Vaguely, Pink looked round at the pine panelling, the scrubbed floorboards, the glassy blackboard and the narrow Gothic windows set safely above boys’ eye-level. He tried to define the missing ingredient.
‘Sex?’ he suggested, sniffing once or twice and looking up at the dark space between the overhead lights and the high vaulted roof. Mary, grabbing a sandwich, shook her head, then spoke with her mouth full.
‘We’re jolly lucky to have it.’
Pink put his thumbs in his pockets. He was still sniffing the air. He made a further suggestion.
‘Sex cruelly denied?’
Mary said, ‘You eat this one, it’s horrible,’ and placed the bitten sandwich on the white linen cloth. As Pink obliged, her husband, Stephen, followed into the room. Apparently she did not think he was so close behind because she blushed a second after she had said:
‘We’ve got David to thank for that. He went and talked nicely to that horrid headmaster who could hardly refuse old Dow’s flesh – not in Dow’s Academy.’ She started thumbing through the sandwiches, announcing the choice. Only she did not do so accurately. Instead, in broad Yorkshire, just for the hell of it, she quoted from a Priestley play. She was almost like a child whistling to cover her guilt.
‘Salmon, salad, trifle, two kinds of tarts, lemon cheese tart, jam tarts, two kinds of jelly …’
But her husband did not listen. He ignored or pretended to ignore her. He too seemed to be affected by the room which contrived to be both damp and dusty at once. His smell-suggestions were more abstract.
‘Of nervous anxiety?’ he asked, looking over the desks that had been shoved up the far end of the room. ‘D’you think?’
The grandeur of this comment drove Mary back to the sandwiches. She tucked her head down and the light shone on her thick red hair.
Her husband continued, solemnly, ‘Perhaps the smell of being laughed at?’ and brother Pink nodded enthusiastically at that.
‘Absolutely, old man,’ he said firmly. ‘Of the extraction of urine. You bet. That’s the stink-a-bomb.’
‘Ugh,’ Stephen said, then smiled faintly. He raised his eyebrows and protested gently, ‘Honestly, I’m not a fastidious man. Really I’m not.’ But this denial did not ring true. His hair was carefully brushed, his nails were perfectly clean.
Mary walked over to the desks and began to play with a china ink-well, pushing it up and down in its socket. Pink, meantime, examined the bottle of Gloag’s as if he had never seen whisky before. He went through a dumb show of discovery. In the gymnasium they were now dancing a reel, but the gym doors muffled the sound of the fiddles. The only noise that reached Classroom IV was the thumping of feet on the floor. It sounded like distant gunfire.
‘Of cut-throat competition for brainy, swatty boys like me,’ Stephen said with a quick, shy glance at Mary, and then he stepped up to the master’s dais. He strolled as far as the blackboard where he picked up a copy of Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer and he drew an isosceles triangle on it with his finger then blew the chalk dust away. Mary said:
‘Oh, come on, boys and girls, everything’s going swimmingly. You are a couple of damp cloths. Do open up that bottle, Pink, I swear the others won’t mind. Anyway they won’t have to. They always do as I say – or does that sound rather horrid and bossy?’
‘A bit on the boss-eyed side, old flesh,’ Pink replied after he had assumed an intensely thoughtful expression. It seemed that he felt bound to mime every thought that passed through his head. He therefore squinted.
Stephen ignored this. Just before he opened the primer he said, with his eyes closed:
‘A right-hand page, about the middle, Mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa.’
Duly finding page seventeen he smoothed it with long fingers and said:
‘I’m right.’
‘I’m so glad, old man,’ Pink replied affably and reached out for a couple of the cheap, fluted tumblers, mumbling, ‘Gloagers.’
It was cold in Classroom IV, even in September. Gusts of wind occasionally rattled against the narrow windows, but Mary still looked warm. She put the back of her hand against her cheek which was glowing pink. Hers was a very small hand with freckles of which she was ashamed. Every gesture seemed to be calculated to imply that this was just another Young Conservative dance; nothing out of the usual.
