The Ghost of Midsummer Common

a novel

Gordon's new novel tells the story of Brian Craig. Brian is a history professor at a suburban Chicago university and disastrous spouse and lover whose intimate life is dominated by memories of an unconsummated first love. In the throws of a second divorce and a mounting sense of disillusionment with his obsessive work life, Brian flees from Chicago for a sabbatical in Cambridge, England. There he begins to have a series of realistic dreams--more like visions, even, than any dreams he has ever had. A dream/vision he has one night walking across Midsummer Common, an open park provides him with a spiritual companion who silently leads him to resolution of the dream tension. All the while he follows the bumpy road of his personal life and struggles to establish a new sense of equilibrium. Mystical visions, spiritual direction, the righting of an ancient wrong, the search for a stable intimate life and a recovery of spiritual wholeness are the underlying themes of the story.

Chapter One

The 1:32 from King's Cross slowed and jerked to a halt at the Cambridge station. Brian leaped out of his seat and danced around inside his skin like a kid on his birthday. He searched for familiar landmarks: a little coffee and pastry kiosk, the newspaper stand, a distant spire. Everything was where it should be and looking the way he remembered it. He straightened up from bending to look through the car's window. He had missed this place so much that it was all he could do to choke down the lump in his throat. Had it really been ten years since his last time here? Such a lapse was wildly out of character for an Anglophile like Brian. Today he felt like the returning prodigal.

So where was the fatted calf? No clouds parting with rays of golden sun falling on tousled fair hair? No strains of Jerusalem swelling in crescendo?

Right.                                                                          

He wrestled his bags off the train and strapped the small cases on top of the two large wheeled ones. Other departing passengers darted around him as he dragged it all down the platform. Another wave of fondness and familiarity swept over him; he loved this little city with all its tradition, vitality and energy, its twisting old streets, grassy expanses and spired buildings.

The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd swept him with it through the ticket machine-lined reception hall like a river at flood. Bumping. Jostling. "Sorry." "Sorry."

The past, both the impersonal centuries and his own stories, unwound into the present in Cambridge. Colleges and bookstores, churches and pubs, libraries and archives—all formed a central place in his life. It was here that he learned to do real research; here that the tentative first chapters of his dissertation were written; and here that he and his young first wife conceived the child who grew to become his only daughter. It was to Cambridge that he returned over the years to find renewal and refreshment. But all that was before Emily, the second wife. Emily didn't like England, didn't like any foreign country, and he had given up fighting with her about it. Now she was divorcing him to live with her Chevrolet dealer. Chevrolets. Couldn't the guy at least sell Volvos? As if her infidelity hadn't been insult enough. Had the rejection and the loss not felt so humiliating he might really have been amused by her bad taste.

No doubt his own self-absorption had made him a lousy husband, and he had to admit that Emily and he had never been a good match. It had been a second marriage for them both. They had just fallen into it. Once their animal lust had evaporated like spilled water on an August sidewalk, their life together had settled down into a dull routine. Still, he would be sorry to end that chapter and lose his comfortable life. He had been cozy with Emily, and he loved that big old house: three stories on a tree-lined Evanston street just across the Northwestern campus from the lakefront. He adored those attic rooms with their dormer windows and his book-lined study. Whose contents were now languishing, captives in cardboard boxes, in a rented storage shed. He thought about the many mornings when he would crawl out of his warm bed in that house, throw on some clothes and head toward the lakeshore for one of his solitary walks. Or runs. There would be no more morning walks. No more cozy bed. No more study. No more Emily.

After sabbatical he would have to find himself a new place as close to the lake as possible, perhaps a little nearer to the heart of the city. He fantasized about an apartment high atop one of the old brick buildings along Lake Shore Drive: high ceilings and dark wood trim. Suddenly he craved the rush and rhythm of Chicago's heartbeat. He felt very alone and a little frightened here in Cambridge. He missed Emily.

Brian took his place in the taxi queue and sat down on one of the large suitcases. There had to be fifty people in front of him.

A wash of sadness nearly swamped him. He thought about the things he would miss about Emily. She could be smart and savvy. She could think through ten complex subjects while the average person was wrestling with one. She was funny. He hadn't seen much of that wit recently, but he knew it was still there. Her sarcasm must now be turned against Fords and Toyotas instead of his departmental colleagues. A Chevrolet dealer? The very idea. Maybe it was inevitable that an accounting professor would be drawn to car sales. Was this the business world's measure of success—a Chevy dealership?

Even he recognized his academic snobbery.

