The Smile of a Ghost

‘It’s nothing to do with me. Anybody could… Everybody knows what I did.’

‘Sorry, I’m getting confused, what are we—?’

‘It’s in the books. The unauthorized biographies.’

‘I’ve never read them,’ Merrily said. ‘I just know the music. I just… wore the clothes.’

‘When I was fifteen,’ Bell said, a tired incantation, ‘I tried to kill myself. I took an overdose. I spent quality time on a stomach pump. I was fifteen and I was overweight, bad skin, repressed and horribly shy, and I had a heart defect and I was not allowed to do games and my parents drove me everywhere — even if I went out at night with friends they drove me there and collected me — and I also had a disgusting brace on my twisted teeth, so I tried to kill myself. It’s in the books.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know about that.’

Bell craned her neck forward. ‘Darling, it’s part of the legend. The next part is when I was seventeen and someone said I could sing and someone else pointed out that if you took the middle out of my dreary name, Isabella Donachie, you had the magic word Belladonna — poisonous, the most resonant name for a singer in those days — and that seemed like some glorious epiphany, and I snatched the brace off my teeth and slept with about a hundred men in six months.’

‘Legend?’

Bell sniffed. ‘You see, I’d grown up to whispers behind my back: doctors to parents, parents to relatives. Peering through the banisters, ears flapping — children have such sharp ears and an acute understanding of the basics. By the time I was ten, I knew I was going to die before my time.’

‘You’re still here…’

‘And I still have a heart defect, apparently — it wasn’t a mistake or anything: they picked up on it again when I was having the baby. I mean, I could still die any time. I just haven’t died yet. But death and me…’ Bell enclosed one hand with another. ‘Close, Mary. Very close, always. And it’s been a remarkable relationship.’

‘It’s certainly produced some remarkable music.’

‘All about sailing close to the precipice. When I swallowed the pills, I was convinced just a handful would finish me off — someone already hanging delicately over the great abyss? Didn’t happen. When I was twenty-one, I recorded the Hungarian Suicide Song and had all the scratches put into the mix, just like the original. Singing close to the precipice.’

Merrily said hesitantly, ‘They say that knowledge and acceptance of death can show you how to live… intensively.’

Bell leaned back in her box. ‘That’s not quite true. It induces, more than anything, a sense of the temporary. I couldn’t settle. Couldn’t settle in a place — travelled all over the world or, at least, back and forth across the Atlantic. Couldn’t stay with a man, either. Pepper was the best, he was a nice guy — why I kept his name — but I was turning him into a nervous wreck, so he appealed to my better instincts and I let him go. But there was only one constant, and that was my son.’

‘Because he was dead?’

‘And then I fetched up in Ludlow, visiting Saul’s daughter, Susannah, who was now my legal and financial adviser — business manager, I guess — and it was… another epiphany.’

‘The town you’d dreamed of when the baby was…’

‘Yes. Knew it soon as I got out of the car. Didn’t quite believe it at first, so I went away. Had the dream again. Came back, and the pull was even stronger. A town that, like me, was outside of its time. And the child… well, the child wanted to come back.’

‘Are we talking about… Robbie?’

‘You’re getting there.’ Bell sighed. ‘I must be insane — you could be a reporter.’

Merrily smiled.

‘But when you’ve been courted and worshipped and shafted by thousands of people the world over, you pride yourself on being able to recognize the ones who’re going to be of some importance. When I saw you with Jonathan at Marion’s yew, I thought, yeah… No, don’t say anything, Mary, don’t feel flattered, I’ll be a burden to you, I always am.’

‘Robbie?’

‘Is my son. Is my son. I wasn’t looking for a child, for God’s sake. I was probably looking for a man. And then one day you’re face to face with your twin soul, and it’s a… a bloody little boy.’ Bell drank some wine, tears like lenses over her eyes.

‘Someone I spoke to,’ Merrily said, ‘actually said you were like mother and son.’

‘We were mother and son. Birth parents are merely that — seldom of any consequence, an impedance more often than not. We were part of the same spiritual seed… essence. And we were both connected with this town and realized it. We’d both come home. We saw the town burning with the same golden light. I remember, in my first dream, walking from the castle to the church, stopping and gazing up at the steeple, and it was like a bar of gold, and the sky was red with sunset, and I felt… well, you can imagine how I felt.’

‘Euphoric.’

‘Oh, well beyond euphoric.’

‘Like a near-death experience? Bell, are we talking reincarnation here?’

Bell shook her head. ‘I don’t believe in that shit.’

‘Someone… that is, I wondered if you felt you were connected with Marion de la Bruyere.’

‘No, not at all. Marion’s an entry point. She’s important because most of the ghosts here are nebulous presences, and she’s fully formed. We know where she died, and how and why. And she’s very much here — like Robbie. So I went to see his grandmother.’

‘Mrs Mumford?’

‘When he’d gone back to school, last January, I went to see the old woman. Realized, soon as I started talking to her, that there was no way I could explain the half of it. I said I was impressed with his knowledge and his enthusiasm and wondered if there was some way I could help with his education. It was pretty clear that she wouldn’t understand.’

‘Would you have expected her to?’

‘Probably not. So, in the end, I went to see the mother. I went to this crummy estate in Hereford. And I met the mother. And it became very obvious, very quickly, that this woman and I would be able to find a common… currency.’

‘Currency?’

‘I’m not speaking metaphorically. Look at this place… it’s a shell. I walk through this house like another ghost. I wanted…’

Merrily sat up, hard. ‘You wanted to adopt him?’

‘My stepdaughter could deal with the formalities. But the essence of it, as far as the mother was concerned, was a large — not to say life-changing — one-off payment.’

‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

‘He didn’t know. I wanted to be sure, before I discussed it with him, that nobody would get in the way. It was obvious Phyllis Mumford wouldn’t be in any state to look after him for much longer. As for Angela… Angela’s eyes positively lit up at the implications.’

‘God.’

‘And then he died,’ Bell said. ‘He died like Marion. And everything shifted. The whole axis of the town shifted under me.’ She stared at Merrily, and her eyes looked as if they were melting in the firelight. ‘It’s the endgame now, Mary.’

The fireplace reared over them. Bell was in shadow, but her breathing was loud and uneven, and you could smell the wine.

‘This is the endgame,’ she said again. ‘It’s as if we’re all part of some great, tragic tapestry across time. And now I’m walking this house and this town like a ghost. Like the ghost…’

‘Like the ghost,’ Merrily said softly, ‘that you’ll become?’