Mr Godley's Phantom Read online

  Long Years apart – can make no

  Breach a second cannot fill –

  The absence of the Witch does not

  Invalidate the spell –

  The embers of a Thousand Years

  Uncovered by the Hand

  That fondled them when they were Fire

  Will stir and understand –

  Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PART ONE: An Infection of Evil 1945–1947

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART TWO: Something Apparently Inconsequential May 1948

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART THREE: You Fit My Wounds Exactly May 1948

  1

  2

  PART FOUR: Close Attention to Detail May 1948

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART FIVE: Wasp Weather August 1948

  1

  2

  Editorial Note

  Mal Peet and Mr Godley’s Phantom: A Ghost Story

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  An Infection of Evil

  1945–1947

  1

  AFTER THE WAR, after he was out, Martin Heath did almost nothing for several months. He was still young but his dreams – nocturnal and diurnal – belonged to an older man, a man much damaged and long steeped in blood. Death operated the film projector inside his head.

  He could not imagine returning to Cambridge and told himself he was too busy being haunted to get a job. To hold one down. He took himself to the doctor. Old McInnis, his father’s partner, whose cold hands had probed his childhood, had retired. The new doctor was a woman. He had never entertained the notion of such a thing. He’d intended to exaggerate his symptoms: the tremor, the headaches. To his very great surprise he found himself bent in the chair, weeping, leaking sobs and snot. She wrote out a prescription and a letter declaring him unfit for work on medical grounds. She also offered to refer him to a psychiatrist: an offer he declined, silently offended, not considering himself mad in any way. Thereafter he went, on Tuesdays, to the Labour Exchange to collect his dole, although sometimes he forgot.

  He spent two days getting his father’s car operational. The Riley had grieved, dulling, in the garage for over a year. His mother had no use for it – she’d never learned to drive – but had been unable to bring herself to sell it. Her husband had died behind its wheel, after all. Parked, smoking his pipe, watching girls leave the High School. Cardiac arrest. The hot spillage from his pipe had left a scorch on his flies.

  Martin had been in Italy when the news reached him. The balls-up they were now calling the Battle of Anzio. A lull in the German shelling. It had taken him three attempts to understand the letter; it was as if the overhead roar of American planes had made him temporarily illiterate. The army chaplain was a Canadian. One of his eyes was hidden under the bulge of a field-dressing, the other blinked incessantly.

  The car’s upholstery still smelled of Dad: tobacco, the almondy whiff of Brylcreem, leather polish. There were two hoarded jerry cans of petrol in a corner of the garage. Martin got the car started with the crank handle and nursed it to Jessop’s.

  The mechanic who came out of the workshop onto the forecourt and greeted him by name was Jessop’s son. What was his first name? Shit, it had gone. Fallen into one of those gaps, fissures, in his head.

  ‘Wotcha, Martin. Heard you was home. How’s tricks?’

  They’d been at school together. Jessop the Younger still looked like a schoolboy: the same girlish fringe of biscuit-coloured hair, the same circular, thick-lensed specs behind which his eyes floated, blue tadpoles in a jar.

  ‘Yeah. All right. You know.’

  ‘Still the same ole place. Nothin’s changed. You’ve not missed much.’

  He could think of nothing acceptable to say. The honest words hung silent in the air between them:

  I can’t talk to you. I’ve been away in a war. You haven’t.

  And: It wasn’t my fault. I would’ve gone. It was my eyesight.

  ‘I’m sorry about your ole man, Martin. It don’t seem fair.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Anyway …’

  Jessop’s eyes swam over to the car. ‘But you got the old Riley goin.’

  ‘Only just. It needs work. Clutch cable. Distributor …’

  Jessop held up a hand, the oily palm like an etching.

  ‘Don’t you worry. You come back next week, I’ll have her running like a dream. Long as she don’t need parts. We can’t get parts for love nor money these days. Shall we say Tuesday?’

  As they were parting Jessop called, ‘Some of us get together down the Plough, Fridays. You might wanner drop by, you fancy a jar.’

  Martin saluted vaguely. ‘Yeah,’ he lied, ‘I might do that.’

  He got himself a petrol ration book and made occasional trips, usually aimless, often to the coast. He’d park the car and sit for unmeasured periods of time willing the clouds to remain clouds, not smoke. Willing the Devil’s projector to shut down.

  On one occasion, near Lulworth, the desire to drive off the cliff was very strong. He was about to release the handbrake when sudden rain squalled against the windscreen, and for some reason this changed his mind. He drove to a pub where he drank, shakily, a half of bitter and a whisky. The only other customers were two elderly men who watched him sidelong and suspiciously.

  He could scarcely remember being the boy in whose room he slept, although its contents had a disturbing familiarity. The jigsaw puzzles in their boxes: 2 pieces missing, sky in fastidious writing. The Sherlock Holmes adventures. John Buchan. This book belongs to M J Heath. The biscuit tin containing sets of cigarette cards held together by rubber bands, now dry and perished. Cricketers, film stars. Regimental uniforms.

