No drinking to speak of went on at this lunch. While I tried to keep my mind entirely on my objections to food, I covered some ham and tongue with chutney and hot sauce and washed the mixture down with a powerful tumbler of whisky and water. It did not look very powerful, thanks to my use of one of those light-coloured Scotches so handy for the man who wants a stronger potion than he cares to advertise to his company. The onions and radishes got me through a small hunk of fresh Cheddar; I had made a good meal. We went on to coffee, that traditional device for prolonging artificially the conditions and atmosphere of food-consumption. I took a lot of it, not in the hope of sobering up, for coffee is no help there and I was already as sober as I could hope to be, but to render myself reasonably wakeful. I wanted to be in some sort of form for later that afternoon.
As soon as Amy had left the table I made up my mind. There is always the chance, when only two people are talking together, that the one may listen carefully to the other and take seriously what he says. No such risk attaches to gatherings of more than two. So I gave up the idea of taking Nick aside afterwards, poured myself more coffee and, addressing him rather than anyone else, said as casually as I could,
‘You know, I’ve been wondering if there mightn’t have been something … slightly curious going on about the time the old man died. I asked—’
‘Curious in what way?’ asked Lucy sharply, intent on getting this settled before I could switch the conversation irrevocably to football or the prospects for the harvest.
‘I was coming to that, actually. According to Joyce, just before he collapsed he stood up and stared in the direction of the door, only there was nothing there. Then, immediately before he died, he said to me, “Who?” and, “Over by the …“ something. I think what he meant to say was, “Who (was that standing) over by the (door)?” That’s—’
‘I don’t see anything very curious about that,’ said Lucy. ‘He was having a stroke—he might have—’
‘Carry on, Dad,’ said Nick.
‘Yes. That’s the first thing, or the first two things. Then, he’d been talking a few minutes earlier about hearing somebody walking up and down the passage outside here. I can’t think of any actual person that could have been, though it wouldn’t be at all significant on its own, I admit. Then, twice, last night and again an hour or so ago, I saw a woman dressed in a, well, it might have been an eighteenth-century ordinary domestic kind of dress, at the top of these stairs. And I think she vanished, both times. I don’t really know about last night, but today, when she went down the stairs I followed her, and no one had seen her. If she went out by the front door, Nick would have seen her, wouldn’t you, Nick? I’m sorry I spun you that yarn about her, but I was a bit het up at the time. Anyway, did you see anyone like that as you were coming in?’
The relief I had been looking for, that of simply telling somebody about my idea, had destroyed my casual tone, and Nick answered very deliberately.
‘Yes, I couldn’t have helped noticing, and there wasn’t anybody. But so what? Who do you think she was, this woman?’
I found I could not say the word that had been in my mind. ‘Well … you’ve heard this house is supposed to be haunted. I don’t know what it’s sensible to say about things like that, but it does make you think. And then there was Victor…’ I glanced at him sitting in front of the fireplace with his toes tucked in under him like a dish-cover, the picture of a cat to whom nothing out of the way, almost nothing at all, had ever happened. ‘He acted very scared just when my father collapsed. Shot past me out of the room when I came back in. Very scared indeed.’
I could think of nothing more for the moment. All three of my audience looked as if they had been listening for a long time to a recital that, although not in the least strange or unexpected, was embarrassingly difficult to deal with except by straightforward, all-out insult. I felt garrulous, egocentric and very, very silly. In the end, Lucy stirred and said judicially—I remembered that she had taken an upper second in some vaguely philosophical mélange at a ‘new’ university— ‘I take it you’re referring to the possible presence of ghosts.’
To hear the word spoken took all the heart out of me. I could not even summon up a dab of sarcasm about haunted houses and vanishing women in antique dress often being thought to carry some such association. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, in the first place it isn’t cats that are supposed to be sensitive to paranormal phenomena, it’s dogs. There’s no way of knowing what your father saw, if anything, and you’re making a lot out of what he said, a few disjointed words you may not even have heard correctly. As for the woman you saw, well … Anybody might have wandered up from the hall and down again. Are you sure she couldn’t have gone into one of the rooms on the ground floor, the ladies’ for instance?’
‘No, I’m not. What about the footsteps in the passage?’
‘What about them? You said yourself they wouldn’t he significant on their own.’
‘Mm.’ I drank some coffee.
‘I remember you telling us the story about the ghost who’s supposed to turn up in the dining-room, but that was a man, wasn’t it? Have you ever heard anything about a woman ghost?’
‘No.’
Lucy did not actually say, ‘Your witness,’ but she hardly needed to. Nick looked at me indulgently, Joyce irritably, or with what could have been irritation if she had not recently been reminded that I had lost my father. I searched my brain. This was not altogether easy. Some shift in my metabolism, or perhaps the gill of whisky I had been putting away, had made me slightly drunk. Then, contrary to the odds, something came up. I turned to Lucy again.
‘If there had been a story about a woman ghost, dressed as I described, would you have believed that that was what I’d seen?’
‘Yes,’ she said, confounding me, and showing she knew she had.
‘Are you saying you believe in ghosts?’
‘Yes. In the sense that I believe that people see ghosts. I can’t think how any reasonable person can be in doubt on that score. That’s not the same, of course, as saying that you see a ghost in the same way as you see a real person. Ghosts aren’t there, so you can’t take photographs of them or anything. But people see them all right.’
‘You mean they think they see them,’ said Nick. ‘They imagine it.’
‘Well, not quite, darling. I would suggest that they see ghosts in something of the same sort of way as they have hallucinations or religious visions. We don’t say, for instance, that St Bernadette thought she saw the Virgin Mary, unless we’re trying to accuse her of misrepresenting what happened, or implying that she was mistaken or deceived. Unless we mean something like that we say she saw the Virgin Mary.’
‘Who wasn’t really there. I’d call that a hallucination. Same with ghosts.’
‘There’s a similarity, certainly, but it doesn’t go all the way.’ Lucy felt in her current fringed handbag, a red-and-white striped object that had no doubt come from somewhere in particular, and took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. She lit one of these as she went conscientiously on. ‘Different people see the same ghost, at the same time or at widely differing times. Hallucinations don’t seem to work like that. You can make a man have hallucinations by giving him certain drugs, but you can’t make him have the same hallucination as someone else. People can see the same ghost as someone else without knowing the other person saw it until later, and they don’t see a whole series of all sorts of other things as well, like people with hallucinations. Put a man in a haunted house and he may see a ghost, even if he didn’t know it was haunted. Give a man a psychedelic drug and he’ll have hallucinations. We don’t know why in either case, but it’s pretty certain the explanations don’t coincide.’