How to Seduce a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

  I nodded meekly, stopping in the doorway in an attempt to stall Selma.

  “The place is absolutely filthy. What on earth have you been doing?” She was practically apoplectic by now and I couldn’t delay Selma’s entry into the hall for another second without seeming rude.

  “Mum, this is—”

  “I mean, I know you’re not capable of cleaning a house, Lee, but whatever happened to Mrs. Jenkins?”

  This was a tough one. I’d got rid of Mrs. Jenkins for two reasons. First I wanted to save money and second I couldn’t stand having her around when I was trying to work. Pretty quickly I had realized that when I tried to do housework, I only succeeded in making the house even dirtier. An unusual talent but not one I could publicize. At that point I tried to retrieve Mrs. Jenkins’s services but the damage had been done. She was miffed beyond belief and refused to return. After that I took to executing lightning cleanups in the living room when I was expecting my friends and hiring a band of professional cleaners to blitz the whole house when my parents threatened a visit—something I had not been able to do this time because my mother had arrived without warning.

  Selma saved me.

  “Hello there,” she said emerging from behind me to grasp my mother’s hand. “I think I can help you.”

  “This is Selma Walker, you know, I was telling you about her last night . . .” Please God, let my mother remember.

  “Of course.” Suddenly my mother was all charm. “I’m Vanessa Bartholomew. Lee’s mother.” If she was surprised by the fact that Selma had not taken her sunglasses off after coming into the house, she didn’t show it.

  “Why don’t I loan you my Bianca?” said Selma. “She’s the perfect cleaner. I’m sure she’d welcome the extra work.”

  I had a fleeting vision of Bianca slaving away for days on end, informing my mother over coffee, “This house very dirty. Miss Selma have the clean house.”

  I started to say that I didn’t think this would be such a great idea but my mother was already marching Selma into the kitchen.

  I was about to follow when another figure appeared at the front door.

  “Miss Bartholomew?” he said, consulting an order form. “Sorry I’m a bit late. Here about the damp?”

  I put my finger to my lips in a desperate attempt to head him off at the pass. Too late.

  “What damp? Did I hear the word ‘damp’?” My mother emerged from the kitchen. “Tell me he’s got the wrong house, Lee. Did I really hear him say he’s come about the damp?”

  CHAPTER 15

  I USED THE ARRIVAL OF SELMA’S DRIVER AS AN EXCUSE TO make my escape. I felt bad about it. For one thing I still did not know the reason for my mother’s surprise visit. I needed to have a talk with her, find out how things stood with Dad, but one look at her getting into her stride with the damp man was enough to send me scurrying into the street.

  “The key to the basement’s in the Vienna roast,” I shouted to her. Let her work that one out for herself. I knew I just did not want to be there when she opened the door to the basement.

  I was wandering aimlessly down Portobello Road, wondering what I could do to keep me away from the house for an hour, when I saw Buzz walking across the road toward me.

  I didn’t think twice. I just turned around and ran and as I did so I realized it was a stupid thing to do. I should have just allowed him to come up to me, chatted for a few minutes, pleaded an errand, and gone on my way. I would have been quite safe. What could he do to me with morning shoppers all around us? Now he knew I was deliberately avoiding him. He’d start to wonder why and pretty soon he’d put it together that it had something to do with Selma’s tapes.

  But I didn’t stop. In a matter of days I’d gone from sexual obsession with Buzz to being downright terrified of him. It was hard to keep moving fast in the midst of the morning bustle of the market. The street was devoid of vehicles except for the odd truck delivering produce, but there were people everywhere. I crashed into someone, apologized, kept moving. After a while I was aware that a crowd was gathering to watch the chase. They were treating it as a bit of fun, cheering us on. Buzz was surprisingly nimble on his feet. I could sense him gaining on me and I began to panic. But then he tripped and fell against a stall, tipping an array of oranges, apples, pears, and lemons down the street.

