Starlight

by Stella Gibbons

  There was a pause. Mr Geddes angrily munched, and Mrs Lysaght stared into the fire with compressed lips. But perhaps the reference to his dead wife had turned her thought into softer and less exalted regions, for in a moment she said in another tone:

  ‘Your mother is really with you at last, then? I’m sure it must be much more comfortable for you … how does she like London after Harrogate?’

  Mr Geddes accepted the change of mood gratefully.

  ‘Very much, I think,’ he replied.

  ‘Didn’t she mind leaving that beautiful old vicarage?’

  ‘She hasn’t been living there for three years, you know. I think the idleness in the hotel got on her nerves.’

  ‘But such a joy to have no cooking or catering or washing up!’

  Mr Geddes merely said that his mother had always been very active.

  ‘Oh – you make me feel so useless. I’m afraid I’m a very idle person. I try to excuse myself by thinking that I am more sensitive than most people, and I’m a dreamer, of course, too – always have been. Heigh-ho!’ Mrs Lysaght sighed and looked at the electric fire with her head on one side; then went on in a more animated tone, ‘I’m glad to hear my dear old Gladys still keeps up her church-going. She’s a simple soul. I don’t want to see her leaving the Church. She came to tea last week. Isn’t it thrilling about Mrs Pearson!’

  ‘Gladys? Oh – Miss Barnes, of course; yes. Yes, she comes to Sunday Evensong usually – can’t manage the early service. I suppose she has to look after her sister.’ (Mr Geddes braced himself; he foresaw more complications.)

  ‘I can’t wait to meet her – Mrs Pearson, I mean.’

  ‘Mrs Pearson?’ Mr Geddes asked, quietly stalling.

  ‘Gladys’s new landlady. Hasn’t she told you about her? She’s a medium.’

  ‘I have heard of her,’ he said unenthusiastically, ‘though not through Gladys Barnes.’

  ‘Oh do tell me what you heard. I’m so interested in her – a genuine psychic. My little plan is to get her to give me a sitting.’

  ‘We were told about her by one of her tenants, an old man who lives next door to her – he described her as “looking like a lost soul”.’ Mr Geddes was feeling increasingly irritated and disturbed.

  ‘“A lost soul”! Oh that really is exciting! Did he mean she’s possessed?’

  ‘How can I possibly say, Helen? I suppose he meant she looks unusually depressed – despairing, perhaps – her looks seem to have made a deep impression on him, anyway. I imagine it might be … I don’t know …’ He decided, then and there, against telling Mrs Lysaght even the little that he did know.

  ‘Do you know if she gives sittings?’

  ‘No I do not.’

  ‘Well don’t sound so cross about it! I’m so excited – life’s so awful in London in February when one hasn’t much money – Ronald always used to send me to the South of France for three weeks – I miss that terribly (and him, of course) – and any little thrill is a godsend, this time of the year. Can you find out for me if she does?’

  ‘Does what?’ He glanced at the clock.

  ‘Oh don’t pretend you don’t understand! Mrs Pearson. Give sittings. As a medium.’

  ‘Helen, I really cannot undertake this – finding things out about her. The woman sounds as if she may be very ill. By far the best thing is to leave her alone.’

  ‘But I might be able to help her … if she’s hard up …’

  ‘The whole thing’s most undesirable, most unwise, I can’t see a single reason for your having anything to do with her, except that it happens to be February, and you’re feeling bored.’

  He got up, and stood with an elbow on the mantelpiece, glaring at her. He knew her well enough to be certain that opposition from him would make her the more determined to get her own way.

  ‘You needn’t be mad about it,’ she said, with an irritating ripple of ‘naughty’ laughter, ‘why shouldn’t I? She needn’t see me if she doesn’t want to. You’re really angry with me, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am really annoyed with you, yes. This is one of the times when I feel that one should … keep out. Keep away from her. I feel it very strongly. You need strong nerves, and a good brain, to tackle that sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing? You do believe there’s something then?’

