Tomorrow's ghost dda-9

by Anthony Price

  That was a mistake: Nannie wouldn't approve of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. She had to make it an appeal, not just a convenient duty offered, but also an act of kindness to her.

  'Please. I'd much rather look after the children than go back home ... to a cold home.'

  Good one, Frances! Lonely little Widow Fitzgibbon.

  'And I do like children, Nannie - '

  Another good one.

  'I can even cook, you know. All you have to do is to tell me what their favourite supper is - I'd so enjoy cooking for someone again.'

  She was even beginning to convince herself, even though she hated cooking. The phone in Nannie's hand chuntered impotently. Nannie raised it to her mouth without taking her eyes off Frances. 'Hold on a moment, Muriel.'

  'It would be an adventure for them, too. Getting used to me, it would take their minds off the robbery, Nannie.' Frances nodded. 'What time do they get back from school?'

  'A quarter past six,' replied Nannie automatically.

  If they didn't like anything too elaborate that would still leave her enough time, thought Frances. And, for a guess, they probably preferred a quick fry-up anyway -

  bangers and beans, or bacon and eggs - and she could manage that. 'What do they like?'

  The corner of Nannie's mouth lifted. And pancakes to follow. The entire human race liked pancakes; and they were not only a treat, they were easy to produce - even Robbie had never faulted her pancakes.

  Nannie was still observing her closely, and suddenly Frances knew that Nannie was almost listening in to the menus which were running through her brain.

  'What do they like, Nannie?' The phone came up again. 'Muriel - '

  * * *

  Detective-Inspector Turnbull left at five to three.

  (Detective-Inspector Turnbull had decided that it was a routine job, a quick in-andout semi-professionally executed by a borstal graduate with more technical skill than intelligence, whom they would pick up sooner or later asking for thirty-seven other offences to be taken into consideration, and who would be patted on the head by the judge, given five pounds out of the poor box and told not to be a naughty boy again, and who would promptly do it again since it was more fun than working and a useful addition to the unemployment benefit; but Detective-Inspector Turnbull was also relieved that Mrs Fitzgibbon agreed with him instantly, with no awkward questions and an equally quick signature on the release, and he was happy to leave Detective-Sergeant Geddes to deal with that and to do anything else Mrs Fitzgibbon required, no matter what.)

  * * *

  And Nannie left at ten past three in her uniform, half excited for the gold future of the Charlotte Tyson Nursing Home, but still half worried about leaving her charges to Widow Fitzgibbon, and consequently also leaving very precise instructions to the Widow -

  ('Jane can watch the Nine O'clock News on BBC-1, if she wishes to, in her dressing gown - the Colonel likes them both to keep up with world affairs. And Sally can watch the first half - the first half only - of the ITV news at ten o'clock ... And don't take any argument from either of them, dear. Tell them that you know the rules, they are good girls really, so you won't have any trouble with them, but they will argue - ')

  - and a letter conferring her power-of-attorney on the Widow, pending her return or the return of their father, whichever might be the earlier.

  ('I'll mention the Colonel, dear, that will give them something to think about, so they won't play you up - they are good girls, but they are half-way between being girls and being young women, and that can be awkward, believe me.')

  * * *

  And Detective-Sergeant Geddes left at quarter past three, with his release signed and sealed in its envelope

  (For the attention of the Chief Constable

  ready-typed on the latter).

  ('Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs Fitzgibbon?') ('Yes, Mr Geddes. There's a Chinese take-away restaurant on the edge of town, a new one opened about two months ago.' The Widow Fitzgibbon consulted the price-card Nannie had given her. 'The Wango-Ho, in Botley Street...) ('Here's seven pounds, Mr Geddes. I'd like two sweet-and-sour pork, one chicken-and-almonds, and one beef-and-green-peppers. Plus three portions of rice - two fried and one boiled - and three spring rolls. And I would like it delivered here at 6.30 sharp this evening - if there's any change, put it in the police charities' box.')

  * * *

  Twenty past three.

  The sound of Detective-Sergeant Geddes' car had faded away. Rodgers, the house-horse-and-garden handyman, who so fortunately hadn't seen anything this morning, had faded away too.

