Title: Ghosts and Children

Author: ALISON GLENNY

In: Sport 31: Spring 2003

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 2003

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Prose Literature

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Sport 31: Spring 2003

ALISON GLENNY — Ghosts and Children

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ALISON GLENNY

Ghosts and Children

Come to me, my dark and silent darling. I am sitting with the cat on my knee, the teapot is on its stand and my copy of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy open on the table before me. I caught myself glancing at the tea leaves, from habit, as if you might have taken to writing in an alphabet of best orange pekoe; there was nothing of course. The clock is ticking—a melancholy sound! I like Burton for he reminds me of the essential folly of the human race. ‘For who indeed is not a fool, melancholy, mad? Qui nil mositur inepto, who is not brain-sick? Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, delirium is a common name to all …’ But his own dark humour is mine, the humour which, while it causes men and women to see the emptiness of this world, makes them long to peer into the next.

In another hour it will be time for my Circle of Discovery. That is what I have taken to calling my weekly seances to the ladies and gentlemen who come to collect the messages from their departed ones. To them, no doubt, I am a kind of spiritual telegraph service, the attendant of an invisible poste restante, sent to fetch their letters from the pigeonholes where they lie as if in a vast and dusty foyer. I can't do it by myself of course: this material body cannot cross over into that other space (not yet, at least!). And so I must rely upon my instruments—the circle of joined hands, the candle flame—to precipitate the spirits, but being immaterial, the latter are unreliable and capricious.

‘You make me feel like an explorer, Mrs Lapidoth,’ Mr Whitfield said to me last week, when I invited him to attend this week's Circle of Discovery.

‘We are all explorers in uncharted waters, sir,’ I told him.

He was looking at the place in my parlour where I keep my shrine to you, Missy. Candles and flowers, artistically arranged. Your photographic portrait in ballet costume, one leg flat on the floor in front of you, toe pointed and poised, the upper body (how marvellously page 215 flexible!) swooning above it: the dying swan. Another, in an oval frame, of a rosy face garlanded by flowers; a caprice on the part of the photographer. It was he who made the spirit photograph next to it, which I keep as a souvenir. In this picture you are the winged woman hovering behind the man in the armchair with the faraway expression in his eyes. I remember you telling me how heavy the wings were, and how difficult to put on over your petticoats, not to mention arranging the yards of white muslin so that the straps would not show and destroy the happy illusion. You were often required to pose in wings (how that thought catches in my throat!). In Mrs de Morgan's painting The Angel of Death, she has you reaching out to a youth with Grecian profile and auburn, Rossetti-ish hair; what a strain it must have been to manage the sickle and the enormous wings like a hawk's, while maintaining the posture she required. (It is somewhere between a crouch and a swoop.)

In front of the photographs are more relics: a pair of ballet slippers (satin, frayed at the edges), the necklace of Baltic amber which was a gift from a client. He was a Russian gentleman with the most unhappy face I ever saw. He came to us in the hope of making contact with his departed daughter. We succeeded in the end, using the Ouija board (Russian birch, which accounts, perhaps, for its effectiveness). The daughter wrote in their own language, so I have no idea what her final message was, but it must have consoled him for when he took his leave his face was less melancholy and he never returned. He admired you, Missy, because you reminded you of him own daughter. Perhaps she had the same looks, the ones that artists seem to admire. Some of my friends thought you too young to model and go to artists’ studios, but it earned you a few guineas, and I saw no harm in it.

It is the spirit photograph which has claimed Mr Whitfield's attention. (On his finger, I notice, he wears an enormous mourning ring inlaid with chestnut hair, like a fox's brush. A memento mori to the invisible departed who are all around us.)

‘Is this a photograph of a real spirit, Mrs Lapidoth?” he asks.

‘A spirit now, Mr Whitfield,’ I tell him briskly. ‘That is my daughter, Mary, who has since crossed over.’

He makes a tutting noise of sympathy.

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‘But the picture itself is a fake, sir; a fancy or trick of the photographer. The ethereal appearance of the so-called ‘spirit’ in contrast to the solidity of the gentlemen is a result of the model's departure from the scene, while the plate is still in a state of preparation.’ I do not tell him that spirits, in my considered opinion, do not manifest themselves to human vision, only to touch, or smell, or hearing: the imprecise senses. Yet it is true that I derive comfort from this sentimental forgery, that in my mind it helps me to believe that my Missy has indeed become an angel.

‘And the spirits themselves, Mrs Lapidoth, do they ever lie?’

I hesitate. ‘Indeed they can be crafty and malicious, just like people,’ I tell him. ‘Spirits may not be mortal, Mr Whitfield, but they are human.

