“Just coming in to say good night, pets. Everyone will be leaving soon, so try to get some sleep.”
“Yeah, we will.” Maureen answers first with a commanding air, which belies her desperation, and resumes comic-flicking.
“We promise, Dad.” Elsa smiles at her father.
George remains straight-faced, as though he is wondering about how he should be saying good night to the children. All through Katherine’s illness and hospitalization, it had, ironically, been simpler. They had had a purpose. They had prayed for her every single night before going to bed, prayed for her to get better and for her to come home. And George had, of course, told them that their prayers would mean something. What else could he have said? But now what was there to pray for? So, before he closes the door of their bedroom, he says quietly, “And in your prayers tonight, ask God for good weather for the funeral on Monday.” His face is stings red from the pathetic realization of the words he has just heard himself say.
“Okay, we will.”
George leaves.
Maureen turns to Elsa. “You can’t wear my navy hairband to the funeral.”
“Oh, okay, then.”
Monday morning, the morning of the funeral, and from the front window Elsa sees Isabel coming up her driveway. Isabel is dressed in her school uniform. She looks plain. Her hair is tied back in a low ponytail. She walks as though she is counting her steps, her head bowed, her pace regular and deliberate. She is holding something in her hand. A few moments later and Isabel knocks on the front door. Elsa opens it. At first, nothing is said. Isabel is looking down at the front step and is beginning to tap one of her shoes against the other one. Elsa is looking above Isabel’s head, as though she has noticed something of great interest in the far distance. Isabel begins to chew on her bottom lip.
“I brought you some chocolates.”
The box of chocolates is not wrapped, so Elsa can see that they are chocolate-orange matchsticks, which she likes.
“Thank you” says Elsa politely.
“And a card.” Isabel indicates for Elsa to turn the box over. Elsa turns it and sees a white envelope taped to the base of the box.
“I didn’t draw it or anything, I bought it,” Isabel continues quietly. “The card’s for everybody, but you can have the chocolates.”
“Thanks.” Elsa gives the box of chocolates a little shake. There is a soft rattle. “You can come in if you want to.” Elsa now looks at Isabel.
“Can’t,” Isabel replies. “Got a note from school on Friday. There’s nits goin’ around. Mummy said just in case.”
“All right.”
“Did ye see Dana won the Eurovision song contest? Did ye watch it on the telly Saturday night?” Isabel sways back and forth on the step.
“No. We had people over.”
Isabel stands for a moment. “I’m sorry about your mum.” “Thank you,” Elsa says politely.
“When are you going to the church?”
“Not for another hour and a half. Are you going to school?”
“Yeah, soon.”
“See ye.”
“See ye.”
Then Isabel trots down the front steps of Elsa’s house, and when she reaches the gate she attempts a smile and a casual wave back to Elsa. Elsa closes the door. She moves into the kitchen, where Nanny Anna is tidying up. Elsa puts the box of chocolates on the table and begins to help her grandmother.
“That was Isabel.”
“Yes, and she brought you something nice.” Nanny Anna nods at the chocolates. “That was very good of her, wasn’t it?” Nanny Anna turns to Elsa and gives her a hug.
“Yes,” Elsa says simply, and goes over to Stephen, who is sitting on the floor. He holds a biscuit in one hand, a slice of apple in the other. He has no agenda, no plan for the day. He is nodding his head in his own time to a tune on the radio. When he talks now, he sounds polite, precise. “Go, go, go,” he is saying. He is looking at the apple in his hand. “Go, go, go!” Since Christmas, his hair has grown into long, soft, dark curls. One of them falls down onto his forehead. He is a child always eager to be happy. “Look, Nana,” he says proudly, “look!” He shows Nanny Anna the apple slice from which he has taken a bite.
“You’re a great fella!” says Nanny Anna, watching him. “Now darlings, we’d better get ourselves organized and get ready. I’ll check how Maureen and Elizabeth are getting on upstairs.”
There is a knock at the door again.
