Ghost

by Helen Grant

  It came to a head when Augusta was seven months old. I suppose the prospect of an entire winter in Langlands House made it worse for Elspeth. We argued more and more frequently. And then on the night of 29th November, she tried to leave with the baby.

  I only heard her because the baby cried out. I always woke if Augusta cried in the night. I left my room with a lamp in my hand and found Elspeth on the landing, with Augusta in her arms and a bag on her back.

  It was the very thing I had been afraid of: she was going back to him. I was appalled, and terrified for her and the baby. I was too upset to speak calmly, and a huge row erupted, both of us shouting at each other. Augusta became frightened and began to cry loudly. Elspeth was screaming at me, saying awful things, telling me I had no right to stop her going anywhere, accusing me of interfering. I couldn’t think clearly with both of them shrieking. I was so afraid for them, but I was angry with Elspeth too. How could she even think of going back, and taking the baby with her?

  I saw that she was going to turn away and go downstairs. I put down the lamp and reached out to grab the baby from her arms. If I couldn’t stop her going back to him, I could stop her taking the baby with her. I could save Augusta. That was what I was trying to do.

  I almost managed it. I had Augusta in my hands before Elspeth knew what I was doing. She gave a great scream of rage and lunged at me, and I–

  I pushed her.

  We were both so upset and angry. Neither of us really knew what we were doing. It was too easy to push too hard, to use more force than I meant to. I didn’t mean to push her down the stairs. I’m almost certain of that.

  I pushed her, and she screamed as she went backwards down the first flight, and for a moment her eyes met mine as I stood there at the top of the stairs with the baby in my arms. Then she turned over and there was a crunch as she hit the bannisters at the turn of the stairs. The scream stopped abruptly.

  I didn’t trust myself to walk down the stairs with the baby in my arms. I was trembling too violently. I stood there holding Augusta and waiting for Elspeth to move, to sit up and shout at me again for pushing her. But she didn’t move. She lay there, perfectly still, but in a way that looked as though it would be painful, with her head bent at that angle, pushed up against the wood.

  I called her name twice but she did not move nor reply. Augusta’s shrieks ran down, as though she were running out of energy. I looked at her, because I wanted to look somewhere else other than at her mother lying there on the landing on the stairs, so silent and still. Augusta’s eyes were very round, and her face was flushed from crying.

  “It’s all right, dear,” I told her. “Mummy’s resting.”

  I took up the lamp again and carried her back to the room she shared with Elspeth. We had never found a cot in any of the rooms at Langlands, only a cradle that Augusta had already outgrown, so she had a kind of bed made up on the floor. I tucked her in again, and made sure to close the door on the way out of the room. Then I went back to the staircase.

  I suppose I knew what I would find. Elspeth was warm and her blue eyes were open, but she was stone dead. Her cheeks were still wet with tears of rage. I wiped them away with my fingertips and she never moved, never blinked. My daughter was gone.

  I couldn’t leave her where she was because I would have to bring Augusta downstairs in the morning. It wasn’t something she should see. So I dragged Elspeth down the rest of the stairs as carefully as I could, and shut her in one of the downstairs rooms. Then I went to the kitchen, where there was a bottle of cooking sherry, and poured myself a glass for the shock.

  According to the strict letter of the law, I should have gone to the police to report Elspeth’s death. It was an accident, after all. I hadn’t meant for her to die. But in the first moments I was afraid of being arrested, and when I had calmed down enough to think the situation through, I began to see other implications.

  Elspeth and her husband were not divorced; they were not even officially separated. Augusta was his daughter. He would want to claim her.

  I didn’t deceive myself that he would do it out of love. He hadn’t laid eyes on his daughter, after all. He would do it for the same reason that he wanted Elspeth back when she left him: because he would see her as his property. As for me, he had resented me before, but now he must hate me; he must have known that I had helped Elspeth to vanish. When he found out that I was responsible for her death, he’d probably be writing to the papers demanding the return of the death penalty. In no conceivable set of circumstances would he let me keep Augusta.

  I suppose it will be said that I should have reported the death anyway, and that I should also have reported my concerns about Augusta’s father having custody; I should have let the authorities make the proper decisions. But Elspeth had never been to the police when her husband beat her, not even once. It would be my word against his, and I was sitting here with her blood on my hands, at least figuratively.

  I went to listen for Augusta’s crying a couple of times, but she had fallen asleep again. I returned to the kitchen and sat there for most of the night, thinking about what to do. The lamp went out in the hours before dawn and still I sat there in the dark, until at last the first grey light began to outline the familiar objects all around me.

  It seemed to me then, as it still does now, that I had never been as happy as I was during those early years at Langlands. Father had not died yet, and although Mother was strict, she was not as grim as she later became, nor was money so scarce. I remembered sunny afternoons exploring the grounds, and the intensely sweet taste of berries gathered in the kitchen garden, and the cosy feeling of sitting in the library with a book open on my lap while rain pattered on the window panes. Is it strange to have loved the wartime? I did, because the War kept me at Langlands, and Langlands seemed like a kind of Paradise back then.

