mind: she could not forget her childhood.’
‘Yes, she says in her letter. George and Alice and Isabel –’
‘All her childhood, Mr Mockler, her parents did not speak to one another. They didn’t quarrel, they didn’t address each other in any way whatsoever. When she was five they’d come to an agreement: that they should both remain in 17 Lorelei Avenue because neither would ever have agreed to give up an inch of the child they’d between them caused to be born. In the house there was nothing, Mr Mockler, for all her childhood years: nothing except silence.’
‘But there was George and Alice and Isabel –’
‘No, Mr Mockler. There was no George and no Alice and no Isabel. No hide-and-seek or parties on Christmas Eve, no Monopoly on Sundays by the fire. Can you imagine 17 Lorelei Avenue, Mr Mockler, as she is now incapable of imagining it? Two people so cruel to one another that they knew that either of them could be parted from the child in some divorce court. A woman bitterly hating the man whom once she’d loved, and he returning each evening, hurrying back from an office in case his wife and the child were having a conversation. She would sit, Mr Mockler, in a room with them, with the silence heavy in the air, and their hatred for one another. All three of them would sit down to a meal and no one would speak. No other children came to that house, no other people. She used to hide on the way back from school: she’d go down the area steps of other houses and crouch beside dustbins.’
‘Dustbins?’ repeated Mr Mockler, more astonished than ever. ‘
‘Other children didn’t take to her. She couldn’t talk to them. She’d never learned to talk to anyone. He was a patient man, Mr Acland, when he came along, a good and patient man.’
Mr Mockler said that the child’s parents must have been monsters, but Dr Friendman shook his head. No one was a monster, Dr Friendman said in a professional manner, and in the circumstances Mr Mockler didn’t feel he could argue with him. But the people called Rachels were real, he did point out, as real as the fat designer of aircraft fasteners. Had they left the house, he asked, as it said in the letter? And if they had, what had they been frightened of?
Dr Friendman smiled again. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said, and he explained at great length to Mr Mockler that it was Mrs Acland herself who had frightened the Rachels, turning on a wireless in the middle of the night and running baths and laying tables for people who weren’t there. Mr Mockler listened and was interested to note that Dr Friendman used words that were not easy to understand, and quoted from experts who were in Dr Friendman’s line of business but whose names meant nothing to Mr Mockler.
Mr Mockler, listening to all of it, nodded but was not convinced. The Rachels had left the house, just as the letter said: he knew that, he felt it in his bones and it felt like the truth. The Rachels had been frightened of Mrs Acland’s ghosts even though they’d been artificial ghosts. They’d been real to her, and they’d been real to the Rachels because she’d made them so. Shadows had stepped out of her mind because in her loneliness she’d wished them to. They’d laughed and played, and frightened the Rachels half out of their wits.
‘There’s always an explanation,’ said Dr Friendman.
Mr Mockler nodded, profoundly disagreeing.
‘She’ll think you’re Mr Rachels,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘come to say he saw the ghosts. If you wouldn’t mind saying you did, it keeps her happy.’
‘But it’s the truth,’ Mr Mockler cried with passion in his voice. ‘Of course it’s the truth: there can be ghosts like that, just as there can be in any other way.’
‘Oh, come now,’ murmured Dr Friendman with his sad, humane smile.
Mr Mockler followed. Dr Friendman from the room. They crossed a landing and descended a back staircase, passing near a kitchen in which a chef with a tall chef’s hat was beating pieces of meat. ‘Ah, Wiener schnitzel,’ said Dr Friendman.
In the cobbled courtyard the gardener had finished sweeping up the leaves and was wheeling them away in a wheelbarrow. The woman was still sitting on the tapestry-backed chair, still smiling in the autumn sunshine.
‘Look,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘a visitor.’
The woman rose and went close to Mr Mockler. ‘They didn’t mean to frighten you,’ she said, ‘even though it’s the only way ghosts can communicate. They were only having fun, Mr Rachels.’
‘I think Mr Rachels realizes that now,’ Dr Friendman said.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Mockler.
‘No one ever believed me, and I kept on saying, “When the Rachels come back, they’ll tell the truth about poor George and Alice and Isabel.” You saw them, didn’t you, Mr Rachels?’
‘Yes,’ Mr Mockler said. ‘We saw them.’
She turned and walked away, leaving the tapestry-backed chair behind her.
‘You’re a humane person,’ Dr Friendman said, holding out his right hand, which Mr Mockler shook. The same man led him back through the lawns and the rose-beds, to the gates.
It was an experience that Mr Mockler found impossible to forget. He measured and stitched, and talked to his friends Mr Uprichard and Mr Tile in the Charles the First; he went for a walk morning and evening, and no day passed during which he did not think of the woman whom people looked at through binoculars. Somewhere in England, or at least somewhere in the world, the Rachels were probably still alive, and had Mr Mockler been a younger man he might even have set about looking for them. He would have liked to bring them to the secluded house where the woman now lived, to have been there himself when they told the truth to Dr Friendman. It seemed a sadness, as he once remarked to Mr Uprichard, that on top of everything else a woman’s artificial ghosts should not be honoured, since she had brought them into being and given them life, as other women give children life.
You always looked back, she thought. You looked back at other years, other Christmas cards arriving, the children younger. There was the year Patrick had cried, disliking the holly she was decorating the living-room with, There was the year Bridget had got a speck of coke in her eye on Christmas Eve and had to be taken to the hospital at Hammersmith in the middle of the night. There was the first year of their marriage, when she and Dermot were still in Waterford. And ever since they’d come to London there was the presence on Christmas Day of their landlord, Mr Joyce, a man whom they had watched becoming elderly.
