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

golden-coloured beer, and she lifted her hand to the glass. She drank half in one go without putting down her cigarette. I was impressed. She didn’t look like the sort of woman who would drink pints.
    “That’s Dilys Kite. A friend of your mother’s. I met her at the funeral. Strange that she should be here.”
    “Well, I don’t care whether she’s a friend of my mother’s. I’ve never met her and I don’t remember seeing her at the funeral. She’s definitely trying to hypnotise me. I won’t look. See her off, won’t you?”
    “She can’t be trying to hypnotise you—at least not from there. She’s only got one good eye. The other is false. Don’t turn your head right now but take a look at her right forearm. She’s got the most magnificent tattoo.”
    I don’t know why but, though I was laughing, I was suddenly afraid Dilys would disappear again. I didn’t want to speak to her this time. At least not in your presence. She would have made me say too many things I didn’t want to say. You would have been rude. I knew that. I took my camera from my bag. You raised your eyebrow.
    “Don’t ask,” I said. “Just humour me. I need a photograph of her. Shift into this seat so that I can see her over your shoulder. That’s right. I’m going to make it look like I’m photographing you but the zoom on this camera is good enough to catch her. She can’t see us anyway, but just in case.”
    “I’m too old for photographs.”
    “Don’t worry. I’ll edit you out later. It’s her I want.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s a long story. You wouldn’t get it.”
    “Oh, OK, it’s a writing thing. Your dark art.”
    The flash of the camera made several people glance in our direction at the same time. I opened up the screen. There was Dilys, now a series of pixels in my digital camera. Fixed. Framed. Imprisoned. Her head rose over your shoulder, the smoke from the cigarette she held in her left hand curling upwards, a snake trail against the polished metal door of an old bread oven set into the fireplace behind her. Your cheek and jaw filled a third of the screen. I zoomed in past you to see how clear the cropped picture of Dilys would be. Her eyes were half closed but she was looking straight at the camera, as if she knew she was being photographed. I took the focus in several times so that her face filled the frame.
    But you had poured me some more wine and begun to talk about Elizabeth and her book again, so I turned off the camera and put Dilys away. When I looked across at her table she and her friends had gone.
    Since then I have gone back to that picture several times. I never did edit you out, though I meant to. And it was only later that day, when I transferred the picture to my computer screen to crop Dilys’s face, that I noticed the bloody weals that ran down your cheek—angry wounds. Funny, I thought. He must have cut himself shaving. Why hadn’t I noticed at the time? You hadn’t cut yourself shaving, had you? Something unaccountable had started.
    Slowly you wove Elizabeth’s spell around me all through lunch with your silk threads and hers, like a cocoon. I was now very interested in your goddamned seventeenth century. Elizabeth’s seventeenth century. You said suddenly, seriously:
    “I’d like you to finish Elizabeth’s book. Don’t say anything yet, just listen. You can make up your mind later. I’ve thought about this a lot. Elizabeth would have wanted this—she left your name among her papers on the last day.”
    “But that doesn’t mean anything—”
    “Shhh. Just
listen.
” You were cross, impatient. You were already talking to me as if we were still lovers. There seemed to be a great deal at stake.
    “I want to pay you to finish it,” you said.
I want to pay you to finish it.
What a strange phrase; what an unnerving proposition. I thought of courtesans then, you know, in silk kimonos, in those still moments as I took in your words and dwelled upon them there, running my finger