Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘You’ve spoken to the police?’

  ‘We had a Sergeant Willoughby here this morning.’

  ‘What are they doing about it?’

  ‘What they can, Meg. There’s not much of a chance.’

  ‘But you got a good look at him? If you saw him again you’d recognise him?’

  ‘I can see him again any time I like, broad as daylight.’

  ‘So you gave your Sergeant Willoughby a good description?’

  ‘Of course I did. I’m not a complete idiot.’

  ‘So they know exactly what he looks like.’

  ‘Not really. I described him, but when he read it back to me it sounded like half the people in London,’ said Alexander, turning Megan’s ring. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  She told him about her exams, and her summer job in the bookshop, and the flat that she and Angela and Helen had rented. With phrases that sounded practised, with gesticulations that seemed too artful, she presented to Alexander the person she had become.

  ‘Still seeing that Liz?’ she asked him, and he said that he was. ‘Happy? she enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied immediately, with certitude. ‘Must be painful,’ she went on, and she lifted her hand towards his swollen eye but did not touch it. She stayed for half an hour more. ‘I have to get the train straight back,’ she explained, and she picked a hair from the pillowcase. ‘I’ve decided I’m going to do teacher training, Eck,’ she said abruptly. ‘It’s time to sort out a career. I’ll be going to Leeds, probably.’ She took her hand from his and looked out of the window. ‘I’ll tell you more next time.’ Simulating tiredness, he closed his eyes and smiled. Megan kissed him fleetingly.

  Two days later Liz returned from holiday. ‘Baby boy,’ she called him, pityingly, when she came into the front room. She stood beside his father, and together they assessed his condition. ‘Fresh air might do him some good,’ she said, turning to his father.

  ‘Indeed it may,’ said his father with a sideways glance.

  ‘All right if I take your son for a walk, Mrs MacIndoe?’ Liz asked.

  ‘Of course, dear. I don’t know why you ask,’ his mother replied, taking up her magazine.

  ‘He hasn’t got the key of the door yet, Mrs MacIndoe. Go through the proper channels and all that.’

  ‘Permission granted,’ his father told her. ‘Come back to eat with us, Liz? Rations served at six-thirty.’

  ‘Don’t forget Megan said she’ll ring after work,’ his mother called when they were in the hall.

  Liz waited until they were walking along the main avenue in the park. ‘Megan will ring after work? Explain, please,’ she said, making him halt by hooking his arm.

  ‘She came to see how I was,’ said Alexander. ‘Dad called her, and she came up for the afternoon. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Liz repeated furiously.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘That’s all? Florence bloody Nightingale, is it?’

  ‘It was good of her, I thought.’

  ‘Doesn’t miss a trick that one, does she? Quick as a rat up a drainpipe. Mop your fevered brow, did she?’

  ‘She’s family, practically,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Like I’m Princess Margaret, practically.’

  ‘No, Liz, she is. We grew up together.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ said Liz. ‘You’ve never grown up.’ She began to walk away. ‘She’s a bit of skirt, Alec. Not little goody-two-shoes. She’s the same as me.’

  ‘Liz,’ said Alexander, weakly.

  ‘Don’t you bloody Liz me.’ She shook her hair as though to shake off a bothersome insect.

  Alexander followed her to the statue of General Wolfe. Sullenly she picked at the shrapnel holes in the base of the monument, and then she turned to face him. ‘But how would you like it?’ she demanded.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ he admitted.

  ‘It’s not fair, Alec.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not,’ she told him. He took a step towards her. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

  He took another step. ‘I’m sorry, Liz. I am,’ he said.

  She put a cool hand on his face and looked at him. ‘It’s like you’ve got a mask on. You can tell what people are like when they’ve got a mask on, because you can only see their eyes.’

  ‘And what am I like?’ he asked.

  Liz stared into his eyes as if peering through a chink in a curtain. ‘You’re a dishonest boy,’ she said.

  ‘I am?’

  ‘You’re not to be trusted.’

  ‘Not so,’ he appealed.

  ‘You’re unfaithful,’ she said, and she kissed him.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you are.’ She kissed him again. ‘You are.’

