Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘The same old drudgery from day to day,’ he replied cheerily. She opened one eye and regarded him critically. ‘No news,’ he confessed with a smile. Sitting on the floor, having matched each plug to its socket, he looked around, at the things his mother had kept and brought to this barren room: the vase that used to stand on the mantelpiece, the clock that used to be in his parents’ room, the square of lace that Nan Burnett had made when she was a girl. He looked at his mother, and then he thought of something he could do. ‘It’s your birthday soon,’ he said.

  ‘Not that soon,’ she said.

  ‘Soon enough. I’m taking you out, for a birthday meal. In advance.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Alexander?’

  ‘I shall brook no argument,’ he said. ‘Sam recommended a place, a new restaurant in Blackheath. You like fish still?’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Eight o’clock?’

  ‘Alexander –’

  ‘Is seven-thirty better? May I use the phone?’

  ‘Alexander,’ she said again, but more to register her surprise than to protest.

  The restaurant was in a converted factory, two streets from where his mother had worked in the later years of the war. At the entrance their coats were taken and hung in what had been a goods lift, and then they were led up a staircase like a fire escape to the dining room, where the floor was waxed oak, like a ballroom. They were shown to a table underneath the slim steel railing of the mezzanine. Silver-painted pipes and ducts traversed the ceiling, running parallel to deep black girders with rivets the size of tennis balls. On the opposite wall hung a large circular clock with roman numerals and spear-shaped hands, of the sort that used to be found in railway stations. At an adjacent table a young man and a young woman were each talking into a phone. Alexander saw his mother glance uneasily at them. ‘I’m the oldest person here,’ she remarked. ‘I’m the oldest person who’s ever been here.’

  ‘And I’m the second oldest.’

  ‘They’ll refuse to serve me,’ she said, but she was shifting excitedly in her chair, and when the black-clad waiter slotted a menu into her hands and enquired if she would like a drink before her meal, she asked without any hesitation for a dry Martini and made scandalised eyes at Alexander. She uttered quiet exclamations of disbelief as she scanned the menu, which she moved back and forth, as though her incredulity were making it difficult to read. ‘Are you sure about this, Alexander?’ she asked. ‘It’s a lot of money for fish and chips,’ she said, before ordering the grilled ribeye with sauce Béarnaise and potatoes. When her dish arrived she prodded it, tentatively, with the tip of her knife.

  ‘Don’t play with your food, Mother,’ Alexander chastised her. ‘I won’t bring you again if you don’t behave.’ She detached a flake of flesh and raised it cautiously to her mouth. ‘Is it good?’

  ‘Nothing tastes as good as it used to.’

  ‘Same with me, dear. But we’re not going to send it back because our tongues are clapped out, are we? Does it taste good, all things considered?’

  ‘It does. But it’s very expensive.’

  ‘Good grief,’ he growled. ‘Stop fretting, Mother. Just enjoy it. The present hour alone is man’s.’

  She swallowed her water with a gulp. ‘The what?’

  ‘The present hour alone is man’s,’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s rather deep, Alexander,’ she commented, frowning at him accusingly.

  ‘It’s not me, that’s why. Dr Johnson.’

  She took another piece of fish and nodded as she tasted it, as if the taste were an interesting idea. ‘And since when have you been reading Dr Johnson?’

  ‘I haven’t. It’s a titbit from Roderick. He found it. From a poem Dr Johnson wrote.’

  ‘And why did Roderick imagine this might interest you?’

  ‘Because, Mama,’ he joked, ‘it was written in Greenwich Park, and the poem’s called “Irene”. That’s why.’

  She looked at him and patted his hand. ‘A strange boy,’ she said, but she smiled as if she had been flattered. And at the end of the meal she took his hand again and said: ‘That was marvellous, Alexander. Dreadfully expensive, but marvellous. Thank you.’ She made him lower his head so she could kiss him on the forehead, and as they left the restaurant she hooked her arm under his and rested her hand on his forearm, as she used to do with Mrs Beckwith, he remembered, when they walked through the park.

