The Ghost Writer (34 page)

I keep thinking he's not as passionate as he was a month ago, but I'm so tense and miserable I don't know if it's him or me. I'm sure he loves me.
I will not read the story again.

20 AUGUST

Filly is acting very strangely. I keep
watching
her—about Hugh I mean—I can't help myself. Sometimes I think I must be going mad.

25 AUGUST

Hardly slept at all. H. very busy again at the saleroom. Tried again to tell him about the story and couldn't.

10 SEPTEMBER

Very close and airless. H. stayed late again playing Scrabble. Kept willing Filly to go to bed but she wouldn't, even though I could hardly keep my eyes open—just played on and on until H. realised he'd missed the last tube. He said not to worry about making up the spare bed, he'd sleep on the couch in the library. I wanted to go downstairs with him but he said good-night on the landing in front of Filly.

By then I was too angry to sleep. I tossed and turned for hours until I gave up and went and stood at the window and looked at the moon. And I thought, I'll go down to the library and have it out with him.

Filly's door was locked and it was deathly quiet. Until I got to the landing outside the study and heard the noise. A squeaking, creaking sort of noise. Coming through the ceiling.

I tiptoed up the attic stairs and there they were, on Lettie's old bed, stark naked in the moonlight. He was sprawled along the mattress with his head hanging over the foot of the bed. She was riding him like a horse, straddling him with her hands on his shoulders, lashing his face with her hair. I couldn't move and I couldn't look away. Then her whole body arched and shuddered and she threw back her head and looked straight at me.

(The rest of this page, and all the remaining pages in the diary, had been torn out.)

I read through the diary by torchlight, sitting on Anne's bed with the faded white tennis dress floating at the edge of my vision. I could not associate the mother I had known with the woman in the attic, and yet the final scene left me with a nightmarish sense of having witnessed my own conception. It was also disturbingly like one of the fantasies Alice and I had shared. I remained staring at the torn page until a very faint rustling somewhere overhead set the hair on the back of my neck bristling.

Downstairs in the comparative safety of the library, in an armchair beneath the four great windows, I read through it again. I had known, really, since I first read Miss Hamish's letter. Why else would Aunt Iris have turned so violently against Phyllis? (I would not think of her as 'my mother' any more.)

Phyllis had found the diary; had probably been reading it all along. 'Filly is acting very strangely: I saw what must have happened, set out as clearly as an endgame at chess, with Phyllis always one—no two moves ahead ... Owe
came true,
indeed. Anne's record of the closing trap had gone with the torn-out pages. But why had Phyllis put the rest of the diary back in its hiding-place after—whatever she had done to—had done
with
Anne? It made no sense: after all, she had taken 'The Revenant'.

And there was something else ... something that didn't fit. I took out Miss Hamish's letter to check the dates. Somewhere around the middle of September, Anne had written to say the engagement was 'all off'. But the 'dreadful set-to' between Phyllis and Iris hadn't happened for another fortnight or so. Anne clearly didn't tell her friend
why
she'd broken off with Hugh Montfort. Then Iris had changed her will and died within days of learning the truth. And Anne had last been seen alive in Mr Pitt's office on 26 October.

Miss Hamish. The diary did not once mention Miss Hamish.

How could this be? Unless she hadn't been nearly as close to Anne as she imagined ... but no, Anne had left her the estate. For a few wild moments I toyed with the notion of Miss Hamish and Phyllis conspiring to murder Anne, but that was idiotic. Every detail in her letter fitted exactly with my own discoveries, and with Anne's diary, including Mr Pitt the solicitor. And the police would have investigated Abigail Hamish, as the sole beneficiary, very carefully indeed.

No: the only obvious answer was that Anne simply hadn't included the friendship—and presumably whole other dimensions of her life—in the diary. Odd, all the same. I leaned back in the armchair, staring up at the gallery where the veiled woman had appeared in my dream.

A woman in a dark green gown. Greensleeves.

The back of my neck prickled.
Of course
it had been a dream. I didn't—did I?—seriously believe in ghosts. Any more than I believed in spirit messages from beyond. I looked over at the stack of butcher's paper on the table. Something about the planchette had changed.

