Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  ‘You’d no need to get between the sheets,’ she said a little sourly, but Jock did not listen to her. He still looked half stunned, as if he were trying to remember something.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘It’s twenty-five to eight. I’m off to supper in another five minutes.’

  ‘Aye. Good for you.’ He walked over to the radiator by the curtained window, and picking up the towel there he wiped his neck with it. Then he shivered. The room was very cold and untidy, and nobody likes waking when it is dark.

  ‘That’s bloody strange, Mary. I was having some sort of dream.’

  ‘It sounded more like a nightmare.’

  ‘A-huh,’ he said gently: he wanted to talk. ‘That’s what’s so strange. Christ, I’ve been sweating.’ He chucked the towel over the back of a chair and ran his fingers through his hair. His eyes were much brighter than usual: they did not look flat any more. ‘I’m thinking it wasn’t so bad. The dream wasn’t so bad. No.’

  ‘Well, you were fairly yelling for me. Here’s your kilt. I was thinking of waking you up, anyway, when you started to cry.’

  ‘I wasn’t crying.’

  ‘Then it was something very near it.’

  ‘I’d no call to cry, lass. The whole Battalion was on the move.’

  But Mary was too busy to listen to dreams.

  ‘Here; take your kilt. I’ll be through next door.’

  She turned away, but as Jock sat down on the bed again he wanted her to stay.

  ‘Mary, Mary, bide,’ he said and she hesitated. ‘It was a good dream. I was telling you.’

  ‘Och, for heaven’s sake, Jock.’

  He gave a little smile. ‘I was only wanting to tell you.’

  ‘All right; all right. I’m glad it was a good dream. But it’s time you were awake, and out of here.’

  ‘That’s the way of it?’

  ‘Och.’

  ‘Hi, Mary. What’s the time?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘It’s after half-past seven.’

  ‘Ach, to hell. I’m too late for the Mess.’

  ‘Then you’d better go home.’ She was standing holding on to the door, half in the room and half out. Jock was as anxious as a child that she should stay.

  ‘I told Morag I’d be out.’

  ‘She’ll give you a boiled egg, I’m sure.’

  ‘A-huh.’ He smiled and bent down stiffly to collect his shoes. ‘I’m no much good at amusing us, so it seems.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  Then Jock returned to the dream. ‘I can’t just mind what the hell it was all about. But it wasn’t a nightmare: not really. It’s cold, Mary. Is it snowing?’

  She knocked her knuckles against the door with impatience.

  ‘How should I know? I haven’t left the flat.’

  ‘You would have been as well in bed beside me then.’

  Again she was about to leave.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘I’ve got company,’ she said and Jock looked up from his laces.

  ‘Who the hell?’

  ‘It’s all right: it’s a friend of yours. Never mind about the bed: I’ll make it later.’

  Jock was not very grateful. ‘If you make it at all,’ he said.

  Charlie Scott was lying on the sofa with his head tipped back on the arm, and he did not move when Jock came into the room. When Charlie sensed danger all that happened was that his movements were a little slower, and his speeches even shorter. He was known for that. There was a live newsreel taken of his company going into an attack during the Italian campaign and Charlie had been something of a star in it. As the smoke thickened and his men deployed along the line of tanks, a runner came up with some message. There is a wonderful picture of Charlie taken on the spot, and you see it repeated from time to time when they show old shots of battle. The runner has a long message which you do not hear, and Charlie listens to him. He nods, and brushes his big moustache: he does not look flurried or afraid. You hear his voice, with the tanks behind.

  ‘Tell Mr McLaren from me,’ he says, ‘that he must bloody well bide his time.’ The message, though never understood or explained, served as a catch phrase in the Battalion for some time after that. And it was the same calm, dumb expression that confronted Jock when he came into the room.

  But Jock could not disguise his astonishment.

  ‘Charlie Scott. What the hell are you doing here?’

  Then he looked at Mary’s back. She was bending over a table at the far end of the room, pouring out some drinks, and it was all suddenly plain.