  ‘Of course I believe there’s “something”, as you call it. There are – what I’d rather call mysteries, both holy and possibly unholy. I prefer to leave them alone. There’s plenty to be done, God knows, without wading out into that kind of thing. I believe in Almighty God and I trust in Jesus Christ. That’s enough for me.’ Colour had come into his face; the crude avowal had not been easy to make.

  Mrs Lysaght was shaking her head and sighing.

  ‘There we are, you see, right back where we started from. Narrowness. You’re a typical Anglican.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s a compliment,’ Mr Geddes said forthrightly, and again looked at the clock. ‘I must go, Helen. Now I hope, when I see you again, you’ll have thought over this business of leaving the Church and decided not to. That’s what really matters.’

  ‘It’s sweet of you to care, Robert. It really is. And I promise to think it over. But I can’t promise to change my mind, so don’t build on it.’

  As he wheeled his bicycle across Heath Street, Mr Geddes was thinking that anyone who built anything on Mrs Lysaght’s mind would need their head examining; the house built on sand was well-founded in comparison.

  21

  Mrs Corbett prolonged her holiday beyond the six weeks she had first mentioned. She had made pleasant acquaintances and was enjoying herself: she would not be home until after Easter. Arnold had the news first, and told Peggy when he telephoned her on the morning of Maundy Thursday.

  ‘So how about coming for a drive with me on Sunday?’ he went on.

  ‘Are you mad? Easter Sunday? It will be absolute hell.’

  ‘Not if you know the roads and aren’t making for the coast.’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll bring the car round about eleven, ma’am. That’ll give everyone else time to be well on their way.’

  ‘Don’t be surprised if I’m not here.’

  ‘I’d never be surprised at anything you did … righto, then. Eleven on Sunday.’

  Mrs Pearson was content to let the hours drift by, eating her slight meals off trays and telling Erika to ‘just make some tea, schatz,’ six or seven times in a day. But Erika, perhaps impelled by some orderly ancestral instinct, painstakingly set a place for herself in the kitchen at meal times; cooked herself a mess of meat and vegetables; and sat in the chilly half-dusk slowly chewing, obstinately declining Mrs Pearson’s invitations to share the warmth of her bedroom and the chocolates and nut-toffee that were always on her tray.

  She would sit facing the dim light coming through the window overlooking the neglected garden, with her head lifted towards it like a flower tilted to the sun. A poor kind of flower, pallid and lacking bloom. But less pale, and less frozen in expression, than some weeks ago. And her hair was beginning to shine.

  Gladys had firmly set her in the way of eating what she called proper meals.

  ‘All that picking off of trays,’ said Gladys, ‘all right for imbalids, but a young girl needs to eat regular and hearty. Put a bit of flesh on your bones. Stews. I’ll show you.’

  She continued to teach Erika her own shopping-lore, learnt during more than seventy hard, impoverished years; Erika could take home that frozen stuff for Mrs P., but let her buy a nice bit of end of neck for herself, and some pot-herbs. ‘What you used to get the lot for sixpence. That I should live to see turnips eightpence the pound. What we’re coming to I don’t know,’ marvelled Gladys.

  And then she taught her to cook.

  Erika’s dealings with turnips had heretofore been confined to clawing them out with frozen fingers from the edge of a frozen field, but she learned to approach them in their more civilized guise – ‘washed, if y
ou please,’ as Gladys pointed out. She then added inconsequently, Lazy Sluts, and even Erika could not think that this remark applied to the turnips.

  Mrs Pearson made no objections to Erika’s shopping for her own meals. She agreed with Gladys, slowly moving her head up and down in a dreamy nodding motion, when the latter ventured to point out that young girls needed to eat proper; she agreed that it would be nice if Erika learned to cook. Gladys had at the back of her mind a vague but splendid notion of Erika’s one day becoming a cook in a posh restaurant, but she spoke of this to no-one except Annie.

  There were other changes for the better, besides the fresh paint glowing in the strengthening sunlight and the clean white curtains; Annie often left her bed now to sit by the fire, putting on stockings and slippers to do so. Mrs Pearson’s unforgettable appearance in their rooms on Christmas Day, holding out both hands and crying, ‘You just hold on to me,’ would never be forgotten by the sisters. It had marked a turning point, for Annie had even partly resumed former domestic habits, and sometimes had the meal almost ready for Gladys on the latter’s return from work.

