Spirit Page 9

  ‘It means, Stay silent,’ he said. ‘“Stay silent, or say something that is better than silence.” ’

  ‘What could that be?’ asked Laura. She adored Dick unreservedly, heart and soul. He knew everything and then some. He was so strong and grown-up. He smelled like a man, of plain red soap and tobacco and something else indescribably musky. He wasn’t like father at all, all books and nervousness and wood-ash. He spoke his mind. He had gingery hair on the back of his freckly, suntanned arms, and he had a meaty, handsome face, his cheeks burned crimson and burnished by the sun, and eyes as green as the sea. He wore brown tortoiseshell spectacles with circular lenses, but far from making him look weak, they gave him an even more masculine appearance, like a professional boxer who just happened to need reading-glasses. His chestnut hair was shinily tonicked and combed straight back from his forehead, with an endearing sprig at the crown.

  ‘Personally, I can’t think of anything more eloquent than silence,’ said Dick. ‘Sometimes you can tell somebody you love them better by staying silent than you can by trying to put it into words. I tell God that I love Him in complete silence.’

  He left the next sentence unspoken. Laura was quite sure that he was going to say ‘I tell you that I love you in complete silence’, but he didn’t. His fingers were poised above her wrist, and she knew that he wanted to touch her, she could feel it on her skin, as hot as summer sunlight through burning-glass. She looked into his eyes and he looked back into hers, and he gave her everything that made her feel bright and good: complete devotion, rapt attention, and a terrible fear of losing her. Such fear! It was unbelievable. It made him even more virile; even more of a god. The tension between them was deliciously unbearable.

  ‘Something happened today,’ said Laura. ‘I thought I ought to tell you.’

  Dick swallowed noisily. ‘Something happened? Something bad?’

  ‘It’s really dumb. I wrote a story about us, that’s all. I dropped it, on the way back from school, and Elizabeth read it.’

  Dick said nothing. Outside in the garden, a pigeon was cooing, over and over, and the trees were rustling excitedly.

  Laura felt her eyes rush up with tears, but they always did when she knew that she had done something cruel or wrong. She wept not because she was sorry, but because she was frustrated at being found out, and because she was angry at the stupid people who told her off. Hadn’t they ever lied, or flirted with boys, or stolen lipsticks or candies or change from their mother’s purse? Sometimes Laura felt that the whole world was filled with people who were trying to make her believe that they were shining saints, and that she was the only sinner. That was one of the reasons she adored Dick so much. He was a minister, a man of the cloth, and if a man of the cloth thought that she was perfect (and hadn’t he said so, Perfect, Laura, you’re perfect), then she must be right, and everybody else who thought such bad things about her must be wrong.

  Dick, at last, grasped her wrist. ‘You say you wrote a story about us? What did you say?’

  ‘Just what we did.’

  ‘The kissing? The lying together? You wrote about that?’

  Laura nodded. For some reason, the more discomfited that Dick became, the more excited she felt. Dick was worried! Dick was terribly worried! There was perspiration on his upper lip!

  He kept squeezing her wrist, squeezing and unsqueezing. He tried to speak but he seemed to be having difficulty with his words. ‘Did you . . . what did you write, exactly? Did you mention our names?’

  Laura shook her head. She was still weeping but she didn’t really feel sad. ‘I said your name was Frank, not Dick, because your middle name being Frank and all.’

  ‘And you said that we took off our clothes?’

  Laura nodded again. ‘I said pecker and muff. Elizabeth said it was rude.’

  Dick took a huge breath, as if he were going down for pearls. ‘Do you think she knew it was us? You didn’t mention the church, did you? My God, my darling, this was supposed to be a secret between us, wasn’t it, a secret?’

  ‘Dick . . . I didn’t drop the story on purpose. Elizabeth shouldn’t have read it. I told her not to read it.’

  He said, ‘Yes . . . I didn’t mean to be angry with you. I’m sorry. But you know that what we did together was pure, don’t you? It was innocent, an innocent affection altogether, a good and devoted man for a beautiful child, both born of God.’

  Laura tilted her head to one side and looked at Dick narrowly. ‘Is that what you want me to tell them, if they ask?’