  ('Three o'clock is his time on a Thursday, dear. But if you'd rather not be alone I can ask him to stay on, and I'm sure he will - I can stop by Mrs Rodgers' cottage and leave a message to say that he'll be late home ... Thursday is her day at the Vicarage, but I can give the message to the woman next door.')

  ('No, Nannie, it's quite all right. I don't mind being alone, it doesn't worry me.')

  * * *

  It was still not absolutely quiet in Brookside House: she could hear the distant rumble of the central heating boiler.

  That at least had been the truth: she didn't mind being alone - even if it hadn't been necessary she wouldn't have minded it, it wouldn't have worried her. Aloneness was now her natural habitat, whether she was by herself or in a crowd. Originally she had set herself to get used to it. Then she had become accustomed to it. And now she preferred it.

  The boiler stopped, and its echoes quickly died away.

  Frances stood in the middle of the empty hall and listened to the silence begin, waiting for it to reassure her.

  She imagined it forming in the top of the house, where at the noisiest of times there would always be a secret yeast of it, ready to grow the moment the front door slammed shut. From there it would seep down, from floor to floor and room to room, until it had filled every last corner.

  Roof space, carefully lagged (Colonel Butler's house would be carefully lagged); attics and box-rooms; bedrooms one by one, master bedroom (there would be one single bed), children's bedrooms, guest bedrooms, Nannie's self-contained flat; bathrooms and dressing rooms and lavatories; then down the staircase, tread by tread, into the hall, into the breakfast-room and the dining room, and the kitchen and the pantry and the laundry room; into the library, curling round the desk; into the playroom and the study room; into the television room, into the sitting room, into the conservatory (how a conservatory fitted into Hollywood mock-Tudor remained to be seen, but a conservatory there was, nevertheless).

  Now she could hear it all around her. The house was ready for her at last.

  CHAPTER TEN

  'If I was your mother, Jane,' said Frances deliberately, coldly seizing her opportunity,

  'I would say that you've just put a great deal too much in your mouth.'

  Jane attempted for a moment to manipulate her spring roll, which was collapsing greasily down her chin.

  'If ... if you were my mother - oops! - ' A tangle of bean sprouts dropped out of the roll on to the spectacular mound of sweet-and-sour-pork, chicken-and-almonds and beef-and-green-peppers which Jane had arranged in an enormous crater of rice ' - if you were my mother, then you would have been ten when Father married you - no, ten when you had me ... and eight when you had Sally, and six when you had Di. Which, according to the sex talks Baggers gives us at school, is just not on.'

  'No.' Sally raised an elegant morsel on her chopsticks. 'She's about twenty-eight. She could just have had you - if she was exceptionally unlucky.'

  Frances wondered whether that unlucky was a purely biological judgement, or whether Sally-was referring specifically to her sister. At the great age of seventeen Sally Butler handled her chopsticks like a Chinaman and was too clever by half, or maybe by three-quarters. Fortunately for the human race - the male half of it, anyway - she was also homely and horsey, apart from the superb hair; but to have been beautiful and that smart would have been unfair on bo
th her and mankind, the contest would have been totally one-sided.

  'Twenty-eight?' Jane examined Frances with the appraising eye of a second-hand car dealer. 'Yes, I suppose you could be right at that.'

  Frances felt the need to keep her end up, to join them if she couldn't beat them. 'And that would make Sally your step-sister,' she observed. Mother would have to wait for another opportunity.

  'And that wouldn't be bad, either,' said Jane, who was obviously accustomed both to her elder sister's accuracy in guessing ages and also to the need to keep her own end up also. 'Are you really as old as that? You don't look it, you know, Frances.'

  'I don't think I could be your mother, quite,' Frances parried the question. Not that I wouldn't like to be, she thought quickly. At fifteen Jane was beginning to lose her puppy-fat and to exhibit the red-gold beauty of her eldest sister, if the portrait in the master-bedroom hadn't lied.

  In fact, where Sally had diverged from the mould somewhere along the line to become a true Butler daughter, Jane might well end up more like Madeleine Francoise than the fabled Diana.

