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  But if the period was Empire, he concluded, she needed a different history entirely. The ghost was an actress, he decided, who had travelled up from Smock Alley in Dublin for the Michaelmas festivities and was wandering round the corridors in preparation for her entry on to the small ballroom stage. As what, Nina wondered. And that was simple for Gregory. As a ghost.

  Hester. The name itself suggested more urgent histories, like illustrated pages flicking over in a storybook. She had drowned crossing the Boyne when it was frozen over, the spider-cracks spreading in the ice beneath her high-heeled boots. She had died in childbirth, out of wedlock, was buried in a pauper’s grave, had walled herself in behind the bricks of the coal-cellar . . . He invented litanies of deaths for her, none approaching the grotesque reality. And in school he drew wraithlike images of her on his slate during prayers, from which he was, being C of E, excused. Prayers to the Virgin, with which he is unfamiliar, to that tiny statue in the niche above the blackboard with her stiff plaster arms and her stiff blue cloak, pray for us who have recourse to thee. He confused them both, understandably, in his musings, his daydreams, two ghosts, both of them female, undemanding and both, apparently, everywhere.

  But this was a new Hester, theirs alone, not George’s, not Jamie’s, not anyone’s in the whole breathing world. A Hester that belonged to the mist curling round the morning haystacks, to the pigeon’s chuckle in the haybarn, to the owl’s hoot at night, echoing round the house and the river. They attributed random events to her, unexplained events: a hen’s egg floating in the well, a badger’s pawprints on the front drive, milk turned sour on the kitchen steps, those rapid showers that swept across those flat fields, caught them unawares, drenching them only to vanish again. She became the cause and the repository of all lost things, socks, combs, pennies, stamps, laces, picture books, balls of all kinds—beach, cricket, golf and tennis, lawn and table, hurley and bat. She became the symbol, the embodiment of their uniqueness, their fraternity and sorority, their secret language.

  The silences that fell over dinner, father lost in his glass of milk, mother sniffing distastefully at the whiff of dried fish, the gap that had grown between them with his arrival became a vast chasm that only Hester could fill. The space between the chink of cutlery and chomp of chewing became hers, they wedged eyes across the table and smiled complicitly at the unseen presence there. Her, me, or Hester. She would have approved, they felt, of the hours they spent in the barn, faces down in the prickly pile, her legs kicking his above. She was their game. Hester says, do this, do that, Hester says touch your toes, stamp your feet, Hester says hide and kiss me.

  17

  THE CATHOLIC CHURCH on the crest of the hill can be seen from the curved window on the upper hallway, with the graveyard beside it meandering towards the estuary wall, its granite spire tapering towards the grey March sky. Gregory walks up the grassed road towards it, his tan gaberdine flapping open on his shoulders, the buttons undone. The church door opens as he reaches the wrought-iron gate and a priest emerges, his small shape bent in a curve of vicarious sorrow. Gregory shakes his hand; he has made an appointment, he has been expected.

  “Mr. Hardy,” he murmurs, “my condolences, a dreadful business even in these dreadful days. No, I didn’t know her, she never graced St. Agnes’s with her presence as far as I recall, and ours is a small parish, a small congregation, I would have remembered. Perhaps she worshipped St. Peter’s in Drogheda or worshipped alone, no harm in that, no harm at all, who among us can cast the first stone. As to the issue of a service, a funeral mass, we would be delighted of course, privileged even, given her notoriety—no, wrong word that—given her stature, her reputation, her fame. What we need is her baptismal certificate and the issue of remains, now how can I put it, the issue of remains remains to be clarified, the Archbishop of course could guide us in this, there must be precedents, requiem sans corpus, an empty coffin need cause no offence, no scandal. No, the only scandal would actually reside in no mass, no service, no funeral rites, so of course, given the appropriate clearances, the baptismal certificate, the permissions, we will be happy to oblige . . .”

