I like my house. I mean, it's not the most that anyone could expect from life, but It's everything I can afford and I'm very grateful to my uncle Alfred for having bequeathed it to me. When he still was alive, he had been one of the last to rent the house to the wool merchants who traded with the weavers of Cirencester.

The floorboards creak, especially in winter or when it rains more than normal; the windows let in some of the outside air and in winter it gets a little cold, however these thin drafts support the draught of the stove and make sure that the house does not fill with smoke.

What I love most is the loft on which I climb, at night, to write under the skylight from which the light of the stars filters. On new moon nights, it's like a diamond blanket on your head. In summer, I often open the glass door and go out to the roof. Hardly never I'm alone. Chloe, beautiful, sinuous, charming, with her green eyes and her reddish, soft fur keeps me company at the cost of a bowl of milk and stale bread: seems not to be as pretentious as other cats whose night movements I follow from the roof. It's probably because elder Mrs. Bridget, of the next yard, takes care of it as, if not better, her husband. I'm quite sure that when she passes away, little Chloe will move permanently to my house.

An insistent knock surprises me in my thoughts. Who can be on Sunday morning? Yesterday, I finished all my deliveries and I haven't any commitments whatsoever. I wait a few moments, maybe he'll leave. Instead the knock gets excited.

I lift my eyes and sigh loudly: I know one person with such a delicate touch. I'm afraid if I don't open soon, in addiction to the coat, I'll also need a new door.

A hurricane hits me, I almost land on the ground, grazed by the feathers of a capon kept dangling by the neck.

«Oh you old mutt,» Ewan starts by throwing the poor beast on my table «if you keep holing up in your house like this, you'll grow moustaches and a rat tail!»

«Cheers!» The ironic derision. «Of course, I've slept well, and what about you?»

«What a f...»

«Just kidding.»

Ewan McGregor, almost two meters giant, whose brawny body and reddish hair effortlessly betray his Irish origins, stays in front of me, staring at me gasping like a freshly caught perch. I can't hold back a laugh that irritates him even more than my irony.

« I bring you lunch and dinner for the next three days and you pay me back by mocking me? Next time I'll bring you a goat's hoof!»

This time I am the one remaining stunned, faced with this response in tone. Both we keep our roles, then we melt in a thunderous embrace. I don't need to invite him sitting on the stool in front of him.

« You were supposed to be with us last night, what's happened?»

«You should know where I am, Ewan.»

«Holy Christ...still with that Adele?»

«Annabelle.»

«And what I've said?» He grabs a crust of bread from the basket I'm saving for Chloe and start munching on it. «You should go out, you're losing all the fun!»

«I can imagine. Cheeky songs, drunken choirs and two-day-old venison skewers. Sorry I missed this specialty, how can I have been so foolish!»

«You don't understand. This time you had to be there!»

I look at him subtly, then immediately I catch the allusion: «Can't believe! Did it happen?»

«Oh, yeah!» He answers with a smile invading his face.

I grab the second stool, pour two glasses of an old whisky that I keep for special occasions and seat down in front of him, to hell if it is Sunday morning (and the day of the Lord, everyone knows, you do not drink).

Ewan goes back to his telling: «I just got out from the tavern and I was quietly clinging to that so handsome shepherdess, do you remember Thess? That's it, I stood there with her beautiful boobs right in the face when I felt an exaggerated hustle coming from the Thompson barn, a shooting that seemed like hell on earth. And as I approached to take a better look, the door opened wide and what did I see?» He clears the throat with emphasis: «The old Geremia Thompson who run away, drawers dropped, chased by his angry wife who wielded his best hunting rifle and tried to shot him with not only one but four shots!»

«Oh my Gosh...» I exclaim laughing.

«But these are not all folks! The elder lady burnt the dresses of that poor girl who was hiding with the husband in the barn and, to escape, she covered boobs and ass with a couple of fat beautiful geese that were squawking like crazy. If she didn't want all Bibury to know, those beasts thought for her.»

This is how Ewan and I spend our days: at night, I write while he's guzzling; in the morning I listen while he's telling the last news of our village better than a screamer in front of the church.

At the end of his detailed speech, we recover and reduce ourselves to milder arguments while I pluck the capon.

Ewan stares at the beast's meat that, feather after feather, appears under the coat and I can clearly see him moistening the lips, his eyes enlightened by the glow of desire.

«Do you want to stay?»

As I were offering a bag of pounds, I see him blushing then he explodes coyly: «I don't want to trouble.»

«I insist.»

«Well, if you say so...I go gathering some potatoes from Thess.»

«Hurry up. I won't wait any longer.»

Ewan is a man of his word. He came back just in time for the soup. In addiction to potatoes, he received a bun that will feed both. I can just imagine the price.

The afternoon is late and over the stone walls of my cottage it rains cats and dogs. A heavy and cold rain that cradles the hearing and accompanies towards the mind oblivion.

The conversation's arguments between Ewan and me are gone thinning more and more, until losing among childhood's memories, the first that we have of each other. He remembers my father more than I can. Probably because, as son, I could capture just the facets of his strict education that he gave me and I wasn't familiar at all with that human side that is so predominant among the wealthy class, where scions are educated by tutors and parents compliment and inflate the doubles-breasted with the name of some prestigious English university. Ewan, instead, knew this side of my father, because he was an orphan and spent whole afternoons pretending to be my brother, catching the attentions that every child should have, dreaming about a pat on the shoulder or a lesson on how to carve an owl on a oak branch.

We spend hours talking about our childhood, until Chloe's arrival foretells the fall of night.

«Tell me about Annabelle.»

The question comes in like a bucket of cold water during a sultry day: unexpected and pleasant. I always love talking about her. And it isn't easy finding someone who shows interest in knowing a ghost.

«Oh, she...is beautiful and sweet and always smiley. She has long dark hair that wears up under lovely hats and eyes green as Scottish prairies.»

«Bloody 'ell, Isaac. You talk about her as if you were in love with!»

«Well, maybe. Back to us...I imagine her free and fierce, daughter of one of that men who have managed to get rich with those mechanised cotton-spinning of the early century. I imagine her tormented love, the desire for redemption; the wish to run away from dogmas of her own social condition, to find her place in the world.»

I put my dreaming eyes on Ewan again, who's looking up to me with a curious expression on his face.

«What's going on?»

«I suspected the matter to be so serious to keep you up late every night. But apparently it's a lot more than I thought.»

My enthusiasm is immediately exhausted.

«Isaac, come on! You locked yourself up in this dump, all you do is run errands and write, write and run errands. You can't undo your entire life for a green eyed ghost. I mean, I'd understand if you had a woman in the flesh, but Annabelle doesn't exist!»

«Since I created her, she does! Since she lives and moves and breathes although she does on the paper, she is real in my mind.»

«Isaac...try to see the reality as it is. Thanks the Lord you have a roof overhead, but you eat little and poorly, you can barely get warm, getting meat just in case I find it or when the butcher has to change the batch because it begins to rot. You must find a good job. Something that makes you living in a more decent way.»

I don't know which sentence, among all that Ewan said, had broken my heart, if hearing him to say that Annabelle doesn't exist or to put right in front of my nose, in such a rough way, everything I deny.

And he finds out, I feel the guilt in his breath, the remorse in his greeting before leaving me alone.

«Bye, Ewan.»

But I'm not alone.

Everyone believes it.

But I've got her.

And she's the only thing I need.