There was a pause. Then Cart turned to look at her sister again.
“Ghost, did you say? There was a ghost—or we all thought there was—just before the hen trouble. I think you’d better tell me.”
She told it, hurrying, sobbing a little, and hurrying on. She was suddenly obsessed with the feeling that there was not much time. She told it all, more or less, right up to the exorcism and the farmhouse and Sally’s midnight dedication to Monigan. But what she did not say, and this was the fact pressing behind all the rest which she could not bring herself to tell even Cart, was that she did not know which sister she was. Not Cart. Not Sally, she thought as she spoke. So I’m either Imogen or Fenella. But I can’t bear Cart to know I don’t know.
Cart listened, bent forward, with two clear creases on her brow—the same clear creases her sister remembered as belonging to Imogen when Imogen was thinking. “So that explains the hen,” Cart said at length when the story was finished. “Funny that none of us knew then. But that’s wrong somehow, you know. There’s more to it than that. I know there is. I wish I could remember properly. For instance, I knew exactly what Will Howard was talking about in his telegram. I knew it was seven years and that Monigan had demanded a life—but I don’t know how I knew. What I do know is that we sort of understood then and took some kind of action.”
“Yes, you tried to exorcise me,” the patient reminded her.
But Cart shook her hanging fair hair vigorously. “No. I don’t mean that. That didn’t work. I remember one of us saying—I forget which of us—that it was no good trying to be religious about it because we were all so very irreligious. And I have a feeling that the things we tried after that were all highly irreligious. I know they were, in fact, because that was all part of the hen row—but—” Cart stopped and sat looking at her sister with strong anxiety.
“What?” she asked.
“You can’t alter the past,” Cart said. “The only thing you can alter is the future. People write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can’t be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently, and that’s no good to us. I’d forgotten the whole thing, until you started talking about it. I think I didn’t want to remember it because it was so disturbing. I’d forgotten how keen we all were on Julian Addiman, for a start. We were all in a silly sexy flutter about him because he was different from Will and Ned and the other boys and didn’t think he had two heads like—who was it thought he had two heads?”
“Nutty Filbert,” the patient supplied.
“Nutty Filbert,” said Cart. “And he didn’t do silly walks or pretend to be spastic like they did. In fact, I think that meant Julian Addiman was probably rather insane even then. And,” Cart said, looking rather astonished, “the end of that sentence should be ‘though we weren’t to know it.’ But it isn’t, is it? We all knew there was something wrong with him, and we knew it was dangerous, and that was why we were fascinated. Were we jealous of one another at all?”
“Yes—” said the patient. “No. Not about Julian Addiman.”
“That’s the odd thing!” said Cart. “We were in a way, but actually we were so—such a unity that when one of us got him, it almost didn’t matter which of us it was.”
“You make us sound like vultures—or female spiders,” her sister protested.
“Well, we were in a way,” Cart said. “I thought as I was talking that if none of us really cared two hoots about him, even you—well, it makes me wonder if Monigan wasn’t really a manifestation of our common thirst for excitement, or our suicidal urges, or something.”
“Do stop being so clever!” the patient begged her. “What are you trying to say?”
“I don’t know,” said Cart, slumping rather. She put her face in her hands. “The ghost was definitely there the next day,” she said. “I remember that much clearly. It looks as if … you haven’t finished yet.” Her face came out of her hands. She was full of anxiety again. “Count two days for leap years, and you’ve got till midnight tonight. Monigan is playing fair after all. Or someone is. It almost looks as if you’re allowed to go back and see what you can do about it. But you can’t!” Cart suddenly stood up. “Why am I sitting here babbling this bloody nonsense? Even if Monigan exists, no one can alter what’s already happened. I know this—I knew it this morning. But even so, I was so damned superstitious that I telephoned Granny when I got Will’s telegram, to see if Oliver was all right.”
“Oliver!” her sister exclaimed. “Is Oliver still alive?”
