Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘By all accounts,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘A good-looking and flinty kind of man.’

  ‘I don’t recall him,’ his father told Jane. ‘I was five when he died.’

  Jane half-closed the album, as though by way of expressing condolence. ‘In the war?’ she asked.

  ‘He survived the fighting. It was the flu that killed him,’ explained Alexander’s mother.

  ‘Killed more than the war,’ said his father. ‘Far more. Twenty-five million in all. Thereabouts. He died in the second wave, in 1920. Worst epidemic since the Black Death.’

  ‘I’d no idea,’ Jane apologised.

  ‘That’s all right. Few people have. Flu’s not dramatic enough, I suppose,’ said his father, peering with one eye into the bowl of his pipe. ‘No sense of the heroic, the Biblical. Not nasty enough. Outdone by the Somme,’ he reflected. ‘I don’t know. Died of the flu. Scarcely better than “slipped on the soap”.’

  ‘He was an engineer,’ said Alexander. ‘A steam engine man.’

  ‘Went up to York on a Friday, right as rain,’ his father told her. ‘Came back with an ache and a cough. Dead the following Thursday.’ With a fluting breath he expelled the debris from his pipe.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jane.

  ‘No need, dear. C’est la mort,’ his father responded, with a loose-wristed wave of his hand, like a gallant salute. ‘But thank you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alexander’s mother wistfully. ‘They didn’t have long together, did they? They married late, for those days. This would be 1910, wouldn’t it, Graham?’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘They moved down to London, for his work, soon after they married. Then they had a five-year wait for their son,’ she said to Jane.

  ‘Remission,’ muttered his father from the side of his mouth, and he winked at Alexander as he struck a match.

  Alexander looked down at his grandparents again. Like busts on a tomb they stared out from behind the sandstone-coloured frames, Hamish to his left and Helen to her right, in perfect symmetry, so that their gazes met at a point midway between them, a short distance above the plane of the page, as if to seal their union in death and exclude whoever in the living world regarded them.

  ‘She had a twinkle to her,’ said his mother, brushing a fingertip across the lace of Helen’s blouse, which looked as hard as porcelain, like the substance of Hamish’s collar. She touched the brooch at Helen’s throat, which was as big and as dark as a bar of coal tar soap, and the lips, which were the only part of her face in which Alexander could recognise anything of his father. ‘I think the photographer had told her to stop smiling a second before he pressed the shutter, don’t you?’ she asked Jane, and Jane agreed. ‘I met her only once before we were married. We took the train up to Edinburgh, then a taxi out to her house. She moved back, as soon as Graham left home. To the same street, just a few doors down. I was frogmarched up the garden path, and Graham’s mother opened the door. Before she could say a word, Graham said to her: “Hello Mother, this is Irene. We’re getting married.” And she inspected me for a minute, then she grabbed my hands and laughed, didn’t she?’

  ‘Screamed.’

  ‘Laughed,’ she assured Jane. ‘We had shortbread and sherry in the garden, and she kept her hand on my knee all the time. And when we had to go she said “You’ll do,” and she sort of patted me, didn’t she?’

  ‘On the bottom,’ explained his father, striking a second match.

  ‘She came to our wedding, of course. Played the piano at the reception for us. What was it, Graham?’

  ‘“The Dance of the Blessed Spirits”.’

  ‘That was it. She had a funny way of playing.’

  ‘As if there was a nasty smell emanating from the keyboard,’ said his father, pressing his head into the back of the chair and flaring his nostrils. ‘One of her wee ways.’

  ‘Like open windows.’

  ‘Always had the windows open. Ice Station Zebra, our house in winter. And she didn’t like handling coins and notes with her bare hands. You never know what diseased flesh has fingered them. Thought I was risking my life when I went to work in the bank. All that unwashed currency.’

  ‘She was a character,’ his mother sighed, and her eyes, directed at her husband, became momentarily vacant with the recollection of her.

  ‘What was her name?’ asked Jane. ‘Before she was married?’

  ‘Cruft,’ said his father, batting aside the curls of smoke. ‘Helen Clementine Cruft.’

  ‘What a wonderful name,’ Jane commented, and she blushed.

