Walking with Ghosts

a private detective agency. You look at them and you don’t believe they are private detectives. Then you look again, and it’s obvious that they couldn’t be anything else. Their last house was blown up by a psychopath. That’s why Sam was living with Celia. But he’s living with you now. Sam touches Geordie all the time. He cannot keep his hands off him. Eventually Geordie relaxes, chatters constantly about his friend called Janet. Janet is a cousin of Philip. Small world. Whatever happened to Philip? Some people are like that, insubstantial. They disappear.
    When Geordie has gone you sit together with Sam in silence. He has something on his mind, but you do not prompt him. When he is ready he will speak. ‘Have you ever thought of marrying again?’ he asks.
    You laugh. Of course you have thought of it. You thought of nothing else for years. But not now. It was something to think about, to dream about ten years ago, even five. But not now. Men are not interested in old women.
    ‘I’m not interested in old women,’ he says. ‘But I’m interested in you, Dora.’
    Your heart sits up inside your chest. It pumps blood at a breakneck speed into your head. You see Sam for the first time. You see him in a flash of light, and then he has gone. He is younger than you, but he has migrated across generations. In the space it takes to blink an eye you lose sight of him and something inside and outside of you pulls you to your feet. You are running from the room, as if pursued by a demon. You run over the garden, beneath the starving pear tree and out of the back gate. You are in the alley lined with garages. It is night, pitch black apart from the stars. He has proposed marriage to you, Dora. This man; this young man.
    You stop to catch your breath, pressing your back against the rotting wood of a garage door. The stars, which meant everything to the ancients, mean nothing to you. You try to put them in place, casting around for the Plough, but they will not take form. They strew the sky like spilled silver, and they remind you of people, of humanity itself, of the millions of isolated human beings sprawling over the planet, never touching, never coming within range of each other: your father in his perpetual sick bed, your cold mother, your dead husband, and your absentee children. They remind you of everyone you ever knew. Smiley and Philip, as far apart as the sky can reach, sailors and cowboys, Dylan Thomas and Sam Turner, your first and last lovers.
    You walk back towards the house and Sam comes to meet you. He drapes your coat over your shoulders and takes your hand. You walk for a long time in silence, under the trees in the avenue, over the road to the park, alongside the lake.
    ‘You came back,’ he says.
    ‘You came for me.’
    He laughs and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I wanted to meet you halfway.’
     

33
     
    Over the years, piece by piece, William had refurnished the first-floor front room of the house in St Mary’s. The size of it had started him off, the height of the ceiling, the proportions. It was now an exact replica of the room his father had used as a study when William was a child.
    Some of the furniture had been easy. For a long time he had carried in his mind a picture of his father’s favourite chair. The chair had a shield-shaped back, made of carved and inlaid mahogany. Although he looked for it in antique and second-hand shops he never found an exact replica until he managed to draw a picture of it for a dealer in Harrogate. The man looked at the picture and smiled. ‘I’ll find you one,’ he said. ‘Now that we know what we’re looking for.’
    It was a chair in the style of Hepplewhite, and was the first piece of furniture in the transformation of the first-floor room. The desk came next, and through the same dealer. It was a writing-table, not a desk, French with reproduction Riesener marquetry, ormolu mounts and Sevres plaques from the end of the Louis XV period.
    Those two had been the most expensive items William had purchased in his life, and they had depleted his funds considerably. After that he had had to resort to desperate means to put money back into the bank. The bookcase and shelving had been discovered in a second-hand shop in York, and he had got them for a song. William smiled at that, the thought of buying things with songs. William knew a singer, a professional singer - he’d done his make-up for him from time to time - who bought everything