Ghostwalk (2 page)

As I write, Grace’s grandchildren play in raincoats on the trampoline under the apple tree. Before the rose garden and the shrubs and the trampoline and the shed, before any of that, the elder had made its way up through the orchards that stood here for centuries, before Kit’s house and before all the others in this terrace were built. Kit has a sepia photograph in her kitchen of the building works for her street, a skeleton row of houses being built on the orchards. Before the orchards, there were marshes here to the south of the city, southeast of Newton’s Trinity College, and the ground elder would have rioted then in the wet earth, unrestrained. Before the orchards and marshes, Roman farmers and the gardeners of Roman villas built on this land would have kept it at bay or used it in herb gardens to make soups and broths or to cure their gout. Builders found the remains of a pretty villa under the road only a stone’s throw from here—three rooms with painted plaster walls, bright red, yellow, green, grey, and deep blue, some patterned to imitate panels of marble, a tiled roof, mortar floors, glass windows, under-floor heating built on blocks of imported chalk. It was probably the last house on the edge of the settlement, marking the boundary between civilisation and the marshlands.

Every cut in the ground elder root is a failure; every cut will make a redoubling of effort necessary. That’s how I came to understand Isaac Newton’s fear of sin, I think, and how embroiled Mr. F. became in Newton’s name, and how neither of them could stop what they had started, and, finally, how I have come to see the way the consequences of their seventeenth-century acts twisted and turned their way to us, underground and overground, splitting and redoubling. Organic and botanical.

My story, both of my stories, the police tapes in the Parkside station and the typed account I wrote for Patricia Dibb, began with Elizabeth Vogelsang’s funeral.

Now, Cameron Brown, I am starting to tell it again so that I can make you a thread for your labyrinth. Yes, I am putting the seventeenth century back into the picture. I hope you can hear me.

Two

O
n the day of Elizabeth’s funeral I’d been in a hurry, as usual, and once I reached the motorway I couldn’t quite remember if I had pulled the flat door closed. It was too late to go back. Could I call my neighbour and get her to check? Gripping the wheel with one hand, I pulled out my phonebook with the other to see if I still had Greta’s number listed there, but then swerved too closely towards the central reservation. Stop rushing. One thing at a time. Just pay attention. And don’t lose your way. Head directly north with the sea behind you up the M23, over the massy chalk of the south downs to the open eye of the M25; trace a line around its rim anticlockwise, crossing under the Thames through the Dartford Tunnel and then north to the top of the circle, then north again up the M11 and into the flatlands of East Anglia. Drop into Cambridge from the north, then find the Leper Chapel from the ring road on the east side.

To compensate for my lack of a mental compass, Kit had taught me to turn directions into a painting or a drawing, a charcoal line stretching across white paper. Lack of direction? Now, don’t put that down to me being a woman. If being male and female can be reduced to a set of stereotypes, you know I have more male instincts than female ones. Perhaps it’s the writing. Writers, apparently, often have a diminished sense of direction: too many maps—time maps, road maps, character maps—all laid one on top of another, like the stories of a building. It gets to be difficult to separate them out.

I shouldn’t have been late. It wasn’t as if I went to funerals very often. That morning I’d taken ages to get out of the flat, unable to decide whether to wear black or not, so I’d pulled on black clothes and then dark blue ones and pulled them all off again until they had piled up on the bedroom floor. Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals. I hated all those sentimental empty rituals made stiff and unyielding by rules and protocols. Elizabeth wouldn’t have cared what any of us wore. She refused to go to funerals.

Elizabeth Vogelsang—what kinds of things had she cared about? Misused semi-colons; mistakes in dates; poor logic; “dodgy reasoning”; mixed metaphors; the Leper Chapel on the Newmarket Road. Oh, and smells. Elizabeth always noticed smells. She could smell if you were getting sick. She’d said something to me once two years or so ago when we’d met in the University Library tearooms. That day I watched the shadow of your remembered mouth pass over hers as she talked. Her mouth. Your mouth. Mother and son. “Lydia, are you feeling quite well?” she’d asked, stirring her tea and refusing to meet my eye. “It’s just you are giving off a particular kind of smell…not an unpleasant smell exactly…”

“What kind of smell? Sweat?” I blush easily. No one had ever talked to me like that before. Not even my closest friends. Not even Kit. I’d felt affronted, angry, and fascinated.
You are giving off a particular kind of smell.
Giving off—it made me think of exhalations, steam rising from the backs of saddled horses, dragon’s breath on frosted mornings. For one bad moment I wondered if your strange mother could smell you on my skin, but then you’d not been near my skin for three years. Could you have left your smell on my skin after all that time? You were certainly still
under
it then, especially as I was sitting there with that mouth, her mouth, just on the other side of the table.

