In the Shadow

Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her novel Foreign Affairs. She has published ten novels, one collection of short stories, and a non-fiction work entitled The Language of Clothes.

Celia Zimmern was about the last person she, or anyone else, would have expected to see a ghost. To the other women who worked at the American Embassy in London that year, she seemed almost unnaturally cool and rational. Nothing ever rattled her, or – as far as they could observe – deeply excited her.

Celia didn’t even seem excited by her undoubted effect on men – which she should have been, they thought, because there was really no explanation for it. She wasn’t beautiful, only rather pretty: slight, small, with a halo of crinkly dark-oak hair and oak-brown eyes with lashes so long and dense that some thought them false. Her manner wasn’t flirtatious or seductive, and she always dressed quietly. Most people didn’t realise that Celia’s fawn wool suit was a thrift-shop Chanel, and her navy crêpe a Jean Muir; they only noticed that she wore the same clothes over and over again.

For Celia, such monotony was preferable to its alternative. If she had a failing, she knew, it was that she wanted the best or nothing. Unfortunately, the best is usually expensive, and as a result not only Celia’s closet but her tiny elegant flat in Knightsbridge was almost empty. She would rather shiver all day than wear a cheap synthetic sweater, rather sit on an Afghan cushion or even her beautifully waxed parquet floor than in a plastic sling chair. Her acquisitiveness expressed itself so fastidiously that most of the time it seemed more like asceticism. But anyone who had watched Celia in a shop, stroking the surface of a beige suede skirt or lifting a perfect peach from green tissue paper, would have known other-wise.

Celia made no public show of her good taste – or of any other preference. On the job, especially, she maintained a very low profile; she took in information rather than giving it out. She’d never understood why most people strove to voluntarily repeat facts and anecdotes and opinions they already knew. Whereas by listening carefully one might hear something interesting, even something that would turn out to be useful.

Because Celia’s manner was so low-key, members of the public tended to assume that she was employed at the Embassy in some low-grade clerical capacity. In fact she was a career diplomat with a responsible position in the Information Section. Her attitude at work was one of polite attention to the matter at hand; but underneath this was an almost formidable administrative intelligence and decisiveness.

Though a few of Celia’s female colleagues considered her somewhat poor in spirit as well as in wardrobe, most liked and even admired her. From their point of view her only fault was that she attracted too many men, and that she continued to go out with ones in whom she had no serious interest, constantly accompanying them to restaurants, concerts, theatres, and films. She was nearly thirty, they said to each other; why couldn’t she settle on one guy and give somebody else a chance? It wasn’t fair. ‘I don’t even believe she sleeps with most of them,’ one irritable young woman from the Visa Office asserted, calling Celia ‘a bitch in the manger’.

Celia herself was modest and a little cynical about her social success. She knew it was mostly her gift as a listener that attracted and held men, just as it soothed irritated officials and calmed impatient journalists. Somehow, she had the ability to focus her entire attention on whomever she was with, letting them speak at length without intruding any personal opinions. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she would say if the monologue faltered. ‘Tell me more,’ or ‘Really! I never knew that.’

What still rather surprised her was that none of the men she knew ever caught on. They took her ready responsiveness for granted, as they would that of a superior computer system. Indeed, she sometimes privately compared herself to those computer programs that can imitate psychotherapy and even produce a transference. A similar transference usually appeared in any man Celia went out with more than once or twice: a feeling of love and trust, and the conviction that she was deeply sympathetic with all his views. So strong was this conviction that often, even when Celia declined to put out, they wanted to continue seeing her, to engross her attention for life.

Celia was aware that her acquaintances wished she would settle on one guy, and also that she was twenty-nine. Even from the point of her career, marriage would be advisable. In this connection, her mind turned most often to an economist named Dwayne Mudd. He was a large handsome young man among whose many assets were good manners, sexual energy, professional competence and a declared wish to have children. When she admitted to her friends that Dwayne was talking of marriage, they told her she could hardly do better. He was perfect, they said.

It was true, Celia admitted to herself, that Dwayne Mudd was a Rhodes Scholar, a member of a well-known midwestern political family, a former college track star, a magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, and an alumnus of Yale Law School, with what was probably a brilliant career ahead of him. Why was it, then, that when she imagined being married to him her strongest feeling was one of restless depression? Was it just his ridiculous name?

Or did it have something to do with the fact that Dwayne seemed to assume Celia was fortunate to be courted by him? When he told her that she was really very pretty, or that she would make an ideal diplomat’s or politician’s wife, she somehow felt he was giving himself a pep talk. He was excusing himself for not having chosen someone richer and more beautiful; above all, someone from another prominent midwestern family, because as he had once remarked, in politics it’s a big advantage to have a wife with good connections.

When Celia told Dwayne that she didn’t think she would ever want to marry him, he didn’t seem to hear her. ‘You can’t mean that seriously, darling,’ he said. Even though she repeated it, he insisted on treating her reluctance as feminine coquettishness. ‘You’ll come round,’ he said, smiling. ‘I can wait.’

But Celia, though she told herself that she could hardly do better, was more and more determined not to come round. Privately, she had begun to refer to Dwayne as the Wombat; not only because of his admiration for Australia, where he had spent his last posting, but because of his cropped furry hair, broad and somewhat furry hands, solid build, and stubborn tenacity.

Usually Celia kept her growing annoyance with Dwayne to herself, but occasionally it slipped out. Once, for instance, he called her office four times in a single day, mainly to say that he was thinking of her and of what he referred to as ‘last night’.

‘He must love you very much,’ said her boss’s secretary, Crystal, who was softly pretty and romantically inclined.

