Outside, Mary stopped and leant back on the door. She suddenly said, guided by infallible instinct:
‘I’m here, in the dark, by the door. My eyes are closed.’
He was trembling very badly when his hands first touched her face. His fingers passed all over it, for he too had closed his eyes. Soon he brought his hands down to her arms and, leaning forward, he lowered his head until it rested on the wool in the lapel of her coat. She brought one hand up and held the nape of his neck, and as he wept she said: ‘Don’t, whatever you do, be ashamed.’
She stroked his hair softly and as she said again, ‘Don’t be ashamed. Don’t be sad, I’m back,’ she opened her eyes. To one side was the dark shoulder of the byre, to the other the huge skeleton of the open hay loft. Behind, the cars’ lights followed each other up the main road, past the bothie. Above that, the woods, and higher still the Pole star. It was Stephen who at last broke the silence. He squeezed her arms and looked at her. He kissed her firmly and quickly on the lips, saying:
‘It will be all right?’
Mary nodded.
‘Of course it will,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied, almost absently, and she let him slip back a little. She looked at him curiously as if she had never seen his face before. He was smiling and he took out a huge clean handkerchief to dry his cheeks. She looked very perfect, pale and cold.
He said, ‘I’ve done some batty things.’
‘Such as?’
He whispered, ‘I got them to chop down our damned silly monkey puzzle tree.’ He had carved their initials on it, before he had even proposed to her.
‘You didn’t,’ she exclaimed, in a sudden lively voice, and she began to move away. Their feet crunched over the dross and coke until they came back to the muddy track: a track which Stephen was going to improve.
Still talking of the monkey puzzle, he said:
‘I didn’t know you’d come back.’
She gave him her hand and rather cheerfully, she said:
‘Poor Steve, what else, batty?’
‘I read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall from cover to cover.’
The thought of it made him say ‘God help me!’ and laugh at himself, and an instant later she laughed too.
She said quickly, ‘Oh dear, you must have been upset.’
‘And you?’
‘Batty things.’
‘Weren’t you happy?’
‘No. Then I didn’t really expect to be. I wasn’t in love for very long.’
White lying has a curious, curving effect on how things are said. The words run smoothly together and the voice rises or falls at a different place.
‘… I think for a little longer than he was. That’s never very nice.’
It occurred to her that even if she were making up this story, there was no language to explain what happened with David.
‘After David?’
‘After David? Well, I shared a girlish flat. I got a job too.’
‘Publishing.’
‘That’s what I liked to tell people. It was filing and copy-typing. Not much else.’
‘And men?’
‘After David?’ Coolly, ‘None, darling.’ She paused, then excitedly she said, ‘Oh yes, one. My boss in the office. My very own big white chief,’ and she gave a description of Eric, her boss. Stephen said:
‘He sounds very nice.’
Stephen did not know much about lying. He did not know that when a Customs man hears a girl say with a laugh, ‘Well, I’ve got a horrible jar for me Mum,’ in just the same sort of facetious voice, he knows there is also something else.
‘No one really,’ she said. ‘Except the odd friend of David’s being kind and standing me lunch.’
He clasped her hand very tightly and said:
‘Darling, it will be all right, it will be all right.’
Again with a coldness, almost a brittleness, she laughed and said, ‘Scout’s grip.’
But he was talking very seriously. He said:
‘It’ll probably be as miserable as before, but you won’t have to copy-type.’
She stopped and shook her head. They were at the edge of the pool of light that came from the dairy. She said:
‘I don’t expect miracles. You mustn’t either.’
‘I never have done,’ he replied honestly.
‘Dig my down-beat man,’ she said, and was surprised this time by her own voice. Trying to find herself again, she said more steadily:
‘There’s a sort of hopeful pessimism, isn’t there, that’s you? It’s better, I think, than poor Pink’s hopeless optimism.’
‘Saner,’ he said, and she nodded as though she were learning things.
