Walking with Ghosts

will be spiritualized, and she will be able to take from it whatever she finds useful. That is how it is in life. It is like the sea. It comes and goes in waves, now turbulent, crushing, frightening, exciting, full of passion, and then it is calm, peaceful, empty, boring, slow, and silent. You only have to remember that the waves come and go, come and go. There is constant change. Life and death. Life and death. It is the rhythm of the universe.
    She kisses you, Dora. She really kisses you. She reaches up her face to yours, and you feel her lips on your cheek She gets to her feet and stands back, hands on her hips.
    You tell her there is a song by Lady Day, ‘I’ll Never Be The Same’, and she goes off to find it. Buck Clayton and Lester Young together for the intro, then Billie holding back, intentionally lagging behind the beat all the way. Recorded in 1937, one of the happiest years of her life, and you can hear it in her phrasing, in her harmony. How she takes hold of banality by the throat and coaxes from it a kind of nectar.
    ‘You were always a bloody philosopher,’ Diana says. But she is smiling. She used to smile like that during your time with Smiley. At least at the beginning. During the first few weeks.
    You were both in love with Smiley. For you he was a man, a man who had pulled you out of yourself, given you the key to your sexuality. But for Diana he was a dream. For Diana he was a reincarnation of Arthur. He was exactly what you and she were looking for. Nothing. A heaven-sent nothing. A spaceman filling up the spaces in your lives.
    Smiley was comparatively fresh in those days. He had died an existential death the day the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia, but as yet the smell of death had not consumed him. He had removed his body from the Party, but there was no way he could recover his soul. And it was his body that came to you and Diana, a cadaver, an empty projectile wrapped in a paisley-patterned cravat.
    You cannot be hard on Smiley, Dora. The dead are forgiven everything.
     

18
     
    Sam was out of bed at six. It was still dark. He pulled on his clothes and checked Dora. She was sleeping. Barney followed him out of the room and he took the dog to the park. Donna, his first wife, had come back in the night, in a dream. He hadn’t recognized her at first. He’d thought she was Dora in disguise. She kept trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t make out what it was, couldn’t hear her. There was a mist, in which she was half dissolved. And an overamplified chorus of ‘Visions Of Johanna’, the man at the Isle of Wight in a white suit wishing he was somewhere else. Sam sweating in the dream, a yellow bandanna tied around his head, a Californian sun squeezing him like a sponge.
    ‘Visions Of Johanna’ was punctuated regularly by the piercing scream of a child, and Sam held his fists to the sides of his head wishing for a drink, knowing that wasn’t the answer, but wishing for a drink anyway. A drink in a glass as long as a dream.
    Donna came crashing through it all. She didn’t look anything like Dora. She burst through the mist and the amplified music. She was wringing wet, dripping a river, dressed in those tight black jeans and her T-shirt, like always, her skinny arms hanging by her side. ‘You’ve forgotten us, Sam.’
    Sam hauled in the dog’s lead, patted Barney’s head and let him loose. He took the pebbled path behind the tennis courts, then veered left under the trees and along the edge of the water. Donna, and their daughter Bronte, had been his life before they were swept away by a hit-and-run driver. The twenty-five years between then and now sometimes seemed like hours. It was a lie about time being a great healer. Time was nothing.
    Sam smiled as he lengthened his stride to keep pace with the dog. There were no ghosts apart from the inventions of the human mind. There was memory and fear and guilt, and the three of them had somehow conspired in the night to bring his long dead wife to the forefront of his mind. But the vision that spoke to him was wrong. He hadn’t forgotten her. She was as fresh in his memory as the breeze that skipped over the lake. ‘I’ve changed,’ he said to himself. ’I’m not the same man I was then. But I haven’t lost my memory. God knows, sometimes I wish I had...’
     
    Celia arrived at the house a few minutes before nine. She had been Sam’s secretary for four years, after retiring from a career as a schoolteacher.