Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  Still waters run deep, she could hear her mother saying. It’s always the quiet ones …

  ‘Tell me,’ she prompted.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, his tone a little reserved. ‘I was thinking about it on the plane, like if I was in your situation where I didn’t know anything about my father, and I was asking myself if I would want to know.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well Annie, I kind of had the thought that the past was the past, you know? Whether I’d want to find out things, whether it would really change anything now …’

  ‘I should think it would change things now,’ she said.

  ‘But for the better?’

  She frowned. She was uncertain of the thread he was pulling, where he was going with this thing.

  ‘I mean, for example, say you found out something you didn’t want to find out?’

  ‘Such as?’ she asked.

  ‘Like he wasn’t everything he was supposed to be … like he had an affair or something.’

  Annie smiled. ‘Christ David, is that the worst scenario you can imagine, that my father might have had an affair? You really think that might change my viewpoint now?’

  ‘Everything changes your viewpoint Annie, even the little things.’

  She stopped for a moment. She thought of the flight up here, the thoughts she’d had on the plane, as she’d walked through the airport concourse, as they’d pulled away in the cab and started towards the hotel. She’d had many shifts of viewpoint, and they were just little things.

  ‘Say it was something worse than that,’ David said. ‘Like he had done something bad … I mean really bad.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘I think I would have known about it,’ she said. ‘I think my mother might have said something … I mean, if it was that bad then there’s no way that I wouldn’t have found out something. And what about Forrester? Surely he would have said something if there was really something worth saying.’

  ‘What about this Forrester?’ David asked. ‘How many times have you met him?’

  ‘Twice,’ she said.

  ‘Two times you’ve met him, and spoken to him for literally a few minutes each time, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Annie said.

  ‘So who the hell is he? Where does he fit into anything?’

  Annie leaned forward. ‘What makes you think he has to fit into anything David? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  David smiled, shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I think sometimes I’m a little possessive, you know? Everything has happened so fast, seems it’s been no more than a few days and already we’re going away to Boston together.’

  ‘It has only been a few days,’ Annie said, ‘and we are going … in fact David, we have gone to Boston together.’

  He laughed, seemed to relax a little. He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Ignore me,’ he said. ‘This is what I was talking about when we went over to my apartment.’

  Annie raised her eyebrows. ‘What bit exactly?’

  ‘You know, the thing about pushing the barriers, like when you start to look at yourself and realize there are things that perhaps you don’t like.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘The things you don’t like about yourself that you hope no-one will ever find out.’

  Annie shook her head.

  ‘Jealousy,’ David said. ‘Let’s face it Annie … I’m a little jealous.’

  ‘Jealous?’ she said, and started to smile.

  ‘No, seriously … I don’t mean like Fatal Attraction-type jealous, bunny-boiling and all that, but you know when you really like someone, when you really care for someone, well I kinda get like I want them all for myself and there’s nothing left to share.’

  ‘You’re jealous about Jack Sullivan and Robert Forrester? Christ David, I’ve known Jack for years, and Forrester must be getting on for seventy. I really don’t think you have a thing to worry about.’

  David smiled, leaned forward and took Annie’s hand. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but we are men, you see? We are different creatures altogether, and once we find someone, I mean really find someone, then we kind of go a little crazy.’

  ‘But if I talk to another man you’re not gonna do anything nuts, okay?’

  David laughed, seemed back to himself again. ‘No, I’m not gonna do anything nuts, Annie. I think I’m just overcompensating.’

  ‘Over-compensating for what?’

  ‘For all the years I’ve believed that being with someone couldn’t feel as good as this.’

  Annie smiled; she was touched.

  ‘I’m sorry –’ he started.

  She raised her hand. ‘Enough of the sorry already. Eat your eggs, drink your coffee, go to your meeting, okay?’

  He nodded. ‘Okay.’

  And he did. He ate his breakfast, drank his coffee, and then he rose to leave. She watched him as he pulled on his jacket, leaned across the table and kissed her forehead, and then holding her hand he told her he wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours.

  ‘Take in some sights,’ he said.

  ‘And no talking to strange men, right?’

  ‘Not just the strange ones Annie O’Neill … no talking to any men.’

  David laughed. She laughed with him. And then he was walking away, and just for a moment a slight trepidation about what she had let herself in for crept into her thoughts.

  She brushed it away. It went – effortlessly, silently – and for a while she sat alone in the small hotel restaurant believing that whatever this might bring it was better than what she had – or more accurately, didn’t have – before.

  TWENTY-THREE

  There was something about waiting that unsettled Annie O’Neill.

  After breakfast, after David had left for the city, she went back to their room and sat in a chair leafing through a copy of Tatler that someone had left behind on the coffee table. Then, already restless and a little agitated, she went to the window and looked out across the green lawns that spanned the length of the building, at the slip-road from the freeway, and the cars that hurried past as if late for their destinations.