  Had I lost him? I didn’t look back. I kept running, thankful I had gone to meet Selma in jeans and sneakers. By the time I leapt onto a passing number thirty-one bus, I had no idea where he was. I braved a glance out the window and I couldn’t see him but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still after me.

  As with train journeys, bus rides send me into a reflective state. Somehow I become immune to the chatter all around me, people getting on and off, the precarious swaying of straphangers, and start to gaze out the window, bringing whatever problems I had buried in my subconscious to the surface for inspection. Stuck in traffic for thirty, forty minutes, sometimes I even managed to resolve them by the time I arrived at my destination.

  As we crawled along High Street Kensington, turning left into Earl’s Court Road, I let my mind go blank and to my surprise my preoccupation with Buzz vanished. Instead I found myself thinking once again about Fred. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Fred had made an impression on me that had nothing to do with his horrendous death. As the bus came to a standstill in the run up to the slow-moving Cromwell Road, the main exit to Heathrow, I returned again to the image of him gazing at Angel in adoration. No one had ever gazed at me like that. Tommy looked at me with affection sometimes but it was always tinged with amusement and backed up with a gentle poke at my ineptitude in some area.

  But Angel had not even noticed. I felt sure she had at no time returned poor Fred’s devotion and I wasn’t talking about sex. She had strung his tender teenage heart along and then broken it. How could she? Those extraordinary blue eyes. In a year or two—maybe even in a matter of months—Fred’s pimples would have disappeared and he’d have grown into his gangling frame. As we passed Earl’s Court tube station I began to create for Fred the life he’d never have. I sent him to the Earl’s Court gym, just coming up on the right, where he expanded his upper body until his protruding Adam’s apple disappeared and he emerged a veritable Adonis. His stringy hair grew with miraculous new luster, he shed his anorak and faded jeans for tight-fitting black trousers and a billowing shirt open to the waist. Continuing on this seventies journey—I found it easier to place him in the Saturday Night Fever world of my own teenage fantasies because somehow I couldn’t connect Fred with hip-hop—I sent him to a dance instructor, and from there to a series of clubs where he amazed everyone on the dance floor. Girls swooned at the sight of him and Angel had to wait her turn.

  I was in the process of having Fred give Angel the runaround, taking her on a date and then not calling for weeks on end, making her suffer not knowing where she stood with him, when I saw we had reached the Fulham Road. The Royal Marsden Hospital was only a short walk away and Noreen’s visiting hours were in progress.

  But Noreen already had a visitor.

  A delicate creature who looked almost as frail as she did was crouched on a chair at Noreen’s bedside, immaculately dressed in a pair of tailored slacks and a soft wool sweater.

  Noreen’s face brightened when she saw me.

  “Lee, how sweet of you to visit me again so soon. This is Marie-Chantal. Do you two know each other?”

  Marie-Chantal said, “No, I don’t zink so,” very firmly in one of those infuriatingly exaggerated French accents and stood up. She came up to about my waist.

  I smiled at her but for some reason she suddenly seemed in a hurry to be off. She clasped Noreen’s hand very tightly for a second and beetled off down the ward lugging two enormous bags of supermarket shopping.

  “So who is she?” I asked Noreen, intrigued.

  “She works with Tommy at the BBC. Hasn’t he mentioned her? I’ve met her several times and—”

  Noreen seeme
d about to add something else and then changed her mind. All she said was “It’s good that you two met.”

  A lightbulb went off inside my head. “Is she the one who’s been giving Tommy French lessons?”

  “Probably,” said Noreen vaguely. “Ask Tommy to get the two of you together. She’s enchanting.”

  I only stayed about twenty minutes with Noreen. I noticed—to my distress—that she tired more easily than on my last visit but she assured me she was on the mend.

  “They’re going to send me home in a couple of days. They say they’ve got it all—you know, the cancer—but I’m to come in for treatment regularly.”

