Tomorrow's ghost

by Anthony Price

  Frances served Sally with the final pancake. It was (though she said it herself, as shouldn’t) an absolutely perfect example of its species.

  ‘That’s gorgeous, Frances!’ Sally rubbed her stomach guiltily. ‘But you’ve made us eat too much, you know—we’ve got to watch our figures.’ She looked down at a figure which, if it was going to be watched, would only be watched with approval.

  ‘Nonsense. You’re just right.’ Irresistibly, Frances found herself slipping into her allotted role in response to their prompting. ‘Eat it up.’

  The sad truth was, of course, that she’d become such a chameleon that there wasn’t a real Frances left to argue the toss, she cautioned herself. And when the role was as easy as this—when the other actors were determined to make her a success (for all she knew, they might both hate pancakes, but they would eat anything she cooked tonight until it came out of their ears, she knew that)—no other Frances had a chance.

  * * *

  ‘Hullo, Princess,’ said Paul. ‘Pancakes? Is there one for me by any chance?’

  Sally looked up from her pancake with an expression of undisguised hostility.

  ‘And who might you be?’ The influence of Nannie at her frostiest was apparent.

  ‘Paul Mitchell—at your service. Miss Butler.’ Paul wasn’t used to such immediate feminine disapproval, guessed Frances. But he rallied as gamely as any man might have done who encountered a barbed-wire fence in what he had assumed would be open country. ‘At everyone’s service, in fact.’

  ‘Indeed?’ As Sally considered him her sister circled round to stand behind her. For the first time Frances could see their father in both of them: when those stares had matured they would be able to stop a grown man in his tracks at twenty paces.

  Even as it was their combined effect rocked Paul. He looked to Frances for support as much as for a pancake.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Frances was torn between conflicting loyalties, but for once her sympathy was marginally on Paul’s side, with the odds he was up against. She tilted the empty mixing bowl for him to see. ‘You’re just too late.’

  ‘My luck!’ Paul didn’t look at the Misses Butler. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.

  Princess?’

  ‘Why do you call her “Princess”?’ Curiosity got the better of Jane’s disapproval.

  ‘Because she is a princess.’ Paul didn’t smile this time. He was learning. ‘Through how many mattresses could the true princess tell there was a pea under her?’

  ‘How—‘ Jane frowned at him. ‘It was twelve, I think.’

  ‘Twelve it was.’ Paul nodded towards Frances. ‘She can manage thirteen, no trouble … Also, the last time I met her, she’d lost a shoe … Also, she tells fairy stories, so I gather. She’s an expert on them.’

  Jane looked at Frances. ‘Are you really?’

  Frances regretted her marginal sympathy. ‘Mr Mitchell works with me—‘ she embraced them both with the same look ‘—so I have to talk to him on business now.

  You’ll have to start the washing up without me, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘But you won’t be going?’ asked Jane. ‘Not tonight?’

  ‘No.’ Frances smiled, reassuring herself as much as the two girls. ‘I will be staying.

  And Mr Mitchell will be going.’

  ‘Well … that’s all right,’ said Sally.

  ‘I could help with the washing up,’ offered Paul.

  ‘No,’ said Sally. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be fair,’ said Jane. ‘You haven’t dirtied anything.’

  ‘That’s unfortunately true,’ Paul turned his charm on to full strength. ‘But—‘

  ‘After we’ve finished washing up we’ll go and watch TV, Frances,’ said Sally. ‘There’s a programme we like at quarter to.’

  ‘What about your prep?’

  ‘We did that at school. First prep before tea, second prep after tea—that’s why we stay till six,’ said Jane. ‘After we’ve watched our programme we shall read. I’m reading The Lord of the Flies—it’s one of our set books.’

  ‘I shall do some biology,’ said Sally. ‘I’ll make some coffee after the Nine O’clock News. But if you’d like something to drink before, there’s sherry and stuff in the cabinet in the sitting room—‘

  * * *

  Paul followed Frances to the library.

