Starlight (24 page)

‘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.’

‘Not talk that … that … to me,’ shrilled Mrs Pearson, in a voice like a bat’s, and slammed back the receiver. She leaned over the table where the telephone stood, trembling, with both hands pressed over her eyes, and was still standing there, when Erika crept anxiously up to her.

‘Mrs Pearson? You feeling bad?’ she whispered. It was the first time she had heard a voice raised in anger in Lily Cottage; even the dread Mr Pearson never shouted.

‘No, dear. I’m all right, I just had to send her away – she was worrying me – going on at me – bothering me – I’m all right now. Make me some tea, will you,
schatz
? and come up and have it with me.’ She pulled out a packet of cigarettes from her pocket with a shaking hand, and went slowly upstairs.

Later that afternoon, some bunches of spring flowers arrived, with a note: ‘To make my apologies. Hope you’ll change your mind soon!’

Mrs Pearson tore the card into fragments over, and over again.

But she made Erika arrange the flowers all around her room; she could resist flowers no more than she could resist a note of kindness in a voice. Her room was always full of them; her husband would not know that these irises and narcissi came from someone who wanted a sitting.

Alone, as twilight fell, she lay on her bed looking out across the room, so pretty in the pink light, with the faces of the flowers, trumpet-shaped, frill-shaped, horn-shaped, looking back at her from every side. It was completely quiet; the rich fresh colours glowed, the scents of daffodil and narcissi mingled with those from the bottles and jars on her dressing-table. Her grotesques, in glass and wood and plastic, smirked at her from the mantelpiece.

I wish Gladys hadn’t gossiped, she thought. I wish she hadn’t. Whatever happens, I mustn’t let Tom know. He’d be … he might want me … no, I don’t believe he would, now. We’ve got money, plenty of money … he wouldn’t want …

Show them
, the voice insisted,
show them. You’re the only one who can do it, show them. I’ll help you
.

Mrs Pearson moved her head deeper into the pillow, and let her eyes close. Oh the warmth, the silence, the lovely faces of the flowers. Any instant now, the green tunnel would be there; mossy, shaded by gentle boughs.

Show them, insisted the voice.
I’ll help you. Show them
.

It was the afternoon of Easter Day. Peggy and Arnold Corbett were sitting after lunch in a silver birch coppice, surrounded by primroses. It had been raining lightly, but Peggy had sat with upturned face, the shower pouring down on her skin, while he sheltered under what protection there was, watching her with a wondering, feeble smile.

‘We’re between Slinfold and Sedgemere. If that means a thing to you?’ he said now; he had been studying an AA map.

The rain had ceased. Peggy, who had wandered off to pick primroses, came towards him, moving silently between the tree trunks. There was a scent of wet moss. She was slowly wiping her face and brow with her handkerchief.

‘Sedgemere’s a pretty little place – three cottages and a church – we might go back that way?’ Arnold suggested.

‘If you like.’ She was shockingly pale. Yet she did not seem ill; the brightness of her eyes was that of youth, not fever. She kept them fixed on Arnold’s face, as if resigning the way that they should go home to him. All right, her brilliant eyes seemed to be saying, we’ll go by way of Sedgemere. You decided, not me.

‘Sedgemere it is, then.’ He folded the map. ‘And we’d better start now, if we want to avoid the lunatics.’

Peggy made him wait while she gathered up the smallest fragments of eggshell and paper and, amid his jeers, buried them under leaf-mould and moss. He watched her with the mocking smile that the slightest sign of gentleness in her always brought to his face. ‘What’s the point? Who the hell’s going to see a bit of litter in here?’

‘Nobody. If I can help it.’ She wiped the moist earth off her hands and they went to the car.

Paler and paler grew Peggy as they approached Sedgemere in its narrow valley, and the stalks of the primroses were crushed in her hand and she stared unseeingly at the spring going by.

When they were passing through the little place with its three cottages covered in Sussex tiling and its square-towered, flint-set church, Arnold glanced at her. ‘I’ll slow down a bit, so’s we can look at it – I say, are you car-sick?’

‘Of course not. Do I look it?’

‘You look a bit green.’

‘I’m all right.’

There was silence again, while he drove slowly past the long cottage gardens and the duckpond. It was a heavy, slumbrous day; Sedgemere seemed asleep.

‘Bet these little hovels’ll sell for a nice price,’ he said in a moment, ‘when the inhabitants die off … but no-one seems to have got on to Sedgemere yet … oh, there is a riding-school.’

Rattray Riding School, said the notice above the white gate at the edge of the meadow, Rattray Riding School,
Rattray Riding School
.

A young woman on a horse was coming towards them down the unfenced track; she had the type of face once called sweet, and it was plain from the first sight of her that although she might try to fight for something she wanted, it would be hopeless; she was no fighter, and the battle would be lost from the start.
Fighting
and
battles
would mean little to that face. She glanced casually at the car.

‘Do for God’s sake get on, I’m bored with Sedgemere,’ Peggy said, low but violently, and Arnold accelerated and they swept on, leaving Sedgemere asleep in the sun. The girl who lacked a fighting face turned her horse, and galloped back towards the buildings at the end of the meadow.

‘That was a pretty girl,’ said Arnold, ‘notice?’

Peggy could not have spoken; she did not see the sweeps of green meadow or the hills crowned with white hedges of blackthorn or the silvery blue sky. All her spirit pursued, with hatred, the tiny figure receding at seventy miles an hour into the sunlit distance.

