The Time of the Ghost

“Ministry of Silly Walks,” Sally heard him mutter. “Ministry of Silly Walks.” It was Howard, the boy whose splinters were not catching.

Near him, another boy with gingery hair was going about with one arm bent like a cripple’s and jerking about. At each step he made a different hideous face. “Quiet, please, gentlemen!” he muttered from his contorted mouth. This one was Ned Jenkins, Sally remembered, and she did not think there was anything wrong with his arm usually.

Honestly! You’d think they were all mad, to look at them! she said wonderingly. She could not believe boys usually behaved like this. The boys at this school were clean-limbed young Englishmen. Yet, as she watched the stumbling, muttering, jerking figures, she knew that they often did this – or something equally peculiar. Cart had once told her that all boys were mad. Sally had protested at the time, but she now thought Cart was right. And she went on watching, trying to fix all of their bizarre antics in her strange, nebulous mind, hoping that something – anything – might give her a clue to how she came to be like this. Because I can’t stay like this for the rest of my life, she said. I shall go as mad as Jenkins.

Panic began bulging again. The idea hovered – just behind the name Jenkins – that it was nonsense to say the rest of my life. It was quite possible Sally was a ghost, and her life was over already. Sally fought to keep this idea behind Jenkins’ name, safely hidden, and the idea fought to come out. In the battle, Sally herself was tumbled off again, through the thick hedge, back into the orchard where the hens fled cackling, and then whirled towards the house. There she stopped, hanging stiffly against the branches of the last apple tree. A new idea had been let out in the fight.

Suppose, Sally said, I left a letter – or made a note – or keep a diary.

The notion was a magnificent relief. Somewhere there would be a few lines of writing which explained everything. Sally did not quite see herself doing anything so methodical as keeping a diary, but, right at the back of her transparent, swirling mind, she found a dim, dim notion that she might have written a letter. Alongside this notion was a fainter one: if there was a letter, it was to do with the Plan Fenella had talked about.

The house quivered with Sally’s excitement as she whirled inside it.

In the kitchen, Cart was actually doing the washing-up. She was standing at the sink with her heavy feet planted at a suffering angle, slowly clattering thick white cups. Her face had a large expression of righteous misery.

“Penance,” Cart said, as Sally hovered by the kitchen table, wondering where to look for a letter. “Utter boredom. I do think the rest of you might help sometimes.”

Now you know how I feel, Sally said. I always do it. Letters were more likely to be in the sitting room. She was on her way there when she realised that the only other being in the kitchen was Oliver. Oliver was asleep in his favourite place – vastly heaped in the middle of the floor – with three feet stretched out and the fourth – the one with only three toes – laid alongside his boar’s muzzle. Oliver was snoring like a small motorbike, jerking and twitching all over. That means Cart was speaking to me! Sally said, and hovered to a halt in the doorway. Cart? she said.

Cart plunged a pile of thick plates under the water and broke into a song. “I leaned my back up against an oak, thinking he was a trusty tree—” It sounded as if there was a cow in the kitchen, in considerable pain.

CART! said Sally.

“First he bended and then he broke!” howled Cart. Oliver began to stir.

Sally realised it was no good and went on into the sitting room, just as Fenella shut its door to keep out the sound of Cart singing. She brushed right by Fenella, feeling again the tingle of the field of life round a human body. But Fenella seemed to feel nothing. She turned away from Sally and went to crouch like a gnome in an old armchair. Imogen was still lying on the sofa. The room was hot and fuggy and dusty.

You both ought to go outside, Sally said disgustedly. Or at least open a window.

There was a desk and a coffee table and a bookcase in the room, each covered and crowded with papers. There were rings from coffee cups on all the papers, and dust on top of that. Sally could tell simply by hovering near that it was several months since any of the papers had been moved. That meant there was no point looking at them. The notion was very firm – though dim – in Sally’s mind that, if there was a letter, it had not been written very long ago. She went over to try the papers on the piano.

