Spirit Read Free Page A

over.
    Elizabeth was crying, too. She struggled her way back through the snow, shivering and cold and shocked, her face a blur of tears. By the time she reached the house, father had already wrapped Peggy in blankets and laid her on the back of the station-wagon. Exhaust smoke filled the driveway, tinged hellishly red from the rear lights. Elizabeth’s mommy came out of the front door, her face like a mask of somebody else pretending to be Elizabeth’s mommy.
    â€˜Darling . . . we have to take Peggy to the hospital . . . Mrs Patrick is coming over to take care of you. We’ll call you later.’
    Then they were gone. Elizabeth stood for a while in the driveway, watching the snow fill in their tyre tracks. Then she went back into the house, which was warm and suddenly quiet, and smelled of baking. She closed the front door and went to the cloakroom to take off her boots and her socks and her sodden coat.
    Laura appeared, her cheeks watermarked with tears. ‘Peggy’s dead!’ she gasped. ‘I said drat her, and she’s dead!’
    The two sisters sat on the stairs, side by side, and cried until it hurt. They were still crying when the front door opened and Mrs Patrick arrived from Green Pond Farm. Mrs Patrick was their nearest neighbour, and she had known the girls since they were born. She was big and Irish, with a fiery complexion and fiery hair, and a nose like an old-fashioned hooter. She took off her coat, and then she gathered the girls up into her arms and shushed them and shushed them, until at last they were aware that her thick green home-knitted cardigan smelled of mothballs and that her brooch was scratching their faces. Much later, Elizabeth was to write in her diary that the consciousness of ordinary irritations is the first step towards coping with grief, and when she wrote that, she was thinking specifically of Mrs Patrick’s cardigan, and Mrs Patrick’s brooch.
    When the girls were in bed that night, the telephone rang. They crept in their nightgowns out on to the galleried landing, and listened to Mrs Patrick in the hallway. The house was much chillier now: the fires had died down and their father hadn’t been there to stoke them. Somewhere, a door was persistently banging.
    They heard Mrs Patrick saying, ‘I’m sorry, Margaret; I’m really so very sorry.’
    They looked at each other, their eyes liquid, although they didn’t cry. It was then that they knew for certain that Peggy had left them for ever; that Peggy was an angel; and strangely, they felt lonely, because now they would have to live their lives on their own.

 
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Two
    The following Thursday morning their mommy took them to Macy’s in White Plains. The sky was brown with impending snow and Mamaroneck Avenue was brown with slush. Snow-covered automobiles crept this way and that, soft and sinister, like travelling igloos. Their mommy bought them black coats and black hats and charcoal-grey dresses with black braid trimmings. The store was overheated and while she was trying on her coat, Elizabeth felt as if she were going to suffocate. But somehow, the sombre ritual of buying mourning clothes was the first normal and understandable thing that had happened in a nightmarish week, and when they left the store with their packages Elizabeth felt very much better, as if a fever had passed.
    Every day since Peggy’s drowning had been different, frightening and off-balance. On Saturday and Sunday, nobody had spoken. On Monday evening mommy had silently hugged them and rocked them backwards and forwards and stroked their hair, feeling just like mommy, looking just like mommy. But then she had abruptly dropped them off her lap, and left the nursery without turning back, and noisily locked herself in her bedroom. A few moments of silence had passed while they stared at each other in perplexity. Then they heard her cry out like a wild mink caught in a gin-trap.
    The sound of their