Ghosts (17 page)

‘Will the
principessa
be joining us?’ she asked.

He shrugged.

‘Quella povera ragazza!’
he said, and shook his head and heaved a heavy sigh. ‘She sleeps.’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I know.’

It took him a moment. He laughed, and wagged a finger at her playfully.

‘Ah, erudèle!’
he trilled.

He went and stood in the back doorway and contemplated happily the sunlit yard, a hand inserted in the side pocket of his tight jacket and his narrow back twisted. A robin alighted at his feet.

‘Oh!’ Alice stood up quickly from the table. ‘I was supposed to bring her a drink of water.’

She went hurriedly to the sink and rinsed a smeared glass and filled it under the tap. Felix produced a key from the pocket of his jacket and held it negligently aloft.

‘You will need this,’ he said. Sophie stared in scorn and he shrugged. ‘A man must protect what is his,’ he said, smirking.

Alice took the key and put it in the pocket of her dress and went out, holding the glass carefully in both hands and
watching the water sway under its shining, tin-bright, tense meniscus, her grave little face inclined.

Without warning Hatch and Pound leaped up from the table, like a pair of leaping fish, and Hatch in an amazing rage went at the fat boy with fists flailing. Pound stood suspended like a punchbag, with a mild expression, almost diffident, frowning in a kind of puzzlement as the punches sank in. Hatch leaned against him with his head down, hitting and hitting, as if he were trying to fight his way into Pound’s fat chest. The others looked on, mesmerised, until Croke struggled up and grasped Hatch by his skinny shoulders and lifted him into the air, where the boy, incoherently in tears, squirmed and swore, thrashing his arms and legs like a capsized beetle. Croke set him on his feet with a thump and the boy sat down and gathered himself into a huddle, biting his knuckles and furiously sobbing.

‘I only said,’ Pound said dully, ‘I only said …’

Alice came back and sat down and folded her hands in her lap. Felix lifted an eyebrow at her.

‘How is the patient?’ he asked.

Alice did not look at him.

‘She says she only wants to rest,’ she said and pursed her lips.

Felix came and stood above her, a hand outstretched.

‘The key?’

Alice looked sideways at his hand and considered.

‘She has it,’ she said and smiled a little smile of triumph and for a second she looked like a tiny wizened old woman.

Sophie laughed.

Felix hesitated, then shrugged and walked to the middle of the floor and stood with his feet together and his elbows pressed to his sides, smiling about him and bobbing gently on his toes, like a swimmer effortlessly treading water, borne up in his element.
‘Ah, Mélisande, Mélisande!’
he sang softly in thin falsetto, turning heavenwards his stricken eyes. Then
he cut a sudden caper, tip and toe, rolling his eyes and waggling his hands limply from the wrists.

The latch of the back door rattled and knuckles tentatively rapped.

Felix, crooning wordlessly and holding himself at breast and back in a tango-dancer’s embrace, shimmied to the door and flung it wide. Light from the yard entered and along with it the smell of sun-warmed straw and hen droppings. Soft flurry of wings. A little breeze. The blue day shimmers.

A red-haired, buck-toothed boy in Wellingtons stood on the step.

‘Aha!’ cried Felix, ‘there you are! How fares
le bateau ivre?
Gone down, I trust, women and children in the boats, flag still flying and the captain saluting from the poop, all that?’

The boy squinted at him warily and said:

‘The skipper says to say the tide will be up before long and youse are to be ready.’

Felix turned back to the room and opened wide his arms.

‘Do you hear, gentles?’ he said. ‘The waters are rising.’

Sophie was winding the film in her camera.

‘Are you not coming with us?’ she asked.

But Felix only smiled.

