Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  Everything was back to normal, Roger thought. He really ought to watch himself, imagining heaven knows what, spinning terrors out of worry and wild dreams. There was nothing out of the way in Tony’s being erratic and unpredictable. Who should know that better than Roger? Last night’s sleepwalking, and Sunday’s, were just a new wrinkle in opening-weeks nerves. Tony invested a tremendous amount of emotional energy in a new role—or as in the case of Hamlet, re-thinking a familiar one—and until that expense of effort stretched it, like a new glove being shaped to his hand, he always had required a bit of nursemaiding. And devil take him, have I not given it? What need has he of Katherine? I would be glad of a way to wring dear Kitten’s neck!

  The words slid into Roger’s mind as he poured away the water and spooned the eggs from the pan: a deep-thrust pinprick of sound that did not even register at first but bloomed in the next moment into panic. The dish shattered in the sink, eggshell, yolk and shards all mixed together.

  “Problems?”

  “No.” Roger turned his back to the table. “Not if you don’t mind having just the one egg,” he managed. I’ve made a mess of the other one.”

  “Oh, one’s enough when I have breakfasted on praise,” Tony declaimed irrepressibly. “Besides, there’s toast enough for three.”

  “I’ll do you another in a minute,” Roger mumbled not hearing. He pushed the egg cup on its plate in front of his father and turned away. Moving carefully, as if the floor itself were paved with eggshells, he went out into the passage and closed the door quietly behind him. For a moment he thought he would be sick, but the worst of the feeling passed and he made his way to the pink-and- grey bedroom to throw himself face downward on the bed. When the trembling stopped, he turned over and stared at the roses on the ceiling. What had happened? It had been like hearing a ham radio operator’s broadcast drift across the Radio 3 wavelength—a phrase or two, then nothing. There was no understanding the bitter words that had unfolded in his mind like an opening seed. A bitter almond seed. Some mad little trick of the mind. And yet…

  And yet it was his father who had given Kitten her name. Last night. Last night Roger had decided that Katherine had to be Cathy—Cathy Rockford—who, when she and Tony had split up three years ago, had gone off to Italy and married a rich vineyard owner. But Roger had liked her. He had certainly never wanted to throttle her. Kitten. Puss… No! What he had to put out of his mind was that it had anything to do with the old house in Isleworth. That was craziness. Even if an old house really could be haunted by a long-dead tragedy, this house had no Tudor bones inside its heavy Edwardian walls. And the National Theatre was new from the ground up. So it was Cathy Rockford Tony had moaned over. Not that that was a cheerful thought either… And Jack? Well, it was easy enough to get Jack out of Roger John Nicholas. Perhaps he’d been called Jack when he was small. The rest of what his father had said—his mind shied away from that. The rest of it was just muddle. This morning had to be more of the same: his own tired muddle.

  Roger sat up on the edge of the bed feeling much better.

  His stomach still fluttered, but that would stop. Roger John Nicholas, pathological worrier! He really would have to watch that. Even justifiable worries solved themselves nine times out of ten if you didn’t pick and prod, but ignored them.

  Determined to be cheered, Roger went out and shakily put another egg to boil.

  There was a two-thirty call for a second reading of Moondoggle, a new play due to open in October, and Roger decided to tag along with Tony to the theatre. No reason, he told himself. He just felt like it. To his surprise, Tony took his second taxi in twenty-four hours, hailing one at the Maida Vale crossing instead of carrying on to the underground station. In it they detoured by way of a shop just off Bond Street where Tony picked up an elegantly-wrapped parcel, and they disembarked at the theatre stairs on the south end of Waterloo Bridge with an extravagant tip to the driver. Tony made the rehearsal on time, but with only minutes to spare.

  Rehearsal rooms were off-limits—and had no conveniently obscure doors and gangways—so Roger found himself a sunny spot on one of the terraces and settled down to devour the last part of the mystery he had begun while Tony slept the morning away. Once it was finished, he took up practising the cello in his head, sitting on the base of a massive sculpture with his knees just so, the bowing and fingering precise, his eyes almost closed in a deep and pleasurable concentration.

