Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes. And we always shall be. There it is. Now I wonder if you would forgive me, Miss Allgood, but I am a little tired on a sudden. I assume you shall see Miss Allgood to the station, Johnnie, will you? Forgive my son’s manners in not rising as his mother makes to leave the room, Miss Allgood. But perhaps you are accustomed to his forgetfulness.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘It was most interesting to meet you, Miss Allgood. I wish you a pleasant journey home. Perhaps your family would like the remaining cakes? Please take them if you wish.’

  ‘I hope we meet again, ma’am.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  A blear of rain suddenly, and a bitter, earthy smell. Schoolboys in sky-blue blazers and indigo shorts, as though their uniform was designed by a colour-blind pederast. Past a line of London plane trees, some with branches half wrenched from their trunks like amputations hideously botched. Beggarwomen are watching a council workman with a saw. He rends at the shoulder of a thick, fallen bough, rips the shockingly white sinews with his heavy-gloved hands. Buses and a coal truck inch through the sleet. Hailstones drum on the hood of a perambulator. You see the museum, austerely Greek, as you cross by the post office, and you are thinking of Mr Duglacz, his mild, lined face. How pleasant it will be to have his company again.

  And the letter is in your pocket. Today it will be sold. A piercing guilt takes you; it is as though the piece of paper is a child who is about to be abandoned to an orphanage. It almost seems to whisper: Do not put me away. But what choice have you left? It is only an object. You remember what it says; you are not selling that. What it says isn’t saleable anyway. It is what he would have wanted. He was not sentimental. The idea that you would be hungry and cold would have hurt him to the quick. You listen for his forgiveness as you stand in the street and it comes to you in the stillness of the snow on the railings. We must do what we must. We did not make the world. If we had, it might well have been worse.

  The afternoon smells of fog; you sense it coming from the river as it used to do in the Thirties, before London was at war, rolling in off the estuary like a yellow dream of fog, obliterating your very hand before your face. It frightens the old people and you felt for them, then. And they would live to know the blackout, its terrors. They had hardihood, so it seemed to you, they had come through war before, but blackout must have terrified them even more than did the Blitz, for a blade of light from a window would be treason. A morning when you awoke to find every front door on the Terrace had been plastered with handbills of a swastika bearing the slogan DEATH TO JUDAH. Who had stolen through the preternatural darkness, risking everything he had, through the ice-wreaths of cold and the cordite-scented air, to paste his filth to the walls of your street? To the hydrants and the gateposts and the Belisha beacons and the motor cars, as the bombers throbbed over the city. You yourself are old now, yet fog doesn’t seem to matter. And blackouts don’t matter either – they come in many forms. Of course, age can be forgotten, or successfully not remembered. But lately that is harder. There is always a mirror, and you are never alone when you look in one.

  The ting of the bell and then the particular and immediate restfulness of places where old books are gathered. The proprietor’s ancient Labrador is asleep in an armchair that was rescued when a gentlemen’s club in the Strand was bombed. You wander an L-shaped aisle of second-hand poetry: the tattered paper spines and faded leather bindings. On millboards on the gables of the mahogany shelves, the pinned-up notices of Leftist study groups and meetings, patchworks of bleached old postcards. And the subject-headings written in his scrupulous cursive. Socialists and Socialism, Sociology, Spain, Sexual Happiness and Marriage, including Birth Control, Family Life, Suffragette Movement, Stalin. A poster of a black fist clasping a white one, the watchword beneath them in mimeographed capitals: The Internationale Unites the Human Race. Mr Duglacz is not at his tome-laden table in the back of the shop; there is a young man instead, speaking quietly into the telephone, and there are several shabbily coated housewives browsing the overstuffed stacks of remaindered or jacketless romances. The portrait of Marx with its scarlet Cyrillic slogan, made poignant rather than ludicrous by the addition, many years ago, of an edging of Christmas tinsel around its broken ebony frame. The aroma of vigorous coffee arises like a blessing and over the door the embroidered sign reads ‘Go in Peace’. What a beautiful place to work. It would not be work at all. You wonder if it might be possible that he would need help; an assistant? Even for no money, it would be somewhere to keep warm. But no. It would be too much to hope for.

