Ghost MacIndoe Read online

  One afternoon in April she strode down the hall, lifted him up, and said: ‘What would you say if I said we were going up to town? To see the lights come on.’

  ‘That’d be nice,’ he replied.

  ‘Once more, with feeling?’ she requested.

  ‘That’d be very nice,’ he said, loudly enough to earn an embrace.

  They left the house in the dusk, and it was dark when they reached Nelson’s Column. His mother pointed down the wide road that stretched off to Buckingham Palace. ‘Do you want to go down there?’ she asked. She did not seem interested by the idea.

  ‘Don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘Fine. What about down there? Do you want to go and see the Houses of Parliament?’ she asked, and it seemed she would be disappointed if he did.

  He looked down Whitehall. The buildings were all the same colour and all the people were walking with their heads down, as if they didn’t want to see anyone. ‘We saw them from the train, didn’t we?’ he replied.

  ‘Let’s go and see the lights then,’ she proposed.

  The lights were in Leicester Square, where the Empire was presenting Easter Parade with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. For a few minutes they stood in the drizzle, while his mother marvelled at the signs for the shows. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ she said, gesturing at a building on which huge grey shadows floated like the spirits of the dead in the picture of heaven in Nan Burnett’s front room. ‘We’ll take a walk through theatreland,’ said his mother, and bareheaded in the rain they went up Haymarket and down St Martin’s Lane and across Covent Garden, where the pavements smelled of dustbins. Facing the Theatre Royal she took his hand and said to him, as if telling him something he must not tell anyone else: ‘This is a very famous place. A very special place. The Desert Song, Show Boat, Oklahoma! – they were all performed here.’ Under the theatre’s colonnade she sang a whole song for him, and she sang a few lines as they strolled back along the Strand, and on the journey home. But before the train reached Blackheath station she turned away from him and rested her forehead on the dark glass. From what felt like a great distance, Alexander regarded her, wondering what they had done that had made her unhappy.

  Within twenty years the walk through theatreland would dwindle to the memory of the rain-slicked cars in Leicester Square and the sign for Easter Parade. The train journey home would vanish, but for the image of the tree of steam that rose from the funnel of a waiting engine, and of the railway lines rushing in like streams between the platforms of London Bridge station. The face of Dr Levine would vanish, as would the conversation on the stairs, and his mother’s conversation with Mrs Beckwith in the garden. All this he would forget, but he would remember acutely and at length the Saturday, in July of that year, on which he followed his mother.

  Early on a Saturday afternoon he would sometimes go to Mr Prentice’s shop, for no reason except that it was a pleasant place to be. For as long as ten minutes he would stand behind the potato sacks, where he was not in anybody’s way. Breathing in the bountiful smells of the shop, he watched the brass cylinders flying over the heads of the customers, shuttling along the wires that ran between the counters and the cashier’s turret, where an old woman with a hairnet unscrewed the lids from the cylinders and scooped out the money and the chits, like a cat hooking food from a bowl. To his left were ranged the glazed grey flagons of ginger ale, lemonade and dandelion and burdock, and to the right were the greasy pink hams and wheels of cheese, and the slicing machine with the blade that spun quickly under its shiny steel cowl and made a ringing sound when its edge came out of the meat. Opposite was the door to the back room, where Mr Prentice worked.

  Sometimes Mr Prentice would turn round from his desk and call out to him: ‘All in order, MacIndoe?’ To which Alexander’s response, copied from his father, was: ‘Aye aye, Mr P,’ and a soldier’s salute. And in reply Mr Prentice would brush his brow with his forefinger; and then, having hitched up the metal bands that held his shirtsleeves to his upper arms, he would return to his letters and bills. On this particular afternoon, Mr Prentice gave his one-fingered salute, glanced over Alexander’s shoulder and said, pointing: ‘Wasn’t that your mum going past?’

  Through the gaps in the whitewash prices on the window Alexander watched his mother hurrying along the pavement. She was wearing her long chequered skirt and her chequered jacket, and the dark blue hat that he had seen on top of her wardrobe but never seen her wear.