  Alan Collet found him there at four o’clock, the invisible bow poised, then darting into a last complex and moving passage. “Bravo!” He applauded as Roger lowered the imaginary bow. “What was that?”

  “Bach’s G major solo cello suite. The final gigue,” Roger said. He sighed. “Casals played one of the suites every day from the time he was thirteen, so I thought I would too, but last week I gave up and started counting the ones I play without the cello. What I need is a cello that folds up to briefcase size. Where’s Pa? I thought you would be another hour.”

  “He will be. I just died at the end of the first act.”

  “What’s it about? And who are you?”

  “I, I am told, am highly significant. I’m an astronaut named MacDool and your father, if you will believe it, is Ossip Korngold, a Cambridge radio astronomer. As for what it may be about, ask me at Christmas.” He rolled the script into a fat tube and inspected a barge on the river. “At first blink it sounds like a cross between Space 1999 and a sendup of Being and Time—deep Cherman philozophy,” he explained in a thick German accent. “You will think it exceedingly funny even if you don’t understand half of what goes on. I think it exceedingly funny and hope to understand the first act by the time we open.”

  Lowering the makeshift telescope, Alan cast a sideways look at Roger. “I hear I missed the performance of the year last night. How did old Tony come out of it?”

  Roger flashed him the Nicholas grin. “ ‘Like an empty toothpaste tube,’ he said. He slept almost until noon.”

  “You were there, I take it?” Alan was, for Alan, oddly sober. “I may come in tonight myself. Care to join me? It means standing, to judge by that queue down below.”

  “I don’t mind that,” Roger said hastily. He had half meant to come anyway.

  Alan sat down with his back to the parapet and looked at Roger consideringly. “Queer thing happened yesterday. I came by to pick up this script and found your old man standing in the middle of his dressing room in a complete fog. He seemed to snap out of it after a minute or so and asked if I wanted to go out for a bite of lunch at the Cardinal’s Hat.”

  “So?” Roger wondered at Alan’s puzzled tone.

  “There’s no such place. He led off down the Upper Ground and then got himself all turned round down by Blackfriars Road. I finally twigged that what he was after was supposed to be on Bankside—some new place down by Cardinal Cap Alley, I supposed—so I steered us under the railway bridge and up Hopton Street. And that’s when he said the damnedest thing. He said ‘This is the first time I’ve come on Green Walk across the fields. We’re like to have the dogs set on us before we find a place to cross the ditch.’ Almost knocked me sideways, that did.”

  “It might be out of a play,” Roger suggested.

  “No. It wasn’t the old quotation lark.” Alan frowned unhappily. “There was an odd, uncertain quirk to it, and I think he meant it. He had to be a million miles away. When we turned onto Bankside it was as if he had never in his life seen the gravel works and the power station, when they’re as ugly as Hades and not what I would call forgettable. Anyhow, when we came to Cardinal Cap Alley, old Tony was looking for his pub and it wasn’t there. There were the same mildly pleasant old houses as always, nothing else, and your dad looking like a baffled sleepwalker. I managed to get him down to the Anchor at the far end, and we took our lunch out onto the river wall. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say why he was so shaken; just ate, drank off his white wine, and came back here and slept for the rest of the afternoon. Then apparently he ups and gives
the performance of his life.”

  Alan turned on Roger a worried scowl. “What is it? He was feeling a bit off-colour on Sunday too.”

  Roger turned to lean on the parapet and look out over the river. “I don’t know. Nerves, maybe. You said ‘like a sleepwalker’,” he added reluctantly. “Well, Pa’s been doing that too. The last two nights. He says it’s never happened before, so it must be the play that had him all nervy. I think this one matters more to him than anything else has.”

  “Of course it does, but galloping nerves don’t seem old Tony’s style,” Alan said doubtfully. “I suppose it is possible. He ought to ease off a bit. The backstage reaction to last night’s smash performance wasn’t exactly Universal Love. I understand that he was making moves that threw some of the others off, made them really stretch—changing line readings, speeding up the pace, what-have-you. Not the sort of tricks to endear one to a director even when it does come off. To quote Andy Barron, This may not be Godot, but it’s not the bloody last lap of the Indy 500 either’.”

