Winnie didn’t like the class system of the ghostly world. No more than she liked these living rich rich people who smelled like attar of heirloom roses as they went swanning by. Why should that fop with the cell phone be the one to have so much obvious disposable income, and not the man who slept under the yew trees in the graveyard at Hampstead Parish Church? Why should this dead one leave a ghostly residue and not that? It seemed so capricious.
But it is not something I asked for, said Gervasa, as travelers who had cleared customs looked up over their Independents and Guardians and cafés au lait and then looked down again, too quickly.
Winnie hadn’t realized she had been speaking aloud. She tried to lower her voice. “What do you mean?” she tried to whisper.
It isn’t something I asked for. She was speaking to Winnie out loud, in that muscle-bound Anglo-Norman, but though the sound was foreign, the meaning was coming through in something approximating English. That’s the modern European Community for you, thought Winnie.
“You didn’t ask to be a—a spirit?”
To last beyond my death? Who would ask that? I didn’t believe in the Purgatory promised by the abbots. My punishment is to have been proven wrong.
“What did you do?” said Winnie. What a story she could write and sell to the National Enquirer about this: Thirteenth-Century Ghost Tells All.
It was the third year of the famine. For the sake of a morsel I did what I ought not to have done. They accused me, and set me up to burn like a martyr. To make me repent.
“What did you do? Did you murder for food?”
I will not say it.
An even more novel notion: Thirteenth-Century Ghost Refuses to Talk. “And they killed you for it.”
I had a small life, but it was only half the life I had. The other half quickened within me. The first I was willing to lose to save the second. My bargaining failed me somehow. I am caught, for reasons I don’t know, in between life and death. In this state I cannot learn whether my child lived or died. Such knowledge is too far. But I am caught, a dead leaf that will not detach and fall. I am in between the shadow world and the lighted one. I cannot die enough to follow the child into the dark garden to find its history. Nor can I live enough in the bright garden to remember its vanities and pleasures.
This doesn’t sound like a peasant voice, observed Winnie, but maybe filtered through her own language skills. . . . “Why should you be privileged enough to be caught between?”
That you consider it a privilege . . .
And why do you presume to know how many of us, or how few, are caught? It is a tally I cannot make. But while I was fully alive, revenants attended every family I ever knew.
“Were you the ghost who haunted my forebear, Ozias Rudge?”
I do not know the things you know. I don’t know souls by names, nor remember what happens, except I know that I am grateful when I am safe, and spend my best time as close to being dead as I can manage.
The announcer called them to the train. Winnie saw people hang back to see where she would place herself. The seats were reserved, but there were plenty of unoccupied places and the other travelers were wary. Well, fuck them all. She tried to hold her head up and walked shakily by, accepting the hand of an attendant into the car.
The train went in an unhurried pace through bemuraled, grimy Brixton, graffiti sprayed in Day-Glo paint on red and yellow Victorian brick. Then the beginning of the rust, as Forster called it in Howard’s End, the suburban Edwardian villas that metastasized all over southern England. Dulwich, Sydenham Hill. Into a tunnel. Gervasa flinched within Winnie at the dark and the noise. Out again, past the industrial lots and hangars of Tonbridge, giving way quickly and mercifully to orchards, fields with standing water in tractor ruts. Reflections of the fresh growth of newly planted winter crops. The strange cone-roofed grain houses, their tips tilted. Oast houses, was that the term?
The day grew wetter, brighter, as sunset neared. There ought to be a word for a kind of first direct daylight that occurs only before evening, when the angling sun finally manages by lowering itself to slip in under the clouds that have ceilinged the day. A dusky sunrise is what it was, thought Winnie.
As the land began to peter out, the train picked up speed. The land mounded to the east in a green henge. Then concrete retaining walls, grids, screens, wires. In.