  ‘Bit worried about you. Thought you might have tottered along here, old boy.’

  Jock looked at him hard, looked at Mary, and looked back at him again. He blinked; then he smiled.

  ‘Aye. Old boy, old boy. And you’re a bloody liar, Charlie Scott. But you’re a bloody bad liar. I’ll give you that.’

  ‘No, Jock lad, I …’

  ‘Och, it’s no business of mine,’ Jock said irritably, turning away, and now Mary put a tumbler in his hand. ‘I was just surprised.’

  As casually as she could, Mary said, ‘Don’t worry, Charlie; Jock always judges others by himself.’ But Jock shook his head. She was as unconvincing as Charlie. He chuckled as he said, ‘And I’m always right.’

  ‘Here’s to us,’ Mary said; then she put her glass down on the bookshelf and disappeared into the bedroom.

  Charlie sat up and he raised his glass with a flippant little jerk.

  ‘Astonishing good luck.’

  ‘Aye,’ Jock said, and he took a gulp. When he noticed it was brandy he was drinking he made a sour face. ‘I suppose the whisky’s done. Was it your bottle, Charlie?’

  ‘Lord, no.’

  ‘I’ll repay you, sometime.’

  Charlie sat silently and Jock walked up and down the room for a moment or two, touching things. Then he glanced at the door, and stepped back to Charlie. He bent forward and spoke in a low voice.

  ‘Charlie; you’re a bloody idiot, man. It’s time you got out and got yourself married. You can’t go on like this all your life.’

  It was just like that newsreel. Charlie’s face was without expression. At last he said slowly, ‘You must have had the hell of a dream,’ and he took a sip of brandy, but he did not much like the taste of brandy, either.

  Jock looked at him earnestly then he straightened his back again, and he said, ‘Aye; the hell of a dream.’ He walked over to the chair in the corner and picked up his bonnet.

  Charlie said, ‘Sorry about all this.’

  ‘A-huh.’ Jock had not meant to say any more on the subject, but now he nodded to the bedroom door. ‘Anyway the bed’s warm for you.’

  ‘Nothing’s warm these days, Jock: nothing except the bathwater.’

  ‘Aye, aye.’

  It was only after he had closed the flat door behind him that Jock remembered Charlie’s confession on the night the Colonel had arrived. He had said it was fresh water. But Jock did not feel very much like smiling. He was worried: worried first because it had been the sort of dream that leaves a man worried: worried because he should never have gone round to see her; worried because he had said what he had said to Charlie; and finally, but most immediately of all, worried because he should have said a lot more to Charlie. When Charlie had said that about the bathwater he should have had an answer, or thrown a drink in his face. The thought of the bath and the bathroom annoyed him particularly. It was not that he was particularly in need of Mary, or any other woman. He supposed it was just something he had missed. Presumably, amusing men did it in the bath.

  He was just about to wander down the stairs when Mary appeared on the landing beside him.

  ‘Jock.’

  He was surprised to see her, and she smiled kindly. She quickly closed the door behind her and she touched his wrist.

  ‘Jock, you’re all right?’

  He stared at her slowly: at her eyes, and the set of the eyes
, and at her hair. She smiled anxiously.

  ‘I shouldn’t have been cross like that.’

  He cocked his head on one side.

  ‘I’m all right, lassie. Dinny fash yourself.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ She was almost like a mother, saying goodbye to a schoolboy son. She did not seem to know quite what to say, but she was anxious to say something. ‘It’s fine seeing you again.’

  Jock smiled now and shook his head. ‘Will I call back?’

  ‘Of course. I’m always pleased to see you,’ she said looking away, and Jock began to chuckle.

  ‘Away you go back to Charlie. Charlie’s a bloody stoat.’

  ‘Och, Jock …’ There was his coarseness again.

  ‘Aye, aye.’ He touched her hand and started to walk downstairs.

  Charlie did not move from his place on the sofa when she returned to the room, and poured herself a drink. At last he said with a silly smile, ‘Touching farewell?’ and she gave him a look.

