Spirit (44 page)

The sky was faultlessly blue. The ground was faultlessly white. The air was totally transparent, like a polished lens. In the distance, the heat wavered and flowed, so that it looked as if Camelback Mountain were floating in a glassy lake. The only sounds that interrupted the silence were the cracking of ice in Elizabeth's drink, and the soft rustle of paper as Bronco turned another page.

Elizabeth lowered her proofs onto her lap and looked towards the horizon. She was frightened of what she and Bronco were going to do; yet in a way she was quite excited by it, too. Surely the living could exert their influence over the dead? And surely real people could exert their influence over imaginary characters – people who wouldn't even have existed, if it hadn't been for human imagination? She had often wondered where fictitious characters ‘came from'. Somebody at a literary dinner party had once argued that they were all of those people who had never been born . . . either because their potential parents had failed to meet, or because their sperm had come second in the race towards the egg, or for whatever reason. ‘Imagine that you never got to be, simply because your father argued with your mother about the way she cooked the dinner . . . and so they didn't make love that night . . . and that was your chance gone for ever. Unless, of course, you could
make your presence felt in some fiction-writer's imagination. A life on the printed page is better than no life at all, after all.'

Eventually, Bronco closed the book, picked up his drink, and took a swallow. ‘Pretty crappy novel, hunh?' he remarked.

‘The characters were good; especially Raul.'

‘Yes. I can see why Billy liked him. He didn't give a bent cent for anybody, did he? Mind you, I liked Captain Figueredo, too. What a bastard he was.'

‘How about Rosita?'

He eased himself off the sun-lounger and walked along the verandah until he was standing next to her. ‘Ah, well, Rosita . . . now you're talking.'

‘I think I should try to be Rosita and you should try to be Captain Figueredo.'

‘You're really game to try it?'

‘What choice do we have?'

Bronco sipped his drink and stared out over the dry, bleached landscape. ‘You think we should do some research? Like, study some maps of Havana, maybe, or learn the Cuban national anthem?'

‘I know the Cuban national anthem. “Al combate corred bayameses . . .” '

‘How the hell do you know that?'

‘I had a Cuban friend at school. Her father had something to do with the abrogation of the Piatt Amendment. That was when the United States gave up control over Cuba's internal affairs. She was very proud of him.'

Bronco smiled at her. ‘I like you, Lizzie. You're the only person who knows more irrelevant rubbish than I do.'

Elizabeth said, ‘Why don't you ask Eusebio to get us some peyote for tomorrow morning? Laura should be here by nine tonight . . . I'd like her to be here when we try the glamour. It's not that I don't trust Eusebio, I do. But if anything goes badly wrong . . . well, I think I trust Laura a little more.'

Bronco sat down beside her. ‘How come you're so young and I'm so old?' he asked her.

She smiled at him kindly because she was very fond of him. She knew what he was trying to say to her. She knew what longing and what frustration he was trying to express. They would have been the happiest of partners, if their ages hadn't been so disparate, if they hadn't met when his career was waning and hers was just beginning to flourish. The life they could have led. The talks they could have talked. She gripped his hand and gripped it and gripped it, trying to communicate to him that she knew, she knew.

They collected Laura from the airport at sunset. The sky was luridly streaked with orange and mauve. The sisters flung their arms around each other and held each other tight, and cried, but they cried out of happiness more than grief, and the feeling that fate had brought them back together again, where they had always belonged.

Laura was wearing a pretty yellow-and-grey dress with puffy sleeves and a crossover bodice, and a big yellow hat. Elizabeth said, ‘Look at you! Just like a movie star!'

‘Don't,' said Laura. ‘That's a sore point with me, after what happened.'

Bronco took off his hat to her. ‘Laura, sweetheart . . . good to see you. Glad you could come. How's Beverley?'

‘She's going to recover . . . I mean, she's going to live. What she's going to look like, though – I've only seen her in bandages. The surgeon told me that she lost her nose.'

‘What about Jim Boreas?'

‘Paralysed, with facial burns. He swears that the windshield frosted over. Ice, that's what he said, so that he couldn't see where he was going. The police say that he was drinking too much tequila.'

