounding in my chest, pumping blood to my muscles, telling me to run, run, run. But the door is closed behind me. I can’t just run away. If the rifle is loaded, if her aim is any good at all, she’ll have dropped me before I can get it open.
Down the stairs she comes: another step, and another. With each movement she comes a little closer, her aim a little surer. Still she says nothing to me, nothing at all.
“Don’t shoot me,” I beg her. “I’m sorry. I came back to talk. Can’t we sort this out? Please?”
Her head moves from side to side, slowly and deliberately. No. She gives a great sob but she doesn’t lower the rifle. She keeps on coming down the stairs. A tremor runs through the barrel of the gun, as though it is sniffing the air. The way her finger flutters on the trigger makes me feel sick.
“Ghost, please,” I say. “I love you.”
And the gun goes off.
I see the look of shock on her face. I feel an impact that nearly takes me off my feet. I stagger and I look down and I see red I see red oh God I see red Ghost I
Tom fell, and I stood frozen with the rifle in my hands and the crash of the gunshot still echoing in my ears. I waited for myself to wake up, for it to be a bad dream, for it not to be so. But it was so. I had shot Tom.
I dropped the rifle. I wanted to walk over to where he lay on the black and white tiles, but my limbs didn’t want to obey me. My legs trembled under me, and then they wouldn’t support me at all. I crumpled onto the floor.