‘I woke up …’ Nellie Meehan’s eyes blurred, as if in some visionary trance, and her voice grew rhythmic. Outside, the wind blasted away at the house which creaked and shuddered to its foundations under those powerful assaults of air. ‘I woke up that night with a terrible pain in my left shoulder, hearing this loud knocking all around, and there was Minnie, standing at the foot of the bed, right pale and sweet-faced—I was about seven, the winter she took pneumonia; we slept in the same bed then. Well, as I looked, she kept fading and fading, until she went fading clear away into nothing. I got up real careful so as not to wake Clifford, and went downstairs to make myself a pot of tea. My shoulder was hurting something terrible, and all the time I heard this knock knock knock….’
‘What was it?’ Dora Sutcliffe begged, her watery blue eyes wide. She had heard the story of Lucas’ hanging countless times, at second and third hand, but with every fresh telling the previous tales blurred, merging into one, and each time, at this juncture, she asked, eager, curious, as if part of some perpetually inquiring chorus: ‘What was knocking?’
‘First I thought it was the carpenter next door, Nellie Meehan said, ‘because he was often up till all hours hammering away in his workshop in the garage, but when I looked out the kitchen window it was pitch dark. And still I kept hearing this knock knock knock, and all the time the pain throbbing so in my shoulder. I sat up in the living-room, then, trying to read, and I must have fallen asleep, because that’s where Clifford found me when he came down to go to work in the morning. When I woke up it was dead quiet. The pain in my shoulder was gone, and the mailman came with the letter about Lucas, all bordered in black.’
‘It wasn’t a letter,’ Clifford Meehan contradicted. Without fail, at some point in her story, Nellie was carried away by inaccuracy of this sort, improvising whatever details eluded her memory at the moment. ‘It was a telegram. They couldn’t have had a letter in the post and you getting it the same morning.’
‘A telegram, then,’ Nellie Meehan acquiesced. ‘Saying: Come, Lucas dead.’
‘It must be one of your uncles, I told her,’ Clifford Meehan put in. ‘I said it couldn’t be Lucas, him so young, a real fine master joiner he was.’
‘But it was Lucas,’ Nellie Meehan said. ‘He’d hung himself that night. His daughter Daphne found him in the attic. Imagine.’
‘Just imagine,’ Dora Sutcliffe breathed. Her hand, as if independent of her motionless, attentive body, reached for a buttered scone.
‘It was the war,’ Cousin Herbert announced suddenly in sepulchral tones, his very voice gone rusty from disuse. ‘No lumber to be had for love nor money.’
‘Well, however it might be, there was Lucas,’ Clifford Meehan knocked his pipe against the grate and took out his tobacco pouch. ‘Just made partner of his joining firm. Only a few days before he went and hung himself, he’d stood out where the new apartments were going up and said to his old boss, Dick Green-wood: “I wonder, will these apartments ever get built.” Folks spoke to him the night he did it, and noticed nothing wrong.’
‘It was his wife, Agnes,’ Nellie Meehan maintained, shaking her head sadly as she recalled the fate of her departed brother, her brown eyes gentle as a cow’s. ‘Agnes killed him sure as if she’d poisoned him; never a kind word had Agnes. She just let him worry, worry, worry to his death. Sold his clothes at an auction, too, straight off, and bought a sweet shop with the money she took in, that and what he’d left her.’
‘Fancy!’ Dora Sutcliffe sniffed. ‘I always said there was something mean about Agnes. She kept handkerchiefs over her scales, and everything in her shop was just that many coppers dearer than anywhere else. I bought a Christmas cake off Agnes only two years back and priced one exactly like it in Halifax the next week. Half a crown more, Agnes’ cake was.’
Clifford Meehan tamped the fresh tobacco down in his pipe. ‘Lucas went driving about the pubs with his daughter Daphne on the very night,’ he said slowly: he, too, had told his part of the story so many times, and each time it seemed to him as though he were pausing here, expectant, waiting for some clear light to spring out of his own words, to illumine and explain the bleak, threadbare facts of the going of Lucas. ‘Lucas went upstairs after dinner, and when Daphne called him down to drive out, it was a couple of minutes before he came—his face was puffed funny, Daphne said afterwards, and his lips kind of purple. Well, they stopped for a few bitters at the Black Bull, as was Lucas’ habit of a Thursday night, and when he came back home, after sitting about downstairs with Daphne and Agnes a bit, he put his hands down on the arms of his chair and heaved himself up—I remember him getting up like that a hundred times—and said “I guess I’ll go get ready.” Daphne went up a little later and called to Agnes: “Pa’s not upstairs.” Then Daphne started up the attic steps; it was the only other place he could have been. And there she found him, hanging from the rafter, stone dead.’