‘Dwayne Mudd is a sentimentalist,’ replied Celia. ‘He probably read somewhere that women like this sort of constant nuisance and interruption.’

A few days later, a cornucopia of sugar-pink rosebuds appeared on her desk at lunchtime.

‘Oh, how lovely!’ Crystal exclaimed.

‘Well. Maybe,’ Celia said. ‘What I think is, if you’re going to buy flowers, you should go to a flower shop. Anything you find on those stalls outside the underground is going to be dead before you get it home.’ She held the crumpled paper cone out horizontally, so that the weak stems, studded with knots of crumpled, rusting pink silk, drooped downwards.

‘But it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?’ Crystal asked.

Celia, who disagreed, did not contradict her. ‘You know what they always remind me of, flowers like these? Those shoddy cut-price umbrellas they sell in the same place, outside Bond Street station. They never open right either, and quite soon they collapse completely.’

They’re kind of sweet now, though, you know.

Crystal looked at the roses in a way that caused Celia to ask, ‘Would you like them?’

‘Oh, yes! Thank you.’ Crystal raised the paper cornucopia to her lace-trimmed blouse and buried her nose in the faint fragrance.

‘I guess Dwayne still wants to marry you,’ she said finally, exhaling.

‘Yes.’ Celia gave a little apologetic laugh. ‘Of course that’s impossible. I couldn’t marry a man whose name was Dwayne Mudd. Imagine what it would mean – a lifetime of bad jokes.’

‘You could keep your own last name. Lots of girls do that now,’ Crystal suggested.

‘You’d still be married to him and have to hear the jokes,’ said Celia. ‘Just for instance, Dwayne told me once that in elementary school he was known as “Muddy Drain”.’

Crystal giggled. ‘But he must believe he still has a chance,’ she said. ‘After all, you keep seeing him. And you still have his mother’s gold watch.’

‘Yes,’ Celia admitted. She lifted her slim hand, admiring again an exquisite bracelet watch made in the nineteen-thirties by Cartier, with a woven gold-mesh band and a tiny oblong dial elegantly engraved with Roman numerals. ‘But it’s only a loan, you know. I’ve promised to return it the moment Dwayne finds someone else to marry.’

‘He’ll never find anyone as long as you go on encouraging him,’ Crystal predicted.

‘I don’t encourage him,’ Celia protested mildly.

‘You must, or he wouldn’t still be hanging around. He’d find another girlfriend. I think really maybe you should give back his watch and tell him you don’t want to see him any more.’ Crystal’s voice shook slightly.

‘But I do want to see Dwayne,’ Celia said, smiling, not offended – indeed, Crystal had never seen her offended. ‘He’s quite pleasant to be with and he knows a great deal about international economics and the Common Market. I just don’t want to marry him. He realises that.’

‘I don’t think he does,’ said Crystal, who already had the difficult last name of Freeplatzer and felt she could reconcile herself to a lifetime of bad jokes quite easily if it should become Mudd. ‘But I suppose he’ll figure it out in time.’

Either Crystal was wrong, or Dwayne Mudd didn’t have enough time. He was still stubbornly pursuing Celia when, two months later, driving home from a party in what was later determined to be a condition of .12 blood-alcohol content, he turned the wrong way up a one-way street in Belgravia and collided fatally with a heavy lorry.

Celia, in the opinion of some, didn’t take this news as hard as she might have – as she should have, one of them said at lunch in the canteen.

‘I don’t see that,’ protested Crystal loyally. ‘I know Celia was really, really shocked by what happened to Dwayne.’

‘Well, we all were. I’m not claiming she doesn’t feel as bad as we do. But she ought to feel worse. After all, she was going out with him.’

‘Yes, but she’s been going out with a lot of other men too, you know. Three at least.’

Crystal’s friends nodded. Oh, they knew that, they said crossly.

‘I don’t see how she can just go on as if nothing had happened,’ one complained. ‘As if she didn’t really care.’

Celia does care, Crystal thought. She’s still wearing Dwayne Mudd’s mother’s gold watch; doesn’t that prove it?

It was true that Celia was wearing the watch. After Dwayne died she’d asked herself if perhaps she should return it – but to whom? Dwayne had no brothers or sisters; she’d have to ask someone at the Embassy who his legal heirs were, which meant appearing in the embarrassing and false public role of grieving girlfriend. Possibly Dwayne had some cousin who would want the watch, but that wasn’t likely. Most people – especially people in Iowa, was the thought that crossed Celia’s mind, though she quickly suppressed it as snobbish – wouldn’t appreciate Dwayne’s mother’s watch. They’d think it old-fashioned and inconvenient; they’d much prefer the latest glittery Rolex that never had to be wound and would tell them the day of the month and the time in Hong Kong. And anyhow, wouldn’t Dwayne have wanted her to have it; if he’d known—?

A month later, as if the Fates had finally harkened to Crystal’s friends, Celia abruptly removed herself from competition: not by accepting another of her current beaus, but by requesting and receiving a job transfer. What amazed everyone was her destination: a small hot West African country of no political importance.

‘Of course it’s a fairly responsible position: Cultural Affairs Officer,’ a secretary in the department involved reported to her friends later in the canteen. ‘And the salary is good, because it’s a hardship post.’

‘But gee, really: Goto,’ Crystal exclaimed.

‘I know. Nobody’s ever heard of it. My boss told Celia that if she’d just hang on a while he could probably find her something much better. But Celia said she wanted to leave as soon as possible. I don’t get it.’

‘Maybe it’s because of Dwayne Mudd,’ suggested another young woman. ‘Maybe she can’t forget him as long as she’s here in London. She might feel guilty, even.’

