Incarnate (24 page)

He stared at what he’d done and felt empty and meaningless and spied upon. He didn’t have to turn to know his enemies were watching him. They were watching to make him feel meaningless, but if he were so meaningless, why were they bothering to watch? They hadn’t thought of that, he was too clever for them. He cleaned the tiles with toilet paper, then he ran the hot tap in the sink until it was steaming and held his disgusting penis under it for as Jong as he could, even when he screamed. They were making him do that to himself, Dr. Cunt and Molly Wolfe. Let them send their spies to watch and report back, let their spies say they’d heard him screaming. It would be nothing compared to the way he was going to make Molly Wolfe and the other cunt scream.

21

W
HEN
Freda had finished stuffing the turkey, she went into the parlor to see if Doreen was ready to walk to midnight Mass. The parlor, with its gas fire hissing orange, was hotter than the kitchen; the flowers on the corner table were already wilting. Doreen was watching snowflakes vanish from the window almost before they touched it. “You’ve never finished already,” she cried, letting the floor-length curtains fall together. “You’re a wonder, Freddy. Maybe someday you’ll be able to teach me how to cook.”

That seemed unlikely, when Harry hadn’t been able to. Perhaps that occurred to her, for she started bustling about, flicking a feather duster at her wedding photograph on the mantelpiece, pulling at the antimacassars. Freda watched her friend, this small slight woman who didn’t come up to her shoulder and who oughtn’t to look so frail—Doreen unbuttoning the cardigan of her twin-set and buttoning it again as she tidied the room. She had so much energy, but it didn’t seem to be achieving much.

“That’ll have to do for now.” Doreen lingered to prop up a card on the sideboard, next to a pile of Harry’s
National Geographies.
“Did you see that poor old Mrs. Vosper sent a card? At least this Christmas we won’t have to pretend we can’t see how she’s doing her magic tricks.”

“I remember.” Mrs. Vosper had been staying here the year Freda had taken refuge. “You can see how happy she was from what she wrote.”

“They all wrote things like that. Look, Mr. Calvert says he hopes he’ll be back soon. You can’t blame them for leaving before the weather got too bad and they couldn’t get home to their children.”

“Of course not,” Freda said, knowing that they’d stayed as long as they could to prevent her pining for Harry, that they’d left once they knew her best friend Freddy was coming, left because they couldn’t stomach her cooking or her fussing, though fussing helped her not to think. Freda couldn’t tell her all that, not on Christmas Eve. “I’ll just get my coat,” she said.

“I’ll come up with you, shall I?”

“Yes. do.”

The women’s footsteps made the house sound like a bare room, though the stair carpet was thick. Freda was glad when they reached the top floor.

She really didn’t need to be using this room now, with an empty floor between her and Doreen’s ground-floor quarters. It was the room Doreen gave to her transient guests, though she’d told Freda to stay as long as she could. Of course she wanted to believe that her former tenants would come back someday—as Harry never would. All the rooms were the same: a gas fire and a patchwork quilt Doreen had sewn, a fitted wardrobe that almost did, and a crucifix on the wall, though one resident, Freda remembered, had put hers out in the hall propped up like a boot for cleaning. Freda could only hope religion proved to be what Doreen needed, since Spiritualism seemed to have failed.

She stooped to pin her hat in front of the dressing-table mirror, which swung back to reflect the sky or the heavy curtains when it wasn’t propped. “Did you sleep well last night?” Doreen said.

“Marvelously.” Doreen wasn’t pleading, not even with her eyes, but her hope was so intense that Freda found it hard to breathe. “I can’t remember a thing between going to bed and waking up this morning.”

“I thought when I saw you you needed a rest.”

“I’ve been sleeping much better lately.” The mirror swung up, losing their faces. She couldn’t lie again, she had already told Doreen she’d dreamed of Harry, that he was happy and waiting patiently for her, that seeing her lead a full life would make him even happier, and Doreen had smiled and said, “Oh, I am glad,” so gratefully that it had been a while before Freda realized Doreen had been humoring her, knowing Freda had been lying for her sake. Didn’t she realize that if Freda dreamed, the message would be just as banal? Freda would have told her about Sage except that then Doreen would want to go to Blackpool, when Sage would already have moved on. “We’d better go down,” Freda said.

