John Harwood: The Ghost Writer

But the lightbulb was blown. The thought hovered for an instant, but made no sense. Just as I had stared at the advertisement for Hugh Montfort, late of Endsleigh Gardens, without once considering that my mother, alone and pregnant, might have asked the solicitor to place it. Thinking that Hugh had abandoned her when he too was already dead. Under the cellar floor, perhaps.

And no record of Anne's death, and not one mention of Abigail Hamish in Anne's diary.

I tried to keep you safe.

'You killed Hugh Montfort.'

I could hear my pulse ticking like a demented clock.

The veiled figure stirred.

'He came crawling back here,' she whispered, whining for forgiveness. And then he was in such a hurry to get away, he fell down the stairs…' I couldn't catch the rest, only something that might have been 'accident'.

'And Anne,' I said. 'You killed her too.'

'In a way,' she said, and raised her gloved hands to her veil.

'Filly slept in the attic that night. Where she slept with him. '

And then, almost inaudibly, 'There was no light under her door, you see. I thought I was safe.'

The veil floated free; the cloud of chestnut hair slipped from her shoulders and fell at her feet with a soft thud. Lamplight gleamed upon a bald, mummified head, skin stretched like crackling over the dome of the skull, with two black holes for nostrils and a single eye burning in a leprous mass of tissue, fixing me, half a life too late, with the enormity of my delusion as I saw that Alice Jessell and Anne Hatherley and Abigail Hamish were one and the same person.

FOR A MOMENT NEITHER OF US MOVED. THE WIND HAD grown distinctly louder. The sound seemed to be coming from beneath the floor. A rushing, crackling sound. She swirled around, glided to the door, and unlocked it. I saw, as I came up behind her, an orange glow in the doorway at the foot of the attic stairs. The air was shimmering with heat.

She stood for a moment with one hand on the doorknob, then moved calmly on to the landing. I thought she spoke, but the words were lost in the noise of the fire. Then she took hold of the banister and started down the stairs. I felt the heat on my face, and could not move. She had almost reached the landing below when a great gust of smoke came boiling up the staircase. I heard myself cry 'Alice!' and fell to my knees, choking. A blast of hot air followed; the smoke cleared, and I saw through streaming eyes that there was no one on the stair.

Then the smoke boiled up again, and I was forced back into the room, slamming the door as I went. The desk lamp shone blue through the smoke; blind instinct sent me crawling towards the curtains behind the desk. I dragged them apart and saw French windows, a narrow terrace, the night sky; and beyond a low parapet, a faint flickering gleam on the nearest treetops. I threw open the doors, breathed fresh air. The trapped smoke began to clear.

But where was the fire brigade? All I could hear was the muffled rumbling of the fire: no sirens, no voices, no alarms. Vertigo seized me; I crawled across to the parapet, a plain brick wall barely two feet high. Even lying almost prone behind it, I found myself gripping the top of the wall with all my strength. Gravity seemed to have altered; I felt the outward pull, the impending headlong plunge to the glass roof of the conservatory far below. Lit by the pulsing glare of the flames in the stairwell and the four great windows of the library, the encircling wall of vegetation looked more than ever like jungle. Despite the ferocity of the blaze, it was evidently still concealed from the neighbouring houses and the Heath. None of the glass appeared to have broken yet, but it could not be long now.

And there was no fire escape. The terrace ran the width of the house, bounded at both ends by the steep descending angle of the roof. The only possibility would be a wild leap from the corner to my left, where the jungle along the edge of the courtyard came nearest to the house, into the crown of the nearest tree. I tried to imagine myself doing it, and the terrace seemed to slide from under me.

Still no sound of sirens. The fire must still be confined to the back of the house; it would have raced up the rear stairwell and spread outwards from there. Perhaps there was another way. I retreated from the parapet, managed to stand, stumbled back into the room. The air was hotter, the roar and crackle of the flames much closer; a line of orange light was flickering beneath the door to the landing.

The desk lamp still shone. I looked at my letters to Alice, my wasted life; thought of Violas library blazing below. There was one thing I wanted to save. I seized Viola's typescript and thrust it inside the front of my shirt, thinking, this is what Anne did, and then, but that never happened either.

Which way? Oily black smoke was seeping under the landing door. I had no idea what lay beyond the other door, in the darkness at the far end of the room. Better to fall than burn. I ran back through the French windows on to the terrace, to the brink of that dreadful plunge. I saw the wreck of the pavilion, bathed in flickering light. I thought of Alice, Miss Hamish, Staplefield, everything I thought I'd known: all phantoms, all gone. With nothing to hold me to the earth, and no life to relive, what was there left to fear? I could simply close my eyes and dive, and vanish in a flash of light.

Then the world breathed fire and my feet carried me, not over the edge but along the terrace and up and over into a dark confusion of tearing branches and a jolt that left me winded and sprawled backwards, but somehow attached to the tree. Through the hole smashed by my fall, I saw flames rising above the parapet. Small tongues of flame began to detach themselves and soar above the main fire, more and more of them, like flocks of fiery birds, flaring and rising and vanishing into the night sky. I felt the weight of the manuscript tugging at my shirt, and began precariously to descend.