‘No face, nothing at all?’
‘Nothing. I was scared to death.’
‘And that was today?’
‘When do you think? That was this afternoon, when I was walking home from seeing you. I saw her, Lenny, she was real. Solid enough to touch! But she kind of blew away, like sheets of paper, like pages torn out of a book.’
‘She was real enough to touch and yet she blew away?’
Elizabeth was infuriated. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think that I’ve lost my mind, like my mother! You think it’s a trick, or a joke, or some kind legpull! Well, if that’s what you think it is, Lenny, look into my eyes, because I’m crying for my sisters and I’m crying for my parents and most of all I’m crying for me, and if this is a legpull it isn’t a very funny one, is it?’
Lenny quickly seized her hands and said, ‘Whoa, come on, Lizzie, don’t get so steamed up! I’m sorry, I believe what you’re telling me. I really do. Come on, I saw it for myself, I saw the photographs, except that was I sure that I must have been dreaming, or having some kind of an optical illusion. I mean that doesn’t happen, right? People appearing in photographs and then they’re gone. That doesn’t happen.’
Elizabeth picked up the album and held it tight against her breasts. ‘This time, it has happened. This time, it’s real.’
Lenny swallowed. Then, almost reverently, he said, ‘I’ve seen men dying. I’ve seen the shadow of death pass over their faces. I’ve seen men talking and laughing when they were shot to pieces and should of been dead, and I’ve seen men sitting on the ground dead without a single mark on them, as if they just decided to stop being alive. But I never saw anything like this before, and I don’t know what to think of it, so what I’m doing is, I’m trying as hard as I can to believe that it isn’t true, and that I was tired, and my brain was just kidding me along, or maybe you were.’
‘It’s real,’ said Elizabeth. Then, much more quietly, but no less emphatically. ‘It’s real.’
‘Then what do we do? Laugh it off? Call for a priest, or what? What the hell do you do when something like this happens?’
‘I suppose we have to try to work out what it means.’
Lenny frowned, and raked back his hair with his fingers. ‘You really think it means something?’
‘It must do. I think it’s Peggy. In fact, I’m sure of it.’
‘Peggy? Your little kid sister? The one who drowned?’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘I know it doesn’t look much like her, but it feels so much like her. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but she won’t go away. It’s almost as if she’s looking after us, because she made us so unhappy when she died.’
Lenny took out a pack of Luckies, and offered one to Elizabeth. On some of those Pacific islands, you know, they believe that you can go into this hypnotic trance, and talk to your dead relatives. These witch-doctor types even advertise their services on billboards. Come on in and chew the fat with your dead Uncle Frank, or whoever.’
He lit her cigarette, and then his own, and blew out smoke. ‘That’s in the Solomons, though – Choiseul and Bougainville. You don’t expect to talk to your dead relatives in Sherman, Connecticut.’
Elizabeth said, ‘I’m worried about her. I’m worried that she’s trapped in some sort of terrible betwixt-and-between – you know, not quite living and not quite dead. Souls are supposed to let go, aren’t they. They’re not supposed to haunt you. I read somewhere that ghosts are the souls of people who can’t let go, people who can’t quite die, because they’ve left something unfinished here on earth.’
Lenny sat back. ‘What did your sister leave unfinished?’
‘Her life, of course.’
‘But nothing specific?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
Elizabeth turned to him. The firelight was dancing in his eyes, and he looked as sensitive and handsome as she remembered him, from all those years back, when he was all packed up to join the army. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Sure I believe you. Why would you make up something like that? Besides, I saw the photograph album.’
‘Shall we look at it again?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘Unh-hunh,’ said Lenny, quickly shaking his head. He laid his hand on top of the album cover so that she wouldn’t open it. ‘I don’t think we need to, do you? Either she’s there, or she’s not there. If she’s there we’ll go crazy; if she’s not there, we’ll start to doubt what we really saw – what we know we saw.’