  While loudly welcoming this, Gladys had been known to remark to acquaintances, met while shopping, that she never knew, nowadays, what Annie would be poking into during her absence.

  But when the rackman visited his wife; when the car bumped gently to a standstill over the bomb-cracked road in the dusk; or when he walked noiselessly down between the rows of houses he owned, head bent and hands in his pockets, then a hush fell over the small, harmless lives in Rose Cottage. Gladys would start at the sound of his key in the adjacent hall, and look at Annie and nod, and they would become silent. The house, always quiet, would seem filled with a frozen air when he was in it; Mr Fisher would creep out on his walk, by daylight or dusk, noiselessly as a shadow.

  Gladys was always ready to welcome kindness between people; it was in her nature to look for it. But though Pearson’s manner towards his wife was loving, it never reassured her, and she spoke of it to Annie as unnatural, and downright soppy.

  The few words he dropped, his glances, the sight of his caressing touch, conveyed a burning-sweet, Eastern love that vaguely reminded her of certain films seen long ago; in her young womanhood, when the Orient was still a strange and romantic place and the Oriental lover was the ideal. His manner as a husband was so unlike the rough comradeship between married pairs that she was accustomed to; it increased her conviction that he was as false as he was dangerous.

  Easter was at hand. The spring flowers were at the street-corners. Mr Geddes had of course been even more occupied than usual at Saint James’s; he had not so much forgotten Miss Barnes’s landlady as postponed thinking what to do about her until he should be less occupied.

  But Mrs Lysaght had not forgotten.

  One afternoon the telephone rang in Lily Cottage.

  Erika, who was in the kitchen, tidying up, moved off slowly to answer it.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said cautiously. Mrs Pearson had explained to her that she must never be in a hurry to give their number; it might be someone whom Mr Pearson did not want to know it.

  ‘Is that Highway 8741 – Mrs Pearson’s house? I wondered if I might just speak to Miss Barnes?’ cooed a voice. ‘Miss Gladys Barnes. She lives next door to you, I believe.’

  Gladys had gossiped about the door between the cottages, on her last visit to Hampstead.

  Erika considered this, breathing oppressedly down the receiver.

  ‘Hullo?’ said the voice, tentatively.

  ‘I ask,’ almost whispered Erika, thereby adding more mystery to that already, in Mrs Lysaght’s imagination, filling the house of the sorceress.

  ‘Oh, thank you, I’ll hold on –’

  Mrs Pearson was lying on her bed as usual, pretty and wraithlike in one of her rose house-coats, and reading a woman’s magazine.

  ‘Hullo, schatz, what is it?’

  ‘Der is a woman at der phone. She want to speak to Gladys.’

  ‘Lady, dear – not woman. Always say “lady” and “gentleman” – you like to be called “a young lady” don’t you? – Gladys is at work, isn’t she? Just run up and see, love.’

  By the time Erika had digested the lesson in social behaviour and nodded solemnly, and made her way down the stairs, and through the door, and up to the Barnes’s quarters, and received from Annie an alarmed assurance that of course Glad was at work, where else should she be this time of day? Oh it wasn’t the ’ospital, was it, Glad hadn’t been knocked down, had she? She was that careless crossing the road; and Erika had in her turn assured Annie that it was only a lady, and Annie had said oh it wasn’t one of those foreigners from where Glad worked, was it? because if it was something must be wrong, and Erika had looked at her in silent sympathy for a moment or two, unable to reassure her because, in her own lifelong experience, something had been perpetually wrong – nearly ten minutes had passed.

  But Mrs Lysaght had nothing much to do.

  She was still there when Erika, having returned to Mrs Pearson and reported what Annie had said, came back to the telephone.

  ‘She is at vork,’ she said, and, charmed by the usage of the instrument with which she had had no previous encounters, waited interestedly for the unknown lady’s next remark.

