Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  Then Jock remembered.

  ‘What about the music?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The music.’ ‘Aye.’ The eyes flared up again. ‘There’s the question of the music.’ They waited with clenched fists.

  ‘Aye, let’s see. No music when we parade, but the march off. The slow march. The Flowers of the Forest.’

  They watched him now. He was talking with feeling again. Every note of the tune seemed to pass through his head when he mentioned the title, and he repeated it. ‘The Flowers of the Forest.’ Then he spoke quite plainly as if the recollection just amused him.

  ‘Charlie, you remember that dream I had about Barrow?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘About the Colonel. I had a dream, you mind that day in Mary’s house.’ The thought of that made him frown. ‘In poor Mary’s house,’ he said, then he brightened up again. ‘I said it was a good dream. I told her. And I couldn’t mind the dream at all, and you said it must have been a nightmare. I mind it now. The whole Battalion, you see, was lined up on a grey afternoon, lined up ready to move off and at the back there was the gun carriage, with a platoon round it, commanded by a tinker. That’s why I’m so sure of the music. We’ll have The Flowers of the Forest at the ceremony, of course, but we’ll have it as we march off too.’ He smiled hopelessly and Charlie looked back at him blankly.

  ‘Can’t say I remember.’

  The smile stayed on Jock’s face, but he seemed to have forgotten it. It was a mask.

  ‘In a way, I was right. But I was wrong in thinking it was a good dream. It was a nightmare, after all. You were right about that, Charlie. So you were. Charlie’s always right.’

  Mr McLean’s voice was gentle. ‘And after The Flowers of the Forest, sir?’

  ‘Aye, we’ll have My Home, and then it’ll be time for the quick ones. The three-fours. What’ll be right then?’

  ‘The Green Hills.’

  ‘Aye, I like The Green Hills. And one or two more but most of the way through the town you’ll no play. Play when you turn up the hill there.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Jock was warm again:

  ‘The Burial Party. Your one corporal’ll lead with the traditional Flowers of the Forest there again, the whole way from the gates to the grave, and take it slow, Pipe-Major, take it slow.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now what about the pibroch?’

  ‘That’s for the Corporal, sir.’

  Jock looked over their heads at the Corporal, who nodded. Jock winced when he looked at the bruise on his face and he lifted his own hand to his eye.

  ‘Are you right?’ he asked. ‘You’re all right?’

  ‘I’m all right, sir.’

  Jock blinked. ‘I’m glad of that. I’m glad of that. So you’ll choose your own pibroch.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘And what’ll it be?’

  ‘Morag, sir.’

  ‘Morag, aye. Can you manage it?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘You’re a man after my heart, Corporal. That’s the bloody silly thing.’ Then he turned back to the Pipe-Major.

  ‘The death they say is a victory. The death they say’s the great triumph. We’ll march away to the Black Bear. The Black Bear’s to pull us together.’ Jock was lost in the music again. ‘Then the regimental march; Scotland the Brave; the Cameron Men; some others, Pipe-Major?’

  ‘The Cock o’ the North.’

  He was suddenly angry, like a turkey: ‘Yon’s a cheesy tune. You’ll no play that till Charlie Scott here’s Colonel. You’ll no play that. Some others, aye. Lawson’s Men’d do.’

  He tapped his fingers on the desk and he mentioned several more marches.

  ‘All the tunes of glory!’ he suddenly cried. ‘We’ll have them all, to remember the more clearly. We’ll have all the tunes of glory!’ He turned towards the window again and he raised his hands with a triumph and excitement: he stared up at the sky and his eyes glistened as he said:

  ‘It’ll be a right funeral. I know it will. It’s as I said. I’ve seen it once already. And it’ll be the least we can do.’ He wheeled round again, and the moon faces watched him.

  ‘And all along Stuart Road, Mr McLean, along Stuart Road until the cross-roads …’ Suddenly he looked back at the window again and he said very quickly with a sort of clown-like bathos, ‘We’ll have no music at all: all along the road there, we’ll have no music. Just the long column winding through the town, winding all the way. Just the noise of the marching and the straps and bayonets. Just the rattle of the wheels of the empty gun carriage, bumping along the cobbles there. And all the people’ll be watching us. Mr Riddick, the marching must be perfect. D’you hear me? Perfect!’

