Chapter 1: Ghost Story

1 - A New Ghost

“Dying doesn’t make you any wiser, per se.”

The words were just audible, but you couldn’t describe them as soft or whispered – more like wind blowing through dry grass, thin and reedy. I recognised the voice and I almost jumped forward and landed in the grave where I had just helped to lower the speaker in his oak-effect coffin.

This was only the second burial I had been to and the first where I held a cord. The weight was taken by two hefty undertakers holding a webbing strap under the coffin but the six nearest male relatives that were fit to do so each held a fancy braided cord attached to the handles.

I had taken a step back into line with the rest of the mourners when the eerie message reached me. Pull yourself together, I thought. I heard the words and they came from behind me. All I had to do was turn round to see who – or what – had said them. I would not panic but would calmly turn and look the speaker in the eye.

“In fact, I’ve never met a ghost that was much of a thinker. They’re great talkers but they repeat themselves an awful lot.”

I was sure I could feel his breath as he leaned forward to continue the one-sided conversation. He gave a little cough wafting the odour of mint imperials over my cheek. I took one last look into the grave to make sure the coffin was still there with the lid securely fastened then I spun on my heel to face my nemesis.

I’m eighteen with decent A levels and I’ve completed my first two terms at a good university. I do not believe in ghosts and, even if I did, I wouldn’t be afraid of one even at its own funeral. I have also been very well brought up so, as I turned, I was ready to smile and be polite.

Before I matriculated, I hardly knew Great Uncle Henry. He used to turn up at family functions when I was in primary school, but he had been confined to a nursing home before I went to secondary school. I had formed the impression that he was a bit ga-ga from the things the family said about him. At get-togethers the adults would look shifty and change the subject if anyone mentioned his name.

All I knew for sure was that he had been a solicitor and had amassed considerable wealth. It turned out that his nursing home was in the same Georgian terrace as my Hall of Residence. Under moderate persuasion from my mother, I went along to visit this relic of a bygone era on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday at the beginning of October.

He needed more persuasion to see me than I did to make me visit. I could hear him arguing with his nurse while I waited outside the room. It was odd to listen to a thready, tremulous voice using foul language to tell her that he wanted nothing to do with my branch of his family.

“No treat for you tonight, Henry, if you don’t see the lad,” the nurse told him in a patronisingly arch tone.

“Stuff the treat,” he sighed, since his vocal chords could no longer cope with the stress imposed by his emotions. “I’m too old for treats. Give him the treat – see if I care.”

There was silence for a minute or two and then he gave in and permitted me to enter. He was sitting beside his bed when he condescended to meet me, small and wrinkled but with his mind totally unaffected by age or infirmity. The nurse was a homely lady in her forties, and she gave me a complicit wink while she wiped what looked suspiciously like lipstick from Great Uncle Henry’s wrinkled cheek.

I don’t know which of us was the more surprised because we took to each other from the start.

That, however, did not give him the right to haunt me, especially since we hadn’t even covered the coffin with earth. I almost passed out when I finally made myself turn to the person or entity that had spoken to me. It was Great Uncle Henry all right but the thing that caused my brain to fuse was that he was in drag.

Until this morning when he was lying in his coffin dressed in a suit, I had only seen him in silk pyjamas and a brocade dressing gown. Now he was standing about a foot from me in a long black frock with a feather scarf wrapped round his throat. The undertaker had put on a bit too much rouge for the lying in state but now Great Uncle Henry had chosen to add earrings and a hat decorated with fruit salad.

I was shaking pretty badly by this time; he was straight in front of me, and I was nearly sure that I would lose my balance if I tried to turn away. After his birthday I went to visit him three or four times a week. He liked me to read to him. Maybe ghosts can’t turn the pages of books for themselves and have to haunt great-grand nephews to do it for them.

Then he smiled at me, and the world slowly returned to normal. Henry had a set of sparklingly white false teeth that were the joy of his old age. He didn’t mind me seeing him on the commode with his pyjama trousers pooled around his skeletal ankles, but he would not be seen without his choppers.

