Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  Roger shut it out. He knew nothing of priories or barns. But Jo… Without a thought for what he meant to do, he sprinted for the corner of Hamilton Terrace and turned south, paralleling the way the old track went. At Hall Road he knew he must still be well behind. There, the garden wall the old way followed came out along the mews entrance to a foreign-car sales and service garage, but across Hall Road there was no longer a through-way, only flats and houses and garden walls. So he kept straight on.

  Hamilton Terrace ended at St. John’s Wood Road, where Roger instinctively turned down towards the main road instead of taking the way past Lord’s in towards the City and the Temple. On Sunday night Tony had meant to go by water to the Temple. What might be there besides the lawyers’ lodgings and Blackfriars Bridge further along the Embankment, Roger was not sure. He strode on doggedly until a fleeting glimpse of a tall figure far ahead spurred him again into a jogging run past the sleeping reach of the Regent’s Canal.

  There the trees lining Maida Vale gave way to the first wide stretch of Edgeware Road, running down through a jumble of shops and flats towards Marble Arch. How was he to follow a half-seen shadow down that long and lamp-lit way—a wraith that he could not be sure was any more than a shadow in his mind’s eye? If he got as far as the police section house by the Marylebone overpass without being noticed by a curious policeman, he could not hope to get much further. It was hopeless. There was a part of him—a part he feared—that recognized the old way in the new, that knew the road past Lillestone Manor and Paddington village came at last to Tyburn and the road east to St. Giles and London’s City, but he shut his heart and mind against it. Tony had put a name to that part of him: Jack. And because he was afraid of Jack, who knew the way, he faltered, slowed, and stood lost in the long, still street.

  Somewhere in the house there had been a noise. Roger woke, trembling, to find himself crouched knees-to-chest on his own bed. The first faint wash of morning showed grey through the window opening onto the front areaway. His shoes lay on the floor, but he was fully dressed and could not remember why. Last night? Last night he had been—where? Slowly, muzzily, it came back: at the theatre with Alan, then a huge spread of make-your-own sandwiches at someone’s house. There had been talk and games and singing, and he had kept dropping off to sleep. Had slept most of the way home in the taxi. Remembering, he uncurled luxuriously from his tight, cramped knot and slid into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Awakening again at nine, what Roger remembered was his promise to Jo about the clothes. After a hasty breakfast he brought out two suitcases from the cupboard under the sitting room stairs and set about packing some of Pippa’s things, and his own, and a few books. Jo’s and Tony’s could wait until he had made Tony a breakfast that would do for lunch as well since he liked to be at the theatre by noon on matinee days.

  At ten Roger went in to wake Tony, feeling his way across the dark room to draw the heavy curtains and let the sun spill in. They whispered open, and when he turned again he saw his father stretched across the bed as if he had fallen there, his arms out-flung and sandalled feet dirtying the rumpled bedspread. Roger wanted to turn away and could not. He could only stare like a cornered woods-creature. Tony’s feet were filthy, his velvet shirt muddied. An ugly, swelling redness ran from above his temple down to his jaw.

  And a scrap of bloody rag was knotted clumsily around his left hand.

  These are but wilde and whurling words

  TONY LOOKED ON WITHOUT MUCH interest as Roger swabbed the shallow gashes across his palm with antiseptic. “I don’t know,” he said. “I must’ve grabbed at somethin’ sharp as I fell. It doesn’t matter.”

  Alan Collet looked at Tony, sitting on the edge of the rumpled bed, with baffled concern. “What is that supposed to mean? I come by with an offer of transport for the gear Jo says young Roger here has been packing, find one half-packed case, you looking as if you had gone a round with Ali, and ‘It doesn’t matter’? That hand looks as if you had taken hold of a double-edged knife.”

  “I thought I had,” Tony said indistinctly. “But there wasn’t one.”

  “What did happen? Surely there has to be more to it than ‘I must’ve been sleepwalkin’ again.’ Not, I grant you, that there aren’t streets up yonder in Kilburn where you could manage to get yourself roughed up at two or three in the morning.”

