The Time of the Ghost (10 page)

“It's not moving,” said Ned.

“It was a mischievous ghost playing a trick, I expect,” said Fenella.

Shut up, Fenella
, said Sally.
Here we go again, then.
Imogen's finger made the glass harder to push, not easier. Sally put her whole force into it and heaved. The trouble was, she thought as she heaved, she could not tell Imogen all about it because she did not know herself. It seemed easiest to ask a question. A-M, spelled Sally, with great effort, M-
no
-J-
no
-N—
oh, I give up!
—D-E-A-D.

She was thoroughly startled by the effect this had. Cart, Will, and Ned jumped up beside Imogen. At least two chairs fell over, and somebody must have trodden on Oliver, too. He sprang up with a yelp. There was such a babble of worried talk that Sally went right up to the ceiling and hung there to avoid the noise.

Imogen was shrieking. “Oh, what's happened, what's happened?” and Ned was shouting, “I knew it was!” Howard was saying, “Look here, this is serious. I think your practical joke misfired somehow.” And Cart was bellowing, “Shut up, everyone! Keep calm! This is serious!”

Julian Addiman scraped his chair and coughed for attention. “Look, if this nonsense really worries you, all you've got to do to disprove it is to telephone Sally's friend.”

“Stupid,” said Fenella. “If Sally's dead, she can't talk on the phone.”

“I don't think this was Sally,” said Julian. “Not for one moment. Come on, Cart. You go and phone. I'll come with you.”

“It
was
a ghost, though!” Fenella called after Julian as he and Cart hurried to the door.

Julian Addiman held the door open for Cart and answered as he followed her through it, “Don't believe in them.”

What do you think I was, then?
Sally yelled after him.

Julian and Cart were gone a long time. For the first ten minutes everyone sat quiet and tense. For the second ten minutes everyone fidgeted. Howard built a pile of Scrabble letters, and Imogen made a swift, bold drawing of him doing it. It was quite like him, Sally thought, watching over Imogen's shoulder. Then Imogen threw down her pencil.

“Whatever are they doing?”

“Perhaps they ran into Himself,” Ned suggested uneasily.

Fenella turned in her chair to give him her most scathing stare. “They're kissing,” she said, with deep contempt.

This caused another silence, an embarrassed one. During it Sally wondered if Fenella was right. She had a strong feeling that Julian Addiman might kiss people when it was dark, as it was by now. She could not understand why this should make her feel so relieved. She had just decided to set off and find out the truth when Howard said, “This Plan of yours—does Sally just disappear indefinitely, or what?”

“Until a parent notices,” said Imogen.

“But,” said Howard, “wouldn't it have made more sense to have sent your parents some kind of letter?”

“We tried that,” said Imogen, “but none of us could think of the right thing to write. So we decided just to wait until they noticed.”

“It seems a bit strange to me,” said Howard.

“We
are
strange,” said Fenella.

At that point Cart came back. She was alone. She crashed through the door into the kitchen like an advancing tank, and her face was radiant with relief. “It's all right!” she said. “Sally
is
at Mangan Farm. They'd gone up to bed—Sally and Audrey—but Mrs. Chambers said she could hear them talking. So, phew! I was worried for a moment, but it really is all right. That couldn't have been Sally.”

There was a certain amount of laughter and some exclaiming from the others, but it was short and troubled and rather sheepish. Howard and Jenkins said they would be going now. While Fenella was seeing them through the green door, Imogen swept the Scrabble letters back into their sponge bag. “Good,” she said. “It must have been an evil spirit then. Where's Julian?”

“He didn't bother to come back. It's almost time for the bell,” Cart said, dismissing Julian without a trace of self-consciousness and even with some impatience.

