Ghosts Read online

  The kitchen had the puzzled, lost look of a place lately abandoned. Only Licht was there, sitting at the strewn table with his head lifted, dreaming up into the wide light from the window. At first when he saw her he did not stir, then blinked and shook himself and sat upright.

  ‘She said to say that she’s asleep,’ she said. He nodded pleasantly and smiled, quite baffled. ‘Flora,’ she said with firmness.

  ‘Ah. Flora.’ Nodding. ‘Yes.’ His gaze shied uncertainly. He was thinking there was something he should think. The noise of the wind had made him feel dizzy, as if a crowd had been shouting in his ear for hours, and he could not clear that awful buzzing sensation in his head. For an instant he saw himself clearly, sitting here in the broad, headachey light of morning, an indistinct, frail figure. Over the oak wood a double rainbow stood shimmering, one strong band and, lower down, its fainter echo. ‘Flora,’ he said again. Dimly in the dark of his mind the lost thought swirled.

  Alice imagined taking him by the shoulders and shaking him; she wondered if his head would rattle.

  ‘She said to say she’s still not well,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ Childe Someone to the dark tower came. ‘I hope she …’

  The unwashed crockery was still in the sink, the breakfast things were on the table.

  ‘Will we wash up?’ Alice said.

  Licht shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘leave that, that’s someone else’s job.’ He looked at her sidelong with a crafty smile. ‘We had a maid one time who had a dog called Water, and when my mother complained that the plates were dirty, Mary always said, Well, ma’am, they’re as clean as Water can make them.’ He laughed, a sudden, high whoop, and slapped the table with the flat of his hand and then grew solemn. ‘Poor mama,’ he murmured. He stood up. Hop, little man, hop. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you something.’

  The rainbows were fading already in the window.

  The house was quiet as they climbed up through it and she imagined figures lurking unseen all around her with their hands pressed to their mouths and their eyes slitted, trying not to let her hear them laughing. She walked ahead of Licht and had a funny sensation in the small of her back, as if she had grown a little tail there. She could hear him humming busily to himself. The thought of her mother was like a bubble inside her ready to burst. Everything was so awful. On the boat that morning Pound had come into the lavatory when she was there and offered her sweets to pull down her pants and let him look at her. She was a little afraid of him, but she felt sorry for him, too, the way he bared his front teeth when he frowned and had to keep pushing his glasses up on his sweaty nose. His breath smelled of cheese.

  On the first landing Licht stopped and cocked his head and listened, his smile fixed on nothing. Who did he look like, in that long sort of frock-coat thing and those tight trousers? ‘All clear!’ he whispered, and winked and shooed her on. The White Rabbit? Or was it the March Hare. For she was Alice, after all.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘was the boat trip nice?’

  She was not sure what she should answer. She thought he might be making fun of her. He was walking beside her now, leaning around so that he could look into her face. There were little webs of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, very fine, like cracks in china.

  ‘It was all right,’ she said carefully. ‘Then it ran on to that sandbank thing and we all fell down. I think –’

  ‘Ssh!’

  They crept past the room where Flora was asleep. He wondered if she had taken off her clothes. A slow, dull ache of longing kindled itself anew in his breast.

  Again he stopped and listened.

  All clear.

  They gained the topmost storey.

  In the turret room Alice stood with her hands clasped before her and her lips pressed shut. Everything tended upwards here. The windows around her had more of sky in them than earth and huge clouds white as ice were floating sedately past. Something wobbled. She had a sense of airy suspension, as if she were hovering a foot above the floor. She imagined that as well as a tail she had sprouted little wings now, she could almost feel them, at ankle and wrist, little feathery swift wings beating invisibly and bearing her aloft in the glassy air. She could see all around, way off to the sea in front and behind her up to the oak wood. It seemed to her she was holding something in her hands, a sort of bowl or something, that she had been given to mind.

  ‘This is Professor Kreutznaer’s room,’ Licht said, with a hand on his heart, panting a little after the climb. ‘This is his desk, see – and his stuff, his books and stuff.’

