Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘You’re looking good,’ she said.

  ‘As are you,’ he replied.

  ‘You approve of the oriental theme?’ she asked, folding the sunglasses into their case.

  ‘I do,’ he told her. He read the menu, conscious that she was watching him, with her hand against her cheek and her elbow on the sill of the window, in an attitude of lukewarm curiosity.

  ‘I’m getting a salad,’ she said, as if she thought he might need assistance in making his choice. ‘They’re always good here.’

  ‘You’re a regular?’ he asked, not looking up.

  ‘I’ve been here a few times,’ she admitted. She looked out into the street, where a man in a gold-buttoned blazer was manoeuvring a wicker hamper into the back seat of an open-topped car, while in the driver’s seat sat a woman in a cerise headscarf, staring down the road as fixedly as a bust, as if unaware of the presence of the man and of everything around her. ‘I’ve been raiding the sales,’ Jane informed him, patting the carrier bags that hung on the back of her chair.

  ‘What did you get?’

  From a bag the size of a small suitcase she extracted a black silk raincoat, which she ran over her outstretched arm, as though to furnish proof of the taste she had developed in recent years. The coat slithered into the bag with a noise like a fall of dry sand.

  ‘Things are booming in the alternative health sector, I take it?’

  ‘Don’t be facetious, Alexander. It doesn’t become you.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be facetious,’ he said, and it was then that he noticed the ring.

  ‘I do well enough. And I’m careful with my money. I save.’ She turned the ring towards her face and made a frowning smile, as though she were grudgingly impressed. ‘Didn’t make it before thirty, did I? Closer to forty.’ In the look she gave him there was a hint of fondness and sadness, but quickly she was watchful again. ‘His name’s Philip. Perhaps you’ll meet him one day,’ she said wryly.

  ‘When did you –?’

  ‘Six months,’ she said, as the waiter came to their table.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you.’ When they had placed their orders she asked about the shop, and he told her how he had come to take it over from Sid Dixon, and how it had changed. Jane listened, in a manner that was both attentive and uninvolved, until the food arrived, and then, glancing at the street, she asked: ‘And how’s your Megan?’

  ‘Megan’s fine,’ he replied, and though he heard nothing in his voice that might betray him, Jane looked at him keenly now.

  ‘What’s she up to? Teaching still?’

  ‘I should think so, yes,’ said Alexander, and he began to eat.

  Jane replenished her glass of water and topped up Alexander’s, which he had not yet touched. For a minute she did not speak. She looked at him, but he did not return her gaze. Taking a sip of water, she looked up at the rotating wooden blades of the ceiling fan. Alexander saw her lips begin to form a word that was instantly rescinded, and then she said, in a low voice, as if the subject made her tired: ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’ She held her fork above her food, and her eyebrows shrugged. ‘Sorry if that seems unsympathetic. But I’m not surprised, not really.’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I shouldn’t imagine you are.’

  She met his glance with a small frown of pique. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean, given my record –’

  ‘That’s not what you mean.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘It isn’t, Alexander. You think I’m pleased.’

  ‘Aren’t you? A little?’

  ‘I am not. And that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I apologise.’

  ‘I didn’t mean you.’

  ‘OK,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m not at all pleased. I might have reason to be, but I’m not. I want you to be happy, believe it or not.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I’m not surprised it didn’t work out.’

  ‘You seemed surprised.’

  ‘No. That’s not the right word. It’s like hearing that someone old has died. You’re not surprised they’ve died, but it’s still a bit of a blow when you hear it.’

  ‘A nice analogy,’ Alexander commented, and he could not prevent himself from smiling.

  ‘There’s no need to be nasty, Alexander. I am sorry it didn’t work out with Megan, but if you don’t want to believe me, so be it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it didn’t work out, but let’s leave it, shall we? Tell me about your Philip.’

  ‘In a minute. Let’s settle this first. I do not want you to be unhappy, Alexander. Look at me. Do you believe me?’ she demanded, holding her head up as if challenging him to find evidence of insincerity in her face.