Cambridge was a home in need. Now, maybe a year in Cambridge would give his academic life a kind of kick start. It certainly needed something. The mollusk minds, usually called university administrators, would be thousands of miles away. The tedium and monotony of classes and committees would soon grow remote. He would restore life as he had known it before Emily came into it. Maybe he could get back to his real work in earnest and be productive again. Maybe even write something.

But he felt another jab of emotion, of fear. After everything that had happened on his last visit to this island he had a right to be fearful. His second marital disaster, the aura of failure that seemed to hover over everything else in his life right now and the return of his fear: Brian was a mess.

He watched as city busses, taxis and private cars moved in a ritual dance around the circular drive in front of the rail station. Every few minutes he pushed and pulled his cases ahead as the queue shrunk. The young man in front of him was eating a Donar Kebab. It smelled spicy and tempting. Watching and sniffing brought back memories of meals just like that one, caught on the run, moments when some interior drive was more compelling than stopping to taste and sample something really elegant. But he was no longer in his twenties. Even his thirties and half of his forties had slipped away.

An impeccably turned-out older woman stood impatiently behind him. She was dressed in mauve and black with matching hat, purse and shoes and had a green Harrods shopping bag on her arm. She felt to him as imperious as she was obviously impatient.

Glancing across the street, Brian saw a field of parked bicycles. Making a quick calculation, he estimated that there had to be something approaching five hundred of them. Appraising quantities inside containers or enclosures was a kind of hobby of his. How many grains of rice could be gotten into a jar? How many people could you cram into a railroad car? How many strings of spaghetti fitted in a pound package? Or he could use the subject matter of his work as a historian and ask how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? Obsessive? Probably so. But there seemed little real harm in it.

The Kebab eater polished off his sandwich and flashed a grinning mouthful of sparkling white teeth. The snooty woman gave him a disdainful look, much as if he had been a distasteful and embarrassing growth on her bum. Finally, it was Brian's turn to get into a taxi, a minivan that gave him lots of room for both his long legs and his bags. "Lord's Hostel," he said.

The driver grunted something cheerful but unintelligible, pointed the van into the roundabout and careened around it onto the narrow road.

Brian leaned back in the seat and looked out fondly at the familiar town as the minivan scooted between parked cars and moving busses. He was charmed and amused afresh by the orderliness of the buildings and the chaos of the traffic. Long rows of attached brick houses lined the way. In the distance, the spires of medieval churches and college buildings jabbed into the sunny afternoon sky and gave him a little thrill. He soaked up the antiquity of it all, feeling better already.

 

Ten years ago Brian's first marriage had finished unraveling, and he was on the mend. Where else would he go to nurse his wounds but England? He had been with Alison, one of his graduate students. She had pursued him until she caught him. Then she ministered to him in the ancient way of younger women. He had been having the time of his life, a time of sexual extravagance. But that was before Alison decided to throw him back. Until, quite frankly, she had grown tired of him. Or had thought he was just too weird. He remembered how she had looked with her riotous blonde hair atop that unblemished young body. A Camelot existence. Then the strange things started happening.

It wasn't so much that he had begun seeing things, though that had been part of it. Mostly he had felt them. Vivid emotional encounters with the past, especially the violence of tragic events. Ultimately he had gotten an explanation about it all. Enough to convince him that he wasn't going nuts. But it still seemed pretty bizarre. The Chicago shrink called what he was having place memories. According to the theory some people are susceptible to lingering residues of the past in physical locations—rooms, houses, battlefields. "It says much about haunted houses and such like," she had said in her quiet way. With gray hair tumbling over gold-rimmed spectacles and a tendency to mumble something very like tut-tut, she had reminded him of an eccentric grandmother. "The Church of England even had a commission a few years back to look into the rash of strange occurrences that broke out right after the Second World War," she had explained. "Their theory held that the bombing stirred up some unsettled old stuff from the past." She shook her head. "No, really, that's what they said. Susceptible people started seeing, hearing and feeling things." Susceptible people. Apparently Brian was one of those susceptible people.

Alison had wanted to see Coventry Cathedral, so they made a little detour in the day's plans and took it in. A World War II Luftwaffe attack on the evening of November 14, 1940 had left the medieval building in ruins. It remained that way as a reminder of the horror of war. Brian walked amidst the roofless partial walls and began to feel strange. He became aware of the new cathedral looking down on them through its wall of etched glass, turning the ruin into a terrible cloister. He tried to imagine what it would have been like watching the old church burning out of control, the firefighters doing what they could about it, but being helpless. Meanwhile the bombs continued to fall.

