She held up the glass before her veiled eyes. ‘There’s hardly enough to wet one’s lips. I don’t see why you feel the need to stint us when it’s Waldo’s sherry.’
‘We mustn’t give Rupert the wrong impression, Clarissa. It’s very good of him to come to the rescue. We must do our bit and make little economies where we can.’ He turned his spectacles in Rupert’s direction. ‘We’re running a tight ship here. We’ve got to if we don’t want to founder. There’ll be a stiff breeze to the Cape and a storm or two before we’re round it! It’s a cruel sea, an unforgiving sea, a sea that’ll never be tamed! It’ll take all we men can give in seamanship and sweat and sheer damned guts and then, by God, it’ll ask for more! Our hands’ll be raw – our eyes stinging with the salt –’
‘Do shut up, Ronnie!’ My mother carefully manoeuvred the glass beneath her veil. ‘You gave us Hornblower yesterday. Whoever wrote that script had as much idea of life at sea as a carpet-beetle.’
What there was visible of Ronnie looked hurt. I got the impression that he was rather in awe of Rupert. Of course, drama critics are Olympians where actors are concerned, with the power to set a fair wind behind them or sink them without trace. I stole a glance at Rupert. He was standing next to me and for a moment I thought I saw something in his eyes that might have been amusement. Ophelia and Portia had come in then and his expression became grave. Portia said hello but did not offer to shake hands. She went to sit on the window seat, parted the curtains fractionally and stared moodily through the gap into the street.
Ophelia made no attempt to greet him but threw herself down on the sofa. She tossed her head and glared at Rupert. ‘I suppose you think it’s very amusing to come here and make absurd demands. It’s an odd way to show gratitude for all you had from us, I must say. You’d better know at once that I’ve no intention of dancing to your tune like the organ grinder’s monkey.’
‘Certainly not. You would look quite ridiculous,’ returned Rupert smoothly. It seemed he was master of the dusty answer.
I longed to say something to show that we were grateful for his generous offer of assistance but I was afraid they would all be angry and accuse me of sucking up, so I kept quiet. Rupert looked at his watch.
‘Has anyone got a job yet?’
‘I’m going to work as PA to a romantic novelist called Jessica Delavine,’ said Portia, turning away from the window to look at him for the first time. ‘Luckily she doesn’t want any typing done, just answering the telephone and organising meetings and things. She’s an ardent feminist and only writes novels to fund the cause. She’s going to pay me one pound fifty an hour.’
Rupert nodded. ‘Good. Harriet, we know, is fixed up.’ I tried not to look despondent. ‘Bron?’
‘There’s an advertisement for a car salesman in today’s paper but it doesn’t exactly excite. If you can’t help me with the Guardian, I wouldn’t mind going into banking, though it is the death of the soul –’
‘Right, garage job for you. Ophelia?’
‘Pah!’ said Ophelia.
‘I repeat my terms. Should any one of the four of you fail to get employment, or lose it, I shall wash my hands of all of you. So I suggest you start trying to make Ophelia see sense. I don’t envy you the task. Harriet can telephone me next week to let me know how things stand. Goodbye.’
He had put down his glass and walked out. I had run after him to the front door. ‘Don’t be angry, please, Rupert. I’ll make Ophelia understand that she’s got to get a job. I know you’re doing this for our own good and we are grateful, though we don’t behave as though we are. It’s really so kind of you to help us.’
‘I’m not angry.’
‘Really not?’
‘I know what actors are like. I spend a lot of time with them. The worse they are at acting the more arrogant they become.’
‘You are angry.’
He sighed. ‘Not yet, Harry, but if you keep me here, fruitlessly debating my state of mind and making me miss my train, who knows?’
I felt crushed. Only his use of my old nickname gave me any hope that there was a watery milk of human kindness in Rupert’s breast.
‘Oh, boy!’ cried Cordelia when I returned to the drawing room. ‘Che uomo affascinante! I wonder if he’ll want to make love to me when I’m a famous film star. Of course he’ll be quite old by then, but frantically experienced.’
