Starlight (33 page)

‘You heard from your nephew lately?’ put in Miss Gallagher; not hastily, but slid in on a gliding note, bred of long practice in diverting the course of situations created by Gladys Barnes. The stratagem was successful.

‘Only yesterday!’ cried Gladys dramatically, ‘well, how strange you should ask. Only a p.c. but ever such a pretty little place, Osney, regular village it is and got a job in the old Guard House. Under the National Trust it is, got a little bungalow right next door to it and a good bit of garden, has to show people round it, there’s a kind of museum, old guns and things, says we must go down in the summer and see it. Fancy you should ask.’

‘And how’s the old gentleman these days?’ pursued Miss Gallagher, seeing that the subject of Georgie Barnes must be limited, unless they delved into his past life, to what had been on the postcard.

‘Not himself,’ announced Gladys, with equal drama but in another key, ‘not himself at all. Very frail. Doesn’t have his walk every day now, and don’t go far afield with those rubbishing dolls. Hasn’t given himself another name not for weeks now. Used to go right up as far as Harringay this time last year, but none of that these days. Up in his room most of the time. Comes down to us for lunch most Sundays. Annie will have her way. Don’t smell no fish and chips, neither.’

Miss Gallagher looked mild inquiry.

‘Sometimes of a Saturday,’ explained Gladys, ‘very arbitary about what he eats, always going on about brown bread, nasty old cardboard I say, but likes his fish and chips every now and then, we always smell it, been looking deffly pale too. Well so long we must be toddling.’

Summer’s getting along – if you can call it summer, she thought vaguely, as they hurried homewards before the threatening rain; a wet, cloudy, hushed summer, reluctant and brooding. The green leaves hung limp in the soaked air. June: seems more like September, thought Gladys.

At tea-time, when she accompanied Erika with the tray on a visit to Mrs Pearson, she found the latter looking disturbed.

‘Anything the matter?’ asked Gladys bluntly, after the tray had been settled and the first cup poured, ‘
he
been upsetting you?’ The Reverend Gerald Corliss had just left, and Gladys had not quite the respect and liking for him that she had for the Vicar.

‘No, oh no, dear. But I am upset – there’s going to be a phone call and it’s going to bring trouble.’ Erika, who had been about to launch a request that she might go to the Spacemen’s dance, lowered her curtain of sulks and instantly determined that
go she would
, no matter what ‘trouble’.

‘Oh don’t say that!’ cried Gladys, dismayed and excited.

‘It’s true, dear. It’s coming. Later this afternoon. You’ll see.’

‘But who’ll it be? Who from? Can you tell that, too?’ Gladys asked, almost whispering, as she approached closer to the subject of her landlady’s mysterious powers. She stood by the bed, with folded arms, looking fearfully down on the skeletal form.

‘Something to do with Peggy. I dread it – oh, I do dread it,’ Mrs Pearson whispered.

‘I’ll go,’ said Gladys, in spite of a sudden fear that the anticipated call might be from ‘another world than this’, ‘I’ll answer it. Give them a bit of my mind, too, if we have any sauce. You leave it to me.’

‘It’s kind of you, dear. All right, if you like. But Erika could do it, couldn’t you,
schatz
?’ turning to her. Erika parted lips well coated with
Way-Out Melon
.

‘I would lak,’ she announced, ‘go to that dance with the Zpacemen.’

‘With – what
is
she talking about?’ demanded Mrs Pearson, turning wearily to Gladys.

‘Some dance at the church my friend was telling us three and six quite enough too nothing but washy lemon powder and bang bang bang enough to deafen you on those drums and they like doing it anyway –
Oh my goodness there it is!
’

The telephone bell’s shrillness seemed to leap out into the silence of the house; urgent, insistent, frightening.

‘I’ll go – I’ll go,’ Gladys babbled, not moving.

Mrs Pearson gave her a loving smile. ‘You’re a dear soul, Glad Barnes. Off you go, then; it’s nothing to frighten you – only bad news for me. Bad news about my Peggy.’

‘H-hullo? Who’s there?’

Gladys half-expected to hear some ghastly tones from the vaults or haunted seashore of a horror-film.