‘There was a hole bored in the middle rafter,’ Nellie Meehan said. ‘Lucas had fixed a swing up there for Daphne when she was just a young thing, and he strung the rope he hung himself with through that very hole.’
‘They found scuff marks on the floor,’ Clifford Meehan reported, coldly factual as the account in the yellowed newspaper dated nine years back preserved in Nellie’s family album, ‘where Lucas tried to hang himself the first time, just before he went out, only the rope was too long. But when he came back he cut it short enough.’
‘I wonder Lucas could do it,’ Dora Sutcliffe sighed. ‘Like I wonder about my brother-in-law Gerald.’
‘Aye, Gerald was a fine man,’ Nellie Meehan sympathized. ‘Stout and red-faced, husky as you could wish. What’ll Myra do with the farm, now he’s gone?’
‘Ee, Lord knows,’ Dora Sutcliffe said. ‘It was in and out of hospital with Gerald this past winter. On account of his kidneys. Myra said the doctor’d just told him he’d have to go back again, they still weren’t right. And Myra all alone now. Her daughter Beatrice married the one who’s experimenting with cows down in South Africa.’
‘I wonder your brother Jake’s kept on so chipper, like he has these thirty years, Nellie,’ Clifford Meehan mused, taking up that fugue of family phantoms, his voice melancholy as a man’s might be whose two stalwart sons had left him in his old age, the one for Australia and the sheep farms, the other for Canada and a flighty secretary named Janeen. ‘With that witch of a wife Esther and his one surviving daughter Cora twenty-eight and numb as a tree. I remember Jake coming to our place, before he married Esther …’
‘Those days absolutely shone with bright and funny conversation,’ Nellie Meehan interrupted, her own smile pale and wistful, as if already frozen in some dated family photograph.
‘… coming to our place and throwing himself down on the sofa and saying: “Don’t know as I ought to marry Esther; she’s in weak health, always talking about ailments and hospital.” Sure enough, one week after they were married, Esther’s in hospital having an operation that cost Jake a hundred pound; she’d been saving it up till he’d married her and would have to pay for the whole do.’
‘Slaved all his life for his woolen mill, my brother Jake did,’ Nellie Meehan stirred the cold dregs of her tea. ‘And now he’s a fortune and ready to see the world, and Esther won’t stir a step out of the house; just sits and nags at that poor silly Cora; wouldn’t even let her be put in a home where she’d be among her own kind. Always taking herbs and potions, Esther is. When Gabriel was on the way, the only good one of the lot, right in his senses, after that queer Albert was born with his tongue in wrong, Jake came right out and told Esther: “If you ruin this one, I’ll kill you.” And then pneumonia took the two boys, good and bad, not seven years after.’
Nellie Meehan turned her tender eyes on the red embers in the grate as if the hearts of all those dead glowed there. ‘But they’re waiting.’ Her voice dropped, low and reassuring as a lullaby. ‘They come back.’ Clifford Meehan puffed slowly on his pipe. Cousin Herbert sat stone-still; the
fading fire carved his brooding features in stark light and shadow, as if out of rock. ‘I know,’ Nellie Meehan whispered, almost to herself. ‘I’ve seen them.’
‘You mean,’ Dora Sutcliffe shivered in the thin, chill draft sifting through the window-frame at her back, ‘you’ve seen ghosts, Nellie?’ Dora Sutcliffe’s question was rhetorical; she never tired of Nellie Meehan’s accounts of her spasmodic commerce with the spirit world.
‘Not ghosts, exactly, Dora,’ Nellie Meehan said quietly, modest and reserved as always about her strange gift, ‘but presences. I’ve come into a room and I’ve felt somebody standing there, big as life. And it’s often I’ve said to myself: “If you could just see that bit harder, Nellie Meehan, you’d see them plain as day.”’
‘Dreams!’ Cousin Herbert’s voice rasped harsh. ‘Stuff!’
As if Cousin Herbert were not in the room, as if his words met deaf ears, the three others spoke and gestured. Dora Sutcliffe rose to leave. ‘Clifford’ll walk you up Slack way,’ Nellie Meehan said.
