The ghost had gone: that is to say I no longer – how can I put it? – felt waited for, as if some moral bailiff stood by the gate. I went out into the road, and a dog – a mangy, yellowy animal with a pointed snout and little sharp eyes – trotted by about its business, loose skin wobbling beneath its belly, elongated teats dangling. Bitches after childbirth are not a pretty sight. See, I thought. There! If there were some presence standing there even this ribby thin creature would have the energy to react. And no sooner had I thought this than the animal cast a sideways glance at me, and stopped, teats quivering, and stared, and its hackles rose, and it looked at me with terror and hate, and turned tail and fled, howling. I promise you this happened.
And I thought whatever it was is no longer outside me but in me: now what was I to do? Or had it always been there, and I had somehow left it behind, in my mean-minded, snarly shopping trip to the village? And now it was back in again, and I had succeeded in stirring up some awful sediment to such an extent that even a passing bitch, running back no doubt to her pups, had noticed and reacted?
I used as a talisman against my inner demons the memory of Jack and myself, out to sea, in our berth on the ferry, fucking and fucking while the ship (one of those roll-on, roll-off, roll-over types) banged up and down into the waves as if in sympathy with our cause. Let the stars drift unobserved in the heavens, unannotated and recorded, let Matthew rant, let Anne weep, only this counted. In and out and up and down, and the swooning blackness pierced by light as we remade the universe, Mad Jack and me.
A butterfly alighted on my hand, and fanned its wings a little, and then flew off: a gesture of reconciliation, perhaps: or else the thing was just too drunk and simple to understand its danger.
Then the telephone rang inside the Hôtel de Ville. Now this was not surprising: a town hall, even in France, even one not used for its bureaucratic purpose for a year or so, may have a line still connected; a wrong number may have been dialled: or indeed for all I knew Monsieur le Directeur du Festival was trying to contact the Band – an extra gig, perhaps tomorrow morning, early: or – and this I did not want to contemplate – perhaps I had stirred up sufficient sediment, in my calls to Alison and Jude, to allow my whereabouts to be traced.
I thought at first I would let it ring unanswered, and then something struck me as odd. The ring was not the long-burr-silence-long-burr-silence of the French system, but the burr-burr, burr-burr of the English. Now how could that be? I stood in the kitchen and the ringing disturbed the motes in the air, where the low sun shone through the window above the shallow stone sink; otherwise I would have thought the sound was imaginary. I went looking for the instrument – into the big empty front room whence, once, the business of the town had been conducted. The ringing stopped – nor was there a telephone there that I could see, or anywhere in any of the other big square ground floor rooms. A thin torn cotton cloth hung before a doorless cupboard beneath the staircase and on one of the shelves, indeed, rested one of those old black wall telephones, but it was broken; more than simply disconnected – discarded. All the same I felt nervous of touching it. When I moved the cloth it threw up a cloud of dust, and I sneezed, and sneezed again and startled myself.
Now from much study of the heavens, since I was a child, I know how difficult it is to find anything one does not have the confidence of finding and how easy to find anything one means to find. I looked again for the instrument, willing myself to see it. But still to no avail.
I was, I admit it, frightened. Of course the sound might have been produced in my own head: the dancing motes of dust caused by the burr-burr, burr-burr could have been visionary. It was unusual for two senses to be involved in these phenomena, but not, I suppose, impossible.
I went back to sit in the kitchen and heard footsteps outside in the courtyard, and looked out into the dusk, relieved, glad of human company, but there was no one there. The pang of disappointment which seized me was very great: it made my throat tighten: and I thought, how strange, this is altogether the wrong emotion: fear would be more reasonable. And then indeed panic set in and I ran from the Hôtel de Ville – taking up my pad and the rest of the bread (I’m not daft and was certainly hungry) – and set myself up beneath the yellow arc light which stood where the N89 crosses the little D9, just to the right of the Hôtel de Ville, where the companionable and sensible traffic passes, and where notions of life and death are practical things. Stop and wait for the lights, or you’re dead! At least these small matters appear to be within our control; do not contain the menace of evil rampant and malicious – the lights, for example, staying green of their own volition when they should have turned to red, causing some head-on smash by accident on purpose of malice. Or does the driver just see green, when others see red, so great is his/her underlying wish for death, if only to ease the burden of guilt? Perhaps only the guilty see and hear ghosts, are afflicted by demons? And only a few of the guilty at that, not all of them, or we could scarcely move about for paranormal phenomena, pick up an egg without it leaping from our hand, breaking on the ground, and just sitting there, frying. Or whatever. And the death rate on the road would be vastly, vastly higher.