‘Oh is that you, Gladys? How nice to hear your voice,’ said Mrs Lysaght. ‘I just –’

‘Oh – oh – it’s you! Oh, I’m not half glad – very pleased to hear you speak – I was –’

‘Why, is something wrong? I hope Mrs Pearson hasn’t been very much upset by all this business?’

‘No – she’s all right – a bit better, I’d say, with them calling regular every day but keeps ever so thin – what business, excuse me?’

‘Why – but you don’t mean to tell me she hasn’t heard? It’s hardly believable – the girl’s own mother. Have they quarrelled?’

‘Not so far as I know – but what’s ’appened? We never heard a thing.’

‘That girl has simply
gone off
,’ proclaimed Mrs Lysaght. ‘About a week ago. Left half her clothes and her room upside-down and never said a word to anyone … she worked for a great friend of mine, I know her quite well, I used to see her almost every time I went there – and my friend is so upset. The dogs miss her dreadfully, you see.’

‘Poor little things. Well I never,’ marvelled Gladys, enjoying all this the more because it was so unlike the eerie communication from comic-book-land which she had anticipated. ‘’Ave you told the pleece?’

‘No. My friend, Mrs Corbett, won’t hear of that. She says Peggy’s of age (and more than capable of taking
very
good care of herself, if you ask
me
) – and it’s up to her people. But I did think my friend ought just to
get in touch
with Mrs Pearson, to see if she had any news. However – she won’t, so that’s why
I
called up.’

‘She won’t half be upset,’ murmured Gladys.

‘She hasn’t heard from her, then?’

‘Not for days, I don’t think. She did say, though – only this afternoon, it was ever so queer –’ Gladys paused, hesitating and blundering.

‘Queer? How?’ Mrs Lysaght pounced.

‘Said there was going to be a phone call with news. Said it not fifteen minutes ago.’

‘News about Peggy?’

‘That’s the funny part.’

A pause followed. Both were wondering what to say next. Into the silence came a faint imploring call from upstairs:

‘Glad!’

Gladys started. ‘There she is! Calling out. I’ll just run up and tell her – shan’t be a tick.’

‘Yes, do – oh – and, Gladys, see if you can’t persuade her to give me a sitting. You know – tell my fortune – I would so adore it – I’m thrilled by all that kind of thing.’

Gladys toiled up the stairs. A conviction that Mrs Lysaght was a bit soft was in her mind, so firmly lodged behind the barriers set up by habit, loyalty, and gratitude for those pound notes sent off every Christmas, that it never rose beyond them. But she did feel that this was hardly the moment to make a suggestion about telling fortunes.

Mrs Pearson was sitting upright, a listening look on her white face framed in the burden of princess-like hair. She heard the news, given by Gladys with a conscious attempt at softening it, in silence; then lay back on the pillows.

‘All right, Gladys. Thank you, dear.’

‘She said would you tell her fortune,’ added Gladys, ‘but don’t you do it, not if you don’t want to – I’ll tell her, shall I?’ She lingered, troubled by this silence, this weary falling back on to the bed. Mrs Pearson shook her head. ‘Oh – I don’t know. I can’t say now. Tell her …’ her voice changed slightly ’ask her to ring up again.’

Gladys gave the message and heard her old employer’s eager promise to do so. When, she asked, when? Gladys said she didn’t know, and hung up the receiver.

A week passed. The evening of the dance at Saint James’s church hall approached. Mrs Pearson had not mentioned Peggy’s name again. She lay quiet for most of the day, smoking without pause, her eyes fixed on the glimpses of summer sky visible through the window.

Gradually, a fear for Mrs Pearson, mingled with a vague grief, began to diffuse itself through the cottages; a cloud, a whisper, rising from the hearts of the three old people. She was so changed – and still changing. Gladys said nothing; but, sometimes, she shook her head.

Erika had not bothered herself by asking Mrs Pearson a second time if she might go to the dance. She was collecting, with teutonic thoroughness, her equipment. Dress, shoes, stockings, and a hair-band that was to clasp the narrow end of the pear lay neatly displayed along the top of her chest-of-drawers, together with a new
Way-Out Melon
(the original was used up), a tiny plastic box of sapphire eye-shadow, and a bottle of scent named
Brazilian Night
.