  It had gone too far again for anybody to stop him: there was no chance of interruption now, and again the heads began to drop. But this time Jimmy did not lower his eyes. He watched Jock all the time, with awful anguish, as he talked on and on. It was as if he could not leave off: as if he knew that it was his last speech in court, and when that was ended, all was ended. With a fever, with every gesture, his voice growing loud one moment and soft the next, he went on and on.

  ‘… And it’ll snow again. Those are the snow clouds there. But the snow’ll not break until the end of the day. It’ll not start snowing until the parade is over. When we’re finished it’ll snow. But when we march back from the hill it’ll be bitter cold, and a wee bit misty maybe, and pink, over the roofs. I see it fine, with the aprons over the kilts and the pink picked out in the stone of the houses: and the daft purple of the drapes over the kettledrums. Now the last bit …

  ‘Aye, the last bit. The last bit into the barracks at the slow march. We’ll no have the Flowers then, nor any other tune.’ He suddenly spotted Charlie and he said quickly, ‘We’ll no have Charlie is my darling, either.’

  He turned his head in a little circle and he spoke softly, almost secretively as he walked back to look at the barrack square below. ‘We’ll not have the pipes at all. That’s how we’ll do it. We’ll come the last bit through the gates with the muffled kettledrums alone. No music at all. Just the drums. The whole long column, the whole Battalion of us at the slow march and just the four kettledrums rapping, beating, with a die – with a die, dittit-die, dittit-die.’

  He waited, and there was no sound. He turned very slowly and his face was frozen with a curiously questioning expression. The tears were pouring down his cheeks. For a terrible moment he must have seen himself reflected in their eyes.

  Slowly he put his hand to his face and felt the wetness of the tears. He looked about him, trapped and appalled, then again he was quite lost and he moved like a waif across the room.

  There was silence until Mr McLean’s voice broke gently, like a soft wave on an Atlantic shore.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ he said, ‘it will be done exactly as you have said.’

  Jock did not turn back to them, so Mr McLean got up without another word, and the others followed. They walked from the room leaving only Charlie and Jimmy behind, and when they were outside they dispersed immediately, going their different ways in silence, like monks.

  Inside the room Charlie moved slowly towards his friend as if he were approaching an animal and he said, as he always said:

  ‘Jock, old chum’ and Jimmy said, ‘Laddie.’

  It was then that he broke. It was then with a great groan of relief as much as of sorrow that it came to an end for him. It was the end of what had started in a desert. His shoulders began to shake, his lip quivered and first he gave a whimper. Then with great gulps of air like an inconsolable child, he began to sob while the two officers supported him.

  ‘All right, laddie; all right.’

  ‘We’ll tell Mary,’ Jimmy suggested kindly but Jock shook his head violently. They got a car and put him into it because he asked, at last, to be taken home.

  ‘Tell Morag, you fools, tell Morag, and take me home.’ And there were soldiers passing by, who stared at him. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said.
‘I’m bashed the now. Oh, my babies, take me home!’

  HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS

  for Susan

  BOOK ONE

  A Country Dance

  ONE

  THE GYMNASIUM AT Dow’s Academy that night was a monumental patch-up of ugliness and joy. Fifty tables covered by hand-stitched linen cloths were squeezed into the shadows, at one side, hard against the climbing bars; and at the other side, beyond a huge square mirror (in front of which, in term time, flat-footed grammar school boys performed remedial exercises) all the instruments of torture or of glory – the horse, the horizontal and the parallel bars – were crowded into the corner and inadequately covered with a huge Union Jack, as if for a mass burial at sea. Sad streamers were looped across the hall but all they succeeded in doing was to draw the eye to the two climbing ropes strung up like giant nooses. Amongst the climbing bars by the mirror pale ribbons were interwoven and tied in pussy bows. Framed in the middle of these was a coloured photograph of the Duke of Edinburgh on his wedding day, provided by the local confectioner whose best pre-war line had been boxes of George V chocolates. Above the platform, at the end of the hall, set against blue sackcloth curtains was a big banner which shouted vote unionist and carried, one each side, prints of Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden, both wearing confident smiles.

