Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  I tried to comfort her.

  ‘You’ve done more good for me in one afternoon than the twenty-five years that went before. That’s not bullying to say that.’

  ‘No, darling.’

  ‘Come on then,’ gently.

  ‘I promise it’s only that awful music. I know it was only that …’ Then she broke down again. She put it back to front in mirror writing. She spoke as if she had refused. ‘Oh, Davie darling, I can’t, I can’t. There’s Stephen, and – I promised. I swore. I can’t.’ She sobbed very loudly as I held her. She tried to stop crying until she said it made her throat sore, and then she cried again. ‘I’d give anything to be able to, don’t you see, but I promise I can’t.’

  For a second poor Lucy Ashton came to mind. I wondered if it were possible, after all, to drive somebody mad. She had no idea what was going on round about her. She asked me what the spray was for.

  I sat her down on an old, gilt cane chair that had found its way from the ballroom to the sprays, and I unfolded a huge white handkerchief and said, ‘Blow it to bits.’

  Then I said, ‘I refuse to do more damage, darling.’ This time it was not mirror writing. With a great wail she replied, ‘God damn you, Davie, or damn whoever made you, or spoiled you, so you can say a bloody silly thing like that. Don’t you understand what you’re doing?’

  ‘Darling, calm.’

  ‘No,’ she cried, ‘I shan’t be. I shan’t be calm. It’s a horrible dream, one of the ones when your feet stick to the ground. What else do I have to do for you? Don’t you see I’ve really found you? I’ve reached through all your faces and edges. We’re there!’ And then with a laugh, ‘No, we’re not!’

  Then, for a moment, she tried to control herself again. She pressed her head down and wiped her eyes and forehead with the back of her hand. But she was losing grip again.

  ‘It’ll break – Davie, I promise it’ll break. My heart will break.’

  She flung back her head suddenly and her whole face was wet. Her eyes looked curiously light. She said, ‘I shall have to go to Moo.’

  I replied, hopelessly, ‘It’s just – you must have been working up to this.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said, rolling her head again in a curious, almost bear-like motion. ‘Oh Christ, I shall have to go back to Moo. Don’t let me go there – we could live, darling. I don’t care where. I’d have your babies, with keely faces too … It’s hopeless!’ She said quietly, like an older woman now, ‘I wouldn’t lie any more. I wouldn’t have to. I’d keep you sane. You’d keep me sane. Just that?’

  And as I still could find no reply, she said, looking hard at the floor, ‘I’m not sorry I spoke – I shan’t be ashamed.’

  ‘Of course you mustn’t be,’ I insisted, very quietly, but there I stuck again. I held her shoulders. I believe I was afraid lest she might literally break into pieces.

  Then all the children came running, from the baths, to the sprays.

  But by the time we got back to the main entrance, where I had left my car, she was much recovered. She still was frowning. We stopped for a moment to look at the conference’s Notice of Events and she asked me, then, if I had anything to do that night. ‘Work and Play’ had completed my obligations that morning, and I said if I did not simply eat and sleep I would probably drive south. But I added:

  ‘Don’t ask me to supper.’

  She said, ‘No. I was going to ask you a favour.’

  ‘On you go.’ The Oxford accent had vanished.

  ‘I’m meant to be doing something terribly depressing tonight, and I really feel too weak.’

  She was red about the eyes. The porters watched us with undisguised curiosity.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I’d run Pink over to Arbroath. He’s to go into a place there.’

  ‘A place?’

  ‘It’s not as bad as all that. Looking round,’ she said, ‘I should think it’s much like this. Anyway it’s about the same price. It’s voluntary and so forth. He’s all right about it. But they might be able to do something for him. Make baskets, I suppose. Would you do that?’

  She was quite calm. A hostess asking a favour.

  ‘Go with you, you mean?’

  Firmly she replied, ‘No. Alone, please.’

  ‘What about Stephen?’

  She brought her finger down her face, pressing the bone of her nose. ‘He’s working so hard. I don’t really want him to drive late at night.’ Then she added, ‘Anyway, I want to be with Stephen tonight. Would you?’

  ‘For you.’

  ‘And for old Pink,’ she said carelessly. ‘I think he’ll be pleased it’s not me. Together we might get terribly gloomy … A little dodgy, I think.’

  * * *

  It was soon after that, just outside, that she stopped and spoke of sin while I cried, ‘No.’ I could not find the words to say ‘Now that you are there, that you feel love, that you have given, don’t already start making rules and feeling sin; just be glad.’ And not finding the right words I made a pompous sort of statement.

  I think I said, ‘It’s better to start just with life and find out about right and wrong than to be burdened with so many hoodoos that you spend all your time in revolt, and miss out on love and life altogether.’

  She cut straight through that.

  ‘Do you loveme?’ Then, under her breath, ‘Can you love me?’

  Why couldn’t I have lied? I do, in a way. Cousin, I do. But then came the furtive look. I moved a step forward. Something was sticking in my throat.

  In a horrible stony silence, we climbed into the car.

