“Overwork,” I said to myself and went back up my front steps. Just as I opened the front door, a blast of wind caught it with such force that I was thrown, virtually headfirst, into the entry hall. Bruised and smarting over my insult by nature, I eventually made my way back to bed. The storm continued unabated and three more times I went downstairs to answer the banging. I at last decided that I was being tormented by the neighborhood drunk, thug or idiot who knew just how far the single occupied bedroom in my house was from the front door, and pulled the covers over my head, falling after a long time into a nervous, unrefreshing sleep.
Having been so harassed, I very naturally overslept the next morning and, since I had an early appointment, dived into my clothes and sped out of the house, not returning until long after the tea I had promised to give to Shelagh over her never-ending supply of sample books.
I let myself in and was immediately confronted with Ireland, rampant. Shelagh was clearly angry as hell which, even for her, was somewhat an overreaction for a delayed tea.
“Look here,” she said, doing a splendid imitation of Glenda Jack-son being arch and bitter, “if you don’t like the things I’m choosing for the house, just say so, why don’t you? There’s no need to throw the furniture about and pull the pictures off the walls!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, really! You know just what I’m talking about! Your cleaner took one look at it and says to tell you she’s off to South-end for a holiday until further notice! And don’t blame it on the workmen. They’ve walked off in sympathy with the dockers today over containerized shipping!”
“Shelagh?” I tried to catch hold of her.
“Just have a look at that, then!” she said, steering me at top speed into the livingroom.
It was a sight to see. The room, as does the dining room, runs from the front to the back of the house and is about forty feet long with French doors opening onto a long balcony overlooking the garden at the back. It was simply littered with overturned furniture, mainly the new stuff Shelagh had bought to mix with the 18th Century furniture I had purchased and liked so much better. I had no objections to this eclectic style since Shelagh seemed to know what she was doing, but I could not help but silently congratulate the burglars who had concocted this mess.
“And the dining table!” she wailed. I perked up my ears. The dining table was a twenty-foot Parsons table done up in puce Formica. “It’s scratched, scratched, scratched! You wicked man!”
I got my hands on Shelagh’s softness, getting a couple of scratches myself in the process. “Burglars,” I whispered into her ear.
“Fancy that,” she snarled, breaking away and tenderly picking up the toppled Francis Bacon reproduction of a peeled, howling nun, “Rob MacKenzie himself being burgled!”
I broke out the American gin from my Adam commode and mixed a pitcher of therapeutic martinis. Over the drinks and a half-tin of stale peanuts, I explained to the gradually mollified Shelagh about the banging the night before.
“You’re not making it all up, are you?”
“Darling girl, I need my sleep. Abdington was very shirty when I arrived late this morning and he’s not a source of information I can afford to annoy.”
I could see this went down very well with her and was just on the point of suggesting she go downstairs to the kitchen and fix us some kind of tea when she looked at her watch and exclaimed she had to flee to an after-hours preview of kinetic sculpture at Harrod’s. I seemed bound to miss all my meals that day.
Which is why I was up and about that night when the banging started again. I immediately rushed from the kitchen up the stairs to the livingroom, which I had set aright, but it was perfectly undisturbed. So, like a fool, I opened the front door and was almost knocked down by a blast of air from the dry, windless street. Quite on its own, the hair on the back of my neck rose.
The banging was now inside my house but, by the time I reached the livingroom, it had stopped. No wonder. All Shelagh’s stuff had already been chucked about.
“All right, whoever you are,” I shouted, a la Rob Mackenzie, “you might as well come out. I’m armed and a crack shot!” I manipulated the chicken leg in my robe pocket menacingly.
There was that damned blast of graveyard air again and I found myself flat on my back on Shelagh’s cream-colored wall-to-wall watching the shutters on the open window at the turn of the stairs rattle as the damp wind let itself out.
Had I a ghost?
“A ghost? A spirit? Rob, darling, you’ve been reading too many of your own books.”
Shelagh calls me, affectionately and always, by my pen name since she says, and I confess I see her point, that plain old Ken Wenks lacks a certain cachet.
“Have you a better explanation? If our furniture-tosser were corporeal, I’d surely have caught him last night.”
“Quite a conservative ghost, I’d say,” Shelagh mused, trying to restore a chrome and rice-paper balloon lamp to its former glory, but I could see her mind was already elsewhere. I was going to lose this smashing girl if I didn’t get rid of my nightly visitor.
“Remember what Larry Olivier did when he was faced with something like this?” The green eyes were reduced to a speculative slit.
“I don’t even know Sir Larry.”
“In the film, darling. They did show it in the Canadian wild, didn’t they? Hamlet, Rob.”
So she was not indulging in non sequiturs, after all.
“With the ghost of his father! Larry, I mean, Prince Hamlet, held up his sword and used it as a cross in case—”
“Yes! Is there a cycle shop roundabouts? We’re going to get a packet of that reflecting tape cyclists use to make their cycles ultra-visible at night and we’re going to stick a cross made of it outside every door and window in this entire, awful house!”
“What a bright girl you are!” I said, attempting to bestow a kiss on her.
“Never mind that. I’m bloody well fed up with having my furniture bashed about!”
At about midnight, and I can tell you I was very wide-awake, the banging began and it was wilder than I had ever heard. My front door knocker chattered as if possessed. Then, one after another, each window in the house shook until I thought the glass would shatter. There was a terrible crashing in the garden and then in the outside stairwell leading to the kitchen door. I put my head under my pillow, only to remove it a moment later. That was real silence I was hearing. Shelagh’s scheme had worked!
Far up over my head, I heard a drumbeat on the roof. The house was filled with the sound of a great “Ah-h-h-h” and I knew two things: the bicycle tape had failed and, sometime tomorrow, I would have to face Shelagh over the wreckage in the drawing room.
I didn’t mind the livingroom in its, by now, familiar disarray, but I really did resent the long-armed desk lamp in my hitherto-untouched study being twisted into a pretzel knot, never mind what my haunt had done to my books and papers, now strewed everywhere.
Shelagh pointed out the very large soot-stain on the pale carpet in front of the fireplace and left. Actually, what she said was: “You bloody damned fool, why didn’t you think to go up onto the roof and attach crosses to all the chimneys your bloody spook’s spoiled this fitted carpet beyond, bee-YOND repair and I hate you here’s your bloody ring back and I hope I never see you or your damned house ever again!”