‘So nobody believed him?'

‘Would you, if you didn't know about Peggy?'

‘Will he get better?'

They were walking across to Bronco's station-wagon. It was growing dark already, and there was a strong aroma of mesquite and aviation fuel in the air.

‘Jim Boreas? No, I don't think so. He can't walk. He can't speak clearly. He can't even swallow.'

Bronco said. ‘This convinces me, you know. This really convinces me. We have to learn how to do this glamour thing, and make it work.'

Elizabeth stroked his hair; and it was a gesture that Laura didn't miss. ‘Come on, Bronco,' she said, ‘let's get home first, and let Laura settle in. Then we can talk about the glamour.'

They were driving east on Indian School Road. The night was velvety-black now and warm, and the lights were sparkling everywhere. Laura said, ‘I know that Peggy was wrong. Chester and Raymond didn't really deserve to die. But, by God, when I heard what had happened – I was pleased, I have to tell you, I was pleased.' She hesitated for a moment, and then she said to Elizabeth, ‘You didn't tell Bronco what happened?'

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘I told him they were rough with you, that's all.'

Bronco said, ‘I don't need to know what happened, sweetheart. If anyone lays one finger on you, all I can say is, they deserve the very worst. I'm sorry about Beverley, too, but I think she got her just deserts. That woman has been playing a dangerous game for many, many years, believe me. It was bound to catch up with her, sooner or later.'

Elizabeth reached over the back of her seat and took hold of Laura's hand, and held it all the way to Bronco's house. Tonight, they all felt a strong need for physical contact.

Bronco served up barbecued chicken for supper, and a big
salad of palm hearts and avocado, with his own special dressing, and plenty of cold white wine. Vita ate a little, then excused herself, and went to bed, pleading nausea. Bronco watched her go, and then relaxed. ‘She doesn't take kindly to female company,' he explained. ‘Mind you, if it's a man, no migraines then, she's all over him like wallpaper paste.'

‘She's probably jealous,' Laura suggested.

Bronco shrugged. The candles flickered in his eyes. ‘It doesn't really matter what she is. The truth is, I should never have married her. She used to follow me around, when I was at NYU, and she would do everything for me . . . cook my meals, press my trousers, type my essays, you name it. I needed a partner for dinner? There she was, all dressed up, corsage and all. I was lonely, one night? She was always ready to warm my bed. She made herself indispensable, that's what she did. I didn't marry her because I wanted to marry her. I married her because I didn't have the heart not to. In other words, I was a moral coward; and I can never forgive myself for that.'

‘This is the author of
Bitter Fruit
talking?' asked Laura. ‘The low-down dirtiest book that ever was?'

Bronco laughed. ‘I think you'll find that's pretty dated now. All that swing, and trucking, and so-called loose behaviour.'

Elizabeth said, ‘We'd better talk about the glamour, hadn't we, before we drink much more wine?'

‘Do you think this cactus stuff is really going to work?' asked Laura.

‘The peyote?' Bronco was filling up his glass. ‘I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. The Indians have been using it for centuries. Elizabeth and I are going to eat a little and see if we can take on two of the characters that appear in Billy's novel.' He held up
Nights In Havana
. ‘If it works,, we're going to find him and try to persuade him to take off somewhere else, and stop bothering me.'

‘What if he refuses?'

‘I don't know. We'll have to think of something else.'

Elizabeth said, ‘Like I told you, we want you to watch over us while we do it, just to make sure that nothing goes wrong.'

Laura pulled a reluctant face. ‘All right, but I can't say I'm very happy about it.'

‘Just think about Aunt Beverley,' said Elizabeth. ‘You wouldn't want that to happen to anybody else.'

‘I guess not. But it frightens me, all the same.'

That night, Elizabeth slept badly, and dreamed of walking through the snow. She was standing in a vast, black-vaulted hall, and snow was falling thickly all around her, and carpeting the floor. The experience was very intense. She could feel the cold. Then, gradually, the light began to fade, until she was standing in total blackness. She reached out with both hands, but all she could feel was the snow falling. She shuffled forward like a blind woman, groping in the air in front of her. She heard a thin, lamenting voice close to her ear. Oh, I have left my gloves behind . . . oh, I have left my boots behind . . .'over and over again.

