Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  David raised an eyebrow. He was prepared to leave the subject as her mother had been dead for ten years anyway. Moreover when she was alive she was rather a pathetic, self-pitying invalid who later took to drink. David even could remember meeting her, once, in Forfar when he was a boy; a fussy, nervous, dumpy little woman wearing a hat and white gloves. His mother had introduced her as Lady Ferguson.

  Contrarily, Mary had decided to talk about her mother. ‘Anything to do with Mummy’s complicated,’ she said and drank a gulp of whisky. It was not easy to see what she was up to, but her movement across to the desks, back to little-girl land, seemed to give something away.

  She said, ‘I don’t know why I get so worked up about her, sometimes, but it annoys me. People get such wrong impressions of what she was, and even if you did see her once, she was my mother and I know. It doesn’t matter if they get a good impression or a bad impression, it’s still the wrong impression and it makes me mad. It’s probably very silly.’

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ David said, a little mystified. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’m not selling anything, David.’ She turned back to the ink-well. ‘Really I’m not. Absolutely the opposite. But I’d hate you to go away thinking I’m bloody about Mummy because honestly, honestly I’m not. She was awful and mixed-up, but she was a great woman really. Most people up here met her when she was at the end of her tether. Didn’t even meet her, just heard about her, lying in her bed, drinking and that. Maybe she did drink, but she was a great woman; a very passionate woman.’

  David watched her very carefully as she circled round and returned to the desk. The approach was nothing, if not oblique. He sat down and smoked. Mary, meantime, sat down on the desk and told her story with bright eyes.

  ‘I could tell you things about Mummy almost beyond belief that nobody knows – I mean outside Pink and Co. And it’s only lately, really, since I was married that I added it all together. Not just the card cheating, the scandal and their coming back north: not about that at all. Until a year or two ago I just used to frown when people asked me about Mummy. She was just a washed-out woman in bed. We never used to see her get drunk, but we’d hear her sometimes at night, shouting and often laughing, saying the most extraordinary things. Pink and I never could make out whether she was talking to Daddy or one of the dogs. Whichever it was they never answered. Then there would be a long silence and Pink and I would hold hands.’

  She moved the ink-well again. She did not look at him for a moment as she spoke. Very quickly she went on:

  ‘You’ve been home, you know where – just by the top of the stairs by the nursery gate, there’s a linen cupboard there. We’d hide in it. Then another silence or perhaps a click of a door and we’d dash back to bed, shivering cold. I wonder we weren’t more frightened. She came in once and found us in the same bed and I thought there would be an awful rumpus. Macdonald never used to allow us in the same bed. She said that’s how keely children slept. But Mummy wasn’t really angry at all. She put on all the lights, she blinked, then she moved across to us. I remember it like yesterday. Then she sat down at the end of the bed and pitched forward and her hair was all undone. She kind of pushed us through the bedclothes as if we were the dogs under the blankets. I kept my eyes tight shut until I heard her. I thought she was laughing, but she wasn’t. Tears were pouring down her cheeks. I don’t think she was drunk at all. We were scared stiff. We didn’t move or speak, even after she went out. We stayed like that until it was light outside, and the sun was shining on the floods.’

  David sat patiently. Nothing could have stemmed the flow. Mary talked and went on talking for about half an hour, with hardly a pause for breath. Her eyes were here and there and everywhere; for a second staring honestly and emphatically into David’s; then looking up at the light; at the ink-well; at her white, pointed shoes. She still talked of her mother.

  ‘Another time once she got out of bed. She took us into Dundee right down by the docks and the tenements there, it’s almost as bad as Glasgow. We didn’t know then much what it was all about. There were a lot of men standing about at the street corners. There must have been some strike or something like that. They’d got banners, some of them, God knows what they said … We’d done something wrong, I think. We’d put our rice pudding under the chest in the dining-room hoping the dogs would find it, and when she discovered it hours later, it was a day later, I think, she bunged us into the back of the car and took us into Dundee. I suppose she was pretty high. She shouted, “Open! P.N.!” That’s what the kids cry there at night when they come up the wynds and can’t get in the door. The Inas and Sheilas and Elspeths and Jeans. The Cathies and Normas. She threatened to leave us there until Macdonald said, “For heaven’s sakes, that’s enough.” Macdonald never said, “For heaven’s sake,” it was always, “For heaven’s sakes,” with the “s” on both.

