Poor Tom's Ghost
Page 14
From the window overlooking the back garden came the aroma of bacon frying. For a long, blank moment Roger could not think what to do, what it would mean to have those five days back, and then—to his surprise—he knew he did not mean to worry about it. He scrambled out of the sleeping bag so eagerly that the low camp bed tipped over on its side and gave him a sharp crack on the elbow. He hardly noticed, but headed, shivering, for the rear window. The long shadow of the house lay across the tangled back garden, but below, at the corner by the kitchen areaway, Bast lay stretched on his back in the one shaft of sunlight. Beyond, down along the garden wall, Roger caught a glimpse of his father’s dark head moving along a shaggy row of box trees and felt a great contentment. Directly below and to the right, on the patch of terrace at the foot of the French-door steps, Jo had set up the camp stove and was turning bacon in the frying pan with as much easy elegance of gesture as if she were conducting Mozart instead of breakfast. It was eerie—seeing the day begin just as it had the first time through.
But it was too chilly still to stand watching. Roger rooted in his rucksack and brought out the same riotously bright T-shirt. Jemmy had presented it to him because Alan refused to be seen in it. On an empty stomach it did look alarmingly violent, and it wasn’t really warm enough, so—feeling like an echo of himself—he pulled his old green cotton polo-neck on over it and hurried down the upstairs hall.
Breakfast was spread higgledy-piggledy on the door-table in the dining-room and Pippa sat in the doorway to the garden, wiping clean her eggy plate with a piece of toast. As she turned, Roger had a moment of panic. If Pippa didn’t remember… And then he met her nervous, questioning look and knew that she had felt that same brief flicker of doubt.
“I haven’t said a word,” she whispered owlishly. “It’s weird.”
“Not weird, weirdly wonderful,” Roger declared with a flourish of the milk jug.
Jo peered indoors from her post at the stove. “ ‘Hark! there’s one up!’ Roger, and at eight o’clock? Wonder of wonders!”
Roger struck a pose in the doorway. “ ‘The busy day waked by the lark, hath roused the ribald crow.’ ”
“And fielding Shakespeare at that! You’ll have bacon, won’t you?”
“Yes, please.” Roger cut three slices of bread and clattered down the iron steps past Pippa. “Is there room for this much toast?”
Jo moved over. “For you, always. But you’d better fetch a fork if you don’t want to burn yourself turning it. I take it you slept well?”
“Like the proverbial.” Roger bounded back up the steps as Pippa moved to let him by. He came back, fork in hand, to hesitate in the doorway. “On second thought, that’s not precisely true.”
Pippa set her plate behind her. “We went down to the river in the middle of the night,” she announced baldly. “It was high tide. Roger fell in and I had to hang on until he could climb out.”
“You what?” Jo turned to stare at them in astonishment.
Roger flushed. “Not right in. Only on the slipway.” Trust Pippa to plunge straight in.
“But what on earth were you—” Jo broke off as Tony appeared along the north-west fence and came, plate in hand, picking his way through the brambles. “Tony, these two were down messing about in the Thames in the middle of the night.”
Tony gave Roger a sharp look. “Might one inquire why?” he drawled.
“I suppose,” Roger said carefully, “one might say one was out exorcising the household ghost.”
“I wasn’t aware that we had one,” said Jo with a glimmer of amusement. But there was an odd, guarded interest, too, in the look she gave him.
“We did have,” Pippa declared.
Tony recovered quickly from the moment’s mood that had frozen him, frowning, at the terrace-edge and came to peer at the bacon. “I’m disappointed in you, Rog,” he said lightly. “A little night breeze moans through that colander of a ceiling and you begin coining ghosts. Not that we’re not well-placed for it. I see we’re smack up against the churchyard on that side.” He nodded in the direction of the river with a ghoulish waggle of eyebrows on as he speared a half-toasted slice of bread with his fork and held it out to Jo on his plate. “None of your brittle, dried-up rashers, now. The three fatty ones will do nicely.”
