Poor Tom's Ghost Read online

  “Plenty long. Look.” Roger disappeared into the thick shrubbery alongside the garage. “It runs back this way a good twenty feet. The boat’s only fourteen.”

  When he reappeared, Tony had produced the ring of keys provided by Mr. Carey and was trying one in the padlock. “There you go.” The hinges screeched as together they opened the leaves of the door wide on a long, bare shelter roofed with corrugated green plastic panels.

  “A poor thing, but our own,” Tony quipped sourly. “I reckon the simplest course will be to pull round here to unhitch, and then run the trailer in by hand. If we decide not to stay, we can still go by the river and have a look at the slipway before we head home.”

  “It’s already four o’clock,” Roger said nervously as they headed back to the car. “If we do have to go, shouldn’t we wait until the worst of the traffic’s over?”

  “On a Friday it’s the outbound traffic that’s bad. It shouldn’t be too heavy going in, even—” Tony broke off. “Here Pippa! We don’t want all that gear off-loaded. I said we’d see.”

  Roger grinned. While Jo poked around in the shrubbery—looking for what, he could not guess—Pippa had calmly begun piling bundled camp beds, sleeping bags, carryalls, lawn chairs and the smaller of the cartons of groceries in a heap beside the wide doorstep in front of the armour-clad entryway at the corner of Castle Cox. Sammy’s carrier and Spencer-the-snake’s gallon glass jar stood side by side on the step.

  “I’m sorry.” Pippa did not look particularly apologetic, though. “ ‘We’ll see’ always ends up ‘Oh, all right,’ so I thought I’d save time.”

  Tony contemplated her with raised eyebrows. “Fox! Still, I suppose ‘We’ll see’ is playing for time in the face of defeat. You’re quite right.”

  “About what?” Jo drifted up, waving a dry palm frond. “Looky. We have a midget palm tree on the far side of the jungle.”

  “About staying the weekend. All the world’s little shuffles are transparent as glass to your daughter.” Tony tossed her the key ring. “Do the honours, will you? I’ll root out the ruddy tire iron to use on those window boards.”

  But when he went to open the car’s trunk, he was humming “Any old iron, any old iron… Any, any, old, old, iron?” and Roger knew things were looking up.

  The oddest thing about the Nicholas family, as Roger saw it, was that they were one at all. His life, and his father’s, had been so haphazard for so long that even though more than two years had passed since Tony and Jo were married, it seemed incredible that their luck could still hold.

  Tony, as an actor, was inclined to spend more time and attention getting himself inside other people’s skins than paying much attention to those details of everyday life other parents worried over: regular bedtimes, school, meals, and clean socks and underclothing. Roger’s own mother had died when he was three, and Tony, in his distraction, had deposited him in Ealing with Granny Nicholas and headed back to Nottingham’s repertory company to plunge himself into work. Two years later, having made something of a name for himself at Nottingham and in an Oxford Playhouse production of a Stoppard play, he had as suddenly reappeared. But after three years in London with the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic—lived half in Ealing and half who-knows-where he left again, this time to join the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. When Granny died, he had simply added Roger to the luggage he took on tour to America, Australia, and back.

  For an older child it might have been an interesting life, easygoing and hectic at the same time, but it was precarious, too. There were missed meals, erratic schooling, too many strange hotel rooms and, at home in London (wherever home might be at the moment), long evenings alone with homework and the television set. All that, mixed with being fussed over, resented, or ignored by Tony’s successive girl friends, had left him at the age of eleven with his father’s disarming grin and curly dark hair, a nervous stomach, and a humourous, gregarious manner that masked the daily dread that everything was going to fall apart: that now his father was well known, making good money, endlessly busy, Roger would be packed off to boarding school and forgotten.

  Jo Parkin had appeared out of the blue: auburn-haired, American, divorced, and Pippa’s mother, playing opposite Tony in a televised version of Women Beware Women.

  They had worked together years before without paying much attention to each other. This time round, they had a hard time paying attention to the play. Jo was, if it were not a contradiction in terms, a glamorous old shoe—generous, quirky, unflappable. Pippa was a quieter, shyer version of the same.