Then something changed. He had felt the accumulated pain and fear of many people. He heard quite clearly the rough uneven drone of German aircraft, the whine and buzz of British Spitfires and Mosquitoes, the whistle and concussion of the bombardment, and the rapid report of antiaircraft guns. He became terrified. Ghostly shapes of people were screaming and running around in what seemed like aimless circles. Shattered glass littered the ground. The sight of bloody wounds and missing limbs filled him with horror. The whole place began to burn. He had even felt the heat of the flames. It had been as if that massive attack were going on right then. With him standing in the middle of it. For a time the pain of those killed and maimed was staggering. Then his mind stilled and the quiet of the morning returned, leaving only the present moment. Tourists wandered in and out of the gift shop. Others went around the walls of the roofless building or into the new cathedral. Alison was looking at him as if he had lost his mind. She later told him that he had been ducking and wincing, and, even worse from her point-of-view, people had been staring at him. The whole experience must have lasted less than a minute and was over as quickly as it had begun. But he had been left shaking and in a cold sweat. That may have been the beginning of the end with Alison. It certainly raised questions in his mind. What could he tell Alison? He didn't get it himself.

That was only the first, if the most dramatic, of those strange experiences. On the field of Culloden Moor in the Scottish Highlands, he had felt the thrill and horror of eighteenth century conflict. For a moment he heard the clash of swords and the explosions of cannon and musket. He left there terrified. A few days later, the ring of hard steel against stone had shattered for him the serenity of Winchester Cathedral as statues were smashed and the clomping of Cromwell's horses echoed in the nave. He came to feel like a frightened child every time they visited some ancient monument. His relationship with Alison didn't survive their return to Chicago.

Brian hadn't had the nerve to go to Britain since. Emily had provided a convenient excuse. But now, well, now he wanted to get away. He needed to get his work back on track by doing some research in the original documents and having the uninterrupted quiet to write. He needed to be in a place that had always renewed his spirit. He would just have to take his chances with the place memories.

 

Lord's College's historic buildings sat just off Trumpington Street near St. Catharine's and Corpus Christi colleges. Right in the heart of the medieval town. Brian's year in Cambridge would be spent as a visiting scholar of Lord's. Several lunches and dinners a month at the high table and full rights to use the university library were tops among his privileges. But he wouldn't be living in college. Instead, he had a flat at the Lord's Hostel, or Lo-Host as he had learned the locals called it. Situated half-a-mile west of the college, Lo-Host was convenient to the history faculty building and the university library. Otherwise a brisk fifteen minute walk along Sidgwick and Silver streets or across the grassy college Backs would bring him to the heart of the medieval city. It was a perfect location: quiet and yet close to everything.

The taxi stopped in front of a Georgian red brick house that, according to the information he'd gotten from Lords, must contain his flat. He paid the driver, tipped him and stood for a moment looking at the place. Not bad, he thought, though the building's original integrity had been spoiled at the rear by a thirty-year-old addition. He pulled his bags around to the left side of the house where an opening led into an inner courtyard. A door bore the label, "Residential Office." It opened to his touch, but the room was unattended. In the interior clutter, he spotted an envelope waiting on the counter with his name, "Prof. B Craig," printed on it in heavy black ink. He tore it open to find two keys, each with a piece of string attached to a tag. A single sheet of official notepaper said, "Welcome to Lo-Host," and was signed, G. Firth. One of the key tags said "outside." The other had the number "5" written on it. Back on the sidewalk, Brian soon found the entrance door at the rear of the Georgian house and tried the first key. It opened onto a flight of stairs.

Number five was two flights up. Making three trips with his luggage, panting and huffing—and muttering "shit" and "damn" as he banged his shin against a low table—he finally closed his own door behind him with an emphatic sigh. He was glad to be done with it and to have the trip behind him.

He took an appraising look around. The flat's interior was unlovely and painted a shade of off-gray. "Charming," he mumbled in vague disappointment. It had an interior hallway with doors on either side. First on the left came the sitting room; it doubled as a dining room. "And now for elegant relaxation, the living room suite," he said in a cynical tone and bowed. The room had one wing chair, a desk and chair set with lamp, and a small end table beside the wing chair. A sort of dining table with two mismatched straight-backed wooden chairs rounded out the room's furnishings. Everything looked well seasoned. A bare bulb hung from a cord in the middle of the room. He noticed a string dangling beside the door and remembered this as a common way of turning on lights in England. He tried it out and flooded the room with a harsh glare. Not a single print, calendar or any other kind of decoration broke the monotony of the scarred dull walls. He resolved to do something about the look of the place. He would, after all, call this home for a whole year.

