The Ghost Writer

'Oh no, not at all, I was hoping you wouldn't be someone stuffy'

'To tell the truth,' he continued as they set off down the hall-he moved, she noticed, with a slightly uneven gait, rolling a little to the right-'I'm much more interested in pictures than I am in the law. That's another reason Uncle Timothy despairs of me. I wish I could say I'm here because I know something about pictures, but to be honest it's because he thought even I couldn't make a mess of checking things off against an inventory and asking you to sign a few papers.'

'Well I'm glad,' she replied, 'because I care for the pictures, and I hope you will too.'

As they started up the stairs, she saw that his left knee did not bend properly, so that he had to check himself momentarily at every second step in order to swing his leg up to the next.

'Legacy of the war,' he said, as if in reply to her unspoken question. 'Entirely ignominious, I'm afraid. I was late getting back to barracks one night, and took a spill on my motorcycle. Spent the rest of the war on crutches, doing staff work in London. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be here. None of my friends are. From before, I mean.'

'Yes. I lost-we lost our father, a month before it ended.'

'How awful. Makes it worse, somehow, to have come so close… sorry, tactless thing to say,'

'No, not tactless, it's true. I don't think truth ever hurts-well it shouldn't, anyway' she added, thinking of Beatrice.

'I say, who's this?' he exclaimed as they reached the landing and stopped in front of the portrait.

'Imogen de Vere, my grandmother.'

'It's very fine. Very fine indeed. Who was the artist?'

'Henry St Clair-don't you know the story?'

'You mean this belongs to the trust? Good God. No; all I've read is the deed. A very odd bequest… quite mad, if you don't mind my saying so. Why on earth…?'

'Yes, I think he was mad. And bad.' Repressing a temptation to pour out the whole story, she said almost nothing about Imogen, confining herself to Ruthven de Vere bankrupting St Clair 'in a fit of madness' and hiding away the pictures. Harry Beauchamp listened attentively while studying the portrait. Once or twice he glanced at Cordelia, as if comparing faces.

'So really,' she concluded, 'morally, I mean, they belong to Henry St Clair, though I know the law doesn't agree.'

'No, unfortunately-but I see what you mean. The more I look at this, the more I feel I should have heard of him. Extraordinary eyes… may we see the others?'

Though the room was now familiar, she still could not cross the threshold without a shiver of anticipation. Ushering her first visitor through the door-especially one as personable as Harry Beauchamp-prompted an additional frisson, and she was not disappointed in his reaction. He began by making a slow circuit of the room, moving from picture to picture, while she watched from the doorway, remembering her own progress that first wintry afternoon. So absorbed was he, by the time he passed her and began a second circuit, that he might have been walking in his sleep. At last he stopped before the first of the 'exorcisms'-the solitary figure hastening through the moonlit wood-and turned to face her.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I had no idea… until I saw that portrait, I was expecting a roomful of amateur watercolours or something of the sort. But these are quite remarkable. This, for example, reminds me a lot of Grimshaw-do you know him?-No, he's not much thought of these days. Went in for moonlight in a big way. Fine painter. But there's a menace about your man here…'

'He called them exorcisms,' said Cordelia, coming over to join him. 'For his melancholia.'

'I see… Now this-' moving on to another moonlit scene-'why, it's a sort of joke!'

To the untutored eye, there was nothing comical about it. The upper half of the canvas showed a tall, gaunt house framed by a tracery of bare branches. Orange light shone from an upstairs window, accentuating the dark outlines of the casements in a way that gave an unnerving impression of bared, grinning teeth. Leaves and twigs were strewn thickly over a flagged path: the place had an overgrown, desolate air. The path led down, by way of a series of steps, to a gateway between stone pillars. But there the semblance of normality ended, for just beyond the pillars, the ground ended in a sheer, vertical fall of rock, plunging to infinite depths. Flagstones hung precariously over the lip of the precipice, which ran like a jagged tear right along the front wall of the house. Torn earth and foliage gleamed in the moonlight.

