Her Fearful Symmetry (34 page)

Julia’s mental map of London began to fill up with oddities: the cattle and elephants of the Albert Memorial; the shop in Bloomsbury that sold only swords and canes; the restaurant in the crypt of St. Mary-le-Bow Church. She went to the Hunterian Museum and spent an afternoon looking at clouded jars full of organs, a display on antiseptics and the skeleton of a dodo.

She came home each day filled with London sights, scraps of conversation, ideas for the next day’s adventures. When she let herself into the flat she invariably found Valentina sitting on the sofa amidst drifts of paper, intently watching the planchette moving across the Ouija board. Julia would tell Valentina and Elspeth about her day. Valentina would share some of Elspeth’s stories. They were each pleasantly surprised to find that spending the day apart gave them things to talk about over dinner, though Robert often appeared and whisked Valentina off just when Julia hoped for a whole evening of her company.

Every morning Julia pleaded with Valentina to come out with her. Valentina would almost let herself be persuaded, but then find an excuse to stay in. “You go ahead,” Valentina would say. “I’m not really sick. I’m just tired.” And she did look tired. Each day a little vitality seemed to leave her. “You need some sunlight, Mouse,” Julia told her more than once. “Tomorrow,” Valentina always replied.

Martin stood at his front door. He reached out and put his gloved hand on the doorknob. His heart was pounding and he stood immobile, trying to calm himself.
You’ve been in the hall countless times. It’s safe there. Nothing painful has ever happened in the hallway. No one is there, nothing at all except some old newspapers.
He breathed deeply, exhaled slowly and pulled the door open.

It was late afternoon and sunlight filled the stairway. Radiant dust motes floated in the still air. Martin squinted.
See, it’s quite benign.
He considered the door sill, the newspapers, the floor. He imagined himself stepping forward, planting his feet on the carpet, standing outside his flat for the first time in more than a year.

Go ahead. It’s only a landing. Robert and Julia stand here all the time. Marijke was here. Marijke wants you to leave the flat. You’re a rational being; you know it’s safe. If you can leave the flat you can see Marijke.
Martin thought of himself as a boy, standing for the first time on the high diving board, terrified. The other boys in the class had jeered when he turned and climbed down the ladder.
No one is here. No one will know if you can’t do it. But if you do it you can tell Julia.
He tried to picture Julia’s face, but instead remembered her lips, counting as his tooth was extracted.

He was sweating, and he took out his handkerchief and blotted his forehead.
Just step over the sill.
It was becoming difficult to breathe. Martin closed his eyes.
This is simply idiotic.
He began to tremble. He stepped backwards and closed the door, gasping.

V
ALENTINA AND ELSPETH were playing a game with the Little Kitten of Death. It went like this: Valentina sat on the floor in the hall, near the front door of the flat. She had a bucket full of Ping-Pong balls she’d found in the pantry. (“Why, Elspeth?” she’d asked. Elspeth just shrugged.) Elspeth stood at the other end of the hall. The Kitten, as usual, had no clue that Elspeth was there, so when Valentina rolled a Ping-Pong ball across the floor the Kitten ran confidently after it, only to have Elspeth divert it at the last moment in an unexpected direction. Soon the Kitten was overexcited, pouncing madly at the little white balls that seemed to have their own ideas about where they might go, balls that might suddenly fly straight up in the air or simply reverse direction. Elspeth let the Kitten run right through her, enjoying the sensation of fur whisking through her phantom skin and bone. She lay down on the floor and let the balls roll through her, with the Kitten veering after them. Valentina saw her reach out with both hands as the Kitten approached, as though to grab her. Elspeth forgot that she was insubstantial. The Kitten ran through her hands; she felt something smooth and slippery hook around her little finger; she felt her hands fill up with something solid and she struggled with it as though she had caught a fish. The thing wriggled and tried to bite. Elspeth was holding the Kitten.

But at the same instant Valentina saw the Kitten drop to the floor and lie still. She came running. The Kitten was dead.

“Elspeth!” Valentina flung herself to the floor, seized the Kitten’s body. “What did you do? Put her back!”

