Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I wrote to her. We met up, and we got along brilliantly, right from the start. Right from the re-start.’

  ‘And she solved your crisis?’

  ‘She helped, yes,’ said Esmé sharply. ‘A lot. She gave me some good advice. But more important than that, she’s become a real friend. The more I’ve got to know her, the closer we’ve become. She’s a strong character. Such a strong character. Someone you can measure yourself against. It’s great, knowing her again. It really is great.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Alexander.

  ‘I’ve learned a lot about her. About you and her,’ said Esmé, bending forward in the chair and knitting her fingers.

  ‘And what have you learned?’

  ‘That Megan loved you, and that she was never happier than when she was with you.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like something Megan would say.’

  ‘She mentions you whenever we get together. In some way or other you always get brought in. She talks about her father and she talks about you. She’s told me everything.’

  ‘Everything, eh?’ he smiled.

  ‘A lot. Enough.’

  ‘Enough for what.’

  ‘Enough to know what should happen now.’

  ‘So you’ve come on a mission to turn back the years?’ said Alexander, glancing out of the window. ‘To reunite what has been put asunder?’

  ‘If you like,’ she said, but then suddenly she lost patience with him and smacked a palm on an arm of the chair. ‘Why are you being like this?’ she protested. She glared at the wall and took a deep breath. ‘Sorry. I know why you’re like this. You’re angry with her. Of course you are.’

  ‘I’m not angry with her, Esmé. There’s no reason to be angry. There never was a reason to be angry. You don’t understand.’

  ‘I do understand. I’ve seen her, and I know what she wants.’

  ‘Better than she does herself?’ Alexander responded, and he fixed his gaze on her eyes, preventing her from interrupting. ‘Esmé, I didn’t vanish. It didn’t require the services of Interpol to track me down. You found me easily enough, and Megan could have done the same if she’d wanted. Thank you for your concern, and I’m glad you’ve made a friend. But you should leave this alone.’

  ‘Of course she wasn’t going to come after you,’ Esmé argued. ‘Not in the circumstances. It’s obvious why she wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s obvious that –’

  ‘When I saw her again it was like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. And that’s what it would be like with you two. Each of you is the other’s missing piece. You were made for each other, I know you were.’

  ‘Please. Listen to yourself. That sounds like something from local radio.’

  ‘I don’t care how it sounds, Alexander. You were made for each other. You shouldn’t be apart.’

  ‘Nobody is made for anybody, Esmé. You might live well with somebody for a while. For a long time, even. But there’s no such thing as the perfect match. Not unless one person’s forcing the other to fit.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’

  ‘Life isn’t a jigsaw puzzle, Esmé.’

  ‘So what is it then?’

  He paused, turning to look down at the street. ‘A flood,’ he said, and laughed quietly.

  Esmé was chewing at a corner of her lip when he turned back. ‘She’d love to see you again,’ she said. ‘I know she would.’

  ‘Let me ask you a question, Esmé. I am assuming that Megan knows nothing about your visit. Am I right?’

  ‘I said I’d like to meet you.’

  ‘But you didn’t say you were going to play the detective.’

  ‘I’m not playing at anything.’

  ‘You didn’t say you had a plan.’

  ‘Not in so many words. But she didn’t order me not to do anything.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alexander. He took hold of the plate and stood up.

  ‘Can I take your number?’ asked Esmé, getting to her feet.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Alexander.

  ‘In that case, I’m going to give you mine,’ she said. From one pocket she took a steel-covered notebook in which a postcard was lodged, and from another she took a tiny pen. ‘I’m going to give you hers as well,’ she stated, writing on the card. ‘And her address. She’s not far away. She’s been there for more than ten years now, and she’s not likely to be leaving any time soon,’ she said.

  He looked at the card and saw Megan’s address. It was only five or six miles from where they used to live, and as he read the address he experienced, fleetingly, a sensation of loss, as if a moment from the day she left had slipped into the present.

  ‘You can read my writing?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied.