Stephen, still turning over the pages, said:
‘It’s just the same. I confess I find that reassuring. Tristis, tristem, tristis, tristi.’ Then he turned over some more pages and smiled again. He said, ‘Here’s one for Pink. Vomo, vomere, vomui, vomitum.’
‘Oh, do shut up spouting Latin and enjoy yourself, darling,’ Mary said, a little edgily.
Stephen looked up innocently.
‘But I haven’t enjoyed anything so much for years. Perhaps I’m not the scholar your friend David is, but I’m strictly the serious type.’
Mary let the ink-well drop into its socket. As if she meant something quite different, in the same firm tone in which one might dismiss a servant forever, she said:
‘If you lean back on the board like that you’ll get your jacket covered with chalk.’
Stephen looked back at her, his eyes wide open.
‘Does that matter?’
And when she shrugged, he asked:
‘Do you mind?’
This was Pink’s cue, as fool. He at once grasped the phrase, repeating it cockney style as if he were a typist finding a hand above his knee.
‘Do you mind?’ And as Stephen did not react he turned back to his sister and spread his arms wide.
‘For God’s sake,’ he pleaded. ‘The boy’s doing his best.’
She said suddenly, to Pink, in one breath, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only Steve. I’m laughing like anything.’
Pink’s method of blowing her a kiss was to stick his finger in his mouth and make the noise of a cork being extracted from a bottle. The imitation was loud and successful.
‘Right up,’ he said, and his sister replied:
‘I’m so glad I only understand half the things you say. They get fouler every day.’
Stephen closed the book. Looking round again, he said ‘Of guilt,’ and sniffed.
‘Oh God,’ Mary said, dropping her head and gripping the edge of the desk.
‘Of ambition,’ Stephen went on, quietly, with a nod, as if he still had a list of alternatives.
‘He only does it to annoy,’ Pink said, and added, instructing himself, ‘Do stop fumbling with that bottle, old chum.’
But Stephen continued:
‘I think it really makes rather an appropriate sitting-out room … Odd to think it used to be your friend David’s home.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Pink said quietly, warningly.
‘But correct me if I’m wrong—’
‘Stephen!’ Mary pleaded.
Pink drank his whisky, then spoke again to Stephen.
‘My chum and I,’ he said, with a gesture towards Mary, ‘are rooting for you. What Moo has joined together let no black-eyed intellectual expatriate Dow put asunder – it’s in the Book. All right?’
‘Please,’ Stephen insisted. ‘I just said it was his old home. And he was at school here. You’ve told me so yourself. D’you suppose his initials are carved on one of the desks?’
‘I haven’t looked,’ Mary replied, staring him straight in the eye, and there was a moment’s silence, broken only by that noise like distant gunfire. The top half of Mary’s face was in the deep shadow cast by the bakelite shades, like Chinese hats, above the bright bulbs, but her eyes shone.
She then persisted, ‘D’you want me to make a search?’
‘Why should I do that?’ Stephen replied, turning his head to one side, almost as if he were showing his neck.
Mary shrugged and said, ‘You raised it,’ and another sticky silence was only broken by the noise of the ink-well dropping in the socket again. Mary spilt some ink on her fingers. ‘Bugger the thing!’
Pink said,
‘The world’s your oyster, Lilian.’
‘Can I borrow your hanky?’ she asked, and Pink pretended to be shy. He blushed and gave a very dirty laugh.
‘Well actually, old girl,’ he began. ‘Farmers’ hop and all that—’
‘Oh, do stop being foul and give me the thing. I’m covered in ink.’ Then, still furiously trying to rub the ink off her fingers, she rushed across to her husband, saying:
‘Poor, poor Stiffy,’ and she put her arms round his neck. ‘But we do root for you, honestly we do.’
She leant back a little and smiled, then adjusted his jaw so that he grinned more broadly, saying:
‘Light up the lantern.’
For a second she looked seriously, almost sadly, at his white face. Just before she turned to Pink she said:
‘Old chum?’
‘Old chum,’ Pink replied.
‘A tiny triple old chum.’ She stepped away from her husband.
‘For Madame.’
‘Absolutely, old chum,’ she said, still seriously.
‘No sooner said than done.’