“More flowers!” Nanny Anna adjusts her pinafore and goes to answer the door. Elsa follows her and stands at the doorway of the kitchen, looking down the hall. When Nanny Anna opens the door, there is a man, perhaps in his early fifties, of medium height, and wearing glasses, standing before her holding a piece of paper in his hand. His hair, graying at the temples, is brushed neatly back from his forehead. It is as though Nanny Anna has startled him slightly on opening the door, perhaps a little too quickly, as his lips are curled in anticipation of what he has to say. Although he appears grave, his face breaks into a broad smile.
“Have I got the right house?” he says.
Nanny Anna looks at him and replies simply, “I don’t know.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m looking for Mrs. Fallon, Katherine Fallon. I’m an old friend of hers. She’s Bedford now, of course,” he adds correcting himself quickly. “I know she lives on this street. I’m sure I have the right house.”
Nanny Anna cannot believe how awful the man’s timing is. So fresh in her own grief, she does not know what to say. After a moment, she asks the man to step inside the house.
Elsa watches Nanny Anna and the stranger standing in the hallway. She looks at the two of them silhouetted against the glass of the front door. She cannot make out what they are saying to each other, as they are speaking in such low tones. The man had appeared animated at first, but now his movements are smaller and slower. Elsa now sees the man lower his head and put his hands up to his face. Nanny Anna is still talking. Elsa sees the man’s shoulders shaking and then she hears a strange high bubble of sound. The man is crying. She has never seen a man cry before. She wonders who he is. Nanny Anna has placed one hand over her mouth. Elsa moves a little closer to Nanny Anna and the stranger.
“I am so sorry,” the man says to Nanny Anna between sobs “Oh, I am so, so sorry.” He takes out a handkerchief from his pocket and, lifting up his spectacles, wipes his face roughly and then blows his nose. He makes a sound like a cow anxious to be milked.
“And now that I look around me . . . what with the flowers and all . . . and the blinds are half-pulled . . . but I didn’t . . . I . . .” Here he sucks at the air sharply. “I only came with some details about mutual friends of ours . . . When I met her last, only four, five months ago. My name is Charlie Copeland.” He is shaking his head in disbelief. “I have names and addresses here. I thought she might like to know.” Charlie Copeland raises the envelope that he has been holding in the air and then lets his arm fall like a hammer. “And I brought her a calendar, too.” With this he gasps a little at the inanity of his gift, “I make . . . calendars you see . . . but it’s of no consequence . . . no consequence.” His voice trails off into nothing.
Charlie Copeland stands like a man at the edge of a cliff, looking downward, slightly stooped, shaking his head at what he sees washed up on the rocks below him. He cannot believe that Katherine is dead. He cannot take it in. He does not know what to do with the envelope and the calendar in his hand. They are an embarrassment to him now. His hand is shaking. He does not know whether it is more inconsiderate to take them with him or to leave them behind. Either way, it now feels pathetic. Charlie Copeland awkwardly places the envelope and the calendar on the hall table.
“Ach, my God, my God” is all he can say.
Nanny Anna and Charlie Copeland stand quietly together in the hall for some moments. Nanny Anna then offers him a cup of tea. Charlie Copeland takes Nanny Anna’s hand and squeezes it, shaking his head as a “No, thank you.” Charlie Copela
nd then quietly says good-bye and moves slowly through the front door.
Elsa runs to the door to watch Charlie Copeland walk down her driveway. She remembers now that he is the man they saw at the pantomime, the man who played the wicked old woman. Charlie is lifting his spectacles and rubbing his face with his handkerchief again. He wears a bright canary yellow jacket with broad orange stripes, and parrot green trousers. But then, his is a surprise grief.
