The Ghost's Child Read online

  For Julie Watts

  One damp silvery afternoon an old lady came home from walking her dog and found a boy sitting in her lounge room on the floral settee. The boy hadn’t been invited, so the old lady was surprised to see him. It wasn’t a large boy, and he looked annoyed and bored, as if he had been waiting for her for some time. The lounge room was cold, and the tip of his nose had turned softly pink, which made the old lady feel sorry for him. “You should have lit the fire,” she said, and pressed a button and twisted a dial, causing flames to jump up like can-can dancers inside the silver chest of the heater. Her guest didn’t answer, but looked more aggrieved: being a boy of a certain age, he had a taste for suffering manfully, and preferred not to be given advice. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked him. “I’m about to make a pot.”

  The boy thought for a moment; then said morosely, “Yes please.”

  The old lady was relieved to hear that he knew about please and thank you. At least he had some manners. She hung up her cardigan and went to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. The kitchen was clean and lined with green cupboards; on the speckled bench were rectangular tins for flour and coffee and rice. On the windowsill was a posy of drooping fuchsias from the garden. Although she couldn’t see him, the old lady knew that her curious visitor was still sitting on the settee, hands folded in his lap, waiting and watching for her. She tried not to wonder what he intended to do or say. She determined to keep her thoughts very blank, so she wouldn’t race ahead of him or turn a wrong corner in her mind. She couldn’t help smiling at the thought of him seated so casually in her lounge room. It was odd, and also somehow flattering, as when a stray cat chooses your house to call home.

  While the kettle boiled she busied herself putting biscuits on a plate and pouring milk into a jug; while the tea was brewing she dressed the pot in its cosy for warmth; then carried the pot, the cups, the jug, the sugar bowl and the biscuits into the lounge on a tray.

  The boy was sitting on the verge of his seat and looking down at the dog, who sat by the heater staring intently back at him. The dog was small and long-legged, with a rough coat the colour of winter and treacle-coloured eyes, and a spiky moustache of wet whiskers after rummaging in the grass. “What’s your dog’s name?” the boy asked, without glancing up.

  The old lady – whose name was Matilda – put the tray on the little glass table that stood between the chairs, and poured the tea into porcelain cups. “His name is Peake,” she said. “Do you take sugar?”

  “What sort of dog is he?”

  The tea flowed fragrantly from the teapot’s spout, the colour of conifer sap. “The proper sort, I suppose. He quarrels with cats and chats with strangers and keeps himself clean. He buries bones and keeps tabs on his enemies and sleeps under my bed. That sort of dog.”

  Rather sharply, as if he detested having to explain himself, the boy said, “I meant what breed is he, what kind?”

  “Who knows?” Matilda shook her head. “The scruffy kind, the busybody kind, the kind which likes his dinner on time. He’s something of everything, the way a dog should be. Do you take sugar?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know.” The boy looked suddenly thin with confusion. “Should I?”

  “You would probably prefer it.”

  “Yes please, sugar,” he said, as if he’d known all along.

  Matilda stirred sugar into both cups. The milk turned the tea a pressed-rose brown. Quiffs of white steam waltzed and vanished. The boy returned to studying Peake. “You should have called him Max,” he said. “Max is a good name for a dog.”

  “A good name for some dogs,” Matilda agreed, “but not for Peake.”

  “Does he bite?”

  “Occasionally, I’m afraid. There are certain cats, and certain people, of whom he particularly disapproves.”

  The boy smiled – as if he too disapproved of certain things, and was occasionally tempted to bite them. Peake was watching the visitor closely, neither wagging his tail nor growling but simply staring. He watched the boy take the cup and saucer that Matilda passed across the table; his ears, angular as envelopes, twitched when the spoon clinked on the cup. The boy looked appreciatively into the tea, but pouted when Matilda offered him the biscuit plate. “I prefer biscuits with jam,” he said.

  “So do I,” said Matilda. “There were some in the tin, but I ate them. There’s usually only Peake and myself, you see, so we eat all the fancy biscuits and leave the plain ones for last. I’d have bought a cake or some tarts if I’d known we were expecting a visitor today.”

