Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  Madge came in coughing with the cold. “Give me a hand,” she said. “You know it’s heavy.”

  She had her back towards her sister, dragging the bath, so she could not see what was happening in the room.

  When Madge turned round she saw that her sister had her finger to her lips. Iseabal was kneeling in front of the easy chair. “Randal’s fallen asleep,” she whispered.

  “So I see,” said Madge.

  “Well,” she went on, after a moment’s silence, “shall I fetch it?”

  “No,” Iseabal said, “I will,” and she went out smiling, on tiptoes.

  Madge pulled the curtains shut as softly as she could. The little rings made a rushing noise. She looked round nervously. The light from the grate was almost golden with the curtains drawn.

  The cat twitched in a bad dream, or as its heart missed a beat.

  Madge slipped off her coat and dragged the bath in front of the fire without making a sound. Then she picked up the scuttle in her arms, and set it down beside the bath. She knelt. She took sticks and papers and pieces of coal from the scuttle and began arranging them inside the bath. She worked neatly, making a pattern.

  Her sister Iseabal came back in with snow across her hair. She carried a green can in each hand.

  “There,” Iseabal said, putting the cans down beside the bath. “Good. You put the sticks and papers in.”

  “And some bits of coal,” Madge said.

  Iseabal smiled. “Isn’t that a waste?”

  “You never know,” Madge said.

  Her sister shrugged, accepting, and unscrewed the top of one of the green cans. She poured a thin stream into the bath.

  “More than that,” Madge said.

  “It’s plenty,” said Iseabal.

  “Let me do it,” Madge said, standing up.

  She took the can from her sister and walked right round the bath, pouring freely as she went. When she reached the spot where she had started, she stopped, nodded to her sister, and went round once more, still pouring.

  “That will do,” Iseabal said.

  “Yes,” said Madge. “That will do.”

  She set down the empty can and they stood looking at each other. Iseabal shook the snow from her grey hair with an almost flirtatious gesture, and smiled. Iseabal’s fingers came up to touch the smile on her own face as if to make sure it was there. After that they avoided each other’s eyes.

  Madge undressed quickly. Half-turned away from the chair, she held out her hand and her sister took it. Iseabal’s hand was hot. Madge helped her sister into the bath. Iseabal knelt down.

  “Go on,” Iseabal said.

  Madge picked up the other green can and unscrewed the top. She poured half of the contents over her sister without looking at her. She could hear it trickling down.

  “It’s stinky,” Iseabal said.

  “Well,” said Madge, “what do you expect it to be?”

  “I’m not complaining,” said Iseabal.

  Madge nodded. She climbed into the bath and handed her sister the can. She knelt down facing Iseabal, but with her glasses off and her eyes shut. She felt the liquid pouring over her.

  Madge tilted up her face. “Plenty in my hair,” she said, and some ran into her mouth.

  Madge coughed.

  “Sorry,” said her sister.

  “Never mind,” said Madge.

  In the dark, with her eyes tight shut, Madge could hear the marble clock ticking. She waited. “Go on then,” she said at last.

  “I thought you had them,” Iseabal said.

  Madge opened her eyes. For the first time since taking off their clothes, they looked at each other. Iseabal was smiling. “There’s a box in the knife drawer,” Iseabal said. “Or we could use a taper.”

  “That would not be right,” Madge said. She climbed out of the bath, groped around on the floor until she found her glasses, put them on, and went to the dresser. The matchbox was wrapped in a table napkin, beside the cheese grater. Madge unfolded the napkin and put the matchbox on the table. She refolded the napkin and replaced it in the drawer. Then she shut the drawer. She picked up the matchbox from the table and went back to the bath.

  Madge removed her spectacles and knelt down once more facing her sister. She clasped the matchbox in her right hand. Its edge was sharp against her palm.

  “Randal’s still asleep,” said Iseabal.

  “Of course,” said Madge.

  She looked into her sister’s eyes but she could only see herself reflected there. The firelight flickered across Iseabal’s proud face.

