How to Marry a Ghost Read online

  And that was exactly what happened. When the guests began to arrive at around six o’clock, some of them wearing galoshes and bundled up in rain capes to protect their finery, they were directed to the veranda at the back of the house overlooking the beach. Here they were served a warming punch from a recipe my mother had given the kitchen staff at the first sign of the storm. I had been instructed to be dressed and ready and waiting at the bottom of the sweeping staircase in the great hall. When I arrived, feeling very sophisticated with my hair swept securely into an elaborate updo by my mother’s hairdresser, I found the Phillionaire standing there with Scott.

  “You look quite beautiful, my dear,” said Phil. As he held me in his arms for a second, I heard his sharp intake of breath as he looked over my shoulder. “But not as beautiful as your mother.”

  She was coming down the stairs in a white satin dress with a high round neck and long tight sleeves that set off the shape of her toned arms to perfection. The narrow body buttoned up the side and had a dropped waistline that descended into a full and softly pleated skirt ending at the knee. Tossed around her neck was a long white garland of gardenias. She was regal and serene and she carried a posy of white gardenias to match the bloom attached to the side of her headband just above her left ear.

  When she reached the Phillionaire she didn’t say a word, just looked deep into his eyes, took him by the hand and led him out via the French windows onto the veranda where everyone parted to let them through. Scott and I made up the rest of the family party and we followed. The rain had stopped but the wind was still howling and the waves were pounding onto the shore.

  My mother turned and instructed us to take off our shoes and then she gave a slight nod to someone waiting at the far side of the deck.

  “Watch,” she whispered to me. “Something for Phil. He used to be a great surfer in his day, so I’m told. Here’s his other son, Rufus.”

  Around each corner of the house came a procession of bare-chested hunks bearing surfboards. They lined up at the bottom of the steps to the deck and raised their boards to form an awning under which we picked our way barefoot across the eroded beach strewn with debris from the storm. We stopped at a small patch of sand that had been raked clean right at the edge of the sea. The surfers were the groomsmen, forming a semicircle around my mother and Phil, and holding their boards upright in the sand beside them like monuments. To look at, Rufus was as unlike his brother as he could possibly be. He was blond and cheeky with an upturned nose and freckles. He was quite short but his upper body was strong and muscled. He had a knapsack on his bare back from which he extracted two long garlands of white gardenias. He hung one each around my mother’s neck and the Phillionaire’s and then took his place by my side. Scott was trying to look cool in a lightweight gray suit and bare feet but he didn’t stand a chance next to his buff and tanned brother.

  My mother and the Phillionaire stood facing each other, barefoot in the sand, hands clasped, and suddenly I realized that we would not be able to hear their vows above the roar of the surf.

  But it didn’t matter. From the expression on their faces, there was no doubt that what they were exchanging were declarations of love.

  And then I stopped abruptly because a figure had appeared on the horizon, walking toward us along the shoreline, and once again I sensed a portent that something disturbing was approaching. As it came closer, I saw it was a woman, not in the first flush of youth, long gray hair flowing past her shoulders. She was a beauty, whoever she was, but her appearance was as unkempt as my mother’s was groomed and elegant. She was dressed hippie style in a loose flowing caftan and an Indian shawl was tossed around her shoulders. Hard lines of disappointment were etched in her strong face but there was no escaping the fierce intensity of her eyes.

  The Phillionaire had told me that he didn’t own the actual beach—anyone could walk along it—but it was surprising to see someone out for what appeared to be a leisurely stroll in the wake of a tropical storm. I expected her suddenly to sense she was intruding on a private ceremony and turn back but she kept on coming until she was near enough that a stranger might have mistaken her for one of our party. Then she stopped and stood there, watching and smiling at us in an eerily familiar way.

  Rufus winked at me. We hadn’t actually been introduced but he seemed to know who I was. “That’s all we need,” he muttered to me, grinning.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Some woman who wanders the beach. Everyone calls her Miss Havisham. The word is she was left standing at the altar many years ago and it sent her around the bend. She never married anybody else and she frequents beach weddings because they’re the only ones she has access to. But it’s what they say will happen if she shows up at your wedding that’s the killer.”

  “What do they say?”

  “That she puts a curse on the wedding to avenge what happened to her, that the marriage won’t last.”

  “Well, that’s okay,” I said, “because this isn’t a proper wedding.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Rufus, “and it’s all a crock anyway.”

  But he didn’t look too sure and I was relieved when “Miss Havisham” didn’t make any attempt to follow us into the house for the dinner.

  One good thing about the gloomy stucco mansion was that it had a ballroom. When I saw the Phillionaire lay down his cigar and lead my mother out onto the dance floor, I took the opportunity to slip out to the veranda to see if Miss Havisham was still wandering along the beach. But there was no sign of her. The surfers, now wearing sleek black wetsuits, were gathering up their boards in the moonlight and Rufus told me they were going over to the ocean to take advantage of the post-storm swells.

  “Midnight surfing under the full moon,” he said. “You want to come along?”

