Chapter 24
THIS WEEK, THOUGH Josephine wouldn’t remember, Minty would have worked at Immacue for twenty years. The end of May, it had been, when she was eighteen. As she started on the shirts, she tried to work out how many she must have ironed in those years. Say three hundred a week for fifty weeks a year, two being taken off for holidays, times twenty made 300,000 shirts. Enough to dress an army, Auntie had said when she’d done ten years. White ones, blue-and-white striped, pink-and-white, yellow-and-white, gray, and blue, there was no end to it. She picked the first one off the pile. It was light-and-dark-green, a rare combination.
As often happened when she let herself think about Auntie the ghost voice spoke to her. “It’s not three hundred thousand, you’re wrong there. You never did shirts on a Saturday, not when you first went there. Not for a good two years. And there was days when you never did fifty on account of there wasn’t fifty to do. That figure’s more like a hundred fifty thousand than three hundred.”
Minty didn’t say anything. Answering Auntie relieved her feelings but it caused trouble, too. Yesterday, when she’d shouted back, Josephine had come running out, wanting to know if she’d burnt herself. As if a person who’s ironed 300,000 shirts would burn herself.
“She ought to have a celebration for you just the same. She’s bone selfish, never thinks of anyone but herself and that husband of hers. If she has a baby you’ll find yourself looking after it. She’ll bring it in here and ask you to keep an eye on it while she goes to the shops or pops round the Chinese. That Ken, he may be over the moon, but he’ll not babysit. Men never do.”
“Go away,” said Minty, but very quietly.
“Now Mrs. Lewis knows more about these things than me. She’s had the experience. Giving birth, I mean. I had all the trouble and expense of rearing you but I never had the labor pains. If Jock hadn’t been killed in that train crash you’d maybe have had a baby yourself. You’d have liked to be a grandma, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Lewis?”
This time Minty couldn’t restrain herself. “Will you shut up? I wish you’d stayed deaf. She’s not going to have a baby and neither am I. Take that old woman out of here. I don’t want her near me.”
Josephine came out, as she was bound to. “Who were you talking to, Minty?”
“You,” Minty said boldly. “I thought you called me.”
“When do I ever call you when you’re doing the ironing? Now look, I’m going to nip out for a while and I’m leaving you in charge, right? I want to have a bit of lunch with Ken. Can I bring you anything back?”
Minty suppressed a shudder. She eat food someone else had touched? Food she hadn’t seen being bought? Josephine would never learn. “No, thanks. I’ve got my own sandwiches.”
She didn’t start on them till she’d finished the shirts. They were chicken sandwiches, made with white bread she’d sliced herself—you could never tell who or what had done the slicing with cut bread—fresh Irish butter and chicken she’d cooked and carved herself. She’d used the remaining big knife, twin of the one she’d had to get rid of because you could never tell how clean boiling made anything. If she ever saw that Mrs. Lewis she might need to use the big knife as she’d used the one that got rid of Jock’s ghost.
But she’d never seen Mrs. Lewis. Auntie manifested herself every so often, though she was never as clear and solid as Jock had been. Furniture and doors were always visible through Auntie. Sometimes she was no more than an outline, the middle part of her just a watery shape that shifted and waved like the mirage on the road she’d seen from the bus last week. Minty thought she might go away altogether if she resumed putting flowers on her grave. If she went back to praying to her. But why should she? She’d never defied Auntie while she was alive but she thought it was time to assert herself. Why should she be tied to that for the rest of her life, spending all that money and arranging those flowers, just to please a ghost?