  “He won’t do it tonight,” Roger said defensively. “He feels great today. He’s so un-up-tight he’s almost unstrung.”

  “So I noticed. Peacocking it a bit, isn’t he?” Alan’s frown cleared and he grinned. “Newspaper reviews overflowing with superlatives do work great cures.”

  Tuesday evening’s Hamlet, sold out down to the last of the standing-room, may not have matched Monday’s in its pitch of feeling and tension but that was at least in part because the audience—and the cast—came forewarned. The performance was deeply moving and Tony superb, but it was not the triumph of the previous night. Even so, it widened Alan’s eyes. Fond as he was of Tony Nicholas, he would not have rated him as an actor as any more than very highly skilled. This Hamlet was that, yes, but far more. The softened colloquial accent startled him at first, but he came to hear how uncannily it fitted itself to the poetry. To Roger’s repeated question of “What did you think of it?” he finally shrugged helplessly and said, “That has to be what Brook meant when he coined the term ‘the Holy Theatre.’ It is that.”

  Roger himself had enjoyed it thoroughly even though standing for so long gave him a cramp in one leg; and when he was wholeheartedly included in a large, impromptu, late-supper expedition to Fulham, he began to wonder why he had never thought he might become an actor. Tony was in great form and spent one hilarious half hour teaching everyone a raucous word-game he called Tickle-brain; and when the party was winding down he borrowed a guitar to accompany himself in Dowland’s gravely lovely old song, “I saw my lady weep.”

  Roger had not even known he played the guitar and listened with awe and pleasure. It was a perfect evening. Still, by the time he hit St. John’s Wood and bed, Roger had come to the reluctant conclusion that he preferred less talk and more sleep. He would have to stick to the cello. Kicking off his shoes, he flopped onto the bed in all his clothes and was out almost as his head touched the pillow.

  There had been nothing to worry about at all. Nothing at all.

  Ile goe no further

  ROGER COULD NOT REMEMBER HAVING got up again, and yet he must have, for he sat in the big flowered armchair in the high-windowed sitting room and dreamt. Or dreamt he sat there. He was not sure which even though the heavy linen was smooth under his hand, and, outside, the dark, familiar lawn bordered by darker walls stretched from the low sill at his knees to the shadowed trees at its end. The trees were black against the street lamp beyond and the pale, warm loom of city sky that hung like a glowing border on the night.

  The sound brought him erect in the chair: a click of the Yale lock on the garden door in the downstairs entry passage. Through the wide window he watched, frozen, and saw Tony, still fully dressed, emerge onto the lawn below to stand and look about him in bewilderment. His face was a blur against the darkness, indecipherable, but the bewilderment was easy to read. His movements were the uncertain starts and turns of a man who does not know where he is, who has taken the wrong turning and cannot decide where he took it. He did move at last, and it was Roger’s turn to be bewildered, for Tony strode with sudden purpose towards the darkness under the trees.

  Roger rose from the chair unwillingly. His mind pulled and coaxed like an anxious terrier trying to stir its sluggish master out for a walk. Stumbling down the stair, he fumbled the lock open and stepped out into the cool summer night. But he came to the trees too late. There was neither sound nor sign of his father. And nowhere he could have gone. The path curved through the trees and out again onto the lawn, but path and lawn were empty. There was a faint sound—the tap of heels on pavement—but it came from the little neighborhood park on the other side of the high garden wall, slow at first, then more sure, more rapid.

  Climbing first onto the frame of the compost bin Roger gained the roof of the garden shed and peered over the top of the wall down into the park. In the light from the street lamp the roundabout and swings and benches had a bleached, desolate look, as if the shrieking children were gone forever. For a moment it seemed almost—not quite, for he could not really see it—but almost as if a tree grew up through the centre of the roundabout. Almost as if beyond the tree whose branches sheltered the shed roof where he crouched, a wide wood spread: a wood of great, broad trees with moonlight spilling through their branches.

