Spirit (36 page)

She started to walk back to the kitchen. It was then that she distinctly heard a young girl's voice say, ‘
I have to protect you, Laura. You know that
'

Frightened, she turned around. There was nobody there.

‘Who's that?' she called out. ‘Is that you, Peggy?'

‘
I have to protect you, Laura. Sisters have to look out for each other, don't they? Even if you never looked out for me.
'

With a skin-contracting sense of horror, Laura realized that the voice was coming from the radio. She hesitated for a split-second, wide-eyed, then she leaped across the room and switched it off.

‘
Oh, I have left my gloves behind
,' the voice continued, undeterred. ‘
But that won't matter, will it. Laura? I can endure almost anything, for the sake of keeping you safe.
'

‘Go away!' screamed Laura, in a panic. ‘Go away, leave me alone! You're dead!'

‘
I still have to protect you, Laura, dead or not.
'

‘I don't want you to protect me! I don't
need
you to protect me! Just go away and leave me alone!'

At that moment, the whole room appeared to tremble. Not the way it trembled in an earthquake, but as if Laura were seeing it through a heat haze. It seemed to
darken
, too, and in some extraordinary way the corners drew nearer. Laura took a step back, then another, but then she couldn't step back any further. She didn't know why. She simply couldn't. Her brain seemed incapable of telling her legs that she had to move.

The lace curtains in the far corner of the room seemed to be stirring more than the others. They started to fold and bulge and rise away from the wall. Laura watched in dreadful fascination as they took on the form of whatever was standing underneath it. There was somebody there. There was somebody hiding behind them. She could see the shape of their head and the shape of their shoulders, and their upraised arms.

There was a little girl hiding behind the curtains. A little girl so white of hair, so white of face, that Laura couldn't see her underneath the lace
.

‘You can't be,' she whispered. ‘You can't be here. Leave me alone, please. You don't need to protect me, you honestly don't.'

But the figure behind the curtains said nothing, and now it was growing, and rising from the floor. Right in front of her eyes, the curtains floated in the air, their folds revealing an agonized, childish face, and outstretched arms, and a summer dress, in dusty lace, that was more like a funeral dress.

Laura opened her mouth, but she was incapable of speaking. All she could manage was a sharp barking sound. She saw now that there was nobody hiding behind the curtains, no little girl at all. The curtains
were
the little girl, they had taken on her shape. Even her eyes showed as darker whorls in the lace.

The lace-girl rose and sank in the faint currents of air that blew through the room. Her lips moved, and she spoke, but her voice came out of Aunt Beverley's radio, as before, crackly and distant, like listening to a radio programme from long, long ago.

‘
I always wanted to protect you, Laura. There are so many things around us. So many frightening things, only seen in dreams
'

Laura managed to say, ‘Please, Peggy. Don't scare me like this.'

But the room darkened even more, and Laura saw strange shadows moving across the walls, as if there were someone behind her; a rushing sound like something passing; horses with long, attenuated legs; ghostly men and women.

‘
They are dreams
,' whispered the Peggy-girl. ‘
They have come to haunt us in the night.
'

Laura turned around, her neck stiff with terror. But there was nothing there, only the open door. She turned back again, and seized hold of a curtain, and flung it violently to one side, to reveal what was underneath. It billowed and fell back against the window, empty and lifeless. At that moment, the room brightened, too, and Laura found herself standing alone. A car
horn honked in the street outside, and she heard birds chirping and people laughing. She went over to the radio and tried the control-knob. It was switched off. She switched it on again and it was playing the Chiquita Banana calypso commercial. She switched off again and went through to the kitchen. The flower-vase was covered in a thick furry layer of white frost, and when she touched the orchids, they shattered, as if they were made of fragile glass, and scattered over the tabletop.

She went to the phone and picked it up. ‘Long-distance, please. New York.'

She reached Charles Keraghter & Co. but a nasal receptionist told her that Elizabeth was in an editorial meeting, and wouldn't be free for another hour.

‘Do you want to leave a message?'

