The Ghost Road

  Moffet levered himself off the edge of the bed.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘Don’t know. Weird.’

  ‘Do you want to try a few steps?’ Awkwardly, like untalented dancers, they shuffled across the floor, the curtains ballooning out around them. Rivers put his hands up and loosened Moffet’s grip. ‘No, you’re all right, I’ve got you.’ Two steps, then Moffet fell forward into his arms. Rivers lowered him back on to the bed. ‘I think that’s probably enough for now.’

  Moffet collapsed against the pillows.

  ‘It’s important to keep at it, but I wouldn’t try it just yet without an orderly.’ He hesitated. ‘You know we’re going to have to talk about why this happened.’

  He waited, but Moffet remained stubbornly silent.

  ‘I’ll be along again later.’

  Later that afternoon, Major Telford – as he must now remember to call him – sidled up and tapped him discreetly on the shoulder. ‘Yes, Major Telford, what is it?’

  A conspiratorial whisper. ‘Spot of bother in the latrines.’

  Rivers followed him into the wash-room, wondering which bit of Telford’s anatomy had dropped off now.

  Telford pointed to the bathroom. ‘Chap’s been in there ages.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Keeps groaning. Well, he did – stopped now.’

  Rivers rattled the handle. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Tried that, it’s locked.’

  It couldn’t be – there weren’t any locks. Rivers lay down and looked under the door. A lot of water had slopped on to the floor, he could see an arm drooping over the edge of the bath – a puffy, white arm with blood oozing from the wrist. A chair had been wedged under the door handle. He tried pushing it, but it was no use. He stood up and kicked. The door was hardly thicker than cardboard – the bathrooms were mere cubicles put in cheaply when the War Office adapted the hospital for military use – and the second kick broke the hinges. He burst into the room, startled by his own face in the looking-glass. Moffet lay in the bath, pink water lapping the shining belly as it rose and fell. Breathing anyway. His head had slipped to one side, but his nostrils were clear of the water. A whisky bottle skittered across the floor as Rivers knelt by the bath. Cuts on both wrists, superficial on the right – deep on the left. Loss of blood probably fairly heavy, but you can never bloody well tell in water. He pushed Moffet’s eyelids up, smelled his breath, felt for the pulse …

  ‘Dead, is he?’ Telford asked cheerfully.

  Dead drunk. ‘I think he’ll be all right.’

  Lack of space was the problem. Barely enough room to squeeze between the wash-basin and the bath at knee height. He had to bend from the waist to get his hands round Moffet’s chest and then his fingertips slipped on the cold, plump skin. Telford stood, looking on.

  ‘Get his legs.’

  They heaved, but without co-ordination, Rivers finally managing to haul the shoulders out of the water just as Telford grew tired of waiting and dropped the legs back in. They were gasping for breath, shoulders bumping in the confined space.

  ‘All right, together,’ Rivers said. ‘One, two …’

  Moffet came clear, only to fall back with a splash, a great plume of water flying up and drenching them both.

  ‘I’ll try to get m’leg under him,’ Telford said.

  They lifted again, and Telford stepped into the water so that Moffet was balanced across his thigh, Rivers supporting the head and shoulders. They froze like that, an improbable and vaguely obscene pietà. ‘All right?’ Rivers asked.

  ‘Right, I’ve got him.’

  They collapsed in a heap on the floor, blood from Moffet’s left wrist flowing more copiously now, bright, distinct drops splashing on to the mottled tiles. Rivers dragged a clean towel off the rail and pressed it hard against the deepest cut. ‘There, you take over,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Sister Roberts. Just press now, no need for anything else. No tourniquets.’

  ‘Shouldn’t dream of it,’ Telford said, fluffing his shoulders.

  Rivers intercepted Sister Roberts on her way down the ward. ‘Moffet,’ he said, pointing behind him. ‘He’s slashed his wrists. We need a wheelchair.’

  He returned to find Telford entertaining the now semi-conscious Moffet with a story about an inexperienced groom who’d applied a tourniquet to the leg of his favourite hunter. ‘Gangrene set in, would you believe? We had to shoot the poor sod.’ Telford looked down at the fluttering lids. ‘And it was only a graze.’

  Moffet flapped like a landed fish, moaned, vomited yellow bile. Rivers tapped his cheek. ‘Have you taken anything?’

