AFTER THAT BREAKFAST, MY descent to calamity was essentially laid out, all the necessary positions had been assumed (affectively at least), save one—Pascal’s replacing Ellen as my companion:
Despite further noble orations on the need for respectful handling of my ghosts, the group decided that I should coax them out and pump them as best I could. I should simply think of myself as getting to know them better—after all, wouldn’t I be giving the poor things an opportunity to unburden themselves? Since Mr. Sho-pan had proved himself to have the “seeing eye,” he should pay the flat a visit or two. I should report any unusual events as soon as they occurred, and perhaps Ellen could write everything down. Under Mrs. Sho-pan’s leadership, it all felt a little like starting up a club, The Sloane Square Ghost Society.
Feigning an air of diplomacy, I remained uncommitted without rejecting the plan outright; I waxed increasingly purple (sometimes in iambic pentameter) and, Pilate like, publicly washed my hands, putting the matter into those of Fate; I said I wouldn’t be able to do any coaxing, but if there were any future chance encounters (“should Fate see fit to cross our paths again”), I would see what I could learn of Walter and H. E. Jevons and the girl. Secretly, I thought James, whoever he was exactly, the most likely one to tell me. I said that naturally Ellen and I would welcome a visit from Mr. Sho-pan anytime, for any purpose.
We said our good-byes in the front hall of the hotel. Mrs. Sho-pan’s last words to Ellen were, “Of course you must come and stay with us, dear.” I overheard this remark, though it was spoken softly (almost conspiratorially) and though Pascal was saying something to me at the time, and I watched out of the corner of my eye as Ellen thanked Mrs. Sho-pan and kissed her on the cheek. Then the three of us, Ellen, Pascal, and I, stood briefly lost in the hall—it was a sudden intermission, when no one had thought ahead, the Sho-pans were gone, and we had to imagine on the spur of the moment what would be next. I thought, Okay, now that’s all settled, I suppose I should go upstairs and get to coaxing out my ghosts. I thought that both Pascal and Ellen were looking as if this was what was expected of me. Pascal handed me the two copied pages of the Daily Mirror, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. I said, “Oh,” and, “Thank you.” Someone came in the hotel’s front door, and we all turned to see who it was, quite shocking the poor old woman greeted so intensely by six wide eyes. Finally, Ellen said, mock-cheerily, “Well …” Pascal looked at his watch and said he would go change out of his dressy clothes. He kissed both Ellen and me, walked to the door beneath the staircase, which presumably led to the staff quarters below, and waved at us before disappearing through it.
We rode up in the elevator in silence. It seemed to me, perhaps overgloomily, that the metallic clanking made at each floor was like the sound of another iron door being latched. When we reached our floor, I went to pull back the lattice gate but couldn’t. Ellen said, “What’s wrong?”—two words, a glint of alarm, a sawtoothed edge of blame. I said the gate seemed to be stuck. Then the car suddenly bounced up another inch, scaring both of us, and I found I could now slide the gate open. As we walked down the dark hallway toward the door to the flat, Ellen’s last words—“What’s wrong?”—echoed in my ears.
Inside, she went straight to the bedroom. I followed her and found her lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. By now I had no feelings to speak of, only an almost prurient curiosity about what she was going to say. I took off my jacket and sat on the inside edge of my bed, facing her, wrapping my tie around my index finger like a window shade, letting it fall open, rolling it up again.
After a while, without looking at me, she said, “You didn’t tell them about my not being able to wake you … or about the smell of the whisky and the obscenities.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I guess I left some things out.”
Another long pause.
Finally, she said, “I’m not sure how I feel about all this. I’m not even sure I want to sleep here tonight.”
“I understand,” I said. “It’s a lot to take in at once.”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “Is that what I’m supposed to do, Cook?” she said. “Take it in?”
I had no answer to this question. I supposed it was rhetorical. She turned her head and looked at me intensely. She continued doing this until I said, “What?”
“I’m just thinking it seems like a long time to have known someone without really knowing him,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” she said.
“Isn’t that a little melodramatic?” I said. “Just because this stuff is a bit unusual, it doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a different person.”
“I want you to see a doctor, Cook,” she said.
“What for?”
“What for? Because something’s happening to you. Isn’t it obvious? You’re getting worse and worse, and you seem to have this notion that no matter how outrageous you become, it’s just something I’m supposed to ‘take in.’ It’s the story of our whole life together, if you want to know the truth.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Before we go into the story of our whole life together, I need to get something straight. You’re saying you think everything I said down there at the breakfast table is the result of some kind of mental illness?”
She rose from the bed abruptly, moved to the chair in the corner of the room, and sat, rather like a fighter taking to his stool. “Something is happening to you, Cook,” she said. “That’s all I know. Something’s been happening to you since we arrived here. This was supposed to be a trip … a chance … an opportunity for me to soak up atmosphere for my book. Instead, I’m soaking up—I don’t know—whatever new weird, incredible thing you come up with. Since we’ve been here, I’m worried about you half the time, concerned that you’re going off some deep end, concerned that you’re sick, and now we have this deal where I’m supposed to wander around London by myself because you’re back in the flat in some kind of coma and can’t wake up. I know—”
“I don’t think you can complain about atmosphere,” I said. “There’s been plenty of atmosphere.”
“I know you’re interested in spiritual stuff,” she said, ignoring me. “And I’m not particularly. That’s okay. But you’re having auditory hallucinations, Cook, talking to spirits like some—I don’t know—like some Hungarian person in a tent somewhere. Being transported to other time periods … it’s like something out of the National Enquirer. I mean, what’s next? Astral projection? Stigmata? Are you going to start writing mysterious messages on the walls, channeled from an entity in outer space? Why don’t you get really out there, Cook? Good old Ellen, she’ll just take it in.”