  “Not Kilburn.” Tony winced as he straightened the hand for the bandage Roger held ready. “I dreamt—I dreamt I had to go to Fleet Street to ask the porter at the Temple if he knew where Cliffe had gone, where in Essex it was he lived. I thought … it seemed I was set upon. Someone from out a dark doorway, I thought. But when I came round, a police constable was helping me up, and he said there’d been no one, that he’d seen me fall. It took a while convincin’ him that I was capable, but in the end he saw me onto an N94 bus and told the conductor to make sure I didn’t miss the Elgin Avenue stop. And here I am.”

  The question “Who is Cliffe?” sprang to Roger’s tongue, but he bit it back. It didn’t matter. It could not matter. His father had been walking in a dream. And seemed half in it still. Even his speech was strange—not softened, exactly, but … there were the elisions, the dropped Gs…

  “Yes, here you are,” Alan agreed worriedly, his grin more rueful than amused. “And look at you. You’ll need an icebag for that swelling or you’ll be a very lumpy Dane this afternoon indeed. Have you such a thing?”

  “In the bathroom.” Roger fixed the last strip of elastic tape round his father’s hand. “I’ll get it.”

  When he had disappeared, Alan asked, “What ails young Roger? He seems as jumpy as a flea on a griddle. Is there something you’ve not told me?”

  Tony shook his head wearily. “No, nothing. But you know kids. Give them somethin’ they can’t handle and they back away like wild animals. No look-ee, no wor-ry. I reckon he thinks the old man is fallin’ apart and it frightens him. I must say I don’t care for it much myself. I suppose I can thribble through this afternoon…” His voice trailed off uncertainly. “If only I could discover where Cliffe had gone,” he whispered.

  “Cliffe? You mentioned him before. Who is this Cliffe?”

  Tony passed his good hand over his face as if that could clear away the cobwebs of his mind. “I… I don’t know,” he said muzzily. “But I think that when I find him I must kill him. Does that sound mad? I suppose it does.”

  Alan stared. “It certainly does,” he said at last, as steadily as he could manage. “You are going to have to see a doctor, my friend.”

  “I suppose I am,” Tony agreed slowly. “Jo knows one who—” He broke off as Roger came through from the kitchen with a bowl of ice and the ice bag.

  “Jo knows one what?” Roger asked.

  “Knows we’re comin’ down after the matinee,” his father amended, making an effort to concentrate. “But if Alan’s goin’ to run our cases down we won’t have to go through the rig’marole of puttin’ them in the Left Luggage at Waterloo for the afternoon. We might send a box of books or two as well.” He frowned. “When did Jo phone you about the things to go down, Alan?”

  “Not Jo. Jemima.”

  Roger was startled. “Jemmy? But she went back to Cambridge.”

  Alan’s eyes twinkled briefly. “She’s not there now. Not with a lovely puzzle to poke and pry at in Isleworth. It seems that yesterday morning the itch grew so painful that she persuaded her boss to let her begin her holiday a week early, cleared her desk, and was in Isleworth in time to walk in on Jo and Pippa at teatime. She rang about an hour ago to tell me.”

  “That’s great!” Roger exclaimed.

  “Probably wants to make sure we don’t wreck more than we restore,” Tony observed with a glint of humour. “What had she uncovered this mornin’? A servants’ loft up in the rafters?”

  Alan looked at him searchingly, as if he were puzzled by something he could not quite put his finger on. “Nothing. At least not in the house. Seems Jo put your solicitors onto tracing the
property title back through the legal records, and then paid a call on the rector to find out whether there might be anything in the old parish registers.”

  “Do they go back that far?” Roger asked eagerly. “What did she find?”

  “Oh, they go back,” Alan said, almost evasively. “To 1566. It seems there was one entry among the burials that might give a lead to your original householder—something about ‘New House, by the parsonage.’ Jo’s back at it today, trying to see if she can find some other trace. Since the fire in the old church, the registers have been kept in Hounslow Public Library, so she’s there and Jemmy’s across at Syon House trying to charm her way into the manuscript collection to check through their early seventeenth-century local maps and plans. Pippa and the animals are holding down the fort.”

