Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  She was still at the table when he returned. With a flat hand she primped the crown of her hair as he put the tray down. ‘Tea is served, madam,’ he said. She looked at him keenly, as if she suspected his thoughts. ‘Mother, have you considered selling this place?’ he asked her.

  ‘Why ever should I do that?’

  ‘I’m not saying you should. But have you ever thought about it?’

  ‘You’re saying you think I should,’ she said, and she turned her cup a few degrees.

  ‘This house is so big, for one person.’

  ‘For a little old lady,’ she amended.

  ‘For anyone.’

  ‘I can cope, Alexander. I’m not senile.’

  ‘But to maintain this place. It’s difficult.’

  ‘I’m comfortable. The bills get paid. Your father took care of me. A thrifty man, your father.’

  ‘It’s not the money I meant,’ said Alexander.

  ‘We could have moved to a bigger house, but he put security before everything. So we wouldn’t want for anything after he’d gone. We were looked after. Both of us.’

  ‘I know, Mother. I appreciate that.’

  ‘This is our home,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but living on your own. You don’t need all this room.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of what I need, thank you.’ She pushed her cup towards him for it to be filled. ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said, with emphasis on the final word.

  At least once a week Alexander visited his mother. Month by month the skin of dust thickened on his father’s desk. The lettering on the spines of his father’s books were erased by the action of the sunlight. In the smallest bedroom there was a smell of damp wool, and he would find catkins of hair and lint in the corners of the rooms in which his mother lived. She had a fall in the kitchen and for two months had to use a stick and had a thick strapping on her foot and shin. Still she refused to talk about leaving the house. Having seen her pause for breath on the stairs, or crouch painfully to reach the bolt on the back door, he would try again to persuade her. ‘Don’t make a fuss, Alexander,’ she would say, or ‘I don’t need a nursemaid,’ or ‘Leave it be,’ and then they would sit in the armchairs, on opposite sides of the fireplace, and read in silence.

  Then, in December, Sam Saunders’ son moved into a flat three streets away, and one evening Alexander suggested to his mother that he might bring Sam with him some time, and a couple of weeks later he did.

  In the living room Sam and Alexander waited for his mother to come downstairs. ‘Ready for judgement,’ said Sam, buttoning the jacket of his best suit. He stood in the centre of the room, where Alexander had stood to be inspected when the two of them had come home together on leave.

  Alexander’s mother opened the door, and an expression of guarded curiosity arose in her eyes, giving her face a new vivaciousness. ‘Hello, dear,’ she said, affecting not to know that Sam was in her house solely in order to meet her.

  ‘Mrs MacIndoe,’ said Sam, bowing from the waist. ‘You are looking splendid.’

  ‘I am not, Sam. I am looking old. But thank you for lying. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Best part of thirty years, Mrs MacIndoe.’

  ‘Thirty years,’ she wearily exhaled. She looked at him intently, as if in an effort to recall what she had thought of him thirty years ago. From a puckering beside her eyes it appeared that she had retrieved some memory that pleased her. Sam held out his hand. She took it, and Sam brought his other hand forward to enclose hers. ‘You’re not as plump as I remember,’ she said.

  ‘Very kind of you, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Sam replied. ‘I make an effort.’

  ‘But every bit as charming.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s a pity you didn’t make a good impression on my husband.’

  ‘Did I not?’

  ‘You did not,’ she chastised him. ‘But it doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam.

  ‘You’re an insurance man?’ asked Alexander’s mother. She sat down in her chair, ushering Sam to the settee with a waft of her hand.

  ‘An insurance man is what I am.’

  ‘And your wife, she was Alexander’s girlfriend for a while, wasn’t she?’

  ‘He stole her off me,’ Alexander interjected.

  ‘Not quite, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said Sam.

  ‘He did,’ Alexander told his mother.

  ‘Did you?’ she asked Sam, apparently amused by the notion.

  ‘No,’ Sam stated ingenuously, with a hand on his chest.

  ‘I have forgiven him,’ Alexander countered. ‘Shall I put the kettle on, as a sign of our accord?’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ said Sam.