  ‘If who ask? Who else is going to know, apart from your sister Elizabeth?’

  ‘Well, everybody, if we’re not careful. You know what people are like in Sherman. They say that if you tell somebody a secret on one side of the town, and then start walking to the other side of town, the people on the other side of town will already know your secret by the time you get there.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Dick. He took his hand away from her wrist.

  But this wasn’t what Laura wanted. She didn’t want Dick to be distressed. She didn’t want him to shrivel up inside of himself, and cut off all his affection for her. She wanted him now to be bold, and virile, the boxer in reading-glasses. She wanted him to say that he loved her forever, no matter what the consequences. She was only eleven, and yet she had discovered already how weak men can be, how easily led, and while she liked the power it gave her, she despised them for not being braver.

  Dick said, ‘We’ll have to wait. I don’t think it’s wise for us to go on meeting each other any more. Not until we’re sure.’

  ‘But I thought you loved me. You said you loved me.’

  Dick half-lurched up in his chair took hold of her blonde curly head in both hands and wildly and inaccurately kissed her forehead and her cheeks and her eyes and her chin.

  ‘Laura, Laura, Laura, of course I love you, my darling! You’re my angel! You’re my darling! We know each other completely, don’t we, like Adam and Eve? Remember that afternoon when we were naked and then we wore leaves because we ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? Remember that afternoon? And wasn’t that innocent affection, two people revelling in the bodies God gave them, beauty and beauty?’

  He kissed her on the lips, tenderly and slowly, and obviously quite aware that he might never kiss her again. He touched her dress; he touched her knee. He slid his hand up inside her dress, against her bare suntanned thigh. She didn’t flinch, she liked what he was doing. But she liked to exercise her influence over him even more, and she stared at him with those misty, misty eyes and her eyes said stop, pederast even if she didn’t know what pederast meant, had never heard the word.

  ‘I – ’ Dick began, then remembered the words of his sermon. Aut lace, aut loquere meliora silentio. Laura looked at him and arched her head back slightly, in quite a superior way.

  Dick sat down. Next to the ecumenical calendar on the wall above his desk was a photograph of himself at St Luke’s College, soft-focused, faintly smiling, a portrait of Perfect Unctuousness. Beside it was a faded print of Susanna and the Elders by Thomas Hart Benton, a painting of a curvy 1930s nude with immaculately-tweezed eyebrows being ogled from behind a tree by knobbly-faced old men. He had always told himself that he liked Susanna and the Elders because it harked back to traditional virtues, and brought Christian thinking into the modern age. But of course the reality was that Susanna herself was so arousing, and a close examination of the painting revealed a shadowy and mysterious cleft beneath her pubic hair.

  Laura swung her leg backward and forward and stared at him boldly. ‘You did say that you loved me.’

  Dick was evasive, worried. Who might have read Laura’s story, apart from Elizabeth, and whom might Elizabeth tell? The end of the world is not just nigh, Bracewaite; the end of the world is practically upon thee.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘But all the same . . .’

  Laura stood up. She took hold of his hands, both of them, as if she were giving him her blessing. It was wonderf
ul to smell his fear, and his virility, and the fustiness of the church. She had actually seen his pecker, red and hairy, with its purple plum-like glans, and for some reason that gave her a power over him that was greater than any other power she had ever known. And just because she didn’t fully understand it, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t going to exercise it.

  ‘Will you get into trouble?’ she asked him.

  ‘Only if people find out about us. And even then – even if they do – only if they get the wrong idea.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Dick was finding this very difficult. ‘I’ll only get into trouble if people think that I was hurting you, or trying to have congress with you.’

  ‘What about the veritable fountain?’

  He flushed. Look at this, he had urged her. A veritable fountain.

  ‘We ought to forget about the veritable fountain.’

  Laura touched his forehead with her inky school fingertips and didn’t know whether to feel sorry for him or not. With Dick, she had learned a lot about men, and the best thing she had learned about them was that she could always attract their attention, no matter who they were, just by running the tip of her tongue across her lips, and sitting with her legs crossed so that her frock rose high. She knew how to be a movie star, already, because if she could do this with Dick, she could do it with any man, and have them all panting after her, thousands and millions of them, all over the world.