  19. Edie the WAAF

  The shop became overgrown, its contents rising nearer to the ceiling week by week and narrowing the tracks between the furniture. Alexander’s desk became enclosed within a grotto of coat-stands and stacked dining chairs and standard lamps with fringes of dusty braid. Three pianos formed a cul-de-sac near the door to the back room. Cushions and hat boxes rose like enormous toadstools on top of the two Utility wardrobes. Occasional tables, suitcases, model ships, tapestries, typewriters, irons, kettles, roller skates, games sets and books crammed the windows. To make more room, Alexander was told to dismantle the long display case. A family of armchairs soon took its place, and trays of jewellery and trinkets and timepieces were piled onto the seats and under them.

  ‘Look at this place, Alec. Just look at it,’ he would remember Liz complaining as she smacked the side of the old gramophone. ‘Does anything ever leave this dump?’ With distaste she lifted from the shelves a bundle of bone-handled knives, a set of initialled silver napkin rings, a gravy boat, a set of tortoiseshell hair brushes. She took a pinch of needles from the small steel well by the arm of the gramophone, sprinkled them on the platter’s brown felt mat, and cranked the machine into motion to spin the needles off. ‘Any ideas for tonight?’ she asked, as had become her habit.

  ‘Not yet,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ll have a think,’ she said, disdainfully inspecting a china bust of Wellington. She went into the back room, where she would sit for much of each Saturday afternoon, reading the magazines that Alexander’s mother had discarded. After an hour or so she would emerge to complain that she was bored, or to put a 78 on the gramophone, or stand in the doorway, with her arms folded, as though it were the fault of the people in the street that time was passing so slowly.

  Sometimes he would suggest that she should come back nearer to closing time, but she would always remain with him throughout the afternoon, for a reason that he never suspected until a day on which he went into the back room to find her kneeling on the arm of the settee, her face against the leather-coloured mesh that covered the speaker of the big radio. As if she had not noticed him, she twirled the tuning dial, raising a flutter of voices in different languages. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said airily, and turned the dial one degree, then another, then another, like a safe-breaker. Alexander watched the cursor creep under the serried names on the glass panel above the dial. The small recessed window of green glass in the corner of the radio brightened as a French voice came into focus.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ she replied, and turned up the volume.

  ‘Liz, what’s up?’ he asked. ‘Turn that off, will you? Neither of us can understand it, so what’s the point?’

  ‘It’s educational. And a bit of company.’

  ‘I have to work, Liz.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You have to work. Silly me.’

  ‘I do,’ he protested.

  ‘Work, he calls it,’ Liz muttered to the radio.

  ‘Liz, what’s the matter?’

  As if breaking something out of spite, sh
e switched the radio off. ‘Alec, do you think I got off the last banana boat or something? Think I’m an idiot? Do you?’

  ‘You’ll have to give me a clue, Liz. I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘Look, I’ve been stuck back here for, what, two and a half hours?’

  ‘About that. But you don’t have to sit around if you don’t want to. I’m not forcing you.’

  ‘Not the point I’m making, Alec. I’ve been in here for more than two hours. Quite a few people have been in and out in that time. Half a dozen at least. What are the two things that all of them have in common? Every single person who’s come in through that door, bar none. Go on. Have a go.’ Alexander began inwardly to recount the afternoon, but she interrupted the roll-call of faces. ‘Jesus, Alec, how slow can a boy be? Number one: they’ve all got these,’ she shouted at him, grasping her breasts. ‘Are you following me so far?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Number two: not one of them gets her purse out. I’m right, aren’t I? All women, yes?’

  ‘Now you mention it.’

  ‘And every one of them goes away empty-handed, yes?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘They mooch around for a while and then they bugger off. Having bought not a thing?’

  ‘One way of putting it, I suppose.’

  ‘And what does that tell you? What conclusion do we draw from a procession of women who don’t seem interested in buying anything? Come on, Alec. It’s not a case for Sherlock Holmes.’ The chain of the shop door rattled.

  ‘I’d better go,’ said Alexander.

  ‘I’m not budging from back here, Alec, I’ll tell you that. Turn my back and one of those cows will be in like I don’t know what.’