And sometimes, I might have added, they do not speak at all. There it is, the question to which my thoughts always return: what was the cause? What thought or anguish was in my Missy's mind that could make her leave her mother and cross to the other side? Have I tried to find out? Of course I have! (Tell me what mother could resist the urge to ask her daughter if she is happy, or what kind of company she is keeping …) To assist, I placed bowls of water all around me on the table. For it is well known that a shy or reluctant spirit can sometimes be coaxed with a token of its last, earthly habitation. And I felt it briefly—your presence. A clammy hand, the unmistakable smell of river weed. I reached out and touched a hand, a hand that seemed, as it were, to shrink from mine, even as I sought to pull it closer, and a voice in my head cried out as if from the cold depths of a well, ‘Let me go!’

Oh Missy! Some spirits, as I know from long experience, are less friendly than others. But I never dreamed that you would prove one of the unfriendly ones!

So many things a mother never imagines. Among them, that her daughter will go before her into the other realm. In the circle that night I felt the rush of air, the sensation of that dreadful, fatal plunge, what a hawk might feel or a gannet, as it swoops towards water. Only my Missy had no wings (no, not even angel wings!) and so could never rise again—

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The consolations of faith are meagre. I was raised a Congregationalist, in a church with no body, only words. A dry wafer, hardly sufficient for a canary, the barest sip of wine. Promises and hope, the could ministry of speech! My Circles of Discovery are for those who seek more. The touch of a hand, a clammy presence, an electric charge, the movement of curtains by mysterious breezes; knocks, rapping, the invisible energies that can seize a table and suspend it in the air for a second or more.

This afternoon, besides Mr Whitfield, I am expecting the Princess Glyka and her companion Miss Blood. They call themselves explorers. (They are a curious couple; they share a melancholy humour if ever I saw one.) Knowing something of their habits (and guessing more) I can hazard that all the travelling they have done recently has been between the British Museum and Oxford Street, where Miss Blood calls for a bottle of Squire's Elixir or Dr Battley's Sedative. The Oriental perfumes which fill her pages have, I would guess, their origin in the camphor, cochineal, fennel seed, spirit of aniseed and tincture of snake-root with which those worthy gentlemen flavour their paregoric to make it more palatable. Miss Blood seeks a lost companion: don't we all. There's not a man or woman passes through my parlour who doesn't live their life in proximity to an absence, the gap left by a departed soul. Leaving in its wake only the grief which causes them to walk in this world with its crowds, its marvels and its tedium and not see any of it, because their attention is fixed upon that other world where everything they've lost will, they believe, be found.

And who is not a fool, who is free from melancholy? Fools are sick, and all that are troubled in mind: for what is sickness, but as Gregory Tholosum defines it, “a dissolution or perturbation of the bodily league, which health combines”: and who is not sick or ill-disposed? In whom doth not passion, anger, envy, discontent, fear and sorrow reign? Who labours not of this disease?

After the funeral, when she took me back to her studio to show me the painting, Mrs De Morgan said, ‘Missy used to say that you were not afraid of death’. I did not answer her at once, for looking at the painting I was struck by a queer and unaccountable fancy: that she had painted you twice, both as the angel and the Grecian youth, and that one of you was leaning out to embrace the other—

page 218

The pleasantest spirit I ever encountered was the one who, when I asked ‘Are you happy on the other side?’, filled the room with the perfume of attar of roses. It lingered in my parlour for days. While in this world the spirit had, it transpired, been a flower-seller at Covent Garden. She died in a room filled with bouquets; when she was buried, her lover filled the coffin with flowers.

But spirits are not always so pleasant, nor so content. My worst conversation took place, Missy, in the winter of the year you crossed over, on a day when the wind might have blown straight from the Arctic, or the grave. It was a husband and wife dressed in half-mourning whom I ushered into my parlour. In her youth the wife had been an equestrienne; now her eyes were dulled by grief, while her bulk creaked and groaned in corsets: a ship in a heavy sea. Her children ranged behind her in order of size; the girls stolid, each with a crease in their forehead and a thick blonde plait, while the eldest child, a boy, had his father's ginger hair and pale, sharp face. His eyes, I noticed, were dry; possibly because he was the second husband and thus not the natural father.

For it was a child they wished to materialise, a daughter.

She might have been a changeling, or a sylph. Her image, in spangled costume and flesh-coloured tights, still vaulted from the posters advertising ‘Sanger's Circus Spectacular’ as she soared into the air from the back of a galloping horse. It was the attitude in which she had made her entrance each night to the sound of a drum roll, between the knife-thrower and the trapeze artists, sweeping around the ring on the back of a white circus pony. (The stepfather had a place in this picture for it was he who, in these nightly performances, caught and steadied her on the descent from her most ambitious culbute: the triple somersault.) But her aerial ascents would no longer collect bouquets or applause, alas! Her body had been found in Hackney Pond two weeks ago; drowned, or put there by someone who wished to make it seem as if she had drowned, for there were bruises about her neck, a sure sign, the newspapers said, of foul play. Indeed one might suppose there were something she wished to tell, for she had not been quiet since: far from it. Since her death the house had been plagued by mysterious rapping, knocking and other spirit tricks: furniture moved page 219 and objects thrown, candles snuffed out, the ashes tipped out of the grate and spread on the floor; once, a torrent of sobbing. The family had come to me in the hope of laying to rest a ghost.