  She advanced a step and bent her eyes dutifully to the muddle of yellowed papers with their scribbled hieroglyphs and the big books lying open with pictures of actors and musicians and ladies in gold gowns. It all seemed set out, arranged like this, for someone to see. There was dust on everything.

  ‘Does he look at the stars?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ He had turned his head and was gazing out of the windows into the depths of the sky.

  ‘The stars,’ she said, louder. ‘At night.’

  Reluctantly he came back from afar. Alice pointed to the telescope.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘And the sea.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘The clouds.’

  She stood before him, blank and attentive, waiting. He touched a fingertip to the back of the swivel chair and it flinched.

  ‘He used to only look at pictures,’ he said, frowning. ‘He was an expert on provenance.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Providence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘No no: provenance. Where a painting comes from, who owned it, and so on. You have to know that sort of thing to prove it’s not a fake. The painting, I mean.’

  ‘Oh.’

  A helpless silence fell. Faintly from the garden below came the sound of voices; in a rush both stepped at once to the window and peered down, their foreheads almost touching. The boys were down there, wrestling half-heartedly on the grass.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Alice softly, with soft contempt.

  Licht from the corner of his eye studied her in sudden wonderment. He had not been able to look at her this closely before now. She might have been a new species of something that had alighted at his side. He could hear her breathing. Each time that she blinked, her eyelashes rested for an instant on the soft rise of her cheek. She had a smell like the mingled smell of milk and pencil shavings. Distinctly they heard Hatch say, Oh, fuck! Silence, dark woods, that wind again, like a river running through the glimmering leaves. He closed his eyes. A nerve was twitching in his jaw.

  ‘Do you ever think,’ he said softly, ‘that you are not here. Sometimes I have the feeling that I have floated out of myself, and that what’s here, standing, talking, is not me at all.’ He turned his troubled eyes away from her and bit his lip. Alice gazed intently down through the glass, hardly breathing. Something swayed between them and then gently settled. He sighed. Of late he had been experiencing the strangest things, all sorts of strange noises and reverberations in his head, pops and groans and sudden, sharp cracks, as if the world were surreptitiously disintegrating around him. One night when he was on the very brink of sleep something had gone off with a bang and a flash of white light, like a pistol being fired inside his skull, and he had started awake in terror but there was nothing, not the faintest sound or echo of a sound. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘I wonder is there something the matter with my brain.’ He saw himself elsewhere, running down a street, or crouched at a school desk in dusty sunlight under a ponderously ticking clock. ‘Do you think we just die, Alice?’ he murmured. ‘That everything just … ends?’

  The shadow of a bird, stiff-winged and plunging, skimmed slantwise across the window.

  ‘I think that captain really was drunk,’ she said suddenly, still looking down through the glass.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The captain of the boat. He had a bottle under a shelf. First he cursed and then laughed and told that
Felix fellow to go to hell.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Is that right?’ he said. He watched her as she stood on tiptoe peering down through the window, the shell-pink rim of one ear showing through her hair and a tongue-tip touching her upper lip.

  ‘I’m staying in a hotel, you know,’ she said. She gestured in the direction where she thought the mainland lay. ‘My mammy …’

  A tremulous frown passed over her face and he was afraid she was going to cry again.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  Outside the turret room three deep steps led up to a door so low that even Alice had to stoop going through it. Here is the attic, a long, broad, tent-shaped, shadowed place with a dazzling pillar of sunlight suspended at an angle from a grimy mansard window in the roof. Smell of dust and apples and the sweetish stink of decaying timbers. It is hot up here under the roof and the air is thick. There were things piled everywhere, bits of furniture, old bottles, croquet mallets, an antique black bicycle, all standing like their own ghosts under a soft, furry outline of dust. ‘The Emperor Rudolf,’ Licht was saying, ‘the Emperor Rudolf …’ but the odd acoustics of the place took the rest of his words and made of them an unintelligible booming. They stood a moment, struck, listening to the echoes ricochet and fall like needles. A draught came in from the stairs and a door somewhere cried tinily on its hinges. The heat pressed on their eardrums. Unseen pigeons murmured lasciviously in the eaves and a mouse under the floorboards softly scurried. I have been here before.