  Out of the dust comes a recollection of your daughter’s sixteenth birthday: a book Sara sent as a gift. ‘To my darling Pegeen from your auntie in Hollywood – tell BORING Mum to let you visit. Will introduce you to DIVINE Gregory Peck.’ The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers. Beethoven with bloodied rags protruding from his ears. Bach at an organ, keyboard littered with manuscript. Drunken Mozart being hefted through Vienna in a wheelbarrow. The laughter at the birthday party as they studied the strange pictures. Silly Sara never had a clue regarding presents. But Pegeen so touchingly kind when she wrote back to thank her. There are times you truly think your daughter the most admirable person you know. Wasn’t easy for her, either. Saw a thing or two, poor kid. Listen to you – ‘kid’ – and she a middle-aged woman. This morning she was teething in my dreams.

  You drift over towards the glass cases where the rare volumes are displayed, and the autographs and signed photographs of the famous. There is a letter from Abraham Lincoln to an Irish-born general, a menu initialled by Napoleon, a postcard from James Joyce to his brother, a fine first edition of Wilde’s De Profundis almost illegibly signed by its author. Cartes de visite and love letters; an attempt at a sonnet; the magnificently etched cornucopia of a medieval psalter’s frontispiece. How could such things be for sale? What are their truer stories? These foxed and stippled novels with their ex libris labels and insignia, their scrawled dedications and assertions of lasting love. It is suddenly as though the phantoms of the sellers are present in the doorway, glancing regretfully over their shoulders, guilty money in their hands.

  ‘Might I help you at all, madam?’

  ‘Is Mr Duglacz about?’

  ‘I am Mr Duglacz,’ says this ludicrously handsome youngster, his flop of sandy hair falling loosely over his brow. There are holes in the elbows of his donnish pullover and he looks as though he needs a bowl of soup.

  ‘Excuse me, I meant an older man.’

  ‘You are thinking of my uncle. I am Michael, should have said.’

  ‘Oh but how nice. The famous Michael. You went to Cambridge, I think?’

  ‘That’s right. Few years ago now. Just after the war.’

  ‘And you were decorated for bravery unless I am greatly mistaken?’

  ‘More a matter of luck than anything else. Right place at the right time, that’s all.’

  ‘I see the resemblance to your uncle. Particularly about the eyes. It is remarkable, actually. I am delighted to meet you.’

  He smiles so broadly that the creases in his cheeks would hold a shower of rain. What a sweet, infuriating face, like a grubby little boy’s. ‘All the men in my family look like brothers, I’ve been told. The women are not so alike, don’t know why. Was there anything in particular you were interested in at all, or just browsing?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing tremendously important. Only a little manuscript I’d been meaning for some time to have valued. Well, to be honest, it is something I’d be content enough to let go. Seems a shame to keep it to oneself when a proper collector would treasure it. It is an autograph letter from the Irish playwright John Synge.’

  ‘Oh I’m terribly sorry, Miss, we’re not acquiring just now. We’re rather over-stocked at the moment, as I’m afraid you can probably see. And to be frank, we’re sort of moving out of the manuscript line. We’re an unimportant little bookshop in the end.’

  ‘Oh. Oh I see. I quite u
nderstand. Well, no matter at all. No matter. You’re quite certain you wouldn’t want to take a look? It’s a nice little curio. It was valued several years ago at thirty guineas give or take. But one wouldn’t want to quibble. For cash, one could accept twenty.’

  ‘Rather too rich for our blood, I’m afraid. You might try Christie’s or Sotheby’s? I know a good man at Sotheby’s. Should be happy to ring him up and make an appointment for you, if that would be of any help? They’re planning an auction of literary collectables next summer, so I’m told. Rather think it’s where most of ours will end up.’

  ‘I would be happy to accept less, of course. Say fifteen pounds. Or ten. It’s only that it’s been on my conscience, keeping it all to myself. And so I woke up this morning and do you know what I thought? If old Duglacz would have that blessed nuisance of a thing for five pounds down, I would just as soon allow it to go.’

