Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  Then, one evening in April, they were walking up to the Heath from her flat when a wolf-whistle, not loud but protracted, made them turn. On the other side of the street, walking in the same direction, was a boy of fifteen or so, in jeans and a denim jacket that was studded across the chest with small enamel badges, and with straggly dark hair, parted down the centre. He kicked a flattened can off the pavement, then looked at them and gaped. ‘Stay here,’ Jane sighed. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ The boy had turned and was walking away with a rapid, cringing gait, but Jane caught up with him quickly, and pulled him back by the shoulder. He raised a hand to knock hers away. Alexander called her name and stepped off the pavement, but she stopped him with a flat hand, like a policewoman on traffic duty. She pushed her face towards the boy, who was smiling now. Jane poked a finger at the boy’s chest. Laughing, he ducked and weaved, leading with a loose left fist. Alexander ran towards her. ‘Stay back!’ Jane shouted at him, and contemptuously walked away from the boy, who stayed on the spot for a few seconds, shadow-boxing. ‘What a creep,’ she cursed quietly.

  ‘What was he –’

  ‘My brother Martin,’ Jane told him.

  ‘Not how I imagined him,’ said Alexander. Over his shoulder he saw Martin watching them, rubbing at his chin to erase his smirk.

  ‘A brat and a nuisance,’ she complained, looking back. Martin, walking their way again, waved heartily at her, like a hiker hailing a pair of fellow enthusiasts on an upland footpath. ‘Now we’ve been found out,’ Jane said. ‘You’ll have to meet the family.’

  He met the family the following week, on the Saturday evening. He wore the blue suit he had bought when the band had tried a change of image, and the blue silk tie his father had passed on to him the year before, to smarten up his wardrobe. Standing on the pavement outside her flat, Jane appraised his outfit. ‘You look lovely,’ she said. ‘Mum will adore you.’ She buttoned her duffel coat over the outsized blue jumper and inspected him again. She adjusted the knot of his tie and stroked it as though it were a talisman. ‘An hour,’ she said. ‘That’ll do for the introduction.’

  It was her mother who came to the door. Blue-eyed and pale and broad at the hips, with fair hair that was pulled back into a bun, she was so similar to Jane that it was like looking at Jane’s face under a disguise of creases and little pouches of flesh. ‘Mrs Nesbit, you’ll have guessed,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Very nice,’ she said to her daughter as she shook Alexander’s hand. ‘I do like a man in a blue suit. Come on in.’ Behind her mother’s back, Jane raised her hands as if asking for heaven’s aid. ‘You see what you’re letting yourself in for?’ said her mother to Alexander, having halted halfway down the hall. With a thumb she pressed at the creases that crossed her brow and curved towards her eyes. ‘All the women in this family go wrinkly before their time. Wonderful when you’re a youngster.’ Cherishingly she put her hand to her daughter’s cheek. ‘Beautiful milky skin. Never had a spot in her life. But soon enough she’ll get the wrinkles.’ She took them through to the living room, where Martin was watching a flock of flamingos on TV. ‘Say hello, Martin,’ she instructed him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Martin, lifting a hand from the bowl of crisps in his lap. ‘We’ve met.’

  ‘No you haven’t,’ said Jane.

  Rustling his crisps, Martin simulated fascination with the antics of the feeding birds.

  ‘Martin. Where are your manners?’ demanded his mother.

  ‘Missing, presumed dead,’ Jane interrupted.

  ‘Evening, boyfriend,’ said Martin.

  ‘Good evening, Martin,’ Alexander responded.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Nesbit. She went into the kitchen, leaving Alexander and Jane to sit at the table, while Martin heckled the wildlife. A cheetah was running a small antelope to ground when Mrs Nesbit came back, bearing a tray on which were set three cups and a teapot enclosed in a brown and beige tea-cosy.

  ‘Left, left, you stupid bastard!’ Martin shouted.

  ‘Martin!’ snapped Jane.