I did not attempt to defend Rupert against the chorus of denunciation that followed. I was thinking, for the hundredth time since she had gone to stay with the nuns, how much I missed the stout bosom and sympathetic presence of Maria-Alba.
THIRTEEN
Mr Podmore threw open the door of his office and faster than you could lick a stamp Muriel and Eileen were thundering at the keys. ‘Slim in yet?’ he barked.
Muriel and Eileen continued to attack their keyboards as though they were playing Rachmaninov. Without raising her eyes Muriel said, ‘He rang in to say he’s got a bad cold. Bad hangover more like.’
‘It’s a bloody nuisance, whatever the cause. Body found in sewer’s being buried this morning. The coroner gave accidental death. Cops wanted first-degree murder. Something smells. Gangland Killing! Corruption In High Places! Someone’ll have to report it. It’s only a question of getting the names of the mourners and what sort of police presence there is.’
‘It’s no good looking at me.’ Muriel stopped typing to stare indignantly at Mr Podmore. ‘My doctor says my sciatica ought to be reported in the Lancet. If you think I’m going to stand around in that cold wind –’
‘It isn’t any use my going,’ said Eileen. ‘Funerals always make me cry, even if it’s a stranger what’s being interred and once I start I can’t always stop.’ She fumbled in her bag and brought out a handkerchief. ‘I’m that soft-hearted. When my next-door neighbour’s budgie died I had to have the district nurse in. I sort of swelled up.’ She gulped and blew her nose.
Mr Podmore’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling as though seeking inspiration from above, and then they travelled round the room to rest on me. ‘You. Byng. Four Lamps Cemetery, eleven o’clock. You can take the bus fare out of petty cash.’
‘Oh, but I wouldn’t know what to –’
‘Two hundred words’ll do. Put in a bit of atmosphere. Weeping relatives, slanting rain, that kind of thing.’
‘But really I –’
Mr Podmore had retreated into his office.
‘Well, I am glad it isn’t me going.’ Muriel got up to put the kettle on. ‘Rain’s forecast. I don’t know about slanting. Some people are always ready to push themselves forward. Like a Cadbury’s orange sandwich, Eileen?’
‘Yes, please.’ Eileen smothered a sob in her handkerchief. ‘It’s ever such a liability having a tender heart like what I have but I shouldn’t care to be hard.’
They looked at me disapprovingly. ‘What was it he said your name was?’ said Muriel, thoughtfully as she dropped tea bags into flowered china cups. ‘Byng, wasn’t it? Now where have I heard that name before? Quite recently, wasn’t it?’
The bus dropped me outside the cemetery gates, which was lucky as rain was beginning to fall in chilly drops and darken the concrete drive. The cemetery was large and by the time I found the funeral party, I was uncomfortably wet. I spotted a police car parked behind a large yew. The mourners, dressed to the eyes in deepest black, with preposterously dressy hats, were sheltering under an enormous cedar while the vicar stood with open prayer book some ten feet away at the head of the grave. His surplice billowed to expose a pair of ancient paint-splashed flannels beneath.
The vicar spoke quietly, depressing his chin and muttering into his chest. The others had stopped bothering to listen and were chatting among themselves. I sidled up behind a large woman in a short skirt that revealed an underground map of blue veins on the backs of her knees. ‘We thought the Seychelles this year,’ she was saying to her neighbour. ‘On account of our Dawn wanting to go to Lanzarote with her boyfriend so Fred said, what the h
ell, let’s go somewhere decent for a change, just the two of us.’
‘Very nice,’ said the other woman, an unrealistic redhead in extravagantly patterned black tights that made her legs look gangrenous. ‘Gerald wanted to go to Barbados. But I said to him, Gerald, I said, have you forgotten my stomach? Show it an unwashed lettuce leaf and it rebels. Everyone we spoke to last year who’d been to foreign parts had gippy tummy. I said to Gerald, it isn’t worth making yourself ill, just to show off.’
‘So where’re you going then?’ said the fat woman sharply.
‘Blackpool.’
