Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Exactly. Neither of us is sure it’d be a good idea, so we decided no.’

  ‘Why? Because she’s so up and down?’ said his mother, using the very words Megan herself had once used.

  ‘No, Mother. A lot of reasons. Our age—’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Mother, we’ve had this conversation,’ said Alexander, stepping out of the room.

  From the living room his father called: ‘All systems go.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll change her mind,’ said his mother.

  ‘Perhaps we will, Mother. If we do, you’ll be the first to know. But we’re not getting any younger, so don’t set your heart on it.’

  ‘A pity, Alexander,’ she mourned, turning off the light, and she nudged him to go ahead of her. ‘There should be more MacIndoes.’

  After half an hour of the film Megan arrived; she kissed Alexander’s mother and simply made a balancing gesture when Alexander asked how the meeting had gone. ‘Only just begun,’ said his father, sitting beside Megan on the settee. ‘Can’t have Megan missing the opening. Nobody minds if we go back to the beginning, do they?’ he asked, having already started the rewind. He laughed at each scene as if he had never seen it before, and Megan found hilarious everything that he found hilarious. Together they rocked backwards and forwards in their seats, while Alexander’s mother watched the antics of the Marx brothers with little more amusement than Margaret Dumont. There was a moment when his father laughed so much that he had to take off his glasses and hand them to Megan so he could dab his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to Alexander, who had stopped the tape so that he could recover. He laughed again, and his laughter tripped Megan’s laughter. ‘How childish of me,’ he apologised to his wife, who shook her head, resigned to her incomprehension. ‘Let us resume,’ he said, controlling himself, and he put out a hand, palm upwards, over Megan’s lap, and Megan, straight-faced, slapped his glasses into it, like a nurse giving an instrument to a surgeon.

  And that Friday, when Alexander returned home, Megan came out of her room when she heard the door and led him into the kitchen, where tubs of food from the Italian delicatessen were piled on top of a box containing a VHS recorder. ‘We’re always moaning that there’s nothing decent on at the cinema,’ she explained. ‘And I felt like splashing out on something.’ From the fridge she took a bottle of prosecco. ‘He’s staying. Courtney. He’s staying on. His mother has prevailed, God knows how.’ She took the bottle and the food out into the garden, where they put the bottle in the little pool that Alexander had created, and spread the dishes on the circle of short grass in the middle of his enclave of wild flowers. They drank to the career of Courtney Wilson, who would leave the school before the end of the year to work for his father, then resume his studies at a sixth-form college, and eventually become a draughtsman for a firm of civil engineers in a town ten miles or so from the city in which his father had met his mother.

  It was a pleasant evening, and they stayed in the garden until they could feel the dampness in the grass. Megan brought a book out, but put it aside after only a few minutes; Alexander uprooted some weeds here and there, then sat down next to her. He plucked a poppy bud, he would remember, and put a thumbnail into the red crack in its side, to break it open. As Megan watched, he unfolded the flower meticulously, then held it up to the sunlight, above her face. She took it from him and turned it against the light. When she lay down, Alexander dropped a poppy over each eye. Poppies were the most beautiful flowers, she said. The petals were like a skin of supple scarlet glass. ‘Looking at the world through poppy-tinted glasses,’ he would remember her saying, as she lay with her hand touching the water and the poppies on her eyes, and then she whispered, still smiling: ‘She’s a dragon sometimes, isn’t she, your mother?’ He held her hand as he gazed through the flowers, and soon afterwards they went inside, and listened to a record, and went to bed early.

  38. The Greta

  ‘It’s your friend. He’s gone mad,’ said Megan, dangling the phone over the back of the chair, and Alexander heard a tiny voice singing in the earpiece as it turned. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she replied to his look as he took the phone.

  Alexander listened for a moment, as ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ became, mid-phrase, a strenuous and tuneless hum. ‘Desist,’ he instructed.

  ‘And a very good evening to you, Mr MacIndoe,’ said Sam, in a compère’s croon. ‘How are you this evening?’

  ‘I am well, thank you,’ Alexander bantered. ‘And how are you?’

  ‘I am exceedingly well.’

  ‘It gives me great pleasure to hear that.’

  ‘Did you, by any chance, happen to catch the end of Grandstand?’