Gervasa didn’t like the Chunnel. “Only a few moments, don’t panic,” said Winnie. “As if dark and silence are a problem for you.” But perhaps it was the speed, the hopeless onrush. Gervasa began to babble more noisily and Winnie needed to talk herself in order to keep the Francophone syllables from offending any of the French passengers. She went hunting for a mint to suck on, hoping to shut Gervasa up, and found the toy phone. She must have stuffed it in there. She pulled it out and pretended to punch some numbers, and held it up to her ear.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “please. There is nothing to this.”
None of this is going to help.
“What help can you possibly need? What can I do?”
Gervasa was silent for a moment.
“What? Don’t make me beg. I invited you here, remember? I’ve already proven my hospitality. Just tell me.”
Exchange places with me.
It was Winnie’s turn to be silent.
I have no further death possible without you. And you are not living your life. You know it. You don’t want your life. You’ve turned your back on it.
“I haven’t.”
You who do no good could yet do good. What are you now? A thief, a parasite. You steal the meat of other people’s lives and lie about it in words on a page. You turn your eyes away from your own life. You live in a sequence of punishments, in sacrifices and penances.
“Not me, you’ve the wrong gal. I don’t believe in all that Church stuff.”
Tell me, if you want your life at all, why you bothered to exhume what was left of mine?
“I,” she began. “I.” But it was hard to finish any sentence that started with I.
“Listen.” She held the phone so hard, so close to her face, that the casing began to crack and the plastic to sweat in her palm. “Something happened to me. I didn’t expect it and I didn’t ask for it. But it happened, a tragedy, an awful dreadful thing.”
What?
But Winnie no more wanted to tell Gervasa this than Gervasa wanted to reveal what sin or crime she had committed. And died for. More or less died, that is.
What?
“It doesn’t matter what. Just this. When I came to—when I came back to myself—I wasn’t myself anymore. I was a living plant that had been cut down at the ground level—flower, fruit, and stem. I thought I should die. I wanted to. But I didn’t die. I just became redundant in my own life. I lost weight, I let my hair go back to its tired natural color. I was living the semblance of my old life, with all my books, my friends, my same old history behind me, but I wasn’t myself.”
So if you’re not yourself, let me be you.
Winnie pushed on. “My husband divorced me and I thought I deserved it. My doctors said the word hedonophobia—I who drank the best scotch, who flew business class when my air miles allowed it. But it was true. For several years I couldn’t listen to music, not because it made me sad but because it didn’t make me feel anything. And I couldn’t work. I tried to write. This whole trip to England was meant to jostle me to face what I had not faced. To face the facts with John, to try to move out of this half-life I inhabit. But it hasn’t worked.”
Someone a seat or two ahead, an American, turned and said bluntly to Winnie, “You can’t even get any reception for that thing in here so you might as well hang up.”
“This is a conference call, you fat prick,” said Winnie, and turned her head toward the window. She could see her reflection in the dark glass, a puzzled face swimming in black water.
If you give me your life, then I can use it. When you die I will go with you. With a guide I can make it, into knowledge or ob
livion, either is acceptable. I can ride your corpse into the death I couldn’t manage for myself.
“Is that what you asked of my great-great-great-grandfather?”
I have asked it before was all Gervasa would say.
Of whom? Of Ozias Rudge? Had he resisted, gone on to have something of a real life? Of Chutney? Of Mrs. Maddingly? Maybe they killed—Chutney slaying the other cats, Mrs. M roasting poor Chutney—as a kind of kicking action, trying to evacuate the murderous Gervasa virus.
If I give myself over to her, I’ll be the reborn Jack the Ripper, she thought. But at least I’d be somebody.
“What would happen to me? Is this like a sublease? Do I go hang in a closet somewhere?”
How different would that be?
“Don’t be withering. Without me you’re nothing.”
If Gervasa had a witty reply to that, she kept it to herself.
Then the train was through the Chunnel, zipping faster and faster, on flatter, cleaner land, with grayer grass. The first building that came into view was unquestionably French, a brick farmhouse with an oriel window. Odd how the look was unmistakably foreign, yet as the crow flies so close. . . .