  The boy only crinkled his nose, and did not apologize for his uninvited presence. He took a biscuit and ate it miserably, as if it were made of clay. While he crunched on the splinters, Matilda closed the door that led to the kitchen and the door which led to the hall, so the lounge room was made snug and private, like the cabin of a boat. Then, with some relief, she settled into her armchair, which was her favourite chair and the one she always sat in, although it was not very different from the one on which the boy perched. The chairs faced each other with the little table in between, their broad flanks turned away from the television with its piked legs and wooden shell. Every evening Matilda sat in this small square room with Peake, listening to the radio or reading a magazine or playing records on the gramophone. They did not have many visitors, and never any who were children. And yet, although it was completely peculiar to sit in her chair and see a fussy boy sitting opposite her, Matilda somehow felt that things were as they should be. It seemed that she had seen this exact boy sitting exactly where he sat countless times before. She said, “I’m sorry about the biscuits. I wish I had something nice to give you. But you’ll be warm soon, and maybe happy.”

  The boy only shrugged, for he was nearing the age when it is embarrassing to admit you can be happy. Matilda guessed he was eleven or twelve. His hair, which was pale, was fine, and not tidy; there was still enough childhood in him to plump the cheeks of his scowly face. His eyes were lashy, and grey as cinder. He wore a loose red collarless shirt with three unfastened buttons at the throat. It was a flimsy garment for such a damp day – Matilda wondered if his mother had told him to take his coat, but he’d been too vain to obey. His trousers were the colour of charcoal, and showed, on the knees, signs of dirt. On his feet were a pair of cotton socks and good scuffed lace-up boots. He did not smell of anything, yet nor was he perfectly clean. He was not fat or puny, short or tall, dainty or strapping, but medium in all ways, a boy from the illustrations in an annual. He looked the kind who felt cooped up indoors, who preferred to be outside climbing trees and building forts and having sword fights with sticks, who endeavoured to be injured when playing boisterous sports so he could then be nobly brave. He looked the type who’d sooner suffer a painful illness than spend an afternoon drinking tea with an old woman. Matilda liked all these things about him very much. He was like a strong bold bird that had flown into the room and, finding itself cornered, was bored, but unafraid.

  Before she could think of anything to say, the visitor lowered his cup, wiped his mouth with his wrist, and regarded her through grave eyes. His voice was grim when he announced, “I have bad news for you.”

  Matilda had lived for seventy-five years, and she wasn’t afraid of bad news. She had heard it before, and she had always survived it, and she’d learned that bad news is part of being alive, and thus should not be resented. Anyway, at seventy-five most news is neither good nor bad, but simply something to accept. She thought she knew what the boy would say, but she bit her lip and kept her thoughts to herself. She wanted to hear how her puzzling guest, with his eccentric etiquette, might put the momentous fact into words. “What is it?”

  The boy’s grey eyes roamed the room –
across the mantel with its clocks and statues, over the walls with their paintings and picture rails, down to where Peake had flattened out before the heater – before returning, like dark clouds, to her. He declared the matter without evasion: “Your house smells like old people.”

  Matilda blinked, surprised and deflated; her emotions, which had grown grand as a symphony in an instant, fell down like skittles, and she felt a little bereft and nonplussed. But she reminded herself that the boy was only a child, and his childish impudence made her smile. She hesitated several moments to prove she was taking him seriously; then, although she knew the answer, having once been a child herself, she asked, “What do old people smell like?”

  “Like coats in mothy cupboards.” He winced in revulsion. “Like cold porridge in a bowl. Like taps dripping for years and years. That’s how they smell.”

  Matilda said, “How awful.”

  “I’ve been sitting here for ages, waiting for you, almost choking to death!” The boy quaked with frustration. “Why are you like this?” he demanded to know.

  “I don’t mean to be.” Matilda couldn’t help laughing, everything was so bizarre. The afternoon was turning out very differently from what she’d imagined. She would not be able to finish reading the novel she’d set aside. “A person gets used to their own smell, I suppose, and doesn’t notice it. I should have kept a window open. It’s unforgivable to smell like a tap.”