  He’d awake, gasping, into the dark no-man’s-land between Then and Now.

  He drank, at first to keep his mother company. They often played cards in the evenings. Some games necessitated a dummy hand, which his mother dealt to the place at the table where her husband no longer sat, as if he’d merely left the room to visit the lavatory. They played with the wireless on, not listening to it but using it as a reason not to talk. She drank gin, topping up her glass in the kitchen between games. As the evening wore on, mistakes would enter her play and, eventually, she would become tearful.

  ‘I don’t know who you are any more, Martin.’

  Or: ‘I lost your father, and now I feel as though I’ve lost you.’

  Or: ‘I feel doubly bereaved.’

  So Martin started to work his way through his father’s Scotch while they played. It helped him murmur the slurred phrases that seemed appropriate or required. Combined with the tranquillisers from the new doctor, it sometimes unmonstered his sleep.

  He never went to the Plough, but when he felt he should try human society he went to the Lion and Lamb on the other side of town where he was less well known. For a while he was content to eavesdrop, timing his pints, sitting at the bar like someone perfectly happy in his solitude; a man spending an hour or two away from his wife, perhaps. Then one night he got into a fight. Some buffoon said something about Hitler having the right idea about the Jews, say what you like. His mates laughed, agreeing. Martin put his drink down carefully on the beer mat, stood up and took the man by the throat. By the time he stumbled out into the street a mere three minutes later he’d damaged the man and two others.

  B
ecause he’d known how to, because it was uncomplicated.

  Because he felt released by it.

  He walked a hundred yards or so, no one following him, until he came to a stone horse trough. He sat on its rim and lit a cigarette. When he took it from his mouth it had blood on it. He waited until he heard the police car, then stood up and stepped into the road where he would be clearly illuminated by its headlamps.

  The sergeant knew him, had always known him, and had read of Corporal Heath’s gallantry, his honours, in the local press. He brought Martin a cup of tea and left him sitting in a small cubicle next to the Duty Desk.

  When he came back he said, ‘I’ve had a word, Martin, and we won’t be taking this any further. There was provocation, the way we see it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I know what you’ve been through. Well, I don’t, but I can imagine. But let’s have no more of this, there’s a good lad. Think of your mother.’

  Her forty-eighth birthday fell in November. Martin drove her to Dorchester through filthy weather and treated her to afternoon tea at the Royal Wessex Hotel. He slipped the waiter a shilling to seat them closer to the fire. For the first time since his return she wore make-up, and nothing black. She handed her coat – lavender tweed with a fur-trimmed collar – to the waiter and then, walking to their table, glanced at herself in a tall wall-mounted mirror and touched up her hair.

  During the meal Martin noticed that two well-dressed middle-aged men at a nearby table glanced at her a number of times; he saw one of them purse his lips and nod appreciatively at his companion. It seemed to Martin – a slight adjustment of her posture, a half-smile not occasioned by the slice of ersatz Dundee cake in front of her – that his mother was aware of this apparent admiration. And with a shock that was almost physical – he shifted in his chair as if to counteract it – he realised that his mother was still an attractive woman, one who might not be content to remain a widow. He suffered a brief, grotesque vision of her in a hotel bedroom with one of the sleek businessmen. His cup shook; he had to use both hands to lower it onto the saucer. Yes. His mother might well be ready for a new life.

  One without him in it. One for which he was, in fact, an obstacle.

  He wrote to his tutor at Trinity. It took him a while to remember the man’s name.

  The reply was prompt and cordial. Yes, in the circumstances, Martin could resume his degree at the beginning of the Lent term which, Doctor Merrett reminded him ‘no doubt unnecessarily’, commenced on the fifteenth of January.

  2

  HE LASTED three terms.

  Allowances were made for his behaviour. After all, there were a good many ex-servicemen at Cambridge; it was not surprising that a few of them were a little, well, erratic. That chap at Corpus Christi who went to pubs and challenged customers to drink a yard of ale out of his tin leg. The former Bomber Command fellow at Peterhouse, who liked to sing hymns in Coe Fen, naked.

  At the beginning of December 1946, lacking a better option, Martin went home to Dorset for the Christmas vacation. At his mother’s insistence, which he considered perverse, he accompanied her to a round of dinners, drinks parties and lunches. He was surprised by how many of these there were, by how extensive his mother’s acquaintanceships had become. It seemed to him that she might have been more the merry widow without him in tow. Which was, perhaps, why she had him in tow.

  Conversations at these tiresome occasions soon became predictable: the reckless socialism of Atlee’s Labour government, especially the unworkable idea of a free national health service; rationing, and ways to get round it; the continuing and ridiculous presence of German and Italian prisoners of war in the country and the cost of feeding and housing them.

  And how Martin was getting on at Cambridge.

  ‘Margery tells me you’re reading History, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fascinating subject. Bit of a history buff myself. Any particular, ah, area of interest? I’m rather hot on the Tudors, personally.’

