Ghost MacIndoe by Jonathan Buckley

Author:Jonathan Buckley [Buckley, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00744-729-9
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2001-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

27. All My Appointed Time

Late in the evening Alexander’s mother brought the biggest of the photograph albums downstairs and placed it in Jane’s hands. Jane lowered it into her lap as if she were holding a box of blown glass, raised the front cover on her fingernails, and peeled back the leaf of tissue paper that covered the first page.

‘Alexander’s grandparents,’ said his mother, with a fond, respectful cadence.

‘Paternal?’ asked Jane, and she gave Alexander a glance for corroboration.

‘Hamish and Helen,’ said his father.

‘On the occasion of their engagement,’ his mother added, wiping a crease from the tissue.

As Jane raised the album closer to her face, Alexander leaned over the back of the settee to regard the portrait of his father’s father. Hamish Alexander MacIndoe always looked to Alexander not like a man who was alive but like an effigy of himself, with his waxen white skin and wig-like hair, and his mouth as straight as a spirit level, and his wide glassy eyes. The shining eyes and the rigid mouth gave his grandfather’s image the expression of a man stupefied by his own probity.

‘A handsome man,’ Jane remarked, angling the page in the light of the standard lamp, and Alexander could tell by the tightening of the skin at her temple that she, like he, could see no resemblance at all between Hamish MacIndoe and Hamish’s son.

‘By all accounts,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘A good-looking and flinty kind of man.’

‘I don’t recall him,’ his father told Jane. ‘I was five when he died.’

Jane half-closed the album, as though by way of expressing condolence. ‘In the war?’ she asked.

‘He survived the fighting. It was the flu that killed him,’ explained Alexander’s mother.

‘Killed more than the war,’ said his father. ‘Far more. Twenty-five million in all. Thereabouts. He died in the second wave, in 1920. Worst epidemic since the Black Death.’

‘I’d no idea,’ Jane apologised.

‘That’s all right. Few people have. Flu’s not dramatic enough, I suppose,’ said his father, peering with one eye into the bowl of his pipe. ‘No sense of the heroic, the Biblical. Not nasty enough. Outdone by the Somme,’ he reflected. ‘I don’t know. Died of the flu. Scarcely better than “slipped on the soap”.’

‘He was an engineer,’ said Alexander. ‘A steam engine man.’

‘Went up to York on a Friday, right as rain,’ his father told her. ‘Came back with an ache and a cough. Dead the following Thursday.’ With a fluting breath he expelled the debris from his pipe.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jane.

‘No need, dear. C’est la mort,’ his father responded, with a loose-wristed wave of his hand, like a gallant salute. ‘But thank you.’

‘Yes,’ said Alexander’s mother wistfully. ‘They didn’t have long together, did they? They married late, for those days. This would be 1910, wouldn’t it, Graham?’

‘It would.’

‘They moved down to London, for his work, soon after they married. Then they had a five-year wait for their son,’ she said to Jane.

‘Remission,’ muttered his father from the side of his mouth, and he winked at Alexander as he struck a match.

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