The person facing me had dark brown stumps in her lower jaw and off-white teeth at the top that slid slowly down as she continued to smile, to reconnect with the molars on the bottom, showing the upper edge of the plate.

“I thought you were a ghost,” I breathed. I was still far from certain that the person eyeing me quizzically was wholly natural. Just because it wasn’t Henry’s ghost didn’t mean that it wasn’t someone else’s ghost, if you see what I mean.

“I’m Harriet, Henry’s twin. Do you know all these people?”

I moved to stand beside her while she extracted a veil from amongst the cherries on her hat and pulled it down over her disturbingly familiar face. She put her hand through my arm and gave my biceps a squeeze.

“Oh my, it must be sixty years since I felt that much muscle.”

It wasn’t hard to work out that she was intent on keeping me unsettled but I was making heavy weather of dealing with her teasing. There was a good turn-out at the graveside since the spring day was warm and almost windless. The group from the nursing home had commandeered the side of the open grave nearest the path and they had formed a sort of infantry square of nurses and orderlies surrounding the patients in wheelchairs and Zimmers.

Great Aunt Harriet seemed to know most of that group because she was giving and receiving little waves of recognition. I mostly knew them only by their function within the home where Henry had breathed his last. Harriet still had my arm firmly grasped in her left hand tight enough to get me worrying about the blood supply to my fingers.

The family occupied the other side of the grave where they had formed into two clumps on either side of the minister, so they looked like dumb-bells with the representative of the established church as the connecting bar. We are a large but not a unitd family. The fault line between the two main groupings seemed to me to be largely geographical. My lot continued to live within sight of Singers’ clock, when there was a Singers’ clock to live within sight of. Our homes ranged along the Clyde from Yoker to Dalnottar but no further. The other lot had moved to Bearsden and Helensburgh and places like that.

Harriet and I were standing slightly apart from the rest at the foot of the grave. As the youngest cord-holder I had been placed at the bottom end of the coffin. The ghost had spoken to me before I could sidle round to merge with the nearest family group. Between us and the nursing home folk there was a loose arrangement of eight unattached observers. They comprised three pairs and two individuals. There was a small but distinct gap between the component parts.

The Minister had just started his oration when Harriet asked me to identify the people in the crowd. He spoke loudly and clearly with the authority of his office, but this did not stop my aunt. Her reedy voice did not penetrate far so no one even looked in our direction when she spoke. I tried to whisper the information she wanted back to her, but it turned out that she is very deaf. She insisted that I tell her who was who while the rest of the congregation were shushing me – my dad actually shook his fist in my direction.

Great Aunt Harriet seemed to be blissfully unaware of the problem that was making me want to jump in on top of the coffin to escape the embarrassment. When the Minister stopped talking and turned to glare at the pair of us, Harriet gave him a little wave and told him to carry on. I don’t know if he cut the eulogy short after that, but he certainly speeded up the delivery.

There were a few tears at the conclusion, but the family bore their loss with a great deal more fortitude than the staff and patients of the nursing home. Several of the older nurses were sobbing and the one who had threatened to withhold his treat stepped forward and dropped a single long-stemmed rose wrapped in a pink ribbon into the grave.

“Ribbon be damned. If I know her that’ll be a pair of knickers – she was always ready to drop her knickers, that one!” I was glad there was no one near enough to hear Harriet’s throaty whisper.

“You and me’ll just go along to the purvey. I don’t want to miss their faces when they hear Henry’s Will.”

Harriet dragged me a willing victim towards the parked cars. I had arrived at the funeral in one of the official cars and I had no wish to face the disapproval of the other passengers on the return journey. I was feeling a bit light-headed, to tell you the truth. I don’t mean that I was likely to pass out; it was more as if I didn’t think that I had any further to fall into the pit of humiliation I was already in.

“So, you believe in life after death then, Great Aunt?”