“Oh, yes,” said Cart. “Didn’t I—? I keep forgetting you can’t remember. He’s oldish, of course, and he smells, and he eats like a pig, but luckily Granny adores him, so he lives with her while I’m in Cambridge. I couldn’t leave him at home. No one would remember to feed him.” Suddenly, without warning or explanation, Cart’s face folded together, and she began to cry.
“What’s the matter?” the patient said. Crying seemed infectious. She started to sob again herself.
“I’m sorry.” Cart wept. She pulled out what she thought was a tissue from her pocket, found in time that it was the telegram, and wiped her shirtsleeve over her face instead. “Now I’ve made you cry, too. It’s just—I dote on Oliver, but seeing you there like that makes me see how much more I love you. You must—when you get back as a ghost, try and make us understand. We may have all been nutcases, but none of us were fools. And—”
A nurse was suddenly there, a blurred shape beyond the great white leg. She said to Cart, “Do you mind waiting outside for ten minutes? Dr. Smythe wants to examine Miss Melford.”
“Of course,” said Cart. She bent quickly over the patient and once more brought the smell of health with her. “I’ve got the key to your flat, so I shall stay in London, anyway, until you’re better. May I use your bed? I know you’ll hate the thought of me tidying your things, but I promise not to touch anything, honestly.”
“That’s all right,” said the patient. She was aware that the doctor was in the room and that Cart was going away. “Just a moment,” she called out. Cart paused. “Are you going to be a teacher?” Funny thing to ask, but it seemed important.
Cart hesitated, looking at the dim people crowding into the room. She grinned. She knew why it was important. “Just because Phyllis always said I was going to be? Come off it. It was her way of looking after us—telling us all we were bound for those careers made her feel we were taken care of. I haven’t decided what to do yet. It’s not that easy to get a job.”
Then she had slipped away. Her place was taken by the dim people and by a great white leg with a nodding face of fat purplish toes.
CHAPTER
9
There was peace to think again. Sally—no, she was not Sally, she must be Imogen or Fenella—hung among the buzzing flies in the empty kitchen room, trying to consider some of the things she now knew. But as before, her intelligence as a ghost seemed as limited as a narrow torch beam. What was outside it hardly seemed to exist. The flies seemed to exist more, and the fading breakfast smells from beyond the green door.
None of the sisters seemed to be awake yet. There was silence apart from the flies and a distant hum from School. Outside the window the apple trees gusted and the hens pecked in one of those windswept, hot gray days when every color looks bleak and ordinary. It was ominous, as if the day was expecting something. From time to time the windows were covered with blisters of the fine rain.
The ghost hung, trying to recapture some of the seven years between now and the hospital. It was a time of fruitless mistakes. It had been dominated on one hand by Himself, always angry but seldom there, and on the other hand by Julian Addiman, always laughing, always demanding more and more. Between them she had scarcely been a person. At first she had tried to please them both, until it was obvious she could never please Himself; he was just not interested enough. After that she had devoted herself wholly to pleasing the demanding Julian Addiman. She had gone to art school, Cart had said
. That seemed to be true. She had a fuzzy memory that Julian Addiman had decided on that. He said it made a good excuse to live near him in London. She could not live with him. He lived with his parents.
But art school. What was that like? By turning the narrow beam of her attention on that as hard as she could, she recalled a time of being lost and shamed. There were a host of brilliant painters and wildly good young artists, who could all talk intelligently about what they were doing. She could not talk like that. And as an artist she knew she was stuck at what was good for a child, but rather feeble in a grown student. She was only there because of Julian Addiman.
She wondered if she had become as dismal and discontented as the grown-up Sally. She rather feared she had. She had blamed Julian Addiman for it. But she had known it was her fault for letting Julian Addiman take her over like this. And she had decided to break with him. She knew she had to if she was ever to do anything of her own accord. But she was afraid to do it. Julian Addiman had outbursts of frightening violence if she did anything he did not want. That was how he came to fling her out of his car.