Then, suddenly, she reached for his hand again and she was glad to hold it. It was cold. In this fashion they picked their way back through the puddles which reflected the dairy lights, until they came to the house.
Stephen was quite childishly excited about the reunion and he went through the sitting-room to tell Macdonald and Pink the news. Mary, who was altogether more apprehensive, remained in the kitchen where she was joined, a few moments later, by Pink, who was struggling into his duffle coat. He wore a pork-pie hat, poised on the top of his small head.
Mary was by the Aga. She was preparing, or at least pretending to prepare, some supper. She said, ‘You’ve heard?’
‘Sorry, old girl?’
‘Stephen’s told you.’
‘Not my business, old girl.’ He shook his head and said with an infuriating smile and little bow:
‘Some of us mind our own business, Miss Popham.’
‘Aren’t you glad?’
Pink said, ‘I wish you every happiness in your life together. But as a matter of fact, old thing, it won’t have much to do with Pink. Oh no. I’m expecting a most important letter. Canada, as a matter of fact. Oyez, oyez. You can ring those bells.’
He checked his fly buttons then pushed his feet into an enormous pair of flying boots. ‘There’s a nip in the air,’ he said happily. And then he laughed a noiseless laugh which shook him, and pointed one finger in the air. He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side as he said, ‘And high above, a long piercing note …’
‘Pink, darling,’ she said, much more softly. ‘You’re not going out, tonight?’
Pink pushed back his head and again raised an eyebrow. He spoke with undisguised hostility.
‘Does a chap have to sign out, now, eh?’
She shook her head. She said, ‘I mean, I want you to stay.’
‘Sorry, old thing. Just a bit late.’
‘You’re huffing.’ It was the first thing she said which penetrated, because it was about the only thing she had said since she had returned which was couched in their own language.
‘Me, old girl? Not a bit.’
‘You were, earlier. Sitting staring into nothing. All that.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. He would not acknowledge the corners of her mouth which were ready, whenever he was, to break into a smile. ‘Not a bit,’ he said again.
He nodded and leaned towards her, using his most confidential tone.
‘I don’t know if I should say it, but I’ll tell you the truth, old love. I don’t feel bad at all. Pink feels a lot better.’
She looked at him oddly and he nodded again.
He said, ‘I don’t want to be hard. Of course he was a tragic character and that, our mutual friend, but I’d be fibbing if I didn’t say it was a load off my mind.’
‘Of course it’s a relief,’ Mary replied warily. ‘If it had to happen—’ and Pink waved that aside with his hand.
‘It’s a relief,’ he said. ‘Better this way: all that stuff. Baal’ He bleated like a lamb. ‘It’s the truth. You can like it or lump it. Now he’s gone I feel a sight better. Better already. Stevie and I’ve got the old place ticking over – mainly Stevie, I grant you, oh yes – Well—’ He splayed out his hands. ‘Things aren’t at all bad, you know. Matter of fact we never ha
d it so good, like the gentleman said. Things are looking up.’
‘Go out tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Stay at home and cheer us up tonight.’
‘Not actually poss.’
‘You’re not going down to the steadings, are you?’
‘No. Not actually the plan.’
‘Well then, where?’
‘Questions! Power!’ Pink suddenly exclaimed, violently. ‘Macdonald’s asked me all this. Women! Power!’ he said again. ‘“Num” questions. You’re not going out, are you? When will you be back? Who with?’ Pink smiled. ‘Dear little things,’ he said, very quietly. ‘Gorgeous sweet charms.’
When Mary began, ‘Are you going into … ?’ he interrupted at once.
‘As a matter of fact I am. Anything I can do for you there?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. She said, ‘Peter Forbes, and Peebles and Blue Boy and that crowd?’
‘It’s Saturday night,’ Pink replied.
‘The Queen’s? Pink, you can’t. No, honestly you can’t. Not the very same night.’
‘Why not? Eh? Private party. Private room.’
