DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?

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    The ime I saw her, Miss Winter looked different. She closed her eyes wearily, and it took her lohan usual to jure the past and begin to speak. While she gathered the threads, I watched her and noticed that she had left off her false eyelashes. There was the habitual purple eye shadow, the sweeping line of black. But without the spider lashes, she had the ued appearance of a child who had been playing in her mother’s makeup box.

    Things weren’t as Hester and the doctor expected. They were prepared for an Adeline who would rant and rage and kid fight. As for Emmelihey were ting on her affe for Hester to recile her to her twin’s sudden absehey were expeg, in short, the same girls they had before, only separate where they had been together. And so, initially, they were surprised by the twins’ collapse into a pair of lifeless rag dolls.

    Not quite lifeless. The blood tio circulate, sluggishly, in their veins. They swallowed the soup that ooned into their mouths by in one house the Missus, iher the doctor’s wife. But swallowing is a reflex<cite></cite>, and they had no appetite. Their eyes, open during the day, were unseeing, and at night, though their eyes closed, they had not the tranquility of sleep. They were apart; they were alohey were in a kind of limbo. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

    Did the stists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unscious figures of the twins cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.

    The doctor carried out tests. Hester observed. And they met every day, to pare o discuss what at first they optimistically called progress. Behind the doctor’s desk, or in the Angelfield library, they sat together, heads bent over papers on which were recorded every detail of the girls’ lives. Behavior, diet, sleep. They puzzled over absent appetites, the propensity to sleep all the time—that sleep which was not sleep. They proposed theories to at for the ges iwins. The experiment was not going as well as they had expected, had begun in fact disastrously, but the two stists skirted around the possibility that they might be doing harm, preferring to retain the belief that together they could work a miracle.

    The doctor derived great satisfa from the y of w for the first time in decades with a stifid of the highest order. He marveled at his protegee’s ability to grasp a principle one minute and to apply it with professional inality and insight the . Before long he admitted to himself that she was more a colleague than a protegee. Aer was thrilled to find that at long last her mind was adequately nourished and challenged. She came out of their daily meetings aglow with excitement and pleasure. So their blindness was only natural. How could they be expected to uand that what was doing them such good could be doing such great harm to the children in their care? Unless perhaps, in the evenings, each sitting in solitude to write up the day’s hey might individually have raised their eyes to the unmoving, dead-eyed child in a chair in the er a a doubt cross their minds. Perhaps. But if they did, they did not record it n their notes, did not mention it to the other.

    So depe did the pair bee on their joint uaking that hey quite failed to see that the grand project was making nress at ill. Emmeline and Adeline were all but catatonid the girl in the mist vas o be seen. Uerred by their lack of findings, the stists tiheir work: They made tables and charts, proposed theories and developed elaborate experiments to test them. With each failure hey told themselves that they had eliminated something from the field of examination a on to the  big idea.

    The doctor’s wife and the Missus were involved, but at one remove, the physical care of the girls was their responsibility. They spooned soup into the uing mouths of their charges three times a day. they dressed the twins, bathed them, did their laundry, brushed their hair. Eaan had her reasons for disapproving of the project; each had her reasons for keeping mum about her thoughts. As for John-the-dig, he was outside it all. His opinion was sought by no one, not that that stopped him making his daily pronouo the Missus i: “No good will e of it. I’m telling you. No good at all.”

    There came a moment when they might have had to give up. All their plans had e to nothing, and though they racked their brains, they were lost for a rick to try. At precisely this poier detected small signs of improvement in Emmelihe girl had turned her head toward a window. She was found clutg some shiny bauble and would not be separated from it. By listening outside doors (which is lot bad manners, ially, when it is done in the name of sce) Hester discovered that whe alohe child was whispering to herself in the old twin language.

    ‘She is soothing herself,“ she told the doctor, ”by imagining the presence of her sister.“

    The dan a regime of leaving Adeline alone for periods of several hours and listening outside the door, notepad and pen in hand, he heard nothing.

