‘The dysfunctional fly to each other like iron filings to a magnet,’ Louis once said to Scarlet. ‘But better a family like
yours than one like mine.’
He made the assumption that his own family was functional, which always rather puzzled Scarlet. Louis did a great deal to
annoy his mother – taking up with Scarlet being one of his major departures from good form.
Or perhaps ‘murder in the family’ merely refers to Cynara’s history of terminations? Is that how Beverley sees them? Cynara
was always sexually active, while at the same time renouncing contraception as part of the male plot against women. Perhaps
Lola is a single child because, of all her succession of pregnancies, Lola was the only female conception? The others being
male and therefore not wanted in the world? Single-handed Cynara fought back against the beliefs of China, where the girls
are aborted and the boys are treasured. She wanted to right the balance. She was a trained barrister, specialising in gender
law. She liked justice.
‘Tell me more about murder running in the family,’ says Scarlet, and instantly wishes she hadn’t.
The chutney, the coffee, the potato and tomato mash – just add water and stir – are now stacked in the cupboards. The mixed
mushrooms with red wine polenta, which is to be Beverley’s lunch, is gently heating in the slow oven of the Aga – which is
a six-oven model. If Scarlet sits down and listens, who is to say whether she will get to Costa’s even by teatime? She will
need to check through what Lola’s packed, and make sure she hasn’t nicked the white transparent top she bought from Brown’s
in South Molton Street for £105 (it is Jackson’s favourite) and confirm that Lola has actually taken her suitcase and left
Nopasaran, as she promised. She can see that leaving Lola alone with Louis is not necessarily sensible, as Beverley points
out, he not being a blood relative.
Moreover, Scarlet is seized by another anxiety. Supposing Jackson doesn’t get the text, turns up at lunchtime, thinks she
has decided to go back to Louis, and changes his mind? Supposing he’s just another prize dangled before her by fate, only
to be cruelly snatched away? Like the job on the
New York Times
op-ed pages that was once so nearly hers, that would have changed her life. Only someone else got the job, even younger and
cheaper than she was. Like Eddie, the wealthy sports journalist, the one before Louis, who was so exciting and moved in with
her and was an ex-alcoholic and ex-gambler, a frequenter of multiple-Anons, only it turned out he wasn’t any kind of ex of
anything after all. He broke the place up when she said she wasn’t going to lend him any more money. He left shouting and
screaming and stormed back to his previous girlfriend, a half-bottle of Scarlet’s best whiskey under his arm. He said it was
all Scarlet’s fault for starting him off drinking again.
After Eddie, Louis had seemed a model of stability and genuine concern. It seemed so difficult to get everything into one
person. She hadn’t realised how trying ‘dull’ could be. Now, thinking of
Jackson, she has a strange airy feeling of exhilaration, fear, lust and anticipation mixed, that starts between her thighs
and moves upwards to part her lips; it’s a kind of psychic breathlessness.
But it is too late. The definitive question has been asked. Scarlet is going to have to hang around to listen to the answer
and Beverley will make a meal of it. As she does.
‘If you can bring yourself to sit down for a second, I will tell you. I swore I never would but circumstances require it.
You’re not the only one with secrets.’
So Scarlet sits and finally listens to Beverley’s story, out of family courtesy, but she would much rather live in the here
and now. She does not really want to know about the past.
Come to think about it, your writer doesn’t really want to think about the past either: she can see that her current view
of the next pages is all too likely to suddenly shift and change; and so, moved by the thought of mixed mushrooms with red
wine polenta, which she too happens to have in her freezer, she is now going to break for lunch. Writing makes you very hungry:
it’s a matter of the more you put out the more you need to take in. And food can steady you, whirled around as you so often
are by a sudden flurry of possible alternatives. I am going to put on a lot of weight, I can see, between now and the end
of the book, glued to my desk as I choose to be, instead of taking healthy exercise.
I go upstairs and wait for the microwave to do its work. It’s bright up here too, and the trees in the front garden are heavy
with snow: the noise of traffic is muffled. Technology would soon have done all those servants out of a job anyway. Hot water
comes out of taps, warmth radiates from the central heating, the Hoover takes the place of the brush, the dishwasher washes
the dishes, the washing and drying machines do the laundry. The world moves on, and we must do our best to keep up.