“Oh, wet newspapers. Newspapers that have been wet for several weeks. Ink, the edge of mould, wet leaves…It’s just your glands. You’re probably coming down with something.”

It was only then that Elizabeth had looked up. Thankfully, by then my scorched cheeks had returned to their natural colour. I raised my hand to my glands and found swellings there like invisible bruises. Three days later I had a temperature.

She wasn’t finished with me. “It became something of common knowledge in Cambridge, you know. You and my son.”

“I know,” I said, trying to match her directness with my own. It was perhaps more of a relief than anything to have broached the subject. “Did someone tell you?”

“No. I saw you with him in here once. You didn’t see me. You were walking together from the South Wing to the North Wing. There was something about the way you were walking, the way you didn’t smile, like friends do. So I asked some questions. But don’t worry. I’m not one to judge—how could I? Life is complicated. Mine has been…complicated.”

“That’s why I left Cambridge,” I said, realising I was lying a little.

“I wondered.” She laughed and gathered her papers together. “Well, that’s a relief. I thought if we were going to be working together again, it might be better to avoid tiptoeing around all of that. We don’t need to talk about it again.”

Now, years later, here I was driving from Brighton to Cambridge, from the sea to a Leper Chapel that looked like a ship on the marshy common outside Cambridge, for my last appointment with Elizabeth Vogelsang. And I was late.

The Newmarket Road was traffic-bound enough for me to risk checking my phone and to reach for my bag of makeup. I had covered only one cheek and part of my nose with foundation before the traffic began to move again, and in trying to manoeuvre the makeup and the steering wheel, I spilled a single drop of foundation onto my black skirt, which wouldn’t rub off. I needed makeup that morning—I’d had almost no sleep the night before so that I could finish the manuscript and e-mail it to my agent before leaving for Cambridge. Miranda would have opened my e-mail by now, I knew, saved the attachment, printed it out in her office onto the thick cream-coloured paper she used:
Refraction: A Screenplay,
by Lydia Brooke. Then she would have set it aside. Judgements later. I decided I wouldn’t think about the script today. Only Elizabeth. Wonderful, clever, obsessive Elizabeth.

The Newmarket Road, as it passed out of Cambridge through Barnwell, always made me think of prostitutes: seventeenth-century prostitutes and brothels. Barnwell was where the undergraduates came to pay for sex: a seventeenth-century traveller to Cambridge once wrote that for 18 pence (that’s just £8 now), a scholar and his mistress could have a brothel all to themselves, and, he added with a crow of male triumphalism, there hadn’t been a maidenhead to be found among the sixteen-year-olds of Barnwell since the time of Henry I. The undergraduates, they said, would take off their gowns and roll them up outside Christ’s College at the Barnwell Gate, so as not to be seen leaving the city eastwards, because no undergraduates were allowed there—officially, at least. There weren’t many who stuck to the college rules. Newton was probably one of the rare rule keepers, at least as far as brothels were concerned. As far as anyone knows.

I found a parking space on Oyster Row, finished my makeup in the car mirror—coral-pink lipstick, dark mascara, cappuccino brown brushed onto pallid cheeks—climbed out, and locked the car. That’s when I realised that in my half-asleep state I had found my way to exactly the same place where I had parked on the winter afternoon when Elizabeth showed me Stourbridge Fair. It was part of the research for the screenplay I’d been writing then, just after I had come back from France. The sign on the old scrap-metal yard brought that memory back, the memory of the two of us walking this street six years before. I leaned back against the car and closed my eyes hard. I was tired. I was sure to cry.

“If you want to write about the seventeenth century you’ll have to know how it smells,” Elizabeth had said. I could hear her voice as if she were standing there beside me. “Find me an afternoon and we’ll conjure some smells. Then you’ll know where to start, I promise.” One snowy afternoon in February, Elizabeth had driven me up and down the warren of streets off the Newmarket Road called Oyster Row, Mercers Row, Garlic Row, and Swanns Walk. I took scores of pictures through the open car window with the digital camera that I used as a kind of visual notebook—graffiti, overturned bins, scrap-metal yards, bungalows, warehouses, and corrugated iron. Modern streets built on the site of the old Stourbridge Common, where the mayor and aldermen of Cambridge had hosted a fair since the twelfth century. At the foot of Garlic Row, Elizabeth had parked, climbed out of the car, and then, standing in the forecourt of the scrap-metal yard, she’d turned into some kind of historical shaman, her voice raised against the clamour of the industrial machinery behind us. I gave myself up to her. You had to do that with Elizabeth.

