The Time of the Ghost (15 page)

A thought struck her: If Sally came to see me, then the others will come, too. I shall know that the one who
doesn't
come must be me. That seemed clever until it occurred to her that she could ask a nurse who she was. But she found she was ashamed to ask. It seemed so silly not to know, even though all the nurses must know she had lost her memory.

It was clear she must have lost her memory. Seven years had passed—or at least enough time for her sister Sally to grow into a drab, depressed lady—out of which she knew one fact: Julian Addiman had done his best to kill her. All the rest was a blank, except for what she knew from being a ghost. And the funny part was that apart from the last half hour of that time, Julian Addiman had not seemed important at all. She had not even remembered him. That suggested she must be Imogen or Fenella, for Cart had clearly fancied him, at least for a time. But the fact was she did not feel like any of them. Perhaps she was a case of mistaken identity?

No, that could not be true. Sister Sally was familiar, and her discontent was the most familiar thing of all. The home and the parents she had visited as a ghost had definitely been hers. And a funny home it was, she found herself realizing: everyone so strange and her parents so busy and no cooker in the kitchen. Could it have been a mad, feverish dream? No. She knew it had been real and true. That school had really existed—perhaps did exist still. The frightening thing was that the Monigan part had also been real. Which meant that somehow, after seven years were up, she had been released as a ghost to visit the cause of her death. No. Because she was still alive. It was horribly confusing.

A beautiful thought struck her: Monigan meant to kill her, but thanks to modern medicine, she didn't manage it.

Soothed by this idea, she went to sleep. But it worked in her head, distrustfully. The result was that when she woke up and found someone else by her bed, the first thing she said was, “What date is it?”

“Sixteenth of July,” the person sitting there replied promptly. “You've been unconscious twenty hours, as near as they can work it out. You was brought in here half past eight last night, and they thought you was a goner, I can tell you! They were half the night doing jigsaws on you. Did you know you had a hundred and ninety-two stitches in you? Fact. I asked in the office,” the visitor said gleefully. And she added, with thoughtful relish, “They won't half hurt coming out, too!”

The patient turned her eyes and gazed at … not a perfect stranger. She knew she had seen this new lady somewhere before, but where she could not imagine. She saw a smart, not-quite-elderly lady, who had staved off advancing years by dying her hair bright ginger and using quantities of orange lipstick. She was wearing an exotic coat made of alternating areas of bald mauve plastic and curly lavender fur. The patient knew she had never seen
that
before. It was truly memorable. But the fat green and orange shopping bag dumped on the lady's knee was not entirely strange. Nor were the bright, gleeful eyes and the dry, perky features of the face beneath the ginger curls.

“Here,” said the lady, digging busily in the green and orange bag. “I brought you some grapes. Got them on the station when I got in. Awful price they were, but then everything is these days.” Her hand, plump and wrinkled, came into sight, dangling a mighty bunch of big green grapes. “Like them?” she said. “Green is the best kind for eating, I always say. I thought of getting you flowers, but I didn't dare. I didn't see you, with your artistic tastes, liking anything I could buy.”

“Thank you,” said the patient feebly. She did not like to say she could not move enough to eat the grapes.

However, her visitor had thought of that. “Don't look as if you could move much, the mess you're in,” she said. “Like me to pop one in your mouth?” She seemed to gather that the patient did not welcome this idea. Unconcerned, she laid the grapes down out of sight somewhere and rummaged in her bag again while she talked. “They had a proper job tracing you, I can tell you, after they brought you in. You don't have to tell me what happened to you. It's common knowledge. That no-good boyfriend of yours threw you out of his car. The trouble was, he went off with your handbag. I hope they've got him by now. There was plenty of witnesses—more fool him for choosing a main road! Someone got to you almost at once, thank the good Lord! But all the hospital had to go on, to find out who you was, was one of those school name tapes on your old shirt, and all that said was
MELFORD.
I ask you! They was all night and half this morning trying to trace you. They got you through the art school in the end. You'd have seen me last night if—well, you weren't in a fit state to see then, but you know what I mean.”