  Just as she had done, he looked round curiously. By the time she had finished drawing the curtains he was halfway along one section of shelving, running his eyes over the titles. He stopped suddenly, while she watched him, and drew a book from one of the shelves.

  ‘Winged Victory—‘ he opened the book ‘—Ex libris Henricus Chesney … so it has to be a first edition.’ He flipped a page. ‘And signed by the author, too! A nice little collector’s piece … and I’ll bet there are a few more like it hereabouts.’ He replaced the book. ‘All the old General’s books, of course.’

  Frances waited. She knew he was going to say something more.

  ‘You know, that was the only thing of the old man’s that he kept,’ said Paul. ‘Sold up the house and contents. Gave the papers and the diaries to the Imperial War Museum—matter of fact, I’ve actually read some of them … when I was researching there. Beautiful copperplate hand, the old General had … Not a bad commander, either, come to that—kept his men well back when the Germans attacked in 1918—not at all bad … And the old man’s medals and portrait to the Lancashire Rifles’ Museum … Just kept the books, that’s all.’

  And the money, he didn’t bother to add. They both knew that, it didn’t need to be said.

  ‘You’ve been researching the General, then?’ That didn’t really need to be said either, but she didn’t want to trade anything of value yet, before he’d offered her something worth having in exchange.

  ‘Uh-huh. The General and the Colonel both.’ He seemed engrossed in the titles of the books. ‘Or the General and the Captain. And the General and the Rifleman—hard to think of Fighting Jack as an Other Rank, but that’s how he started … in the army, that is.

  With the General he started out even lower down the scale. The social scale.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. He was odd-job boy to the General’s gardener in his school holidays—did you know that, Princess?’

  ‘Wasn’t his father the General’s sergeant-major in the First World War?’ Frances encouraged him.

  ‘That’s right. Regimental Sergeant-Major. And RSM Butler was … “a proper tartar”, so I am reliably informed. Like the General, in fact—both hard as diamonds, one with a bit more polish than the other. But both hard as diamonds.’

  ‘Reliably informed by whom?’

  ‘One Who Should Know: the old General’s gardener, ex-batman. One Private Albert Sands—Rifleman Sands, I beg his pardon!’ Paul looked at her—through her—suddenly, smiling to himself, his face quite transformed by his memory. ‘Rifleman Sands, aged 84—a jolly old boy who has all the nurses eating out of his hand. They say he pinches their bottoms if they don’t watch out—Rifleman Sands, sans teeth, almost sans eyes, but not sans memory, fortunately … He sits there like a little old wizened monkey, a bit vague about the last twenty years, but before that he’s practically got total recall. Just a little old man—but he and Butler’s father pulled the old General off the barbed wire at Beaumont Hamel in 1916.’ Paul’s eyes flickered. ‘Pulled him off the wire—the old General was only a young Colonel then—pulled him off the wire under machine-gun fire in full view of the Germans, and dragged him into a shell-hole.’ The eyes focused on her. ‘And you know what Rifleman Sands said. Princess? He said “It was a bloody silly thing to do, we should have known better—we could have got ourselves killed”.’

  Frances held her tongue. This was another Paul, a different Paul whom she had only very rarely glimpsed.

  ‘The irony is that after the war they both went in opposite directions, the General and the RSM, and on opposites sides—the RSM was a printer, and’ he
organised the Union in the General’s printing works, Chesney and Rawle’s. Come the General Strike in 1926 and they fought each other, in fact. Tooth and nail.’

  He looked at Frances, and Frances began at last to see the direction in which he was heading.

  ‘The General was a pillar of the Conservative Party—a Tory alderman on the council, and he could have had the Parliamentary seat if he’d wanted it, too … And ex-RSM Butler was the heart and soul of the local Labour Party.’

  And little Jack Butler caught in the middle, caught between two men who were both as hard as diamonds, old comrades implacably opposed to each other.

  ‘Rifleman Sands reckoned that if it had been a marginal Parliamentary seat they would both have stood for it, and made a real fight of it. But it was a safe Tory seat, and neither of them reckoned to waste their time in London when they could be pitching into each other where they were. Beautiful!’

