Spirit (19 page)

Mrs Patrick stopped at the foot of the staircase. ‘You'll be wanting to go up to see him.' There were tears glistening in her eyes.

Elizabeth put her arms around her and hugged her. ‘Oh, Mrs Patrick, I'm so sorry. You look exhausted.'

‘Oh, don't worry about me. I've had a lifetime of hard work, I'm used to it. It's your poor father you should be worried about. I never saw anybody so stricken. Now be careful, you don't want to get flour on that lovely coat of yours, do you?'

Elizabeth wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘He's not alone, is he?' she asked.

Mrs Patrick said, ‘The doctor was here a half-hour ago, and
the nurse gets here at half after twelve to feed him and bathe him. So he's well looked after. It's hard to tell what he might be thinking, though, or even if he's thinking anything at all.'

Seamus appeared at the top of the stairs, carrying two empty log baskets. Of everybody Elizabeth had known during her childhood, Seamus was the only one who hadn't changed at all. It was almost as if his abduction by the little people had given him a charmed and ageless life. His mind had unravelled even more, like a home-knitted sweater caught on a nail, but that made him seem even younger, and even more endearing.

‘Hallo, Seamus,' said Elizabeth. ‘I see you're keeping the home fires burning.'

‘Blue lights,' grinned Seamus. ‘Blue lights every evening.'

‘How has he been?' Elizabeth asked Mrs Patrick.

Mrs Patrick shrugged. ‘He has his moments, poor darling. Now I must get back to my dumplings.'

Seamus came down the stairs. ‘Crows and ravens,' he said, his eyes sparkling, as if he were saying something really mischievous. ‘They jumped round the carriage, but they never barked.'

Elizabeth stared at him. ‘What did you say, Seamus?'

‘They jumped round the carriage, but they never barked.'

‘Why didn't they bark, Seamus?'

‘It was forbidden.'

Elizabeth slowly nodded. ‘Yes, Seamius. You're quite right. It was forbidden. Now how did you happen to know that?'

‘Crows and ravens,' smiled Seamus, very pleased with himself. ‘They jumped round the carriage, but they never barked.'

‘Seamus!' called Mrs Patrick, from the kitchen. ‘Stop babbling that nonsense and put some more wood on the fire! And make sure it's dry!'

Elizabeth went upstairs. At the top of the first flight, she stood and looked around her. The house was no longer hers. It
had shrunk and grown shabbier, and somehow her presence had left it now, even her childhood presence. Laura's too.

She supposed that it happened to all children in the end, and to all houses. Once she had graduated from High School, and gone to university, she had come home less and less frequently, and two Christmases ago she had moved out altogether to share an apartment in Hartford with one of her best friends, Leah Feinstein. Now she had her job with Charles Keraghter & Co, and she shared a third-storey walk-up apartment on West 14th Street with another assistant editor and a girl who worked on set design for Radio City.

She had written to Lenny all through the war – sending him cards and drawings and badly-knitted socks and the sexiest photographs of herself that she dared to have developed (in her swimsuit, mostly, with the shoulder straps let down). All of that golden dream had died when Lenny had married. But something else had kept her in touch with her childhood: the whispers she constantly heard; and the fleeting glimpses of a little girl in white. Sometimes she didn't see the girl for weeks on end. But then suddenly she would see her running through the crowds on Seventh Avenue; or standing on the corner of Times Square; or staring at her from a passing bus. It always unsettled her; and gave her a bad day, as if the barometer were down. But she missed her if she didn't see her. For some reason, the little girl made her feel watched-over, and protected.

Laura had admitted that she had seen her too; but to Laura her image had appeared much more vaguely. A shade, a quivering reflection, rather than a real girl. She and Elizabeth had written and talked about it again and again. Laura had even suggested they go to a medium. Aunt Beverley knew a man called Gilbert Maxwell who was supposed to have talked to the spirit of Frank Gaby, Universal Studios'
Mr Dynamite
, who had hanged himself in 1949. But Gilbert Maxwell charged $250 a session, even to his friends.

