‘What do you think, Joyce?’ asked Nick, who had listened to all this attentively enough, but with no sign of feeling that anything more than the validity of a theory was at stake.
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Joyce, ‘but I think ghosts are all balls. There can’t be any such things. Maurice has been upset, and that’s made him, you know, a bit imaginative.’
‘That’s roughly what I think,’ said Nick.
Lucy frowned to herself and fiddled with her cigarette packet, as if pursuing her line of thought internally.
I had been all too right about not being taken seriously—by which I suppose I had meant causing some sort of stir. Accusations of madness or shouts of ridicule would have been preferable to these sober, sedative evaluations of my idea. ‘Well, what do I do now?’ I asked.
‘Forget it, Dad,’ said Nick, and Joyce nodded.
Lucy drew in her breath consideringly. ‘If this woman turns up again, see if you can touch her. Try and make her speak. It would be quite something if you could, because there are surprisingly few really well-attested instances of a ghost saying anything. Anyway, chase her and find out whether other people can see her. That’d be worth knowing, from your point of view.’
‘I don’t get the point of all that,’ said Joyce.
‘Well … it might be interesting.’
I found myself feeling slightly angry with Lucy. She alone had given me practical advice, which I had already decided to follow, but I disliked her bigoted reasonableness and her air of having already, though nearly thirty years younger than I, accumulated quite enough information and wisdom to deal with anything life might have in store: deal with it better than I could, too. I said in what I hoped was no more than an interested tone,
‘You seem to know a lot about these things, Lucy. Have you studied them?’
‘Not studied, no,’ she said, to rebuke me for seeming to suggest that she had taken a university course in ghosts. ‘But I have looked at the problem. I was doing a paper on the meaning of unverifiable statements, and it just happened to strike me that saying you’ve seen a ghost is one of a special class of unverifiable statements. I read a few accounts. Some interesting points of correspondence, I thought. This business, for instance, about the temperature dropping or seeming to drop before a manifestation. It’s been claimed that thermometers have registered it, but I’m not convinced. It could be subjective, a concomitant of the person entering the physiological state in which they can see ghosts. Did you feel cold before you saw this woman?’
‘No. Hot. I mean there was no change.’
‘No. My own view is that there aren’t any ghosts around here. At the moment, anyway. But tell me … Maurice,’ said Lucy, giving just a hint of what it cost her to call me by my name, ‘would you say you believe in ghosts?’
‘God, I don’t know.’ Until last night’s events and today’s appearance had taken on their present shape, I would have answered no without thinking about it. But I am not enough of a bloody fool to have bought the Green Man if I had heard any talk of hauntings in living memory. ‘Of course, if any more evidence turns up …
‘Any evidence is how I’d put it. I could be wrong, but according to me you only thought you saw a ghost.’
That was that: the table broke up. Joyce went off to check the bed-linen. I said I would take a short nap and then go and collect fruit and vegetables from a couple of farms in the district. Nick said that in that case, if it was all right, he would ring up John Duerinckx-Williams, the French scholar who had been his supervisor at St Matthew’s, and see if he could arrange that he and Lucy should drive up to Cambridge and have a cup of tea with him, returning about six o’clock. I said that sounded a good idea, and we parted.
It was two fifty. I had a shower, put on clean clothing and otherwise prepared myself for encountering Diana. For some reason I could not then discover, I felt sure she would turn up. I combed my hair carefully, then decided it looked too much like a dark-red wig, and worked on making it seem careless but cared for. By the time I was satisfied it was too late for a nap. Not that I could have managed one of any sort: I was too strung up. With me, this is normally an altogether unpleasant state, but fluctuating within it now was a tinge of amorous expectancy. I looked at my face in the glass. It was all right really: on the pale side, a bit red under the eyes, and that ageing division between chin and jaw at least as perceptible as ever; but physically not unpresentable. What I had against it was its sameness and its continuity, always available with its display of cheap sternness and furtive worry, always a partner to unnecessary and unavoidable questioning. Timing it just right, my heart gave one of its lurches and, following up dependably, the pain in my back, which I had not thought about since the morning, turned itself on. I retaliated immediately by making a face of maniacal relish at myself and marching purposefully out of the room. I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it. What will have been, will have been.
The pain went. I backed the 8-cwt trade truck out of the garage and drove towards the centre of the village. The engine was not loud enough to drown the horrible roaring and rattling noises from a couple of earth-moving machines that were levelling a slope beyond the back gardens of a dotted line of cottages. Here, perhaps in early 1984 if the present rate of progress was maintained, a row of houses was to be built, though I could not imagine what sort of person was going to be forced to live in them. The village itself looked as if it had been uninhabited for some weeks. A mail van coated with dust stood outside the corner shop, its driver more than just possibly in the arms of the postmistress, a middle-aged spinster people said was a funny sort and who certainly had two illegitimate children as well as an authentic bedridden mother. Everywhere else, if not actually dead, they were brooding about their wheat, dimly contemplating the afternoon milking, hoping on the whole that it would be fine for the Saturday cricket match against Sandon, dropping tea-bags into the pot, playing with the baby, asleep. Rural life is a mystery until one realizes that nearly all of it, everywhere in the world, is spent in preparing for and recovering from short but punishing bouts of the tedium inseparable from the tasks of the land, or rather their failure to give the least sense of achievement, as it might be a lifetime spent washing up out of doors. I have never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.
The Mayburys’ house, a genuine-looking stone structure that might have been a converted dames’ school or primitive pickle factory, was at the farther end of the village. I drove past it, along a pot-holed road between bramble hedges, turned off and stopped on a patch of bare sandy soil at the corner of a farm track that led between fields of corn, the place where I had met Diana on two previous and unrewarding occasions. It was three thirty-two.
In the middle distance, beyond the crops, a man hunched up on a tractor was slowly dragging some farming implement across a large area of naked earth. From where I was (and I dare say anyone on the spot with a magnifying-glass would have told the same tale), this activity seemed to leave matters as they had been, apart from the multiple ruts being made in the soil. Probably the fellow was getting nerved up, trying to accustom himself to the idea of performing some actual deed of tillage there the following week.
His machinery was making the only audible sound, apart from the song of a blackbird with nothing better to do. I had barely started to hope I would not have time to think about things when I heard a third sound, turned my head and saw Diana approaching on foot—only five minutes late, quixotically early, in fact, by her standards: a good sign. She was wearing a dark-blue shirt and a tweed skirt, and was carrying a folded newspaper. I wondered slightly about the newspaper. When she reached the truck, I leaned across and opened the door on that side, but she made no move to get in.