Haunted (2 page)

“Now you’re too kind,” I said, and looked
down to hide a sudden rush of tears. Maybe this was the real reason
I was seeing things – I was tired and overwrought, and Michael
didn’t want to know me any more. I was all dressed up with
somewhere to go and no-one to go with.

“You still haven’t told me your name,” Wally
said gently.

“It’s Alexandra,” I said, my voice unsteady.
“Alex to friends.”

Afterwards I was never too clear how it had
come up, but when I came out of my fit of despondency and
self-pity, I discovered I had a date for the Battle of Britain
Ball. A date quite out of this world.

But when I woke up to the fact that I was to
be escorted to the Ball by what was in effect a Battle of Britain
casualty, I suddenly saw a black mass of pitfalls in the scheme and
began, panic-stricken, trying to convince Wally of them.

“It will be all right,” he kept saying to all
my bleak predictions.

And so it was that I found myself driving to
the ball, not quite knowing how I got drawn into it at all, wearing
a sky-blue gown, white gloves and imitation diamonds at my
throat.

I had started out alone, but soon a presence
materialized beside me. Wally turned a frankly admiring gaze my
way.

“My word,” he said, eyeing me up and down,
“aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

“Do they rent tuxes in the Other World?” I
asked, glancing at him. He was dressed in one, with a white scarf
draped elegantly round his neck.

“So to speak,” he said.

I removed a hand from the steering-wheel to
tuck-up a stray strand of hair. It was shaking and he saw it.

“Hey,” he said. “Relax. Get into the spirit
of the occasion.”

I gave him an incredulous look but he
appeared to be sublimely unaware of what he had just said. Then he
made the error of glancing my way. I saw the devilry that danced in
those blue eyes, and we both burst out laughing.

After this, I could almost believe that
things were going to be all right after all.

At the hotel, I parked the car and climbed
out, carefully smoothing my skirts. Wally politely offered me an
arm.

I hesitated. So far he had been a shadow, a
spirit, something that one’s hand would go through if one reached
for it. He had never touched me. But now…

He noticed the pause, and waited until I
looked up to meet his eyes. There was a wealth of understanding in
them.

“I swear to you it will be all right,” he
said. “For tonight I’m as human as I ever was, as you are. Take my
hand, Alex. Please. Take my hand.”

His words echoed hollowly in the deserted
garage. Very slowly I reached for the hand he held out to me. Our
fingers met; my hand slipped into his as if it had always been
there, as if it had been made for this, and his fingers curled
protectively round it.

“Come on,” he said softly. “The music is
waiting.”

The evening passed like a dream. Wally was a
hit. His charm and ready wit enchanted the other three couples at
our table. But he danced only with me, and when I was whisked off
by a hoary patriarch from our table to do a Scottish dance, Wally
didn’t take the opportunity to ask anyone else but sat and watched
me with a smile in his eyes.

My own eyes kept wandering back to the table,
and I realised I was in real danger of falling in love with a man
dead for 40 odd years. Dead and yet young and vibrantly alive and
with a disturbing pair of blue eyes which knew how to smile at
me.

Dancing with Wally was an experience which
went beyond anything I had ever known. His touch was firm and sure,
he knew how to guide a partner, and in his arms I found a calmness
and a confidence that gave me the freedom to do anything.

During the slower numbers he held me close
and I laid a cheek on his shoulder and dreamed that he was
real.

He did not turn into a pumpkin or disappear
at midnight, but remained clear and solid and debonair, and made
outrageous comments about the people around us which made me laugh
and them glower, because sometimes it was impossible to conceal
whom the laughter concerned.

The patriarch and his lady went home at
12.30; the other two couples gave up at approximately 1 a.m. Wally
and I stayed until the end, until the last magic note; and then,
just as we thought it was over, the band, after a small pause,
began to play its final number, a farewell song.

“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t
know when…”

“…but I know we’ll meet again some sunny
day…” Wally sang softly into my hair as we swayed, very slowly,
barely moving at all, while the mellow World War II melody wove its
spell around us.

