Giving Up the Ghost

by Hilary Mantel

  I never saw a ghost in Africa, though more than once death came so near me I had to grapple with him. It seemed to me that ghosts—the knocking, echoing, pesky sort—were a manifestation of Europe that would trail after the person who was not yet at home in Africa: who was only half-adjusted to a new, deeper state of emergency. I never felt that unease in the empty house, the queasiness of populated rooms where you can’t see the population: or fear of the dark. It seemed to me that symbols in Africa organized themselves differently. Outward manifestation of inner chaos came in fatal road accidents and suicides: the truck without lights, the one drink too many, the misspelled police report that got filed in the waste bin. Any number of lives were trashed, casually, born and unborn; and in Africa, I actually knew a woman who died in childbirth. She was just one among the continent’s casualties, but the one I used to speak to every day. I didn’t like her much, in fact: I’d like to say I mourned, but it would be stretching a point.

  Jeddah was different. My life in Saudi Arabia, for at least two years, was like life in jail. Simple force of will—or the force of simple will—could move the furniture and rip off the wardrobe doors. At times of stress, or on the brink of change, you can seem to act as a conduit for whatever disorganized, irrational forces are in the air. Shut in those dark rooms, life going on elsewhere, my body subject to strange mutations, I accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off.

  When I came back to England, and gave up my concealing Islamic draperies, neighborly eyes would note my bulk and ask, when is your baby due? Sometimes kindly women, waiting on a station bench, would edge along for me. Once, a young Scots boy, too new to London to have lost his natural grace, offered me his seat on the tube, and because I felt so ill, I thanked him with an astonished smile, and sat on it. The unborn, whether they’re named or not, whether or not they’re acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt. No advance in medical technology was going to produce Catriona; she was lost. But when biological destiny veers from the norm, there are parts of the psyche that take time to catch up. You understand what has happened, the medical disaster; you reason about it. But there are layers of realization, and a feeling of loss takes time to sink through those layers. The body is not logical; it knows its own mad pathways. Mourning is not quick; when there is no body to bury, mourning is not final. I used to say (because flippancy was my weapon), look, it’s a good thing I never had children, because I’d be putting them outside the door while I finished a paragraph: I’d be saying, don’t you know I’ve this piece to do for the newspaper, why don’t you go and play in the road? No more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall: did Connolly ever write a truer word?

  But at a less conscious level, I kept on planning for Catriona: for her brothers, and for their children too. This is the only conclusion I can reach, when I look at the strange decisions I took about real estate in the late eighties, the nineties. Property was a sound investment, of course, but I think I had investments that went beyond the financial. The larders were stocked with food, the presses with sheets. We could have provisioned a small army from the stuff that was stacked in the garages. After we bought Owl Cottage, we had accumulated a total of seven bedrooms, four lavatories, a duplication of domestic machines, the capacity to wash clothes for eight people at once, to do the dishes for sixteen. Who did I think was coming, unless the unborn; or possibly the dead? The hungry family of uncles, wanting ham and Cheshire cheese: their own dead offspring, that missing generation: my own missing daughter trailing her offspring, a green-eyed girl with my green-eyed grandchildren. What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?

  There is a certain pathos attached to ghosts, to household sprites and those hobgoblins that jump into the vision between waking and sleep. At one time, I was plagued by a spate of dreams in which I was a midwife who had let a child die; but when I got my first book on track again, and when, after many years in limbo, it was published at last, those dreams ceased. But time goes on, you think of more and more books you should have written, stories half-fledged and left in the file called “Work in Progress.” I know some of these narratives will never be finished. I dream of half-formed, fetal beings, left abandoned on a cold floor. Sometimes they are blackened, like frozen corpses. They take malign forms: I dream of a castle floor, where the children come shrieking through, and so evil are they, that they have the actual capacity of revolting stone, of making the flags shrink away from them. Risen from the ground, they are naked and sexless, foulmouthed and knowing. My impulse is to injure or kill them, swat them like flies, like little demons that, if they’re left, will range about the world and will bad-mouth me and misrepresent me and filch from me everything I have.

  But then I wake up, chilled, and put out my hands to be sure that surfaces are solid, that my own flesh is still warm. I grope for a pen and write down my dream; when the day has settled around me, the prosaic Surrey light, I take my dream to the keyboard and mince it through a second draft.

  Afterlife

  When we came home from Saudi Arabia, we had various houses. Some of them had minor poltergeists, and one of them was home to a nebulous cat. People less suggestible than me were aware of these anomalous phenomena, rational people who didn’t make their living by what they could conjure up; so I feel it’s all right to admit that I gave house-room to some ghosts. Ghosts are the tags and rags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don’t know what to do with, knowledge that you can’t process; they’re cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page. “Ghosts” are whatever it is that moves the furniture, stops the clocks, hides things from you, and arranges for you to be locked out of your hotel room. It’s just the little dead, I say to myself, kicking up a fuss, demanding attention by the infantile methods that are the only ones available to them.