They rarely talked about it now. They found that they argued about it too much; or that they tried to read too much into it. Elizabeth had thought about exorcism, but then how could she exorcize her own sister? She didn't even know what happened to spirits, when they were exorcized. What if they suffered? What if they were trapped forever, in some airless suffocating prison?

She walked along the landing. She had loved this house so much when they first moved here. But now the rooms were empty and there was nothing here but shadows and terrible regrets.

She reached her father's room, knocked, and opened the door. Even though the blinds were drawn, the room was filled with sunshine, because it faced south-westward. Her father hadn't changed it since her mother had gone to the clinic. The cheval-mirror stood in the same corner; the hat boxes were still piled on top of the closet. Her father lay in the large sawn-oak bed that they had bought from a farmhouse in Washington Depot. The heaped-up pillows were white and starched. His face was drained of colour and featureless, like chewed-up papier-mâché. His arms lay inert on the cream bedspread, his hands veiny and emaciated.

‘Father?' she said, and approached the bed. His eyes followed her but he showed no sign of recognition. ‘Father, it's Lizzie.'

She leaned over the bed and kissed him. His breath smelled of meat. His nurse must have been shaving him because he had random crops of white bristles that had eluded the razor. His mouth sloped open at the left corner, and he was dribbling.

Elizabeth took hold of his hand and squeezed it. He blinked and swallowed; but he probably blinked and swallowed all day and all night. It didn't signify anything. She sat on the edge of the bed so that he could see her. He was definitely looking at her, but he was incapable of telling her that he could see her, and that he was pleased that she was here.

‘Oh, father, why did this have to happen to you?' she asked him. ‘You were always so energetic, always so lively. But they can cure you, can't they? They can give you exercises. They can teach you how to talk. I was talking to Jack Peabody at work, and his grandfather had a stroke. You remember Dennis Peabody, who used to work for Scribner's? He was paralysed for almost six months, but now he's writing articles for the
Saturday Evening Post
, and walking to the deli and everything.'

She smiled at him but she felt more like crying. That any man's life should come to this; after years of fun and dancing and publishing books and talking and going to parties. Alone now, or all but alone, in a vast dilapidated house without any family at all, incapable of movement or speech. The tears slid down her cheeks and there was nothing she could do to stop them. Her father watched them and said nothing.

‘I've been working real hard,' Elizabeth told him. ‘They've given me this really complicated book to edit.
Reds Under The Bed
, by Carl Scheckner III. It's all about the Communist threat, and it's full of references and footnotes and indexes and everything and I have to check them all. I have a senior editor called Margo Rossi and she's such a Tartar! If I'm one minute late back from lunch she practically flays me alive.'

Her fingertip circled the back of her father's hand.

‘I want to tell you something, though, father. I couldn't have done any of this without your help and without your support. You taught me so much. I know how much you hurt after Peggy died and mommy got sick; but you were always there, weren't you? And you always told me that you loved me.'

Her father made a thick rattling sound somewhere in his throat, as if he were trying to speak. His eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, but there was no pattern to it, no secret semaphore, nothing but helplessness, Elizabeth sobbed, ‘Don't give up, father. Please don't give up. I'll do everything I can to help you get better.'

She sat and watched him for nearly ten minutes; and he lay there and watched her back. She tried to tell him about work, and what her friends had been doing, and the weekend she had gone upstate to Mohonk Lake. But his inability even to show her that he recognized her was more than she could bear, and she choked up, and had to sit with him in anguished silence.

She was thinking of leaving him when his eyes rolled slowly to the right, as if he had seen something in the far corner of the bedroom. She thought at first that what he was doing was completely involuntary, but then his eyes rolled back to her, and repeated the movement to the right.

She turned around, and let out a ‘
hah
!' of total shock. In the corner, only feet away from her, was the little girl in white. She was standing in the sunlight, and she seemed to be quite real, although Elizabeth couldn't understand how she had managed to enter the bedroom and walk across to the opposite corner without being seen and without being heard. Her face was as white and as smooth as polished marble. Her eyes were impenetrably dark. She wore the same simple dress that she had worn before, although she seemed to have put on more petticoats. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and Elizabeth noticed that her nails were bitten down. Somehow this made her seem all the more frightening. Whoever saw a ghost with bitten-down nails?