  ‘We were very frightened then. Pink was a great weeper. I didn’t cry out but Pink cried all the way there and all the way back in kind of short bursts. Macdonald told him he was a great bubbly and that just made him worse.’

  She walked over to the sandwiches again. She ate a lot. Speaking with her mouth full of smoked salmon, she said:

  ‘But we didn’t know, then. We weren’t told anything. Daddy never said much to us beyond, “Old boy” or “Old girl”, and Macdonald’s as secret as the grave. The only time we ever got anything out of her was when she was bathing us. Soap seemed to do something to her discretion. She’d cackle away.

  ‘It’s only lately I’ve kind of discovered, and now I feel awful for all the things I used to say about Mummy. That’s why I feel bad now. I confess you’ve got me on the raw. Even as a joke. I feel bad about saying she was a boozer. I probably was in the wrong. I used to say awful things about her at school. Tell fibs.’

  ‘Even then,’ David interrupted quietly, and she looked at him, a little puzzled.

  ‘Yes …’ Then she checked herself and said, ‘What do you mean? You never will say quite what you mean.’

  David shook his head. He wondered if there was any truth in her stories.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘That’s a very womanish thing to say,’ she replied, and frowned. She scraped her nail against the wood of the desk and began again, speaking even more quietly than before.

  ‘Anyway. It’s as I was saying. People don’t really know about Mummy. She was terrific, really. I mean she had an awful time. You see that day in Dundee was awfully significant really. Her taking us back there, because when she was very little, well, about eleven, I suppose, until she was about eleven she lived there. Can you believe it? It explains a lot. I mean, when she was younger, God knows what she didn’t go through.’

  She moved away a step or two, then she turned round to him and smiled.

  ‘Honestly, David, I do wish we could make it work as sort of friends. Cousin-type. I so adore talking to you.’ She put her back to one of the old desks and jumped up and swung her legs again. Pointing her toes, she continued:

  ‘There’s a really terrifying background. This one Macdonald knows and nobody else. I don’t think Mummy properly knew it herself. You can have a kind of block with these things, can’t you? When she was eleven she was living in one of those horrid tenement things. Her father wasn’t a labourer, actually. He was an actor or music hall or something, but at one time he’d had to do with the jute business … clerk or checker, I think … You didn’t know who you were cousin to, did you? All your long looks of the poor schoolmaster’s son? God knows who my cousins are on Mummy’s side, probably all sailors and drunks.

  ‘Anyway, Grandfather doesn’t come much into the picture. It was Mummy’s mother looked after her and she was supposed to be redheaded but even littler than me. She used to go out and work up the Perth Road or one of those places, sometimes in a private house and sometimes in the Infirmary. You didn’t get much as a cleaner in those days, so she had to kind of work all day and Mummy spent all her time in those gloomy streets, I suppos
e, skipping and playing peevers and all that with Ina and Sheila, and Elspeth and Jean and Cathie and Norma and all. Mummy never talked of it exactly but little things came out when she was plastered. They lived in two or three rooms up eighty-nine steps, and some people thought they did too well. There were ten people in one room below. And there was an old creepy man opposite, he smelt like a cat, or his room did. I don’t know. Anyway he used to give Mummy jube-jubes and watch her until she ate them. He always watched her until she swallowed them right down. Mummy, when she was drunk, you know, whether it was to the dogs or Macdonald or me, she always used to give a great sweep of her hand and say, “You don’t know very much.”

  ‘It’s an awful story really, but it explains so much. I’m sure if things had gone the other way she’d have been so different. She’d got,’ she clenched her fists here, ‘she’d got a sort of passion. Did you notice that when you met her?’

  But David did not reply and Mary went on in a lower, steadier tone.

