"All the Beloved Ghosts" - A Short Story by Alison MacLeod - from her collection of that name, 2018

"All the Beloved Ghosts" - A Short Story by Alison MacLeod - from her collection of that name, 2018

Website of Alison MacLeod (includes a ddetailed bio and list of her works)

 this story is for  "Angelica Garnett 1918–2012". From Alison MacLeod

In her obituary in the Guardian Angelica Garnett  is called the last of the Bloomsbury group.  Her mother was Vannesa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf.  As was her mother, her legal father Clive Bell, was a famous painter.  Possibly her biological father was another Bloomsbury painter, Duncan Grant.  She grew up in the middle of all the drama, creativity, and unconventional sexuality the group was famous for.  She was herself a highly regarded painter.  When we meet her in this wonderful story, she is 92.  Her famous family members are long deceased, even her now elderly children think she may be suffering from dementia when she seems to interact with her mother, her aunt Virginia, and other famous persons long gone. MacLeod does a wonderful job of showing the disparity between how people see and treat the very elderly virus how they see themselves.

She hears foot steps in the room above her, no one else does:

"THUMP-THUMP-thump. There it is again. Upstairs, above the bulging ceiling, footsteps beat out their metre, a sound she knows in the depths of herself, like something rolling at the bottom of an old trunk.  The feet are too quick in their step for middle age, too heavy for a child’s. Julian. She is sure of it. The girl assistant at her side wouldn’t understand, of course she wouldn’t, but never mind the girl. Oh, Julian, we were never ourselves again without you. ‘Mrs Garnett, may I get you anything before we make our way to the marquee?’ My brother. My brother who died in a stalemate of a battle in a place whose name I can’t remember."

Julian  Bell
 

She is being escorted to an interview where audience members may ask her questions about her life experiences.  As she waits to go Grace, a long time now passed is now young again, serving plums cakes for her and Duncan Grant, probably her real father.

I find these lines so beautiful, so restorative I must quote a bit more.

"But the quiet, the composure of Grace’s routine in the kitchen has the restoring effect of a Vermeer. Grace arranges wedges of lemon on a plate and adds a pair of tongs. She lays oatcakes for Duncan and stacks of freshly buttered toast for the children. She selects ripe plums from the willow basket on the floor and piles them high in a bowl for Vanessa’s pleasure. The plums are the colour of a Sussex sky before a downpour, and in this moment as Angelica gazes, she falls into their colour, into a dark pool of plumminess. When she surfaces, she finds that Grace’s ghost is also standing utterly still, her eyes closed, her face as contented as a Sufi at prayer. But Grace is not similarly moved by the plums; she is warming her backside in front of the coal range. It is a private moment of course, and she, Angelica, is trespassing."

Duncan Grant

Look at the colours in this, from the mind of a painter.

There is a great section toward the end of the story where we see the audience asking her questions.  A man who seemed to worship the great economist, Maynard Keynes is Flubbered by her response to his question. I laughed so much.

I read this story three times, I think you need too.

The reading life is in a way a  mingling of the dead and the living.  Ghosts are every where in my blog. 

"Nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. Ghosts love Yid­dish — they all speak it".

There are ghosts all through the stories of Alison MacLeod.

I think they are proud to be there.

Alison and Aunt Virginia

So far I have read and posted on four of the fourteen stories in the collection.  I look forward to the rest.

Mel u