  ‘I believe you,’ he said. He lifted the bottle to pour her some water, but she put her hand over the empty glass.

  ‘I want you to be happy. I always wanted you to be happy and I never thought you were going to be happy with her. It was obvious she wasn’t right for you.’

  ‘I was happy with her. I was happy with you and I was happy with her.’

  ‘For a while, but not for long, I’ll bet. Am I right?’

  ‘You met her once, for ten minutes,’ Alexander reminded her.

  ‘It was enough,’ Jane said, accepting the water now. ‘She was too hard for you. Too cold.’

  ‘Jane, you wouldn’t know,’ he stated.

  ‘It takes seconds to see things like that. How long did it take you to decide you liked me? Did you have to go away and think about it? Of course you didn’t.’

  ‘So you didn’t like her. I did,’ Alexander replied, taking his cigarettes from his pocket. ‘There I think we might leave it.’ Jane pointed to the No Smoking sign on the wall behind her. ‘Let’s hear about your Philip,’ he suggested.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Jane went on, ‘I was disappointed in you, when I found out. I may as well tell you this, while we’re on the subject. I thought it was a bit lazy of you, like getting together with your pretty cousin. A bit like using a safety net, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘I’m not going to argue, Jane. There’s no point,’ said Alexander, but Jane persisted and the conversation continued, on the brink of becoming an argument, until at last he asked her simply why she had wanted to see him.

  ‘I could ask the same question,’ she replied.

  ‘To see how you are.’

  ‘Well, there’s your answer,’ said Jane, flipping a nonchalant hand. ‘And how am I?’

  ‘You seem well.’

  ‘I am well,’ she said, raising a hand to summon the waiter.

  She was going to Victoria station, and Alexander walked with her as far as Pimlico Road. They never did talk about Philip, nor did they mention her family or his. They hardly spoke as they walked, but at the junction of Pimlico Road and Chelsea Bridge Road, as Alexander would remember, he pointed across the street, at the Chelsea Hospital. ‘That’s where the Rotunda used to be. The Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens.’ Jane smiled at him, wondering why he was telling her this. ‘A huge building, with orchestra stalls at one side and tables around the edge. Mozart played there.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ she said, looking in the direction of the station.

  ‘You saw a picture of it once.’

  ‘Did I? Once?’ Jane replied, shaking her head. ‘Dear Alexander,’ she said, and she patted his cheek as if to humour him. ‘Plus ça change.’ She took a step back, raised a hand in a wave. ‘Perhaps I’ll phone you again,’ she called from the far side of the road, and she walked away rapidly, though her train would not leave for more than half an hour.

  Alexander walked down Chelsea Bridge Road to the river. In the grounds of the hospital a jammed sprinkler had waterlogged a slender oval of grass, in which the sky was reflected so sharply he mistook it for a sheet of blue tarpaulin. The Rotunda was built by a syndicate headed by the man who owned the Drury Lane Theatre, which became the Theatre Ro
yal, he recited to himself. It was demolished in 1805, he went on, seeing the colour of that year in his mind, a tarnished silvery blue that was the colour of the smoke that rises from a match at the moment it ignites, a tone of blue he imagined as the colour of the walls of the Chinese pavilion that once had stood by the canal in Ranelagh Gardens.

  44. The desk

  Alexander’s mother sat at the table in the living room, with the solicitor’s letters and papers arrayed before her in a broad arc that encompassed a smaller arc of cards and letters. ‘Iris Evans,’ she said, showing a signature to him. ‘How did she hear?’ she asked herself, and replaced the card in its position.

  From a box by her elbow she took a sheet of paper and wrote her message to Iris. She passed it to Alexander, who signed his name and folded the page into an envelope, which he sealed and placed on a tray beside the fireplace, underneath the flowers that Jane had sent. He picked up his newspaper and turned the page quietly, as his mother slid the next card across the tabletop. Somewhere in the street a car was started and driven away, and the mid-morning silence filled the room again.

