The Time of the Ghost (17 page)

He was going to South Africa. His father had found him a job there. His father found him everything, even the car he had thrown her out of. Julian Addiman had wanted her to go to South Africa with him—to drop everything and go. And she knew this was the time when she had to say no. There were a thousand reasons—particularly the fact that South Africa was the kind of country it was. And she had put off saying no, because she was so frightened of him, until they were driving along in his car. Then she had clenched her hands and teeth and her courage and said no. And Julian Addiman had reacted with more than his usual violence—

She was interrupted by Oliver. Oliver came stumbling sleepily out of the living room and uttered a faint, far-off rumble on finding she was still there. But he was used to her now. She was one of his family after all. She could make herself useful and let him out for his morning airing. Accordingly Oliver rolled his mottled donkey-sized bulk to the back door and stood with his head pointed at it patiently. When she did nothing, he uttered a few squeaks, like the whistle of a distant referee, and continued to stand, patient and pointed.

It's no good
, she said.
I can't open doors in this state.

Oliver did not believe her. He put his nose to the crack where the door closed and blew, meaningly. When that failed, he sighed, raised a massive three-clawed foot, and hit the door with it. The door leaped about. Oliver waited, looked over his shoulder at her, and did it again.

Stop it
, she said.
I told you. I can't.

Oliver, however, went on hitting the door, and the door went on leaping, shaking the whole building. Five repetitions of this treatment brought Fenella, tramping half awake downstairs in her gray nylon nightwear.

“Oh,” said Fenella. “The ghost is back again. Stupid dog. Ghosts can't open doors.” She opened the door, and Oliver rolled majestically forth.

The ghost went with him for no real reason except that Cart had been anxious about him. She followed while he ambled forth among the hens and sketchily raised a hind leg against the hut that held Monigan. She followed again when he walked round the buildings and emerged in the wide bleak green of the playing fields. Here Oliver went on the longest walk he ever permitted himself—to the other side of the field, almost as far as the dead elms. She did not follow. She hung by the school, watching the shaggy shape, large even at that distance, ambling and prying among the hedge bottoms there.

She could feel Monigan out there. Monigan was waiting, gloating, dwelling out there in triumph. Last night Sally and Julian Addiman had brought Monigan more life than she had had for centuries, and now the ghost could feel that life in each fleeting dry shower of rain and in each sour scudding patch of sunlight. Seven years away, Cart might have said she had invented Monigan, but that was not true. The school had once been a place called Mangan Manor, and Cart had taken the name from that, out of a mispronunciation Fenella once made. But who was to say Cart had not taken the name of a real being—either by accident or because that being made her take it? No. Monigan was terribly real.

Suddenly terrified, the ghost knew that the only way she could hang on to her little patch of existence—a white patch, seven years away, the size of a hospital bed—was by keeping near to people. People could keep Monigan away. People could stop Monigan moving in and taking her, if only they had long enough to understand in. How long had she to make them understand? Seven years in the future, it had been, say, three in the afternoon. What was the time here? It was later than the soporific state of her sisters suggested. She could tell by the hum from the redbrick building that it was lesson time. Ten o'clock?

Confirming this, the School clock began to strike. Heavily it tolled off ten. Then she had nine hours here. Until seven o'clock that evening. It was not much time.

The ghost fled back to their private quarters.
Quick! Wake them up. Get them to UNDERSTAND!
She arrived back with Oliver and was let in by Imogen this time. Imogen and Fenella were getting up. Imogen looked tousled and unwell, and the yellow trouser suit became her less than ever. Fenella was tousled, too. The knots jutted at the sides of her face, and her green sack hung unevenly. She stood in the middle of the littered living room and boomed to Imogen, “Oliver's feet are killing him, and the ghost is back again.”

“How do you know?” Imogen called from the kitchen.

“I just know,” boomed Fenella.

From Cart, up above in the bedroom, came a wordless snarl of rage. It was like a wild animal. Both her sisters—and the ghost with them—stopped dead where they were and stared nervously at the ceiling. There was an angry rattle of bedsprings from above, but no further noise.