It was the same story there. Dust lay, even and undisturbed, over each magazine and each old letter, and only slightly less thickly over a school report. This last term’s, Sally saw from the date. “Name of pupil: Imogen Melford.” A for English – A for almost everything except Maths. Imogen was disgustingly brilliant, Sally thought resentfully. A for Art too, which made a change. Only B for Music – which made a change also, a surprising one, considering Imogen’s career. Underneath: “An excellent term’s work. Imogen has worked well but still seems acutely unhappy. I would be grateful for an opportunity to discuss Imogen’s future with Imogen’s parents. B.A. Form Mistress.”

But Imogen always seems unhappy! Sally said.

The papers on the treble end of the piano keys were actually browning with age. Nothing there. The picture – it was good – was more recent, but still slightly dusty. There was a film of scum on the water in the crookedly balanced paste-pot at the other end.

Here Sally noticed that Imogen had turned on the sofa to stare at her. Imogen’s eyes were large and a curiously dark blue. They had a way of looking almost blank with, behind the blankness, something so keen and vivid that people often jumped when Imogen looked at them. Sally jumped now. They were, as she remembered agreeing with Cart, unquestionably the eyes of a genius.

Imogen? Sally said hopefully.

But it was the picture behind Sally that Imogen was staring at. “I like those brambles particularly,” she said. “The stalks are just that deep crimson – brawny, I call them. They almost have muscles – tendons, anyway – and thorns like cats’ claws.”

“My self-portrait,” Fenella said smugly.

“It’s not a self-portrait. You didn’t paint it,” said Imogen. “And it makes you look too brown.” She sighed. “I think I shall take up writing poetry.” A large tear detached itself from the uppermost of her dark blue eyes and rolled down the hill of her cheek, beyond her nose.

“What are you grieving about now?” Fenella enquired.

“My utter incapacity!” said Imogen. A tear rolled out of her lower eye.

Imogen’s grieving was so well known that Sally was bored before the second tear was on its way. There was going to be no letter down here. The place to look was the bedroom. She flitted to the stairs at the end of the room, as Fenella said, “Well, I won’t interrupt you. I’m going to steal some tea.”

Sally was halfway upstairs when the door was barged open under Fenella’s hands. Oliver’s huge blurred head appeared on a level with Fenella’s face.

“Get out, Oliver,” Imogen said, lying with a tear twinkling on either cheek.

Fenella pushed at Oliver’s nose. “Go away. Imogen’s grieving.” Oliver took no notice. He simply shouldered Fenella aside and rolled into the room, growling lightly, like a heavy lorry in the distance. Where Oliver chose to go, Oliver went. He was too huge to stop. And he had detected that the peculiar Sally was here again. He shambled past Imogen to the foot of the stairs, alternating growls with whining.

“Sorry,” Fenella said to Imogen, and went out.

Sally hung at the top of the stairs, looking down at Oliver. He filled the first four steps. She did not think he would come up any farther. Oliver was so heavy and misshapen that his feet hurt him most of the time. He did not like going upstairs. But she wished he would not behave like this. It was alarming.

“Imogen’s grieving again,” Fenella said to Cart in the kitchen.

“Damn,” said Cart.

Sally gave Oliver what she hoped was a masterful look. Go away. The result was alarming. Oliver growled until Sally could feel the vibrations in the stairs. The hair on his back came pricking up. Sally had never seen that happen before. It was horrifying. He looked as big as a bear. Sally turned and fled to the bathroom, where Oliver’s growls followed her but, to her relief, not Oliver himself.

The bathroom was in its usual mess, with a bright black line round the bath and dirty towels and slimy facecloths everywhere. Sally retreated from it in disgust, into the bedroom. Here, as seemed to keep happening, she found herself being startled by something she should have known as well as the back of her hand. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t got a back to my hand at the moment, she thought, trying to make a joke out of it.

The bedroom was airless and hot, from being up in the roof. It was the size of the kitchen and sitting room downstairs, with a bite out for the bathroom, but that space did not seem very big with four beds in it. Three of the beds were unmade, of course, with covers trailing over the floor. The fourth bed, Sally supposed, must be hers. It had a square, white, unfamiliar look. There was no personality about it at all.