The squeak and scrape of the chair rose into a high, drawn-out note as I stood up. There was my question:

WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNE?

but the planchette had moved on. In faint, spidery letters, an answer had appeared:

Filly murdered me

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Subject: None
Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 19:48:21 +0100 (BST)

...later I rang Mr Grierstone's clerk and asked her if the cleaners, or a security patrol had been in the house last night, and she said no, certainly not, no one else has keys, Miss Hamish was most insistent about that. She said the only way anyone could have got in was if I hadn't locked up properly last night, and I know I did.

I felt angry when I first saw the message. A defensive reaction, I suppose. Someone's playing games with me, I thought, but I'll show them. I wrote down another question, something no one else could answer, thinking, that'll prove you're not a ghost. It seemed perfectly logical at the time. But I knew really, even before I went out to phone, that it couldn't have been a cleaner or anyone like that. Who could possibly know that my mother was Filly to the family?

Maybe Mr Grierstone lives a double life, creeping out at night to frighten his clients. I wish I could believe that.

The only other possibility—the only one I want to think about—is that I wrote it myself, when I was sitting at the table yesterday afternoon, doodling with the planchette. But I KNOW I didn't do that. I can see myself sitting there yesterday, trying to convince myself that Mother couldn't have killed Anne, and the planchette doesn't move.

So either I'm turning into one of those 'missing time' people with alternate personalities, or Anne's ghost is telling me what I already know from her diary. I don't know which is more frightening. If I did write that message, what am I going to do next? What if it's inherited?—the condition, whatever it is? Am I going to turn into a murderer too?

I know what you'll say: I'm letting my worst fears run away with me. If only. It would actually be a relief, now, to believe what I've just written. Because I don't. I keep getting flashes—like the shadow of something truly monstrous creeping up behind you. Your mind keeps saying no, no, but your skin and your spine and your hair and the pit of your stomach know what's coming. In that house, anything is possible.

Alice I know we agreed to wait but I really need to talk to you right now. I've never felt more alone in my life. This morning in Family Records I looked you up, or tried to, I just couldn't help myself. You weren't born in England, so why have you always let me believe that you were? And that the accident happened here? After the shock of losing Staplefield, and finding out my whole childhood was a lie (I mean my mother's, but it feels like mine) and now this, you must understand why I need to hear your voice now, not 'very soon' but now.

I'll wait for an hour to see if you've read this before I ring the hospital...

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Subject: None
Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 20:29:53 +0100 (BST)

I didn't tell you because I wanted it to be a surprise, but I've already left the hospital. I'm having a last lot of physiotherapy, in a clinic in St John's Wood, and I'll be with you in three more days, maybe sooner. There's nothing I want more in the world than to pick up the phone and pour out everything I feel. But we might regret it later. We mustn't have a conventional beginning, hi how are you, nice to speak to you at last. I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal.

And it is a terrible ordeal, but you mustn't lose hope yet, about your mother. I think you did go into some sort of trance and write that message, but it doesn't have to be either/or, either you wrote it or Anne did. I think Anne was trying to speak through you, only the fear that was preying on your mind took over the pencil. Houses, especially old houses, hold the impressions of people very strongly, and you're so attuned to her.

We'll be together very soon

Your invisible lover

Alice

As soon as I had read Alice's message, I took the lift down to the foyer and joined the crowds heading west along Euston Road towards the last of the sunset. The roar and stench of traffic was comforting; it stopped me from thinking. Just beyond Tottenham Court Road I found an entire street full of restaurants. I chose the noisiest, ate something vaguely Middle Eastern and drank a bottle of bad but expensive red, a thick metallic wine heavy with sediment. On the way back to the hotel I stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of whisky.

I woke at ten the following morning with a slow, thudding headache, which accompanied me down Kingsway to Somerset House on the Strand, where I intended to look up Iris's will, only to be told that wills were no longer kept there. I was sent back up to First Avenue House, a featureless modern building with airport-level security, in High Holborn. There were only two other people in the registry, and it took me all of three minutes to establish, from the probate registers, that Viola's estate had been valued at £12,989; Iris's—she had died on 6 October 1949—at £9,135.1 applied for copies of the wills, was told there would be an hour's wait, and went back to the registers.

