The Ghost Writer

Dear Madeleine,

Relieved to hear you won't need another extraction. Teeth are the root of all evil (forgive the pun)-or so I feel whenever I have to face the dentist. I don't know why they call it laughing gas; I have never felt the slightest impulse to chortle whilst having my jawbone scraped. Enough of this.

The girls are doing well. Anne has got the whole of 'La Belle Dame' by heart (Iris thinks it unsuitable for a child of six, but I really don't see why). Miss Drayton is very good with them-they both adore her and I only hope she'll stay on. Yesterday we took them all the way to Parliament Hill-a long walk for Phyllis but she didn't complain. We met Captain Anstruther on the way home & he made a great fuss of them as usual.

Anne has been asking a good deal about the accident lately, but I don't see any sign that either of them feels orphaned or deprived or anything of that sort. If only people (mostly adults who ought to know better) wouldn't treat them as if they ought to be unhappy-the sad truth is that they have a better life with us than they would have had if George and Muriel had lived. I doubt the marriage would have lasted. Poor George… shell shock is such a ghastly thing. Though as he once pointed out to me, if he'd been a corporal instead of a lieutenant he'd have been shot for cowardice rather than invalided home. That actually happened to a man in his regiment and it preyed dreadfully on his mind. He said the humiliation of losing his nerve (that was how he saw it, no matter what the doctors said) was worse than the worst nightmares.

I don't think I shall be going to Scotland in August after all, so if you

***

for certain, but next week, if this wonderful weather keeps up, I shall go down to Devon to stay with Hilda.

You asked me what became of Alfred's 'infernal machine'-I kept it as a memento mori. I shall never forget, that day at the Crystal Palace: I think of it whenever I read 'The Relic'. It destroyed the illusion of immortality, the feeling of infinite time that one enjoys when young. Alfred was obsessed- he had to have one. But it seemed to me pure, evil, a thing of darkness. I think that was when I knew, irrevocably, that I'd married a stranger. (Though I suppose the obvious riposte is: who doesn't?)

Foolish youth-illusions perdues, indeed. But yes, I suppose it does fascinate me in a perverse sort of way. A few years after the War-I don't think I've ever told you this-I used it in a novella. All those years I didn't write-I seemed to have lost the impulse-and then the idea came to me, and went on nagging until I wrote it all down. Then a year or two later-it can't have been much more-George got married out of the blue. Though as everyone must have realised, he can't have had much choice: Anne was far too big to be a seven months' child. And then that dreadful smash. Sheer coincidence of course-literature is full of orphaned girls brought up by relatives-but there was something unheimlich about it. I felt that some sort of prognostic gift had been thrust upon me, and I didn't like it. So I put the manuscript away; I could never quite bring myself to destroy it.

Odd how one can write what one wouldn't say. I do hope Edie is quite recovered.

Yrs ever

V.

***

Harry flung up one arm as if to ward off an assailant. Beatrice cried out in fear, which turned to fury as she recognised her sister.

'What are you doing, hiding there?' she cried, advancing on Cordelia.

'I was on my way to meet Harry-'

'No you weren't, you were spying on me. You're so jealous, I cant even walk with him from the station, why do you think I never speak to him when you're around? Because you cant bear it, I only have to look at him to have you sneaking off to Uncle…'

'-I say, steady on,' said Harry nervously.

'-I am not jealous,' said Cordelia, backing away from her sister's tirade.

'Then why were you spying?'

'I wasn't-'

'Yes you were, or you would have waved as soon as you saw us.'

Beatrice would not concede an inch of her ground, and soon Cordelia found herself apologising while Harry stood feebly by, leaving her no choice but to retreat. She did not stop at the house, but kept on until she reached the riverbank, hot, humiliated, and confused. Being in love, she thought, has not made me a better person as it is said to do in novels. Beatrice is right; I am jealous, and distrustful, and clutching, and thoroughly miserable, and I hate myself… and if he does not follow I will break our engagement. The light was fading rapidly. A few moments later the still surface of the rock pool was broken by a large raindrop, then another, and then the heavens opened with a flash and a deafening thunderclap.

***

I read and re-read these pages sitting in Viola's armchair, distracted once or twice by the sensation, rather than the actual sound, of the faint rhythmic scraping or rustling I had heard the day before. The novella she mentioned could only have been 'The Revenant': the typed page in my hand was numbered '82', and the typescript back in my hotel room broke off at 81. So… I stared at the photograph, trying to imagine what must have happened: Phyllis running in here, perhaps, as she was packing to leave after the quarrel with Iris, wrenching the desk drawer open and snatching the typescript… which must, presumably, have been kept with the bundle of letters for these pages to be caught up together. But not the photograph… she must have had her own copy… well, obviously. Perhaps it really was Viola and the inscription had nothing to do with the picture at all.

And Phyllis must already have found and read the story. About two sisters growing up in this house. But where were the remaining pages? Where, for that matter, were the rest of Viola's manuscripts?

One came true.

I went on gazing at the photograph until I was no longer certain that the two pictures were identical. Different setting, different light, I told myself; and easily settled: I would bring my own copy up to the house on my next visit.

For the next two hours I searched the study. I leafed through every book on the shelves, took every drawer off its runners, moved the furniture, looked under the carpet. Nothing but dust and shreds of dried tobacco and an assortment of bookmarks, bus tickets, slips of paper with fragmentary jottings on them. But in several of the books, I found indentations where folded papers or envelopes had been crushed between the pages.

Someone had been through the house, not in a mad rush but carefully, thoroughly, removing letters, manuscripts, pictures, photographs… And it couldn't have been Miss Hamish because she had asked me to look for just these things.

It could have been Anne, in her last weeks alone here after Iris died. If she'd taken everything away, and died in an accident (yet another accident?) and somehow not been identified… but how could she possibly not be identified if she had all the family papers with her?

She could have made a bonfire of the lot-amnesia or breakdown again-and walked away from the entire estate to start a new life. Leaving behind just the one photograph on the cedar cabinet; which just happened to be the double of the photograph I had found in Mawson.

Again I became conscious of that faint rustling and scratching somewhere nearby, and again I found myself stumbling down the stairs, back through the dining- and drawing-rooms, fumbling with the front door locks in the semi-darkness of the porch, and out into the lane where I leaned gasping against the wall until I noticed an elderly woman with a dog, both of them watching me suspiciously. I attended ostentatiously to the Banhams, and walked away as casually as I could.

BREAKFAST, I TOLD MYSELF FIRMLY. A SOLID ENGLISH breakfast, and then some solid factual work in the