  When he returned to the back room she was sitting on the floor, her ankles crossed and her knees pulled up to her chin, with an open copy of the Sunday Times colour section balanced on her head, like a sou’wester. ‘Cow gone?’ she enquired.

  ‘Was a male cow. An elderly male cow. Didn’t buy anything.’

  ‘They’re the worst. Can’t get enough of you, the old boys.’ She made a winsome pout for him, and the magazine slipped down her back. ‘I’m sorry, Alec,’ she said. ‘What can I do to make it up to you?’ He crouched beside her and she kissed him vehemently; her fingers freed the buttons of his shirt, quickly, as though shelling peas from a pod.

  She always took her bracelet off and placed it on the mat of flattened cardboard boxes under the settee, as he would recall, and for a time there was a burgundy velvet curtain that served as their bedsheet. On the draining board there sat a TV, a set so decrepit that no picture would appear until, after five minutes, figures like reflections in a pool of dirty oil would begin to emerge. For half an hour or more they would watch it, even though the sound was so muffled it seemed to be coming from another room, and sometimes if it had not been for the sound they would not have known if it was a car chase or a variety show they were watching. ‘So what’ll we do?’ Liz would sooner or later ask, and then they would go dancing in Lewisham or up in Soho, or go to the cinema, or to a pub. They saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s together, and he would remember standing at the bottom of Regent Street, and Liz saying to him: ‘Audrey Hepburn, she your type of girl? Fragile and sweet. That your type?’

  ‘I don’t have a type,’ he told her.

  ‘Rather have Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren, would you? Come on, tell me, Alec. I won’t mind.’

  ‘They’re not real,’ he said, and he tried to take her hand as they waited to cross Piccadilly.

  ‘Audrey Hepburn’s too soppy, isn’t she? Needs a square meal inside her,’ she said, and for a second there was an inertness in her eyes, as if a sense of pointlessness had momentarily overcome her.

  ‘I already said, Liz. I don’t have a type,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Everybody has a type. Be chaos otherwise, wouldn’t it? I’ve got a type.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Same type as most girls. Dark and handsome. Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, Alexander MacIndoe. That type.’ She tucked a hand under his arm and pressed her face to his shoulder. ‘What about your other girlfriends?’ she asked ‘What were they like?’

  ‘What other girlfriends?’

  ‘When you were in the army. Every soldier had a girl. You must have had one. You can tell me now.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Come on. Don’t be shy. You don’t get to kiss like that without practice.’

  So they sat on the grass in Green Park and Alexander told her about the regimental dance before Christmas, when the WAAFs were brought in by bus and everyone got drunk. Two signalmen had a fight over a WAAF officer; the next day they were ordered to load a sack of rice using teaspoons. Alexander ended up with a girl called Edie under the stage while the band – Mick Michaels’ Mad Men – was playing a set of Bill Haley numbers. ‘The drummer knocked his beer over and it was leaking through the boards onto Edie’s neck,’ he lied, and he continued with the tale of Sam Saunders and the WAAF named Edie, taking Sam’s role in the story.

  ‘Bet she still thinks about you,’ said Liz. She glanced at him and her mouth alone smiled.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Alexander, gazing up through a plane tree’s branches at an aeroplane’s condensation trail.

  With a thumb she brushed the skin above his collar, and she kissed his neck. ‘I love you,’ she said, as if she were reminding him of a loan. ‘You’re never going to say you love me, I know. But you like being with me, I know that too.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Always.’

  A cyclist rode past them, he would always remember, and the loose chain-guard made a dismal clank with every turn of the pedals. Alexander looked at Liz’s hands as they lay loosely meshed on her lap. A gust of damp air passed over them, and he knew that they would soon be finished.

  A walk through Greenwich Park, on a Sunday afternoon two months later, was the end. They had walked in silence from the Heath gate to the summit of the steepest path. ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked him, surveying the river from the top of the hill.

  The water shone like crinkled cellophane; over the north of the city, the clouds were thick and white and churned; to the west, the clouds were nothing but scratches on the sky. ‘We are doing something,’ he replied.

  ‘What’s that then?’ she asked.

