Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  She smiled brightly as she finished her story.

  ‘Aren’t men so silly when they get drunk? Especially the little ones. They get so aggressive. You must have heard Peter Forbes. You must have heard him when he’s drunk. Pink, darling, you’re not sobbing really. And Peebles, too, going on about his tenor voice—’

  But Pink had recovered. He dropped his hands and opened his mouth in what almost appeared to be a cartoon of a toothless, noiseless laugh. Then he laid his hand on the top of Mary’s head and said cheerfully:

  ‘As a matter of fact, kid, I confirm you as a member of God’s Holy Church.’

  ‘I do love Pink.’

  Not very long after that, the band leader played the first bars of ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’.

  Mary said, ‘Isn’t that perfect? Just right for three sparrows on a wire,’ and Stephen put down the bottle.

  ‘Are you dancing, Belle?’ Pink asked and Mary gave a skittish little giggle, as Belle.

  She said, ‘That’s a fact. We’d better bring hubby too.’

  Mary seemed prepared, as they moved to the floor, to ignore David. But Stephen was polite to him. He said, very pleasantly:

  ‘Sit down at our table. There’s lots of room.’

  Mary looked at her husband furiously. As they moved into their first circle she said, ‘That’s a bloody silly thing to do.’

  SEVEN

  COUSIN, D’YOU remember? All three of us felt badly about it, I’m sure. There were some sticky moments, at that corner table, after your Dashing White Sergeant and before poor Captain Jack Gordon diverted us.

  Even the atmosphere had changed. It was vaguely Teutonic, when the squeeze-box man came down from the stand. All your Young Conservative friends tried to yodel. In my mind the scene is marked as a notable chapter in Scotland’s war against taste. Burns had given way to Lehár. Somebody lowered the lights to that particular degree of dimness which makes the younger girls (and a few of your Auntie Belles) scream, yet fail to lose their inhibitions.

  I remember your face, white, and your eyes looking darker than I’d ever seen them as you hung on to Stephen, pushing your face against his arm. When you did look atme it was with hatred. Or is that quite accurate? With something resembling hatred, something a little sulkier. I can’t get nearer it than that. And remembering it now, in a bright neon-lit laboratory, it’s like something out of a dream. It was as if we were in a huge, unhaunted night club on the outskirts of Berlin. The wooden beams and the music lead me to Germany. The square mirror, the instruments in the corner and the giant nooses above added a macabre touch to excite the macabre; these take me to Hamburg or Berlin.

  How did it start? I can’t remember. Perhaps talking about Pink who had gone to join the Queen’s bar cronies in that other classroom. Yes. Stephen mystified me, I remember now, with some reference to the antics in that classroom: something about their imitating my father, his former pupils abusing him, now that he was safely dead and buried. But of course, not having heard the story you wove for Pink, I was lost.

  I remember your bracelet fell down your wrist as you watched the dancers creeping round, most of them, rolling Hunt Ball-Night Club style. You weren’t drinking whisky any more. That added another German touch. Lager, now. You leant your head back until your hair pushed against the climbing bars, and there were dark shadows under your eyes, giving you, rather alarmingly, and suddenly, a great deal more sex. You blew some cigarette smoke that had drifted close to your eyes and then cut into our conversation, saying to Stephen, not to me (nothing was addressed directly to me), ‘I made the story up. More or less.’ You said it with a sort of shamelessness that added, perhaps you knew, to the sex. Before we said anything you ran on, ‘I am rather worried about Daddy. Perhaps he was huffing because I was away so long.’

  Then you twisted back to the classroom story. It was typical Mary.

  ‘I just said it to keep old Pink afloat.’ You never smiled. Then you said, ‘David didn’t rape me or anything like that.’

  ‘That wasn’t going through my head.’ Stephen, on the other hand, smiled kindly at you.

  ‘Prop me,’ you said, and leant against him. He put an arm behind you and played with the back of your hair.

  Two, three years ago?