  We lived first in a tiny flat in Windsor, the castle looming in at the window. Then, to buy space, in a no-man’s-land along an arterial road, somewhere outside Slough. At the time we bought Owl Cottage we were living in Sunningdale in a ramshackle flat converted from a former mother-and-baby home, which had been run by nuns.

  Drummond House was built of a red brick whose color time didn’t soften. By the look of it, it had been put up in the 1890s, with 1920s additions. Its façade was blunt, square, and ugly; the back of the building was tile-hung, like an overgrown cottage, and almost had charm.

  After the place had been hacked into flats, there were four households under the one roof, and a poor sort of roof it was; when it rained we had to run around with buckets. The big rooms were gracelessly partitioned, and there were crucifixes and Latin mottoes in unexpected places, and one of the neighbors was spiteful and intractably litigious. But there were compensations; a copper beech behind the house filtered into the rooms, on winter afternoons, a lemon-colored light, and as you lay in the deep Edwardian bathtub, you could hear in the background the reassuring shuffle of branch-line trains. In summer there was a backcloth of shifting, rustling green, green against green, as if the whole world were made of leaves.

  We had been seven years in this house. Then, within the space of a few months, it became unbearable. It was a wasting asset, its lease shortening. We decided to sell up to a builder, who would give us the market rate for the flat in return for our deposit on a patch of rutted ground eight miles away, ground on which stood, preconceived but not yet embryonic, a five-bed detached “executive home.”

  We had looked at the plans of the “executive homes” with fewer bedrooms, but they were dispiriting hutches. “We’ll go for the biggest one,” we said: five beds and three baths. I can have two offices, I thought, in two of the bedrooms. And think; a spare room with the beds made up tidily, where guests will be en suite and always expected: instead of this ambling around in the small hours with a drink in one hand, a pillowcase in the other, a towel over your shoulder, and the guest trailing behind you, bleating, “Don’t go to any trouble.” And we’ll have a gard
en that will be—unlike our garden in Sunningdale—attached to the house. And think of the central heating—our own modern controllable system, instead of the monster boiler of Drummond House, housed in its own shed or cave, which demanded each autumn the sacrifice of seven virgins before it would agree to splutter into life and infiltrate a vitiating heat between the whistling drafts.

  We spent a nervous summer, thinking that the litigious neighbor would somehow spoil this happy arrangement. In the evenings, we drove over to the building site, where down the hillside spilled walls grown to the height of eight-year-olds. These walls, soon, would be raised up; one evening we stood under the vast gaping skeleton of the roof, looking up at its timbers, arched above us like the ribs of a brontosaurus. On later visits, we climbed into the prerooms, and looked out through the holes where windows would be. We would see other couples, picking their way through the caterpillar tracks in the churned-up earth, between the pipes and cables; we would see the wondering look in their eyes. No one could believe that out of these bits of plastic and concrete the vast solid structures would grow, the structures of family houses, houses for the stable modern families of Middle England.

  They were not, our neighbors-to-be, the kind of families whom the breakup statistics comprehend. They were not the sort for adulterous upsets, for drunken fumbles, for spring folie, for subterfuge and lies. They were grounded infotech folk, hardware or software people, bright philistines, sharp and intelligent. They were mobile in their habits till their children fixed them: keen, pragmatic, willing to defer gratification: committed to their offspring, investing in them. Men and wives met each other halfway, gentle fathers and defined, energetic mothers. They were a new sort of people who didn’t seem to feel the need of history, personal or collective. They seemed to have sprung straight from a pot in Homebase, putting out glossy, polished leaves; they had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Sundays like their barbecue forks. In this part of the world, each family unit runs like a model small business, and the accounts, you may be sure, are squared at the end of each quarter: and if quarter is wanted, a small measure is granted: and if quarter is granted, the favor must be returned: and when the columns are totted they must balance, I think, husband to wife, wife to husband, with none of the shocking deficits that are incurred in the wilder parts of the world.

  One evening we drove up to the site and saw that they were putting the façade on our executive home. The drawings had lied to us; we had not been promised this. For some time we sat in our parked car. I may have used some rough language, and said I wanted out of the deal. But my sentiments dried on the air. It was too late. We were committed. After all, I said at last, when you’re in it, you don’t have to look at it, do you?

  We moved in November. They were someone else’s problem, the half-timbered elevations from Disneyland, the herringbone “brickwork” that was as thick as cardboard, glued onto the raw building blocks beneath: the fake leaded windows. Our problems, the builders told us brightly, were just what you call “snagging”; for instance, the central heating that creaked and banged, and groaned in the night like a ghoul. Once we had settled in, we were able to relax and appreciate the house’s more charming features. The washbasins were specially designed so that the soap slid off them, unless you wedged it behind the tap. The watered-down paint on the walls was so thin that a casual wipe with a cloth would remove it, along with the mark that had offended you.

