She gave me her card, saying that if I wanted any advice she was there for me.
Janice Barrington, clairvoyant and medium extraordinaire. Karma cleared, houses delivered, walk-ins contacted. Don’t trust
your luck, trust me! Terms and conditions
– and an e-mail address. Well, it was one way of making a living, and did explain her rather odd behaviour. I excused her.
She was drumming up business as I daresay she had to. The son had lost his job in the City. The more ghosts she saw the more
she would earn, and a house like mine was a godsend; and I was a sitting duck. She was off to the School of Occult Studies
in Salisbury where she was studying for a diploma in Rosicrucian approaches to ageless living, with presumably extra modules
on body language.
‘Well, I must run,’ she said, as she got into her valiant little banger. And I thought, it’s all women do, really, isn’t it,
run. Tuck the children under the arm and try and find somewhere better, safer. You get into the habit when they’re small and
then just carry on.
I went down to the basement and travelled swiftly north, from whence the Borean wind blows. Better a cold wind than warm deceiving
Livas, who blows in God knows what from the southwest. I’ve seen Boreas on Greek vases, a massively strong, winged old man
with shaggy hair and beard, and a violent temper to match. But I can cope with him, better than I can Livas’ sneaky demons.
I bet Livas looks like a male version of Janice.
When Beverley heard the front door click behind Scarlet and was convinced that she had indeed left the house, she put down
her book, took her laptop and Skyped her friend Gerry Askell in the Faröe Islands. Modern technology is wonderful.
At sixty-seven Gerry was eleven years Beverley’s junior. Not that eleven years, at this stage of the game, made much difference.
She switched the camera on: now that she’d had her hair done she looked okay, and webcams, showing a moving, talking image,
have the knack of transmitting the spirit of the person, not just their looks. Gerry, responding, clicked his camera on. He
had very little hair to worry about these days, anyway, and besides, was confident enough that women usually liked the look
of him. His general appearance was of someone halfway between a man of action and an academic: he had a good strong build,
a square face, bright eyes and a stubbly chin, which with a day or two of neglect would burst into a shaggy beard. He felt
himself, not without reason, to be a veritable Harrison Ford of a man.
Beverley could see beyond Gerry to the gabled, grassy roofs and red wooden buildings of Tórshavn, and the North Sea beyond.
There was no way she would ever move there, but it was pretty to look at. And perhaps it would be wiser to have Gerry stay
where he was, all promise and no fruition. She liked having him at the end of
a phone. It had been too long. But whether she actually wanted the exhaustion of having him in her bed was another matter.
Beverley could see his gold fillings and the ridges along the top of his mouth. His deceased wife Fiona, Beverley’s rival,
had not ensured that he looked after his teeth properly.
Gerry for his part could see the daffodils of an English garden behind the clump of Beverley’s expensively shampooed hair,
and the arms of her expensively upholstered sofa, and the various lineaments of a contented old age which he would rather
like for himself. He was in the Faröes, and had been for ten years or so, studying the second of the three plates of volcanic
basalt which composed the island, one of which had lately proved to be oil bearing. But oil prospecting was a young man’s
job. His employers were thinking of pensioning him off. It was a good enough pension but even oil companies went bust, and
he needed security, company and comfort. Gardens, a warm sun and daffodils beckoned, and Beverley still looked in pretty good
nick and might even see him out.
And Beverley, seeing her ex-lover again, remembering the good times not the bad, and feeling a real pang of affection for
him, could see she might do worse than to encourage him. She did not want a quiet life, to go peacefully to her grave. This
could only be why she had Skyped him.
‘I’m in a muddle, Gerry,’ she said. ‘I’m quite upset.’ She had become good at playing helpless over the decades, and was of
a generation who saw no need to be anything else. She was a lapsed Marxist, not a feminist.
‘What’s gone wrong?’ he asked. ‘I can come over if you need me.’
‘No thank you, Gerry.’ The tune from
The Beggar’s Opera
ran through her mind.
By keeping men off you keep them on.
Tra-la-la. All the old tricks, still there.
‘It’s Scarlet. You know Scarlet?’
‘My dear, how can I not? I know all your family like the back of my hand. You are the Marxist, Cynara the feminist, Scarlet
the non-aligned and Alice is the born-again Christian.’