  A big mauve thunder cloud came up from the west as I drove her home, still in silence, and when we arrived the house had a bright, clear, well-washed look. From the gravel, it was like a child’s painting. Directly in front, one could not see how far back it stretched, and in the odd bright light, it looked oddly two-dimensional, with the door in the middle, a square window either side, and three windows above. The roof did not look quite straight. To the right were the chestnut trees and the yew hedge, to the left the small lawn and the walled garden. Flush came up to be patted on the head. The windows, too, were full of faces, just like a child’s drawing. They were all waiting for Mary. Pink waved supremely gaily from an upstairs window. Cathie came to another with the baby in her arms, and tried to make it wave to its mother.

  ‘My goodness.’ The tinker was beginning to regret the visit. ‘I’d nearly forgotten about that one. He or she?’

  ‘It’s a “he”. A boy called Harry,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to meet him. If he’s up there, he’s been fed.’

  Just before she reached the door she said, ‘Do I look a wreck?’

  ‘You could have been crying.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The last private thing that she said to me was, ‘Do I look a bit more Mary?’ but I was still too cold and stuck to do more than nod. She was much more relaxed than me: curiously, calmly resigned.

  She said, ‘I’m glad about that. The only girl I knew called Georgina was a kleptomaniac.’

  In the sitting-room Cathie recognised me, but it took me a moment to remember her. She had developed a more aggressive, impudent manner which barely covered a sense of happiness. Cathie was gradually replacing Macdonald, and although she was meant to leave at four she evidently always stayed until six or seven at night. Macdonald herself seemed to have slipped gradually but certainly into the background. Telling all seemed to have left her without wind in her sails, as if those evenings with Mary had completed a life which, more obviously, might have been expected to finish with the Colonel’s burial. Age seemed to be catching up with her, all of a sudden. She had even lost confidence with the baby and Cathie, unthinkingly, had stepped in.

  Cathie asked me fiercely, ‘Have you not been offered a drink?’

  Before I had time to reply she said, ‘A fine house you’ll be thinking this is, and you’re given no hospitality.’ She looked up at
me and went on, aggressively but not unpleasantly, unsmilingly but not without humour, ‘And a fine sort of guest it is, too, who doesn’t even go up and see the son and heir. Mary says you’ve to go in the dining-room and pour yourself a whisky.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll manage that.’ But I could not then remember her name. At the door, she said:

  ‘Pink’ll be down in a moment. We’re trying to persuade him to take a reasonable amount of stuff. You know what he is with all his things. He’s everything there but the kitchen stove. You’d never get your car up the hill.’

  Soon after, both Mary and Stephen arrived and we all had a drink together. She had made up her face again. She looked me perfectly warmly and friendlily in the eye, as if I’d become, in an hour, an old family friend. Stephen looked brown and well. He greeted me with great enthusiasm and even asked me to stay the night. The cut on his forehead rather improved his looks, I thought. What might be called informally formal, he was correct, but did not stand on ceremony. His manner was energetic and verging on the hearty. He was in shirt sleeves, and he was meaning to go out again after supper, because the hay harvest had prevented him doing a thousand and one things round the garden. But he still had the old habit of throwing all his worst cards on the table. I can’t remember how he came to it but one self-disparaging phrase sticks in my mind. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a 3.4 Jaguar and oil heating throughout. I can always tell St Peter that.’

  Pink, when he appeared, was dressed for the city. He was in his best suit and Old School tie. He had a case in each hand and an umbrella under his arm.

  ‘V-very good of you, old man,’ he said to me, making the best of his stutter. Then he stood looking into thin air. He would not even accept a lime juice and soda and silence fell, as we stood round the door of the dining-room. As Stephen began to ask me about the conference, Mary hurried us along.

  She said, ‘David doesn’t want to be late. Let’s put these cases in the car.’ We took them outside and it was then that Macdonald appeared for a few seconds. She stood at the back of the hall, and stared. We bundled Pink into the car and Mary nodded quickly to me so that I should not wait any longer. Pink was looking white and strained. The gay wave from the upper window was already forgotten.

  Then, at the last moment, as if Pink were going off to school, Mary suddenly dashed into the house, and when she returned she slipped him a five-pound note. His last remark to her before we left had a curious, triumphant lift to it, but I did not see how she reacted. I could no longer look her in the face. As the wheels turned on the gravel he smiled and wound down the car window.

  ‘T-tirez la whatsit, Belle,’ he said. ‘La farce est jouée.’

  ‘It’s most awfully good of you,’ Pink said to me as we approached the huge baronial mansion, on the outskirts of Arbroath. ‘In point of fact it’s nothing much more than a five-thous and-mile check-up. Thirty-fifth year, I am. Oyez.’

  The Superintendent of the baronial nut-house (as Pink would have it) was uncertain of himself, it seemed to me, only in the sense that he could not quite make up his mind which part to play. There were several alternatives that went with an actor’s hoody face and a thick shock of white hair. To the patients, I fancy, he liked to present himself as, frankly, an angel. He had a way with him, everybody agreed, and if one of the male nurses was having difficulty with a patient he would not fail to go and help, and usually he did good. Sometimes he used a slug of Pentothal or Soneryl, or one of those with more or less Biblical names, but occasionally he just talked. That was what he called, ‘a little touch of Hector in the night’. To the patients’ relations he was the brilliant scientist – ‘We’re mapping out the mind, Mrs Robertson, we’re charting it.’ He talked of deep sleep and physical methods, of analysis and occupational therapy. To the visiting scientists, officials, students or professors he was the prophet and the poet. He played all these parts with great energy, and his real genius lay in the fact that he persuaded himself he was being entirely honest in each.

