Spirit (18 page)

Aunt Beverley was a fierce woman and no mistake, and you could see it in the eyes of the people she talked to.

Laura was still standing on the balcony in her too-big red-and-white striped pyjamas when she heard that whispering again. It seemed so close that she turned around, startled, but there was nobody there. It could have been the ocean, shushing. It could have been the breeze. Yet she was sure that she had heard somebody close to her ear, trying to tell her something. Whisper-whisper-whisper, the way schoolgirls do.

Her room was empty, apart from Mr Bunzum, tilted lopsidedly on the pillow. Poor old Mr Bunzum had made it to Hollywood at last, and still couldn't drive his excellent red Packard, poor old whisker-face, mainly because he was nothing but a stuffed rabbit, and didn't really own an excellent red Packard anyway. Laura lifted up the net curtains and stepped back into her bedroom and strained her ears. She could hear a woman singing ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition' in Spanish. She opened her bedroom door and looked down into the courtyard, and saw a plump black-haired woman down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the blue mosaic. The woman looked up and smiled and called, ‘
Buenos dias
!' Laura quickly closed her door in embarrassment.

It was then that she turned and saw the faintest outline of a girl, standing on the balcony. The girl was aged about ten or eleven, the same age as Laura, with tousled curls. She was wearing the simplest of white dresses. Her face was turned away, and for some reason Laura thought that she was crying. She was scarcely visible, no more than a half-transparent disturbance in the morning air, although Laura could see her more distinctly when the breeze dropped and the net curtains fell across the window.

Laura stood still, her hands tingling with fright. The breeze
blew up the curtains, and for a moment the girl's outline disappeared; but then they fell again, and the girl faintly materialized. She turned towards Laura. Her eyes were little more than smudges, and her cheeks were white, but Laura could see that she was deathly serious. What was more, Laura knew her – she knew her so well that her heart almost stopped on the spot.

The girl was Peggy. She didn't actually look like Peggy. She was much older than Peggy had been when she drowned. But Laura was absolutely certain that it was her.

Ohhhhhh . . .' the girl whispered, her voice fading and swelling like a faraway radio station. ‘Mmmmmmhhaaave leffft my boots behind . . . mmmmmmhhhawve lefffft my gloves behind . . .'

Laura, aghast, said, ‘What? What have you left behind?'

‘. . . leffftt my boots behind . . .'

Laura knelt on the edge of the bed, reached over, and picked up Mr Bunzum. She held him tight against her heart, and slowly approached the curtains. The breeze blew them up again, and the girl momentarily vanished in the sunlight; but then they sank back, and Laura could see her again, very faintly, scarcely more than a watermark in the air. Anybody who walked into the bedroom by chance, and hadn't heard her whispering, would probably have failed to see her altogether.

‘Peggy, what is it?' asked Laura. ‘Tell me what you want.'

Peggy whispered something but Laura couldn't hear what it was. The ocean was shushing too noisily on the shore, and two or three automobiles drove past. The maid was still singing ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition'.

Laura said, ‘Peggy, are you crying?'

The whispery voice grew stronger, and for a moment it rushed over Laura's ears like water rushing over pebbles.

‘Oh . . . I have left my boots behind . . . I have left my gloves behind.'

‘What boots, Peggy? What gloves? What are you talking about?'

But the curtains lifted, and the girl vanished. Laura dropped Mr Bunzum and pulled the curtains back across the window, but the image didn't return.

‘Peggy?' she called. ‘Peggy, are you there?' She stepped out onto the balcony. She put out both hands and felt the air, in case Peggy was there but couldn't be seen, like
The Invisible Man
or something. But there was nobody there, nobody there at all, and all she could feel was the warm morning wind.

She went back into the bedroom. She almost tripped over Mr Bunzum, and she was just about to pick him up when she realized that he looked very strange. Normally he was a brownish sort of rabbit, in a dirty yellow waistcoat, but now he was sparkly and white. Very cautiously, Laura picked him up, and realized at once what had happened to him. He was sparkly and white because he was frozen solid. Not just cold, but frozen hard, and giving off fumes of intense cold.

