The Ghost Writer (16 page)

Thus she had remained for many months, and it seemed to Cordelia that her sister had never entirely recovered; or at least, that relations between them had never been the same. Perhaps they had simply grown apart, even in small things: both, for example, were avid readers, but Cordelia would always set her book aside for a chance of conversation, whereas Beatrice, who read only novels, had become even less tolerant of interruptions. In the game of animal comparisons Cordelia liked to play in the privacy of her own imagination, her sister had always been a cat. Beatrice had inherited their mothers almond-shaped eyes; her face narrowed markedly to a small, determined chin, making her cheekbones look more prominent than they really were. Now, at nineteen, she was more than ever the cat that walks by itself: watchful, silent, aloof, disdainful of petting, the kind that will settle only on the lap of its own choosing. Cordelia had sometimes accused herself of clinging to a romantic ideal of sisterly intimacy; yet she could not shake off the feeling that a door had been closed against her at the time of Papa's death, and never reopened.

Beatrice would not concede that anything had altered between them, but there was something about the very adroitness with which she had learned to evade her sister's overtures that seemed to say: "You have wounded me very deeply, though you profess not to understand what you have done; so I will not quarrel; there would be no point; of course we shall stay friends, but I shall never completely trust you again. As for the door you accuse me of closing, you are quite mistaken; it is you who have closed it; or perhaps there never was a door, only a blank wall, which is no more than you deserve." Cordelia had racked her memory and her conscience; she had privately asked her aunt and uncle, whether they knew of anything she had done to offend her sister, but no, Beatrice had said nothing against her. "You must not take it personally," Uncle Theodore had said only recently. "Your sisters nature is very different from yours; she turns inward, away from others, as you turn towards them. I don't think she has ever got over your fathers death. You must not blame yourself for what is none of your fault."

His words came back to her as she stood on the chilly landing. The mention of her father—and a certain unease in Theodore's tired, kindly, slightly bloodshot eyes (a beagles, or a bloodhounds; she had never quite decided)—had stirred an old, obscure suspicion that his death was somehow the cause of the estrangement. As if summoned by Imogen de Vere's intent, shadowed gaze, her thoughts were drawn along a path from which she had always turned uneasily aside, as she had once avoided the corridor that led past Grandmama's bedroom.

Papa had blamed Beatrice for their mother's death. Not consciously, she felt sure; and perhaps "blame" was too strong. He would have been shocked, no doubt, if anyone had confronted him with the idea. But just as she had always known that she was Papa's favourite, so she had become aware of a certain constraint in his manner towards Beatrice. Whenever he came home on leave, the two girls would be allowed to wait, if they were not at school, at the front gate, and run along the lane to greet him as he appeared at the turning. Cordelia, being the elder, would always reach him first, and fling herself into his arms, and he would swing her high into the air and onto his shoulder. But with Beatrice he was never quite as spontaneous; sometimes he seemed almost to recoil for an instant, though the shrinking would be as swiftly checked, and it seemed to Cordelia that he never sought Beatrice out, whereas he would often come looking for her when he wanted a game (which was how he had caught her wearing Grandmama's veil that afternoon). Everyone else in the house, including Mrs Green, had made a special pet of Beatrice, and yet Cordelia had never felt any the less loved; on the contrary, she was proud to be included in a sort of adult conspiracy to spoil Beatrice (though nobody had put it quite like that), especially when Papa was away with his regiment. They had kept up the conspiracy through four anxious years of war, until the arrival of the letter from the War Office, the dark winter of grieving, and Beatrice's retreat into sullen, resentful silence.

The suspicion that her father had, however unconsciously, held Beatrice responsible for the loss of their mother, did not begin to trouble Cordelia until after his death. The more she struggled against the idea, the more firmly it took root, until she felt compelled to question her aunt. But instead of offering the hoped-for reassurance, Aunt Una had looked very grave, and talked of how deeply Papa had loved their mother, and how he had married her as soon as they had both turned twenty-one and no longer needed their parents' consent—though Grandmama, she added hastily, had given them her blessing; they had been married from Ashbourn House ... and of course it had been a terrible blow to Papa, losing their mother so young, but Cordelia must always remember that he had loved both her and Beatrice very dearly, and try not to think such troubling thoughts.

