The Girl Who Passed for Normal (11 page)

She heard Mary Emerson’s car on the drive, and waited for a summons. She half expected to be called down by the woman, shouted at, and made to feel thin, for having been weak with Catherine. She waited on her bed, feeling like a young girl waiting for her mother to come and tell her,
piteously
and angrily, that the money she had spent on a skirt had been the money for the family’s food for a week.

She waited, but no summons came, and she began to relax. Perhaps Catherine had prepared something strange and
beautiful
, possibly some incredible cake, as a going-away present for her mother. Perhaps at this moment mother and daughter were sitting somewhere in the house, crying onto each other’s shoulders, apologizing to each other for the wasted years they had spent together—all those years they could have redeemed with love.

Still no call came, and still Barbara waited. This, she thought, was her last task as Catherine’s teacher; from
tomorrow
all would be different. Tomorrow, and the day after
tomorrow
, and every day after tomorrow, she would do the calling. This was her last wait. Even if David came back she would not wait for him; he could come to her, or not come at all; he would have to come to her, in her house, with her child.

She wondered whether David would be living at the address Mary Emerson would tell her to send the trunks to,
but she thought not. She wondered where, in the world, David was, and wished he could be with her now, in her time of triumph.

At seven-thirty Catherine called her. Her voice came faintly through the house.

Barbara went out of her room, down three steps, along the corridor, past the second guestroom, which from tomorrow would be the only guestroom, past the bathroom, past Catherine’s bedroom, past the box room and the room where Iva did her ironing and mending, past the steps that led up to Iva’s bedroom, onto the landing. She stood for a second and listened, and then called down the stairs, “Catherine, where are you?”

Catherine’s voice, suddenly quite loud, called back, “Here, in mother’s bedroom.”

Barbara crossed over the landing and knocked on the door. As she went into the room she saw, on the far side of the bed, the boxes and plastic bags from the supermarket. Then, as she got closer, she saw, all over the floor, egg cartons. Hundreds and hundreds of egg cartons. Suddenly she felt frightened. The house was very quiet.

Catherine called from Mary Emerson’s bathroom, “I’m in here.”

Barbara walked slowly over to the bathroom. Catherine was sitting on a stool, smiling. All around her, all over the floor, there were eggshells. Hundreds and thousands of eggshells. And in the pink bath, in a brown wool dress, was Mary Emerson, lying face down under a transparent slime full of yellow and with traces of red; Mary Emerson lying face down in a bath half full of eggs. Mary Emerson, dead.

Barbara looked from the bath, to the floor, to Catherine;
she thought she should faint, but couldn’t. She couldn’t think what to do, what to say. She just stared, and shook her head. Finally, because she had to say something and it didn’t really matter what, she said, “Catherine, what have you done?” Her voice was tiny, and she heard that the question was ridiculous, because it was quite obvious what Catherine had done.

“What have you done?” she repeated. She took a step nearer the bath and heard eggshells cracking under her feet. Mary Emerson’s hair was supported, rather than floating, in the slime. There were wisps of what looked like blood around her head. Some of the egg yolks were intact, and some were broken, and there were eggshells in the bath. Then she did begin to feel faint; she became conscious of her body, of where she was, of what had happened. She tried to tell herself that she was hypnotized by the horror. But she wasn’t. She was hypnotized merely by the fact of Mary Emerson lying dead in her bath, drowned in eggs. The fact repeated itself to her. Mary Emerson had been drowned in eggs. She swayed forward toward the bath and vomited, and her vomit lay on the surface of the slime, over Mary Emerson’s stockinged feet. She stepped back, and wiped her mouth with her hand. She stepped back, trying to get out of sight of the contents of the bath.

Catherine was looking at her with faint distaste, as if her vomiting had ruined a carefully planned scene. Then she shook her head and smiled weakly. “She didn’t deserve to go away. It wouldn’t have been fair.”

Barbara shook her head.

“What shall we do with her?” Catherine said.

“What do you mean?” Barbara whispered.

“What shall we do with her? We can’t leave her here, can we?”

