Tomorrow's ghost

* * *

Paul followed Frances to the library.

Just as she had done, he looked round curiously. By the time she had finished drawing the curtains he was halfway along one section of shelving, running his eyes over the titles. He stopped suddenly, while she watched him, and drew a book from one of the shelves.

'Winged Victory - ' he opened the book ' - Ex libris Henricus Chesney ... so it has to be a first edition.' He flipped a page. 'And signed by the author, too! A nice little collector's piece ... and I'll bet there are a few more like it hereabouts.' He replaced the book. 'All the old General's books, of course.'

Frances waited. She knew he was going to say something more.

'You know, that was the only thing of the old man's that he kept,' said Paul. 'Sold up the house and contents. Gave the papers and the diaries to the Imperial War Museum -

matter of fact, I've actually read some of them ... when I was researching there. Beautiful copperplate hand, the old General had ... Not a bad commander, either, come to that -

kept his men well back when the Germans attacked in 1918 - not at all bad ... And the old man's medals and portrait to the Lancashire Rifles' Museum ... Just kept the books, that's all.'

And the money, he didn't bother to add. They both knew that, it didn't need to be said.

'You've been researching the General, then?' That didn't really need to be said either, but she didn't want to trade anything of value yet, before he'd offered her something worth having in exchange.

'Uh-huh. The General and the Colonel both.' He seemed engrossed in the titles of the books. 'Or the General and the Captain. And the General and the Rifleman - hard to think of Fighting Jack as an Other Rank, but that's how he started ... in the army, that is.

With the General he started out even lower down the scale. The social scale.'

'Yes?'

'Yes. He was odd-job boy to the General's gardener in his school holidays - did you know that, Princess?'

'Wasn't his father the General's sergeant-major in the First World War?' Frances encouraged him.

'That's right. Regimental Sergeant-Major. And RSM Butler was ... 'a proper tartar', so I am reliably informed. Like the General, in fact - both hard as diamonds, one with a bit more polish than the other. But both hard as diamonds.'

'Reliably informed by whom?'

'One Who Should Know: the old General's gardener, ex-batman. One Private Albert Sands - Rifleman Sands, I beg his pardon!' Paul looked at her - through her - suddenly, smiling to himself, his face quite transformed by his memory. 'Rifleman Sands, aged 84 -

a jolly old boy who has all the nurses eating out of his hand. They say he pinches their bottoms if they don't watch out - Rifleman Sands, sans teeth, almost sans eyes, but not sans memory, fortunately ... He sits there like a little old wizened monkey, a bit vague about the last twenty years, but before that he's practically got total recall. Just a little old man - but he and Butler's father pulled the old General off the barbed wire at Beaumont Hamel in 1916.' Paul's eyes flickered. 'Pulled him off the wire - the old General was only a young Colonel then - pulled him off the wire under machine-gun fire in full view of the Germans, and dragged him into a shell-hole.' The eyes focused on her. 'And you know what Rifleman Sands said. Princess? He said 'It was a bloody silly thing to do, we should have known better - we could have got ourselves killed'.'

Frances held her tongue. This was another Paul, a different Paul whom she had only very rarely glimpsed.

'The irony is that after the war they both went in opposite directions, the General and the RSM, and on opposites sides - the RSM was a printer, and' he organised the Union in the General's printing works, Chesney and Rawle's. Come the General Strike in 1926 and they fought each other, in fact. Tooth and nail.'

He looked at Frances, and Frances began at last to see the direction in which he was heading.

'The General was a pillar of the Conservative Party - a Tory alderman on the council, and he could have had the Parliamentary seat if he'd wanted it, too ... And ex-RSM

Butler was the heart and soul of the local Labour Party.'

And little Jack Butler caught in the middle, caught between two men who were both as hard as diamonds, old comrades implacably opposed to each other.

'Rifleman Sands reckoned that if it had been a marginal Parliamentary seat they would both have stood for it, and made a real fight of it. But it was a safe Tory seat, and neither of them reckoned to waste their time in London when they could be pitching into each other where they were. Beautiful!'

But maybe not so beautiful for little Jack, though?

Paul turned back to the books again.

'What about ... Colonel Butler ...' She couldn't call him 'little Jack' out aloud '... when he was a boy?'

'Ah .. . You mean, what did Rifleman Sands have to say about Rifleman-Colonel Jack?' He reached out for another book, and Frances noted the care with which he extracted it from the shelf, how he pressed the top of its spine inwards first so that he could lift it out from the bottom without straining the binding. 'Yes ... another Ex libris Henricus Chesney - but the one next to it - ' he exchanged one book for another ' - that can't be, because I remember when it first came out. The Debateable Land ... that would be about '69 ... J. Butler 1970, there you are! And the old General died way back in '53 ... so -

quite a lot of these must be J. Butler's, actually. But that figures, as they say ... that figures.'

'Who say?' Frances inquired gently. So far he hadn't given her anything, and now he was teasing her.