  But maybe not so beautiful for little Jack, though?

  Paul turned back to the books again.

  ‘What about … Colonel Butler …’ She couldn’t call him ‘little Jack’ out aloud ‘… when he was a boy?’

  ‘Ah .. . You mean, what did Rifleman Sands have to say about Rifleman-Colonel Jack?’ He reached out for another book, and Frances noted the care with which he extracted it from the shelf, how he pressed the top of its spine inwards first so that he could lift it out from the bottom without straining the binding. ‘Yes … another Ex libris Henricus Chesney—but the one next to it—‘ he exchanged one book for another ‘—that can’t be, because I remember when it first came out. The Debateable Land … that would be about ‘69 … J. Butler 1970, there you are! And the old General died way back in ‘53 … so—quite a lot of these must be J. Butler’s, actually. But that figures, as they say … that figures.’

  ‘Who say?’ Frances inquired gently. So far he hadn’t given her anything, and now he was teasing her.

  ‘”Always had his nose in a book, young Jack”—Rifleman Sands.’ Paul nodded at the shelves. ‘Thought he was going to be a schoolmaster, young Jack, did Rifleman Sands … scholarship boy at the grammar school, with his nose always in some book or other when he wasn’t working at his odd jobs. And that’s really how it happened, I suppose: the General kept an eye on him because he was RSM Butler’s son—gave him the job because he was RSM Butler’s son. Sands was there when he gave it to him. And then saw how much he read, and gave him the run of the library too … One lonely old man and one lonely small boy—no mother, and Father Butler busy with his politics and his trade unionism when he wasn’t working … and the old General’s only son had been killed by the Afridis ten years before, up in Waziristan somewhere, and his wife had died of ‘flu donkey’s years earlier, just after the ‘14—‘18 War. One plus one equals two …

  I guess young Jack must have aroused the old man’s interest first, because he was his father’s son. Then the interest became a sort of hobby, because the boy was intelligent…’

  More than that under the surface, Frances suspected. There was a familiar enough pattern here: the age gap was such that the two of them would probably have been able to talk to each other in a way that they could never have talked to anyone else. She could remember the confidences she exchanged with Grannie, which went far beyond anything either of them had told Mother. And, for a guess, unspoken love would have followed spoken confidences.

  As always, she was surprised how the memory of Grannie still ached. Or not the memory, but the loss.

  ‘And then the interest—the hobby—became an obsession.’ Paul gazed into space for a moment. ‘You know, they wrote to each other once a fortnight. Butler and the General—never failed. Sometimes it was only a note from Butler. And sometimes, when he was away at the war, and when he was in the thick of it in Korea, the letters would bunch up and arrive together. But the General would give Rifleman Sands a letter to post every other Monday, rain or shine, every one numbered in sequence. And he’d report to Sands how Butler was getting on—the day Butler’s Military Cross was gazetted they both got stoned out of their minds, Sands says. Started with champagne, which neither of them liked, and finished up on 40-year-old malt whisky, and Sands sprained his ankle trying to get on his bicycle afterwards, and was off work for a week.’ Paul grinned at her suddenly. ‘Got his money’s worth out of our Jack, the General did, in Rifleman Sands’ opinion—or value for money, anyway. And so did Sands himself, he was quite frank about it: nice little private nursing home, with pinchable bottoms—not a lot of change out of £100 a week, I should think—all at Rifleman-Colonel Butler’s expense. And not in the General’s will, either—the General took it for granted that Butler would do it, and Butler did it.’

  ‘Does that make Sands a reliable witness?’

  Paul laughed. ‘The old bugger doesn’t give a damn. With his pension and his investments—he’s been a bachelor all his life, and the General made his investments for him—he’s got enough to see himself out, no problem. He said so himself.’

  ‘Then why does he accept money from Butler?’

  ‘Ah—now that’s interesting. He does it to please Butler.’

  ‘To … please—?’