  ‘Oh dear, how tiresome of her. Aren’t people tiresome? Now what am I going to do? Now wait a minute –’

  Erika waited. During the next three or four minutes, Annie’s remarks about hospitals and those foreigners finally reached a destination in her mind.

  ‘Are you der ’ospital?’ she asked at length, and there was a tinkling laugh. ‘Of course I’m not the hospital – do I sound like the hospital? I’m just thinking –’

  ‘Are you doze foreigners where Gladys vorks?’ pursued Erika, with teutonic perseverance.

  ‘No I am not – you funny girl, do I sound like a foreigner? Your English isn’t very good, is it? Are you Mrs Pearson’s au pair girl? How long have you been over here?’ she went on chattily, ‘I really think I’d better speak to Mrs Pearson.’

  Erika did not know what an au pair girl might be. She announced, ‘I ask Mrs Pearson,’ and plodded away and up the stairs.

  ‘But who is she? Didn’t she say? Oh well – I’d better come down,’ Mrs Pearson laid aside her magazine, ‘it may be a message – something important for Gladys.’

  She drifted down the stairs, too good-natured to feel irritation at the interruption. Her mind was busy with the story she had been reading; a suspense-story about multiple murder and hidden love in the Deep South of America.

  ‘Hullo?’ she murmured into the receiver, ‘Miss Barnes is at work. Would you like to leave a message?’

  ‘Oh –’ said a voice, on an indrawn breath that might have been one of satisfaction, ‘it’s just that … I’m Mrs Lysaght, Miss Barnes used to work for me – and she was coming to tea with me to-morrow and now I find I have to go out of town on that very day – so tiresome – an old aunt of mine is ill (or thinks she is) – would you be very kind and explain to Miss Barnes – Gladys – it’s difficult to think of her as “Miss Barnes”, isn’t it?’ Then, suddenly, with a kind of cooing pounce in the voice, ‘That is Mrs Pearson, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Pearson, after a pause, with reluctance. She let the word drop flatly. The train of thought about the Deep South romance was interrupted; she looked blankly across the hall. Erika had gone back to the kitchen; she was alone. A plastic dog on the hall table, a pink dog with a pink bow, looked perkily back at her. The voice was speaking again.

  ‘Oh I’m so delighted to have got hold of you – I’ve heard so much about you from dear old Gladys, such a character, isn’t she? Mrs Pearson …’

  ‘What?’ Mrs Pearson said, weakly. It was almost a whisper; a sensation of helplessness was creeping over her. She knew what was going to be asked of her. Her eyes widened and stared into … somewhere …

  ‘Mrs Pearson, I’m going to say something impertinent. (You must forgive me �
� I’m so passionately interested in the Occult.) Gladys has told me a great deal about you. You’re a medium, aren’t you?’

  The question came out sharply, with a note of triumph; ah, I’ve tracked you down, this is what I was after. Mrs Pearson answered, faintly but instantly, ‘I’m not well.’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry … were you in bed? I hope I didn’t disturb you, what’s the trouble?’ Decent regret only half concealed ravenous curiosity, and Mrs Pearson yielded, as she had done often before, to a superficially kindly tone. There was some innocent vanity, too, prompting her answer: ordinary people, non-sensitives, always took it for granted that you could see what you saw, and hear what you heard, and go on having nerves like whipped steel … let this woman hear the truth.

  ‘I’m not well because being a medium takes it out of you,’ she retorted, with feeble anger, ‘that’s why.’

  ‘Oh – then – you are still giving sittings? I asked old Gladys but she seemed to think you weren’t (it’s rather difficult getting a straight answer to a straight question, with our Gladys, don’t you agree?).’

  ‘No, I’m not giving sittings … now.’

  ‘Oh, how disappointing. I was wondering if you couldn’t break your rule for once and give one for me.’

  ‘I don’t give them any more – I –’

  ‘Just for once. I … would pay you, you understand. I don’t want something for nothing.’

  ‘I don’t … take money now, I’m never going to give sittings again. My husband doesn’t … he wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘But such a wonderful gift. So rare. Don’t you ever feel it’s your duty, Mrs Pearson, to use it? Like the talents? In the Bible, you know.’