‘I don’t know,’ Crystal said. ‘Guilty doesn’t exactly sound like her.’

All the same, she thought later, there was definitely something on Celia’s mind. She had a new distracted manner, a kind of preoccupation – could she have realised that she’d been in love with Dwayne after all?

‘I think I can guess why you asked for a transfer,’ Crystal said when Celia took her for a farewell lunch at Wheeler’s. ‘It was because of Dwayne Mudd.’

Celia started as if she’d taken hold of a defective electrical appliance. ‘How did you know?’ she half-whispered, looking round the restaurant as if it were full of undercover agents. ‘I mean, what makes you say that?’ she amended, recovering her cool.

‘It’s – well, the way you’ve been sort of tense ever since he died,’ Crystal said. ‘I figured you might still be thinking about Dwayne and kind of, you know, imagining him everywhere in London.’

‘Yes,’ Celia said after a considerable pause. She lowered her fork, speared a slice of cucumber, raised it. ‘Not everywhere,’ she added, addressing the cucumber, ‘I only see him at certain times… Whenever I’m, you know, with somebody else.’

‘You mean, in your mind’s eye,’ Crystal said, stirring her salad for concealed bits of shrimp.

‘What?’ Celia lowered the fork again.

‘I mean you don’t, like, really see Dwayne? Not like a spirit apparition.’ Crystal leaned forward, her mouth half-open.

‘Oh, no; of course not,’ Celia lied. She was reminded that Crystal, though reasonably discreet, was the daughter of small-town spiritualists and had a residual fascination with their beliefs.

The truth was, though, that Celia was seeing Dwayne Mudd, or something that looked a lot like him. Mostly he appeared as a sort of wavery grey semi-transparent image printed on the scene like a weak carbon copy when someone’s forgotten to change the ribbon. He wasn’t there all the time, only very occasionally – only, she realised after the first week, when she was alone with a man.

The first time Celia saw Dwayne she was in a taxi with a handsome, slightly stupid young merchant banker. As he bent and kissed her, she imagined or perceived something like Dwayne Mudd sitting on the jump seat. She sat up abruptly and it vanished.

It was dusk and raining, and Celia attributed the illusion to a trick of the wet half-light. But she couldn’t really get into it again with the merchant banker, and when they reached her flat in Knightsbridge she checked her little gold watch, exclaimed at the lateness of the hour and didn’t ask him in.

The next time Dwayne Mudd appeared was worse, because it was daylight. Celia was on a Sunday outing with an American legal expert called Mark. They were sitting in a little wood at the top of Hampstead Heath, looking out through a stand of ancient beeches at a Constable landscape of towering cumulus clouds and descending fields of grass and flowers. Celia had just had a first-rate lunch and learnt several useful things about libel law; she felt pleased, at peace.

But when Mark put his arm round her and stroked her bare shoulder the grey shadow of the Wombat wavered into view beneath the branches of a nearby tree. This time what she saw was difficult to explain as a trick of the light: it was clearly the two-dimensional image of a man; not grey now, but weakly coloured like a tinted black-and-white photograph.

‘What is it?’ Mark asked, following her start and fixed stare.

‘I heard thunder,’ Celia said, improvising. ‘We’d better get back, we’ll be drenched.’

When Mark, clearly much disappointed and even cross, had returned Celia to her flat and not been invited in, she poured herself a vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down to face the situation.

She refused to consider Crystal’s idea that what she had seen was a ‘spirit apparition’ i.e. a ghost. Not only did ghosts not exist, the very idea of them was in bad taste; it went with woozy New Age music, the fingering of greasy tarot cards and the search for people’s former incarnations, who somehow always turned out to be upscale or celebrity personages.

No, there was no ghost, Celia said to herself. Rather, for some reason, she was psychologically haunted by the death of Dwayne Mudd, about which she consciously felt only a mild sadness, and also – for Dwayne had become quite a nuisance in the final month or so – a little relief.

But, Celia thought, there must be more going on subconsciously. I must believe that if I’d agreed to marry Dwayne he wouldn’t be dead. Some irrational, infantile part of me must think that if I’d gone to that stuffy dinner-party with him he wouldn’t have drunk too much and there wouldn’t have been an accident. That’s what he would probably want me to think if he were alive.

‘Don’t be Silly,’ she told herself sharply, capitalising the adjective, which had been her nickname as a small child – perhaps on the principle of opposites, for if there was anything Celia hadn’t been for a long while, it was silly. That’s total nonsense about Dwayne, it’s just what something neurotic in you imagines. Maybe you ought to see a shrink.

But almost as rapidly as this idea came to Celia she rejected it. She couldn’t afford private therapy, she’d have to go through the Embassy medical plan. And when anyone did that it got into their medical records and stayed there. Of course no one was supposed to know what was in the records; but people often did know, because someone had to file them.

And when you came up for promotion, it usually came out. Then, even if there’d only been a minor problem, insomnia, for instance, or fear of flying, it could hurt your career. And hers wasn’t a minor problem: she was having what a shrink would call delusions. Possibly she was actually coming down with a full-blown psychosis.

Celia, who up to now had always taken her mental stability for granted, began to feel depressed and even frightened. But she was a young woman of considerable courage and determination. The only thing to do, she finally decided, was to ignore her hallucinations and assume they would eventually go away.

An opportunity to test this theory appeared the following weekend; Celia was at home, making lunch for a former lover from America, a painter named Nat. She knew, and he knew, that this lunch would probably end in bed, for old times’ sake. But as she was adding fresh cream to the vichyssoise, Nat came up close behind and embraced her; and there was the greyish shape of Dwayne Mudd again, sliding about on the sunlit wall among the shadows of the hanging Swedish ivy. As Nat caressed her right breast the shape seemed to grow darker.