She stopped and dragged me round to look at me. It would be hard to read her expression through all the wrinkles but the heavy veil she kept in place made it impossible. She made a sound that I thought for a minute was a death rattle: it turned out to be a laugh, but I had time to consider and reject the idea of giving her the kiss of life before I realised that.

“I’m not at all sure that I even believe in life before death. I don’t think I would believe that you’re real if I didn’t have your lovely firm muscles in my hand!”

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said, but I decided to have another wild attempt at normal communication.

“How come I’ve never heard of you, Great Aunt Harriet?”

“I’m the black sheep of the family.” This was more like it! She had offered a rational answer to my question, and I felt safe in continuing:

“I thought Great Uncle Henry was the black sheep?”

“Don’t be silly – he was the black ram. His indiscretions were not approved of by the family, officially that is, but the men secretly admired him for his reputation and the women all wanted to know just how many of the stories they had heard were true.

“He was a rake walking a thin line mostly just within the law. He loved women and they seemed to be unable to resist him. He also made stacks of money and a rich man can be forgiven almost anything.”

I thought of the lipstick on his cheek when I first met him and the freedom with which his hands roamed about the posteriors of the nurses attending him. They didn’t object but just smiled and moved out of his reach if he got too naughty.

“The nurse that threw the rose into the grave threatened to stop his treat. Do you know what she meant?”

The death rattle that signified amusement came again.

“I can’t be sure, but it probably involved her hands in his pyjama trousers or his hand up her skirt.”

By this time, we had reached the cars where we were greeted by an old man dressed in blazer and flannels and wearing a peaked cap. I thought he was a refugee from Henley until Aunt Harriet introduced him as ‘Young Cedric’. He must be seventy years old, but I suppose that counts as young when you’re ninety. I was looking round for a Rolls Royce dating from the mid-twentieth century, but he opened the back door of a scarlet BMW and ushered Aunt Harriet and me into the plush interior.

I didn’t know that BMWs were fitted with after-burners! We went through the cemetery gates at sixty taking the turn onto the main road with our tyres squealing to a chorus of motor horns from the drivers who had right of way. The journey to the nursing home where a nourishing buffet awaited us was brief but exciting.

Young Cedric crouched over the wheel weaving in and out of slower traffic – we only encountered slower traffic! Harriet leaned eagerly forward between the seats urging him on and cursing other road users in her whispery voice. The trip seemed to rejuvenate the two old people, but it left me white knuckled and catatonic.

As soon as we stopped outside the nursing home, I reached for the door handle, but Aunt Harriet held me back until Young Cedric skipped round to let us out. She renewed her firm grasp on my arm as we climbed the steps and in through the open front door. Unlike my first visit, the hallway was crowded.

All the houses in the terrace are listed buildings and many of them are recovering from their nadir in the 1960s. At that time, they were too large to be fashionable and most of them were amateurishly converted into flats. The university bought a couple of the properties at about then, keeping one for the medievalists and putting first year students into the other under the charge of a warden.

Great Uncle Henry’s nursing home had been restored to its original splendour. The hall was floored with large black and white marble slabs usually decently hidden beneath protective carpets. Two white marble staircases rose in majestic curves to the first floor where two stained glass windows added to the impression that you were facing a large white bull with bloodshot eyes. In the afternoon with the sun setting behind them you were left in no doubt that the bull was thoroughly pissed off about something.

On my first visit I had walked uncertainly along the green runner stretching from the door to the reception desk nestling between the lowered horns. The solitary receptionist totally ignored me, and I was a bit overwhelmed by the grandeur so I stood waiting for her to look at me. My early trepidation was giving way to surly resentment before she deigned to notice me.

Today she is standing at the bottom of the left-hand staircase carrying a clipboard and scowling at the guests who are leaving their coats at a couple of trestle tables manned by a young man and a young woman busily transferring the outdoor clothing to racks.

