John Harwood - The Ghost Writer

Actually that reminds me of something.

Later: I've just been reading through your letters, the very first ones you ever wrote me, and I just found this: 'Mother said we can't go and live there because it was sold a long time ago and we don't have enough money to buy it back.' Perhaps she was still hoping, when she said that, that one day you might be able to afford it. Before whatever happened that made her abandon hope completely. What do you think?

I thought it made perfect sense. It also reminded me of the photograph I had found in my mother's bedroom. I'd always assumed that she had stopped talking about Staplefield to punish me. Perhaps the two things were unrelated: maybe the bad news just happened to arrive at about the same time. Maybe… but that Medusa-like fury… No, there had to be a connection. Perhaps catching me with the photograph had caused my mother to make some enquiry about Staplefield, something that brought on the bad news, whatever the news might have been? No point asking her. 'Photograph, what photograph?' More to the point: whose photograph? Not Viola's, surely: my mother had only ever spoken of Viola with affection. Wouldn't Viola's picture have been displayed on our mantelpiece, at least when we were still talking freely of Staplefield?

And I still hadn't said anything more to my mother about finding 'Seraphina', so I still didn't even know, for certain, that 'V.H.' was my great-grandmother. I had opened the drawer one more time and found it empty. Then as I learned more about the library, I realised I could order The Chameleon on inter-library loan, photocopy the story, present it to my mother as if I had no idea who 'V.H.' might be, and see how she reacted. Only one problem: there wasn't a copy of The Chameleon to be found anywhere in the southern hemisphere. From the British Library Catalogue I learned that it had run for just four numbers, from March to December of 1898. The only way to see them was to secure a reader's ticket; I had my letter of introduction in my pocket.

Seraphina's resemblance to Alice still sometimes troubled me. Rationally speaking, I knew there was nothing in the least uncanny about it. Of course Viola would have been to exhibitions of Pre-Raphaelite painting. She might perfectly well have seen the Lady of Shalott herself when the picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy. Only Seraphina hadn't reminded me of the Lady, or any of the faces I'd borrowed from Burne-Jones, Millais, Waterhouse and company, but of Alice as I'd seen her in the dream. The memory had faded as quickly as it had come, but I had never quite shaken off a superstitious fancy that in opening the drawer for a second time I had accepted the terms of an inheritance, with no idea of what that might entail.

The plane shuddered and rattled like a bus crossing a stretch of gravel road. Twenty-one and a half hours to go. The dull weight of subdued, half-anaesthetised anxiety had not diminished. Maybe reading would dislodge it. I picked up Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales.

'WHERE, MY PET, IS MISS JESSEL?' THE PHRASE REPEATED itself over and over, through the cramped, interminable night aboard QF 9. The engines played endless rhythmic variations on the words: dum dadadda dada, dum dadada dum, dum dadadadadada. They didn't care that Alice spelled her surname with two Ts. Every so often they would lift the tempo to Miss Jessel Miss Jessel Miss Jessel Miss Jessel, just to make sure I was still awake enough to hallucinate. Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel? Waiting in Alice's room of course. I knew I would never get the name out of my head. I had once looked it up in the Mawson phone book. Not a single Jessell, whichever way you spelt it. Alice would take one look at me and know that something was appallingly, irrevocably wrong. I wouldn't be able to look at her without thinking of Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel with her dead white face and long black dress. Like the man in the churchyard, tramping over my mother's grave, and were you aware sir, that your late mother was in a highly disturbed state, while out in the garage the trains still ran on time, round and round and round Miss Jessel and where Miss Jessel is my pet, waking with a thump to the runway lights of Heathrow and rain streaming over the wing.

I hadn't realised that it would still be dark when the Airbus deposited me outside Paddington station. Or that the Stanhope-when they eventually agreed to let me in-would be a claustrophobic warren, smelling of wet animal hair, stale fry-ups, and mould. The stairs creaked at every tread, and the only window in my room, or rather cell on the second floor, opened into a so called lightwell and a view of blackened walls and rusting fire escapes.

And no letter from Alice, though I had sent her the address a fortnight before I left. Struggling to shake off the depression which seemed to be gathering around me like thick black mist, I stumbled back down the stairs to the payphone in the foyer.

From Directory Enquiries I learned that Penfriends International had an unlisted number. There were dozens of entries for Summers, J., in the phone book, but none of them gave the Mount Pleasant box number as their address. And when it finally occurred to me to phone Mount Pleasant post office, they would only confirm that Penfriends International were indeed at Box 294. All other details were strictly confidential sir, I'm sorry there's nothing more I can tell you, more than my job's worth, sorry sir but there it is, can't help you any more.

I dragged myself back up the creaking staircase, lay down on the bed, and slipped head-first into a pit of darkness.

IT WAS ALL TRUE, EVERYTHING MY MOTHER HAD SAID, THERE really were mountains of black plastic bags spewing garbage on to the pavement wherever you went. Ragged beggars lined the underpasses, wrapped in sodden cardboard, lying in pools of unspeakable filth. I couldn't walk two blocks through the rain and sleet without getting lost, or stop to wrestle with my London A-Z without being jostled into the gutter by seething crowds. Half frozen but rabidly adhesive dogshit lurked beneath the slush. The chaffinches had all mutated into scrofulous pigeons.

Each morning until the postman arrived, I hovered in the Stanhopes reeking foyer, waiting for a letter which never came. Then I would set off for the British Museum in grey half-light, to haunt the Reading Room until closing time, searching for some trace of Alice. I knew that I ought to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Museum: the immense stone columns, the rainswept forecourt seething with tourists, the Babel of unknown languages rising from the front steps, the Reading Room itself, into which the whole Mawson College Library building would have fitted quite comfortably. I would stare up into the blue and gold dome above the tiered galleries and try to feel something, anything, but it was like looking at the sun through a thick pall of smoke. I would feel eyes following me up and down the aisles; several times I felt certain I had caught people staring at me with horror, as if they could actually see the fog of black depression that enveloped me.

Some of my fellow readers were in no better shape: the little old woman in the filthy grey raincoat who sat all day in row L, with half a dozen tattered shopping bags clustered at her feet, muttering at the partition in front of her; or the wild-eyed, white-haired man at the far end of row C, who shielded his book with both arms when anybody approached him. And once a tall, emaciated old lady, who smelt strongly of mothballs and wore a black veil so impenetrable you could not see even the outline of a face beneath, came and sat next to me for two hours while I worked my way through a pile of directories. She had The Times open in front of her, but I felt she was watching me all the time.