The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (39 page)

We said a prayer over him and then made tea. The edge was off the wind and the earth warm and stirring. Soon we were laughing and joking. What a force life is, even out here. But my head is full of thoughts which there is not time to write. When I come home, then we’ll talk.

Cheer-ho!

Patrick

May, 1917

Suddenly things were unbearable. The stony faces on the walls frowned down at her; Newcastle, who was after all a civil soul, drifted into a reverie; Gavin was trying to catch her eye. She got to her feet and retreated through the door that led into the courtyard where the toilets were. The last of the autumn leaves were thick on the cobbles and crunchy underfoot. She scuffed through them, then was irritated when a gust of wind snatched them up and threw them prickling against her legs. The wind blew from the road that led to the Lille Gate and past the moat which enclosed Ramparts Cemetery, where Patrick would lie. She had first seen the place from the other side of the moat: from a distance, the creamy headstones, stalwart on thick green lawn, looked like a stubby little village huddling under the trees. At Gavin’s insistence they had crossed to go in and she had posed for a photo at the foot of the Cross of Sacrifice. The air was sharp with chrysanthemum scent which rose like thin smoke from the ragged clumps planted at each grave; sombre in their funeral purples and golds, the flowers sighed out the bitterness of the dying days of autumn and the finish of things. Patrick’s grave was open and ready to receive him. And she was here to learn at last what he wanted.

The nights at Inverash were full of sound: the water lapped and the trees sighed and the owl in the woods to the rear of the house hooted mournfully. There were whispers too, boys’ whispers, as they slipped out of the back door and into the woods, looking for badgers, or going down to swim in the dark, which was strictly forbidden but Mum and Dad slept deeply. Rowan was always pleased when Kate told her she’d heard them, and disappointed when Kate was sure there were only two.

They used to sit in the evening and read the letters, which were carefully stored in a square metal biscuit tin. Charlie’s and Alex’s were short, hoping everyone was as well at home as they were in France and Flanders, and please to send some tobacco; but Patrick, the clever one, wrote often and at length:

. . . Jinty was bringing up the rear when we crawled back into the trenches and suddenly Fritz opened fire. Well, the bullets pinged off the wire and whizzed into the tin cans, and some of them hit Jinty’s kilt, and next thing we knew, he was leaping up and down, flipping his kilt up to keep the smoulder off his legs, skirling like a banshee. Talk about a Highland Fling! Anyway, the snipers’ bullets started falling short. They were probably laughing too much to take aim and Jinty got back in alive. There wasn’t a mark on him, except for a little embarrassing singeing.

Cheer-ho!

Patrick

April, 1917

Kate had told the English teacher about the jokes and laughing when they were studying Wilfred Owen, but the teacher felt that Patrick had rather missed the point if he wasn’t doom-laden and star-crossed. Kate thought the teacher had missed the point.

The worst thing would have been not keeping my end up. I was more afraid of that than anything else the first weeks. But I’m all right now. When it’s time to go over the bags, when the whistles blow, something rises in me like the sap in spring and carries me along. I wouldn’t call it courage. In both life and death there is nothing for it but to go forward. So forward it is.

Cheer-ho,

Patrick.

August 1917

There were letters too from hospitals all over the country in response to the family’s enquiries about a soldier who might have lost his memory, or been too ill to know who he was, a Scottish soldier, five foot six, dark-haired, blue-eyed.

“She wrote to hospitals for years. She never gave up hope,” Rowan said. “The day he disappeared, there was an advance into autumn mist and gun fog. One minute he was there and the next not and no one saw what happened. So he might have been picked up or captured or lying bleeding in the mud. She was tormented for years by the thought that he might be somewhere. Because living or dead, he must be somewhere. Somewhere.”

One night Kate and Rowan sat on the front step looking over the loch – it was too warm for bed or to sit inside – and shared dreams about what might have happened to Patrick. All the endings were happy until the realization that in life they hadn’t been silenced them.

“We can only hope it was a clean shot,” Rowan said, and went to bed first. Kate looked across at the winking silver coins on the rowan tree. Patrick’s looked duller than the other two. She stared – no, it was shining as brightly – then, no it wasn’t. It was duller. Then brighter. Then dull again. A shadow? She glanced up at the sky, but it was clear of clouds and full of stars. She stared harder at the coin and it was as if the still air was gathering round it, not darker but thicker. She watched as the sixpence was gradually obscured by air as thick as syrup. She watched and then leaped to her feet and ran inside, locking the door behind her. In seconds she was in her room with the curtains drawn and the light on, but she could not shut out the sound of whispers and low laughter. The boys were on the path to the gate, scuffling, and then someone slapped the tree, and then someone else. And then a third. She flicked back the curtain, but there was nothing to see, only the coins twinkling and showers of blossom falling lightly and silently on to the grass.

Next day, she could hardly bear the eager flare of hope in Rowan’s eyes when she was told the story, or the mischief in the eyes of the lost soldier on the mantelpiece.

“Kate!”

Gavin. Impatient. She wondered how long she had been standing here.

“Kate. Aren’t you coming back inside? It’s cold out here.”

“Just getting a breath of fresh air.”

“You were rather rude to that man, you know.”

He was in the doorway with the light behind him, a bulky faceless shadow with a peevish voice which grated. She turned to face him.