  They were not long in making up their minds. They were married between rehearsals for Shaw’s On the Rocks, and though life went on as erratically as before, it seemed at first to Roger as if it had against all reason righted itself—as if he might not be in danger of falling overboard after all. But since the spring the four of them seemed to have drifted further and further apart. With Jo up before dawn and off to the film studio until just last week, and Tony caught up in preparations for taking over the role of Hamlet for two months, there were days when “family” came down to Roger and Pippa sharing scrambled-egg sandwiches in front of the television.

  So Roger, when Great-aunt Deb died and left Tony a house, had fastened onto it as the only answer. With all the Nicholases’ comings and goings, what they needed was a safe harbour.

  Whose there?

  THE TIRE IRON, AS IT HAPPENED, WAS unnecessary. Once indoors, Tony found that the boarding was secured by hooks that were easily reached when the lower window sashes were raised halfway, and the upper ones lowered. To his surprise, several of the hooks were rusted in place.

  “Odd. These couldn’t have rusted fast so quickly,” he muttered, straining to loosen a stubborn one. “You’d think they’d been in place since the time the house was used as a warehouse. Do you suppose the Children of Nod were all in Aunt Deb’s head?”

  Jo sniffed tentatively. “No, I detect an aroma of mouse and man. It’s not been empty long or you’d smell the dreadful decay.”

  She flicked the light-switch hopefully, but with the electricity off, predictably, nothing happened. However, with the large room off the hallway opened up, there was light enough in the ground-floor rooms to give even Roger pause. While Pippa explored, he stood rooted in dismay in the wide doorway between the entrance hall and the room that must once have been a sitting-room or parlour, clutching the camp stove to his chest as if it were an over-sized talisman against despair.

  The hall was not only not “long and high” as Tony had remembered it, but was dreadful to boot. It ran the length of the northeast side of the house and up a flight of stairs to a landing dimly lit by a stained-glass window in muddy purples and browns. The entire length was papered down to a waist-high moulding in a dirty grey-and-pink pattern like a flecked linoleum, and every twelve or so inches a deformed pink and yellow duck soared off in the direction of the landing window. Below the strip-moulding the wall was covered with a heavy embossed paper last painted a glossy black. Where the wallpaper above was blotched brown with age, the lower was buckled and furred at the bottom with dust. The dim expanse of ducks and dust was broken only by a single window and the doorway opposite.

  The front room itself, though oddly proportioned, was not unpleasantly so. But little more could be said for it. Here and there paper sagged from the ceiling and walls in ragged festoons and the oak parquet was deeply scarred, as if the builder-tenant had shifted heavy equipment in and out with no care at all for the once-handsome floor. All that was left of the Children of Nod was a heap of mouse-eaten mattresses tumbled into one corner of a smaller front room opening off the first, and a miscellany of rubbish in another corner: soiled, discarded clothing, boots without mates, frames without pictures, bundles of leaflets announcing that The End is Nigh, and a motorway sign that read BRISTOL—8 miles.

  “Do you know, I think they must have left these windows boarded up and lived in the dark,” Tony said incredulously. “Or by electric lig
ht. A most peculiar lot, Aunt Deb’s little charity. She can’t have had Carey check them out or come down to see for herself.”

  “I suppose we must be thankful that it wasn’t a hostel for homeless dogs or cats.” Jo, edging past Roger with a sleeping bag under each arm, laughed as she caught the strained look on Roger’s face. “For heaven’s sake, you great lummox! We don’t have to leave it this way. Not even for the weekend. A good airing and a good scrub will work wonders.”

  “It’ll take more than that,” Tony said as he moved into the next room. “It’s too hot for a bonfire now, but tonight we’ll burn every scrap that isn’t nailed down: mattresses, rubbish, wallpaper, the lot.”

  “Lovely!” Jo dropped the sleeping bags in a corner and stretched like an elegant, bony cat. “I adore ripping wallpaper. The very word is luxurious. R-r-r-rip!”

  “ ‘What depths of pure destruction a woman’s smiles do paper o’er’,” Tony murmured, coming to the doorway of the shadowed rear room. His voice sounded strange as he said it, and Roger half imagined that he saw a bewildered look of pain flicker in his father’s eyes.

