The Time of the Ghost (2 page)

Himself rounded on the class, glowering. “May I remind you, Howard, that
mens
means the mind and
mensa
means a table? But I expect in your case the two things are the same. No, no. Don't scratch your head, boy. You'll get splinters.”

The boy Howard seemed untroubled by the glower and the roar of Himself. “Not to worry, sir,” he said comfortingly. “I don't think splinters are catching.”

“Fifteen all,” murmured someone at the back of the room. This caused a good deal of not quite hidden laughter.

She found she knew Howard, too. He had a round, bright-eyed face like an otter's. In fact, most of the boys at the desks were people she had seen before. She knew names: Shepperson, Greer II, Jenkins, Matchworth-Keyes, Filbert, Wrenn, and Stinker-Tinker, to name just the front row. But she was beginning to think this was not her class after all. There should have been girls. And this was probably a Latin lesson. She had never learned Latin.

I think I'd better go
, she said apologetically to Himself.

“A test tomorrow on the third declension,” said Himself. “Make a note in your rough books.”

He had not heard her. To judge from the way everyone was behaving, no one could see her or hear her. She might just as well not have been there. Maybe that was not such a bad thing. Very much ashamed of her embarrassing mistake, she leaned into the door and was in the corridor again, hearing Himself still, dimly, from behind the door.

Puzzling about how she knew everyone in that strange class so well, she wandered on. And because she was not trying to remember where to go, she found herself going very certainly in a definite direction—downstairs, past a room with rows of tables, past a shiny door which gusted out smells of cooked cabbage and washing-up liquid, into a dark wooden hall with a green-covered door at the end of it. The green was the felty kind of cloth you find on billiard tables. She knew that door well. She suddenly wanted badly to be on the other side of it.

Before she got there, a lady came quickly through the shiny door, which bumped loudly and let out a gust of old gravy smell to join the smell of cooked cabbage. The lady hurried to a side table and picked up a pile of papers there, frowning. She was a majestic lady with a clear strong face. Her frown was a tired one. A bright blue eye between the frown and the straight nose stared at the papers. Fair hair was looped into a low, heavy bun on her head.

“Ugh!” she said at the papers. She looked like an avenging angel who had already had a long fight with the devil. All the same, the papers should have withered and turned black. The bodiless person in the corridor felt yearning admiration for this angel lady. She knew they called her Phyllis.

Under the frown Phyllis said wearily, “Your father's told you, I've told you. How many times have you been told to stay behind the green door, Sally?”

Warmth and comfort and pleasure swelled, as huge and swift as the balloon of panic had swelled earlier. Mother had seen her. Mother knew her. Mother knew who she was. She was Sally. Of course she was Sally. Everything was all right, even though she had gone and done an awful thing and interrupted Father while he was teaching. It was true she should have been on the other side of the green door. Sally—yes, she was sure she was Sally—stood guiltily by the green door wondering how to explain, as Phyllis turned her blue eyes and tired frown toward her.

The blue eyes narrowed her way, and widened, as if Phyllis had suddenly focused on a distant hill. The frown vanished and came back, deeper, making two little ditches at the top of Phyllis's straight nose.

“Funny,” said Phyllis. “I could have sworn—” Her creamy face became reddish in the darkness. The words turned to mere moving of the lips. Phyllis twitched her shoulders and turned away uncomfortably.

Sally—she must be Sally if Phyllis had said so—was astonished to find that other people besides herself could get embarrassed when they thought they were all alone.

That embarrassed her. It was even worse to realize that Phyllis could not see her after all. Sally—she knew she was Sally now—turned and plunged desperately through the green door. She went so fiercely that the door actually lifted inward an inch or so and bumped back into place. Sally thought that Phyllis turned and stared at it as she went.

Beyond the door was the right place. First, a stoneflagged passage, which was chilly now and freezing in winter, where four coat hooks held a mound of many coats. The open door at the end led to the room called the kitchen, also stone-flagged but warmed by the sun that rippled in through the apple trees outside. It was in its usual mess, Sally saw wearily. Books, newspapers, and bread and jam were cast in heaps on the table. Someone had spilled milk on the floor. Sally longed to lift the front page of one of the newspapers out of the butter, but she was not sure she would be able to. She wondered whose turn it had been to do the washing-up. She could see a mountain of white school china sticking up out of the sink.

Well, this time I can't do it
, she was saying when she saw what she took for a hideous dwarf on the draining board.

The dwarf had a tangle of dark hair and was wearing what seemed to be a bright green sack. The sack stuck out so far in front that Sally thought the dwarf was hugely fat at first, until she saw its long, skinny arms propped on the edge of the sink. The dwarf was leaning forward, propped on its arms, so that a sharp white nose smeared with freckles stuck out from among the tangled hair, and so did two large front teeth. From between those teeth came a jet of water, squirting onto the white crockery in the sink. The dwarf appeared to have tied two knots in the front of its tangled hair to make way for the jet of water.

The dwarf squirted solemnly until the mouthful of water was used up. Then it relieved Sally's funny vague mind considerably by standing up on the draining board. Two skinny legs with immense knobs for knees unfolded from under the green sack, making the dwarf about the right height for a small ten-year-old. Some of the bulge in front of the sack had been those knees, but quite a large bulge still remained. Fenella—she knew its name was Fenella now—took another mouthful of water from a mug in her hand and tried the effect of squirting the crockery from higher up. The jet of water hit a cup and sprayed off onto the floor.

That's no way to do the washing-up, Fenella!
Sally cried out.
And what have you tied your hair in two knots for?

There was no sound, no sound at all, except the gentle hissing of Fenella's spray on the cup and the floor and the mild buzzing of flies round the table.
No one can hear me!
Sally thought.
What shall I do?