  Alexander looked at Mr Prentice, but Mr Prentice was leaning forward in his chair and looking out at the street, though there was no longer anyone to see there. ‘Better hurry home,’ he said.

  ‘Suppose,’ responded Alexander. He stepped out under the awning and saw his mother go straight across the road at which she would have turned right had she been going home. From a distance he pursued her, dashing from doorway to doorway, watching for a few seconds before following, excited by the adventure but agitated by a sense of his own deceitfulness. When he saw a man stop to look at her as, waiting on a kerb, she glanced at a window and altered the angle of her hat, Alexander’s anxiety became so strong that he almost turned back. He saw his mother pull at her cuff to check her watch, then quicken her stride; he followed again, his heartbeat seeming to increase with the speed of her footsteps. She crossed another road and then, beyond her, a bus drew out from its stop, uncovering The Winslow Boy in white boxy letters, and his limbs became hollow with the relief of knowing where his mother was going.

  From behind a lamppost he watched her slide a coin under the grille of the booth and receive her ticket. She smiled at the woman in the booth, and she was smiling as she pushed at the curving brass door-handle and crossed the deep red carpet of the foyer. A commissionaire with golden bands around his cuffs held open the inner door, and eased it shut once she had passed through, as if it were the heavy steel door of a strongroom.

  Alexander sat on the pavement, his back against the lamppost, and waited for a while. When three men arrived and bought tickets he stood up to watch the commissionaire open his door, thinking that perhaps she would come out as they went in. He walked around the block, stopped to watch the commissionaire’s fingers drumming on the ashtray on the wall, and walked around the block again. He crossed the street. In a padlocked glass cabinet to the side of the outer doors there were advertisements for the new films: a photograph of Orson Welles in a shadowy doorway, and a picture of Alec Guinness in a dress and one of John Wayne on a horse. It was when he noticed that the woman in the ticket booth was watching him out of the corner of her eye that Alexander was spurred into making up his mind.

  Two buildings along from the cinema there was a blind alley which Eric Mullins had once taken him down. The alley made a right-angled turn twenty yards from the street, and on this angle there was a flat, handleless door which led, Eric said, to the cinema. ‘It’s not locked,’ he said. ‘They can’t lock it, because then it wouldn’t be an escape, would it? You can get it open with a knife.’ Alexander inserted a penny into the crack of the door and levered it out a quarter-inch. He grappled his fingers onto the strip of door and worked it open far enough to slip through.

  On the other side was a corridor of bare brick with a floor of rough, ridged concrete; a single bare lightbulb burned in a socket above a door at the far end, through which came the sound of indistinct voices talking loudly. Another door, halfway down the corridor, opened with a judder and a woman came out, fiddling with a button on her blouse. She smiled and looked at him as if she were trying to work out who he was. ‘Hello, mischief,’ she said. The light from the bulb made her hair gauzy. She opened the door and pushed aside a velvet curtain. ‘You coming or aren’t you?’ she whispered.

  He went inside. The cinema was so large and dark it seemed to have no boundary. Like a drift of scum on a river, a stream of smoke flowed upwards through the beam of light, which swelled and shrank and twitched incessantly. Dozens of faces tilted upwards underneath the beam, all of them with the same expression of exp
ectation, or so it appeared initially. Alexander wrapped himself in the folds of the curtain, which smelt like curtains in Mr Mullins’s pub. Unable to understand what the people on the screen were doing, he looked again at the people who were watching them. A few sat open-mouthed, as if waiting to be fed. Some were chewing, while some sucked on cigarettes, making scarlet bugs appear in the darkness. One woman seemed to be joining in with the words that the actors were speaking. Under the lip of the balcony, a man kissed the woman in the seat beside him; in front of them a man had his eyes closed, next to a woman who was frowning as if she disagreed with everything she was hearing.

  Alexander’s gaze travelled to the end of the row in which the frowning woman sat, and travelled gradually back, to halt at a face he had already passed over once, and realised now was his mother’s. It went dark for a moment and then the light flashed on her skin, but she remained motionless, like a woman balancing a book on her head. Voices were raised in the film. The frowning woman shook her head and the sleeping man woke up, and then his mother’s eyes widened in amazement, though nothing had happened, that Alexander could see, to make her react in this way, and her lips formed an expression as if someone he could not see was in the seat beside her and telling her something she could scarcely believe. She smiled to herself, curling a strand of hair around her finger.