  “Shall I say a prayer?” Madge asked.

  “Can you remember one?” said her sister.

  “No,” Madge admitted. “I can’t.”

  The two clocks struck the half hour, with the grandfather as usual a heartbeat in front.

  “The devil,” said Iseabal.

  “Never mind,” Madge said.

  The fire crackled in the grate.

  “Mercy on us,” said Iseabal.

  “Amen,” Madge said.

  The cat looked up at them with bright unwondering eyes, then put its head back between its black and white paws.

  “I never did like that graveyard,” said Iseabal.

  Madge nodded absentmindedly, giving her sister the box of matches into her hand. Then she said, as an afterthought, catching at Iseabal’s wrist, “But I don’t think you should strike the match.”

  “Why not?” said Iseabal.

  “I just don’t think you should,” Madge said.

  Iseabal smiled. “All right,” she said. “You do it. You and your remembering. But you were always the strong one, really.”

  “No doubt,” said Madge. “But I don’t think I should do it either.”

  Iseabal smiled. “Who then?” she said.

  “Who?” said Madge. “You know who.”

  “Randal,” said Iseabal softly.

  “Randal,” Madge said in a great voice.

  They both shut their eyes. There came the sound of the striking of a match against the matchbox. At first it would not light. The match had to scrape against the box twice without success. The third time it lit.

  THE VINEGAR MOTHER

  Ruth Rendell

  Ruth Barbara Rendell (1930–2015), née Grasemann, was born in London and grew up in South Woodford, Essex. She worked as a reporter for the Chigwell Times, before marrying journalist Donald Rendell. Rendell’s first six novels were rejected by publishers, but in 1964, From Doon with Death, featuring Inspector Wexford, was accepted. She went on to publish twenty Wexford novels and over fifty other books. Ruth Rendell also wrote under the name Barbara Vine. She was a member of the House of Lords.

  All this happened when I was eleven.

  Mop Felton was at school with me and she was supposed to be my friend. I say “supposed to be” because she was one of those close friends all little girls seem to have yet don’t very much like. I had never liked Mop. I knew it then just as I know it now, but she was my friend because she lived in the next street, was the same age, in the same form, and because my parents, though not particularly intimate with the Feltons, would have it so.

  Mop was a nervous, strained, dramatic creature, in some ways old for her age and in others very young. Hindsight tells me that she had no self-confidence but much self-esteem. She was an only child who flew into noisy rages or silent huffs when teased. She was tall and very skinny and dark, and it wasn’t her hair, thin and lank, which accounted for her nickname. Her proper name was Alicia. I don’t know why we called her Mop, and if now I see in it some obscure allusion to mopping and mowing (a Shakespearean description which might have been associated with her) or in the monosyllable the hint of a witch’s familiar (again, not inept) I am attributing to us an intellectual sophistication which we didn’t possess.

  We were gluttons for nicknames. Perhaps all schoolgirls are. But there was neither subtlety nor finesse in our selection. Margaret myself, I was dubbed Margarine. Rhoda Joseph, owing t
o some gagging and embarrassment during a public recitation of Wordsworth, was for ever after Lucy; Elizabeth Goodwin Goat because this epithet had once been applied to her by higher authority on the hockey field. Our nicknames were not exclusive, being readily interchangeable with our true christian names at will. We never used them in the presence of parent or teacher and they, if they had known of them, would not have deigned use them to us. It was, therefore, all the more astonishing to hear them from the lips of Mr Felton, the oldest and richest of any of our fathers.

  Coming home from work into a room where Mop and I were: “How’s my old Mopsy, then?” he would say, and to me, “Well, it’s jolly old Margarine!”

  I used to giggle, as I always did when confronted by something mildly embarrassing that I didn’t understand. I was an observant child but not sensitive. Children, in any case, are little given to empathy. I can’t recall that I ever pitied Mop for having a father who, though over fifty, pretended too often to be her contemporary. But I found it satisfactory that my own father, at her entry, would look up vaguely from his book and mutter, “Hallo – er, Alicia, isn’t it?”

