Ghost

by Helen Grant

  Now that the savage Scottish weather had breached the old house, it would gnaw its way more and more deeply into the open wound. Damp would seep into the rooms below; timbers would rot and collapse. Like a festering injury, untreated, it would be the death of Langlands.

  Grandmother looked at the ragged hole in the ceiling for a while, her lips set in a tight line. Then she said, “This is more than we can repair ourselves.” She shook her head. “I shall have to drive into the town and ask someone to come.”

  It was a good thing she was looking at the hole in the ceiling and not at me. Ask someone to come. I could have danced around the room. I glanced up at the hole in the ceiling, willing the damage to be even worse than it looked.

  “You know what this means, don’t you, Augusta?” Grandmother was saying.

  Her calling me that, Augusta, snagged my attention. She only ever did it when she had something serious to say. The rest of the time she called me Ghost, a nickname I’d had ever since I was tiny and hadn’t been able to say my own name properly. ’Gust, I used to say, and somewhere along the line it had turned into Ghost. It was apt really, considering that that was what the few people who saw me thought I was.

  I knew what was coming.

  “I have to hide,” I said. I did my best to sound resigned. If she realised I was dying to see whoever came to the house, she would make it her business to see that I was out of sight. Would she go so far as to lock me in my room? I didn’t think she would, but I didn’t want to risk it.

  “I’m sorry,” Grandmother said. “It will be very dull for you. The work may take days.”

  She looked at me. Grandmother had eyes the colour of summer skies, but the impression they gave was anything but sunny. There was an intensity to their gaze; it was nearly always useless lying to her. This was important though. I made myself hold her stare, my expression carefully neutral. I tried very hard to look as though it had not occurred to me that having someone come to Langlands would be anything but very, very boring.

  “You really cannot be seen,” she said. “You understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll go up to the attic and stay there the whole time, Grandmother.”

  “You’ll be terribly uncomfortable up there,” said Grandmother, doubtfully. She looked down at the sodden carpet, strewn with chunks of stone and plaster. “But we simply cannot leave this as it is. It’s out of the question.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s all right, Grandmother. I’ll be perfectly fine. I can take some bread and cheese and a lantern and a stack of books,” I added.

  “You’ll be so cold,” she objected, but I could see that she was weakening. There wasn’t much else she could suggest, anyway.

  “I’ll put the old bearskin from the library up there, and wrap myself in blankets,” I said. “I’ll go and make a space, right now,” I added and slipped off before she could protest. I ran to the end of the passage, where there was a green baize door. On the other side of that were the steep narrow stairs that ran up to the attic; I went up them as fast as I could, hearing the door slap shut behind me. I had to suppress the urge to whoop out loud, in case Grandmother heard me.

  I didn’t really need to clear a space in the attic. There was a space there already, behind all the trunks and shrouded picture frames, and close to the only window. I went up there sometimes when I wanted to think about something in peace. The window had a view out over the gravel drive and the forest; I could imagine myself skimming away over those treetops like a bird. Now, I picked my way over the trunks and boxes and settled myself by the window.

  Outsiders were coming to Langlands. Never mind that it would probably be ancient workmen, too old to be called up to fight. It was still the most interesting thing that had happened for ages. New people. New faces. And I would see them; I was resolved about that.

  Grandmother drove into the town in her black Austin. The car reminded me of an enormous black beetle, with its darkly gleaming body and rounded lines. It had two big headlights like protuberant eyes.

  Grandmother did not think that the workmen would come back with her that day, but she told me to make myself scarce anyway. After she had left, I dragged the bearskin up to the attic, and then went back for some books. I spread out the bearskin and tried lying on it, experimentally, with my head close to the window. There was a very clear view of the drive, although I wasn’t sure how much detail I would be able to pick out from that distance – and I wanted to see everything, even if the workers were gnome-like old men.

  I was still staring down when Grandmother’s Austin reappeared, coming up the drive from the forest. I watched the car turn the corner, and waited to see whether a second vehicle would follow. There was none.

  By the time I had run downstairs, Grandmother was already in the kitchen, unbuttoning her sober navy coat. There was a cardboard box full of groceries on the big pine table. Normally, I would have fallen on it, to see what she had brought back with her; today, I had other things on my mind.

  I suppose I showed it too clearly, because Grandmother said rather sharply, “Stop dancing about, Ghost. Whatever is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If you have so much energy, there’s plenty of work to do.” Her expression softened. “I mean it, Ghost. You may as well use some of it up, because you’re going to be stuck in the attic for the next few days.”

  I made myself stand very still. “A few days?”

  “Probably. I spoke to Mr. McAllister. He’s coming to assess the damage tomorrow morning, but he doesn’t think he can repair it in a day.”

  “Oh dear,” I said gravely. I didn’t miss the glance she shot me. There are dangers in living for a long time with only one other person; eventually, you can more or less read each other’s minds. Something in my tone of voice had hit a false note. She was wondering whether I could be trusted to stay out of sight. I was asking myself the same thing, only I already knew the answer.

