The Pillow Friend (34 page)

He looked baffled. “Well, no, of course I didn't want to keep talking about something that was upsetting you so. I was trying to make life easier for you, for us, just then, not laying down the law forever and ever, amen. How can I know what you're worrying about if you don't tell me? I can't answer questions you don't ask.”

She wanted to press him for more details about the play, when it had been reviewed, Caroline's last name—but she knew it wouldn't get her anywhere she wanted to go. “I'm sorry.”

“Poor darling. If I'd known you were worried, of course I would have said something. I thought you'd put it out of your mind. When I didn't hear from her again, after I'd twigged she'd made the whole thing up, I forgot it.”

She thought he was going to take her hand again, but he picked up his knife and fork. “Eat your dinner, darling. Don't let it go cold.”

The horse's head had been severed and nailed above an archway.

The blood dripped down, splashing the white paving stones. Obviously, freshly slaughtered; obviously dead, yet as she stared at it, full of grief and rage that her faithful friend had been killed, the eyes opened and looked down at her and she heard a voice say a single word.

As she woke she tried, desperately, to hang on to the dream, to understand it. But she was awake, and even the sound of the voice had vanished, leaving behind only one word, bereft of meaning. Falada. She knew it meant something, but although it seemed vitally important, she could not remember what.

The dream stayed with her throughout her day at work, hovering behind everything she looked at, but it was not until very late in the evening that she finally remembered the fairy tale from which the image, and the name Falada, had come, and understood what it meant.

That night, her sister called long distance with the news. Their mother was dead.

THE PILLOW FRIEND

—Marguerite Duras

A
fter the funeral close friends and family went back to the Shawcross home in River Oaks. Agnes had never seen the large house filled to capacity before, and she was surprised at all the people she didn't know. Among this crowd of strangers she was baffled by an absence: where was Marjorie?

On the other side of the room Eddie Shawcross was going over the details of his wife's death again for Agnes' sister and brother-in-law. He felt guilty because he'd argued with her about her leaving. If they hadn't argued she would have left earlier and never met the drunk driver who had ended her life in a smash-up on Highway 59.

She had heard it all last night when she arrived, but she edged closer to hear it again.

“Where was she going?” asked Ros. “Why didn't you want her to go?”

“She said she just wanted some time to herself, time to think. She wouldn't say where she was going. It's not that I would have tried to forbid her going somewhere, but I didn't think she knew where she was going. I didn't like the sound of it. If she wanted a short vacation from me, fine, but she didn't even have a destination in mind, it was obvious.”

“Of course she did,” Agnes interrupted. “She was going to Marjorie's. Why else would she take 59?”

Ros nodded. “You were right to try to stop her.”

“Who's Marjorie?”

“Her sister,” said Agnes.

He frowned. “A sister? Mary didn't have a sister.”

“Her twin sister.” She looked at Ros for confirmation, but Ros was looking elsewhere, summoning the support of her own twin. It was a familiar look, and she found herself remembering the time the twins decided she was old enough to know the truth about Santa Claus. “I don't know why she's not here. Did anyone tell her about the funeral? If you didn't know her, then of course—Ros? Has anyone been in touch with Marjorie?”

“Agnes—really.” The big-sisterly tone stirred up a desperate, childish rage. Tears pricked her eyes, the first since she'd left England.

“What's that supposed to mean? I'm asking a simple question. Was Marjorie invited to the funeral.”

“I don't think she knows,” said Clarissa.

“Well where is she? Can't anyone find her?”

“Marjorie doesn't exist,” said Ros. “She was one of Mother's fantasies, like her acting career.”

“We thought you knew.”

“But—no. She couldn't be! I stayed with her one summer. For weeks!”

“That's why we thought you knew.”

She was hot with shame. They must think she was an idiot, and they were right. How could anyone not know her own mother? Then she felt furious at her mother, for tricking her. Then she remembered her mother was dead, which meant Marjorie was, too.

She looked around and saw that everyone was paired—even the widower was being comforted by his grown daughter, the child of his first marriage. She was the only person in the room who was alone. She hated herself for crying, because she knew it was only self-pity, but even so she couldn't stop.

The next day she rented a car and drove out of Houston on Highway 59, drove without stopping all the way back to Marjorie's house.

As soon as she entered the kitchen through the unlocked back door she was aware of the difference. Although it was still uninhabited, it was obvious someone had been here since her last visit, probably within the past month. The floor and other surfaces had been recently washed; the litter of dead insects and the other dirt she remembered had been cleaned away. She opened a cupboard and found a couple of cans and an unopened box of Ritz crackers still far from its sell-by date. She closed the cupboard and went through to the living room.

She smelled fresh paint. The wall behind the big desk was cream-colored and entirely blank, showing no evidence of any of the portraits which had once been taped there.