The vicar signalled to the chief mourners to come forward to throw a trowelful of earth over the coffin. A woman started to hand round a basket of artificial flowers but a strong gust of rain sent her scuttling back under the tree. I got out my notebook.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to the fat woman. ‘I’m from the Brixton Mercury. Would you mind giving me your name and relationship to the deceased?’
‘Ooh, that’s nice. Think of Vildo having the papers to his burial! He was anxious enough to keep out of them when he was alive, that’s for sure!’ She let out a squawk of laughter and then made a face of apology when she caught the vicar’s eye. ‘It’s true, though. He was a pain in the underpass, when all’s said and done, and there isn’t anyone here that gives a toss. Not what you could call a credit to the family either, was it, drowning in a sewer? He was my uncle.’
‘Vildo? That’s an unusual name.’
‘It’s Serbian. His dad came over here from Sarajevo after the last war.’
‘Would you mind giving me his surname?’
‘Surely. It’s –’ She made an explosive sound and then spelled it for me. It had seven letters and not one was a vowel.
As I struggled with fingers numbed by cold, to write to dictation half a dozen impossible names, it occurred to me that they looked like typing mistakes and no one would be any the wiser if I made them all up. The vicar hurried off, holding his prayer book open over his head in a last-ditch attempt to keep off the rain. I looked desperately about for atmosphere. The flowers, beheaded and tortured into hideous shapes, were already limp with rain. The artificial turf lining the hole was spattered with mud. The glossy black headstones, with lettering picked out in gold, set off by green chippings in granite corrals, looked bravely gay.
I noticed a man standing alone in the shadow of the cedar. The mourners ignored him, gathering into groups to make dashes for their cars, which were parked along the drive. When every one, including the police car, had driven off, the man walked over to peer into the grave. He looked dreadfully ill, his cheeks a ghastly greyish-white, his lips blue. A few black hairs straggled across his bald head. It was a battered sort of face, perhaps foreign, probably Serbian. He ignored the freezing rain blowing into his face. ‘A friend from the past, a mysterious stranger,’ I wrote, hoping this might qualify as atmosphere. As I sucked my pencil and thought how best to describe him, the man put his hands to his head and uttered a keening sound. I was glad that Vildo had someone to mourn for him. The man certainly seemed upset. He got out his handkerchief and put it to his eyes while his shoulders heaved. ‘Never again. Never again,’ he said. ‘As God is my witness, this is the last time.’
This had some poetry about it as from the grave’s edge, so I wrote it down, intending to embellish later. When I looked up the man had gone. I stared about in bewilderment. He was absolutely nowhere to be seen. I even looked up into the branches of the cedar in case he had swung himself up, Tarzan-style, but the tree was empty, even of sparrows. For miles around there was nothing but rows of memorial slabs, wilting blossoms and tattered grass. There was no one in the cemetery but me.
A damp mist coiled about the graves. The branches above my head dripped mournfully. A sudden blast of wind sent the black clouds scurrying and a wreath bowling down the drive. I clutched my coat tightly round me for comfort. From within the grave there came a sepulchral groan. Once I had started to run I couldn’t stop for fear of a skeletal hand on my shoulder. I reached the gates, wet to my knees from landing in puddles, and in a sad state of breathlessness. I flagged the bus that was approaching, and hopped on, hurling myself into a seat with such speed that the other passengers looked at me in surprise.
Once my heart had slowed to a reasonable rate and my nerves had been soothed by the ordinariness of the old lady sitting next to me, grasping a string bag filled with Brussels sprouts, I started to wonder what I might make of the extraordinary phenomenon I had just witnessed. I had heard plenty of stories about people appearing in photographs of their own funerals. That I had just seen Vildo’s ghost I was almost ready to take my oath on. Ignoring the motion of the bus and the jerks of its stopping and starting, I began to write.
I continued the narration in the hothouse of the office and, by the time my shoes and coat had dried, I had finished what I hoped was a masterpiece of reporting. In case Mr Podmore was disposed to be sceptical I had added a few extra details. I made the apparition transparent and had him gliding through a couple of headstones and a tree before vanishing. Also I dressed him in a white shroud rather than a grey mac. As soon as I had checked in the office dictionary whether ‘wraithlike’ was one word or two, I delivered my article in person to Mr Podmore.