Across the hall a kitchen the size of a closet had a small cooker, an even smaller Fridge stuffed under the counter, and a single sink. The lingering rancid smells of frying eggs and bacon grease hung in the air. He found the bedroom and bath up a half-flight of stairs at the end of the hall. The bedroom had a pair of twin beds. He would have his usual challenge stretching his six- foot-two frame from end to end without hanging over at the bottom. A two-headed lime-green goose-necked lamp sat on a small table between the beds. A chest of drawers and a large wooden wardrobe were ready to take his things. The bathroom made him wince. "Bath" meant exactly that, a bathtub. No shower. He was supposed to fold himself into that thing? He looked at the deep narrow tub with disdain. It was an unattractive prospect. Oh well, it was home.

Other than this unlovely place, Brian Alexander Craig, full professor and visiting scholar, author of books and articles and historian of some modest note, had just joined the ranks of soon-to-be-divorced men ejected from their comfortable lives. He pictured himself homeless in Chicago, a street person with a five-day growth of beard on a pleasant enough face. His still full head of boyish light-brown hair in disarray, tattered once-fine suit pulled tight against the wind, and a look of hungry despair in his hazel eyes. The disreputable Chicago alley of his imagination was littered with broken wine bottles, garbage, piss and puke. He struggled with a former executive for a refrigerator box as a shelter for the night. All the while the famous Chicago wind howled off the lake and down the man-made canyons. Was that what Emily wanted to see? Why do people who have lived with each other for years, sometimes without any passion whatsoever, become nasty and hostile toward each other upon the decision to break-up? Suddenly they exhibit levels of emotion that the marriage itself never evoked. Brian felt no animosity towards Emily. Not really. She was the one who wanted the divorce. Why did she have to be so rotten to him?

Oh well, at least he had his year in England and this bare, unadorned flat. Despite what it lacked in decor, it provided what he hoped would be a warm and cozy place to tie up for the winter. Still many months off. He might have been stuck with a single room with bath down the hall. That had been his initial expectation. He decided to like the place, bathtub and all.

He left one of his large bags and his laptop in the sitting room and carried the other one up the four steps to deposit it along with the overnight in the bedroom. That was where he collapsed, shoes kicked off but otherwise fully dressed face down on the bed nearest the door. A nap would feel just right.

 

What is this place? It looks familiar, and then again it doesn't. Everything is so intense. Greens are greener and blues are bluer. Light is brighter and shadows are deeper. A beautiful June day dotted with the brilliance of a thousand flowers and aromatic from the musty, warm scent of the water. And quiet—it's so quiet.

But where are the people?

I'm standing in a little flat-bottomed boat, like the punts in the River Cam. Standing? God, I'm going to fall into the water. I steady myself with the pole I have in my hands. Pole? Where did that come from?

I know this is Cambridge. Lush vegetation, plain trees and willows, long grasses and wild flowers. They all could be anywhere. Even the buildings beyond the trees look pretty generic. But I just know I'm in Cambridge.

I pull the pole up from the bottom of the riverbed and thrust it down again as if I've done it a thousand times before. The little boat vaults ahead. This is fun. Now it's slowing again and drifting with the current, turning slightly on its axis. I lift the pole and push it down again, and it straightens out.

I laugh out loud. I'm having the time of my life.

I thrust the pole down, grinning for the sheer joy of being here. The boat acts like a live thing and leaps forward.

Now I see another punt coming around a bend in the river and headed my way. I let my boat drift as I wait for it to draw near. It's good to be sharing the river with the punter and his lone woman passenger. She's looking toward the punter and away from me. Something about her seems official somehow. There's a stiffness to her spine that shouts, "I am important. Ignore me at your peril."

And she seems familiar in some way. Her dress seems a bit eccentric.

By some intuition I know that the punter is her servant.

Suddenly the woman turns around. A shiver of recognition passes through me, and I nearly fall over. I stare at her and confirm with astonishment her regal identity as Gloriana. Or at least someone who looks very much like the fabled Virgin Queen. This Elizabeth is in early middle age and reminds me of how she looked in a portrait I once saw of her, pictured dancing with the Earl of Leicester and laughing. Elizabeth Tudor. Brilliant. Loaded with talent. Dangerous. But this Elizabeth isn't laughing. She turns back around and looks the other way again.

I remember that actors sometimes dress in Elizabethan garb to promote local Shakespearean productions. Is this someone drumming up business for As You Like It or The Taming of the Shrew? But riding in a punt? And looking this much like the real thing? Feeling this much like the real thing?