“Well, we must —” She didn’t know. What did one do? Call the police, she supposed. She looked at Catherine. She seemed so normal, sitting there. But she was quite mad. She would be locked up somewhere, Barbara thought, and never let out again. So her mother and Marcello had been right to warn her against the girl. But none of that mattered now. This was the end of Catherine. This was her end, lying in the bath. Her beginning and her end.

Barbara shook her head. There was a body in the bath. Half an hour ago, an hour ago, Mary Emerson had been alive and planning her new life. Now Mary Emerson didn’t exist, and there was a body in the bath that had drowned in eggs.

“What did you do?” Barbara said. “Did you hold her down?”

Catherine shook her head. “When she came in I hit her very hard on the head.”

“What with?”

“A piece of wood I found outside. Then I pulled her up here and when she started to move I pushed her in here.” She pointed at the bath.

Barbara stared at the body, and asked softly, almost
tenderly
, “Did she make a noise? Did she struggle at all?”

Catherine nodded, and Barbara imagined going under the slime of a thousand eggs, imagined her mouth, her eyes, her nose, full of eggs. She imagined choking, suffocating in them, the thick slime, and that smell, and those round yellow yolks, being forced down her windpipe…

She swung around to Catherine and said, though it came out almost as a shout, “How did you do it?” The girl was pale, and weak. “How did you pull her upstairs? How long—”
her voice dropped — “did it take to put all those eggs in?”

Catherine shrugged, and said, “Oh, I don’t know. Not long. But what are we going to do with her?”

Barbara shook her head. She felt that she wanted to laugh. She was suddenly very interested to know exactly how the girl had done it.

“How did you pull her upstairs?”

“I pulled.”

Barbara smiled. It wasn’t real. “But she must have been so heavy. What would you have done if I’d come out of my room and —”

Catherine smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t.”

“How did you know?”

Catherine lowered her head. “Because you knew what I was doing.”

“I did!” It was no longer even remotely funny. The girl was mad. She had murdered her mother. It was real.

“Yes.” Catherine nodded.

“Catherine, I went to my room because you said you had a Christmas present —”

Catherine smiled. “That’s my Christmas present.” She glanced toward the bath. Then she said sulkily, “But you knew what you were getting.”

“No,” Barbara whispered. “No. You know I had no idea of — this.” She thought of the boys in the supermarkets, of Catherine flushed and trembling, of the glimpse she had caught of the egg cartons in the plastic bag on the driveway.

Catherine suddenly ran past her, out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, and down the stairs. Barbara stayed there, staring at the facts. It came to her standing there in
the eggshells, that this was her end. Her future had vanished. She would have a month of questions, of inquests and
investigations
—and then she would have nothing. She had thought that she had to save Catherine to save herself. Well, Catherine was lost now, and so was she. Finally the full horror of it hit her, and she swayed into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.

Catherine returned dragging the branch of a tree, about four feet long, and thick. She said, “I hit her with this.”

Barbara shook her head. It didn’t matter anymore.

“I hit her when she got out of the car. It was dark. I don’t thin she saw me.”

The girl was mad. “Why did you do it?” Barbara said. “How long have you been planning this?”

“Oh, a long time. I knew you’d help me.” Catherine sat down on the bed beside her.

The girl was mad. She’d thought that if she made up enough stories — David going to America, David sleeping with her mother, David being killed and buried in the wilderness,
Barbara
would help her. She had thought to turn Barbara against her mother, and get her to help her kill the woman; and, Barbara realized, she had been turned against the woman. She had, or at least part of her had, believed Catherine. But if she hadn’t believed Catherine, who should she have believed? Marcello? She had had to believe someone, for David had disappeared. Perhaps, by believing her, she had helped her.

“Catherine,” she said, “I have not helped you and I won’t help you now. You’ve done a horrible, wicked thing, and now you must be punished for it. You can’t—” she shrugged
her shoulders. It didn’t matter. She had failed to save herself.

Catherine started to cry, and Barbara put her arm around her. She looked around the room at the empty closets, at the trunks, standing ready to be sent away, at the two small
suitcases
Mary Emerson had been going to take with her on the plane.