Sally found herself looking at Cart in dismay. Cart was no longer keen on Julian Addiman; nothing could be plainer. Whatever had happened over the telephone, it had been final. Some of Cart's obvious relief was due to this. What Sally could not understand was why Cart's relief should make her heart sink so. She felt doomed, as if there was something she must go through with now. And that was as inexplicable as the fact that Cart so clearly believed that Sally was at Mangan Farm with Audrey Chambers. There must be some mistake, surely! Yet Cart was just not capable of lying and looking relieved at once. Sally did not know what to think.

A bell began to ring beyond the green door, meaning it was bedtime in School. Howard and Jenkins had only just left in time. “Bedtime,” said Cart. “I'm tired out.”

From sheer habit Sally went upstairs with the other three. She felt tired and depressed after her efforts at pushing the glass—efforts which had come to nothing, too, except to give Imogen the idea she was an evil spirit. Sally's disembodied mind hurt that Imogen should think that.
I'm Sally
, she told herself.
I know I am. When Mother comes in after School bedtime to tuck us up, I shall make her notice me and get her to realize I'm not an evil spirit. But I wish I understood how I can be in two places at once!

While she waited for Phyllis, she hung around watching her sisters undressing. None of them troubled to wash, not even Imogen, who took more care over undressing than the other two. Fenella was ready first. She put on a short grayish nylon nightgown, out of which her stomach bulged crudely, and went wandering round the room, surveying the pictures on the walls.

“Can mice knock over wastepaper baskets?” she asked, when she came to the Rude Rug.

“Probably not,” said Cart.

To Sally's disgust, nobody bothered to pick the basket up or made the slightest attempt to gather up the fallen papers. Cart stood in the middle of the torn letters with only a pair of pants on, looking down at her large, wobbly body rather critically.

“Do you think Phyllis would let me wear a bra?” she asked Imogen.

“No. Himself would say it was too expensive,” said Fenella, and climbed on the bureau.

Imogen was carefully arraying herself in a wilted pair of pale green pajamas. Sally knew those pajamas. They had once belonged to Phyllis. Imogen had rescued them from the dustbin. Like the yellow trouser suit, they were far too big for Imogen. They were decorated with grimy green lace, most of which was torn, and hung off Imogen's wrists and ankles in loops. Imogen, however, carefully slid a mirror out from behind one of the beds and looked at herself in it with some complacency. Her tear-swollen face looked happier at what she saw. “You don't need a bra,” she said to Cart, “if you intend to be a properly liberated woman.”

“I don't think I
am
that liberated,” said Cart, still surveying herself.

“No, Imogen,” said Fenella. “Cart means, will it please boys?”

Fenella's voice came from above somewhere. Sally looked and found that Fenella had climbed onto one of the three wavy beams that ran across in the roof. As she spoke, Fenella set off to walk along the beam, spreading her bony arms wide and swaying like a banking airplane.
Stop it!
Sally shrieked, quite horrified.
You'll break your neck!

Fenella, of course, did not hear. She continued to shuffle and sway along the length of wavy black timber. Neither of her sisters seemed alarmed. Cart said coldly, “Shut up, Fenella,” and put her head inside a great baglike nightdress. Imogen lay down on the unmade bed nearest her. She put her arms behind her head and stared up at Fenella without seeming very interested. Sally had a strong feeling that Fenella had walked along that beam many times before. But she was still terrified. Suppose Fenella fell! She was so frightened that she found she had zoomed up beside Fenella and was flittering round her, before she was aware.

Sally's presence seemed to disconcert Fenella. Her thin arms whirled. She leaned out sideways. Next second she was hanging upside down, with her knees hooked over the beam. Her face looked exasperated.

“You look like a monkey,” remarked Imogen.

“The evil spirit knocked me off,” Fenella said crossly, upside down. “Throw me up a skipping rope. I want to play Tarzan.”

“Get one for yourself,” said Cart. She was climbing into bed, and, to Sally's astonishment, it was the one bed which was neatly made. So that meant that one of the two remaining unmade beds must be Sally's.

In her disgust, Sally descended to the Rude Rug again.
I don't think much of your Plan!
she said.
If you don't make my bed, how on earth is Phyllis to know it hasn't been slept in when she comes?

