Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

desk in his arrowed suit and twisting his cap in his hands, this time I’m going straight, you can count on it, I won’t let you down!) There is something about islands that appeals to me, the sense of boundedness, I suppose, of being protected from the world – and of the world being protected from me, there is that, too. They approved, or seemed to, anyway; I have a notion they were relieved to get rid of me. They treated me so tenderly, were so considerate of my wishes, I was amazed. But that is how it had been all along, more or less. They had worse cases than me on their hands, fellows who in a less squeamish age would have been hanged, drawn and quartered for their deeds, yet they seemed to feel that I was special. Perhaps it was just that I had confessed so readily to my crime, made no excuses, even displayed a forensic interest in my motives, which were almost as mysterious to me as they were to them. For whatever reason, they behaved towards me as if I had done some great, grave thing, as if I were a messenger, say, come back from somewhere immensely difficult and far, bringing news so terrible it made them feel strong and noble merely to be the receivers of it. It may be, of course, that this solemn mien was only a way of hiding their hatred and disgust. I suspect they would have done violence to me but that they did not wish to soil their hands. Maybe they had been hoping my fellow inmates would mete out to me the punishments they were loth to administer themselves? If so, they were disappointed; I was a man of substance in there, ranging freely as I might among that hobbled multitude. And now I had done my time, and was out.
    I was not at all the same person that I had been a decade before (is the oldster in his dotage the same that he was when he was an infant swaddled in his truckle bed?). A slow sea-change had taken place. I believe that over those ten years ofincarceration – life, that is, minus time off for good, for exemplary, behaviour – I had evolved into an infinitely more complex organism. This is not to say that I felt myself to be better than I had been – the doctrine of penal rehabilitation broke against the rock of my inexpungible guilt – nor did it mean I was any worse, either: just different. Everything had become more intricate, more dense and pensive. My crime had ramified; it sat inside me now like a second, parasitic self, its tentacles coiled around my cells. I had grown fat on my sin; I seemed to myself to wallow along, bloated and empurpled, like a mutated species of jellyfish stuffed full with poison. Soft, that is, formless, malignant still, yet not so fierce as once I had been, not so careless, or so cold. Puzzled, too, of course, still unable to believe that I had done what I did do. I make no pleas; it is the only thing I can boast of, that I never sought to excuse myself for my enormities. And so I had come to this penitential isle (there are beehive huts in the hills), seeking not redemption, for that would have been too much to ask, but an accommodation with myself, maybe, and with my poor, swollen conscience.
    They tell me I am too hard on myself; as if such a thing were possible.
    I was brought, or perhaps transported is a better word: yes, I was transported here by boat. It was charming. I had expected to find myself standing outside the gates some desolate grey morning with a brown-paper parcel under my arm, whey-faced and baffled before a prospect of enormous streets, yet here I was, skimming gaily over the little waves with the breeze in my face and the tarry smell of the sea in my nostrils. The morning was sunny and bright, the light like glass. Shadows of clouds raced towards us across the water, darkened the air around us for a second, and swept on. When we got into the lee of the island the breeze dropped and the skipper cut the engine and we glided smoothly forward into avast, flat silence. The water with the sun on it was wonderfully clear, I could see right