In the spirit

When you are writing a biography it is a little like falling in love — everything you see and hear and even smell makes you think of your subject, your object. You might see the surname “Wong” and think that the woman you are writing about had an accountant of that name, and was inclined to insert an “r” between the first two letters to wind him up, sad to say. You might see a delivery van with the word “Brinks” on the side and remember that, when she did not get the Oscar she deserved, it was called “the biggest robbery since Brinks”. Then you muse generally on disappointment that is played out on an international stage, and then you realise the van says “Binks” and you think, oh well. These to-ings and fro-ings punctuate your day. You develop a one-track mind. Think of King Lear assuming every distressed soul he encounters must have been mistreated by his daughters. It’s a tiny bit like that.

At the moment I am doing some academic work around the subject of ghosts. I am doing this in a manner that could be called “accidentally on purpose”, that most wry sphere of the unconscious, or perhaps I am just doing it accidentally. For truth be told, I am not really interested in ghosts. They feel beneath me and beyond me. If I think of the human traits I value most: warmth, intelligence, kindness and an excellent memory for lyrics — ghosts so rarely excel in these areas. Ghosts might represent things, but they rarely seem to interpret them. I can’t help feeling they are crude in their communication. They aren’t analytical. They create anxiety and fear, they may even feel it, but they don’t discuss it. I like ambiguity, certainly, but I’ve never gone in for mystification.

I justify this work by thinking that although I am not really interested in ghosts, nothing interests me more than the things that haunt people. If you take ghosts in the widest sense — that is, strong sensations or flashes of sensations usually linked to the past — then I am right at home. With that definition, ghosts operate at the very heart of things. Ghosts are my people!

I comfort myself further by thinking that I may have been guilty of underestimating ghosts. I remind myself that they must be a bit obsessive by nature, for their existence is effortful — chosen, even — and I’ve always liked obsessive people: perfectionists, grievers, geniuses. And of course, in literature at any rate, ghosts are often haunted themselves, with regret, with unfinished business, with revenge and what might have been. They want to correct the past or lay things to rest. They want closure. But do they want Frasier?

Since beginning this ghostly work I have half-wondered if I might see one round and about. Of course I occasionally feel the presence of a lost loved one sending me approval or its reverse, but it is always a feeling, not a sighting. There has been nothing uncanny. I don’t get the pulls to ghosts several times a day that I did when focusing on other subjects, although I often detect a haunted look on the faces of the people that I pass, or I wonder, when people stop speaking mid-sentence, what fledgling unsayable things lie behind the words not chosen...

It happened that on Valentine’s Day half of central London was closed and a four-mile journey took almost two hours. I was warm and happy in the car en route to a party in my orange-and-blue houndstooth-check skirt. We listened to a podcast by a distinguished surgeon who claimed the best professional advice he had ever received was: “Don’t just do something, stand there!” Our desire to intervene can be huge, he continued, but first we must wait until we have a thorough understanding of the situation, and that often involves waiting. For a moment I imagined this advice being issued to a row of ghosts. I smiled.

At the party one of the guests took me to one side. “Can we talk about your birthday?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Well, I was standing in the kitchen near the window and when I looked back towards the garden I saw this ghostly figure in a pale nightgown by the table, and she was standing there and the back of her head and her neck were completely white and she was kind of shimmering. And her arms were very long and thin and luminous. And I froze. And then suddenly she just disappeared. I was going to come and find you but I thought it might freak you out.”

“Was the dress to the floor?” I asked, “A kind of bluish white colour?”

“That’s right.”

“Was the hair dark?”

“Yes, it was very dark.”

“Was she of medium build?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That was Helen. She had to leave early.”

“Oh, OK. Sorry about that.”

“Not at all.”

— Financial Times