The Anatomy Of Ghosts

Beside him, Richardson was as rigid as a dog scenting game.

As they watched, a figure appeared at the window. Holdsworth saw only a fuzzy silhouette, outlined by candlelight in the room behind, but the shape was almost certainly Carbury’s. The lower sash scraped downwards and hit the sill with the sound like the rapping of a gavel.

Carbury tugged the curtains across the window. The light vanished.

‘Ah,’ said Richardson, letting out his breath in a lingering sigh. ‘And now all is darkness.’

Out of the darkness.

‘Georgie? Georgie?’

The voice pulled Holdsworth towards consciousness. Maria. This was his first thought, instantly suppressed.

It was still dark. Am I dreaming? He was too warm, his body shrouded in the bedclothes. His mouth was dry, which was not surprising after so much wine at supper. And he was uncomfortably aware of another source of discomfort, as shameful as it was urgent. He was as stiff as a ramrod.

‘Georgie? Come to Mama.’

Let me consider this analytically, he thought, I am not an animal.

His wife returned to his sleeping self more often now than just after her death. Sometimes it was only the echo of her voice or a smell lingering in the air – or even a painfully sharp awareness of her absence, as though she had very recently been there. Or not there, depending on how you looked at it. Because that, surely, lay at the heart of the thing: it was not really she who was or had been there. It was a personalized emptiness – a sort of enclosed nothing, a longing for something that no longer existed, or not in this world.

But still – one could give a name even to an irrational sensation. Why should he not call this one Maria? It was a species of philosophical shorthand.

He tried to turn his body in the bed but the blankets still held him fast. All the abortive movement achieved was the application of sweetly uncomfortable pressure to his membrum virile.

My love, forgive me. My prick misbehaves.

Somewhere between waking and sleeping, he sensed Maria’s presence. He fancied he saw her outline, just for a moment, a shadow among shadows between the bed and window, but somehow darker than the shadows that surrounded it.

He was breathing too fast, and he couldn’t suck in enough air. He tried to slow the rhythm but something stronger than his will increased the tempo instead. Soon his nightshirt was drenched with sweat. He shivered, and once he had started he could not make himself stop.

Slowly the dream, if that was what it was, filled with grey light, a sort of illuminated mist that cloaked as much as it revealed. He was no longer in his bed but standing in the Fellows’ Garden and looking down at the Long Pond, just as he had with Richardson a few hours earlier. The transition did not strike him as in any way strange. He looked down and there was Maria, floating face upwards on the water, her body submerged an inch or two below the surface. Despite this apparent handicap, she was speaking, or rather he heard her voice quite distinctly.

‘Georgie,’ she cried. ‘Georgie, I am here now. Come here, my little one.’

Maria, who had drowned in the Thames, was now drowning in the Long Pond. In the logic of the dream, the water was the same, and perhaps all times and places flowed through the same essential nexus of circumstance, and you saw one or the other – in this case the Long Pond at Jerusalem in May or the Thames at Bankside in March – according to your perspective on the matter. In the dream, this speculation seemed entirely rational and he wondered why he had not thought of it before.

‘Come out!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll drown. Take my hand. Quick.’

But Maria did not hear. She was still calling for Georgie, and telling him that Mama loved her own boy, and that he was Mama’s little sugar plum.

He shrieked wordlessly at her.

‘Georgie, Georgie.’ Her voice was fainter now. ‘Mama’s own little boy.’

Her body was no longer there. Indeed, now there was nothing left except the thick, black water of the Long Pond, and it was rising higher and higher.

‘Georgie?’ The voice was no more than a whisper on the edge of silence. ‘Georgie?’

Holdsworth groaned. His ears hurt, and he had the curious sensation that his skin had been stripped away from the bleeding flesh beneath. His hands tingled. Underlying everything was still the disgusting, desperate desire to copulate.

Stiff as a ramrod.

‘Maria?’ he muttered. Something puzzled him, but he could not pin it down, a monstrous and unspeakable anomaly of some sort. ‘Maria? Maria?’

It was only then, as he said her name for the third time, that he realized what the anomaly had been. It was quite inexplicable that he had not noticed at the time. The face he had seen distorted in the water had not been Maria’s face. The voice had been Maria’s. But the face had belonged to Elinor Carbury.

Pain lanced into his chest. An iron band tightened around his ribs. It tightened, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He opened his mouth to scream but the rising tide of black water now covered his mouth. As his lips parted, the darkness flowed inside him. His body convulsed.

He wrenched himself from the blankets. He was falling. A jolt ran through him.

Full consciousness flooded over him, and he knew that he was in the bedchamber at the Master’s Lodge, lying on the bare boards between the bedstead and its surrounding curtains. His left elbow, which had borne the brunt of his fall, was exquisitely painful. He flailed with his arms and succeeded in finding the gap between the curtains. A cooling draught brushed his cheek. And there was a little light, too – a faint vertical line where the shutters failed to meet across the window.

Dear God – Elinor Carbury? He pushed the thought of her away. He despised himself and his treacherous, sin- ridden body.

A nearby clock with an unfamiliar set of chimes struck the three-quarters. Holdsworth stood up, steadying himself on the bedpost. He tore off his nightcap and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He shuffled across to the window and opened the shutters. His body ached. To the east there was a pallor in the sky, an easing of the darkness. Thank God, it would soon be day. His erection slowly shrivelled.

The air was chilly. The window seat had a strip of cushion running along the top. He perched on it, drawing up his legs, wrapping the hem of the nightshirt under his feet and hugging his knees like an overgrown child.

Outside the window, light crept back into the gardens of Jerusalem. He grew steadily colder. He made an irrational decision, again like a child who invents a purpose because even an invented purpose is better than none: that he would permit himself to return to bed as soon as he saw or heard another human being, an incontrovertible sign of life and sanity returning to the world.

He had not long to wait. Through the glass of the window came the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels on stone. He craned his head and caught sight of a hunched figure trundling a little barrow along the flagged path at the back of the Master’s Lodge. It was a man in a long dark coat and a slouch hat. He was making his way to a cluster of outbuildings on the left, near the northern boundary of the college.

The night-soil man. There was no one else it could be. The man who had found Sylvia Whichcote in the Long Pond.

The night-soil man. There was no one else to see. Not Maria. Not Elinor Carbury.

10

After breakfast, Ben, the Master’s manservant, directed Holdsworth to a stationer’s, where he purchased a plan of the town and its environs. Guided by this he set out on the road to Barnwell, which lay to the east of the town in the Newmarket direction. It was not quite a village and not quite a suburb of Cambridge, but something indeterminate between the two. Carbury warned him that parts of the neighbourhood were not agreeable. There were disreputable taverns and houses of ill fame, which attracted low characters from both the town and the University.

None of this was visible on Saturday morning. The road was busy, mostly with traffic going the other way