She wasn’t even particularly afraid of Auntie. That must be because she’d known her so well and known, too, that Auntie wouldn’t do her any harm. Jock, after all, had already harmed her, helping himself to her money like that. And when he came back as a ghost he’d sometimes glared fiercely at her, opening his eyes wide and baring his teeth. But it was Mrs. Lewis showing herself that she really feared and she didn’t know why. If the old woman ever actually addressed her instead of always speaking to Auntie, she felt she might not be so alarmed by the thought of it. Mrs. Lewis had never done this, but attached herself to Auntie like her shadow and, like a shadow, was only there at certain times and on certain days. For instance, this morning there had been no word from her and when Auntie asked her a question she hadn’t replied. That might mean she wasn’t there and Auntie, for purposes of her own, had been speaking to the empty air. On the other hand—and this was what frightened Minty in a way she couldn’t have entirely explained—she might have accompanied Auntie from wherever they lived, a heaven, a hell, or an unknown, unnamed abode of shades, yet kept silent. This was hateful to Minty, who imagined her lurking unseen behind Auntie, taking Auntie away from her, noting everything Minty did, making judgments on her appearance and her home. Biding her time, but for what she couldn’t tell.
With the arrival of Josephine in the ironing room Auntie had disappeared and she hadn’t come back. Minty finished her sandwich and went to wash her hands. She washed her face as well because she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t got an invisible smear of butter on her chin. While she was in the washroom the bell rang on the outer door. She could hardly believe her eyes. Mr. Kroot’s sister was standing in the middle of the shop, clutching an armful of dirty clothes she’d pulled out of a very old and worn carrier bag.
Gertrude Pierce—was that her name?—was as surprised to see Minty as Minty was to see her. “I’d no idea you worked here.” Implicit in her remark was the unspoken If I had I’d never have come in. Her voice was low, with a sort of growl in it and an accent Minty couldn’t place. Very recently, perhaps on the way here, she’d had her hair color touched up and it was as red and glossy as the scarlet satin jacket she deposited on the counter along with a green woolly jumper and a pair of purple trousers. Minty could smell them from six feet away. She wrinkled up her nose, a change of expression Gertrude Pierce wasn’t slow to notice. “If you don’t want to do them I’ll take them elsewhere.”
Josephine wouldn’t like her to turn away business. “We’ll do them.” Minty had to answer her, but the thought of Auntie finding out that she’d actually spoken to Mr. Kroot’s sister made her tremble. Her hand shook as she worked out the cost of dry-cleaning, wrote the sum down on a card and the name “Mrs. Pierce,” and passed it across the counter. “Ready by Saturday.”
Gertrude Pierce studied the card with suspicion and something like wonder. It was as if she speculated as to what divining powers or superhuman insight Minty must possess to have known her name. “I’ll have my carrier back, thank you.”
It lay on the counter, a black bag bruised and scratched by the hundred occasions on which it had been used since the assistant at Dickins and Jones put newly bought goods into it for the first time. Minty pushed it an inch or two nearer Gertrude Pierce. Mr. Kroot’s sister waited, perhaps for her to bring it over and curtsy, Minty thought. She went into the ironing room and slammed the door. Presently she heard heavy footsteps and the exit bell ring.
“I told you not to speak to her,” said Auntie. “I could hardly believe my ears. You should have pretended she wasn’t there, not given her the satisfaction.”
“I’d like to pretend you’re not there.” With Josephine absent, she could answer back as much as she liked. “I want you to go away for good and take Jock’s old mum with you.”
“You put nice flowers on my grave like you used to and I’ll think about it. Tulips are over, whatever the florist may say. I suppose roses are too much money.”
“Nothing’d be too much to get rid of you,” said Minty rashly.
And when she left for home at five-thirty she bought roses, a dozen white ones, expensive enough but cheaper than they would have been at the cemetery gates. It was a dull evening and just inside the gates, the building she’d never noticed before with its pillars and porticoes in weathered gray stone looked as if it had been there for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Minty, who’d last week seen a television program about ancient Rome, wondered if it dated from that time. It was a smaller version of the great gloomy crematorium and, like it, its doors were shut. Inside, the air would be dark and smelly and always cold. She shut her eyes and turned her back on it. She didn’t know why she’d come down this way at all, this wasn’t the way to Auntie’s grave.