  Sally stared at her for an instant, catching her in the act of projecting her sister's face into the future.

  'You know about our mother, don't you?' Sally selected a sweet-and-sour pork ball from its fellows. 'It'll all be in Father's print-out, of course.'

  God Almighty! thought Frances - Father's print-out!

  'Twenty-eight is quite old,' said Jane, to no one in particular. 'Relatively old, anyway.

  Not too young, anyway.'

  Frances looked from one to the other. Jane munched complacently; Sally lifted the pork ball on her chopsticks and popped it into her mouth.

  'Your Father's ... print-out?' Not too young for what?

  'Computer print-out. Everything's on computer, obviously,' Sally informed her.

  Jane stopped munching. 'What sort of computer?'

  Sally ignored her sister. 'Isn't it?'

  'Oh - I get you,' said Jane. She nodded to Frances. 'You know our mother's dead, that's what she means. Well ... not strictly speaking dead - strictly speaking she's missing. But after all these years it's like the war - like Nannie's husband. He's still missing, although they know he was killed, because Father was there. But they lost him after that.' She made it sound almost like carelessness. 'He wasn't there when they came back, anyway - there was just a shell-hole.'

  On one level they were both being incredibly cold-blooded, almost to the point of childishness much younger than their actual years, even allowing for the retarding effect of an English private girls' school education; but they had been just as cool over the break-in - or, at least, Jane had been just as cool, and Sally had been cool once it had been established to her satisfaction that the thief had not put a sacrilegious hand on either of her horses.

  However, that hadn't surprised Frances, from her own memories of a similar education. The order and discipline of their school lives, with its well-defined rules and regulations, emphasised the disorder and indiscipline of the jungle outside, so that they were able to take the break-in as something like a misfortune of war. Also, she recalled that petty theft was more or less endemic at school (Money must NEVER be left in the cloakrooms or in the desks'), and an endless subject for rumour and speculation. To have been burgled would provide them both with an exciting tale next day which would lose nothing in the telling.

  What was disturbing all the same - or tantalising, anyway - was the suspicion (also out of her own memories) that they were also operating on another level, the nature of which she had not as yet fathomed. But children like this, who were immature in some areas, were apt to be precocious in others.

  They were waiting for her to say something.

  'Your Father is very much my senior.' That was a statement they could both understand. 'So I don't get to see his ... print-out ... any more than you see your reports.'

  Jane swallowed her mouthful. 'We do see our reports,' she said. 'And I bet Father's seen your print-up - print-out, I mean.'

  'I expect he has.' And now to business. 'I'm sorry to hear about your mother.'

  'What does your husband do?' Sally's hitherto impeccable manners suddenly deserted her. 'Does he work for Father?'

  'My husband is dead.'

  'How?' said Jane.

  Nannie was prettily revenged. 'He was a soldier.'

  'A soldier - ?' Jane regarded her with interest. 'Like Father, was he?'

  'Tais-toi!' snapped Sally. 'I'm awfully sorry, Frances.'

  'So am I,' said Jane quickly. 'What rotten luck!'

  'Shut up,' said Sally. 'Our mother died nine years ago, that's what the police think.

  After seven years a missing person is presumed to be dead, anyway.'

  Frances was beginning to feel out of her depth. 'Is that so?' she said inadequately.

  'That's right,' agreed Jane in a totally matter-of-fact voice. 'Like in the war. There's

  "Missing, believed killed in action", and there's "Missing, presumed killed in action", and there's just plain "Missing". Maman was "Missing", but after seven years it's the same as

  "Missing, presumed killed in action'" She nodded at Frances. '"Presumed" is really when they don't actually know, but it's the most likely thing. When they've got some evidence

  - like with Nannie's husband, Father was there in the trench with him when the Chinese attacked, and saw him get shot, but then he had to go to another bit of the trench, and then they were shelled, you see - ' she nodded again ' - our side shelled them. Father called them up on the wireless and said "There are hundreds and hundreds of Chinese here, and only a few of us, so if you shell us you're going to kill a lot more of them - "'

  'He didn't say that at all,' cut in Sally. 'Father had built this sort of tunnel, and he retreated into it with his men. It was what they'd planned to do if things got really bad.