  Summer came. The newly turfed gardens sprouted a miniestate of multicolored Wendy houses and play shacks, plastic slides and swings and paddling pools. I should like to say that the happy laughter of children drifted in from the gardens, but more often it was their aggrieved wails as they pitched off their climbing frames headfirst, or were beaten up by their brothers and sisters. As I sat in my stifling upstairs room, coaxing out of my computer the novel concealed somewhere in its operating system, I could hear their mothers’ voices from below, running the gamut from coaxing to shrieks of fury. I asked myself, why don’t they like their children more? Why are they so angry with them for doing childish things? If they hate childhood so much, why didn’t they arrange to give birth to adults?

  For a year or two in the new house, our possessions expanded to fill the rooms. The cupboards were packed with linen and towels. We bought everything by the dozen. We had bath cleaner by the crate: enough sandwich bags for a primary-school picnic: enough tinfoil to wrap a town hall. Shuttling to and fro between Surrey and Norfolk required lists, master lists and sublists, and constant calculation and recalculation of stocks and supplies. Was everything scrubbed and scoured? Was everything warm? Was every cupboard full to capacity, and everything scraped up to the standard that—God knows why—I had set myself? My husband knew a couple, childless like us, who ate out every night. They kept nothing in their fridge but a bottle of champagne and an inch of souring milk. Imagine, I thought, any woman so deficient in household arts; imagine any man, so wretchedly deprived of pies. Myself, I never peeled two pounds of potatoes if I thought five would do. I would take up a great fistful of spaghetti, and toss it in the boiling pot. I used to think, there’s plenty here, for anybody who drops in.

  There must have been a moment of realization, though I don’t remember it clearly: a moment when I looked at the contents of the cupboards and said, but who is all this for? Who am I expecting? I knew, if I thought about it, that I was expecting the unborn. But could I face them anymore? Perhaps I’d grown away from them, without noticing it, over the years. One day, when I was upstairs in one of my two_offices, listening to my best bit of Telemann, the merry, jingling ice-cream van lurched around the corner playing: “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”

  I left my desk and fell into my armchair; a chair which (like many of our chairs) could be pulled out to form a spare bed. Bugger off teddy bears, I said: hugging myself, my head drooping. Off back to the woods where unless I’m much mistaken, you’re in for a big surprise. I was angry, unreasonably so. I felt I had been invaded by the juvenile, my attention trashed. What would I do if real children came padding at the door, smiling their sticky smiles, smearing my printout with sticky hands, and pressing DELETE on my keyboard? I could have coped once, of course; I’d have found a way to laugh about it. I’d have said they were my inspiration, that I’d be only half a woman without them. But that was then, when I was twenty-five, in the days when, notionally anyway, I was fertile. Now I was tired, more fragile, less tolerant. I stood up, closed the window, put the Telemann on again, and sat down at my desk.

  Then a thing occurred to me, about ghost children. They don’t age, unless you make them. They don’t age, so they don’t know it’s time to leave home. They won’t, without a struggle, be kicked out of your psyche. They will hang on by every means they know; they won’t agree to go, until you make your intentions very clear. They’re stupid, so it’s not enough to tell them; you have to show them as well.

  I went round to my next-door neighbor. “You know you said, if we were ever selling the house, that we should tell you before we told anyone else?”

  Oh, wow, said my neighbor. You’re going, are you?

  Come over, I said, when the children get home. Have a look around. Think where everything would go. At four o’clock they came in a gang. The children whooped through the rooms. They couldn’t wait to evict us. Only the three-year-old cried, sobbing, “When do we swap the pets?” for she thought that we were exchanging houses and all their contents, and that she had to give up her white rabbit for the cat who was steadily hating her from a bookshelf, thinking which way to prey on her would be best. Once we knew her mistake, we soon ironed it out, soothed her temper. That evening, over a bottle of wine, we shook hands on the deal. Our “second home” must go as well, we decide. If we’re going to remake our lives, we must do the job properly.

  It is August 12, 2000: a Sunday in Norfolk. We are taking Owl Cottage apart. My eldest brother and my husband carry out the pine table, which I remember as my first p
urchase for the Windsor flat. I remember working at that table, when it was new and smooth as glass, the sash windows flung open to spring sunshine, the kitchen smelling of daffodils and chopped onions; and a few trial words going down on paper, words scented with furniture polish. I have a nervous sort of nostalgia for any surface I have written a book on, or even half a book; I think the words, for better or worse, have sunk into the grain of the wood. But the pine table is bashed and battered now, its surface gouged and its legs wobbling; I am touched by fellow feeling. I pat it for the last time: good table, good table. I don’t watch it leave the house. It’s going to a good home in my brother’s workshop: light duties, an honorable retirement.

  Owl Cottage sold within an hour of going on the market. One of Mr. Ewing’s ladies rang, her voice astonished, to say, were we happy to accept the asking price? I have never had anything before or since, that another person wanted so much. And as we pack up, we are rushed, a little flustered; we hadn’t thought we would have to quit so soon.