Harriet made straight for the receptionist towing me along with her. When the woman spotted us, I thought she had been struck with a sudden pain before I realised that she was in fact smiling. The only look she had given me that first time was unconcealed scepticism that I could be a relative of the great Henry Winterton. Even when a phone call had forced her to let me climb the stairs, she carefully watched me out of sight.

Now she is fawning over my Great Aunt and being ignored by the old lady as she richly deserves. Harriet strode past the receptionist, past the end of the temporary cloakroom and, still with me in tow, took us to a narrow door under the horn of the stair. She took out a key to unlock this inconspicuous opening disclosing a mirrored elevator. The same key was needed to set the lift on its upward journey. There were no buttons to allow you to select a floor; in this lift there was only one destination and that turned out to be a large office expensively furnished.

Harriet strode across to the huge desk and sat behind it with the authority of ownership. She picked up a remote control to activate a bank of television monitors on the wall to her left and then she picked up a telephone and whispered:

“We’ve arrived. Be a good girl and bring us some food.”

One of the monitors showed the melee in the entrance hall from a camera mounted above the reception desk. People were slowly moving towards the stair and, as I watched, the front door was swung closed. Another screen showed a large room with mourners crowding in and making for a table running the length of the room laden with food. In the top corner a string quartet looked comical as they scraped away at their instruments in silence.

On my first visit to Uncle Henry, I was met at the top of the stair by Karen, the lady who talked the old man into seeing me. She was dressed as a nurse except that she had on shoes with three- or four-inch heels. She greeted me with a warm smile and took my arm to escort me to the door where I waited for permission to enter. Now she entered the office where I was standing a pace from the elevator, carrying a folding base. She set it up near the desk and helped young Cedric who had followed her in to place a large tray of food down on top.

He went to a cupboard on my left that proved to be a well-stocked bar where he filled two glasses and took them back to the desk placing one in front of Great Aunt Harriet. Karen handed me a plate laden with sandwiches, sausage rolls and cakes. When I had taken it from her, she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

“You’re doing great,” she whispered as she went towards the door. She’s probably older than my mum but I felt a little tremor when she kissed me – I think I’m a pervert!

Cedric and Harriet were engrossed in a file over at the desk and the monitors were showing much the same scenes: the hall was almost empty, and the large room was almost full but the string quartet was still sawing away with great vigour. I walked around the room eating the food and looking at the landscape paintings that filled the walls. They all looked moody and a bit gloomy so I suppose they must be valuable but they don’t have little cards underneath telling you the artist and date so I can’t be sure.

There was only one portrait hung facing Harriet at the desk, but it was by some way the biggest picture in the room. It was unmistakeably Uncle Henry although a younger and less wrinkled version than I was familiar with. There were things here that I didn’t understand.

2. Great Uncle Henry

It was curiosity rather than filial duty that made me go to see my great uncle. The family grandparents are in their seventies, and they are a rum bunch. Those that remember what happened to the world after about 1980 disapprove of all the changes since then. What view would someone a generation older than them hold?

I was ready for him to be about as communicative as a pot plant, so it was actually a nice surprise to find him refusing to meet me – at least he had strong opinions. Human nature is queer. If the frosty receptionist had turned me away, I’d have shrugged and gone without regrets but now that the old man wanted to turn me away I was determined to meet him.

He was sitting, dwarfed by the large chair he occupied. He seemed very old and frail as I was approaching until he looked up and I saw his eyes. Small, they should have been lost in the wrinkles surrounding them, but they sparkled with vitality and humour. There was something else in those old eyes, but it took more than one visit for me to recognise malice.

He opened the conversation by showing that he knew all about me and the rest of the family. I had entered the room expecting a difficult, slightly confused old man but he set out to baffle me with rapid changes of topic. After ten minutes I admired his memory and conversational skill, but I wasn’t enjoying my visit.

