Giving Up the Ghost

by Hilary Mantel

  My mother arrives. Now we are going to do something difficult, which is to clear the loft. Some boxes were stowed up there by Jack when my parents first arrived in the county, and left there; now no one can remember what is in them.

  When I went to Africa, I left a box of my own in the eaves of my parents’ house. In it was my Complete Works of Shakespeare , which they had bought me (to keep me quiet) when I was ten. Even when it was new it was cheap; but what did I care? It was bound in fraying black cloth, its paper was yellowing and woody, its blurred type looked as if it were running from the page; I loved that book. My child’s fingerprints were on every leaf of it. I felt as if it talked back to me, as if I had exchanged breath with it; no other Complete Works would ever be the same. By the time I was leaving England the book was nearly fifteen years old, it was falling apart, its glue drying, its pages brittle; I still liked it too much to trust it to sea freight. I knew that to pack it in my suitcase—a book like a house brick, against my allowance of 20 kg—would be a little ridiculous. Besides, I feared the effects on it of a change of climate. “I’ll just store it in the eaves,” I said, for the eaves were spacious, dry, and cool. In the box, also, was a bibliography for my French Revolution book, kept in a humble school exercise book with a stiff burgundy cover. I thought—and I was right—that it wouldn’t be much use to me where I was going.

  Three years later—around the time I went to St. George’s to have my insides remodeled—I came back to my parents’ house to reclaim the box. The Revolution book was with a publisher, and if it was accepted I would need my bibliography, to help me with editing and checking. I felt a sober, righteous pleasure as I waited for it to emerge from the eaves, and I anticipated opening my Shakespeare, wondering which passage I would light on first. But the searchers drew a blank. They frowned, puzzled, and rubbed out of their hair the fine dust of accreted pigeon droppings. It must be in there somewhere, they said. They dived in again, bent double, and emerged rubbing their backs, shaking their heads. No box, no Shakespeare, nothing at all conforming to the description of a burgundy notebook with five years of my reading life in it. “Oh, look again,” I begged. They did; they drew a blank. The family said, that’s strange. Where oh where can Ilary’s box be? Some suggested supernatural reasons for its disappearance. But I had my own theory. Shakespeare is bunk. History is bunk. Why are women always smiling? Smile, smile, smile.

  So much for my box; now at Owl Cottage, Jack’s boxes come down from the loft, the men’s feet bouncing on the steel ladder. The boxes are heavy, covered in what looks like iron filings. We take them into the kitchen and wipe them down. One box contains a tidy stack of National Geographic magazines. We know the contents before we open it, because it is precisely labeled in Jack’s fading hand. Another box seems to be full of old engineering textbooks. Why keep them, I wonder? But it’s not for me to judge the quality of someone else’s nostalgia. It is five years since his death. Soon after the funeral my mother packed up his watercolor paints, ready for me to use, at some unlikely date when I have the leisure. We framed what we could from his last sketchbook, anything that was nearly complete: sea, sand, clouds. We put the sketchbook away with the paints, and with it the pictures he must have been working on: another seascape, and what may be, emerging from the paper’s weave, an apple tree under a darkening sky.

  “Get another cloth,” I say. “There’s a whole big box of them, under the sink.” The textbooks—sad wastepaper—we pile in a stack. Then out comes an edition of Creasey’s Decisive Battles, which I gave Jack because of its fine binding and marbled endpapers—and which, surprisingly, he decided to read. Now comes—I laugh as it emerges—an ancient, grimy relic called “An Analysis of English History: with Appendix and Maps.” I pick it out of the box; as I try to open it, its pages fall like loose cards into my hand. Inside the cover is written BERYL A WHITE, 58 BANKBOTTOM, HADFIELD, NEAR MANCHESTER, ENGLAND. Beryl, my heroine, my cousin after whom I named my pointy-headed doll! I shuffle the pages, I look at a few. Their content is only slightly familiar; but is this not the tale of my native land? The story begins in the days when all the main players are called Ethel, those days when the successor of Ethelfrith marries Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert: hilarious consequences ensue. I shuffle the pages again: “War with France: this war arose from an unseemly jest.” Shuffle again: “The skeletons of two children were found buried at the foot of a staircase … Marlborough took the field, but owing to the extreme dilatoriness of the Dutch …” The book—if it can be called a book, in its loose-leaf state—is full of moral judgments, against unseemly jesting and turning up late for the fight. King John died of a fever brought on by anxiety, which one sees was weak of him; the character of Mary Tudor, naturally mild, took a turn for the worse “when she gave her hand to the Spaniard.”