Cousin Herbert got up, without another word, his shoulders hunched, as if labouring under some great, private, unspeakable pain. He turned his back on the group about the fire and stalked to bed, his footsteps hollow and heavy on the stairs.
Nellie Meehan saw her husband and Dora Sutcliffe to the door and waved them off into the gusts of wind and drifting moon-haze. For a minute she stood in the doorway, gazing after those two figures vanished in the dark, feeling a cold more deadly than any knife strike to the marrow of her bones. Then she closed the door and went back toward the parlor to clear away the tea things. As she entered the parlor, she stopped, stunned. There, in front of the flowered upholstered sofa, hung, a few inches above the floor, a column of dazzle—not so much a light bodied on the air, but a blur superimposed upon the familiar background, a misting across the sofa, and the mahogany china cabinet behind it, and the sprigged rose and forget-me-not wallpaper. As Nellie Meehan watched, the blur began to shape itself into a vaguely familiar form, its features pale, solidifying like ice on the vaporous air until it bulked real as Nellie Meehan herself. Nellie Meehan stood, unblinking, and with her steady eyes fixed the bright apparition. ‘I know you, Maisie Edwards,’ she said in soft, placating tones. ‘You’re looking for your Katherine. Well you won’t find her here any more. She’s living away now, away down in Todmorden.’
And then, almost apologetically, Nellie Meehan turned her back on the glimmering form, which still hung in the air, to stack and wash the tea service before Clifford returned. It was with a queer new lightness in her head that she noticed the plump, tiny little woman propped stiff, mouth open, eyes staring, stock-still in the rocking chair next to the tea table. As Nellie Meehan gaped, she felt the encroaching cold take the last sanctum of her heart; with a sigh that was a slow, released breath, she saw the delicate blue willow pattern of the saucer showing clear through the translucence of her own hand and heard, as if echoing down a vaulted corridor sibilant with expectant, gossiping shadows, the voice at her back greeting her like a glad hostess who has waited long for a tardy guest: ‘Well,’ said Maisie Edwards, ‘it’s about time, Nellie.’
Day of Success
Ellen was on her way to the bedroom with an armload of freshly folded nappies when the phone rang, splintering the stillness of the crisp autumn morning. For a moment she froze on the threshold, taking in the peaceful scene as if she might never see it again—the delicate rose-patterned wallpaper, the forest-green cord drapes she’d hemmed by hand while waiting for the baby to come, the old-fashioned four-poster inherited from a loving but moneyless aunt, and, in the corner, the pale pink crib holding sound asleep six-month old Jill, the centre of it all.
Please don’t let it change, she begged of whatever fates might be listening. Let the three of us stay happy as this forever.
Then the shrill, demanding bell roused her, and she stowed the pile of clean nappies on the big bed and went to pick up the receiver reluctantly, as if it were some small, black instrument of doom.
‘Is Jacob Ross there?’ inquired a cool, clear feminine voice. ‘Denise Kay speaking.’ Ellen’s heart sank as she pictured the elegantly-groomed red-headed woman at the other end of the wire. She and Jacob had been to lunch with the brilliant young television producer only a month before to discuss the progress of the play Jacob was working on—his first. Even at that early date, Ellen had secretly hoped Denise would be struck by lightning or spirited to Australia rather than have her thrown together with Jacob in the crowded, intimate days of rehearsal—author and producer collaborating on the birth of something wonderful, uniquely theirs.
‘No, Jacob’s not home at the moment.’ It occurred to Ellen, a bit guiltily, how easy it would be to call Jacob down from Mrs Frankfort’s flat for such an obviously important message. His finished script had been in Denise Kay’s office for almost two weeks now, and she knew by the way he ran down the three flights of stairs each morning to meet the postman how eager he was to hear the verdict. Still, hadn’t she promised to behave like a model secretary and leave his hours of writing time uninterrupted? ‘This is his wife, Miss Kay,’ she added, with perhaps unnecessary emphasis. ‘May I take a message, or have Jacob call you later?’
‘Good news,’ Denise said briskly. ‘My boss is enthusiastic about the play. A bit odd, he thinks, but beautifully original, so we’re buying it. I’m really thrilled to be the producer.’
This is it, Ellen thought miserably, unable to see anything for the vision of that smooth-sheened coppery head bent with Jacob’s dark one over a thick mimeographed script. The beginning of the end.