“Use your imagination and get your bearings. It’s September in—let’s say—1664. You are standing at the bottom of Garlic Row, which is the main thoroughfare of the fair, a wide dirt track that runs north in front of you. It’s muddy; sticky underfoot. Over that way, northwest, is the River Grant, down which most of the traders have arrived, many from the north, from King’s Lynn, weaving their way across the waterways of the Fens. Their boats are moored on the river now. Between us and the river are arable fields. The harvest has just finished, so the fields are cropped close; there’s stubble as far as you can see and a few wildflowers. But there’s not much room for anything to grow now because already everything has been trampled by hundreds of traders and merchants, who have set up their coloured booths in row after row. Over near the river is the Coal Fair and the Tallow Fair and a little mound called Fish Hill. Right in the centre near the mayor’s temporary house there’s the Oyster Fair, stalls selling thousands of oysters brought down from King’s Lynn and kept fresh in barrels of ice and straw.

“Between the Oyster Fair and us is Soper’s Row. Over to your right are the bookstalls and beyond them the White Leather Fair and further north the Horse Fair. Now add the others in their stalls. Think of the trades, the guilds who have come here: goldsmiths, toymakers, braziers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, wigmakers, drapers, pewterers, china warehouses, puppeteers, and prostitutes, and among them all coffee shops, eating houses, brandy shops. There are jugglers, acrobats, and clowns. You are standing among all the tents and booths. What can you smell? Close your eyes.”

Manure, brandy, the seawater smells of oyster shells, the perfumes of soaps, tar, tanning, leather, oil from wool fleeces piled around the Leper Chapel. Smells and perfumes mingled into each other as the sun rose. I walked through the thoroughfares, invisible to the ghostly sellers, running my hands over wool, silks, spices, oyster shells; I felt dried hops running through my fingers, the marbling of books on my fingertips; I heard cries, accents from all over England and northern Europe, men and women from Lancashire, Holland, Germany, Yorkshire—chickens, horses, iron, the chains of scales working. Sex, riot, and desire.

“The greatest medieval fair in Europe,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Now that you can smell it, can you
see
it? Cambridge is just a palimpsest. All of this is. Just one century laid upon another upon another. Nothing is ever quite lost while there are still a few old buildings standing sentinel. Time bleeds here, seeps, perhaps more than anywhere else in the city. You’ll see.
Now
you have to see the chapel.”

We walked back onto the busy Newmarket Road up the brow of the hill, where the Leper Chapel stood facing the road in a miniature valley of its own. “In Newton’s time it was used for storage; it was semi-derelict,” Elizabeth began, pulling a wrought-iron key from her coat pocket and slipping it into the hole in the door. “Just think, it’s been here for nearly a thousand years from before the city was anything more than a village with a castle and a fort. In the seventeenth century Samuel Pepys would have stood in it and John Bunyan—he used Stourbridge Fair as the model for his ‘Vanity Fair’ scene in
Pilgrim’s Progress
—which, of course, Thackeray stole for the title of his novel—”

Now I was late for Elizabeth’s funeral, walking towards the Leper Chapel, lost somewhere in Stourbridge Fair with the ghost of a dead woman and a whole host of imagined smells I didn’t know what to do with, and Pepys and Bunyan and Thackeray. “Your fault I’m late, Elizabeth,” I said aloud, stepping to one side to let a woman pass who was pushing a child in a buggy and talking on a mobile phone at the same time. We were both talking to the air, to ghosts.

Time had begun to bleed in the way that it did around Elizabeth. Yes, I had turned my back on Cambridge and you, Cameron Brown, for five years, but the feelings the city dragged from me were always the same—a physical oppression, a sense of mouldy suffocation and bad air, low grey skies on most days suddenly transformed to arcs of blue that made your heart ache. Cambridge made me think of Madame Bovary trying to draw breath in the prim protocols of suburbia and yearning for she knew not what, angry with she knew not what. And yes, like Emma, your eyes were never quite the same each time I saw you—black in shadow, brown in daylight, and close up, like the stem-cell slices you photographed, they had all the richness and variety of hue of medieval stained glass.