It was interesting how much she knew about the people who were going to Willowvale. Perhaps seeing her as the Mouse (they had never called her that to her face but she was good at eavesdropping), people felt free to say almost anything in front of her. Perhaps they liked to feel they were shocking her. They weren’t. Nothing about people shocked her. Every horror she read about in the newspaper or saw on television she liked to confront calmly because it was telling her the way things were. She had always sent her imagination into situations and experiences she had never known herself, so that she could feel what others felt.
She knew the story of Jacqui Forsyth’s break-up with the apparently appalling Kevin. She suspected from certain remarks Alison Miller had made that she had been involved with David Cudlipp at last year’s weekend. She knew that Andrew Lawson’s life outside university was devoted to his wife, who was housebound with illness. Devoted to her and the bottle, she suspected.
She thought of them a lot. She thought most of Harry Beck. That was inevitable, given that the key to his writing class was mutual honesty, and he led by example. She knew that he had had problems with the book he was working on.
‘I think I’ve discovered a new neurosis. The Penelope Syndrome. You heard of her? She was the wife of Odysseus. While she was waiting for him to get back from Troy … Twenty years it took in all. How do you explain that one to your wife? “That was some traffic jam on the M1.” She was pestered by men who wanted to marry her. Eventually she had to give them a time-limit. She said she would choose a new husband when she finished the tapestry she was working on. Every day they could see her weaving it. Every night she unravelled in secret what she had done during the day. The never-ending tapestry. That’s me. Every night my head unravels my belief in what I’ve written during the day. Just call me Penelope. But not in public, please.’
He had finished it now and had submitted it to a publisher. She had read all his published work, finding his books on Amazon with great difficulty, and that told you a lot about a person, she felt. She had seen him once in a bar called the Ubiquitous Chip. He hadn’t noticed her, of course. But the company he was in had dismayed her. One man in particular looked like a caricature of an aging gigolo. But there was more to Harry Beck than that. Most of the notes on the table in front of her were transcriptions of things he had said.
‘Does it matter? A day or a lifetime. Or one crowded hour of glorious life. I suppose every book creates its own wilful timescale. Certainly, you can’t tell a story without it inhabiting time. Once upon a time, as they used to say. I suppose every story really begins: It was that time when …’ There was a pause. ‘Of course, you could get twenty different people writing about the same event and using that beginning. And still have twenty different stories.’
She leafed through some of her other notes, transcriptions she had extracted from his tutorials, which he had allowed her to tape. She had taken them mainly from the free-ranging chats they always had at the end of a class. She liked those times best. Usually then, with assignments decided, Harry Beck was just responding to their general questions about writing.
‘I don’t think you teach anyone to write, really. You might give them something useful to react against, right enough. That’s healthy. But what we do here is still valuable, I believe. You can let people see their mania is shared. They’re not alone in the padded cell. And, at the very least, it’s going to make you a more appreciative reader.’
‘I can only speak for myself. Writing a book feels for me like trying to ride a bucking bronco. And trying to go somewhere at the same time.’
‘How can you know there’s actually a book there when you start out? I don’t see how you can. I can’t anyway. It’s like a mirage. Sometimes you think you can see it. Sometimes you suspect there’s nothing there. You’re deluding yourself. But you have to keep going. And even once you’ve arrived. I suppose only other people sharing your belief that you’ve arrived somewhere real can confirm it for you. And then, these days, often the people publicly confirming your book’s reality aren’t very real themselves. I think you have to leave it to the individual lay reader. The dread of mirage remains.’
‘Posterity? Who says you can trust posterity? Think about it. This is posterity for all the writers who are dead. And look how undervalued some great writers are today. And how overvalued some chancers are. Nah. You’re on your own. No guarantees. Place your bet.’
She would be taking her notes with her and hoped she would be adding to them and finding out about more people.
‘Mickey Deans is going,’ Kate said.
‘I’ll leave him to you,’ Jacqui said. ‘I don’t rob cradles.’
Kate thought she might not mind. At least he might be more accessible than the men at the bar.
‘Does that mean Donnie Davidson’s going too?’ Alison said.
Jacqui touched both nostrils and sniffed, as if her nose were running.
‘With a truckload of pharmaceuticals.’
Kate realised that Jacqui had just spoken as if she would be going. It was necessary to encourage her with something more.
‘And it’s supposed to be haunted.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Willowvale. It’s supposed to be haunted.’
‘Ooh,’ Jacqui said. ‘There’s an idea. Maybe I could lay the ghost. That would be a first.’
Andrew enjoyed telling his students about the ghost of Willowvale. A recuperating soldier was first to claim he had seen it in 1919. Having turned a corner in the house at dusk, he saw a woman in a floor-length black dress at the end of a long corridor. She had a fierce white face and she appeared to be gliding towards him threateningly – perhaps, Andrew thought, because her dress concealed her feet. The soldier apparently didn’t wait for her to introduce herself.
Having been brought to the public’s attention through an article in a local newspaper and become a tourist attraction after Willowvale was a hotel, the black woman decided to make many more visits. For a time she was something of a fashion. Perhaps people felt they weren’t getting their money’s worth if she didn’t appear for them, rather as if they had gone on a safari holiday and not seen an elephant.
Andrew told his students that she might well be Elspeth Muldoon, the disgruntled wife, come back to express her unexorcised distaste for Muldoon’s folly and to make sure that no jumped-up tourist would be entirely at ease in the place she seems to have hated. Or perhaps she was looking for her dead son, Edward. It wasn’t that Andrew believed in her. His credulity had certainly not been encouraged by the discovery that the soldier who had first seen her had ended up in an asylum. It was just that he thought a ghost might be another inducement to going away for a weekend to talk about books. It wasn’t exactly an indoor swimming-pool but it might help. Considering the diminishing numbers on these trips, he needed all the help he could get.
Also, there was for him a certain appropriateness in the idea of a ghost. He felt Willowvale was, in a way, haunted, though not by a woman in a black dress. It was haunted by something less easy to escape.
Willowvale might be a monument to Edward Muldoon’s failure but it was a big monument. The grand exterior might now be undermined within by small, often gimcrack rooms full of one-night lodgers and squabbling families waiting for good weather, but the grandness of their surroundings made the smallness of their presence all the more questionable.
The real inheritance left by Muldoon’s vision, Andrew came to think, was not the building but the warren of dreams it housed, the inevitably shifting terms our lives have to inhabit but seek constantly to make over into dubious certainty, whether complex or simple, important or trivial. What haunted Willowvale, Andrew believed, was the revenant of human aspirations. What people met in its corridors was perhaps the ghost of something in themselves, the unfulfilled stature of their dreams, looking for flesh.
Ghosts didn’t bother her, Jacqui