Catherine cried, and the house was quiet. Now, more than the horror, the sadness of it all struck Barbara. It was all such a waste. All that possibility of flight, of salvation, of freedom; all lost. They had been so full, so ready for a new life. Mary was to have been released, like a huge bird, and her flight was to have been a sign for them all. But now Catherine had killed the bird, and there was no more possibility of anything. It was all such a waste, and so sad.

Through her tears Catherine said, “You must have helped me.”

Dully, Barbara said, “Catherine, I must go and call the police now.”

Catherine trembled beside her. “No, please. Please.” She clung to Barbara.

“I must, my love. You know I must.”

Catherine clung to her, shaking, and Barbara felt the girl’s tears soaking through her blouse. They sat like that for two or three minutes, until Barbara slowly started to ease herself from the girl’s grasp. She had to call the police. She had to get this last chapter over. Catherine would have all the time in the world to cry. It didn’t matter. The world had come to an end.

“If you call the police I’ll tell them you helped me.”

A part of Barbara reacted. “That would be silly.”

“I will. They’ll ask the taxi driver, and he’ll say we went shopping together.”

“He’ll also say I sat in the taxi all the time you were shopping so I didn’t know what you were buying.”

“I’ll tell them you made me do the shopping. I’ll tell them you made me and pretended you didn’t know what I was getting. They’ll believe me. They won’t believe you. Iva will tell them I never went shopping on my own.”

“Catherine,” Barbara said, “You’re being very wicked now.”

Catherine shook her head, her tears coming faster, her face red; when she spoke she sounded hysterical. “No. No. You knew I was going to do it. You helped me. You wanted me to do it. And I did it because I love you. You did help me, you did.”

Barbara stared at the empty closets. She stared at the empty egg cartons, the plastic bags, and the cardboard boxes. She stared at the white fur bed cover, at the brown wall-to-wall carpet, at the brown-and-yellow silk curtains. She looked at the white empty closets and the beige egg cartons; and then at the pale fair girl sitting on the bed.

“They’ll know I didn’t do it alone,” Catherine said. “They’ll know I couldn’t have planned it all on my own. They’ll know I couldn’t have pulled mother upstairs on my own.” She added, “She was terribly heavy.”

Barbara went to the window. It was dark out, but she knew that below her was a rock garden, and beyond that the
wilderness
. She closed her eyes and thought of Howard, of the green Oxfordshire countryside in the summer. She thought of her mother sitting at home eating ginger biscuits and drinking
tea and watching the television. She wondered what was on the television now. She thought of David, and wondered what time it was in America, but it depended where he was in America, on the East or West Coast. Still it would be day there, wherever it was, and people would be out in the streets, and could see each other. Even two miles away, in the center of Rome, though it was dark, people would be rushing about; the shops would be closing, but there would be lights and brightness and movement, and the rushing people would be carrying presents. She thought of the present Catherine had given her.

She turned from the window; she wanted a cigarette. She walked quickly to the door of the bedroom, without looking at Catherine. She ran along the corridor to her room. She lit a cigarette, and lay down on her bed. She was alone. She was alone in her room in a villa on the Appia Antica, and in a bedroom down the corridor there was a mad girl sitting alone. And soon the police would come, and she, Barbara, would explain, like an efficient secretary, what had happened.

She would explain away everything, until there was nothing left, just as she had done when she had learned that Howard was dying. She had cried at first, of course, but the tears hadn’t removed the tumor, so she had stopped crying and explained to herself what was happening. That had made things a little easier to bear, so she had sat by Howard’s bed and explained the whole world, including Howard and his tumor, away. She had explained to herself that nothing, really, meant anything, and she had emphasized the “really.” She had explained and explained; had desperately tried to keep afloat by explaining to herself that she, too, would sink and
drown eventually. She had explained and explained; and she had survived, and Howard had died.

She lay on her bed and smoked her cigarette and told herself that nothing,
really,
meant anything. She would survive. Even though the world had ended, she could always get another job. Perfect secretaries were always in demand. She was safe, even if she hadn’t quite made salvation this time.