  ‘Mummy had a brother. My uncle, I suppose, if he’d lived, and that’s actually where Pink gets the Arbuthnot. I know it sounds funny but they called him Arbuthnot, and my grandmother absolutely worshipped him. She couldn’t see past him and he was delicate. Maybe that’s why she was so fond of him. Worse than delicate. He had fits. He was epileptic or whatever they call it. Isn’t it awful how life works? Get landed with a no-good husband and no money in a tenement in Dundee and you bet your son’s an epileptic. And this wasn’t all that long ago. That’s what makes it more frightening. They had the whole works in the tenement.

  ‘But it wasn’t fits Arbuthnot died of. I don’t think you do die that way, do you? Not unless you smother? He was evidently a terribly complicated, tidy sort of boy. It’s too awful really, it makes me laugh. Pink does a splendid imitation of the scene. There was a bucket, you see. Uncle Arbuthnot was so tidy …’

  She broke off and laughed. Then she clenched her fists.

  ‘Godplease don’t let me laugh,’ she said. ‘Please. I promise I don’t really think it’s funny. If I’m laughing when the wind changes perhaps I’ll die of hiccoughs like that queen.’

  She diverged for a few seconds, perhaps to gain control of herself.

  She said, ‘It’s like a woman in the village, Bank Lizzy, in her new car, only last winter, in the snow. She wasn’t very good with this car and she ran over the village cripple. That’s bad enough, but then the poor dear panicked and instead of putting on the brake and getting out she jammed the thing into reverse and by mistake,’ she began to laugh again. ‘Bumpety-bump,’ she cried and leant back with tears of laughter forming in her eyes ‘… she went straight back over him and finished him off.’

  She shook her head. ‘When Pink and I are really blue we always think of that.’

  She shifted her seat along a desk, toward David and asked for a cigarette. She smoked very ineptly, like a schoolgirl.

  Anyway,’ she said, as she always did, resuming the tale, ‘This poor Arbuthnot boy decided things were a bit much for him. One’s been sixteen, but not in a tenement. One hardly blames him. So one afternoon he slits his wrists, only he does it very methodically, getting on to his bed, and holding the wrist over the bucket. Appalling, really. But there it is, and Mummy came up the eighty-nine steps back from school, or Salvation Army or Ina or Sheila or whatever it was she was doing – walks into the house and calls his name. She was about eleven, yes, just eleven. She hears nothing, but a moment later there’s a clanking next door, and a groan.’

  She had stopped laughing now. She looked quite pale.

  ‘I mustn’t go too quickly,’ she said. ‘I must get it right … The first thing is that the boy has changed his mind and he’s trying to stop the blood coming. In doing so he’s knocked over the bucket which was about half full of blood, and oddly enough what strength he does have seems directed against the fearful mess around the floor and the rug – one of those woollen rugs you make yourself, you know … In the space of two seconds Mummy’s out the door again and across the gallery to the body ’lives next door. But they’re all out working, the women at the Perth Road or Broughty Ferry, and old jube-jube and the rest at the jute or the ships … Some of them worked on the railways, there. Well, by the time Mummy’s tried some doors, and got no reply – “Open … P. N.” for another reason, then – she sees she must go back herself. He has righted the bucket which is filling with red again. In doing so everything has got covered with blood. And he’s dead.

  ‘Now Mummy’s got two hours before her mother’s back. And what’s so odd about life is that of course because her mother adored Arbuthnot, Mummy worshipped her mother. And she knew it would break her heart if her mother learnt how the boy had died. She’s got two hours—