That was because she’d come in by the eastern entrance instead of the western. She’d never done that before. For once, she’d bought flowers at a shop, not at the gates. Suddenly it seemed very important to her to “give” Auntie the flowers. Auntie had asked for them and specifically for roses. Was the grave up along this aisle or that? The cemetery was so big with so many paths, some of them winding, so many tombs that looked the same. Some of the trees were evergreens that might more suitably have been called everblacks, their leaves were always dark and dull. Others had limp green leaves hanging down. Only the grass and the tiny flowers in it, yellow and white, were bright and varying from season to season.
It was still broad daylight and would be for hours, even if that light was half obscured by cloud. She should be heading for the crematorium and the western gate but didn’t know how. She walked down one aisle and up another, turned right and then left again. She’d know the grave when she saw it, by the name on it of course, but first by the angel, covering his eyes with one of his hands and in the other holding the broken violin. The trouble was that the cemetery was full of stone angels, every other tomb seemed to have an angel on it, some holding scrolls, some stringed instruments, though these were mostly harps, some on which the angel wept with bowed head. Minty began to feel like weeping herself. She knew she ought to go out of the gate she’d come in by and re-enter by the other, but that would mean passing the man who sold flowers. He might think she’d stolen hers when he wasn’t looking or even taken them from someone else’s grave, a not uncommon proceeding, she’d heard.
Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life December the 15th, 1897, aged 53. Asleep in the arms of Jesus. She knew the inscription by heart and she remembered telling Jock the corpse or the bones or the dust which lay below had been those of Auntie’s grandmother. None of that mattered. All that did was that she had buried Auntie’s ashes in that grave. By now she was down by the canal with the small Roman place ahead of her, and she turned once more. There were so many graves in here and so few people to look after them that grass and moss and ivy crept over and covered everything, hiding stone and obscuring engraved names. She had never seen a cat in here, though she imagined them invading the place by night, but now one appeared, long, thin, and gray, picking its way delicately over anonymous mounds, diving into an ivy-tangled cavern between the roots of a tree when it saw her.
An angel holding something loomed ahead of her at the point where the aisle met a path at right angles. This must be it, this was where, kneeling on the earth, she had looked up and seen Jock’s ghost approaching. Even before she had reached it she saw that the angel was the same, with the same covered eyes and holding the same broken violin. But when she pushed aside ivy tendrils and read what was engraved on the stone she saw that it was different. This wasn’t Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, but Eve Margaret Pinchbeck, only daughter of Samuel Pinchbeck, fled to her Savior, October the 23rd, 1899. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, thought Minty. Have a Polo, Polo. How could two graves be so alike yet not belong to the same person? Maybe the person who made statues all that long, long time ago, maybe in those Roman times, made lots of them the same.
Perhaps it would do. And if Auntie’s ashes weren’t here that might not be so important. Something different on this woman’s grave was the stone vase that was part of the molding round the base of the platform the angel stood on. It was dry, and green moss crept close up to its lips. As she had done before, Minty found flowers on a nearby grave, flowers that were withering, threw them into the bushes, and used the water they had been standing in to fill the mossy bowl. She arranged the roses, breaking off their stems to shorten them, and in doing so tore her hands on their thorns. The blood-letting relieved her in a strange way she hadn’t experienced before, though the dirt that must be on the rose stems was distressing. There should be a water tap somewhere in here, there probably was, but she didn’t know where.