He paused, and smoked, and then he said, ‘One day on Guadalcanal I was sitting outside my tent eating my midday meal when one of my best buddies came and sat down next to me. I swear this is true. Ray Thompson, his name was, tall sad guy from St Louis, Missouri.
‘I didn’t look at him too closely. On Guadalcanal there were so many flies that you concentrated one hundred per cent on what you were eating. We all developed this kind of flick-bite way of eating, twitching our spoons to shake the flies off, and then quickly swallowing it before they could settle again. That was a stinking place, Guadalcanal, let me tell you. There were spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, and tree-leeches, and centipedes that left a rash when they walked over your skin. Most of us caught malaria or dengue, and we all had dysentery.’
‘I don’t know how you could bear it.’
‘I’ll tell you how we could bear it, we didn’t have the choice. You want some more wine?’
She passed over her glass. ‘You were telling me about your friend.’
‘That’s right. Ray and me sat together and talked about home and girls and this and that. I noticed that Ray wasn’t eating but I guessed that he’d eaten already, because General Vandegrift was always complaining that we were too damned thin. Mind you, who wouldn’t be, with malaria and dysentery? For no reason at all, Ray says, “When you get back, tell Carole that I’ve left the money under the driver’s seat.” I turned around to ask him what he meant, and he was gone. I didn’t know where he went. I was pretty sick by then, I could have been hallucinating. But I never saw Ray again; and about two days later somebody told me that he was dead. Not only that, they’d found him in a clump of kunai grass a quarter of a mile away from the camp, about an hour before he came to talk to me. An hour before. He talked to me, I swear it, but he was dead.’
‘Then it does happen,’ said Elizabeth, feeling awed.
‘I think so. Something lives after you. I don’t know what, or for how long, or why. But I believe it does. I still see men who died on Guadalcanal. I see them driving in automobiles. I see them in supermarkets. No man leaves his loved ones, and the life that he worked so hard for, just because he’s dead.’
‘What about the money?’
‘The money under the car seat? I don’t know. I wrote to his wife and told her but she never wrote back. Kind of an unsatisfactory ending, huh?’
At first, Elizabeth found Lenny’s talk about his dead friend to be convincing and sympathetic. But after he had finished another glass of wine, and started to tell her that everybody lives after death, and that all of his Marine buddies could still be found, if only he knew where to look for them, she began to think that there was something wrong with him, something irrational. She knew for sure that she had seen Peggy, but how could Lenny believe that all of his dead friends were still walking around. Over 1300 Americans had died on Guadalcanal. Surely they hadn’t all returned home, dead, to pick up their lives where they left off?
‘If somebody wants something bad enough,’ Lenny declared. ‘Then, death alone isn’t enough to stop him having it, believe me.’
Eleven
Elizabeth went down to the cellar and brought up another bottle of wine.
‘Were you really that struck on me?’ Lenny asked her, as he poured it out.
Elizabeth laughed. ‘You were the love of my life.’
‘Maybe I should have paid more attention to you.’
‘You were going to war. You were a m
an. Why should you have paid any attention to a gawky thirteen-year-old girl?’
He sat back and lit another cigarette. ‘You weren’t gawky. You were cute. I always remember you as cute.’
‘I felt gawky.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly changed now. I hardly recognized you when I met you at the station.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and found herself blushing. She still found it difficult to accept compliments without colouring up.
‘Can I ask you something personal?’ said Lenny. ‘Do you have a steady beau?’
‘I have plenty of men friends, if that’s what you mean.’
‘No, no, I’m talking about somebody steady. The kind of guy who takes you home to meet his parents, and who starts discussing children, and where you’re going to send them to college.’
She smiled at him and shook her head. ‘No, nobody like that. Not now, anyway. After Haldeman Jones, I dated a writer called Kenwood Priest for a while, and Kenwood kept talking about buying a house in the Finger Lakes region and living the life of a recluse, just the lakes and the trees and the whippoorwills, but that wasn’t for me. I spent my whole childhood in Sherman. I want traffic, and people, and police sirens.’
