Spirit (6 page)

‘Johnson,' said father. He looked quite small by comparison, almost as if he had shrunk in the wash. Johnson Ward took off his glove and squeezed father's hand tight, and then clapped him on the back.

‘Hullo, David. I hope you don't object to my coming. Michael Farkas told me what had happened. I'm really so sorry. Your little Peggy was a dream come true.'

‘Yes, she was,' said father. ‘Yes. We're going to miss her.'

‘And this must be Lizzie,' said Johnson Ward. He took off his hat, and when he took off his hat, Elizabeth saw that he wasn't so very old. His hair was the shiny light-brown colour of peanut-brittle, and neatly combed into a parting. He had a peanut-brittle coloured moustache, too. His face was broad and generous and friendly, with an easy smile and a captivating way of crinkling up his eyes. He reminded Elizabeth of Clark Gable, sort of, except that he was taller and heavier, and his ears didn't stick out, as Laura always said, ‘like the kitchen cupboard with its doors wide open.'

‘How do you do, sir,' said Elizabeth, in a whisper.

Johnson Ward squatted down in the porch so that his coat-tails dragged in the snow. He was very
clean
, with a crisp white collar, and he smelled of cigars and spices.

‘You don't have to call me “sir”,' he told her, taking hold of both of her hands. ‘We're friends, you and me, even if you don't know it. The last time I saw you was when your baby sister was born, and you were four. Do you know what we did?'

‘No, sir,' said Elizabeth.

‘Well, I'll tell you what we did, we spent the whole afternoon in the garden popping balloons, that's what we did. We
jumped on them. We sat on them. We pricked them with pins. We even bit them, do you know that? Now, that's what I call brave, biting a balloon. But there's one thing I'll never forget; and that is, what a lady you were. Even at four, you were a lady, and I can see today that you're still a lady; and that you always will be.'

Elizabeth didn't know what to say. She remembered bursting the balloons but she didn't remember Johnson Ward. All the same, Johnson Ward grasped her hands warmly and tightly, and she decided she liked him. Elizabeth's father said, rather sharply, ‘Say thank you to Mr Ward, Lizzie.'

‘Thank you, Mr Ward,' Elizabeth whispered.

‘No, no, thank you,
Bronco
,' Johnson Ward insisted.

Elizabeth hesitated. How could a grown-up writer with a Cadillac and a moustache call himself ‘Bronco'? That was a cowboy's name; a name that little boys used, in schoolyard games.

‘Come on, now,' Johnson Ward urged her.

Elizabeth swallowed. The cold draught had made her throat feel dry. ‘Thank you, Bronco,' she told him.

Father closed the front door and Johnson Ward took off his heavy coat. ‘I'll bet you miss your little sister sorely,' he said.

Elizabeth nodded. Most of the time she didn't find it too difficult to think that Peggy was dead. But now and then, for no particular reason, her eyes would fill with tears, and her throat would tighten up, and her voice would sound as if she had a thistle stuck in her larynx – that's if she could speak at all. At those times, she felt a cold and blasphemous suspicion that Peggy wasn't in Heaven, after all; that she wasn't sitting on some sun-blessed cumulus cloud, with white wings and a white nightgown and a golden halo around her head. At those times, she suspected that Peggy had simply left them for ever, and was lying chilly as ice in her coffin, and that was all.

At those times, she thought about Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, too, lying concealed beneath the shed.

As they crossed the hallway to the crowded living-room, Johnson Ward laid his hand reassuringly on Elizabeth's shoulder. ‘When my older brother Billy died, I was so cut up that I couldn't eat and I couldn't write and I couldn't even think. You know what that's like, when you can't even
think?
Your head's no more good to you than an empty cooking-pot. You can bang on your skull with your knuckles for all you're worth, but there's nothing inside, only echoes. Those were bad, bad times for me, those were.'

He stopped, and looked down at her. ‘But do you know what happened? I went to Havana, for the principal purpose of getting drunk. I gambled at the casino, and I smoked big cigars the size of telegraph poles, and I got drunk. And I was sitting in the Plaza de Armas, with a mouth that felt like a cat's favourite cushion and a headache that felt like an iron Derby that was half a size too small, when a Cuban boy came up to me, and stood staring at me. He was wearing a white shirt and khaki pants and sandals with open toes. He stood and stared at me and I sat and stared back at him. And do you know what he said? He said, “Bronco, don't you recognize me?”

‘Well, I stared at him even harder, and maybe there was something familiar about his eyes, but that was all. But then he said, “It's Billy, your brother.”

‘You can imagine that I went shivery all over, just like somebody had emptied an ice-bucket down the back of my shirt. I said, “It can't be. Billy's dead.” But he stepped a little closer and he looked at me just the way I'm looking at you now, and he said, “It's Billy. I just want to tell you that everything's fine.”

‘ “Fine?” I said. “You've turned into a Cuban and everything's fine?” '

‘ “Couldn't be sweller,” he said. And he turned around, and walked across the plaza, and that was the last I ever saw of him.'

‘Was he a
ghost?
' asked Elizabeth, in awe.

‘Uh-unh. I don't think so. I think he was just Billy.'

Elizabeth wanted to ask Johnson Ward if it might be possible to find Peggy, too, amongst the crowds around the Plaza de Armas, or anywhere else for that matter. But before she could do so, mommy came across the room, black-veiled, tilting slightly.

‘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.