‘No,’ she said aloud.

‘Sorry, love,’ Nat grinned. ‘Okay, I’ll leave you alone while you cook.’

The shadow wavered, faded. But it reappeared after lunch as Celia stood to clear the table.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Nat said, standing also, looking directly at her.

‘Yes.’ They moved towards each other and then, entwined, towards the bedroom. Dwayne’s image followed them from room to room, sliding over the walls and furniture.

As they sank down on the bed, Celia deliberately shut her eyes. ‘You want to watch, Wombat, go ahead,’ she told him silently in her mind, where of course he was located.

As if she had spoken, a voice – Dwayne Mudd’s voice, though flatter now, dead-pan – in fact, dead – replied. – That’s a filthy person you’re with, it said. – Literally. He hasn’t had a shower since Thursday.

Celia, with considerable effort, did not look round or even open her eyes. It was clear that Nat had heard nothing, for he went on kissing her enthusiastically. She cooperated, holding him close, although now his light-brown hair had an – imagined? – odour of stale turpentine.

– You like dirt and paint, look at his hands, Dwayne Mudd’s voice said. – And wait till you smell how long he’s been wearing those socks.

You’re lying, Celia thought, but in spite of herself she glanced at Nat’s hand as it lifted her grey silk Nicole Farhi jersey. There was a sour-green smudge across the knuckles and the square-cut nails were black. And when, in spite of her resolution, she raised her eyes, there was the shadow of Dwayne Mudd in the desk chair. Irrationally, because he was merely a figment of her imagination, she felt deeply embarrassed that he, fully clothed, should see her lying there naked.

The event that followed, though clearly great fun for Nat, was unsatisfactory to Celia. She concentrated on keeping her eyes shut, but she couldn’t help hearing the voice.

– Well, look at that. He still doesn’t wear underpants. Kind of disgusting, isn’t it? Dwayne said, while Nat gasped and cried out, ‘Oh, love!’

– And get a whiff of those armpits. That was why you broke up with him, wasn’t it?

‘Celia, my darling,’ Nat murmured, subsiding, then turning to look at her. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘I mean, is something the matter? You didn’t – You usually—’

‘I’m fine,’ Celia assured him. ‘That was lovely. But I think… Well, the thing is,’ she continued, ‘I’m rather involved with someone else just now.’

‘Really? Oh, hell,’ Nat said.

That was how it began; and it rapidly became worse. Soon, whenever Celia even shook hands with a man, the wavering image of Dwayne Mudd appeared and spoke. In life the Wombat’s language had been decorous; now it was coarse.

– He’s got zits on his ass.

– Notice how he stinks of stale smoke, from his lousy nicotine habit. Shit, you can smell it, you’re close enough.

– How can you stand that moustache, so red and bristly, like a hog I knew in Iowa. Got a face like a goddamn hog, too, hasn’t he?

– I suppose you know he’s fucking the wife of the MP from that place in Surrey where he lives.

This last remark was directed at the merchant banker, whom Celia had been spending most of her time with lately – not because she liked him best but because he was the most imperceptive of her suitors and thus least apt to notice her distracted condition. But after she’d made discreet inquiries and discovered that Dwayne was right about the MP’s wife, she crossed the banker off her list. Someone must have mentioned the affair and I must have remembered it subconsciously, she told herself. But she wasn’t sure; she wasn’t sure of anything any more.

I’m falling apart, Celia thought. I’ve got to get out of London before I completely crack up. No, out of England.

When she first heard of Goto, Celia had seen in her mind a comic-book panorama of jungle and swamp, crocodiles, giant snakes, political violence and malarial heat. But in fact it wasn’t bad. Though she arrived in July the temperature was tolerable. The heavy rains had passed and the landscape was densely green, layered like a Henri Rousseau painting with palms and banana trees and tall grasses studded with red and magenta and white flowers. The atmosphere at the Embassy was agreeable and relaxed, and there was an Olympic-size outdoor pool embraced by blossoming shrubs.

Popti, the capital, turned out to be a seaside city of broad boulevards and red sandy alleys; of low blond and ochre and terracotta houses and shops, with here and there a shimmering high-rise hotel or bank. For years it had been a French colony; French was still the official language and there were visible survivals of French cuisine and French fashion.

There might be advantages in a place like this, Celia realised. She could practise her French and develop some regional expertise. Moreover, her professional situation was greatly improved; she had an office of her own, a secretary and the occasional use of an Embassy car and driver. She also had authority; she could cause events to happen. In just a month she’d started two film series; she was reorganising the library and negotiating with USIS in Washington for interesting speakers.

What’s more, she had been assigned a four-bedroom air-conditioned villa with cook, cleaner, part-time gardener and twenty-four-hour guard service. It was not far from the Embassy and next door to the home and shop of the city’s most fashionable dressmaker, Madame Miri (to some of her European clients, Madame Marie). Celia’s own house was usually quiet except for the faint, almost domestic hum of the radio that would communicate instantly with the Marine guard station at the Embassy in case of emergency.

But there was always something going on in Madame’s deep, leafy compound, which besides the shop contained five buildings and a large and shifting population of relatives and employees, from infants in cotton hip slings to toothless grandmothers. Celia was becoming quite friendly with Madame, who like herself was a perfectionist where dress was concerned; she had already copied a complex Issey Miyake for Celia in a remarkable black and indigo-grey local batik.

Most restful of all, Celia hadn’t seen Dwayne Mudd since she arrived. That proved nothing, though, for as yet she had touched no man except to shake hands. Now that she had her life organised, she knew, it was time to test her safety – her sanity, really. Because what was the alternative? The alternative was a possibly lifelong nervous celibacy.