Surely I wouldn't bother to dream about a fake queen. Cool.

I pole my boat along with the current, anxious now to draw near to the other one. I go under a bridge. The two punts meet. We pass. The woman—the Queen—is glaring at me. Can that stare possibly be for me? What have I done? Her look gives me a quake of fear. Might she send me to the Tower?

But this isn't real, is it?

Still, I'm uncomfortable. I look away for a moment, and then back again. The other boat carrying the last of the Tudors has vanished. I have the river to myself once more. Where have they gone? There's no place for them to go.

I'm nearly knocked from my perch by a sharp pain. It comes without warning and radiates through every limb in my body. My legs and arms ache. I feel as if I'm falling into the water. The scene in front of me is fading. Am I going blind? My legs are weak. I'm going to fall after all.

 

Brian woke to find himself curled up in the wing chair of his new flat's sitting room. His legs were pulled up against his chest in a fetal position and clasped in his arms. How'd he gotten there? He was shaking. He remembered falling asleep in the bedroom. "The dream," he muttered. Why did he feel so bad?

 

Brian had dinner in a little Indian restaurant on Regent Street. Later he explored some of the Cambridge pubs. He finally settled in at his old favorite just off King's Parade. The Eagle. It hadn't changed in twenty years. Mellowed and comfortable, he sat there, surrounded by old wood and laughing people, and thought about the dream he'd had that afternoon. Bizarre. It lingered, as vivid and present still as if he were continuing to dream it. What an imagination. Connected to the place memory stuff? Not necessarily. There hadn't been any strong feelings connected to it—except his oddly fearful reaction. But that wasn't the same as sensing pain and other feelings lingering in a place. Still, he got a little thrill thinking of the image of the Queen. In some odd way he felt as if he had actually seen her. He shook his head, got up from his table and went back to his flat, knowing he would toss and turn before he would be able to fall asleep.

 

 Now I'm standing alone, looking across the River Cam. I recognize the Clare College Bridge, lighted only by a waning moon. The bridge arches over still water. Stars reflect off the river's surface. I lift my foot to step with trepidation onto the bridge, feeling a vague uneasiness. The worn-smooth texture of the handrail against my palm and fingertips reassures and steadies me. I wait for something to happen. A little shiver of dread passes through me. Shadows of trees with branches weeping toward the ground, and structures, some boxy and some pointed, sculpt the horizon. Night flowers in the garden behind me spray cloying perfume into the breathless air. The riverbank smells of mud and rotting vegetation. On my right the unmistakable shape of the King's College Chapel soars to a sharp line of buttress pinnacles. Soldiers standing guard over Perpendicular Gothic walls of glass and stone.

I strain to listen, and I hear the river's gentle sighing against its banks and the rustle of a new breeze high in the trees. But no sounds of roaring motorcycles or sirens wailing in the distance. No tires squealing in complaint against hard asphalt or even harder cobblestones. No typical sounds of a city intruding on the quiet of this night. Not even the barking of a dog or the buzzing of a motor scooter. I listen through the stillness as I try to hear something, anything, beyond the river and the trees. Even the breeze has stilled.

Now an indistinct band of horsemen, perhaps a dozen strong, rides superimposed into my line of sight. Some have swords drawn. Others brandish old-fashioned firearms. Their leader waves and gestures with his sword as he urges his followers on. But no matter how hard they ride, they get nowhere: immobile, silent and opaque. They fade and disappear. Something about them frightens me.

I look back at the bridge and see a man perched on a short stool. His body is round and looks soft. I recognize him instantly. He's a scholar, one of the greatest ones of his age. He's accustomed to endless hours at his books and manuscripts, writing his treatises and his letters. I wonder if his fingers are as ink-stained as I imagine them to be. I look at him hard. His robes are gathered about his torso and legs. A Canterbury cap is pulled over his ears and brow. His vein-latticed nose peeks out from beneath the cap. I've seen every known portrait of him; have read all of his published works and much of his voluminous correspondence. I used to think that I knew his mind as well as I know my own. But I've rarely thought about him in years. Now here he is.

 "Evening," I say. My voice startles us both, breaking as it does into the near sound vacuum that surrounds us.

He looks up. Pale eyes stare unwaveringly at me, "Ja?"

"You are Master Erasmus?"

"Ja. To be sure," he says in accented English. His face brightens, and he grins at me as if he knows who I am.

Now he begins to fade before my eyes. He's gone. The bridge and everything around it disappears. I am left empty and alone. My whole body aches. My stomach hurts. I think I might throw up.

Copyright © 2008, Gordon McBride