  Standing at the window, Esmé stretched her back, like a dancer limbering up, and smiled at him. ‘The story of your life is the story of you and Megan. That’s what I think, and I think you suspect I’m right. You’ll regret it if you don’t get in touch. You know you will. If you don’t do it you’ll end up like that,’ she joked, pointing up the road, where an old man was hobbling alongside a scruffy terrier. ‘Is that what you want to be like?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s like and neither do you. He could be the happiest man in Sussex.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

  ‘So do I,’ admitted Alexander.

  She turned the postcard over in his hand. On the front was a cartoon of a deserted square, with a church and a cactus at one end and a waterless fountain at the other; against the basin of the fountain a hunched man was asleep under a sombrero. On his T-shirt was written: ‘Carpe Mañana’.

  ‘Very humorous,’ he said.

  ‘I thought it was funny,’ said Esmé, and now there was a warmth in her eyes.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you told Megan nothing about this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I need time to think it over. There’s nothing to be gained by forcing things any further, is there? So don’t file a report, please.’

  She looked at him, drumming her fingers on her upper lip. ‘OK. I won’t say a word,’ she said.

  Seated at the window, Alexander watched Esmé get into her car. She inspected her face in the rear-view mirror, and seemed satisfied with what she had done. From the glove compartment she took a phone; she punched in a number, listened, and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. Her fingers rippled on the steering wheel; she checked the time, then drove away.

  Alexander read the address on the card and he felt almost nothing, but that night he could not sleep, and he found himself dragging from underneath his bed a suitcase that he had not opened since he had moved into the flat. He tipped the contents of the suitcase onto the floor and opened the wallet of photographs that lay on top of the pile. A picture of Liz with her hair dyed blonde was the first he removed, and then came Nan Burnett, and Megan holding Mr Beckwith’s hand to her head like a beret, and himself and Sam sitting on the tailgate of an army lorry, and himself and his parents and Megan and Mrs Beckwith at Praa, and Jane in Princes Street. He pushed the photograph albums away, to sift through the other things that he had kept: a watercolour of the Theatre Royal that Sid Dixon had painted, and a Jubilee Medal from Sid Dixon’s shop; half a dozen copies of Melody Maker; a bookmark with a drawing of the Bellevue Hotel on it; a button embossed with a pair of wings; a flyer for The Park Rangers; a pale mauve cinema ticket and a spent flashbulb; a card from Edwin Coleman that still smelled of sandalwood; Sam’s business card and a business card for MacIndoe’s and a third for The Videocentre; a ticket for the bullring in Ronda; a postcard of the amphitheatre at Epidavros, and another from Fatima; a bundle of school reports; the order of service for the funeral of Mrs Joan Beckwith; a programme for Bonfire Night in Lewes; a small cassette with Megan’s voice on it; pictures of Tollund Man, and Perón’s return to Buenos Aires, and himself in Carnaby Street; an envelope containing a key from the Beckwiths’ house, a key from the
flat in which he and Megan had lived, and a nail from the Doodlebug House; leaflets from the churches of St Mary Abchurch and St Clement Danes; a paper hat that he had worn on VJ day; a shirt that had once been black-blue.