Fenella tiptoed into the kitchen. “I think she ought to get up and look after Oliver at least,” she muttered to Imogen.

“Sssh!” said Imogen, staring at the ceiling, with half a loaf clutched anxiously to her chest. They remained like that for a good minute. When it seemed clear that there was going to be no further sound from Cart, Imogen whispered glumly, “There aren't any cornflakes left.”

“Let's go and get some,” said Fenella.

Remembering that Mrs. Gill could see her, the ghost went with them, pushing through the green door and thumping through the silver one into the white, breakfast-scented school kitchen. There was not much going on there. The two other white-coated ladies were sitting face-to-face at the white-topped table, eating cornflakes. Looking at them now, with the eyes of someone seven years in the future, the ghost saw that one was an elderly nonentity and the other was a girl not much older than Cart. This girl had asserted her grown-upness by dyeing her hair a deep and improbable black. Mrs. Gill was the one who mattered here. Mrs. Gill was sitting at the table with her back to the door. Her hair, at this stage in her life, was a kind of peppery brown. As the door thumped, her peppery head turned, bringing into view her peaked side face and the cigarette curving from her upper lip.

“Get out of my kitchen,” she said.

Fenella simply stumped toward the table and removed the packet of cornflakes from it. All three ladies stared unlovingly, but none of them said anything until Imogen came up, too. Imogen, with a nervous duck of her head and a silly, polite smile, picked up the jug of milk from the table and started to carry it away. It was clear that Fenella's brazen approach was the right one. There was something about Imogen's apologetic manner which invited trouble. All three ladies reacted.

“Hey!” said the young one. “You just put that back!”

“You got no right,” said the old one.

“Coming in here,” said Mrs. Gill, passing smoothly into a tirade from a standing start, “without so much as a word and walking off with half the food in the place. Spongers, that's what you are! When I was your ages, I was out at work. It's time you girls learned to look after yourselves and stopped coming pinching things in my kitchen.”

“We are trying to look after ourselves,” Imogen pointed out humbly.

Mrs. Gill flung round in her chair. The cigarette wagged fiercely. “Well, you better try harder than this! I've had about enough of you girls coming in here and walking off with things. I'm going to speak to your mother about it.” The cigarette wagged on, and with it went Mrs. Gill's voice, shrilling and skirling. The tirade was so familiar that no one needed to listen properly. Hopefully the ghost put herself where Mrs. Gill could see her. Mrs. Gill certainly saw her. Her face turned to the ghost, to Imogen, to Fenella, and the cigarette wagged fiercely her way every third sentence, like a punctuation mark. But Mrs. Gill had evidently decided that her strange appearance was intended to annoy and just one more cross to bear. “You and your silly tricks!” The cigarette wagged at her. “I've had enough!” It wagged at Imogen. And at Fenella: “So I'm going to your mother this minute!” Mrs. Gill seemed to mean this. She started to get up from her chair.

Fenella spoke. “Go if you like,” she said carelessly. “And I shall go and tell her all the things you take away in your green and orange bag.”

Mrs. Gill's face became utterly still. It was hard, peaky, and red, and her eyes stared into Fenella's venomously. “I see,” she said. “Right.” She turned back to her thick cup of coffee on the table. “You do one more thing, my girl,” she said. She said no more. She picked up her cup. The other ladies went back to eating cornflakes. Fenella and Imogen might have been ghosts, too, for all the notice anyone took of them.

Quietly and hurriedly they retreated to the door and backed out, clutching the milk and the cornflakes. “I wish you hadn't said that,” Imogen whispered when they were outside in the passage.

“So do I,” said Fenella. “But I had to, or she'd have gone to Phyllis.”

“But we've got a
right
to food!” Imogen said wretchedly. “What else can we do? Do you think Phyllis would give us the money to buy cornflakes of our own?”

“No,” said Fenella.

