For a moment he could not manage to say anything more, because he was laughing so much. He pushed his nose to one side, then the other, like a performing seal. He said:
‘He was in there seven hours before we found him, tossing Cox’s high and low.’
Stephen too began to laugh. He said:
‘Don’t. I’m not meant to shake about.’
‘That’s excellent,’ Pink exclaimed, and Stephen recognised that he was referring to one of his favourite subjects, laughter in church, when he said:
‘Old Stiffy in the front row of the choir, eh?’
Stephen, in his most miserable tones, which delighted Pink, said, ‘Well, I couldn’t help it. The bloody dog must have thought it was Boxing Day. Started howling around.’
‘You should have taken a bang at him.’
‘Too British,’ Stephen replied, and Pink said:
‘Mind, you’d have probably missed him, or taken a lug off. That wouldn’t have been at all nice. You’d never have got back in the house that way.’
Then Pink’s mood changed. He grew intensely serious and pulled his chair along the polished red linoleum, closer to the bed.
‘Mind,’ he said again, ‘I don’t see how that happened. Didn’t it put you off, I mean, bloody dog bounding round and licking you? Enough to ruin murder, far less suicide, isn’t it?’
Stephen shook his head, very gently.
‘Well, come on,’ Pink said. ‘This is Your Life.’
Stephen said, ‘Once you’ve made up your mind that sort of thing doesn’t matter. Lots of tactical difficulties you have to overcome, but you’ve made up your mind, you’ve told yourself you’re going through with it, intention to annihilate private enemy number one. Things get in the way but they don’t stop you. If Flush had wandered into the nursery a couple of hours before things might have been different.’
‘Now isn’t that fascinating?’ Pink said. He shook his head, grasped his knee again, and went on:
‘By God, that’s good. I get it, though, I get it. D’you suppose murder’s that way?’
‘Premeditated. More or less.’
‘Good old Steve. Ever thought of doing somebody in?’
‘Yes, often.’
‘Really? I find that most interesting. Thought of murdering me?’
‘No.’
‘Oh,’ Pink said, disappointedly. ‘Steady on. There’s no need to be rude.’
‘How’s Flush, by the way?’ Stephen asked.
‘Joggin’ along,’ Pink replied. Then he assumed that curious, secretive smile which usually heralded some devastatingly intimate confession. In this context it alarmed Stephen, and he was greatly relieved when Pink merely said, ‘Apples’, and put one finger in the air. He opened his mouth several times as Stephen, guessing what was coming next, began to smile.
‘No, no,’ Pink said. ‘Serious animal study. Real Pavlov stuff. Interest to Mary’s boy friend: old smelly Dow. I’ve been trying Old Flush. Oyez. The other day he chewed up one of Cathie’s ghastly hats, and I went right up to him.’ He demonstrated excitedly, ‘Like this, hands behind my back. Then I faced him with it. The biggest Cox’s I could find. I held it right there in front of his nose. I did.’
He nodded, triumphantly, and leant back again. He seemed inclined to leave the story there.
‘What happened? Was he frightened? Tail between his legs?’ Stephen asked.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, old man,’ Pink replied, rather stuffily, ‘he ate the thing.’
Soon after, a nurse came in and it was the end of the visit. Stephen never saw him again until he was let out of hospital, though he got a Valentine card from him with a shot-gun through a bed pan, as device.
But if there was a moment during Stephen’s long convalescence which could be counted as a turning-point it must have occurred one afternoon in February when Macdonald came, instead of Mary. It was thawing. Through the window, as gloomy afternoon turned swiftly to night, the patches of snow on the banks of the lawn outside still showed long after the features of the miserable little garden had faded away. The light was already switched on, in the room, when Macdonald arrived, and by this time Stephen was tired of lying still. At her first glance Macdonald could see he had arrived at a state of what she called ‘natural depression’ which, in its way, was a subtle definition. She meant by it the sort of straightforward schoolboy depression which comes to everybody who is bored and lonely, as opposed to the type which Pink favoured. Stephen’s barometer was at low, but with ordinary cheer and new subjects of interest the needle would gradually creep round again. No outside influence on the other hand, had any effect whatsoever on Pink’s storms. It was only possible to wait until the needle hit the buffer at ‘low’ and bounced back to ‘Oyez, oyez, ring those bloody bells’.
