Chapter 3

The first time I went outside, she couldn’t get past the door. I went up to her room and put a couple of her rings in my pocket and tried again. This time, she was able to leave the house. I rode to the Duke, with her sitting in the sidecar. When we arrived, she disappeared after telling me that it would be best that I didn’t see her. It might be odd if I kept looking at an empty space.

In the bar, I saw the barmaid and she saw me.

“Hello, again. You are starting to be a regular.”

“I’m living in a house on the other side of the train line, redecorating it for the estate agent. I’ll be there for up to six months.”

“That’s good. I’ll see more of you, then. My name is Maisie, by the way.”

“I’m Marcello, but most call me Marcie.”

“That’s funny, Marcie and Maisie, almost like a comedy duo.”

“I hope we have some laughs, as well as good food and beer. Do you know how Albert is?”

“I’m told that he’s taking a while to recover. What are you eating tonight?”

“What’s your pick?”

“A fine young man like yourself – I’d try the mixed grill.”

“All right, I’ll go with one of those and a half of IPA, please.”

She passed me some cutlery and my half and told me that she would bring my meal to me.

I went and sat in the corner, so I could look at the other drinkers, as well as look at Maisie behind the bar. She looked my way a few times and smiled. I heard a low voice.

“You’ve made a conquest there, Marcello. She seems nice.”

I didn’t say anything as Maisie brought my meal over. It was a good choice and I really enjoyed it. When I went to leave, I told her my phone number and she gave me hers. She had to work weekends but had Mondays off, so I told her that I would give her a call to work something out. Sitting on the bike, Geraldine materialised in the sidecar and told me that I had done well.

Tonight was going to be interesting. It would be the first night with Geraldine free to roam. I wondered if I would meet her in my dreams. I made sure that I was well relieved before getting into bed. When I dozed off, I was standing outside a group of buildings. As I looked, Geraldine appeared beside me.

“Welcome to my memories, Marcie. That building is the pottery. Pablo will be along in a minute.”

I stood as Pablo came along and entered the pottery building. My viewpoint changed to inside as I watched him working on a pot. He looked at me.

“There you are, Gerrie. This is the third time I’ve worked on this design. Look in the corner, you’ll see that the other two have strange colours.”

I knew he was speaking Spanish, but Geraldine interpreted it for me in my mind.

I went to the corner and saw two fantastic pots. I said that they were beautiful, and he said that they were mine. I asked him if he would write a note so that my parents wouldn’t think that I’d stolen them. He smiled and nodded. The picture changed to watching her father loading the kiln. It must have been later as Pablo had installed an electric one after getting poor results from the wood-fired one. There were a lot of Picasso plates, all similar. I knew that there were a lot of plates sold that were replicas of the original. These looked like a batch of those.

The vision blurred and then I was sitting at a meal table with my parents, the Ramies, and Pablo was on the other side next to Jacqueline. His last years of his life was almost dedicated to painting her, and you could tell why. She was not a great beauty but had a regal face on a long neck and the most amazing eyes I’d ever seen.

I sat for a while and gazed at them until the scene faded and I woke up. I put the light on and went to the toilet. I found my sketchbook and drew her head and shoulders as I had seen her in my dream. Then I sketched Pablo as he worked on the pot.

When I went back to sleep, it held no dreams until the morning. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom, doing my business and having a shower. Today was a working day, so I dressed in old jeans and a tatty sweater over a tee-shirt. When I had my working boots on, I went to have a cup of tea. Geraldine was in the kitchen.

“Thank you for letting me see your memories.”

“You’re welcome, Marcie. They were wonderful times. What I didn’t appreciate, at the time, was how important they were.”

“The two pots are in the trunk in the attic?”

“Yes, they really didn’t mean anything to Pablo. Any other potter would have just smashed them, but once he saw them as failures, he just forgot about them and moved on.”

“Jacqueline was striking, wasn’t she?”

“She was truly wonderful. I heard that he did over four hundred pictures of her. It was lovely to see them together. She would look at him with such devotion. He had been jumping from woman to woman, procreating, and then moving on. He stayed true to her until his death. Now, young man, why aren’t you eating anything?”

“The boss usually brings egg and bacon sandwiches for us to eat while we work out what bit get loaded first. I don’t know what time I’ll be back, but I’ll have to start preparing the kitchen so it may be a week or so before I can sit down for a meal.”