He was going to South Africa. His father had found him a job there. His father found him everything, even the car he had thrown her out of. Julian Addiman had wanted her to go to South Africa with him—to drop everything and go. And she knew this was the time when she had to say no. There were a thousand reasons—particularly the fact that South Africa was the kind of country it was. And she had put off saying no, because she was so frightened of him, until they were driving along in his car. Then she had clenched her hands and teeth and her courage and said no. And Julian Addiman had reacted with more than his usual violence—
She was interrupted by Oliver. Oliver came stumbling sleepily out of the living room and uttered a faint, far-off rumble on finding she was still there. But he was used to her now. She was one of his family after all. She could make herself useful and let him out for his morning airing. Accordingly Oliver rolled his mottled donkey-sized bulk to the back door and stood with his head pointed at it patiently. When she did nothing, he uttered a few squeaks, like the whistle of a distant referee, and continued to stand, patient and pointed.
It’s no good, she said. I can’t open doors in this state.
Oliver did not believe her. He put his nose to the crack where the door closed and blew, meaningly. When that failed, he sighed, raised a massive three-clawed foot, and hit the door with it. The door leaped about. Oliver waited, looked over his shoulder at her, and did it again.
Stop it, she said. I told you. I can’t.
Oliver, however, went on hitting the door, and the door went on leaping, shaking the whole building. Five repetitions of this treatment brought Fenella, tramping half awake downstairs in her gray nylon nightwear.
“Oh,” said Fenella. “The ghost is back again. Stupid dog. Ghosts can’t open doors.” She opened the door, and Oliver rolled majestically forth.
The ghost went with him for no real reason except that Cart had been anxious about him. She followed while he ambled forth among the hens and sketchily raised a hind leg against the hut that held Monigan. She followed again when he walked round the buildings and emerged in the wide bleak green of the playing fields. Here Oliver went on the longest walk he ever permitted himself—to the other side of the field, almost as far as the dead elms. She did not follow. She hung by the school, watching the shaggy shape, large even at that distance, ambling and prying among the hedge bottoms there.
She could feel Monigan out there. Monigan was waiting, gloating, dwelling out there in triumph. Last night Sally and Julian Addiman had brought Monigan more life than she had had for centuries, and now the ghost could feel that life in each fleeting dry shower of rain and in each sour scudding patch of sunlight. Seven years away, Cart might have said she had invented Monigan, but that was not true. The school had once been a place called Mangan Manor, and Cart had taken the name from that, out of a mispronunciation Fenella once made. But who was to say Cart had not taken the name of a real being—either by accident or because that being made her take it? No. Monigan was terribly real.
Suddenly terrified, the ghost knew that the only way she could hang on to her little patch of existence—a white patch, seven years away, the size of a hospital bed—was by keeping near to people. People could keep Monigan away. People could stop Monigan moving in and taking her, if only they had long enough to understand in. How long had she to make them understand? Seven years in the future, it had been, say, three in the afternoon. What was the time here? It was later than the soporific state of her sisters suggested. She could tell by the hum from the redbrick building that it was lesson time. Ten o’clock?
Confirming this, the School clock began to strike. Heavily it tolled off ten. Then she had nine hours here. Until seven o’clock that evening. It was not much time.
The ghost fled back to their private quarters. Quick! Wake them up. Get them to UNDERSTAND! She arrived back with Oliver and was let in by Imogen this time. Imogen and Fenella were getting up. Imogen looked tousled and unwell, and the yellow trouser suit became her less than ever. Fenella was tousled, too. The knots jutted at the sides of her face, and her green sack hung unevenly. She stood in the middle of the littered living room and boomed to Imogen, “Oliver’s feet are killing him, and the ghost is back again.”
“How do you know?” Imogen called from the kitchen.
“I just know,” boomed Fenella.
From Cart, up above in the bedroom, came a wordless snarl of rage. It was like a wild animal. Both her sisters—and the ghost with them—stopped dead where they were and stared nervously at the ceiling. There was an angry rattle of bedsprings from above, but no further noise.