  Sister Roberts came creaking to the door with a wheelchair. Telford looked up at her, horrified, whipped a flannel off the side of the bath and draped it over Moffet’s genitals.

  ‘For God’s sake, man,’ Rivers snapped. ‘She’s a nurse.’ Though with Telford’s history it probably wasn’t Sister Roberts’s modesty he thought he was protecting. ‘If you could get us a couple of blankets,’ he said, twisting in the narrow space.

  Moffet’s head lolled to one side as they hauled him into the chair and wrapped blankets round him, though Rivers was beginning to suspect he was less drowsy than he seemed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, straightening up. ‘I think I can manage now, Major Telford. Thank you, you’ve been a great help.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ He looked down at Moffet and sniffed. ‘Helps break up the afternoon. Anyway, what’s all this Major nonsense?’ he demanded, punching Rivers playfully in the biceps. ‘Don’t be such a stuffed shirt, man.’

  And off he went, whistling ‘A Bachelor Gay Am I’.

  They wheeled Moffet into a side ward, since nothing is worse for morale on a ‘shell-shock’ ward than a suicide attempt. Except a successful suicide of course. He remembered the man at Craiglockhart who’d succeeded in hanging himself. Quite apart from his own tragedy he’d undone weeks of careful work on other people.

  The deepest gash required stitching. Rivers set to work immediately, and was rather surprised to find Moffet stoical. He watched the needle dip in and out, only licking his lips once towards the end.

  ‘There,’ Rivers said. ‘All done.’

  Moffet rolled his head restlessly. ‘I didn’t make a very good job of it, did I?’

  ‘Not many people do. The only person I’ve ever known to succeed by that method was a surgeon – he virtually severed his left hand.’ He got up and stretched his legs, pressing a hand hard into the small of his back. ‘How much whisky did you have?’

  ‘Half a bottle. Bit more perhaps.’

  No point talking to him, then.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘My mother. Does it matter?’

  ‘And the razor?’

  Moffet looked puzzled. ‘Mine.’

  ‘All right. You try to get some sleep.’

  ‘Will you have to tell the police?’

  ‘No.’ Rivers looked down at him. ‘You’re a soldier. You’re under military discipline.’

  He found Sister Roberts waiting for him. ‘I’m afraid we can’t let this go,’ he said. ‘The lockers are supposed to be searched regularly.’

  ‘I’ll ask Miss Banbury. She was the last person to do it.’

  She was also Sister Roberts’s bête noire, for no better reason than that she was well-meaning, clumsy, enthusiastic, unqualified and upper class.

  ‘His mother gave him the whisky.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m surprised. Silly woman.’

  Sister Roberts, as he knew from numerous air-raid conversations of the previous winter, was the eldest girl in a family of eleven. She’d clawed her way out of the Gateshead slums and therefore felt obliged to believe in the corrosive effects on the human psyche of good food, good housing and good education.

  ‘Telford was a bit of a revelation, wasn’t he?’ she said. ‘Surprisingly cool.’

  ‘Oh, Telford’s fine. Until he opened his big mouth nobody noticed he was mad.’ He added,
not entirely as an afterthought, ‘He works at the War Office.’

  Outside in the corridor he met Wansbeck, now much better though surely not well enough to be up and about.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Rivers asked.

  ‘Bit weak. Throat’s still sore, but I’m not coughing as much.’

  ‘You’d be better off in bed. Go on, back with you.’

  As the doors banged shut behind Wansbeck, Rivers became aware of an insistent clicking. Nothing to account for it. The long corridor stretched ahead, empty, its grey, palely shining floor faintly marked with the shadows of the window frames. Click, click, click. And then he realized the sound was being caused by the bobbles on the end of the blind strings, tapping against each other in the slight breeze. But identifying the sound didn’t seem to lessen its potency. It was almost the sound of a yacht’s rigging, but the memory went deeper than that.

  He had reached the lift before he managed to dredge it up. That day Njiru took him to see the skull houses at Pa Na Gundu, they’d walked for miles in sweltering heat, scarcely a breath of wind, and no sound except the buzzing of flies. Then, abruptly, they came out into a clearing, sharp blades of sunlight slanting down between the trees, and ahead of them, rising up the slope, six or seven skull houses, their gratings ornamented with strings of dangling shells. The feeling of being watched that skulls always gave you. Dazzled by the sudden light, he followed Njiru up the slope, towards a knot of shadows, and then one of the shadows moved, resolving itself into the shape of Nareti, the blind mortuary priest who squatted there, all pointed knees and elbows, snail trails of pus running from the corners of his eyes.