  ‘Now why would I be watching Grandstand?’

  ‘You never know.’

  ‘No, I did not catch the end of Grandstand.’

  ‘So you would be unaware that the entire civilised world is, as we speak, engulfed in controversy? That a travesty of justice occurred in the last minute of one of the season’s crucial games? That the result of said game was decided by a goal scored by a player standing in excess of the regulation mile offside, as was clear to everyone in the ground except the ref and his linesman?’

  ‘Passed me by, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, I recommend you watch it on the box tonight, and while you’re watching it you can think of me and the wife, because that goal made it a one-all draw, and that one-all draw means that my boat’s come in, after twenty-odd years. What it means is that those columns of little crosses you and me filled in, after a lot of pints, as I recall, in the Crown and Anchor – those columns of pretty little crosses, that I’ve stuck to through thick and thin, have brought me a nice little packet. I’ve struck lucky at last.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Not the jackpot, I shouldn’t think. We’re not looking at a Rolls, or anything like that. We won’t be retiring to the Costa del Sol. But a nice little packet, all the same. A proper holiday, a few things for the house.’

  Alexander heard Liz in the background, muttering, before she called out: ‘Ask him how much he’s spent over the years.’

  ‘I’m ahead of the game, Mac.’

  ‘About two quid ahead,’ Liz heckled.

  ‘Well ahead,’ Sam stressed. ‘So what are you two doing next weekend? I thought we’d have a little party over here, on Saturday. We’ll pack the kids off to the grandparents, get in a crate of fizz. You on?’

  ‘All right for a drink with himself and Liz, a week from today?’ Alexander asked Megan. ‘Champagne on the house. A windfall.’

  Megan sat on the floor, reading the cinema listings. ‘Sure,’ she replied, turning the page.

  When Alexander and Megan arrived at the house Sam and Liz were standing on the drive, beside a black BMW. Walking down one side of the car, Richard Ellis was peering through the windows the way a child might look into a tank in a reptile house, uncertain whether anything lived there. A younger man, whom Alexander had never seen before, braced his hands on the nearside wing and stooped under the raised bonnet. Watching the two men, with her arms crossed, Maureen was talking to a tiny young woman whose stature and tense demeanour and tousled dark hair reminded Alexander instantly of Edith Piaf.

  ‘What do you think, Mac?’ Sam called out, wiping a fingertip along the edge of the roof, as if testing the sharpness of a blade. ‘One previous owner. Under twenty thousand on the clock. Full service history. Could eat your dinner off the engine.’ He patted the shoulder of the younger man. ‘My protégé, Matthew Stimpson,’ said Sam, ‘and Anne, his charming wife.’ Anne glanced at them, fingering the zip of her black denim jacket, and gave a nervous nod. Before shaking hands, Matthew threw his cigarette into the road, with the deliberate action of a man aiming a dart; his new white shirt still had a square of creases on the chest. Richard, now in the driver’s seat, wound down the window to say hello. ‘Shall we crack open the bubbly?’ suggested Sam after they had chatted for a couple of minutes. Hol
ding the front door open, Matthew brushed a piece of ash from his new blue jeans. Richard aimed a playful blow at his midriff as he passed; Matthew flinched, and gave Megan a wearied look.

  There was a stack of holiday brochures on the table at the foot of the stairs, and in the living room the standard lamp had been moved from its place by the window, which now was taken by a tall black loudspeaker, perched on a pedestal of black steel. The other speaker had displaced the small table on which had stood the florid majolica vase that Alexander had bought for Liz from Sid Dixon’s shop after she had said that she liked it. A record was spinning under the smoked plastic lid, which was raised an inch or two, revealing the gleaming bevel of the turntable.

  Sam brought two bottles of champagne from the kitchen. ‘Here’s to the most outrageous decision of the season,’ he said, lifting his glass.

  ‘To the blind man with the flag,’ Richard responded. ‘And to Mr Saunders, our generous host.’

  ‘To Mr Saunders,’ they all repeated.

  ‘You’ve got to hear this,’ Sam told them, going over to the stereo.

  ‘Sam,’ said Liz.

