Spirit (11 page)

There was no room in Mrs Patrick's theology for a Peggy who was dead but not really dead at all.

‘
Sad the man, mind the man, day after day
,' keened Seamus. ‘
Flowers and clouds, flowers and clouds
'

Then, abruptly, he stopped singing, and sat up straight, gripping the seat of the stool. His face was bright with inspiration. ‘Living snow flakes!' he exclaimed, his thick lips shiny with saliva. ‘Dried stock-fish!'

‘What holy gibberish,' said Mrs Patrick, shaking her head.

But Elizabeth sat and stared back at Seamus with her mouth open and her fingers tingling with fright and surprise.

Because dried stock-fish was what the Lapland woman in
The Snow Queen
had used to write a letter to the wise Finland woman (‘paper had she none'); and living snow flakes had been the Snow Queen's guards (‘their shapes were the strangest that could be imagined; some looked like great ugly porcupines, others like snakes rolled into knots with their heads peering forth, and others like little fat bears with bristling hair – all, however, were alike dazzlingly white – all were living snow flakes').

‘Seamus,' said Elizabeth. ‘Seamus, who told you that?'

But Seamus leaned back against the fireplace again, and carried on singing.

‘He's a poor boy,' said Mrs Patrick, chopping carrots.

Elizabeth found her mommy sitting in her bedroom with the linen blind drawn down to keep out the sunlight. It gave the room the appearance of an old sepia photograph. The bed was made but the quilt was rumpled where her mother had been
sleeping on it. Sometimes she slept all day, day after day. At other times you could go into her room in the small, intense hours of the morning, and find her standing by the window in her nightgown, staring into the garden.

Today, her mommy had dressed in a cream short-sleeved blouse and pale blue skirt, and pinned up her hair. She was sitting in her blue basketwork chair smoking a cigarette, her head wreathed in curls of smoke as if she were wearing an evanescent crown of thorns. She looked better today: her eyes were more focused.

‘And what have you been doing, darling?' she asked.

‘We went to the cemetery to see Peggy. Then we had icecream at Endicott's. Lenny wasn't there, though. They've called him up.'

‘You really like Lenny, don't you?'

Elizabeth blushed and nodded.
Like
him? Whillikers, she adored him! ‘He's always so considerate.'

‘You should always go for a
considerate
man,' said her mommy, taking a last hard draw on her cigarette, and then crushing it out. Immediately, she picked up the pack of Philip Morris and shook out another, and lit it with fussing, jiggling hands. ‘To hell with handsome,' she continued. ‘Do you know what I mean? You need the kind of man who doesn't stifle you. The kind of man who lets you be yourself. Doesn't . . .
disappoint
you all the time. Doesn't dish you up nothing but tragedy. Doesn't trap you with children in the back of beyond.'

Elizabeth said nothing. She was used to this endless complaining about her mommy's lost career. What was more, she quite liked the idea of ‘the back of beyond'. It sounded like somewhere mysterious and odd, where extraordinary things could happen. Maybe she ought to sign all her letters: ‘Elizabeth Buchanan, White Gables, Sherman, The Back of Beyond'.

‘I'm beginning to feel like getting out,' said her mommy. She
half-turned towards the shaded window, her cigarette poised. ‘It's summer, isn't it? I'm beginning to feel like getting out. Going for a walk, maybe. Sitting on the verandah. Clothes-Peg loved the summer, didn't she? She never liked the cold.'

Elizabeth said, ‘I think I may have some good news.'

‘Good news? Good news about what?'

‘About Peggy, of course. I think Peggy is kind of still with us, in a way.'

Her mommy turned slowly back from the window, and stared at her. ‘What are you saying, Lizzie?'

Elizabeth began to grow hot and flustered. She had thought that this was going to be easy – easy and joyful – a way of lifting her mommy out of her misery and her discontent. She wasn't prepared for the hostile, intense look in her mommy's eyes, the quiver of disapproval in her voice.

‘I was walking back from Lenny's house and I saw a girl who wasn't Peggy but she was.'