As she comes back through the hallway, Elsa sees Charlie Copeland’s envelope and calendar lying on the table. She lifts the envelope and, seeing that it hasn’t been sealed, opens it. Inside there is a letter and a newspaper clipping. The letter, written in an irregular hand, begins, “My dear Katherine. So wonderful to see you again. You haven’t changed a bit. I hope you don’t mind my saying, but I always had a soft spot for you.” At the bottom of the letter, there is a list of names and addresses: “Hugh Drummond, Rosemary Wylie, James McCauley.” The letter ends with an invitation to a reunion at the Grand Central Hotel in Royal Avenue at the end of March. She sees that Charlie has signed the letter with what looks like a small heart above the i in his first name. She opens the newspaper clipping that accompanies the letter. The headline reads A CAPTIVATING CARMEN. Underneath the headline is a photograph of a group of people in costumes, in the center of which stands a woman wearing a dress that spreads out so elaborately around her that it looks as though it goes on forever. And under the photograph it reads “The Rutherford Musical & Dramatic Society present a tale of passion and despair in this tragic, romantic melodrama. Carmen, a young woman not careful with her love. . . .” Elsa is immediately drawn back to the photograph again and realizes that the woman in the center is her mother. Her mother links the arm of the man beside her as though they are married. She has a haughty look about her, as though she owns a secret. Her hair is pinned up. Her head is held at a defiant tilt.
Nanny Anna calls Elsa from the kitchen. A sandwich and a glass of milk are ready for her. Elsa stuffs the newspaper clipping and letter back into the envelope and places it back onto the hall table. As she turns from the table, she notices that Charlie Copeland has marked “Reunion at the Grand Central Hotel. See you there, Carmen!” in tiny handwriting on the calendar.
The coffin had been slow to move out of the house. And people had hovered around it silently, so silently. And all the people dressed in black had looked like little figurines, all moving together, as though stuck to one another. Elsa watches the black bits of people now through the back window of the black car. The black car follows the hearse. The people follow the black car. Inside the black car, the smell of the new leather seats intensifies as the car heater is switched on. Elsa sits in the backseat of the car beside Maureen and Elizabeth. Nanny Anna sits in the seat in front of them with Stephen on her lap. Their father walks with the people behind the black car. Elsa has never seen him look as sad as this. Tears are rolling down his face and dissolving him, spilling themselves upon his skin and burning him. After never having seen a man crying before, now she has seen two in one day.
Everyone in the car is quiet, even Stephen. He is unaccustomed to his new look. His hair has been brushed and tidied and he wears a little navy jacket and a pair of navy trousers. Elsa thinks he looks sweet and a little bit funny. He keeps kicking his shoes off. They are a too big for him and he doesn’t like them.
“Now, darling,” Nanny Anna says reaching for his shoe on the floor of the car, “you’ve got to keep your shoes on.”
“Here, Nanny” Elsa leans over the seat to get Stephen’s shoe. “I’ll put it on him.” She tickles Stephen’s toes before she slips his shoe back on. “Your toes’ll get cold, silly.”
Stephen gives Elsa a big smile. He starts to laugh. “Put shoe on,” he says, and jiggles his legs up and down.
Elsa leans farther toward Stephen and pushes her face close to his. “You look like a little monkey in that suit.”
“Elsa, stop that,” Nanny Anna says gently.
“Monkee!” Stephen laughs. Then he says, “Li-li looks like a monkee!” and he points at Elizabeth.
“I don’t look like a monkey. That’s a rotten thing to say,” Elizabeth says dolefully.
“He’s only joking,” says Elsa in his defense. Then, feeling the need to humor Elizabeth a little, Elsa says to her “Would you like to play ‘blue car, brown car’?”
Now Maureen starts to cry. She draws her long hair over her face so that no one can see.
Elsa sits back into her seat. She looks out of the car, squeezing her nose against the glass. From where the car is now, on the steepest part of their road, she can see the city spreading out below her. It reminds her of the burning bus, of the two alphabets she needs coming home from school, of the angry man with the stick in his hand and the look of vengeance on his face. As the car turns around the bottom of the street, Mr. McGovern’s shop stands empty and black. Someone has painted a new slogan on the side wall of the shop above the words TAIGS OUT. The new slogan is painted in big white letters and it says The Past Is Not Quite Past. Elsa wonders what it means. Then she puts her hand up against the window and blots it out. Now she can no longer see it.
With her hand against the glass, Elsa turns to look at the hearse in front of her. The woman in the coffin did not look like her mother, she thinks. That woman was just a little gray bird. The woman in the photograph that Charlie Copeland left on the hall table did not look like her mother, either. But her eyes were bright and her lips were pretty. She was dangerous and lovely at the same time, Elsa thinks. So which is she? And where is she? Where is her mother now?
