Jock had always had a pack of Polo mints in his pocket. That was why he’d called her Polo, she thought. He’d passed them to her when they were at the cinema and she’d liked them, they were a clean sort of sweet, they didn’t come off on your hands. Pinch, punch, first of the month, she remembered, no returns. Just walk on by, wait on the corner…
She’d brought her lunch with her, sandwiches of grated cheese and lettuce, a small plain yogurt. You never knew what went into the flavored kind. When she’d eaten it, she wrapped the remains in newspaper, then a plastic carrier, and put the lot in Josephine’s rubbish bin in the backyard. Even touching it made a more than usually thorough wash necessary. She scrubbed her nails with a brush, left her hands soaking in clean, soapless water for five minutes afterward. When they came out and were dried, the fingers were pallid and wrinkled, which Auntie had used to call washerwoman’s hands. Minty rather liked them that way, it meant they were really clean.
It was one of those afternoons that passed uneventfully. A man came in with his seven shirts. He always did, once a week. Josephine asked him once if he hadn’t a wife or a girlfriend to bring them in for him, not to mention wash or iron them. Josephine hadn’t put it that way, but she did mention it and the man hadn’t liked it one bit. Minty thought he might not come back but take his shirts to the place down Western Avenue. As it was, he took a fortnight before reappearing and Josephine was especially nice to him, remembering how tactless she’d been.
After that there was no one until a teenager came just as they were closing and wanted to know if she could pay by installment for having her dress cleaned. It was a short red dress with bootlace shoulder straps and hardly any skirt, and Minty thought it would have washed. She’d have washed it. Josephine said, “Certainly not,” and the poor kid had to take the dress away again.
Minty walked home. She had an uneasy feeling Jock would be on the bus. He’d never yet appeared in the open air. Old Mr. Kroot was in his front garden, sweeping the path. He pretended not to see her. Maybe he hadn’t been the one who had sent that condolence card, but the home help had without him knowing. She could tell he knew she was there. Something in the way he stiffened told her that, and the way his wrinkled old hands with tree-root veins tightened on the broom handle. When she was a child he’d been quite friendly and then, one day, while his sister was staying with him, his sister and Auntie had had a row. It was about the washing line or the fence between the gardens or maybe Mr. Kroot’s cat peeing up against the bushes, something like that, but Minty couldn’t remember what. Mr. Kroot’s sister and Mr. Kroot had never spoken to Auntie again and Auntie had never spoken to them. So they’d never spoken to Minty again either.
The sister wasn’t there at the moment. She lived somewhere else, a long way from London. Mr. Kroot was all alone with his cat, which didn’t have a name. He just called it Cat. He turned and looked through her as if she were a ghost like Jock. Then he went into the house with his broom, shutting the door much harder than he normally would have. The cat came up to the door just as he’d closed it. It was so old that Minty could hardly remember a time when it wasn’t there; it must be at least twenty by now, and if you multiplied that by seven, which was what Auntie said you had to do if you wanted to work out a cat’s real age, it must be a hundred and forty.
As Minty unlocked her front door and went into the house, the cat began a deep-throated senile yowling to be let in. She half thought Jock might be in the hall, waiting for her, but there was no one and nothing there.
Would a knife have any effect on a ghost? What were ghosts made of? Minty devoted quite a lot of thought to this. Before she saw one, before one touched her, she believed them composed of shadows and smoke, vapor and some cloudlike intangible substance. Jock’s hand had been firm, exerting a strong pressure, and the seat of the chair he sat on had been warm to her touch. Was he the same person he’d been when he was on the earth? A thing of flesh and blood, not like a black-and-white photograph, a grayish moving image, but brown-haired, pink-skinned, his eyes that same dark blue? Blood-would he bleed?
She would try it. If it failed to work she’d have lost nothing. She’d just have to try some other way. Imagining it as she ran her second bath of the day, she saw the knife go into the ghost body and the ghost dissolve, disappear in a wisp of smoke or melt into a clear pool like water. There would be no sound, no cry or gasp, only a vanishing, an acknowledgment of being beaten, of her victory.
Thinking of it like this almost made her want to see him. She had her bath, using the big golden sponge that had once had a life of its own, attached to some rock in the sea. When she was done, she washed it out in hot water, then cold. One day Jock had asked if they could have a bath together, the two of them get into the water at the same time. She’d said no, she’d been shocked at the suggestion. It wasn’t what grown-up people did; it was for little kids. Besides, if she’d shared a bathful of water with him she’d only have had to take another bath on her own afterward. He never seemed to think of that.
For a moment, naked, she half wanted to see him. She opened the bathroom door, stepped outside, crossed to her bedroom. He was nowhere. In the clean clothes she’d wear for the evening, an evening of a hygienic meal, an hour of television, two hours of cleaning up, she went downstairs into the dark hall. The ghost came in darkness or in light, nothing seemed to make a difference to that. She felt it with her, all around her, though she couldn’t see it. As she was peeling her two potatoes and carving her home-cooked cold chicken, his voice came singing, like music heard from a long distance away: Today I started loving you again…
Chapter 7
ONCE SHE HAD said yes, Zillah thought she and the kids would move in with Jims and arrangements would be made for the wedding to take place later, say six months later. Jims had different ideas about that. The proprieties must be observed. The chairman of the South Wessex Conservative Association had said only last week, apropos of some local pop singer, his girlfriend, and their baby, that couples living together outside marriage should be banned from owning property and have their passports and driving licenses withdrawn. Jims could think of no surer way of losing his seat at the next election than by letting Zillah move in with him. Besides, he’d engaged the services of a PR company and the woman acting for him was doing her best to get photographs of Zillah and himself into national newspapers. That slum in Long Fredington would be an unsuitable background and his duplex in Great College Street an improper one. He took a three-month lease on a flat in a purpose-built block in Battersea with a view of the river and the Houses of Parliament from the front windows. Jims, who knew about these things, said this struck just the right note. It was more serious than Knightsbridge and less raffish than Chelsea; it was dowdy but solid, besides having a suitably political air. As to her possessions and property in Willow Cottage, he recommended she set fire to the lot, then revised this advice, remembering the owner of the house, his old pal Sir Ronald Grasmere.
Much as she’d have liked to tell Jims she was now a widow, Zillah didn’t quite dare do this. The first thing he’d have wanted to know was when did she hear of Jerry’s death and why hadn’t she told him before. So she plucked up the courage needed to tell him a lie he wouldn’t much like but would mind less than the truth. “I wasn’t actually ever really married to Jerry.”