She stood up and turned round, walking on, away from the gasometer. That must be the right direction for the western gate. Yet it wasn’t. She began to be frightened. Suppose she could never find the way out, but must wander on for hours, searching for years maybe, forever among the overgrown graves with cats walking over them and making live people shiver. This was surely a place of ghosts, with the myriad dead lying everywhere beneath the ground, but hers weren’t here. There was only dimness and a kind of heavy peace, and in the distance the hum of traffic on Harrow Road. No other people, alive or phantom, no birds singing. She came suddenly into an open place with the huge colonnaded temple that was the crematorium before her. It was always frightening but from this angle more so with its high blank wall and the gathering gray clouds behind it, the wilderness of the neglected place coming close up to its footings. Minty imagined its great door swinging open, its stained-glass window shattering, and ghosts coming blindly out, their hands upraised and their robes streaming. She began to run.
Notices directing you were everywhere but they never seemed to point to what she wanted, never to Auntie’s grave. She read the one ahead, she didn’t know why, as she pounded along, afraid to look back in case she was pursued. It said: Exit. The relief was enormous. She knew where she was now, approaching the western gate that was opposite her own street and where the flower seller was. By the time she reached it she was walking quietly, managing a smile and nod for the flower man. And there was no one and nothing behind her.
It was rare for Minty to feel happy. Fear drives away happiness as much as sorrow does and she was mostly afraid. She lived in a climate of unnamable fears, terrors that could only be kept within bounds by strict routines. Something else had allayed them, had once or twice entirely banished them, and that had been what she’d never known in her first thirty-seven years, the feeling she’d had for Jock. When she’d told him, after he’d made love to her, that she would never be like this with another man, for she was his forever, she was expressing for perhaps the first time in her life her true and honest feelings, unaffected by cleanliness or tidiness or eating prejudices. And what he gave her back, or she thought he did, had given her a strange, unfamiliar sensation she didn’t know how to name. Happiness. She felt it now, returned in some small measure, as she left the cemetery and walked toward Syringa Road.
With Jock it had been relatively long-lived. If he hadn’t died, she sometimes thought dimly, not knowing quite what she meant or wanted, if he’d stayed alive and with her, those feelings she’d had and he’d inspired might have changed her into a different woman. This present scrap of happiness was doomed to be short, she knew it while it was with her, succeeding raw terror, for fear was returning as she approached her front door. She was afraid of what awaited her inside and she even thought of knocking on the Wilsons’ door, spending half an hour with them, having a cup of tea, a chat, maybe telling them about her experience looking for Auntie’s grave, of which, now it was over, she could see the funny side. What, a woman who’d lived a stone’s throw from the cemetery all her life, unable to find her own auntie’s grave! If she went into Sonovia’s house she’d only have to come out again and enter her own. She couldn’t stay in next door all night.
She put the key in the lock and turned it. Although it wouldn’t be dark for hours, she switched the hall light on. Nothing. Emptiness. She went upstairs, fearing to meet Auntie on the way, but there was no one, nothing. Very faintly, through the dividing wall, she could hear music, the kind of music very young people like. That wouldn’t be Mr. Kroot’s radio, it must be Gertrude Pierce’s. A strange woman she was, playing teenagers’ music. Minty ran a bath, using the kind of gel that makes foam, washed her hair in it, scrubbed the blood off her hands with a nailbrush. The punctures the thorns had made were a hundred tiny wounds. The music was turned off and silence followed. Minty dried herself, dressed in her usual clean T-shirt, clean trousers, socks. She never wore sandals, even in hot weather, because the streets were dirty. Things could burrow their way into your feet and give you a disease called bill-heart-something, she’d read about it in Laf’s newspaper. That was in Africa but she couldn’t see why it wouldn’t happen here.
She wasn’t hungry. Those sandwiches had been very filling. Maybe later she’d have a scrambled egg on toast. You never knew where the egg came from but it must be out of a chicken and, anyway, she’d cook it very thoroughly in a clean saucepan. Out of the kitchen window she could see washing sagging on the line in Mr. Kroot’s garden. It looked bone dry, had probably been there since before Gertrude Pierce came into Immacue. Minty went outside. It hadn’t been hot all day, there was too much cloud for that, but it had been gently warm and still was. She studied next door’s washing. So much sagging had taken place, one of the poles that supported the line leaning over at an angle of forty-five degrees, that the edges of the sheets and towels were on the ground, actually touching the dry, dusty grass. Minty was shocked but there was nothing she was prepared to do about it.