  I put down the Analysis regretfully, vowing I will get back to it. Here is another book of Beryl’s, her name in pencil in a round baby hand. “She must have it back,” my mother says. “I’ll keep it for her.” It is “Alice”—both adventures—in a jacket of porridge-colored canvas. Next—but why?—comes a copy of Lorna Doone, abridged for the young. It is the remnant of a set of miscellaneous nineteenth-century novels I had for Christmas, perhaps the year I was ten. The colophon is a silhouette of a man in a tall hat, holding by the hand a silhouette child; the publisher’s name is Dean & Son. How has this one survived, when Treasure Island has gone, the only one of the set to have a yellow jacket; where is Jane Eyre, bound in dull green? I remember the first time I read Jane Eyre: probably every woman writer does, because you recognize, when you have hardly begun it, that you are reading a story about yourself. The books with their colored bindings were passed on, down the family; I remember how my youngest brother liked Children of the New Forest. It had a peach-colored binding; I thought it was tedious, myself. Kidnapped came in dark blue. I knew by heart its opening lines, and running through my memory, the words still affect me with a shiver of trepidation: “I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.” Like a wimp, like a girl, I wanted David Balfour to stay at home, with the kindly minister Mr. Campbell, with his dead parents who lay in the churchyard under the rowan trees. The plot would never have got beyond its second page, if it had stood to me: its hero would never have left Essendean. I loved and trusted Alan Breck, his bantam swagger, his defiance of logic and the odds; but I worried about David and his welfare, much more than I worried about Jane Eyre, who, in my opinion, had stitched Rochester’s eyes shut long before he went blind.

  It is summer at Owl Cottage; light bounces on the black-and-white tiles of the kitchen floor. I put my arms, briefly, around the shoulders of my mother and my brother’s wife. The box we are dipping into seems deeper than we thought, darker and fustier. Almost at the bottom of it, we find one of Jack’s own books—one of those that came with him when he moved into our house at Brosscroft. It is Out with Romany, its title almost illegible now, its cover, which I remember as green, now faded to gray. It is illustrated with naive woodcuts: a hedgehog, a bird’s nest, hares dancing. We pass it from hand to hand. I’d like it, says my brother’s wife, I like these pictures. “Yes, take it, love,” my mother says. Then last of all comes the vast tome of Tennyson, square and brown like a well-packed parcel, like a parcel that has been left in a sorting office for thirty years. I open it, and the odor of decay rises up, so powerful and bitter that it seems like the smell of burning. For a moment I stand, shaken, recalling this book in my child’s hands: it was old then, the pages freckled with butter-colored marks. “Can I have this?” I ask. “It must be middle age, you know, but I’ve been wanting to reread Tennyson lately.” I open the book, and my fingertips turn gray as I leaf through it.

  When cats run home and light is come,

  And dew is cold upon the ground …

  My mother, standing next to me, brushes my elbow; si
lently, heads bent over the empty box, we begin to cry.

  October 2000: moving day at last. The sales of our two houses have been tied up neatly, completion of both on the same morning. Owl Cottage has been packed up by removal men; I couldn’t stand to do it myself, to turn the key for the last time and leave Jack’s baffled spirit locked in the shell of the house. At our Disneyland villa, as our furniture vanishes into the removal van, our neighbors, their children and their friends spread out over the garden, brooms and vacuum cleaners held like bayonets across their chests, ready for the charge. They have taken down a fence panel between the two gardens to give themselves access; as soon as the phone rings, as soon as the word from the lawyers comes through, they storm down the slope of the lawn and pour through the French windows, mobhanded. I have to plead for a safe corner in the house, for a twenty-minute respite, till the cats and I can be collected, for we are going last. I sit on the bathroom floor, the door locked against the mob, waiting, the minutes ebbing away, talking to the cats to soothe them, while they fume and moan in their traveling cages and rattle the bars. By the time I come downstairs, and walk out of the front door for the last time, the neighbors have got their furniture in place, their milk in the fridge, their food in the cupboards. It is theirs already, and they fit it; I cannot believe this house ever belonged to me. It has four children in it; solid, squalling, overexcited, ready for a showdown about who gets which room. The cats shake their fists at them, and curse as I hand over the spare door keys: as the tailgate of the car slams on their bawling, the house becomes history.