As a sympathetic listener, Celia had not only rapidly become popular in the European community, she had also acquired two admirers. She decided to go out with the one she liked least, an Oklahoma businessman – probably married, she guessed, though he claimed not – called Gary Mumpson. She therefore allowed Gary to take her to the most expensive French restaurant and, after dinner, to drive to the beach and park. It was pitch dark there, under a sky of intense tropical blackness speckled with stars. As Gary leant over to kiss her, rather sweatily, Celia held her breath. For a moment nothing happened; then, mixed with the sound of the heavy, treacherous surf, she seemed to discern an unmistakable voice.

– Yeah, give the creep a big hug, it said, – so you can feel that rubber tyre.

You’re imagining things, Celia told herself; but her arms were already around Gary and she could not help following the Wombat’s instructions.

– Anyhow, you’re wasting your time, the voice seemed to say. – Not only is he married, his cock is only three inches long.

No, it was no use. ‘Come on, let’s drive back,’ Celia said miserably, struggling upright.

‘Nah, what for – oh, sure. Great idea!’ Gary panted, imagining (mistakenly) that this was an invitation to Celia’s apartment.

The next day was Saturday. Celia, after a sleepless night, left her house in the hope of jogging off some of her depression. The morning was cool and fresh, the street nearly empty, but as she reached the gate of the compound next door she was greeted by Madame Miri.

In the strong sunlight her landlady was an imposing figure. Her skin shone like polished mahogany and she wore a brilliant ballooning orange robe and turban printed with blue birds-of-paradise.

‘What is it, chérie?’ she inquired in her excellent French, putting a broad vermilion-nailed hand on Celia’s arm.

‘What?’ Celia said stupidly. ‘What is what?’

‘You are troubled this morning.’

‘No, not at all.’ Celia tried to make her voice light and unconcerned.

Madame shook her head. ‘I see it, in the air around you. Please, come into the shop.’ She lifted a hanging curtain printed with giant golden flowers.

Blurrily, Celia followed. Madame Miri indicated that she should seat herself beside the big cutting-table heaped with fashion magazines and bolts of multicoloured cloth, and brought her a cup of scalding French coffee.

‘You don’t sleep well last night,’ Madame Miri stated rather than inquired.

‘Not very well, no,’ Celia admitted.

‘You have the nightmare, perhaps?’

‘Well, yes, sometimes,’ said Celia, thinking that the appearances of Dwayne Mudd were a kind of nightmare.

‘I shall give you something.’ Madame Miri rose and swept through another curtain at the dim back of the room, where she seemed to be opening drawers and unscrewing bottles, murmuring to herself in a sing-song.

I’m not going to swallow any strange medicine, Celia promised herself.

‘Voilà.’ Returning, Madame laid before Celia a small bag of reddish homespun tied with a strip of leather.

‘Take this, chérie. You don’t open it, but tonight you put it under your pillow, yes?’

‘All right,’ Celia promised, relieved. She knew or could guess what was in the bag: a selection of the magical and medicinal herbs and bits of bone sold at stalls in the village markets and even here in the capital. It was what people called a gris-gris – a protective charm.

‘It’s good,’ Madame urged, smiling, holding out the little bag. ‘Good against fear.’

Of course Madame Miri believes in spirits, she thought; almost everyone does here. The principal religion of Goto, after all, was animism: the worship of ancestors and of certain trees, rivers, and mountains. Ghosts and demons inhabited the landscape and the fields and groves often displayed, instead of a scarecrow, a bundle of leaves and powders and bones given power by spells and hung from a branch or wedged into the fork of a tree. According to local belief, it protected the crops not only against birds and animals but against thieves and evil spirits.

‘Thank you,’ Celia said.

When she could Celia kept her promises. She therefore put the gris-gris under her pillow that night and, because of it or not, slept more easily the rest of the week. Somewhat revived in spirits, she decided to risk going out with the second of her current admirers, the Marine Master Sergeant in charge of the guard at the Embassy. Jackson was an amusing young Southerner of considerable native wit who looked well in his uniform and magnificent in swim trunks. On the down side, he was four years younger than Celia, badly educated, and had terrible political convictions.

This did not surprise Celia: in her opinion, many people had peculiar views. But however much she might disagree, she made no attempt to protest or correct them. She’d always disliked argument, which in her experience never convinced anyone – only facts did that, and even then not very often. Whenever she seriously disagreed with someone she repeated a phrase her father had taught her when she was fourteen: ‘You may be right.’ (‘It took me fifty-five years to learn to say that,’ he had told her. ‘Maybe it’ll save you a little trouble.’)

At the last moment before Jackson arrived in his red Corvette, Celia, with a superstitious impulse of which she was rather ashamed, placed Madame Miri’s gris-gris in the bottom of her handbag. But when her date handed – or, more accurately, handled – her into the car, she thought for a moment that she saw Dwayne’s image, wavering but distinct, on the whitewashed wall of the compound. It was transformed almost at once into the blowing shadows of a banyan tree, and Celia scolded herself for succumbing to nerves.

Unlike Gary, Jackson did not wait to make his move till after supper. As soon as they pulled up in front of the open-air restaurant, from which noisy, thumping local music was soaking, he turned towards Celia. ‘Hey, you really look super tonight,’ he said, grabbing her expertly.

Dwayne Mudd reappeared at once, sitting on the hood of the Corvette: strangely grey and semi-transparent against the sun-flooded tropical shrubbery, as if the light that shone on him was still the humid grey light of London. You better watch your step with this one, he announced.