  It was good news but I was secretly shocked. She seemed far too frail to be sent home to cope on her own. Tommy would have to sort something out for her. On my way home I realized I had forgotten to pick up Max Austin’s laundry but before I did so, I popped into Tesco. The Caught on the Hop stir-fry had been fun but it had cleaned me out of food. I always felt a bit guilty going to Tesco when the market merchants were always on about how the supermarkets were taking away their business and how soon traditional street markets would be a thing of the past if we didn’t support them properly. But they couldn’t argue that a one-stop shop wasn’t convenient, could they?

  I ignored the filthy look Chris gave me—quite a change from his matey banter earlier in the day—as I bypassed his stall to go into Tesco and started running menus in my mind. How was I going to cope with catering for four, instead of one, every night? After the euphoria of the get-together we’d had in the kitchen the night before I’d found myself coming down to earth with a bump. On the bus back from the Fulham Road I realized I was actually dreading going home. I was used to walking into an empty house and going straight to my desk to work, secure in the knowledge that I would not be disturbed. This wouldn’t happen anymore. How long was my mother planning on staying? How long before Angel found herself somewhere to live? How long before Max Austin nailed his man and I could release Tommy from his role as my protector?

  In the meantime I had to think about feeding everybody. Deep down I was rather proud of myself that I was able to play house to so many people. This was something most women took care of as a matter of course, many with the additional responsibility of raising children. Quite frankly, I simply did not know how they did it and I admired them more than I could say. But I was a realist; I knew exactly what would happen. I would be thrilled and excited having people in the house for a few days, cooking and catering for them as I had already done for Angel, and then I’d want them gone.

  Well, this time it wouldn’t happen as fast as I’d like and I knew I’d better face up to the fact that I’d have to get used to it. I decided I’d cook for the next two nights and then I would draw up some kind of roster and pin it on the front of the fridge. Monday supper—Tommy; Tuesday—my mother; Wednesday—Angel. I paused. Was Angel capable of cooking a meal or would we all be given fish and chips? And could she afford it? Well, all I could do was ask.

  I looked about but didn’t see her on any of the tills. I approached the duty manager’s desk but when I mentioned Angel’s name, it caused quite a stir. Heads popped up all over the place.

  “What’s she done?” someone asked me.

  “Is she coming back today?”

  When it became clear that I didn’t know what they were talking about, they told me what had happened. The police had arrived soon after Angel turned up for work and taken her away with them.

  “They said they wanted to ask her some questions,” said the girl on the next till.

  I wandered up and down the aisles for a few minutes but I couldn’t focus my mind on what to buy to feed everyone and I kept expecting Buzz to appear around every corner. The memory of our last encounter at Tesco and what had taken place in my hall shortly thereafter filled me with misery. Every way I looked I was trapped. I couldn’t abandon the book because I couldn’t let Selma down. But if I went on with it, I’d have to see Buzz. How was I going to get him out of my life?

  As I was on my way out of Tesco, a woman waylaid me. I didn’t think I knew her but she looked vaguely familiar, something about the color of her eyes.

  “You were asking about Angel O’Leary,” she said. She was older than I was, in her late forties probably. She looked haggard and worn out and her voice had a smoker’s rasp.

  “Yes, do you know why the police were looking for her?”

  “She lives with you, doesn’t she? You gave her that place to live in that burned down. Her mum told me she was back with you now. You’ve taken her in again. What you want to go and do that for, nasty piece of work like her?”

  Suddenly I knew who this woman was. Her son had inherited her devastating ice-blue eyes that were fixed on me now. What had Angel said? My mum knew Fred’s down the bingo.

  “There’s nothing I can say that will tell you how sorry I am,” I said, aware that my words sounded trite.

  “Well, why did you have to take her back in? If you hadn’t given her a home in the first place, my Fred would never have gone there.” Her voice was rising, bordering on hysterical. “Fred was my eldest. I’ve got four more back home and Fred’s dad’s not around anymore. I needed Fred. He was my oldest,” she repeated.