Despite Eddie's ignorance, his wife must have come here at least once in the months before her death, and probably more often. It wouldn't have been difficult to pretend she was going shopping, drive out here first thing in the morning, do some cleaning or painting, and get home in time to cook dinner—but why do it? Why keep it a secret? Had Marjorie been planning her return?

She still couldn't entirely accept that Marjorie was not real. She had known her. And her memories of Marjorie were of an individual quite distinct from Mary Grey. She began to go through the desk, looking for evidence.

In the bottom right-hand drawer she found a pink folder with “Poems” written across the front, another labeled “Notes,” and an old blue paper box which contained a book-length manuscript titled “The Heart's Journey.” Flipping through it she encountered pornographic descriptions on every other page. She set it aside, embarrassed and edgy.

Other drawers held a jumble of things, mostly paper: newspaper clippings, pages from magazines, handwritten sheets ripped from spiral-bound notebooks, envelopes, writing paper, postcards, half-used notebooks, paper clips, ancient rubber bands, pencils, long-expired coupons, corroded batteries, and then, at the very bottom, something which had been hers: the small red leather-bound book titled
Agnes Grey
.

It was so obvious, as soon as she picked it up, that it was homemade that she could not understand how she had been fooled. Even as a child she must have recognized that it was not typeset but merely typed, on ordinary typing paper cut down to size and bound together. It wasn't a real book.

Sitting on the rough, bare wooden floor beside the desk she opened the little book and began to read. Reading it was like falling back into the past, into one of her childhood fantasies. Only now she noticed, with her critical adult eye, that the writing was florid and graceless, a crazy quilt of clichés lifted from the most easy and undemanding of generic romantic novels. Yet the story still seemed to her wonderful, even though she recognized sources for some of the scenes—this from
Rebecca
,
that from
Jane Eyre,
something else from
Frankenstein,
bits and pieces from all her favorites, which had also been her mother's favorites: E. Nesbit, Mrs. Molesworth, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.

She read feverishly, as she had read as a child, taken out of herself, utterly involved, herself a part of the story. She got through it in less than an hour. It was less like reading than like remembering a particularly vivid daydream, a sexual fantasy from the days before she knew what sex was.

She got to her feet, clutching the book like a talisman, dazed and thirsty. Only the shallow middle drawer of the desk remained unexplored, and now she pulled it open. Pens, pencils, more paper clips, old stamps, gnawed erasers, and a small, polished wooden box, surprisingly beautiful, out of place in that anonymous mess of office-ware. Inside the box there was a braided silver ring and a key. The ring fit her middle finger perfectly. She wore it and clicked it against her plain silver wedding band: “Sterling from Stirling,” Graham had said.

It was the first time she had thought of him all day, and she realized with a guilty start that she had not phoned him, as she had promised him she would, to tell him her plans, post-funeral. On such short notice, she had bought an open ticket between London and Houston, good for six months, and had made no definite plans for when she would return. She still didn't know what she was going to do, but she ought to talk to him.

She would drive into Camptown, she decided; get herself some lunch, and call Graham. She hoped there would be somewhere to eat other than the Dairy Art. If not, there was another town only a few miles further up the highway; she could drive on, or head back toward Houston.

As she was turning to go the key she'd found in the box with the ring caught her eye. She wondered if it fit the padlock on the cellar door. She was curious about the cellar, which had been out-of-bounds in her youth, and wondered what Marjorie had kept there. Good French wines had been a favorite luxury. Or, this being a dry county, perhaps a still?

The key fit. She pulled the door open and then, because it threatened to swing shut, found a chunk of wood to wedge it open. But even with the door firmly open she did not go in. All at once she was afraid. Why was it forbidden territory? Why had Marjorie warned her away so vehemently? It was too dark under the house; daylight penetrated only a very little way inside. She wouldn't be able to see much if she went in. After a moment's indecision she went up into the house to look for a flashlight. She found one in the kitchen, in roughly the same place where they'd always kept one at home, but the batteries inside were horribly corroded. She took a white candle and a box of matches from the same shelf. The matches chattered like teeth in her hand. She concentrated on her breathing and tried to empty her mind. This was no time for fantasies. There would be nothing that could harm her in the cellar with the possible exception of a few scorpions, and she was wearing shoes.

She lit the candle, tucked the box of matches into her pocket, and went down into the dark. Shadows stretched, lunged and wobbled. The enclosed space was warm and humid and smelled of earth and dust and very faintly of something unpleasant: shit, she thought, and rotting meat. She heard scrabbling sounds as small creatures fled from her or hid themselves, but they didn't frighten her. It was the unknown, some mystery, the large dark shapes looming in the shadows, the cardboard boxes and shrouded furniture rotting away on the floor which made her muscles tense and her heart beat harder. There was something down here which her mother had hidden from her.