Oh, shut up, Celia said silently. I’ve come all this way; I’m going to enjoy myself if I feel like it.

– He goes with whores, Dwayne continued relentlessly, pressing his grey face up against the windshield. – You should find out when he was last tested for AIDS. And check if he has a cut on his lip.

Involuntarily, Celia ran the tip of her tongue over Jackson’s wide mouth. Mistaking her intention, he gasped and pulled her closer, murmuring, ‘Oh, baby.’

That night, oppressed by both anxiety and frustrated desire, Celia slept worse than ever – as was immediately apparent to Madame Miri when she appeared next morning.

‘But it is not yet well, ma petite,’ she announced, after lowering herself into a chair and accepting coffee.

‘No,’ Celia admitted. ‘I guess your charm doesn’t work on Europeans.’ She laughed nervously.

Madame ignored this. ‘There is something heavy on your mind, is it not so?’ she asked.

‘No – well, yes.’ Giving in, Celia told Madame Miri, gradually, everything. She’ll know I’m insane now, she thought as the grotesque words fell from her mouth like the toads and snakes of the old fairy tale. She’ll tell me to see a doctor.

‘My poor child,’ Madame said instead, when Celia fell nervously silent. ‘I see how it is. This individual, he is jealous. Since he cannot have you, he wants to keep all other men away. That I have seen before, eh oui.’ She sighed. ‘And so for nothing you made this long journey.’ For the first time, she used the intimate second person singular. ‘Though perhaps not for nothing,’ she added almost to herself.

‘I thought, if I was so far from London—’

‘Chérie, two, three thousand miles, they are like this’ (she snapped her fingers) ‘to a spirit. They don’t figure space like we do.’

‘A spirit?’ Celia echoed.

‘Exactement.’ Madame Miri smiled, and Celia remembered a verse from a tribal chant that had been recited to her by the Deputy Chief of Mission.

Those who are dead have not gone.

They are in the shadow that brightens,

They are in the shadow that fades,

They are in the shadow that trembles.

‘And how was he called in life, this personnage?’ Madame asked.

‘Dwayne Mudd,’ Celia said.

Madame frowned. ‘Mudd. C’est la boue, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Celia admitted.

‘A bad name. Ill-omened.’

‘Evidently,’ Celia said. She tried an uneasy laugh, but Madame ignored the pathetic result.

‘It takes a spirit to catch a spirit,’ she said in a low voice, leaning across the table towards Celia as if Dwayne Mudd might be listening. ‘You know perhaps some very powerful woman gone over to the other side, your mother, your grandmother peut-être?’

Celia shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry. They’re both still alive. And my other grandmother, my father’s mother – I don’t know. I never liked her much and I don’t think she liked me either.’ She looked up at Madame Miri, who was still waiting patiently, and then down into the dark reflections of her coffee cup.

‘There is someone,’ she said after a pause. ‘I never knew her, but I’m named after her. She was my father’s stepmother.’

‘Une belle-mère, mais sympathique.’

‘Oh yes, so my father claims. He never uses the word “wonderful” about anyone or anything, but he said once that she was a wonderful woman – I’m supposed to be like her, even though we weren’t related.’

‘That’s well. Perhaps you have her soul.’

‘Maybe,’ Celia said, recalling that according to local belief ancestral spirits returned after death to inhabit their newborn descendants.

‘En tout cas, she’s without doubt watching over you, or you would not have thought of her now.’ Madame Miri smiled.

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Celia said. ‘I mean, if she is, I guess she hasn’t been watching very often, or I wouldn’t be in this fix now.’

‘Pas certain, chérie. This belle-mère, she was perhaps a very polite lady?’

‘What?’ Celia asked, feeling disorientated. Lack of sleep, she thought. ‘Oh, yes. My father said she had perfect manners.’

‘That explains it. She’s watching over you, oui, but when you and some type are becoming close,’ (Madame made a somewhat obscene gesture) ‘elle est bien élevée, she averts her eyes. And, tu me l’as raconté, that’s the only time this evil spirit appears.’

‘Yes,’ Celia agreed. Am I really having this conversation? she thought.

‘Very well, I tell you, this is what you do. Next time you see him, you call for la belle-mère. Not necessary to shout her name out loud, just whisper in your mind, “Venez, venez à moi, aidez-moi.”’

‘All right,’ Celia promised.

For a few minutes after Madame Miri had left, she felt better. Perhaps she wasn’t mad after all, only haunted. In Goto the existence of supernatural beings did not seem so impossible. Out in the country, almost every village was guarded by one or more fetish figures, which resembled large grey stone fire hydrants hung with coloured rags and garlands of flowers. They had broad faces, staring eyes and huge sexual organs, and gave off, even to a sceptic like Celia, an ominous and powerful aura.

Even here in the capital, the totemic animal of the dominant local tribe, the pigeon, was honoured by a monumental sculpture of a huge white bird, described in tourist brochures as the ‘Pigeon of Peace’. Closer at hand, in a shadowy corner of Madame Miri’s courtyard, squatted two household gods, smaller versions of the village fetish figures. They wore bright, constantly renewed garlands of red and orange flowers, and each day Madame’s cook fed them: their open stone mouths were always smeared with dried blood and rice and fruit pulp.

But Celia’s euphoria lasted only briefly. She realised that if she began to take all this seriously she would be mentally worse off than before: not only having delusions, but starting to believe in ghosts, and thinking that she could exorcise them by invoking the name of an ancestor whom she had never met and who wasn’t even an ancestor. Going native, in fact, she thought. She had already heard stories about people, anthropologists mostly, who began by taking the local belief system too seriously and ended up partly or wholly off their rockers.