Fenella tiptoed into the kitchen. “I think she ought to get up and look after Oliver at least,” she muttered to Imogen.
“Sssh!” said Imogen, staring at the ceiling, with half a loaf clutched anxiously to her chest. They remained like that for a good minute. When it seemed clear that there was going to be no further sound from Cart, Imogen whispered glumly, “There aren’t any cornflakes left.”
“Let’s go and get some,” said Fenella.
Remembering that Mrs. Gill could see her, the ghost went with them, pushing through the green door and thumping through the silver one into the white, breakfast-scented school kitchen. There was not much going on there. The two other white-coated ladies were sitting face-to-face at the white-topped table, eating cornflakes. Looking at them now, with the eyes of someone seven years in the future, the ghost saw that one was an elderly nonentity and the other was a girl not much older than Cart. This girl had asserted her grown-upness by dyeing her hair a deep and improbable black. Mrs. Gill was the one who mattered here. Mrs. Gill was sitting at the table with her back to the door. Her hair, at this stage in her life, was a kind of peppery brown. As the door thumped, her peppery head turned, bringing into view her peaked side face and the cigarette curving from her upper lip.
“Get out of my kitchen,” she said.
Fenella simply stumped toward the table and removed the packet of cornflakes from it. All three ladies stared unlovingly, but none of them said anything until Imogen came up, too. Imogen, with a nervous duck of her head and a silly, polite smile, picked up the jug of milk from the table and started to carry it away. It was clear that Fenella’s brazen approach was the right one. There was something about Imogen’s apologetic manner which invited trouble. All three ladies reacted.
“Hey!” said the young one. “You just put that back!”
“You got no right,” said the old one.
“Coming in here,” said Mrs. Gill, passing smoothly into a tirade from a standing start, “without so much as a word and walking off with half the food in the place. Spongers, that’s what you are! When I was your ages, I was out at work. It’s time you girls learned to look after yourselves and stopped coming pinching things in my kitchen.”
“We are trying to look after ourselves,” Imogen pointed out humbly.
Mrs. Gill flung round in her chair. The cigarette wagged fiercely. “Well, you better try harder than this! I’ve had about enough of you girls coming in here and walking off with things. I’m going to speak to your mother about it.” The cigarette wagged on, and with it went Mrs. Gill’s voice, shrilling and skirling. The tirade was so familiar that no one needed to listen properly. Hopefully the ghost put herself where Mrs. Gill could see her. Mrs. Gill certainly saw her. Her face turned to the ghost, to Imogen, to Fenella, and the cigarette wagged fiercely her way every third sentence, like a punctuation mark. But Mrs. Gill had evidently decided that her strange appearance was intended to annoy and just one more cross to bear. “You and your silly tricks!” The cigarette wagged at her. “I’ve had enough!” It wagged at Imogen. And at Fenella: “So I’m going to your mother this minute!” Mrs. Gill seemed to mean this. She started to get up from her chair.
Fenella spoke. “Go if you like,” she said carelessly. “And I shall go and tell her all the things you take away in your green and orange bag.”
Mrs. Gill’s face became utterly still. It was hard, peaky, and red, and her eyes stared into Fenella’s venomously. “I see,” she said. “Right.” She turned back to her thick cup of coffee on the table. “You do one more thing, my girl,” she said. She said no more. She picked up her cup. The other ladies went back to eating cornflakes. Fenella and Imogen might have been ghosts, too, for all the notice anyone took of them.
Quietly and hurriedly they retreated to the door and backed out, clutching the milk and the cornflakes. “I wish you hadn’t said that,” Imogen whispered when they were outside in the passage.
“So do I,” said Fenella. “But I had to, or she’d have gone to Phyllis.”
“But we’ve got a right to food!” Imogen said wretchedly. “What else can we do? Do you think Phyllis would give us the money to buy cornflakes of our own?”
The Time of the Ghost Page 12