Anne Berry - The Hungry Ghosts

‘Your Aunt Lucy is feeling a bit anxious,’ I told him, pushing my rimless spectacles more firmly up my nose with a fingertip.‘She wants to know where your sister Alice is?’ Did I imagine it or was there a flicker of something in his cold, bluish-grey eyes. Recognition? Anger? Or perhaps even fear?

‘Alice?’ he queried with a dry little laugh.‘Really? Who is Alice?’ He placed crossed hands over his rotund belly, almost defensively.

‘Forgive me. I thought that Alice might be your sister,’ I explained. ‘Your Aunt Lucy seems convinced you have another sister. Alice?’

‘Well, my aunt is mistaken,’ Harry said curtly, looking at my charge with undisguised displeasure. He bent over the fragile form of Lucy and bellowed, ‘What rubbish are you talking now, Aunty, getting Ingrid all upset? Ralph would be ashamed of you making up such silly things.’ I detected, though subtle, a slightly lazy ‘r’ in his speech.

‘I’m not upset,’ I assured Harry Safford. ‘It’s just that your aunt seems so certain. She keeps saying that Alice should be here. She seems concerned that something may have happened to her.’ Harry arranged his features in an expression of extreme bafflement. But I was not to be so easily thwarted. I pointed my next words.‘To Alice I mean. That something may have prevented Alice from coming.’

‘What is all this nonsense, Aunt Lucy?’ Harry blustered, his face reddening, more with annoyance, I guessed, than embarrassment.

‘Why is Harry shouting at me?’ Lucy wanted to know, hunching further down in her chair. ‘I’m not deaf. But then he always was a bully.’

Now it was my turn to colour. The old, like the very young, do not screen their words, parcelling them up and sending them out in acceptable packages for this world to receive, as most of us do.

‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised on behalf of Lucy. ‘She’s a bit tired, and probably a touch overwrought with the emotion of the day.’

‘It’s quite understandable,’ Harry said shortly, eyes unblinking, giving me a perfunctory smile. He turned away from us then towards his mother and sisters, ruffling back his short ash-grey hair in an impatient gesture.

‘It’s just that Lucy appears to be quite fractious about…well…about Alice you see,’ I persisted.

Reluctantly Harry turned back. But this time he recruited his sisters to add weight to his own voice.

‘Aunt Lucy has been bothering Ingrid with foolish stories about someone called Alice,’ he said, with the air of a parent whose tolerance is being pushed to its absolute limits. Again, I thought I saw a furtive glance pass between Nicola and Jillian.

Jillian, a large lady, whose considerable height was diminished by her width, gave a slight shiver before speaking. She tossed back her startling, shoulder-length red hair, greying at the roots. ‘Poor Aunt Lucy,’ she said at last. ‘She gets very muddled.’ She reached out a hand tentatively and touched her aunt’s bony shoulder. It was hard for me to read the expression in her flint-grey eyes, with her large, square-framed glasses reflecting back the bright sunshine at me. She did not, I observed, have her sister’s dress sense. The variation in shade, however slight, from the black tailored trousers, to the dark navy jacket, was disconcerting. Added to this, the jacket appeared rather snug and the trousers at least one size too large.

‘That’s right,’ Nicola chimed in, her tone liberally soaked in pity, ‘poor Aunt Lucy hardly knows what day it is, bless her.’ She shot me a swift appraising look, critically taking in my own cheap black suit, practical flat shoes, and hurried attempt to pin up my straight salt and pepper bob.

She was a little shorter than her sister, and slimmer in build. From a distance her outfit had looked smart, but close up it was stunning. The knee-length black dress with matching jacket, delicate gold flowers stitched into the fabric, had the unmistakable sheen of heavy silk.The outfit was finished off with inky stilettos, a designer’s golden tag glinting at their heel backs. Her hairstyle was eye-catching too. The overall shade was altogether more natural than her sister’s, a deep mocha-brown, aflame with red and gold highlights. It was cut into irregular bangs that suited the fine bone structure of her face. But bizarrely her hands, I noticed, were those of a nineteenth-century scullery maid, rubbed red and raw. Now she fixed me with her own inscrutable eyes, just the colour of the slab of liver I had purchased for Lucy from the butcher’s that week.

‘You really shouldn’t be concerning yourself with Aunt Lucy’s ramblings, Ingrid. Surely you’re experienced in caring for the elderly? You should know what to expect.’ And I could have sworn there was a warning edge to a voice that had an unsettling, forced brightness in it.

‘Of course,’ I said, understanding that the conversation had been brought to a close.

I pushed Lucy onwards, briefly shaking Myrtle Safford’s hand. The matriarch of this family was a tall woman with a proud but guarded face, gimlet eyes, glittering jewels, and outdated clothes which nevertheless screamed quality. However, I barely had time to express my sympathy, before her children whisked her away to speak to a less troublesome mourner. My thoughts in turmoil now, I steered my charge to a quiet spot in the churchyard, beneath the shade of an oak tree encircled with a wooden seat. I tucked a cheerful tartan rug I had brought with me about Lucy’s knees, and told her gently that she must be mistaken about Alice. Was she perhaps thinking of someone else, from her husband’s side of the family? Another niece or perhaps the child of a friend? When she said nothing, I crouched before her, my hands resting on the arms of her wheelchair, levelling my gaze with hers. For a moment her sharp blue eyes had a promising intensity about them. She opened her mouth and took a shaky but deliberate breath.

‘You see, Ingrid, Alice is…is…’

‘Is what?’ I urged her eagerly. But the elusive thought had wriggled away, and Lucy’s eyes suddenly shut tremulously. ‘You’re tired. I’ll take you home now,’ I told her, unable to keep the disappointment from my voice.

But just before I helped her into my car she grasped my bare arm. I had peeled off my jacket by then and was only wearing a short-sleeved cream blouse. Now Lucy’s fingers scrabbled against the flesh of my forearm, splayed and light as birds’ feet.

‘Where is Alice? Alice should have been here. Ralph would be most upset,Ingrid,you know,’she croaked. Shortly after this I bundled her into the car, and she immediately fell into a deep sleep, snoring lightly.

I was staying overnight with Lucy in her small terraced house in Hailsham. After her tea, cottage pie and raspberry jelly, I decided a warm bath might settle her for the night. I never quite got used to the shrivelled bodies I handled daily, with their spun-glass bones and their tracing paper flesh. As I sponged the curve of Lucy’s back, knotted and wrinkled as the bark of some ancient tree, my mind played over the events of the day. No matter which thread of thought I plucked at, they all seemed to lead back to Alice, as if by merely uttering her name Lucy had conjured up her ghost. Later, when my charge was tucked up in bed, just before I slipped out her false teeth, I tried once more.

‘Are you sure your brother Ralph had a fourth child, a child called Alice?’ I asked softly.

The last thing I wanted to do was to distress Lucy just before she fell asleep. But I needn’t have worried. She looked at me blankly, and then the coquettish smile of a flirtatious young woman wreathed her wizened face.

‘Who…is Alice?’ she said.

For the remainder of the evening I watched a bit of television, and then settled to a crossword puzzle. I like doing crosswords, everything fitting into its correct space, all the words connected, interdependent. Just before turning in, I drew back the green velour curtains, and stared out into the tiny garden.The pane had misted lightly with the cool of the night. I wrote the name ‘Alice’ very carefully on it with my index finger.