He poured her an enormous whisky, and sliding some sandwiches on to a Dundee cake that looked like a fighter, he put the tumbler on the plate and carried it across to her, speaking once again in their curious code, a language drawn from anecdote and limerick; from family jokes and nursery rhyme; from a lifetime spent together; from a myth they had had to weave for themselves.
‘At the Savoy,’ he said, ‘we do it with a warm spoonerooni,’ and at once understanding, she hauled up her dress, which since she raised her arms to hug Stephen had begun slipping down her breasts.
For the first time she smiled warmly.
‘I love Pink,’ she said, ‘L.U.V. Mary loves Charles Henry Arbuthnot Chuff-chuff Ferguson,’ for Pink had been ‘Chuff-chuff’ before he was old enough for gin.
The only bright things shining in the two brutal arcs of light were Stephen’s silver buttons and the table-cloth. Then, as Pink moved, there was a third reflection which Mary increased by poking her brother in the middle. His remarkably white shirt which did not quite button up at the neck had escaped between waistcoat and pin-stripe trousers. Mary pulled the shirt out further.
‘You haven’t even buttoned it,’ she complained.
‘Dress optional, old Dutch,’ Pink said, tucking it in again.
In a loud and false voice, Stephen answered a remark which Mary had made only with a doubtful look. ‘My darling, I promise I’m being perfectly reasonable.’
‘Then why did you mention his name?’ Stephen shrugged.
‘I thought this was a great family for jokes …’
Mary blinked and Pink, his chins folding into each other as he gave a little burp, recommended his sister to lift her elbow. He did this, of course, by signal; a signal which he could not resist developing into an imitation of a big dog lifting his leg. He was answered more or less, in code. This time Mary spoke in a strongly respectable Kelvinside accent.
‘The elbow?’ she asked. ‘D’you think that’s wise, Bun?’ And they went into one of their acts.
Pink was convincing as a respectable spinster. He blinked as he plunged into the imitation.
‘A little of what you fancy, Belle – it’ll do you the world of good.’
‘Is that a fact, Bun?’
‘That’s a fact.’
Stephen’s dislike of the Kelvinside ‘respectable’ game seemed to be out of all proportion. He groaned, said ‘No’ and screwed up his face as if he were experiencing physical pain. His fists were squeezed tight. It seemed possible that it was not the act itself that annoyed him. The act merely provided him with an excuse to express some of the feelings of nervousness and irritation which until then had only just been kept under control. Laughing quietly, as if it hurt him, and as if he were about to break into tears, he said:
‘No, please. I don’t think I can bear it if you go on like that. I know what it’s like once you’ve started. We won’t hear a sensible word all night.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mary said, taking a big drink. ‘It’s ages since we’ve done Bun and Belle. We used to do it for hours on end.’
‘I know,’ Stephen said; and Pink said, very sentimentally:
‘Always on a rainy day.’ Catching his mood, Mary answered:
‘And it always rained.’ She gave him a very sweet smile, then they all drank again, quickly. A second later Mary was frowning, and Pink picked up her hand and kissed the back of it before he returned to the table for a sandwich. They could still hear the thump of the floorboards.
Stephen sat down on the bench along the wall and pushed his legs out in front of him. He said:
‘We’re very nostalgic, suddenly. The story changes, as you grow up. I thought you used to spend your time smoking cigarettes or lying in the loft, watching the bull at work. That was much more convincing as a picture of country childhood.’
Mary was still sitting dreaming and she did not listen to Pink as he said: ‘You wait till we write our book. We will write one, won’t we?’ Then, polishing the imaginary screen in front of Mary’s eyes, he said much more loudly:
‘Won’t we?’
‘That’s it,’ she replied, swinging her feet on to the floor. ‘Children of the Caledonian Forest.’ Suddenly she started laughing, and dropping her head to her hands on the desk she said, ‘Dear me!’
‘What?’ Pink was half smiling. It was as if he did not know what exactly she was laughing at, but knew at once the nature of it.
Stephen had moved towards the classroom door. Down the corridor he could see the reel being danced in the gym. He pretended not to hear Mary, as she began to giggle, hopelessly. It always irritated him. In the pitch of her laughter he recognised an oblique attack.