Alighting at the terminus, Gare du Nord, Winnie had the feeling of floating, like a ghost, down the rail platform. There was no longer a customs officer to approve the passports. Whoever could know she was in another country now?
A cold rain was spitting, making the shuttered stone buildings more blurred, more soft-focus. She ducked into a fancy enough restaurant only a block or two from the station and, too tired to sink the bucket into the memory well for high school French, in as polite and apologetic a voice as she could manage, said in English, “Please, a table, for one; just me, alone?”
The maître d’ stared at her with consummate Parisian disdain. Then he shrugged wide-eyed, as if she’d just spoken in Choctaw and he passed beyond her, to a sullen French businessman who’d come in the door behind her. The maître d’ pointed him toward a table for one, just a few feet away. The fellow sat down, slung his silk tie over his shoulder, and began to pick apart the bread and feed himself with both hands.
Winnie approached the maître d’ and grabbed his shoulder, and Gervasa said, out loud, in her own tongue, something like, “You smelly old pompous shithole, give me a table before I slice off your nuts, or you’ll be speaking in neither French nor English, but in baby squeals.”
It was a lovely table. The waiters hovered fawningly. A small vase of fresh flowers was located promptly and set down in the candlelight. Winnie held the plastic phone in her left hand. With her right she sipped soup and polished off a carafe of wine.
Then she rented a room for the night, and two days later the hotel staff broke the door down, thinking she was dead. She had slept for so long that her bowels were stone and her bladder had leaked in the bed. She paid extra for the trouble she’d caused, apologizing all the while, and then rented a car and bought a map, and ventured out onto the Autoroute Périphérique, heading south a bit for the A6 toward Orly. And then (she’d written it in large letters so she could study it while driving),
the A10 toward Chartres
the A11 toward Le Mans
the A81 toward Rennes
and onto some smaller D roads. But as the land grew flatter and emptier—and from the motorways, the countryside in France was always broader and emptier than she remembered—the night drew in, with swiftness and force, and Winnie didn’t want to drive on without knowing where she would sleep.
She found a motor court on the outskirts of Le Mans, where the concierge welcomed her in polite and flawless English, and in polite and flawless English, the preteen boy offered to park her car, and the Moroccan maid coming back from a janitor’s closet with a damp mop and a bucket said “Pardon me, please” in flawless English. And very polite. So it was only in Paris, apparently, near the train station that brought visitors from England, that the French behaved as if they’d never come across the English language before.
She sat in a room the color of stewed celery. She didn’t lie down for fear of sleeping for two days again and drawing attention to herself. Her eyes closed once or twice. Her imagination cast upon the backs of her eyelids the flickering semblance of images. Harsh or furtive faces, seen in glimpses. A streambed glistening in early spring runoff, the stream channeled by boulders into sleek silvery bolts of water. A hulk of a building, a church perhaps, in the sunrise, with an open door. “Is that a church?” said Winnie. “Is this my imagination?” When Gervasa answered her: What if it is?—the answer seemed to be about the whole condition of being haunted.
A man’s face, seen leaning forward, looking loving. Not a face that Winnie could find attractive, but one that Gervasa might. A handle of a nose, a rucked-up lip, sweet belaboring eyes.
A pair of cows knee-deep in snow.
A pennant, or skirt, or something, tied to a limb of a tree and held aloft, in scorn or play, Winnie couldn’t tell.
The play of flame along a bundle of kindling.
None of this seemed related, nor was it clear. She had to name it with words, even—cows in snow, flame along kindling—to bring the loose sense of things into something identifiable.
But her mind worked like this when she was writing. She recognized that, at least. Gervasa’s memories? Or was it just Winnie filling in as she could? Hard to tell.
She felt herself beginning to nod off. What time was it? When she looked at the bedside clock, at first she thought it said 00:00, 00:00. But that was a figment; she blinked and the clock remarked 03:00.