  “Absolutely!” I was amazed at my spontaneity. Back in London my natural British reticence and neurotic terror of the unknown would have stopped me taking off so quickly with a bunch of near strangers. Yet riding through the dunes in the back of a pickup truck, dressed in nothing but a bit of black silk chiffon with my hair unraveling in the wind, I experienced a sense of sheer exhilaration and began to feel excited about the new person I might become in America.

  For about twenty seconds.

  As the trucks with their four-wheel drive sped along the wide ocean beach, an ambulance and a police car began to give chase behind us and, looking up, I saw a police helicopter whirring overhead. The surfers pulled over allowing the ambulance to overtake us and we followed at a discreet distance, everyone standing up in the back of the truck and craning their necks to see what was going on.

  Farther up the beach appeared to be floodlit. At least a dozen vehicles had beaten us to it and crowds had already gathered at the water’s edge. There was a body lying facedown on the sand illuminated by the headlamps of parked trucks. A familiar feeling of panic began to creep over me and my first instinct was to ask Rufus to take me back, but when everyone else got out and I found myself alone, I followed. I was drawn by a morbid fascination and, feeling sick with dread, I jostled with the crowds to get a closer look.

  It was so weird that at first I thought I was hallucinating. The body had clearly been pulled from the water and I thought it must have somehow come to be wrapped in the tulle that the storm had whipped from our bamboo arch. Then, as the ambulance men lifted it onto a gurney, the head rolled toward us and I could see it was a man’s face. Bloated and mottled and strewn with seaweed, but definitely a man’s.

  But he wasn’t wrapped in something, he was wearing it.

  It was sodden and crumpled and it clung to his body like the spoiled plumage of a magnificent bird washed up on the beach, but there was no mistaking it for anything but a wedding dress.

  “White taffeta and gold brocade over layers of tulle,” whispered a woman behind me with an air of reverence. “I sold a dress like that at Saks once.”

  “Some guys from the Town Shellfish Hatchery just reported tha
t they found the veil over in the bay near our house,” said Rufus. “It was caught up in a clam raft they were towing. Man! The press are going to be all over this one.”

  “Don’t get too many men in wedding dresses washed up on your beach, I suppose?” I was being flippant to cover my nerves. That was a dead man lying there and without being aware of it, I had raised my hands to my face in horror.

  “You don’t get it.” Rufus looked at me. “As far as the press are concerned, this isn’t just any man. Someone just told me. It’s the son of that British rock ’n’ roll guy—Shotgun Marriott.”

  My knees gave way and I flopped down onto the sand before Rufus could catch me. There was another reason besides my mother’s ceremony that had brought me to New York.

  I was here to interview for the job of ghostwriting Shotgun Marriott’s autobiography.

  CHAPTER 2

  THAT NIGHT AROUND 3:00 A.M. I JERKED AWAKE, trembling with the jolt of a nightmare still reverberating vividly inside my head. I’d been swimming, plunging through the water for what seemed like forever, and my legs were on the verge of giving out from exhaustion. Finally I’d reached the shore and lain there, recovering on the wet sand as the tide ebbed over me, and after a while I’d become aware of another figure that had drifted in beside me.

  It was the body in the wedding dress and as I reached out to touch it, the eyes opened wide and stared at me and the shriveled lips parted to speak.

  I sat up in bed and realized that it was a dream and I never would hear what they said to me. My instant reaction was to reach for the phone on the nightstand and do what I always did when my insanely overactive imagination convinced me that danger was lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce.

  I called Tommy.

  I actually got as far as dialing his number in London, congratulating myself for remembering the country code without having to look it up, before it hit me at the sound of the first ring.

  Tommy wasn’t in my life anymore.

  My relationship of almost nine years with a certain Tommy Kennedy was complicated. Complicated by me, I hasten to add. Given that my natural inclination is to spend much of my life alone I had, until very recently—like about a year ago—insisted that Tommy and I live separately. Poor Tommy, a chubby forty-three-year-old radio engineer at the BBC, was warm, affectionate, and gregarious. He was desperate to get married, settle down, and have loads of little Kennedys and it was just his bad luck that he had fallen in love with someone for whom that appeared to be total anathema. As we often used to joke, I was the one with the biological clock but he was the one keeping time. He never could figure out why I banished him from my life for several days a week but being the devoted rock that he was, he accepted it.

  Just as he accepted my irrational fear of violence and my belief that around every corner someone was lurking to kill me. When an arsonist started setting fire to buildings in my neighborhood with the result that those inside were barbecued, he moved in with me the minute I summoned him, so convinced was I that I would be the next victim. The only way I could feel remotely safe was to have his hefty bulk beside me every night.

  The impossible happened. I got used to having him around. I fell in love with him all over again. And I asked him to marry me.

  Yes, I asked him and he said yes and I spent the best part of a year planning our wedding to coincide with the Notting Hill carnival. We were going to be transported amidst the carnival revelers down Ladbroke Grove from the church to the reception on a float bearing the colors of Chelsea, the football team who were neck and neck with me when it came to receiving Tommy’s unswerving devotion.

  But in the end, Chelsea won.

  He didn’t leave me at the altar or anything. He’s the sweetest, kindest man so he would never do anything like that. All he did was change his mind, something he was perfectly entitled to do.

