The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

by R. A. Dick

  “But I’m not asking you to tell my fortune or give me advice about the future,” protested Lucy. “I just want to know as a matter of curiosity what the next world is really like. Do you have wings and float about on clouds all day, playing golden harps, and where do you sleep at night?”

  “Did I say you were in the first grade?” asked Captain Gregg in disgust. “Dammit, you’re no higher than the kindergarten. There is no day here and no night, it’s eternity, not time.”

  “Oh, dear me!” said Lucy. “Eternity, everything going on for ever and ever—it makes my head reel!”

  “Exactly,” said Captain Gregg, “and yet you expect me to explain it to you in words of one syllable. Reality on earth is all you need worry about at the moment, and without me I doubt if you’d be capable of tackling that!”

  It was astonishing how swiftly the days slipped by on their string of routine. The children were happy at their schools, where they remained for lunch until Lucy should become more proficient in the art of cooking. She herself was more than happy in her solitude, knowing that it would be broken each evening by the lively chatter of her daughter Anna, to whom each day brought some scene of stirring adventure, and by the more restrained account of her son Cyril’s doings, and not least by Captain Gregg’s appraisal of the day’s happenings, of which he often did not approve.

  Indeed he was quite fierce in his disapproval of the alterations that Lucy made in the downstairs rooms, though finally he had to admit that the pale gold walls and brocade curtains in the drawing-room set off his Persian carpet and kakemonos and lacquer cabinet to advantage.

  “But what you wanted to get rid of that good suite of furniture for, I can’t think,” he grumbled. “I paid good money for it.”

  “I’m sure you did,” said Lucy, “but my father paid better for the chairs I have in its place, and I got two-pound-ten for yours at the second-hand dealers, which paid for the new mantelpiece.”

  “Robbery—nothing but robbery!” Captain Gregg snorted. “And who wanted a new mantelpiece anyway? I brought that bit of marble from Italy, and now what have you done with it? Made it into a rockery in the back garden! My God! I believe you’d root up your own father’s tombstone and use it for that rockery!”

  “I certainly should if it were made of black marble carved into gargoyles,” Lucy retorted.

  “Notre Dame is covered with gargoyles,” snapped Captain Gregg.

  “Perhaps,” said Lucy, “but I don’t have to sit and warm my feet under Notre Dame.”

  “And I don’t see why you had to move my portrait up here, either,” continued Captain Gregg.

  “You ought to be pleased that I didn’t move it to the attic,” said Lucy, glancing with disfavour at the oil painting of the captain that now hung over the bedroom fireplace.

  “It’s a very good portrait,” said Captain Gregg stiffly.

  “That,” said Lucy, “is a matter of opinion. I think it’s frightful.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?” asked Captain Gregg hotly.

  “The hands are terrible,” said Lucy.

  “They weren’t my hands,” replied Captain Gregg. “I took the fellow that painted the picture out to South America and he made that portrait instead of paying me passage money. Of course I couldn’t always be sitting for him and wasting my time, so he’d paint bits of anyone that came along.”

  “He can’t have been a very good artist,” said Lucy.

  “He wasn’t.” Captain Gregg chuckled. “Bigamy was his trouble, though I never did think he was really bad, just weak. Any woman could marry him, and it was surprising how many wanted to turn him into a good husband—a little chap he was, with no chin and canary-coloured hair.”

  “I was referring to his artistic ability,” said Lucy.

  “Oh, well, chuck the thing away, or use it as a cucumber frame,” said Captain Gregg. “I don’t really think so much of it myself.”

  But he was not so easily placated when Lucy hired a gardener to come and set the garden in order and cut down the araucaria. He burst on her consciousness like a whirlwind that evening.

  “My tree—my monkey-puzzle tree—I planted it with my own hands!” he stormed.

  “Why did you?” asked Lucy.

  “Why! Dammit, because I wanted a monkey-puzzle tree in my front garden,” replied Captain Gregg.