‘What are you saying? What the
hell
are you – ?
What are you saying?
'

Elizabeth felt trapped, suffocated by mommy's cigarette smoke. She knew she was right, she knew for certain that she had passed Peggy on Putnam Street, yet she wished and wished that she had kept it to herself.

‘I saw a little girl . . . she was dressed all in white, she seemed to
shine.
'

‘That's nonsense, such nonsense. What are you trying to do, give me another breakdown? Do you know how
long
it's taken me to – ? '

‘Mommy, I know. And I didn't mean to upset you. But she was so much like Peggy. She was, I can't explain why! And then Seamus said things from
The Snow Queen
, which was Peggy's favourite.'

Her mommy smoked furiously. Then she burst out, ‘For God's sake, Elizabeth! You're as mad as him! Or maybe you're
not! Maybe
I'm
still mad! Ha! It would serve me right, wouldn't it, for marrying your father, for coming here, for having children! And my career – in ruins! In tatters!'

‘Mommy, you're not mad, and Seamus isn't mad, and neither am I. Even if you don't believe me, even if you think I'm being horrible to you, it's true. I saw a girl today on Putnam Street and she wasn't Peggy but she was.'

Mommy looked as if she were about to say something furious, but then – quite unexpectedly – she let her head tilt forward, and her shoulders slope, until she was sitting in her chair like one of those old women you see in nursing homes, with all the spirit and stuffing knocked out of them, resigned to tedium and tantalizing memory lapses, and dwindling visits from relatives whose eyes are shifty with guilt or greed.

‘Mommy?' said Elizabeth, worriedly.

Her mommy looked up, and managed a smile, ‘Oh, Lizzie . . . if it could only be true. If only I could hold her again, just once.'

Elizabeth reached out and touched the back of her hand. It felt dry, dried out, as fragile as a leaf-skeleton.

If only there was some way of explaining what she had seen, and the way she had felt when the girl in white had walked by. But all she could do was lean forward, and kiss her mommy's forehead. Her mommy's skin tasted of nicotine and Isabey perfume, and somehow that taste reminded Elizabeth so much of Peggy and the times that they had all been together, all three sisters, that she was even more convinced that it was true – that Peggy
was
still with them, in some inexplicable way, and for some unimaginable purpose.

Dick Bracewaite was sitting in his small study writing his Sunday sermon when Laura appeared in the open french windows, as if by magic. He sat back and smiled at her. Then he picked up his pen and screwed on the cap.

‘Laura! You quite made me jump!'

She stepped in through the french windows, her blonde curls shining in the late afternoon sunlight. Behind her, the lawns of St Michael's were freshly watered, so that they glittered, and the flowerbeds were thick with the creamy curds of fullblown roses. Laura walked around the back of Dick Bracewaite's chair, and as she passed behind him he half closed his eyes and breathed in, so that he could catch her aroma. Girl, and summer, and ice-cream.

She sat down in the wooden armchair close to his desk, on a worn-out tapestry cushion. She peered at the pages of back-sloping handwriting. Her eyelashes had been bleached by the summer sun, but they were still long, and they trembled as she read what Dick had been writing.

‘What language is that?' she asked him.

‘That's Latin.
Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio
. I'm using it in my sermon this Sunday.'

‘What does it mean?' Her thin suntanned wrist rested casually on the edge of the desk and he felt a compulsion to reach out and stroke it, and then to close his fingers around it, as he had several times before. Look, he had told her, your wrist is so thin that I can close my finger and thumb around it, like a bracelet.

Or handcuffs, she had replied, staring up at him with those misty, misty eyes.

‘It means, Stay silent,' he said. ‘“Stay silent, or say something that is better than silence.” '

‘What could that be?' asked Laura. She adored Dick unreservedly, heart and soul. He knew everything and then some. He was so strong and grown-up. He
smelled
like a man, of plain red soap and tobacco and something else indescribably
musky
. He wasn't like father at all, all books and nervousness and wood-ash. He spoke his mind. He had gingery hair on the back of his freckly, suntanned arms, and he had a meaty,
handsome face, his cheeks burned crimson and burnished by the sun, and eyes as green as the sea. He wore brown tortoiseshell spectacles with circular lenses, but far from making him look weak, they gave him an even more masculine appearance, like a professional boxer who just happened to need reading-glasses. His chestnut hair was shinily tonicked and combed straight back from his forehead, with an endearing sprig at the crown.

