I have never understood the association of ghost stories with Christmas. Is it because it is still a part-pagan festival? Is it because we don’t like to let ourselves be too happy? Or is it because the whole family is likely to be home and you need to remind yourself that there could be more malevolent forces out there than in here, whatever the toxic dynamics? Perhaps it’s just because it gets dark so early.
Whatever the reason, here is another half-hour shiver from Mark Gatiss, adapted this time not from the output of his beloved MR James, but from a more unexpected source. A Ghost Story for Christmas: Woman of Stone is based on a short story called Man-size in Marble by E Nesbit. Yes, that E Nesbit! The Railway Children E Nesbit! She was a prolific writer of novels and short stories, for adults as well as children; Man-size in Marble was published as part of her Grim Tales collection (for grownups) in 1893.
Gatiss frames his version around Nesbit, played by Celia Imrie, in bed and suffering from the lung cancer that would kill her in 1924, but still the glamorous, sociable and mesmeric figure she always was. “I rather like lying in bed smoking Old Virginia and making phantoms in the air,” she says to the young Dr Zubin (Mawaan Rizwan), making his daily visit. He has read only The Railway Children, so she tells him one of her other tales and puts him in it. “Every ghost story should have a rational medical man to offset the nonsense …”
And off we head into the world of the newlywed Lorimers, 40 years previously. Jack (Éanna Hardwicke, hinting at the menace he brought to The Sixth Commandment last year), an artist, and Laura (Phoebe Horn), a writer, have taken a country cottage to make a fresh start after some obscure unpleasantness in London and to let Jack concentrate on his painting.
Nearby, there is a 14th-century church – at which no incumbent has long managed to remain – that houses a pair of tombs topped with effigies of the knights who lie within. “Bodies drawn out man-size in marble”, as the couple’s housekeeper Mrs Dorman (Monica Dolan) puts it, before recounting the local legend.
It says that, on Christmas Eve (Halloween in the original, which – see opening paragraph – makes a lot more sense), the figures rise and walk abroad. Where do they head? Why, to the couple’s cottage, it is said – built on the grounds of an old house to which the knights return to punish the wives they were told (incorrectly) were unfaithful to them while they were at war.
“The way of the world, is it not, ma’am?” says Mrs Dorman, who has deduced, long before the bruises on Laura’s wrist are seen, the reason for the Lorimers abrupt move from London to rural isolation. Jack’s too-heavy hand on Laura’s shoulder and the denigration of her work and opinions tell their own story. “It is their world, my poor lamb,” says the housekeeper. “Theirs to sully and destroy – knights, your husband, mine. Whether flesh or stone, all as one.”
In Nesbit’s story, the Lorimers are a blissfully happy couple, but they are a rarity in her work for adults. Usually, there is marital disharmony, estrangement or scandal in the mix. As Gatiss alludes to in the closing scenes, when we return to “present day” Nesbit, it is not hard to imagine where she got her inspiration; her marriage to Hubert Bland, who had many affairs, involved her unwittingly adopting his illegitimate child and employing his longest-serving mistress as their housekeeper. It is a nice thematic thickening. (Nesbit was much happier in her second marriage. In a letter to a friend, written when she was 59, she said she finally knew “what it was to have a man’s whole heart”.)
The denouement pivots on Dr Zubin’s rationality and Mrs Dorman’s clear-eyed view of true justice – a twist on the original to deliver punishment where it is due, but which, unsatisfyingly, doesn’t allow the innocent to escape, too. That said, righteous vengeance and the power of sisterhood are additions to the season of goodwill that I can get behind. And if it keeps the family distracted for half an hour while you peel the potatoes and mutter imprecations over the sprouts, well, who can ask for more?
• A Ghost Story for Christmas: Woman of Stone aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
