When I wake up it’s dark. I reach for the matches, light the gas lamp. The glow rises and spreads into the corners of the room, and falls on Yvette, who is sitting on my bed.

Mouth dry, I push myself up against the pillow.

These ructions don’t seem to disturb her. She continues to sit neatly at the end of the bed, knees together, face averted, hands folded in her lap. She doesn’t make much of an indentation in the bedcover, but then she never weighed a great deal. She looks as she did the year before she died, a small slender woman of nearly forty, dressed casually in trousers and jersey, curly hair tucked behind her ear so I can see her cheek and jawline. She’s at least as real as I am.

“Yvie?” It comes out as a hoarse whisper.

She turns as naturally as if we’re at home together in the bedroom at Fulbrook. “I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” she says.

“I’m awake!” I’m panting with fear. “Darling . . .”

She smiles. “You’ve been looking in the wrong place. All this while.”

“Where should I look?” I don’t know exactly what she means, but maybe it’s the same for ghosts as it is for sleepwalkers. Keep them talking.

She casts her eyes to the ceiling. The gesture—Lord, men can be obtuse—is so familiar. “Honestly, James,” she says, and gets up off the bed and leaves the room. The door swings shut behind her with a clatter from the wooden latch that makes every hair on my head rise up.

About an hour later, I dare to go downstairs.

Women. They push and prod me, they don’t leave me to my own laggardly pace. As if they aren’t bossy enough, two days later—days in which I stroll in the fields, lie reading on the bed, and scare away ghosts however beloved with wireless programs—I get a postcard from Tom. On the front is a photograph of a monument to one Henry Blogg, hero of the Cromer Lifeboat, a sou’westered captain cast in bronze. On the back, a message. The capital letters are so big that they collide into each other on the right-hand side. The handwriting, and the message, make me think Tom wrote this late of an evening in the Black Horse.

Henry Blogg, his plaque informs me, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Tom’s message is one word.

debatable.

—