  I can’t have taken my eyes away from you. I can live every second again. But I was already beginning the game I played so mercilessly for six months, pressing you for answers to the unanswerable. Stephen rather took my part, I remember, as we tried to examine what had made you make up the particular story about the Queen’s bar gentlemen. You were not to be provoked. You shrugged and answered, looking into the lager glass:

  ‘Even my nose is too small to get into this thing. I wonder what proper craggy Scotsmen do.’ You looked at Stephen then, at his thin pointed nose and at my pugilist’s job. ‘You two are no good,’ you said.

  Gently, I remember coming in. ‘Let’s take that other story you told me about your mother,’ I saw your grip tighten on Stephen’s arm.

  ‘He only does it to annoy,’ you said lightly, but Stephen, oddly, was solidly on my side then, falling over himself to be generous to me, and friendly and fair.

  ‘Answer the gentleman,’ he said. ‘Tell him what’s true about all the stories you’ve spun him.’

  Silence from you. A little superior laugh from me. I said:

  ‘Come on, it’s only a point of interest,’ and you lifted your eyes to me then. It was not hatred. That is the wrong word. It was a sort of self-hatred. And yet an invitation of a sluttish kind. Then you sat up and pushing a finger into Stephen’s cheek, you said, a fraction louder:

  ‘I didn’t tell any more stories. I hepped up the gambling thing a little, but I don’t think that was such a bad thing to do.’ To Stephen you said with a smile, ‘I served him Tranby Croft.’

  ‘Why do you do it?’ Stephen asked. The lights grew lighter and then dimmer. I suppose some young farmer had found and could not resist the running control. The brown suits and green frocks were having their own back on the Hunt Ball-Night Club crawl. With Scottish accents they were singing Lili Marlene.

  ‘If David was anything of a friend he’d go and fish out Pink, else he’ll get sick drunk.’

  Stephen said at once, ‘I’ll get him, darling.’

  A shake of your head. You said:

  ‘No, really,’ as he began to move, then ‘No’ again, much louder.

  ‘But it won’t take a minute,’ he said.

  ‘No, please,’ clenching your fists round his sleeve, ‘Stay here.’

  We knew by then, all three of us: of course we did. You looked at me once again, I remember, when Stephen described your mother as respectable Dundee jute. Silver teapot, I think he said, and what are those paper serviettes called? Doyles or something like that. It hardly fitted with the buckets of blood in the tenement but I let another lie pass. I was playing the old dog’s games now. I did not even have the subtlety to bully you. Just looked at your mouth. All the time Stephen talked coolly and disinterestedly as if he were a little embarrassed that you should hug his arm so tightly and press your head against his chest. You brushed your cheek along the black cloth, from time to time.

  Stephen, with prefect’s authority now, put us right about the Ferguson scandal. I don’t suppose I listened to a word at the time but it must have been a very important scene, this one. I only have to close my eyes, and listen, and I can play him back. He smoked rather elegantly as he talked of your mother.

  ‘Pregnant at the time,’ he said, and I remember your blink of distaste at the phrase that followed. ‘Carrying Pink.’ Once or twice you tried to stop him. I think you were always frightened of Stephen being a bore. You tugged, but it made no difference. He did not talk so quickly or irrationally as you so often did, distant cousin, but he talked for the same reason. Talk takes the edge off a scene. So long as conversation is suspended one can ignore the caveman stuff going on beneath. ‘That makes it about 1926—’ he went on. ‘For whatever
reason the Colonel had started going back to some of his bachelor habits and he was in one of the smarter jobs, White’s or Buck’s or Boodle’s or Pratt’s, or one of those, when Mona kept ringing him up to get him home; she became tearful and evidently quite obsessional about his club life, nobody can quite explain why. It got to the stage when she rang the club about every five minutes and then she arrived in a taxi. There followed a scene which sounds pretty farcical, whereby she was bundled out of the place, weeping and yelling, but the Colonel evidently didn’t think this was such a joke. There’s a missing link here, but it seems that his friends and acquaintances behaved rather cruelly. They were all very bright sort of men, most of them fairly idle, and one assumes they must have teased the life out of him. Anyway, rather obstinately, and certainly very stupidly, as he had a huge future in front of him – he was a colonel at thirty-three, after all – he tried to get his own back at cards. He cheated. It was discovered.’