George Rupert Hatherley, my grandfather, had died intestate in Prince Alfred Hospital in Brighton on 13 August 1929, leaving effects to the value of £724.13.9. Violas husband, Alfred George Hatherley, had died not at Ferrier's Close but at 44 Ennismore Gardens Knightsbridge, on 7 December 1921, leaving just under six thousand pounds. So Viola had presumably inherited money, as well as Ferrier's Close, from her own family. Then I thought I might as well search forwards from 1949, just to make sure that Anne Hatherley hadn't died without Miss Hamish's knowing about it; I had got as far as 1990 before I remembered that as Anne's executor, Miss Hamish couldn't
not
have known. A coffee break was clearly overdue.

My copies arrived just as I was leaving. Viola had made her last will on 10 August 1938, leaving everything to Iris with the proviso that if Iris should die before the will was proven, the estate should be divided equally between 'my granddaughters Anne Victoria and Phyllis May Hatherley, both of Ferrier's Close Hampstead in the County of London'. Her executor was 'Edward Nichol Pitt of 18 Whetstone Park Solicitor'. Iris's last will, signed on 4 October 1949, two days before she died, was even simpler. It left everything to 'my dear niece Anne Victoria Hatherley'. Pitt the Elder was again the executor; Phyllis wasn't even mentioned.

Surrounded by people shouting into mobiles through the clatter of cups and the hiss and roar of the coffee machine, while the traffic outside negotiated High Holborn in a series of kamikaze rushes, I felt almost certain I didn't believe in spirit messages. Of course I had written those words myself. If only I could
remember
writing them, I wouldn't have to worry any more about alternate personalities, or missing time. Or ghosts. I picked up my pen and sat with the tip resting lightly on a blank page of my notebook, trying to will myself into recalling the moment. But the memory would not come, and instead I found myself thinking about Alice.

Some time later I realised I had been doodling. Above a heavily inscribed 'A' I had drawn a small pig with wings, an imbecilic smile, and a halo.

At least it showed I could have written that message.

A
T SEVEN THAT EVENING
, I
WAS SITTING IN A VAST BEER
garden at the foot of Downshire Hill. Evening sunshine slanted across the grass. Still plenty of daylight left.

From Holborn I had walked slowly back up Southampton Row, intending to call in at the new British Library and try another search for more of Violas stories. Instead I had gone straight back to the hotel and slept until half-past five. The headache had gone when I woke, but the knot in the pit of my stomach was still there. Hunger, I told myself. A good meal will settle it.

Yet in spite of the roast lamb, and the beer, and the roar of several hundred conversations, the knot had refused to unravel.

I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal.
In a couple of days' time I could be sitting here with Alice.
Trust me.
I tried to imagine her, in her white dress embroidered with small purple flowers, her thick copper-coloured hair loosely tied back, smiling at me from the empty chair opposite. She would be wearing that dress, she'd told me, when we met; it still fitted her.
Alice is so beautiful, we all love her.
Parvati Naidu, the ward sister at Finchley Road, had said so. I'd forgotten about Parvati during this last attack of doubt. I should learn to be more trusting.

And what would we be talking about, sitting here on the terrace, watching the sun go down? Whether Phyllis had murdered her sister as well as sleeping with her fiancé? I loved Alice for defending my mother to the bitter end, but I couldn't agree with her. On the evidence of Anne's diary alone, Phyllis May Hatherley was guilty unless proven innocent. And to prove it either way, I would have to find out what had happened to Anne.

I found that I was on my feet and heading for East Heath Road. The shadows had lengthened noticeably; the sun was only just above the treetops on Rosslyn Hill. All I needed to do this evening was check the library and confirm what I already knew: that the planchette would be sitting exactly where I'd left it, beneath the question I'd scrawled on my way out, in a moment of nervous defiance—if you're so smart, answer
this.
To make certain nobody was creeping into the house at night, I had fetched a reel of black thread from a sewing basket upstairs, tied a length of it across the hall a few paces from the front door, and another half-way along the path to the gate. I hadn't told Alice.