We still labour and toil but at less physically exhausting things. I can write novels in the basement while the household
more or less looks after itself. Mind you, nothing ever runs quite smoothly. There
have lately been signs of poltergeist activity upstairs too, not just auditory hallucinations, but disappearances. Just little
annoying things.
The other day Rex said, ‘Where’s the key to the back door?’ and I said, ‘It’s still in the lock, where you left it,’ because
I’d just seen it there a minute ago. He went to look. It wasn’t there. We searched high and low and finally used the spare.
The next day I found the missing key tucked away between two stacked cans of tomato purée on the shelf by the cooker. How
could it possibly have got there other than by some agency wanting to make a minor nuisance of itself? Because we couldn’t
explain it – other than that I was deranged, which I was not prepared to accept – we forgot it. Just one of those things.
Like the letter from the bank, which disappears from the kitchen table and is found later in a room where nobody’s been –
the Coronation mug which falls and breaks, and must have leapt by itself from the hook it hung upon, because neither hook
nor handle seems to have broken – that kind of thing. Yet there the pieces of china lie, and if you catch your finger on a
sharp edge it will bleed. Nothing like blood for proving a reality.
Okay. Overlook these random events. There are such things as joint delusion and who wants to doubt the immutable laws of physics?
Lunch was fine. But the gas bill was in and a letter from Inland Revenue. It will be baked potatoes and cheese from now on,
and from Lidl’s at that. No more of this Waitrose frozen-food nonsense. My agent has gone to New York to see Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
. It feels fitting. I fear I will end up like Veronica Lake, my childhood idol, who died alone and in penury. Or the prolific
Walter Scott, who died worrying about money, looking for another plot to the bitter end. He had his family to support.
It is thankfully that I return to Scarlet and her grandmother and
the house in Highgate. I sit down on my typing chair and bring the laptop back to life. But escape into the alternative universe
is not so easy today. I don’t think this basement room can be described as technically or formally haunted, any more than
is upstairs. Let me just say it seems rather more busy than usual down here; the air, which ought to be still, is overactive.
Where my typing table stands once stood a big solid pine table round which the staff would sit for meals. ‘Mavis, Mavis, where
be you too?’ a voice calls, or perhaps it doesn’t, how can I tell? Because you hear it in your head doesn’t mean it has been
said. Novelists have overactive imaginations: it’s why they make bad drivers. They’re always envisioning some scenario of
disaster just over the brow of the hill.
I reckon Mavis is the tweeny, one down from the kitchen maid, two down from the cook. Life in the basement is strictly stratified.
She’s setting up for tea in the staff dining room and I can’t see her but I can feel her. It’s okay. She’s just there, left
over from the past when the generations got swept up. She’s companionable. A flapping sound. That’s her shaking out the tablecloth:
she hasn’t bothered to use the crumb tray, so the crumbs are scattered all over the floor. We’ll get mice at this rate. Cook
will be furious if she sees. Mavis doesn’t want me to pay her any attention, she just wants to get on. Like Lola, she’s sixteen,
going on seventeen, but without the luxury of Lola’s discontent, or Lola’s postmodern anorexia. She has long, rather greasy
dark hair – hot water is not easily come by, it is fifty years before the invention of detergent, and instead of each hair
being coated with glossy conditioner it is coated with a soap scum which thickens it but makes it dull. Adding vinegar to
the rinsing water helps but never enough. Mavis has a rounded figure, nice innocent brown eyes and a plump, still unformed
face. I don’t
know how I know what she looks like, but I do. I see her as one would see an old photograph, mottled by age.
