An Absence of Natural Light by F. G. Cottam Page A

to the care home to an elderly man with all his mental faculties and a body betrayed cruelly by time.
    She hardly had the nerve for the ordeal she thought they might be about to put him through. Her stomach rebelled acidly against the assault of the double espresso she’d just inflicted on it. ‘I’m my own worst enemy,’ she said out loud. But she had an inkling, now, an intuition, that where she particularly was concerned, this old saying no longer rang true.
    There were armchairs in the reception room and Tom helped Professor Fleetwood out of the wheelchair and into one, where he looked more comfortable and composed than he had forty minutes earlier. He’d flushed with pleasure like a boy on seeing his celebrated visitor and tried and failed to struggle to his feet to greet him properly. In other circumstances, Rebecca might have felt nervous or uneasy about their encounter. She generally held with the view that you should never meet your heroes; it’s always going to be an occasion at best anticlimactic and at worst disillusioning. Not today, though. Tom was a charismatic man in life, but that wasn’t why she thought it would go okay. She thought it would go okay because he had the grace and generosity to make sure that it would.
    The Professor sipped tea from a cup they’d scrounged from the kitchens, the saucer nursed in his lap. They sat in armchairs just like his, facing him. The door to the little room was firmly closed. He looked a good decade younger than he had earlier and he was composed and when he spoke his voice was firm. He’d used the interval to wipe the drool from his chin.
    â€˜I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said. ‘I need to establish that emphatically with both of you from the start. She used to talk about checking out early. She would follow the remark with a bark of laughter, made husky by her chain-smoking, which wasn’t all that unusual in students back then. Cigarettes were cheap and the harm they did not yet widely understood. Everyone in those days smoked. She smoked the French Gauloises brand.
    â€˜She must have meant what she said about checking out early, because less than two years after I first laid eyes on her she went and did it. Suicide, or the threat of it, was quite fashionable back in those days. It sounds sick to say that now. I think it had something to do with the Cold War and the way the constant threat of obliteration by the bomb had debased life. Life then seemed far more tenuous and contingent and insecure.
    â€˜She used to say that she’d check out early and that one day she’d be back. She said she’d surprise everyone. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more defiant creature in my life. And it’s been a long life. It’s my belief that no one cheats death, however, not even a Rachel Gaunt. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should start really at the beginning.’
    He was twenty-eight, had just been awarded his full professorship and his career at the LSE had launched with a property deal very profitable for both him and the school where he was to spend the rest of his academic life. He’d become one of only two tenants at Absalom Court, which by then had otherwise fallen into near-dereliction.
    He’d moved in after his successful LSE job interview at the beginning of June and seen the potential of the block as student accommodation straight away. He’d inquired about securing a lease and asked half a dozen building firms to tender for the conversion work required. Then he’d drawn up a business proposal based on typical student rents for rooms in halls of residence, showing that costs would be covered and a profit start to show within a period of five years. He’d presented this to the school’s vice-chancellor and, because wealthy alumni had made the LSE cash-rich, the scheme was approved and the work was begun immediately.
    Rachel Gaunt was among the first