  At the chime of one o’clock she rose from her chair and went out into the kitchen, from where she returned, twenty minutes later, with two bowls of soup and a basket of bread. She set his bowl on the round table and carried hers to the armchair by the window. Slowly she raised and lowered her spoon, gazing at the aerials on the roofs across the road. The visible part of the sky was a blemishless blue. ‘I might take a holiday,’ she remarked at last. ‘Do you think that would be a good idea?’ she asked him, still facing the window.

  ‘On your own?’ Alexander asked.

  She glanced at him without expression. ‘I should think so,’ she replied.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Somewhere we never went,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought.’ She looked up at the sky again, while her hands turned the empty bowl on her lap, an inch at a time. Alexander crossed the room and took the bowl from her. ‘I should write to Jane,’ she commented absently, to the window. He detached the note from Jane’s flowers and put it on the arm of the chair. ‘I’ll do it now,’ she said, but when Alexander came back into the living room she was asleep, with the note held against her chest. He knelt at the side of her chair. A veil of shadow was cast across her face by the lacework pattern of the curtains. Her eyes were motionless under their lids, but her lips moved, as though she were striving to deny something that she was hearing in her dream.

  Leaving her to sleep he went upstairs and stood outside the room that had become his father’s study. As if preparing to shift a great weight, he gripped the porcelain handle. The door had stuck to the jamb, and cracked as he pushed at it. He saw his father’s desk, ponderous as a sarcophagus, in the centre of the darkened room. Behind the desk, the gold and scarlet seals glowed weakly on his father’s certificates. The air bore a smell of ink and old paper and cold tobacco pipes. Suspended on a strand of spider’s web in the angle of the doorway, a tiny piece of wood swivelled in the draught of his breath.

  Alexander opened the blinds. His father’s journals and books were yellowed and inert. The castors of the leather-padded chair, he noticed, had been displaced from the little wells they had worn in the carpet. He sat in his father’s chair. Striking the long steel lever of the Underwood typewriter, he watched the turning of the wide black rubber drum, on which was softly embossed a pattern of words, the residue of all the letters his father had written on it. To the side of the green glass lamp there was the rack of pipes, and next to that the puck-shaped glass paperweight with the Saltire in its base, and next to that the shallow wooden trough in which were laid two pencils and his father’s antique pen, the pen with the gilded clip and the scratches on the barrel that he knew as well as he knew the lines around his father’s mouth. He rolled the pen between his fingers, examining the quarter-inch of pitted enamel that he used to see as an elephant’s eye.

  Sitting in his father’s chair, Alexander surveyed the room. For more than twenty years, before it had become his father’s study, this room had been his bedroom. He stated this to himself, as if his estrangement might be dispelled by the utterance of the fact. His bed had once been set where he was now sitting. His wardrobe had occupied the place where the shelves of books and journals now were. There had been a chair where the files were stacked, and pictures where the certificates were fixed. He tried to see the colour of the walls in his room, but he could not overcome the presence of his father’s things. He lay on the floor, below the window, as often he used to lie and read a landscape of rivers and deserts in the imperfections of the ceiling, which long ago had been erased, as had the pawprint of blotches on the cornice above the door. Not a trace of himself was to be seen in the room, it seemed, but then he found, on the underside of the windowsill, the initials of his name, which he had scored into the wood with a fingernail one afternoon, during a winter when the snow had piled up against the glass and turned into prisms of ice in which the walls and roofs of the houses were broken up and inverted. At night the light of the moon was spread by the ice in such a way that it radiated over the whole windowpane, and Alexander would lie, with his lamp turned off, watching the colour of the frosted window alter as the lights went on and off in the kitchens and bedrooms of the neighbours’ houses. Sometimes, as he recalled, the changing whiteness of the ice so entranced him that he did not at first hear his mother’s voice calling him down to eat, and he would have to splash water on his face to awaken himself before going downstairs. And one Saturday evening that winter, he remembered, he sat on the carpet beside his father’s desk in the corner of the smallest bedroom, while his father worked through a sheaf of accounts. Snowflakes alighted on the black window and quickly lost their form, blossoming into extinction, and a skid of smoke rose from his father’s pipe. Alexander watched his father as he wrote, made calculations, considered. The light of the desk lamp was reflected as a misshapen disc in each of the lenses of his father’s glasses, and such was his father’s concentration that these reflections barely moved for as long as Alexander looked at them. The shining, unmoving lenses were the emblem of his father’s knowledge and his seriousness, just as the eye-mask was the image of the shiftiness of the thief in Alexander’s comics. The desk at which his father worked had the weight of a factory machine, it seemed to Alexander. He put a palm to its flank to feel its solidity. His father noticed, and smiled, and continued with his work.

