I do not mean to be defeated. I’ve gone back down to take my seat in my spooky room, haunted both by the ghosts of my imagination
and whoever once lived and worked here, and sure enough, the face on the wallpaper is gone. It has dried out. I left the central
heating radiator on full blast.
‘Then fancies flee away.’ I sing to myself Bunyan’s hymn,
To Be a Pilgrim
: ‘I’ll labour night and day…’
Hobgoblin and foul fiend, I’ll have no more of you. Tap, tap, tap goes my keyboard. I shift in my typist’s chair to ease the
ache in my back. I expect you feel the same, Mavis, as you bend to sweep the grates. And you’re younger than me in one way,
but a hundred years older in another. I hope I’m not inadvertently discommoding you, by even thinking of it.
Everything is going to be fine. No moans from Mavis, no untoward noises. I tell myself I have set my own kehua to rest. Then
I hear barking. But there are no dogs who live round here. I am instantly paranoiac. But it’s not a whining, complaining irritating
bark – rather that of an excited dog playing a game of catch in the garden with the Bennetts’ children, Ernest, Thomas and
William. A kindly-looking dog, a black-and-white Welsh border collie, walks by the window: not exactly walks, more like gliding,
as if attached to a moving band. I take it to be Bonzo, which means our friend Martin his owner is upstairs having a cup of
coffee. But I didn’t hear his car drive up. And Bonzo usually walks by from the other direction – out the back door, in the
front. This dog is walking in the opposite direction. His white patches are differently arranged. It’s
not Bonzo. Bonzo is older and has a limp. Then the dog on the moving band is past the window and gone. But it’s not on a moving
band, of course; what I saw was a dog walking from the knees up – the ground level will have risen since its original passed
by this window. Oh my God, too much knowledge.
Only yesterday someone was talking about the ghosts of Roman soldiers seen marching along the old Roman road which runs from
Badbury Rings to Bath. They march along as though amputated at the knee, on moving bands. My problem is I am the most suggestible,
gullible person on earth.
I go out into the garden to look but there is no dog. I didn’t really expect to see one. I project my own fantasies in rather
too lively a way, that’s all. I am a writer: I make things up. I am not going to flee upstairs again. It’s pathetic. The dog
will only follow me up there if I am in the wrong frame of mind. He was on the other side of glass. He’s not threatening me.
I don’t suppose ghost dogs draw real blood, and anyway he seemed a friendly, relaxed and amiable creature. Had he looked in
through the window I daresay he would have seen me, and I for him would have been a ghost and made his hair bristle.
But he didn’t, and it didn’t. I turn my computer back on. It takes its time and then there’s the familiar sound of the ‘welcome’
chords of Microsoft materialising: real and not real, aetheric yet so very here and now. I suppose they are from this world,
not the other, crossed over to delude us all? How could one tell? Do we understand the mechanism by which they are now heard
in every house in the land?
Beverley thinks perhaps her knee hasn’t been infected with MRSA after all. Now her hair is fluffed out she thinks she will
Skype her friend Gerry, an oil engineer prospecting in the Faröes, and ask him what to do about Scarlet. Should she call Louis
and tell him to get home quickly before Scarlet does something silly, or should she just do nothing and not get involved?
Perhaps a lifetime’s policy of not standing between her family and their follies, feeling it is always wiser to run than to
stay, has been misguided. Better still, she decides, she will call Louis, before she calls Gerry, the minute Scarlet is out
the door.
‘I mustn’t hold you up any longer,’ she says to Scarlet. ‘You’d better run along now. Where are you meeting your lover? Somewhere
smart?’
‘Costa’s in Soho,’ says Scarlet. ‘You won’t know it. No one important will recognise him there.’
Or he can’t pay for anything better, thinks Beverley, and if he doesn’t get recognised in Soho where will he be? But she doesn’t
say so and smiles sweetly at Scarlet, to hurry her out of the door.
‘Why are you rubbing your eyes?’ asks Beverley.
‘I’ve got the beginnings of a migraine,’ says Scarlet, and she takes an aspirin out of the pack in the little Marc Jacobs
handbag (£205, Harvey Nichols sale, 30 per cent off) she keeps in the Chloé tote
bag, and swallows it without even bothering to find water. She coughs a little as it dissolves in her throat.