  ‘Goodnight, madam,’ said the man at the door. ‘Goodnight, sir.’

  ‘Goodnight to you,’ she said, and she glanced at Alexander, copying the man’s supercilious smirk.

  On the way back she asked him to drive past the old house. The front garden was now an expanse of gravel, with a single Japanese maple in a vast half-barrel in its centre. White cloth blinds hung in all the windows. A spotlight illuminated a new white door. They looked at each other but said nothing. His mother gazed at the house again, as if it were the grave of someone she could no longer remember precisely. ‘That’ll do,’ she said, and they drove away.

  Alexander made a pot of tea and they listened to records for an hour. They listened to the Ella Fitzgerald album he had bought when she moved into the flat, and to Frank Sinatra and Lena Home and Nat King Cole. They recalled the afternoons when she would come into his shop to listen to the new releases, and together they sang part of some of the songs she had liked. Around midnight she fell asleep, and when she awoke Alexander put his jacket on.

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘The dutiful son.’

  ‘Not a duty, Mother. A pleasure.’

  In front of the hallway mirror she embraced him. ‘Look at that,’ she said, turning his face towards her reflection. ‘And look at you. You’ll be an old man soon.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Alexander. ‘Goodnight. Lock up.’

  The metal cowls of the streetlamps were chattering in the wind, he would remember, and plastic bags and scraps of paper were swirling in the amber light of the cul-de-sac. He would remember stopping the car and opening the window to hear the wind in the trees of Greenwich Park. The foliage surged like a wave on a night sea. It was nearly two o’clock. At some moment between then and nine o’clock, when Mrs Bingham called to see her, his mother died.

  51. Be like the dead

  As his secretary held the door open Mr Tully looked up from the four perfectly parallel piles of documents that were on his desk. ‘Mr MacIndoe,’ the secretary announced, her voice softened by sympathy for the client, or perhaps for her employer.

  Placing his left hand on one pile and his right hand on another, Mr Tully pushed himself up like a tired swimmer from a pool. ‘Mr MacIndoe. Gavin Tully,’ he said, giving Alexander a grimacing smile that seemed to acknowledge a shared misfortune. Mr Tully wore a three-piece suit of the same tone of brown as his desk, and horn-rimmed glasses of the type Alexander’s father had worn thirty years ago. Finely combed and oiled, and divided by a lard-white parting, his hair resembled the open pages of a book of black paper. He was about forty years of age, but it was as if he were impersonating a man of sixty. ‘Tea, coffee?’ he enquired, in a voice that was almost fey. Alexander declined. ‘Thank you, Veronica,’ said Mr Tully, and the secretary left them alone, closing the door as gently as a mother leaving her infant to sleep.

  Mr Tully motioned Alexander towards the armchair that faced his desk; the leather quilting wheezed as Alexander sat on it. After giving two sharp pulls to the hem of his waistcoat and adjusting the cuff of each shirtsleeve so that slivers of identical width were on show, Mr Tully brought his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. In the warmest terms he recalled Alexander’s mother, and his father, and then, grazing his lips with his praying hands, Mr Tully regarded the papers. ‘Yes,’ he mused, prolonging the vowel equivocally. Arched as if to play a chord, a hand sprang across the papers, touching each stack.

  ‘Which brings us to the complications,’ said Alexander.

 
‘Yes,’ said Mr Tully. ‘Yes, it does.’ His gaze travelled across the bookshelves behind Alexander and seemed to see the subject of their discussion looming there.

  ‘You said that there are things that are not as they should be.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Tully agreed. ‘Yes, that is the case, I regret to say.’ He drew a long breath and leaned forward, supporting his chin on his thumbs. ‘Some of your father’s investments hit a patch of rough water in the eighties,’ he went on, like a detective establishing the facts of the case before revealing his thoughts. ‘This you know, of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alexander replied.

