Tomorrow's ghost

(The same motorway that Colonel Butler had once travelled at another November dawn, nine years ago.)

She felt strangely fatalistic about it all. 'Thank you, Mrs Bates.' As she stepped out of the car she saw Mrs Bates reach under the dashboard for the microphone which linked her to Brian and Evan Owen and Mr Harcourt in his Cortina.

* * *

A cobweb of rain brushed her face, fine as gossamer but nonetheless quickly soaking.

This was real northern rain - not so much rain as total wetness. When she had left Brookside House it had been raining - raining obviously, with real raindrops spattering on her. But somewhere along the drive northwards it had stopped raining and had become simply wet, the very air so saturated with moisture that a fish could have breathed it.

She put up Mrs Bates' big black umbrella, but the dampness ignored it. By the time she reached the porch she could feel it running down her face, spoiling Marilyn's make-up. If someone didn't come quickly to answer the bell Marilyn's blonde frizz, which had jumped so surprisingly from under the wig, would be reduced to unsightly rats'- tails.

The door opened.

' 'Northern Daily Post-Gazette,' said Frances quickly, hunching herself up against a trickle of rain which had infiltrated the top of her plastic mac. 'I phoned up about an hour ago. To see Mr Sands, please.'

'Mr Sands?' A blast of warm air reached Frances's face.

Rifleman Sands, please, begged Frances silently.

'Oh, yes - the young lady from the newspaper?' The green-uniformed nurse was as crisp and fresh as a young lettuce leaf. But she looked at Frances - at Marilyn -

doubtfully for a moment, as though she had expected a better class of young lady, not something off the cheapest counter at the supermarket.

'That's right,' said Frances desperately. Marilyn would just have to do, now. But the theory that as Colonel Butler and the North had never seen Marilyn, so that she might purchase a minute or two more of anonymity if the worst came to the worst ... that theory of Paul's didn't seem so clever now.

She shivered uncontrollably, and the Florence Nightingale training of the lettuce leaf came to her rescue.

'Ee - but you're wet, dear - come inside!' The lettuce leaf opened the door wider. Tut your umbrella down there - in the stand - so it won't drip on the floor.'

Frances collapsed the umbrella gratefully. The door closed at her back and the warmth swirled around her.

'And get your raincoat off - let me help you - there now - that's better! Oh ... isn't it a right miserable day - that's better!'

That was better. And without the raincoat Marilyn was better too: she was only Marilyn from the neck up. From the neck down she was still Frances, in Mrs Fitzgibbon's best Jaeger suit.

'Thank you, nurse.' Marilyn-Frances took in her surroundings. Everything that wasn't a cool, freshly-laundered, green-uniformed lettuce leaf was painted and polished in St. Luke's Home for Elderly Gentlefolk. And on the landing window-sill halfway up the staircase was a great spray of out-of-season flowers, too: one thing St. Luke's Home didn't need was a grant from the Ryle Foundation, it was doing very nicely thank-you on the fees from the Elderly Gentlefolk. Colonel Butler was certainly doing right by General Chesney's ex-gardener, ex-batman, in return for the old man's 50 per cent share in pulling the General off the barbed wire at wherever-it-was in France sixty years before.

'And you've got an appointment with Mr Sands.' The lettuce leaf smiled at her this time, it was the influence of the Jaeger suit, no doubt. 'He is having an exciting time!'

'Yes?'

'Oh yes - this way, if you please - ' The lettuce leaf pointed up the stairs ' - the Colonel this morning ... with a big box of chocolates for us, and flowers for Matron ...

and the young man yesterday - ' she glanced over her shoulder at Frances ' - and he was from your paper too, wasn't he? What has Mr Sands been up to?'

She was moving at nurses' quick-step. 'We're planning a series on veterans of the First World War,' said Frances breathlessly.

'That's right,' agreed the lettuce leaf. 'The young man told me. There aren't many of them left, I suppose - didn't he get everything, the young man? Old Mr Sands talked to him for ages.'

'I'm the woman's angle,' said Frances.

'Ah ... of course.' Nod. 'Well, when you do a series on the Second World War, you come to me - I wasn't born then, but my mum remembers it all. Dad was at El Alamein, and had his toe shot off in Italy, in a monastery there - would you believe it? Here we are.'

She knocked at a gleaming door. 'Mr Sands? Another visitor for you! You're really in luck today...' She filled the door for a moment. 'All right, then? You don't want the bottle, or anything like that? You're ready to see your visitor?'

There came a sound from beyond her, a sort of croak.

God! Don't let him be senile, prayed Frances: he wasn't yesterday for Paul. Don't let him be below par for me. I have the right question for him, Paul didn't.

'That's good,' said the lettuce leaf briskly. But she caught Frances's arm then. 'Now, dear. ..' she murmured into Frances's ear confidentially '... he's a lovely old man, really -

not like most of our old gentlemen, not exactly - but a dear old chap, all the same.'

Most of their old gentlemen would be rich old gentlemen in their own right, that must be the difference.