Grahame Coats smiled sympathetically on the outside. He picked up his Fanta and walked with Rosie to the table in the corner. Rosie’s mother radiated ill-will just as an old iron radiator can radiate chill into a room, but Grahame Coats was perfectly charming and entirely helpful, and he agreed with her on every point. It was indeed appalling what the cruise companies thought they could get away with these days; it was disgusting how sloppy the administration of the cruise ship had been allowed to get; it was shocking how little there was to do in the islands; and it was, in every respect, outrageous what passengers were expected to put up with: ten days without a bathtub, with only the tiniest of shower facilities. Shocking.
Rosie’s mother told him about the several quite impressive enmities she had managed to cultivate with certain American passengers whose main crime, as Grahame Coats understood it, was to overload their plates in the buffet line of the Squeak Attack, and to sunbathe in the spot by the aft deck pool that Rosie’s mother had decided, on the first day out, was undisputedly hers.
Grahame Coats nodded, and made sympathetic noises as the vitriol dripped over him, tch-ing and agreeing and clucking until Rosie’s mother was prepared to overlook her dislike both of strangers and people connected in some way to Fat Charlie, and she talked, and she talked, and she talked. Grahame Coats was barely listening. Grahame Coats pondered.
It would be unfortunate, Grahame Coats was thinking, if someone was to return to London at this precise point in time and inform the authorities that Grahame Coats had been encountered in Saint Andrews. It was inevitable that he would be noticed one day, but still, the inevitable could, perhaps, be postponed.
“Let me,” said Grahame Coats, “suggest a solution to at least one of your problems. A little way up the road I have a holiday house. Rather a nice house I like to think. And if there’s one thing I have a surplus of, it’s baths. Would you care to come back and indulge yourselves?”
“No, thanks,” said Rosie. Had she agreed, it is to be expected that her mother would have pointed out that they were due back at the Williamstown Port for pickup later that afternoon, and would then have chided Rosie for accepting such invitations from virtual strangers. But Rosie said no.
“That is extremely kind of you,” said Rosie’s mother. “We would be delighted.”
The gardener pulled up outside soon after in a black Mercedes, and Grahame Coats opened the back door for Rosie and her mother. He assured them he would absatively have them back in the harbor well before the last boat back to their ship.
“Where to, Mister Finnegan?” asked the gardener.
“Home,” he said.
“Mister Finnegan?” asked Rosie.
“It’s an old family name,” said Grahame Coats, and he was sure it was. Somebody’s family anyway. He closed the back door and went around to the front.
MAEVE LIVINGSTONE WAS LOST. IT HAD STARTED OUT SO well: she had wanted to be at home, in Pontefract, and there was a shimmer and a tremendous wind, and in one ectoplasmic gusting, she was home. She wandered around the house for one last time, then went out into the autumn day. She wanted to see her sister in Rye, and before she could think, there she was in the garden at Rye, watching her sister walking her springer spaniel.
It had seemed so easy.
That was the point she had decided that she wanted to see Grahame Coats, and that was where it had all gone wrong. She was, momentarily, back in the office in the Aldwych, and then in an empty house in Purley, which she remembered from a small dinner party Grahame Coats had hosted a decade back, and then…
Then she was lost. And everywhere she tried to go only made matters worse.
She had no idea where she was now. It seemed to be some kind of garden.
A brief downpour of rain drenched the place and left her untouched. Now the ground was steaming, and she knew she wasn’t in England. It was starting to get dark.
She sat down on the ground, and she started to sniffle.
Honestly, she told herself. Maeve Livingstone. Pull yourself together. But the sniffling just got worse.
“You want a tissue?” asked someone.
Maeve looked up. An elderly gentleman with a green hat and a pencil-thin moustache was offering her a tissue.
She nodded. Then she said, “It’s probably not any use, though. I won’t be able to touch it.”
He smiled sympathetically and passed her the tissue. It didn’t fall through her fingers, so she blew her nose with it and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you. Sorry about that. It all got a bit much.”
“It happens,” said the man. He looked her up and down, appraisingly. “What are you? A duppy?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so…what’s a duppy?”
“A ghost,” he said. With his pencil moustache, he reminded her of Cab Calloway, perhaps, or Don Ameche, one of those stars who aged but never stopped being stars. Whoever the old man was, he was still a star.
“Oh. Right. Yes, I’m one of them. Um. You?”
“More or less,” he said. “I’m dead, anyway.”
“Oh. Would you mind if I asked where I was?”
“We’re in Florida.” he told her. “In the buryin‘ ground. It’s good you caught me,” he added. “I was going for a walk. You want to come along?”
“Shouldn’t you be in a grave?” she asked, hesitantly.
“I was bored,” he told her. “I thought I could do with a walk. And maybe a spot of fishin‘.”
She hesitated, then nodded. It was nice to have someone to talk to.
“You want to hear a story?” asked the old man.
“Not really,” she admitted.