  One by one he examined the scraps of almost six decades, waiting for each to release its memories, and memories arose from every object, propagating other memories in profusion. He saw his mother running beside the hedges with her arms aloft, and looking at him over the kitchen table with a maroon scarf knotted on the top of her head, and scrubbing at a window with a ball of newspaper, and holding out the hem of her gingham dress, and smiling into an empty copper pot, and her face below a beam of light in which there were swirls of cigarette smoke. He saw his father at his desk, with a spot of light on each lens of his glasses, and laughing at A Night at the Opera, and standing in the wind, lost in thought, on the hill near Pitlochry. He saw Megan in her blue-checked pinafore, and sitting on a sparkling step, and walking through the park with Mr Beckwith, and sulking in the Doodlebug House, and he saw her white foot resting on his hand, as the rain came through the awning of Sid Dixon’s shop. He saw Megan descending the steps of Bank station, and facing the moonlit wall of a light well, and hitching his white cotton shirt onto her shoulders, and bubbles running over her throat, and pearls of water on her scarlet mittens. He remembered kissing her by the church. He remembered the tins of food in perfect rows in Mr Beckwith’s kitchen, and the glimpse of Mrs Beckwith’s breast, and the puddle of bird’s-foot trefoil, and the sun on the rocks of Rinsey Head, and Megan’s hairclip on Mr Beckwith’s muddy palm, and Mrs Beckwith dead. He remembered Sam at the dinner table in his parents’ house, and embracing him by a basket of geraniums that the landlord’s daughter had watered, and smoothing his tie by the house with the green tarmac drive. He remembered Liz putting her face to the big radio, and Liz’s short violet dress, and her grass-green buckle, and her father with a glass of sherry in each hand. He remembered Jane crossing her bedroom, naked, and her lips whispering as she kissed him, and walking between gravestones in Edinburgh. He saw Mr Barrington with his book and the jar of copper sulphate, Mr Greening in his paisley cravat, Sid Dixon turning a soup tureen in his white-gloved hands, Esmé with a plum-coloured elephant that had yellow eyes, and Pen Hollander’s purple hair. He saw Roderick bouncing his walking stick outside the church, Mr Owen turning a ball on a circle of blue paint, Roy Draper holding his severed finger, a woman with a cerise headscarf sitting in a car, a man in a black corduroy suit carrying a book to Cornelia, and Sir Archibald Mclndoe’s pinstriped sleeve. He saw the barrage balloons in the smoky sky and the feet of Mr Fitchie, and Sister Martha’s fingernails and Mr Harvey’s fingernails, and Douglas Nesbit sitting enthroned on the settee, showing his teeth. He remembered a tiny green flare against a night sky, mustard-yellow lichen on thick grey planks, a steel wall covered with a slime of salt, streetlamps chattering in the wind that stirred the trees in Greenwich Park, a woman in a turquoise woollen bonnet, the sound of bells by the Panthéon, the doctor’s room with the sticky red seats, a kayak with a pale pink hull, a mauve and pink sunburst on a quilt, and the crack of the door of his father’s study. He saw a half-moon in a flow of starling-coloured cloud, a fragment of glass on the driveway of the scout hut, the silky ash on the joists of the Doodlebug House, the till in the grocer’s, a frog under the rhododendron in Nan Burnett’s garden, and rain on the silver roof of the Dome of Discovery. He saw the flakes of white paint on the window of Sid Dixon’s shop, a pub with black doors and windowframes, a bright red hosepipe that leaked water, strings of bunting slung over trestle tables, a boy making a megaphone of his hands to shout across an empty valley, and the birthmark between Lily’s breasts. He saw Gareth Jones and Eric Mullins, and Mrs Pardoe, and Mrs Darling and Mrs Evans, and Harold Stevens and Geoff Darby, Lionel Griffiths and John Halloran, Jimmy Murrell and Mrs Murrell, and Mr Gardiner. He saw Mrs Solomon, Mr Owen, Mick Radford and Dave Gordon and Billy Barton, Ronald Prentice, Courtney Wilson and Gisbert, and dozens of other ghosts, as clearly as he saw, in the weakening darkness, the reflection of himself in the mirror at the end of his room. He allocated the things and places and the people he remembered to their years, and accounted for every year of his life, beginning with the cold February morning in 1944 that arose from a postcard of the Virgin Mary in a blazing sun. Year by year he completed his life, but what he made was not a story. The years were no more than labels on his memories, which were all present in the same place, and he was the place in which they existed, in a state of equanimity that was the sum of them. He had become a theatre of memories, a reef of memories, Alexander told himself. He desired nothing. He remembered Jane’s bedroom, and Megan’s face freckled with salt and with the shadows of raindrops. He dropped the card into the case. Seeing buds of condensation on the wall of the shop, a piece of orange vine on a fragment of china, three letters on a table, a saddle like brass in fierce sunlight, he fell into sleep.

  56. Sea lavender

  Alexander MacIndoe lay in bed, watching the shapes that were cast on the ceiling, shapes as faint as a few days’ dust on white paint. The clouds that he could see were no bolder than the shadows on the ceiling. For many minutes all he could hear was the ticking of his watch, then the noise of a passing car wiped through the room. There was a sound like an axe striking soft wood, which was the sound of a dog barking down on the beach, he realised. A peal of gulls burst over his roof and fell swiftly behind the houses.