‘Kenwood Priest, what did he write?’
‘Oh, some thin, sensitive book called The Lost Young Men. I’ll always remember the last line. “For there is no going forward for us, and no going back, and we must stand on the shoreline of our growing-up, with the seagulls keening overhead, until the surf comes in and overwhelms us at last.” ’
‘Hmm,’ said Lenny, swallowing wine. ‘Sounds kind of mushy to me.’
They paused in silence for a moment, with the fire crackling and the wind blowing hollow in the chimney, and then they both looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was probably the wine, or tiredness, or the extreme strangeness of what had appeared in the photo album. But they laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks.
‘Oh God, stop,’ begged Elizabeth. ‘My sides hurt.’
But Lenny went on hooting and gasping and clutching himself, until Elizabeth seized hold of his wrists and shook him and said, ‘Stop it, Lenny! Stop it! You’re giving me a stomach ache!’
He stopped laughing and looked up at her. She let go of his wrists, but he lifted his hand and touched her hair, soft and fine and shiny in the firelight.
He didn’t say a word, but he lifted his face and kissed her, first on the cheek, then on the lips. Their tongues touched, and spoke in silence more words than either of them had said since they had first met each other again. Both of them kept their eyes open, and looked deep and unfocused into each other’s eyes, their lashes still wet and sparkling from laughing.
They kissed, and kissed again. Lenny held Elizabeth tight in his arms, his fingers running slowly down her back. Even through his jacket she could feel how lean and wiry he was. All those months in the Pacific had taken the flesh off him, and he had never put it back on again, even after five years of civilian life. He stroked her hair, he stroked her shoulders. His hand slid around the side of her sweater and cupped her breast.
She pulled away. ‘Please – I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.’
Lenny smiled, and shrugged. ‘That’s okay by me. Just following my natural urges.’
‘You don’t mind?’
He leaned forward and kissed her again. Of course I don’t mind. It’s quite enough excitement for one evening, finding out that the girl I always used to like has grown up into the most attractive woman I ever met.’
Elizabeth blushed again. ‘Flatterer.’
‘That’s not flattery.’ He touched her cheek with his fingertips. ‘You really are one of the most beautiful women I ever saw.’
‘Only one of them?’
He grinned, and gave her one more kiss. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I have to be going. I’m taking mom to Hartford tomorrow, and I want to make an early start.’
‘It’s been good to see you,’ said Elizabeth, squeezing his hand.
‘How about dinner Saturday night? You’ll still be here?’
‘I’d love it.’
She found Lenny’s coat and he shrugged it on. He stood in the draughty hallway holding her close, holding her right inside his coat, like warm wings wrapped around her. Until she stood so close to him she hadn’t realized how tall he was. He smelled of tobacco and musky cologne.
‘I know things have been bad for you,’ he told her. ‘I just want you to know that I’m here to help you out now. Old playmates, huh? You should go through your dad’s papers, you know. See what kind of insurance he’s got, life insurance, pension, disability insurance. His savings won’t last for ever.’
‘Thanks, I will.’
‘Goodnight, then, sweet Elizabeth,’ he said, and they kissed – a long, lingering, exploratory kiss. Elizabeth’s hand brushed accidentally against his front and she felt how hard he was, and that feeling was imprinted on her nerves for hours to come, in the same way that a dazzling light is imprinted on the eye. By the time the rear lights of his Frazer had disappeared behind the trees, she knew that she was dangerously infatuated with him. But then, she supposed that she always had been.
She went around the house, damping down the fires and drawing back the dusty velvet drapes. She didn’t like coming downstairs in the morning to find the house in darkness. The house was silent and filled with heavy regret. All the house could do now was to wait for Elizabeth’s father to be moved to hospital, or to die, and then it would welcome a new family. The days of the Buchanan household were gone for ever: Elizabeth, Laura and Peggy, their giggling echoing in the corridors, their slippers scampering down the stairs.