Easing open the wooden gate Sergeant Toner paused a moment before tackling the steep path up to the house. He lifted his cap and scratched his head with middle and little finger and reset his cap at a sharper angle. The light had thickened to a hot haze over the fields. Housemartins skimmed here and there in the radiant air above him, shooting in swift loops in and out of their nests under the eaves. The Sergeant, large, freckled, mild man, moves in his policeman’s deliberate way, thoughtfully, with a sober and abstracted air. He climbed the steps to the porch and knocked loudly on the door and waited, and knocked again, but no
one answered, and cupping his hands around his eyes he bent and peered through the ruby panels of the door but could see nothing except the claret-coloured shapes of hall table and umbrella stand and the tensed and somehow significantly unpeopled stairs. He descended the steps and stood with hands on hips and head thrown back and peered up frowningly at the upstairs windows. Behind sky-reflecting glass nothing moved. He turned and put his hands behind his back and with fist clasped in palm walked slowly around by the side of the house. In the yard a high-stepping hen stopped and looked at him sharply and the dog under the wheelbarrow growled but did not rise, thumping its tail half-heartedly in the dust. The back door was open; the kitchen was deserted. The Sergeant leaned in and rapped on the door with his knuckles and called out: ‘Shop!’ but no answer came except a tiny, ringing echo, like a stifled titter, of his own big voice. He stepped inside and stood a moment listening and then walked forward on creaking soles and pulled out a chair and sat down, removing his cap and setting it on the table beside his elbow, where the shiny dark-blue peak reflected in elongated form a squat milk-jug. He sighed. On the stove a big pot was making muffled eructations and there was the smell of chicken soup. A shimmering blade of sunlight stood broken on the rim of the sink.

Somewhere in the house someone loudly sneezed.

A very large bumble-bee flew in through the back door and did a staggering circle of the room and settled on the window-sill. Sergeant Toner studied it with interest as it throbbed there in its football jersey. He thought how it would feel to be a bee in summertime, drunk on the smell of clover and of gorse, and for a moment his mind reeled in contemplation of the prospect of other worlds.

Licht came hurrying in from the hall and skidded to a stop and stared at the Sergeant and sneezed.

‘God bless you!’ Sergeant Toner said largely, with broad good humour.

Blinking rapidly and gasping Licht fumbled in his trouser pocket and brought out a greyed handkerchief and stood with his mouth open weakly and his red-rimmed nose tilted back.

‘Ah … ah … ahh,’ he said expectantly on a rising scale, but this time nothing happened and amid a general sense of anti-climax he put away his handkerchief. ‘Getting a cold,’ he said thickly. He looked as if he had been weeping. He lifted the lid of the simmering pot on the stove and peered squintingly through the steam.

The bee with an angry buzzing rose up from the window-sill and flew straight out the door and was gone.

‘I was just passing by,’ the Sergeant said, quite at his ease.

‘Oh,’ Licht said flatly and nodded, avoiding the other’s eye. He sniffed. ‘Will you take something?’

The Sergeant considered.

‘Glass of water?’ he said, without conviction.

Licht centred the big black kettle on the hob; a thread of steam was already rising from the spout. Sergeant Toner watched him as he had watched the bumble-bee, with interest, calmly. Licht’s hands were unsteady. He let fall a spoon and tried to catch it and knocked over the tea caddy and spilled the tea. The spoon bounced ringingly on the tiles. The kettle came to the boil.

‘I think we’re in for a fine spell,’ the Sergeant said.

Licht nodded distractedly. He paused with the grumbling kettle in his hand and frowned at the wall in front of him.

‘I spend my life making tea,’ he said darkly to himself.

Sergeant Toner nodded seriously but made no comment. Licht picked up the spoon from the floor and wiped it on his trousers and spooned the tea into the pot and poured the seething water over the leaves and banged the lid back on
the pot, then carried pot and a cracked white mug to the table and set them down unceremoniously beside the Sergeant’s hat. Milk, sugar, the same spoon. The Sergeant surveyed the table hopefully.

‘A heel of bread would be the thing,’ he said, ‘if you had it.’

Licht, unseen by the Sergeant, cast his eyes to the ceiling and went to the sideboard and came back with a biscuit tin and opened it and put it on the table with a tinny thump. The fawn smell of biscuit-dust rose up warmly on the air. Sergeant Toner smiled and nodded thanks. Judiciously he poured the tea, raising and lowering the pot with a practised hand, watching with satisfaction the rich, dark flow and enjoying the joggling sound the liquid made filling up the mug. Licht fetched cutlery from a drawer and began to set out places at the table while the Sergeant looked on with placid gaze.

‘Visitors?’ he said. Licht did not answer. From the dresser he brought soup bowls and dealt them out. The Sergeant idly counted the places, his lips silently moving. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the time we had the devil-worshippers?’ He glanced up enquiringly. His white eyelashes were almost invisible. ‘Do you remember that?’

Licht looked at him blankly in bafflement.

‘What?’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Your mother, God rest her, was still with us then.’

