Hilary Mantel - Giving up the Ghost - A memoir

When we went to see the house, the builder’s debris was still in it. We stood in its unfinished rooms and imagined it. We imagined it would be ours. It was cheap, and a minute from the market place. At midnight, we left our room at the Old Brewery and walked to the gate: or to where the gate would be. We wanted to see it again, in privacy and silence. As we stood, hunched into our coats on a night of obdurate cold, the tawny owl called out from the tree.

Later we had a plaque made to say ‘Owl Cottage’, with a picture. But the man did a barn owl, canary yellow and thin, with creepy feet like the feet of a rodent.

It’s a strange phenomenon, the ‘second home’. Like the second marriage, it’s not something that I ever associated with myself. I thought it was for rich people who drove up prices in the Cotswolds. I never felt guilty about Owl Cottage; there was hardly a queue for it, with its tiny backyard and weekday traffic noise. We hoped that buying it would be the first stage of a permanent move to Norfolk. Getting into our car, the BMW and its less flashy successors, I would imagine this was the final journey, and that we were travelling in convoy with the removal van: that we were leaving the South-east behind for ever. When I played this game, I would smile and my shoulders would relax. But then we would grind to a halt, at the sight of some carnage or disaster on the M25, and I would have to acknowledge that it was just another short, fraught weekend trip, and that the change in our lives would have to be earned.

For a time, we would visit every two or three weeks, our two cats travelling with us. Released, squalling, from their cage, they would race through the rooms, bellowing, feet thundering on the wooden stairs, driving out the devils only cats can see. Exhausted, they would take to their basket, while we climbed the stairs to a room papered the pale yellow of weak sunshine: better people already, calmer, kinder. On Saturday morning we would make a leisurely circuit of the market place, shop to shop, talking to people, posting our parcels, filling my many prescriptions, buying meat for our freezer. In the afternoon we would drive up to Holt to see my parents, with a bag of scones or a cake, some flowers, a book or two; then on Sunday my parents would drive to Reepham, and we would have lunch at the King’s Arms or eat something cold at home: Cromer crabs, strawberries, Stilton. Then it was time to pack the car and go. Routinely, as we left, there was a small ache behind my ribs. I only count the happy hours.

My mother was a tiny, chic woman with a shaggy bob of platinum-coloured hair. She usually wore jeans and a mad-coloured sweatshirt, but everything she wore looked designed and meant; all the time I’d known her, since first I’d been able to see her clearly, she’d had that knack. My stepfather was younger than she was, by a few years, but he had undergone a coronary bypass, and his brown, muscular body seemed wasted. Frail, was not a word I would have associated with him, but I noticed how his favourite shirt, soft and faded, clung to his ribs, and his legs seemed to consist of his trousers with articulated sticks inside. Once a draughtsman, he had taken up watercolours, trying to fix on to paper the troubling, shifting colours of the coast; earlier in life, he would not have been able to tolerate the ambiguities and tricks of the light. Passion had wasted him, and anger; no one had given him a helping hand, he had no money when money mattered, and he was chronically exasperated by the evasions and crookedness of the world. He was honest by temperament; the honest, in this world, give each other a hard time. He was an engineer. He wrote a small, exact, engineer’s hand, and his mind was subdued to a discipline, but inside his chest his heart would knock about, like a wasp in an inverted glass.

I had been six or seven when Jack had first entered my life. In all those years, we had never had a proper conversation. I felt that I had nothing to say that would interest him; I don’t know what he felt. Neither of us could make small talk. For my part, it made me tense, as if there were hidden meanings in it, and for his part…for his part I don’t know. My mother thought we didn’t get on because we were too much alike, but I preferred the obvious explanation, that we didn’t get on because we were completely different.

Now, this situation began to change. Since his heart surgery, Jack had shown a more open and flexible personality than ever in his life. He had become more patient, more equable, less taciturn: and so I, in his presence, had become less guarded, more grown-up, more talkative. I found that I could entertain him with stories of the writers’ committees I sat on in London; he had been a man who sat on committees, before his enforced retirement, and we agreed that whatever they were for ostensibly, all committees behaved alike, and could probably be trusted to transact each other’s business. On that last afternoon, a bright fresh day towards the end of March, I hung back as we crossed the market place, so that my husband and my mother would walk ahead, and I could have a moment to tell him some small thing that only he would like. I thought, I have never done that before: never hung back, never waited for him.

He seemed tired, when we got home after the meal. One of the cats, the striped one, used to lure him to play with her on the stairs. Until recently, he had loathed cats, denounced them like a Witchfinder General; he claimed to shrink at their touch. But this tiny animal, with her own strange phobias, fright shivering behind her marzipan eyes, would invite him with an upraised paw to put out his hand for her to touch; and he would oblige her, held there by her mewing for ten minutes at a time, touching and retreating, pushed away and fetched back.

That last Sunday, when she took up her stance and invited him to begin, he stayed on the sofa, smiling at her and nodding. I thought, perhaps he is sickening for something: flu? But it was death he was sickening for, and it came suddenly, death the plunderer, uncouth and foul-mouthed, kicking his way into their house on a night in April two or three hours before dawn. The doctor came and the ambulance crew, but death had arrived before them, his feet planted on the hearthrug, his filthy fingerprints on the pillowcase. They did their best, but they could have done their worst, for all it availed. When everything was signed and certified, my mother said, and the men had gone away, she washed his face. She sat by his body and because there was no one to talk to she sang in a low voice: ‘What’s this dull town to me?/ Robin’s not near/ He whom I wished to see/Wished for to hear…’

She sang this song to me when I was small: the tune is supersaturated with yearning, with longing for a lost love. About six o’clock she moved to the phone, but all her three children were sleeping soundly, and so she received only polite requests to leave the message that no one can ever leave. On and on we slept. ‘Where’s all the joy and mirth/ Made life a heaven on earth?/ O they’re all fled with thee/ Robin Adare.’ About seven o’clock, at last, one of my brothers picked up the phone.

You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of your curtains, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that wouldn’t work after the opening lines.