  She looked out into the garden. A little girl in a white dress was standing beside the bushes, solemnly watching her. The sun was so bright that the little girl almost seemed to effloresce. Laura didn’t know why, but she thought she recognized the little girl, from sometime long ago.

  ‘Is your gardener here today?’ Laura asked Dick.

  He blinked at her. ‘My gardener?’

  ‘His little girl’s standing outside.’

  Dick turned around in his chair, but the girl had gone, and there was nothing but the lawns and the bushes and the lazily-buzzing bees.

  ‘You don’t really love me, do you?’ asked Laura, in a voice much wiser than her years.

  Dick looked up at her, and then glanced back at the garden. The sun had gone in, and suddenly the lawns were dull and the roses were dull, and a dry, unsettling wind sprang up. Dick grasped Laura’s hand, grasped it so tightly that he almost crushed it.

  ‘Of course I love you,’ he insisted. ‘It’s just that I’m frightened.’

  ‘Frightened? What of?’

  ‘I don’t know. Satan; or maybe God. Maybe it’s my own vileness.’

  Laura kissed him on the forehead, even though his forehead was furrowed and glistening with sweat. The girl in white had strangely reappeared, almost as if by magic, and was watching her while she did so.

  ‘I won’t tell,’ Laura promised him. ‘Even if I get into trouble, I promise I won’t tell.’

  She pressed her fingertip to her lips. All the same, her eyes were alive with mischief, and Dick didn’t know if he ought to be melting from heat, or terror, or adoration.

  Six

  Elizabeth rang at Bindy’s doorbell and stood in the shady porch waiting for her to answer. Mr Theopakis the baker drove past in his big green Oldsmobile and Elizabeth waved at him. Eventually Bindy opened the door, a plump brown-haired girl with spectacles and a stutter, and said ‘Hi, Elizabeth. You looking for Laura?’

  ‘We’re waiting supper. She should have been home twenty minutes ago.’

  Bindy shook her head. ‘She hasn’t been here.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  Bindy shook her head again. ‘I haven’t seen her since school.’

  Elizabeth left Bindy’s house feeling hot and worried. If Laura hadn’t gone to play with Bindy, then where the heck was she? Supposing she was hiding? Supposing she was frightened that Elizabeth would show her sex story to father, and had decided to run away?

  She walked as quickly as she could to the end of Maple, and then back along Oak. Mrs Patrick would be furious if they were late for supper, even though it was potpie and she could keep it warm for them. Mrs Patrick believed that the very least courtesy that cooks deserved was punctual arrival at the table, hands washed, no last-minute dives to the bathroom.

  She turned the corner, back towards St Michael’s, and the cemetery. She could see almost as far as the Ledger property, on Upper Squantz Road. There was nobody in sight. The afternoon was beginning to fade, and the breeze was blowing even more strongly. Elizabeth had the feeling that something was dreadfully wrong – that she had stepped into a world that looked the same as her own, but had subtly altered.

  Somewhere in the world, a butterfly had fallen broken to the forest floor, and everything had changed.

  Judy McGuinness and Dan Marshall drove past, and tooted her, and called out, ‘Hi, Lizzie, why so busy?’

  Elizabeth looked back along Oak, then squinched her eyes against the sun and looked down Central. Sherman was gradually emptying, the stores were closing up. Where could Laura have got to? She hoped that ‘Frank’ in her story wasn’t a real man, and that she had gone to talk to him. Or even worse, to do more of that pecker and muff stuff. It made her blush red even to think about it.

  She decided to go back and tell Mrs Patrick that Laura was lost. She was just turning around, however, when she glimpsed a small girl dressed in white, running along beside the white fence in front of the churchyard. She shaded her eyes with both hands, trying to make out the girl more clearly, but in a flicker of a second, the girl had vanished between the trees.

  She didn’t know what to do. She had the dreadful feeling that it was the same girl she had seen earlier this afternoon, when she was walking home from Lenny’s. The girl she had imagined to be Peggy.