‘Personally, I can't think of anything more eloquent than silence,' said Dick. ‘Sometimes you can tell somebody you love them better by staying silent than you can by trying to put it into words. I tell God that I love Him in complete silence.'

He left the next sentence unspoken. Laura was quite sure that he was going to say ‘I tell
you
that I love you in complete silence', but he didn't. His fingers were poised above her wrist, and she knew that he wanted to touch her, she could feel it on her skin, as hot as summer sunlight through burning-glass. She looked into his eyes and he looked back into hers, and he gave her everything that made her feel bright and good: complete devotion, rapt attention, and a terrible fear of losing her. Such
fear
! It was unbelievable. It made him even more virile; even more of a god. The tension between them was deliciously unbearable.

‘Something happened today,' said Laura. ‘I thought I ought to tell you.'

Dick swallowed noisily. ‘Something happened? Something bad?'

‘It's really dumb. I wrote a story about us, that's all. I dropped it, on the way back from school, and Elizabeth read it.'

Dick said nothing. Outside in the garden, a pigeon was cooing, over and over, and the trees were rustling excitedly.

Laura felt her eyes rush up with tears, but they always did when she knew that she had done something cruel or wrong. She wept not because she was sorry, but because she was
frustrated at being found out, and because she was angry at the stupid people who told her off. Hadn't
they
ever lied, or flirted with boys, or stolen lipsticks or candies or change from their mother's purse? Sometimes Laura felt that the whole world was filled with people who were trying to make her believe that they were shining saints, and that she was the only sinner. That was one of the reasons she adored Dick so much. He was a minister, a man of the cloth, and if a man of the cloth thought that she was perfect (and hadn't he said so,
Perfect, Laura, you're perfect)
, then she must be right, and everybody else who thought such bad things about her must be wrong.

Dick, at last, grasped her wrist. ‘You say you wrote a story about us? What did you say?'

‘Just what we did.'

‘The kissing? The lying together? You wrote about that?'

Laura nodded. For some reason, the more discomfited that Dick became, the more excited she felt. Dick was worried! Dick was terribly worried! There was perspiration on his upper lip!

He kept squeezing her wrist, squeezing and unsqueezing. He tried to speak but he seemed to be having difficulty with his words. ‘Did you . . . what did you write, exactly? Did you mention our names?'

Laura shook her head. She was still weeping but she didn't really feel sad. ‘I said your name was Frank, not Dick, because your middle name being Frank and all.'

‘And you said that we took off our clothes?'

Laura nodded again. ‘I said pecker and muff. Elizabeth said it was rude.'

Dick took a huge breath, as if he were going down for pearls. ‘Do you think she knew it was us? You didn't mention the church, did you? My God, my darling, this was supposed to be a secret between us, wasn't it, a secret?'

‘Dick . . . I didn't drop the story on purpose. Elizabeth shouldn't have read it. I told her not to read it.'

He said, ‘Yes . . . I didn't mean to be angry with you. I'm sorry. But you know that what we did together was pure, don't you? It was innocent, an innocent affection altogether, a good and devoted man for a beautiful child, both born of God.'

Laura tilted her head to one side and looked at Dick narrowly. ‘Is that what you want me to tell them, if they ask?'

‘If who ask? Who else is going to know, apart from your sister Elizabeth?'

‘Well, everybody, if we're not careful. You know what people are like in Sherman. They say that if you tell somebody a secret on one side of the town, and then start walking to the other side of town, the people on the other side of town will already know your secret by the time you get there.'

‘Oh, God,' said Dick. He took his hand away from her wrist.

But this wasn't what Laura wanted. She didn't want Dick to be distressed. She didn't want him to shrivel up inside of himself, and cut off all his affection for her. She wanted him now to be bold, and virile, the boxer in reading-glasses. She wanted him to say that he loved her forever, no matter what the consequences. She was only eleven, and yet she had discovered already how weak men can be, how easily led, and while she liked the power it gave her, she despised them for not being braver.