I rinsed the cup, put my coat and helmet on and left the house, starting the bike. I looked at the directions he had texted, then rolled out onto the road. The day was pretty usual. It was a bungalow with the attic converted to a bedroom. The container was slowly filled with furniture and electricals, mostly less than five years old. The people were moving to a newbuild in Wales, and the container would be the storage until the house was finished. It was a straight-forward job with no surprises, and we finished just after one. The boss gave me cash, to cover this job and what I had done with the Twyford house, and I took the bike to a fast-food chicken place for lunch, before going home. Home! That’s what it felt like.

That afternoon, after taking some pictures, I rubbed down walls, removed cupboard doors and took out drawers. I was going to strip the kitchen built-ins and give them a high gloss finish. I rubbed down the cellar door, in and out, taking the knob off. That would match the cupboards. I vacuumed the place and pulled the fridge away from the wall, which didn’t need much preparation. Lastly, I laid down some plastic drop sheets that had come with the paints.

Geraldine allowed me a dreamless night after I had nuked my dinner. She had been entranced by the microwave and the speed that it heated something from the frozen state. The next day I painted the first coats all over, the next I did the topcoat, the day after I worked on the doors and drawers with the smaller brushes. The kitchen was a pumpkin colour with the cupboards white. I allowed it all time to dry while I moved the contents of the main bedroom to the middle of the room and took more pictures.

The next morning, I stood on a chair and painted the ceiling, and as it was the Sunday, I rang Maisie in the afternoon and arranged to pick her up at ten on Monday. I warned her that I had a motorbike and that I would bring a spare helmet. I had been here a week, had discovered a lot of important ceramics, made friends with a ghost, and was now taking a girl out for the day.

I did more preliminary work on the main bedroom before bed. Tomorrow I was going to pick up Maisie and I hadn’t decided where we would go. I would do the honourable thing and see if she had a place in mind.

In the morning, I showered, shaved, and dressed as neatly as you can when riding a motorbike. I had some breakfast, with Geraldine telling me to take care, brushed my teeth, checked that the painting was all drying well, and put my jacket on to leave. As the bike warmed up, I looked at the outside of the house with a critical eye. The windows would need work.

When I stopped at the address that Maisie had given me, she was waiting by the door. It didn’t take long to say hello and hand her the spare helmet. I asked her if she wanted to go anywhere special.

“Actually, my sister called me and told me that she was taking her toddlers to Wellington Country Park. I told her that I would meet her there. I haven’t been there since I was a little one.”

I knew where the park was. I had been there a few times as a toddler. It was a place where I went down a slide before my sister had stood up, knocking her into the sandpit. I was told that I had no idea about playground manners. I got her settled in the sidecar and we went to the Park. When I parked, I helped her out of the sidecar, holding her hand as she stepped onto terra firma. I locked both helmets wire a strong wire attached to the bike, looping it through the ‘D’ rings and locking the padlock. We walked to the entrance, and I paid. It was expensive, but they were season tickets, and it was still only early summer. On the other side, I held out a hand and she took it.

“Hasn’t changed a lot since I was last here.”

“My sister says that they’ve taken away all the fun things as unsafe and replaced them all with lower slides. The old sandpits are now soft mix.”

“It looks like they’ve built a new eating area, all there was when I last came was a couple of guys selling ice cream and fairy floss.”

“I loved that fairy floss, but it tended to end up as a sticky mess on your face. There’s my sister, by the swings.”

We strolled over to the girl who looked like an older version of Maisie, trying to control a couple of two-year-olds.

“Hi, Babs, this is Marcello Gambino, otherwise known as Marcie. Marcie, this is my older sister, Barbara, and her twins, Terry, and Tracey.”

The two of them hugged, and I got a hug from Barbara, and then felt a toddler hugging my leg. Both girls giggled.

“Looks like you’ve got an admirer there.”

We spent a good hour in the park, with Maisie and Babs telling me a little about their lives, when I wasn’t helping Terry onto a slide or on the swings. At one point he dragged me off so he could climb on the ‘Gawwion’. Tracey was much more ladylike, only squealing when she was on the merry-go-round. When the nippers were tired, we went into the eating area, and they were sat in their double stroller for a nap. I had wondered where I would take her for lunch but had never expected to be eating pie and chips in a playground, with ice cream to follow.

We walked out with Babs and helped her load the children into her car. They asked me to watch the car while they went back in to use the toilets. I stood there, thinking about the strangeness of the morning.