  Paul nodded. ‘That’s got you, hasn’t it! Autres temps, autres maeurs, Princess … You see, the way Rifleman Sands was brought up—and the way Rifleman-Colonel Butler, our Jack, was also brought up, just one street away in the same district, also on the wrong side of the tracks, but in the same world as the General—was that if a man did his duty to the best of his ability, then everything would be all right, come what may. You can laugh—‘

  ‘I’m not laughing.’

  ‘Then bully for you. That makes you a very old-fashioned girl, I can tell you … But I’ve talked to a lot of these old boys, when I was pretending to be an historian, and trying to find out how they stood it in the trenches. And it all comes back to the same thing: they didn’t think it was religious, but they were all brought up on the Bible and it’s straight out of St. Paul to the Colossians, chapter three: And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not to men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for ye serve the Lord Christ.’

  Good God! thought Frances involuntarily: Paul Mitchell quoting the Scriptures—it wasn’t so much surprising that he could recall the words accurately, because his amazing capacity for recall was well-known, as that he accepted their importance in preference for more cynical interpretations.

  ‘So Rifleman Sands considers it his duty to let Butler do his duty. Which in turn allows Sands to leave his money to Army charities—mostly the British Legion—which Butler himself knows perfectly well, because he’s an executor of the will … I tell you.

  Princess, it’s all absolutely incredible. And at the same time it’s beautiful as well, the way both of them have it worked out between them—where their obligations lie.’

  He was telling her something now. Maybe he didn’t think he was—maybe he was simply blinding her with what he took to be irrelevant facts, however academically interesting—but he was, nevertheless. He was telling her something of enormous significance.

  ‘What about those letters? The General would have kept them—did they go to the Imperial War Museum?’

  Paul shook his head. ‘No way we’re going to get a look at them. They’re safe in the bosom of the regimental archives somewhere—he didn’t include them with the papers he gave to the museum. And I mean safe. Because when he handed them over he slapped a 50-year embargo on them, and only he can unslap it … the adjutant made that crystal clear.’

  He paused for a moment or two, ran his finger over some of the books casually, and then glanced sidelong at her. ‘A decent fellow, the adjutant … didn’t know Butler himself, too young, but he produced a couple of old sweats who knew him pretty well, and put me on to a retired half-colonel of the Mendips who was one of his subalterns in Korea … Lives not far from here, the half-colonel, so I took him in en route. And there w
as another chap I talked to this morning, ex-Rifles … I’ve covered one hell of a lot of ground since last night, and that’s the truth.’

  He was impressing her with how much he knew, and how much he had to offer.

  And also that he was nearly ready to start trading.

  ‘But he didn’t tell me about the letters, the adjutant—I heard about them from Rifleman Sands. And when I phoned the adjutant back he said—ever so politely—that if Her Majesty wanted to see them it’d be a case of hard luck. Your Majesty. ,’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Frances.

  ‘I agree. Except they would only have given us the beginning of the story, and it’s the end of it we really need …’ He watched her. ‘That is … if we’re looking for the same thing, Princess.’

  ‘True.’ The trading had started. ‘You said Sands thought he was going to be a schoolmaster, not a soldier? Did he really mean that?’

  Paul half-smiled. ‘Takes a bit of effort to see Fighting Jack as Mr Chips, not Colonel Blimp, doesn’t it!’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I doubt it. I think Rifleman Sands simply thinks that any poor boy who won a scholarship to- the Grammar and liked reading books ought to be a schoolmaster, that’s all. Just the old class prejudice against the Red Coat … plus his own memories of the trenches, I suspect.’

  ‘And what did Butler’s father make of it?’

  ‘Well, I think . ..’ He broke off. ‘I think … that it’s about time you stopped asking questions and answered one or two for a change. Princess. Like, for instance, what this sudden interest in Fighting Jack’s academic progress means?’

  Frances shrugged. ‘I think he’s a complex man.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ He gestured towards the shelves of books. ‘But he carried on the family tradition—adopted family anyway. They’re all military, or military-political. Or political … Ex libris Butler is the same as Ex libris Chesney.’

  ‘Not upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs?’