"Lisa Tuttle - Ghosts and Other Lovers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

influences, as far as IтАЩm aware of them, include M.R. James, Robert Aickman, and Shirley Jackson.

As I looked through my previously uncollected work to decide on the table of contents, I noticed the
way certain situations, themes, and ideas reappeared. These stories, most of them written in the early
1990s, are nearly all тАЬrelationshipтАЭ storiesтАФand mostly about love affairs. The title announced itself as
inevitable: here are stories about strange relationshipsтАФwith ghosts, with lovers, and with ghostly lovers.

Despite the thematic link, the stories are different enough, I hope, to be enjoyed not only one at a time
but also as a sequence. Some are romantic; a few even have happy endings; but most, in the great ghost
story tradition, are meant to disturb and unsettle, rather than comfort, the reader.

тАФLisa Tuttle
Torinturk, Scotland
June 2001

In Jealousy
IтАЩve always liked ghost stories without believing in them. But this one I believe, because it happened to
me.
In 1985 I went to China on a tour organized by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). I
went not so much because I was deeply interested in China as to get away from London where
everything reminded me of my estranged husband. Even after six months I couldnтАЩt stop brooding about
what had gone wrong and how I might have handled things differently and saved the marriage. I had just
finished a book, and I had a little money, courtesy of my ex, so I decided to go somewhere far away and
utterly different.

It was mostly couples on the tour, which I hadnтАЩt thought would matter as I wasnтАЩt looking for a new
partner, but it did matterтАФthere seems to be a powerful instinct in human beings toward pairing off, and
if you donтАЩt do it yourself, others will do it for you. David and I were the only singles under fifty, so we
kept getting put together on the tour bus or at table.

Under other circumstances we would not have been drawn together. He was in the catering trade,
wholesale side, with no interest in my kind of literature. Physically, he wasnтАЩt my type: very tall,
big-boned, pale-skinned, with that faintly raw look you see in some Scandinavians. He wasnтАЩt
Scandinavian: his father came from Scotland, his mother from Manchester, and he was a Londoner by
birth and choice. He had big teeth and his blue eyes showed a lot of white. He was gloomy but witty,
politically conscious and opinionated, and his reason for going on the tour was similar to my own.

He had been involved with a woman called Jane for nearly four years, the same length of time as IтАЩd been
married. It was over, she had ended it, finally, by refusing to see him again, and, fed up with glooming
around their old haunts in London, mourning what was lost, heтАЩd decided to try to get her out of his
system by doing something completely different.
Yet neither of us really wanted to forget. What we wanted, and what we found in each other, was a
sympathetic, non-judgmental listener to give us the chance to talk about our feelings.

We became very close very quickly, in the way that people sometimes will in a new environment, away
from the usual cautions and distractions. China itself, so overwhelming and strange on first experience,
faded into the background, of less importance than the old, London-based events we were re-creating
for each other, of less interest than the internal drama which was developing, the intimate heat drawing us
closer and closer.