  ‘A second, I promise. It’s special,’ said Sam, lowering the arm onto the record. From the speakers came a splintering noise, like a piece of heavy furniture being dragged on ice, and then an explosion like a bursting balloon. ‘Listen,’ Sam urged them, as fingers squealed on the strings of an acoustic guitar. Between two notes they heard the sound of a ring-pull coming off a can. ‘Hear that? Isn’t that what hi-fi’s all about? The drummer having a beer. Listen carefully and you’ll hear him light a fag in a minute.’

  ‘We can have that treat later, love,’ said Liz. ‘Come and sit down.’

  While Sam searched his record collection, Anne and Maureen were looking at the pictures on the mantelpiece. ‘Your children?’ asked Anne, touching the portrait of Robert and Clare. ‘And is that you?’ she asked Alexander, holding the photograph of Sam and Liz and their guests on the steps of Woolwich Town Hall.

  ‘The Swinging Sixties,’ Sam scoffed. ‘Never guess it, would you? Looks like we’ve all been freshly stuffed half an hour before. Check out the mother of the bride. Got a small dead animal stuck down her front, by the look on her face.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Anne, giving the photograph a sentimental smile.

  ‘We’ve known each other a long time,’ Liz explained. ‘Megan and me were at school together. I went out with Alexander for a while, before I married Sam. And Sam was in the army with Alexander before I was going out with Alexander.’

  ‘But Megan was there first,’ Sam added. ‘She’s known himself since she was so high,’ he said, smacking the top of the television. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Since I was five,’ Alexander confirmed.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said Anne, with a quick, timorous smile for Megan.

  ‘A good story,’ Matthew agreed, but he regarded Megan, when she looked away, as if there were something about her appearance that he could not reconcile with what Liz had told them.

  ‘But it took a long while,’ Liz continued. ‘For them to get together, I mean.’

  ‘Years and years and years,’ Sam groaned. ‘Thank Christ, we said, when we found out, didn’t we? We couldn’t have stood the suspense any longer.’

  ‘Thank you, Sam,’ Megan interrupted.

  ‘Thought they were never going to get round to it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Sam held up a Simon and Garfunkel album for their approval. ‘OK if it’s quiet,’ said Richard, making a queasy face.

  ‘Very quiet. So we can’t hear it,’ said Alexander, and Sam defeatedly put the record back into its place on the shelf and sat on the floor beside the television.

  ‘So,’ Matthew resumed, turning again to Megan, ‘do you live near here as well?’ Sam cackled at the question, and hid behind his glass. ‘What did I say?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘They live in Blackheath,’ said Liz, in the tone of someone defending a friend out of loyalty rather than from conviction.

  ‘Blackheath’s nice,’ Anne commented.

  ‘Visit us once a year. With a string of garlic and a crucifix,’ Sam told Matthew plainly. ‘They think Croydon’s the city of the unburied dead.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s nice,’ declared Maureen, nodding at Anne as if to secure her support. ‘Very convenient for the city, but not in the thick of it. And good shops too.’

  ‘And a tip-top cemetery,’ said Sam.

  ‘We live on the edge of Blackheath,’ Megan told Matthew. ‘We’re from there. Alexander works there. We like it.’

  ‘And hate Croydon.’

  ‘No, Sam. But prefer where we are. You prefer here, we prefer there.’

  ‘It’s where you belong,’ said Anne, making Megan’s meaning explicit for everyone.

  ‘It’s where we want to be,’ said Megan.

  ‘How nice,’ said Matthew. ‘We live in Forest Hill.’

  ‘A friend found us a flat there. We thought it sounded attractive,’ Anne explained.

  ‘Sort of foresty,’ Matthew laughed. ‘Trees. Open spaces. That kind of thing.’

  ‘We’ll move out one day, before too long,’ Anne insisted, taking Matthew’s hand as if making him join in her promise.

  ‘We came down from Durham,’ Matthew told Megan.

  ‘And given half a chance he’d go back,’ said Sam, aghast at the perversity of the notion.

  ‘To live by the Greta is all I desire,’ Matthew declaimed, as if ironically quoting a poet.

  ‘The Greta? What Greta? Greta Garbo?’ asked Richard.

  ‘It’s a river,’ said Megan.

  ‘My family’s from Bishop Auckland,’ Matthew told her.