‘It’s hereditary,’ observes Beverley, and closes her own eyes to see how the flashes are getting on behind her lids and for
once finds there are none. Thoughts of the kehua do not enter her mind, but they enter into mine, your writer’s. The voices
which say
run, run
are stronger in Scarlet’s head than ever. The problem with dealing with ghosts is that they are so unpredictable. There today,
gone tomorrow, undetectable by any technology so far discovered.
Scarlet takes her nice little Stella McCartney jacket (silk, striped black and white, £965 – Jackson loves it; Louis, for
all he’s in the fashion world, albeit on its edges, hasn’t even noticed) and prepares to go. It is a pity the Prada top is
navy but it’s a dark shade and Jackson probably won’t notice in the haste to get it off. If as she makes her way to her smart
little ecologically sound Toyota Prius an unexpected gust of wind follows her so she shivers in the silk jacket and wishes
she had worn wool, the thought lasts only a second or so and is forgotten, but lingers with your writer.
The souls of the dead in most cultures pass as breath in the wind but can do so with some force. The pain in the back, the
flashes in the eyes – flail around and burn a witch! Perhaps some kehua forced themselves through the window seals to get
into the Prius, perhaps others carried on to reinforce those already in Nopasaran down the road, where Lola was on the phone
to Cynara. Beverley’s shower may have simply made them disperse, not disappear. That’s the trouble with the grateful dead:
they are never convinced we are better off without their help.
Soon the Northern kelpies are going to enter on the scene, they too in search of their own. The living travel the world; nationalities
no longer contain them. It’s no different for the dead. They’re all over the place, like the chords of Microsoft. No wonder
the world is in a mess.
Now yes, where were we with Lola? She is on the phone to her mother and her mother is dumping her in favour of her lesbian
lover. I have neglected to tell you what Cynara looks like. She has the hard edges of the busy businesswoman, the accomplished
and self-confident lawyer – though her confidence is currently under some threat. She is brisk and beautiful and has the plentiful
frizzy hair and the wary, determined look cultivated by the committed feminist. (Though which comes first, the chicken or
the egg, the hair or the nature, it is hard to say.) She is broader and dumpier than her young sister Scarlet, wears flats,
and carries a rape alarm. Her grandmother, her mother, her sister, and indeed her daughter, would not deign to do either.
It is not so much the set of the features but the lines into which the expression falls that mark them as belonging to the
same stock. Male genes enter into the generations and cloud the mix. Cynara and Scarlet have the same mother but a different
father, thus diffusing their genes still further, but Cynara and Scarlet are not aware of this, and Alice certainly has no
intention of telling them.
Cynara’s skin has seldom seen face cream. But she has fine eyes, a voluptuous mouth, likeability, high principles and a working
mind. Sometimes she wonders how she and Jesper managed to beget this child, Lola, who seems to have so little to do with her.
Her friends all seem to be wondering the same thing. It’s as if you
didn’t beget your own daughters any more, but pulled them out of some central pool where they lie waiting to be claimed, ready
formed. Some of them are better-looking than others but that’s all there is to it. All have longer legs than their parents.
They speak a strange language, have alien views, communicate to their friends and find their parents as weird as their parents
find them. Lola is at least one of the better-looking, brighter ones.
Cynara tells herself it is her social and personal duty to follow the authenticity of her sexual orientation. In attempting
to live her own life, go where her emotions direct and relate to women more than to men, she has done something admirable,
not disgraceful. She, Cynara, would rather share her bed with D’Dora than with Jesper: that is the simple truth of it. If
she is to create a different, better world for Lola to live in, and Lola chooses to take offence, too bad. She will live to
thank her mother, so be it.
Jesper, who had a Swedish father and an English mother, was himself a declared feminist, and so when Cynara texted him to
announce her decision that he was to live elsewhere, he took it nobly. He was away on business in Dubai anyway, employed in
the construction and design of the new museum of Atlantis. Cynara was even a little hurt at the ease with which he emailed
back ‘OK’. Jesper put up with the present, because he had to live in it, but preferred the past. He did not actively reject
the present, but it was not his main concern in life. The plan was that he would take some small convenient flat round the
corner from where Cynara and Lola live, which Lola could see as a second home when he came back to England to present papers,
see funding bodies, talk to colleagues about two-horned helmets, refute suggestions that Atlantis had been situated off the
Danish coast and so forth, and everything would go on much as before.