  ‘Really, thank you for thinking of us, but we’d be unable to take it.’

  ‘Yes of course. Well, there we are. No difficulty at all. And so your uncle is not here at the moment? Is he expected presently?’

  ‘Oh dear – you hadn’t heard. What an idiot I am. I’m so sorry to have to tell you that Ernie passed away in August. He had been ill for a short time. Cancer of the lung. He was very brave, as you can imagine. Tremendously brave. To the very last moment he was laughing and joking and writing notes and little letters to his friends. We all miss him terribly deeply. We’re just carrying on here as best we can.’

  A bus pauses outside the store, emptying out a gang of horseplaying schoolboys who puck at one another and throw caps in the puddles, a whirl of dirty-faced happiness.

  ‘I have shocked you. Please forgive me. Won’t you sit down a moment over here? May I offer you a handkerchief? Please don’t cry.’

  ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Michael. Please excuse my being upset.’

  ‘It’s quite all right, really. We know how people felt. He had so many friends in the business and in London generally. He was a wonderful person, so courageous and kind.’

  ‘He reminded me very much of a man I once knew in Ireland.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t awfully matter. A person I knew when I was younger. Thank you for telling me so gently and considerately. I mustn’t take up any more of your time.’

  ‘Forgive my dreadful manners, I’ve not even asked your name.’

  ‘It’s O’Neill. Miss O’Neill. I used to come in and out sometimes.’

  ‘Not Miss Allgood, do you mean? The lady from Dublin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, but my uncle spoke of you with great fondness. We tried to find you for the funeral. We wanted to write to you. Couldn’t rummage up your address. Would you forgive me just a moment, Miss O’Neill, there’s something in the back which Ernie wanted you to have if you happened ever to come in to us again.’

  He rises and goes into a curtained room behind the table, returning after a few moments with a small buff-coloured envelope on which someone once placed a cup of coffee.

  ‘Sorry about the stain. Don’t know how it happened. Things have been a little upside down about the old place as I’m sure you can imagine. We’re still finding our feet. It’s my cousin and I, by the way, from now on. Her name is Rebecca. Not quite sure where she is just now. Won’t you come in and meet her, too, some day if you’re passing?’

  ‘Of course. I should be honoured. But the envelope – what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m afraid. But he wanted you to have it. Please won’t you call in to us any time you happen by? Now if you will excuse me, there is some paperwork I sort of can’t escape from attending to. We’re short staffed today, I’m so sorry.’

  The museum grey and stately as you stand in Russell Square. Buses growl through the smoke fumes and the snow. A stone urn containing pampas grass in the window of a shop and a clerk hurrying by on his way to the Tube wondering what it is they sell there. He barely notices the old woman near the telephone box on the corner, the schoolboys not far from her trading football cards and sweets, the tranquilly uninspiring grey sky over Bloomsbury, the tremor of the old woman’s shoulders as she reads.

  Dear Miss O’Neill

  A little note just to tell you how much I have enjoyed your company over the years of our friendship. I’m afraid I’m not so well. I’ve thought of ringing you up. They’ve sent me to this chest-hospital which is like something out of Dante. Well, it’s not so bad as all that. They buck you up nicely. Can’t be easy for the nurses and doctors but they’re very fine people. So young, full of liveliness and brave, bright talk. Food’s not too ghastly; not that I’m eating much at this stage. Bit of fear now and again and of course regrets. Roads not taken and so on.

  I’m not a fellow for scenes or speaking out his mind. My late wife, may she rest, used always to chide me for not saying a thing out. But that is a man, I suppose. But I did want to tell you something, which I hope will not distress you – that I thought of you in many ways as fondly as the sister I never had, and, if I am honest, and I hope it will not offend you when I say it this plainly, as an even dearer and more special friend. It was an honour to know a lady as beautiful and kind and lively. And your lovely spirit and gaiety for life. Everything you ever said was so full of common sense, and yet charity, too, and feeling for people, and understanding. So much so that I often thought to myself: ‘If only everyone in the world were like my dear Miss O’Neill, we wouldn’t be in the pickle we are in.’ I used to greatly love a day when you came into my little shop and our nice long talks and happy joking. Books are so wonderful, aren’t they, how they bring people together. I think they are the best part of us, really – books and music. And courage. My assistant, Mr Boyers, would often rib me about you. He used to term you my ‘sweetheart’ and ‘best girl’ and so on. He retired the other month and has gone to his daughter, who is married in Truro. Anyhow; there we are.

