The Time of the Ghost (8 page)

“Why?” said Fenella.

“Because Filbert's mad,” Howard said blandly.

“But we're pleased to see you two,” Imogen said kindly.

She said it so grandly that Howard bent down under the table and whispered to Fenella, “Is your sister saying hallo, or is she letting me know my socks smell?”

“You
are
stupid!” said Fenella.

Ned Jenkins said awkwardly, “Julian's coming. He went to scrounge some buns from Perry's.”

Cart turned round from plugging in the electric kettle, beaming. Sally could see this was good news to her. “Let's have that coffee here,” she said. “I saved enough milk, I think.”

“I brought some powdered milk, too,” said Ned. “By the way, where's Sally?”

“Gone to visit a friend,” Fenella said, grinning up at him from under the table. She looked like a green goblin in a cave.

This was another thing Sally had forgotten, it seemed—these almost nightly visits of the boys. She watched Imogen stumbling over her trouser legs to draw the curtains, even though it was not dark yet. Nobody switched on the light until the windows were covered because the boys were here quite illegally. Will and Ned both had a slightly guilty look and kept grinning at one another like conspirators, while Cart stirred mugs of coffee and Fenella, with great dignity, crawled out from under the table. Everyone settled round the table with their mugs.

Now Sally knew who did the pictures signed WH and N. The spaceships were Howard's, of course. And it was no wonder Ned Jenkins had done his surprisingly good bad drawing of Oliver. He really liked him. Oliver was rolling amiably and hugely from person to person, joining in the sociability, but he kept returning to Ned. Ned rubbed his back energetically each time, as if he was scrubbing a hearthrug, and chuckled.

“That dog is so ridiculously huge that I have to laugh every time I look at him,” he said.

“I know. Something went wrong with his genes, and he turned out nearly twice as big as he should be,” Cart said. “He ought to have been an Irish wolfhound really.”

“You've told him that before,” said Fenella. “Why is Filbert mad?”

“He thinks he's got two heads,” said Will Howard. Everybody looked incredulous, even Imogen, who did not care for coffee much and was not being very interested in anything. “Really,” Howard assured them. “Stinker started it yesterday. ‘Nutty,' he said, with an absolutely straight face, ‘Nutty, we think you may not have noticed your other head. We thought we ought to tell you because you forgot to comb its hair. It looks a sight.' And Nutty says, ‘What do you mean? I haven't got another head.' ‘Oh, yes, you have,' says Stinker. ‘You mean you've gone all these years and not noticed?' And Nutty says, all puzzled, ‘If I'd got two heads, I'd have seen them in the mirror, wouldn't I?' ‘Oh, no,' says Stinker. ‘The one behind's behind the one in front, you see.' And Nutty, being Nutty, believes him! Ever since then he's been turning round suddenly about once a minute, trying to catch a glimpse of his other head before it dodges out of sight. Honestly—I swear it!”

“Boys are all mad,” said Fenella.

“Ah,” said Howard. “Is that so? Girls only do sane things like lying under tables eating paper, don't they?”

There was silence, while Fenella turned her most phenomenal glower on him. Out of it, Imogen said violently, “I think that's a very cruel and barbarous story!”

The silence deepened uncomfortably. Imogen would not look at anyone. She sat leaning forward stiffly in her chair, with her head bent at an odd, listening angle, staring into her mug of coffee. Sally found herself saying,
Imogen really is terribly unhappy!
Imogen's face, with its strong angel features, was somehow bloated from behind, with tears she was waiting to cry. The boys could see it, too. They could not understand it, and it embarrassed them. Sally wondered,
Is that how Imogen would look if she knew I was dead?

“Fiddle-di-dee, Imo!” Howard said, forcing the natural expression of cheerfulness back to his face. “I'll tell him tomorrow it was only a joke.” Imogen did not answer. She just sat, leaning and bloated. “I promise,” Howard said. When Imogen still would not answer or even look at him, he leaned back with an artificial sigh of pleasure and gazed round the kitchen. “I do like a taste of homelife!”

