Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

‘I think I remember this one,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you must. If you lived there you must remember. It’s the only thing people know about the Fergusons.’

  She turned away from him again and he said:

  ‘Remind me of the details.’

  ‘Oh, they’re not known exactly.’

  ‘In outline.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t say whether Daddy was the scapegoat or not. Obviously I have an opinion. Let’s leave that aside. Either way the result’s the same as far as we’re concerned. Instead of being in London in some stuffy house in Chester Square or something like that, here we are on our lovely farm. I don’t complain about that. But it’s true enough.’

  ‘Facts,’ David gently suggested.

  ‘Not very original really,’ she said, gliding across the room. ‘A country house. Ascot I think it was. A lot of smart people. Daddy was in the Guards, you know. Well, there was one person there much smarter than the rest. There was evidently some sort of trouble. Anyway the men played cards half the night and argued what to do about the fact that somebody had cheated, for the rest of the night. Rumour has it that it wasn’t Daddy who did cheat, but Daddy certainly took the rap. The very next day, you know, he resigned from his clubs.’

  ‘What a dreadful hardship,’ David said.

  ‘Oh I know—’ she said quickly. ‘We’re marvellously lucky really. Nobody cares up here. Nobody at all. Not in our generation anyway.’

  ‘And in mine?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly, you’re not as old as all that. No, you mustn’t get the idea that I’m complaining about things. And of course to us cheating at cards sounds such a little thing. I’d do it like mad, I’m sure—’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he agreed.

  She went on, ‘Resigning from clubs and all that. It’s all terribly grand, but in those days, you know—’

  He interrupted, ‘D’you not think it’s perhaps a little too grand?’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’ She seemed alarmed again.

  ‘I actually do remember this story … I mean both the one you’re telling and what was told at the time.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ very slowly.

  ‘Yes. I can’t remember why I learnt. I don’t honestly believe that people were sufficiently interested—’

  ‘Everybody knows the Ferguson scandal,’ she replied firmly.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. I wonder who could have told them?’ He smiled. ‘I confess I’d never thought of it in quite the same way as you. I didn’t think the operation had quite the scale to merit the word scandal. What we gathered was that your father used to make quite a habit of gambling, even soon after he was married, and your mother put her foot down. It was one of several things of that nature. But she used to ring him at his club. I believe it was one of the St James’s Clubs. It was said, jokingly, I believe—’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got it right.’

  He persisted. ‘Purely as a local joke, that your mother brought him north because he spent so much time in his club, playing bridge. I don’t remember any suggestion of cheating.’

  ‘Of course there was cheating. That was the whole point. And as a matter of fact,’ she added, ‘Daddy did cheat. He’s wonderful, Daddy, really.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘He doesn’t care that for what anybody says. Never did.’

  David shrugged. ‘I only tell it as I remember it. You may be right.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I didn’t know your parents, myself. But I remember the farmbeing pointed out to me. That’s when the joke came up. I remember it quite clearly because it was one of the most human jokes my father ever told me. And I remember my mother enjoying it enormously and pretending to be rather shocked.’ He added, ‘It doesn’t really matter, you know.’

  ‘Of course it matters. I know exactly what you’re thinking. That I’m untruthful.’

  ‘I think you may get muddled. There was quite a famous case called Tranby Croft, but that was at the turn of the century, I believe—’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard of that,’ she said, her colour rising. ‘And I don’t muddle it a bit. In fact usually when I’m telling the story I mention Tranby Croft. The circumstances were quite extraordinarily similar – a different guest of honour – you know?’ The way she added ‘you know’ with a childish haughtiness made it clear that he had caught her and he suddenly looked sad, too. He sat down on one of the desks and reached out both hands to her. If one suspects one’s best friend of pinching things, there is, after all, no satisfaction in finding out that one’s suspicions were well founded. She stood biting her lip, refusing, shaking her head.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said very kindly. She came near enough for him to be able to reach forward and touch her only with his fingertips. Rather moodily, still with a deep frown she banged her hip again and again against one of the desks. She looked at him solemnly and bitterly. She was not afraid to meet his eye. He said, again:

  ‘It doesn’t matter a bit. And I won’t tell anybody.’