The thing that changed the course of my future arose out of a remark I made about golf. He had warned me to beware of false friends and he listened when I told him that the lad I thought was my best friend in school had taken me onto the golf course with the intention of humiliating me. He had been playing golf since he was eight and he mocked my feeble attempts to make contact with the damned little white ball.

“So, what do you conclude from that?” Henry asked.

“First off, I learned to be on the look-out for envy and secondly, I will take professional lessons before I try anything else. I had a driving instructor, and I passed my test first time.”

“What about sex?”

I thought he had changed the subject: “Oh well you know, I’ve been on dates but nothing serious, you know.” He became quite agitated.

“Don’t be stupid boy! I mean, will you take professional lessons in sex?”

“It’s a bit different from learning golf and driving a car, you know.”

“I do not know. Sex is a skill, and no one is born with the ability to do it so why not take instruction from a professional?”

He was still rattling on in his penetrating whisper, but I was taking longer and longer to find answers. At some level I recognised that the answer lay in the emotional interaction, but I couldn’t find the words to explain. He said nothing but he was watching me very carefully and I felt that I was being tested.

I began to get angry: he had set out to put me on the back foot. I came to see him, but he was reluctant to admit me and he wasn’t showing the least gratitude for my sacrifice in coming here. It was time to stand up for myself.

“I need to think about buying sex. It’s a new idea for me.”

He nodded once or twice and then gestured for me to pour him a glass of water. After two sips he handed back the glass.

“Do you read?”

I told him that I’m an avid reader.

“Have you read Kidnapped by RLS?”

“Yes, but it must have been ten years ago.”

“Same with me except it’s nearer eighty years since I first met Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour. There’s a copy on the shelf by the door. Will you read it to me?”

So, I sat and read the classic prose of Stevenson. The nurse came in, put the lights on and drew the curtains while David survived the attempt on his life at the House of Shaws. He had become cabin boy for Hoseasons before she brought in Uncle Henry’s medication and asked me to leave.

Something about my tone when I answered the question about sex had convinced Great Uncle Henry that I was worth spending time with. He never did explain his reasoning, but it wasn’t simply my youth because he told me later that he had sent my cousin Kirsty packing when she came to visit him

“Come back tomorrow and we’ll see off the Red Fox,” he whispered sounding tired but happy. So I went back four or so nights a week and read until we had finished Kidnapped and the Black Arrow. Ivanhoe had just released Womba when I left him one evening five months later. In the morning Karen called me to say that Henry had suffered a massive stroke. He was dead by the time I walked the fifty metres to the nursing home.

It was a shock without being a surprise. I had known from the start that he was frail, and he was convinced that his remaining time was limited but I felt cheated that he had gone before I really got to know him. You’re not wholly rational at a time like that and I was angry with him for deserting me when I still had so much to learn. He will be a welcome ghost if he does haunt me.

I didn’t spend all my time reading. Uncle Henry favoured the Socratic approach so he would ask questions to force me to think. I was, I suppose, a typical eighteen-year-old lad believing that I had all the answers to the problems besetting the world although I was deeply unsure of my ability to thrive or even survive in my own small part of it.

At first Henry would lead me into making positive commitments to a point of view before he exposed my certainty as a shallow misunderstanding of the facts. Having me expound on the virtues of professional help in developing a new skill, he forced me to think outside the box with his question about using a prostitute to teach me about sex.

He didn’t make me answer, being content when his questions had made me think. He never stated his own opinion on any subject and I found in time that it was not safe to infer his beliefs from the questions he posed. In the early days I sometimes asked him for his views, but he would give a dry throaty chuckle and ask me for a drink of water or would hand me the book I was reading at the moment.

The only times when I got an inkling of his philosophy of life was when a nurse was in the room when I asked a direct question.

“What do you think, Karen?” he would enquire. “Am I the sort of man who would consort with prostitutes?”

“Don’t ask me. All I know is that you’re a wicked old man. Don’t you let him corrupt you Kenneth,” she would add giving me a friendly squeeze or a kiss on the cheek.

