all the beloved ghosts

by Alison Macleod

  I follow him up and cock my head. ‘So?’

  ‘So?’ he says, his face blank.

  It’s none of my business. ‘What did the doctor say about Saddam?’

  He bites the plastic packaging off the box. ‘Moobs, yes, deffo. Breast cancer, no. No lung cancer either, as it happens.’

  And the lump? I want to ask. What about the lump?

  He opens the box, lifts out my new thermostat, and fishes for the installation instructions. He rummages in his toolbox, lifts out a glasses case and waves his specs. ‘You’d never know I used to be a sniper.’

  Watch.

  A sniper is an expert marksman at a thousand yards. His vision is perfect or near perfect. When he isn’t shooting, he is able to run three miles in eighteen minutes. He can perform a hundred sit-ups and twenty pull-ups in two minutes. He can execute the low crawl, medium crawl, high crawl and hand-and-knees crawl while carrying a hundred-pound pack, an L115A3 rifle and a 9mm pistol.

  He can navigate by day and night. He can draw an accurate field sketch. He understands the vanishing point. He knows the imagination can distort. There can be no history of mental illness.

  A sniper must move undetected. He must not smoke, move suddenly, use soap, wear insect repellent or arouse birds or wildlife. He relies on his spotter. The spotter will calculate wind velocity, the position of the sun, the grid coordinates and the range of all weapons prior to each shot.

  On that searing March day in 2003, four men landed in the Drop Zone of Umm Qasr. ‘Two teams,’ Toby explains, ‘in all that light. Two men too many.’

  In desert areas, camouflage must be tan and brown.

  A sniper uncovers his riflescope only when aiming at a target.

  A sniper must not shine.

  That day, Toby shone. While the four men lay prone on a rooftop across from the corner shop from which the target was about to emerge, Toby’s St Jude medal slipped outside his T-shirt, outside his combats, and glinted in the midday light.

  Later, in the concrete courtyard, the butt of an AK47 would break his skull and knock out his teeth. It would crush his fingers, break an arm and smash his ribs. Each day, the four men were pushed into the four chairs.

  His first tour, his first assignment.

  One morning, a bird, a warbler of some kind, sang overhead. Kaka-kee, kaka-kee, kaka-kee. Toby didn’t hear the footsteps. Two shots rang out. Only when he opened his eyes did he understand he wasn’t dead.

  A scan revealed the lump on Toby’s sternum to be a protective scar of bone; a final, slow mending where the ribs had rejoined the sternum.

  I take a seat on the stair below him and stare straight ahead. ‘How did you get out of the courtyard?’

  He stalls, choosing his words for me. ‘The two of us fought our way out.’

  I understand what cannot be said to a stranger, in a stranger’s new home. They killed their way out.

  I don’t turn around. ‘Your girlfriend calls me,’ I say, ‘on your phone.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘She say anything?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘I suspect she knows you’re keeping something from her.’

  Behind me, he’s nodding. Without turning, I know he’s nodding. And staring at his hands.

  ‘Another woman?’ I try.

  ‘Almost,’ he says. I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘Fatboy Slim.’ He shifts on the stair. ‘At night when it warms up like it has, I sneak out, pull on my waders and fish from his surf. No bathers to bother you, no one to see, and the bass bite best at night in spring and summer. I’m pretty good now at casting, hooking and landing them in the dark. Nice bloke actually. Don’t expect he’d mind. I don’t bother anyone. Before I leave, I hide my fish on the public side and return first thing to collect them, before work.’

  ‘It seems you’ve been spotted. At home, I mean.’

  ‘Point taken. Yep. After the kids are in bed, I slip out our back door. With her friends being over, I didn’t think—’ Behind me, I hear him rub his whiskered face. ‘I leave my phone. I mute it and hide it under Madison’s mattress. Can’t risk it lighting up in the surf in the dark.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Madison on the line.’

  ‘No. Sorry. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘Maybe she knows you’re keeping something more from her. More than the outings in the dark.’

  ‘I am. As you know.’ He hesitates. ‘And it can keep. Now it can, I mean. That’s what I mean. Now it can.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘That’s good,’ I say.

