one of them, including the cat. Even so, it doesn’t stop them turning up. Just now my father put his hand on my shoulder, and said: “Come on, my boy.” Death hasn’t changed him at all. He’s just as solid, he’s still got the same voice and even the same smell of Three Nuns Navy Cut pipe tobacco. He still smokes a pipe. He wears the plus fours and long socks and brogues that I used to find so embarrassing and old-fashioned. Every time I sit here, he comes and asks me to leave. I wish he wouldn’t. I love him, but he isn’t entitled to tell me what to do any more.
They’re all here now, as solid and real as when they were alive. There’s Catherine and her baronet, hand in hand, and Sebastian and Michael looking at me pityingly. There’s even the cat. It’s not Tobermory. This one is Gerald, and he was two cats later. Gerald used to drink from the dripping tap in the bathroom basin, whereas Tobermory would get under the sofa, stick his claws into the hessian underneath, and drag himself along on his back as fast as he could go. Gerald settles on his haunches and looks up at me with interest, as if I were an experiment.
My mother is here too. She reaches out a hand to try to take mine, and says: “Please, darling, please,” but I take my hand away, not roughly, but gently. I know she loves me, you see, and I don’t want to cause her any hurt. She implores me with her eyes, and still holds out, her hand.
“Come on, you big fool,” says Sebastian, grinning like a big schoolboy, and Michael thumps me on the shoulder with the same old fraternal violence, and says: “Come on, old thing. You’ve been here quite long enough.”
“I’m watching the house,” I say.
The baronet lights a cigarette, and when he throws the match to the ground, it disappears. “Look,” he says, “I know I’m not strictly family and whatnot, only being married in, as it were, but you’ve got to give it up one of these days, this watching over the house lark.”
“It’s really the house watching over me,” I say. “Anyway, you’re all dead.”
“When are you going to understand?” asks Catherine, shaking her head.
“What’s wrong with staying here?” I say.
“Please,” says my mother.
After a while they leave, one by one, as they always do. My mother and Catherine give me a gentle kiss on the cheek. It’s surprising how you can distinctly feel the kiss of someone who is dead. My father once surprised me by taking my head between his hands and kissing me on the forehead. He would never have done that when he was alive, and he hasn’t done it since. Michael and Sebastian subject me to more claps between the shoulderblades. They all turn and wave modestly before they fade away not far from where the bonfire always used to be. Only Gerald stays a little while. He winds himself around my legs a few times, and reaches up to touch a claw to my hand, as he used to when he suspected that it contained a morsel of cheddar cheese. After a while he wanders away after the rest of them.
I don’t understand why they keep coming back. I am glad to see them, of course, but they are dead. I keep telling them, but they don’t seem to be able to take it in. They don’t seem to understand why I won’t go with them. Perhaps death makes you less perceptive.
Anyway, I am perfectly contented here, sitting atop this rockery by moonlight, not even feeling the cold, looking at the tree sparkling with so many colours in the french window. I love it here. I love this beautiful house, I love the way it holds me as if it had hands and I was cupped inside them. I sit here and it watches over me, I feel absolute happiness, and there’s nothing I’d rather do.
Appendix
A Century of Ghost Novels
1900–2000
1902:
Inspired by the new craze for golf that had developed at the dawn of the 20th century, this comic story recounts the efforts of sports-mad Major Gore to beat Lindsay, a young golf champion. The Major receives supernatural assistance in his cause from the ghost of Cardinal Smeaton, a Scottish renaissance figure who is still nursing a grudge against his opponent’s family.
1904:
When little Cockney Jimmy Rogers dies of typhoid fever he finds himself in a grey world of wraith-like beings. Here he learns that it is possible to return to the real world and reincarnates himself into another quite different person whose behaviour leads him into the path of mysticism and a series of bizarre encounters.
1907:
In pursuit of Rosetta Rose, a beautiful singer, Carl Foster survives a series of disasters: a train crash, a shipwreck and even attempted murder. On each occasion he sees a sinister figure, who proves to be the ghost of Lord Clarenceux, once in love with Rosa and now deeply jealous of his rival. It takes the intervention of the girl herself to enable Carl’s love to succeed.
1907:
A beautiful woman in 18th century clothes and a man with a sword repeatedly re-enact a murder haunt in an old house in Soho. The arrival of little orphan Alice Kavanagh eventually leads to the discovery of the woman’s bones buried in the basement as well as a surprising revelation about the child’s ancestry.
1909:
The old ship, the
1911:
Dr Daniel Myas is carrying out experiments in order to transfer human souls. When the doctor dies suddenly from an overdose of drugs, his special apparatus transfers him to the body of his fiancee, Alice. The girl herself dies shortly afterwards in a train crash and the ghosts of the two endeavour to resolve their endless future.
1911:
Isobel Muircarrie grows up in the Scottish Highlands where her gift of “Second Sight” enables her to see the phantom White People and communicate with a ghost child. When she moves to London as an adult and falls in love with a stricken young man, Hector MacNairn, who dies shortly afterwards of a heart attack, her ability enables her to “see” him as a spirit.
1911
After spending three years in England, the Harvard educated narrator returns to America with a pair of pyjamas said to be over 4,000 years old. These can transform the wearer into a phantom-like figure and the young man uses them in a number of seductive exploits with very unexpected results.
1912
Matilda Turnus has inherited the poise and beauty of an Egyptian princess as well as ancient supernatural powers that she uses to great effect. Aware of a ghostly figure hovering over her in moments of crisis, she uses her ability to fend off unwanted suitors and advance the career of her young lover into the highest echelons of society.