  She didn’t pursue it, though. What else was there to do? We couldn’t mend the roof ourselves; we would have had no idea where to start. Leaving the room open to the elements wasn’t an option, either. Grandmother had no choice but to trust me.

  Early the next morning I took what I needed up to the attic: the blankets, the bread and cheese. I took a couple of apples from the kitchen too. At twenty to nine I slipped downstairs one last time, hoping that Grandmother wouldn’t hear me. There was a room on the first floor that we used to call “the study”, although it didn’t look as though it had been used as one for a very long time; too much furniture had been put inside, so that you had to weave your way around it to get from one side of the room to the other. I went straight to a tall oak press, the dark wood shiny with age, and opened the door, turning the key with exquisite care to avoid making any sound. I was just reaching inside for the thing I wanted when I heard something from outside the house: the distant rumble of an engine.

  “Augusta!” My grandmother’s voice sounded brittle with anxiety.

  I grabbed what I wanted and slipped out of the room, closing the door behind me as I quietly as I could. Then I went to the head of the stairs and looked down. Grandmother was standing in the middle of the hallway, like a queen on the black and white chessboard of a floor; her hands were clasped in front of her, and she was rubbing them together compulsively.

  “I’ll go,” I called down in a low voice, keeping the hand with the precious object in it out of sight. When I saw that she had understood me, I flitted away along the passage. I was halfway up the back stairs when I heard tyres crunching on the gravel before the main entrance, and by the time the slam of a door closing reached my ears, I was in the attic, pulling the door shut behind me.

  There were voices below, already inside the house, I thought. My heart sank a little. It was no good if the visitors were already inside; I wouldn’t see a thing.

  I g
lanced down. Perhaps it had been a mistake going downstairs again for the field glasses; it had cost me just a little too much time. I’d probably have to wait right until the end of the working day for a glimpse of anyone coming out of Langlands now.

  Still, I couldn’t resist looking. I got down onto my hands and knees, and then onto my stomach and elbows, inhaling the dusty scent of bear fur, and then I wriggled forward until my breath was misting the window glass. There was a vehicle parked in front of the house. It was nothing like Grandmother’s. This was something altogether more functional, like a big box on wheels. I supposed that was what it was: a container for transporting things from place to place. It was somehow sleeker than Grandmother’s Austin, but I thought it was uglier. There were letters painted onto the side of it, scarlet against the white background: Neil McAllister. Underneath that was a string of numbers.

  I put the field glasses to my eyes. They were heavy, and the little screw you had to use to adjust the focus was stiff; first I struggled to turn it, and then it came loose and went too far, and the view swam out of focus again. I managed it in the end, though, and now I was able to see the vehicle in sharp detail.

  It was then that I caught a flicker of movement at the front of it. I held my breath, waiting, and for a moment I thought I had imagined it, or that I had simply seen the motion of the tree branches in the wind at the other side of the drive. Then someone stepped out from behind the vehicle, out into the open, and I saw him.

  He was young, like me.

  It was a shock, realising that; I felt it as sharply as an indrawn breath of freezing air. Someone the same age as me, or just a little older. And he was...he was something I didn’t have words for, or words I would not have dared to say, even to myself.

  I gazed down from the attic window with a kind of stunned fascination, watching him strolling about the gravel drive, scanning the front of Langlands with casual interest, his breath visible on the cold autumn air. I felt the warmth in my skin as the blood rose to my face, but I didn’t stop looking.

  The weight of the field glasses was already beginning to make my wrists ache but I couldn’t put them down; instead I tightened my grip on them. He had brown hair, not quite dark enough that you could call it black. Even with the field glasses it was impossible to see the exact colour of his eyes at this distance, but I thought they were grey or hazel, light-hued under dark brows. He looked around him in a way that somehow suggested wary interest. Perhaps he had heard the stories about Langlands – about the ghost.

  Once, he glanced up towards the high window behind which I lay full length on the bearskin, gazing down, and I froze, my heart thumping, not daring to move in case I drew attention to myself, but he looked away without reacting. I suppose my face was invisible, so high up, behind the reflections on the glass.

  He wore a dark jacket of some thick material, blue cotton twill trousers and heavy boots. Nothing as smart and elegant as the costumes displayed in the oil paintings at Langlands, which included tailcoats and frock coats and military braid.

  Clearly, people on the outside had no time or energy to spend on fancy clothing.

  Why hasn’t he been called up? I wondered. What he does, rebuilding things, maybe that’s considered important, like being a doctor. Grandmother said they don’t get called up. Maybe this is the same.

  I touched the glass, feeling it cool under my fingertips. I watched him lean against the side of the vehicle, obscuring the lettering. Neil McAllister. Was that his name? His face was turned towards the house; I suspected he was listening to or watching something. A moment later his posture changed, and he pushed himself away from the van, standing to attention.

  Grandmother appeared on the gravel below with a second stranger, whose shiny bald head pronounced him old and therefore less interesting.

  Something about the way Grandmother moved suggested that she was not happy. She moved stiffly, her shoulders raised, her head a little to one side, as though she were turning away from bad news. I thought I knew what the problem was. It was the younger man. She didn’t want him here. She probably judged, quite rightly, that I would find him interesting – assuming I ever laid eyes on him, which she was evidently determined I wouldn’t.