  I said to myself that I would forget about all the troubles that came later: Angus dying before his time and Elspeth getting mixed up with that man, and the years when I worried about her and hardly ever saw her, and could count the bruises on her when I did. I would wipe away the argument I had had with her, and when I had laid her to rest, I would try not to think about how her life had ended. I would go back to the war years, and I would take Augusta with me. I would give her the happiness I once had.

  I am giving her the War too. I remember how Elspeth was as a child: curious and impetuous. As my granddaughter grows, there has to be some bogeyman to keep her away from the edges of the estate – some reason to make her hide herself if anyone comes to the house. It will be easy, after all, because there is virtually nothing in the house that dates to later than the 1940s.

  Sometimes I have a kind of waking dream that it really is 1940 again, and that Augusta is my own infant self, and I her elderly relative, and with enough loving care I can make the future different. The years stretch ahead like a ladder to be climbed: 1950, 1962, 1999. At the end there should be something better than an old woman dragging the body of her only child through the undergrowth to a stone mausoleum.

  Augusta will have to know the truth one day, of course, and I do not know when that day will be. When she is eighteen, and an adult in her own right, nobody can compel her to do anything. Her father cannot insist that she lives with him. She will be safe from that, at least. But eighteen years is a very long time to persist with a world and a time that exists only at Langlands. I will have to hope that Augusta’s father never finds us here. I will have to hope that I can find answers to the questions Augusta will inevitably have as she grows older, each more perceptive, more insistent than the last. I will have to hope that I can be anything and everything she needs me to be, for all that time.

  Dear God, help me.

  Rose Elspeth McAndrew

  I read the letter through from beginning to end and Tom read it too, looking over my shoulder. Since that day, I have read it again, many times, trying to understand
more, and better. I have tried to suck the marrow from the bones of her words. But that first time, all that I could think, all that ran through my brain with throbbing insistence, was: Grandmother killed my mother.

  Knowing is always different from believing. Grandmother had always told me that my mother was dead; she had not lied about that. But it had never been real to me. When I found out that Grandmother had deceived me about so many other things, I hoped that perhaps my mother’s death was a deceit too, that she was out there somewhere in the world outside Langlands. Now I knew that she was dead because I had seen her pitiful remains, brown and crumbling. I had smelled her, the faint lingering scent of her decay. And Grandmother had done this. Grandmother killed my mother.

  I did not scream, or faint, or cry. I simply sat there, with the letter on my lap, walled up inside my own horror. Tom very gently took the pages out of my hands. He sat beside me, re-reading it, and I heard him curse under his breath, but it was like listening to something through glass or water; it did not touch me. I had turned to stone.

  Tom stopped reading and folded the letter up again. He put it back into the tin and replaced the lid, as though he could seal up its contents again. Then he sat beside me for a while, with his head in his hands. Rain rattled at the window, and the kitchen clock ticked, but otherwise there was silence.

  At last Tom said, “We have to go to the police.” He looked at me. “Ghost? Do you understand? We have to tell someone about this.”

  His face was very close to mine.

  “Ghost?” Tom touched my shoulder.

  I stared back at him. “Tom...”

  “We have to go to the police,” he said again.

  I shook my head, and it felt strange, as though the room were swimming past me, then reversing and flowing back like a tide.

  “We have to lock it up again,” I said. “I don’t have the key.”

  “Ghost–”

  “It’s all right, Tom. We just have to put that tin back and lock the door.”

  Tom’s eyes widened. “But we can’t–”

  “I don’t have the key,” I said again. I patted at my pockets, and ran my fingers over the surface of the table as though the key were there somewhere if only I could find it. “I don’t have it. Where is it? I need the key, Tom.”

  “Ghost!” Now Tom was really gripping my shoulder, hard enough to get my attention. “We can’t just lock the place up again. We have to tell someone.”

  “No,” I said, and this time when I shook my head it was like shaking a snow globe; a blizzard of fragmented thoughts seemed to whirl around inside my brain. “No, we can’t tell anyone.”

  “Ghost, there’s a dead body in there. We have to.”

  I put up a hand and rubbed my face. “No, Tom. Grandmother will get in trouble.”

  “She’s dead,” said Tom. “Your grandmother is dead.”

  Tom didn’t seem to be making any sense at all. “No,” I told him. “My mother is dead. It’s my mother in there, and we have to lock the door again.”

  Tom sat back and stared at me. His face looked strange: the eyes round, his mouth open, as though he had seen something terrible.

  I looked at him, and then I began to look for the key again.

  After a moment, Tom spoke in a choked voice. “Ghost, don’t.” He grabbed my hand and pressed something into it. “Look, here’s the padlock, and the key.” The muscles of his face were twitching.

  I took the padlock and key from him and held them in my hands. I turned the key and with a tiny click the lock sprung open; I pressed it closed again with another click. It had been as easy as that to unlock the truth that I did not want to know.

  I cried then. I cried for my mother, and for Grandmother, and for all the things that were wrong or ruined; I cried with great sobs that made my whole body clench like a curled fist.