Sonovia’s voice called to her over the other fence, “Minty! Long time no see.”
In fact, it wasn’t very long. No more than two or three days. Knowing it would please, Minty told her, with many glances over her shoulder, about Gertrude Pierce coming into the shop, not realizing she worked there. Sonovia laughed, especially at the bit about her being amazed Minty knew her name. Some twenty years ago Mr. Kroot was reputed to have made a racist remark, though where and to whom he’d made it no one seemed to know, but it was enough for Laf, who’d never addressed a word to him since. Sonovia was often heard to say that she wished it hadn’t been so long ago but now instead and she’d have him up in court.
“Someone told me she’s going home on Saturday week. We’ll all be glad to see the back of her.” She listened, smiling, while Minty told her what had happened in the cemetery. The smile didn’t waver but when Sonovia went back into her own house, she said to Laf, “If Winnie Knox is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“She isn’t buried at all. She was cremated. You ought to remember that, you and I were there.”
“Of course we were. That’s why I said that was the first I’d heard of it. Minty had the ashes in a box on the shelf for months, but I noticed they’d gone. She’s just told me she got lost in the cemetery looking for Winnie’s grave. White roses she’d bought because she said her auntie was fed up with tulips. What d’you make of that?”
“We’ve always said Minty was peculiar, Sonn. Remember all that stuff about ghosts?”
Minty had for a moment forgotten all that stuff about ghosts. She went back into her kitchen and through to the living room thinking about Gertrude Pierce and the washing and the evil-smelling clothes she’d brought to be dry-cleaned. In the doorway she stopped. Two women were standing between the fireplace and the sofa, Auntie and an old bent person with a humped back and a witch’s face. Minty couldn’t speak. She stood there on the threshold, still as one of the cemetery statues, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were still there.
“You know very well that wasn’t my grave, was it, Mrs. Lewis? You put those roses on a stranger’s grave. How d’you think that makes me feel? Mrs. Lewis was disgusted.”
Auntie had never talked like this to her while she was alive, though Minty had often thought she’d like to but for some reason had resisted. There had been anger in her eyes, this anger that was now coming out, while she said nice things. Mrs. Lewis stood quite still, not looking at Auntie nor in Minty’s direction, staring at the floor, her gnarled old hands clasped.
“Can’t even manage a word of apology. She never could say she was sorry, even when she was little, Mrs. Lewis. There was never a word of regret passed her lips.”
Minty found a voice. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. There, will that do?” Her tone strengthened, though her fear hadn’t lessened, and the words came out in a throaty croak. “Go away, will you? Both of you. I don’t want to see you again. You’re dead and I’m alive. Go back to where you came from.”
Auntie went but Mrs. Lewis stayed. Minty could see Jock’s face in hers, the same features but wrinkled and aged as if by a thousand years. His eyes had looked like hers, defeated and tired, when they’d been to the racing and the dog he’d put money on came in last. One day he might have come to look like her if the train crash hadn’t taken him. The old woman raised her head. She was less solid than she’d been when Minty first saw her and again she was aware of that mirage effect, the watery waviness that made Mrs. Lewis’s loose cardigan and floppy skirt shiver as in a breeze. They stared at each other, she and Jock’s mother, and she saw that the eyes were not blue as she’d first thought but a dull, cold green amid the wrinkles, each one like a bird’s egg in a nest.
If she turned and walked away the old woman would follow her. For the first time, she wanted a ghost to speak, in the midst of her fear she wanted to hear what kind of a voice Mrs. Lewis had. “Say something.”
As she spoke, the ghost vanished. Not immediately but like smoke disappearing into the neck of a bottle. And then she was gone and the room empty.