Elspeth was still clutching the Kitten, who threw herself back and forth and clawed at Elspeth. Valentina couldn’t see the Kitten’s ghost, but she could see Elspeth grappling with something.

“Put her back! Now!”

Elspeth took the struggling Kitten and shoved her back into her limp body as best she could. It was like trying to put a live trout into a silk stocking: the Kitten Elspeth was holding was thrashing and terrified, and the Kitten Valentina was holding was inert and delicate. Elspeth was afraid she would injure the Kitten by trying to insert her back into her body. Then she realised that the Kitten was dead, and would continue to be dead if she was not firm about this. She decided to work on the head and let the rest follow. She felt as though she were using an old camera with a rangefinder, trying to align two images to make them one.

Elspeth motioned to Valentina to put the Kitten’s body on the floor. Elspeth found that the Kitten’s ghost was
real
in her hands; whatever the Kitten was made of, it was like Elspeth’s own ghostly self, it made sense to her in a physical way. The Kitten was the first thing Elspeth had touched since she’d died that seemed to exist with her, not in another realm.
I’m so lonely,
she thought as she tried to push the Kitten into her lifeless body.
I wish I could keep her.

The Kitten stopped fighting and seemed to comprehend what Elspeth was trying to do. Elspeth made small pleating motions with her fingers, trying to seal the Kitten in; it reminded her of the way her mother pinched a piecrust all around the edges. Suddenly the Kitten’s ghost vanished. It absorbed itself into the body. The little white cat-body convulsed-the Kitten sat up, lurched sideways and then recovered herself. She looked around, like a child caught stealing a boiled sweet, and then began to lick herself all over.

Elspeth and Valentina sat on the floor, staring at the Kitten, and then at each other. Valentina left the room. She returned with the Ouija board and the planchette.

“What happened?” she asked Elspeth.

IT CAUGHT SHE CAME OUT

“What caught?”

HER SOUL

“Caught on what?”

Elspeth crooked her little finger like a lady drinking tea.

Valentina sat thinking. “Could you do it again?”

I WOULD RATHER NOT

“Yes, but if you wanted to, do you think you could do it on purpose?”

I HOPE NOT

“Yes, but Elspeth-”

Elspeth got up-or rather, she was suddenly walking out of the room without any intermediate motions of getting up. When Valentina followed her into the kitchen she vanished. The Kitten mewed loudly and bumped against Valentina’s leg.

“You don’t seem any the worse for wear. Do you want your dinner?” Valentina set out the dish, opened the can, plopped the food onto the dish and placed it in the usual spot on the floor. The Kitten waited for it as though she were a member of a cargo cult and began gobbling down the food with her usual enthusiasm. Valentina sat on the floor and watched her eat.

Elspeth stood in the middle of the kitchen, invisible, watching Valentina watch the Kitten.
What are you thinking about, Valentina?

Valentina was thinking about miracles. The Kitten looked absolutely ordinary, eating her dinner: that was the miracle.
You’d never know that ten minutes ago you were dead. You don’t seem like you even noticed. Did it hurt, Kitten? Was it hard to get back in your body? Were you scared?

She heard the front door open; Julia was home. “Mouse? Where are you?”
Don’t tell Julia,
thought Elspeth. She was ashamed of having killed the Kitten, even though it had been only temporary.

“Kitchen,” Valentina called out.

Julia came in bearing Sainsbury’s bags, which she slung onto the counter and began to unpack. “Wassup?” she asked.

“Not much. You?”

Julia launched into a long boring story about a woman in the checkout queue at the supermarket, a tiny old person who apparently subsisted entirely on fairy cakes and Lipton tea.

“Gross,” said Valentina, trying to remember what fairy cakes were.

“Cupcakes,” said Julia.