‘Who are you?' asked Elizabeth, standing up and taking a cautious step backwards.

‘I came to see papa,' the girl replied. She spoke without opening her mouth, and her voice was extraordinary, with a metallic, distant quality to it, like somebody sliding a brass ring along a brass curtain-pole.

‘Are you Peggy?' asked Elizabeth. She was so frightened that she could scarcely speak properly.

‘I came to see papa. I've left my boots behind. I've left my gloves behind.'

‘Are you really Peggy?'

The girl gave Elizabeth an unfocused smile. ‘Don't be so worried, Lizzie. You don't have anything to fear. Nobody will ever hurt you, ever.'

‘You've been following me. You've been watching me.'

‘Yes.'

‘Then why haven't you ever talked to me before? I wanted so much to talk to you.'

‘Better to stay silent, unless you have something to say. I didn't want to upset you.'

‘I saw you in Macy's. I saw you in Central Park. I've seen you everywhere! You came here before, didn't you? You froze the swimming-pool.'

‘The winter froze the swimming-pool.'

‘But it was summer, and you almost drowned us, mommy and me.'

‘You didn't drown, though. She didn't want me to take you.'

‘What are you talking about?' Elizabeth demanded. She was close to hysteria. ‘I don't understand what you're talking about.'

‘– want me to take you,' the Peggy-girl repeated, her voice more distorted.

She slid towards the bed. As she passed the cheval-mirror, the surface misted over. She stood and looked down at Elizabeth's father and her face was filled with curiosity and regret.

Elizabeth said, ‘Don't touch him.'

The Peggy-girl smiled without looking at her. ‘He'll be cold soon enough.'

‘He's not going to die,' Elizabeth retorted. ‘He's going to live, and he's going to get better.'

The Peggy-girl slowly shook her head. ‘Even he doesn't believe that.'

‘How do you know? He can't even speak.'

‘He has something in him that can say what he wants. We all do; although many of us don't know it, and many of those who do know it prefer to stay silent.'

‘You're not making any sense.'

The Peggy-girl stared at her. Of course I'm making sense. Why do you think some people rest in eternal peace while others never do?'

She turned back to Elizabeth's father. She reached her hand out to his forehead, but Elizabeth snapped. ‘No! Don't touch him!'

Elizabeth bustled around the end of the bed and tried to seize Peggy-girl's wrists. But instead of grasping them, her hands plunged
into
them, like plunging into freezing slush. She could feel them, but she couldn't get any kind of grip. She pulled her hands back in shock.

‘Just let him alone!' she demanded, breathy and scared. ‘I don't care who you are or what you are, just let him
alone
!'

The Peggy-girl stepped to one side, and this time Elizabeth snatched at her sleeve. But the Peggy-girl seemed to have scarcely any weight, or substance. Instead of resisting, or trying to pull herself away, she completely collapsed. Her head dropped into her collar; and then her whole dress folded up, billowy and insubstantial, and before she knew it Elizabeth was struggling with nothing more than an empty bag of collapsing cotton. She clung to it, tried to stop it from collapsing any further, but it rolled up into something the size of a handkerchief; and then Elizabeth found that she was holding in her hand nothing but a snow-white rose, made of frost. It melted in front of her eyes, until the only evidence that it had ever been there was a faint chilly feeling in her fingers.

Elizabeth turned to her father in astonishment. He was watching her, but of course he couldn't speak. She looked wildly around the room, trying to see if she had been deceived by some elaborate trick. But the room hadn't changed; the sun
still shone; and there was no place at all where the Peggy-girl could have concealed herself.

Shaking, Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the bed and took hold of both of her father's hands. Her heart was still beating at high speed, and she badly needed a drink. But she looked him intently in the eyes, and said, ‘You saw her, didn't you? She was really here? A little white girl in a little white dress.'