  The furthest of the skull houses was being repaired, and its occupants had been taken out and arranged on the ground so that at first sight the clearing seemed to be cobbled with skulls. He’d hung back, not sure how close he was permitted to approach, and at that moment a sudden fierce gust of wind shook the trees and all the strings of votary shells rattled and clicked together.

  The lift doors clanged open in his face, startling him back into the present day.

  Five

  Ada Lumb always wore black, less in mourning for her husband – if she’d ever had one – than because black enabled an air of awesome respectability to be maintained at minimal cost.

  Respectability was Ada’s god. She’d arrived in this neighbourhood eighteen years before, recently widowed, or so she claimed, with two pretty, immaculately dressed little girls in tow. The house had belonged to a man called Dirty Dick, who rambled and muttered and frightened children on street corners. Yellowing newspapers were stacked high in every room. Within a few weeks Ada had the house painted, doorstep scrubbed, range black-leaded, net curtains up at every window. At a safe distance from the house, she bought a lock-up shop, selling boiled boots, second-hand clothes and – below the counter – a great variety of patent medicines designed to procure abortion or cure clap. Pennyroyal Syrup, Dr Lawson’s Cure for Female Blockages and Obstructions, Dr Morse’s Invigorating Cordial, Curtis’s Manhood, Sir Samuel Hannay’s Specific, Bumstead’s Gleet Cure, The Unfortunate’s Friend, and Davy’s Lac-Elephantis, a foul-smelling suspension of chalk and God knows what, which claimed to be the medicated milk of elephants.

  But on Sundays she locked up the shop and entertained the Vicar, the Rev. Arthur Lindsey, in a room which might have been designed as a stage set for the purpose. Dark oak furniture, plants with thick, durable, rubbery leaves – Ada had no patience with flowers, always drooping and dying – and, prominently displayed on a side table, the family Bible, open at a particularly fortifying text. In this setting Ada poured tea into china cups, dabbed her rat trap of a mouth with a starched napkin and engaged in light, or, in deference to the Sabbath, improving conversation on the topics of the day.

  Billy Prior sat at the other end of the table, a concession to his new status as future son-in-law. No more material concessions had been forthcoming: he and Sarah had not been left alone together for a second. Though Ada was gratified by the engagement. She believed in marriage, the more strongly, Prior suspected, for never having sampled it herself. You don’t know that, he reminded himself. But then he looked round the room and thought, Yes, I do. Photographs of Sarah and Cynthia stood on the sideboard, but none of the grandparents, none of their father. No portrait of Ada-the-blushing-bride. And the fortifying text she’d selected for display was the chapter of the Book of Job in which Eliphaz the Temanite visits his friend and seeks to console him for the plague of boils which covers his skin from crown to sole by pointing out that he had it coming. One thing Ada did have was a sense of humour. Oh, and an eye for male flesh. Yesterday he’d helped her hang curtains, and her gaze on his groin as she handed the curtains up had been so frankly appraising he’d almost blushed. You might fool Lindsey, he thought, but you don’t fool me.

  He made an effort to attend to the conversation. They were talking about the granting of the vote to women of thirty and over, an act of which Ada strongly disapproved. It had pleased Almighty God, she said, to create the one sex visibly and unmistakably superior to the other, and that was all there was to be said in the matter. From the way Lindsey simpered and giggled, one could only assume he thought he knew which sex was meant. He was one of those Anglo-Catholic young men who waft about in a positive miasma of stale incense and seminal fluid. Prior knew the type – biblically as well.

  Sarah touched the teapot, and stood up. ‘I think this could do with freshening. Billy?’

  ‘Does it take two of you, Sarah?’

  ‘I need Billy to open the door, Mother.’

  In the kitchen she burst out, ‘Honestly, what century does she think she’s living in?’