  Tom put his arms around me and held me. He did not say, “We have to go to the police” again. For a long time, he said nothing at all. At last, when I had cried until my eyes were red and sore and it felt as though there were no tears left to cry, I heard him say, “I don’t know what to do.”

  I had been leaning against his shoulder; now I pulled back and looked into his face. Do I look as drawn and shocked as that? I wondered. We stared at each other.

  “What–” When I tried to speak my voice came out as a hoarse croak. I cleared my throat, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand. “What will they do when they come, Tom? The police, I mean? They’ll take her away, won’t they?”

  Tom nodded reluctantly. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to call them today. Please, Tom. I want some time – with her.”

  “You don’t want to go back there?” asked Tom. He looked horrified.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to see – that – again. I just want some time.”

  Tom let out a very long sigh, but he did not say no, it has to be today. I suppose he thought, as I did, what difference can it make?

  How is it possible to try really hard to do the right thing, and end up doing the wrong thing? Old Mrs. McAndrew thought she was doing the right thing helping her daughter run away from her husband, and look how that ended up. Then she decided it was better for the baby to stay with her than go to her bastard of a father, even if it meant bringing her up in 1940.

  And then there’s me. So desperate to know the truth that I couldn’t wait a second longer. I think we have to know, I said. I couldn’t even wait for the rain to stop. I hacked lumps out of the ground so I could open the door to that place. That’s how keen I was. And thanks to me, Ghost got a really good look at the seventeen-year-old corpse of her own mother. Well played, Tom.

  I put my head in my hands, digging my fingers into my hair. What have I done? I ask myself. You idiot, I think. I keep thinking about what happened when we were in that place, the way she kept screaming It’s me! It’s me in there! For a moment I almost believed her. Anything seemed possible, after seeing something as horrible as that. It made me feel cold inside, looking from the dead body to the girl screaming her head off, and both of them with the same hair.

  She shouldn’t have seen that thing. And it’s down to me.

  I look at Ghost. She’s sitting beside me, leaning back in the chair with her head resting against the wall and her eyes closed. She’s so pale she really does look like a ghost. It’s late in the afternoon now, and the shadows are getting longer. If we don’t light one of those old lamps soon I won’t be able to see her at all, she’ll just fade into the darkness.

  I think about what happened after she read the old lady’s letter. She wasn’t making sense – saying all we needed to do was lock that place up again, so her gran wouldn’t get in trouble, like she’d forgotten old Mrs. McAndrew is dead. I felt...Okay, I’ll admit it to myself. I was afraid. Afraid that something inside her had just...broken. Afterwards, after she’d been crying, she seemed calmer. She sounded like herself again. But I think the cracks must still be there.

  I think about a lot of things. There’s nothing to do but think, as the sun sinks in the sky and the room becomes colder.

  I think about that car, abandoned in the glen near Aberfeldy, with plants slowly growing all over it. Where did Ghost’s father go? Maybe he did kill himself. Sometimes people do that in lonely places, and it’s ages before the body is found. But it was true what I said to Ghost before, that it’s too much of a coincidence that it happened so close by. Did he come to Langlands house after all, and did the old lady deal with him? There’s no way to know.

  And I think about home. Mum will be making the dinner right now. The kitchen will be warm and full of steam. Dad will be sorting out stuff for the week, maybe loading things into the van. We’re supposed to be doing some work for a customer over near Comrie tomorrow. Nine o’clock sharp on Monday morning, that’s when they’re expecting us; that’s where Dad
thinks we’ll be. Except we won’t. I don’t even know where we will be. The police station, maybe, or driving up to Langlands together while Mum shouts at me, wanting to know why I never told her any of this before.

  Nine o’clock tomorrow morning: I have no idea how we are going to get there, either. I’ve been thinking about that other time here in this kitchen, when I brought those magazines to prove to Ghost that it really is 2017. She went over to the drawer at the other end of the room and got these scissors out, great big kitchen shears with points on the end of them. I thought she was going to do something a lot worse than cut her hair with them. It seemed possible – she’d totally lost it, she could have done anything. I wonder what she might do now, if she comes out of the trance she seems to be in. Is it even safe to leave her here on her own tonight?

  “Ghost,” I say. I have to say it two or three times before she looks at me. It’s like looking at a sleepwalker. She has a slow, loose way of moving that makes it look as though she wants to slip back into sleep. I don’t think it’s any use asking her how to do anything.

  “Do you want some food?”

  She just looks at me. I get up anyway and do the best I can. I open the stove and put some more firewood in. There’s a lamp on the dresser, so I light that the way Ghost showed me once before. Then I look for something to eat. I find some bread that’s just about edible, and some jam. There’s no butter. I have a good look through all the shelves and cupboards in case old Mrs. McAndrew still kept cooking sherry, but there isn’t anything. It has to be more tea, with no milk again. While I’m waiting for the water to heat up, I get my phone out and text Mum. Will be back v late sorry T. I think about other things I could add to that but in the end, I press send and then I turn the phone off so she can’t call me.