  ‘But he did steal her,’ Alexander reiterated, going out to the kitchen.

  When he came back his mother was sitting next to Sam, holding one side of the photograph he was showing her. ‘Pretty girl,’ she commented. ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she, Alexander?’ She raised the photograph of Robert’s girlfriend towards him. ‘Where is she from?’ she asked Sam.

  ‘London. Herne Hill.’

  ‘But originally, where does her family come from?’

  ‘From Grenada,’ said Sam. Nodding to herself as she made connections in her mind, Alexander’s mother pondered the photograph of Robert and Valerie. ‘You ever been to the Caribbean, Mrs MacIndoe?’ Sam asked her.

  ‘People of my generation didn’t do that sort of thing, dear,’ she informed him. ‘We never went abroad much.’

  ‘You went to Malta,’ Alexander reminded her.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘That was quite nice. And Madeira we went to. But it was a bit too hot for my husband, and we didn’t realise there weren’t any beaches till we got there. Swimming pools simply aren’t the same thing at all.’

  ‘Happy to leave the sea to the fishes, myself,’ said Sam.

  ‘Oh no,’ she contradicted. ‘A man for the sea and the hills was my husband.’

  ‘But no banks on Ben Nevis.’

  ‘And no lochs in London,’ she responded, echoing Sam’s regretful cadence. From the mantelpiece she took the photograph of herself and Alexander’s father when they were young. ‘Our honeymoon,’ she explained. ‘A weekend in Dorset.’

  ‘Matching gaberdines,’ Sam commented. ‘Very beautiful. Very handsome,’ observed Sam.

  ‘I’m only twenty-one there,’ she told him. ‘In those days you looked thirty as soon as you left home.’

  ‘So where did you meet, Mrs MacIndoe?’ Sam asked abruptly, and to Alexander’s surprise his mother received the question as though she had been asked about something impersonal, such as where she had bought her carpets.

  ‘Here,’ she said immediately. ‘In London.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’ Sam went on.

  ‘I threw myself at his feet,’ she said plainly, and took a sip of her tea, as if to add its taste to the pleasure of the recollection.

  ‘You did?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘Indeed,’ she replied, with a laugh. ‘I was shopping with my mother,’ she explained to Sam, ‘and I tripped on a paving stone, right outside Graham’s bank, at the very moment he was coming out. I hurt my hand, and he took us inside so I could wash the cut. He went to the chemist’s to get some lint and bandage for me. I remember the way he looked at my mother before he put the bandage on. Asking her permission to touch my hand, you see.’

  ‘So that was it?’ asked Sam. ‘Love at first sight?’

  ‘For my mother it was. She fell for him straight away. I thought he was a bit too smooth. Or I thought I did, but then I bumped into him again, outside the bank. He asked me how the hand was, wanted to know where I was going. For a moment I couldn’t remember, and then I realised I was smitten.’

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘I told a fib. I said I was going to Seward’s, the haberdasher’s. And Graham asked if he could walk with me. So walked together, but I wasn’t listening to anyth
ing he said because I was worrying what I’d do when I got to the shop. I bought a piece of blue satin ribbon. I took it out of my pocket that night, thinking it was funny that this was my first love token and I’d had to buy it for myself.’

  ‘I’ve never heard this story,’ Alexander said to Sam

  ‘Flowers every Saturday he sent me, for a month,’ she went on. ‘Then he took me to the theatre, and in the interval he asked me to marry him. Always straight to the point with Graham. And his shoes were always so nicely polished. Like ink bottles, the toe caps were. A man who looks after his shoes will look after you, my mother said, and she was right.’

  Alexander tried to imagine Nan Burnett uttering her motto about men’s shoes. ‘I’ve never heard any of this,’ he said to his mother.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you have,’ she said.

