The Ghost Feeler (29 page)

Mrs Attlee heaved an introspective sigh. Like many humble persons of her kind and creed, she had a vague idea that a sin unrevealed was, as far as the consequences went, a sin uncommitted; and this conviction had often helped her in the difficult task of reconciling doctrine and practice.

II

Moyra Attlee interrupted her listless stare down the empty Sunday street of the New Jersey suburb, and turned an astonished glance on her grandmother.

‘Mrs Clingsland? A wrong you did to Mrs Clingsland?'

Hitherto she had lent an inattentive ear to her grandmother's ramblings; the talk of old people seemed to be a language hardly worth learning. But it was not always so with Mrs Attlee's. Her activities among the rich had ceased before the first symptoms of the financial depression; but her tenacious memory was stored with pictures of the luxurious days of which her granddaughter's generation, even in a wider world, knew only by hearsay. Mrs Attlee had a gift for evoking in a few words scenes of half-understood opulence and leisure, like a guide leading a stranger through the gallery of a palace in the twilight, and now and then lifting a lamp to a shimmering Rembrandt or a jewelled Rubens; and it was particularly when she mentioned Mrs Clingsland that Moyra caught these dazzling glimpses. Mrs Clingsland had always been something more than a name to the Attlee family. They knew (though they did not know why) that it was through her help that Grandmother Attlee had been able, years ago, to buy the little house at Montclair, with a patch of garden behind it, where, all through the Depression, she had held out, thanks to fortunate investments made on the advice of Mrs Clingsland's great friend, the banker.

‘She had so many friends, and they were all high-up people, you understand. Many's the time she'd say to me: “Cora” (think of the loveliness of her calling me Cora), “Cora, I'm going to buy some Golden Flyer shares on Mr Stoner's advice; Mr Stoner of the National Union Bank, you know. He's getting me in on the ground floor, as they say, and if you want to step in with me, why come along. There's nothing too good for you, in my opinion,” she used to say. And, as it turned out, those shares have kept their head above water all through the bad years, and now I think they'll see me through, and be there when I'm gone, to help out you children.'

Today Moyra Attlee heard the revered name with a new interest. The phrase: ‘The wrong I did to Mrs Clingsland,' had struck through her listlessness, rousing her to sudden curiosity. What could her grandmother mean by saying she had done a wrong to the benefactress whose bounties she was never tired of recording? Moyra believed her grandmother to be a very good woman – certainly she had been wonderfully generous in all her dealings with her children and grandchildren; and it seemed incredible that, if there had been one grave lapse in her life, it should have taken the form of an injury to Mrs Clingsland. True, whatever the lapse was, she seemed to have made peace with herself about it; yet it was clear that its being unconfessed lurked disquietingly in the back of her mind.

‘How can you say you ever did harm to a friend like Mrs Clingsland, Gran?'

Mrs Attlee's eyes grew sharp behind her spectacles, and she fixed them half distrustfully on the girl's face. But in a moment she seemed to recover herself. ‘Not harm, I don't say; I'll never think I harmed her. Bless you, it wasn't to harm her I'd ever have lifted a finger. All I wanted was to help. But when you try to help too many people at once, the devil sometimes takes note of it. You see, there's quotas nowadays for everything, doing good included, my darling.'

Moyra made an impatient movement. She did not care to hear her grandmother philosophize. ‘Well – but you said you did a wrong to Mrs Clingsland.'

Mrs Attlee's sharp eyes seemed to draw back behind a mist of age. She sat silent, her hands lying heavily over one another in their tragic uselessness.

‘What would
you
have done, I wonder,' she began suddenly, ‘if you'd ha' come in on her that morning, and seen her laying in her lovely great bed, with the lace a yard deep on the sheets, and her face buried in the pillows, so I knew she was crying? Would you have opened your bag same as usual, and got out your coconut cream and talcum powder, and the nail polishers, and all the rest of it, and waited there like a statue till she turned over to you; or'd you have gone up to her, and turned her softly round, like you would a baby, and said to her: “Now, my dear, I guess you can tell Cora Attlee what's the trouble”? Well, that's what I did, anyhow; and there she was, with her face streaming with tears, and looking like a martyred saint on an altar, and when I said to her: “Come, now, you tell me, and it'll help you”, she just sobbed out: “Nothing can ever help me, now I've lost it”'.