  Alexander put a hand on the upper drawer of his father’s desk and opened it, expecting to see files and folders arranged as precisely as the publications on his father’s shelves. Instead he discovered a Silvikrin jar that contained a farthing and three single cufflinks, and a ring of keys that he did not recognise, and two science fiction novels he had never seen before, and a rusted penknife in a buttoned leather pouch, and some advertisements, cut from newspapers, for ‘Elsie Carlisle (Radio’s Most Popular Songstress)’ and one for ‘Eddie Gray (You Can’t Help Laughing)’, and another for ‘fack D’Ormonde (Scientific Nonsense)’, and, at the back of the drawer, under an old book of interest tables with a battered primrose cover, Alexander’s school reports, bound together with rubber bands. He placed the reports on the top of the desk, squarely against the typewriter, as if in observance of a ritual that demanded his precision. The perished bands had the texture of pigskin, and snapped when he pulled at them. Starting with the earliest, Alexander read the teachers’ judgements of the mediocrity whose name was Alexander MacIndoe, a character who was only intermittently himself. He came to Mr Barrington’s name, and he repeated aloud Mr Barrington’s sentences. He shut the report book and rested his fingers on the pale blue cover, as his father’s fingers had rested on it, and he closed his eyes and heard his father’s voice say: ‘But this is good, son. This is good.’ As if to give his memory a note from which to take its pitch, he repeated his father’s words, again and again until they made another scene appear. ‘Listen,’ said his father, putting an arm arou
nd his shoulder and holding him. There was a wall, a wall of the fort at Reculver, and Alexander was sitting between his father and Mr Beckwith, who was crouching on one knee and looking around them as though scouting the terrain. Megan sat on a stone fifty yards away, near Mrs Beckwith and Alexander’s mother, who held each other’s arms like dancers. On a fence post a seagull turned and turned, like a weathervane. The long evening was beginning, and they would soon be going back to the car. His father put an arm around Alexander’s shoulder and said: ‘Listen. Listen to that. Isn’t that a glorious noise?’ The breeze moved through the long dry grass with a swishing that could have been the sound of a legion marching across the meadows. He told his father what he had imagined. ‘Yes, it could be,’ his father agreed, and he raised a hand theatrically to invoke the name of Julius Caesar, and said something about a phalanx, a word that made a brassy tang come to Alexander’s tongue, as the thought of the word did now.

  The door opened, and his mother stood on the threshold of the room. She looked at the desk, then at him. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked drowsily.

  ‘I came across these,’ he told her, lifting a report.

  She looked at him, not at what he was holding. There was no reproof in her gaze, nor any interest.

  ‘Leave them, Alexander,’ she said, and she stepped out of the doorway.

  When all the cards and letters had been answered they cooked a meal together and ate at the table in the living room. They watched a film on TV, and his mother fell asleep before it was over. Alexander kept the TV on until there was nothing more to watch, then turned it off, and all the lights except the lamp beside his mother’s chair, and then he went back to his chair, where he slept. He awoke a few minutes before three o’clock. Coming out of sleep, he averted his eyes from the glare of the lamp. Then, distinctly, he glimpsed his father’s face. His father looked tired; it was the face he often had when he worked late in his study and Alexander went in to say goodbye. His father’s eyes would sometimes look aside, quickly, when Alexander was leaving, as though he had heard a quiet sound outside, a sound he did not recognise. Anxiously Alexander glanced at his mother. She was asleep still, and her lips were moving silently.