keeping watch. Keeping watch for not a hell of a lot in particular, I suppose, but anyway
‘But nothing more than be, apparently. How would you spend the time? I’m sure you’ll have realized there’d be plenty of it.’
‘Oh yes. Well, thinking. All that kind of thing.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ said Joyce. ‘Laundry in the morning. Good night, Nick. Good night, Lucy.’ She kissed them both, then said mechanically to me, ‘Don’t be too late.’
While she departed, I got myself a Scotch and water. Nick was looking compliantly bored. Lucy seemed to be taking a minute or two off, as between one seminar topic and the next. After pouring herself a careful half-cup- and-no-more of coffee, and adding perhaps a minim-of milk, she said,
‘Uh, uh-Maurice, I take it you don’t allow any possibility of survival after death?’
‘Christ no. I’ve never believed in any of that crap, not even when I was a boy. To me, it’s always been a matter of a sleep and a forgetting, beyond all question. The other thing is egotistical, if you like. And so outre, somehow. Fit for madmen only. Why?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking that one of the traditional parts of the case for belief in some sort of hereafter is the existence of ghosts, which usually resemble actual people known when alive, and behave like them too, just as they would if they’d come back from beyond the grave.’
‘But according to you earlier on, ghosts don’t really exist as entities, and seeing one is seeing something that isn’t there.’
‘Yes, I’m not changing my mind. I don’t believe myself that ghosts are there in that sense, but there’s an arguable case that they are. And I have to admit that some ghosts do put on a remarkable show of having momentarily wandered back into our world from some place they went to after they died physically. I don’t mean so much the haunted-room sort of ghost, like the ones here; I’m thinking more of the sort that turn up under the most ordinary circumstances, sometimes by day, and speak to someone, often a person they knew well in life. Like the airman who walked into his friend’s room one afternoon and said halo to him five minutes after he’d been killed in a crash and hours before the friend heard about it. Or the woman who’d been dead for six years who appeared on the doorstep of her sister’s house at her usual time for coming to see her, only the sister had moved in the meantime, and the new occupant recognized the dead woman from a photograph the sister showed him. And even your friend Underhill … There’s one point in what you say happened in the dining-room tonight that takes him out of the category of the ordinary revenant kind of ghost.’
I judged that Lucy was fully capable of going to her grave without ever saying what this point was unless I prompted her, so I prompted her. ‘Namely?’ I said, with that sensation of taking part in Armchair Theatre on TV from which I suffered much more often, indeed continually, when dealing with Diana.
‘The fact, at least you say it’s a fact, that Underhill recognized you. Of course, he might just have mistaken you for someone else, but if he did really recognize you, then there’s an obvious case for saying that he is in some sense or other existing in the twentieth century, having died physically in the seventeenth—existing to the extent of being able to perform at any rate one kind of action, involving intelligence, memory and so on: recognition. There’s no knowing what else he may be able to do. Not at the moment, that is. But, given your views on death, I should say it’s more than ever up to you to try and get in touch with what you believe to be Underhill’s ghost.’
Nick had begun to twist about slightly in his seat. ‘Oh,
‘I was saying earlier, your father could see if he could touch the woman he thought he saw, or really saw— I’ve never denied that that’s a genuine possibility—or try to get her to speak to him if she appears again, and the same applies to Underhill. He seemed to hear his name being spoken tonight I still don’t think it was Underhill, but your father does. In his place, I’d spend as much time as possible sitting in that dining-room while it’s not in use and waiting for Underhill to reappear. He might speak next time. From your point of view, that’s logical, don’t you agree … Maurice?’
‘All right, I will. But you think everybody goes by mood because that’s the way you work yourself. You’re bloody bright, Nick, but on almost everything except Lamartine you muddle up what you think with how you feel. I prefer to take what your father says at face value. But I promise to drop it. I’m off to bed now anyway. See you both in the morning.’
‘You mustn’t take too much notice of Lucy,’ said Nick when we were alone. ‘She misses the old cut-and-thrust of academic discussion up there. I’m no good to her on that one, and the faculty wives can’t follow two consecutive remarks on any subject. She’s all right, actually. I know you can’t understand what I see in her, and I’m not sure I can myself, but I love her. Anyway. How are you really feeling, Dad?’
I hesitated. I had not until that moment thought of what I now urgently wanted to say, any more than I had consciously rehearsed a single word of my diatribe about death, which, it occurred to me belatedly, I had delivered as if I had had it by heart. I stopped hesitating. ‘I feel I ought to have done more for Gramps. I don’t just mean what everybody’s bound to feel, about wishing you’d been more considerate and nicer and everything. I could have tried to help him live longer. For instance, perhaps those walks of his were too taxing. I ought to have thought about that, talked to Jack Maybury and so on.’
‘Look, to begin with, Gramps wasn’t your patient. And Jack’s a good doctor; he knew what was best for him. And he was a vigorous old boy; he’d have died a bloody sight sooner, out of misery, if he’d been cooped up in the house all the time. Don’t worry about that.’
‘Mm. Would you like a whisky, or a beer?’
Nick shook his head. ‘You have one.’
While I poured, I said, ‘And the stairs here, they’re very steep. I ought to have tried—’
‘What could you have done? Put in a lift? And I don’t think climbing stairs gives you strokes, does it? That’s heart, I thought.’
‘I don’t know.’ I hesitated again. ‘It made me think of your mother.’
‘Mum? What’s she got to do with it?’
‘Well, I … feel responsible for that too, in a way.’
‘Oh, Dad. The only people responsible were the chap driving the car, and perhaps Mum herself a bit, for crossing the road without looking properly.’
‘I’ve always wondered whether she stepped out deliberately.’
‘Oh, Christ. With Amy holding her hand? She’d never have risked anything happening to Amy. And why should she? Knock herself off, I mean.’
‘That bit’s obvious. Thompson letting her down.’ Thompson was the man for whose sake Margaret had left me, and who had told her, four months before her death, that he was not after all going to leave his wife and children and set up a home with her.
‘That’s Thompson’s headache, if it’s anybody’s, which I don’t believe.’
‘I ought to have tried to stop her going.’
‘Oh, balls. How? She was a free agent.’
‘I ought to have treated her better.’
‘You treated her well enough for her to stay with you for twenty-two years. This is a load of crap, Dad. What’s bothering you isn’t that you were in any way responsible for her death, but that she died. Same with Gramps. Both those things remind you that you’ll be going the same way yourself one of these days. I know you’ll hate me taking a leaf out of Lucy’s book, but that is egotistical. Sorry, Dad.’
‘Okay. You may be right.’ He was certainly right about the first part of it—the small but permanent despair, and the illogical feeling of dread, that come from having spent so many years with a dead woman, talked, met people, gone to places, eaten, drunk with her, most of all (of course) made love to her, and had children by her. Even now I woke up three or four mornings a week assuming that Margaret was still alive.