  The interview with Pink and me gave him full scope for his powers, and it was not until the end that he discovered that I was a scientist. Even then, he bluffed it out. Most of the conversation was directed to Pink who was more than prepared to discuss, in painful detail, the methods that they used. Hector then insisted on showing us round the place although I was anxious to go as quickly as possible.

  ‘I say,’ Pink asked him. ‘Have you tried any surgery?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, lad. We don’t have the bad boys here. No bad boys.’

  The Superintendent cleaned his glasses. He did not appear to enjoy the suggestion.

  Pink said he was glad about that and then, alarmingly suddenly, both he and Hector started roaring with laughter.

  Hector said, ‘Were you thinking we might be chopping out hunks of your grey matter?’

  Pink giggled and Hector slapped him on the back.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come, lad,’ he said. ‘I can see you’ll be an asset to the place. You’ve got to have a sense of humour, you know. It’s exactly like on board ship.’

  But it was a curious, unnerving, sort of ship. Mary had been nearer right in the hall, that afternoon, when she had suggested it would be like the alco-pathic golfing hotel. I trailed from room to room, and did not smile. It was agonisingly depressing. Some of the rooms were bright and filled with people, playing bridge, listening to records, making rugs or dancing the cha-cha. There were several Buns and Belles playing clock golf and they looked at us as if we were men from Mars. In no case could the Superintendent define the nature of the patient’s complaint.

  ‘Nervous,’ he said, certainly. He made a very dramatic speech, in one corridor. The rhetorical questions bowled along the vaulted roof like buckled wheels.

  ‘What is a drunk? Or a dipso? Or an alcoholic? Or an unhappy fellow, eh? I defy you to define it, eh? Doctor, I defy you.’

  One or two men and women, in spite of being jollied along by Hector as he passed, still sat alone, firmly determined to remain within themselves. But whether the faces, as they passed, were miserable or ludicrously happy, they filled me with the same terror. I saw one red-headed woman there, and wondered whose cousin she was.

  Pink behaved as if he were being delivered to his private school. He seemed to find the whole idea of the place so awful that he made himself live entirely in the present. When I left him, with a sudden, strange, personal sadness, he was happily accepting a cup of cocoa from a trolley wheeled by a man with a handlebar moustache.

  ‘Smoking,’ Hector said to me, as we passed back to the main entrance of the huge converted Victorian house, ‘is allowed everywhere. Send him cigarettes, eh?’ Hector put an arm round my shoulder. ‘Of course you’re depressed,’ he said. ‘But your brother’ll do well here. I’m sure he will. We don’t guarantee things. You know that, as a scientist.’ I fear I only wanted to get away. Hector had a curiously cynical phrase for it all.

  ‘God, bottle and bed,’ he said. ‘That’s what brings them here—But Bedlam? No. Not if I can help it. It’s a question of organising them. Just giving them things to do.’ He went on about Pink, at last. ‘But we’ll do no harm. And I bet we do good with your brother. I bet we do. You never can tell, but I bet we do good. It’s not all science, you know. There’s a bit of water-divining too. A lot of it’s instinctive. We look into the dark, we do that. “We look into the dark and there’s always someone there.” That’s Yeats, you know,’ he said.

  I felt very tired. I shook hands rather hurriedly and walked back to my car. I did not stay at the hotel that night. I picked up my things there and drove through the night, south to London again. The road passed Juniper Bank, and as if to mock me, the clouds drifted away from the moon as I came down past the bothie. The farm lay below, neat, toy-like, by the old hooped bridge and the bend of the river. As I swung round the corner and crossed over the new bridge I saw the house at its own level, and it looked solid, safe, permanent and un-neurotic. For a moment, it seemed to me u
nbearably beautiful.

  We look into the dark and there’s always someone there. We look into the dark and see the faces of those we have already destroyed, by our own ignorance of ourselves; our immaturity.

  We look into the dark, sweet cousin, and no wonder we are afraid.

  SILENCE

  THE DOCTOR THOUGHT: I wish I could believe her. I wish I could take the story at its face value. I wish I could accept what the Sister had to say. I wish I could say I were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more.

  He was sitting in an almost empty movie-house watching a bad western about a cowboy and an Indian girl. He thought, If I had told the hospital authorities that I too was a doctor they would have let me in, they’d have let me see Lilian, they wouldn’t then have said how she was under sedation and not to be visited.

  The movie wasn’t very good. It had some kind of pioneering evangelist in it who didn’t ring true; not, anyway, to the doctor who was himself, surprisingly, a believer. Surprisingly, because he was at the age of disbelief: over forty. But he happened to believe. He accepted the Christian rules. Which was odd, in 1968. His name was Larry Ewing, and he was one of the world’s listeners.