Spirit Read online

  But now Elizabeth was frantically clearing away the snow from the surface of the pool, and wiping the ice with her gloved hands, around and around, like a speeding driver trying frantically to see through a fogged-up window. When it was clear, she stopped, and stared, and said nothing. Because it was a window – a window through which Elizabeth could look down into another world, dark and dreadfully cold. A window through which she could see her drowned sister Peggy, her skin as white as milk, her eyes wide open, her lips pale blue. Her curls floated and the fur trimming around her hood floated, languid and slow, as if they were weed, or Arctic sea-anemones.

  Most poignant of all were Peggy’s little hands, in their pink woolly gloves, which were clasped together, up against her chest, as if she were saying her prayers.

  The more it snows (tiddely pom).

  Her father had reached the edge of the pool. She could hear him, but she didn’t turn to look at him. If she turned to look at him, she knew that she would have to obey him.

  ‘Lizzie!’ he called. ‘Is Peggy there? Where’s Peggy?’

  Elizabeth didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Lizzie, sweetheart, is Peggy there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. Her voice was deadened by the snowflakes.

  ‘Jesus,’ said her father. He stepped out on to the pool, and balanced his way towards her. His circular glasses were partially fogged-up, and his grey fisherman’s sweater sparkled with snowflakes. A thin, brown-bearded man in his late thirties, intent on rescuing his drowned daughter.

  ‘Lizzie, where is she?’ he barked. ‘Come on, Lizzie, for God’s sake!’

  Beneath the ice, Peggy smiled and slowly revolved. Elizabeth knew for certain that she was dead. She felt an intense pang of sorrow – so painful that it almost doubled her up. Peggy’s face was so near, just inches below the ice; yet she was already so far away. For her, it would always be five past three on Friday, 23 February 1940, and never any later.

  Peggy’s face was directly below her. Elizabeth paused, and touched the ice with her fingertips. Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips to the frozen surface of the pool, just above her sister’s lips.

  Her sister stared at her, but didn’t blink. The snow fell all around her, as if it wanted to lay a blanket over her, as if it wanted to cover her up.

  ‘Lizzie!’

  Her father was picking her up by one arm, swinging her around. She felt her shoulder socket being wrenched.

  ‘Lizzie, get off the goddamned pool and back in the house!’

  She stepped back, just as her father started kicking at the ice with his boot heel; but she didn’t climb out of the pool. She stood close behind him, watching him in helpless anguish as he kicked and kicked and kept on shouting, ‘Peggy! Peggy! Hold your breath, darling! Keep holding your breath! Daddy’s here!’

  It took him only a few seconds to kick out enough ice to reach her. He caught hold of her sodden fur coat and swirled her into the slushy water where the ice had first broken. Her body circled and dipped, one of her arms floated free. ‘Come on, Peggy, come on honey,’ he told her, and managed to pull her halfway out of the water, and then roll her on to the ice.

  ‘Blankets!’ he roared. ‘Somebody get me some goddamned blankets!’

  He picked Peggy up, cradled her, balanced himself, and somehow managed to skate and slither to the edge of the pool. He heaved himself up on the ladder. He groaned, ‘Oh, God!’ Peggy’s arms flopped and swung, and water dripped glittering from her fingertips. Her face remained buried in her father’s sweater, as if she didn’t want anybody to look at her, because she was dead.

  Elizabeth’s mommy was running from the house, her white baking-apron flapping. ‘Peggy!’ she was shrieking. ‘Peggy!’

  Elizabeth climbed rigidly out of the frozen pool. Her shoulder hurt where her father had swung her around. Her father was already surging through the snow, back to the house, with Peggy in his arms. Mommy hurried close behind him, crying ‘Peggy!’ over and over.

  Elizabeth was crying, too. She struggled her way back through the snow, shivering and cold and shocked, her face a blur of tears. By the time she reached the house, father had already wrapped Peggy in blankets and laid her on the back of the station-wagon. Exhaust smoke filled the driveway, tinged hellishly red from the rear lights. Elizabeth’s mommy came out of the front door, her face like a mask of somebody else pretending to be Elizabeth’s mommy.

  ‘Darling . . . we have to take Peggy to the hospital . . . Mrs Patrick is coming over to take care of you. We’ll call you later.’