  The Feltons were on a slightly higher social plane than we, a fact I did know and accepted without question and without resentment. Their house was bigger, each parent possessed a car, they ate dinner in the evenings. Mr Felton used to give Mop half a glass of sherry to drink.

  “I don’t want you growing up ignorant of wine,” he would say.

  And if I were present I would get the sherry too. I suppose it was Manzanilla, for it was very dry and pale yellow, the colour of the stone in a ring Mrs Felton wore and which entirely hid her wedding ring.

  They had a cottage in the country where they went at the weekends and sometimes for the summer holidays. Once they took me there for a day. And the summer after my eleventh birthday, Mr Felton said:

  “Why don’t you take old Margarine with you for the holidays?”

  It seems strange now that I should have wanted to go. I had a very happy childhood, a calm, unthinking, unchanging relationship with my parents and my brothers. I liked Rhoda and Elizabeth far more than I liked Mop, whose rages and fantasies and sulks annoyed me, and I disliked Mrs Felton more than any grownup I knew. Yet I did want to go very much. The truth was that even then I had begun to develop my passion for houses, the passion that has led me to become a designer of them, and one day in that cottage had been enough to make me love it. All my life had been spent in a semi-detached villa, circa 1935, in a London suburb. The Feltons’ cottage, which had the pretentious (not to me, then) name of Sanctuary, was four hundred years old, thatched, half-timbered, of wattle and daub construction, a calendar-maker’s dream, a chocolate box artist’s ideal. I wanted to sleep within those ancient walls, tread upon floors that had been there before the Armada came, press my face against glass panes that had reflected a ruff or a Puritan’s starched collar.

  My mother put up a little opposition. She liked me to know Mop, she also perhaps liked me to be associated with the Feltons’ social cachet, but I had noticed before that she didn’t much like me to be in the care of Mrs Felton.

  “And Mr Felton will only be there at the weekends,” she said.

  “If Margaret doesn’t like it,” said my father, “she can write home and get us to send her a telegram saying you’ve broken your leg.”

  “Thanks very much,” said my mother. “I wish you wouldn’t teach the children habits of deception.”

  But in the end she agreed. If I were unhappy, I was to phone from the call-box in the village and then they would write and say my grandmother wanted me to go and stay with her. Which, apparently, was not teaching me habits of deception.

  *

  In the event, I wasn’t at all unhappy, and it was to be a while before I was even disquieted. There was plenty to do. It was fruit-growing country, and Mop and I picked fruit for Mr Gould, the farmer. We got paid for this, which Mrs Felton seemed to think infra dig. She didn’t associate with the farmers or the agricultural workers. Her greatest friend was a certain Lady Elsworthy, an old woman whose title (I later learned she was the widow of a Civil Service knight) placed her in my estimation in the forefront of the aristocracy. I was stricken dumb whenever she and her son were at Sanctuary and much preferred the company of our nearest neighbour, a Mrs Potter, who was perhaps gratified to meet a juvenile enthusiast of architecture. Anyway, she secured for me the entrée to the Hall, a William and Mary mansion, through whose vast chambers I walked hand in hand with her, awed and wondering and very well content.

  Sanctuary had a small parlour, a large dining-living room, a kitchen and a bathroom on the ground floor and two bedrooms upstairs. The ceilings were low and sloping and so excessively beamed, some of the beams being carved, that were I to see it now I would probably think it vulgar, though knowing it authentic. I am sure that nowadays I would think the Feltons’ furniture vulgar, for their wealth, such as it was, didn’t run to the purchasing of true antiques. Instead, they had those piecrust tables and rent tables and little escritoires which, cunningly chipped and scratched in the right places, inlaid with convincingly scuffed and dimly gilded leather, maroon, olive or amber, had been manufactured at a factory in Romford.

  I knew this because Mr Felton, down for the weekend, would announce it to whomsoever might be present.

  “And how old do you suppose that is, Lady Elsworthy?” he would say, fingering one of those deceitful little tables as he placed on it her glass of citrine-coloured sherry. “A hundred and fifty years? Two hundred?”

