Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

mobile phone had committed me to writing Elizabeth’s book, a few words might also undo that knot. But I didn’t undo it. You were in Berlin; I in Cambridge. I sent no further message. What could I lose, I wondered, now that my direction was so unscripted? I would have liked to talk to you. I didn’t. I walked on in.
    I turned myself into Elizabeth’s ghostwriter by a series of small and inconsequential acts over the following week that continued to propel me towards The Studio and tied the knot between Elizabeth, you, and me ever tighter: a long phone call to Peter that started with explanations and ended with raised voices, a phone call in which I sought advice and which ended instead in my telling him I was moving into a house in Cambridge; a deliberately formal e-mail sent to my now ex-lover the following day with a list of things I needed to take with me; a drive to Brighton to pick up the boxes of papers, books, and clothes that Peter had packed up, labelled, and colour-coded; new agreements made over my kitchen table about bills and responsibilities and rent to be paid into my account; an argument with Kit about risk and your manipulations; boxes that stayed unpacked in the back of my car until the morning I took my clean washing from Kit’s laundry cupboard, packed my last things, picked up the key to The Studio, stepped into the car, and drove to your mother’s house. Just keep on walking forward, I said.
    The Studio was not as I had remembered it. Quiet roads twisted and turned down by the river, lined with elegant eighteenth-century houses of all different shapes and sizes: gardens filled at this time of the year with hollyhocks that had bloomed; the little pub called the Green Dragon overlooking the river; the parking place by the cobbled wall; the door in the ivy which I had to open by pushing my shoulder against it hard; beyond the door the bright September light falling through trees that were already turning gold and russet. It was only when I pulled the heavy door to behind me, shutting myself away from the sound of the traffic, and when I smelled the river and the apples rotting in the orchard garden, that my ambivalence dropped away. I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the blue sky blindingly bright above the sharded angles of the roof and the sound of my feet on the gravel path and the clustered treetops over which rooks circled and cawed in the glassy sky.
    When I circled the outside of the house looking in, taking my time, Elizabeth’s cat, Pepys, a ginger tom, twisted his way like a skein of wool round my ankles, as he and I followed the path round the woodpile at the back of the house and through the rose arbours and shrubs planted around the skirts of the orchard. I remember noticing that there were no curtains at the windows and that many of the wooden shingles on the roof, which swept all the way down to the ground, needed replacing. Not my responsibility, I said to the cat. I don’t have to mend and paint and repair here. I’m just passing through. I didn’t walk down to the riverbank, down to those reeds, not just yet. No ghosts here, I thought. No ghosts and a room of my own.
             
    Two days later a woman dressed in black with short blond hair let herself into The Studio at around midnight and, finding me sitting at Elizabeth’s table in the dark, reading her papers by candlelight, let out a scream. Of course: in that light and at that hour, she thought she’d seen a ghost. Since the front door was still open, the wind blew the candle on my table out, and paralysed by the sudden darkness, she dropped everything she was carrying onto the hallway floor. Switching on the light, I helped her pick her things up: library books, a tobacco tin, and a new bottle of glass cleaner called Shine.
    “She’s run out of glass polish,” she said, by way of explanation.
    “How come you’ve got a key to this house?” I asked.
    “How come
you
have?”
    “I’m going to be