Spirit Read online

  As she approached, Elizabeth slowed, and stared at her. For some ridiculous reason, she began to feel alarmed, although she couldn’t think why. She knew just about every single kid in the whole of Sherman, and Boardman’s Bridge besides, even kids as young as this one, but she had never seen this kid before. Maybe she was visiting, with her parents. Maybe she was lost.

  The girl came gliding nearer and nearer on white-sandalled feet, until she and Elizabeth were face to face. The sun was so strong that Elizabeth had to squinch up her eyes. Even then she didn’t seem to be able to focus on the girl’s face.

  The girl stared up at Elizabeth with perfect composure. ‘Hallo, Elizabeth,’ she said. Her voice was oddly tinny, as if she were speaking on the radio.

  ‘Do I know you?’ asked Elizabeth.

  The girl gave her a blurry smile. There was something familiar about her – something so familiar that Elizabeth began to feel seriously frightened. How could she be so familiar, when Elizabeth had never met her before?

  ‘Are you lost?’ Elizabeth asked her.

  The girl shook her head. In some peculiar way, she had managed to pass Elizabeth by, while at the same time never taking her eyes away from Elizabeth, nor turning her head. Elizabeth could feel the sun beating hot on the top of her head, and yet the girl herself seemed to give off the faintest of chills.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Elizabeth repeated.

  The girl was already gliding away. She was swallowed by the shadows of the overhanging elms, until all that Elizabeth could see of her was a white dress and gliding white sandals. How did she walk like that? It was so strange, like a waking dream, right here on the corner of Putnam Street, on a normal afternoon.

  Deeply immersed in the shadows, the girl turned around just once. Her pale face was completely expressionless, yet she was obviously trying to communicate something.

  But what?

  Elizabeth slowly continued her walk towards Main Street, frowning in perplexity. Why had the girl seemed so familiar? It was almost as if Elizabeth had known her all her life; and yet she knew for sure she hadn’t.

  It was only when she reached Main Street and saw the sign across the street saying Walter K. Ede & Son, Mortician, that she was seized with the most horrific of thoughts. She turned, and stared back down the street, and she was so frightened that she felt as if centipedes were crawling in her hair.

  ‘Peggy,’ she whispered. Then she screamed out, ‘Peggy?”

  Five

  Laura was already in the billiard-room when Elizabeth got back. She was sprawled lanky-legged on the sofa eating a sugared doughnut and leafing through a copy of Glamour. She didn’t look up when Elizabeth came into the room and dumped her schoolbooks on the end of the coffee table.

  ‘Well?’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Well what?’ retorted Laura, aggressively.

  ‘Well – what do you think I ought to do?’

  ‘What do I think you ought to do about what?’

  ‘Your story, of course. That’s what.’

  Laura gave her a sulky, challenging stare. ‘Be a snitch. Go on. See if I care.’

  ‘But Laura, it was so rude. Where did you learn all of those words?’

  ‘I just heard some of the boys talking, that’s all,’ said Laura. She pushed almost half of the doughnut into her mouth at once. ‘They’re always saying things like pecker and muff.’

  ‘It’s awful.’

  ‘Why should it be awful?’ said Laura, with her mouth crammed. ‘You say “woodpecker” don’t you? And women say they wear muffs in winter, and nobody gets upset.’

  ‘That’s different. You shouldn’t write stories like that.’

  ‘Says who?’

  Elizabeth was about to answer when the door opened and her father came in. He had become thin as a rail and very grey, like a man who has been standing for hour after hour in a shower of fine wood-ash. The girls had grown used to his emaciation and premature ageing; but his appearance was a constant reminder of Peggy’s death; as if her shadow had fallen across him for ever. He still spoke just as firmly, and the Candlewood Press was doing reasonably well, and making a bit of money, but losing Peggy had taken so much of the meaning out of his life.

  ‘Hi, Elizabeth,’ he said. She went up and put her arm around his waist. His sand-coloured trousers drooped because he was so thin. He scarcely ate, and wouldn’t touch drink these days because it gave him nightmares. Nightmares of snow, nightmares of ice. Nightmares of Peggy rising out of the pool. ‘How was school? Do you have much homework?’