  Of course she didn’t know or was too well-bred to say.

  “One year’s your answer! Factory-made last year and I defy anyone but an expert to tell the difference.”

  Then Mop would have her half-glass of sherry and I mine while the adults watched us for the signs of intoxication they seemed to find so amusing in the young and so disgraceful in the old. And then dinner with red or white wine, but none for us this time. They always had wine, even when, as was often the case, the meal was only sandwiches or bits of cold stuff on toast. Mr Felton used to bring it down with him on Saturdays, a dozen bottles sometimes in a cardboard case. I wonder if it was good French wine or sour cheap stuff from Algeria that my father called plonk. Whatever Mr Felton’s indulgence with the sherry had taught me, it was not to lose my ignorance of wine.

  But wine plays a part in this story, an important part. For as she sipped the dark red stuff in her glass, blood-black with – or am I imagining this? – a blacker scaling of lees in its depths, Lady Elsworthy said:

  “Even if you’re only a moderate wine-drinker, my dear, you ought, you really ought, to have a vinegar mother.”

  *

  On this occasion I wasn’t the only person present to giggle. There were cries of “A what?” and some laughter, and then Lady Elsworthy began an explanation of what a vinegar mother was, a culture of acetobacter that would convert wine into vinegar. Her son, whom the adults called Peter, supplied the technical details and the Potters asked questions and from time to time someone would say, “A vinegar mother! What a name!” I wasn’t much interested and I wandered off into the garden where, after a few minutes, Mop joined me. She was, as usual, carrying a book but instead of sitting down, opening the book and excluding me, which was her custom, she stood staring into the distance of the Stour Valley and the Weeping Hills – I think she leant against a tree – and her face had on it that protuberant-featured expression which heralded one of her rages. I asked her what was the matter.

  “I’ve been sick.”

  I knew she hadn’t been, but I asked her why.

  “That horrible old woman and that horrible thing she was talking about, like a bit of liver in a bottle, she said.” Her mouth trembled. “Why does she call it a vinegar mother?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps because mothers make children and it makes vinegar.”

  That only seemed to make her angrier and she kicked at the tree.

  “Shall we go
down to the pond or are you going to read?” I said.

  But Mop didn’t answer me so I went down to the pond alone and watched the bats that flitted against a pale green sky. Mop had gone up to our bedroom. She was in bed reading when I got back. No reader myself, I remember the books she liked and remember too that my mother thought she ought not to be allowed to read them. That night it was Lefanu’s Uncle Silas which engrossed her. She had just finished Dr James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. I don’t believe, at that time, I saw any connection between her literary tastes and her reaction to the vinegar mother, nor did I attribute this latter to anything lacking in her relationship with her own mother. I couldn’t have done so, I was much too young. I hadn’t, anyway, been affected by the conversation at supper and I went to bed with no uneasy forebodings about what was to come.

  In the morning when Mop and I came back from church – we were sent there, I now think, from a desire on the part of Mr and Mrs Felton to impress the neighbours rather than out of vicarious piety – we found the Elsworthys once more at Sanctuary. Lady Elsworthy and her son and Mrs Felton were all peering into a round glass vessel with a stoppered mouth in which was some brown liquid with a curd floating on it. This curd did look quite a lot like a slice of liver.

  “It’s alive,” said Mop. “It’s a sort of animal.”

  Lady Elsworthy told her not to be a little fool and Mrs Felton laughed. I thought my mother would have been angry if a visitor to our house had told me not to be a fool, and I also thought Mop was really going to be sick this time.

  “We don’t have to have it, do we?” she said.

  “Of course we’re going to have it,” said Mrs Felton. “How dare you speak like that when Lady Elsworthy has been kind enough to give it to me! Now we shall never have to buy nasty shop vinegar again.”

  “Vinegar doesn’t cost much,” said Mop.

  “Isn’t that just like a child! Money grows on trees as far as she’s concerned.”