  I feel his hand, light, fleeting, on my shoulder. ‘You’re a fine Methodist woman.’

  I turn back and peer up. His grin is broad.

  ‘That’s a comfort.’ I bite back a smile. ‘But I forgot to say. Our tulips are dead. I mean, totally dead this time.’

  He sighs. ‘Total death. It comes to us all in the end. Including the two beautiful bass I landed last night.’ His smile breaks out again. ‘They’re on ice in the back of the van. Not gutted yet, but I could give you one if you like.’

  ‘You’re all right,’ I say. ‘Next time maybe.’

  I look away again.

  And together, beneath my chapel window, we sit in pools of morning shadow and light while, somewhere beyond its bright panes, the Portsmouth-to-Caen ferry is slowly returned to port.

  all the beloved ghosts

  For Angelica Garnett 1918–2012

  Angelica passes through the bow-ceilinged kitchen – or ‘the green room’ as the assistant at her side refers to it. Her eyebrow, or what remains of it after ninety years, arches at the phrase. The kitchen is the kitchen. More to the point, it has been whitewashed for as long as she can remember. If she is demented – and the whispering of her ageing children would have her believe as much – at least she can testify to the colour of her family’s former kitchen. If she is gaga, at least she has the manners to walk around, rather than through, the dead.

  Grace, specifically.

  At the great, hulking square of a table, Grace, the housekeeper of her childhood years, is slender and pink-faced again. She pours tea from the ancient yellow pot with the cracked glaze, and steamy bergamot rises on the air. Wherever did that pot get to? Angelica wonders. An assortment of cups and saucers wait on two trays. A silver tea strainer lies by the milk jug – which means there will be no giddy reading of the tea leaves this afternoon by the children; no stolen glimpses of the future, and really, Angelica decides, that is just as well. Doesn’t the future rush at you headlong? Doesn’t it get hold of your heart and—

  THUMP-THUMP-thump. There it is again. Upstairs, above the bulging ceiling, footsteps beat out their metre, a sound she knows in the depths of herself, like something rolling at the bottom of an old trunk. The feet are too quick in their step for middle age, too heavy for a child’s.

  Julian. She is sure of it. The girl assistant at her side wouldn’t understand, of course she wouldn’t, but never mind the girl. Oh, Julian, we were never ourselves again without you.

  ‘Mrs Garnett, may I get you anything before we make our way to the marquee?’

  My brother. My brother who died in a stalemate of a battle in a place whose name I can’t remember.

  The girl’s high-browed oval face is tipped to one side. It is a pretty face, certainly, but unremarkable, Angelica decides. It boasts all the blandness of good breeding. (Her daughters tell her she mustn’t use the phrase ‘good breeding’. They assure her it is offensive these days, but offensive to whom? Horses?)

  If the girl and her face disappoint, Angelica can admit, privately, that her vowels are pleasingly rounded and resonant. She could not fail to appreciate their music. It conjures images of broderie anglaise, of almond party favours and of clean white napkins dropped into the lap. But for all that, Angelica is not interested in the girl. And – oh, oh – Julian’s footsteps overhead have – she listens again – gone.

  But the quiet, the composure of Grace’s r
outine in the kitchen has the restoring effect of a Vermeer. Grace arranges wedges of lemon on a plate and adds a pair of tongs. She lays oatcakes for Duncan and stacks of freshly buttered toast for the children. She selects ripe plums from the willow basket on the floor and piles them high in a bowl for Vanessa’s pleasure. The plums are the colour of a Sussex sky before a downpour, and in this moment as Angelica gazes, she falls into their colour, into a dark pool of plumminess.

  When she surfaces, she finds that Grace’s ghost is also standing utterly still, her eyes closed, her face as contented as a Sufi at prayer. But Grace is not similarly moved by the plums; she is warming her backside in front of the coal range. It is a private moment of course, and she, Angelica, is trespassing.

  The girl assistant and her even-featured face are waiting. What can Angelica do but bow her head, take her cane and follow the girl out the side door? Not that this guarantees they will be on time. Audience or no audience, she will not be hurried.