  Several times in the course of the following year Sam came to the house with Alexander, and whenever they called she would tell them stories that he had never heard. She told them about her husband climbing a drainpipe in the blackout, to daub black paint on the window of a room in which a light had been left burning, and about her mother taking the mirror from her room when she was eight, to stop her becoming vain, and about her dancing on the pier in Brighton with a flighty girl called Joanie Holroyd, whom Alexander did not recognise as Mrs Beckwith until the story was nearly finished. They heard about the day that Alexander went missing and a policeman found him in a neighbour’s coal shed, wrapped in his mother’s housecoat, and the time he drew circles of castor oil on the front path, where the postman nearly broke his neck, and about the woman who kept chickens in her garden and sometimes gave Alexander a fresh egg, which he would carry back home and not surrender until the warmth had gone from it. Her hands became the child’s sealed hands and her face assumed the child’s determination, and as he looked at her hands Alexander wondered whether it was her intention to embarrass him, and why the stories she told about him were always from the years of his early childhood, and then it occurred to him that the boy she described was closer to her than he was now.

  ‘Like this,’ she said, and she frowned and her hands shook with tension, as if resisting an attempt to prise them apart.

  ‘Greenwich chickens,’ said Sam, shaking his head at the strangeness of it.

  ‘It wasn’t that unusual,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘Very handy when food was scarce.’

  ‘I bet,’ said Sam.

  ‘I remember the rabbits,’ said Alexander.

  ‘That was a different house,’ said his mother. ‘The Dennises, you’re thinking of. At number fifteen. They had the rabbits.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Definitely. The family that went to Canada right after the war. They threw open the hutches the day before they left. Rabbits all over the place.’

  ‘And they were at number fifteen?’

  ‘They were.’

  ‘Let’s have a look. Point it out to me.’

  They went into the garden and stood on the platform of concrete, with the curtains of the dining room closed behind them. The sun was setting and rain would soon fall. The leaves of the neighbour’s bamboo shivered.

  ‘With the greenhouse,’ his mother said, pointing to the fourth house from hers. ‘That was the Dennises.’

  ‘And the chicken woman?’

  ‘She was where that greenhouse is,’ she said to Sam. ‘Next door was the carrot king. Grew the biggest carrots you ever saw in your life. Like torpedoes.’

  ‘Dig for Victory,’ quoted Sam.

  ‘Ate them all by himself, mind you. Never shared a thing. A miserable man, he was. Name’s gone clean out of my mind.’

  ‘Mr Marley?’ Alexander suggested. ‘Mr Morley? Marley?’

  ‘Marples, I think,’ said his mother. ‘And see there,’ she said to Sam. ‘The tree on the tilt? There’s an air-raid shelter under that garden. The family that was in that house had a peculiar young man as a lodger. Every time the Luftwaffe came over he’d stand in the garden and shout at the planes. Encouraging them. “Come on, lads!” he’d yell, and then he’d jump into the shelter, just in case his lads were on target. Graham met him in the street once and punched his nose for him. Little Lord Haw-Haw my husband called him. Then he got killed by a bomb. He was in Woolworth’s when the V2 hit it. They hardly found enough to bury.’

  For a few seconds they stood on the rectangle of concrete, like actors who had forgotten whose turn it was to speak. A gust banged the kitchen door shut. Sam started at the noise, and muttered ‘Bloody hell’, holding his chest. ‘Pardon the language,’ he said, but Alexander’s mother said nothing.

  Alexander saw her look at the door, and then scan the wall, noting the cracked strips of mortar and the splitting paint of the windowframes. The linings of the dining room curtains were the colour of dishwater, and there were whorls of dirt on the glass. A look of submission came into her eyes for an instant. ‘Come on,’ she said, rubbing her arms.

  And when they were sitting at the table that evening, as Alexander would remember, Sam told them about the work his son had begun on the bathroom of his flat, and Alexander’s mother was scandalised by the expense of it.

  ‘We used to wash in a cup of cold water,’ remarked Alexander.

  ‘It’s easy to laugh now,’ his mother said, and within a minute she was talking about the enamelled tub she would put in front of the fire for Alexander’s bath on a Sunday evening, and how she would wrap him in a big blue towel that had a white thistle on it, which he used to hold in his fist as she dried him. One evening a brass band of firemen went up their street at bathtime, and she held Alexander up to the window, wrapped in his towel as tightly as a lamb in its fleece. He watched the trumpeters tramp past until the last one had gone, and when he couldn’t hear the trumpets any more he cried his eyes out. ‘He was inconsolable,’ she said, looking out of the window as if the parade were passing by, and in that moment Alexander understood that when she told these stories she was preparing herself for the day when she would leave the house, and that every story told was like an object packed for her departure, or put aside to be left behind.