Though that sounded sarcastic just at that moment, Sally knew Howard meant it. He was trying, in the only way he could think of, to remind Imogen he was grateful to her. Imogen had started the visits of the boys. One day, two years ago now—Sally thought it was—Imogen had discovered a homesick new boy crying in the hedge between the school garden and the orchard. It was Howard, of all people. Though he was a year older than she was, he had inspired Imogen to mother him. She had brought him into the kitchen and fed him cups of tea mixed with condensed milk stolen from Mrs. Gill's cupboard, until Howard felt better. Howard came back the next day, and the next, and, when he made friends, he brought his friends. They had worn a well-beaten secret path down the middle of the orchard hedge.

The latch of the door clicked again, and everything changed except Imogen's misery. Julian Addiman strode in laughing and dumped a bag of buns on the table.

“Two nicked, one sponged, and three paid for,” he said. “How's that?”

“Brilliant!” said Cart.

“Out of character. What made you
pay
for three?” said Howard.

“I only promised him the money,” Julian said.

“Then I let you off,” said Howard. “Hey! They're jam doughnuts! My favorite!”

“Perry's House have doughnuts every Tuesday,” said Julian. “Why do you think I went there? You can trust your uncle Julian, you know. He thinks of everything.”

“Keep the bag away from Oliver!” Cart shouted, banging up from her chair to turn the kettle on again. Oliver's blurred nose was sweeping in over Ned's shoulder to work its magnetizing trick on a doughnut or so. Julian and Fenella plunged on the bag, both laughing, and shoved it out of reach. But Ned seemed to have worked Oliver's magnetizing trick for him. Sally saw him pass Oliver a jammy lump over his shoulder, smiling secretively. What an odd boy Ned Jenkins was. You would never catch Julian Addiman being that secretive, or making faces and jerking an arm, like Ned had been doing in the garden.

Sally had forgotten Julian Addiman completely until now. She wondered how she could. He was dark and striking-looking, with brows as black as Fenella's and eyes nearly as blue and luminous as Imogen's, and he had a wide, curiously red mouth, which looked as if it was laughing all the time. Julian Addiman laughed a lot. But what people noticed most about him was that wherever he was, he took control. He was not bossy. Nor was it the fact that he was a fifth former and older even than Cart. It was just that when Julian Addiman was there, things ran Julian Addiman's way.

He took control now, in the easiest possible way. Ned moved his seat, Oliver was pushed out of the way, and Julian Addiman sat down with a mug of coffee, next to Cart and facing Fenella. He looked at Fenella and laughed. There was nothing particular to it, but Sally found herself staring at Julian Addiman and feeling very strange. Everything seemed to quiver when she looked at him, as if she was about to be swept away by panic again. It seemed almost as if she was terrified of Julian Addiman.

“Fenella,” said Julian, “do my eyes deceive me, or have you tied your hair in two granny knots, one over each eye?”

“I've been dying to ask that, too,” said Howard, “but I wasn't sure it was polite.”

Fenella sat up haughtily. “It keeps the hair out of my eyes. But if you must know, it's part of the Plan.”

“Nature's Holy Plan?” asked Howard. “Or something else?”

“A Plan we devised to shake our parents up a bit,” Cart explained. “We wanted to prove to them—and to Sally, too, actually—that they wouldn't notice if—if something awful happened to one of us.”

“If one of us
died
!” Imogen said savagely, without looking up.

“I'm going to time how long it takes them to notice my knots,” Fenella explained. “If they haven't noticed by Christmas, I shall fall seriously ill instead.”

“How are you going to do that? Drink poison?” Julian Addiman asked, laughing.

Fenella sat up even haughtier. “I don't need to do anything so crude,” she said, lifting her chin. “I shall just lie in bed and groan and think pale.”

“Pretend to be ill then, you mean?” Ned suggested.

Fenella was genuinely scandalized. “It's not pretending! When I'm ill, Mrs. Gill has to bring me dinner, and she scolds me for being ill when she's so busy. She says it's only psychological. That means in your mind. And if I think pale, that's in my mind like a real illness, isn't it?”