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Mr Tully. ‘It could have happened to anybody. Such things happen to a lot of people, of course. It’s all a gamble. You never know.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And some sectors of the portfolio your father had assembled did not fare particularly well afterwards. After his death. There was a degree of underperformance.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘It’s a salutary tale, that someone with your father’s experience, his expertise, should have sustained such significant losses.’

  ‘It is,’ Alexander consented.

  ‘It is,’ said Mr Tully. He eased back into his chair and a look of extreme solemnity came into his eyes, as though he were a physician who could no longer delay imparting his fatal diagnosis. ‘It is apparent, Mr MacIndoe, that your mother, after your father’s decease, made a number of decisions that proved to be detrimental, highly detrimental, to her interests, and now, of course, regrettably, to yours. Some of these reversals can be attributed to bad luck, as I say. Very bad luck.’ He took a letter from the top of one pile and laid it on Alexander’s side of the desk, pinning it with a forefinger that was pressed onto the rubric of Lloyds of London. ‘The insurance market is a perilous enterprise, by its very nature, and perhaps your mother was not properly apprised of the risks of this venture before making her commitment to it.’ Mr Tully plucked the letter away, as if to remove a noxious object from under Alexander’s nose. ‘I should advise you, Mr MacIndoe, that there are liabilities here that will consume a substantial portion of your mother’s estate. A substantial portion,’ he repeated, and his eyes tightened with empathetic grief. ‘What we should discuss at some point, Mr MacIndoe, perhaps now, is the quite extraordinarily bad advice that your mother was consistently given by Mr –’ he lifted a dozen pages as if raising a stone that might be covering something repellent – ‘Ibbotson,’ he read. ‘The Barlow Clowes affair,’ he continued, letting the pages fall. ‘A calamity, as you know. Perhaps another mistake on Mr Ibbotson’s part. We all make mistakes. But what I suspect is becoming apparent, Mr MacIndoe, is that we may be looking at a case of something rather worse than incompetence. Your mother’s affairs are somewhat entangled. We have a not inconsiderable amount of work still to do. Certain anomalies, however, have come to light. Let me explain.’ Mr Tully took hold of a tranche of papers and carried it round to Alexander.

  Having heard the lengthy explanation, Alexander agreed that Mr Tully should proceed in the way he had outlined, and thanked him for his efforts, and left the solicitors’ offices having in no way betrayed his bewilderment. Of neither his father’s misfortunes nor his mother’s had he known anything. Walking home, he recalled conversations with his parents, searching for clues that he had missed, but could find none that were not clues solely in retrospect. That evening he went into the room in which he had stored the things he had saved from his mother’s flat, and for an hour or more he sat amid the cases, raising memories that brought no resolution. There could be no resolution, he knew. He could never know why his mother and father had both kept him in ignorance of things that Mr Tully had reasonably assumed he had known, yet as he turned the pages of the photograph albums and was struck again and again by the gaze of his parents, he felt that he had failed them. Often, in the succeeding weeks, a confusion of guilt and incomprehension would seep into his mind when he was in the flat, like an emanation of the room. From this period of his life he would remember nothing of any substance, except for the day that he would come to see as the day his life again began to change.

  It was the fourth time he had driven down to Lewes to stay with Roderick and Cornelia since the birth of Maximilian. Roderick opened the door and handed the boy to him straight away, as though passing a parcel to a courier who was late. ‘He’s been on tenterhooks,’ said Roderick, stroking the cheek of the somnolent baby. A skim of pink plaster was drying on the walls of the hall and a carpet of polythene sheets extended back to the kitchen, where Cornelia was filling the washing machine. ‘Come in,’ said Roderick, pushing the door shut before Alexander was clear of it. ‘Come and see this. A mighty acquisition.’ Alexander waved to Cornelia and followed Roderick into the front room, where a tea-chest stood amid tussocks of straw and shredded paper. ‘An entire set of Pevsner in there,’ Roderick told him, pointing proudly at the tea-chest. ‘An entire set, in good condition, for less than the price of a few days’ plastering. Incredible bargain.’ He withdrew a book and riffled its pages over Maximilian’s head in benediction, causing a small draught of mildewed air. ‘Your patrimony, Max,’ he smiled, swinging the book like a censer.