  ‘Only geography, the Rockies, and that’s easy.’

  ‘Listen . . .’ he said. ‘I had a call this afternoon that granpa’s sick. I have to go to New York tomorrow. I really have to. Do you think that you two could stay home and take care of mommy for me?’

  ‘Is granpa going to die?’ asked Laura.

  Their father shook his head. ‘It’s his heart. His heart’s weak. He has to have tests for his blood pressure.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We’ll look after mommy.’

  Their father ruffled her hair. ‘Thanks, Lizzie. I’ll call the school before I leave, and tell them why you’re taking the day off.’

  ‘Okay, sure thing,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Mommy should have a nurse,’ Laura protested.

  ‘Laura –’ Elizabeth retaliated. But her father said. ‘Ssh, she’s probably right. It’s just that I can’t afford a nurse right now. Besides, you know how difficult your mother can be. Too difficult for most nurses.’

  He was about to leave when Elizabeth said, ‘Father – ’

  Laura sat up and glared at her furiously, staring daggers. Long-bladed daggers with elaborately-decorated handles, just like the cartoons.

  But Elizabeth had no intention of telling her father about Laura’s story. She wasn’t a snitch by nature; and, besides, she would have found it far too embarrassing. But she did want to tell him that, somehow, she had met Peggy on Putnam Street on the way back from Lenny’s house – that she hadn’t exactly looked like Peggy, but she was almost certain that she was. After all, hadn’t Bronco’s dead brother looked like a Cuban? It didn’t matter what people looked like, surely, so long as it was still them.

  The body is simply the costume of the soul, that’s what Dick Bracewaite had told them, in church last Sunday.

  Maybe, if her father knew that Peggy was still walking around, it would put his mind at rest – give him hope, and peace. Maybe it would brush off all those ashes of guilt that made him appear so grey.

  ‘Lizzie, I really have to run.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s nothing.’ Nothing that she could possibly articulate, anyway. She was mature enough to realize that if she told him and he didn’t believe her, his pain would be even more difficult to bear. And, just at that moment, she wasn’t at all sure that she believed it herself.

  There were two hours to spare before supper, so Laura went off to call for her friend Bindy on Sycamore Street and Elizabeth sat in the kitchen with Mrs Patrick while Mrs Patrick finished off a chicken potpie. Seamus was there, too, sitting on his favourite stool next to the range, his head leaning against the tiles, softly singing a nonsensical song.

  Sad the man, mind the man, day after day

  Flowers and clouds,

  Flowers and clouds.

  The kitchen was filled with warm marmalade-coloured sunlight, which fell in shafts through the steam and flour dust. Elizabeth traced patterns in the flour with her finger.

  ‘Your father’s a poor suffering soul,’ said Mrs Patrick.

  ‘I know,’ Elizabeth agreed. She looked over at Seamus, who was still nodding and singing. His voice was a thin, tuneless whine.

  ‘Is he worse?’ she asked Mrs Patrick.

  Mrs Patrick nodded, and gave Elizabeth a sad and wistful smile. ‘Dr Ferris said he’ll have more fits. I like to think that it’s the fairies. They loved him so much that they want him back, to play with him some more.’<
br />
  Elizabeth listened to Seamus singing for a little, and then she said, ‘Mrs Patrick – do you think it’s possible for people, when they’re dead, to be other people, and walk around, and meet their old friends?’

  Mrs Patrick was about to put the potpie in the oven. She turned around and stared at Elizabeth in the strangest way. The open oven was so hot that Mrs Patrick’s forehead was beaded with sweat.

  ‘What made you say that, child?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something I saw.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘A little girl, that’s all. She didn’t look like Peggy and yet she did. And she looked at me so queerly. And she said, “Hallo, Elizabeth”, quite plain, as if she knew me.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘On Putnam Street: I was visiting Lenny. He’s had the greeting, and he has to go to Fort Dix tomorrow.’

  ‘The dead go to Heaven, child, to sit with Our Lady and Our Lord Jesus Christ.’

  ‘But you said that Seamus would go back to the fairies.’