  ‘Taken a left he’d have been home,’ explained her brother, gesturing at the screen in his defence. ‘Now look at him. Cat food. Should have looked both ways before crossing.’

  Mrs Nesbit shrugged hopelessly at Alexander and gave him a rapid smile that the others were not intended to see. ‘Knitted by Jane,’ she told him, tweaking the bobble of the cosy. ‘When she was eight.’

  ‘Finished when she was sixteen,’ said Martin.

  ‘Ignore the oaf,’ said Jane to Alexander, and her mother nodded in agreement. For a while they chatted at the table, and then the front door slammed.

  ‘The boss is back,’ said Martin, raising both hands in awe.

  Mr Nesbit presented himself in the doorway, but did not come into the room. Scratching his dusty hair, he looked from his wife to Jane to Alexander, and when his gaze fell on Alexander a twitch seemed to occur in the muscles of his hairline and eyelids.

  ‘This is Alexander. Jane’s young man,’ said Mrs Nesbit.

  Mr Nesbit took the rolled newspaper from his back pocket and lifted it in greeting. ‘Evening, Jane,’ he said.

  ‘Hail,’ called Martin, without turning round.

  ‘I’ll get cleaned up,’ said Mr Nesbit, indicating his overall. ‘Excuse me – Alexander, was it?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Nesbit. ‘Excuse me.’

  Ten minutes later he returned, with his hair combed and oiled, wearing a waistcoat over a fresh white shirt. Passing behind Jane’s chair he stroked her hair lightly, and Alexander thought he saw a slight cowering of her shoulders. ‘So, Alexander,’ said Mr Nesbit loudly as he sat down on an armchair, but instead of completing his sentence he took a pack of papers and a pouch of tobacco from his waistcoat and began to roll a cigarette in his palm.

  ‘Alexander works in the record shop,’ his wife explained. ‘In the village.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Nesbit.

  ‘You know it?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘I know it.’

  ‘And he’s a singer. In the Forest Rangers. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Park,’ Martin snorted. ‘The Park Rangers.’

  ‘Martin went to see them,’ Mrs Nesbit continued. ‘Didn’t you, Martin?’

  ‘I went somewhere and they were there.’

  ‘He said you were very good,’ Mrs Nesbit told Alexander.

  ‘I said they were OK.’

  ‘We had worse reviews,’ Alexander said to Martin. He took the replenished cup that Mrs Nesbit was offering him. ‘Actually, Mrs Nesbit,’ he said, ‘I’m not a singer any more. The band broke up.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘We’ll recover,’ said Martin.

  ‘Turn that off,’ Mr Nesbit ordered his son.

  ‘It’s educational,’ Martin replied.

  ‘You’re not going to get leopards in your exams.’

  ‘They’re not leopards.’

  ‘I don’t care what they are. Turn it off.’

  Martin jabbed a thumb on the switch and kept it pressed there, rocking it as if squashing a fly.

  ‘So anyway, tell us about yourself, Alexander,’ resumed Mr Nesbit, with a half-smile that seemed almost resentful, and which was directed at Alexander several times in the ensuing conversation. Martin watched with evident pleasure at his discomfort, while Jane seemed to conduct a dialogue of glances with her mother, to whom Mr Nesbit addressed not a word in all the time that Alexander and Jane were there.

  ‘You’ll stay for a bite?’ Mrs Nesbit asked Alexander, after a story about Sam Saunders and Sam’s mother’s cigarette supply had made nobody laugh except Jane.

  ‘We’d better get going,’ said Jane. ‘We’ve got friends coming round,’ she lied.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Nesbit, rising from his chair with alacrity to give Alexander a forceful handshake.

  Alexander shook hands with Mrs Nesbit, and said good
bye to Martin, who was already moving towards the TV. ‘See you,’ said Martin. ‘Bye, your ladyship,’ he called to Jane. Only Mrs Nesbit came out into the hall.