  It was gone in a moment if it had been there, and Tony went back to wrestling cheerfully with the bar-locks to the back room’s French doors. Jo stood for a moment quite still, faintly perplexed, off balance, and Roger looked away quickly, not wanting to see in a hurt look that Tony had been needling her. He put the stove down and headed back for the hall. Jo’s voice followed him out. “We might as well chuck everything in the front room until we get straightened out.”

  “Whatever you say,” Tony answered vaguely.

  Pippa clattered down from upstairs and followed the fleeing Roger into the sun-dappled drive. “Rog? Will you carry Bast’s thingummy? He’s got too heavy for me.” She bent over to unlatch the door to Sammy’s carrier and coax out the curled-up bushbaby. In a moment he was on her shoulder, eyes screwed shut in fright and dislike of the sunlight’s glitter. His tiny hands twined tightly in her flyaway hair.

  “Sure.” Roger reached into the car’s back seat for the big cat basket. “Where do you want him?”

  “Around in the back garden, I guess. Ow!” She winced as Sammy scrambled round to her other shoulder and grabbed at her earlobe to steady himself. “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “It was being left in the basket. He’s never stopped being afraid we’d go off and leave him in quarantine again.”

  “We should have left him in California,” Roger pointed out. “Then he wouldn’t have had six months in cage and all this to-ing and fro-ing.”

  “Ye-es. But then he wouldn’t have me,” Pippa returned unarguably. “And I think he’d rather have me.”

  “I suppose so.” Roger was doubtful, but amused. In the overgrown back garden Pippa headed for the shade of a broad-limbed old horse chestnut. While Roger fumbled with the fastener on Bast’s door, she fished in her pockets and came up with a handful of dry cat crunchies to be shared between Bast and Sammy. Then she unscrewed the lid on Spencer-the-grass-snake’s jar and reached in to stroke a finger down his silky spine.

  She frowned as she replaced the perforated lid. “He’s all excited. If I turn him loose now he might take off for good, so I think I’ll wait. He’ll like it here once he’s not too hysterical to hang around.”

  “How can you tell he’s excited?” Roger was genuinely curious. His small step-sister had been known to carry on long, incomprehensible conversations with birds and squirrels, and on one eerie afternoon in the London Zoo had talked for a good five minutes through a fence with a bewildered but fascinated wolf. It had been eerie because Roger could have sworn that they understood each other’s growls and yips and snuffles. But—a snake? Spencer, so far as Roger had noticed, was not given to cocking his head or snuffling.

  “Oh, that’s easy.” Pippa reached back to stroke Sammy. “You feel it through your fingers. A ripple like a pulse, almost. Besides, his head moves more, and his tongue flickers further out.” She looked around for a clear spot at the edge of shade and sun. “He’ll feel better when he’s warmed up and had a drink.”

  Roger believed it. He had a sudden, almost overwhelming, urge to wrap his arms around Pippa in a bear hug and squeeze, the way she squeezed old Bast. But then Bast, when hugged, just hung there like a furry sack of flour, with a look of martyred boredom. Pippa not only might hug back, but she might begin to think that he needed looking after too. It was safer to enjoy her with the old detached amusement. She might be only ten to his thirteen, but the way she trotted around tidying up her universe and making all its creatures comfortable was—at a distance—somehow reassuring.

  Or usually was. The garden’s peace was suddenly shattered by an eldritch yowl as Bast burst through his basket’s door and streaked for the open French doors where Tony struggled to shift an unwieldy plywood panel over the rail of the garden stairs. A shriek followed close upon the yowl.

  “Mice! Three or four of them,” Jo, hiccuping with laughter, called from the front room as Tony and the children came running. She held a slice of half-buttered bread and a buttery knife. “There were three or four, but fat old Bast chased them into the hall and straight out the front door. I hope he routs the whole population before nightfall. I don’t much fancy waking tomorrow to a row of little corpses lined up like love gifts at the foot of my sleeping bag.”

  Roger grinned. “I wouldn’t have thought he still had it in him.”

  “He did look more like a flying fur cushion than your usual mouser. Anyway, you’re in, so come have your tea. The kettle won’t be a moment.”