  ‘But I was happy here,’ he said to her. ‘I had a happy childhood. Couldn’t have been better.’

  ‘We were all happy here, very happy, for quite a time,’ she said, and she put one hand on Alexander’s arm and one on Sam’s.

  ‘Now, now, Irene,’ said Sam. ‘No moping,’ he scolded, touching her hand as though it were as fragile as a canary’s head.

  She looked at the street like someone proudly facing exile. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right. Alexander will miss this house more than I will. He gets too attached to things,’ she said.

  48. Goodnight Ralph

  It’s the wrong verb, Roderick was fond of saying. One might watch TV but one does not watch a film. You do not watch a book and you do not watch a film. Therefore the best time to go to the cinema is the afternoon, he would say, when one is alert and the environment is more conducive to close attention. And so it was usually a Saturday afternoon when Alexander and Roderick went to the cinema together, and it was on a Saturday afternoon in September, as Alexander would remember, that they walked along Orange Street on their way to see Herzog’s Nosferatu, a film for which Roderick avowed a morbid liking, on account, he said, of the ghostly ship that glides into the harbour, with the dead helmsman lashed to the wheel.

  ‘You know Isaac Newton’s house used to be there?’ Roderick asked, with a flick of his hand in the direction of the Westminster Reference Library. As was expected of him, Alexander confirmed that he did indeed remember this fact. ‘And you know about the plan to encase the house in a monument?’ Roderick continued.

  ‘George Scharf’s pyramid and globe, 1834,’ Alexander responded.

  ‘I’ll take your word for the date,’ said Roderick. He stopped, and his neck stretched out from his scarf as he smiled slyly at Alexander. ‘But do you know of Etienne-Louis Boull#x00E9;e’s memorial to Newton, the
precursor of Mr Scharf’s?’ His eyebrows quivered, as if he were a comedian fooling with his straight man.

  ‘I do not, you’ll be glad to know,’ replied Alexander, and he linked his hands behind his back to await that day’s first item of instruction.

  ‘Imagine a globe as wide as Leicester Square,’ said Roderick, describing a circle above their heads with his hand. ‘Bigger. Monsieur Boullée’s drawings depict three tiers of conifers planted around the base of the globe, one above the other. The thing was to be so big that the tips of the lower trees wouldn’t have reached the feet of those above them, and the tips of the highest wouldn’t even reach the globe’s equator. And the skin of the globe was to have hundreds of holes in it, so the sunlight would make the pattern of the night sky on the inside. Quite mad. Mad but heroic.’ Roderick shook his head in consternation, as if seeing the monstrous sphere rising over Leicester Square. ‘I found a picture of it in there,’ he then said, seizing Alexander’s arm. ‘I’ll show you. We’ve got time, haven’t we? Five minutes.’ He tightened his scarf and led Alexander through the door of the library.

  In the threshold of the reading room Roderick paused to scrutinise the other users. At the largest table a young man was gazing at the ceiling while his forefinger pressed a page as if to hold in place the word that had given him his thought. Opposite him, a shaven-headed man transcribed addresses from half a dozen telephone directories, with the fervent demeanour of someone on the trail of a conspiracy. Surrounded by open books, the library’s other user, a man in a black corduroy suit with a beard as profuse as a Greek Orthodox priest’s, was writing on a single sheet of paper with an inch-long stub of pencil, as the fingers of his left hand ran quickly up and down the columns of print. Roderick smiled approvingly, then crossed the room. Passing along a stack, he stroked the spines of the books as though feeling for a secret catch in a wall. His hand stopped. ‘Here,’ he said, hooking a heavy volume from the shelf. Eagerly he turned the pages until he came to the image of Boullée’s colossal sphere. ‘Astonishing, isn’t it?’ he marvelled, presenting the picture.