  “But why?” persisted Lucy. “It’s not useful and it’s certainly not ornamental. Think how much prettier a bed of roses will look there.”

  “Bed of roses be damned!” said Captain Gregg, fuming. “May the whole blasted bed die of blight!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t swear, it’s so ugly.” Lucy sighed.

  “That’s not swearing,” retorted Captain Gregg, “that’s Sunday school language to what I’m thinking.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t admit it then,” said Lucy. “I would have thought you ought to have known better by now. You still seem to be very—very earthly for a spirit.”

  “You, madam, are enough to turn a saint from his canonizing,” snapped Captain Gregg, “but all women are alike—I might have known, I might have known.”

  And he vanished in a sudden stillness that clapped down on her senses louder than any thunder. Nor did he come back for several evenings, not indeed till Lucy had bought two small bay trees at the local market garden and planted them in green tubs on either side of the front door.

  “Bay trees doing well, I see,” he said, his voice strolling in casually as she turned on the light in her bedroom a few nights later, for he kept his word and never visited her downstairs or when the children were at hand.

  “Oh!” she said, more pleased at his return than she cared to admit. “Yes, I hope so.”

  “Appropriate, too,” said Captain Gregg.

  “Appropriate?” said Lucy.

  “The wicked shall flourish like the green bay tree,” said Captain Gregg. “It was a pretty way of admitting your villainy, my dear, but never mind, we’ll forget it. I was never one to bear a grudge. Even when that swine in Valparaiso borrowed my best pants, I only threw him in the ditch and said no more about it!”

  The days slipped by, and the laburnum trees shed their yellow glory in pools of gold about their roots. The buttercups spread a vivid carpet across the field that lay beyond the garden wall at the back of the house; and the raspberries drew the starlings, and sparrows, and thrushes, and blackbirds, in quarrelsome brotherhood to maraud the kitchen garden. Most of the residents had let their houses at summer rates to summer visitors, and the pierrots had set up their stands on the beach, where bathing tents had sprung up like a colourful garden of flowers.

  More colourful, thought Lucy ruefully one evening, than her own garden, where her herbaceous border wilted under the hot August sun, showing a healthier display of weeds than blossoms.

  Bindweed, she muttered, “blasted” bindweed, and looked round hastily to see if either of the children, free for the holidays, were at hand. It was hot work tugging the obstinate weed up by the roots; more often than not it snapped above them to grow again in luxurious mockery about her columbines and snapdragons and hollyhocks. It was very hot work, and she sat back on her heels, sweeping a curl of tickling hair off her damp forehead with the back of an earthy hand, as the garden gate clicked and the postman clumped his way up the path and back again.

  Not so many people wrote to Lucy that her curiosity could allow the letter he had brought to lie hidden in the letter-box, and she still retained the childlike feeling that, one day, treasure from an unknown source might come dropping through that narrow slit. She dusted her earthy hands on the grass, rose to her feet, and went toward the house. She felt in the wooden box for the envelope. A first glance at the firm writing on it showed her it was from her sister-in-law, Eva. With a ridiculous feeling that she was showing her independence by keeping that strong-minded lady waiting, she thrust the letter into the pocket of her gardening apron and sauntered back into the garden. She climbed the steps up to the round lo
okout in the wall and seated herself on the parapet, gazing down on the shore where her children were playing. She could see them there in the distance. Cyril, industriously building a lake on the wet sands exposed below the pebble ridge by the falling tide, was working hard, guiding little streams into the pool he had dug, reinforcing the dam he had built to hold it there. He leaned over his iron spade, his back bowed with his labour. Anna danced along by the edge of the waves on her bare feet, trailing a long tail of brown seaweed behind her, her curly dark hair blown back by the breeze, joy and vitality in every line of her graceful body.

  Lucy looked fondly down at them. The rough grey stone was warm under her hand from the heat of the sun. In the cracks a scarlet snapdragon flourished, and farther on a yellow-brown wallflower, and nearer at hand a cushion of grey-green upheld the roundness of sea pinks on their stiff stems, like old-fashioned hatpins.