  Alexander smiled too, yet her lonely pleasure made him sorrowful. He was ashamed, and he told himself that he should not have left Mr Prentice’s shop. He picked a cancelled ticket from the carpet and turned it repeatedly in his fingers to keep his eyes from his mother.

  ‘This is where we came in,’ said a man somewhere in the shadows under the balcony. Three men and a woman came down the slope, making the floor boom under their tread. Alexander rolled under the curtain and reached the end of the corridor before the door behind him opened. He returned to his post at the end of the side street, and waited. Half an hour passed, and still his mother did not come out. He counted the buses that drove by. Ten buses passed, and in that time he saw many people leave, but not his mother. The sun was resting on the roofs when he decided to go home.

  Alexander would remember the pursuit of his mother, and the apparition of her face amid the other shadowed faces. And from the evening of that day he would remember his father putting his elbows on the dinner table and drawing on his pipe so strongly the liquid rattled in its stem, and saying to him: ‘Anything wrong?’

  Alexander stirred his spoon around the empty soup bowl as his mother gathered the rest of the cutlery and crockery. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘There is, I think,’ his mother teased.

  ‘Come on, what’s up?’ asked his father, taking off his glasses.

  ‘No, nothing,’ he repeated. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he grinned, holding his spoon upright like a sceptre. ‘Dr Levine said so.’

  ‘Comedian,’ said his mother. She stacked the plates and went off to the kitchen.

  ‘Come on,’ his father said. ‘Let’s go and help your mother in the galley.’

  Alexander followed his father down the hall, twisting the ticket in his pocket as he walked.

  In the kitchen his mother was reading a newspaper she had spread out on the draining board. Her head was posed like one of the women in the glass cabinet at the cinema, but she was even prettier. Alexander stood in the doorway and looked at her in the way the man in the street had looked at her, with his head angled slightly to one side and both hands in his pockets.

  ‘Can I have a picture of you?’ he asked her.

  His mother looked sideways at him. ‘What do you need a picture for?’ she asked.

  ‘For my room.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got the real thing. You don’t need a picture.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re being silly.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Alexander, stop it,’ she said, and he ran out of the kitchen because he felt he might cry.

  7. The Bovis stove

  The afternoon was so hot that Alexander’s father took a chair from the kitchen and carried it out into the garden, where Alexander, propped on his elbows in the middle of the lawn, was turning the pages of the old atlas.

  ‘Would I be disturbing you, son and heir?’ his father enquired, in the butler’s voice he often used when he was joking. ‘I would not? Well and good. We shall study together,’ he replied to Alexander’s smile, and he placed the chair on the patch of concrete to the side of the kitchen door, under the honeysuckle that grew across the wall that year. He went back inside and emerged again with a sheaf of square-ruled paper and the big tin tray, which he laid across the arms of the chair to make a desk. ‘This is very agreeable,’ he remarked, examining the point of a pencil approvingly. He unbuttoned his collar and slipped his feet out of his broad-strapped sandals.

  Askance Alexander watched his father working, drawing graphs and reckoning figures across the gridded paper, placing the completed sheets neatly upon the pile underneath the chair. His mother brought a pitcher of lemonade and poured a glass for each of them; his father kissed her fingers and his mother made a curtsy, holding out the hem of her dress so the shape of a leg showed through the red and white checks, as Alexander would remember.

  ‘Alexander, come inside when you’ve finished your drink,’ she said.

  ‘He’s fine, Irene,’ said his father. ‘Quiet as a monk, aren’t you?’

  So Alexander continued to roam the pink expanses of the maps, measuring the distances between names that seemed to have been invented for their melody, tracing systems of rivers that looked like roots. From time to time he turned to the first page of the atlas, where his great-grandfather’s name was written in a script that resembled blades of grass, with ink that was chestnut brown and gave the book an aura which the name of Duncan Manus MacIndoe deepened with its ancient, clannish sound. With a forefinger he stroked the loops and limbs of the writing, as if to encourage a visible presence to rise like a genie from the paper.

