Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  But she did not seem to hear him or notice the trunk crash down the stairs. She walked slowly to her mother’s room which was used as the spare room now. She stood just inside it for a moment. There were some sweet peas on the dressing-table but otherwise it looked as blank as any unoccupied bedroom. Pink came up behind her.

  ‘Nothing to do with Mummy,’ she said, and as she did so they had the same vision of the mild, stupid little woman who always wore grey to match her eyes.

  ‘Poor pigeon,’ she said sadly, and it was as if her mother was dismissed in death as she had been in life, ‘nothing to do with her.’ She swallowed. ‘Just the room … It smells of moth balls.’

  ‘Like the Captain’s jacket,’ Pink said. ‘My dotter’s doing.’

  Flatly Mary said, ‘I suppose he’s dead.’ Then she went on in her lowest tones, ‘Horrible. Just now I saw this house quite empty and, Pink, it was all our fault. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Old flesh,’ he said.

  ‘Old flesh,’ she replied, still sadly and seriously. ‘I sometimes wonder if we’ve any bones. Moral bones.’

  They wandered out again, and she looked at the ceiling and the curved wall round which the staircase ran.

  ‘We mustn’t let it empty itself. I saw myself clattering up the stairs, crying “I’ll buy it, I’ll buy it”, just like in a story.’

  ‘Big stuff,’ Pink said.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted with a nod. ‘I heard myself say, right on this spot, “I love it, I love it, I love it, because I was unhappy here.” I don’t know why.’

  Then they walked downstairs quietly and once again started to manhandle the trunk. Pink was only serious for one moment.

  He said, ‘Don’t go, love,’ and she replied, ‘I have already gone.’

  There is a story told in Edinburgh of an old lawyer who never leaves his house and sleeps for only an hour or so at night, sitting in a chair. And he has lived like this for forty years, during which he has devoted his waking time to preparing a brief for an appeal. He is his own client. When he was only thirty action was taken against him for fraud and it was brought by his colleagues. He has, apparently, inexhaustible energy in the preparation of the case which will exonerate him, but although he never takes more or less sleep, in the winter he grows a little tired and it is said that around the end of February or the beginning of March, he will drink a bottle of bad port and confess with a bitter laugh, to his housekeeper, that he was guilty in the first instance. On the following morning, sober by 4 a.m., he starts work again.

  Colonel Sir Henry Ferguson appeared to be a great deal more sane, and slept eight hours every night, but behind the blank stare and the occasional charming smile, there lay hidden a not unsimilar obsession, broken only, from time to time, by the appearance of his daughter, whose spectacular beauty appealed so much to his vanity.

  His actions could have hardly been less like the unhappy Edinburgh lawyer’s, but in principle the obsession was much the same. Born, however, a baronet and not a lawyer, he took a different line, which he followed equally as selfishly. His life was devoted to playing the unaccusing, injured gentleman. He never once mentioned the card game or anything to do with it again, and it is likely that except when he was with Mary, he never thought about anything else.

  Apart from his ignoring a wife who slowly poisoned herself to death (for in the end, Lady Ferguson’s diet was solely gin and French), there were, every day, many signs of this astonishing self-absorption.

  He spoke very little, he avoided company, he was totally irresponsible where his children were concerned, although he often snapped at Pink whom he intensely disliked; he was close with his money but careful to pay all local tradesmen, he was charming to the odd visitors to the farm, and politically he was immovably Right. People meeting him noticed the far-away look in his eyes and instantly felt sympathy for him. They could never have believed, or had they believed could never have blamed him, for devoting his life entirely to Colonel Sir Henry Ferguson.

  His routine, incidentally, in this self-imposed exile, was porridge and an egg for breakfast, The Times and the Scotsman in the morning, a glass of wine with lunch, a little rough shooting in the afternoon, and then tea with the family and the portable television set, which he carried from room to room. After that there was a bath, a pink gin, some light supper, a little more television, check the doors and up to bed.