‘Even then—’
‘Now,’ Pink warned, ‘don’t play the heavy with old Pink. What’s the alternative, Pink asks? Sitting through there watching TV, or sloping off to my own fart-sack half an hour after the scoff?’
‘Just tonight,’ she said. ‘We could talk.’
‘Windy?’ he said, looking at her.
‘It would be nice.’
‘Maudlin,’ he replied with a shake of his head. ‘Well rowed, maudlin. It would be maudlin talk. But don’t get me wrong, old duck, there’s no question of a fellow getting high. Peter said it. Wee Forbes. He said, “Now, Pinkie, we’ve been there every Saturday night for years, now, and Sir Henry’d be the last to stop us, I’m sure. He’d want us to carry on, and that’s just what I votes we do.” No drunkenness, no singing. No sobbing.’
‘It sounds a bit boring,’ Mary said.
‘Just chums getting together in the quietest possible way.’
Mary knew nothing would shift him. She nodded and said, ‘Don’t be too late,’ and he turned by the scullery door.
‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head. Not about anything. We’ve got it all tee’d up, Stiffy and I. I tell you, this is something really different. Sad and that, but I feel a new man. It’s going to be a great ranch, little girl, a great ranch. You ask Steve.’
She nodded.
‘Oh, yes it is,’ he cried, slapping the pork-pie further on to his head. Just before he left he said, as much to himself as to her:
‘And great ranches need great men, eh? Chin up. See you, angel-bum.’
Mary was still standing watching the spot from where he had vanished when the kitchen door opened again.
Macdonald came in. Seeing Mary, she stopped for a second, then walked across the room, keeping to the far side of the big kitchen table. She said:
‘I think it’s wicked. I’m not saying more or less than that.’
TWENTY-ONE
THE SAME FALSE quality which had been in Mary’s voice when she had said to Stephen outside the dairy, ‘Dig my down-beat man’, and ‘My very own big white chief’, often came into play in the days that followed. Pink must have noticed it, because it was the sort of thing he recognised before anybody else, but if he did hear it, he made no comment because he, on the other hand, was far too involved with the Pink problems. He seemed to want to make it quite clear that he was suffering great mental anguish and presented them each meal and each evening with all the physical clues. He assumed an air of ferret-like rather than poetic distraction, rushing at his food then staring blankly out of the window for ten minutes at a time. He counted the cigarettes in his packet most times when he took one and when he was not drinking lime juice and soda he often rushed to the kitchen and grabbed a lemon. This he would eat like a monkey, biting at it savagely and sucking out the juice. Whenever he went to the village or as far as Forfar or Perth, Coupar or Aberdeen, he brought back another couple of bottles of lime juice, a dozen lemons, fifty or sixty cigarettes, the odd cigarette holder, and on one occasion, a clay pipe. He was both secretive and careless. He never mentioned these buying sprees but never failed to leave the objects where they might be found by one of the others. He seemed to enjoy his food very much, but after the heartiest meal he always stuffed in a few vitamins in pill form. He was growing rather paler in the face as he now never ventured out of the house, except in the car. He was also growing fatter. Most of the time he wore too many clothes, and his brow was usually covered with a gleaming surface of sweat, which he mopped from time to time with one of several handkerchiefs he carried, ‘just in case, old chum’. Because he was also consuming a large number of Amplex pills and making profligate use of every deodorant on the market, Mary said that she was sure he was drinking. But this was not true, at the time. He was just wildly worried that he stank like a polecat. Once or twice a week a huge parcel would arrive from Trumper’s packed with lotions, spirits and eau-de-Cologne. Where all the bottles went was a mystery which none could solve. But the annoying thing for them all was that when they tried to help him he denied stoutly that anything was the matter.
‘Old bird, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Never felt better. Don’t I look too good, then?’
He said this to Mary one afternoon when she returned from a walk round the farm with Stephen. She had found Pink at four o’clock in the afternoon, fast asleep in the nursing chair.
She replied, ‘Pink, I can’t be expected to help you unless you tell me.’