They reached home about five, having spent the last half hour of the journey running blithely along almost deserted suburban roads, while the cars on the main ones jerked and crept, jerked and crept, in the contemporary idiot rhythm. Peggy was still deadly pale and at last, to avoid further questions, had to say that her head ached.

‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you admit to a human weakness in six months,’ he observed.

‘Thank you,’ said Peggy; if he would be quiet!

‘Hullo!’ added Arnold, ‘there’s the Rolls – my mother must be home.’

The Rolls was standing before the open garage with the old chauffeur, busy with a rag on the metalwork of the bonnet, looking distinctly sulky.

‘Yes, that’s mamma all right, all right, she’s given him a rocket about the car being dirty, I did tell him, weeks ago, but the lazy old blighter hasn’t touched it.’ Having parked his own car, he went into the house.

Peggy followed slowly. She felt it as the last straw that her employer should have arrived back this evening; she had planned to go to her room and be on her bed until darkness came. She felt ill; shaken by jealousy and hatred.

Mrs Corbett spent the evening, naturally, in resuming control of MacLeod House and lamenting at intervals that she had put on ten pounds, that the car had not been cleaned, apparently, since she left, and the roses not pruned hard enough.

But, on the whole, she was satisfied with Peggy’s stewardship, and the servants confided gloomily to one another in their sitting-room that it wasn’t going to be no use complaining about
her
; she had ‘wormed her way in’, and would doubtless be left half – if not all – of Mrs Corbett’s money.

It was, on the whole, a fine Easter. There were blue sky and warm sun and silver catkins and golden daffodils to be thankful for, as well as the alleged return from the dead of a gifted teacher with a messiah-complex. Gladys Barnes, one of millions made happy by the bright weather, confided an intention to Annie on the Saturday evening.

‘I wouldn’t. Not if I was you I wouldn’t,’ Annie said.

‘If you was me you would, you soppy date. She’s gone fifteen. She ought to go.’

‘It’s not your business, Glad. Now is it?’

‘He’s always going on about getting people to come.’ (‘He’ was Mr Geddes.)

‘Yes, but not if it means trouble, Glad. You know Mrs P. don’t believe in the Church. You heard her, going on about the bells. We both ’eard.’

Gladys was silent. Her large eyes, innocent behind her glasses in their mended frame, were troubled.

‘Now didn’t we?’ repeated Annie.

‘Yes …’ said Gladys doubtfully, ‘but … I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not those turns of hers what make her go on like that. She hasn’t never said a word to me against the Church not when I come in of a Sunday evening. Just smiles and says have a nice service? quite ordinary. I don’t know …’

There was a pause, while they sat in their worn, comfortable old clothes in silence, enjoying the crackle and sparkle of a little coal fire, which replaced the greedy gas one in warmer weather. They were in the parlour.

‘’Course, she needn’t know!’ exclaimed Gladys at last, breaking into a sparkle bright as the fire’s.

‘Glad! That’s downright deceitful!’

Gladys made a movement of her grey curls that took some sixty years off her age, and went on sparkling in silence.

‘Erika’s like her maid, Glad. She tells her what to do, and that … I know she don’t pay her nothing but a pound a week and those opairs gets three, sometimes, but she gets all her board and Mrs P. buys her cloes – I’d have thought myself a regular queen, I can tell you, if Mrs Hunter or Mrs Ross’d bought me cloes like that when I first went out to service, and I was round about Erika’s age, my first place.

‘Remember those skirts? Didn’t half pick up the muck … well. I’m going to ask her. ’Sides, it’s as dull as ditchwater for a kid her age living here, she might get taken into that Youth Club, bit of jam for her, young company.’

‘I wouldn’t. Honest, Glad. We’re all getting along so nice. I wouldn’t.’

Gladys closed the argument by getting up and going down to the kitchen in search of Erika.

They walked to Saint James’s through streets parked with paleblue, scarlet or pink cars, like a mechanized age’s version of the spring flowers. Such owners as had not started early for the coast were busy with hose and oil and rags, tending their treasures. Erika’s thoughts were vaguely occupied by the new coat and hat she wore, Easter presents from Mrs Pearson.

Gladys marched them up to her usual seat, nice and near the front where they could see and hear all that was going on, and proceeded to instruct her charge; kneeling, clasping her hands and covering her closed eyes, praying.

‘How what you mean, Glad, praying?’ breathed Erika, looking sideways at her mentor under the coquettish hat with floating ribbons.

‘Praying – good gracious, don’t you know what that is? – here, where’s the Ourfather –’ Gladys grabbed at the prayer-book and pointed with a black-gloved finger. ‘Read it. Then shut your eyes and say it, girl.’

Erika bent her head and tried to do what she was told. Her reading of English had so far been in the sheets of the
Daily Mirror
. Whether she felt any difference between the words therein, and those she was now studying, it is not possible to say. She was fully occupied with balancing her hat on top of her head and in admiring the church’s festal white and gold, and the many flowers.

The service was interrupted occasionally, for her, by Gladys’s hissing murmurs of explanation and comment. She pulled her down in awkward genuflexion when the cross was carried past in procession after the last hymn, and then they both knelt dutifully for a final private prayer.

‘There!’ beamed Gladys sitting up amidst the bustle and rustle of departure. ‘Set us up for the week, won’t it?’