  But in everything he was a gentleman, almost a King in exile, and one of the ways in which this showed itself happened each morning at breakfast, now usually eaten in the kitchen. The Colonel, demonstrating that obsessional eye for detail, supped his porridge standing up. He usually did so by the Aga cooker, but occasionally he wandered about, and this explained his appearance at the bottom of the stairs beside the little pile of plaster which Mary’s trunk had broken off the wall.

  Seeing Pink, the Colonel turned savagely on him, telling him it was just the sort of bloody stupidly irresponsible thing he would expect of him. Even if he seldom made any moral judgments or suggestions to his children (because gentlemen in exile don’t) he never stopped biting at Pink for his bad manners, his scruffy appearance, his slovenly habits and his stupidity. It was a family joke, which Pink did not enjoy, to say that Pink was in the doghouse if the Colonel ever addressed a civil word to him. The doghouse, beside Flush, the Colonel’s Labrador, was a step up. Not that the Colonel ever took the risk of getting involved in a serious talk with his son. He avoided him.

  So, while Pink was saying ‘Sorry, sir’ and ‘Won’t happen again, sir’, and Caliban-like, shuffling forward with the trunk, the Colonel turned away, towards the kitchen. As he did so he murmured, ‘I don’t know what the hell you want a bloody great trunk like that for anyway,’ and then with a short ‘huh’, he added, ‘Montreal, I don’t doubt.’

  Mary had paused on the stairs. She had a kind of clean, morning ‘on stage’ brilliance, backed by the light from the big staircase window above and behind her.

  ‘It’s mine,’ she said.

  The Colonel stopped and smiled.

  ‘Hello, my mouse,’ he said kindly. ‘I didn’t see you standing there. You’re up and about early.’

  She took one step down.

  ‘Daddy, I don’t want you to bawl me out,’ she said, perfectly confident that there was no possibility of this. ‘I know it’s rather awful of me and I shall miss you, darling, but I’m eloping, or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘Christ almighty,’ the Colonel said. ‘Well there’s a turn-out.’ He screwed up his eyes, against the light, as he looked at her. ‘You’re sure you’re right?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ she replied, definitely.

  ‘With this Dow fellow?’

  ‘Isn’t it awful?’

  ‘It sounds very rash, little one. But I suppose you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘I don’t really think I do. But actually I’ve gone. So let’s not fuss. It’s rather like that awful wedding day. I mean it was too late, wasn’t it, by the time we sat in there drinking sherry waiting for the taxi. That was fun.’

  ‘You look even prettier,’ the Colonel said.

  ‘You’re wonderful how you don’t fuss. Daddy, if it all goes wrong I can always come back to you.’

  ‘Always.’ He laid down the porridge bowl and she put her arms round his neck. At the end of the hall, by the front door, Pink stood like a frightened butler, moving from foot to foot.

  Mary smiled up at her father.

  ‘This time if it’s the most frightful muck-up we’ll go on that holiday.’

  ‘Fishing?’

  She nodded and he squeezed her rather clumsily and tightly. It somehow betrayed his age.

  ‘That is something to look forward to,’ she said.

  Then she looked over her shoulder and saw Pink and the trunk silhouetted against the bright green lawn beyond.

  ‘Darling, I must go.’

  ‘A little love,’ he said and squeezed her again. She batted her eyelids against his cheek. �
�A little love’ had been a routine for twenty years.

  ‘I’m worried about Stevie,’ she said airily. ‘You will be kind to him?’

  The Colonel nodded as if she had mentioned her budgerigar. ‘Tickety-boo’ was all he said.

  ‘Daddy, the gulls are inland. D’you think that’s a sign of the most awfully bad luck?’

  ‘Oh don’t be so silly,’ he comforted her. ‘You’re just a naughty, pretty girl.’

  ‘That’s it,’ she replied with a delighted smile. ‘That’s much more in proportion. I knew you’d say the right thing. Come on.’ She dragged him to the door by his hand.

  He opened the car door for her, but it was Pink who lugged the trunk into the back. David laughed ironically at the size of it, but laughed with Pink, not with Mary, who sat still and upright in the front seat. She said to her father, ‘Go away, now please,’ and he blew her a kiss and withdrew.