But Fenella said, “Look at this, Sally.” The white face, the freckles, and two large shrewd eyes under the knots of hair turned Sally's way. “Oh, I forgot,” said Fenella. “She's not here.” At that Fenella raised her sharp nose and her voice, too, and bellowed, “Charlotte—Cart! Cart, come and see this!” Fenella had the loudest possible voice. The window rattled, and the flies stopped buzzing.

“Shut up,” said someone in the next room, obviously answering without listening.

“But I've invented something really horrible!” Fenella boomed.

“Oh, all right.”

There were sounds of movement in the next room—sounds like a heavy creature with six legs. The creature came in about level with Sally's head. It looked like two people under an old gray hearthrug.

It's only Oliver
, Sally told herself quickly. She found she had backed almost into the passage again. Seeing Oliver suddenly often had that effect on people. Oliver was probably an Irish wolfhound, but he was larger than a donkey and blurred and misshapen all over. He looked like a bad drawing of a dog. And he was almost impossibly huge.
Oliver wouldn't hurt a fly
, Sally told herself firmly.

Nevertheless, it was alarming the way Oliver shambled straight toward the passage door and Sally. His huge, heavy-breathing head—more like a bear's head or a wild boar's—came level with Sally's nonface and sniffed loudly. His shaggy clout of tail swung, once, twice. A distant whining came from somewhere in his huge throat. Then, even more distant, a rumbling grew inside his shaggy chest. He stepped backward, still rumbling, and sideways, and his tail dropped and curled between his legs. He could not seem to take his great, blurred eyes off the place where Sally was. The whine kept breaking out on the rumble and then giving way to a growl again.

“Whatever's the matter with Oliver?” Charlotte said from the door of the living room.

Charlotte was just as much of a shock to Sally as Oliver had been. She was built on the same massive scale. Like Oliver, she was huge and blurred. Blurred fair hair stuck out round her head. A blurred face, like a poor photograph of angel Phyllis floated in the hair. She was the size of a tall, fat woman and cased in a dress that had clearly been designed for a little girl. There was about her, blurred and vast, the feeling of powerful personality, which, like her lumping body, had somehow got itself cased in the mind of a little girl. She was carrying a book folded round one finger. “Oliver's scared stiff!” she said.

“I know,” said Fenella. Oliver was trembling now, rattling the things on the table.

Nobody bothered with Oliver after that, because the door behind Sally crashed open. Sally was barged aside like a kite in a stiff wind, and Imogen stormed in.

“Mr. Selwyn turned me out of the music rooms
again
!” Imogen yelled. “It's impossible! How am I going to perfect my art? How shall I ever be famous like this?”

“You could win a screaming competition,” Fenella suggested. “Except that I'd beat you.”

“You little—” Imogen turned on Fenella, at a loss for words. “You
Thing
! And why are you wearing that green sack? It looks terrible!”

“I made her that green sack,” Charlotte said, advancing on Imogen and looming a little. And so she had, Sally remembered. Fenella's clothes had been handed down three people before they reached Fenella, and they had all fallen to pieces. It was a pity, Sally thought, looking at the sack, that Cart was so very bad at sewing. It was not even a straight green sack. It puckered one side and drooped the other. The neck sort of looped over Fenella's skinny chest.

Imogen realized her mistake and tried to apologize. “It was only an insult,” she explained, “chosen at random to express my feelings. I was thinking about my musical career.”

Which was typical Imogen, Sally thought, in the dim, remembering way she had been noticing everything so far. Imogen had set her heart on being a concert pianist. Very little else mattered to her. Sally looked at Imogen. Imogen, like Charlotte, was tall and fair, but unlike Cart, Imogen was an unblurred version of Phyllis and very pretty indeed. This was unfair on Cart and Fenella, and unfair on Sally, too, because Imogen was bigger and cleverer than Sally, and over a year younger.

What a hateful family I've got!
Sally thought suddenly.
Why did I come back here?

Oliver meanwhile, seeing that nobody noticed him, passed his great nose gently over the table. The butter was coaxed from under the newspaper, deftly magnetized, and slid away inside Oliver. This seemed to help Oliver get over the phenomenon of Sally a little. He advanced toward her, trembling a little, whining slightly, and gingerly swishing his tail.

“What
is
the matter with that dog?” said Imogen.

“We don't know,” said Fenella.

All three of Sally's sisters stared at her, and not one of them saw her.

Their name was Melford, Sally suddenly remembered.

They were Charlotte, Selina, Imogen, and Fenella Melford. But she still did not know what she was doing here in this state.

Perhaps I came back here to get revenged
, she thought.

It was rather a horrible thought, and one, Sally hoped, that would not have come to her in the ordinary way. But no one could deny that this was not the ordinary way. They were all three looking at her, and she hated them all: big, formless Cart in that babyish blue dress, and self-centered Imogen. It was a mark of Imogen's character, it seemed to Sally, that Imogen had somehow got hold of a bright yellow trouser suit which would have fitted Cart better. On Imogen, it was so large that the top half hung in downward folds like a curtain, and the bottom half was in crosswise folds like two yellow concertinas. Imogen had great trouble in not treading on the ends of the trousers all the time. And she had evidently felt the suit needed brightening up. She was wearing mauve plastic beads and orange lipstick. As for Fenella, Sally thought angrily, she looked just like the little Thing Imogen had called her. Those knob knees were like joints in the legs of insects, and for antennae she had those two knots of her hair.

I hate them so much I've come back to haunt them
, Sally decided.

At that the whirl of misty notions—which was all Sally's nonexistent head seemed able to hold—took a sharp turn in the opposite direction and almost stopped.

This
is
a dream after all
, she told herself tremulously.

But was it? Where had Sally come back from after all? She had no idea, except that there had been some kind of accident.