Within the first five minutes of her visit Macdonald was afraid she had put her foot in it. As he was lying so quietly she searched for subjects and picked on the roads being better, as they had been icy for nearly three weeks. She mentioned that Mary would find it easier driving back from the specialist in Dundee, assuming that Stephen knew where she was that day. Neither she nor anyone else quite realised the narrowness of the plank which the two of them walked together. The attempted suicide was never mentioned, nor the return from London, nor the bedroom, nor the bed, and although Mary was now obviously pregnant they never mentioned that. Macdonald now realised this, too late, when Stephen asked her questions. Macdonald said:
‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it, maybe.’ Neatly she found a reason. ‘She wouldn’t want to worry you with it, Stephen, you know what men are when they hear about specialists. But there’s nothing wrong at all. He’s the best gynaecologist round about, that’s all there is to it. If she goes to him he can get her one of the private rooms at the hospital and that’s not nearly such big money as the nursing homes. Most of it’s on the National Health.’
‘When’s it due?’ Stephen was lying back on the pillows. He was playing with his watch, which rested on the sheets over his tummy. He buckled and unbuckled the strap.
‘Not till May. There’s time yet.’
‘Does David know about it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she replied, and she watched him carefully. Macdonald took some big risks sometimes, which she never felt to be risks, herself, because her instinct was so strong. She used to say, ‘I just tell the truth, that’s all it is,’ but this in itself could not have been less true. She often told lies. But she had an unerring sense of timing. She knew when the truth would be most effective. She tried it now.
‘I don’t see why he should, either. It’s got nothing to do with him.’
Stephen thought she was being kind, not truthful. He shook his head and said:
‘Nothing to do with me.’
Macdonald, unwrapping a box of Meltis fruits said, almost casually:
‘That doesn’t mean to say it’s got anything to do with David, either. Mary wasn’t too happy in London, you know.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw she had said the right thing. Jealousy does not work like fear. One cannot measure oneself against the unknown. The sharpest pain comes when one sees the person who has been preferred. Stephen pushed himself up with his elbows.
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know nothing as a fact, Steve. But you’ve only got to look at David Dow, and where he came from. Even when they’re tearaways like that, there’s some things is always saved. She’d have gone to him if it was his – I’m certain of that.’
Then she put a parcel on one side and said more cheerfully:
‘Come on now, Steve, I’ve no right to be talking to you like this. The walls have ears. D’you want more books yet? The man at the library here says you’ve read all he’s got. We’ll have to send up to Foulis Lending, to keep you in stocks.’
That was all there was to it, but when she left him he looked much happier.
Macdonald did not confess to Mary that she had had this conver
sation, but then Mary no longer confessed things to Macdonald. Yet the hostility that had existed between them when Mary first returned, gradually disappeared. Macdonald, herself, seemed to grow much older that winter, as if only now, after the Colonel’s death, could she relax and admit to herself that she was nearly sixty. She would occasionally sit and talk to Mary, and they even began to laugh together, about old times. Mary learnt of her father’s last months, indirectly, in this way. Macdonald joked about the terrible things Pink had said to the local minister who had come very often to visit him, because the Colonel turned to God at the end.
‘What is it he calls God?’ Macdonald asked one evening as they sat on the leather fender, drinking sherry. ‘Is it “Moose”?’
‘Moo,’ Mary said. She always wore a fur hat that winter and she played with it as they talked. Then she stopped herself fidgeting, with a conscious effort and put the hat over with the parcels she had brought back from the shops in Dundee. She bought all the things for the baby, by herself. She knitted none. She brought things back each Tuesday and Thursday when she went to the clinic in Dundee. She never showed them to Macdonald, but put them straight into the new white chest of drawers in her bedroom. That Macdonald and Cathie looked in the drawers when she was not there did not upset her. Indeed, she might have been disappointed if they had not done so. But Mary said very little, these days, that was not absolutely necessary.