  Stones in my coffin to give it weight, he wants a service to remember me, never religious my Gregory, C of E, how could he be, but afflicted with an almost Roman sense of duty, a pagan perception of the wastelands beyond this aching world. Et in arcadio ego, and I remember, of course, I posed for it once, the shepherdess by the massive gravestone, the skull peeping from the tangled, dying grasses round my sandalled feet and the muscled rustic below me gorging on a bunch of grapes. He wants to send me to that paradise but he doesn’t know—how could he, his whole life spent in the pursuit of the quotidian—where or what that paradise is.

  And then perhaps it’s more subtle than that, more complicated. He wants to perform the rite in the oldest sense, as family, to remember me and even more, perhaps, to finish me, finally put me to rest. He could remember well that which he buries here, which he puts to rest in that tiny graveyard tumbling towards the river’s mouth. He could remember it well in its purest, Platonic form. And as the priest moves into that dark interior, which seems to Gregory old, unshowy, plain but plangent, only one word comes to mind. Rest. So put me please to rest, my Gregory, bury the me you held inside you all those years—that gamine, thin, small-breasted teenage sister.

  He walks inside then with the old priest, into the oaken interior, the wheat-coloured walls and the crumbling plaster. “A donation,” murmurs the priest, “yes, that would indeed be welcome, there are of course certain costs fixed by the parish but a donation over and above would be most gratefully received. The roof needs work, the flashing on the gutters needs replacing, a hard rain and a wind from the west and our little church weeps all by itself. And the rains, you can imagine, are considerable.”

  Gregory leaves, blessing himself at the outside font with the wrong hand. He walks back from the church with a quickened gait. Something has been achieved although he’s not sure what, the first spade in the grave has been turned, the ivy cleared, the coffin waxed and something done eases that ache, that scald of memory which he wants to quench and cannot. The church’s spire sits behind his head like a conical hat, the fuchsia hedges of the little lane sprout either side of his shoulders like a bat’s wings or a pantomime witch’s cloak. The wind blows from the river, ruffles the water, darkens the grasses like a cosmic chuckle.

  The dead are laughing. An empty coffin, an incense-burner wafted over an absent corpse, why wouldn’t they be? But it’s a forced laugh, the awful throaty wheeze of a joke badly told, the music-hall comedian sweating in the limelight with his rehearsed lines and his cackle that begs for a response in kind. The dead laugh because the ending’s always the same, and, like the catastrophe in the old comedy, always comes when you least expect it. And the laugh is forced because, pinioned by the footlights in our sweat-odoured wigs and our bad make-up, we know the sad punchline before it happens. The laugh is bilious because we don’t want to be these rancid comedians, we want all the innocence, the unknowing of that throng beyond the flaring limelight, whose laughter answers us in obedient waves.

  Death envies life. It longs, weeps, pines, retches for that condition even at its bleakest. And as Gregory walks down the church lane with the ache inside him almost visible, I want to whisper to him, treasure the ache, the pain that seems as if it will never end, because the joke that you don’t see coming is that it will.

  Any feeling is better than none, my sweet, my unwhole brother. I could almost touch the penumbra of that ache as he walks on down, beneath the grey, quiet winter skies, towards his car by the graveyard gates. But it’s not enough to ache, he must remember too. And so he drives towards the Drogheda Quays, underneath the viaduct, over St. Mary’s bridge, underneath the margarine factory, down that long road with the mulched river to his left now, and above him the bowed sycamore trees. We would cycle our bikes on weekends this way, the four of us, and only when we had reached this stretch, where the trees
umbrellaed over the road and the sun danced through the shifting leaves, would we feel we were on the other side.

  There are no leaves above him now, but bare brown spindles against the grey clouds. He passes Mornington and follows the road towards the river’s mouth on the Bettystown side. The waves curl and do their pointless beating on the low stone waterbreaks. Our father’s factory is a roofless ruin. He stops the car for the briefest moment and looks through the rusting girders at the trickle of water in the neap tide sludge. He drives on then, past the newly-fenced golf-course to the Maiden’s Tower at the Boyne’s southern mouth. Baltray sits low beneath the huge sky across the shifting water, smudges of dark green where the dunes meet the limp trees behind them, like those Dutch landscapes in the National Gallery. Those Dutch, as Michelangelo said, were only good for painting grass.