  Occasionally his father broke the silence, stopping his pencil and enquiring quietly, without looking up: ‘Eight times thirteen?’ or ‘Twenty-two nines?’ or some other sum. Alexander would give his answer, and whenever the answer was correct his father would say, with pretended briskness and still without looking at him, ‘Carry on,’ then get back to his work.

  Late in the afternoon the clouds began to cluster on the city side of the sky. Alexander watched the sun fall behind them, turning parts of them to tangerine foam as it sank. The white shirts on the neighbours’ washing line, hanging with arms raised in the breezeless air, took on the tint of skin. As if soaking a dye from the horizon, the clouds became tangerine right through, a colour that brought to Alexander a sensation that seemed a foretaste of the pleasure he would have at the funfair that evening. It was a sensation so strong that for many years this quality of sunlight in a cumulus sky would elicit a moment of anticipatory happiness, and sometimes he would glimpse the tomato-red metal panels of the merry-go-rounds under loops of electric bulbs, and hear the jubilant, malicious music of the steam organ above the hum of the generators.

  Following his father, he passed between the caravans that formed a wall around the fair, and stepped onto grass that had been mashed into arrowhead tracks and heel shapes. Beside the Hall of Mirrors there was a coconut shy, where his father handed his jacket to Alexander before hurling three wooden balls into the netting behind the coconuts, and close by was a stall at which his mother threw two black rubber rings at hooks on a wall that was painted with red fish, then handed the third ring to Alexander, whose throw struck a hook and bounced off. They bought toffee apples from a man with blurred tattoos of a dagger and a red snake on his right arm. Standing by the test-your-strength machine, Alexander raised his half-eaten apple in the direction of the Big Wheel.

  ‘Can we go on that?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re not getting me on that, I can tell you that right now,’ said
his mother to his father.

  ‘Can I go?’ Alexander asked his father.

  ‘You wouldn’t like it,’ his father told him.

  ‘Have you been on one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you know I wouldn’t like it?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t be contrary, Alexander,’ said his mother.

  ‘No, he’s right,’ said his father, raising one forefinger in judgement. ‘But don’t say you weren’t warned. You’ll get no sympathy from me if you get up there and find it’s too high. Do you want me to go on with you?’ his father asked, in a tone that Alexander took as a challenge.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Alexander replied, and his father pressed a couple of coins into his hand, as if he were handing over an important message for him to deliver.

  A woman with curlers in her hair took the money. ‘Just for you, lover?’ she asked, letting the coins slide down her hip into the pouch that was slung across her dress. Alexander looked at his mother, who looked at his father, who was studying the wheel. ‘Shouldn’t really, you being a little ‘un,’ said the woman; then, after a teasing pause, ‘but go on.’ She touched his cheek with her inky fingertips as he crossed the steel ramp to the empty car. ‘Hold tight,’ she told him, pressing his hands onto the iron bar that she fastened across his belly, and then she turned towards the man in the sentrybox at the foot of the ramp and cried ‘Up and away,’ letting her voice trail off like someone falling a long distance.

  With a jolt he rose backwards and in a second he was above the stalls and then pitching down towards them, through air that smelled of onions and hot sugar. His parents appeared and receded, and he looked over his shoulder, down on the tarpaulin roofs, which glowed like multicoloured lampshades. He saw the gigantic shadows of the stallkeepers quivering on the tents as he swooped towards his parents. At the top he looked across the fairground, and was fascinated to see how orderly it appeared from this height, but the wheel was now gathering speed. A wind was whirring in his ears. Becoming frightened, he closed his eyes. The car swung as it was flung over the apex, and swung again at the end of its fall. A woman in a car behind him let out a gleeful yell, urging the wheel to turn faster. Alexander screwed his eyes so tightly shut that he could no longer sense the fairground lights. He heard his mother’s voice say his father’s name. ‘Make it stop. Please make it stop,’ he prayed, and then it did stop.