“It’s a test, young Marcie. You just passed with flying colours.”

“Geraldine, what on earth are you doing here?”

“You still have those rings in your pocket. I was with you when you cleared that house. How anyone can live with that terrible stuff they call furniture, I don’t know. Those two girls are probably discussing your suitability as a father. You didn’t have younger siblings, so how come you’re a natural?”

“I don’t know, it’s a knack I’ve picked up since talking to you. Here they come.”

“Ask her if she wants to ride on the pillion, that way I can sit in comfort, so to speak. Why don’t you show her the house?”

The girls came back, and Babs gave me another hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“You’ll have to help me with the twins again, Marcie. You were brilliant with Terry.”

“That would be a pleasure, Babs.”

“That would be good, I might get to see more of my sister then. She works too hard.”

The sisters hugged and Babs got into the car and drove off. I looked at Maisie.

“Is there anywhere else you want to go to?”

“Not really. Why don’t you show me this house you’re doing up? What did Albert have to do with it?”

“He was the gardener there, for some years, when the Huberts lived there.”

“I sometimes help out at the St. Marys, clearing weeds, and there’s a Hubert there. It’s only a couple of minutes from the Duke.”

“Why don’t you show me, then we’ll go to the house. Do you want to go in the sidecar again, or ride on the back?”

“I’ll ride on the back if you don’t mind. That seat is a bit hard when you go over bumps.”

I got on the bike, and she got on behind me. We tightened the helmets and she put her arms around me as I started the motor. As we rode back towards Twyford, I could feel her breasts pressing on my back and it was very nice.

At the church we walked into the churchyard, hand in hand, and she showed me the burial plot. There was a simple stone, with just the name, date of birth, date of death, and that Geraldine was the much-loved wife of Francois Hubert. I could sense Geraldine beside us as we looked on, and Maisie looked worried as well.

“What’s wrong, Maisie? You’re tense.”

“It’s a feeling I got when I tried out for nursing. They put me in the Morgue for a while to see if I was spooked by bodies. It wasn’t the bodies, so much, but the feeling that the spirits were hanging around. Usually from accident victims or suicides. I only lasted it about six weeks before I decided that I needed to do something else.”

“This grave is the lady that owned the house. As you can see, she’s been dead over forty years. She still haunts the house I’m working on and is a lovely person who knew Picasso when she was much younger. Her husband assisted in her death when she was terminally ill with cancer.”

“How do you know all this?”

“We talk. When I first met her, she was trapped in the attic, where her husband had stored all of her things. I’ve moved a lot down into her old bedroom and released her to wander the house.”

“Could I see her?”

“Give her a ring, Marcie. If she can stay upright seeing me standing next to my grave, she’ll stand up for anything in later life.”

“Maisie, I have two of her rings in my pocket. If I give you one and you put it on your finger, you’ll be able to see Geraldine, as well as talk to her. I’m coming to consider her as one of my grandmothers.”

She nodded, and I took a ring out of the jacket pocket. She held it for a few seconds and slipped it on her finger, her eyes going wide as Geraldine appeared, in the summer dress.

“Hello, my dear Maisie. You have no reason to fear me. I can’t harm you in any way. I’m in limbo, until we work out a way to allow me to pass on. In the meantime, I’m having the time of my life with young Marcie. I’d been in the attic since before my body was put here.”

“I’m not dreaming this, am I? You really are the ghost of Geraldine Hubert?”

“The name on the stone is wrong, Maisie. My husband was a collaborator in the war and fled to England with a false identity paper. My birth name was Ramie, and I worked in the French Embassy in London until I got sick. Come, let us show you the house. Marcie has just started renovating it and it’s going to look good when he’s finished. Good enough for a young couple and their family.”

She led us back to the bike. It was odd, with the two of us walking through the long grass, while she seemed to glide. It reminded me of the nun scene in ‘Blues Brothers’. When we were helmeted and back on the bike, Maisie was behind me again and gripping me like I was her lifeline. At the house, I parked and watched as Geraldine glided through the front door. I think that she was having a bit of fun with us. It worked, as I snorted, and Maisie had a little giggle.

“She really is a ghost, if she can do that!”

I opened the front door and welcomed Maisie to the house of chaos. It looked like it, with just the few things in the lounge, nothing in the dining room except for a couple of crockery cabinets on one wall. The kitchen still smelled of paint but looked a lot better, while the conservatory held her attention.