The rummaging had at last produced a dingy old tobacco tin and some cigarette papers. The visitor proceeded to roll herself a cigarette, and talk continued to gush out of her. The patient stared. Who
was
this lady? Her landlady? That seemed the most likely idea.

“Just Melford,” said the visitor, laying tobacco along a fragile strip of paper. “That's your mum all over, making one set of tapes do for the four of you. If she could have brought herself to get you a set each, then they'd have had that much more to go on. Wouldn't they?” she asked, rolling the paper round the tobacco. “All economy is false economy,” she declared, with her orange lips parted, ready to lick the paper. She licked it, stuck it down, and continued. “As I've told your mum, over and over again, skimping only leads to trouble. And don't say I'm not proved right by this!” she concluded. She stuck the withered little cigarette triumphantly in her mouth and lit it with a huge mock-agate lighter.

That proved to be the clue. Many and many a time, on raids to the school kitchen, had the patient seen just such a withered, bent cigarette, usually bearing a long, trembling length of ash, sticking straight out of her visitor's face as it bent over a mixing bowl. Now she knew, she could see that there had actually been an expectant groove in the orange upper lip, waiting to be filled by that cigarette.

“Mrs. Gill!” she exclaimed.

Mrs. Gill crouched guiltily under a wave of blue smoke. “What? Am I going to be in trouble for smoking on the wards?”

“Oh, no! No,” said the patient. “It's just—” She found she could not bear to let Mrs. Gill know how blank her memory was. “I've only just placed you. I don't think I've ever seen you dressed up before.”

Mrs. Gill laughed, a strong, whirring chuckle. That was well known, too. Fenella said it sounded like someone trying to start a car. “You'll bet you haven't, dear! I don't wear my good things to work. But I could see you couldn't place me. That's because you're in shock. In shock, they told me when I asked at the office. I found out all about you. I thought your mum and dad ought to know. I've got it all written down here. Like me to read it out to you?”

“No, thanks,” the patient said hurriedly. One of Mrs. Gill's most outstanding characteristics was a love of gory details.

“Yes, you'd be better off not knowing,” Mrs. Gill said. Her manner suggested that the very least thing wrong was a broken neck. “They'll tell you when you're off the danger list, I expect. Anyway, the hospital phoned through to the School around break, but it's end of term, you know. Your father's up to the eyes in exams, and your mum's packing all the boys' trunks—work, work, work. You know how they are. So I phoned your sisters and then said I'd pop up to town and see you for her. Mind you,” said Mrs. Gill. She spoke with some viciousness. The patient instantly had dim memories of a thousand rows between Mrs. Gill and Phyllis. “Mind
you
, I don't grudge the fare to London one bit, but I'm quite as able to pack a boy's trunk as what she is! Frankly, I nearly said to her, ‘Mrs. Melford, here's one of your daughters lying at death's door, and all you can think of is packing socks and shirts!' But I held my tongue. I'm not one to pick a quarrel.”

“Of course not,” said the patient. She was feeling gray again. Mrs. Gill had brought back to her the reality of her time as a ghost. “Mrs. Gill, do you remember a ghost? About seven years ago?”

Mrs. Gill made her starting-motor chuckle. “You mean that time I saw right through one of you and threw custard over the kitchen? You were a wicked lot! Been up to black magic, hadn't you? Got half the boys in on it, too! Oh, yes. I remember the row there was, and all four of you packed off to your granny's for corrupting the lads. But as I said to Lily at the time, those boys didn't need corrupting. Boys never do. And it was only a silly bit of child's play, when all's said and done. I never saw the harm in that.”

“Do you think there was really no harm in it?” she asked eagerly.

Mrs. Gill tipped her ginger curls to one side and considered. “I wouldn't say you was little innocents,” she said. “Wicked is wicked and harm is harm, at any age. But children get up to things. Kids left to themselves get up to everything. But your father should have laughed it off, to my mind. You don't want to take the idea with you that you're wicked into when you're grown up. That's where the harm is. You don't grow up proper if you think you're wicked. But that's all over and done with now, and I'm worried about your father. He's not well. He ought to retire, really, but you get some that can't do that. My cousin's husband dropped dead the night after he retired. She told me, she said work was his life and—Oh, hallo, Charlotte, dear! Fancy you getting here so quick!”