A song from his day, played in mine – it
seemed impossible then that we could overcome even the towering
barrier that divided us from one another, and yet – we clung to
each other for a long moment after the song had ended, with the
desperate and despairing strength of those who knew they were
doomed to be torn apart despite anything they might do.

It was Wally who finally broke free. “Well,”
he said, with a queer catch in his voice, “it’s over.”

We went to our table and retrieve dour
things, and I placed the thin white silk scarf, which he had
earlier removed, round his neck with an infinitely tender gesture,
because that was all I would ever get to do for him.

He held my wrap while I shrugged into it, as
a true gentleman would, and kept an arm around my shoulders as we
went down to the car. I pulled away slowly from the parking spot
and then out into the empty street.

We drove in a cocoon of companionable silence
all the way to my flat. As I stopped the car and took the key out
of the ignition, Wally sighed and withdrew his hand. I saw with the
keys in my lap, staring at them.

One of those cool, alabaster hands came up to
tilt my chin gently, so that I was forced to look at him. The blue
eyes were serious and sad.

“I told you that tonight, I am as human as I
ever was,” he whispered. “But only for tonight. Ah, Alex, dear
Alex, it’s many years too late for us. I will be back into shadows
and darkness before long, but you are still of the real world…

“I’d have to leave you in the morning more
finally than anyone ever left before and it’s better, much better,
that I leave you tonight, before things happen that will leave us
both even more deeply unhappy the next day.”

He leaned over and brushed my lips with his
and even the kiss was cool, like the touch of a snowflake.

“Good night, my love,” he said.
“Goodbye.”

And then there was only the empty seat where
he had been sitting the instant before.

I packed and sent off the cigarette case the
next morning. Wally’s words had been a farewell – I would not see
him again – and although I did wish to keep the cigarette case to
remember him by, I sent it.

For a myriad of different reasons I sent it.
One was that only this was would he find true rest; another, that I
needed to memento to call to mind Wally’s blue eyes and that lock
of fair hair. That was burned in me for ever.

Wally had given me the address; I suppose I
should have checked to see if it was still correct, but I could not
bear to have the delay while, via the cigarette case, Wally was so
close and yet so far from me.

I wrote a small explanatory note, which I
hoped didn’t sound too ludicrous, and posted off the small parcel
with Wally’s spirit, trying to put it from my mind. The fact that I
did not quite succeed is neither here nor there.

However, I had not been thinking of Wally
when I went to answer my doorbell some six months later, and opened
the door to find Walter Charles Hawke standing there. A Walter
Hawke too disturbingly solid to be the dear ghost I had
recalled.

I think I would have passed out if my visitor
hadn’t reached over to steady me.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, and even the
voice, the words used… “I didn’t mean to startle you. I knew I
should have phoned.”

I got my voice back. “Who are you?” I
whispered.

“I’m Ben Hawke,” said the apparition. “I’m
Walter Hawke’s great nephew. And you, from the way you reacted,
must be Alex. Great-uncle Wally sent me here, so to speak.”

“How…? Where did you…?” I swallowed and
straightened. “You’d better come in.”

He did. Then my heart, back in its natural
place, gave a queer tug and showed every sign of bolting again.
For, almost like an after-image, Wally Hawke stood in the doorway
that Ben had vacated. He was very dim and distant, but I knew the
smile in those eyes.

Before he faded away completely Wally gave me
a slow, casual salute and finished by blowing me a kiss. It landed,
even if only in my imagination, like a long-remembered
snowflake.

And as I looked away from the door towards
the real, live Hawke in my living-room, smiling such a Wally smile,
the words and the promise of an Old World War II song woke a memory
in my mind, something that Wally had sung at our last dance,
something that he, against all odds, had meant.

He did know we’d meet again one sunny
day.