“I still call that pretending,” said Ned.

Howard was looking unhappy. “You don't know,” he said, “how lucky you are to have so much independence. I wish I had.”

“It's all right for
you
!” Imogen said fiercely. “You just come along in the evenings and enjoy yourself. You don't have to live with it.”

Julian Addiman was finding this boring. Sally could see him shifting about, even though she was avoiding looking at him. She did not like the feeling he gave her. “Oh, come on,” he said impatiently. “When are we going to start the séance?”

Séance?
said Sally. And at that the whole room, the electric light, the faces, the furniture, and the bulk of Oliver asleep by Ned's feet began to shake and quiver apart for Sally.
This is wrong!
she said.
There's been an accident!
Everything she could see was falling into upright, waving strands, as if she were looking through a bead curtain. Voices were filmy threads in a different dimension. Something very terrifying and gray and formless was appearing in the space behind the threads. Sally was so much afraid of the formless thing that she clung with all her might to the waving, stranding, fraying kitchen. She heard Ned and Howard, in distant voices like filaments, protesting that spiritualism was “a load of crap,” and Julian Addiman replying, in another strand of sound, “I thought that's what we came for.”

No, it wasn't. It was something else I came for
, Sally said.

And she clung again to the threads, as they threatened to billow apart and leave her with the formless thing. Cart, she noticed, evidently knew all about the proposed séance. She bounced up—Cart was so clumsy that two chairs spun about as she went, twirling from thread to thread as they moved—and fetched a set of Scrabble letters, which she dumped on the table with a thick glass tumbler. Howard's otter face, swaying like waterweed, examined the letters nervously. Ned and Fenella began picking out an alphabet from them, and Cart wavered across half the threads like a blue bolster, to put the alphabet in a ring in the middle of the table.

The thread of Julian Addiman's voice said something. Cart turned and smiled at him. Sally saw, with what seemed to be a sense of enormous relief, that Cart was keen on Julian Addiman. A formless face like Cart's, swaying and billowing from thread to thread, ought to have had no shape at all just then. Yet because of the way she felt about Julian Addiman, Cart's face showed more firm and angelic than Imogen's, whose face was destroyed by misery. But Julian Addiman had been pointing out something wrong. The table was sticky. Cart moved all the letters and bent over, a blue bolster again, rubbing the table hard with a cloth. Julian Addiman's hand swung casually out and came down on the bolster's rear.
Smack.

Sally jolted. The threads drew firmly back into place, and the kitchen, with everything in it, was solid again. There was an uncomfortable silence in it. Everyone was sitting and standing like a tableau, except for Oliver, who was heaving himself to his feet and looking inquiringly at Cart's too-pink face.

Imogen scraped back her chair and stood up. “Are you quite settled on this stupid séance?” she asked. Nobody answered. They were trying to move their attention from Cart and Julian to Imogen. “Very well,” said Imogen. She was speaking in a hard, hacking gabble, by which Sally knew she was very angry. “I'm not doing it! I think it's stupid, mean-minded, and vicious. It's playing with something nobody understands. It's—immoral!”

“It doesn't do any harm!” Julian Addiman exclaimed. “It's only for fun.”

“You've no business doing a thing like that for fun!” Imogen snapped.

“So you're not doing it?” said Julian.

“No,” said Imogen. She took up her mauve beads in a trembling hand and bit them. “Nobody must do it.”

Julian Addiman gave Cart an exasperated look. Cart said wearily, “Imogen's always been like this. The first words she ever spoke were”—Cart put on a squeaky, jeering voice—“‘I'm not play-ying!'”

Sally found herself swooping toward the table.
Cart, that was thoroughly unkind! How dare you hurt Imogen just to please Julian Addiman!
Of course, no one heard her except Oliver. He growled.

“Look, if we get a ghost,” Ned said diplomatically, “and it spells something out, we're going to need someone to write it down. Couldn't Imogen do that?”