  Alexander heard the refrigerator shudder and its bottles clink. Unobserved by his parents, he touched the upper arch of Jane’s right ear. ‘Moving on,’ he said, reaching over to turn the page.

  ‘Alexander never met her,’ said his mother, settling a cushion in the small of her back. She craned her neck to see the picture that Jane was now studying, in which Helen and Hamish, out of focus some twenty yards from the camera, grasped the top bar of a fence to balance on a tandem in front of a crag and a stretch of blurry water. ‘Where’s this, Graham?’ she asked. ‘The tandem.’

  ‘Dunsapie Loch. Holyrood Park. Same year, I think.’

  ‘She loved Holyrood. When she was a girl she used to go there every day. Before school in winter, after school in summer. Her favourite story was King Arthur, the once and future king, asleep under his hill. She used to imagine that Arthur’s Seat was the hill he was under, she told me. And she used to imagine herself asleep under the hill.’

  ‘The view from Arthur’s Seat was the most beautiful in the world, she thought,’ said his father. ‘Very romantic city.’

  ‘Cold,’ his mother retaliated, encasing Jane’s arm in her hands.

  ‘Not necessarily a contradiction.’

  ‘Cold and wet.’

  ‘A city of all weathers and for all temperaments. The Old Town for the heart, the New Town for the head.’ With the stem of his pipe his father made crosswise incisions on his chest. ‘When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calton lying in my heart,’ he proclaimed.

  ‘I’ve never been,’ Alexander whispered to Jane, turning the page. ‘They never saw fit to take me.’

  ‘We took you to Scotland once,’ said his mother.

  ‘But not to Edinburgh.’

  ‘No, to –’

  ‘Pitlochry,’ his father interrupted.

  ‘He can’t bear the way I pronounce it,’ his mother confided to Jane.

  ‘When I was twelve,’ said Alexander. ‘For a week.’

  ‘A week of rain and midges. Bitten raw, my arms were.’

  ‘Bitten raw,’ his father mocked.

  ‘They were. Clouds of the things, every evening. Thousands and thousands of them. Horrible little specks. In your hair, in your eyes, in your ears. Everywhere.’

  ‘Tried spraying them with Chanel, to no avail.’

  ‘Never again,’ said his mother, fiddling with the chain that fastened her bracelet and then with the strap of her wrist watch. ‘Anyway, Alexander preferred Cornwall. And we’ve been to Edinburgh a few times, Graham, you and I.’

  ‘We have,’ his father conceded, and received from his wife a tender glance, from which Alexander looked away.

  Alexander turned the page, revealing the photograph of his mother’s father that used to hang in a frame in Nan Burnett’s front room. He started to turn the page again, but Jane stopped him. ‘Wait a second,’ she said, raising a forefinger, almost peremptorily.

  ‘My father,’ said his mother. ‘Stanley. Stanley Burnett. He died before I was born. In the war.’

  ‘Let’s pass on,’ his father said. ‘The poor girl’s had enough death and gloom for one evening.’

  ‘We’re not gloomy, are we, Jane?’ his mother responded, taking a corner of the page. Alexander saw her gaze slide from Jane’s pale hand to her own, and stay for an instant on a varnished nail, as if noticing a flaw in its colour. ‘Alexander, why don’t you make us all some coffee?’
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  He went into the kitchen, and when he returned they were still looking at the photographs. ‘The years of short trousers,’ Jane smiled, holding up a page on which Alexander, wearing shorts and a V-neck jumper and a narrow tie, sat beside Jimmy Murrell on the kerb of a street he did not recognise, and his father stood under a tree in Greenwich Park, frowning at an entangled kite, and his mother slept in a deckchair in the garden, with the fingers of her left hand curled so elegantly on the armrest it looked as if a cocktail glass had been erased from her grasp. Jane studied the page again, as if wanting to make sure that she had memorized each image before proceeding. When she came to the photograph of his parents and the Beckwiths on a boat by Tower Bridge she commented: ‘Now I know what he looks like.’ She pointed to Mr Beckwith, and his father looked at her over the rim of his cup.