“Was I? They’re a bit much sometimes.”

“You could show a polite interest.”

“You laughed hard enough at the one who’s dug a replica trench, complete with sandbags, in his allotment.” She paused. “When we got back to the hotel anyway. But I’ll allow you were polite and interested to his face.”

They were spared an argument by the creak of the door set in the yard wall, then footsteps and the rustle of fallen leaves. Another shadow appeared out of the darkness. She froze. It was in uniform, complete with puttees and soup-plate tin hat, carrying a rifle. The squirming in her stomach was like live eels and she gasped.

“Sorry, hen. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

A thick Scottish accent, a broad face with a smile like the one on a Hallowe’en lantern. She stood unable to move or speak until he had passed by into the café.

“Kate, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Patrick? His name dropped into her mind like an envelope falling on the mat. Was that Patrick? But no, Patrick was finer-featured, smaller. Gavin was beside her now, patting at her arm.

“Come inside. That was one of the re-enactors. They’re here for a sing-song round the piano. Songs of the Great War.”

Re-enactors. Of course. After the Armistice Day parade, they were going to march out of Ieper and follow the route the troops took to Messines, living on tins of bully beef and plum jam. They were mad as hatters.

“Their uniforms are exact replicas,” Gavin said. He laughed. “Gave you quite a turn, didn’t he? Now come inside and join the party. There’s a little surprise for you.”

He pulled her gently inside, towed her right up to the bar, and stood expectantly, pointing to a place above the gantry. Patrick. The photo from Rowan’s mantelpiece, black-framed with a scarlet poppy stuck to one corner.

“I had it copied,” he said, “so that Patrick could take his place with the others.”

He was waiting for thanks, she knew, but she could not find the words, not when her stomach was heaving and her mouth dry. Patrick stared down at her impishly, the dimple at the end of his grin deeper than she remembered. She could not look away from the face she had avoided for years. Was she imagining a knowing triumph in the clear light gaze? Was she imagining the colour creeping into the face? The blue light flooding the eyes, the pink flushing the skin, the deep black sweeping into the thick dense hair? He was in from the cold, warming up.

Words rattled round inside her skull like raindrops spattering on window glass:
Here I am, here I am. At last, at last, at la-aaa-ssst
. Her skull was transparent and he could see inside, she knew he could, her every thought, her every secret.

“Go away,” she muttered. The dimple deepened and the eyes held her gaze. “Go,” she said louder, but the piano player was thumping out crashing chords and no one heard her. And Patrick wouldn’t go away anyway.

Voices roared into song. “
It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go . . .
” There were a dozen re-enactors round the piano, standing, slouching, leaning on one elbow as they sang. Lamplight shone on their brass buttons, their buckles, their glossy boots. The sight made her queasy. “Tipperary” was too much to take.

Everyone loves to sing that song as we march, Mum. Sing it and think of us and the long straight roads with the big trees growing like spears on either side.

Cheer-ho,

Patrick

August, 1917

“Gavin – I have such a headache. I think I’ll go back to the hotel.”

“Playing up a bit, aren’t we? Not giving into hormones, are we?”

“I can’t speak for you.”

He stiffened. “I’ll walk you back if you must go.”

“It’s only across the street. You stay here and . . . sing. I’ll be fine.”

She saw his hesitation, but he was reluctant to give up his place as centre of attention, as relative of the resurrected hero.

She wriggled through the assembled singers and was out the door before he could follow.

Inverash became a place of unease. She took to keeping her curtains drawn and her window closed at night. It was small comfort because then she had to suffer the knowledge that the night air, thick and viscous, was pressing up against the window pane, feeling for a crack to slide through, oozing around the house, searching for a way in, wrapping it in cool heavy darkness, flooding it with a longing for . . . she didn’t know what. She didn’t want to know.

Rowan scoffed, saying that if Patrick came he would enter through the door like anyone else. It wasn’t a helpful reply. Kate found herself awake half the night, listening for a footstep on the gravel path outside, for the click of the old-fashioned latch. In the evenings, she found excuses to avoid the reading of the letters because the air outside was always thicker when they read of his adventures in Flanders, as if the telling drew him closer. She knew he was listening, reliving those days, watching her. It was intolerable.

Rowan was hurt by her early nights and the books she had to read for school, but it couldn’t be helped. Patrick wasn’t pleased either. Night after night she lay in bed, knowing he was out there. She heard the muffled laughter, the excited whisperings like the buzzing of insects, and then the heavy silence when Charlie and Alexander wandered off down the path and left Patrick alone. She never heard him or saw him but knew he was there, waiting. He was the gently insistent tap of the tree branch on the window, not blown by a stray breeze, but regular and rhythmic, guided by someone; he was thick like warm summer air, dense as cat’s fur rubbing at her wall, at her window, insistent, gentle, coaxing. He invaded her dreams in the form of a shadowy figure which ran silently into a brown mist and disappeared, and no matter how she peered, she could not see where he had gone. Once she woke to find herself at the window, hand clutching the curtain, ready to draw it back; another time she was in the hall at the front door. Both times she had a struggle to turn away: her hand would not let go of the curtain or the bolt; her feet would not take her away. Instead she listened and dreaded and sensed a smile in the darkness and, without her volition, her hand would reach forward to open, to let in a brownish mist or a lost soldier.