I wrote this one after my one and only trip
to Scotland – and yes, I DID go to Skye, and I found it beautiful.
And haunting. And I honestly didn’t mean to people it with ghost
children until this story came tumbling out some months after I had
returned home and all those Skye memories had a chance to gel and
re-form and come together in the shape of the sweet little ghost
presence which haunts this romantic tale – originally published in
a Cape Town magazine called “You” – oh, too many years ago now. But
it still has a scent and a sound of Skye and Scotland for me, an
amazing haunting feat for something that happened so long ago. So
come walk the shores of Skye with me – with me, and with the ghost
I brought home with me…

He seemed to have the most peculiar ability
to slip behind his shadow. Marian saw the urchin hanging
precariously over the cliff edge, laughing, reaching for something
just underneath – even as she started forward to pull him away by
the seat of his pants, she became aware that she could not hear
that laughter. And in the time it took her to blink, he was
gone.

She first saw him two days after she and
Jamie had arrived on Skye. That had been on the cliff, just next to
where the waterfall plunged off Kilt Rock in Trotternish.

The next time the ghost-boy had been playing
hide and seek around the monument on the grave of Flora MacDonald,
and that time Marian had gasped and pointed, but Jamie had just
stared.

“What child? Where?” he asked somewhat
impatiently. It had not been a good topic to raise. The subject of
children hung between them like a sword. There would be none, not
if Jamie had anything to do with it. Not after Charlie.

But the urchin had gone again by the time
Marian looked back. And she didn’t insist. His toussled dark curls
and laughing peat-water colored eyes etched themselves into her
memory, though, and it was as if recognising an old friend that she
encountered him again, on their way down into Portree from the
northernmost fringes of Trotternish along the road skirting Uig Bay
and Loch Snizort.

He waved at her once from the roadside as
they drove past in their rented red VW Golf; Jamie picked that
moment to perform one of the grinding gear changes for which the
car was rapidly acquiring a reputation, and Marian was distracted –
the eyeblink was all it took. The child had cloaked himself in his
shadow again. He was gone.

Jamie was bad-tempered with everything. He
almost resented Marian’s obvious enjoyment of the landscape and the
late summer sunshine which was a bonus, gliding the spreading,
shimmering waters of the Inner Sound and Loch Ainort as they had
driven up the coast on their way to Flodigarry.

“It’s only because you haven’t seen this
place with horizontal rain which doesn’t stop for the Lord’s forty
days and nights,” Jamie muttered darkly as his wife begged him to
stop the car in an impossible place yet again to that she could
drink in the beauty of the sea which divided Skye from the
mainland.

“You’re a Sassenach anyway; what’s with you?
You’re behaving like Bonnie Prince Charlie is on the threshold of
returning, and you the last of the faithful Highlanders waiting to
welcome him home.” He snorted. “You’re all the same, you romantic
Englishwomen. You fall for the Highlands and conveniently forget
that you English destroyed it, for what it was worth.”

“Oh, stop it,” snapped Marian, annoyed. “You
fawned over Devon and Cornwall. Did I say a word?”

They squabbled over the silliest things of
late. Jamie’s first wife Morag and their son Charlie – named after
Morag’s father and not after the Bonnie Prince – regularly look a
sizeable chunk of Jamie’s monthly income; even with Marian’s
salary, things were tight in the MacDonald household, and money
always talked.

Charles MacDonald was an obnoxious little
brat of seven, spoiled by his mother beyond exasperation, but it
was only of late that Jamie was waking up to the fact that he had
lost his son to his embittered wife.

It was enough to sour him, enough to declare,
halfway through the first year of his second marriage, that he
wanted to children at all. Marian had been almost forcefed the
Pill.

Not only that, but it seemed that the entire
episode of his marriage had turned Jamie anti-Scotland as a
whole.

Marian had begun to suspect not long after
her wedding that part of her desirability as a bride was the fact
that she hailed from good English yeoman stock form the deep South
of England, people who had nothing to do with Scotland for
generations.

She had wanted to come see the island where
her husband had been born, but Jamie had steered her to a honeymoon
in Italy and if they travelled anywhere in the months that followed
it was always south, south into the sun and the Mediterranean. If
it hadn’t been for old Duncan MacDonald they would never had come
back.