  Cornelia came into the room, pulling one of Roderick’s sweaters over her head. ‘What are you doing, you strange man?’ she demanded, putting out a hand to receive the book, which she put back in the tea-chest firmly. ‘Hello, Alexander. You’ll stay tonight?’ she asked, brushing the dust off her fingers.

  ‘Do not mistake that for a question,’ Roderick warned. ‘Acceptance of hospitality is compulsory.’

  Already Cornelia’s hands were around Alexander’s waist, tying the straps of the pouch. ‘We shop,’ she told him.

  With Cornelia on one side of him and Roderick on the other, as though forming an escort, they walked down the hill and past the waterless outdoor pool, where a young man wearing headphones was shoving a slurry of decomposed leaves along the blue concrete floor. ‘The oldest public pool in the country,’ observed Roderick, in a tone like that of an estate agent with a prevaricating buyer. The young man stopped at the bottom of the slope, under the diving board, and leaned on the handle of his broom as if inviting them to commend the work he had done. ‘Who is that?’ Roderick asked.

  ‘One of the Barretts. Paul, I think,’ said Cornelia.

  ‘Ah,’ said Roderick, nodding with satisfaction. He looked at Alexander and smiled, in a manner that again made Alexander think of a salesman. ‘A sizeable clan,’ he added.

  ‘Six boys,’ Cornelia explained, but she said it to Roderick, as though following a script they had devised for Alexander’s benefit.

  At the apex of the footbridge they stopped to watch a scarlet kayak pass under them. Roderick removed his glasses and stooped to inspect his son. ‘Asleep,’ he reported to Cornelia, and winked approvingly at Alexander. The kayak was approaching the road bridge, on which a queue of traffic from the supermarket had formed. ‘Busy,’ Roderick remarked, and he looked from Cornelia to Maximilian to Alexander, making a proposition that Cornelia immediately understood.

  ‘Why don’t we leave you here?’ she said. ‘You and Max can sit in the sun for a while and we’ll come back for you. We’ll only be thirty minutes.’

  ‘Maximum,’ Roderick assured him. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said, offering the riverbank.

  Another kayak soon slid around the bend of the river; the fibreglass of its hull had faded to the colour of rosewater, and the rower was digging at the silted water like a tunneller as he rode the current. A supermarket trolley lay askew in a bed of caramel mud, with gouts of spinach-green mulch caught in the mesh of its basket. Alexander glimpsed the dark back of something that scampered across an islet of matted grass, beneath the lip of the opposite bank. From somewhere upstream came the tolling of a church bell; downstream the saws in the timber yard yelped and groaned. Under the branches of a nearby willow there was a translucent blue box that glowed in a spill of sunli
ght when a gust moved the leaves of the willow aside. The blue light swelled and faded and swelled in the discarded box, like a sign that was meaningless. A perfume like bitter almonds, carried by the breeze, awoke a sentence that seemed to belong with it: ‘Be like the dead and you shall be saved.’ The words were Mr Barrington’s, he eventually recalled; he tried to picture him, and Mr Barrington’s face appeared and disappeared, like a shape glimpsed in a quickly moving cloud.

  Cornelia came back without Roderick. ‘He has gone to buy wine,’ she explained. ‘But he will buy some books. I know him. He is a deranged person.’ She placed the carrier bags on the embankment and sat down beside him. For a minute she gazed at the river, and then Maximilian stirred. Cornelia looked at Alexander as though he had said something to her that she suspected was a lie. ‘How are you, Alexander?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  ‘How are you, Alexander?’ she asked again, with precisely the same intonation.

  ‘I’m fine, really.’

  ‘I think that is not true,’ Cornelia said. She lifted Maximilian from the pouch and kissed the top of the baby’s head as she looked at Alexander, as if to oblige Alexander to speak with greater candour.