valuable in the garage now as he or my uncle; Effie kept the books and sent out bills. My father took things easy, spending more time talking to his older customers. My uncle pursued the racing pages; my mother had had an operation for varicose veins, which she should have had years ago.
I could disgrace them in the town, in all the shops and public houses, in Bolger’s Medical Hall, in the convent and the Christian Brothers’ and the Church of the Holy Assumption. How could Brian and Liam carry on the business if they couldn’t hold their heads up? How could Effie help with the petrol pumps at a busy time, standing in her Wellington boots on a wet day, for all the town to see? Who would marry Kitty now?
I had spoken by mistake, and I didn’t speak again. It was the first time I had said anything at a meal in the kitchen for as long as I could remember, for years and years. I had suddenly felt that she might grow tired of coming into my mind and want to be left alone, buried beneath the Protestant church. I had wanted to reassure her.
‘They’re afraid of you,’ she said that night. ‘All of them.’
She said it again when I walked in the sunshine to our field. She kept on saying it, as if to warn me, as if to tell me to be on the look-out. ‘They have made you,’ she repeated. ‘You’re the child of all of them.’
I wanted to go away, to escape from the truth we had both instinctively felt and had shared. I walked with her through the house called Tremlett Hall, haunting other people with our footsteps. We stood and watched while guests at a party laughed among the suits of armour in the hall, while there was waltzing in a ballroom. In the gardens dahlias bloomed, and sweet-pea clung to wires against a high stone wall. Low hedges of fuchsia bounded the paths among the flower-beds, the little dog ran on in front of us. She held my hand and said she loved me; she smiled at me in the sunshine. And then, just for a moment, she seemed to be different; she wasn’t wearing the right clothes; she was wearing a tennis dress and had a racquet in her hand. She was standing in a conservatory, one foot on a cane chair. She looked like another girl, Susan Peters in
I didn’t like that. It was the same kind of thing as feeling I had to speak to her even though other people were in the kitchen. It was a muddle, and somewhere in it I could sense an unhappiness I didn’t understand. I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. I tried to say I was sorry, but I didn’t know what I was sorry for.
In the middle of one night I woke up screaming. Brian and Liam were standing by my bed, cross with me for waking them. My mother came, and then my father. I was still screaming, unable to stop. ‘He’s had some type of nightmare,’ Brian said.
It wasn’t a nightmare because it continued when 1 was awake. She was there, Elvira Tremlett, born 1855. She didn’t talk or smile: I couldn’t make her. Something was failing in me: it was the same as Susan Peters suddenly appearing with a tennis racquet, the same as my desperation in wanting to show gratitude when we weren’t in private.
My mother sat beside my bed. My brothers returned to theirs. The light remained on. I must have whispered, I must have talked about her because I remember my mother’s nodding head and her voice assuring me that it was all a dream. I slept, and when I woke up it was light in the room and my mother had gone; my brothers were getting up. Elvira Tremlett was still there, one eye half-closed in blindness, the fingers that had been delicate misshapen now. When my brothers left the room she was more vivid, a figure by the window, turning her head to look at me, a gleam of fury in her face. She did not speak but I knew what she was saying. I had used her for purposes of my own, to bring solace. What right, for God’s sake, had I to blow life into her decaying bones? Born 1855, eighty-nine years of age.
I closed my eyes, trying to imagine her as I had before, willing her young girl’s voice and her face and hair. But even with my eyes closed the old woman moved about the room, from the window to the foot of Liam’s bed, to the wardrobe, into a corner, where she stood still.
She was on the landing with me, and on the stairs and in the kitchen. She was in the stony field by the wood, accusing me of disturbing her and yet still not speaking. She was in pain from her eye and her arthritic hands: I had brought about that. Yet she was no ghost, I knew she was no ghost. She was a figment of my imagination, drawn from her dull grey tablet by my interest. She existed within me, I told myself, but it wasn’t a help.
Every night I woke up screaming. The sheets of my bed were sodden with my sweat. I would shout at my brothers and my mother, begging them to take her away from me. It wasn’t I who had committed the sin, I shouted, it wasn’t I who deserved the punishment. All I had done was to talk to a figment. All I’d done was to pretend, as they had.
Father Kiberd talked to me in the kitchen. His voice came and went, and my mother’s voice spoke of the sodden sheets every morning, and my father’s voice said there was terror in my eyes. All I wanted to say was that I hadn’t meant any harm in raising Elvira Tremlett from the dead in order to have an imaginary friend, or in travelling with her to the house with Virginia creeper on it. She hadn’t been real, she’d been no more than a flicker on the screen of the Vista cinema: I wanted to say all that. I wanted to be listened to, to be released of the shame that I felt like a shroud around me. I knew that if I could speak my imagination would be free of the woman who haunted it now. I tried, but they were afraid of me. They were afraid of what I was going to say and between them they somehow stopped me. ‘Our Father,’ said Father Kiberd, ‘Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…’
Dr Garvey came and looked at me: in Cork another man looked at me. The man in Cork tried to talk to me, telling me to lie down, to take my shoes off if I wanted to. It wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t fair on them, having me there in the house, a person in some kind of nightmare. I quite see now that it wasn’t fair on them, I quite see that.
Because of the unfairness I was brought, one Friday morning in a Ford car my father borrowed from a customer, to this brown-brick mansion, once the property of a local family. I have been here for thirty-four years. The clothes I wear are rough, but I have ceased to. be visited by the woman who Elvira Tremlett became in my failing imagination. I ceased to be visited by her the moment I arrived here, for when that moment came I knew that this was the house she had been staying in when she died. She brought me here so that I could live in peace, even in the room that had been hers. I had disturbed her own peace so that we might come here together.
I have not told this story myself. It has been told by my weekly visitor, who has placed me at the centre of it because that, of course, is where I belong. Here, in the brown-red mansion, I have spoken without difficulty. I have spoken in the garden where I work in the daytime; I have spoken at all meals; I have spoken to my weekly visitor. I am different here. I do not need an imaginary friend, I could never again feel curious about a girl who died.
I have asked my visitor what they say in the town, and what the family say. He replies that in the bar of Corrigan’s Hotel commercial travellers are told of a boy who was haunted, as a place or a house is. They are drawn across the bar to a window: Devlin Bros., the garage across the street, is pointed out to them. They listen in pleasurable astonishment to the story of nightmares, and hear the name of an English girl who died in the town in 1873, whose tablet is on the wall of the Protestant church. They are told of the final madness of the boy, which came about through his visions of this girl, Elvira Tremlett.
The story is famous in the town, the only story of its kind the town possesses. It is told as a mystery, and the