‘Not exactly born-again. Kind of refound. I believe she’s a Methodist, not a charismatic; anyway, she’s certainly very much
in love with Jesus at the moment. It may change, it has before. Cynara has decided she’s a lesbian.’
‘These girls will do anything to annoy. I don’t suppose it will last long. And Scarlet? I hear she has Lola living in an alcove
halfway up a wall with no safety rail, Cynara is hopping mad with her, and Scarlet is about to run off with Jackson Wright
the vampire.’
‘How can you possibly know this?’ Beverley was startled. ‘You’re in the middle of the North Sea.’
‘Because I’ve just clicked off from Cynara.’
‘Why on earth? What has Cynara got to do with you?’
‘In the old days, Bev, I spent time in your bed. We all but lived together. Did I make so little impression on you? Cynara
was around. I was her father figure. But I see you have forgotten. No wonder I fled to Fiona’s arms…’
Back in the mists of time Gerry had left Beverley’s bed as the sun rose and by the time it set had married a fellow geologist
called Fiona. Fiona had finally met her come-uppance, dying suddenly of leukaemia. That had been two years ago. She had forgiven
Gerry, though he had caused her grief. Death is the final victory over sexual rivals; animosity weakens and disappears.
‘…Cynara and I always got on. We kept in touch. I hated women and she hated men. We’d sound off together.’
‘Cynara never told me this.’
‘Why would she? She liked me and you hated me.’
‘That was only when poor dear Fiona was alive.’
‘Don’t you poor dear me,’ said Gerry. ‘At least I’m only one wife down, you’re three husbands. Wouldn’t that make any man
rather nervous?’
‘Men have no staying power,’ she said. ‘Poor dear Winter got himself shot, your friend poor dear Harry died by his own hand,
and poor dear Marcus fell under a train. No common cause.’
‘Only exhaustion,’ he said. ‘Shall I come over? Just for a week or two?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, and heard the fall away of the Skype connection as she clicked the red button. She’ll think
about it but perhaps leave it at that. Why bother with flesh and blood since the picture on the screen provides so agreeable,
intense and temporary an association?
She did not like the idea of Cynara keeping in touch with Gerry. It was going behind her back. It was bad enough when daughters
defied you, hardly worse, it seemed, than when granddaughters did. She had failed her children. They resented her. They had
interpreted her ‘so long as you’re happy’ approach as idleness and lack of concern. Perhaps it had been. Alice was still acting
out – Cynara maintained that her mother’s flirtation with Jesus was a response to Beverley’s long love affair with Marx; that
Richie’s flight to Hollywood and his homophobia were precipitated by Beverley’s marriage to the bisexual Harry; that her own
childhood had been so marred by her grandmother’s disastrous heterosexual affairs it was no wonder she had turned to women
for safety and comfort. But then, Beverley comforted herself, Cynara was a born blamer – her mother, the law, men, her assistants,
anyone. The hell with it.
There’s this novel laid out like flood water over fields, quite calm and serene. And then all of a sudden Janice the trainee
medium from Glastonbury comes tearing over the surface of the water like a speedboat, churning things up, sending waves slapping
to the shore and making a terrible noise. She has shocked me back into some kind of sense. I have to forget all this ghostliness
and get this story moving. The past has been clinging on to me: holding me back: making the present spread wide instead of
moving on into the future. Somehow I have to get all this massive weight of water draining away from the fields and rushing
through its proper channels again, and I promise I will. Even if it means moving out of here and shifting my laptop to some
new bungalow in an urban estate. Free, as Janice would say, from the vibes coming out of these walls.
I should have been more understanding of Janice and asked her to lunch. One needs to be on good terms with witches, mediums
and sorcerers. They can strike you down with writer’s block in a mere flutter of kehua around the head, forget the Furies.
But back to the story and I will try and keep out of it for a while. I am doing myself no good by engaging with the real ghosts
that live in these walls around me, while inventing these characters of mine. I am really disconcerted by the way Janice picked
up on little Beverley while ignoring Mavis and the weekly laundress, both of whom
at least once had a real existence in time. Novel is novel, I am I, ghosts are ghosts, fictional characters are fictional.