  He parks the car in the crunching gravel, gets out, the shards of old scallop-shells beneath his boots. They are laced-up boots, not the elegant hand-stitched Jermyn Street shoes he wore yesterday. Shoes were always important to both of us. Fetishes, the portly young director told me in Gainsborough Studios, signatures of a hidden desire as he tried to get the camera below mine, below the high spindly heels he found erotic, in the hope it would take in the expanse of leg, the flare of skirt, the underwear above. And Gregory’s boots now, neatly laced and polished, make their way across the broken scallop-shells, each step sounding like a crunched carrot. And I think, maybe it’s true, fetishes—with him it was always shoes and hair, spit perfect, while the rest of him could happily look as if it had been dragged through a briar patch. The laced boots take him to the foul, shit-odoured entrance of the Maiden’s Tower, and of course he shouldn’t enter it but of course he will.

  ~

  The Maiden’s Tower, the Lady’s Finger, the girl drowned in the foaming waters. Hester. This estuarine landscape was populated by dead women, Gregory concluded, all of them different, yet in certain crucial details the same. Hester rarely moved beyond the house and grounds, the Lady was buried somewhere beneath her jutting finger, the girl was mired in the drowned seaweed. Of the Maiden’s Tower he knew nothing, other than that it rose from the forbidden, Mornington side of the river. But he was determined all four of them would put this ignorance to right.

  The boat was lying in the shallows as it had been for months, and it was a simple matter for four of them to drag it along the dried mud, through the sand into the water. The oars were a different matter; they had to be stolen from the punts left abandoned for the long weekend by the salmon fishermen. George walked along the water’s edge, dragging a poacher’s line through the water, to which were attached, instead of poached salmon bass, the two stolen oars. He slotted them into the rowlocks of their chosen boat and lifted Janie on his back through the shallow water, then Nina, while Gregory removed his shoes and rolled his trousers up to his white speckled knees. George had grown since Nina first met him by the chestnut tree, into something close to a youth, bigger than her, muscles already defined on his chest. But as if his body still remembered its childlike status, he kept his eyes cast to the ground, his shoulders bowed, willing himself smaller. Once out on the river with the oars in his hands, though, he felt instantly at home, and rowed with a fluid, animal grace. He knew every current in that river by reputation, through his father’s hearsay, so he rowed them out towards sea initially, to take advantage of the tide’s incoming pull. Nina took her shoes off, tucked her skirt between her knees, displaying her smooth tapering calves to the wind and to the world.

  Nina told them the legend of the Maiden’s Tower, how she was young, dark and beautiful and waited each day for the return of her lover from the wars.

  “Which wars?” asked Gregory, ever specific.

  “The Thirty Years War, the Ten Years War, the Half A Day War, I don’t know, any old war. There are always wars, aren’t there, George?”

  And George agreed, as he rowed. Wars were a constant.

  And Nina elaborated. How the maiden watched the seas each day from the parapet; how the returning ship was to show a black sail if it bore his dead body, a white sail if it bore his living one; how a black-sailed ship hove into view on the horizon and she hurled herself to her death on the rocks below; how, climbing the steps of the tower to the parapet, you can still hear her weeping. How the Lady’s Finger, looming towards them now in the centre of the swirling river, was built in her memory.

  “Why her finger?” asked Gregory. “Why not her hand, her neck, her head?”

  “Why not her knee?” asked George, moving his eyes from Nina’s knees to the obelisk of the Lady’s Finger. He guided the boat round it and let the current pull him towards the shore, and the Maiden’s Tower.

  “Because the Lady’s Knee doesn’t sound quite right,” said Nina. “And because on her finger she wore his wedding-ring.”

  They pulled the boat to the shore under the shadow of the tower and walked over the crackling shells.

  “I would still like to know which wars,” said Gregory.

  “What are the possibilities?” asked Nina.