  I watched the three of them – Grandmother and the two men – moving around the gravel drive as though they were taking part in some formal dance that none of them liked performing. Grandmother gesticulated several times, and then I saw the older man shake his head. I guessed that she was objecting to the younger workman, though I couldn’t imagine on what grounds. She could hardly say that she didn’t want young men around her granddaughter, since they weren’t supposed to know I was here. At any rate, whatever she was saying, it wasn’t working. The older man had his cap in his hands, standing politely bareheaded before a lady, but he evidently wasn’t giving way. Several times I saw him shake his head very slowly.

  After a while, some kind of agreement seemed to have occurred; all three of them began to move towards the stone porch which overhung the main door of Langlands House, and they vanished from my sight. I knew what was happening now. Grandmother would take them to the bedroom with the ruined ceiling so that they could assess the amount of work required to repair it.

  I knew better than to go downstairs and try to eavesdrop or even peep out through a crack in the door, although I was dying to. Grandmother would be on her guard; the merest creak on the attic stairs would land me in hot water. All the same, I came down three or four steps and sat there for a while, listening. I knew those stairs, like I knew every other part of Langlands; the creaks they gave when you went up or down them was like playing a tuneless harmonium. The top ones weren’t too noisy so long as you kept to the right-hand side, so I did that and then I sat and waited.

  Langlands was never truly silent. Even at night, when I lay motionless in my bed, I could hear the house creaking. A change in temperature as day broke or night fell would make the ancient boards expand or contract. Sometimes you would have sworn that someone was moving stealthily about. The slightest breath of wind would make the old windows rattle in their frames, or shake the branches of the trees that clustered close to the back of the house, so that they would tap on the glass. I wasn’t frightened by these noises. My ear was finely attuned to them, so that now I could pick out the discordant notes, the sounds that told me people were moving along the upper floor of the house. Not just people: Grandmother, the old man, and...him.

  I hugged my knees and tried to hold my breath, the better to hear the tiniest sound. I heard the brisk sound of a door closing; that would be Grandmother, shutting off one of the rooms from the visitors’ view.

  She must hate this, I realised. I couldn’t remember any outsider ever coming into the upstairs part of the house. No work that the house had ever needed had required it – until now.

  What was his name, the one my age? I supposed it was reasonable to assume that the older man was the one in charge, so presumably he was the Neil McAllister whose name was painted onto the vehicle. Was the younger one his son? Sons were sometimes named after their fathers; I knew that from the dusty novels in the Langlands library. He might also be Neil – but he might just as easily not. I tried to imagine what name might suit him instead, and in this way, I amused myself for some time, until the door at the bottom of the stairs opened and Grandmother appeared.

  It was just as well I hadn’t been sitting at the bottom with my ear to the door. I had been too preoccupied with my own thoughts to hear her coming.

  She looked up at me, and although half her face was in shadow, I could see the disapproval on it.

  “You shouldn’t sit there, Ghost. If someone were to open the door, you would be plainly visible.”

  I knew whom she meant by someone. The thought of coming face to face with him gave me a sharp pang that was both thrilling and guilty.

  I took a risk and said, “I heard them leave, so I was just
waiting here for you.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Well, you had better come down now. They have gone, and they’re not coming back.”

  “Not at all?” I couldn’t keep the note of alarm from creeping into my voice, and I saw her frown. “I mean, what about the repairs?”

  “No,” she said. “Just not today. Mr. McAllister has some materials he has to buy.” She went on for a minute or two after that, telling me what the workmen had to get and what they were going to have to do both outside on the roof and inside in the bedroom, but I was only half listening to that; I was too overwhelmed with my own relief. I couldn’t have stood the disappointment if the outsiders had gone without my having more than a glimpse of them.

  I went down the stairs to where Grandmother stood and followed her down the landing. I wasn’t thinking at all about where she was going, but I should not have been surprised that we went back to the bedroom with the damaged ceiling. Of course, she would want to examine it again and satisfy herself that she trusted the workmen’s opinion, and she would want to tell me about it.

  I hoped half-heartedly that the men would have left some sign of themselves in the room. There was a certain thrill in knowing that they had been here, on this exact spot – that he had been here. The room wasn’t one I had visited very often, but now I looked around it with new interest, trying to fix everything in it in my mind: this was the environment in which the men would be working, these were the things that they would be seeing every day they were here.

  Grandmother talked, gesturing at the ruined ceiling, holding out a chunk of fallen plaster. Meanwhile, I wandered about, giving as much of an appearance of rapt attention as I could whilst taking in everything for myself, and after Grandmother had finished and taken herself off downstairs, I still lingered in the room.

  It was the middle part of the day now, and for once it was clear and dry; the light coming in through the windows was cold but very bright, showing the contents of the room with crystal sharpness. That was how I came to see it – a small sliver of silver glinting on the dusty floorboards. I knelt and picked it up. It was flat and thin and I had to use my fingernails to do it. I held the thing in the palm of my hand and stared.