  A sea-gull planed its way down to the water on curving, outstretched wings. The salt air blew coolly on her flushed cheeks, and she smiled to herself in her happiness.

  I wonder if there is something wrong with me, she thought, that I can get so much from so little, because all my joy really comes from not doing—not spending summer afternoons in stuffy drawing-rooms listening to women setting their neighbours’ morals to rights over the bridge table, not spending summer evenings listening to men and women setting the world’s affairs to rights over five-course dinners, not sewing in circles, nor reading in groups. I must be very selfish, she thought, for I want to set nothing and no one right; all I want is to be left in peace to make what I can of this problem called life for myself and my children. What would the world be like, she wondered, if everyone minded his own business? And yet there must be leaders; states and nations could never be allowed to drift without some guiding hand on the helm.

  “Anna, Anna!” Cyril’s shrill voice came up to her on the breeze, as clearly as if he were speaking at her elbow. “It’s time for supper.” He straightened himself as he called, and, picking up his bucket, began to make his way up the beach toward the cliff path.

  Anna continued on her way, dancing along the wet sand.

  “I told her, mother,” said Cyril, panting a little from his climb up the steep cliff path, “I told Anna it was time for supper.”

  “I know, darling, I heard you,” said Lucy.

  He stood on the grass looking up at her, a fat little boy with round glasses on a sharp little nose, and mouse-coloured hair growing stiffly up from his high forehead. He was so good and so conscientious, and her first-born and a son. Why, then, did she not appreciate him more? And suddenly the reason came to her—he was Eva’s child far more than hers; he was Eva herself, in a grey shirt and shorts, and that was a depressing thought, to have produced a man like a maiden aunt, if only in miniature.

  “Darling!” she said with fierce affection as the unwelcome truth took a firmer grip on her consciousness, “darling, what a lovely lake you made!”

  “It wasn’t a lake, it was a reservoir,” said Cyril in his precise voice, “and Anna wouldn’t help me. Did the postman come?” he continued, his gaze on the white envelope sticking up from his mother’s pocket.

  “Yes, dear,” said Lucy.

  That was typical of Cyril, approaching everything obliquely. There was no direct communication between them, and the only comfort in that was, that in this, at least, he was unlike his aunt, who had the directness of a sledgehammer in her questioning.

  “Hello, mummy!” cried another voice behind her.

  Turning, Lucy saw her daughter clinging to the top of the wall. With a last scrambling effort the child hooked a brown leg over, and, swinging herself upright, groped in the elastic of her cotton knickers and pulled out a handful of broken shells.

  “Oh,” she said in dismay, “I scrunched them getting over the beastly wall. There was a mother-of-pearl one, and a yellow periwinkle, and a little pink one like a fan, and I got them specially for you, mummy dear, but never mind,” she said, flinging the fragments to the wind, “there are plenty more. I’ll get you lovelier ones to-morrow. I’m hungry, what’s for supper?”

  “Salad and cream cheese, brown bread and butter and honey, milk, cake, and fruit,” replied Lucy.

  “Scrumptious,” said Anna. “You do think of the goodest food.” She snuggled down like a puppy beside her mother on the top of the wall, noticing in her turn the letter in her pocket. “You’ve had a letter,” she said. “Who from?”

  “From Aunt Eva,” replied Lucy, trying to keep prejudice far away from her speaking.

  “Oh, golly!” said Anna. “What does she want?”

  “I haven’t read it yet,” replied her mother. “My hands were rather earthy,” she added lamely under Cyril’s steady gaze. “I’ll read it at supper.”

  The letter was not a long one. It merely stated that everyone was well and that the writer intended to come and stay on August the fourteenth.

  “But she can’t,” burst out Anna, “there’s no bedroom for her.”

  “I will write and explain that we have no spare room,” said Lucy, but without any real hope in her heart.