  Once or twice a month his mother would invite them for a meal, and sometimes the album would be brought down again, at Jane’s request. Lingering on the portraits of Hamish and Helen, resting her fingertips on the page as she listened, like a medium at a seance, she would ask his father about his mother and their holidays in Edinburgh. His father would lower his newspaper far enough to allow Jane to see his eyes, and recount what he could recall, or what he thought might suffice, in a way that made it seem as if the anecdote were a story rather than a recollection. He told her one evening about visiting the High Kirk of St Giles, with his grandfather, Duncan Manus, on a day so windy that his grandfather’s beard was blown into a shape like a swallow’s tail. Underneath a stained glass window his grandfather put his hands on his shoulders and talked to him about the prophets, whom he described with such familiarity and esteem that thenceforth his grandson had imagined the City of God as a town that was somewhere on the other side of the world, with streets like the streets of Edinburgh, but wider and cleaner and with no horses or automobiles, and with buildings made of stained glass, one of which was a building like a parliament in which the prophets made their speeches. When his grandfather left him to contemplate the Israelites crossing the River Jordan, he passed the time by counting the pieces of glass in the window, which seemed to tremble like a sheet of greaseproof paper in the wind, and when they stepped outside a flock of crows went over Lawnmarket sideways, like black paper bags blown off the rooftops. His hand skittered out from the arm of his chair, the fingers rippling like wind-beaten wings, and it was then, Alexander would remember, that Jane closed the album softly and said: ‘We should go, one day. To Edinburgh.’

  A couple of months later, a week before Jane’s birthday, they travelled to Edinburgh on the sleeper, on a night that was very humid, as he would remember. They lowered the window and lay together in the upper bunk to see the lightning splash the hills and houses to the west. After Jane fell asleep he stayed awake for another hour or more, watching the light of the train as it raced over fields of black grass, through sidings in which the wrecks of old carriages were herded, across empty streets and stations. He slept for no more than an hour, and his tiredness enhanced the evanescent pleasure of emerging from the station into a city that was perfectly strange. Breathing an air that was like the air of no other place, he saw in the hills and buildings varieties of colour he had never seen before. The sound of the morning’s traffic seemed as rich as the sound of an orchestra tuning up. He kissed her, and then she took out the map his father had marked and pointed the way to the guest house. She reversed her signet ring to make a wedding ring of it while he signed the register, a sleight of hand that the receptionist noticed. They were given a room that was barely larger than the train compartment and provided a view not of the castle, as he had been assured it would, but of the glow of the floodlights on the castle, which radiated above the roofs like the nimbus of another moon.

  As soon as they had unpacked they went to the Royal Mile. He bought her a pair of earrings from a shop on Lawnmarket, where they were served by an obsequious and breathless young man who had shaved so hurriedly that he had left sooty tufts of whisker under each nostril. In the High Kirk of St Giles they gazed up at the prophets and the River Jordan. ‘Is it what you expected?’ Jane asked him, and Alexander could not recall what he had expected, because he was thinking not about the building but about his father, whose own father had died so early. It wasn’t quite, he replied; nothing ever was what you imagined it would be. She gave him a sceptical look, which she cancelled as she took his hand. They had lunch on Canongate and in the afternoon they visited the castle, where, as they surveyed the city from the Argyle Battery, an American man asked them if they were on their honeymoon. He looked at them through lenses so thick his eyes were like olive stones in the bottom of flesh-coloured cups. That was right, Jane said, reaching for Alexander’s hand behind his back. They were spending the weekend in Edinburgh, and then they were going on to Pitlochry, she said, and her fingers caressed Alexander’s as she spoke.

  The next morning, having been roused at ten o’clock by Mrs Donaghy, who told them loudly, from the other side of the bedroom door, that they were now too late for breakfast, they took a bus to Mayfield, to find the houses in which his grandmother had lived. Following the map, Jane eagerly led Alexander up the street, as if she were hurrying to see a place that she was thinking of buying. ‘This is the one,’ she said, at a drab little house behind a privet hedge. ‘This is where she lived until she married.’ Alexander looked at the slug-shaped scars that had been left on the bricks by a web of ivy; he looked at the lank green nylon curtains in the upstairs windows, and all he felt was a redundant compassion for his father, like an echo of the emotion he had felt in the church. Jane gazed at the building, as if it were a screen and she was waiting for something to appear on it. ‘Her room must have been at the back,’ she observed, pointing at the hill that rose over the roof. Alexander agreed, and continued down the street. The house in which his grandmother had died was fifty yards away. It was now a guest house. Where there had once been a garden there was now an area of concrete paving, on which three cars were parked. ‘This is disappointing,’ she said. ‘But I want to go on. You don’t mind, do you? It’s your roots, after all.’