“Oh. Well, that’s not too terrible.” She got up off the floor and began to help put away the shopping. The twins worked in semi-amiable silence. The Kitten finished her dinner and wandered off. Elspeth stood in a corner, out of the twins’ way, with her arms folded across her chest, thinking.
That was extraordinary. That was-a clue-to something…but what?
She would have to think about it. Elspeth left the twins in the kitchen and found the Kitten settling down to nap in a pool of sunlight on the sofa. Elspeth curled up next to her and watched her eyelids droop, her breathing slow. It was a charming, ordinary sight, quite incongruous with Elspeth’s turbulent mood. Valentina came into the room and whispered, “Elspeth?” but Elspeth did not reply or make herself known. Valentina wandered off to peer into all the rooms as though they were playing hide-and-seek. Elspeth followed behind her, an invisible shadow.

R
OBERT SAT at his desk on a lovely May afternoon, trying to make himself write. He was working on the section of his thesis devoted to Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, lady novelist. He found Mrs. Wood incredibly dull. He had ploughed his way through
East Lynne,
pored over the details of her life, and simply found himself unable to care about her at all.

When he was giving a tour, he always skipped Mrs. Wood. She would have fallen between George Wombwell and Adam Worth, not only alphabetically but geographically, and to Robert she seemed unworthy of their peculiar, almost dashing company. He sat gnawing his pen, trying to decide if he could omit her from the thesis. Perhaps not. He could try to make the most of her death, but that was also dull: she’d died of bronchitis.
Damn the woman.

He was relieved when Valentina arrived to interrupt him. “Come outside,” she said. “It’s spring.”

Once they were outdoors their steps turned inevitably towards the cemetery. As they walked down Swains Lane they heard a lone tuba player practising scales in Waterlow Park. The notes had an elegiac quality. Swains Lane, being overshadowed by high walls on both sides, existed in a permanent dusk even as the sky above them was blue and cloudless. Valentina thought,
We’re like a little two-person funeral procession.
She was glad when they arrived at the cemetery’s gates and stood in the sunshine, waiting to be admitted.

Nigel opened the gate. “We weren’t expecting you today.”

Robert said, “No, but it’s such glorious weather, we thought we might go looking for wild-flowers.”

Jessica came out of the office and said, “If you’re going out, take some rakes. And no lollygagging, please.”

“Certainly
not
.” Robert equipped himself and Valentina with a walkie-talkie and two rakes as well as a large bag for litter, and they crossed the courtyard and went up into the cemetery. “Well,” said Robert, as they turned onto the Dickens Path, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you to work.”

“That’s okay,” said Valentina. “I’m pretty useless most of the time. I don’t mind raking. Where do all these empty water bottles come from?”

“I think people must throw them over the wall,” said Robert.

They raked in companionable silence for some time, clearing the path and collecting an impressive bag of fast-food wrappers and coffee cups. Valentina liked raking. She had never done it before. She wondered what other kinds of work she might enjoy.
Bagging groceries? Telemarketing? Who knows? Maybe I could try lots of different jobs for a week at a time.
She was imagining herself checking coats at the British Museum when Robert beckoned her over to him.

“Look,” he whispered. She looked and saw two small foxes sleeping nose-to-tail on a pile of old leaves. Robert stood behind her and put his arm around her. Valentina tensed. He released her. They walked down the path to let the foxes sleep and went back to raking.

After some time Valentina said, “What’s lollygagging?”

“I think that’s an American word. Jessica and James picked up a certain amount of American slang during the war.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Oh. Well, it can mean being lazy, just fooling around. Or it can mean fooling around, in the other sense.”

Valentina blushed. “Did Jessica think-?”

“Ah-I’m sure we didn’t exactly look like two people who intended to spend the afternoon collecting garbage.” He peered into the bag. “I think we can stop now. Let’s have a walk-just leave the rakes here, we’ll come back for them.” He took her hand and led her towards the Meadow, an open, sun-dappled section full of well-tended graves.

Valentina said, “It’s nice to be out in the sun. I think it’s been grey every day since we arrived.”

“Surely not.”

“No-I guess it just feels that way. It’s like the greyness soaks into the buildings, or something.”

“Mmm.” Robert felt a bit depressed.
You can’t make her love London. Or yourself, when it comes to that.
They kept walking. A number of graves had flowers newly planted on them, each one a small dense garden.