“This is gorgeous! It’s a beautiful house, and big enough for a family. It’s a pity you don’t own it.”

“I may be able to if I can start selling some things. I have some Moorcroft vases that I found, and there are my paintings.”

She went and looked at the one on the easel.

“Is this one of yours?”

“That’s one of Geraldines’. It’s been in the cellar for forty years, along with some others. Mine are very similar and we’re thinking that I can use the same signature. If I transfer mine onto canvas from my laptop, I’ll have enough to put on a showing. Geraldines’ all need some repair.”

“Cellar?”

“That’s the door in the kitchen. It’s quite big and there’s central heating down there. There’s a scullery, pantry, and downstairs toilet to the back.”

“Upstairs?”

“Come and have a look.”

I showed her the three bedrooms, telling her that I’ll be starting on the main one this week. When I showed her Geraldines room, her ghost appeared and told Maisie to have a look at her things. I stood while Maisie looked at her outfits, being told where they had been bought, and what gala events they had been worn at. Maisie was entranced.

“They’re all beautiful. Did Marcie bring these all down from the attic and hang them away?”

“He did, and even brought down all my lingerie in those drawers.”

“You must have been one gracious lady. These are all top of the range and labels that sell well in the market today. What’s that stained one doing there?”

“That’s my old painting smock. I’m going to get Marcie wearing it when he works on his paintings.”

She had a look at the other paintings and then I showed her where I was sleeping, the bathroom and the box room, which reminded me that it needed cleaning out before I could work on it. Downstairs, we sat in the wicker chairs, and I showed her my own pictures on the laptop.

“These are wonderful, Marcie. When you’re selling loads, I will be able to tell people that I knew you before you were famous.”

“I had planned to stay in the background, and it would be nice for you to still know me when I am famous.”

“All right, mister famous. Are you taking me somewhere nice for dinner?”

“I thought that we could follow the pie and chips in a playground with a pizza from the best place in town, and you’ll be able to meet a couple of my family.”

I locked up and we took the bike into Reading, stopping at the industrial park first and choosing a kitchen suite to be delivered in the morning. First date and she was helping me choose furniture. When I stopped outside Game On Pizza, we left the helmets in the sidecar and went in, to see my father at the counter.

“Hi, Dad. This is Maisie and she wants to taste one of your pizzas. I see that you still have a couple odd tables. We’ll eat in. What’s the special?”

He came around the counter and pulled me into a big hug, then did the same for Maisie.

“Do you know those square pizzas that I got so angry about? Well, the few that bought them came back for more and told their friends. I now make more of them for gamers than the round ones, and they are made to fit the different boxes. I didn’t go mad with the game ones you suggested, you can’t get pheasant or venison around here. I did start a smoked salmon pizza, which is proving popular.”

“We’ll try one of those, Dad. What about the Hare of the Dog that I suggested for gamers who are up all night, I was sure that you could get rabbit.”

“We do a lot of those in the early mornings. We’re now open from Friday morning to Monday nights, with your sister helping out in the early hours. Sit yourselves down and I get you a small one of each to try.”

We sat at a table, and he brought us out a soft drink, each. I held her hand on the table, and she looked around the shop in amazement.

“Will this be yours?”

“Don’t want it. My sisters have children who will be old enough to take over when Dad retires. The way he looks now, that will be a long way into the future. Me? I’m a budding artist and a free spirit. I was held back in the family, every idea I had was squashed. I’m so surprised that my square pizzas and game flavours were even tried.”

We sat and I gazed into her eyes until my mother came out of the kitchen with our pizzas. She gave me a spine-breaking hug and a kiss, before doing the same to Maisie. She told me not to be a stranger anymore and that our meals were a thank you for the change of direction that I had brought to the business – any time we dropped in.

We each had half of the two pizzas. I found the Hare of the Dog a different taste, with the toppings more than enough to make you think that the meat might be chicken. Come to think about it, it also tasted a bit like chicken. The smoked salmon one was to die for, though. I would eat one of those any time. When we had finished, we said thank you to my parents and had more hugs, before going out to the bike. I was sad, as now I had to take Maisie back to where I picked her up, this morning.

When we were going along between Reading and Twyford, she directed me to a small park by shouting in my ear. There, we sat on a bench in the evening light, and we kissed for the first time. I was certain that it wasn’t for the last time.

Marianne Gregory © 2024