They were on the middle landing when Doreen took hold of her arm. “You mustn’t let me trade on our friendship.”

“Doreen, you could never do that after all you’ve done for me.”

“But that’s what I
mean.”
She stamped her foot at failing to make herself clear. “You mustn’t feel you have to repay me. I’ve got you cleaning the rooms and cooking dinner. I’ll be having you running my bath and polishing my shoes next. You mustn’t let me use you, Freddy. Just your company is enough for me.”

“I’d get bored if I sat around doing nothing.”

“I should think you must be bored anyway, you poor love. Using up your leave, and it can’t be much of a holiday for you. I’ll pull myself together. I won’t have you thinking you can’t leave me.” She punched Freda’s arm so hard that it hurt. “I’ll have Mr. Calvert back soon, you see if I don’t. One thing I can’t stand is an empty house. I’m perfectly capable of cleaning all the rooms and I’ll have to employ a cook, that’s all. I just have to feel right about it first. You understand.”

Of course Freda did. She was doing everything for Doreen she could think of except what Doreen wanted most and could never ask for. When they went into Doreen’s quarters she felt useless. In the tiny bathroom she could see Harry’s shaving kit, pale with talcum powder, and she almost stumbled over his favorite chair, its right arm worn down by the way he always propped his chin when he played chess with Doreen. She remembered his soft Cornish voice saying, ”Off to bed, m’dear? If I get tired of this one I’ll come knocking.” Doreen had flung a captured rook at him in mock anger, but she’d left them alone on Timothy’s anniversary, Timothy ablaze and writhing in the German sky. They had gone dancing, and there in the midst of the smoky light and the couples turning in the waves of music, he’d told her that if he hadn’t met Doreen first he would have hoped to meet her. His cuckoo clock gave a tentative whir as if the bird were impatient for midnight, and Freda thought helplessly that however vivid her memories were—Harry’s skin that always looked suntanned, his slow grin, his strong hands on her shoulders— they could be nothing compared with Doreen’s. The trouble was that if the house could be said to be haunted, as far as Doreen was concerned it wasn’t haunted enough.

Doreen switched off the gas fire in the parlor and adjusted her headscarf in front of the oval mirror, and at twenty to twelve they left the house. Snow glistened on the saplings that poked through the crust of the pavement. The two-tone Georgian terrace—cream on the ground floor where keystones looked like faint frowns above the windows, two redbrick stories above—led to Caledonian Road, where a locked gate kept out traffic. Families emerged from under the railway bridge into the sparkling light of the streetlamps on their way to church. Beyond the bridge was Pentonville, the long off-white prison building she had once mistaken for a factory. All the trees inside the prison wall looked stunted. Two nights ago she’d dreamed that every prison window had contained the same woman’s face, and that had made her even less willing to dream.

The women turned along Copenhagen Street toward the Lewis Carroll Library, in the ground floor of a multistory block. They might almost have passed the church if people hadn’t been converging on it, it looked so like a small block of flats.

Doreen fell to her knees as soon as they reached a pew. Freda knelt unobtrusively beside her and hoped that Doreen’s fervor was a good sign. She didn’t often go to church herself, it had always made her a little uneasy since a schoolmate had told her that her dreams were a sin. All the same, she’d come away from Timothy’s Requiem Mass feeling that the church believed in eternal life as deeply as she did, so how could it say that her dreams were wrong? She had never dreamed of Timothy, though she had been haunted by the image of his death; she hadn’t dreamed of anyone since her parents, after they’d died of the winter and the rationing of coal and food and the doctors being kept so busy by the air raids. Perhaps she no longer dreamed because their acceptance of her dreaming as something quite natural had died with them, but she was sure they were together, sure that she would see them again. Sometimes she had gone to church to think of them or Timothy, never to ask for anything, since she didn’t quite feel she belonged. Now, for the first time in many years, she was praying—praying that tonight Doreen would begin to accept her loss.

The congregation rose when the priest came in, and Freda found that almost everything had changed: the Latin had gone, the ritual was unfamiliar. She had to watch the people in front of her so as to know when to stand or sit or kneel. Christ was born, they couldn’t change that, and he promised life after death. If anyone deserved that it was Harry, who had never missed a Sunday or, as far as Freda knew, done wrong to anyone. The ritual had left her behind, but it must mean more to Doreen, who was silently weeping.