  “All very industrious, aren’t they? And here I sit playin’ prima donna.” Grimacing, Tony pushed himself erect and took the filled ice bag from Roger. “I can at least look through the closet and drawers in here and see what needs packin’, and then you can look out a box or two for the books. There’s that parcel I picked up yesterday, too. Mustn’t forget that.”

  Alan moved to the bedroom doorway. “I wouldn’t bother about the books,” he said with an almost convincing show of now-how-did-I-manage-to-miss-the- obvious. “There won’t be room. I haven’t anything on for this afternoon but an errand or two, so it makes better sense to do them first and run you two and the cases down after the matinee.”

  “In rush-hour traffic? You can’t,” Tony objected. “You’re playin’ tonight.”

  “I’m not on until the middle of the second act. And we can make good time going out Wandsworth way to Upper Richmond Road and then across Twickenham Bridge instead of through the West End. Isleworth isn’t the end of the earth. I’ll be back in good time.”

  Tony, moving after him into the hallway, paused, his face in shadow. “It has proved th’end of my earth,” he murmured.

  Alan looked quickly from Tony to Roger but Roger, his face set and calm, moved on, apparently not having heard. “Right, then,” Alan said with a passable imitation of his usual good cheer. “Why don’t I conjure up three of the famous Collet omelettes while you two are at your packing. I can’t leave the cases in the open car all afternoon, so I’ll drop you and them off at the theatre. O.K.?”

  Tony gave him a wry smile. “Gen’rous of you. And welcome to the nursemaid brigade.”

  After dropping Tony and Roger at the theatre Alan turned the MG north again across Waterloo Bridge, then up Aldwych and Kingsway. He felt a bit uneasy about not sticking to Tony for the afternoon since Roger seemed determined to see nothing odd in his father’s behavior. As for the Hamlet, Tony’s understudy had been alerted—discreetly and just in case—so there was nothing more to be done but hope for the best. As he drove, Alan tried to pin down just what sort of crazy bee it was that he had in his bonnet.

  Tony was clearly in trouble. Of course it might be some private, personal complication and none of his business, but Alan’s instincts said no. The tale Jemima had poured out over the telephone of Pippa’s ghost and the “wall” across the bedroom doorway must have started him off. When you added young Roger’s divination of the old staircase and his more than usually tight and nervous manner—the familiar act of nonchalance had worn painfully thin—it began to sound suspiciously as if the old house really were haunted. Idiotic thought, but there it was. Tony’s sleepwalking had begun in Isleworth. Even more disquieting, to Alan’s way of thinking, were his odd, waking lapses: that search for a non-existent tavern, the uncomfortable rehearsal scene Andy Barron had recounted, and those two astonishing performances that combined Tony’s considerable best with something more formal and vibrant, more disciplined, more alive to the verse as poetry.

  Alan scowled at the red traffic light by Holborn Underground Station. Tony was simply not that brilliant. Yet Monday night’s performance, if it really had topped last night’s, must have been transcendent. “Transcendent.” Frightening word when you came right down to it: a performance that took the best of two worlds and made of it something incredible. The best of two worlds … that was the bee in his bonnet. That faint touch of accent the Guardian critic had commented on had come and gone yesterday afternoon, and had been even stronger in last night’s performance. If it had not seemed obtrusive then, it was because it was consistent and seemed an oddly right and natural part of the blank verse. But this morning? Turning into Great Russell Street, Alan made for the Bloomsbury Square underground parking. Finding an empty place on the street could take a good half hour, and the five-minute walk to the University Library in Senate House was a lot less wearing. No, he thought. This morning that pleasant, softened accent had been distinctly unnerving. An echo of the past.

  On the fourth floor of Senate House, Alan flashed his out-of-date reader’s ticket and breezed past the porter and through the turnstile as if he were still a member of the university with a perfect right to be there. He had taken his English lit degree five years before, but was in and out often enough that the porters on regular duty always remembered him with a friendly nod. Without a current ticket he could not take out books, but it was possible to do some good, uninterrupted reading at one of the tables down among the open shelves. On the second level he found the section he was looking for and collected an armload of books to take to the vacant table by the nearest window: Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, Baldwin’s The Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company; M. C. Bradbrook’s The Rise of the Common Player, T. L. Irons’ two volumes, The King’s Men at the Globe and The Queen’s Children at Blackfriars, F. Halliday’s Shakespeare in His Age, and Kökeritz’s Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. A good afternoon’s-worth of skimming. Choosing a volume at random, he leafed through to the index pages.