  Somehow Martin managed not to say, I’m specialising in the theory of history as complete balls. That historians are preposterous liars and always have been. That theses, overviews, explications, are all self-serving nonsense. That the truth is that history is merely the story of mankind stumbling from one brutish fuck-up to the next. And I know because I was very recently part of one.

  Instead, he said, ‘I’m rather interested in ninthcentury Persia at the moment. Shall I fetch us another drink?’

  He couldn’t decide whether to return to Trinity or not. Then, in the middle of January, the matter was taken out of his hands.

  A raging polar winter did what Hitler had failed to do: it invaded England, crushed it, brought it to a standstill. Snow levelled its contours and imposed a terrible silence. Army troops worked alongside prisoners of war to dig out railway cuttings which, the following day, filled again. Tides froze. Canals solidified. Snowploughs were swallowed by snow. Coal, already rationed, became unobtainable. Electricity was intermittent. Telephone lines collapsed.

  Martin and his mother spent most of their days in their beds, nursing warmth. When the electricity did come on, they heated canned foods and ate them hurriedly. Now and again, wearing lots of clothes, they played cards by candlelight. The radio came and went unpredictably. Like everyone else, they presumed this waywardness of the weather would be short-lived.

  It was not. Britain’s paralysis continued through February. There were rumours of cannibalism in the north of Scotland.

  In early March, in a last wild gesture, the winter flung an icy blizzard across the country. The thaw that followed it was accompanied, calamitously, by endless rain. England’s rivers overran their courses; half the country was flooded. The East Anglian fens, in which Cambridge sat islanded, became a vast lake.

  Martin waited. And continued to wait.

  When postal services resumed in April he received a letter. The envelope was of quality paper, not the usual flimsy stuff. Basingstoke postmark. Martin’s reluctance to open it irritated his mother.

  Late in the morning he took it up to his room.

  A cursive letterhead: Whittier, Locke & Sons, Solicitors & Commissioners of Oaths. Two pages, typed. He looked at the signature, three verticals and two wriggles of black ink above its translation, James R. Locke, and below that the words Junior Partner. It meant nothing to him at first.

  Martin stopped reading, looked again at the signature. His blood thumped inside his ears and it seemed to him that the air in the room had become difficult to breathe. James Locke. ‘Lucky’ Locke. Lieutenant Locke. Lucky and insanely brave. Brave enough to cry in front of his men when they entered Hell at Belsen.

  The projector whirred. The images flickered, steadied. He could not stop them. Lucky sobbing obscenities while forcing SS women, his pistol to their heads, to drag bodies to mass graves. The silent skeletons, who yet moved on legs of bone, walking towards him, slow as dreamers but all eyes. The others, heaped, skulls muddled with shin bones, claws, shrunken genitals. Shit and slurry and decomposition. Martin had felt neither rage nor even revulsion. Rather, it was like discovering that he had contracted an incurable disease; that, having inhaled the miasma of death, he could never be well again. That his heart might eat itself.

  He dropped the letter and doubled up on the bed, his breathing making phlegmy moans in his throat. After several minutes he sat up and fumbled out the bottle he kept in the drawer with his underwear. He took a slug straight from the neck and let the burn filter down into his chest, then went to the window and shoved it open. The sky was full of ash. No, not ash; snow. Dear God, not again. But the flakes vanished as soon as they touched ground. He lit a cigarette, but its taste was vile and he flicked it out onto the lawn.

  After a while he took up the letter again. His eyes skittered along the text. He had to make himself read every sentence at least twice. The lieutenant dwelt awhile on the subject of the recent ‘apocalyptic’ weather.

  He folded
the letter back into its envelope, put it into his coat pocket and went for a walk. There was no sign of snow having fallen. He assumed he’d imagined it.

  Over dinner, yielding to his mother’s curiosity, he said, ‘From my old platoon commander.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Yes. One of the good guys.’

  She grimaced at the Americanism. Waited.

  He said, ‘This is real ham, isn’t it? Where on earth did you get it?’

  For a few days he tried to put the letter out of his mind. Because thinking about the letter meant thinking about Lucky Locke and thinking about the lieutenant meant thinking about all the rest of it. Watching it.

  Then, late one morning while he was poking about in the sodden garden, he heard his mother singing, accompanying the wireless. A sentimental love song he half remembered from before the war. Motionless, he listened to her for a minute or so, then dropped the trowel into the flower bed and went inside. He washed his hands then picked up the telephone, dialled 0 and gave the operator the number in Basingstoke.

  3

  HE WAS ATTRACTED to the place, felt a sort of affinity with it, as soon as he saw it. Burra Hall was, he supposed, a mere hundred years old, if that, but occupied its leafy cleft in the moor as if it had always done so; as if, in fact, it had been formed by the same geological upheaval that had created the rocky hill behind it and the heaped, harsh slabs that capped it. The house was built of that same granite, but its architectural details – window bays, lintels, the two columns that supported the portico – were of a more mellow and paler stone.

  Out of habit he worked out a plan of attack on the place. The Bren gun on that higher ground to the right. Good cover: gorse, jumbled rock. Move the platoon up along the dead ground between the lawn and the paddock. Grenades, then—