Like Mavis, I too must get on with my work. Is it cold in here? Yes, it is. But how can that be? The central heating is blasting
away: the heating engineer who last worked on the house got his figures wrong so the large rooms are underheated and the small
rooms too hot. I know that ghosts and cold chills are associated, but I reckon that warmth too is suffering a time slip at
the moment. If Mavis shivers so do I, that’s all. Or even more plausibly, since there are now a few inches of snow just the
other side of a thin sheet of glass, it’s not surprising that I am cold. I put on the mittens with the coloured-wool bobbles
on the knuckles, which Lizzie gave me for Christmas, to keep my fingers thawed. Lizzie lives hereabouts; she is a friend,
teaches the flute and keeps sheep, and I watch the bright bobbles fly as my fingers speed up. Lizzie has been down here to
the basement to see my new office and assures me the house isn’t haunted. It has a perfectly nice atmosphere. She speaks as
one who has experience of these things.
‘You never told me,’ says Scarlet.
She can see the Alexandra Palace mast between the trees. She feels it is probably transmitting invisible rays of evil, jagged
and ill-intentioned, cursing her designs for the future. Why did she have to find this out now? She feels wronged: and frightened
that her resolution might drain away. In Japan, if a criminal act occurs in the family, the guilt and shame remain for generations.
Even two hundred years later you sometimes can’t get a job. Criminality ran in the blood, like Korean ancestry. She had researched
an article on it, so she knew. Her great-grandfather had murdered her great-grandmother back in 1930-something-or-other, and
no one had seen fit to mention it, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.
‘Well, no,’ says Beverley. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, not if you hadn’t mentioned love at first sight. It’s the kind of
thing that’s better forgotten. Then Walter my father went and shot himself. Well, men often do, in these circumstances. They’ve
killed the thing they love. Though I don’t suppose Louis has a gun. But do remember that murder, as well as victimhood, runs
in your veins. I’d be more worried for this Jackson, if he ever runs out on you. But not to worry. I’ve managed to get through
life without being accused of murder, as have all you young ones. Alice would be shocked at the very thought. Beryl Bainbridge
had a near miss from your sister Cynara
some years back, mind you. Asked for her definition of “woman”, Beryl replied, “Why, a person who has babies,” and Cynara
ran on to the platform and attacked her. Mind you, if you count abortion as murder, Cynara is certainly a dab hand at it.’
‘That’s absurd,’ says Scarlet, who has had two terminations herself.
‘But we won’t worry about that too much,’ says Beverley. ‘According to Maori mythology the ghosts of aborted or miscarried
babies stay around to look after the family, so you two younger girls are well protected. They’re probably a match for the
kehua.’
‘The kehua?’
‘They flap around on the edges of one’s vision if the proper rituals aren’t carried out after death,’ says Beverley. ‘They
can’t get home. They live in trees. They attach themselves to the living, and do what they can to bring them back to the pa,
the home village. Kehua can be a real drag. Mind you, we were only pakeha, white people, and I left New Zealand decades back.
I can hardly have brought any with me. Me and mine are no use to them.’
Beverley is making it all up, thinks Scarlet. Her father wasn’t even called Walter, he was a doctor called Arthur and there
was a mother called Rita. This Kitchie has never been mentioned. And even if it is true, this is not Japan, and though it
may be news to me, it is extremely old news. An event that happened seventy years ago can hardly be relevant today. As for
kehua, ghostly flappings about the head, that way madness lies.
It was true that Scarlet herself occasionally suffered from zigzag flashes out of the corner of the eye, and had even complained
about these visual disturbances to the doctor, but he had said it was a form of visual migraine and prescribed aspirin, which
always worked.
All the same the ground seemed to have slightly shifted beneath her feet, as if she were getting out of bed after an earthquake
she’d slept through, and found the floor was sloping. Last night she seemed to remember she’d picked up the bread knife and
said to Louis, ‘I’ll kill you.’ He had taken the knife from her hand because of course she had no intention of using it, and
she had let it go easily enough before anyone hurt themselves. Though she had managed to nick his wrist and blood had flowed.
Had she known then what she knew now, that murderous genes ran in the blood, would she have refrained from picking up the
knife in the first place, or would it all have been worse? Apparently, when the knife goes in through living flesh it meets
less resistance than one supposes, which is why knife wounds so often end up fatal.
‘One-two, one-two, down the dusty road,’ says Beverley. ‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Running
away is so often the best answer, second best to doing nothing. But that’s enough of that.’