  ‘A great collector,’ Licht said softly, as if someone else might be listening. ‘Did you ever hear of him?’

  Alice glanced sideways worriedly at his knees. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said slowly.

  ‘He had such things! – a magic statue, for instance, that sang a kind of song when the sun shone on it.’ He looked uncertain for a moment. ‘At least, that’s what I read in a book somewhere.’

  She turned and took a step away from him carefully, teetering. The thing she seemed to be holding in her hands now felt as if it were brimming over with some precious, volatile stuff. Suddenly he laughed behind her and the echoes flew up.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen,’ and came forward with a finger lifted. ‘What shape is a dead parrot?’ She made a pretence of thinking hard. He watched her gloatingly, nodding, his eyebrows rising higher and higher. ‘Give up?’ She got ready to laugh. ‘A polygon!’ He quivered with glee, teeheeing soundlessly. She smiled as hard as she could, nodding. She had heard it before.

  In a corner the floor was strewn with shrivelled apples. When his eye fell on them Licht grew morose.

  ‘My pippins,’ he said. ‘I forgot about them.’ He picked one up and sniffed it wistfully. ‘Gone.’ He gave her a mournful smile. ‘Like poor Polly.’

  He knelt before a brassbound chest. There were costumes in it, he told her, fancy-dress things from long ago, ballgowns and helmets and an officer’s uniform with a cocked hat. He tugged at the catches but could not get them undone. After a brief effort he gave up; leave them, leave them there, the gaudy centuries. He sat down on the lid of the chest and rocked himself back and forth, hugging one knee, while Alice stood, swaying a little, looking away. Another cloud swept over and the sunlight in the window above their heads died abruptly with a sort of click.

  ‘He was famous, you know,’ Licht said. ‘Oh yes. He was in books, and people came from all over the world to get his opinion on pictures.’ His face darkened and he looked like a vexed child. ‘Then they said that he –’ He paused and lifted a warning finger, listening.

  Eek.

  The sunlight returned. Distantly they heard again from the garden the raucous voices of the boys.

  ‘Where was he emperor of?’ Alice said.

  Licht looked at her and blinked. ‘Eh? No, no, not him – I mean Professor Kreutznaer.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He looked more vexed than ever. He stood up from the chest and paced the floor moodily with his hands at his back and the corners of his mouth pulled down. Alice felt the invisible bowl tilting in her hands.

  ‘I was his assistant, you know,’ he said airily, pointing to the papers on the desk. ‘I used to type up what he wrote.’ He waggled his fingers, tapping invisible keys. ‘I was the only one who could read his handwriting.’

  He stood and frowned, scratching his head with one finger.

  ‘Did they write about you in the books, too?’ she asked.

  He glanced at her sharply. ‘Of course not!’ he snapped, and she felt the ghost of a quicksilver splash fall at her feet. He broke off and lifted a hand again, frowning, his rabbity nostrils flared. A stair creaked; then silence. (The Professor is out there, poised like a voyeur, listening.) I watch them, outlined in dusty sunlight against the soft dark, an emblem of something, and my heart contracts.

  ‘What is it?’ Alice whispered.

  ‘What? Oh, I thought I heard – ssh!’

  They listened. No sound. Licht shrugged and started to speak, but suddenly Alice turned to him and said:

  ‘I’m afraid!’

  And as soon as it was said it ceased to be true. Licht stepped back, staring, cradling in his startled palms the invisible vessel she had handed him.

  When Alice had run off down the stairs and Licht came stooping through the little doorway Professor Kreutznaer was there at the landing window with his fists sunk in the sagging pockets of his old black jacket. Licht flushed angrily.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the Professor said.

  ‘Nothing!’ Licht cried. It came out as a squeak. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Nothing. What do you mean? Are you spying on me?’

  From below came the abrupt thud of the front door slamming; the house quivered and after a second a ghostly draught came wafting up the stairs.

  ‘I told you you shouldn’t let them stay,’ the Professor said. ‘Why did you let them in?’