Some of these tales, and most of the information about Gotolese superstition, had come from a man in whom Celia was becoming seriously interested: the Deputy Chief of Mission himself, a career diplomat and former anthropologist named Charles Fenn. He was a tall, thin, very intelligent, slightly odd-looking man of about forty, with a long face, skewed eyebrows, a beaky nose, and a satirical, melancholy manner. She had liked him from the start, without ever thinking of him as a possible beau. But then, everyone at the Embassy liked Charles, from the Ambassador (a fat, elderly Texan magnate whose contributions to the Republican party had earned him this honorary post) down to the twelve-year-old Gotolese undergardener.

According to Embassy gossip, melancholy was not Charles’ normal mood, but the result of events beyond his control. He was recently separated and in the process of being divorced: his ex-wife, everyone said, had been a cute and even lovable airhead, but terminally indiscreet and totally unable to adjust to West Africa. Since she left, Charles had been under the weather emotionally, while remaining unvaryingly hard-working and sympathetic to his staff. ‘He really listens to you,’ people often said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Celia always replied, feeling mildly uneasy, because this was what people often said about her.

Her unease escalated to panic at her next one-to-one meeting with Charles, after her skilled attentiveness had drawn him into describing his years as an anthropologist.

‘It’s a very cluttered field,’ he was telling her. ‘In more ways than one. You know what they say about the Navaho, that the typical family consists of a grandparent, the parents, 3.2 children, and an anthropologist. It was almost like that where I was. I realised I wasn’t only going to be unnecessary and ineffectual, I was going to be superfluous.’

‘Tell me more,’ Celia murmured encouragingly as he paused and gazed out the window into the glossy green crown of an Embassy avocado tree.

Charles turned and looked at her. ‘You always say that, don’t you?’ he remarked with what struck Celia as a dangerous casualness. ‘“Tell me more.”’

‘No – well, not always,’ she stammered.

Charles smiled. ‘Or else you say, “That’s really interesting.” Persuading the other person to go on talking, so you’ll get to know them, and they won’t know you. I recognise the technique, you see, because I do it, too.’

‘I don’t…’ Celia began, and swallowed the rest of the fib.

‘But now I think it’s your turn. You tell me more.’ He did not take his eyes off her. They were a strange colour, she saw, between dark gold and green.

‘More about what?’

‘I don’t care. Your childhood, your opinions, your ambitions, your dreams, whatever you like. As long as it’s the truth, of course.’ Charles smiled.

‘I – uh.’ Celia hesitated; her heart seemed to flop in her chest like a fish.

‘I know. Tell me about your time in the Peace Corps, what you liked most about that.’ He glanced at the wall clock. ‘You have ten minutes, all right?’

‘All right,’ Celia said. She swallowed. ‘I think it was the way the villages looked at night,’ she was surprised to hear herself say. ‘Especially when there was a moon…’ Why did I agree? she asked herself. Why didn’t I just laugh it off and say – Not today or – I don’t feel like it? I could still say that. But instead she heard her voice going on, beginning to speak of things she’d not told anyone, not because they were private or shocking, but because nobody had ever really listened, they were all just waiting their turn to talk.

It’s the way he looks at me, she thought, glancing at Charles. He knows I’m here. Is that how I make people feel?

‘That’s very interesting,’ Charles said as she paused, glancing at the clock and then back at Celia. ‘Go on.’

‘Well. It’s because, you see, the desert isn’t quiet at night. There are all the sounds in the trees and scrub outside the village, rustlings and squeaks and sighs, and you’re there, you’re part of it… you feel…’ She looked at Charles Fenn. He was still listening; he heard her, every word. This could be important, she thought. It is important.

She thought it again after she left Charles’ office, and that evening back home. She told herself that Charles was a most unusual man. That without his flighty wife he would probably go far; with Celia, even farther – if she were ever her normal self again. Otherwise she would simply screw up his career, not to mention her own, she thought wretchedly. Then she reminded herself that there was no reason to worry about this, because nothing Charles had yet done or said suggested he wanted to go anywhere with her. But for some reason that made Celia feel even more miserable.

Things were still in this condition when Charles asked Celia to accompany him and another staff member to a reception at the French Embassy. The Commercial Attaché was in the front seat with the driver; Charles and Celia in the back, and as they drove through streets illuminated by the mauve and vermilion afterglow of a tropical sunset Charles described the rank, history and personal peculiarities of the people she was about to meet.

‘There’s a lot of rather odd characters in the local diplomatic corps, I’m afraid,’ he concluded. ‘But I hope you’re going to like it here all the same.’ The car lurched suddenly round a corner, flinging Celia, in her gossamer-light pale mauve muslin dress, abruptly against him.

‘Thanks, I think I will,’ she replied distractedly, trying to catch her breath, not moving away.

‘I’m very glad to hear that.’ Charles also did not move; under the cover of the attaché case on his lap, he put his hand on hers.

– You’re making another mistake, said the flat dead voice of Dwayne Mudd. At first Celia could not see him; then she realised he was sitting, grey and squeezed up, between Charles and the door.

– You think he’s so fucking great. He’s got –

I don’t want to hear it, Celia thought desperately, feeling the steady, disturbing, desirable pressure of Charles’ shoulder, arm and hand against hers.

– Athlete’s foot, and –

Remembering Madame Miri, she cried out silently in her mind to the other Celia Zimmern. Venez à moi, aidez-moi! How stupid it sounded: like calling on herself.

Miraculously, the horrible flat voice ceased. My God, it worked, Celia thought. But the shadow of Dwayne Mudd did not vanish: it remained in the car, silently moving its greyish lips, until they reached the French Embassy.