  Then they were gone. Elizabeth stood for a while in the driveway, watching the snow fill in their tyre tracks. Then she went back into the house, which was warm and suddenly quiet, and smelled of baking. She closed the front door and went to the cloakroom to take off her boots and her socks and her sodden coat.

  Laura appeared, her cheeks watermarked with tears. ‘Peggy’s dead!’ she gasped. ‘I said drat her, and she’s dead!’

  The two sisters sat on the stairs, side by side, and cried until it hurt. They were still crying when the front door opened and Mrs Patrick arrived from Green Pond Farm. Mrs Patrick was their nearest neighbour, and she had known the girls since they were born. She was big and Irish, with a fiery complexion and fiery hair, and a nose like an old-fashioned hooter. She took off her coat, and then she gathered the girls up into her arms and shushed them and shushed them, until at last they were aware that her thick green home-knitted cardigan smelled of mothballs and that her brooch was scratching their faces. Much later, Elizabeth was to write in her diary that the consciousness of ordinary irritations is the first step towards coping with grief, and when she wrote that, she was thinking specifically of Mrs Patrick’s cardigan, and Mrs Patrick’s brooch.

  When the girls were in bed that night, the telephone rang. They crept in their nightgowns out on to the galleried landing, and listened to Mrs Patrick in the hallway. The house was much chillier now: the fires had died down and their father hadn’t been there to stoke them. Somewhere, a door was persistently banging.

  They heard Mrs Patrick saying, ‘I’m sorry, Margaret; I’m really so very sorry.’

  They looked at each other, their eyes liquid, although they didn’t cry. It was then that they knew for certain that Peggy had left them for ever; that Peggy was an angel; and strangely, they felt lonely, because now they would have to live their lives on their own.

  Two

  The following Thursday morning their mommy took them to Macy’s in White Plains. The sky was brown with impending snow and Mamaroneck Avenue was brown with slush. Snow-covered automobiles crept this way and that, soft and sinister, like travelling igloos. Their mommy bought them black coats and black hats and charcoal-grey dresses with black braid trimmings. The store was overheated and while she was trying on her coat, Elizabeth felt as if she were going to suffocate. But somehow, the sombre ritual of buying mourning clothes was the first normal and understandable thing that had happened in a nightmarish week, and when they left the store with their packages Elizabeth felt very much better, as if a fever had passed.

  Every day since Peggy’s drowning had been different, frightening and off-balance. On Saturday and Sunday, nobody had spoken. On Monday evening mommy had silently hugged them and rocked them backwards and forwards and stroked their hair, feeling just like mommy, looking just like mommy. But then she had abruptly dropped them off her lap, and left the nursery without turning back, and noisily locked herself in her bedroom. A few moments of silence had passed while they stared at each other in perplexity. Then they heard her cry out like a wild mink caught in a gin-trap.

  The sound of their mother’s pain had been more than they could bear, and they had started crying, too, while father stood outside the bedroom door ineffectually calling, ‘Margaret . . . Margaret . . . for goodness’ sake, Margaret, let me in.’

  On Tuesday night, without warning, their father came home catastrophically drunk and started blundering around the house and
slamming doors, screaming at mommy that she blamed him for everything, for giving up his job at Scribner’s, for moving to Sherman, for buying the house, for failing to empty the goddamned pool. Why didn’t she come right out with it, and say what she felt? Why didn’t she simply accuse him of murdering his own daughter? Jesus Christ, he might just as well have plunged her head under the water with his own bare hands and held her down until she drowned.

  After that, suddenly, the night went quiet. Elizabeth and Laura lay in their beds side by side and listened and listened, and didn’t even dare to whisper. Eventually, they heard sobbing, and it went on for almost a half-hour. It might have been mommy’s, it might have been daddy’s. It could have been both.

  They said a prayer to Peggy, although it was more like a conversation than a prayer. They found if difficult to believe that she had actually gone for ever.

  ‘Dearest Peggy, what’s it like being dead? Do get in touch somehow, even if it’s just a whisper or writing your name on the frosty window. We think about you all day every day and we still love you just as much. We won’t let anybody throw Mr Bunzum away, we promise. We cry about you all the time but we know you must be happy.’