  ‘There are fairies in Heaven. There is anything a soul could want in Heaven.’

  Elizabeth had the feeling that this conversation was going to get her nowhere at all. Mrs Patrick was a Catholic, and while she may have been a very superstitious Catholic, and believed in elves and piskies and all sorts of supernatural larkings-about in hedgerows and underneath toadstools, she was still sure and certain that her Redeemer liveth, and his Blessed Mother, too, and that it was They alone who set us down on earth when we were born and scooped us back up again when we died.

  There was no room in Mrs Patrick’s theology for a Peggy who was dead but not really dead at all.

  ‘Sad the man, mind the man, day after day,’ keened Seamus. ‘Flowers and clouds, flowers and clouds’

  Then, abruptly, he stopped singing, and sat up straight, gripping the seat of the stool. His face was bright with inspiration. ‘Living snow flakes!’ he exclaimed, his thick lips shiny with saliva. ‘Dried stock-fish!’

  ‘What holy gibberish,’ said Mrs Patrick, shaking her head.

  But Elizabeth sat and stared back at Seamus with her mouth open and her fingers tingling with fright and surprise.

  Because dried stock-fish was what the Lapland woman in The Snow Queen had used to write a letter to the wise Finland woman (‘paper had she none’); and living snow flakes had been the Snow Queen’s guards (‘their shapes were the strangest that could be imagined; some looked like great ugly porcupines, others like snakes rolled into knots with their heads peering forth, and others like little fat bears with bristling hair – all, however, were alike dazzlingly white – all were living snow flakes’).

  ‘Seamus,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Seamus, who told you that?’

  But Seamus leaned back against the fireplace again, and carried on singing.

  ‘He’s a poor boy,’ said Mrs Patrick, chopping carrots.

  Elizabeth found her mommy sitting in her bedroom with the linen blind drawn down to keep out the sunlight. It gave the room the appearance of an old sepia photograph. The bed was made but the quilt was rumpled where her mother had been sleeping on it. Sometimes she slept all day, day after day. At other times you could go into her room in the small, intense hours of the morning, and find her standing by the window in her nightgown, staring into the garden.

  Today, her mommy had dressed in a cream short-sleeved blouse and pale blue skirt, and pinned up her hair. She was sitting in her blue basketwork chair smoking a cigarette, her head wreathed in curls of smoke as if she were wearing an evanescent crown of thorns. She looked better today: her eyes were more focused.

  ‘And what have you been doing, darling?’ she asked.

  ‘We went to the cemetery to see Peggy. Then we had icecream at Endicott’s. Lenny wasn’t there, though. They’ve called him up.’

  ‘You really like Lenny, don’t you?’

  Elizabeth blushed and nodded. Like him? Whillikers, she adored him! ‘He’s always so considerate.’

  ‘You should always go for a considerate man,’ said her mommy, taking a last hard draw on her cigarette, and then crushing it out. Immediately, she picked up the pack of Philip Morris and shook out another, and lit it with fussing, jiggling hands. ‘To hell with handsome,’ she continued. ‘Do you know what I mean? You need the kind of man who doesn’t stifle you. The kind of man who lets you be yourself. Doesn’t . . . disappoint you all the time. Doesn’t dish you up nothing but tragedy. Doesn’t trap you with children in the back of beyond.’

  Elizabeth said nothing. She was used to this endless complaining about her mommy’s lost career. What was more, she quite liked the idea of ‘the back of beyond’. It sounded like somewhere mysterious and odd, where extraordinary things could happen. Maybe she ought to sign all her letters: ‘Elizabeth Buchanan, White Gables, Sherman, The Back of Beyond’.

  ‘I’m beginning to feel like getting out,’ said her mommy. She half-turned towards the shaded window, her cigarette poised. ‘It’s summer, isn’t it? I’m beginning to feel like getting out. Going for a walk, maybe. Sitting on the verandah. Clothes-Peg loved the summer, didn’t she? She never liked the cold.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘I think I may have some good news.’

  ‘Good news? Good news about what?’

  ‘About Peggy, of course. I think Peggy is kind of still with us, in a way.’

