Read Online Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott - Free Book Online Page A

actually.
“Shall we order? I’m very hungry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
    “Jesus. I know how you get when you’re hungry. We better eat quickly or you’ll have one of your tantrums. Were you working late or just anxious about seeing me?”
    “Neither. It was a noisy guinea pig.”
    “I was up late last night too. Sick child.”
    Cameron Brown up at night with a sick child. Toby or Leo? That seemed strangely incongruous and implausible. Then I saw it all again—the house, the wife, the boys who played football and got sick. The smell of couples, sentences routinely finished by the other, clothes hanging in the same wardrobe, schedules for cleaning the toilet or for picking up the kids. Was Sarah still arranging for your bike repairs and taking your clothes to the dry cleaner? You probably never even questioned all of that, took it for granted. Life was disappointing, I thought, when you looked close; full of mediocrity and domesticity. Everyone went down in the end, martyrs to the golden marital dream. Then the compromises and the bandages, the arguments about who cleans the toilet. Cambridge was full of wives who tolerated their academic husbands working late and did everything for them, looking firmly away from their affairs. And full of women like me who didn’t want all of that and in return got to be called mistresses and were whispered about in libraries and college corridors. Pretty, suffocating Cambridge. I didn’t like to look at it. Didn’t want to see inside your house and find a repetition of a thousand Cambridge middle-class households. It bored and frightened me.
    I blushed and you noticed. I saw your eyes linger on the base of my neck, which is where my blushes stain most red. What were you thinking then? Only the most obvious interpretation, I thought: confirmation that you were still under my skin.
    But you didn’t misunderstand me, did you? Not then and not later.
    You misunderstood other things but you knew then, you knew why I blushed. I never gave you credit for that.
    “And how is Sarah?” I asked when that blush had receded. I made an effort to meet your eyes head-on. I must have looked confrontational. No more misreadings.
    “Sarah? She’s fine. She’s had a book out too, on seventeenth-century trade relations between England and Spain.”
    “She finished that book? You
both
finished?”
    “Yes, it’s been, Christ, what’s the word? Peaceful. We just got on with our lives. Worked hard, finished certain projects. Lydia, I want to ask you something.”
    “Yes, you said. About the ‘goddamned seventeenth century.’ Can’t you ask Sarah? She’s a seventeenth-century historian.”
    “Not the right kind, unfortunately. OK. From the beginning…It’s about Elizabeth’s book.”
    “The history of alchemy book?”
    “You know how it meant everything to her, night and day, summer and winter.”
    “Yes. I don’t know much about it, though. She never really talked about it to me.”
    “She didn’t really talk about it to anyone. She’d started out with that history of alchemy project thirty years or so ago, but in the last decade she’d narrowed it down to just Newton’s alchemical work. She published a few articles in the nineties, all of them highly scholarly but uncontroversial. She gained a reputation; even something of a following. There were certain important historians who were waiting for her to finish the magnum opus with a degree of anticipation, I think.”
    I noticed several patches on your neck that you’d missed in shaving. I hated noticing things like that. You leaned forward, suddenly conspiratorial, and whispered:
    “Don’t look now but there’s an old girl two tables away who’s trying to hypnotise me.” I glanced in the direction you indicated. An old woman dressed in dark blue sat with a group of friends, talking and chain-smoking. She looked away as I turned towards her. An older woman in a tweed jacket passed her a pint of