  Lots of unfamiliar people came and went. Adults who murmured and blew their noses and avoided your eyes. Almost magically, the house began to fill with flowers, daffodils and irises and even roses. There were so many flowers that mommy had to borrow vases from the neighbours, and still the blossoms seemed to swell. In February, with the snow still blinding the windows, all of these bright and fragrant flowers made the week seem even stranger, like a Grimm’s fairytale.

  Mrs Patrick came in every day that week and brought them lunch, which they ate in the kitchen. They liked Mrs Patrick’s lunches because they were pot-roasted chicken and thick vegetable soup and Swedish meatballs, good farm food, fragrant and plain. Their mommy had always baked pretty little cookies and cakes, because granma had taught her when she was a girl. But when it came to stews and casseroles, she seemed to lose interest halfway through, and all her meals were odd-tasting and kind of unfinished, too salty or too herby or too floury, as if she had experimented with some new recipe and then grown bored. Her roasts were always grey and overcooked and sorry for themselves, and for a long time the girls thought that her greens were an intentional punishment, like losing your allowance, or having your leg slapped.

  Once or twice, while they ate, mommy came into the kitchen and talked abstractedly to Mrs Patrick. ‘You lost your little Deborah, didn’t you, Mrs Patrick? Oh God, I never understood what it was like to lose a child, not until now. It’s like having your heart torn out by the roots.’ Her cigarette smoke trailed endlessly across the room, towards the range, where the heat made it shudder for a moment and then suddenly snatched it away.

  Mommy’s presence made the girls uneasy, because they felt that they shouldn’t show too much of a healthy appetite, what with Peggy having just drowned. Sometimes mommy said, ‘Don’t make so much noise with your knives and forks.’ Then they picked at their food, hungry but reluctant to eat, and Mrs Patrick looked at them ruefully, but didn’t shout at them.

  On Wednesday morning, emboldened by the need for affection, and by plain gratitude, Elizabeth said pardon but what was Mrs Patrick’s real name? Mrs Patrick looked at her in bewilderment, and said, ‘Why, you goose, it’s Mrs Patrick.’

  Later Elizabeth wrote in her diary that – even in real life – some people are given major speaking parts, while others are only background characters. Even life has its extras; and Mrs Patrick was an extra, and knew it. ‘Perhaps God will pay her some overtime, for looking after us.’

  Mommy was the prettiest woman that Elizabeth and Laura had ever known. It was only later in life that Elizabeth realized that half of her brain was missing.

  Mommy was petite and eye-catchingly narrow-waisted, with a clear, fine-boned face and a slightly side-sloping smile that every man friend of the family seemed to take personally, and which every woman friend of the family seemed to take as a threat.

  Father always said that mommy looked like Paulette Goddard in a curly blonde wig, only prettier. Her eyes were as blue as that first piece of sky that shows when a rainstorm clears, and she always dressed in crisply-starched cottons or pastel silk sweaters. She had a snappy, flirty way about her – even with Duncan Purves, the doleful owner of the local auto shop, and with the Reverend Earwaker, the pastor of Sherman’s Methodist Episcopal church, who believed that the radio was the very larynx of Satan, and who had once spoken the ritual of exorcism throughout the Jell-O programme (much to the fury of his wife, who was a Jack Benny fan).

  The girls always loved to hear the story of how father and mommy first met. He had been working at Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publishers, as a fiction editor: and she had been working as a cigarette girl at El Morocco – temporarily, of course, while auditioning for parts in Broadway musicals. Father was having dinner with Louis Sobol of the New York Journal, who was supposed to be writing the ultimate Cafe Society novel – a roman-à-clef that would out-Gatsby The Great Gatsby. In spite of the fact that Louis Sobol was capable of turning in five 2000-word gossip columns every single week, he had written only two paragraphs of his novel in seven months, and he was pleading for more time. ‘I’ve got the clef licked; I just don’t have the roman a sorted out.’

  Father had called mommy over for a pack of cigarettes; which she had opened for him, so that he could take the first one, and then struck a match. Unfortunately, she had dropped the lighted match into her cigarette tray, and before she could retrieve it, the whole tray had burst into flames. The girls loved this bit, because father and mommy always acted it out together, rushing around the living-room to show how father had snatched a magnum of Krug ‘21 from a neighbouring table, violently shaken it up, and hosed mommy’s blazing tray with foaming champagne. Louis Sobol had written about it in his column the following day, calling it ‘the costliest fire-fighting exercise in Manhattan’s history’.