  Her mommy turned slowly back from the window, and stared at her. ‘What are you saying, Lizzie?’

  Elizabeth began to grow hot and flustered. She had thought that this was going to be easy – easy and joyful – a way of lifting her mommy out of her misery and her discontent. She wasn’t prepared for the hostile, intense look in her mommy’s eyes, the quiver of disapproval in her voice.

  ‘I was walking back from Lenny’s house and I saw a girl who wasn’t Peggy but she was.’

  ‘What are you saying? What the hell are you – ? What are you saying?’

  Elizabeth felt trapped, suffocated by mommy’s cigarette smoke. She knew she was right, she knew for certain that she had passed Peggy on Putnam Street, yet she wished and wished that she had kept it to herself.

  ‘I saw a little girl . . . she was dressed all in white, she seemed to shine.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, such nonsense. What are you trying to do, give me another breakdown? Do you know how long it’s taken me to – ? ’

  ‘Mommy, I know. And I didn’t mean to upset you. But she was so much like Peggy. She was, I can’t explain why! And then Seamus said things from The Snow Queen, which was Peggy’s favourite.’

  Her mommy smoked furiously. Then she burst out, ‘For God’s sake, Elizabeth! You’re as mad as him! Or maybe you’re not! Maybe I’m still mad! Ha! It would serve me right, wouldn’t it, for marrying your father, for coming here, for having children! And my career – in ruins! In tatters!’

  ‘Mommy, you’re not mad, and Seamus isn’t mad, and neither am I. Even if you don’t believe me, even if you think I’m being horrible to you, it’s true. I saw a girl today on Putnam Street and she wasn’t Peggy but she was.’

  Mommy looked as if she were about to say something furious, but then – quite unexpectedly – she let her head tilt forward, and her shoulders slope, until she was sitting in her chair like one of those old women you see in nursing homes, with all the spirit and stuffing knocked out of them, resigned to tedium and tantalizing memory lapses, and dwindling visits from relatives whose eyes are shifty with guilt or greed.

  ‘Mommy?’ said Elizabeth, worriedly.

  Her mommy looked up, and managed a smile, ‘Oh, Lizzie . . . if it could only be true. If only I could hold her again, just once.’

  Elizabeth reached out and touched the back of her hand. It felt dry, dried out, as fragile as a leaf-skeleton.

  If only there was some way of explaining what she had seen, and the way she had felt when the girl in white had walked by. But all she could do was lean forward, and kiss her mommy’s forehead. Her mommy’s skin tasted of ni
cotine and Isabey perfume, and somehow that taste reminded Elizabeth so much of Peggy and the times that they had all been together, all three sisters, that she was even more convinced that it was true – that Peggy was still with them, in some inexplicable way, and for some unimaginable purpose.

  Dick Bracewaite was sitting in his small study writing his Sunday sermon when Laura appeared in the open french windows, as if by magic. He sat back and smiled at her. Then he picked up his pen and screwed on the cap.

  ‘Laura! You quite made me jump!’

  She stepped in through the french windows, her blonde curls shining in the late afternoon sunlight. Behind her, the lawns of St Michael’s were freshly watered, so that they glittered, and the flowerbeds were thick with the creamy curds of fullblown roses. Laura walked around the back of Dick Bracewaite’s chair, and as she passed behind him he half closed his eyes and breathed in, so that he could catch her aroma. Girl, and summer, and ice-cream.

  She sat down in the wooden armchair close to his desk, on a worn-out tapestry cushion. She peered at the pages of back-sloping handwriting. Her eyelashes had been bleached by the summer sun, but they were still long, and they trembled as she read what Dick had been writing.

  ‘What language is that?’ she asked him.

  ‘That’s Latin. Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio. I’m using it in my sermon this Sunday.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Her thin suntanned wrist rested casually on the edge of the desk and he felt a compulsion to reach out and stroke it, and then to close his fingers around it, as he had several times before. Look, he had told her, your wrist is so thin that I can close my finger and thumb around it, like a bracelet.

  Or handcuffs, she had replied, staring up at him with those misty, misty eyes.