  I’m afraid I don’t believe there is much in store for us on what is sometimes called ‘the other side’ but if there is, and who knows – I have been wrong many times! – I have made a little commitment of a spiritual nature to be with you all the days of your life, if I can be.

  Goodbye, my dear Miss O’Neill,

  With my sincerest gratitude,

  Your loving friend

  Ernest Duglacz

  11

  ST MATTHEW’S CHURCH RUSSELL SQUARE

  4.03 p.m.

  Agnes beatae virginis

  natalis est, quo spiritum

  caelo refudit debitum

  pio sacrata sanguine …

  The nave is cold and dark. Candles burn before the statues. The odour of beeswax and incense. You are trying to pray for Ernest Duglacz but the praying is hard, and the words of the prayers turn to steam. That gently intolerant, scrupulous, irascible, eternally Luddite old bookseller. He regarded the portable typewriter as an instrument of the devil, believed in sealing wax and quills and ornate sans serif the way others believe in Christ. No prayers exist any more for such believers as these; their credo is a thing of the past. But you try. Yes, you try. Perhaps attempting it is everything. But strange pictures come, which you don’t understand. The night the flying bomb fell on the street parallel to the Terrace, the queer whirr in the moments immediately before it struck. Sara in her costume when the two of you were in a picture. Sara in the limousine to Elstree. Mr Hitchcock was the director. It was a great chance, she told you. Really, you would have to stop drinking.

  And the incense or the odour of the beeswax polish raises a chapel in New York, on the East Side of the city. The rich, heavy wood of the serried lines of benches, and the purple of the confessional curtains. And high in the rafters, the carved faces of men and women, cut there by the boatwrights who had fashioned the timberwork on the corbels. The images of their people back in Ireland, it was rumoured, though nobody knew if it was true. And one of those graven, imperturbable faces always reminded you of an uncle who wen
t away one autumn to pick a harvest in England and never came back to Mary Street. Mercy for Ernest Duglacz. My dear, dear friend. You look up at the altar through the mote-filled beam of light. Mercy for all the departed.

  And you are remembering a wreath of lilies before a plaque in that church, for the Irish boys who died in the Civil War. The fighting Irish. Heroes of Gettysburg. Champions of brotherly freedom. Sara had no time for ‘all that auld talk’. They want the Irish to build their railroads, fight their wars, kill their Indians, whose land was robbed off them for nothing, Sara said. Then get soused and die quiet in some gin-shop, she said. And that’s the great plan for the Irish. The way some Americans go on, you’d swear no Irishman ever did anything bar shooting someone in the head and spouting the rosary. She liked being mischievous. It was one of the reasons you always loved her. She saw the world differently. Her own woman.

  The third time you came to New York, America was about to go to war. Recruiting officers were waiting on the waterfront. You and the other actors had watched some of the boys sign up to fight, as though they were joining some fraternity of revellers on a spree. Not a minute in America, like foals with the staggers, pucking one another, joshing, moon-eyed with exhilaration. A lad Sara had taken a shine to, Michael English from Ennis, had led two of his cousins to the tent in Castle Gardens and asked the Yankee corporal for a uniform and a gun, for he wished to prove himself for the Republic of liberty. Tis a tiger you’re looking at here, boss. I’ll kill a thousand before breakfast. It had seemed strange to you – to come all this way in the hope of a new life, only to fight in another man’s war.

  You didn’t understand the war in Europe, its causes, its purposes. Sara had tried to explain it to you, but you suspected she didn’t understand it either. You suspected that nobody did. Her eyes were sea-green and they shone like dappled water. She adored America. She would make herself a home here. If you’d half a pick of sense, you’d do the very same, she told you. Jesus God, was she bossy. Dear Sara.