The Time of the Ghost (16 page)

Cart was staring at her. “Never cared for him? Now she tells me! You ran away from home after him and actually forced Himself to pay for you at art school so that you could be near him—and believe me, no one has ever forced Himself to pay out so much money in his life! And now you say you never cared for Julian! Who's crazy? You or me?”

“Me.” She sobbed. She wanted to say many things, but all she managed was “M-monigan.”

“Oh.” Cart sat back, almost out of sight, in sudden sobriety. Her face, outlined against Sally's lilies, which someone seemed to have put in a vase, looked very clear and brooding and pale. “Now that's a funny thing,” she said. Then, after a moment of brooding: “Yes, I
will
tell you. Do you remember Will Howard?”

“The one with a face like an otter,” the patient said.

Cart laughed, a little blurt of merriment. “That's him! You were always so good at describing things! Well, you know he's in Canada now. I thought we'd lost touch with him entirely, but this morning, just before Mrs. Gill phoned me, I got a telegram from him. Like to see it?”

“Yes, please.” She was astonished. Will Howard! What was such a stay-at-home English kind of boy doing in Canada?

Cart stood up to fetch a folded grayish paper from the back pocket of her patched jeans. Holding it spread between both hands, she leaned over and displayed it before her sister's watery eyes. The smell of clean hair and health came off her as she leaned.

I don't smell like that, the patient thought. I have that funny smell people have when they're ill. For a moment, the typed lines of capital letters danced all over the grayer letters printed behind them. Only the word
ONTARIO
stood out. She blinked, and the letters steadied.

CHARLOTTE MELFORD

GIRTON COLLEGE

CAMBRIDGE

REMEMBER MONIGAN CLAIMS A LIFE JULY

SEVENTEENTH THIS YEAR AND WATCH OUT

OR TRY ANOTHER HEN STOP WORRIED STIFF

HOWARD IN THE HEDGE

“He called himself that because he thought we might have forgotten him, I think,” Cart said. “As if anyone could forget Howard! And when I read it first, I thought it was just Howard being silly. Then Mrs. Gill phoned, and my spine crawled. I thought, It
can't
be! It's a day early, Monigan's cheated!”

“Two days early,” said the patient. “It happened last night.”

“Yes, I know,” Cart said, sitting soberly down again. “But it's occurred to me that there have been two leap years since.”

A gray chill seemed to settle over the little glassed-in antiseptic room.

“But it's so silly!” Cart burst out. “Monigan was just a stupid game! And I
curse
myself for inventing her—I curse my wretched imagination! I keep on telling myself that Monigan isn't real. Perhaps it's all a matter of belief. Perhaps you should try very hard not to believe in Monigan—because I can see you do, just as much as Howard does.” She lifted the telegram up, to stand for Howard. “Stupid boy!” she said. “Stupid, humble boy! Fancy thinking we might have forgotten him!”

The water in the patient's eyes welled and rolled away down the sides of her stitched and plastered face. “But I have,” she confessed. “I mean, I haven't forgotten
him
, but I haven't the faintest memory of him going to Canada!” She could see Cart turning to stare at her. “It's seven years since—since I last knew,” she explained. “I've been having the weirdest experience. I've been a ghost, and I went home, and you were all there—I saw everyone. Howard was one of the first people I saw. But he was a schoolboy.”

“Don't you really remember?” Cart said wonderingly. “It was just after the row over the hen, after we'd all been sent to Granny's. Will Howard suddenly turned up at Granny's and mooned about, almost crying, because his parents had decided to take him and live in Canada, and he didn't want to go. We said we'd hide him. But,” Cart concluded, remembering gloomily, “Granny phoned his parents, and they came and fetched him away.”

There was a pause. Then Cart turned to look at her sister again.

“Ghost, did you say? There
was
a ghost—or we all thought there was—just before the hen trouble. I think you'd better tell me.”

She told it, hurrying, sobbing a little, and hurrying on. She was suddenly obsessed with the feeling that there was not much time. She told it all, more or less, right up to the exorcism and the farmhouse and Sally's midnight dedication to Monigan. But what she did not say, and this was the fact pressing behind all the rest which she could not bring herself to tell even Cart, was that she did not know which sister she was. Not Cart. Not Sally, she thought as she spoke. So I'm either Imogen or Fenella. But I can't bear Cart to know I don't know.

Cart listened, bent forward, with two clear creases on her brow—the same clear creases her sister remembered as belonging to Imogen when Imogen was thinking. “So that explains the hen,” Cart said at length when the story was finished. “Funny that none of us knew then. But that's wrong somehow, you know. There's more to it than that. I
know
there is. I wish I could remember properly. For instance, I knew exactly what Will Howard was talking about in his telegram. I knew it was seven years and that Monigan had demanded a life—but I don't know how I knew. What I do know is that we sort of understood then and took some kind of action.”

“Yes, you tried to exorcise me,” the patient reminded her.

But Cart shook her hanging fair hair vigorously. “No. I don't mean that. That didn't work. I remember one of us saying—I forget which of us—that it was no good trying to be religious about it because we were all so very irreligious. And I have a feeling that the things we tried after that were all highly irreligious. I
know
they were, in fact, because that was all part of the hen row—but—” Cart stopped and sat looking at her sister with strong anxiety.

“What?” she asked.

“You can't alter the past,” Cart said. “The only thing you can alter is the future. People write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can't be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently, and that's no good to us. I'd forgotten the whole thing, until you started talking about it. I think I didn't want to remember it because it was so disturbing. I'd forgotten how keen we all were on Julian Addiman, for a start. We were all in a silly sexy flutter about him because he was different from Will and Ned and the other boys and didn't think he had two heads like—who was it thought he had two heads?”

