The Time of the Ghost (22 page)

Everyone made a movement to run away and then stopped. A smaller boy said, “I heard that.”

“What did it say?” asked Imogen, craning forward irritably.

“I think,” Cart said slowly—her mouth was jibbering a little—“I think it doesn't know who it is.”

Fenella said, “It looks like you, Cart.”

“Or like Sally,” said Jenkins. “Why is it wrapped in white like that?”

Imogen said, violently and shrilly, “I'm
intensely
scared! I think we've conjured up the devil!”

“No, the dead,” said someone. “That's its shroud it's wrapped in.”

No
, said the ghost.
You don't understand. I'm not dead yet, but I'm going to be if you don't help me.
And like her first speech, it came out broken and garbled to, “Understand dead help … yet will be.”

“I don't understand you,” said Fenella.

The great shaggy shape of Oliver hove into sight, with his face plastered with earth. He saw the ghost at once. He uttered a squeak of pleasure and set off toward the bowl at his fastest pace, wagging his tail madly. But three feet away he stopped, shivering and whining, staring piteously at the apparition hanging over the bowl. He plainly dared not go any nearer. To make up for that, he swung his great tail faster than ever.

Oliver's behavior seemed to make everyone feel better. “Oliver knows it,” said Howard. “I think it really is one of you four.”

“Well, it said it was,” said Cart. “Please—whoever you are—tell us what you want and why you're here.”

The ghost knew she should have started explaining at once. The tingling of her blood-given body was growing less already, particularly lower down. She tried looking down. She could see a tall, vague length of human body, mostly blurred white, with the green of the orchard grass showing through. The white puzzled her as much as it puzzled the others. Perhaps it was what they had put her in at the hospital. But the more alarming thing was that there was a gap between the blurred white and the shining blood in the bowl, where her feet should have been. She could not feel any tingling there at all. Frightened, she tried to summon all her strength and concentrate it in the part of her that seemed to be speaking.

Meanwhile, Imogen was saying ferociously to the four smaller boys, “Don't
you
know who it is? Can't
you
recognize her?”

They shook their heads. In spite of Oliver, they had lost their voices from sheer terror.

The ghost spoke. She gave them, as far as she was able, a perfectly clear explanation. She told them about Monigan, Julian Addiman, and the hospital. She told them how she had found herself seven years back in the past as a ghost. But while she spoke, she was listening to a strange, broken mutter and moaning pieces of words, and she knew it was what everyone else was hearing.

“Monigan… Monigan … seven years' claim … life help. Help. Help future now … only you … help blood Monigan … seven years help life … dying … seven … help….”

The moaning mutter of her voice seemed to go on and on, but she could feel it fading even from the first word. Within seconds she knew it was too faint for anyone to hear. Behind that, very distant, she could feel Monigan's amusement at how little she was saying and how she had wasted this opportunity. So she kept on desperately forcing out words. And the tingling of the life the blood had given her grew less and less and fainter every moment. She felt it traveling from her chest, up out of her arms, up through her neck, up into her head. Until it was gone.

It was gone. She was lying, grayly aware, in the hospital bed again.

Cart's voice said, “She's only allowed one visitor at once. I'll go. But I warn you…” The voice fell to a murmur. She lay, hearing it, wondering about that blood. Had it been a mistake? Cart had put it in Monigan's hut, and that troubled her. Was this perhaps how the dedication of Sally had got passed on to her?

There was somebody else beside her bed now. She was chiefly aware at first of the enormous bunch of red and white roses which this someone was busy arranging in a vase.

“Those must have cost a bomb!” she remarked, deeply impressed.

“They did,” said this new person. “Nice, aren't they? I like spending money. I got it out of Himself to stay in a hotel with, but I shall have to sleep on your floor instead now.”

“Cart seems to be doing that, too,” she said. She was beginning to focus on this new person. It seemed a total stranger, as bad as Mrs. Gill. This was a highly glamorous young woman, much better dressed than Cart. Her hair was beautifully cut, in a tumble of glossy brown curls, and her face was beautifully and carefully made up. Delicate scent breathed off her, and the hands arranging the roses had long, egg-shaped red nails. Yet the voice was definitely familiar, deep and refined and grown-up though it was.

The young woman turned from the roses, saying, “Cart says you're concussed and don't remember a thing, but that sounded quite alert to me. How are you?” And, with the words, the pretty lipsticked mouth spread in a smile full of affection, uncovering a pair of large front teeth with a wide gap between them.

“Good God!” she said weakly. “You're Fenella!” It made her wonder if more than seven years had passed by this time. This Fenella
could
not be only seventeen. “Why are you so glamorous?”

“These,” said Fenella, with dignity, “are my coming-to-London clothes. I worked in Boots over Easter to earn them. I thought you'd like them. Mrs. Gill's sister did my hair for me.”

“Oh,” said her sister. “Er—you've left school now, have you?”

Fenella sighed, and followed the sigh up with a scowl which was pure ten-year-old Fenella again. “No,” she growled. “I meant to. I told you. I wanted to leave like anything, but Himself wouldn't let me. I told him I was going to fail all my A levels on purpose if he made me stay on. I may still, I don't know. But I don't mind so much now I'm going to be an opera singer.”

“Opera singer!”

“Yes,” said Fenella. “Listen.” She faced the glass wall and opened her mouth. Out of it came a long, clear note. It was one of the most beautiful sounds her sister had ever heard. But it was also most powerfully loud. It made her throb, from her head to her hoist-up leg. Beyond the glass wall, bandaged heads craned and visitors turned round. And it brought to mind the way Fenella had always been able, without the least effort, to produce that deep, booming shout that was twice as loud as anyone else's.