  They walked to the cemetery in which Helen was buried, and Alexander would always remember Jane striding between the rows of gravestones, as if the grave of his grandmother were something immensely precious that she had mislaid. ‘Over here,’ she called at last, beckoning him. On a low white stone was inscribed: ‘To the memory of Helen Clementine MacIndoe, née Cruft, b. 1880, d. 1941’, and underneath, carved in a fluid and uneven script, like letters scraped quickly into soft clay, ‘All My Appointed Time Will I Wait, Till My Change Come.’ Jane crouched by the stone, with one hand resting on its upper face; Alexander read the words again, and wandered away, towards the perimeter wall.

  He sat on the ground with his back against the wall, by an overspill of buddleia. The name of Eliza, the beloved wife of George McFarlane, was spelled in grey lead letters on one of the four bars of marble that enclosed her burial plot, a rectangle of coarse grass on which plantains and mint and daisies sprouted. Next to her, a slab of stone that had become as dull as cardboard recorded the deaths of Lieut. Gordon Petrie, R.N., who crossed the bar 3rd Feb 1914, and Charles, youngest son of the above, died in action in France, 14th August 1917, aged 22 years. Behind them lay Richard Guise Davidson, who ceased not to preach Jesus Christ and was called suddenly to rest in a year that was lost under moss. Alexander breathed the honeyed air beneath the buddleia and recited the words that his father must have ordered to be carved for Helen Clementine, who was alive in the memory of his father, as she was alive in the memory of the unknown people in this city who had known her and could remember her, just as, perhaps, Eliza McFarlane and Gordon Petrie and his son were still alive, and Hamish MacIndoe was still alive, though he was dead to his son.

  Jane contemplated the stone for a minute more and came over to Alexander. She put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Does this upset you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.
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  ‘I would have liked her,’ she said, stroking his neck. ‘I know I would.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Shall we go up the hill?’ she suggested, and they walked from the cemetery to Dunsapie Loch, where Jane asked a hiker to take a picture of them, near to the spot where Helen and Hamish had been photographed with their tandem. They went on to the summit of Arthur’s Seat. Sitting cross-legged on the grass, Jane watched the sunlight bloom and shrink on the roofs of the city. She closed her eyes for a second, and her face was as beautiful as it was when she listened to music and it was as though he was not in the room. ‘Your father was right,’ Jane said, opening her eyes narrowly, as if wavering on the edge of sleep. ‘And Helen Clementine was right.’ She put her arms around his waist. The sea flashed in the distance, under a flotilla of speeding clouds, and Alexander looked down the hill and recalled the ride to Kinloch Rannoch from Pitlochry, along the shore of Loch Tummel, in the cold bus that smelled of mud inside and had no padding on the seats. The rain had made the lake look like a field sprouting short black shoots, and the dripping leaves beside the road were as vibrant as wet green ink, and when he had pulled the narrow window back he could hear a sound like thousands of tiny cogs within the trees. Something broke through the surface of the water, like a portion of the tread of a spinning tyre. It was an otter, the driver had said, without looking. They had passed a boat that was gliding very close to the shore, with a man in a sou’wester standing in it, immobile, watching the bus go by. And he remembered from that week two fragments that he would still remember in the last years of his life: a bright red hosepipe, leaking water from its new brass nozzle onto the sunlit gritty tarmac of a railway platform; and striding with his father up to the Pass of Killiecrankie, where the wind battered the heather and the parting clouds spread a blush over the hills, and his father lowered his head, as if he were thinking about a difficult question, and Alexander kept quiet and stayed a couple of paces back, like the cabin boy standing behind Nelson in the picture in one of his books at home, until his father said his name and they walked down the springy path towards the tiny figure in the white hat, who was his mother.