  So they get only as far as the old cattle pond at the front of the house when she stops again, seduced by its light. The breeze ruffles the surface. She wanders to the edge and locates her image in the upside-down world, discovering the girl who used to stand in that spot. She blinks at herself through the wrinkled glass, across decades and dimensions. Behind the barn, the milking machine grinds preternaturally to life, and a cow bellows. Swallows snip the afternoon sky.

  Another day gone.

  She turns at last and follows the girl whose name she can’t recall – Sophie or Zoë or Chloë. Her hand reaches out, a reflex action, to push on the door that leads into the walled garden, but the old, familiar door is gone. She hears only the phantom creak of its hinges. On either side of the path, hollyhocks – huge and fantastical – nod to her on the breeze.

  The girl leads the way, turning at intervals. It is her job to get her to the marquee on time, and it is, no doubt, a challenge. Earlier Angelica insisted that she did not want a retinue, nor even as much as an elbow to clutch.

  She wanted only to be alone with the house, her old family home, to be where visitors, where others, were not. She wanted to feel again the warmth of its floorboards beneath her feet; to see the bright chintz curtains blowing in the breeze. Perhaps she’d unearth her earliest sketches, drawn with lumps of chalk her brothers had gathered for her on the Downs all those years ago. She’d dawdle over memories of poached eggs made from daisies for her rag doll; of the River Cuck icy between her toes; of the old bay tree in whose branches she once balanced, small but queenly.

  ‘Mind this bit here, Mrs Garnett,’ Chloë calls over her shoulder. She taps the offending flagstone with her foot.

  Angelica nods curtly to demonstrate good sense. But the day, the house and its ghosts do not make it easy. Far from it. On the garden lawn by the ornamental pond, she must try not to look too closely at the ensemble of children in costume, at the girl and her brothers who are posed in the tragic attitude of a tableau vivant. Their arms implore. Their eyes are woebegone. Their mouths tremble with giggles.

  She remembers the Grecian-style dress. Her mother ran it up for her on the Singer. It was once a sheet on the floor of the attic studio; if the girl were to turn, Angelica knows she would see telltale splashes of Prussian blue paint on the back. And if she were to speak to her ten-year-old self, what should happen then?

  The child would no doubt be frightened by so old a person; by the need to speak closely to a fuzzy, overgrown ear. How could Angelica tell her to Take it all in, remember, because life pares you down and . . .

  In that moment, a figure passes so near to her, she catches the whiff of turpentine from the pores of his jacket.

  The shadow over her heart disappears.

  Duncan.

  He is carrying a bundle of roses he has cut himself. He takes a penknife from his pocket, flays a stem of its thorns and, without disturbing the girl’s pose, slips a white bloom behind her ear.

  ‘It smells of cold cream!’ she says, laughing.

  ‘Careful,’ he teases. ‘You’re wrinkling your nose. Quentin, your director brother, will not be pleased.’

  ‘Mrs Garnett?’ Zoë again.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘Something in my eye. An eyelash.’

  Zoë assures her that they are nearly at the marquee, as if she is unable to mark their progress for herself. Doddering. Doolally. Angelica prefers the term ‘demented’. It has a certain drama. It suggests a capacity for danger.

  ‘Are you fine to go on?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she mutters, with a fluttering of her hand. But, in spite of the girl’s fervent hope that she will come along, and in spite of her own blasé assurances, as they step into what was once the orchard, she stumbles.

  Her neck jolts back, her stomach lurches, and only at the last moment does her cane anchor her. Her ankle rights itself after all. She does not hit the ground. The wind is not knocked from her. Her free hand flies to the beads at her neck, as if they are a rope thrown to her in the tide.

  Relax, she commands herself, relax. She has not embarrassed herself with a fall. Her hip will not crack today.

  She is aware that – Chloë? – has paused on the path; that the girl is trying very hard not to make a fuss. Her wide, milky brow is wrinkling with concern for an elderly woman, for a weathered castaway adrift in a new century. How can Angelica possibly explain?

  Vanessa. There. At her easel.

  In the orchard of all places.

