Ghosts might have been a more common word for them — she believes in ghosts. But if that's what they are, they're the ghosts of people she's never met. And surely, if they were ghosts, her husband, Leonard, would be one of them.
Unless he has decided for some reason to give her a miss.
She finds this possibility distressing. She doesn't particularly want to see Leonard, but the thought that he could appear to her if he wanted and has chosen not to puts a clamp on her heart, makes her go damp and miserable.
All this is a puzzle and she would like to ask someone about it, get a few answers, but is afraid of what she might hear. In the meantime she turns her attention to Donald. Let the feet go their own way. Let them just go!
Donald looks sweet when he is writing. He sits with one shoulder dipped and his arm circling the page, for ever worried, like a child, that someone might be looking over his shoulder and trying to copy. His tongue is at the corner of his mouth. Like a sweet-natured forty-three-year-old, very earnest and absorbed, practising pot-hooks.
Poor Donald, she thinks. He has spent his whole life waiting for her to become a mother of another sort. The sort who'll take an interest. Well, she is interested. She's interested, right now, in those feet! But what Donald means is interested in what interests him, and she can't for the life of her see what all this stuff is that he gets so excited about, and Donald, for all his cleverness, can't tell her. When she asks, he gets angry. The questions she comes up with are just the ones, it seems, that Donald cannot answer. They're too simple. He loses his cool — that's what people say these days — but all that does is make him feel bad, and the next moment he is coming after her with hugs, and little offerings out of the Herald that she could perfectly well read for herself, or out of books! Because she's made him feel guilty.
This capacity she appears to possess for making grown men feel guilty — she had the same effect on Donald's father — surprises her. Guilt is not one of the things she herself suffers from.
Duty. Responsibility. Guilt. Leonard was very strong on all three. So is Donald. He is very like his father in all sorts of ways, though not physically — Leonard was a very thin man.
Leonard too would have liked her to take an interest. Only Leonard was kinder, more understanding — she had almost said forgiving. It wasn't her fault that she'd left school at thirteen — loads of girls did in those days, and clever men married them just the same. Leonard was careful always not to let her see that in this way she had failed him; that in the part of his nature that looked out into the world and was baffled, or which brought him moments of almost boyish elation, she could not join him, he was alone.
She was sorry for that, but she didn't feel guilty. People are what they are. Leonard knew that as well as she did.
Donald's generation, she has decided, are less willing to make allowances. Less indulgent. Or maybe that is just Donald. Even as a tiny tot he was always imposing what he felt on others. His need “share,” as he calls it, does have its nice side, she knows that. But it is very consuming. “Look at this, Mum,” he would shout, his whole tiny body in a “You're not looking! Look!”
In those days it would be a caterpillar, some nasty black thing. An armoured black dragon that she thought of as Japanese-looking and found particularly repulsive. Or a picture of an air battle, all dotted lines that were supposed to be machine-gun bullets, and jagged flame. Later it was books — Proust. She'd had a whole year of that one, that Proust. Now it was this Rock.
High maintenance, that's what they called it these days. She got that from her neighbour, Tess Hyland. Donald was high maintenance.
“What's up?” he asks now, seeing her dip her shoulder again and flinch. “What's the matter?”
“Nothing's the matter,” she snaps back. “What's the matter yourself?”
She has discovered that the best way of dealing with Donald's questions is to return them. Backhand. As a girl she was quite a decent tennis player.
She continues to crouch. There is plenty of space up there under the cantilevered ceiling, no shortage of space; but the fact that twenty feet over your head the splayed toes of some giant black acrobat are sloshing about in blood is not an easy thing to ignore, especially at breakfast. She is reminded of the roofs of some of the cathedrals they'd seen — with Leonard it was cathedrals. They visited seven of them once, seven in a row. But over there the angels existed mostly from the waist up. You were supposed to ignore what existed below. They hung out over the damp aisles blowing trumpets or shaking tambourines. Here, it seems, you did get the lower parts and they were armed with hosepipes. Well, that was logical enough. They were in the southern hemisphere.
Donald is eyeing her again, though he is pretending not to. They are all at it these days — Donald, Douglas, Shirley. She has become an object of interest. She knows why. They're on the lookout for some sign that she is losing her marbles.
“Why aren't you eating your breakfast?” Donald demands.
“I am,” she tells him.
As if in retaliation for all those years when she forced one thing or another into their reluctant mouths — gooey eggs, strips of limp bread and butter, mashed banana, cod-liver oil — they have begun, this last year, to torment her with her unwillingness to do more than pick about at her food. When Donald says, "Come on now, just one more mouthful,” he is reproducing, whether he knows it or not, exactly the coax and whine of her own voice from forty years ago, and so accurately that, with a sickening rush, as if she had missed a step and fallen through four decades, she finds herself back in the dingy, cockroach-infested maisonette at West End that was all Leonard was able to find for them in the shortage after the war. The linoleum! Except in the corners and under the immoveable sideboard, roses worn to a dishwater brown. A gas heater in the bathroom that when she shut her eyes and put a match to it went off like a bunger and threatened to blast her eyebrows off. Donald in his high chair chucking crusts all over the floor, and Douglas hauling himself up to the open piano, preparing to thump. To get away from that vision she's willing even to face the feet.
She glances upwards — ah, they're gone! — then away to where an oversized ranger in a khaki uniform and wide-brimmed Akubra is examining the leaves of a rainforest shrub that goes all the way to the ceiling. For all the world as if he was out in the open somewhere and had just climbed out of a ute or off a horse.
“You shouldn't have taken all that,” Donald is saying — she knows this one too—"if all you're going to do is let it sit on your plate.”
Dear me, she thinks, is he going to go through the whole routine? The poor little children in England? What a pain I must have been!
In fact, she doesn't intend to eat any of this stuff. Breakfast is just an excuse, so far as she is concerned, for a cigarette.
But the buffet table here is a feature. Donald leads her to it each morning as if it was an altar. Leonard too had a weakness for altars.
This one is garishly and unseasonably festive.
A big blue Japanese pumpkin is surrounded by several smaller ones, bright orange, with shells like fine bone china and pimpled.
There are wheatsheaves, loaves of rye and five-grain bread, spilled walnuts, almonds, a couple of hibiscus flowers. It's hard to know what is for decoration and what is to eat.
And the effect, whatever was intended, has been ruined because some joker has, without ceremony, unceremoniously, plonked his saddle down right in the middle of it. Its straps all scuffed at the edges, and with worn and frayed stitching, its seat discoloured with sweat, this saddle has simply been plonked down and left among the cereal jars, the plates of cheese, sliced ham and smoked salmon, the bowls of stewed prunes, tinned apricots, orange quarters, crystallised pears …