  She walked up to the church, up the old redbrick path and up to the steps that led to the shiny white-painted front doors. It looked as if the girl had been running away from the church, in which case Dick Bracewaite must have seen her. Maybe he had even been talking to her, and knew who she was.

  Elizabeth climbed the steps and opened the church doors. Inside, it was gloomy, and smelled of seasoned wood and dust. There was a tall statue of Jesus standing on a pedestal close to the door, with a large vase of freshly-arranged flowers around His feet, lilies and roses and blood-red dahlias. He looked down sadly at Elizabeth, as if He would have liked to have helped her, but was too preoccupied with His own woes.

  ‘Mr Bracewaite!’ called Elizabeth. The sunlight fell through the stained-glass windows, burnishing the pews and the huge brass candlesticks. ‘Mr Bracewaite, are you there?’

  She walked across to the vestry and cautiously opened the door. All of Dick Bracewaite’s robes and surplices were hanging there, and a pair of scruffy black shoes lay tilted on the floor beneath them, as if somebody had taken them off in a hurry. On the table was a copy of National Geographic featuring Ibo tribesmen, and a pair of spectacles with only one arm.

  ‘Mr Bracewaite?’

  She opened the door that led out into the gardens. Across the sloping lawns stood the white weatherboarded house. It looked unnaturally bright in the dying summer’s light. The lawns still glittered with water. Elizabeth walked between the rose beds to the back of the house. The french windows were swinging open and closed, open and closed, like a conjuring trick, their panes occasionally catching the flash of the afternoon sun.

  Elizabeth stepped through them into the study. The breeze was ruffling the pages of Dick Bracewaite’s Sunday sermon. ‘Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio.’ Only his tortoiseshell pen kept the pages from blowing away.

  ‘Mr Bracewaite, it’s Elizabeth Buchanan! Is anybody there?’

  She looked around the study. Although she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, she felt as if the room had only recently been vacated, only moments before, only seconds before. Human beings leave a resonance behind them when they leave a room, an eddy of disturbed molecules, an echo. Somebody had only just walked out of here: and there was somet
hing else, another feeling.

  Somebody had shouted in here. She could almost hear the shout, slapped against the wall like wet wallpaper. She circled the room, listening, listening, and she was sure that she could still sense it.

  The french windows swung and banged. ‘Mr Bracewaite?’ (Scarcely audible now.)

  She listened and listened, but there was nothing at all, and she had almost decided to leave when she heard a soft, blurred moaning sound, like a man trying to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ into an empty jamjar. She stepped out of the study, and across the narrow hallway. The floor was light oak parquet; and there was a large steel-engraving on the wall of Christ preaching to the five thousand, standing on his boat, his hair curled by the wind, his hand upraised. ‘I am the bread of life, he who comes to Me shall not hunger.’

  She heard the moaning again, and she hesitated. It was coming from the kitchen. The door was half ajar, and she could see a triangular-shaped section of the floor, with black-and-white tiles, and part of the solid pine table. She could also see a blotchy, mottled shape rather like a penguin’s flipper that swung repeatedly from side to side. It took her a moment to realize that it was a bare human foot.

  Now she was seriously frightened. There was something lying on the kitchen floor; somebody who was moaning; somebody whose foot was blackened and blistered, as if it had been burned.

  She was so terrified that she was tempted for one tightly-swollen moment to run right out of the house and back across the lawns and out into Oak Street and keep on running no matter what. But the sight of the foot was so grisly that she knew she couldn’t run away. She had to look.

  This is experience, she told herself. No writer can ever shy away from experience. Without experience, writing has no meaning. She walked into the kitchen in a slow trance of absolute terror. In later years, she never remembered actually moving her legs when she walked. It was just as if she slid, irresistibly drawn by the magnetism of what she was about to see.

  A man was lying on his back on the kitchen floor, a man with no clothes on, moaning and shuddering, and surrounded by scattered sausages. On first sight, Elizabeth thought that he was a negro, because his face and the upper part of his shoulders were almost totally black, as if they had been stained with ink. Not only was he swinging his feet from side to side, he was jerkily waving his arms in the air, like a wind-up clockwork drummer who had lost his drum. His arms were black, too, almost down to the elbows, and his hands had no fingers, only a few thick stumps of fingers.