Another reason why the room looked so small was that it was as high as it was long. Three black bending beams ran overhead. You could see they had all been cut from the same tree. The twists in them matched. Above them was a complex of dusty rafters, reaching into the peak of the roof, which was lined with greyish hardboard. Sally found herself knowing that this part, where they lived, was the oldest part of School House. It had been stables, long before the red buildings went up beside it. She also knew it was very cold in winter.

She turned her attention from the roof and found that the walls were covered with pictures. By this time, from under the floor, through the rumbles from Oliver, she could hear Cart in the sitting room. Cart was beginning on another unsuccessful attempt to stop Imogen grieving. “Now look, Imogen, it’s not your fault you keep being turned out of the music rooms. You ought to explain to Miss Bailley.”

Sally paid no attention, because she was so astonished by the number of pictures. There were pen and ink sketches, pencil drawings, crayoned scenes, water colours, poster paintings, stencils, prints – bad and wobbly, obviously done with potatoes – and even one or two oil paintings. The oil paints and the canvases, Sally knew guiltily, had been stolen from the school Art Room. Most of the rest were on typing paper pinched from the school office. But there were one or two paintings on good cartridge paper. That brought a dim memory to her of the row there had been about the typing paper and the oil paints. She remembered Himself roaring, “I shall have to pay for every hair of every paintbrush you little bitches have thieved!” Then afterwards came a memory of Phyllis, desperately tired and terribly sensible, saying, “Look, I shall give you a pound between you to buy some paper.” A pound did not seem to buy much paper, by the look of it.

This was supposed to be an Exhibition. Sally discovered, round the bathroom corner, first a bell-push, labelled FOR EMERGENCY ONLY, and then a notice: THIS WAY TO THE EXHIBITION. The notice was signed “Sally”. But Sally had not the slightest recollection of writing it. Why was that? After staring at it in perturbation for a minute, she thought that it must have been written very recently, perhaps just after the end of term – and it was always the things in the last few days she seemed to have the greatest difficulty in remembering.

She followed her own arrows round the walls, drifting through beds and a chair in order to look closely at the pictures. Cart had signed all hers with a flourishing “Charlotte”. Imogen had signed some of hers neatly, “I. Melford”, but not all. Sally could not tell which of the rest were Imogen’s, or which were her own – if any. Then there were three signed “WH”, including one of the oil paintings, and several labelled simply “N”. N’s pictures leapt off the page at you, even though N could not draw. There was a drawing of Oliver N had done, which was a bad drawing of a bad drawing. But it was Oliver to the life, in spite of it.

I simply don’t remember any of these! Sally said. A view of the shop-cottage, unsigned. The dead elms, with blodgy rooks, also unsigned. A splendidly dismal dream-landscape by Cart. Cart went in for funereal fantasies: a coffin carried past a ruined castle in a black storm; cowled monks burying treasure; and a horrendous one of a grey, bulky maggot-like thing rising out of mist in a meadow. That one made Sally shudder and pass on quickly. Imogen, on the other hand, seemed to paint more strictly from life: flower studies, fields of wheat, and a careful drawing of the kitchen sink, piled full of thick crockery. That seemed very like Imogen. She could hear Imogen at that moment: “But I must face facts, Cart. It doesn’t matter how unpleasant they are. I can’t turn my back on reality.”

“Why can’t you?” Cart demanded. “It seems to me that enough facts come up out of life and hit you, without you going and facing all the other ones. Why can’t you turn your back on a few?”

“Don’t you see? It’s a matter of Truth and Art!” Imogen declared. The strong note of hysteria was in her voice.

Sally signed and turned to the next picture in the row. And laughed. Oliver seemed to hear her. He rumbled hard from the bottom of the stairs. Sally was laughing too much to care. The picture was signed “And Fenella did just this one awful one”. The picture was a terrible wicked jumble of everyone else’s. N’s badly drawn Oliver snuffled at Cart’s cowled monk, who fled for protection past WH’s spaceship to Imogen’s sink piled with crockery, where – Sally found she remembered this one all right. It was a large, simpering Mother figure, stretching out both arms towards the sink.