  Around the tables sat a hundred Auntie Belles (‘Gin and ginger, thanks, pet’) and Mary, brilliant, red-haired Mary moved amongst them, expecting the answer yes. Hardly had an Uncle Harry or a Douglas time to reply – to say ‘Hello there, Mary’, with joy, because no man was anything but pleased when Mary touched their sleeve or laid the flat of her hand on their lapel – before she moved on again. Mary bending forward, listening keenly; Mary leaning right back and laughing; nodding worriedly to one or sympathising with the next; she talked to practically all of them.

  And there was a phalanx of square-shouldered fur-capes to talk to; a great aroma of bath salts and moth balls and a loud tinkle-crash of jewellery.

  At the top of the hall, beside the platform but not directly below the band, a table for some guests and parents of the Committee or Landed added the Kitzbuhl and Consolidated Steel touch. Below the band, some perched on the stage, others standing biting their nails or holding each other’s hips, were many girls in pretty cotton frocks with full skirts; pinks and greens and whites. These girls were anything from fifteen to a rather raddled, on-the-make elder sister of twenty-eight, and they darted glances at the unaccompanied young men who were standing by the main entrance flattering each other with obscenities and loud, long laughs. Most of these seemed, at least at first, reluctant to dance. Two of them were dressed more or less as Teddy boys but they were unteddied by their own pink cheeks. In the end, the younger of the two forgot his grimace and assumed a leery grin confirming that he would have come in a cow-boy’s get-up, if only he had had the nerve. The other boys were all in blue or brown suits and they looked as if they had shaved in a circular movement along the chin and around the back of the neck. They were sharply critical of the girls in their pretty frocks, of the bar prices, of the band and of the old bags sitting at the tables; but polite, abashed and confused as soon as Mary said:

  ‘You must be the crook who sold us short on coke—’

  And she talked to the important townsfolk too. Each one jumped to his feet, from the provost to the clerk’s assistant. But they did so not only for Mary. It was as if they were desperately canvassing votes not for any political cause but for some imaginary, competitive election to be decided on the basis of obituaries in the local Press and on the market-day epitaphs collected on the week they should die.

  A few gaps at the tables where men should be looking after their wives betrayed the group who moved between the bar and Classroom III. These were the Boys from the Queen’s private bar; the vet, half a dozen farmers, the potato merchant, the town’s second solicitor and estate agent, the golfing pro, the undertaker and building contractor, and a couple of others. But somehow the women who had been abandoned looked happier than those who had managed to hang on to their husbands, diverting their appetites from whiskies and Exports to soft biscuits, sweet tea and creamy meringues. (‘Will you not have another, pet?’)

  Mary, jokingly, held her hands against her ears to dull the blasts of laughter and the noise of the smart-Alec concertina and fiddle band with Flying-Officer Kite type on the Kettle Drums, then slipping past a couple of young girls who were dancing together at the corner of the floor she went to the table where an absurdly good-looking little man with white hair was staring into the middle distance. She approached and spoke in his ear and he was obviously very fond of her. He put a hand on her shoulder. She said quickly and seriously:

  ‘Daddy, darling, you don’t blame me, do you?’ He leant back and against the noise of the band he mouthed a long ‘No’. She began again:

  ‘For God’s sake, darling, what does it matter? It’s too idiotic. It’s a silly joke, even if he has fallen for me which I don’t suppose he has. I can tell you he’s never really said a friendly word. And if they think I’ve fallen for him they’re absolutely batty. He never smiles at me. He never says a kind thing. Not to me or anyone else, I bet, except when he’s laying on the charm. But don’t blame me. I just met him at this bloody silly cocktail party, only down in London it seems to be after supper when they throw about the gin.’ She sighed and shrugged. Again her father reassured her with a shake of his head. She persisted:

  ‘I’ve told them about a hundred times – So he glared at me? I didn’t hide my wedding ring or anything like that. We danced to some ghastly Rock and Roll, and that wasn’t much of a pleasure I can tell you. He’s the world’s worst dancer. He rang and rang, and all right, so I did have lunch with him. After all, I was there for a holiday.’