Laura hesitated for a moment, and then looked across at the broken orchids. ‘Yes, tell her that her sister called. Tell her that the Snow Queen's paid me another visit.'

‘Do you want to repeat that?'

Aunt Beverley came home in time for lunch and they ate shrimp and avocado salad in the courtyard. Aunt Beverley's lipstick was smudged and she was wearing a silk polo-neck blouse in a particularly jarring mauve. She seemed irritable and distracted.

‘You saw Harrison?' asked Laura, cautiously.

‘Yes. He's being very nosy.'

‘That's his job, isn't it, being nosy?'

‘There's nosy and nosy. Harrison makes Jimmy Durante look like Porky Pig.'

‘What's he after?'

Aunt Beverley put down her fork, lit a cigarette. ‘It's all hearsay. He can't prove anything.' ‘What's all hearsay?'

‘I've done some people some favours over the years, that's
all. Fixed it for people to meet. Fixed it for people to get hold of some difficult merchandise that they might have had a hankering for. He says I might have supplied some difficult merchandise to Vele Lopez.' She defiantly blew out smoke. ‘It's all lies, of course.'

She didn't seem to want to say any more, so Laura said, ‘Chester called by. He's seen the camera tests and he says they're terrific. He wants to take me out for dinner tonight, so that we can pow-wow.'

For one fleeting instant, there was a look on Aunt Beverley's face that almost approached remorse, but then she shrugged and turned away, ‘Make sure he takes you somewhere fancy. Last time he took me out, we ended up at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset.'

Laura gave her a brief, dissolving smile. Then she said, ‘Aunt Beverley, do you believe in ghosts?'

‘Ghosts? What do you mean, ghosts? Of course I believe in ghosts. Every time I look in the mirror, who do you think I see standing behind me, but every man I ever knew?'

‘I mean real ghosts, people who have actually come back from the dead.'

Aunt Beverley crushed out her cigarette right in the middle of her shrimp. ‘That's a funny question to ask. Are you serious?'

Laura nodded. ‘Peggy's still with us. Elizabeth's seen her, too.'

Aunt Beverley thought about that for a very long time without saying anything, her eyes searching Laura's face. ‘Do you know what it is she wants?' she asked, at last. ‘Ghosts usually
want
something, don't they? Peace, or reassurance, or forgiveness. Mind you, Peggy couldn't have had anything to forgive.'

‘She says she wants to protect us. The trouble is – '

Aunt Beverley raised a hand to silence her. ‘Don't tell me
what the trouble is. Don't tell me anything. I don't want to know about ghosts, not real ghosts. God knows, I have quite enough of my own. If she wants to protect you, fine, let her protect you. All of us could use some protecting, now and again.'

But Laura persisted. ‘The trouble is, it's not just her. There's always something with her, something that freezes everything it touches. You remember your planter that broke? That was frozen. And today, when Chester had left – '

Her eyes filled with tears and she clamped her hand over her mouth. She hadn't realized until now how much Peggy's apparition had distressed and frightened her. Aunt Beverley stood up and put her arm around her shoulders and said. ‘There, come on now. You've been under a strain, that's all, what with David's funeral and trying to get this part.'

All the same, she remembered the pan of milk that she had set to boil, and which had frozen solid.

She stayed where she was, stroking Laura's shoulder, and for the first time in her life she began to feel that the past was catching up with her, as if every sin that she had ever committed had been painstakingly set to paper, and stacked away, leaving a crooked chalk initial on the wall to identify it. V for Velez, H for Herman, B for Bartok.

Elizabeth left the conference room at 4:15, when it was still only 1:15 in Hollywood. She felt exhausted and angry. Almost every editorial suggestion she had made to Margo Rossi about
Reds Under The Bed
had been greeted by a single, supercilious raise of one eyebrow, followed by a sweeping and totally contradictory suggestion from Margo herself. Margo had dismantled Elizabeth's attempts at editing the book so completely and so systematically that even George Kruszca, who was normally Margo's Number One Yes-Man, had started to look disturbed.