“Ow!” she said. “Lovely, but please don't do it again. You'll get turned out.”

“I know,” said Fenella. “I only did it to show you I really have a voice. I know you kept worrying about me. But you needn't any longer—truly. I'm having proper singing lessons now. I got the money out of Himself.”

“Out of Himself—?”

“Yes,” said Fenella, with just a trace of smugness. “Last month. I'm almost as good at getting money out of him as you are. In fact, I may even be better than you. What I did was I went to him with the cost of the lessons all added up, and, next to that on the page, the cost of all the other things other fathers always have to pay for and he never does—you know, clothes and food and heating and pocket money and all that. Even for a year it came to a huge amount. I was quite scared to show him.” Fenella paused, looking a trace surprised. “I thought he'd be furious, being shown how mean he is. Wouldn't you? But the first thing he did was multiply it by four to find out how much money he'd saved over the four of us. And it was such a lot that he was ever so pleased. Then I threw in a bit of cajolery. That's one thing,” Fenella declared, “that you three never noticed. Himself loves to be cajoled. The boys know. They cajole him all the time. But none of you three realized—you just had rows with him all the time. But I imitated the boys and cajoled him, and I got him to pay for singing lessons in five minutes flat.”

“That was clever,” the patient said admiringly.

After that, as so often happens in hospital visits, they seemed to run out of things to say. Fenella sat down and stared at the bag of blood in an alarmed, observant way. Her sister lay and thought.

I am Imogen, she thought. This settles it. I don't feel like Imogen, and I don't particularly want to be a concert pianist, but I must be her. I wonder, she thought, with a trace of hope, if my concert career is ruined—Oh, no. I went to art school, didn't I? How odd. Wait a minute—

“Fenella. Who painted that picture of you that used to be propped up on the old piano?”

“The one with the blackberry bushes?” asked Fenella. “You, of course.” At that they both began to speak at once. Fenella, being in full health and with by far the stronger voice, naturally won. “By the way, if you see Mrs. Gill before I do, will you let her know that I came on the later train because I couldn't get the money from Himself in time.”

“Why—?”

“I got it straight after the hospital phoned, of course,” said Fenella. “But I couldn't bear to come with Mrs. Gill. If she's not talking about illnesses all the time, she's sort of taking charge of me. She makes me feel as if I'm a human version of her green and orange bag. So could you very kindly?”

“Of course. She's sitting in casualty now. Cart sent her there.”

At this Fenella gave a sharp chuckle, as startlingly loud as her singing voice. And they relapsed into silence again.

This won't do, thought the patient. There are so many things I don't know. “Fenella, what time is it?”

Fenella looked at the gold watch on her wrist; no doubt she had got that out of Himself like the singing lessons. “Four—just after.”

Another hour gone. “Fenella, do you remember the ghost?”

Fenella's head turned sharply. Her eyes, large to start with and splendidly enlarged by her makeup, now seemed enormous. “We got rid of it,” she said. “It went in the afternoon.”

“How? What did we do?”

Fenella shrugged. It was now a pretty gesture, but it meant what Fenella's shrugs had always meant: She knew, but she was not going to say.

“Please, Fenella. It's terribly important. I was the ghost—don't you realize?”

“If you think,” Fenella said grudgingly, “we haven't all realized that by now, you must be a fool. But it was all years ago. There's nothing any of us can do now.”

“Yes, there
is
!” cried her sister. “I know I can do something!”

“You'll make yourself ill,” said Fenella. “Even iller, I mean. All right, but I don't really know how it happened. We all went on a cycle ride because of something Cart said, and it worked somehow, though I don't know how. Anyway, the ghost wasn't with us on the way back, but we all got soaked, and Will and Ned got caught because they were wet.”

“And where did we go?”

Fenella clearly did not want to say. She hated answering questions. She hated it even more if the questions were important. In the normal way she would have clammed up, or pretended to forget. It was because she found it so difficult to explain anything. But since she was being asked by a very ill sister, she forced herself to answer. “We went where Monigan was supposed to live, of course.”

Her sister understood the effort Fenella had made to say this. She tried to smile, and Fenella smiled in reply, a gap-toothed grin which matched better with freckles and hair in two granny knots than with the modern elegant Fenella. “Thanks. Where did she live?”

And Fenella made one more effort and answered exactly as she might have done seven years before. “Through the Dream Landscape and behind the Back of Beyond, of course.”

She sped back, once more a ghost, in triumph. She was certain that going to confront Monigan was not Cart's idea but hers. It looked as if she had managed to guide her sisters—or perhaps the boys—into some kind of attack on Monigan. She could hardly wait to be back there in the orchard, with the bowl of blood.

She was there. Here was the orchard, still in sallow sunlight, and the baby apples were still glinting with drops of moisture. But something had happened while she was away. The enamel bowl beneath her was upside down in the grass. She looked down at black patches flaked out of its underside, and a brown ring of grease. The hens, lifting their claws with tiptoe, delicate caution, were moving away from it not to be near her.

Beyond that Monigan's hut was in ruins. Pieces of carpet lay scattered flat round the oblong of yellow grass. The clotheshorse and the two deck chairs which had supported the carpet were snapped in pieces, with yellow raw wood showing where they had been broken. Cart did that, she was sure.

She was terrified. The sisters had understood, but they had still not seen the horror of Monigan. She had told them it was Monigan's doing, and their answer had been to desecrate Monigan's temple. That would make Monigan angry.

She hung over the pieces of sodden carpet, listening, or feeling—or whatever it was she did—waiting somehow for Monigan and Monigan's anger. And there was nothing. The orchard felt blank. Monigan was not there. Then where—?