Cart's voice, as well known as any, answered from somewhere out of sight, “It wasn't very quick, I'm afraid. I was supposed to be going to France with my tutor, to look after her children, and I had to see her and explain I couldn't go.”

“Ah, she probably has sisters she's close to, too,” Mrs. Gill said wisely. “She knew how you felt.”

“Yes. She has,” Cart said, rather brusquely. “Then I had to hitch up from Cambridge, and that took ages.” She came into sight and stood looking over the plaster, the bandages, and the bag of blood with evident horror. “This looks an utter mess! How is she?”

“In shock, dear.” Mrs. Gill leaped up from her chair with a clatter. She and Cart retired almost out of sight and began holding one of those muttered conversations which makes any patient feel they must be at death's door.

This patient did not mind. She knew she was at death's door. It was only July 16. Monigan would be able to claim her just after midnight. She would have to tell Cart. Chiefly she was occupied in staring at Cart—Cart, whom she remembered as a blue bolster with a blurred face. It brought back a scene, around seven years ago, probably just before their school broke up for the summer holidays, when she and Cart had been coming out of school. At the bus stop had been standing a line of girls, some from Boots across the road, two from the school office, and a group from the Poly down the street. She and Cart had wondered how all these grown-up girls came to be so incredibly slim and pretty. They had wondered what happened in five or seven years to work such a change. They looked at the other girls coming out of school. They looked at one another.

“I don't know,” Cart had said gloomily. “It must take a miracle.”

The miracle had happened to Cart. She was evidently a student. Her jeans were old and patched. Her check shirt was tied in a knot at her waist. Her fair hair simply hung. And she was one of the prettiest girls the patient had ever seen. It was not only that she was slim and fair and young—and she looked younger now than she had looked as a bolster—she had a clear, glowing, confident look. She looked as if she felt as lovely as she looked. It was awesome.

She watched Cart smile radiantly at Mrs. Gill. “Then I'll come and talk to you about it before you go. You'll want to come back and say good-bye, anyway, won't you? I tell you what—I came in through casualty. There were some awfully comfortable seats in the waiting room there. Why don't you wait there?”

“Just the job,” agreed Mrs. Gill. She leaned forward to stare brightly at the patient's face. “Ta-ta for now, dear. At least you're not dead yet, eh?” Uttering her starting-motor chuckle, she vanished.

“Oh, Cart,” the patient said weakly. “It was naughty of you to send her to casualty!”

Cart's clear features bunched into a much more familiar look of anger. “She's an old ghoul! Nothing delights her more than broken bones and buckets of gore. She was absolutely gloating over you!”

“I know.” Weak tears grayed the sight of Cart's angry face. “I know she was, but you're not being fair, all the same. She came because Mother couldn't, and she paid her own fare, and she bought me a beautiful bunch of grapes.”

“Yes. Typical of our parents!” Cart said, swinging herself angrily into the chair by the bed. “They can't be bothered, so they send Mrs. Gill instead. And Mrs. Gill goes, because then she can tell all her neighbors how they don't come near you even when you're at death's door. Oh—don't cry. I'm sorry. I
know
Mrs. Gill was being quite as kind as she was being horrible, but it doesn't make it any less true, and that's what makes me angry! Now tell me how you are and what happened—or don't you know? Is it true that rat Addiman slung you out of his car? Oh,
don't
cry! I suppose you're still as crazy about him as ever, even after he does this to you.”

“No.” She gulped. “Don't—don't think I ever cared two hoots for him.” Tears continued to fill her eyes. She knew she was crying because of seeing Cart—Cart so transformed and yet so well known—and because she had suddenly realized that Cart was—and always had been—someone you could tell things to. Who, after all, had always patiently listened to Imogen's grieving?