  Outside the house a van was now parked. ‘D. S. Nesbit: Builder & Decorator’ was painted on its sides. Jane leaned against a lamppost, scowling at the lettering on the van as though it were an abusive message directed at her. ‘That was awful,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t the social event of the decade,’ said Alexander.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She glared at the house then threaded a hand under his arm. ‘He’s ruined the evening for us. I’m sorry. You had the third degree.’

  ‘Did I say something wrong?’

  ‘No, you were lovely. He takes against people sometimes. I knew he’d take against you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re with me, for one thing. He’s jealous,’ she said, taking a kick at a tyre. ‘I have to go home, Alexander. He’s put me in a mood. Are you OK?’

  ‘Unscathed.’

  ‘Shall we go out tomorrow?’ she asked him. ‘Let’s have a day away. I’ll call for you?’

  At precisely nine o’clock his doorbell rang, and he looked out of the kitchen window to see her Morris Minor parked below. She had fastened the canvas roof back and the steel spokes of the steering wheel glinted as if they had been polished that morning. Hearing the window rattle, she stepped backwards out of the doorway. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt and a long blue skirt, and her hair was arranged in a ponytail that was tied high on her head and swung at the slightest movement. ‘Very Grace Kelly,’ he called down. She crossed her ankles and curtsied, ballerina-fashion, holding her hem between her fingertips.

  When Alexander came out of the flat she was in the car, with a map draped over the dashboard. ‘How about a trip to Canterbury?’ she suggested, and with a finger she demonstrated the route to the city. He kissed her on the cheek, and from the way she accepted the kiss he understood that the visit to her family’s house was not to be mentioned. Canterbury was fine, he said. ‘Open top?’ she asked, gesturing at the sky. He smacked his hand on the outside of the door and pointed up the road.

  For the first few miles they hardly spoke, but then Jane seemed to relax, as if the last trace of the previous day had now evaporated from her mind. She told him about the day she first went driving after passing her test, when she ended up on the coast, not far from Brighton, and had so little petrol in the tank that she was turning the engine off at every set of lights on the way back and coasting down every hill. ‘Befuddled by the thrill of independence,’ she commented. ‘So I did it again the next weekend, but with enough money this time. A one-woman victory parade, down to Brighton and back.’ She looked from the rear-view mirror to Alexander and back again quickly. ‘Silly, is what you’re thinking.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ he said, and he told her how, when he moved into his flat, he would sit in the living room at night, with the lights off, enjoying the silence of the place. Sometimes he would lose all sense of time and find, when he awoke from his trance, that hours had passed while he sat at the window. ‘Mad, is what you’re thinking,’ he said. She smiled and put her hand to his face.

  They were about ten miles from their destination when Alexander sensed a vapour of salt water. Resting his head against the window, he closed his eyes to sniff at the air, in pursuit of the saline taste.

  ‘Alexander, what on earth are you doing?’ Jane asked.

  ‘The sea,’ he replied. ‘You can smell the sea.’ She breathed deeply, but was unconvinced. ‘You can,’ he insisted, smiling with his eyes closed, like a sunbather.

  ‘You can smell the engine, and that’s about it,’ she said.

  ‘The sea, the sea,’ he yearned, like a feverish young poet repeating to his pillow the name of his lost beloved.

  Jane raised herself in her seat to put her face into the air that streamed over the windscreen. ‘I’m getting nothing,’ she said.

  ‘We’re there, practically,’ said Alexander, and he showed her the map, spanning the distance from the city to the coast with a thumbnail.

  ‘You’re advising a change of plan?’

  ‘A small diversion. We could go to Canterbury afterwards. A stroll by the water. What could be more pleasant on a day like this?’ he asked, with a florid, poetical wave of a hand.