  As he walked back to the door, he looked at his watch. He shouted, ‘If you get a good run through you should catch the ten o’clock ferry,’ and (as Pink later put it) Mary said, quietly, by way of merry reply:

  ‘I feel as if I were going to the gas chamber.’

  Cathie, the maid, who had a peculiarly poor grasp of situation, was rather taken by David’s looks, and when she gathered what was going on she rushed from the kitchen and threw some rice half-heartedly at the car, wishing them good luck.

  ‘Oh God,’ Mary said, dropping her head. ‘That is bad luck.’ The Colonel sent the girl back to the kitchen saying, ‘That’s enough of that,’ and hearing the command in his voice, Flush, the dog, began to bark.

  Mary looked at David as he pressed the self-starter. She said:

  ‘Please don’t look angry.’

  He took his hand off the steering-wheel and said:

  ‘My sweet, it’s your idea.’

  She asked very fiercely, ‘What’s my idea. What is?’

  ‘Steady,’ he said, putting both hands back on the wheel, as the car moved off. Pink put his head through the window, held his nose and pulled an imaginary plug.

  ‘Good-bye, old slob,’ he said.

  Breakfast in the kitchen that morning was a more than usually disturbing meal. Cathie, perhaps because the quiet that had descended rather unnerved her, decided to be cheeky to Pink, who put on his dark glasses again. The Colonel sat staring out at the floods. When Stephen came down he at once began to set the kitchen table, and Cathie, a little heavily but with the best intentions, said:

  ‘I don’t know what we’d do without Mr Stephen, really I don’t.’

  Shortly after, Macdonald came in, in her cheap fur coat. She and Stephen exchanged glances and seemed tacitly to agree that it was wiser to say nothing. She sat down, away from the table and told Cathie to give her a cup of tea.

  Stephen said quietly, ‘We’d better hurry, Pink.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Pink asked. ‘Why’s that? It’s the Sabbath, isn’t it?’

  Stephen pulled in his chair.

  ‘Sabbath or no Sabbath,’ he said, ‘if you remember, we’ve got a pack of school children arriving at nine who’ll throw spuds at each other and get paid for doing it, unless we’re there to shout.’

  ‘By God, yes,’ Pink said. ‘We’ll fix them.’

  ‘You’re coming out?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Pink exclaimed.

  Stephen nodded and said, ‘Good.’

  There followed a prolonged silence as they sat eating. It became almost unbearable, but just before Pink felt something had to be said, Macdonald began, in her usual gloomy voice:

  ‘Did you see Mr Thompson at the dance, him with the centre parting?’

  Stephen asked, ‘The chartered accountant?’ But Macdonald did not reply. She looked very tired and dazed.

  ‘There’s a story about him,’ she went on, as if she were describing a dream. ‘When he’s on his honeymoon he sends Sheila up to her bed first and after a dram he comes up. He’s near fifty when he’s married first, and he’s got habits. He opens the window just that much – you know, he’s fastidious. So he folds his shirt and trousers and all. He puts his shoes, very neat, outside to be cleaned. He lays his dressing-gown, precise, over the chair and he kneels and says his prayers. Then he switches out the light and just before he climbs into bed he says, “And noo Mrs Tamp-son,” he says, “your thingamy if you please.”’

  She took up her spoon and continued stirring her tea. There was a terrible, embarrassed silence and Stephen very softly laid down his cup. Extremely seriously and quietly Pink said, ‘Very good’ just before Macdonald dropped her spoon in the saucer again and burst into tears. Covering her face with her hands she said to the Colonel:

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry—’

  And they all rose and reached towards her. It was the first they knew of the Captain’s death.

  The Colonel said, ‘No matter; one of those things,’ and then Cathie, who was by the range, began to giggle.

  She said, ‘You mean Leslie Thompson? I think that’s funny.’ She laughed out loud. ‘I’m sorry, but I do.’

  Pink said, ‘Shut up,’ then softened the blow. ‘Nothing personal, old thing—’ He got up and walked out of the kitchen, leaving Stephen to cope with Macdonald who was beginning, in a broken sort of way, to talk about the Captain’s last moments.