“The Sho-pans believe me,” I said, trying not to sound too much like a sulking child.
“The Sho-pans are English,” she nearly shouted. “They’d believe anything that had a ghost in it.”
“Actually, they’re Asian,” I said.
“Actually, they’re English,” she said. “To all intents and purposes. Listen, Cook, you didn’t describe these spirits to me and then we went and found the newspaper reports. You read the newspaper reports first and then said you’d met these …”
She held out her hands, palms up, as if she were pleading. “Don’t you see, Cook? I just think it’s possible that you—”
“I’m confused,” I said. “At breakfast, I thought you were as interested in this as Mimi was. You were as enthusiastic—”
“I was trying to make the best of a bad situation, Cook. My guidebook doesn’t say anything about what to do if your husband goes psycho while staying in London. What was I supposed to do? Besides … I don’t honestly know what to believe. I don’t think this is as simple as who believes in ghosts and who doesn’t. I don’t think it makes any difference, frankly, whether this stuff is in your head or actually happening—it’s still making you weird. It’s still affecting you. I can’t believe it’s good for you. Do you think it’s good for you?”
“I don’t think I have any choice,” I said.
“Oh, great,” she said. “I get it now. We’re going to be like those couples in horror movies where something horrible and scary is going on in the house, and for some strange, inexplicable reason they can’t just get in the car and leave. They have to stay in the house so a movie can be made about it. I guess we should start hanging up crucifixes all over the flat and wearing strings of garlic around our necks—”
“That would be to keep away vampires,” I said calmly.
“Maybe we should scatter human hair around our beds at night—”
“That would be to keep away deer.”
“What do you mean, you have no choice?” she said. “Of course you have a choice.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think I do. What did you mean, it’s the story of our whole life together?”
“What I mean is that for the last sixteen years I’ve accommodated one thing or another, whatever phase you happen to be going through. And I’m not just talking about pills and booze, though God knows that would have been enough to deal with. I’m talking about your gun-collecting phase, when you know I hate having guns in the house. I’m talking about your chanting-at-sunrise phase, when every morning Jordie and I were awakened at the crack of dawn by some mysterious moaning in the house.”
She stood and walked out into the hallway; I heard the sound of the medicine chest in the bathroom opening and closing. Then she was back.
“I’m talking about your sending Jordie off to school,” she said, “with black-bean-and-alfalfa-sprout burritos for lunch when every other kid’s got a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, because you didn’t think she was getting enough calcium in her diet. I’m talking about your bringing home morbid pictures for her to look at of old women bent over with osteoporosis, to get her to drink her milk. I’m talking about your low-fat, low-cholesterol, health-and-fitness, work-out-at-the-gym-twice-a-day-every-day and your fear-of-asbestos, fear-of-lead, fear-of-radon phases.”
She sat back down in the corner chair.
“And what was it last year?” she said. “The mysterious child’s face that nobody could quite see but you? How do you think it made me feel, your bringing out an X ray of your pelvis every time we had people over for dinner? How in the world do you think that made me feel?”
Somewhere near the midpoint of this long, excessive speech, I was distracted, charmed, and strangely comforted by the sight of a face in the window just over Ellen’s left shoulder: leaning in from the side of the frame, the face—the eyes and better part of the nose—of the girl I now assumed to be the young and lovely, possibly victimized, Victoria Jevons. She looked directly at me, in what I took to be a show of sympathy for the poor man so unfairly subjected to these ravings of a harridan.
It was for this reason (and for this reason alone) that I smiled when Ellen was finished, and continued smiling as I said, “I don’t know how it made you feel, Ellen. How did it make you feel?”
“I’m glad you find this amusing,” she said.
She stood, went to the wardrobe, and took out her beige all-weather coat. She draped it over her arm and moved to the hall door.
“I’ll tell you how it made me feel,” she said, beginning now to pull the coat on. “It made me feel tired,” she said. “Which is how I feel now. I feel very, very tired. I don’t know why I’ve accepted every quirky, idiosyncratic behavior you’ve dreamed up over the years. I don’t know why I’ve accommodated everything and everybody who has come my way my whole life long. I don’t know why I seem to push aside my own needs in order to meet everyone else’s. But I’m very tired. And I’m not doing it anymore.”
I continued to sit, unmoved, on the edge of my bed and held the gaze of Victoria Jevons at the window, listening first to my wife’s footsteps in the hallway and then to the sound of her leaving the flat. When I heard the door close, I turned for a moment toward the sound—it had a hard-edged, briefly painful tone of finality—and the thought of following her, catching her at the elevator (which I surely could have done), passed quickly through my mind. But I remained still. And when I turned back to the window, the face was gone.
At that moment, sunlight flooded the room, so abruptly it was almost startling, then faded away. I stood, walked to the window, and looked out. I seem to recall a faint, lingering moon up there in the now unfogging, pale, blue-white dome of the sky, but it’s more likely that I saw some haze-screened version of the sun. I’m not entirely sure what I saw. That night, however, I would stand at the same window, alone, and actually see the moon as it was overwhelmed and extinguished by charcoal-colored clouds. Pascal would phone, to see if I was all right, to see if there was anything I needed. Then I would return to the window and stand for a long time, rather empty-headed, brooding without a definite subject (if that is possible), and staring at the browns and grays and blacks of the jigsaw rooftops, the yellow domestic lights of other lives, the amberish-pink city glow that hovered over it all, and I would wait. I would wait, and in a while, rain would move in, and stay. It would rain every day until we left England.