Laura dropped him in alarm. He fell onto the Mexican tiled floor and shattered into seven separate pieces – arms, legs, body and head. Even one of his ears snapped off.

Laura sat on the bed staring at him for a very long time. She didn't understand this at all. But there was one thing she knew for certain. Peggy wasn't dead; not in the usual sense of being dead; and somehow Peggy had managed to find her all this way away in Santa Monica.

She stood up after a while, went to the bureau and took out her pen and the pad of writing-paper that father had given her. Carefully, so that she would always remember it, she wrote down the date and the time. Then she wrote the words that Peggy had whispered to her.

‘Oh, I have left my boots behind. I have left my gloves behind.'

The words seemed familiar, like something that somebody
had once said to her when she was very small. Yet here, in the warmth of California, they seemed so incongruous. Who needed boots and gloves on a morning like this? Nobody but Mr Bunzum, and he was broken now.

 

 

She stepped off the train and there he was, waiting for her, in his big brown coat and his wide-brimmed hat, still looking like Jimmy Stewart but filled out now, and broad-shouldered, a man instead of a boy.

The locomotive let out a deafening, dolorous wail. Lenny came towards her with both of his hands held out, and grasped both of hers, and kissed her. ‘Lizzie . . . you look like a million.'

‘You too,' she said. ‘I couldn't believe it when the phone rang and it was you.'

‘I'm just sorry that it was such bad news. Is this all of your luggage?'

He picked up her tan calfskin bag and together they walked across the depot to the parking-lot. It was a dazzling-bright Thursday morning in October 1951. The train from New York had taken Lizzie back into the reds and russets and shimmering yellows that had illuminated every October of her childhood, and she had sat by the window reminiscing about Laura and Peggy and the days that she had spent in Sherman, all the way from White Plains to New Milford.

Outside the station the sidewalks were ankle-deep in crisp, scurrying leaves. Lenny guided Elizabeth over toward a shiny red Frazer Manhattan convertible.

‘What do you think?' he asked her, opening the boot and stowing her case. ‘I bought it last summer.'

‘It's beautiful. I love the colour.'

‘Sure. I chose it specially to match your lipstick.'

He helped her into the car and then climbed behind the wheel. ‘I think I ought to warn you that your dad's pretty bad.
He can't walk and he can't talk. He can make a few signs, but that's about as far as it goes.'

Elizabeth nodded. She had tried to prepare herself for seeing her father, but every time she thought about him, she remembered him the way he was, carrying in logs for their innumerable, every-hungry fires; or carving the turkey at Thanksgiving; or bouncing Laura and Peggy on his knees. She remembered him standing in winter with his back to the hearth, his glasses on the end of his knees, reading to them with all the rapture of an actor from one of the latest publications from Candlewood Press, one of his books about local witches or strange customs or the ghosts of those who had lived in Litchfield when it was a country of isolated farmhouses and dark, tumbledown coaching inns.

She couldn't think of him immobile, speechless, his intellect trapped in a useless body.

They drove through New Milford toward Sherman, over the Housatonic bridge. The river reflected the pecan-red trees and the royal blue sky and the ducks that were already flying south. Elizabeth opened her purse and took out her cigarette-case. ‘Smoke?' she asked Lenny.

‘Trying to cut down. Not very successfully. Sure, you can light me one.'

Elizabeth was never quite sure when she had grown out of being an awkward, gawky adolescent and turned into the trim, elegant young woman she was today. All of her diaries were crammed with miserable ramblings about spots and periods and hair that would never do what she wanted it to do. Yet here she was, at the age of twenty-one, with dark upswept hair, a finely-boned face, and long slim legs. She was wearing her best camel coat from Bergdorf Goodman, a pleated plaid skirt and a red twinset. In her coat lapel sparkled the diamond brooch that her father had given her when she had graduated with honours from Connecticut State University. It was fashioned like a rose, and it had once belonged to her mother.

‘How are you liking the big city?' asked Lenny, as Elizabeth passed him a lighted Philip Morris.