  Pink pocketed his dark glasses and smiled gaily at the walled garden, the big lime trees, the yew hedge, the black shed, the dairy and the castellated steadings behind. He looked even happier when he turned his eyes to the white clouds bowling across the sky. He spoke under his breath.

  ‘You old tragedy, you,’ he said. ‘You rotten thing.’ And then, at once, he underwent one of those extraordinarily swift changes of mood. He froze, with his head cocked slightly to one side and his smile was suddenly false and bitter; even cruel. He was thinking of Captain Gordon. At last he raised his eyebrows, sighed, and by way of epitaph applied Rabelais’ last words:

  Tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée.

  THIRTEEN

  COUSIN, YOU WITHOUT morals,

  When I dropped the receiver back on its rest, my angelic mother (who had tactfully disappeared into the parlour as I spoke) returned and she looked upset.

  ‘Nothing amiss, I hope? Is it bad news, David?’

  I shook my head. I smiled, even, and said ‘No.’ I never lied to my mother except by silence which is only, sadly to say, that I seldom told her any of the truth. But she understood. She turned away without complaint. I just caught sight of the side of her face and I recognised there exactly the same expression which she had worn ten years before when I told her of my separation. But she never uttered judgment; not after I was grown up. She talked that morning only of tiny creature comforts. Would I like her to prepare a picnic lunch for the road? ‘I shouldn’t like to worry about you,’ she said, and added more quickly, ‘Not on that account.’

  I think that I must have answered ‘no’ more abruptly than I realised.

  She bowed her head and said again very quietly, ‘I would prepare it for two.’ Angels are not stupid.

  I knew, as I drove to you that morning, along deserted roads through fields of stooked corn, under the huge beeches that reach across the road, I knew I was about to destroy. All that can be said for me is that knowing that, I did not feel excited. I have never felt so depressed. Or is that worse? Here came the bludgeon, shaped by Calvinist hands.

  A dear friend of mine’s pet otter was once slaughtered by a Scottish workman who saw it on the road. For apparently no good reason he just picked up his long spade and crushed its head. There in Juniper Bank, were you, as illogical, as selfish and as sweet as any otter. It’s a nightmare remembered … A big yew hedge, that grows and grows.

  You shall not go free. Here comes the spade.

  There was a murderer’s confession that appeared about that time in one of the Sunday papers. The murderer drove the victim to a deserted marsh near Ely, to do away with her
, and as she was perfectly able-bodied it was important, for the smooth success of the crime, that he should give no indication of anything except love as he drove through the last village before the fens. In many other ways he proved to be an extremely subtle and well-controlled operator, but he very nearly failed, in this case, because he found it impossible to be pleasant to the girl during the journey. He bickered and quarrelled with her all the way, so that several times she demanded that he should stop the car. In those last hours he could not, in effect, bring himself to deceive the person he knew he was going to destroy.

  He might have been telling the story of the Byronic marriage, the one when the groom turns unbearably hostile between the altar and the first hotel.

  It began almost straight away.

  ‘Be glad,’ you said, stretching out a cupped hand in which I placed no kiss.

  ‘Darling, don’t be huffy. The ferry doesn’t matter anyway. Nothing matters now, does it?’

  It was my arm you clasped so tightly now.

  ‘Don’t look so black. Look out there, it’s terribly pretty, it really is. The smoke’s not going straight up to the sky – look,’ you said, pointing to a cottage down from the road that led through the first kind, lowland hills. ‘It’s going downward, the smoke, which isn’t a good sign, but that won’t matter either. We’ll be gone. Will we ever come back here again?’

  ‘You talk—’

  ‘You’ll have to put up with that,’ you said bravely rather than cheerfully, now. ‘Everybody does. Darling, I know what you’re feeling. I know exactly and I promise I understand. You feel you’re trapped. There’s a song in Figaro.’ You tried a few notes but failed to find a key, then went on, ‘You think all the fun’s over. That’s what it is. I promise I understand.’

  ‘I promise you don’t,’ I said.