And so far so good. Jesper has even put down a deposit on a suitable flat, only now Lola has taken it into her head to move
out and go and stay with her Aunt Scarlet, who in Cynara’s eyes is too young to be serious, and has no interest in the fate
of nations, only in fashion. In her worst moments, angry at her daughter’s desertion, Cynara sees Scarlet as having bribed
her way into the child’s affections from the beginning by buying her the in-present every Christmas, its only merit being
that it was difficult to get hold of. And as D’Dora pointed out, it was Scarlet’s habit of buying little Lola ostentatiously
expensive clothes far too precocious for her age that Scarlet would claim were ‘cute’ and ‘cool’, words which Lola would pick
up and use against her mother as ammunition in the daily battle to get her to school in decent clothes.
And now back for the detail of Lola on the phone only weeks after declaring she’s gone for good. Cynara reflects that the
better everyone else behaves, the worse Lola will and probably none of it is Scarlet’s fault at all. Lola is a little cow,
incapable of gratitude, and she, Cynara, chose the wrong father in Jesper; just because he looked like good breeding stock
didn’t mean he was.
‘I want to come home,’ Lola was saying. ‘Scarlet’s such a bitch. She treats me like a servant. She threw a vase of flowers
at him last night and left me to pick up the pieces. I got a bit of china in my hand and it’s bleeding and she doesn’t care;
she’s just gone shopping at Waitrose. Shop, shop, shop. Now she’s had the nerve to ask me to pack her things, because she’s
running off with Jackson Wright. She’s been having it off with him for ages under poor Louis’ nose. She has this white blouse
thing from Brown’s, which she’s far too old and fat to wear. I asked her if I could have it and she said no, just to be mean.’
Which was true; Scarlet had. ‘Now it’s got blood all over it and serve her right.’
‘But darling,’ says Cynara, ‘you told me you were never coming home. You were staying with Auntie Scarlet until your flight
was arranged. So I’m clearing your room out. It’s hard work.’
‘You mean you’ve given my room to your fat dyke friend?’ screeches Lola in her nasal, druggie voice, or so her mother heard
it.
‘Dyke is not a word of opprobrium,’ says her mother. ‘On the contrary. I’m using your room to store my things, and as it happens
D’Dora is sharing my bedroom.’
‘You’ve thrown all Dad’s things out too?’ shrieks her daughter. ‘To make way for her? You bloody cow!’
‘No darling,’ says her mother peaceably, ignoring the insult. Lola had got into the habit of flinging insults and Cynara of
taking little notice. ‘Daddy helped me take them up to the attic,’ she lies. ‘He was just here on a flying visit. He sent
his love, said it was a good idea about staying with your Auntie Scarlet and wishes you well on the Haiti trip.’
‘What have you done with all my things? Burned them?’
‘They’re all safe and sound in the attic too, darling, so you can come and take them away when you have a place of your own.’
‘So what’s happening in my room?’
‘D’Dora and I are using it as a workshop. We’re weaving wreaths and making felt flowers for the Mother Goddess festival. You
should do more crafts, Lola. It would make you feel so much better about yourself.’
Lola makes sick noises down the phone.
‘I feel just fine about myself, Mum,’ says Lola. ‘But how do you feel – about you? You never wanted me anyway. Why didn’t
you just abort me in the first place? The reason you don’t want me around is D’Dora fancies me. She gives me the creeps. She’s
only with you to get at me. Like Humbert Humbert with Lolita.’
It has occurred to Cynara that this is a possibility, just as any mother of a fetching sixteen-year-old is wise to check a
new partner out. Indeed, the police run a special service for worried single mothers to do exactly this for fear of possibly
paedophile new step-fathers, and what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. But Cynara has dismissed the thought
with contempt. More reasonable to be worried that there was something slightly unhealthy about Jesper’s interest in his daughter,
or, rather, in Lola’s interest in her father. Just as Cynara’s more extreme friends spread the doctrine that all men are rapists,
so do D’Dora’s friends suppose that all fathers are child abusers, thus clouding any number of issues.