After Mass Doreen knelt for a while, hands clasped until their knuckles turned white, eyes closed, lips moving, shoulders shaking. Freda watched children, bright-eyed at their first midnight awake, filing past the crib. Doreen dabbed her eyes and stood up, smiling bravely at Freda. They emerged into the Christmas morning, where families exchanged hushed good-nights and small flakes settled through the dark air, and Doreen said, “Sorry if I embarrassed you, blubbing like that.”

“So long as it made you feel better.”

“It didn’t, not really. I was thinking of last Christmas and all the ones before it. I feel so lonely, Freddy. I don’t know what to do.”

At least she was talking about it. “It’ll pass, Doreen. I know you can’t believe that now, but it will.”

“But I feel so lost. You can’t imagine.”

“I can, Doreen. Believe me, I can.” She’d felt like that when she’d heard of Timothy’s death, felt reduced to nothing by the meaninglessness of it all. She’d overcome that, she’d come back to life, and she had to make sure Doreen did too. Doreen had to be helped to accept that she wouldn’t see or hear anything of Harry for a while, that it wouldn’t help if she did. That was Freda’s task, and already it seemed daunting. They turned the corner out of Caledonian Road, past the locked gate, and then they faltered. A tall man in black was standing on Doreen’s steps.

Doreen recovered first, no doubt because she didn’t recognize him. “I’m sorry to trouble you at this hour,” he said in his quiet voice. “Miss Beeching gave me your address. I wondered if you might have room.”

Freda felt as if a crippling burden had been lifted from her all at once. She couldn’t recall telling him the address or even her name, but thank heaven he could. “Doreen, this is Sage,” she said. “If anyone can help you in your trouble, he can.”

“If Freddy says so, that’s good enough for me.” Doreen looked tearful but trusting. Sage’s calm face and long delicate hands must have made her feel as Freda had. “All the rooms are made up. You can have whichever you like,” Doreen said, slipping the key into the lock beside the dogfaced knocker that Harry had screwed on askew. Freda noticed that the old green paint was beginning to show through the red of the door. Perhaps she could give it a new coat of paint. She could help to cheer up Doreen’s house.

22

W
HEN
Susan came out of the bathroom, where she had been allowed a touch of Mummy’s purple eye shadow, Mummy was wearing her new black dress, which Susan had saved up for. “Oh, Mummy, you look lovely,” Susan cried.

“Thank you, kind lady. So do you. Turn round and let me see.”

The hem of Susan’s long skirt whispered over her glittery stockings, and she could see it in the mirrors of her shoes. “You look very grownup,” Mummy said. “You’ll remember to be on your best behavior, won’t you? Our host is the lady who got me the job.”

They huddled inside their coats and went downstairs arm in arm. Lions roared in the flat across the landing, where the cats must be watching their cousins. They were roaring louder on the floor below, until a woman’s voice screamed, “Turn that down, I’ve enough of a circus with you as it is,” at the man who’d cornered Susan at the dustbins. He no longer bothered Susan; maybe everyone was strange sometimes—that was what she wanted to believe. “We’re having a nice Christmas, aren’t we, Mummy ?” she said.

“I’m glad you’re happy here now.” Mummy opened the front door, where a drift as tall as a thumb had gathered. “I was worried when I thought you mightn’t be.”

Susan had been hoping Mummy would say she was enjoying Christmas now. She might have thought she was if Mummy hadn’t stopped on the crunchy path and slapped her forehead. “I knew there was something. We’ve forgotten the wine. Get it for me, there’s a good girl.”

Susan forgot things herself sometimes. She ran upstairs and grabbed the bottle of Harrod’s wine from the refrigerator. Perhaps she was wrong to be suspicious, and so she hurried through the greenish dimness of the main room to the window. As soon as she parted the curtains her heart sank. She had been right after all.

She put down the bottle and gripped the curtains so hard she could feel her nails through them. Mummy was pacing back and forth on the pavement, stepping into the road to stare both ways between the cars, hurrying to the opposite pavement to peer along there. When she came back to the light of the nearest streetlamp she glanced up at the house. She caught sight of Susan in the moment before Susan let the curtains fall and dodged back.