  It was already humming on the camp stove set up by an open window in the big front room, and a battered tea case had been rescued from the rubbish in another room, upended, and given a newspaper tablecloth. Crowded onto it were the bread on its cutting board, a large lump of cheese, a pint of milk, butter, and a slightly squashed chocolate cream cake. On the floor, a tin of biscuits, a pot of strawberry preserves, a mug full of cutlery, plates, and the teapot were set out on last Sunday’s Observer.

  “Hah! All the comforts of,” Tony said ironically. But he took a piece of bread and butter and a large dollop of jam on a tin plate and, dusting off a seat on the steps between the front room and the rear one opening onto the garden, looked around him speculatively.

  “I suppose it’s not quite so bad from the inside. The proportions are almost all wrong, of course, but with a few changes it might just be possible. I wonder what possessed the late tenants to rip out the kitchen fittings.” He nodded toward the smaller room off the front room. “It looks as if it must have been some time ago—there’s no trace of water pipes or gas connections.”

  Jo smiled placidly. “Kitchen’s down in the basement. The door and the stairs down to it are between the built-in cupboards and the far wall in the room behind you. And there’s actually running water, which is a blessing.”

  “It may seem less a blessing when the bill comes,” Tony said sourly. “I suspect it means that the Children of Nod have gone off without settling their account with the Water Board.” He looked over his shoulder as he reached for the mug of tea Jo held out. “The room at the back would be the dining room, then. Perhaps the little one was a library. I thought it queer the only kitchenish room should be off such a front-parlourish one. It’s still peculiar, though. This doesn’t really strike one as the sort of place to have a town-housey basement kitchen, does it?” His eyes narrowed with the expression of a man beginning to be caught up in a crossword puzzle. “I think I’ll have a look round upstairs before we run the boat under cover, Roger. Parcel out the bedrooms.”

  “Fine with me,” Roger said casually, struggling to mask his pleasure.

  And then Pippa had to go and ruin it all.

  “But what about all the holes in the roof up there?” she said.

  At eleven Roger was still awake, kneeling in his briefs by the window of the bedroom he had chosen—in spite of the hole in the ceiling. But he was lost to the rising breeze, the laughter and closin
g-time murmur floating up from the riverside pub, the London Apprentice, and the insects’ song woven through the leaves and grass like a net to cradle the sleeping house until morning. For Roger knelt there in a familiar dream, leaning out the window of a room all his own—a green and brown lair, book-strewn, music-filled, with a specially made case on one wall for his swimming trophies and on the far wall his double-poster-size blowup of the funny old photograph of Tony and Jo as Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. It was a room so real that had Roger turned just then he would have been bewildered frightened even, to see it shadow-filled, its walls and floors badly splotched with damp, and nothing in it but an old safari camp bed.

  It had been a good day, all in all. To judge from the damage already done to plaster ceilings and the panelled facing of the master bedroom and dining-room fireplaces, the holes in the roof were of long standing even though they were small enough to take no more than a day or two’s repairing. Not, according to Tony, to be done by the lot who had gouged the good parquet floor into splinters. He had got a line on a roof-repair firm in Twickenham Road over a pint of bitter at the pub while Roger leaned happily on a fencepost above the slipway to watch the mud slopes disappear as the river broadened with the rising tide.

  The little stretch of Church Street along the Thames from the London Apprentice to Perry House and the Syon Park boundary wall had been a pleasant surprise: an open stretch along the river bank downstream from the old tavern’s pleasant waterside terrace, parking for cars on either side of the slipway entrance, the wooded island “ait” and, on the opposite bank, the lush green of Kew Gardens. Parallel to the river and overlooking it from across Church Street was a row of oddly assorted old houses—strangely harmonious in their variety-- and a pleasant new church in brick with only a weathered stone tower to show for the old church, burnt down some years past.

  The best of Church Street, though—or so all four Nicholases agreed—was an attractive white house with a crenellated roof-line and pinnacled corners, entry pillars, and window bays. “The swan that laid our ugly duckling,” as Jo put it, brightening noticeably. Stripped clean and bare and made to look even half so graceful, Castle Cox might be tolerably presentable after all.