  “Norman, Jacobite, Elizabethan.”

  “Norman,” said Nina and pressed her back against the Norman corners of the tower, as the summer wind blew fine grains of sand along her arms, blew her dress between her legs.

  “He came over here,” said Nina, “with Strongbow. He was an archer with a bow so rigid that only he could pull it and the arrows he fired were always strong and true. He saw her picking cockles by the river’s edge, a barefoot Irish girl with the kind of beauty that stopped his heart. He drew back his bow and fired a different kind of arrow that stopped her heart. And he built this tower for her, to keep her for his pleasure, away from prying eyes.”

  “What kind of pleasure?” asked Gregory.

  “All kinds of pleasure,” said Nina. “And, being Norman, his pleasures were violent, sudden and extreme. Because the Normans invented the mailed suit, the knight on horseback, rapine and pillage and courtly love. Isn’t that true, brother mine?” she asked Gregory.

  “And the Norman tower,” said Gregory.

  “Now place your sturdy back, George, against this tower and let this lady effect her entry.”

  And George, ever obedient, leaned his back against the tower wall and cupped his hands and held them out for her feet to hoist her up. She placed her hands on his shoulders, her foot on his hands and clambered up above him to where the steps began. She wandered into the gloom and heard the wind whistling down the curving steps.

  “I can hear her,” she said, “crying.”

  “It’s the wind,” said Gregory.

  “No,” she said, “it’s the maiden.”

  Janie clambered over George in turn and Gregory followed suit. He held out his hand for George, and as George grabbed it, scrabbling with his boots against the Norman stone, Nina tickled Gregory’s armpit. George fell back down and muttered, “Damn you, Nina Hardy.”

  “The maiden’s lover is away,” said Nina, “and she finds herself torn. Should she admit this callow Irish youth, or keep up her lonely vigil? The maiden finds herself tempted.”

  Nina reached her own hand down. He grasped it in his and Gregory held her from behind to bear his weight.

  “Unhand me,” she whispered, as his barrelled shape made it into her arms, “and consider my virtue. I’m Irish like you.”

  There was blood on his cheekbone where the Norman stone had grazed it. “Let me kiss it better,” she murmured as if in apology, and she did. And he blushed as her lips met his cheek and the muscle in his trousers leapt with surprise. She withdrew her lips with a streak of red on them, like lipstick.

  Then she ran from him, as if propelled by an arrow, towards the light above.

  “Hark! The maiden cried. Methinks a boat approaches—”

  Thin stone steps curled upwards, softened by centuries of ascending feet. There were apertures every half-circle or so through which the sunlight poured, blurring the cut stone edges. She darted up them, l
eaving the smell of dried excrement behind her and wondering what she looked like from below, where she could hear their feet clattering, gaining on hers.

  At the top the blast of wind enveloped her, wiping her clean of the fine down of sand. She lay down on the cold stone and heard a hum as if there were a bell-jar above her, a whorl of privacy and peace that left her below, untouched. She heard Gregory’s feet and then saw the shoes he was so proud of, no longer immaculate.

  “The maiden lies most days on the cold stone,” she said, “pining for her lover’s kiss.” She turned her head on the flagstone and saw Gregory above her, slowly-moving clouds behind his head, framed by the tower walls. “She dreams of far-off castles and dusky maidens and wonders is he with one now.”

  “One what?” asked Gregory.

  “One dusky, sloe-eyed Abyssinian maid.”

  “He’s in Africa?”

  “In the Holy Land, silly. Crusading.”

  George’s head behind Gregory’s, then. Above them, blue, and the slowly-moving puffs of white.

  “Lift me up.”

  They both reached down. She gripped two hands, one long-fingered, delicate, one squat, like a spade. She pulled herself up like a straight rod, her hair dangling backwards. “She stands on the parapet. She mistakes the white horses on the ocean for sails.”

  The stone steps led up to a buttress. Nina mounted them, one by one. “She grows bored with waiting, bored with watching.”

  “Come down, Nina,” George whispered.