“Nutty Filbert,” the patient supplied.

“Nutty Filbert,” said Cart. “And he didn't do silly walks or pretend to be spastic like they did. In fact, I think that meant Julian Addiman was probably rather insane even then. And,” Cart said, looking rather astonished, “the end of that sentence should be ‘though we weren't to know it.' But it isn't, is it? We all knew there was something wrong with him, and we knew it was dangerous, and that was why we were fascinated. Were we jealous of one another at all?”

“Yes—” said the patient. “No. Not about Julian Addiman.”

“That's the odd thing!” said Cart. “We were in a way, but actually we were so—such a unity that when one of us got him, it almost didn't matter which of us it was.”

“You make us sound like vultures—or female spiders,” her sister protested.

“Well, we were in a way,” Cart said. “I thought as I was talking that if none of us really cared two hoots about him, even you—well, it makes me wonder if Monigan wasn't really a manifestation of our common thirst for excitement, or our suicidal urges, or something.”

“Do stop being so clever!” the patient begged her. “What are you trying to say?”

“I don't know,” said Cart, slumping rather. She put her face in her hands. “The ghost was definitely there the next day,” she said. “I remember that much clearly. It looks as if … you haven't finished yet.” Her face came out of her hands. She was full of anxiety again. “Count two days for leap years, and you've got till midnight tonight. Monigan
is
playing fair after all. Or someone is. It almost looks as if you're allowed to go back and see what you can do about it. But you can't!” Cart suddenly stood up. “Why am I sitting here babbling this bloody nonsense? Even if Monigan exists, no one can alter what's already happened. I know this—I knew it this morning. But even so, I was so damned superstitious that I telephoned Granny when I got Will's telegram, to see if Oliver was all right.”

“Oliver!” her sister exclaimed. “Is Oliver still alive?”

“Oh, yes,” said Cart. “Didn't I—? I keep forgetting you can't remember. He's oldish, of course, and he smells, and he eats like a pig, but luckily Granny adores him, so he lives with her while I'm in Cambridge. I couldn't leave him at home. No one would remember to feed him.” Suddenly, without warning or explanation, Cart's face folded together, and she began to cry.

“What's the matter?” the patient said. Crying seemed infectious. She started to sob again herself.

“I'm sorry.” Cart wept. She pulled out what she thought was a tissue from her pocket, found in time that it was the telegram, and wiped her shirtsleeve over her face instead. “Now I've made you cry, too. It's just—I dote on Oliver, but seeing you there like that makes me see how much more I love you. You must—when you get back as a ghost, try and
make
us understand. We may have all been nutcases, but none of us were fools. And—”

A nurse was suddenly there, a blurred shape beyond the great white leg. She said to Cart, “Do you mind waiting outside for ten minutes? Dr. Smythe wants to examine Miss Melford.”

“Of course,” said Cart. She bent quickly over the patient and once more brought the smell of health with her. “I've got the key to your flat, so I shall stay in London, anyway, until you're better. May I use your bed? I know you'll hate the thought of me tidying your things, but I promise not to touch anything, honestly.”

“That's all right,” said the patient. She was aware that the doctor was in the room and that Cart was going away. “Just a moment,” she called out. Cart paused. “
Are
you going to be a teacher?” Funny thing to ask, but it seemed important.

Cart hesitated, looking at the dim people crowding into the room. She grinned. She knew why it was important. “Just because Phyllis always said I was going to be? Come off it. It was her way of looking after us—telling us all we were bound for those careers made her feel we were taken care of. I haven't decided what to do yet. It's not that easy to get a job.”

Then she had slipped away. Her place was taken by the dim people and by a great white leg with a nodding face of fat purplish toes.

There was peace to think again. Sally—no, she was not Sally, she must be Imogen or Fenella—hung among the buzzing flies in the empty kitchen room, trying to consider some of the things she now knew. But as before, her intelligence as a ghost seemed as limited as a narrow torch beam. What was outside it hardly seemed to exist. The flies seemed to exist more, and the fading breakfast smells from beyond the green door.

None of the sisters seemed to be awake yet. There was silence apart from the flies and a distant hum from School. Outside the window the apple trees gusted and the hens pecked in one of those windswept, hot gray days when every color looks bleak and ordinary. It was ominous, as if the day was expecting something. From time to time the windows were covered with blisters of the fine rain.

The ghost hung, trying to recapture some of the seven years between now and the hospital. It was a time of fruitless mistakes. It had been dominated on one hand by Himself, always angry but seldom there, and on the other hand by Julian Addiman, always laughing, always demanding more and more. Between them she had scarcely been a person. At first she had tried to please them both, until it was obvious she could never please Himself; he was just not interested enough. After that she had devoted herself wholly to pleasing the demanding Julian Addiman. She had gone to art school, Cart had said. That seemed to be true. She had a fuzzy memory that Julian Addiman had decided on that. He said it made a good excuse to live near him in London. She could not live with him. He lived with his parents.

But art school. What was that like? By turning the narrow beam of her attention on that as hard as she could, she recalled a time of being lost and shamed. There were a host of brilliant painters and wildly good young artists, who could all talk intelligently about what they were doing. She could not talk like that. And as an artist she knew she was stuck at what was good for a child, but rather feeble in a grown student. She was only there because of Julian Addiman.

She wondered if she had become as dismal and discontented as the grown-up Sally. She rather feared she had. She had blamed Julian Addiman for it. But she had known it was her fault for letting Julian Addiman take her over like this. And she had decided to break with him. She knew she had to if she was ever to do anything of her own accord. But she was afraid to do it. Julian Addiman had outbursts of frightening violence if she did anything he did not want. That was how he came to fling her out of his car.