It is surely not too difficult to keep them apart in one’s mind. If I continue the novel in a more orthodox manner and keep
clear of the diary form things should go more smoothly. To move upstairs and write in a more conventional space would seem
a dereliction of a writer’s duty, which is not to shy away from experience. Nor is it their nature. I am not surprised that
Scarlet is a writer, as yet only of fashion journalism, but given time who knows what she will blossom into.
Onwards. But first allow me a little discursion now into the history of Beverley, Gerry and Fiona.
Gerry had been a good friend of Beverley’s second husband Harry, architect to the Queen. Harry had died – by his own hand
– exposed as gay by the
News of the World
– ‘Queen’s architect found in bed with male Palace employee’ – at a time when homosexuality was still scandalous and certainly
not admitted to be close to the monarchy. Gerry had courted Beverley assiduously for a whole three years after Harry’s death,
while she held him off. He got tired of waiting and one day ran off without warning with a fellow geologist. Love amongst
the rocks and sediments.
Fiona, plainer and more academic than Beverley by far, had tiny hands and feet and noticeably short little fingers, which
had made Beverley, who had strong broad colonial pioneering hands, dismiss her at first as any kind of rival. Effective rivals
often come in deceptively callow forms. Better to be ousted by someone younger and prettier than by someone plainer and thicker.
It’s less painful, being explicable. Beverley had failed to notice the impressive string of degrees after Fiona’s name, let
alone her willingness to follow Gerry to the ends of the earth, which she did. Norway, the Orkneys, Iceland, the Faröes –
where Gerry went Fiona gladly went.
Gerry thus snatched away, Beverley married Marcus Fletzner the journalist, who had been researching a book on the scandal
around Harry’s death. That had lasted four years, before he too died, stumbling under a train in the wrong company.
Gerry had lived and worked contentedly enough with Fiona in various places in the Borean far North, until she died of leukaemia.
Beverley felt it was not surprising. Fiona had been a bloodless sort of person. And there is always a little
Schadenfreude
when a person responsible for discomfiture or embarrassment is removed from the world. It is a kind of victory. You have
survived to give your version of the tale. They have not.
Gerry and Fiona had gone up from Tórshavn in the Faröes to the far island of Kalsoy for Christmas. It is not as cold up there
as you might suppose as the Gulf Stream brushes around the islands. On Twelfth Night they’d been to the little fishing village
of Mikladalur; it has pitch-black wooden houses with green turf roofs, and a pretty, white, red-roofed church in which model
ships are strung from the ceiling, offerings from those grateful to God for preserving them in dangerous seas.
People keep a traditional watch for the seals here – folklore has it that they congregate in a cavern in these parts every
Twelfth Night, throw off their skins and dance as the people they once were, before the sea took them. Fiona had wanted to
go: she was born on Skye and loved the folklore of the sea creatures and the kelpies of the rivers and lakes.
‘But how do you know which twelfth night?’ said Gerry.
‘The Christian one will do,’ said Fiona, ‘and besides, we have the time.’
So in that strange lonely holiday time after Christmas, Gerry and Fiona turned up on the dawn of Twelfth Night to stand where
the tussock met the sand beneath a reddy-grey sky and to gaze out over a flat sea.
‘Red in the morning, shepherds’ warning,’ said Gerry, ‘there’s going to be a storm.’ They were the only people there. They
were wrapped up well against the cold. Nothing happened except a shaggy horse came wandering down by the shore, stood still
as if in a painting, and then wandered off again.
‘That was no horse,’ said Fiona. ‘That was a kelpie. A water spirit.’
They were in a light-hearted mood. They went back to the boarding house to have breakfast, walked and bird-watched through
the short day, and came again to the church and the shore at dusk, and stood there to wait and watch with a few other seal-sighting
hopefuls. Someone played the fiddle, a cheerful ring dance about the selkie wife who shed her seal skin and married a farmer,
and sure enough as Gerry and Fiona watched, presently a single seal did come ashore. Clouds were racing past the full moon:
it was hard to be sure what was happening: everything gleamed so, and then yes, it was really a seal, and then another, and
another, shiny sea creatures, so elegant in the water, so clumsy on land, flopping forward amongst the rounded rocks and driftwood,
driven by God knows what – some say they respond to impending earthquakes on the seabed, hundreds of miles away, and Fiona
collapsed.