The Princess and Miss Blood completed our small circle. We joined hands and I invited the spirit to make itself known. The words were hardly out of my mouth when the candles were abruptly blown out, as if by a gust of angry wind. The same wind seized the photographs on my mantelpiece, and hurled them to the ground. I had never sensed such anger in a spirit! But there was more than that. This spirit, I felt, was filled not only with anger but with a confusion akin to madness, a wild and unpredictable humour.

In the dim light something seemed to leap onto the table. If felt as heavy as a tiger. There was an insistent drumming sound, like heels on a wooden floor or a horse's hooves. A heavy object came towards us in a rush, and where it had been, the table was wet. But oh—what an atmosphere it left in its wake—of mingled fear and a betrayal so powerful that it made me weak!

To the air I said, ‘Why are you angry?’

A burst of hysterical sobbing.

‘We do not wish to hurt you.’

Something bounded from the table and went to the piano. The keys moved, releasing a few soft chords, a skeletal arpeggio, the beginning of a melody (and I recalled the mother's words: ‘Such a beautiful touch with the piano, Mrs Lapidoth, my dear husband was never tired of listening to her play’). It was music rather than melody, sounds rather than song, but there was enough of it for me to recognise the opening line of a popular, sentimental song which had done the rounds of parlours and sheet-music shops a year or so before, and which went something like this:

When the swallows homeward fly
When the roses scattered lie
When from neither hill nor dale
Chants the silvery nightingale
I can never know repose
I can never know repose.

page 220 When the music stopped I asked ‘Did somebody harm you?’ And then, ‘Were you disturbed?

A thunderous discord, as if the player had banged his fist down upon the keyboard. Everybody jumped once, then again as the piano lid slammed shut with a great bang, rattling the ornaments and causing the photographs to rattle in their frames. (Nothing so hard on the furniture as ghosts and children!) And then the mother herself spoke up in her faced voice, saying, ‘Tell us, darling, who hurt you, and we shall see that they are punished!’

A peal of laughter, muffled as if it came from a distant room or the bottom of a pit, ran through the rom. Something knocked a picture off the fireplace, a pretty Raphael Madonna and child, smashing the glass, and scoring a great line across the image which divided it in two. A fan on the mantelpiece snapped open, unfurling the tail of a painted peacock and exposing its angry, snarling beak. Its companion, the paperknife, stirred; and for a moment I had visions of stabbing and mayhem—but no; the cold and ferocious wind had shifted to the table. The wife gave a little gasp. For something was moving the heavy antimacassar which covered the table, or, rather, moving beneath it, stiffening the folds into a dreadful rigidity, causing them to rise up towards the astonished stepfather who gaped open-mouthed, as if he had been turned to stone. As indeed did we all, for we seemed to have been frozen in our places, like actors rehearsing some positively Greek tragedy.

At that moment my assistant, who had kept her wits better than I, struck a match and held it to the lamp, which slowly sputtered into flame. The return of the light seemed to deter the presence which had taken hold of the room, for the room grew still, and the tablecloth regained its former pliancy. It fell back onto the table as if dropped from a lifeless hand and the husband caught his breath with a kind of sob. And as the presence departed, I could feel the anger and madness seeping from the room. It was fading back to the place from which it had come, leaving all the confusion and rage it had brought with it on this side and I did not try to recall it, for such emotions belong with us, in this world rather than with the dead, who are destined to leave them behind as they ascend into a region of greater calm.

The husband was complaining in his soft, whining voice. Amid his page 221 monotonous tones I caught a litany of accusation: ‘charlatanage … mirrors … hidden assistants … taking advantage of the grief of honest parents … my wife's susceptibility … the sacred memory of a beloved child …’ But even as he mumbled he was bundling his wife into her coat and hat. She seemed dazed and her movements were slow, although, when she fastened her hat, the pin with which she secured it put me in mind of a skewer. I permitted myself to wonder what words these two might find to say to each other in the days to come. But most of all I found myself thinking of that invisible poste restante where the communications lie as thick as folded gloves: picturing it as a cavernous, dimly lit room filled with disappointed hopes and deceitful memories, where unaddressed parcels rub against others which are wrongly addressed or have lost their labels and for every empty pigeonhole there is another containing a letter which no one will ever claim.

I misted the air with a scent bottle for several days afterwards, to try and shift the lingering smell of pond bottom. But no scent could begin to remove the terrible ache—that curious sensation in which absence and haunting are combined—which struck me every time I recalled the soft chords, the broken arpeggio, the opening bars of the song which had come from my piano; the ghost of the song that you, Missy, loved to play.