  She continued to stare at him.

  He went on, ‘But you ought to know why you did it. Why you exaggerated. Let’s put it kindly – the Ferguson scandal and maybe the Dundee—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not Dundee. That one’s sacred. That’s quite a different thing. Really it is. I confess the Ferguson scandal thing – it’s a bit of a fib. Not really all fib. One’s forgotten just quite what’s right and what’s wrong about it. Pink and I had lots of versions, once. Some better than others. But it doesn’t do any harm. People like a good story. It brightens their lives.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You know too much, don’t you?’ She looked at him, for a second, as if she had loved him for a thousand years.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I haven’t said your story-telling didn’t work. On the contrary, you’ll remember that the basis of my complaint is that it works too well, if you don’t mean to go through with it.’

  ‘Did I tell you these stories just to make myself more attractive? Is that what you think?’

  He nodded.

  She laughed suddenly, and touched the ink-well again. ‘Isn’t that clever of me?’ she said. ‘You may be right. I’m amazed. I must say it would be nice to have you around, as a friend, cousin-style. We could employ you as a kind of fortune teller. Pink would love that too.’

  She moved quickly away, laughing rather loudly while he sat still. But as she suggested, ‘I think it’s high time we went back,’ and walked towards the classroom door, he said:

  ‘Stop.’

  She turned and actually arched an eyebrow in a little pose of dignified surprise.

  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, saying:

  ‘I shall never learn. It doesn’t pay to tell the truth. But I promise I’m not going to tell anybody. You don’t need to feel guilt or shame—’

  ‘Over fibbing about something that happened thirty years ago? Don’t be so silly, David. I’m hardly likely to feel guilty about that. I am a woman, after all. Anyway, a girl. And they’re allowed little lies.’

  ‘Only when they know they’re telling them. That’s a very important point.’ He smiled again as he raised a finger of warning and she returned his smile with real warmth. She came back into the room a few steps.

  She said, ‘I daren’t approach more than this, else you’ll go all grim again and call me obscene names and charge up and down, scratching your head to find new ways of making me feel small.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Am I as bad as that?’

  She said, ‘You do seem to like knocking me about a bit.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head.

  She replied, ‘Yes, you do. You’re a kind of schoolmaster at heart. No, honestly, I’m saying something nice. Will you go up there and pick up Kennedy’s Latin Primer and read me a bit?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ she replied quickly. ‘That was a silly idea. David, don’t bark atme and don’t call m
e that other hateful thing even if you think it, because if I am what you said I am, then I honestly don’t think I can help it very much.’

  ‘Who’s getting complicated now?’

  ‘It’s a plague,’ she said. ‘You should hear Pink try and tell someone how he feels. It always comes out backside foremost. David, I was going to ask. We were having a love scene, weren’t we? Just now, I mean, not just for the last minute or two. Even when I was telling you about poor Mummy.’ She looked at her watch. ‘God, we must go through.’

  ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you,’ he said. ‘You put it much more nicely. At least I know that I’m making love.’

  ‘When you’re cross-examining me? That’s very modern living. Look, I won’t make a speech, David. I’d got a little speech ready. About yesterday.’

  ‘I could see that.’

  ‘You tell me, then, what I was going to say.’

  He thought and smiled slowly, then he spoke on her behalf.

  ‘“Look, David, about yesterday. I don’t want you to misunderstand. I’m not sorry that I said ‘no’. I’m just sorry that I didn’t say ‘no’ much sooner. I don’t mean just yesterday afternoon. Not just in the car. I mean in London. From the very start.”’ He laughed, pleased with his own performance, then grew more serious as he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  She said, ‘But it’s exactly … Darling David, do you know everything about me, as easily as that?’

  ‘No,’ he said thoughtfully, and he did not move towards her. She stared at him as she spoke.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve made up my mind – it is “no”. Because? Well, because it is, darling.’ He still did not move, and she went on, ‘But you’ve every right to bawl me out. I know that’s why I hated the word as much as I did. I did encourage you and then said “no”. It was a very bad thing to do. Please forgive me for that.’