  ‘Lot of history there,’ Richard commented.

  ‘There is.’

  ‘Once a fine team. Very snazzy strip as well.’

  ‘Dark blue and light blue halves?’ Sam proposed.

  ‘I do believe you’re right,’ said Richard, impressed by Sam’s knowledge.

  ‘Before my time,’ Matthew regretted.

  ‘I went to Bishop Auckland once,’ Megan said to Anne. ‘The castle,’ she recalled, ‘and the chapel, and the park with the deer house.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Anne concurred.

  ‘How come you were there?’ asked Richard.

  ‘I lived in Leeds, and one day I saw a picture in the gallery. Of Brignall Banks, by John Sell Cotman? You know him?’

  ‘Never heard of the lad,’ said Richard.

  ‘Afraid not,’ said Matthew.

  ‘A gorgeous picture. A wonderful atmosphere to it. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and it made me want to go there, so I did. It rained every day I was there, three or four hours at a stretch, every day for half a week of walking. But it was wonderful. So beautiful.’

  ‘I swam in the Greta, when I was a kid,’ said Matthew, stroking his handsome narrow nose as he looked at Megan. ‘And in the really hot summer, seventy-six, I went skinny-dipping with a girlfriend.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ Anne protested.

  ‘Best thing there is,’ said Sam, giving Liz a salacious smirk.

  ‘Did you go to Hell Cauldron?’ asked Matthew, moving his glass a couple of inches aside on the coffee table, as if he were moving a chess piece, and for ten minutes or more he and Megan talked about the Scotchman’s Stone and the Greta Bridge and Hell Cauldron. As they talked a sadness bled into Alexander’s mind, not because Megan was reciprocating Matthew’s flirtation, nor because it was a visit with Mitchell that she was recalling with such pleasure, but because, as he watched her talking and gesticulating to invoke the landscape of the Greta, it struck Alexander, more forcefully than before, and memorably, that episodes such as this, in which Megan was seized by an enthusiasm that was almost as intense as those of her childhood, were now infrequent and remarkable. And he would remember that the conversation turned to the subject of what else Sam would be doing with the money he had won, and Sam said that he had thought of taking
Liz to Paris, at which Anne said that she had always wanted to go there but Matthew didn’t think that a holiday in a city was a holiday at all, and Megan edged forward in her seat and confided: ‘Make him go, Anne. You’ll have a fantastic time. We had a great week, didn’t we, Eck? I tell you, a walk around Notre Dame at night. The shadows on the old stone, and the perfume the stone gives off, after a hot day. It’s magical. And all the lights on the water.’ Alexander joined her in describing the things they had seen together, and she smiled at him as he spoke, but when they had finished with Paris, and Maureen and Liz were taking it in turns to recommend the Algarve, Alexander glanced at Megan as she reached for her glass, and he knew by the way she looked at her own hand as it closed slowly on the stem that for her that week in Paris belonged to a receding past, whereas for him the memory of it was a quality of the present, of himself and of Megan as she was. She sipped her champagne quickly and lightly, as if she were trying not to be observed, and he became suddenly aware of the emptiness that was in the room, of how little space was occupied by their bodies and by the things the room contained. Having taken out another album, Sam insisted that they had to hear Alexander doing Lou Reed’s voice. Megan looked at Alexander pleadingly and shook her head, he would remember, and then the doorbell rang as more of Sam’s colleagues arrived.

  When Alexander and Megan left, Sam came with them to the door. ‘Come and have a spin some time,’ he said on the doorstep, pointing a half-full glass in the direction of his car. He looked up at the sky and scowled at the encroaching clouds. ‘Better get it in the garage,’ he decided, scraping the keys from a pocket.

  ‘You’re pissed, Sam,’ said Megan from the end of the drive. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘Good advice. The voice of reason. I’ll leave it. What do you think? It’s only ten feet. Can’t make a bollocks of that.’

  ‘Yes you can. Leave it,’ said Alexander.

  ‘I’ll leave it.’

  ‘Bye, Sam,’ Megan sang.

  Sam winked at Alexander; inside the house a saxophone blared, and Liz shrieked. ‘Be gone,’ Sam ordered, losing some of his drink as he raised his hand.