  At that, you interrupted sharply. Lifted your head to say, violently, ‘He didn’t care if he were discovered! That’s the whole point. He doesn’t care what anybody says. He’s marvellous like that!’

  Stephen ignored you again. He seemed to consider your outburst understandable but inaccurate. He went on, smoothly, as before:

  ‘I fancy the other men would have done nothing about it but he felt he’d let himself down, he lost confidence, resigned from the club, resigned his commission, sold the Knightsbridge house – the whole lot. To Mona, from Dundee – and she’d done pretty well, for jute from Dundee – all this meant an end to a dream. Anyway, she was a nervous sort of type – rather plump. They came back and bought the farm and the family’s been here ever since—’

  I couldn’t be bothered to tell him the story didn’t fit together. Colonels aged thirty-three don’t cheat at cards because their wives kick up a row at the club door. It’s good for prestige to have a woman howling up and down St James’s, crying ‘Bring him out’.

  But the silence had to be broken. It was you, at last, speaking sleepily.

  ‘Now he knows I’m a bloody liar. But some of the things I said were true. Mummy was adopted, you know. That’s the point. Honestly.’

  ‘Oh darling—’ Stephen warned you.

  ‘Yes, she bloody well was.’ You spoke into his face and he betrayed you with an easy smile, saying:

  ‘Yes, of course she was.’ Then he laughed and patted you. ‘Pappa understands,’ he said, and to me, almost as if he were selling you, ‘She’s a remarkable little woman, my wife.’

  ‘Christ,’ right under your breath.

  Even the music had stopped. People were shuffling about. Dishonest you were, cousin, but the least dishonest of the three of us. You sat yourself up to say, ‘I’m in a cold sweat. I feel horrid and old.’

  Then you took your handbag and said, ‘Don’t follow me, Steve darling. I’m hopping it to the loo.’

  He knew as well as I did that you said that to me. Everybody knew, everybody knew. That’s why we all felt sick.

  EIGHT

  PINK WAS NOT the first to see Captain Gordon lumbered in the Gentlemen’s lavatory, but because, in a mild sort of way, he was extremely observant, he took a good look and noticed a detail was wrong. Captain Gordon was sitting in one of the cubicles, with the door wide open. His elbows were on his knees and his head was in his hands.

  Pink said, hesitantly and politely, ‘Old knob, I’d take your trousers off,’ and Captain Gordon swayed unhappily from side to side. He looked up and opened his mouth, once or twice, like a salmon on a rock. His collar was undone.

  ‘Pissed, old chap?’ Pink asked kindly, and perhaps because the Captain shook his head Pink said ‘Never mind.’ He then looked around, and seeing a sort of refuse bin, not quite as big as a dustbin and with a lid that opened by pressing a foot pedal, he dragged that across to the door of the cubicle and there, more or less comfortable, he sat down. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, banging his knuckles against the bin a couple of times, ‘I’m fit for the human scrap-heap myself.’

  Gusts of noise, of music and of laughter came from the corridors, the classrooms and the gym. They were like two boys in the sickroom, kind of poignantly out of things. It was doubtful if the Captain knew what it was all about. He seemed to have lost his knack for his semaphore of winks, belches and rubber faces, or at least the energy needed for its execution. When at last he did answer Pink he applied one of these Scotticisms, which mean nothing but which have a use. They keep friends along the bar from falling fast asleep, and save grandmother in the parlour, on a Sunday afternoon, from dissolving into tears. The one he used translates approximately as ‘life is a labour’, but curiously enough is seldom exchanged between men at work.

  He said, ‘It’s an awful trachle.’

  Pink, apparently delighted to get a reply, as the Captain’s heavy breathing had been beginning to upset him, knew exactly the sort of thing to say to this. A thousand crawling hours at the bar of the Queen’s made him answer, without hesitation:

  ‘Absolutely, old man. But then the fun’s in the ficht.’