  “You think it’s funny.” The boy scowled. “Don’t you care? You should hate it – being so wrinkly, walking so slowly, none of your fingers straight. No one looks at you any more, all your colours have gone. Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t it make you sad? Isn’t it horrible, being old?”

  Matilda considered her hands, which were dotted with spots and crimped with lines and lumpy with thick veins. Her fingers had once been smooth and white as piano keys. She said, “Being old is sometimes painful, but it isn’t horrible. It’s just what I am. When I was a girl, I looked in a mirror and saw me. Now I’m old, but when I look in a mirror, the person I see is still me. I’m not graceful or pretty any more, but maybe I am something else – something just as good, or better. Once I was an acorn, now I’m an oak tree.”

  The boy snorted, unimpressed by trees. “I bet when you were a little girl, you thought old things were horrible.”

  Tea-leaves floated in a penny-sized pool of tea in the bottom of Matilda’s cup. “Everything that’s young is troubled by what is old,” she admitted. “When I was small, there was an elderly woman who lived at the bend of the road. She never said an unkind word to me, she never even looked at me, but I was frightened of her. She was so withered, so crumpled. I knew she had once been a small girl too, but I couldn’t believe it. She was oldness, and nothing else. She was like an abandoned nest you find in a bough, tatty and disintegrating to dust. Even now, the memory of her makes me shiver. It is strange, that oldness is so hard to love or forgive.”

  “Well, do you love it, now that you’re old?”

  Matilda gazed into her cup. She thought about the child she had been, and the person she was now. When she was young, she had sometimes felt old, as if she’d been born and lived life many times. As she’d grown older, she had often felt as inexperienced and easily fooled as a toddler. Time and wisdom were tricksy things. Hearing the silence, Peake lifted his head and stared at her; then stared long and hard at their visitor before laying his head down again. “Young people think oldness is the bottom of a mountain,” Matilda said finally. “In truth, it is the top. I am old, because I have lived a whole life. I have climbed a long, long way. When I look back the way I have come, I can see the town I was raised in, and my mother and father. I see houses I lived in, friends that I made, people and pets that I loved. I see the wrong turns I took, places where I tripped, places where I skipped and sang and ran. I can see for years and years. To have such a view, you have to be standing on top of a mountain. The top is a difficult place to be – it’s windy and it’s perilous, and lonely sometimes – but it is the top, and there’s nowhere else to go.”

  The boy had curled up on the settee while Matilda spoke, propping his chin on his palm. When she fell silent, he unexpectedly smiled. Smiling curved his eyes into crescents, so he looked like a sunny creature from a birthday card. Matilda guessed he was probably a clever boy, full of wit and curiosity, a thorn in his teacher’s side, a ringleader of his friends. When his mother asked him to do something, he did it well, although only after the correct degree of complaint. “Are you warmer now?” she asked.

  The boy glanced at the heater, where the row of flames was doing its agitated dance behind spindly metal bars. The dancers were blue and orange, tossing their heads and swinging their hips and kicking up their feet. His nose was no longer pink, and it creased when he shook his head. He raised a hand and pointed, saying, “From the top of the mountain, do you see a girl in a boat?”

  On the sideboard behind Matilda stood a brown-and-white photograph glassed inside a silver frame. In the photo, a slim young lady in a long oilskin coat stood at the helm of a spry white boat. The boat’s canvas sails were rolled, but a breeze was blowing the girl’s dark hair about her shoulders and face. All around the girl and the vessel bucked a playful sea, and the boat was anchored into place at the end of a taut rope. It was impossible to decide if the photograph was a picture of a sailing boat, or the portrait of a girl.

  Matilda did not bother turning in her chair – she knew what the photograph looked like. “Yes,” she said, “I see that girl. She is the one I see all the time, whether I’m looking for her or not.”

  “She’s you, isn’t she?”

  “She was me – when I wasn’t an acorn or a tree, but somewhere in between.”