‘Oh, it's wonderful. My apartment's pretty cramped. There are three of us sharing. But after Sherman . . .'

‘Don't tell me. The doziest community since Sleepy Hollow. '

They turned toward Boardmans Bridge, and the sun flickered between the trees. ‘Are you back for long?' asked Elizabeth.

Lenny blew smoke. ‘I'm just visiting the folks; and sorting myself out, too. You heard about what happened, I guess?'

‘Yes. I'm sorry. Isn't there any chance of you getting back together again?'

‘Unh-hunh. It was all a mistake, right from the start. One of those wartime idiocies. You don't think about the future, because you think that you're probably going to die anyway. In fact I was sure I was going to die. Even now I still can't believe that I got through it.'

‘What about your business? Are you going to carry on working for her father?'

Lenny shook his head. ‘He and I mutually agreed that we hated each other's intestines, and that it would be better if we parted company. I'm not sorry about that. I hated Pittsburgh. Besides, the old man gave me five thousand dollars relocation money, which is a polite way of saying that he paid me off.'

‘What are you going to do now?'

Lenny tapped his forehead with his fingertip. ‘Think, that's what I'm going to do. I'll still work in insurance, but I'm sure that I can come up with some really neat scam, like family-package insurance or special-rate cover for older drivers.'

‘I was amazed when you went into insurance. I always thought you were too romantic'

‘Romantic? Me?'

‘Don't you remember kissing me, before you went off to Fort Dix?'

‘Did I? That was pretty damn forward of me.'

‘You wrote me, too, almost every week.'

‘That was only because you kept on writing
me
. And sending me those saucy pictures.'

‘I used to think that we were going to be married someday.'

‘You and me?' Lenny laughed out loud.

Elizabeth glanced at him sharply; and was surprised to discover that, even now, he was capable of hurting her. She had sobbed for days when she heard that he was married. She thought that she would never recover. She still felt jealous – so much, that she could almost taste it.

They were driving around the northern end of Lake Candlewood now. On every side the hills were blazing with crimsons and oranges and yellows, like a forest fire. Elizabeth could smell the trees and the woods and the logsmoke aroma of October, and she closed her eyes for a moment and wished that everything had turned out differently, and that the years hadn't passed yet, and that her father and mother would both be waiting for her when she arrived home, smiling and waving and chatting to her.

Lenny said, ‘You tired?'

She opened her eyes. ‘No. Just remembering.'

‘Remembering's a very bad habit. I wouldn't do it if I were you.'

They drove along Oak Street and then turned into the driveway of Elizabeth's house. Lenny carried her suitcase to the front door. She looked around. The lawns were stained with black patches of moss, and the steps were clogged with wet, unswept leaves. The house itself was beginning to look sad and dilapidated, in need of a fresh coat of paint. It looked almost as if nobody lived here.

Lenny rang the bell and after a long pause Mrs Patrick came to the door, with her hands smothered in flour. She looked tired, and even though it had only been early July since
Elizabeth had last seen her, she seemed to have aged about ten years.

‘Lizzie! How good to see you!' she smiled. ‘Come on in. Your bedroom's all ready. The fire's lit.'

Lenny carried Elizabeth's case inside. ‘Listen,' she told him. ‘I really want to thank you for meeting me. Are you going to stay and have a drink?'

Lenny took her hand between his. ‘Not now. You have to see to your dad. But I'd like to see you later, if I could. Give me a call, or come around. I know my folks would love to see you, too.'

He gave her a kiss on the forehead, and left. Mrs Patrick closed the door. The house was chilly and smoky, and there was a faint smell of damp everywhere.

‘Have you heard from Laura?' asked Elizabeth. Laura was still living in Hollywood, with Aunt Beverley.

Mrs Patrick shuffled ahead of her in rundown slippers. ‘She sent a wire. She said she was truly sorry but she wouldn't be able to come home till Thanksgiving at the earliest.'

‘I see. Does everybody else know what's happened?'

‘Oh, yes. Mr Ament saw to that. He's taking care of the bank, too, and making sure that the bills are all paid.'