The one thing the doctor had told her was that he would not leave her. The manner of his betrayal was spectacular. By the time he emerged into the open where two or three police cars were now gathered, he knew there was danger. He was thinking, You have to see both sides to recognise how hostile your own side can look. They were implacable. They had already handcuffed her and somebody had cautioned her. As soon as the doctor came out they helped him. Two men even shook his hand. They seemed to think that he had brought Silence back to Justice. Why not? She had murdered his son.
The doctor’s head felt very sore in the cold wind. He asked that he could go in the same car with Silence. They just said, ‘No, no.’ He tried to insist for a moment and again they reassured him that she’d be treated fine. ‘Wrapped in cotton wool,’ one said. ‘Don’t …’ the doctor began. And he’d wanted to say, Don’t make her talk.
When he looked across at Silence, who was about to be put in one of the cars, she did not seem upset. There was no yell, no terrible plea in her eyes. She seemed to expect the separation and to be resigned, quite resigned to it.
The doctor spread out his arms, looked down at his wound, saw the mess, the bloody, pussy mess, and felt his knees begin to collapse.
‘Catch him,’ an officer yelled. But too late. He was out, in the snow.
* * *
About a week later, all the newspapers had it that Ewing was recovering well, after three very dangerous days. His mother had been to visit him but had only stayed a few moments. The doctor still seemed too painful to speak. The police had no further information about the girl called ‘Silence’: she was being held.
‘Is it true,’ one journalist asked, ‘that she can’t speak?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ the spokesman replied. ‘But she’ll talk.’
The report of that reply was what made the doctor determined to get up. The police doctors had been very good to him. In fact both he and Silence were in the same wing though neither knew it. She was only two floors above, in a more heavily guarded section. The hospital itself was fundamentally for policemen and attached to the Central Police Station.
They allowed him up and gave him back his clothes. He had, be it remembered, been involved in a fight which led to the death of a twelve-year-old coloured boy. When they returned his clothes to him now, he found that they hadn’t even searched them. In his breast pocket he could still feel the dentist’s slim, steel surgical knife.
Before formal questioning, they wanted him to have a few hours’ relaxation. The officers in charge of him (who couldn’t have been more warm and friendly to him) gave each other a wink and said they might take a little time off between the Hospital and the Station.
The doctor did not see the force of the joke until he was taken across the street into a bar which he soon discovered was also just outside the Station. It was strictly a policemen’s bar with a few good looking policemen’s molls – keep your hands off that one, fella, that’s the sergeant’s girl.
Here again the doctor found himself to be something of a hero. The barman wanted to shake him by the hand. Only one of the girls seemed to think that he had brought Silence back for some other reason than vengeance. She’d seen the stockyard photo. ‘She really seemed to be trusting you.’
Answer: ‘Yes, she did.’
Because something had been said that might spoil the party, the boys poured out more drinks. The doctor was a difficult guest of honour. They took him aside to tell him to stop worrying. Through this creature Silence they were going to get every man and woman that touched Junior. Every bastard in that lynching. And they said it again, ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll make her talk.’ When they said that the ice in the doctor’s whisky began to tinkle against the glass.
He played along with them as best he could, because he wanted a favour. There were several charges against her. She already had this police record. They told him that. She was conscious. She was being looked after mainly by women, but with a coloured doctor. ‘Now you can’t be fairer than that.’ Eventually they divulged that she was in the same building.
The doctor asked to see her as soon as they were back in the building. The policemen couldn’t understand why. The doctor didn’t want to explain except to say that together they had been through some tough experiences. The policemen seemed to appreciate that. They thought of it, perhaps, as a man who wanted to look at his retrograde dog. They detailed an officer to go up with him. Someone said that they’d been looking for him all over, that Lilian and Angel had come to visit him. Lilian was fine, fine.
He was introduced to the young coloured surgeon on the wing who was not too impressive, the doctor thought. Police-trained. The strange thing is that the doctor telegraphed the whole thing to him, but he was far too dumb to see it. The doctor said – about nothing – ‘It’s bad when they cut the jugular, doctor.’ The younger man did not look at the doctor as if he thought he was cracked; he said, ‘It’s also pretty quick.’
‘What’s pretty, doctor?’
‘It isn’t too pretty, I guess.’
He must have thought the doctor was referring to Lawrence Junior or one of the others.
‘But they wouldn’t sense too much. There’s some kind of misting up,’ the doctor added. The doctor had been prepared to sit outside the ward in which the girl was kept, but another policeman on guard there unbolted the door, saying, ‘She’s pretty sleepy, don’t think you’ll get much sense.’
The doctor went into the little blazingly white room. The door wasn’t locked behind him, but pushed almost closed. The knife was in his pocket still.
He asked her. Of course, he asked her. The second he went into the room, he said, ‘They’re going to make you talk.’
And she shook her head. He let his eyes fall from hers to the column, the strong column of her neck. She turned painfully on to her side. She always liked it if he pushed her head against him. He pressed it against his own wound so it hurt very badly. The voice behind him said, ‘Please don’t do that.’
But he dropped his head on to her sweet, strong still surviving heart and thanked God. Thanked God that dentists keep sweet, sharp knives.
Then there was blood over everybody and a hell of a lot of people seemed to be there. He stood. He kept his eyes on her until he knew suddenly and gloriously that she was dead. He wiped the tears from his face with his sleeve, then he spoke. He said levelly, ‘Notice the blood. It is also red.’
He now seemed to be beyond sadness. Then he turned and looked at all the others who were still standing round in an appalling silence. He said, ‘Now, please will somebody take me away?’
There followed a bloody accusing confusion and crying noise.
About the Author
HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS
A JAMES KENNAWAY OMNIBUS
James Kennaway (1928–68), was born in Auchterarder, Perthshire, where he came from a quiet, middle-class background and went to public school at Trinity College, Glenalmond. When he was called to National Service in 1946 he joined the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and served with the Gordon Highlanders on the Rhine. Two years later he went to Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a degree in economics and politics before renewing his ambitions as a writer and working for a publisher in London. Kennaway married his wife Susan in 1951, and something of their turbulent relationship and his own wild, charming, hard drinking and intense personality can be found in The Kennaway Papers (1981), a book put together by Susan after his death.
Tunes of Glory (1956) was Kennaway’s first novel. It remains his best-known work, and the author himself wrote the screenplay for what was to become a hugely successful film in 1960. His next book, Household Ghosts (1961), was equally powerful. Set in Scotland as a tale of family tension and emotional strife, it was adapted for the stage and then filmed – again to the author’s own screenplay – as Country Dance (1969). The Bells of Shoreditch and The Mind Benders (also filmed), followed in 1963, while Some Gorgeous Accident (1967), and The Cost
of Living Like This (1969), develop Kennaway’s restless involvement with unhappy personal relationships and love triangles.
At the age of only forty, James Kennaway suffered a massive heart attack and died in a car crash just before Christmas in 1968. His last work, the novella Silence, was published posthumously in 1972.
Copyright
This edition first published as a Canongate Classic in 2001,
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
Tunes of Glory first published in Great Britain in 1956 by Putnam & Co Ltd
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1998 by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © M. St. J. H. Kennaway, 1956
Household Ghosts first published in Great Britain in 1961
Copyright © M. St. J. H. Kennaway, 1961
Silence first published in Great Britain in 1972
Copyright © M. St. J. H. Kennaway, 1972
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Introduction copyright © Gavin Wallace, 2001
All rights reserved
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 494 4
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Household Ghosts Page 47
