The post coming, the rattle of the letter box, the thump of something falling on the doormat, and the crash of the lid closing again, distracted her. A welcome interruption that sent her downstairs, still combing her wet hair. She never got much post. What came was mostly services bills and advertisements from estate agents wanting to sell her houses in St. John’s Wood. Like Auntie, when an unfamiliar envelope arrived she spent a long time scrutinizing it, studying the postmark, deciphering the handwriting, or frowning over the printing, before putting her thumb under the flap and opening it. Here was the usual junk mail and with it a mysterious package. It was a thick, padded brown envelope, the likes of which she’d never received before, and her name and address were written on a white label. It had cost more to send than ordinary first-class mail. Carefully, she slit the flap and opened it.
Inside was money. Twenty fifty-pound notes, held together with an elastic band. No letter, no card, nothing else. But she knew who it was from: Mrs. Lewis. She was dead but there must be someone still on earth she could get to do this for her, someone else she’d haunted and spoken to. Maybe Jock had had a brother or sister; he’d never said he hadn’t. Minty decided that was who it was, a brother who’d inherited the money Mrs. Lewis left. She’d not ignored the things Minty had said about giving back her money; they’d struck a nerve and when she appeared to her son she’d asked him what she ought to do.
Maybe that’s what they’d been talking about, that crowd whose anonymous voices had jabbered and whispered in the bedroom. Give her back the money, Mother, they’d been saying, and though she’d argued and perhaps Jock had argued too, the brother and his wife had told her it was only right to return the money. It was the only explanation. Not all Jock owed, though, only a thousand. Minty could hear-in her mind’s ear, not ghosts talking-that mean old Mrs. Lewis insisting on the smaller sum and winning her son over.
Mr. Kroot’s old cat was asleep in one of Sonovia’s armchairs. As usual, because it never sat sphinxlike as most cats do, but lay stretched out and slack, it looked dead. You had to examine it closely to discern the minuscule rise and fall of its thin side.
“It’s moved in, my deah.” Sonovia contemplated the cat with detachment. “It turned up on the doorstep and that was that. I must say, it’s easier giving it its food in here than going round to that dirty place. Ooh, the smell in that kitchen, you wouldn’t believe it. What Gertrude Pierce did with herself all the time she was here I never will know. Laf went in to see the old man, you know. Went into the hospital, I mean. I said not to. What have they ever done for us, I said. But he would do it.”
“Let bygones be bygones,” said Laf, the peacemaker. “I mean, I don’t know for a fact if he said that about going back to the jungle. It was repeated third-hand to me. It might have got sort of distorted on the way. He’s in a bad way, Minty. I took him a half-bottle of Scotch, he’s not supposed to have it in there, but you should have seen him. His whole face lit up. It’s a terrible thing to be old and alone.”
“I’m alone.” As she spoke Minty heard the voices returning, at first like the murmur of a crowd a long way off, then jostling each other and interrupting and sometimes laughing so that she couldn’t make out a single word. As if Laf and Sonovia weren’t there or didn’t matter, she said, “Well, I suppose I’ve always got people with me. Wish I didn’t. You can have too much of that.”
The Wilsons exchanged glances and Laf went to get the drinks. Sonovia and Minty went into the garden and sat down in the patio chairs, and Minty admired her neighbors’ hanging baskets. The garden was all dahlias and hollyhocks now, the lawn yellowing from the drought. Not a breath of wind stirred the boughs of the cherry tree. The sky was colorless, a sheet of unbroken whitish cloud in which the sun showed like a pool of dull yellow. Laf came out with a tray on which were tall glasses filled with amber liquid surfaced by maraschino cherries and chunks of apple and cucumber. Pimms was his summer craze. He offered the drinks proudly and handed round a dish of macadamia nuts.
“Not cold, are you, my deah?” Sonovia said to Minty, who had shivered. She’d just heard Jock’s voice say, “I can tell you’re an old-fashioned girl, Polo. There aren’t many around like you.”
“Something walked on my grave.” Minty was afraid to say it. She made herself, as if it were a way of forcing the ghost voice to go away. “Or maybe on Auntie’s, over in the cemetery.” She saw Sonovia and Laf exchange glances again, but she pretended she hadn’t. It couldn’t have been Jock’s voice; she’d banished him and he’d gone. She’d imagined it or the drink had brought it on. She shivered again and remembered what she’d come for in the first place. “You had the builders in last spring, doing something in the kitchen.”
“That’s right, Minty.” Laf was always relieved when she said normal, ordinary things, when she talked your language. He smiled encouragingly. “It was when we had the new units put in.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“That depends on what it is,” said Sonovia, but Laf said, “Of course we will. That goes without saying.”
“Well, then, will you tell them to come next door and look at my bathroom and work out what putting a shower in would cost?”
“Nothing easier. And when he comes Sonny will let him in and keep an eye on him while he’s there.”