Roger, bemused, watched the unfinished toast, wrapped round the bacon, disappear. Everything was both the same and different. It was strange to think that the better part of a week had ceased to exist; that Tony would never play Tom Garland playing Hamlet; that Tom would never carry him into the shadow of that “undiscovered country” from which there is no returning. Roger found himself thinking—wonderingly, for it was quite un-Rogerly—that if he acted at risk, half blindly, on what he knew and felt in that strange past time, with no knowing what he might have set in motion, the same really should go here and now. Last night Pippa had not muddled around looking for reassuring explanations and slippers, but had run after him barefooted into the dark. Tony and Jo too… Their feelings braided them together and to others like strands of music improvised upon the moment, unstrained and sure. Oh, in a bad temper they snapped. When they disagreed, they went at it hammer and tongs. But their laughter was infectious, and they spent it with pleasure.
Improvisation. The actor and musician knew improvisation as a discipline of art. Perhaps—perhaps that same spontaneity of response was a discipline of life, and lives he had thought formless held a shifting harmony he had not suspected. That was Jo and Tony’s security. No warm nest. No guarantee of the day after tomorrow. It was as simple as knowing who or what you cared for and acting on it. Jack, now: perhaps Jack had felt love for Tom, but the real love, the love he acted, was for himself. Perhaps in that one thing, thought Roger, he and Jack had been brothers. Love unacted was not love.
“Rog? Your toast needs turning.”
Roger looked up to And Jo watching him curiously and flushed as he forked the bread over.
“A penny for ’em,” Jo teased.
“No charge.” Roger tended to arranging the toast with unnecessary care. “I was wondering whether it was you I love or the crispy way you do bacon. At a pinch I think I could do without the bacon.”
Jo laughed. ‘You did get out on the right side of the bed this morning! Tell you what. I’ll put on three more pieces so that you’ll be in no danger of running short on either.” She cast him an odd, sideways look. “If you’ll tell us this ghost story of yours.”
Roger looked across at his father speculatively. “I might, if Pa would promise to keep quiet until the end.”
Tony looked wounded to the bone. “Oh, come now! Would I laugh?” Hand on his heart, he turned to look be at the ungainly, ugly house. “Actually, I suppose I might. I can’t think when I’ve seen a house with less spirit. I refuse to believe that anything so kitschy could be distinguished by a ghost.” The offhanded tone could not conceal a gleam of wary interest.
“But I saw one of them,” Pippa insisted passionately. “He had dark, curly hair with longer curls down in front of his ears, and a wine-y-coloured suit.”
Tony seemed a bit nonplused at such vehemence from commonsensical Pippa. “Oh, well then,” he said gamely, going to sit on the iron steps, “I suppose I must promise to hold my tongue.”
Jo, when they had heard the tale, stood speechless for a moment and then turned her attention to the bacon, stabbing jerkily at the burned rashers to push them away from the coals. “That’s quite a story! It sounds…” But then she did not say what it sounded like.
Tony’s reaction was the surprising one. His interest had changed by uneasy degrees to a deep disquiet as he watched and listened more and more intently. “An oddly circumstantial bit of moonshine,” he said at last. “You do surprise me, young Nicholas. Where’d you ever hear of Tom Garland?”
“There actually was such a person?” asked Jo.
Tony hesitated. He looked puzzled, half alarmed. “The name’s certainly—familiar. I suppose I could’ve read somewhere th
at a Thomas Garland was Shakespeare’s first Guildenstern. The queer thing is…” The words came slowly, reluctantly. “It’s more like a thing remembered than a dry fact met in a book. As if—but it had to be a dream. It’s sheer nonsense to say that five days can slip out from under one’s feet as if time could ebb as well as flow. And yet the whole tale sounds so bloody familiar! Or bits and snatches of it do. Idiotic things like Alan and Jemmy’s having been here and our uncovering the Elizabethan house. Most of it’s a muddle, though. And how … how could I remember being Tom and filling in for Burbage as Hamlet?”
“I don’t believe all this. But there was a Guardian review,” Jo said dazedly. “I remember cutting it out. I meant to have it framed. There was one bit—” Closing her eyes, she quoted hesitantly, “I left the theatre … with the impression that… I had been holding my breath for three and three-quarters hours. What Tony Nicholas gave us last night … may not have been Hamlet as Burbage played him under Shakespeare’s direction, but it is a Hamlet that brushes away three and three-quarters centuries to make the past—’ ”
“ ‘—our vivid present,’ ” Tony finished for her. “A review like that… Dream or no, it gives me an itch to stir things up, come Monday night.” He grinned shakily.