‘Moo,’ Macdonald repeated. ‘Pink was terrible with the poor man, waving him good-bye, shouting “love to Moo!” or something like this; you know what he is. He got really aggressive once or twice, mind; I was worried he’d attack him at the bottom of the stairs, shouting at him, “If a man does not love his brother whom he has seen how can he love Moo whom he hath not seen? Eh? Answer me that!” Pink looked really angry, you know. The minister’s very patient, mark you. He never complains about this Moo thing, and he just says where the verse comes from, one of the Epistles, I think, and says he agrees with the apostle who wrote it.’
Mary nodded. ‘What did Pink say to that?’
Macdonald raised her eyebrows.
‘That infuriating laugh of his. You know, the one he always gives when he claims he’s won an argument. It used to drive you crazy as a kid.’
Mary filled Macdonald’s glass again.
‘You said you’d tell me some day,’ Mary said, and Macdonald nodded. She knew what Mary meant. At last she replied:
‘You’ll have guessed the most … with the preacher calling and that. He wasn’t the same man, your father, at the end. He was brought down with grief and no’ just fear either. Mind there was no jokes with him. I think that’s why Stevie and I had to have a laugh at Pink. Your father didn’t know it but he had a kind of dignity at the end. He didn’t come downstairs much and he’d just stare at the television but he saw nothing and heard nothing. You could turn the sound down and he’d never notice. The preacher’ll tell you, Mary, he went very bravely, and very humbly too. He was kinder to me in the last weeks than he’d ever been in the years before.’ She said, ‘It was kind of worth it for that.
‘We didn’t know when he was going. It was sudden at the end. Your mother, you know, she drove herself to it: she made herself go. Your father just let himself go. Very suddenly. I think cancer’s like that. It can linger or not. There’s no telling.’
She seemed to leave a gap. She looked at Mary, then away again, and at last she continued:
‘As soon as he moved into your mother’s room, and he was insistent on doing that, mind, he didn’t think of anyone in this world any more. He was on his way, then. But he went over two incidents in his life. Over and over them, to the minister and me. Over and over again, his hand pumping up and down on the arm of his chair and his eyes quite watery. He’d say, “God forgive my soul.”’
Macdonald took a sip of her sherry. Mary looked at her own toes. She sat alongside, on the leather fender. When she leant forward she could clasp the back of one of the oak chairs at the side of the refectory table. The lights were low. Two brackets on the wall were lit and the faces of the Fergusons in the portraits were lost against the sheen of the heavy Victorian gold-painted frames. The silver on the sideboard caught the light.
Mary said, ‘When I was in London I heard a horrible story about the card cheating. I mean what led up to Daddy doing it. I should think it was rot.’ She swept back her hair and looked at Macdonald who was staring at the wine-glass that looked very small in her huge, bony hand.
Quietly, Macdonald said, ‘I shouldn’t think it was. But it wasn’t that that worried the Colonel. Not in the end. He was like all the best men, so the minister said. He was worried only about the negative sins, that’s what you call them, the things you leave undone.
‘Evidently when he came back from that club and it was old General Oliphant brought him back, kind old soul he was, your father had a talk with his wife. I know he did, as a matter of fact. I heard their voices and wondered what was going on. It was only an hour past dawn. As you know, your mother was a wild kind of frightened wee thing, and she’d never have gone to that club unless she’d got herself into a terrible state. I’m only sorry I didn’t know her better then. I’d have stopped her. I wasn’t long enough with the family … But, let’s not deny it, she could be real infuriating, your mother. She couldn’t lift a finger to help herself. That was the drawing-room training – Dundee style. She couldn’t boil an egg and I don’t really think she’d grasped the difference between a cock and a hen. She certainly can’t have understood what was going on, but someone must have put the wind up her good and proper. She got the feeling that it was something really sinful and she wasn’t far wrong. I fancy, too, her own life wasn’t going so well. It was a mystery to me how either of you two came about. A gesture to convention, I’m sure it wasn’t much more than that.
