Spirit Read online

  ‘Johnson!’ she exclaimed, and flung her arms around him.

  ‘Hello, Margaret. Please accept my condolences, and Vita’s, too.’

  Mommy turned her head this way and that. ‘You didn’t bring Vita?’

  ‘Vita’s not too well. Nothing serious, but she couldn’t face the journey.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said mommy, in a tone of voice that suggested that she wasn’t sorry in the slightest. ‘How’s the writing coming along?’ She pecked at the air with two black-gloved fingers, in a charade of somebody trying to find their way around the keyboard of a typewriter.

  ‘Slow,’ said Johnson Ward. ‘You know me. Three words a day if I’m lucky.’

  ‘I’m surprised you can still find anything to write about, after Bitter Fruit.’

  ‘Well . . . Bitter Fruit did have a little of everything in it, didn’t it?’ Johnson Ward smiled.

  Elizabeth’s mommy swayed, as if she were trying to keep her balance on the deck of a ship. ‘You know what the trouble with you writers is, don’t you?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me, Margaret, whether I know or not.’

  ‘The trouble with you writers is that you think you’re realer than we are.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Of course you do! But that’s where you’re wrong! I’m real and all these people are real and David’s real and Elizabeth and Laura are real. The only ficstitious – the only fictitious – character in this room is you. You’re not real. You’re not! But you won’t admit it.’

  Johnson Ward grasped mommy’s black-gloved elbow, partly as a gesture of sympathy, and partly to hold her steady. ‘Why don’t I mingle?’ he said. ‘Maybe some of these good people’s reality will rub off on me.’

  ‘You’re a sham, Johnson,’ mommy declared. ‘A certified fraud.’

  Johnson Ward left mommy frowning at the wall as if she had never seen it before. He circled around the room, shaking hands with some of the people he knew, and smiling to some of those he didn’t know. He clasped the Reverend Earwaker’s hand and whispered something in his ear, and the Reverend Earwaker nodded, again and again. Elizabeth thought Johnson Ward was wonderful and couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He had not only said she was a lady, he had treated her like one, too. And although Mommy had been horribly rude to him, he hadn’t seemed to mind at all.

  On the other side of the room, Laura was chattering to Aunt Beverley, telling her how she still wanted to be a movie star, even famouser than Shirley Temple. Aunt Beverley was saying, ‘Of course, candy-cake. You’re twice as pretty as Shirley. If your mommy says it’s okay, I’ll take you to see Sol Warberg, he’s a very, very famous producer.’

  At one minute after eleven o’clock, the doorbell chimed. The murmuring conversation died away. Everybody knew who it was; they glanced at each other, discomfited. Elizabeth’s father went to open the door with the scissorlike stride of a man who wants to get something over and done with, as soon as he can.

  Black as two half-starved crows, Mr Ede the mortician and his assistant Benny, tall and painfully thin, stood side by side in the snow-clogged porch. They both removed their black hats, and Mr Ede’s hair, which had been carefully combed across his narrow skull to cover up his baldness, flew up in the air and waved around in the wind.

  ‘Are all of your guests arrived, sir?’ he asked, peering beadily into the hallway and swivelling his head. Father turned around to look at their assembled friends and relatives, and there was a look on his face that was close to panic. Even Elizabeth could understand what the mortician really meant. Are you ready, sir? It’s time to put your daughter into the ground.

  Through the open doorway, across the white and ghostly garden, she could see the huge black hearse waiting, its windows so filled with flowers that she could only make out one glinting silver handle of Peggy’s coffin.

  She repeated the little prayer from The Snow Queen. ‘Our roses bloom and fade away . . . our Infant Lord abides alway . . .’

  When they returned from the funeral, the guests were silent and pinched with cold. There had been some painful sobbing at the graveside as Peggy’s small, white, silver-handled casket had been lowered, and mommy had thrown five white roses on it, one for each blessed year of Peggy’s life. A keen north-northeaster had cut across the exposed northern slope of the cemetery, so that the snow had blown into their eyes like shattered glass.