‘“Lost what?” I said, thinking first of her boy, the Lord help me, though I'd heard him whistling on the stairs as I went up; but she said: “My beauty, Cora – I saw it suddenly slipping out of the door from me this morning ...” Well, at that I had to laugh, and half angrily too. “Your beauty,” I said to her, “and is that all? And me that thought it was your husband, or your son – or your fortune even. If it's only your beauty, can't I give it back to you with these hands of mine? But what are you saying to me about beauty, with that seraph's face looking up at me this minute?” I said to her, for she angered me as if she'd been blaspheming.'

‘Well, was it true?' Moyra broke in, impatient and yet curious.

‘True that she'd lost her beauty?' Mrs Attlee paused to consider. ‘Do you know how it is, sometimes when you're doing a bit of fine darning sitting by the window in the afternoon; and one minute it's full daylight, and your needle seems to find the way of itself; and the next minute you say: “Is it my eyes?” because the work seems blurred; and presently you see it's the daylight going, stealing away, softlike, from your comer, though there's plenty left overhead. Well – it was the way with her ...'

But Moyra had never done fine darning, or strained her eyes in fading light, and she intervened again, more impatiently: ‘Well, what did she do?'

Mrs Attlee once more reflected. ‘Why, she made me tell her every morning that it wasn't true; and every morning she believed me a little less. And she asked everybody in the house, beginning with her husband, poor man – him so bewildered when you asked him anything outside of his business, or his club or his horses, and never noticing any difference in her looks since the day he'd led her home as his bride, twenty years before, maybe ...

‘But there – nothing he could have said, if he'd had the wit to say it, would have made any difference. From the day she saw the first little line around her eyes she thought of herself as an old woman, and the thought never left her for more than a few minutes at a time. Oh, when she was dressed up, and laughing, and receiving company, then I don't say the faith in her beauty wouldn't come back to her, and go to her head like champagne; but it wore off quicker than champagne, and I've seen her run upstairs with the foot of a girl, and then, before she'd tossed off her finery, sit down in a heap in front of one of her big looking-glasses – it was looking-glasses everywhere in her room – and stare and stare till the tears ran down over her powder.'

‘Oh, well, I suppose it's always hateful growing old,' said Moyra, her indifference returning.

Mrs Attlee smiled retrospectively. ‘How can I say that, when my own old age has been made so peaceful by all her goodness to me?'

Moyra stood up with a shrug. ‘And yet you tell me you acted wrong to her. How am I to know what you mean?'

Her grandmother made no answer. She closed her eyes, and leaned her head against the little cushion behind her neck. Her lips seemed to murmur, but no words came. Moyra reflected that she was probably falling asleep, and that when she woke she would not remember what she had been about to reveal.

‘It's not much fun sitting here all this time, if you can't even keep awake long enough to tell me what you mean about Mrs Clingsland,' she grumbled.

Mrs Attlee roused herself with a start.

III

Well (she began) you know what happened in the war – I mean, the way all the fine ladies, and the poor shabby ones too, took to running to the mediums and the clairvoyants, or whatever the stylish folk call 'em. The women had to have news of their men; and they were made to pay high enough for it ... Oh, the stories I used to hear – and the price paid wasn't only money, either! There was a fair lot of swindlers and blackmailers in the business there was. I'd sooner have trusted a gypsy at a fair ... but the women just
had
to go to them.