  The place we live in now is an apartment in a converted lunatic asylum. It was built in the 1860s, one of a loop of great institutions flung around London to catch and contain its burgeoning mad population, the melancholic and the syphilitic, the damaged and the deluded, the people who had forgotten their manners and the people who had forgotten their names.

  Aren’t you afraid of ghosts? visitors say. But I smile and shake my head; I say, not I. Not I: not here: not now.

  We are on the top floor; but a spiral staircase leads even higher, to a small square room in the clock tower. We are the keepers of the gargoyles that guard the roofs, and we have a long view over the country, over the city of Guildford, dropped into the landscape like an egg into a dish: to a distant, fuzzy line of uplands that, on rainy days, when cloud thickens and almost obscures it, I can easily imagine is the moorland of my childhood.

  Two wings of the old building have been preserved and converted, but thousands of houses have been built on the asylum’s land. It is hard to believe that seven years ago it was open fields. An elderly man who grew up in the district told me what this countryside was like, before the mechanical diggers moved in. It was an area of market gardens and plant nurseries, and open land cut up with streams and ditches, into which, when he was a boy and out rabbiting, he would invariably fall; and pick his way home, at twilight, half-drowned and dripping, to be shouted at by his mother. He was a good talker, and I found myself sliding, in imagination, into the country that he had shown me, so that it became a part of my own terrain.

  Now on light clear nights, I sometimes go out onto the balcony; the clock face hangs above me like a second moon, lighting up the flickering tongues of the gargoyles, stone saurians leaning out into darkness and space. It is quiet up here: except for the background purr of traveling cars, on the circular road that holds the new houses, the new families, in a loose, careless embrace. I wrap myself in a blanket, and rest my forehead on the balcony’s freezing rail, and think about what I have lost and what I have gained. For me, the balcony is the best thing about the asylum. I am out there in all weathers, looking over the army land that is the last remnant of the unpopulated place this used to be. Sometimes, at dawn or at dusk, I pick out from the gloom—I think I do—a certain figure, traversing those rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write. But when was God ever willing? And what is this dim country, what is this tenuous path I lose so often—where am I trying to get to, when the light is so uncertain? Steps to literature, I think; I have tottered one or two. I move back from the window, dawn or dusk; I think of other houses, which seem not so long ago.

  At 20 Brosscroft, the windows printed on our curtains are alight from within, their flowerpots spilling scarlet blooms, the candle flames swelling, flickering boldly against the fading northern afternoon. The table is laid, and the dead are peering at their place cards, and shuffling into their chairs, and shaking out their napkins, waiting, expectant, for whatever is next. Food or entertainment, it’s all one to the eyeless, the shriveled and the thin: to the ones who have crossed into the land where only the living can provide their light. I will always look after you, I want to say, however long you have been gone. I will always feed you, and try to keep you entertained; and you must do the same for me. This is your daughter Ilary speaking, and this is her book.

  ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL

  Every Day Is Mother’s Day

  Vacant Possession

  A Place of Greater Safety

  Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

  A Change of Climate

  An Experiment in Love

  The Giant, O’Brien

  Fludd

  About the Author

  Hilary Mantel is the critically acclaimed author of eight novels, including The Giant, O’Brien; A Change of Climate; and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books and lives in England.

  GIVING UP THE GHOST. Copyright © 2003 by Hilary Mantel. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt and Company under license from Pan Books Limited.

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  The lines from “The Sharecropper’s Grave,” by Judy Jordan, are published by kind permission of the author and the Louisiana State University Press.

  First published in Great Britain, in slightly different form, by Fourth Estate

  First published in the United States by John Macrae Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company

  Designed by Paula Russell Szafranski

  eISBN 9781429900652

  First eBook Edition : August 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mantel, Hilary, 1952-

  Giving up the ghost: a memoir / Hilary Mantel.

  p. cm.

  “A John Macrae Book”

  1. Mantel, Hilary, 1952- 2. Novelists, English—20th century-Biography. 3. Chronic pain—Patients—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  PR6063.A438Z467 2003

  823’.914—dc21

  [B]

  2003047757

  First Picador Edition: September 2004

  Also by

  Hilary Mantel

  The Bestselling Author of Wolf Hall,

  Winner of the Man Booker Prize

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  Wolf Hall

  www.picadorusa.com/wolfhall

  In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power.

  England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s f
reedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

  Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

  In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

  Bring Up the Bodies

  www.henryholt.com/bringupthebodies

  The sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn.

  Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.