They arrived back in their own kitchen, where Fenella first poured a large heap of cornflakes and milk in a bowl for Oliver and then another, without milk but even larger, into a bowl for herself. She sat down to eat them dry.

“Have some milk,” Imogen said hopelessly, with the jug in her hand.

“No,” said Fenella. “Milk makes them all soggy.”

“Milk is good for you,” Imogen observed, pouring milk on her own cornflakes.

“I never eat things which are good for me,” said Fenella.

There was silence except for the sound of three mouths eating cornflakes. In it, the ghost hung, wondering what to do. She saw she had been silly to expect Mrs. Gill to notice her. For Mrs. Gill would have mentioned it in the hospital if she had understood. According to Cart, it was her sisters who had seemed to understand. So how had she attracted their attention?

One of them must be me
, she said.

She looked at Imogen. Imogen was spooning up cornflakes, fast and desolately. A tear was working its way down one of her cheeks. Mrs. Gill had started her grieving again, and that meant she was not likely to notice anything else.

Fenella, then? Fenella knew she was there. Maybe that was because they were the same person. The ghost floated nearer, just beside Fenella's bony shoulder and sharp munching jaw.

Fenella
, she said.
I think I may be your ghost.

Nothing came of it because overhead Cart came to life again. She came with a scream, which modulated to a roar and then became a scream again, without ever once sounding like a human voice. “Will you all
stop
that horrible
crunching
!”

All jaws stopped, even Oliver's. All attention was on the ceiling.

“How can a person
sleep
!” screamed Cart. “In all this
din
!”

Fenella gave Imogen a deeply expressive look and raised her voice in return. “It's after ten,” she boomed. “We're having breakfast.”

“Well, stop it at
once
!” howled Cart. “Or I'll come down and
kill
you!” She meant this. It was clear to everyone. Oliver lay down beside his bowl with a sigh. Imogen and Fenella looked at one another.

“No one can eat cornflakes quietly,” Imogen breathed.

“Even soggy ones,” Fenella whispered grimly.

“And stop that bloody
whispering
!” yelled Cart.

Imogen and Fenella looked at one another again, united in loathing for Cart. The ghost did not blame them. She had been thinking kindly of Cart—too kindly, she knew. Maybe the grown-up Cart deserved this kindness. This Cart did not. She had forgotten what Cart was like in the morning, and not just this morning but every morning. And there was worse to come, she knew. Imogen bowed her head and gripped the edge of the table, mustering courage.

“I shouldn't,” Fenella said warningly.

Imogen took no notice. It was something she did every morning. She never seemed to learn. Having made herself as brave as she could, she got up silently and tiptoed gently, gently, through the living room. She stopped at the foot of the stairs, where she cocked her head sideways and adjusted a sweet smile on her face. She was seeing herself as a ministering angel. She needed to, in the circumstances.

“Cart, dear,” Imogen cooed gently up the stairs, “shall I bring you up some coffee?”

A terrible growl was the answer. Imogen flinched. Oliver at his fiercest sounded like a lamb in comparison.

“I'll put the kettle on, shall I, Cart, dear?” Imogen said. It was more of a quaver than a coo.

“Oh, shut up!” snarled the thick animal voice upstairs. “When you start being tactful, you
really
get up my nose!”

“Cart, dear—” Imogen began again unwisely.

“Aaargh!”
went Cart. There was a surging sound and a heavy bump that shook the ceiling. Imogen went pale. Her ministering attitude somehow became that of someone poised on one foot ready to run. And with reason. The ceiling vibrated. The stairs shook. Cart appeared with unbelievable speed, wild-haired, white-faced, and snarling, and dived down the stairs without apparently treading on any of them. The ghost caught a whirling glimpse of bared teeth, and swollen eyelids with little piggy eyes glaring between them, and found herself crouching on top of the piano. Imogen took a running dive and vanished into the space between the piano and the sofa. By the time Cart hit the living-room floor, with a crash that shook the whole building, the room was apparently empty.