Elsa looks up at the sky. There is a flat fluorescent light upon the day. Gently, a thin curl of sunlight slips through the pearly gray clouds above, as though someone is gingerly pulling back a curtain in the sky, and soon sunlight falls on the cortege. Elsa drops her hand from the car window and rests her head against it. The sunlight widens and intensifies as the clouds continue to separate. Elsa feels the sun on her face like a warm caress. She sees her reflection in the car window. Where the sun falls on her face, it looks as though there is a light coming from her mouth and she feels her breath like a light rising up inside her. She hopes that calling her mother a bitch at the blackberry bushes didn’t make her sick or make her die. She feels the hot air blowing from the car heater and warming her ankles. She thinks for a moment. She knows what she will do to find her mother. She knows what she will do. She closes her eyes. This is her plan. She imagines herself at her bedroom window, the headlights of the cars in the distance dripping like raindrops into a black pool, and she sees herself walking quietly through the door, leaving Maureen and Elizabeth still asleep. There is no light on the landing. Her father has switched it off on his way to bed. She moves past the bedroom where her father and Stephen are sleeping, down the stairs, and through to the kitchen end of the back room, where she feels the cool linoleum under her bare feet. She is wearing the white nightdress handed down from Maureen with the tiny blue m embroidered on the cuff. Her hand reaches up to pull back the curtains of burned honey revealing a key hanging on a little hook. She lifts the key off the hook and inserts it into the lock of the back door. It turns easily and she leaves the house.
Outside, a thin drizzle has just begun to fall and she can feel the fine needlepoint droplets delicately cool against the skin on her hands and feet. The air smells only of rain, all other scents suppressed. The night is calm and cold and the moon obscured by clouds. Elsa sees herself walking down her driveway and through the front gates, turning upward to the top of her road. Nicotiana, honeysuckle, night-scented stock runs like a song through her head.
She joins the main road and walks along it, past the power station, past the blindman’s house, until she comes to the blackberry bushes. There she steps into their midst. There is not a sound, not a person. All dark and all shades of dark. A mysterious world of no color through which she moves.
Now it is the feel of earth beneath her feet, and now, faintly, she can
hear the tiny trickling of the little river. Light falls from the nearby streetlamp on the main road. It is her electric moon. She winds her way through the bushes, along the little pathways, and crosses the river by the stepping-stones, three rounded boulders, each one a lover’s stone chapter, one—two—three. On the other side of the river, the ground opens out into a grassy meadow where the flowers grow. These are the plants that attract butterflies by day and moths by night. Where children run breathless with nets on the ends of long bamboo canes to catch the butterflies and moths on balmy summer afternoons and in the summer evening dusk.
She sees herself walking through the grass, the hem of her nightdress skimming the wet blades as she goes. She finds a spot where the ground dips. She lies down on her back and spreads her arms and legs out on the earth.
The earth feels silver under her body, as though it is smooth, curved metal she is lying on and not the earth. She is nestled in the slight hollow in the ground, her throat exposed to the tilt of the dark above her. She hears the gentle glip of the night water from the river. Her long white cotton nightdress is now spread out as wide as a tent. Like a great white skin. I will be irresistible to them, she is thinking. She looks up at the night sky and everywhere there is cloud. Everywhere there are dense indefinable purple-gray folds and curves, whether moving or not moving, she is not sure. I will be irresistible to the ghost moths, she thinks, in my white nightdress among the night-scented stock, among the honeysuckle, among the nicotiana, nestled in the hollow.
All she has to do is wait. Wait even until she will perhaps wake up in the gray-lime dawn. She will wait and she will lure the hovering moths and trap them and take them home. The souls of the dead. Wait, wait, they will come!
She lies in the grass amid its inky black blades and, guided by her electric moon, looks up at the night sky, which is not there. She is a child trap for the ghost mother and she is cradled in this small hollow of the world. She will lure her and trap her and take her home. Wait, wait, she will come, she will come!
Ghost Moth Page 24