Just then the telephone rang and Pink rolled across the room to it. He landed with a thump in the desk chair and, picking up the receiver, said in the quiet, slightly sapsy voice of a gentleman publican:
‘Farm house here, Sir Charles speaking.’
As usual, it was somebody complaining about an error in the local milk delivery. Pink called her Madam, and patiently noted down her requirements.
Still prissily he said:
‘In point of fact, delivery isn’t my particular pigeon but I quite understand your distress. It shall be seen to immediately. Your cream, Madam, will be at your door by 17.50 hours this evening. There’s a van goes to the station at that time. Thank-you!’
He replaced the receiver and made a note. His handwriting was wilder than usual.
Mary said, ‘I never knew a van went to the station at six.’
Pink said, ‘You don’t know everything, chumbo, oh no!’
She asked who was driving it. The usual milk van would be at the dairy at that time.
‘Service,’ said Pink. ‘I shall drive it myself.’
‘But, Pink, that’s terribly inefficient. You can’t drive ten miles just to deliver a quarter of a pint of cream.’
‘Service,’ said Pink again. ‘It counts.’
He rang the dairy and, mock military now, instructed one of the girls, at that time due for one of the few breaks she had during the long day, to deliver to the house, without amoment’s delay, one quarter-pint carton of single cream. When he put down the receiver he sighed, took up the pencil and ticked the note he had made.
Then suddenly, in his sulkiest tones, he said:
‘You two are all right, so it would seem. I’m surprised you even notice me about the place.’
But Mary had lived too long with him to accept jealousy as the cause of his uneasiness. That he was pretending to himself, just as his mother might have done, long before, that people did not show him the love due to him, was perfectly likely, but Mary was not deceived. The change had come over him not when she made it up with Stephen, but when the Colonel died. His father’s death had had the opposite effect of what he himself had anticipated. He thought his disappearance would leave him free to live and he had found, in a curious way, that it had left him free to stop trying altogether. But he did not confess this to Mary.
She said, ‘If you’re not going to help yourself, there’s not much I can do.
If I were you I’d ring up and say that cream won’t go until tomorrow.’
When the door closed behind her Pink sat for a while, doodling on the note-pad. In truth he did not know what he wanted, and in this he was much like that poor pigeon, his mother. He just expected more of life; that one day, something would happen that would make it all better. He was reduced, he knew, to believing in a miracle, and vitamin pills, foreign travel, deep sleep, even shock therapy, about which he knew an unhealthy amount, occurred to him as the possible forms which that miracle might take. He sometimes put his hand to his ear, and as it was now his habit to avoid the word God, he would say, with a horrible laugh:
‘Moo, I hear thee not!’
And when, at last, it happened, Macdonald was there, on the landing, in the middle of the night. Instinct had kept her awake, and the sound of voices, rising, brought her from her bed.
She stood, breathing very quietly, just outside Stephen and Mary’s bedroom door. The lights were on within and a shadow flitted across the bar of light at the bottom of their door. A moment later there was the noise of somebody crying, and expecting it to be Stephen, Macdonald was at first unnerved by the noise, which was pitched high. Only as it continued, and as it was broken now and then by the repetition of a single phrase, did she realise that it was Mary’s voice. The noise of the anguish of frustration, as any gaoler, as any nurse or nannie knows, when it reaches the extreme, loses identity. It becomes a note on its own, disembodied, and profoundly alarming. It is a note that passion never reaches, even if, for obvious reasons, it is close to the note of that dream of passion that sometimes rings in the ears. Hearing its wail, Macdonald stood very still, listening for the sound of movement or of another voice, below it. The final exchange between Mary and Stephen, as Macdonald might have guessed, was merely childish reiteration. At first with frenzy and then hollowly Stephen said many times, ‘I can’t.’ The words that Mary was still repeating from time to time, as Macdonald heard only indistinctly, were simply, ‘You must.’
Household Ghosts Page 35