Walking with Ghosts

time.
    You open your eyes when the large disc under your arm goes into spasm. It passes quickly and you stare at the avenue. The old trees beginning to lose their golden leaves. You strain your ears for the sound of Sam downstairs, but there is nothing. The house is silent. You wait and watch the avenue.
    Diana trips along the opposite pavement. She has developed a strange, quirky walk, swinging both arms in the same direction at once, not forwards and backwards, but from side to side like a sailor. She’s been walking like that for years now, since she was eighteen. It started as a nonsense and has developed into a facet of character. You wish she wouldn’t do it, but you don’t say so. She would take no notice, anyway. She does what she wants to do. She is independent, thank God.
    Diana does not look up at your window. She thinks you might be there, and then she would have to wave. Or perhaps she does not even think of looking up? Which is it, Dora? Is Diana avoiding you or not? You do not know. You cannot make up your mind. Questions like these make you tired.
    She passes out of sight, below the house, and you hear Sam’s voice in the hall.
    ‘Diana. You’re early.’
    ‘How is she?’ Diana’s voice is bland, but with something elastic in it. A masculine voice.
    ‘Sleeping at the moment,’ says Sam. ‘A bad night, but she’s better now.’
    ‘And you?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ he says.
    ‘Don’t let me stop you. I’ll check she’s all right.’
    You count her footsteps on the stairs. Nine, ten, eleven, and the handle turns on the door. It is your daughter, Dora. She comes over to you, her hair in an uncombed afro style. Maybe it’s not called that any more. You don’t know, and you’re not going to ask. She wears no make-up, and the hem of her skirt dips and rises in all the wrong places. Her shoes are like boats. She puts her face close to yours and pretends to kiss you. Fifty-odd years too late you feel a pang of pity for your father.
    ‘I hear you had a bad night.’
    ‘Not too bad. Sam was with me.’
    Diana flings an old doctors’ bag she uses as a handbag on to the bed, and Barney lifts his head from the quilt to see who is disturbing his rest. ‘You’re a lucky woman,’ Diana says. ‘To have a man like that.’ She smiles and sits on the floor at your feet. She pulls her skirt over her knees and crosses her legs. You catch a glimpse of her knickers, and your memory goes spinning back in time.
    She was twelve when you began the affair with Smiley Thompson. You had started work again, lecturing in History at the University of York. Smiley was a senior lecturer, ten years older than you, a small man with glasses and a "honing cranium. He was married, of course. Everyone after Arthur was either married or passing through. Smiley was married, and between girlfriends.
    A few days after the Iron Lady sank the General Belgrano Smiley stopped you on the steps of the library. ‘Dora, I’m getting a petition together over this fiasco in the Falklands. Would you like to help?’
    Help? He is asking you to help, Dora. Would you like to help Smiley Thompson? Help the children who were blown up on their training ship? You, Dora, who cannot help your daughter, Diana? You, who cannot stop your own son from screaming the night away. Do you want to help?
    ‘Yes, of course. What do you want me to do?’
    Not much really. He wants to talk. He wants you to listen. There are signatures to collect from members of staff, petition forms to draft and duplicate. It is straightforward work, leg work; but if other universities can be pulled in, the weight of an academic statement could push the government towards a negotiated settlement.
    And listen, Dora, to that voice inside. That voice that has murmured away since they cut Arthur down from the pear tree. It is raving away inside your head as you accost your colleagues with the petition. You are useful, Dora. You have a function. Listen to that voice. You are needed. If your children reject you (and they do reject you, Dora), if you can be of no further use to them, at least you can function for the world.
    You enter into a week of change. You wear your head high. After how many years? Smiley is waiting outside the lecture hall for you, he leaves messages, he telephones you in the evening. You are busy, too busy to think or to worry. The past recedes into a dim bundle of events, and as it does So the future unfolds. The days shorten in relation to the vast