  Prior shrugged. From the kitchen window Melbourne Terrace sloped steeply down, a shoal of red-grey roofs half hidden in swathes of mist and rain. He wondered whether Ada had taken this house for the view, for the sweep of cobbled road, the rows and rows of smoking chimney-stacks, was as dramatic in its way as a mountain range, and, for Ada, rather more significant. For there, below her, was the life she’d saved her daughters from: scabby-mouthed children, women with black eyes, bedbugs, street fights, marriage lines pasted to the inside of the front window to humiliate neighbours who had none of their own to display. He could quite see how the vote might seem irrelevant to a woman engaged in such a battle.

  Sarah came across and joined him by the window, putting her arms round his chest from behind and resting her face against his shoulder. ‘I hope it’s nicer tomorrow. You haven’t had much luck with the weather, have you?’

  Wasn’t all he hadn’t had. He turned to face her. ‘When are we going to get some time alone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll work something out.’

  ‘Look, you could pretend to go to work, and –’

  ‘I can’t pretend to go to work, Billy. We need the money. Come on, she’ll be wondering where we are.’

  Prior found a plate of lardy cake thrust into his hand, and followed her back into the front room.

  They found Lindsey confiding his ideas for next week’s sermon – he was attracted to the idea of sacrifice, he said. Are you indeed? thought Prior, plonking the plate down. Cynthia, not long widowed, was hanging on every word, probably on her mother’s instructions: she was by far the more biddable of the two girls. Sitting down, Prior nudged Lindsey’s foot under the table and was delighted to see a faint blush begin around the dog collar and work its way upwards. A sidelong, flickering glance, a brushing and shying away of eyes, and … You’re wasting your lardy cake on that one, Ma, Prior told his future mother-in-law silently, folding his arms.

  After Lindsey had gone, Ada changed into her weekday dress and settled down with a bag of humbugs and a novel. She sat close to the fire, raising her skirt high enough to reveal elastic garters and an expanse of white thigh. As her skirt warmed through, a faint scent of urine rose from it, for Ada, as he knew from Sarah, followed the old custom and when taken short in the street
straddled her legs like a mare and pissed in the gutter. His being allowed to witness these intimacies was another concession to the ring on Sarah’s finger.

  The young people gathered round the piano, and, after the requisite number of hymns had been thumped and bellowed through, passed on to sentimental favourites from before the war.

  ‘You’ll know this one, Ma,’ Prior said, drawing out the vowel sounds, ogling her over his shoulder. Rather to his surprise, she sang with him.

  For her beauty was sold,

  For an old man’s gold,

  She’s just a bird in a gilded cage!

  ‘By heck, it was never my luck,’ Ada said, going back to her book.

  Prior glanced at his watch. ‘Do you fancy a turn round the block?’ he asked Sarah, closing the piano lid.

  ‘Yes.’ A quick glance at Cynthia.

  ‘I’m too tired,’ said Cynthia.

  ‘You’re never thinking of walking in this?’ Ada said. ‘Listen at it. It’s blowing a gale.’

  It was too.

  ‘Anyway it’s work tomorrow, our Sarah,’ Ada said, closing her book. ‘I think we’d all be better for an early night. Are you comfortable on that sofa, Billy?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ Except there’s this ruddy great pole sticking into the cushions.

  ‘You might try lying on your back.’

  They’d have burnt her in the Middle Ages. Sarah brought down blankets and pillows from her bedroom, and, watched by Ada from the foot of the stairs, kissed him chastely goodnight.

  It’s my embarkation leave, he wanted to howl. We’re engaged.

  The door closed behind her. He wasn’t ready for bed – or rather he wasn’t ready for bed alone. He took off his tunic and boots, wandered round the room, looked at photographs, finally threw himself on to the sofa and picked up Ada’s discarded novel.

  Ada had a great stock of books. A few romances, which she read with every appearance of enjoyment, gurgles of laughter erupting from the black bombazine like a hot spring from volcanic earth. But she preferred penny dreadfuls, which she read propped up against the milk bottle as she prepared the evening meal. Fingerprints, translucent with butter, encrusted with batter, sticky with jam, edged every page. Bloody thumbprints led up to one particularly gory murder. All the books had murders in them, all carried out by women. Aristocratic ladies ranged abroad, pushing their husbands into rivers, off balconies, over cliffs, under trains or, in the case of the more domestically inclined, feminine type of woman, remained at home and jalloped them to death. Only the final pages were free of cooking stains, and for a long time this puzzled him, until he realized that, in the final chapter, the adulterous murderesses were caught and punished. Ada had no truck with that. Her heroines got away with it.