  Licht strode past him to the window and stood looking out. Tears of anger and resentment welled up in his eyes.

  ‘Why do you blame me?’ he cried. ‘You blame me for everything, and spy on me, creeping around and listening at doors. It’s you they’re after, it’s you that fellow came to find!’ How gay and carefree everything outside seemed, the sun on the dunes and the grass waving and the unreal blue of the sea in the distance. At moments such as this he felt the world was rocking with laughter, jeering at him. He beat his fists softly on the window-sill and wept, his shoulders shaking. ‘I have to get away from here,’ he said as if to himself and heaved a juicy sob, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and a big bubble of spit formed on his blubby lips and burst with a tiny plop. ‘I have to get away!’

  The Professor regarded him in silence, frowning. Licht, pawing at his eyes and muttering something, pushed past him and blundered away down the stairs.

  The front door banged again and the Professor felt the tiny tremor under his feet. He waited and presently he heard another sound, closer at hand, and when he looked over the banisters he saw Felix on the landing below, leaning at the door of the bedroom there with one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his head inclined, smiling to himself, listening for a sound from within. The Professor drew back quickly, his heart joggling, but too late. For a moment there was silence and then from below he heard Felix laugh softly and softly sing up the stairwell:

  ‘Helloo-oo!’ Pause. ‘Professor?’ Pause; again a laugh. ‘Are you there, Truepenny?’

  The Professor closed his eyes briefly and sighed. There were things he did not wish to recall. Black nights by the river, the lamps on the quayside shivering in the wind and the gulls wheeling in the darkness overhead like big, blown sheets of paper, and the boys standing in the shadows, all silk and sheathed steel, shuffling their feet in the cold, the tips of their cigarettes flaring and their soft cat-voices calling to him as he walked past them on the pavement for the third or fourth time, trying to appear distracted, trying to look like what at other times he thought himself to be. How are you, h
ard? Are you looking for it, are you? They all had the same, quick eyes, like the eyes of half-tamed animals. He was frightened of them. And yet behind all the toughness and the insolent talk how tentative they were; alone with him at last in a dark doorway or down a back lane they laughed self-consciously and ducked their heads, avoiding his furtive, beseeching eyes, pretending not to be there, just like him. It was that mixture of menace and vulnerability he found irresistible. And then stumbling away through the rain-slimed streets, light-headed, shaking with a sort of sated glee. Never again! he would cry out in his heart, never, I swear it! addressing a phantom version of himself that stood over him with arms folded and lips shut tight in terrible accusal. And Felix there always, lord of the streets, popping up out of nowhere, horribly knowing, making little jokes and smiling his malign, insinuating smile. They all knew Felix, with his cartons of contraband cigarettes off the boats and his little packets of precious powder. The Pied Piper, Professor, that’s me. And that laugh.

  ‘Coo-ee!’ he called now, in soft singsong. He was leaning out over the bannisters, his face upturned, with a wide, lipless grin. ‘There you are. Don’t be shy, Professor, it’s only me.’

  Professor Kreutznaer slowly descended the stairs; Felix, still grinning, stood and watched him approach, beating out a little rhythm on the banister rail with his fingertips. How silent the house seemed suddenly.

  ‘What –’ the Professor said, and had to clear his throat and start again. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Felix expelled a gasp of laughter and pressed spread fingers to his breast and assumed an expression of startled innocence.

  ‘You mean here?’ he said, pointing to the floor under his feet. ‘Why, nothing. Loitering without intent.’

  ‘I mean on the island,’ the Professor said.

  Felix merely smiled at that and moved to the window and leaned there looking out brightly at the sunlit scene: the sloped lawn and the bridge over the stream and the grassed-over dunes in the distance and the far strip of sea. He sighed. ‘What a pleasant place you have here,’ he said. ‘So peaceful.’ He glanced over his shoulder and winked. ‘Not like the old days, eh? Although I suppose there is the odd fisher-lad to bring you up your kippers.’ He took out his dented gold case and lit a cheroot and placed the spent match carefully on the window-sill. He nodded thoughtfully, smoking. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a spot like this would do me very nicely, I must say.’