Dr Friendman smiled again. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said, and he explained at great length to Mr Mockler that it was Mrs Acland herself who had frightened the Rachels, turning on a wireless in the middle of the night and running baths and laying tables for people who weren’t there. Mr Mockler listened and was interested to note that Dr Friendman used words that were not easy to understand, and quoted from experts who were in Dr Friendman’s line of business but whose names meant nothing to Mr Mockler.
Mr Mockler, listening to all of it, nodded but was not convinced. The Rachels had left the house, just as the letter said: he knew that, he felt it in his bones and it felt like the truth. The Rachels had been frightened of Mrs Acland’s ghosts even though they’d been artificial ghosts. They’d been real to her, and they’d been real to the Rachels because she’d made them so. Shadows had stepped out of her mind because in her loneliness she’d wished them to. They’d laughed and played, and frightened the Rachels half out of their wits.
‘There’s always an explanation,’ said Dr Friendman.
Mr Mockler nodded, profoundly disagreeing.
‘She’ll think you’re Mr Rachels,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘come to say he saw the ghosts. If you wouldn’t mind saying you did, it keeps her happy.’
‘But it’s the truth,’ Mr Mockler cried with passion in his voice. ‘Of course it’s the truth: there can be ghosts like that, just as there can be in any other way.’
‘Oh, come now,’ murmured Dr Friendman with his sad, humane smile.
Mr Mockler followed. Dr Friendman from the room. They crossed a landing and descended a back staircase, passing near a kitchen in which a chef with a tall chef’s hat was beating pieces of meat. ‘Ah, Wiener schnitzel,’ said Dr Friendman.
In the cobbled courtyard the gardener had finished sweeping up the leaves and was wheeling them away in a wheelbarrow. The woman was still sitting on the tapestry-backed chair, still smiling in the autumn sunshine.
‘Look,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘a visitor.’
The woman rose and went close to Mr Mockler. ‘They didn’t mean to frighten you,’ she said, ‘even though it’s the only way ghosts can communicate. They were only having fun, Mr Rachels.’
‘I think Mr Rachels realizes that now,’ Dr Friendman said.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Mockler.
‘No one ever believed me, and I kept on saying, “When the Rachels come back, they’ll tell the truth about poor George and Alice and Isabel.” You saw them, didn’t you, Mr Rachels?’
‘Yes,’ Mr Mockler said. ‘We saw them.’
She turned and walked away, leaving the tapestry-backed chair behind her.
‘You’re a humane person,’ Dr Friendman said, holding out his right hand, which Mr Mockler shook. The same man led him back through the lawns and the rose-beds, to the gates.
It was an experience that Mr Mockler found impossible to forget. He measured and stitched, and talked to his friends Mr Uprichard and Mr Tile in the Charles the First; he went for a walk morning and evening, and no day passed during which he did not think of the woman whom people looked at through binoculars. Somewhere in England, or at least somewhere in the world, the Rachels were probably still alive, and had Mr Mockler been a younger man he might even have set about looking for them. He would have liked to bring them to the secluded house where the woman now lived, to have been there himself when they told the truth to Dr Friendman. It seemed a sadness, as he once remarked to Mr Uprichard, that on top of everything else a woman’s artificial ghosts should not be honoured, since she had brought them into being and given them life, as other women give children life.
Another Christmas
You always looked back, she thought. You looked back at other years, other Christmas cards arriving, the children younger. There was the year Patrick had cried, disliking the holly she was decorating the living-room with, There was the year Bridget had got a speck of coke in her eye on Christmas Eve and had to be taken to the hospital at Hammersmith in the middle of the night. There was the first year of their marriage, when she and Dermot were still in Waterford. And ever since they’d come to London there was the presence on Christmas Day of their landlord, Mr Joyce, a man whom they had watched becoming elderly.
She was middle-aged now, with touches of grey in her curly dark hair, a woman known for her cheerfulness, running a bit to fat. Her husband was the opposite: thin and seeming ascetic, with more than a hint of the priest in him, a good man. ‘Will we get married, Norah?’ he’d said one night in the Tara Ballroom in Waterford, 6 November 1953. The proposal had astonished her: it was his brother Ned, heavy and fresh-faced, a different kettle of fish altogether, whom she’d been expecting to make it.
Patiently he held a chair for her while she strung paper-chains across the room, from one picture-rail to another. He warned her to be careful about attaching anything to the electric light. He still held the chair while she put sprigs of holly behind the pictures. He was cautious by nature and alarmed by little things, particularly anxious in case she fell off chairs. He’d never mount a chair himself, to put up decorations or anything else: he’d be useless at it in his opinion and it was his opinion that mattered. He’d never been able to do a thing about the house, but it didn’t matter because since the boys had grown up they’d attended to whatever she couldn’t manage herself. You wouldn’t dream of remarking on it: he was the way he was, considerate and thoughtful in what he did do, teetotal, clever, full of fondness for herself and for the family they’d reared, full of respect for her also.
‘Isn’t it remarkable how quick it comes round, Norah?’ he said while he held the chair. ‘Isn’t it no time since last year?’
‘No time at all.’
‘Though a lot happened in the year, Norah.’
‘An awful lot happened.’
Two of the pictures she decorated were scenes of Waterford: the quays and a man driving sheep past the Bank of Ireland. Her mother had given them to her, taking them down from the hall of the farmhouse.
There was a picture of the Virgin and Child, and other, smaller pictures. She placed her last sprig of holly, a piece with berries on it, above the Virgin’s halo.
‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ she said, descending from the chair and smiling at him.
‘A cup of tea’d be great, Norah.’
The living-room, containing three brown armchairs and a table with upright chairs around it, and a sideboard with a television set on it, was crowded by this furniture and seemed even smaller than it was because of the decorations that had been added. On the mantelpiece, above a built-in gas-fire, Christmas cards were arrayed on either side of an ornate green clock.
The house was in a terrace in Fulham. It had always been too small for the family, but now that Patrick and Brendan no longer lived there things were easier. Patrick had married a girl called Pearl six months ago, almost as soon as his period of training with the Midland Bank had ended. Brendan was training in Liverpool, with a firm of computer manufacturers. The three remaining children were still at school, Bridget at the nearby convent, Cathal and Tom at the Sacred Heart Primary. When Patrick and Brendan had moved out the room they’d always shared had become Bridget’s. Until then Bridget had slept in her parents’ room and she’d have to return there this Christmas because Brendan would be back for three nights. Patrick and Pearl would just come for Christmas Day. They’d be going to Pearl’s people, in Croydon, on Boxing Day – St Stephen’s Day, as Norah and Dermot always called it, in the Irish manner.
‘It’ll be great, having them all,’ he said. ‘A family again, Norah.’
‘And Pearl.’
‘She’s part of us now, Norah.’
‘Will you have biscuits with your tea? I have a packet of Nice.’