  As soon as Mrs Patrick opened the front door, mommy rushed past her and fled upstairs, a distraught black shadow. The girls heard her locking her bedroom door. Uncomfortably, the rest of the guests crowded back into the living-room. The double doors to the dining-room had now been opened, and the table spread with food and drink – chicken chowder and breadcrumbed ham and a joint of red-rare beef and spicy meatloaf, as well as a glazed turkey and a whole poached salmon with pimento-stuffed olives where its eyes should have been. It looked to the girls like a cartoon salmon, as if it might suddenly talk to them.

  In a giant silver bowl borrowed from the Sherman Country Club, Mrs Patrick had brewed up a hot brandy punch with plenty of sugar and lemon juice and cloves and sauternes wine, which Seamus ladled out to every guest ‘to melt you out.’ The punch was very strong, and before long everybody’s cheeks became warm and flushed, and the conversation grew louder and less inhibited. People even started to laugh. There was a lot of talk about the war in Europe. Butter and meat rationing had just been announced in Britain. Most of the men thought that the United States ought not to get itself involved. ‘What’s happening in Europe is Europe’s business. And – who knows? – Adolf Hitler may well turn out to be just the tonic that Europe needs.’

  Johnson Ward, his mouth stuffed with potato salad, said, ‘What about freedom? That’s what we’re talking about here. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought. Those Nazis are against freedom, and if they’re against freedom, then I’m against them.’

  ‘Freedom of speech, indeed,’ said Mrs Gosling from the Sherman Women’s Club. ‘I’ve heard about your book, Mr Ward, and from what I hear about your book, the only freedoms you’re interested in are drinking, dancing, driving too fast and adultery.’

  Johnson Ward shrugged. ‘I disapprove just as much of bridge, home-made gingerbread and embroidery,’ he replied. ‘But, believe me, I’ll defend them to the last drop of blood.’

  When all the guests had been served, Mrs Patrick called Elizabeth and Laura to bring their plates, and she dished out slices of turkey and hot hashed potatoes with thick brown gravy and cranberry sauce. She told them to go to the kitchen if they were thirsty, for milk or lemonade, but Laura said pretty-please to Seamus, who had always liked her, and cajoled him into pouring them two half-glasses of punch.

  They sat on the cushioned window seat overlooking the tennis court, swinging their legs. Elizabeth thought that the turkey was quite nice, but it didn’t taste the same as Thanksgiving, and she soon felt picky and full-up and bored. Laura was just as bad. She complained to Mrs Patrick that there were holes in her turkey, and even when Mrs Patrick told her they were fork-holes, that was all, she still had to cut round them and submerge the holey pieces deep in her gravy, to hide them.

  After all that eyelash-fluttering at Seamus, she and Laura both thought the punch was disgusting. It tasted even more poisonous than Mary Kenneth Randall’s cough candy. They made extravagant retching noises until Mrs Patrick told them to stop it. When nobody was looking they emptied their glasses back into the bowl.

  They hung around the living-room for a while, but the air was becoming almost unbreathable with cigarette smoke, and the conversation was even more boring than the dining-room. Eventually, Elizabeth and Laura wandered to the library, where granpa was talking to father. Granpa looked exactly like father except he was kind of yellowish, as if somebody had cut father’s picture out of the newspaper and left it on the windowsill for too long.

  ‘How are doing, my beautiful young ladies?’ he asked, taking Laura on to his bony knee, and jiggling her up
and down. ‘You’re feeling pretty low today, I’ll bet.’ Elizabeth was glad that she was too big to sit on granpa’s knee any more. He reeked of camphor ice, which he used for his roughened, cracking skin, and tobacco, and death. The girls were always quite sure that they knew what death smelled like. They had only to think of granpa.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ said granpa. ‘Every time a child dies and goes to Heaven, there’s another star up in the sky. You go out one clear night and look for yourself. You’ll see our little Clothes-Peg, sparkling bright as can be.’

  ‘Bronco said that I might meet her in Havana,’ said Elizabeth.

  Granpa frowned at father. ‘What’s the child talking about, Havana?’

  Father gave an uncomfortable smirk. ‘Bronco – that’s Johnson Ward, the writer. You remember Bitter Fruit?’

  ‘Darn dirty book, from what I recall,’ said granpa.

  ‘Go on, girls, run along now,’ father urged them. ‘Granpa and I have things to talk over.’