She put her things together. She left all of her cash except for a few francs for the Moroccan maid. There was no one behind the counter, so Winnie scribbled a note in English—“Charge my card; thanks, WR”—and got on the road again. Would her accountant be required to pay that bill if it turned out she had gone schizoid on this trip? If she let Gervasa have more of the view, and Winnie retired to a dark back corner of her own body? Or, in the event things went wrong, would her estate have to honor the debt if it was posted after the moment of her death?
She had gassed up the car before stopping and had no trouble finding the road back toward Rennes, and peeling off at last around Vitré toward Fougères. She coursed through what looked like the county seat, taking no care in the minute traffic circles, since no one else was on the road at this hour. If Gervasa was taking in any of this, she made no comment. Well, even if she were using Winnie’s eyes, how could she recognize such things—not just the automobiles and streetlights, more or less universal around the world and certainly familiar to Winnie, but also the small details that make this place superficially, or subtly, different from Paris, from England, from Massachusetts?
Fougères must be prosperous. Lights left burning the night through. Green neon crosses, denoting pharmacies. And everywhere, colored Christmas lights, that ubiquitous necklacing of the world to guard against solstice panic.
“Gervasa,” said Winnie—driving alone was proving the least self-conscious way to converse with the phantom—“Gervasa, what about that mark?”
The mark?
“The Christian cross, through which strokes are drawn. It showed up here, and there; on the boards, on the computer . . . in Allegra’s plaster of Paris.”
A kind of prohibition. Laid upon me. It says, to anyone who sees my dying body or my corpse, do not pray for the repose of this soul.
“Oh.” And Winnie didn’t dare ask if it referred to the child who might or might not have died with her. And what about the Madonna and child statue laid in the tomb? “How can all this be, and I not quaking with born-again faith? I don’t believe in Christian charms anymore. They obliterated the sacraments of my own senses, so I left all that years ago.”
Gervasa did not reply. The notion of choice seemed beyond her.
The sky was lengthening and the black terrain taking on definition as, behind them to the east, dawn light seeped through damp clouds. The car sped on a track of wet pavement, betwee
n fields, past isolated houses of brown stone. On the road toward Saint-Malo but not that far, passing signs announcing Saint-Brice-en-Coglès.
What did happen to you?
Past a stand of poplars, past an abandoned car with its blinkers flashing.
“It all came to a crash, my whole life. It wasn’t just poor Vasile being dead. We were going to call him Basil, you know, an odd name for an American boy, but it means king, or prince. Basil Pritzke. It wasn’t just that he died, while John and I, in panic and surprise, had fallen into love at last, briefly, and into bed with each other too. It wasn’t that. This is now. You can survive adultery now. You can recover, you can go on. Since I don’t believe in God anymore, I can’t believe in punishment. Just the banality of coincidence, just fate, that John and I should be screwing ourselves warm while Basil was succumbing to hypothermia. If the snowfall hadn’t come, we’d have arrived four days earlier; he was still alive then. Awful as that was, I could have survived all that.”
Into Antraín and through it in a whisker, and a few cars on the road now, and a little spotted fawn looking up from some bracken, and flashing away. Turning north, the sun now in real evidence. It was what, nearly seven o’clock? Winnie shifted the visor on the passenger’s side to block the glare.
“It was losing Emil on top of losing Basil,” she said. “He didn’t leave me because of my infidelity. Which after all hadn’t been my first. Nor because of the last-minute death of our baby. He left me because I couldn’t find my way back to being myself. I got lost. For the same reason, John is leaving me too.”
Here the sign: D976, Mont-Saint-Michel–Pontorson.
“John knew that though I did love him, in some ways I had been using him to stand in for Emil. The State Department having said that Emil couldn’t safely travel in the former Eastern Europe. But I wanted Emil to risk it. I wanted him there. This was our child, and he was letting John go in his stead.”