while the old priest stood by, patting me on the shoulder and murmuring what seemed a series of soft, mild reproaches.
So I began that day the painstaking trek back over our lives, I mean our lives when Cass was there, the years she was with us. I was searching for the pattern, the one I am searching for still, the set of clues laid out like the dots she used to join up with her crayon to make a picture of the beautiful fairy with wand and wings. Was Lydia right when she accused me of somehow knowing what was to happen? I do not want to think so. For if I knew, if the ghosts were a premonition that this was what was to come, why did I not act? But then, I have always had the greatest difficulty distinguishing between action and acting. Besides, I was looking the wrong way, I was looking into the past, and that was not where those phantoms were from, at all. I used to daydream, in those first weeks I spent alone in the house, that Cass would come to live with me, that we would set up together some new version of the old life I had misled here, that we would somehow redeem the lost years. Was it out of these fantasies I conjured her? And did my conjurations weaken her hold on the real life she might have had, the life that now she will never live? The lives.
I have not begun to feel guilty, yet, not really; there will be ample time for that.
That night, after my visit to the church, I had a strange and strangely affecting dream, one that almost comforted me. I was in the circus tent. Goodfellow was there, and Lily, and Lydia, and I knew too that everyone in the audience, although I could not properly see it, out there in the gloom, was known to me, or was a relative of some kind. We were all gazing upward in rapt silence, watching Cass, who was suspended motionless in midair, without support, her arms outstretched, her calm face lit by a beam of strong white soft light. As I watched, she started her descent toward me, faster and faster, still impassive, still holding up her arms as if in a blessing, but the nearer she drew, instead of growing larger in my sight, she steadily shrank, so that when at the end I reached out to catch her she was hardly there at all, was hardly more than a speck of light, that in a moment was extinguished.
I woke, clear-headed, the weariness of the past days all gone, and rose and went and stood in the darkness by the window for a long time, looking down on the deserted harbour, and the sea, whose little, lapsing waves seemed something that was being sleepily spoken, over and over.
There was a storm on the day that we flew home. The plane unzipped the flooded runway and lifted with a howling whoosh. When we were over the mountains, Lydia, on her third gin, peered down at the flinty peaks and snow-streaked ravines and bleakly chuckled. “I wish we would crash,” she said. I thought of our defaced daughter in her casket down in the baggage bay under our feet. What Goodfellow got hold of her, what Billy in the Bowl sank his teeth into her throat and sucked her blood?
It was strange, to be home, what used to be home, the funeral done with and life, in its heartless way, insisting on being lived. I was out, as often as I could be. Our house by the sea was no longer my home. An odd constraint had grown up between Lydia and me, a shyness, an embarrassment, almost, as if we had committed some misdemeanour together and each was shamed by the other’s knowledge of what we had done. I spent long afternoons walking the streets of the city, favouring especially those neutral zones between the suburbs and the city proper, where the buddleia flourished, and abandoned cars sat rusting on their uppers in puddles of smashed glass, and the jagged windows of disused factories flashed with mysterious significance in the slanted autumn sunlight. Here gangs of urchins roamed freely, trotted after always by a grinning dog. Here the winos gathered, on patches of waste ground, to drink from their big brown bottles, and sing, and squabble, and cackle at me as I sidled past, sunk in my black coat. And here too I saw all manner of ghosts, people who could no longer be alive, people who were already old when I was young, figures from the past, from myth and legend. In those vacant streets I could not tell whether I was moving among the living or the dead. And I spoke to Cass, more freely, with more candour, than I ever could have when she was still here, though she never answered, never once, as she might have done. She might have told me why she chose to die on that sun-bleached coast. She might have told me who was the father of her child. She might have said if that was her suntan lotion I smelled that day in the hotel room. Would she have put on suntan lotion and then gone and jumped into the sea? These are the questions that occupy me. I go through her papers, the scores of foolscap sheets she left behind her at the hotel. She would be proud of me, my scholarly application; I am as intent as any sizar under his lamp. Handwritten, largely illegible, they seemed a chaos, at first, all out of sequence, with no rhyme or reason to them that I could discern. Then, gradually, a pattern began to emerge, no, not a pattern, nothing so definite as a pattern—an aura, rather, a faint, flickering glow of almost-meaning. They seem to be in part a diary, though the things she records, the events and encounters, are fantastical in tone, impossibly coloured. Is it perhaps a story she was inventing, to amuse herself, or ward off the accumulating horrors in her head? There are certain recurrences, a name, or merely an initial, a place revisited again and again, a word repeatedly underlined. There are accounts of expulsions, deaths, extinctions, lost identities. Everything spins and swirls in the maelstrom of her imaginings. And at the core of it all there is an absence, an empty space where once there was something, or someone, who has removed himself. Though the pages are unnumbered, of course, I am convinced that some are missing: discarded, destroyed—or purloined? I feel for the gaps, the empty places, moving my mind like a blind man’s fingers over the words, which still refuse to give up their secret. Am I going to have another ghost haunting me now, one I cannot even see, one impossible to recognise?
Then, at other times, I tell myself it is all in my fancy, that these are no more than the disjointed, desperate last vagaries of a dying mind. Yet I do not give up hope that one day these pages will speak to me, in that known voice, telling me all that I may or may not want to know.
I saw her, once more, a last time, I think it will be. I had gone down to the old house to collect my things. It was one of those smoked-glass autumn days, all sky and cloud and tawny distances. Quirke arrived while I was packing, and stood in the bedroom doorway in his blazer and his fish-grey slip-ons, leaning with one hand on the jamb, a thumb nervously working. After some huffing and throat-clearing he asked about Cass. “She got into difficulties,” I said, “she got into difficulties, and drowned.” He nodded, with a solemn frown. He seemed about to speak again, but changed his mind. I turned to him, expectantly, hopefully, even. Often with Quirke I had the feeling, and I had it again now, that he was about to impart some large and vital piece of information or instruction, some essential fact that is known to everyone, except me. He stands there, frowning, somewhat pop-eyed, amused a little despite himself, seeming to ponder the wisdom of disclosing to me at last the banal but all-important secret. Then the moment passes, and he gives himself a sort of mental shake, and is what he was before, just Quirke, and not the grave repository of momentous knowledge at all.
“When did your wife die? ” I said.
He blinked. “My missus?”
I was stacking books in a cardboard box.
“Yes. I used to see a ghost here, I thought at one time it might be her.”
He was shaking his head slowly, I fancied I could almost hear it turning on its cogs.
“My missus didn’t die,” he said, “who told you that? She ran off with a traveller.”
“A…?”
“Travelling salesman. Shoes.” He gave a mournful, angry laugh. “The bitch.”
He helped me to carry my bags and boxes of books downstairs. I told him I intended to give the house to the girl. “Not to you, mind,” I said. “To Lily.” He had stopped on the last step of the stair, and stood now, leaning forward with a heavy suitcase in each hand, his head on one side, looking at the floor. “There is only one condition,” I said, “that she doesn’t sell it. I want her to live here.” I could see him deciding, with a sort of click, to believe I was in earnest. Already the light of anticipation was dawning in his eye; I suspect he was as much looking forward to drawing up the papers as he was to getting his hands, even if at one remove, on my property. He put down the bags as if all his troubles were in them, and straightened, unable to keep himself from grinning.
Yes, I shall give her the house. I hope that she will live here. I hope she will let me visit her,