She need not have spoken. Imogen and Cart were both laughing at Fenella's attempts to climb back on the beam again. Fenella was laughing, too. In fact, as Sally saw with exasperation, they had all three suddenly become very silly. This happened quite often. Usually they got silly after something upsetting had happened. In this case, it must have been the séance. Now it was as if a gale of idiocy swept among them, whirling Imogen's grief away, forcing high, neighing giggles from Fenella's upside-down mouth, and carrying Cart into such gusts of hilarity that not one of her fenced and careful thoughts remained. It was maddening. The room rang with screams and squeals of silly laughter.

Sally hovered up and down on the Rude Rug, shouting,
What about ME? If Phyllis comes to tuck us up and finds you like this, she's never going to NOTICE your beastly Plan!

“No, no!” Cart shrieked, lying heaving and red-faced on her neat bed. “No—a pantomime!” Sally had no idea what she was talking about.

“With all the fairies flying upside down!” giggled Fenella.

“Let's try!” howled Imogen. “Bags I try! I've always wanted to know how it feels!”

“All right! Let's try it!” screamed Cart, bouncing from her bed.

At the same moment Fenella, screaming
“Whoopee!”
whirled out from her beam and landed with a jangle on the bed Cart had just left. It was a miracle that she hit the bed and did not collide with Cart on the way. But, Sally recalled shakenly, Fenella always did jump to Cart's bed. Sometimes she hit Cart, sometimes not, but she never hurt herself, and she always looked as if she was going to miss the bed entirely. And Sally always protested.

Fenella! You could kill yourself!
she was saying, when Cart arrived on the Rude Rug, too, and shoved her aside. Sally found herself squashed against the paintings on the wall, watching the ballooning Cart heave at the second drawer down in the bureau.
Hey!
Sally complained.
That's my drawer!

“It's all right,” Cart said over her shoulder to Fenella. “I know she had at least two.”

“That should be long enough,” Fenella agreed.

Imogen was still lying staring up at the beams. Her face had become suffused with silly dreaminess. “I think it will be the most exquisitely beautiful experience,” she said.

Irritably Sally wondered what was going on. She suspected it was something idiotic and that Phyllis would arrive in the middle of it and be angry—too angry to notice Sally was missing. She watched anxiously as the loaded drawer was heaved out.

“Feathers!” said Cart, and began laughing again.

“Off the black hen,” said Fenella. “She keeps picking them up.”

“Oh, Monigan, I suppose,” said Cart, and dug beneath the feathers. Her hand came up holding the old sock. She held it in the air, laughing helplessly. After a bit she managed to speak, in weak, squeaky jerks. “Look—guess what?—think whose?”

Her sisters rolled about, screaming with mirth. “Julian Addiman's!”

Sally watched, perplexed and embarrassed. She could not think why she should want to keep a sock belonging to Julian Addiman, and she was exceedingly hurt that her sisters should think it so funny. She was also a little outraged at the way Cart was going through her private drawer—but not as annoyed as she might have been. After all, if you lived close up against three sisters, this kind of thing was only to be expected. She had done it herself that afternoon. But she hoped Phyllis would come in and catch Cart at it.

However, nothing happened to stop Cart, who delved and dug and heaved at the numbers of things in the drawer and finally came up triumphantly with two neatly rolled skipping ropes. “Here we are! I knew she still had them!”

“Oh, good.” Imogen jumped up and stood on her bed, majestic in her withered loopy pajamas, and took command. “Tie them together. Tightly.” Cart did so. “Now you and Fenella pull on the knot,” Imogen ordered. “Hard. I don't want to plunge to my death.”

“You would fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” said Cart.

“I intend to,” Imogen assured her gravely, hitching the wide green trousers up with an air of greatness. “All my life,” she said, “I have dreamed of being a pantomime fairy. I've yearned to swoop across the stage in a spangled dress, and now I shall have an inkling of what it will be like. My dreams are about to come true. Now throw one end over the beam.”