Her room shone, gleamed, and smelt fresh. Every object was in place to a hair’s-breadth. The bed might have been made under the eye of a sergeant-major. The old book of German fairy tales, placed beside her bed by Mrs Pearson’s order, had gone into the dust-bin: Erika did not like torn, shabby things; also, all that – the Märchen – was nonsense.

After a few weeks of staring, eating to stupefaction, and learning her surroundings, she had suddenly fallen, like a quintessence of all German housewives, on the dusty, disorderly room. When she had brought home a bunch of flowers, and arranged it in a vase and put it, after consideration, now here and now there, and finally on the mantelpiece, and taken a slow stare round the fresh orderly place, a broad, gnome’s smile of satisfaction split her queer face.
Gut
, thought Erika,
sehr gut
.

She felt grateful to Mrs Pearson for giving her this room for her very own, and sorry, in a preoccupied way, that she was ill all the time, now, and hardly spoke. But she went calmly on with her preparations.

The dance was announced by a placard, tacked to one of the ancient wooden posts that still marked where a gate had once protected the cobbled lane beside the church from intruders. It was drawn by Barry Disher, whose gifts, varying from one for lettering to one for religious enthusiasm, suggested the riches poured forth by Michelangelo or Lord Bacon; it had a picture of
The Spacemen
, with blown-out cheeks and hair wantoning over their collars. (Barry’s own hair was of a temperate length, and perhaps the pictured locks indicated some degree of humorous disapproval.)

The distant but still horrible noise made by the four, hard at work, echoed down the quiet, elder-shaded, litter-scattered lane, sounding like sweetest Chaminade or Chopin to Erika as she approached.

Mrs Geddes was sitting in the door of the hall at a table where the tickets were given out, looking absently into the summer evening. She smiled at Erika: the scarlet coat over a skimpy red dolly-rocker, the eyes glittering with anticipatory joy, and the
Way-Out Melon
, gave the old woman a happiness and tenderness that must not overflow. (You must never comment; nearly all of them resented comment.)

‘Good evenink, Mrs Geddes,’ said Erika correctly, holding out three and sixpence in a white-gloved paw, while her eyes struck past her into the hall, where flags and coloured decorations could be glimpsed, ‘Der boy Barry Disher is he here?’

‘Yes, he’s here. Thank you. You can put your coat in there, look.’

She watched while Erika peeled it off; she could almost see the powerful young woman emerging from the chrysalis of a terrible childhood; the wings were powdered, not with gold dust, but with strong, coarse bronze.

‘I can’t make der dance,’ Erika confided cheerfully. She looked across at Mrs Geddes and her smile flashed. ‘But I learn quick.’

She launched herself into the crowd, and began to move through the tossing, gyrating groups, toughly inserting herself under flying limbs and past whirling legs until she was level with Barry and the tower-headed girl he was partnering. Mrs Geddes saw him stop, in the midst of a particularly violent contortion of his thin young self, and turn to her. Mrs Geddes nodded in satisfaction.

‘All right – you don’t mind, do you, Bunny?’ Barry said to the tower-headed one, who blithely shook her head and continued to stomp and sway by herself. ‘Come on – give us your hand – like this …’

When Mrs Geddes next glanced towards them, Erika was whirling and stamping like a dollyrock’d dervish, her skimpy skirt sliding up and down to reveal flashes of white frill and lively knees; her hair had shaken down from its confining scarlet band and was flying about her face.

Four hours passed like one. She found partners all the time; the gnome’s smile and the abundant energy drew them without effort on her part; she was a success. The members of the Youth Club whom she had met at the Vicarage were present, and had spread the rumour that ‘that chick had had a deprived childhood’; fortunately, the other girls present this evening had enough success themselves to prevent their saying more than ‘She doesn’t act deprived’. There were some murmurs of ‘You can say that again’.

As she drew near to the cottages, midnight was striking from the steeple among the crowded television masts on the old roofs.