She made tracings, the little beast! Sally said.

The Mother was the next painting. She was stretching out her arms, not to a sink, but to a fat simpering baby. Sally could remember painting this. And it was awful. It embarrassed her, it was so bad. The faces simpered, the colours were weak and bad, and the shapes were floppy and pointless. The Mother was like an aimless maggot with a pretty face on top. Sally could even remember the row she and Cart had had over it. “Oh leave it out, for goodness sake!” Cart had yelled. “It’s fat and squishy! It’s absolutely yuk!”

And Sally had yelled back, “You’re the one who’s yuk! You don’t know a tender emotion when you see one. You’re afraid of feelings, that’s your trouble!” That was true in a way, about Cart. Cart’s body may have been large and blurred, but she tried to keep her mind like a small walled garden. She would let no wild things in – though she was ready enough to let them out if it suited her. Sally’s talk of tender emotions drove Cart wild at once.

“Don’t give me that sentimental drivel!” she roared, and she had chased Sally round the bedroom, waving a coat-hanger.

Cart was saying much the same at the moment to the sobbing Imogen, though she said it in a kinder way. “Imogen, really, I do think you’re working all this up out of nothing.”

“No, I’m not! What good would a letter do? A letter, when my whole personality is at stake!” Imogen rang out dramatically.

Oh! said Sally. She had quite forgotten she was looking for a letter. It was awful the way her mind seemed to point to only one thing at once. It was like the narrow beam of a torch.

The obvious place to look was in the old bureau wedged in the corner. Its top had been cleared for the Exhibition and pictures propped on top of it. But it had four drawers below, one for each of them. Sally, of course, could not open the drawers, but that was not exactly a problem in her condition. She lowered herself at the bureau and pushed her face into the top drawer.

This drawer was Cart’s. It was dark in there, but light came in through the keyhole – and through Sally – so that she could see. There was nothing to see. Cart had cleared the drawer out along with the top of the bureau. Sally remembered her doing it now. Cart had said, “I shall put away childish things.”

“Pompous ass,” said Fenella.

Nevertheless, Cart had thrown everything away – stamp collection, raffia, modelling clay, old drawings, the maps and lists of kings from her imaginary country, and the rude rhymes about her teachers – and had kept only schoolbooks. “I do O levels next year,” she told the others. They felt the importance of that.

One exercise book of a childish nature had survived, however. That, when Sally moved her face down into the next drawer, was lying on top of the jumble of her own things. It was pale green and labelled The Book of the Worship of Monigan. It was there because Sally must have begged it off Cart. Sally wished vaguely that she remembered what was in it, but she could not, and there was no way she could think of to get it open. As for the rest of the things, Sally found herself exclaiming, What on earth do I keep all this junk for? If it had been possible, she would have done as Cart had and thrown the lot away. Pencils, rubbers and scissors she could see the use of, but why had she kept six broken necklaces and half a cardboard Easter egg? What was the pink seaside rock doing, stuck to somebody’s old sock? Whose was the button carefully wrapped in tinfoil? And who wanted a collection of old hens’ feathers?

Among all this, there was no sign of a letter. The only paper was a drawing she had done when she was six, now covered all over with the scores of a card game. A, N, J and S had played. J had won every game.

Sally sank lower still to push her face into Imogen’s drawer. It was full of piano music, stuffed so full that Sally had trouble seeing more than the first layer. The lower she sank, the darker it became. But it was clear that this drawer was devoted to Imogen’s career.

“My career,” Imogen said at that moment, “is in ruins!”

“If that’s what you call looking facts in the face,” said Cart, “I’m going away.”

“I don’t think you believe in Truth,” Imogen said reproachfully. At least she had stopped crying now.

“Rather hard not to, don’t you think?” said Cart.

Typical of both of them, Sally thought. Cart, walling herself in, buttoning up, making a joke of things, refusing to let Imogen have feelings – though there was a case for it over Imogen, Sally had to admit. Imogen’s feelings were vast and continuous.