  “Were you a sailor?”

  Matilda shrugged. “When you’re old, there are a lot of things you have been. A tree is just a single thing, but it has different branches. All the branches are important – all of them make up the tree. On one of my branches, I was a sailor. Although, in truth, more a searcher than a sailor.”

  “What were you searching for?”

  Matilda paused, wanting the right words. “I searched for the answer to a question. I sailed the world trying to find it, and eventually I did. But some answers don’t finish a quest – they merely start it. If everything had been finished back then,” she told her visitor, “I don’t think you would be here.”

  The boy reached out and took a biscuit, broke it into pieces, and ate it in several resolute bites, as if to show that, now he was here, he did not intend leaving until he was good and ready. “And where would you be?” he asked, eyeing her steadily. “Would you be here, sitting in this room, with just a dog to keep you company?”

  “Who knows?” Matilda contemplated the walls, the crowd of cold ornaments. “The view from the mountain top is good, but you can only see clearly the road you took to reach where you stand. The other roads – the paths you might have taken, but didn’t – are all around you too, but they are ghost roads, ghost journeys, ghost lives, and they are always hidden by cloud.”

  The boy’s grey gaze wandered over her face. In the shallow wrinkles of her skin were whispers of the girl Matilda had been. The boy himself was unmarked and flawless, nobody except himself. “I would like another biscuit,” he said sombrely. “I would like more tea.”

  The dark-haired girl who would stand at the helm of a lean white sailing boat was born in the grandest house of a town that sprawled along a pure-white coastline, its windows turned to the sea. Her parents named her Matilda Victoria Adelaide, but that is a big name for a small girl so almost everyone cut its size down to Maddy. As a child Maddy was slender and silent, yet she was not a delicate thing. She lived what was rather a lonesome life, but she was never filled with pity for herself. She was like a wildflower which grows in what earth it can claim, what sunlight touches it, what rain falls on it, and is grateful and happy. She was like a piece of glass that has been tossed in water for a long time: mysterio
us but simple, without sharp edges, and not as fragile as it looks.

  Her father was an important man, although Maddy wasn’t sure what he did that made him so, other than being broad and gruff. She was rather scared of him, though he treated her with the same blunt fairness that he dealt out to all things. Her knowledge that Papa was important made him something to fear, maybe – most important things are also frightening. When she walked with him through town, which she did not often do, Maddy saw that people were pleased to receive Papa’s attention – pleased, and also alarmed, like children being noticed by a nun. Maddy knew that her father had lots of money, because he was often away from home earning it. When she was small and her mother said the word “earning”, Maddy hadn’t understood what she meant. She decided that Mama had meant to say “ironing”. So for much of her childhood Maddy believed that her father’s job was to heat a great iron on a great stove and to press all the world’s paper money flat so it would sit tidily in pockets and in cash-register tills. Such a job would be hot and heavy work, which explained Papa’s gruffness as well as his importance. One memorable day the iron man visited her at boarding school, and cut a swathe across the quadrangle with his lofty imperiousness, and took his daughter out of lessons and to a restaurant for lunch; as he climbed into the brougham to leave, he gave Maddy a pound which he had ironed especially flat, which crackled like autumn when she closed it in her hand. She spent the pound immediately, but kept the recollection of that water-smooth note forever – as well as the memory of another gift, the first present Papa ever gave her, a toy felt giraffe that Maddy had desperately loved, that sat on her pillow and watched with beady eyes throughout the years of her growing up until the day when, feeling burdened and stormy and older than she was, Maddy threw it into a bag of castaways that were sent to the underdressed and toyless poor. And afterwards, when the giraffe was gone, Maddy felt more impoverished than anyone who’d ever lived. She had discovered she could be callous and stupid. The discovery of these faults combined with the loss of her toy felt like a mortal wound. She looked at the lovely things that surrounded her, the ribbons and bracelets and necklaces and buckles and silk flowers and china-faced dolls, and none of them were a consolation. She pined for what she had let go. Then and there Maddy vowed that, for the rest of her life, she would hold tightly to what she loved.