  She flung out her hands.

  ‘Well, since then he’s followed me about, even to the extent of turning up here.’ She referred to a man called David Dow, a physiologist approaching middle age who was the son of the first headmaster of the Academy, and that is why she added, ‘After all, I can’t stop him. This place is more home to him than me.’ Her father was a little deaf. He cupped his hand round his ear. She finished, ‘You know? Let’s not make a situation. That would be too boring for words.’ Then quickly she kissed him on the cheek, said ‘Big official stuff’ and hurried away. At the bar she touched her husband and her brother, and as she led the way through the swing doors to the quiet of a corridor lined with classroom doors she said:

  ‘Come on, you slobs.’

  The two men she touched were of very different kinds. Stephen, her husband, correctly, almost fastidiously dressed in kilt and black Highland jacket, had the look of a man who expects the answer no. He was very pale and thin to be a farmer, with dark wavy hair, blue eyes and a long thin red line for a mouth. He was somehow like one’s mother’s idea of how a young barrister (not a farmer) should look. But closer examination made one less confident of his success. His eyelashes, almost girlishly long, fell on his cheek with the softness of failure. There was intelligence but also resignation in his expression; it was as if he were mocking himself very gently all the time. He did not seem to dwell on his success, which was considerable. He had managed Mary’s father’s farm for four years – married for two of them – with pessimism, but had achieved superb results. He was known all over the county as the most effective of the young farmers, and of this reputation he once said, lugubriously, ‘Even cheated of failure by limited success, that’s me.’

  Brother Pink – Charles Henry Arbuthnot Ferguson – needs altogether less description. He was balder and fatter than a man should be at thirty. He wore a single-breasted pin-stripe suit, that he had long outgrown. It pinched his shoulders and was tight at the cuffs. He took extraordinarily short steps for such a big man, and his feet were almost ludicrously small.

  He answered his sister’s call, ‘Come on, you slobs,’ with a vague, ‘Oyez, oyez, tea-break: a bracing cup of chah,’ not because
it was tea-time or even because he intended then to drink tea, but because it was one of his formulae, and Pink and Mary had talked in a private and complicated language made up of just such phrases since their night-nursery days.

  He paused and looked back at the hall. He closed out the talk from the bar, refusing to listen to the heifer prices or the advantages of Wolseley cars and heeded only the voices of the wives and Auntie Belles. They spoke of common sense and cookies, and Pink could imitate them all.

  (‘I don’t fancy the South, dear, you can have your San Tropez or Brighton. My skin’s too delicate. I fancy Troon myself.’)

  They lived on the land which the first farmers in Scotland had defended again and again from Highland thieves and clans. But Rob Roy and Montrose and the anti-Jacobites are well buried now.

  (‘She was three up and two to go, pet, but I beat her on the bye. And that’s not counting her lost pill. I beat her on the bye; so I did.’)

  Voices of tidy angels fading into tidy graves; the names do not matter. They were part of Pink’s myth, and therefore of Mary’s too.

  Then, at last, Pink pulled himself away, saying ‘Oyez, oyez, there’s a great-time coming. You can ring those bloody bells.’ He trundled after his sister, checking his fly buttons as he went.

  TWO

  EVEN OUT OF term-time a junior classroom smells of something other than chalk dust and scrubbed wood. There was an inseparable but unmistakable ingredient which both Mary and her brother Pink seemed to recognise as soon as they came into Classroom IV, even if they could not define it. They had overtaken Stephen in the corridor.

  Mary smoothed the skirt of her party frock and taking short steps crossed swiftly to the table on which rested sandwiches, glasses, soft drinks and a bottle of Gloag’s Old Grouse Malt Whisky. She said, very quickly:

  ‘It’s rather smelly, but never mind. They seem to have organised the eats.’