  He took a shower, put on the black suit and white shirt he often wore on Sundays, and went to the kitchen to make his plate of toast and mug of tea. Across the gardens, the curtains were closed on every bedroom window. The fences were dark with the rain that had fallen in the night, and cast no shadows on the lawns. A crimson dress had been left hanging on a washing line. A large red plastic ball was in the pond of the garden with the bush of yellow roses. Nothing moved, except a thrush that took flight from the frame of the children’s swing.

  He sat at the table to review what he would be doing in the coming week and compile a list of things he would have to buy at the nursery that afternoon. When he looked out of the window again, he saw that a part of the sky was in motion, like a spill of milk seeping through white cotton. The leaves of the cherry tree quivered. One curtain had been drawn back.

  From the box in the hall he fetched the tools that had to be cleaned and oiled. He worked until eight o’clock and then put on his coat to go out to Mr Kidwell’s shop. At the front door he felt a breeze that smelled of seaweed and wet shingle. On the paving stones, squares of silvery water trembled within borders of dry grey concrete. Mr Kidwell was washing the salt from his windows; Alexander took his newspaper from the untouched pile behind the counter and put his coins in the till. They talked on the step of the shop, looking out at the scuffed surface of the sea, until another customer arrived. A boy carrying a fishing rod crossed the road; he wore vast green rubber boots, which thumped like a slack drum with each footfall.

  Alexander made a second mug of tea and carried it to the armchair by the window. Having read the front page, he put the newspaper down and gazed at the sea. One morning, after a storm, his father went to look at the sea at Portobello, and the water looked, his father had said, as if a rasp had been rubbed backwards and forwards on a sheet of tin. And Alexander went with Jane to Portobello on a hot and stagnant afternoon, and the sea looked like a vast plain of raw clay; she stood in the water, holding her skirt up, and threw her sunglasses for him to catch. He opened the newspaper. At ten o’clock Roderick rang.

  There were three people ahead of Esmé Clark in the queue. ‘Make your mind up time,’ she said, taking a credit card from her wallet. ‘We’ll just about catch it.’

  Megan Beckwith looked at the station clock. It was almost eleven. She had made up her mind, but now, thinking of Alexander MacIndoe, what she recalled was the windy, empty platform of Bank station. She had left before the train came in, and gone back up to the street, where Alexander was no longer t
o be seen, and what she felt now was a weak reprise of the bleakness she had felt then, and the elation of being free.

  Raising her eyebrows, Esmé fluttered the card at Megan. ‘You’re on board, yes?’ She checked her watch and snarled at the back of the head of the woman at the ticket office counter, who was poring over a timetable that had separated into two pieces as she unfolded it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Megan. Her fingers, she realised, were undoing the buttons of her raincoat, as if she were entering someone’s house. The minute hand of the clock edged backwards a fraction before springing forward and halting midway across the hour’s final segment.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Esmé. ‘You’ve had months of dithering. Let’s go. You can finally decide on the way there.’ A clerk at a neighbouring counter rapped the glass partition with a coin, summoning Esmé. She turned to Megan. ‘Well?’

  Crouched under backpacks, a dozen teenagers in identical blue nylon jackets scuttled towards the platform for the Brighton train. ‘Go on,’ said Megan.

  ‘Good,’ said Esmé, and she asked for two tickets.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Let’s see what happens. You can spend the day on the pier if you decide to back out. I’ll only be gone a couple of hours.’

  ‘I’m a bit too old for funfairs.’

  ‘Whatever. You can get some sea air, if nothing else. Have a day out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Esmé signed the counterfoil and gave Megan a frown. ‘I think you should knock on his door.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘What harm can it do? He wanted to keep seeing you. You told me that yourself.’

  ‘That was years ago. He doesn’t now, it seems.’

  ‘Pride, that’s all.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Megan. ‘I see. Male pride.’

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ said Esmé. ‘He said it was up to you. He does want to see you. I know he does.’ She put a ticket in Megan’s hand.