Fenella’s drawer was full of dolls, packed in a dirty jumble, and the remains of several dolls’ tea-sets. Sally was a little touched. Fenella had, in a way, put away childish things too. She no longer played with dolls, even if she could not bear to throw them away. There was a piece of paper on top. “Poem,” it said, “by Fenella Melford.”

I have three ugly sisters They really should he misters They shout and scream and play the piano I can never do anything I want.

The poem had been written at school. The teacher had written underneath, “A poem should be about your deeper feelings, Fenella.” And Fenella had written under that: “This is.”

Nothing here, Sally said. She came out of the bureau and floated face down at floor level, staring at the worn-out pattern of the rug. It looked like Oliver’s tufty coat, except that the pattern was in orange triangles. Imogen hated that rug. She said it offended her. Fenella called it the Rude Rug after that. There must be a letter. Sally was now quite sure there had been. She began floating to more her usual height, and stopped, with her torch-beam attention fixed on the wastepaper basket beside the bureau. It was stuffed and mounded with papers.

Ah! said Sally.

She dived towards it like a swimmer in her eagerness. And there, sticking sideways out of the top, was a sheet of blue writing paper with round, ragged writing on it which could well be hers.

“Dear Parents,” she read. “When you find this I shall be far away from here.”

There was no more, nothing but a doodled drawing of a face. Sally guessed she must have drawn it while she was thinking what else to say. Then of course she could not use that paper. The real letter must be elsewhere.

But where was I going? What was I doing? she wondered frantically.

Desperately, she pressed her face down among the other papers. Thank goodness! Here was another, on paper decorated with roses this time.

“Dear Parents, This is to inform you that I have taken …” Taken what? Sally wondered: the family jewels, a short holiday, leave of her senses? She had no idea. But here was more rosy paper.

“Dear Parents, Let me break this to you gently. I have decided, after much thought, that life here has little to offer me. I have …”

I think I was going to run away from home, Sally said. But I don’t think I had anywhere to go. Both grannies would send me hack at once. Why didn’t I say more? Oh, here’s another one.

“Dear Parents, My life is in ruins and also in danger. I must warn …”

Shaken, Sally withdrew her face from the basket and hovered like a swimmer treading water, staring at the papers. So there had been clanger. That matched her feelings of an accident, though not her feeling that something had gone wrong. But what danger, and where from? And now she came to look, the whole top of the waste basket was packed with the same rosy writing paper. She must have used the whole packet, trying to explain whatever it was to Phyllis and Himself. Perhaps if she read every single one, together they would tell her what had happened. She plunged her face among the papers again.

But it was impossible; they were packed in so tightly, some sideways and some upside down, some rolled into balls, some torn in half, and all so mixed up with old drawings and things Cart had thrown out, that Sally’s bodiless eyes could pick out hardly any of it. The ones she did see were only variations on the first four. And it got darker – too dark to read – more than four packed layers down. It was the merest luck that, when Sally was about to emerge from the basket and give up, her sight came up against a larger paper wedged upright against the side of the basket. At the top was her own writing – the now-familiar “Dear Parents” – but the next line was, to Sally’s wonder, in writing that had to be Cart’s. Cart’s writing was neat and unmistakable.

“We think Sally has come to a sticky end.”

Underneath that, the spiny writing with the angrily crossed Ts was surely Imogen’s. Sally brought her face up, backed away, and drove in again, right through the basket and the papers, so that her non-eyes were right up against the paper. It was dim, yellowish gloom, nearly too dark to see.

“Her bed has not been slept in and we have not seen her since—” Imogen had written. It was too dark to see any more. All Sally could gather was that Cart’s writing and Imogen’s alternated, line by line, all down the page, from yellowish brown gloom to night black. Horribly frustrated, Sally backed out and hovered.

I am going to see that letter!

There was a deal of noise downstairs. Imogen had seemed calmed by Cart, but, in the irritating way it had, her grieving now sprang up again like a forest fire, loud and wild, in a new place.

“But don’t you see, I may be using these difficulties as an excuse to hide the truth from myself! I’m hiding away behind them! I know I am!”

“Now Imogen,” Cart said soothingly. “I think that’s just tormenting yourself.”