  She could remember a time, a time that seemed an age ago, when she had accompanied her mother to a hair salon.

  A woman had sat beside Annie’s mother, a woman she seemed to know, and they had talked for a little while as their heads baked inside their space-helmets.

  Secondary melanoma, three, four months and he was dead, the woman told Annie’s mother.

  He went somewhere out west, to some place where they used Steiner’s teaching. Iscador they gave him. That’s essence of mistletoe, something about a parasite plant curing parasite diseases, but he just kind of dissolved away. I saw him just before he died, out with some nuns in a convent hospital near Secaucus. His face was all drawn up tight, his cheeks thin like tissue, as if you could just push your finger right through them and feel them pierce like rice paper. Scared me Madeline … never so scared in all my life. Little more than forty he was, running every day, didn’t smoke, drank less than a Puritan preacher, faithful to his wife, worked for that corporation … you know, that big new place out near where the New Jersey Turnpike crosses 280 …

  And Annie had listened, listened to every word, and though she hadn’t understood much of what they were saying she nevertheless understood the emotion. It was something close to fear, and something about waiting for someone to die.

  And she’d had a thought, a single thought that haunted her even after they’d left the salon and her mom had taken her to De Walt’s and bought her a cream soda float for being such a good girl while momma had her hair fixed.

  And the thought was: There you are you old dreamer … there you are again.

  Like fear was nothing new. Like waiting for something bad to happen was something she’d experienced before but could not remember. However hard she tried, she could not remember.

  In the hour or two aft
er David had gone she felt that same emotional twinge. She was alone, at least on the face of it, having placed her trust in a man who was little more than a lover, hadn’t even become a real friend as yet, and here she was, hundreds of miles from home, and he had gone. How long had he said? Shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours. Well, that couple of hours had already expired, and surely if he was going to be considerably longer than that he would at least call. He would call, wouldn’t he?

  Annie thought to go out, to take a walk, see the sights, but the idea that David might phone kept her in the hotel room until gone noon. He’d left just after nine, but then of course the traffic may have been bad.

  By one o’clock she was cursing herself for not asking for the name of the insurance company he worked for. If she’d known the name she could have called, asked if he was there, or had he already left? But even if she’d had the number she wondered if she would have made the call. Would that have irritated him, would he have felt that she was a little obsessive? For God’s sake, he’d gone to a meeting, a business meeting with his employers, perhaps prospective clients, and she was panicking that he might not return, that this was some sort of awful practical joke. Find a girl, get her to sleep with you, take her out to Boston and leave her in a hotel.

  Annie O’Neill smiled to herself as she paced back and forth from the bathroom to the door of the room; suddenly she stopped in her tracks.

  What was she doing?

  This was crazy.

  She glanced at her watch; it was just twenty after one. She was hungry, decided to go down into the restaurant and have some lunch.

  She reached the door and the phone rang.

  Right there beside the bed the phone rang. The sound was shrill, piercing the silence of the room. She jumped, startled, and then almost leapt across the bed to snatch the receiver from the cradle.

  Mrs Quinn?

  Annie frowned, and then – realizing – she smiled and said, ‘Yes, this is she.’

  A message from your husband. He says he’ll be a little later than planned. He suggested you have some lunch in the restaurant, that he hopes to be back by about four or five, okay?

  ‘Okay,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you.’

  She set the receiver in its cradle, and then rising from the bed she asked herself why he hadn’t asked to speak to her directly. Perhaps he’d called and she hadn’t heard the phone. Had she been in the bathroom or something? She couldn’t remember a second when she’d been out of earshot. Perhaps David just wanted reception to relay a message to ‘Mrs Quinn’, like it was something to make her smile.

  It had made her smile.

  Why was she getting so wound up about something that really meant nothing at all?

  There you are you old dreamer … there you are again.

  She shrugged the thought away, and headed down to the restaurant.

  Annie ate what the mâitre-d’ suggested – clam chowder, a green salad with avocado slices and lemon mayonnaise. The food was good, she hadn’t realized how hungry she was. Perhaps the sea air. Perhaps the sex. Perhaps compensation for being alone someplace strange and feeling there was no-one to talk to. Like Elvis.

  After lunch she did go out. David had relayed his message, there were at least a couple of hours to kill, and if he called again he could spend a little time wondering where she might have gone. It would serve him right for dragging her out here and then leaving her by herself.

  She didn’t even know the name of where she was, but for a little while she lost herself in the gift shops and bookstores that seemed to populate the harbor-facing street with alarming frequency. She bought a copy of Heart Songs And Other Stories by Annie Proulx, sat on a bench at the end of the street and started to read until the cold was too much for her to bear. She walked back slowly – aimlessly – and by the time she reached the hotel it was almost five.

  She stopped at reception to ask if her husband had returned, if there had been any messages. She was told No, there’s been nothing, but we’ll let you know the moment he calls, okay Mrs Quinn?