  She hadn’t expected her mother, at this late stage of things, to subscribe to any notion of an afterlife. It’s a rather cruel joke. Before her death, Vanessa flatly refused to avail herself of a vicar, a funeral service and even of mourners. Didn’t she show contempt for everything but a hole in the ground? Why leave your loved ones in so stark a place? Why be so remote? Why not cooperate in death if not in life?

  Angelica feels the old molten force blast within her, and her eyes fill with hot tears.

  It is trite to blame one’s mother, as is her wont, especially when one’s mother is long dead. What a spoiled child she sometimes seems, even to herself. And of course she was spoiled, everyone says she was, why even books say she was, though surely so much freedom for a child is a form of neglect, is it not?

  It occurs to Angelica that the mother before her now is a woman of just forty-odd years again, almost half a century younger than she herself. Vanessa simply has no right to be alive and painting here in the orchard. Nor has she the right, after so many years gone, to stand before her daughter, still unaware, still so absorbed, and so vivid it is as if she, Angelica, is the ghost, the lesser presence, the trick of the light.

  ‘Mrs Garnett, do you need a moment?’

  Vanessa is of course indifferent to both Sophie and Angelica. She always had the gift of utter concentration. She is not distracted by ghosts from the future. Angelica watches her mother daub the oils on her canvas with a palette knife. When Vanessa bends to adjust the easel, her palms flash out, a blur of green, ochre and black. Her subject is a fallen apple. She is drawn to the bravura of its rot.

  ‘Almost time, Mrs Garnett,’ chimes Sophie.

  She won’t offer Sophie Augustine’s thoughts on time. She won’t explain that time comes out of the future, which does not yet exist, into the present, which has no duration, and into the past, which has ceased to be.

  Her mother paints on. She is wearing her long brown velvet coat. The buttons fell off years ago. She has rolled up the sleeves. A patch of saffron yellow marks one of the coat’s elbows. She does not turn to acknowledge her daughter, and it is, Angelica tells herself, for the best.

  She accepts Zoë’s elbow.

  ‘I believe they’re ready for you, Mrs Garnett.’

  She shakes out her shoulders. She tells Zoë that she is accustomed to making a spectacle of herself; that she has always been good at play-acting. Once upon a time, when she was a girl, she posed as a Russian princess for one of her Aunt Virginia’s stories. This particular story was to have pictures.
Photographs. Her aunt explained that she should imagine the princess character as if she is like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from up high, or as a hill, all green with springtime, but glimpsed through clouds.

  Angelica stops and turns to Zoë. ‘Do you have any idea what that means?’

  Zoë smiles and shakes her head.

  ‘I tried hard not to frown, but my aunt was not helping at all. It was only when Leonard winked at me from above his camera – I adored Leonard – that, suddenly, I knew how to do it. I slipped the fur cloak over my shoulders and put the hat upon my head. I assumed the sombre expression of a girl who is both burdened and made beautiful by Destiny.’

  She checks Zoë’s face, expecting her to smile, expecting her to find it unimaginable that the old woman on her arm might once have been capable of beauty. But Zoë betrays no trace of incredulity.

  Perhaps she has seen the pictures. Postcards in the gift shop. Images from photo albums in the online archive. All their dear faces – zoom, zoom, magnify – made startlingly clear and strange.

  She must remember to finish her stories. ‘It was for the lovely, silly novel,’ she says.

  As Zoë ushers her into the marquee, the hum of the crowd whooshes in her ear. She leans towards the girl, and her smile is wry: ‘But I’d make only the flimsiest of characters now.’

  At the steps to the stage, she has to bend so low that her torso is almost parallel to the floor. She grips the brass top of her cane with one hand and a courteous male forearm with the other. After her stumble in the orchard, she fears her legs are mutinous.

  When she manages the ascent, she lets herself drop into a high-backed chair at centre stage. She straightens herself as much as nature will allow.

  Is that her aunt in the front row?

  Of course it isn’t. It is her niece. She knows that. But the resemblance does not help.

  Someone, the owner of the courteous male forearm, is introducing her from the lectern. The show has started, it would seem, and she is the show. She hears that she was born in the house on Christmas Day 1918; that she is an accomplished artist in her own right. She wonders where Sophie has got to.