Years later, she had learned from Uncle Theodore that the reason they had never seen their grandparents on Mama's side, and the reason Papa had never so much as mentioned them, was not because they were dead, but because they had never forgiven him for the death of their only daughter. They had blamed him, in other words, just as he had blamed Beatrice.

But why should Beatrice have turned against her, Cordelia, on account of their fathers death? For that was what had happened, she was sure of it. That subtle note of accusation ... as if Cordelia had somehow betrayed her sister; but how? By having been his favourite? Or had Beatrice divined the reason behind Papas reserve and taken the burden of Mamas death upon herself?—and then assumed that Cordelia blamed her too? Such a heavy burden ... but why should she assume that? And spurn all reassurance?
It is not fair; why does she hate me so?

Cordelia again became conscious of her surroundings, realising that she had spoken the words aloud. The face of Imogen de Vere seemed to coalesce out of its dark background, glowing as if lit from within. "No, it is not fair," she imagined the portrait replying; "do you think it was fair that I lost my beauty overnight?" Of course not, any more than the loss of Papa had been fair; but knowing that half the families in the kingdom had lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers had not made their own loss any easier to bear. It had not been fair of Mama's parents to hold Papa responsible for her death. Or to refuse to acknowledge their own granddaughters because of it. "Unto the third generation..." But Papa had not sinned; and besides, the last of her belief—at least in the omnipotent God of the Scriptures—had died with him.

Aunt Una and Uncle Theodore had done their conscientious best, making sure that she and Beatrice had been christened and confirmed, but Cordelia felt that neither of them really believed. Even Mr Gathorne-Hyde, the present vicar, did not sound as if he believed his own sermons about God's mysterious ways and the gift of free will. A poisoned, maleficent gift, that allowed men to slaughter one another wholesale. Or a single child to starve. Beatrice had refused to enter a church since the day the War Office letter arrived. Yet Cordelia still occasionally attended. More often, she would slip into St Mary's when it was empty and stand for a while in the dim silence, which seemed to echo even when the church was completely still, breathing the smells of ancient timbers and stone, musty cassocks and snuffed candles and dried flowers, "hoping it might be so"—without even knowing what "it" might be.

L
AST AUTUMN, SHE HAD GONE WITH
U
NCLE
T
HEODORE
to visit Percival Thornton, the father of one of Papa's dead comrades. Robert Thornton had died only a few months before Arthur de Vere, and the families had kept in touch. Their visits, though inevitably painful, meant a great deal to Mr Thornton, a widower who lived quite alone. Each time they saw him, he looked thinner, greyer and more stooped; his grief was visibly consuming him. Roberts medals, brilliantly polished, were displayed in a mahogany case in the parlour; his dress uniform, immaculately brushed, hung beside his bed in his old room, and the house was crowded with photographs of Robert at every stage of his short life, most of them taken by Mr Thornton.

There was a settled ritual to these visits. They began with an inspection of various mementoes, followed by tea, which Cordelia always insisted on preparing, and then a stroll in the garden if the weather was fine. But on this occasion, it seemed to Cordelia that he was striving to conceal an unwonted, almost feverish anxiety. She noticed, too, that since their last visit his hands had become curiously blotched and stained. As they were finishing their tea, he asked, rather hesitantly, whether he might show them a photograph.

They were naturally expecting yet another portrait of Robert, but the picture he brought out showed only a vacant bench which stood against the hedge at the rear of Mr Thornton's garden, beside an ornamental fountain—a tiered array of stone dishes, each wider than the one above, with a cherub at the top, though the water had long ceased to flow: the dishes were filled with autumn leaves. Dappled sunlight, evidently filtering through the branches of an overhanging tree, was falling upon the bench.

Cordelia had moved over to sit on the arm of her uncles chair; Mr Thornton remained hovering on the other side. She could feel his agitation increasing as the seconds passed, and neither she nor Uncle Theodore could find anything to say.