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you all. It used to be amusing, in the old days.’ She shrugged. ‘Och to hell.’

  ‘Jock’s certainly changed,’ he said at last, and she stopped and tapped her nails against the empty glass in her hand. She opened her eyes very wide, as if she were day-dreaming.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  Charlie swung his legs off the sofa, put his glass on the floor.

  ‘I reckon he’s heading for some sort of crack-up.’

  ‘Is he drinking an awful lot?’

  ‘That’s nothing new.’

  She was dreaming again.

  ‘He was in a funny state today, no mistake. He came in here like an eighteen-year-old. Then he just faded away.’

  ‘Oh yep?’

  She smiled warmly, and moved. ‘Jock’s a great man.’

  Charlie twitched his moustache.

  ‘Let’s not go on about it,’ he said rather quietly, ‘old girl.’

  She looked at him and she knew what she should say. She could have touched him, or joked him. She could have said, ‘He hasn’t your moustache’ or ‘I didn’t know you cared.’ She could have said, ‘For heaven’s sake.’ There were lots of formulae which would have fitted, but she somehow did not feel inclined to apply them. So they just left it at that.

  ELEVEN

  THE WEATHER HAD changed for the worst. The snow lay two or three inches deep on the causeways and in the wynds, and it was still falling. But there was nothing sleety about it now: each flake was a feather and the flakes fell thickly, with a silent perseverance. Above the yellow street lamps it was pitch dark, and people abroad that night wondered what would happen were it never to cease to snow. No footsteps rang on the pavements, and even voices were muffled and lost in a white felt world that was lonely and eerie. Echoes were suffocated by the same snow that falls each year and that fell so long ago, when the first Jacobites, routed, savage and afraid, retreated, burning the villages as they came. The women then – their lips moving and their voices lost – the women and the children escaped from their houses into this same white winter, and waited, moaning. Snow in those parts is altogether different from the Christmas-card showers in the South. It is more serious and more sinister. Snow once meant suffering and poverty, and even starvation: it brought sorrow, not Christmas. The conditions have changed, the storm is no longer a danger; but the memory of something that was experienced generations before lingers like a superstition. Snow comes not as a friend.

  And of all men Jock was the most superstitious. A flake or two fell on his eyebrows so that he pulled his bonnet over his eyes and turned up the collar of his coat. He did not wear one of the short greatcoats that fashionable field officers wear: he wore the regulation officer’s greatcoat. It was long and the two rows of heavy brass buttons ran parallel up to the waist, then flung apart from each other, wider and wider, so that the top buttons were shoulder breadth and the lapels folded across the chest.

  He walked down Seaton Street, across the corner of the park to the footbridge. Its surface is cobbled and as it is steeply humped he found it difficult to walk there without slipping. But at the crest he stopped in one of the bays in the stone walls and leant over to look at the black water swirling beneath. By the light of a single lamp he could see where the snow was lying on a foot or two of ice that curved in from the bank of the stream. And although there was nothing heroic about Jock’s face, the figure standing there in the long greatcoat had a splendour. The same figure had moved from platoon to platoon when the snow was falling on a flatter, duller land: in every war, back and back, in every siege and trouble that same figure existed and exists: the anonymous commander in the long coat moving through the night, alone. He is the guard.

  Anxious, because it was a time for anxiety, he walked on towards his home, to see Morag. He always felt a little guilty when he returned from visiting Mary, but when he found the house empty, he stopped still in the hall, suddenly convinced that something was wrong. He reached out a hand and touched the coat-stand, then took a pace forward to switch on the lights.

  ‘Morag! Morag! Morag!’

  He glanced behind him, as always when afraid, and seeing the door ajar, closed it with a brave bang. Then he went swiftly to the kitchen, and finding it neat and orderly, tidy and cleaned, with a little note propped up on a cup on the bare table, his shoulders dropped with relief, and he opened his coat with a smile of shame. The note read:

  Father,

  Gone out with Jenny. Back by eleven.

  Morag.