  Mommy’s picture had appeared in the paper; and she had caught the eye of Monty Woolley, the famous theatrical producer, who had signed her up for the tiniest of parts in Fifty Million Frenchmen. If you happened to sneeze when mommy came on, you would have missed her appearance altogether. But the next day, mommy had called into father’s office with a bottle of champagne to thank him. Touched, enchanted almost, father had invited her out for cocktails, then for lunch. The rest was all piano-music-and-roses.

  Puffing at her cigarette for punctuation, mommy would say, ‘That was my only Broadway role but of course (puff) if I hadn’t fallen in love with your father (puff) I could have had many, many other roles (puff). Monty Woolley several times said that I had all the potential of a great screen actress. He said my face always lit so well (puff) . But I made my choice and my choice was to marry and have children,’ (puff, followed by an emphatic crushing-out).

  Mommy would repeat this explanation in a light, gushing, well-rehearsed lilt which Elizabeth at first found romantic but later found unsettling, as if she and Laura and Peggy were directly to blame for the fact that she had given up her acting career. As if she and Laura and Peggy had deliberately plotted together to isolate her for the rest of her life in Sherman, Connecticut, baking cookies and listening to the radio and reducing rib-roasts to bundles of rags.

  Laura, however, never tired of hearing mommy’s ‘screen actress’ story, and would lie for hours in front of the fire swinging her legs and leafing through mommy’s newspaper cuttings and agency photographs. ‘Miss Eloise Foster, the former cigarette girl who gained notoriety by setting El Morocco alight, was one of the chorus line’s brightest sparks.’

  Elizabeth often caught Laura posing in front of the cheval-glass in their bedroom, with a table lamp in her hand. ‘I think my face lights well, don’t you?’ she used to ask.

  Elizabeth never answered, but sat on her patchwork quilt and opened her diary, or Loma Doone, or a book of Hans Christian Andersen stories.

&nbs
p; Her favourite Hans Christian Andersen story had always been The Snow Queen. Just like Kay and Gerda, the children in the story, she would warm pennies in front of the fire on winter mornings, and press them against the windows, to make peepholes through the frost. And she always imagined herself as the Snow Queen herself: ‘Exquisitively fair and delicate, but entirely of ice, glittering, dazzling ice; her eyes gleamed like two bright stars, but there was no rest or repose in them.’

  That Thursday evening, after they had gone to Macy’s for their funeral clothes, Laura sat in front of the mirror making faces at herself, while Elizabeth read The Snow Queen yet again.

  She had read the story aloud to Peggy and Laura, and sometimes to Mrs Patrick’s son Seamus, too, over and over, until it had magically transformed itself from a fairy story into a strange kind of reality – into the vivid memory of a parallel life, which they had all secretly been leading, as well as their lives in Sherman, Connecticut.

  When Elizabeth read The Snow Queen, her sisters listened like children in a dream, because they knew it off by heart. They knew that a magician! a wicked magician!! a most wicked magician!!! had once made a mirror that made everything beautiful look ugly. The loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach. The handsomest persons appeared as if standing upon their heads. But the mirror shattered, and broke into trillions of splinters, each of which retained the peculiar properties of the entire mirror. One of these splinters fell into the eye of a boy called Kay, and another pierced his heart.

  Up until that moment, Kay had been living an idyllic life with his sister Gerda and his grandmother, but now he became cynical and rude and rash. One winter’s day, when the snow was flying pell-mell through the streets, he hitched his toboggan to the back of a large white sledge, in which rode a tall, strange woman, dressed apparently in rough white furs. But her furs were snow, and she was the Snow Queen, and she kissed him with her icy lips and wrapped him in snow until he was only a heartbeat away from extinction. The Snow Queen took Kay to her palace in Finland, where she burned blue lights every evening; and there she made him sit on a frozen lake, which was broken into thousands of near-identical pieces. There she told him that if he could form the word Eternity out of ice, she would give him the whole world, and a new pair of skates besides. But he could never do it.