  So it was that they dressed in their coats and their woolly hats and their gloves and their extra socks and their big wobbly-sounding black rubbers and let themselves out of the kitchen door, into the snow. Ampersand the cat glared at them in suppressed fury as the freezing draught ruffled his fur.

  Laura carried a Macy’s shopping bag, one of the bags in which they had taken home their funeral clothes, slung around her neck like a backpack. They marched around to the tennis court, singing Winnie-the-Pooh’s cold toes song. The wind had suddenly dropped, and it had stopped snowing, although the sky was as grey as a Barre granite gravestone. The silence was huge. Elizabeth felt that if she screamed at the top of her voice, she could have been heard in Quaker Hill.

  They traipsed to the very centre of the tennis court. Elizabeth looked around. ‘This’ll do,’ she decided. They began scraping up snow with their gloved hands. Then Laura discovered the nursery slate which father had requisitioned last summer for chalking up his tennis scores, and she used it as a makeshift shovel.

  Elizabeth said, ‘It must be exactly the same size as Peggy, and it must look like her. Otherwise God won’t know it’s her, will He?’

  ‘God’s supposed to know everything,’ Laura retorted. Her cheeks were fiery red and there was a bright drip on the end of her nose.

  ‘I know He’s supposed to, but He must have so many different things to worry about. You know, like the weather, and the Russians.’

  It took them almost a half-hour to create the snow-angel. Elizabeth knew it was the right height because Peggy had come up to the second button on her coat; and so did this snow-angel. Laura rummaged in the Macy’s bag and produced Peggy’s brown beret and Peggy’s bright red kilt and Peggy’s brown tweed Saturday coat, all of which she had borrowed from Peggy’s closet. They dressed the snow-angel and then they stood back to admire her.

  ‘Her face is too white,’ said Laura. ‘And she doesn’t have any hair.’

  ‘Statues always have white faces,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘All the statues in the graveyard had white faces.’

  ‘She’d look much better with a pink face, and hair,’ said Laura.

  ‘Well . . . let’s go look in the shed.’

  They walked back across the garden, and tugged open the door of the spidery, spooky shed, and ventured inside. It was so dark now that they could scarcely see anything, only the faintest of snow reflections shining through the spider webs. They groped around, giggling. In one corner, Laura found an old canvas bag, which had once been used to wrap up the roots of a cherry sapling. They also found some soft, oily cotton, which the gardener had used for cleaning the lawnmower.

  ‘This’ll do, this’ll do,’ Elizabeth hissed.

  Singing, ‘how cold my toes, tiddely-pom’ in an off-key, falsetto duet, they returned to the tennis court. Elizabeth took off the snow angel’s beret and carefully fitted the canvas bag over her head. Then Laura arranged the fluffy cotton on top; and Elizabeth replaced the beret. Now their snow-angel looked more realistic.

  ‘What about eyes?’ frowned Laura.

  ‘We could sew buttons on.’

  ‘It’s too cold for sewing. We could use stones.’

  ‘I have a better idea,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We could heat up the poker in the kitchen range, so that it’s red-hot, and burn two holes for eyes.’

  ‘Yes!’ agreed Laura, excitedly. ‘A red-hot poker! A red-hot poker!’

  They went back to the kitchen, much to Ampersand’s disgust. Laura kept guard while Elizabeth heated up the poker. Then they rushed out with it and Elizabeth jabbed it into the snow angel’s canvas face. With a sizzle and an acrid smell of burning, two black-circled eyes appeared.

  ‘And a mouth, too!’ said Laura, jumping up and down. ‘Quick! Make her a mouth!’

  When they had finished, they stood and admired their snow-angel, and then Elizabeth said, ‘We ought to pray.’

  They knelt in the snow even though it was wet and bitterly cold, and Elizabeth squeezed her eyes tight and said, ‘Dear Lord, this is our memorial to our dear sister who we loved. Please see it and bless it and make Peggy into an angel.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Laura, and sniffed.

  By the time the girls had tugged off each other’s boots and hung up their snowy coats and hats, the funeral guests were beginning to leave. Father and mommy were kissed and hugged again and again, and there were sorrowful faces and tears and slapping of backs and extraordinary yelps of grief, many of which might have been inspired by Mrs Patrick’s punch. All the same, it was a sad, disassembled moment.