  ‘D’you think my collar was too tight?’ the Captain asked. He referred to the pills he had to take, when he added, in a hurt voice, ‘I took my coagulation Johnnies. I didn’t forget.’

  Pink said, ‘I hate these bloody collars. You want to wear a soft job like this.’

  ‘Yours looks tight.’

  Pink did not like the idea that he was, weekly, growing fatter. ‘Not a bit, old man,’ he said huffily, ‘perfectly all right.’ Then added, ‘They always shrink things in the laundry. And, by God, the price.’

  ‘It was mixing drinks, I think,’ the Captain said, recovering a little. ‘Jack Gordon’s all right. I hope.’

  ‘Could be,’ Pink said, pensively. ‘Grain and grape.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s what it was,’ the Captain replied. And then, non sequitur: ‘I remember fine, at Territorial camp, it must have been 1913, anno domini, September I think. There was a big camp over Crieff way; I fainted that night. Now I couldn’t have been more than seventeen then. I was a sprinter too. I was nimble on my feet. It happens sometimes, with people. In adolescence too. Fainting, like that.’ He breathed noisily and shortly, two or three times.

  ‘Good Lord, yes,’ Pink said. ‘You bet. There’s a chum in my house at school, Blinkers somebody. We used tomake a book on which Collect it would be. “Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord” used to crack him most times. Real Blinkers’ Beechers. “Lord have mercy upon us”.’

  ‘Christ have mercy upon us.’

  ‘“Lord have mercy upon us” and bonk, there’s old Blinkers hooped over the stall in front, like a rag doll. Out for the count. As much as twenty-five bob would slip through from the first treble to the altos. It whiled away the time,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Episcopalian,’ the Captain said, swallowing.

  ‘There’s more music,’ Pink said. ‘Am I right, old man?’ But the scenes from his schooldays demanded his attention. He said, in the pause that followed, ‘Old Blinkers’ eyes used to shoot up before he went. I remember the whites of them. We didn’t like him for it, you know, poor chum.’

  The Captain rested his elbows on his knees again. He dropped his head for a second, then lifting it again, he said, with a curious, uncertain little smile:

  ‘You panic, you know. Anything to do with breath. I was a doctor, I should know. It’s not that there’s real danger … I still go to the kirk.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Pink said. ‘It’s good for the— it keeps the thing together.’

  ‘I haven’t the same faith, you know. Not now.’

  ‘Not?’

  ‘No. You’d think someone’s been to death’s door. I’ve been to death’s door. I do not joke, Charles. You’d think it would go the other way. It’s not what’s happened to Jack Gordon. My mother was a great believer, a hat on every Sunday morning and down the road – I’ve always been to the kirk. And now, mind, at the eleventh hour, I
don’t hear a peep. No angels’ trumpets—’

  The look in his eye was one of blank fear.

  Pink said affably, ‘You’re still this side of the door, what?’

  ‘I know it—’ The Captain spread out his hands. He seemed bewildered in a curiously practical sort of fashion. It did not look as if he were saying that his most fundamental beliefs had crumbled. He resembled aman who had been done out of some money. Seeing his face and hands alone, Pink would have imagined that he were saying, ‘I’ve known this man Moo for years: I’ve been in there to put a bet on every Saturday, regularly. And here, he says to me, no ticket, Captain Gordon, no divvy.’ His smile broadened, and froze on his face. In a tiny voice, he went on, about himself:

  ‘It’s the other way about with Jack Gordon. There’s just nothing. I can’t explain it more than that, Charles. A kind o’ tidal wave of nothing coming hellish fast.’ He said ‘fast’ with a very short ‘a’.

  After a pause, Pink said, ‘I never was much of a God-botherer myself, old chum.’

  The Captain looked at him again. It was difficult to know whether he was anxious to find out if he had got his point across, or whether he wanted Pink to find some sort of comfort for him.

  ‘Mind,’ the Captain said at last, ‘it wasn’t always like this. I was at Passchendaele, and—’ He looked at Pink uncertainly. ‘You’ve heard of Passchendaele?’