‘That’s wonderful, Miss Kay. I … I know Jacob will be delighted.’
‘Fine. I’d like to see him for lunch today, if I may, to talk about casting. We’ll be wanting some name actors, I think. Could you possibly ask him to pick me up in my office about noon?’
‘Of course …’
‘Righto. Goodbye, then.’ And the receiver descended with a businesslike click.
Bewildered by an alien and powerful emotion, Ellen stood at the window, the confident, musical voice that could offer success casually as a bunch of hothouse grapes echoing in her ears. As her gaze lingered on the green square below, its patch-barked plane trees thrusting into the luminous blue sky above the shabby housefronts, a leaf, dull gold as a threepenny bit, let go and waltzed slowly to the pavement. Later in the day, the square would be loud with motorbikes and the shouts of children. One summer afternoon Ellen had counted twenty-five youngsters within view of her bench under the plane trees: untidy, boisterous, laughing—a miniature United Nations milling about the geranium-planted plot of grass and up the narrow, cat-populated alleys.
How often she and Jacob had promised themselves the legendary cottage by the sea, far from the city’s petrol fumes and smoke railroad yards—a garden, a hill, a cove for Jill to explore, an unhurried, deeply-savoured peace!
Just one play sale, darling,’ Jacob had said earnestly. ‘Then I’ll know I can do it, and we’ll take the risk.’ The risk, of course, was moving away from this busy centre of jobs—odd jobs, part-time jobs, jobs Jacob could manage with relative ease while writing every spare minute—and depending solely on his chancy income from stories, plays and poems. Poems! Ellen smiled in spite of herself, remembering the gloomy, bill-harrassed day before Jill’s birth, just after they’d moved into the new flat.
She’d been down on her knees, laboriously slapping light grey lino paint on the depressing, chewed-up hundred-year-old floor boards when the postman rang. ‘I’ll go.’ Jacob laid down the saw he was using to cut bookshelf lengths. ‘You want to save yourself stairs, love.’ Ever since Jacob had begun sending manuscripts to magazines the postman, in his blue uniform, was a sort of possible magic godfather. Any day, instead of the disheartening fat manila envelopes and the impersonal printed rejection slips, there might be an encouraging letter from an editor or even …
‘Ellen! Ellen!’ Jacob took the steps two at a time, w
aving the opened airmail envelope. ‘I’ve done it! Isn’t it beautiful!’ And he dropped into her lap the pale blue, yellow-bordered cheque with the amazing amount of dollars in black and the cents in red. The glossy American weekly she’d addressed an envelope to a month before was delighted with Jacob’s contribution. They paid a pound a line and Jacob’s poem was long enough to buy—what? After giggling over the possibility of theatre tickets, dinner in Soho, pink champagne, the cloud of commonsense began to settle.
‘You decide,’ Jacob bowed, handing her the cheque, frail and gay as a rare butterfly. ‘What does your heart desire?’
Ellen didn’t need to think twice. ‘A pram,’ she said softly. ‘A great big beautiful pram with room enough for twins!’
*
Ellen toyed with the idea of saving Denise’s message until Jacob came loping downstairs for lunch—too late to meet the attractive producer at her office—but immediately felt profoundly ashamed of herself. Any other wife would have called her husband to the phone excitedly, breaking all writing-schedule rules for this exceptional news, or at least rushed to him the minute she hung up, proud to be the bearer of such good tidings. I’m jealous, Ellen told herself dully. I’m a regular jet-propelled, twentieth-century model of the jealous wife, small-minded and spiteful. Like Nancy Regan. This thought pulled her up short, and she headed purposefully into the kitchen to brew herself a cup of coffee.
I’m just stalling, she realized wryly, putting the pot on the stove. Still, as long as Jacob remained unaware of Denise Kay’s news, she felt, half-superstitiously, she would be safe—safe from Nancy’s fate.
Jacob and Keith Regan had been schoolmates, served in Africa together, and come back to postwar London determined to avoid the subtle pitfalls of full-time bowler-hat jobs which would distract them from the one thing that mattered: writing. Now waiting for the water to boil, Ellen recalled those down-at-heel yet challenging months she and Nancy Regan had swapped budget recipes and the secret woes and worries of all wives whose husbands are unsalaried idealists, patching body and soul together by nightwatching, gardening, any odd job that happened to turn up.