  As they stood at the foot of the stairs, however, dutiful and pale in their mourning dresses, Elizabeth and Laura could sense a general feeling of relief. Peggy had been laid to rest, thank goodness, and her soul had been commended to God – whether she reappeared as a twinkling star or a Cuban girl in the Plaza de Armas or as nothing more than a gradually fading memory, less and less distinct as the years passed by.

  Dear Peggy, thought Elizabeth. I hope you can hear me. I hope that God has seen our snow-angel, and taken you up into heaven.

  They all returned to the living-room. Father said, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ Through the open doorway, they could see Mrs Patrick noisily clearing up the dishes. Mommy lifted her veil and her face looked puffy and bruised, as if she had been punched. ‘I need a drink,’ she told father. Without a word, he went to the cocktail cabinet and poured her a gin. He was about to close the cabinet again, but then he turned to Elizabeth and Laura, and smiled. He poured each of them a tonic water with rock-syrup and a maraschino cherry; and winked. ‘Cocktails, at your age? Whatever next!’

  Mommy said, ‘I don’t know whether I’m glad it’s over or not. I feel as if she’s been tugged right out of my arms, just ripped away from me. My beautiful littlest baby.’

  Tears streamed down her cheeks and she made no attempt to wipe them away. Elizabeth took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and cautiously handed it to her. Mommy stared at it for a while as if she couldn’t think what it was, then dabbed her eyes.

  ‘I don’t understand how life can be so cruel,’ she said. ‘I gave up everything! I gave up my youth! I gave up my career! Wasn’t that enough, for God’s sake?’

  Father said nothing but stood on the opposite side of the room, watching her cautiously. She wandered around the living-room, drunk and distracted, touching the walls for support, and also to reassure herself that she was still here. Then she went through to the dining-room, and sat down opposite Mrs Patrick.

  ‘You’ve been such a help, Mrs Patrick,’ she said. ‘A Godsend! I don’t know what I would have done without you. No! I mean it. I don’t know what anybody would do without you.’

  ‘It’s all shoulders to the wheel in times of trouble,’ said Mrs Patrick, scraping plates.

  Seamus came up, unsteadily balancing a trayful of punch glasses.

  ‘You, too, Seamus,’ mommy blurted. ‘You’ve been wonderful.’

  ‘Times of terrible,’ said Seamus. ‘Salt
mole lord’s eye.’

  Mommy groped a cigarette from one of the boxes on the table, but didn’t light it. She sat with her head bent for a long time, not smoking, not drinking. Father said quietly to Elizabeth and Laura, ‘Perhaps you’d better think of taking your bath.’ There was a sense of danger in the room; a feeling of adult unpredictability.

  Suddenly, mommy raised her head. She stood stock still for just a moment, and then she approached the window seat and stared at her own reflection in the night-blackened glass.

  ‘David,’ she said, in the oddest of voices.

  ‘What is it?’ asked father.

  ‘David, there’s somebody out there, in the snow.’

  Father peered into the dining-room. ‘Margaret? That’s just your reflection, darling.’

  ‘No, no it isn’t. There’s somebody out there! David, there’s a child, standing in the snow!’

  Father said, ‘How can there be? There are no other children for miles.’

  ‘There is! David, there’s a child!’

  Without warning, mommy’s voice suddenly swerved up to an hysterical pitch. She turned around and stared at all of them with her eyes wide and all of the blood emptied out of her face. Father tried to go to the window but she came stalking back into the living-room, pushing him out of the way. She reached the kitchen door. ‘It’s Peggy!’ she screamed at him. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s Peggy! She’s come back to me!’

  Elizabeth was overwhelmed with dread. She clasped her hand over her mouth and couldn’t do anything but gasp for breath. Laura squealed, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ But mommy was already wrestling with the key in the back door, and before they could say anything else, she had rushed outside. Through the kitchen window they saw her hurrying across the gloomy garden towards the tennis court, her black veil flying behind her. It was like watching a character in a frightening movie.

  ‘Mommy!’ wailed Elizabeth, catching her breath. ‘Mommy, don’t!’