  He said, ‘It happens quite often. I wouldn’t feel too badly about it. In fact it always happens. It’s just a question of how long you go on doing it. Beyond certain limits it slips from good technique to bad judgment, bad taste and then crime.’

  She looked at him solemnly.

  ‘David, am I doing it now?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, I thought I was,’ she said. And turning quickly, she ran out of the room. As she did so, Peebles, the singing farmer, was returning to the gym with his friend. He was saying:

  ‘I’ve been told on the highest authority that if I’d got the professional attention when I was younger I could have made my living that way. It was a conductor told me that. He said to me, “You have some remarkable pure tenor notes.” He said that.’

  SIX

  AS SOON AS Mary re-entered the gymnasium, which, in Pink’s words, now smelt strongly of what your best friend won’t tell you, she realised that she had stayed in Classroom IV too long. The group round the Ferguson table by the door had that particular look of indecision which follows some minor calamity. Macdonald was standing by the table staring in the direction of the band and alongside, her boy-friend the tiny Captain, Jack Gordon, M.C., R.A.M.C. (Retd.), who looked like a sick Mr. Esquire, was joking as he picked a green pill from his silver snuff-box.

  ‘May I offer any one of you one of these anti-coagulatory pills given to me by the kind services of that bloody awful organisation the National Health Service?’ he asked, but Mary, as always, brushed him aside. Stephen was sitting back in the chair drinking some white wine and the blank expression on his face betrayed that he was up to his usual trick of contracting out of a scene. He was looking at Pink, but at the same time ignoring him.

  Pink, meantime, was stuttering and sucking in air. Whenever he had words with his father there appeared an impediment less in his speech than in his brain. He was saying:

  ‘Not just sitting in front of the nursery fire! Oh no! Not right! Fact.’ He twisted his head in a little circle. ‘Not the whole truth. Absolutely not.’ He assumed a mysterious smile. ‘No question of sitting-sickness these days. I may hang on a bit in the nursery alone, sometimes, you follow, but – but not just sitting. You may be very surprised. Things have changed. Pink’s got pink plans. You may be very surprised indeed. I’ve come to my senses.’

  To which Mary said, almost under her breath:

  ‘Oh God. Guv’nor stuff,’ and she meant that there must have been a row between Pink and her father. She looked at Macdonald. ‘Right?’

  Macdonald nodded but Pink interrupted again.

  ‘Nothing to it, Nelly,’ he said to Mary. ‘Just a little ruffling of the old feathers. I was trying to tell him to cheer up, it wasn’t such a bad hop, he seemed to be a bit snobbish about it. You know what he is. He suggested rather snobbishly that it might suit me. Said it suited him too that I should hang on here as it would save me sitting up all night in the nursery drinking his booze.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Mary asked.

  ‘More or less, old flesh.’ Pink took a little drink. ‘When I offered to buy him a bottle he said it was the sitting, not the whisky, that offended him. Then he pushed off.’

  Macdonald said, ‘It was just this minute,’ and Mary ran into the hall. She caught her father on the steps. He wore a perfectly cut, rather gay dog’s-tooth check coat over his dinner-jacket. He looked round with his usual blank, blue-eyed, flat-eyed stare when somebody said:

  ‘You’re being called, Sir Harry,’ but he smiled at once when he saw that it was Mary.

  She said, ‘Darling, you’re not huffing, not on my account? I couldn’t bear that.’

  He stopped with one foot a step higher than the other. He had a royal knack of pose. He smiled very slowly and kindly and took both her hands.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Then do come back.’

  He shook his head. He said, ‘I’ve had the one dance I wanted,’ referring, of course, to their dance. ‘I’d only look what you call stony.’

  ‘You’d still look the best.’

  ‘Bed-time for old bones,’ he said, plonking a tweed hat on his head. He always looked brown.

  ‘Daddy, did you snap at Pink?’

  ‘Snap?’ He frowned, seemed puzzled. ‘Not that I know.’

  ‘He’s a bit hectic.’