Her eyes were sparkling. She put her fingers over her face as she began to blush as well as giggle. She managed to blurt out:
‘Those competitions in the bunkers— No, they were too bad.’
Pink imitated her frown.
‘Too bad,’ he agreed. ‘Strictly Wolfenden stuff. I’ve always said it. Children ought not to be brought up in the country. It’s altogether too near to Nature. The things we did on that golf course would turn Bank Lizzy green.’
‘With horror!’
‘With envy,’ Pink said.
Stephen still did not turn round and it was perhaps the sight of his thin neck (14½-inch collar) with his dark hair cut just so, neither too short nor too long, that drove her to continue the conversation.
‘And in the loft,’ she said. ‘In the spare room, on the bridge, in the rhododendrons and the attic and the black shed—’
‘Even in the garage,’ Pink agreed.
‘Dear!’ She was again horrified by some memory, but still could not stop herself laughing. ‘I swear to you, Steve, one time we—’
She ignored Pink’s long face of warning.
‘Steve?’
For a second it was doubtful how she would cope with him. Then she put the point of her little finger, her pinkie, into the ink-well and said:
‘Steve’s huffing.’
When he turned, pretending that his thoughts had been miles away, she said, warningly:
‘Darling—’
‘Me?’ Stephen said. ‘I’m not huffing.’ He walked over to the table and said, ‘I’m pouring myself another drink.’ Mary was once again furiously trying to remove the ink stain from her skin, with Pink’s handkerchief.
She said, ‘You won’t huff, will you? After all you started it.’
‘I?’ Stephen said. Pink’s eyebrows jumped up.
‘I, Mother?’ Mary asked very grandly. It must have been another of their library of private jokes. If it was not marked under ‘huffy’ it could be found under ‘stuffy’.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, seeing the tiny muscle in his jaw, which always worked when he was angry. ‘But you did start it, you know. About the loft and the bull. Oh dear, how awful. Now you’re really huffy.’
Stephen
said, ‘I don’t know why you choose to use these childish expressions whenever—’
‘Blame it on old Pink,’ Pink said, trundling back to the table, since the cork was out of the bottle again.
‘That’s it,’ Mary said, swinging her legs again. ‘He’s the eldest.’
Pink turned to his brother-in-law who had wandered as far as the corridor again, and said, ‘Tell us, old fruit, was childhood in the Doctor’s house just about the same?’
‘I can’t say I found it so.’ Stephen, by a turn of his head, implied that he was still listening to the music. He had spent most of his childhood south of the border, and it made him very sensitive to things Highland and regimental. At last he said, rather stiffly:
‘I do wish they wouldn’t play Cannon Woods. They don’t seem to know it’s originally a German tune. It was never played here before the war.’ Mary glanced at Pink as if to say, ‘Don’t tell me he’s pompous.’ But Pink knew how far to go. He did not embarrass her. Instead he turned back to Stephen, saying, as affably as ever:
‘Oh, come clean, Stiffy. We’re all chums, we’re all girlstogether.’ When he toasted his drinking companions he raised his glass to eye level rather formally. He held the tumbler between finger and thumb and his other fingers splayed out in mid-air. Then, literally, he lifted his elbow.
‘Astonishing good luck,’ he said.
Stephen said, ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I really have nothing to hide. Perhaps it was the English influence, or living in a town. Even when we were in the country, hay-making meant a ride in the buggy, not a day in the loft.’
‘Really?’ Pink sounded serious and amazed, but it was doubtful if he was thinking what he was saying. He seemed to be more worried by the tumbler in his hand, which he emptied in one gulp.
‘Perhaps it was just me,’ Stephen went on pleasantly, then suddenly, coldly, with one remark, he killed the conversation. It was at an end, as soon as he said, ‘Sex was never my strong subject. It isn’t now, as we know.’
Mary moved across the room. She spoke seriously, as if someone had suddenly, unnecessarily displayed an ugly open wound.
‘Darling, why must you be so silly?’
Stephen seemed perfectly cheerful. His voice and his manner were bolder again.
Household Ghosts Page 20