  It was written in a sane and slanting script, and was firmly underlined. Jenny was a neighbour, and a friend of Morag’s. Nothing could be more secure. Jock looked about the kitchen, and the larder. He looked in a tin and ate a biscuit, then he knew he could not bring himself to make some supper, so he buttoned his coat again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets and retraced his steps down the wynd over the bridge and back into the town. He decided to call into a small hotel which had long ago been one of his haunts but which he had not visited for a full year. In the hall he was about to sign the book on the table as a bona fide traveller – between London and Thurso – when the proprietor appeared, ferret-like and inquisitive.

  ‘Eh, Colonel Sinclair?’

  Jock had never liked the man.

  ‘Eh, you’re travelling are you, Colonel?’

  ‘I am.’ The proprietor pushed his face into the book. ‘Eh, is this right?’

  ‘Aye, it’s right.’

  ‘You’ve come fr’ London?’

  ‘No,’ Jock said solemnly. ‘From Thurso.’ ‘Dear me, Colonel …,’ the proprietor began. ‘It says so there doesn’t it, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘I’m only doing my duty, Colonel Sinclair.’

  The man fidgeted defensively. He was nervous of Jock. ‘It’s no right you should come in if you’re no a bona fide.’

  Jock spluttered. He had always thought it a stupid law and he had no intention of taking it seriously.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, all the law says is that we’ve got to sign the book. That’s all you’ve got to carp about. All right?’

  ‘Colonel, it’s important that …’

  ‘Well I’ve signed the bloody thing. O.K.?’

  ‘There’s still a question.’ ‘There’s no question. I’ve signed it, haven’t I?’ ‘Aye, you have that, Colonel.’

  ‘Well for Christ’s sake get out of my way.’

  Jock clenched and unclenched his fists as he pushed open the inner door, with his shoulder.

  The pub was patronised almost exclusively by the more senior members of the band. No piper would dare to go to the private bar until he was invited there, and after that first invitation he would hardly ever go to any other pub. Not that there was anything special in the way of entertainment. An upright piano was as much as it boasted. But business had been good and since Jock had last called the room had been redecorated, in brown and cream, and it had been filled with new furniture in the shape of
pink and green wickerwork chairs and round glass-covered tables. The proprietor had bought these at the sale of a seaside hotel the other side of Portobello. But the bar itself had not changed: it still had the coloured glass screen protecting it from the open part of the house – the public bar, and the saloon. A sergeant was stooping to order two beers and whisky chasers and he grinned, rather embarrassed, in reply to Jock’s nod.

  Jock himself ordered a whisky from the waiter, and not just a wee one; but it was a whisky that was never to be drunk. As he started to unbutton his coat again he glanced round the room and observed that there were five or six pipers there, mostly non-commissioned officers, in their kilts and spats, their sporrans swung round on their hips, all prepared and all dressed up to get drunk. From the corner of his eye he was surprised to see that there was a dark girl with a pale face in the lounge: there were not often ladies present. Then perhaps almost instantaneously – but this realisation was characteristic of the movements that followed, in that it seemed to him a long time before he understood – he saw that the piper with the girl was Corporal Fraser. He also looked pale and he was rising to his feet, seemingly disturbed. A second glance lasted for a split second, but the picture was so firmly impressed on Jock’s mind that it seemed ever afterwards to have lasted for minutes. Morag was sitting with her hands on the table: she was very tense, and pale and her fingertips were pressing on the glass. She put her hand out to hold Corporal Fraser back for she must have known then what was going to happen. Jock advanced on them. With anger, with that blind rage that is always born of fear, he drew back his right hand, and his fist was only half closed as if he were holding a big stick. Then with a back-handed downward blow he struck the Corporal, just as he was finding his voice to give an explanation. Morag’s fingers went up to her lips, and she gave a whimper rather than a cry. The Corporal knocked against the table and upset the glasses. Everybody in the room stood up, uncertain whether to interfere or to hold back, and Jock’s voice came clear: ‘You bastard’ – with the same short a, but no joke for Charlie this time, ‘You bastard …’