He stopped Elizabeth in the panelled corridor. He was a big wide-shouldered man with heavy-rimmed glasses and startlingly black brushcut hair. ‘Hey . . . that was rough,' he told her.

‘Oh, forget it,' said Elizabeth. ‘Margo doesn't care for anything I do; and she doesn't care for me personally; and she doesn't mind who knows it.'

They walked along the corridor. George said, ‘You have to understand that Margo clawed her way up from the bottom and she resents anybody else who looks as if they're doing it, too. As far as she is concerned, nobody else claws their way up after her. Especially if they're pretty.'

‘I thought you were a Margophile.'

George gave her a lackadaisical grin. ‘I'm a George-o-phile, if you want to know the truth. I've worked at Keraghty for six years and believe me I know the value of keeping my mouth shut and my head nodding. Or shaking, depending on the question. I have a wife and a baby to keep. What's more important? Telling Margo that she's an 18-carat bitch, or putting strained vegetables in my baby's lunchbowl?'

They reached the elevators. George prodded the button for 7, they stood back, waiting. ‘Let me give you a word of advice,' he told her. ‘You're clever, you're educated, you're creative, you're likeable. You can be careless, I've seen it, not only in your editing, but in the way you deal with people. But experience should sort that out, and experience is what you need. So don't let Margo bug you. Take whatever she dishes out, and think to yourself that you're working for one of the hottest publishing houses in the country, and the longer you're here, the more valuable you're going to be.'

‘You're a man of steel, George,' said Elizabeth, and grinned.

Margo Rossi came stalking on sharp high-heeled shoes along the corridor towards them. She was a tall, svelte woman of thirty-two with dark swept-back hair and Italianate good
looks. She had hooded eyes and a long thin nose and the tightest mouth that Elizabeth had ever seen.

‘Lizzie,' she said. ‘I'm glad to see you're not sulking.'

‘I'm a little disappointed, I admit. But I never sulk.'

‘Good,' said Margo, baring her considerable teeth. ‘That's the first lesson of corporate survival. Admit your mistakes and never whine about them.'

‘And bow a lot,' George murmured, under his breath.

The elevator arrived. Margo said, ‘You go ahead, George, I want to talk to Lizzie for a moment.'

He hesitated for a second, then stepped into the elevator and stood with his arms by his sides staring warningly at Elizabeth as the doors closed.

Margo said, sharply, ‘I understand that Johnson Ward is one of your family friends.'

‘Bronco, yes, that's right.'

‘Bronco? I never heard him called that before. Is that what you called him when you were a child?'

Elizabeth said, ‘I don't know. He asked me to call him Bronco, so I did.'

‘I knew that living out West would be the finish of him,' said Margo. ‘I suppose you're aware that he was paid a twenty-thousand dollar advance for his latest novel, due for delivery the week before Christmas? I called him yesterday and after a great deal of evasion he admitted that he hadn't written more than six or seven pages.'

‘I knew he was having difficulty with it. It's his brother Billy.'

Margo blinked, in that intimidating slow-motion way of hers, her eyelashes sweeping downward like raven's wings. It was a blink that meant, am I hearing this correctly, or do you wish to change your mind before I open my eyes again?

‘Billy is dead, Lizzie. He's been dead for a very long time.'

‘Yes, but Bronco's been sort of
haunted
. By memories, I guess.
He's always written slowly, and now he's finding it even harder.'

Margo said, ‘The difficulty I have with this, Lizzie, is that we have twenty thousand dollars invested in this book and Mr Keraghter is
very
keen to know when we might be expecting some kind of return on our investment. I don't need
Bitter Fruit
all over again, but I wouldn't mind a couple of hundred pages of sour grapes.'

‘Do you want me to talk to him?' asked Elizabeth.

‘Do I want
you
to talk to him? No, I do not want you to talk to him. The last person in the world I need to have talking to him is somebody who sat on his knee and called him Bronco.'

‘Margo, I don't think you really understand. This Billy thing is serious.'

‘You're telling me it's serious? I have to account for commissioning one of the most costly novels of 1951, and all I have is six pages of novel and a twenty-page letter of excuses.'