‘Peggy?' she said, with a sudden thrill of terror. Then she woke up.

She sat up in bed, cold and shivering, as if she had really been shuffling through the snow. Her nightlight was still dipping and flickering in its terracotta bowl. She looked down at her right hand, and found that she was clutching something that looked like a dead, desiccated rat. She cried, ‘Agh!' and tossed it away from her. It fell beside the desk, and when it fell she realized what it was.

She climbed out of bed and picked it up between finger and thumb, and looked at it with awe. It was a child's fur glove, very old and very dried up, as if it had been soaked and then left by the fire. It was probably nothing grander than rabbit fur, and it was very roughly made, with big, childish stitching.
What gave Elizabeth such a feeling of dread, however, was that she knew whose glove it was. It had been left behind by Gerda when she was trying to find the Snow Queen's palace. Until Peggy had drowned, it had existed only in a story, an imaginary glove, left by mistake in some hot imaginary hovel, in a fairytale Finland that nobody could ever find in any atlas. Yet now it was here, in Scottsdale, Arizona, on a winter's night in 1951, the actual glove.

She had read of cases in which people woke up suddenly from very vivid dreams to find that small objects had materialized on their pillows. A woman in Montana had dreamed of her childhood in New Orleans, and woken up to discover that she was holding a handful of Spanish moss. An elderly man had dreamed of his wife, who had died twenty-six years before in a hotel fire in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He had opened his eyes to find her wedding ring lying on his pillow, so hot that it had scorched a circle on the pillowcase.

But a glove from a fairy story? She stood staring at it for a very long time. She wondered if Peggy were trying to intimidate her, to discourage her from entering the spirit-world. If she were, then maybe she was frightened herself of what Elizabeth might do. On the other hand, maybe she wasn't frightened at all. Maybe she was trying to protect Elizabeth from an experience more terrible than Elizabeth could begin to imagine. Maybe this was the most potent way in which she could say, ‘
Don't.
' After all, if there were powers in the spirit-world which were capable of changing an imaginary glove into a dream glove, and then into a real, wearable, measurable, touchable glove, then what other powers were there, and how could she and Bronco possibly hope to influence them?

She drank a glass of water, and then she went back to bed. The nightlight cast the most peculiar shadows on the wall – spindly men and women, and stretched-out horses – the silent
caravan of dream-people, on their way to other people's sleep.

She stayed awake until the nightlight burned itself out, and the first wash of dawn appeared on the wall. Before she fell asleep, she thought she heard a child crying, somewhere in the yard outside; but she covered her ears with the blanket, and told herself it was only imagination.

They set up two canvas cots in Bronco's study, side by side, so that when they lay down in them they could reach out and hold hands. Eusebio stood by the window, staring out at his vegetable patch, a tiny screwed-up cigarette stuck to his lip. He showed no interest whatever in Bronco's books, or his pictures, or any of his souvenirs. He was absorbed by the soil, and what he was growing, and the way the cloud-shadows moved across the ground.

Elizabeth was so nervous that she had been sick. Now she sat pale faced on the side of her cot, waiting for Bronco to finish his preparations. She had dressed as nearly as possible to look like Rosita, the prostitute in
Nights in Havana
, in a tight scarlet dress with big yellow flowers on it, and a deep V-shaped décolletage. She had swept her hair up in a 1940s wave and fastened it with two sparkly clasps that she had borrowed from Laura, and painted her lips the same vivid scarlet as her dress. She had borrowed a pair of red high-heels that had once belonged to Vita. They were a size too large but they made her walk in a shoddy, teetering way that went with the character.

She lit a cigarette and puffed it rapidly while Bronco fastened his belt. He had taken his old white Navy uniform out of storage. It reeked of mothballs, and it was so tight around the waist that he could barely button it up, but all the same he looked the part of a seedy Cuban chief of police, especially with his hair greased flat and his moustache waxed so that it pointed upwards at ten to two.