  And found what he was looking for.

  On the whole the matinee performance went well enough, but Roger, standing at the rear of the auditorium, found himself increasingly bothered by having to listen so hard. The accent Tony had been using so effectively seemed to have become an obsession. In the final scenes it sounded almost an affectation—a cross between Lord Peter Wimsey’s fashionably-dropped Gs and the flattened vowels of—of Boston, in Massachusetts. The contrast with the other members of the cast began to be marked, though they gallantly followed his lead far enough to soften the effect. The worst moment, however, had come during the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes when twice Tony appropriated lines that belonged to Guildenstern and then drifted into a confusion that a brilliant job of covering by the other actors could barely mask. After the final curtain Roger’s distress was eased a little by overhearing a smartly-dressed woman say to a friend, “We really would have done better to queue for the evening performance. Matinees do have a way of being rather slapdash.” Which was true often enough. Tony said as much himself. Matinee audiences often were less knowledgeable and less responsive, so the temptation was always there to let down, to ease off.

  But it was harder for Roger to deceive himself when the porter at the stage door sent him along to the second dressing-room level to give Alan a hand with Tony and their cases. Alan, cold-creaming off the last of Tony’s stage makeup, said only, “Fetch us a glass of water and a couple of aspirins, will you, Rog? Your dad has a fierce thirst and a fiercer headache. I think the sooner we get him home to Jo the better. Looks to me like the flu coming on.”

  Roger moved numbly to the sink and came back to offer the glass and pills in silence, for the red-rimmed eyes that had met his in the dressing-room mirror might have been a stranger’s. Tony looked more than exhausted: blank, utterly drained.

  “S’all right,” he said vaguely. “Only a touch of th’ague. It’ll pass.” But he was short of breath and when he rose, saying “Han’ me the shirt there on th’ chair,” his outstretched hand shook.

  The trip down to Isleworth, with the cases strapped on the luggage rack and Roger crammed sideways in the jump seat along with the pr
ecious parcel for Jo, was made in silence. Tony felt too rotten for conversation, and no one else cared to say a word. They pulled up in front of the house just before seven and Alan, after a kiss and a hastily carved chicken leg presented by Jemima, was on his way back to town five minutes later, leaving his afternoon’s notes in her hand. “I’ll be back by midnight,” he promised.

  Jemima had been startled. “I didn’t know you meant to join the house party. What’s up?”

  “That’s up.” Alan flicked a finger at the pocket note book in her hand. “Have a look at it after Jo’s tucked Tony in for the night. And keep an eye on young Roger’s reaction. There’s something queer going on, and I have a feeling he’s part of it.”

  I could a tale vnfolde

  THE DRESS HUNG ON ONE OF THE OPEN French doors, fluttering against the green evening like a gorgeous beribboned chiffon butterfly, green and gold, lemon and rose. Jo’s astonished pleasure—shock, even—had roused Tony from his lethargy enough to make him refuse the offer of a brand-new bed and insist on sitting down to dinner. Every time Jo’s eyes strayed to the lovely gown, Tony’s were on her as hungrily as if he had not seen her in weeks. It was not a comfortable meal.

  “Dinner’s wonderful, Jo,” Roger said to break the silence. He attacked a second piece of chicken with enthusiasm. “And the house looks halfway human.” The table was still the yellow door, but now it was supported at a sensible height on two carpenters’ saw horses and covered with a blue and white Welsh linen cloth. They sat on handsome ash folding chairs. Even the bare front room with its four canvas lawn chairs had been given a touch of elegance by a large white paper globe glowing like a soft moon in the centre of the ceiling where an ornately ugly fixture had hung before. And there were beds—so far only mattresses and box-springs set on wheeled frames, but beds. “How did you do so much if you were off poking around churches and libraries?”