  The Colonel shrugged. ‘Well, then he’s being too idiotic.’

  He kissed her and moved off, careless of the others’ transport problems, intending to take the family car.

  The cars were parked in the school’s ashcourt or playground, and when he arrived at his he found that it would be awkward if not impossible to reverse out. He stood for a moment, staring at it, and he did not turn round when one of the social secretaries of the Young Conservatives, a boy called Alec, with long fair hair, suede shoes and enthusiastic manners came dashing out.

  ‘This’ll never do, Sir Harry. I’ll just move Mr Scott’s car, here, and that’ll let you out.’

  The Colonel did not smile. He looked faintly surprised as he said:

  ‘That’s extremely kind of you.’

  It was somehow never necessary for him to say thank-you.

  Much as the business man blames himself unnecessarily for the deal that’s fallen through, if he spends an afternoon with a tart, so Mary, tight-lipped and clenched fist, blamed herself as she returned to Pink and Stephen. Macdonald and the Captain were by then having what they called ‘a difference’ by the bar at the end of the room. (‘My dear Flora, my dear girl …’ the Captain said, again and again.)

  Pink was still shaking his head and talking mysteriously and secretively of a public relations firm which he and some connection of a neighbouring family were going to set up in Montreal, or maybe Sydney. He had dark plans, but they rather petered out when Mary returned.

  The hiatus that followed was suddenly, swiftly broken by Mary. She pulled in her chair and seeing David over by the bar she turned her back on him, firmly. She talked to Pink with her special kind of excited innocence; as if unbroken conversation would keep the bogey-man away.
Stephen examined the label of the hock bottle throughout her next outburst, as if it had as much written on it as the label pasted on those tiny bottles of Angostura bitters.

  ‘There’s the most fascinating thing going on in Classroom III.’ She drummed her fingers on the table in front of her and then quickly continued:

  ‘It’s all your chums, Pink. You’re really missing something. They’re all in Classroom III sticking pins into the effigy of David’s papa. You know they’re all his pupils, practically all of them, anyway—’

  As she ran on, naming the group, Maclaren, Miller, Peebles, Davidson and all the rest, a sad smile passed across Pink’s face.

  ‘I promise. Honestly,’ she said, which Pink knew to be the mark of pure fiction, then she went back to her story.

  ‘All of them, about ten or twelve, and I couldn’t quite see whether one was pretending to be old Dowie or not – they probably just imagined him.’

  The music seemed loud as a new dance began. It was a dance called Hamilton House, which begins with the girl setting to one man, as if to dance with him, then quickly passing to the next and turning him. The girls were all enjoying it and some of the younger ones put great spirit into the rejection of the first man, twisting their heads away or even flicking their fingers in the first man’s face before grasping the hands of the next.

  Mary still talked.

  ‘I honestly don’t think there was anybody up there actually imitating him, but they were all acting as if they were back at school. I was riveted.’ The heels of her hands banging against the table seemed to say ‘It’ll be all right, Pink, it’ll be all right. Forget his bullying.’ She ran on, as Pink covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Can you imagine all the lads squeezed into desks, half of them laughing and poor old Bill Davidson [the proprietor of the Queen’s], he’d fallen fast asleep at the back. They were shouting at him to wake up at the back and old Baldy Maclaren was standing up in his desk waving his arm about, asking the ghost of Dowie if he might be excused. He was quite funny, I must say, going “Please, please sir”, flicking his fingers too.’ She spoke more and more swiftly. ‘Some of them were imitating Old Dowie too. And wee Peter Forbes was shouting the most of all. All glowing and red, the way he gets, though I must say he’s kept his figure better than the others have, and he must be over fifty now. He’s shouting at the top of his voice, “Aye, and I still feel the strap across my palm. I do. ‘Peter Forbes, you’re dunce!’ Wham! ‘You’ll no do any good in this world or the next.’ Aye and here’s me,” Peter shouts, “And the mill’s never done better and that’s a fact. It’s me that’s done it! Three thousand a year I make! Three thousand pounds and expenses on top of that! Bloody old Dowie! Bloody old man!” He was shaking his fist quite violently.’