  Okay, she’d said, but it wasn’t, and it still wasn’t okay when she reached her over-warm room and sat on the edge of the bed.

  She took off her coat, used the small two-cup kettle and a complimentary sachet of instant coffee to make a drink. Seated in the armchair she tried to read again, but her mind was elsewhere. She considered going down to the restaurant again and eating an early dinner, but she wasn’t hungry, at least not in the nourishment and vitamin department. It was boredom-hunger, that gnawing sense of agitation that makes you feel that anything could be better than sitting waiting for something to happen.

  She was angry with herself, angry that she was feeling like this. This was one of those things that David had spoken of in the apartment, when the something you wind up with might not be altogether better than the nothing you had before.

  She turned at the sound of footsteps approaching the door.

  Her heart stopped.

  The footsteps didn’t.

  She cursed, rose from the chair and tipped the remainder of the foul-tasting instant coffee down the sink. She wanted to throw the cup in there too, to hear it smash, to spend her time collecting fragments of delicately painted porcelain from the linoleum floor. It would be something to do for God’s sake.

  She left the bathroom, started towards the window, and even as she heard the door open, even as she saw David appear in the frame, his face ruddy, his hair windswept, the smell of the outside rushing in with him like a long-lost cousin at Christmas, she wanted to challenge him, to ask him what the hell he had been thinking of …

  But she couldn’t.

  There were no harsh words, no interrogation about where he had been, what he had been doing, why he didn’t call her, visit, send a postcard …

  There was simply relief that he was there.

  She felt that now he’d arrived she could be herself.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ he said quietly, and then he walked towards her and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I had no idea they would want me for so long … there were some people we had to show around, prospective clients, and they had three hundred yards of questions. Jesus, I was furious.’

  He pulled her close and hugged her.

  Annie let him overwhelm her with his presence, with his person, and for a moment she could think of nothing to say.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said eventually. ‘I had some lunch, went out for a walk. I even bought a book.’

  David was shaking his head. ‘I really didn’t mean to leave you here all day,’ he said, and then he let her go, and without taking his hands from around her he looked right at her.

  There was something in his eyes, something that suggested exhaustion, and when he moved to the edge of the bed and seemed to drop she asked him if he was okay.

  He shook his head, smiled as best he could, and said he was fine. Just fine Annie.

  ‘I think we should go out,’ he suggested. ‘Go take a look around, have a drink or something. What d’you reckon?’

  ‘A good idea,’ Annie said. Her eagerness was obvious. She felt like she’d been trapped inside all day. The world beckoned.

  She gathered her coat and purse, and together they left the hotel. They walked, she held on to his arm, and everything seemed back to rights to her – the sounds and smells of this place, the faces of people walking by, the muted colors of early winter invading this territory.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ David said at some point.

  Annie glanced sideways at his worn-out face.

  ‘I’ve been thinking that we should do something different.’

  ‘Kind of different?’

  He smiled, put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. ‘I don’t know, something spontaneous … like pack everything up and go somewhere for six months, maybe Europe or someplace.’

  She laughed suddenly, a little awkwardly. ‘And how the hell could we afford to do something like that?’
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  David slowed but didn’t stop walking. ‘I’ve got a little money saved, you know? I mean, maybe we could put whatever money we have together and do something like that.’

  ‘You might have a little money, but I’ve got about enough to pay the rent and eat for the next three weeks. I don’t exactly make a great deal from the store.’

  David frowned and shook his head. ‘You haven’t managed to save any money at all?’

  ‘This is real life,’ Annie said. ‘I am fortunate to have bought the lease on the store from the sale of my parents’ house, and thankfully the apartment I live in is in a rent-control area. The money I make from the store is just about enough to get me through from one month to the next.’

  David nodded understandingly, but his disappointment was palpable. There was little he could have done to disguise the expression he wore. ‘So no six months wandering around Europe then?’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not David. Six months away from the store and I’d come back to nothing at all.’

  ‘So maybe I should sort out my apartment, decorate it, perhaps look for some other line of work. I feel I should stay put for now, that I should get used to being in one place for more than a week at a time.’

  His voice trailed away.

  She knew he didn’t wish her to say anything; he wasn’t done with his line of thought.

  She glanced at him again. He was smiling. He turned towards her. She smiled back.

  ‘I was thinking that when we get back to New York you could help me … if you wanted, of course.’

  She nodded. ‘I would like to help,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s good.’

  They didn’t speak again, and after crossing a junction at the end of the street David pointed to a bar on the facing side. The place was jammed with people, the sound deafening, but there was great warmth in that sound, an overwhelming feeling of life, of being alive.

  They jostled with people – people laughing, people shouting orders – and only when she stood there, the counter-top ahead of her, David to her right, strangers all around, did she think Why am I here? Why have I come out here when what I really want to do is stay behind in the hotel with David?