When she’d first seen him-that is, seen his ghost-he hadn’t spoken. He’d been silent and somehow menacing, so that he’d frightened her the way he never had done when he was alive. She remembered very clearly how she’d come home from work and seen him sitting in that chair with his back to her, his hair dark brown, his neck brown, and his leather jacket black. His feet had shuffled back as if he’d meant to get up and that was when she’d shut her eyes because she was afraid to see his face. When she opened them again the ghost was gone but she knew he’d been there because when she felt the seat of the chair it was warm. She thought he might follow her upstairs but he hadn’t, he hadn’t been upstairs, not that time. Later on she saw him in that room again and in the hall and in her bedroom. She saw him in the shop. He’d never spoken.
Most people would say it was worse to see a ghost than to hear one. She wasn’t so sure. Auntie and Mrs. Lewis had chattered away and been very clearly visible. When Jock spoke to her it was against a background of voices muttering and whispering but only his words were understandable. The rest of it was like a twittering in a foreign language, it was like those Iranian people talked when they came out of the house opposite in a crowd. She’d rid herself of Jock’s ghost and his mother’s ghost by stabbing them with those long knives. But you couldn’t be free of sounds that way. You’d somehow have to block your ears.
Like the ghosts she could see, the ghosts she could hear weren’t there all the time. At night there was peace. Then she had silence in which to think. Stabbing the ghosts had maybe only got rid of the sight of them but she now knew it wasn’t permanent. It worked for a while but only a while, and when the ghosts came back they let their voices come first to warn her that soon she’d see them. Putting flowers on Auntie’s grave had been even more effective than the stabbings, for she’d never seen or heard Auntie again. Jock must have a grave somewhere, his mother must have a grave. If she could find out where those graves were she could put flowers on them as well.
When the voices had been with her for a week and Jock had said all the things to her that he used to say-Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, you’re an old-fashioned girl, Polo, it’s only April Fools’ Day till twelve and after that it’s Tailpike Day, only two thousand, Minty, it’s our future that’s at stake-she went into the cemetery by her usual gate, stopping on the way to buy flowers from the man with the stall. It was a Saturday but there was hardly anyone about. This time she’d brought a bottle of water, cold from the kitchen tap, to refill the vase. She bought pale yellow chrysanthemums, the kind that have short petals in their centers and long, thin ones on their rims, and white gypsophila like snowflakes and alstro-somethings that she couldn’t pronounce.
Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life on December 15th, 1897, aged 53. Asleep in the arms of Jesus. Auntie’s grandmother. Minty had told herself this so often that now she believed it. She pulled out the dead flowers and poured away the smelly green water that had petals and a dead snail floating in it. There was enough fresh water to rinse the vase out before filling it. When the yellow and white and peach-colored flowers were arranged, she knelt down on Maisie Chepstow’s grave and did something she hadn’t done for a long time. She prayed to Auntie to take away Jock’s voice and the voices of the crowd that accompanied him wherever he was.
A bath when she got home. Laf didn’t come in with the paper until quite late in the afternoon. She hadn’t heard the voices since she offered up that prayer, but she was still going to ask. “How can you find out where someone’s grave is?”
“You’d have to know where they died. Maybe you could get the death certificate. People don’t have graves much these days, Minty. They get cremated so they’d be ashes. Why do you want to know?”
That business about the death certificate confused her. She knew she’d never be able to do those things, go to the right place, talk to the right people. Perhaps Laf would do it for her. “It’s Jock’s grave I want to find.” She wasn’t going to mention his mother. Not yet, anyway.
“Oh, right.” Laf was embarrassed.
“D’you think you could?”
“I’ll see,” he said. “It might not be possible.” He was moved by pity for her. “Minty, wouldn’t it be a good idea to-well-put the past behind you? Try and forget him? You’re young, you’ve got your whole future before you. Can’t you forget the past?”
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said and, in a burst of frankness, “I keep hearing his voice talking to me.”
Saying he’d see what he could do, Laf went home. Daniel was there. He’d been visiting a bed-bound patient in First Avenue and had called in for tea.
“I suppose it’s time someone told her the truth,” Sonovia said.
“I don’t think so, Mum. I wouldn’t.”
“She could go right over the edge.” Laf cut himself a slice of a very sticky banoffee pie. “I mean, what’s best? To believe your boyfriend loved you and met his death in a train crash? Or that he deceived you rotten and is still alive and kicking somewhere, living off some other woman?”
“You checked up, did you, Dad?”
“I was always more or less certain. That letter she had was an obvious con. Then I checked when the inquiry into the crash was on back in May. Thirty-one people died. They thought at first it was hundreds but it was only thirty-one. I say ‘only,’ that was bad enough, my goodness.”
“And there was no Jock Lewis among them?”
“You should think of your heart before you eat that stuff, Lafcadio Wilson.”
“Who put it on the table, I’d like to know?”
“It was meant for me, Dad. No Jock Lewis?”
“No Jock or John Lewis. And what’s more, no man not accounted for. Every man on that list had a name and an address and age and dependents or whatever, and not one of them could have fitted him. And now she wants me to find his grave.”
“Just say you can’t, Laf. Pass it off. She’ll soon forget about it.”
“What does she want his grave for?”
“What d’you think, Dan? To put flowers on like she does on her auntie’s faithfully every week.”