"Don't you see him?" said Mr Thornton at last, in a voice of desolate appeal. A blotched and trembling finger indicated the end of the bench nearest the fountain. Peering more closely, Cordelia suddenly saw that if you took a semicircular splash of light, falling roughly where the head of a seated person might have been, to be the lower half of a human face, the confusing patchwork of light and shadow beneath could form the suggestion of a body—a man's body, if you took the shadows of (presumably) two vertical branches for legs ... and if you then went back to the "face", there were indistinct patches of shadow which would do for his mouth and nostrils, and yes, two faint specks of light more or less where his eyes ought to be ... and below, glimpses of a collar, a shoulder, a lapel...

Robert Thornton, as she had last seen him nine years ago, in his officer's cap, uniform jacket, breeches and boots, materialised upon the bench. The back of her neck prickled; she glanced at her uncle, whose bewildered expression had not altered; then up at Mr Thornton's anxious, imploring face, and back to the picture.

The figure had vanished. There was nothing but the empty bench, and the dappled shadows of leaves and branches. Again she fixed her eyes upon the "face", but she could not summon the illusion a second time; it remained simply a patch of sunlight on the hedge. Something drew her gaze
away
from the picture, to the framed photographs ranged along the mantelpiece; there was a gap near the end to the left, where last time, she was sure, there had been a picture of Robert Thornton, in uniform, seated on this same bench.

She heard a quavering intake of breath. Mr Thornton's gaze had followed her own.

"It is true then. He was there." He was smiling, and tears were streaming down his cheeks.

"Yes," she said, unhesitatingly, though the figure—or rather the memory of the other photograph—had not returned, and Uncle Theodore was looking as bewildered as ever. "Yes, I am sure he was."

Cordelia stood up and embraced the old man, who was almost sobbing with joy and relief.

"I thought I should move ... the other ... so as not to influence you. It was his favourite place in the garden, you see," he added, beaming down at Uncle Theodore, who could plainly see nothing at all.

"It is Robert, uncle," said Cordelia, hastily resuming her place in order to indicate where the "face" had been, "here on the bench, by the fountain."

"Oh—er—yes, yes of course. I am sure I see him now. Tell me—er—when was this taken, Percival?"

"Last week, dear friend."

"Last
week?
I mean—er, how extraordinary; that is to say, how wonderful..."

"Yes," said the old man. "I had not quite dared to believe it until Cordelia saw him too. I feared I might be deluding myself. And after so long ... I had almost given up hope."

He moved slowly across to a cabinet on the other side of the room, and returned with a file-box which he set before them. It was full of photographs. Looking through them, Cordelia saw with something like horror that they were all of the empty bench, all taken from the same angle, in every degree of brightness from full sunlight to near-darkness, hundreds and hundreds of them.

"I read about it here, you see." Mr Thornton, his eyes still wet with emotion, passed them a large book.
Photographing the Invisible, Practical Studies in Spirit Photographs, Spirit Portraits and Other Rare Phenomena,
by James Mclntyre. "The camera, as you see, can sometimes detect what the naked eye cannot." To Cordelia, leafing through the pages, it seemed that a great deal of what the camera had detected was plainly fraudulent: ghostly faces, conveniently shrouded in a sort of soap-bubble haze, floated behind group portraits, or bobbed about on staircases with no visible means of support. She could tell that her uncle was struggling to hide his scepticism. Yet her own illusion had been utterly lifelike. Despite knowing what had caused it, the memory was still so vivid that she understood Mr Thornton's reaction only too well.

"I do all my own developing now," he continued. "Mr Mclntyre says—or at least implies—that commercial developers are not always to be trusted. The Church, you know; they don't approve. And I had almost despaired, after so many attempts. But now ... I am so happy, now you have seen him too."

Soon after, they went out into the garden. Though it was a mild, tranquil autumn day, Cordelia could not repress a slight shiver as they approached the now-celebrated bench. I don't think I could ever sit there again, she said to herself; it would seem—like trespass, or tempting fate. Yet why should I find it sinister? I should simply be delighted for poor Mr Thornton.