  ‘What everyone’s doing,’ he explained, gesturing at the whole park.

  ‘Walking and breathing. Bloody hell. The excitement.’

  ‘It’s more than that, Liz. It’s enjoying the day.’

  Liz inspected the park, like a hotel guest dismissing the inferior accommodation she was being asked to accept as a substitute for the room she had booked.

  ‘But it’s wonderful,’ Alexander urged her. ‘All of London laid out. Look there.’ A damburst of sunlight sped down distant Hampstead Heath and coursed over the city’s streets.

  ‘I’m fed up, Alec. I’m going home.’

  ‘OK. I think I’ll stay here for a bit.’

  ‘Suit yourself. I’m going down the George tonight. Jill said she’d be there. You coming?’

  ‘Not this evening.’

  She was standing a pace away from him. Her hands fidgeted on her hips and she looked at him as if he were holding up a picture in front of his face and asking her what she thought of it. ‘Ah well,’ she sighed. Still she looked fixedly at him. ‘That’s not what you mean, is it? You mean not this evening and not any other evening.’ Her expression was one of profound disappointment rather than distress, and when she started crying it was as if for something that had happened a long time ago. ‘See you later,’ she said, walking away.

  ‘See you later,’ Alexander agreed.

  Halfway down the path, Liz stopped and turned. ‘You look great, Alec, but something’s peculiar with you. Sometimes it’s like you’re the oldest boy in London.’ She walked under the canopy of the trees and into the lower part of the
park, and Alexander watched her until she was gone.

  He made no mention of their separation to his mother nor to his father, until the evening, more than a month later, on which his father commented, as an aside, ‘Bachelor again, I take it?’ and Alexander took the laden dinner plates from him and merely nodded in reply. He said nothing to Sam Saunders for several weeks, but he told Sidney Dixon within a few days. He was cleaning the piano keys with a rag and a saucer of milk when he noticed, through the spars of a ladder-back chair, that Sidney was standing in the street, looking gloomily at the things in the window. Alexander walked to the door.

  ‘All right, Sid?’ he asked.

  ‘Right as rain,’ said Sidney, but his gaze did not move from the window. ‘Come on up, when you’ve done the books,’ he added. ‘Let’s have a talk.’

  President Kennedy was talking on the television when Alexander went up to Sidney’s flat. Sidney patted the arm of the vacant chair; without talking, they listened to the President. ‘What do you reckon, Sid?’ Alexander asked when the broadcast was over and Sidney had turned the television off.

  ‘Bound to happen sooner or later. If not Cuba, then Berlin. If not Berlin, somewhere else.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s going to happen?’ asked Alexander, hearing a passing lorry’s growl as the noise of a bomber.

  ‘It won’t go kaput, don’t worry. Your man knows what he’s doing, that’s what I reckon. Russian lads lost too many last time round. They’ll see sense. They’ll back down.’ For a minute, intent as an astrologer reading the light in a crystal ball, Sidney looked at his own image in the cabbage-coloured glass where John F. Kennedy’s face had been. ‘Sold anything this week?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘A few things.’

  ‘Sold anything today?’

  ‘One picture. And a vase.’

  ‘And that’s the lot?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Bad, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not that bad, Sid.’

  ‘No, Alex, it is that bad.’ Clutching Alexander’s arm, he pushed himself out of his chair. ‘You must be bored senseless,’ he said.

  ‘No, Sid. I’m never bored.’

  ‘Admirable. But it’s time for a change, anyhow. That’s what I think.’ In the style of an orator, he raised a crooked forefinger. ‘It’s what I’ve decided, in fact.’ He shuffled to the kitchen and brought back two bottles of brown ale, two glasses and a plastic bag full of magazines. ‘Do the honours,’ he said, handing Alexander the beer and a bottle-opener. From his bag he withdrew the first magazine. ‘Cliff Richard,’ he said, as though the picture on the cover were that of a fugitive criminal. He let the exhibit fall to the floor and then produced the next. ‘Adam Faith.’ He dropped the magazine and extracted the third. ‘Cliff Richard again. And his Shadows.’ He peered at the fourth cover. ‘Chap in a shiny suit. He Billy Fury?’