    Hester and the doctor advised themselves of the need for patien the more severe case of Adeline, while they gratulated themselves on the improvements in Emmeline. Brightly they noted Emmeline’s increased appetite, her willio sit up, the first few steps she took of her own accord. Soon she was wandering around the house and garden again with something of her old purposelessness. Oh yes, Hester and the dreed, the experiment was really going somewhere now! Whether they stopped to sider that what they termed “improvements” were only Emmeliurning to the habits she already displayed before the experiment began is hard to judge.

    It wasn’t all plain sailing with Emmelihere was a dreadful day when she followed her o the cupboard filled with the rags her sister used to wear. She held them to her face, ihe stale, animal odor and then, in delight, arrayed herself in them. It was awkward, but worse was to e. Dressed in this fashion, she caught sigh<bdo></bdo>t of herself in a mirror and, taking her refle for her sister, ran headlong into it. The crash was loud enough t the Missus running, and she found Emmeline weeping beside the mirror, g not for her own pain but for her poor sister, who had broken into several pieces and was bleeding.

    Hester took the clothes away from her and instructed John to burn them. As ara precaution, she ordered the Missus to turn all the mirrors to the wall. Emmeline erplexed, but there were no more is of the kind.

    She would not speak. For all the solitary whispering that went on behind closed doors, always in the old twin language, Emmeline could not be io speak a single word of English to the Missus or to Hester. This was something to fer about. Hester and the doctor held a lengthy meeting in the library, at the end of which they cluded that there was no cause for worry. Emmeline could talk, and she would, given time. The refusal to speak, the i with the mirror—they were disappois, of course, but sce has its disappois. And look at the progress! Why, wasn’t Emmelirong enough to be allowed outside? And she speime these days l at the roadside, at the invisible boundary beyond which she dared not step, staring in the dire of the doctor’s house. Things were going as well as could be expected.

    Progress? It was not what they had hoped at the outset. It was not much at all pared to the results Hester had achieved with the girl when she first arrived. But it was all they had and they made the most of it. Perhaps they were secretly relieved. For what would have been the result of a definitive success? It would have eliminated all reason for their tinued collaboration. And though they were blind to the fact, they would not have wahat.

    They would never have ehe experiment of their own accord. Never. It was going to take something else, somethiernal, to put a stop to it. Something that came quite out of the blue.

    ‘What was it?“

    Though it was the end of our time, though she had the drawn, gray-white look that she got wheime for her medication grew near, though it was forbidden to ask questions, I couldn’t help myself.

    Despite her pain, there was a green gleam of mischief in her eyes as she leaned forward fidingly.

    ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Margaret?“

    Do I believe in ghosts? What could I say? I nodded.

    Satisfied, Miss Winter sat ba her chair, and I had the not unfamiliar impression of having given away more than I thought.

    ‘Hester didn’t. Not stific, you see. So, not believing in ghosts, she had a good deal of trouble when she saw one.“

    It was like this:

    One bright day Hester, having finished her duties iy of time, left the house early and decided to take the long way round to the doctor’s house. The sky was gloriously blue, the air fresh-smel<u>.</u>ling and clear, and she felt full of a powerful energy that she couldn’t put a o but that made her yearn for strenuous activity.

    The path around the fields took her up a slight ine that, though not much of a hill, gave her a fine view of the fields and land around. She was about halfway to the doctor’s, striding out vigorously, heartbeat raised but without the slightest sense of overexertion, feeling quite probably that she could fly if she just put her mind to it, when she saw something that stopped her dead.

    In the distance, playing together in a field, were Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that m, the other in green.

    It was impossible.

    But no. Hester was stific. She was seeing them, hehey were there. There must be an explanation. Adeline had escaped from the doctor’s house. Her torpor had left her as suddenly as it had e and, taking advantage of an open window or a set of keys left unattended, she had escaped before anyone had noticed her recovery. That was it.

    What to do? Running to the twins ointless. She’d have had to approach them across a long stretch of open field, and they would see her and flee before she had covered half the distance. So she went to the doctor’s house. At a run.

    In no time she was there, hammering impatiently at the door. It was Mrs. Maudsley who ope, tight-lipped at the racket, but Hester had more important things on her mind than apologies and pushed past her to the door of the surgery. She entered without knog.

