79

A man who wishes his tale believed does himself no service by speaking of the supernatural; I would rather have slipped in some neatly tailored lie to fill the gap, but the gap is so odd, so uniquely shaped, that the only thing that will fill it is the event that made it.

I told no one about the ghost. From March to July in 1921 I saw it often. It sat at the kitchen table. It wandered across the flats. Sometimes it was there every night. Sometimes I would think it gone for good. For two, three, four nights I would be left alone. And then I would wake up and hear it, sitting at the kitchen table, whistling out of tune. The hairs on my neck would raise themselves on end, and those on my arms, and those on my legs that had not been worn away by my straight-legged trousers. I soaked the sheet with perspiration.

The hens were my witness to the ghost. They set up the sort of fuss and panic you hear when a snake enters the chook-house late at night. One of them, a big old Rhode Island Red rooster, died of fright. Molly's verdict was that it had fallen prey to damp and I did not disagree with her. The dead rooster, however, smelt of snake.

The ghost was not a single solid shape, but rather a confluence of lights nestling in a lighter glow, like one of those puzzles for children with dots numbered from one to ninety-five. It sat at the kitchen table with the snake. The snake slithered like a necklace around the ghost, entered into it and streamed out of it. You could see the snake's innards pulsing: liquids, solids, legs of frogs and other swarming substances with tails like tadpoles.

The ghost was Jack. Its gait, as it drifted past my bedroom window, was unmistakable. I saw it move out across the grass flats and on to the mud. It hovered round the Morris Farman.

Now you can say I manufactured this ghost myself, and that it was nothing more than my guilty conscience scorched on to the night. I will have to grant it is possible, providing you also give me credit for killing the rooster and making it smell of snake. You are free to argue it, but it makes and made no difference, not to the story, not to my prickling skin, or to my bowels which loosened and gave me a liquid shit to spray and splatter around the dunnycan at odd and unpredictable hours of the night and day.

These nocturnal visits drove me to excesses of kindness, of which the agreement I signed with Phoebe is only one. I cared for the wife and daughter of the ghost with even greater zeal, dazzling them with my attentions, bringing them gifts of ornaments from Cole's Arcade and peculiar cheeses from the Eastern Markets. I offered liquors to Molly and an array of fountain pens to Phoebe so that she might be a poet in any colour she chose. I bought her red ink and indigo, brown and cobalt blue. I built accommodation, as I've said, for Horace and begged him consider himself a member of my family. Yet none of this seemed to have any effect on the ghost who came and went as he saw fit, whistling, stamping his foot, and displaying the snake in styles that varied from the accusatory to the downright lewd.

I fancied I saw it on the night that Charles was born into the hands of the young midwife. It did a jig, a little dance, hop-ho, a shearer's prance, around the house and out across the mud of Dudley's Flat.

I waited for its return, and while young Charles bellowed with rage at those who had tried to kill him and left the household sleepless and his mother's nipples so sore she could not bear my jealous tongue to touch them, Jack did not return.

Now you may argue that the ghost had simply wished to see the continuation of its line, and now reassured had simply gone away. But a ghost does not bring a snake to flaunt and slither round its neck, to swallow down its ghostly throat and produce from between its legs, if all it wishes is to hear the cries of its assassin's child. He does not go hop-ho to celebrate his daughter's union to an unkind man. He has, therefore, other purposes and less innocent things to celebrate.

When I saw the dance I went quite cold. For I knew that I had been defeated in a battle I did not know the rules of, and my tormentor had slipped inside my defence and thrust his weapon home without his victim being aware of the nature of the wound.

Molly always believed the child was Horace's. And Horace's behaviour simply confirmed it. The truth, however, was that Horace had found, at last, his true vocation which was neither poetry nor law nor Rawleigh's Balsam, but the care of house and baby which even Molly had to admit that he did with greater skill than any of the women could have managed. The house was clean and dusted, the meals were large and simple, the child both neat and happy. Horace cooed over it. He dusted its bottom with baby powder and cleaned its napkins and only when the small puckered lips sucked at his chest could he be judged lacking as both father and mother to it. He loved to watch it stretch and curl its feet, felt relief in its burps, and sheer wonder at its small unformed intelligence.

Molly saw that I, on the other hand, was very careful with the child. I treated it with reserve and caution. I was stiff and awkward. When I held him Charles writhed against me and screamed until Horace took him back again.

All this proved Molly's theories about the child's paternity. No such thought had entered my head. I had other reasons for treating Charles so carefully. I narrowed my eyes and watched him. I spied on him as he lay in his bassinet. And as Charles grew and came slowly into focus I saw exactly what had happened: Charles was Jack with bandy legs put on.

No wonder the jig, the hop, the dance.

I did not waste time thinking about the mechanics of this conception, whether Jack's ghost had mounted Phoebe in the night, driven home his pulsing lights deep into her womb and made her cry out, or whether he sent the snake slithering electrically into the bedroom with its belly full of coded liquids, there to insinuate itself between her legs whilst she slept beside her unsuspecting husband.

Phoebe displayed little of the maternal instinct towards her son and for this I silently thanked her. We did not discuss the Little Jack who toddled silently into places it was forbidden, but I always believed we both understood that something sinister had happened.

A lesser man might have been defeated by such a setback. Yet when I recall 1921 and '22 I recall only my feverish optimism. I built for the future, with the passion of a man who plans to start a dynasty. The house grew. It shot out long branches, covered walkways, new rooms. I built a room for Annette who had failed, as yet, to visit. I was oblivious to the world outside, and most of the world inside too.

E. g.: Dear Dicksy, you are, once again, proven right and there does not appear to be any likelihood of a more modern aeroplane. I am sure there is enough money. I am absolutely convinced. But the whole subject seems to enrage them and they will not even discuss it. He, who introduced himself into my life with all his dreams and ambitions, seems to have become an old man suddenly, weary of trying anything and content to sit in his slippers drinking tea. He is jealous of me. He led me on with all this talk of famous air races, and now he has abandoned them completely and he seems set for the life of a shopkeeper.

The poor little boy will, I suppose, suffer because of us, but at least H. has learned his lesson and seen that he is not capable of normal paternal feelings. We are, neither of us, normal people. Ido love my son, but much as I imagine fathers love their children, not in the hot entanglement of child and mother, all muddy with tears and pee. Thank God for Horace who is wonderful with him, and leaves me free to master this very antiquated aeroplane which, at least, is not forbidden me and in which I shall, any week, come to visit you. Dicksy, I cannot wait. I am a cat in heat. I lift my tail. I arch my back. I rub against your calves. And for all this, I blame the sky which is soempty. You are wrong (or, should I say, Freud is wrong – you are merely wrong to quote him). It may be correct in dreams (his, yours, not mine – I only dream of engines and magnetos with faults I cannot fix) but in real life the feelings are produced by emptiness. I know I would have the same urges in the desert, or in any place where I was me, alone, with, no one else to observe or censure me. I have felt the strongest desire in railway carriages when I am alone in a compartment by myself and I know I can do anything, anything at all, without anyone to interrupt. All of which is to say that they are welcome to get cross or unhappy because they have given up their dreams, but I will not.