  But of course there was no moon to be seen in the cloudy sky. And the park was its old, familiar self. Roger heard the click of footsteps on the pavement again, beyond the gate, receding south along Violet Hill. It had to be Tony. Where else could he have gone? Stepping from the flimsy shed roof to straddle the wall, he worked round until he had a good grip, and dropped to the grass below. Once out over the park’s low gate and across the street, he slowed. Tony had stopped at the corner of Abercorn Place and stood looking back, but seemed not to see him. For a moment Roger faltered, suddenly unsure whether it was Tony or only someone strangely like him. In the moment that he hesitated, the street lamp dimmed. Its yellowish glare bleached into a wash of moonlight, and along the street, the Abbey Tavern, the shop-fronts, and the boxy block of flats were only pale shadows glimmering among trees. The footpath where he stood grew soft with leaf-mold, and a rutted cart-track angled down the middle of the car-lined street. The man some forty yards ahead who stood debating about his way for a moment both was and was not his father. By the clothes, as blurred as the landscape, it was and was not—equally—the man he had seen in the dark house in Isleworth.

  Panic-stricken, Roger retreated the way he had come. When his hand closed round a bar of the iron park gate, he clutched it as if it were a life-preserver and he adrift beyond Gravesend, until his knuckles ached with the holding and the illusion of forest faded.

  But he could not turn back home again. He ran, and as he ran he knew or felt that that other place had closed in behind him—that as the pub and the newsagent’s flicked past the corner of his eye, trees grew up through them and the moonlight put out the street lamp. But he would not look. He refused to see. It was a trick, an old trick of dreams. All his five senses and his pounding heart insisted that he was awake, but it could only be a dream—vivid, lucid, but a dream. Even at that, he felt a panicky dread that it was a dream he could drown in.

  Before the corner he slowed, unsure whether to try to stop Tony or simply to follow him as he crossed the road in the middle of the intersection and headed into Nugent Terrace. But as he wavered, one foot in the street, his father’s shadowy figure angled up onto the pavement—and three yards further on disappeared through the wall of the shoe-repair shop.

  Roger froze where he stood. Through the wall of the shop. Through the wall… In a daze, Roger made his way across to it. Touched it. Ran his hands over the rough brick. It was inescapably solid, and yet he had seen what he had seen. He thrust his hands into his jeans pockets and drew back, confused and terribly afraid. He had promised to follow, but how could he? I promised Jo, he thought numbly. But he backed helplessly toward the corner. As he stood there, staring at the
wall, the other place—the same place—slipped silently past his guard and almost swallowed him into its other time. Against the moonlit wood of broad-limbed walnut trees there was only a pale shadow of the brick and the small paned windows where the building had been. The track cutting through the wood ran on, not quite straight, following like an eerie echo the long, fading line of a high brick wall that could only be the long wall forming the backs of the gardens down along Hamilton Terrace. Roger stood unbelieving, watching the past place engulf the present, rendering it as insubstantial as a scene glimpsed through fog: not gone, but unreal, a distant world smothered in silence.

  The tall figure Roger had pursued was almost out of sight a hundred yards ahead, Torn between the urge to follow whether the cloaked, hatted figure were Tony or not, and terror at the nightmare thought that once on the path there would be no getting off it, he felt a sharp pain in one palm, and found himself clutching a seven-sided coin as fiercely as if it were a talisman against the past, 50 NEW PENCE, he knew it read, D·G·REG·F·D·1976·ELIZABETH·II. 1976, not 1603. Elizabeth the Second, not the First. And whether it was the coin or the fear of that first step through the ghost of the little shoe-repair shop, the pavement grew firm under his feet and the red telephone kiosk loomed up reassuringly at his back.

  For so long as he held fast. No more. He might stand on a corner of a tree-lined street, but the long-ago wood slept moon-silvered in the church and houses, among the horse-chestnuts, in the red kiosk, waiting, You promised, one part of him mourned, and another whispered in a far corner of his mind, What can it be but the road form Kylbourne and the old Priory? He’ll soon be past Punker’s Barn and footing it apace, for the road down through the fields to Lillestone village is faster going, don’t forget.