Well, my dear, I'd always had a way of seeing things; from the cradle, even. I don't mean reading the tea leaves, or dealing the cards; that's for the kitchen. No, no; I mean, feeling there's things about you, behind you, whispering over your shoulder Once my mother, on the Connemara hills, saw the leprechauns at dusk; and she said they smelt fine and high, too ... Well, when I used to go from one grand house to another, to give my massage and face treatment, I got more and more sorry for those poor wretches that the soothsaying swindlers were dragging the money out of for a pack of lies; and one day I couldn't stand it any longer, and though I knew the Church was against it, when I saw one lady nearly crazy, because for months she'd had no news of her boy at the front, I said to her: ‘If you'll come over to my place tomorrow, I might have a word for you.' And the wonder of it was that I
had!
For that night I dreamt a message came saying there was good news for her, and the next day, sure enough, she had a cable, telling her her son had escaped from a German camp ...

After that the ladies came in flocks – in flocks fairly ... you're too young to remember, child; but your mother could tell you. Only she wouldn't, because after a bit the priest got wind of it, and then it had to stop ... so she won't even talk of it any more. But I always said: how could I help it? For I
did
see things, and hear things, at that time ... And of course the ladies were supposed to come just for the face treatment ... and was I to blame if I kept hearing those messages for them, poor souls, or seeing things they wanted me to see?

It's no matter now, for I made it all straight with Father Divott years ago; and now nobody comes after me anymore, as you can see for yourself. And all I ask is to be left alone in my chair ...

But with Mrs Clingsland – well, that was different. To begin with, she was the patient I liked best. There was nothing she wouldn't do for you, if ever for a minute you could get her to stop thinking of herself ... and that's saying a good deal, for a rich lady. Money's an armour, you see; and there's few cracks in it. But Mrs Clingsland was a loving nature, if only anybody'd shown her how to love ... Oh, dear, and wouldn't she have been surprised if you'd told her that! Her that thought she was living up to her chin in love and love-making. But as soon as the lines began to come about her eyes, she didn't believe in it anymore. And she had to be always hunting for new people to tell her she was as beautiful as ever; because she wore the others out, forever asking them: ‘Don't you think I'm beginning to go off a little?' – till finally fewer and fewer came to the house, and as far as a poor masseuse like me can judge, I didn't much fancy the looks of those that did; and I saw Mr Clingsland didn't either.

But there was the children, you'll say. I know, I know! And she did love her children in a way; only it wasn't their way. The girl, who was a good bit the eldest, took after her father: a plain face and plain words. Dogs and horses and athletics. With her mother she was cold and scared; so her mother was cold and scared with her. The boy was delicate when he was little, so she could curl him up, and put him into black velvet pants, like that boy in the book – little Lord Something. But when his long legs grew out of the pants, and they sent him to school, she said he wasn't her own little cuddly baby anymore; and it riles a growing boy to hear himself talked about like that.

She had good friends left, of course; mostly elderly ladies they were, of her own age (for she
was
elderly now; the change had come), who used to drop in often for a gossip; but, bless your heart, they weren't much help, for what she wanted, and couldn't do without, was the gaze of men struck dumb by her beauty. And that was what she couldn't get any longer, except she paid for it. And even so –!

For, you see, she was too quick and clever to be humbugged long by the kind that tried to get things out of her. How she used to laugh at the old double-chinners trotting round to the nightclubs with their boy-friends! She laughed at old ladies in love; and yet she couldn't bear to be out of love, though she knew she was getting to be an old lady herself.

Well, I remember one day another patient of mine, who'd never had much looks beyond what you can buy in Fifth Avenue, laughing at me about Mrs Clingsland, about her dread of old age, and her craze for admiration – and as I listened, I suddenly thought: ‘Why, we don't either of us know anything about what a beautiful woman suffers when she loses her beauty. For you and me, and thousands like us, beginning to grow old is like going from a bright warm room to one a little less warm and bright; but to a beauty like Mrs Clingsland it's like being pushed out of an illuminated ballroom, all flowers and chandeliers, into the winter night and the snow.' And I had to bite the words back, not to say them to my patient ...