Yes, Leonard believed in ghosts all right.
Leonard had reached the gate to Birchwood Manor and he went through it. The sun was getting lower in the sky and the shadows had started to lengthen across the lawn. As he glanced towards the front garden wall, Leonard stopped in his tracks. There, reclining in the sunny patch beneath the Japanese maple tree, he saw a woman, fast asleep. For a split second, he thought that it was Kitty, that she’d decided not to go to London after all.
Leonard wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating, but then he realised that it wasn’t Kitty at all. It was the woman from the river that morning: one half of the couple he’d gone out of his way to avoid meeting.
Now he found himself unable to look away. A pair of brogue shoes sat neatly beside her sleeping body and her bare feet in the grass seemed to Leonard in that moment the most erotic sight. He lit a cigarette. It was her unguardedness, he supposed, that drew him to her. Her materialisation here, today, in this place.
As he watched, she woke and stretched, and the most beatific expression came upon her face. The way she was looking at the house sparked a distant recognition in Leonard. Purity, simplicity, love. It made him want to cry as he hadn’t since he was a small boy. For all of the loss and the ugly mess and the awareness that no matter how he willed it he could never go back and make it so that the horror hadn’t happened; that whatever else he did in life, the fact of the war and his brother’s death and the wasted years since would always be a part of his story.
And then, ‘I’m sorry,’ she called out, for she had seen him. ‘I didn’t mean to trespass. I lost my way.’
Her voice was like a bell, pure and unsullied, and he wanted to run over and take her by the shoulders and warn her, to tell her that life could be brutal, that it could be relentless and cold and wearying.
He wanted to tell her that it was all meaningless, that good people died too young, for no good reason, and that the world was filled with people who would seek to do her harm, and that there was no way of telling what was around the corner or even if there was any corner ahead at all.
And yet—
As he looked at her, and she looked at the house, something in the way the leaves of the maple caught the sun and illuminated the woman beneath it made his heart ache and expand, and he realised that he wanted to tell her, too, that by some strange twist it was the very meaninglessness of life that made it all so beautiful and rare and wonderful. That for all its savagery – because of its savagery – war had brightened every colour. That without the darkness one would never notice the stars.
All of this he wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat, and instead he lifted his hand to wave, a silly gesture that she didn’t see, because by now she’d looked away.
He went inside the house and from the kitchen window watched as she gathered her bag and, with a final dazzling smile up at the house, disappeared into the sunlit haze. He didn’t know her. He would never see her again. And yet he wished he could have told her that he’d lost his way, too. He’d lost his way, but hope still fluttered in and out of focus like a bird, singing that if he kept putting one foot in front of the other, he might just make it home.
VII
My father once told me that when he saw my mother in the window of her family home, it was as if his entire life to that point had been led in the half-light. Upon meeting her, he said, every colour, every fragrance, every sensation that the world had to offer, was brighter, sharper, more truthful.
I was a child and took this story for the fairy tale that it sounded, but my father’s words came back to me on the night that I met Edward.
It was not love at first sight. Such claims make a mockery of love.
It was a presentiment. An inexplicable awareness that something important had happened. Some moments are like that: they shine like gold in a prospector’s pan.
I said that I was born twice, once to my father and mother, and a second time when I woke up in the house of Mrs Mack, above the shop selling birds and cages on Little White Lion Street.
That is the truth. But it is not the whole truth. For there was a third part to my life’s story.
I was born again, outside the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, on a warm evening in 1861 when I was a month from turning seventeen years old. The very same age that my mother was when I was born for the first time, that starlit night in the narrow house in Fulham on the banks of the River Thames.
Mrs Mack had been right, of course, when she said that the days of Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Passenger were numbered, and so a new scheme had been hatched, a new costume procured, a new persona put on like a second skin. It was simple enough: the theatre foyer was a hive of activity. The ladies’ dresses were bright and generous, the men’s reserve loosened by whisky and expectation; there were any number of opportunities for a woman with quick fingers to relieve a gentleman of his valuables.
The only problem was Martin. I was no longer a green child, but he refused to relinquish the minder’s role he’d been assigned. He badgered Mrs Mack, filled her head with extravagant ways in which I might come to harm or even – I had heard him whispering when he thought I wasn’t listening – be ‘turned against them’; and then he proposed an arrangement by which he might insinuate himself into my work. I argued that he was overcomplicating matters, that I preferred to work alone, but at every turn he was there, watching with a grating proprietary air.
That night, though, I had given him the slip. The show had finished and I’d made my way quickly across the foyer and out through a side exit, arriving in an alley that ran away from the theatre. It had been a good night: the deep pocket of my dress was heavy, and I was glad. The most recent letter from my father had advised that, after a number of unfortunate setbacks, the clock-making enterprise he had established in New York was almost solvent. I was hopeful that a fruitful summer would occasion his permission for me to set sail for America. It had been over nine years since he’d left me with Mrs Mack.
I was alone in the alley, wondering whether I ought to walk the shortcut home through the narrow laneways or follow instead the crowded Strand so that I might add one or two more wallets to my haul, and it was in that moment of indecision that Edward appeared through the same door by which I had left, catching me without my mask.
It was like the swift clarity that comes with the lifting fog. I felt alert, suddenly filled with anticipation, and yet at once unsurprised, for how could the night have ended without our meeting?
He came towards me, and when he reached out to brush my cheek, his touch was as light as if I were one of the treasures in Pale Joe’s father’s collection. His eyes studied mine.
I could not say how long we stood like that – seconds, minutes – time had slipped its bounds.
Only when Martin appeared and uttered a cry of, ‘Stop! Thief!’, was the spell broken. I blinked and stepped away.
Martin launched into his practised ruse, but I was impatient, suddenly, with its shabbiness. No, I said firmly, this man was not a thief.
No, indeed, said Edward, he was a painter and he wished to paint my portrait.
Martin began to stammer – nonsense about young ladies, his ‘sister’, respectability; but Edward took no heed. He spoke of his family, promising that he and his mother would come to my home and meet my parents: reassure them that he was a gentleman of fine character and that an association with him would not tarnish my reputation.