At first, the precipice that dominated the lower half seemed almost featureless. Cordelia had gazed at it before, without discerning anything more than vague outlines. But now impressions began to form, as if her eyes were growing accustomed to the dark. She was looking into the mouth of a great cavern, thronged with dim figures which might or might not have been human, their eyes materialising into tiny points of reddish light, as if reflecting the fiery glow in the window far above.

'Extraordinary, isn't it?' said Harry. 'You know, that house is pure Grimshaw, and yet-look at this.' He indicated something that Cordelia had taken for a hairline crack in the canvas: a thin, forked line of pure white darting across the mouth of the cavern.

'Lightning, wouldn't you say?' he continued. 'Mad Martin to the life.'

'I'm afraid I don't-'

'Sorry, I shouldn't call him that. John Martin. Early last century. It was his brother who was mad, poor chap. Huge apocalypses-I saw one in a sale not long ago. It went for ten pounds; I'd have bought it myself if I had anywhere to hang it. But putting them together like this, it's a sort of comedy of excess. Remarkable execution. And what are these?'

He moved on to a series of canvases, all seemingly versions of the same scene: a water-bird's-eye view of a dense forest of reeds along a riverbank, done in deep greens and browns and flashes of silvery light, painted so that the reeds looked as tall as trees. Lurking amongst them were a number of dark, mottled purplish shapes which might have been crustaceans, or jellyfish, or the shadows of creatures hovering above the frame. Cordelia could not tell what they were, and yet they drew her eye: whenever she tried to focus on some other aspect of the scene, there was a disconcerting impression of movement among the reeds.

'These don't remind me of anyone,' said Harry. 'Are you sure they're by the same… well, here's his signature, anyway. Extraordinary. And this-' turning to a picture, at least four feet by two, of pairs of naked lovers floating in a firmament of blue, dozens or even hundreds of them, some no larger than gnats, but all intricately detailed-'looks like somebody else entirely. But here's his signature again… did you say he might still be alive?'

Moving away from the lovers, who were making her blush, Cordelia told him everything she could recall about Henry St Clair, without mentioning the affair. Not, she realised, because she would actually mind Harry Beauchamp knowing about it, but because it seemed too intimate a topic, alone in the house together; and she was having quite enough difficulty with her colour already.

'You know,' he said thoughtfully, 'rather than hanging them here and there around your house-though that would be quite all right; the deed doesn't say that everything has to be kept in the same room-you could make a sort of exhibition in here, or in another room, if that suited you better. The stuff in the middle could go somewhere else, if you've space for it, and then… just imagine if Henry St Clair is still alive. And if we were able to find him. At least he could come and see his pictures, and know they were safe-though not for ever,' he added, his expression darkening. 'But if we could find him-I mean just supposing there'd been something illegal about the way your grandfather bought up those debts, we might just be able to save the pictures and… I say, I'm terribly sorry, I've no right at all…'

'No, no, please go on, this is a wonderful idea. But… surely you're not supposed to try and save them?'

'Oh no,' he said cheerfully. 'My uncle would sack me on the spot, if he heard me talking like this. But the pictures are more important, don't you think? There's nothing in the trust that actually prohibits us from trying to find him; and besides, I'd be doing it in my own time, not the firm's. If you approve, that is.'

'Oh yes, absolutely,' said Cordelia, restraining a wild impulse to throw her arms around him.

'Then-er, could I come back, do you think, for a longer look? There's bound to be something here that will help us… it would have to be on a weekend, if that's all right…'

'Oh yes, absolutely,' she repeated, blushing more than ever. 'And you could easily stay, there's loads of room. I know my uncle won't mind.'

'Wonderful… would this Saturday be all right then?'

'Oh yes, absolutely, perfect… gosh, do excuse me for a moment,' she blurted, and ran from the room.