    The doctor looked up, startled to see his collaborator’s face flushed with exertion, her hair, normally so , flying free from its grips. She was out of breath. She wao speak but for the moment could not.

    ‘Whatever is it?“ he asked, rising from his seat and ing around the desk to put his hands on her shoulders.

    ‘Adeline!“ she gasped. ”Yo<tt>..t>u’ve let her out!“

    The doctor, puzzled, frowned. He turned Hester by the shoulders, until she was fag the other end of the room.

    There was Adeline.

    Hester spun back around to the doctor. “But I’ve just seen her! With Emmeline! On the edge of the woods beyond Oates’s field…” She began vehemently enough, but her voice tailed off as she began to wonder.

    ‘Calm yourself, sit down, here, take a sip of water,“ the doctor was saying.

    ‘She must have run off. How could she have got out? And e back so quickly?“ Hester tried to make sense of it.

    ‘She has been here in this room this last two hours. Since breakfast. She has not been unsupervised in all that time.“ He looked into Hester’s eyes, stirred by her emotion. ”It must have been another child. From the village,“ he suggested, maintaining his doctorly dec<cite></cite>orum.

    ‘But—“ Hester shook her head. ”It was Adeline’s clothes. Adeline’s hair.“

    Hester turo look at Adeline again. Her open eyes were indifferent to the world. She was wearing not the green dress Hester had seen a few minutes before but a  navy one, and her hair was not loose but braided.

    The eyes Hester turned back to the doctor were full of bewilderment. Her breathing would not steady. There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was uifid Hester khe world was totally and profoundly stific. There could be only one explanation. “I must be mad,” she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. “I have seen a ghost!”

    Her eyes filled with tears.

    It produced a strange sensation in the doctor to see his collaborator reduced to such a state of disheveled emotion. And although it was the stist in him that had first admired Hester for her cool head and reliable brain, it was the man, animal and instinctive, that respoo her disiion by putting his arms around her and plag his lips firmly upon hers in a passionate embrace.

    Hester did not resist.

    Listening at doors is not bad manners when it is done in the name of sce, and the doctor’s wife was a keen stist when it came to studying her own husband. The kiss that so startled the doctor aer came as no surprise at all to Mrs. Maudsley, who had been expeg something rather like it for some time.

    She flung the door open and in a rush of ed righteousness burst into the surgery.

    ‘I will thank you to leave this house instantly,“ she said to Hester. ”You  send John in the brougham for the child.“

    Then, to her husband, “I will speak to you later.”

    The experiment was over. So were many other things.

    Johched Adeline. He saw her the doctor nor his wife at the house but learned from the maid about the events of the m.

    At home he put Adeline in her old bed, in the old room, ahe door ajar.

    Emmeline, wandering in the woods, raised her head, she air and turned directly toward home. She came i door, made straight for the stairs, went up two steps at a time and strode uatingly to the old room. She closed the door behind her.

    Aer? No one saw her return to the house, and no one heard her leave. But when the Missus knocked on her door the  m, she found the  little room empty aer gone.

    I emerged from the spell of the story and into Miss Winter’s glazed and mirrored library.

    ‘Where did she go?“ I wondered.

    Miss Winter eyed me with a slight frown. “I’ve no idea. What does it matter?”

    ‘She must have gone somewhere.“

    The storyteller gave me a sideways look. “Miss Lea, it doesn’t do to get attached to these sedary characters. It’s not their story. They e, they go, and when they go they’re gone food. That’s all there is to it.”

    I slid my pencil into the spiral binding of my notebook and walked to the door, but when I got there, I turned back.

    ‘Where did she e from, then?“

    ‘Foodness’ sake! She was only a governess! She is irrelevant, I tell you.“

    ‘She must have had references. A previous job. Or else a letter of application with a home address. Perhaps she came from an agency?“

    Miss Winter closed her eyes and a long-suffering expression appeared on her face. “Mr. Lomax, the Angelfield family solicitor, will have all the details I’m sure. Not that they’ll do you any good. It’s my story. I should know. His office is in Market Street, Banbury. I will instruct him to answer any inquiries you choose to make.”

    I wrote to Mr. Lomax that night.

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