  A minute later she turned onto the road to Whitstable, where they parked in a side street and followed the signs to the harbour. They stopped to look at the tiny frontage of the Foresters’ Hall and the gulls that stood like trophies on the stepped gable behind it, and again at St Alphege’s church, where the tone of another visit to the town, a visit made in his childhood, made itself present clearly, like the note of a tuning fork. He remembered seeing that the church had a name that was almost the same as the name of the church in Greenwich, and being confused by it, and deciding that this misspelled building was in some way a faulty version of the London church. At the two white clapboard cottages in Harbour Street he smiled, as if encountering a friend who had thought to surprise him. ‘What?’ Jane asked him, and he told her what he was remembering: his father in his Harris tweed jacket, despite the heat of the day, and his mother in her polka-dot dress, holding his father’s hand and waving her other hand rapidly at Alexander, because he had his thumb over the lens of the Brownie camera.

  ‘Down here,’ he said, ‘there used to be a shop with advertisements painted around the upstairs windows. Royal Daylight Lamp Oil was one,’ he recalled, and they continued down Harbour Street, where ‘Royal Daylight Lamp Oil’ was still legible on the brick, above ‘Shipping Supplied’, which had excited him with the notion that the seafront would be thronged with adventurers, making their last preparations before departing from England.

  They walked along the wharf, past the fish market and the row of tall sheds. On the harbour side of the sheds, nets were draped to dry on the balustrades of the upper storey; at the back, windows oozed a steam that reeked of shellfish. ‘Now I can smell the sea,’ Jane said, and she strode ahead, down the shingle-strewn path that led to the beach. Everything he saw was delicious to Alexander, and he would remember avidly the details of the hour: the thick grey planks of the slipway, frosted with mustard-yellow lichen; the slate-grey wooden walls of the huts behind them; the calm grey sea, which darkened with distance and became, in front of the low promontory across the bay, a colour identical to that of the sky above the headland; the farther strip of land, dark as an eel; the newly sawn lengths of timber stacked on the concrete pier, which were brighter than anything else on the waterfront. He watched the syrupy ripples of the water, while Jane read the book she had brought.

  Jane dozed for a while, and when she awoke a breeze was gathering. Now there were dashes of iridescent olive-green in the open water, between dashes of black. Under the pier, between the rusting iron columns, the light on the agitated water made shapes like new springs of thin steel, coiling and uncoiling. Her hand rose to take his. ‘Alexander,’ she said softly, as if his name were an exotic word that made a pleasing sound. She released his hand and looked at him for a long time. ‘Alexander,’ she said again, putting his fingers over her eyelids.

  They had something to eat in a café at the end of a street of low cottages, and drove back to London. The street lights were not yet on, Alexander would remember, when Jane drew the curtains. In a corner of the room she undressed without hurry, laying her clothes on the seat of a chair, carefully, as if she were laying them out for somebody else to wear. Unabashed, she crossed the room slowly, moving exactly as she did when clothed. She stood beside the bed and bent over to kiss him. She had not said anything since they had come into her flat. All this he would remember, and the coolness and the elusive salty perfume of her skin.

  27. All My Appointed Time

  Late in the evening Alexander’s mother brought the biggest of the photograph albums downstairs and placed it in Jane’s hands. Jane lowered it into her lap as if she were holding a box of blown gla
ss, raised the front cover on her fingernails, and peeled back the leaf of tissue paper that covered the first page.

  ‘Alexander’s grandparents,’ said his mother, with a fond, respectful cadence.

  ‘Paternal?’ asked Jane, and she gave Alexander a glance for corroboration.

  ‘Hamish and Helen,’ said his father.

  ‘On the occasion of their engagement,’ his mother added, wiping a crease from the tissue.

  As Jane raised the album closer to her face, Alexander leaned over the back of the settee to regard the portrait of his father’s father. Hamish Alexander MacIndoe always looked to Alexander not like a man who was alive but like an effigy of himself, with his waxen white skin and wig-like hair, and his mouth as straight as a spirit level, and his wide glassy eyes. The shining eyes and the rigid mouth gave his grandfather’s image the expression of a man stupefied by his own probity.

  ‘A handsome man,’ Jane remarked, angling the page in the light of the standard lamp, and Alexander could tell by the tightening of the skin at her temple that she, like he, could see no resemblance at all between Hamish MacIndoe and Hamish’s son.