Karen wasn’t the only nurse who attended Uncle Henry, but she was clearly his favourite and she was there more often than not. She was always mildly flirtatious with me to the point where my ego was boosted but never reaching the stage where I became embarrassed. She gave him hugs and kisses and laughed off the freedom with which he used his hands on or near her bum. After a few weeks I hardly noticed: it wasn’t the way we behaved at home, but I could see that it was the result of gentle affection rather than lust.

We are a close family, but we are not keen to show affection. It was only after Uncle Henry had posed some searching questions that I came to realise that it was not love but envy that bound us together. We watched each other like hawks ready to stoop on any change in circumstances that put one branch of the family ahead of the others; we were so busy watching the others that I sometimes felt that we missed opportunities of our own.

My cousin Kirsty is a good example of this. She is two years older than I am and we spearhead the University generation of the extended family. Our fathers are cousins and the Chartered generation: my dad is a chartered surveyor while Kirsty’s dad is a chartered accountant. After her first year at St Andrew’s University, Kirsty made it known that she was planning to take her degree to Cambridge where she would become a Master of Arts.

Before I had earned a place at Glasgow, my Mum was already spreading the word that I would be on my way to Oxford after sailing through my first degree. There is an enormous gulf between her ambition for me and my expectations. Five months of Henry’s questions had altered my perspective. I still expected to work very hard to reach degree standard and my Mum still expects me to get a First without conspicuous effort, but I no longer feel under any obligation to meet her hopes. I want to do well but for my own sake rather than for Mum and her bragging rights within the family.

Kirsty had made one visit to Great Uncle Henry while I was still at school, but I gathered that she had been discouraged from returning. Uncle Henry said nothing, but Karen was more forthcoming. Kirsty had made a good first impression: she is tall, pretty and with a figure I might drool over. OK, I do drool over it!

When we met at a family gathering when she was almost fifteen and I had just had my thirteenth birthday, I fell totally in lust with my beautiful second cousin. I got it so badly that I checked the internet to see if the degrees of relationship would allow us to legally marry. Kirsty soon proved that the warmth of her complexion did not extend even as far as her eyes. She had a much higher opinion of her worth than to throw herself away on a cousin – and a younger one at that.

According to Karen, Henry spotted her icy self-interest as soon as she stepped through the door. It was touch and go for a few minutes before her patronising egotism overcame the positive effect of her beauty.

“Henry always was a sucker for a pretty face and a nice pair of tits,” Karen told me. “Kirsty could have become his favourite family member if she’d had the sense to keep her mouth shut. When she began treating him as if he was brainless and worthless her goose was cooked.

“After ten minutes, Henry got out his wallet and rooted around amongst the twenties until he found a fiver that he gave to Kirsty. ‘Buy yourself some sweeties, dear,’ he told her. She flushed bright pink and pushed me out the way to get to the door.”

It was some time before I learned that Karen was never totally objective in her judgement of my cousin. Kirsty had made more of an impression on our great uncle than Karen or he was prepared to admit.

Perhaps if she had stood outside the door listening to Great Uncle Henry refusing me entry, Kirsty would have appreciated that he may be frail but he is in full command of his faculties. She may have been swayed by the generally held opinion within the family that Henry was losing his contact with reality. On the few occasions when his name came up, it was always greeted with groans and ‘tuts’ of disapproval.

When I made my first visit, I thought that no one else had been to see him for years. I turned to Karen for information.

“They visit all right! Whenever any of them need money, they find their way here soon enough. He helped them in the past when they were starting out, but he expects them to stand on their own feet now – that’s why they call him senile.

“When your generation is ready to become independent, he’ll help you to get started as well. He’s not short of money, you can take it from me!”

Now he’s dead. I looked at the portrait hanging on the wall of the study, and I thought he looked sad – disillusioned, perhaps. Then I looked at the eyes where the artist had caught the sparkle and I realised that I knew very little about my ghostly Uncle even although he and I had talked for hours.