  We were having breakfast when he told me. I’d had to make the most enormous effort to incorporate his existence into my daily routine. My normal writing practice was to tumble out of bed, make myself a quick cup of coffee, and go straight to my desk before the inspiration and energy that came from getting a good night’s sleep evaporated. Sometimes I didn’t bother getting dressed until lunchtime.

  In order to preserve that precious period of solitude for as long as possible I encouraged Tommy to go running every morning. “We have to get you in shape for the wedding,” was my reasoning. The first morning, he agreed with enthusiasm and set off wearing a pair of ludicrous baggy shorts and a T-shirt that proclaimed he was a vegetarian, which was a total lie. After seven minutes he was back, clambering up the stairs to the bathroom where he spent forty-seven minutes in the tub, singing his favorite country and western songs at full volume. Then he demanded a full English breakfast, something I haven’t eaten, let alone cooked, for several years.

  I didn’t say a word. After years of thinking I absolutely had to live alone, that I needed my space, that I didn’t want to share my life with anyone, I had suddenly got the point of having someone else around. I had begun to find that I looked forward to sharing whatever thoughts I had during the day with Tommy when he came home in the evening. All right, it nearly drove me crazy having him disturb my early morning peace yet I was prepared to compromise. And that’s a word that was not even part of my vocabulary six months ago. But I was changing and I was proud of it.

  It took several weeks to persuade Tommy that for it to do any good at all, he would have to run for at least half an hour.

  “That jacket you’re going to wear for the wedding, it’s fitted—it’s not loose and floppy like most of your clothes,” I pointed out to him. “If you lose ten pounds—even five would help—you’ll look sensational in it.”

  “These scrambled eggs are disgusting,” he complained, “and I’m not going to be wearing the jacket at the wedding.”

  “That’s because they’re made with egg substitute,” I told him. “We’ve got to do something about your cholesterol. What do you mean, you’re not wearing that jacket? You’ve had it made specially. It’s beautiful.”

  “I meant I’m not going to be wearing the jacket at the wedding because I’m not going to be at the wedding.”

  “Oh really, Tommy? Where are you going to be? Prior ar-rangement at Stanford Bridge maybe?” Stanford Bridge was the Chelsea football ground, Tommy’s home away from home. I think if it could have been arranged, he would have liked us to get married standing in the goal post with the stadium filled with our guests.

  “I’m not going to be at the wedding because I don’t want to get married anymore.”

  He was mumbling now but I heard every word as distinctly as if he had been bellowing.

  I swallowed and held my breath and waited for the “just kidding.” Tommy was a practical joker with a childlike sense of humor. But he didn’t say anything.

  “Any particular reason?” I decided to keep it light and cheery even though my state of mind was bordering on panic.

  “Don’t think I’m ready for it.” More mumbling.

  “That’s not what you’ve been telling me for the past eight years.” I turned on him. “You’ve always been the one who was desperate to get married.”

  “Changed my mind.”

  I resisted the urge to throw something at him. Tommy behaved like a small boy most of the time but when he thought he might be in the wrong, he was almost infantile in the curtness of his answers.

  “Are you going to tell me why?” I sat down now. I was maintaining amazing calm but I knew that later the storm would break and I would collapse and wail in agony.

  “All right, I’ll tell you,” he said, as if he really didn’t owe me an explanation but he’d do me the great favor of giving me one. “I thought I wanted to get married but now I realize I don’t.”

  “Tommy,” I said, fighting hard not to raise my voice, “that’s not good enough.”

  He sat there for a moment in silence, the jowls in his handsome open face collapsed like dewl
aps and his huge hands resting palms-down on the table making him resemble a giant golden Labrador waiting to be fed.

  “I know,” he said finally, “I know. I’ve got to work out exactly how to tell you. But you know, it’s these morning runs that did it.”

  “Running makes you antimarriage?”

  “I had time to think about getting married while I was running. I’m not sure it’s the right time.”

  “Ah,” I said, trying my utmost to be patient with him. “I see”—although I didn’t see at all—“and when do you think might be a good time for us to get married, Tommy?”

  “About two years ago.” Now he was looking very sheepish.

  I didn’t say a word. I just looked at him. Sometimes that was the only thing to do with Tommy. I’d just stare at him until he grew so uncomfortable that what was really bothering him bubbled to the surface and spewed out. It was a bit of a mean tactic but it always worked.

  “Well, it was different. You needed me then.”

  “I need you now, Tommy.”

  “Not sure you do,” he challenged, going red. “You’re so independent, there’d be nothing I could do for you.”

  This was true of our relationship to a certain extent. Tommy didn’t lead, he supported, he followed, and he always left the big decisions to me.

  “You don’t need my money, it’s your house and—”

  Ah, so this was what all the fuss was about.

  “Tommy, it’s not about possessions. I need you. It’s about caring for each other and being there for each other when we have problems.”

  “But you don’t have problems anymore.”

  I stared at him. He stared back looking sad and awkward.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he pleaded. “It’s true. When I first met you, you were neurotic and frightened and jumpy and I was able to help you and understand you and I felt I was really important to you. Now things have changed.”