Transgressions (14 page)

Her fingers were hovering over the keyboard when, three flights down, the doorbell rang. The sound brought back the present and the kitchen and the fear that wasn’t in the words. She rose up to greet it.

nine

T
he reverend was waiting on the step with a pot of what looked like early daffodils in her hand. She was wearing a long flowing coat, rather splendid, and her hair, caught in the wind, was a halo of salt-and-pepper gray. She looked, well, unlike a vicar.

“Hello. Any further developments?” she said as she held out the plant. “Oh, these are for you, by the way. I’m afraid it’s early days, but they always come through in the end.”

“Thanks. Er . . . no. Though while I was out, something ate the cat pellets.”

“You don’t think it could have been the cat?” she said, with such a straight face it took a while for the humor to register.

She led her downstairs. As she unlocked the door, she thought, What if it’s all gone away? What if I did just imagine it all?

But there it was, the table laid and untouched, the pans on the floor with a few errant pellets still scattered in between.

The woman stood in the doorway, then came in slowly, looking around, obviously trying to get a sense of the place. What was she after? Signs of fraud or distress? It was so long since anyone else had been there. When was the last time? Apart from the policeman, it must have been the dinner party after she got back from New York, two, two and a half months now. No wonder this spirit had got so cheeky. It must have assumed it had the place to itself.

The reverend walked over to the windows and looked out. “What a lovely garden. You’ve done some work out there.”

“Yes. Would you . . . would you like a cup of tea?”

“Thank you, I would.” She flicked up the handle on the kitchen door. It was locked. “How do you open this?”

“You have to pull up the catch above. It releases the lock.”

“Ah. Yes. I see. Sad, isn’t it?” she said, locking the doors back up again. “The way winter cuts it all off. Makes you feel like a prisoner in your own house.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Is that what I’m supposed to be feeling? she thought. Would a sense of climatic siege have been enough to give birth to this psychic mischief maker?

She got on with making the tea while Catherine squatted down by the saucepans, picking up the odd cat pellet, then moving to the table, running her hands over the crockery, holding up the cornflakes box, apparently reading the back panel for clues. What was she doing? Listening for the call of the wild, the echo of a paranoid soul trying to get out? This isn’t going to work, Elizabeth thought. She can’t help me. I should never have let her come.

“You said you were a translator?” the woman asked, as they sat together at the other end of the table from the breakfast things, cradling mugs of tea in their hands.

“Yes. Czech into English.”

“Ah, that would explain your surname. Your father’s Czech?”

“Yes.”

“What do you translate?”

“Oh, different things. Some business stuff, books, short stories. I’m working on a novel at the moment.”

“Really. Anybody I’d know?”

“I doubt it.”

“So not Milan Kundera.”

She smiled. “No. Rather more pulp, I’m afraid. It’s a thriller.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s popular,” she said. “Got its eyes on the American market.”

“Aaah. And you work from home?”

“Yes. I have an office at the top of the house.”

“So when you’re up there you presumably wouldn’t be able to hear anything going on down here.”

“That depends what it is. I suspect if it started throwing plates I would.”

“Do you think it will?”

She shrugged. “What do I know? Apparently I’m just controlling it.”

The women smiled. The reverend opened the sugar bowl and scooped out a hefty spoonful. There was a silence. It didn’t seem to bother her. “I rang a couple of people this afternoon,” she said at last. “To get some advice. I’ve not come across many poltergeists before. They said that sometimes, though it can be a manifestation of distress, it may well be distress that the people themselves don’t even know they’re feeling.” She paused. “You mentioned this morning that you’d split up from your partner.”

“Yes.”

“How long were you together?”

“Seven and a half years.”

She nodded. “Do you think you’re perhaps still mourning that?”

Here it comes, the pseudotherapy. I don’t want to talk about this, she thought, suddenly extremely angry. She took a deep breath and sat waiting for her fury to activate a few bits of crockery, start some thrashing and smashing around the room. Everything remained stubbornly in its place.

“We did the right thing,” she said in the end, through half-clenched teeth. “And I’ve been more happy than sad.”

“But sometimes lonely?”

And what would you know about it, shacking up with God every night, telling him your deepest thoughts, getting the hotline version of things, then going out and dispensing divine love like breakfast wafers to anyone who sticks their tongue out. She shrugged. “Maybe, sometimes.”

But it was clear that more was expected of her. The silence grew. She ignored it angrily. Many years before, after her father died and she had found herself in a vise grip of pain that seemed altogether too vicious to be just grief, someone had advised her to see a psychotherapist about it. She had even gone as far as having—what did they call it?—an assessment session. That person had been a woman, too, very quiet, very calm. She had asked a few questions and then left her to talk. They had spent forty-five minutes in total silence at the end of which Elizabeth was absolutely clear that whatever the pain, it was hers and hers alone and could not be shared.

Over time the crippling grief had eased itself and be-come manageable, more soaked into the fabric of life. Now, as she sat there, this silence seemed to put something of the same weight of expectation on her shoulders.

“You know, one of my colleagues this afternoon told me this story about a parishioner he’d seen a couple of years ago,” Catherine said, helping herself to more tea as if nothing had happened. “She lived alone, this woman, not a member of the congregation or anything, just someone who turned up one day rather like you did. She was older than you—in her early fifties, I think he said—very creative apparently, an artist. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have one breast removed. She was so traumatized by the operation that she couldn’t work. They’d offered her reconstructive surgery but she’d refused.