Elizabeth poked the living-room fire until the last log collapsed deep into the hearth, and set up the fireguard around it. Then she walked through to the kitchen, drew back the gingham curtains, and ran the tap for a glass of cold water to take to bed.
She didn’t look out of the window at first, but then the moon suddenly appeared from behind the clouds, almost a full moon, fuzzy and pearly-blue. She was filling her glass, and she dropped it into the sink in fright. Right in the middle of the tennis court stood a small white figure in a coat and beret, a small white lonely figure as still as death.
‘Oh, my God,’ whispered Elizabeth. ‘Oh, my God, no. Don’t let it be that.’
Swallowing with fear, she went to the kitchen door and lifted down the old duffel coat that her father always wore when he went out to fetch firewood. She pulled it on, unlocked the door, and stepped out into the frosty night. This time there was no cat to watch her with slitted, disapproving eyes; Ampersand had died three years ago, under the wheels of a furniture truck.
She crossed the lawn in a hurried, uneven lope. The figure hadn’t moved. It stood exactly in the centre of the tennis court, facing the house. In the moonlight she could see already that its face was a kind of dirty grey, and that its eyes were smudgy and dark.
She slowed down as she reached the tennis court itself, and she approached the figure with extreme nervousness and caution. Eventually, however, she was near enough to touch it, although she didn’t. She didn’t have to, because she knew what it was made of.
It was the snow-angel that she and Laura had made for Peggy. It was dressed in Peggy’s brown beret and Peggy’s red kilt and Peggy’s brown tweed coat. It had a misshapen fertilizer sack for a face, and two black holes for eyes, burned with a red-hot poker.
It was the snow-angel, made of snow, even though it hadn’t snowed since early April.
Elizabeth stared at it, her breath smoking, her heart beating far too fast. What did this mean? What did all of this mean? Had somebody built it for her, to taunt her? Or had they built it to frighten her father?
Maybe it was nothing more than a strange, random occurrence – one of those supernatural phenomena like faces that appeared in mirrors and empty rooms that filled up with blowflies and voices that sobbed in the night. Maybe it had no rational meaning at all.
/> All the same, it frightened Elizabeth badly. She felt as if she was being given a warning. Who else knew about the snow-angel, apart from father and mommy, herself and Laura? Nobody. Nobody at all. But father was paralysed, mommy was still in her clinic, only semi-rational most of the time, and Laura was three thousand miles away in California. What was even more bewildering than who might have built it was how they had built it. It was unseasonably cold for October, but not cold enough to snow. Yet, inexplicably, here was a snow-angel, just as the pool had frozen over in the middle of June and the Reverend Dick Bracewaite had died of frostbite on a sweltering summer’s afternoon.
‘The winter did it,’ the Peggy-girl had told her, in father’s bedroom. But what did that mean? ‘The winter did it.’ There was no winter anywhere; no trace of winter; not real winter; not yet.
Elizabeth circled around the snow-angel. She could even smell the coldness of it. It stared at her mockingly with its charred, lopsided eyes. She stood still, and looked around the gardens. There was a thin, chilly wind blowing, which set the dry leaves rustling across the lawns. More clouds began to run across the moon, and the darkness thickened. Only the snow-angel remained luminous and bright.
Elizabeth was tempted to find a shovel and knock the figure down. But then she thought, no, I’ll go get Mrs Patrick out of bed, and I’ll ask her to come here and see it for herself. Then at least I’ll have a witness, and I’ll know for sure that I’m not going completely insane.
She hurried back to the house, went inside, and locked the kitchen door. She left the house by the front door, crossed the driveway, and hurried down the street, turning off at the shingle-graded track that led down to Mrs Patrick’s farmhouse. There were no lights down the track and only a single light visible at Green Pond Farm, and almost the only way in which she could tell where she was walking was because of the skinny silver birches which lined the track on either side, each as white and thin as a sudden shriek. Her feet crunched on the shingle. Invisible animals scurried through the undergrowth; sleeping birds stirred.
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