‘So, how does it go?’ Madame Miri asked next morning, waylaying Celia as she went out for an early run. Narrowing her eyes in the brilliant sun, she added, ‘Perhaps not completely well, yes?’

‘He’s still there,’ Celia admitted. ‘I can’t hear him any more, but he’s there, trying to speak, opening and shutting his mouth. Half the way to the French Embassy yesterday evening in the car, and all the way back – well, whenever I – you know. I can’t bear it any more!’ she cried suddenly. ‘I think I’m going mad.’

‘Ah non, chérie. Come, come chez moi. We shall consider this further.’

In a dazed condition, weakened by another night without sleep, Celia followed Madame to her shop and then, for the first time, through the curtain into the back room. It was low, dimly lit, hung with thick woven and embroidered fabrics and dominated by a kind of altar covered with an embroidered red cloth and crowded with flowers and images, including what looked like a lion with wings.

‘Sit down, please.’ Madame Miri indicated a low multicoloured leather pouf.

‘There is something,’ she said, opening her eyes after some moments of silent concentration. ‘I think this spirit of mud has got some hold on you.’

‘I don’t know—’ Celia said. ‘Maybe I feel guilty—’

‘Guilty, that is nothing. This is not your husband, only a stupid, jealous spirit. But I think perhaps there is some object that he has given to you, and through this he has power to come to you when he desires.’

Involuntarily, Celia glanced at her left wrist; at Dwayne’s mother’s gold watch. Madame Miri followed her gaze. ‘So that is his?’ she asked.

‘Yes; well, it was his mother’s.’

‘So, even worse. In it, her power is joined to his. I understand well now.’ She nodded several times.

‘You think I shouldn’t wear this watch when I go out with someone?’

‘Never you should wear it,’ Madame said solemnly. ‘It is dangerous to you always. Give it to me; I will take care of it.’

Somewhat stunned by this development, Celia did not move.

‘You must hold to persons; not to things,’ said Madame Miri, putting out her hand.

Slowly, Celia unfastened the gold-mesh band and placed her Cartier watch in Madame’s broad black-rimmed apricot-tinted palm, where it looked strangely small.

‘But if it’s so dangerous,’ she said, watching what she had come to think of as her property disappear into Madame’s fist. ‘I mean, if you have the watch, won’t he come to you?’

Madame Miri laughed. ‘If he comes, let him come. He will have a large surprise, will he not?’ She laughed again, more fully. ‘Don’t derange yourself, ma petite,’ she said gently. ‘I know how to deal with such as him, je te le jure.’

Five months later, Celia Zimmern and Charles Fenn were married in the garden of the American Embassy in Goto. There were well over a hundred guests; strings of coloured lanterns – ruby, sapphire, topaz, and jade-green – laced the tropical evening; fireworks were set off beside the pool. Madame Miri, who had created Celia’s spectacular white tulle and lace wedding dress from a Givenchy pattern, sat at one end of the long head table, resplendent in vermilion silk brocaded in gold, with a matching fantastically folded headdress.

‘A day of joy,’ she said when Celia, circulating among the company, stopped beside her. ‘I see that all is well with you.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Celia looked at Madame again. On both broad, glowing mahogany arms she wore a mass of gold bangles; among them was the gold Cartier watch. But that’s mine, Celia wanted to say; then she faltered, realising that the statement was false, and that anyhow this was the wrong time and place for it; that perhaps there would never be a right time or place.

Madame Miri, unembarrassed, followed the direction of her gaze. ‘That one has not appeared again to you, n’est-ce pas?’

‘No, not since—’ Celia glanced at her own slim wrist, on which there was now only a faint band of untanned skin. Out of practical necessity she had purchased a Timex from the Embassy commissary, but usually kept it in her handbag. ‘Has he appeared to you?’ she added, registering the emphasis in Madame’s phrasing.

‘Ah oui; I have seen him, with his little moustache,’ replied Madame Miri. ‘A good appearance, that fellow. But not interesting, no. Jamais. Not like that man of yours there, eh?’ She gave an intimate laugh, bubbly with champagne, and gestured towards Charles, who was also moving among the guests.

‘No,’ Celia said, trying to remember if she had ever told Madame Miri that the Wombat had a small moustache. She knew she had told Charles; indeed, a month ago, without really intending to do so, she had found herself telling Charles everything about Dwayne Mudd.

His reaction, as always, was interested and sympathetic. ‘I think most people see their former lovers sometimes, though not as clearly as you did. I used to see my wife; almost see her anyhow. And if you live in a place like this for a while you’re not surprised by anything.’

Somehow after that Celia had at last succeeded in forgetting Dwayne Mudd. But now, dizzied by happiness and champagne, she imagined him as a fretful ghost eternally bound to Goto, a country he would probably have deplored and detested – he hated what he called ‘the sticks’. She even wondered if he were present this evening, invisible and inaudible except to Madame Miri.

‘Do you think Dwayne’s at the party, then?’ she asked, glancing round uneasily, and then back at Madame Miri. In the jewelled light of the paper lanterns Madame looked larger and more formidable than ever. What she really resembled, Celia thought, was the female of the pair of larger-than-life mahogany figures in the local museum. Heavy-limbed, heavy-lidded, they had been roughly carved a century or more ago; they were identified on their label as Gardes des portes de l’enfer – guardians of the gates of Hell.

‘No.’ Madame Miri shook her turbaned head slowly, so that her heavy earrings swayed. ‘He is not here.’ She was no longer laughing. ‘He has gone where he should go.’ She pointed down, towards the earth. But then she smiled and raised her glass. ‘Do not think more of him, chérie,’ she told Celia. ‘He will not trouble you again.’