“Anyway, then these things started happening in her home. She had some very beautiful objects, she’d traveled a lot, all over the world. And some of them started to go missing. Statues, ornaments, that kind of thing. But only when there were two of them. One would suddenly go. It affected even quite mundane things apparently. Once she had two milk bottles sitting on the kitchen table. One of them disappeared. Each incident was the same destruction of symmetry. He said that she hadn’t even noticed this pattern until he pointed it out to her. And that when he did she got very upset. She was upset for quite a while. But after that it stopped. Somehow the release of the pain, no longer denying it, helped her to come to terms with it.

“She went on to do a rather wonderful set of sculptures about women’s bodies. There was an exhibition of them in a gallery about a year ago. I’d just got the post at St. Mary’s. I went with my colleague to see it. Although he didn’t tell me the whole story until later, when I spoke to him today, in fact. It’s amazing, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she said, because it was. “Did they come back later?”

“The objects, you mean?”

“Yes.”

The woman laughed. “You know, I asked him the same question. He said he couldn’t remember. Men. They sometimes miss the obvious.”

“Is that a theological observation?” she asked because she couldn’t resist it.

The woman laughed again. “I don’t know. Probably. Probably mildly heretical, too.”

I like you, Elizabeth thought. I like you very much. But I still don’t see how you can help me. How anybody can. “It’s not that I miss him,” she said after a while. “I don’t think we were very good for each other. It’s more that I don’t quite know what to do now. Or if I want to do anything. Sometimes I don’t know how people get close to each other. Why they bother.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“No, no. My father died before I met Tom, my mother two—no, three years ago.”

“I see. How about friends?”

“Loads,” she said. Then quietly, “I don’t see them much these days.”

“Which means you don’t go out a lot?”

“Hardly at all.”

She left a silence. “Do you mind?”

“Mind what?”

“Being so alone. I don’t mean necessarily lonely, just alone.”

“Er . . . do I mind? I don’t know. I don’t seem to be able to do anything different at the moment.” This is the longest conversation I’ve had in months, she thought, maybe the longest since Tom left. Weird.

“You don’t think these things happening . . . well, you don’t think they might be a way of keeping yourself company?”

The very idea of it made her laugh out loud. “What? Somebody putting on the stereo before I get home, or laying the table and feeding the cat for me?” But she thought about it anyway. Once again it made no sense. How could she have done these things to herself? It was not only absurd, it was surely impossible. “I’m not mad,” she said angrily.

“No, you’re most certainly not.”

“But, then, how? I mean, do you really believe that I did all of this without knowing it?” And she gestured to the cups and saucers on the table in front of them.

“Not consciously, no, of course not. Any more than the woman with the mastectomy moved her own objects. But the subconscious is an extraordinarily powerful force in terms of the psychic energy it can release. Well, I don’t think it’s inconceivable. Do you?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s nothing to do with me. Sometimes I think that someone’s just trying to scare the shit out of me. See how strong I am.”

“And how about if you were doing that to yourself? Testing yourself now that you’re alone.”

She shook her head. “If I am, then I don’t need a priest, I need a shrink.”

If the woman was offended by the remark she didn’t show it. “Perhaps what you need is to decide that you’ve passed the test.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean that you’re coping so well, it’s obviously important to you to do so. Maybe it’s time to let yourself off the hook. Accept that you can sometimes be lonely without being destroyed by that.”

“I don’t know.” God, how many times can you say that phrase, she thought? At some level everything the woman said made some kind of sense. But, then, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Maybe that was the problem. “I really don’t know what to think,” she said carefully. “What do your colleagues suggest?”

“About you?”

“Yes.”

“Not anything specific. Each case is unique to itself. Although they do say that prayer is effective.”

“Yes, well, that’s hardly an option for me at the moment.”

She smiled. “I think they meant me rather than you.”

“What, you praying for me?”

“Yes. Does that upset you?”

She laughed. “Not at all. It’s just it’s the first time you’ve mentioned God. I did wonder why you hadn’t brought him up earlier.”

“Why? Would you like me to have?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was er . . . well . . .”

“Compulsory?”

“Something like that.”

She sat for a moment. “You know, there are times when I think they only let women into the Church because they didn’t know what else to do. Then at least if things got worse, they could blame us.” She stopped, playing with the rim of her cup, deciding where to step next. “I think that people’s lives are very hard at the moment. There no longer seems to be any sense of a future, no vision of utopia to work toward. At least not any kind of social or political one.” She paused. “But the fact is I do think God can help. I think that realizing that you’re loved, that you’re cared for, is the most powerful gift a person can be given. It’s like opening a door that’s been locked for too long. Once you’ve seen outside, everything, even the room behind you, looks different. It gives you such strength, such freedom. And nothing can ever be so frightening again. Or quite so painful.” She stopped, then smiled slightly. “Or that’s how it was for me. And still is.”

She had done it as well as it could be done. They both knew that. It wasn’t that the idea wasn’t tempting. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want things made easier? Or less painful. But wanting wasn’t the same as getting. Or believing. She shook her head, almost more embarrassed for the woman than for herself. “I’m sorry but I don’t think we’re fighting the same demons,” she said quietly.

The reverend smiled, pushing her teacup away from her across the table. “I’m not entirely sure about that. But don’t worry. It’s not like Avon calling. You’re not expected to buy the product.” Despite herself, Elizabeth laughed. “I might just pray for you anyway. If you don’t mind.”