  ‘She starts with the bucket. Then Arbuthnot. She heaves him until he’s face downwards on the bed. Then with a big wet clout from the kitchen she starts on the floor, the chest of drawers, the wall, even the window pane. She’s not sick – she’s sweating. There’s less than an hour to go. Downstairs she runs – “I’ll play with you later, Sheila, Ina, Elspeth, Jean, Cathie and Norma, I’m in a hurry now!” Up comes the doctor, a funny kind of strip across his jacket at the back – a Norfolk jacket don’t they call it? And he’s quite good about things. He’s worked in the tenements. He knows the family. He says nothing but plays the game, and when my grandmother came home he said it was one of the fits. “The boy’s suffocated,” he says, “it was a tragic accident …” After that there were screams and yells, I suppose. I don’t know. But anyway the whole thing was in vain, as might be expected. Of course she wanted to see her child and she found the open wrist. There are some horrid details there. She was half crazed with distress and she didn’t even seem to remember Mummy’s existence so the doctor did the right thing. More than that. He took Mummy home and later adopted her and all that, and that’s another story, because he wasn’t quite the angel he looked either. Not when Mummy grew a little older, anyway—’

  David was still watching her very carefully. She suddenly stretched her neck and said:

  ‘Oh God, now I feel awful and guilty and ashamed. I shouldn’t have told you that. Mummy didn’t remember half of it herself. It’s only Macdonald and …’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know why I told you. It’s silly of me. I can’t think what made me do that.’

  Slowly David said, ‘Are you meaning to sleep with me?’

  She looked frightened.

  ‘No. No. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I promise—’

  He said, ‘You are without exception the worst teaser that I’ve ever met. The ends you go to – the ornate – the—’ He could not find words enough, so he leant back, saying in amazement, ‘Lord help us.’

  FIVE

  ‘IT IS TRUE!’ she cried. ‘I promise it’s true. Really, I can’t think why I told you a thing like that. I’ll never tell you another word of anything that matters to me—’

  ‘I didn’t say it wasn’t true,’ David slowly and quietly replied. ‘Even if you expected me to. Your ear has recorded, even if you firmly reject another quite different comment which I made.’

  ‘I heard it,’ she said, on the move again, ‘and it doesn’t make sense. “Ear has recorded” and “rejecting” – God, if you knew how I hated the way you spoke you’d never say another word to me! That’s if you loved me, which I don’t suppose you do.’

  She steadied and looked straight at his face. ‘David, I promise it’s true. Maybe not all the details. I’ve thought of it so often; so often I have to laugh about it, don’t you see?’

  ‘But you’re still at work,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly amazing.’

  She frowned deeply. ‘You mean about teasing? I don’t think I understand what you said. I never touched you at all – not today, I mean, and I was going to say about yesterday. I’d forgotten that. You must let me explain—’

  ‘You’ve prepared a statement?’

  ‘Don’t look
like that. Don’t talk sarcastically.’ Suddenly she spoke more slowly. ‘Nobody likes sarcastic talk, you funny, ugly little man.’

  ‘Help,’ he said and shook his head.

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘I’m exhausted. Exhausted by your dishonesty—’

  ‘But I told you, I swear—’

  ‘Not your lies – if they were lies, I don’t know about that. But by your dishonesty.’

  She picked up another sandwich and seemed to try to collect her thoughts together, before he spoke again. There were rival noises in the distance now. Against the thumping from the gym there were odd phrases of songs being sung by some of the more cheerful farmers and locals, Pink’s chums from the Queen’s bar, who had encamped themselves in the classroom next door.

  Mary said, ‘They sound cheerful enough,’ and she looked around the classroom as if she were a little amazed to find herself there. ‘God knows what’s happened to everybody else. I suppose they’re wondering what’s happened to us.’ Her mind seemed to be flitting along like a fly on the surface of the water, as if she were very tired or had just woken up. She made no effort to leave.

  ‘Some details may not be right,’ she said. ‘One had to piece the story together from shouts in the night, other things Macdonald has heard. Mind you, nobody else knows this. They don’t even know Mummy was adopted. But I only told you because—’

  ‘Because?’ he asked. ‘I’m very interested in this.’

  ‘Because you said I was being unfair to Mummy.’

  ‘It seems an odd sort of way to answer the charge—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just told you. I don’t have to pretend she’s something she wasn’t – not at all, she was pathetic, she drank, she gave up, she wasn’t very pretty any more but if we’d had that life we’d be a bit battered too. I mean, after all that, just when she thought she was safe there was the card game too – you know, the scandal.’