‘I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, and mind, I don’t really. She was a harmless enough body, your mother, but let’s just say she wasn’t top of the class. Not the brainiest. Your father therefore thought it best not to tell her anything, even in the state he was. So she kept asking him questions mainly whether he’d cheated at the cards, because she wouldn’t have known how to frame the real questions, at all. I sometimes think she thought the gambling was the sin and it ended there. Anyway, she went on and on at your father, who as you can imagine was feeling pretty dithery and she kept saying, “All I want to know, is did you cheat?” And evidently, so he said to the minister and me, he said “No.” Isn’t it odd? You’ve got all these awful things happening and when it comes to him dying he’s worried about that lie more than any. He says that’s what cut her out. If he’d admitted that, he might have got round to admitting everything, getting her to understand and making a marriage out of it. But he failed to tell her – he went on a lot about this, Mary. He failed to tell her and that was maybe the beginning of what happened to her. She needed a hand in life and he just didn’t give her it. Even before she started on the booze he’d never say a word to her, you know, except “Good morning” and “Good night.” You wouldn’t remember that.’
Mary said, ‘I understand, I think.’
‘It was his own arrogance,’ Macdonald said, ‘that he was so worried about.’
‘What was the other thing?’
‘Och, it was the same thing. Just another scene. Evidently one night when I was out, I’d a night a month off in those days, she went as far as his dressing-room. She asked to be forgiven. She said a funny sort of thing. She said, “Let’s just pretend we love each other.” I can see fine what happened. He just called her a stupid woman and shoved her out the door. She went along to you two that night and woke you up, and later on I found her on the rug in the bedroom, fallen asleep beside the dog.’
Macdonald put her glass down on the table in front of her, then sat back on the fender.
‘That was the first Flush of them all,’ she said. ‘He was a nice enough dog.’
‘Oh God,’ Mary said, suddenly, and then she pu
t the question she had held back for three months. ‘But didn’t he ask for me?’
‘Of course he did.’
‘Kindly?’
‘Of course. He was kind about everyone at the end. But before he went into your mother’s room he asked for you every day. I was mad, trying to trace you, Mary.’
Mary frowned.
‘What d’you mean, “trace me”?’
‘Well, I knew you’d left David but none of us—’
She interrupted.
‘Pink—’ she said. ‘He had my address. He …’
And then she stopped herself and in a curiously awkward way she put the heel of her hand over her mouth and pressed it very hard. Slowly, Macdonald began to understand. And she knew, too, at that moment that Mary was going to cry.
‘It’ll not matter, Mary, it’ll not matter … But he was funny about it, your father, I mean. He wouldn’t take any steps to find you, the police or that. He wouldn’t let me do that. He said it was a kind of judgment on him—’
‘No.’ Mary spoke almost under her breath.
Macdonald said, ‘He talked a lot about you. And then he made his mind up and moved into your mother’s room.’
‘Was he there long?’
‘Just a week.’
There was a short pause and Mary clenched her fists very tightly. At last, Macdonald said, ‘Did Pink not even tell you he was sick?’
Mary looked very frightened and pale.
‘I didn’t see him.’
‘Of course you did. In London, with David at your birthday time. That’s why Pink went down.’
At first it was a moan, a dry sort of moan, and then at last she began to weep. When Macdonald held out her huge arms she fell against her and pressed.
‘Old Rock,’ she kept saying. ‘Bloody Cassandra. Oh, darling Macdonald. Old Moo-Morality!’
TWENTY-TWO
SHE CAME DOWN later that night and found him sitting in the nursery, staring straight in front of him, playing the Marche Funèbre on the radiogram, behind which he at once hid his glass.
Household Ghosts Page 37