  Father had it all planned, exactly what they were going to do, Frances.' '

  'Well, it was still jolly brave - they gave him a medal for it,' said Jane.

  'I didn't say it wasn't. I just said it was planned.'

  'All right, all right! Anyway ... when they came out of the tunnel, and drove the Chinese off the hill - it was a hill they were on, just above a river - when they got back to the trench there was a shell-hole where Nannie's husband had been, so they had to make it "Missing, believed", that's all I'm saying.'

  Frances groped for a suitable reaction. Jane was clearly determined to inform her, apart from the fine distinctions of the military casualty list, that her father was a gallant officer, while Sally, for her part, favoured intelligence above bravery, and was equally determined to establish that. Unfortunately it was not the information she required from them.

  'I see.' Yet she didn't really see at all.

  A hill in Korea, a quarter of a century or more ago: how many children - how many adults, for that matter - knew anything about that old war? How much did she herself know?

  She shook herself free of it. She wasn't concerned with RSM Hooker, of the Mendip Borderers, or even with Captain Butler, Mendip Borderers (attached). She was concerned with Major and Mrs Butler.

  But she still couldn't think of anything to say.

  'So that was what happened to our mother,' said Jane.

  'I'm sorry' would hardly do. And in any case, she'd already said it once. If anything, she was now further away from the vital question than before these unnerving children had re-opened the Korean War.

  'But then, it was probably all for the best,' continued Jane philosophically. 'It probably wouldn't have lasted, the way it was going.'

  It wouldn't have lasted. It was all for the best - the way it was going?

  It wouldn't have lasted?

  'Lots off the girls at school are in the same boat,' Jane nodded at her. 'Baggers says the one-parent family is going to be the big social problem of the 1980s, with the present rate of divorce.'

  It wouldn't have lasted.

  'But that doesn't take account of
re-marriages.' Sally rested one elbow on the table and looked intensely at Frances. 'What do you think of second marriages, Frances?'

  'I haven't really thought about them.' The question momentarily unbalanced Frances just as she was zeroing in on Jane. 'I don't know ... What do you mean, "it wouldn't have lasted", dear?'

  'I think second marriages are a good thing,' said Jane. 'I mean, it stands to reason that you know better what to look for the second time round - "Marry in haste and repent at leisure" is what Baggers says, and she could be right for once. I think I shall almost certainly get married twice:

  the first time will be a terrible mistake - it'll be a purely physical thing, an animal passion I won't be able to resist ... Or it may be plain lack of experience, like David Copperfield and Dora. I can never imagine David Copperfield in bed with Dora, it must have been an absolute disaster. The mind boggles - at least, my mind boggles. What d'you think, Frances?'

  Frances's mind wasn't boggling, but it was hurting her more than she could tolerate.

  Unlike Jane, she could imagine exactly what had happened in David Copperfield's bed, down to the last humiliating detail.

  Jane didn't wait for an answer. 'So the first time will be a ghastly mistake - but the second time I shall get it right. And I'll be an absolutely super step-mother too. I shalln't try to be a mother, I'll be like an elder sister, only better ... And my step-children will be the most marvellous aunts to my children, if I decide to have any. It'll be an extended nuclear family - all for one, and one for all, like the Three Musketeers!'

  It was fair enough for those who could identify themselves with the King's Musketeers, thought Frances - and the set books at school hadn't changed much, obviously. But Jane's sharp little sword was making her feel like one of the Cardinal's Guards.

  'What did you mean, "It wouldn't have lasted"?' She hung on grimly to her original question.

  'Oh ... they didn't get on. Father and Maman,' said Jane off-handedly. 'That's all.'

  'You don't remember,' said Sally. 'You were only a baby.'

  'I was six - '

  'And a baby.'

  'And you were an old-age pensioner, I suppose. I was there just as much as you - in fact more, because you and Di were at school. I can even remember the day Maman went - she was furious with Father, I can still remember that. Because he wanted to go early, while it was still dark, and she said he didn't have to. And he said he had to.'