He took it from me without a word and began to read. I watched his face eagerly and was pleased to see his expression changed from its customary sneer to one of surprise.
‘Good God!’ he said quite a few times. When he got to the end he let the paper fall on to the desk while he leaned back in his chair and cleaned out one ear with a paperclip, in a distracted sort of way. ‘Incredible, quite incredible. After all these years – when I’ve not seen so much as a wisp of ectoplasm – that you, a young, ignorant –’ he checked himself – ‘I mean, unversed in parapsychology – well …’ He went on looking at me but he seemed to be talking to himself. ‘It might validate the theory that paranormal manifestations prefer to reveal themselves to adolescents and simpletons. Or else that the unformed mind is a sort of wet clay, perfect for taking impressions, to which the more developed intellect is unreceptive.’
There was a confirmatory tinkle from his wind chime.
‘Now, look here,’ I began, not a little annoyed to be called ignorant, a simpleton and mentally unformed, in three consecutive sentences. ‘I’d like you to know that far from being stupid I have in fact read a great deal and I could recite loads of Shakespeare if I wanted –’
‘All right.’ He held up his hand. ‘I’m sure you’re a clever little girl. Deb Claims Brains. And, now I think of it, this is better than I expected, but you’ve got a lot to learn about writing articles.’ He snatched up a pen and bent over it. ‘First rule, establish the facts. Who, what, where and when. Then get on to the why and how. We’ll get rid of the obscure adjectives and adverbs –’ he swiped through all the lovely words I had spent so long thinking up – ‘and we’ll cut out the bit about “the almost palpable miasma of etheric malignity rising from the tombs of the departed”. We don’t want our readers to think that staff of the Brixton Mercury has collectively had hysterics – Mental Health Scare At Newspaper Office! Doctors Baffled! Atmosphere, Byng, does not mean a novel of manners by Henry James.’
He began to scribble all over my precious work, and my spirits, which had soared during its composition, folded their wings and plummeted earthwards. ‘If I’d known you wanted me to write like Raymond Chandler …’ I began, but I could see he wasn’t listening.
‘Just a minute.’ Mr Podmore held up a finger as I turned to go. ‘I’ve had an idea. I want you to write a series for the paper.’
I could not believe my ears. ‘What, me?’
‘Yes, you. Unless there’s someone else in this office that only you can see.’ He put extra sarcasm into his voice but I was too amazed to object. ‘One thousand five hundred words every week until further notice for the Friday edition. Eight pounds an article. Entitled –’ he tilted his chair on to its back l
egs and gazed thoughtfully at the fly-filled globe that encased the light bulb – ‘“The Ghostly Habitat”. No we don’t want them thinking of anything as mundane as a department store. We want to titillate their imaginations. “The Revenant Revisited”? Too clever by half. “Spectral Sleuthing”? Too much of a tongue-twister. We want this to become part of the nation’s patois.’ You had to allow that there was nothing small about Mr Podmore’s ideas. ‘I have it! “Spook Hall”. That’s got a friendly colloquial feel that won’t frighten even those readers who think the Red Brigade is an Italian fire-fighting service and Kenyatta is a kind of African boating party.’
‘But what am I to write about?’
‘Haunted houses, of course. Give your imagination free rein. Get their spines shivering. Make their follicles contract. I want you to visit every house the length and breadth of England that’s had so much as a unattributable footfall. You can indent for expenses. But keep it cheap, mind. No four-star hotels.’
I was bewildered by the suddenness of my promotion and extent of the project. ‘But I can’t – I couldn’t possibly –’
‘I’ll say one thing for you, Byng. You drive a hard bargain and that’s no bad thing if you want to get on. All right, I’ll raise you to ten pounds an article. But the copy’s to be on my desk every Thursday lunchtime without fail. You get flu, or your auntie falls off a cliff, that’s tough. We’ll make a journalist of you.’ For the first time he smiled, disclosing two long incisors like fangs.
‘When shall I begin?’
‘You can start next week.’
‘But where shall I –’
Clouds among the Stars Page 19