  Nor did that fact deter Eva Muir. She would sleep, she wrote by return, anywhere, on a divan in the sitting-room if need be, and she would come on August the fourteenth by the train arriving at Whitecliff at 5:45 p.m.

  This is awful, thought Lucy as she undressed the night after she had received this second letter.

  “Write and tell her you have smallpox,” came Captain Gregg’s advice.

  “That would be useless,” said Lucy. “She would come and nurse me—nothing would put Eva off once she has made up her mind. And the trouble is that I have only just got used to making up mine for myself. She’ll ruin everything. Either I shall have to go her way or there will be scenes——”

  “You never seem to mind about making scenes with me,” said Captain Gregg.

  “Yes, but you’re different,” explained Lucy. “I can’t see you getting red and ugly with anger. I shall give in to Eva, I know I shall, and be ‘poor little Lucy’ again, and I do despise ‘poor little Lucy’ so, weak little fool!”

  “Leave her to me, me dear, leave her to me,” said Captain Gregg. “I’ve had female passengers like her aboard my ships many a time and I sorted them—no woman tried to run my ship for me more than once.”

  “No!” said Lucy. “You must promise me you’ll never speak to her, you must promise me! She’d have me out of the house at once if she knew about you, indeed she would. Or she’d have me in a mental home, for she doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “She’ll believe in me all right,” Captain Gregg assured her.

  “No, she mustn’t,” protested Lucy. “She must never know about you at all.”

  “The damned cheek of the woman,” growled the captain, “marching into my house without a by-your-leave!”

  “Of course she thinks it’s my house,” said Lucy, “and she always has considered that what is mine is hers.”

  “Well, this time she’ll find she’s mistaken,” said the captain.

  “No,” said Lucy, “you must promise not to come near me till she has gone away.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” replied the captain.

  “Oh, dear me!” said Lucy. “What am I to do?”

  “You do nothing,” said the captain with a sudden chuckle, “you leave the doing to me.”

  II

  “What you ought to do,” said Eva, “is to start a few hens. You’ve plenty of room out at the back, and you could sell the eggs.”

  “I don’t know anything about hens,” said Lucy.

  “Well, you could learn, my dear child, you could learn,” said Eva.

  She had not been in the house twenty-four hours, but already she had rearranged Lucy’s entire way of living to her own satisfaction, or rather she had arranged it in her own mind, for dear little Lucy was proving surprisingly obstinate about carrying out her advice. Obviously she needed shaking up. Why had she joined no
clubs, no societies? It was, of course, right and fitting that she should mourn for her departed husband, but there was a happy medium even in mourning, and it was all wrong that she should be living the life of a recluse. People would think her odd, and there was no greater handicap for children than the background of an odd home.

  She must go out and make friends, play tennis and golf, and join a bridge club. And the first thing she must do was to replan the house. There was no schoolroom for the children. Surely Lucy must know that it was essential for children to have a place of their own, and though, of course, they each had a bedroom furnished as a bed-sitting room, it was most unhealthy to spend too much time in the rooms in which they slept, and wasn’t it rather selfish of dear little Lucy to have chosen the best room in the house for her own bedroom? That should be the schoolroom, and Lucy and Anna could share the back bedroom, and “such a very strange way to furnish your room,” said Eva, marching into Lucy’s privacy without knocking, “and what on earth do you want with that great telescope?”

  “I like to look at the stars,” said Lucy weakly.

  “You never wanted to look at stars in Whitchester,” said Eva. “I should leave that to the astrologers, my dear, or you may go very odd indeed, and really, Lucy, do you think it quite nice to have such a large portrait of a strange man in your bedroom? Wouldn’t it be in better taste to have an enlargement made of that excellent cabinet photograph of dear Edwin? And why have you nothing but pictures of ships on the walls? And no photographs anywhere, only a couple of miniatures of the children?” What had become of that expensive likeness of Eva herself, taken only last Christmas, and presented to her in the engraved silver frame? And why had she taken to sleeping in a plain iron bedstead? What had become of the pretty brass bed Aunt Henry had given her as a wedding present?