“How could it have been a dream?” Pippa objected. “Four people don’t dream up the same story, not and have all the bits fit.”
“Neither, in the general way of things, do they get two runs at the same week,” Tony said wryly. “But why quibble? Alan’s due down tomorrow, and we can put and him onto this Tom Garland. He loves a riddle. And if there was such a person, he’s bound to turn him up at the Senate House library or on a top shelf at the Drama League.”
“You can look him up in the old parish registers today if you don’t believe it all happened,” Roger said passionately.
“Or,” offered Pippa, finishing off the last of her third piece of toast and delicately licking the jam from her fingers, “you could look under the rotten floorboards up in Roger’s room.”
The tale in the telling had seemed to Roger no less vivid than the five lost days had been in the living of them, but already, disconcertingly, it had begun to take on the distant vividness of story or dream, as it had for Jo and Tony. When he found his palms sweating on the tire iron as he and Tony ripped up the rotten flooring, Roger wondered whether there might not come a time when he doubted the tale himself. For it was true and not-true. Just as those three days so long ago had been re-done, the five just past would be. Two separate realities now and in the past. But surely the house was the same…
It did not take long. Through a hole ripped open in a matter of minutes, the beam from Jo’s flashlight picked out the broad, dust-thick stairs and, in a dusty cobwebbed jumble on the landing, the dismantled upper railings, newel post, and balusters. They ripped the hole as wide as could be managed without a proper wrecking- bar, and Roger lowered himself awkwardly into the cramped space below. In Tony’s and Jo’s dumb struck silence he moved down the dust-soft treads to the landing and with his hands brushed off the great round knob of the landing newel post. Wrapping both arms round it, he strained forward and back to work the knob loose, circling round the post as he did so. It was awkward work. He had to keep hunched over because of the flooring inches above his head.
“Like a dirty great champagne cork,” Tony observed nervously. He sat on the top step with Pippa on his lap and an arm round Jo, who shivered with excitement.
And then it came free.
Roger thrust one grimy hand into the cavity. When he drew it out, his eyes were shining.
Almost as brightly as the gold coins that glittered in his palm.
Had I but time…
O I could tell you
WHEN ALAN COLLET WENT ON MONDAY to the Senate House library, he went with the eerie sense that each step, each gesture made, each page he turned was an echo of motions already made, of pages already scanned. Even the notes he made in the little notebook were the same—all but the last. A footnote reference to the parish church attended by actors from the Globe sent him to an obscure little history book, and then to the church itself. These last notes read:
Memorial plaque in St. Saviour’s recorded in W.M. Goss,
The history and antiquities of the parish Church of
St. Saviour, Southwark (1819). Seems to have been
lost in the demolition and rebuilding of 1839-41.
Plaque read:
IOHN GARLAND OF THIS PARISH
DEPARTED THIS LIFE JULY THE
18 1603 BEING AGED 14
YEARES 7 MONTHES AND 9 DAYES
HE LYETH IN WYNCHESTRE FIELDE
Confirmed by St. Saviour’s register of burials.
Entry for 2 July 1603 reads:
Iohn Garland, apprentice, buried with a
forenoone knell of the great bell, xxs.
Roger and Jo, poring together over pages of crabbed handwriting in records as far afield as Kingston and Mortlake pieced together only the barest bones of Tom Garland’s mended life, but those few were enough to tell more of a tale than they looked to find.
From the parish register of christenings, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Mortlake:
24 September [1603] Christopher, son of Thomas Garland, player, and Katherine his wife.
The same Daye: Also Susan, daughter of the said Thomas and Katherine.
From the parish register of burials, All Saints’ Church, Isleworth:
26 December 1603 Buried in the church with a knell of III for the monthes of his lyf, Christopher, infant son of Thomas Garland, pl … r and Katherine, of New Howse … rsonidge
3 May 1642 Buried this day, Katherine,wife to Thomas Garland of this parish, in the churchyard.
9 May 1642 This day was buried in the churchyard Thomas Garland of New Howse, vestryman of this Church.
From the register of marriages, All Saints’ Church, Isleworth:
21 June 1621 Susan, daughter of Thomas Garland of New House to Gilbert Cox, farmer of this parish.
The tale had come full circle.
Readers can also meet Tom and Jack Garland three years earlier, in the year 1600, in the time-shift adventure, THE BLACK CANARY