The Sergeant lifted the brimming mug with care and extended puckered lips to the hot brim and took a cautious slurp. ‘Ah,’ he said appreciatively, and took another, deeper draught and then put down the mug and turned his attention to the biscuit tin, rising an inch off the chair and peering into the mouth of the tin with lifted brows. ‘A bad lot, they were,’ he said. ‘They used to cut up cats.’

Licht went to the sink, where the line of sunlight, thinned to a rapier now, smote him across the wrists. The sink was
still piled with unwashed crockery; he stood and looked helplessly at the grease-caked plates and smeared cutlery.

‘Locals, were they?’ he said absently.

The Sergeant was biting gingerly on a ginger nut. ‘Hmm?’

Licht sighed. ‘Were they locals, these people?’

‘No, no,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They used to come over on the boat from the mainland when their feast days or whatever they were were coming up. The solstices, or whatever they’re called. They’d start off by making a big circle of stones down on the strand, that’s how I’d know they were here. Oh, a bad crowd.’

Licht plunged his hands into the greasy water.

‘Did you catch them?’ he asked.

Sergeant Toner smiled to himself, drinking his tea.

‘We did,’ he said. ‘We always get our man, out here.’

The Professor came in. Seeing the Sergeant he stopped and stood and all went silent. The Sergeant half rose from his chair in respectful greeting and subsided again.

‘I was just telling Mr Licht here about the devil-worshippers,’ he said equably.

The Professor stared.

‘Devil-worshippers,’ he said.

‘They killed cats,’ Licht said from the sink, and snickered.

‘Oh, more than cats,’ said the Sergeant, unruffled. ‘More than cats.’ He lifted the teapot invitingly. ‘Will you join me in a cup of this tea, Professor?’

Licht came forward bustlingly and put the lid back on the biscuit tin, ignoring the Sergeant’s frown of weak dismay.

‘We’re a bit busy,’ Licht said pointedly. ‘I’m making the lunch.’

Sergeant Toner nodded understandingly but made no move to rise.

‘For your visitors,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

For a moment all three were silent. Licht and the Professor
looked off in opposite directions while the Sergeant thoughtfully sipped his tea.

‘I seen the ferry out on the Black Bank, all right,’ he said. ‘Ran aground, did it?’ He paused. ‘Is that the way they came?’ Then, softly: ‘Your visitors?’

Licht lifted a streaming plate from the sink and rubbed it vigorously with a dirty cloth.

‘The skipper was drunk, apparently,’ he said. ‘That ferry service is a joke. Someday somebody is going to be drowned.’ It sounded a curiously false note; too many words. He rubbed the plate more vigorously still.

The Sergeant nodded, pondering.

‘I was talking to him, to the skipper,’ he said. ‘The eyes were a bit bright, right enough.’ He nodded again and then sat still, thinking, the mug lifted halfway to his mouth. ‘And where would they be now, tell me,’ he said, ‘these castaways?’

Licht looked at the Professor and the Professor looked at the floor.

‘Oh,’ Licht said with a careless gesture, ‘they’re around the house, getting ready.’

The Sergeant frowned. ‘Ready?’

‘To leave,’ Licht said. ‘They’re waiting for the tide to come up.’

He could feel his voice getting thick and his eyes prickling. He wished now they had never come, disturbing everything. Blast them all. He thought of Flora.

‘Just over for the day, then, were they?’ the Sergeant said.

Licht turned away and muttered something under his breath.

‘Beg pardon?’ Sergeant Toner said pleasantly, cupping a finger behind his ear.

‘I said,’ Licht said, ‘maybe they came to say a black mass.’

A brief chill settled. Sergeant Toner was not a man to be
mocked. Licht turned to the sink again, head down and shoulders hunched.

The Professor cleared his throat and frowned. The Sergeant with a musing air inspected a far corner of the ceiling.

‘Was there a chap with them,’ he said, ‘thin chap, reddish sort of hair, foreign, maybe?’

Licht turned from the sink.

‘Red hair?’ he said. ‘No, but –’

‘No,’ the Professor said heavily, and Licht glanced at him quickly, ‘there was no one like that.’

Sergeant Toner nodded, still eyeing the ceiling. From outside came the faint buzz of a tractor at work far off in the fields. Licht dried his hands, not looking at anyone now. The Sergeant made a tube of his fist and confided to it a soft, biscuity belch, then poured himself another cup of tea. The sun had left the window but the room was still drugged with its heat.