  “Have you buried him yet?” I asked. Angel hadn’t mentioned the funeral but she probably wouldn’t have been welcome at it.

  “We cremated him yesterday, what was left of him,” said Mrs. Fox with no apparent irony. “And she never even bothered to show up. I hope he don’t meet no Angels like her where he’s going.”

  “Can I help you in any way?” A direct question, better than the ghastly If there’s anything I can do to help.

  “You can help me by trying to find out who started the fire.”

  “The police are—”

  “IT WAS IN YOUR BACK GARDEN!” she screamed at me. “You’ve got to do something.”

  She was right up close to me, staring into my face, holding me directly responsible for what had happened to her son. Another woman came up and drew her gently away but it didn’t make any difference. She’d got to me and I was glad that she had. I knew that the reason I kept thinking about Fred was because in some way I did feel responsible for what had happened. I wasn’t a mother, I’d never had a child, and I didn’t presume to think that the feelings I harbored for Fred’s memory were maternal—yet in a way they were. Standing in front of the checkouts with people wheeling their laden carts around me, I resolved there and then to do my utmost to find Fred’s killer.

  I barely recognized the house I had left two hours earlier. My mother had gone into action with a vengeance. Workmen swarmed everywhere—or so it seemed. In fact there were only two but the sound of whining drills made it feel as if the entire house was being taken apart. This was worse than I had ever anticipated and I sat down in a heap, wondering how on earth I was going to be able to write a word of Selma’s book with all this noise going on.

  The floorboards were up in the living room beside the kitchen and the damp man’s head was poking through them. The smell was nauseating.

  “Another month and your kitchen would have been in the basement,” he told me cheerfully.

  “Where’s my mother?” I asked him nervously, expecting her to rise up out of the woodwork and strike me dead at any second.

  “She’s out back.” He jerked his head in the direction of the garden.

  I saw she was with Felicity Wood, her gardening club pal. They were walking about the blackened area around the summerhouse, striding through the ash, seemingly impervious to the stench that still lingered from the fire. In the spring and summer, Felicity came over once a week with a couple of hefty-looking men whom she proceeded to boss about, directing them to mow the lawn and dig and plant according to some grand scheme she had for her annual reinvention of my mother’s garden. They were now scooping up ash with a shovel and tossing it into bin bags. I was feeling guilty enough about not having done anything about the house. Trust my mot
her to put me to shame about the garden as well.

  I went outside. With Felicity there, my mother might just restrain from venting her wrath on me but to my surprise she didn’t seem angry at all.

  “There you are,” she greeted me. “Isn’t this marvelous? Everything’s going to be cleared up in no time and then I’ve decided to ask Felicity to plant a memorial garden for that poor boy. Get a sundial or a birdbath or something. Nice idea, don’t you think? Not sure what to do about rebuilding the summerhouse. Might be best to knock it down altogether. I don’t think I’m going to want to barbecue out here anymore. There’s been enough grilling of flesh, wouldn’t you say?”

  I winced and Felicity looked as if she might throw up. It was so like my mother to have the sweet idea of planting a memorial garden for Fred—something I should have thought of—and then spoil it all by talking about grilling flesh.

  “And I’ve ordered a damp course for the whole of the basement. Just in time by the looks of things. Only problem is it’ll stink the place out for quite a while. But thank God for your Tommy.”

  “Tommy?” How did he fit in?

  “Oh, he really is a saint. We had a nice chatty breakfast together after you’d gone out—where on earth did you rush off to my first morning? Anyway, he told me about all the work he’s doing in the house and I have to say I’m just thrilled. I’d no idea he was even living here and to find out he’s really pulling his weight, well, we’re going to make a great team.”

  She really was in her element taking charge like this. Where would we all be without her? Hadn’t she arrived in the nick of time? Leave it to her to assemble her own personal task force to get the house and garden back in shape. As long as my mother thought she was invaluable, she was one happy bunny.