Greyglass Page 13

  Susan imagined Crissie meant she had discovered, under-age, the lure of sex, perhaps become pregnant, and so incurred the wrath of her parents, whose characters Crissie had not really filled in.

  Crissie said, as if Susan had asked, “It was something that happened when I was a child. As Dad said, after I was nine I was fine. He said it a lot. And it rhymed, so we couldn’t forget it. Mother’s contribution was that bloody name she gave me.” Crissie didn’t sound angry, only momentarily exasperated. “Crystal. Oh what a thing to saddle a kid with. As soon as I ran off – which you won’t be surprised to learn was with my boyfriend of twenty-two – I changed it to Crissie. I suppose I could have changed it totally. I think, then, I meant to keep in touch. But I had to realise in the end I never wanted to.”

  “Did they try to find you?”

  “I expect so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know what they did. Or do. They could even be dead. Dad worked too hard and he was a big drinker, and Mother was scared of every disease under the sun.”

  Susan wondered what Crissie had done that was so awful, when she was a child. She wondered if Crissie would say, but that time Crissie didn’t, and soon they were speaking of something else.

  One night Susan told Crissie at length about her own past. Her own mother, and Wizz, and then about R.J. Crissie sat listening, sympathetic and involved, tender, gentle and cool as rain. She let Susan recount it all, all she wanted. Sometimes Crissie said things, unjarring and so apt that afterwards Susan forgot what they were – they were the same things Susan might have said to console and reassure herself, perhaps. There was nothing judgmental or self-expanding about Crissie. She never told Susan she had been foolish, or badly-used, or that Wizz was a monster or R.J. a bastard, or what she, Crissie, would have done, or what Susan should have done. She seemed to have said, Susan thought afterwards, only that life could hurt you, yet here they were. But there was also the kindness of Crissie, her eyes and how they looked at Susan, and the way she brought her the glass of wine, and then touched the tip of Susan’s nose for half a second with her warm, smooth finger.

  Like a mother? No. Not like that. Not like any of that. Like Crissie.

  There came a gloaming afternoon in late November, when Susan, walking along the Strand, saw Crissie near the Savoy with one of her clients.

  Crissie, working, was not very altered from the everyday Crissie, in appearance. Glamorously and expensively dressed, faultlessly made-up, and this time with blood-red lipstick, that on her young mouth looked only edibly correct. She was standing with an oldish, overweight man in a Savile Row suit. He was holding her hand, and she was looking into his eyes, smiling, sweet and affectionate, playful and calm. Then he said something and she laughed and he laughed.

  Susan turned away and walked on. The crowd was thick and surging, it was nearly four – she had left Paragon early to pick up a book at Zwemmers.

  Then Crissie was there.

  “Hello, Susie. I saw you go by. That was my lovely Heinrich. We were just bidding adieu. Thanks for not saying anything. He’d be shy.”

  Susan knew that the deal with the clients was often to lunch or dine first, the mask of the agency being that it provided social escorts. There was one young man, Crissie said, Todd, who seldom wanted sex, only that Crissie go with him to various functions, and act “as if I can’t keep my hands off him.”

  “Isn’t that –?”

  “No,” cried Crissie, “it’s fun, like acting in drama. I love it. He’s brilliant too. We scream afterwards.”

  She spoke of them all undamningly. She never told Susan anything much, either, carefully not betraying them, and sometimes stressed that this was not the man’s real name, she didn’t know what that was.

  “Shall we go for tea? This is a rotten time, the trains will be getting packed,” said Crissie.

  So they went to Zwemmers, then had tea and scones, and then Crissie got them both a black cab all the way back to Tower Gardens.

  Anne rang that night, at a quarter past midnight.

  “Anne…? Are you all right?”

  “Sure, I’m fine. Just bored as hell. So I thought I’d call you. What time is it there? Oh. Well it’s just around seven p.m. here.”

  Wizz was away on one of his, by now, perennial excursions. This time it was to Hawaii.

  “I didn’t want to go,” said Anne. “I mean, take-off in winter, with ice on the wings when you land?”

  They talked for a while, Susan holding the receiver away to shut off her yawns from her mother – she had been in bed, drifting, when the phone went.

  Finally Anne said, “You know, I think the rat is playing around again. No, I am sure he is. He’s been doing it, on and off, for years. What a skunk. Christ, I’ve long thought he even had the Hispanic maid that time.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Susan.

  “Not as sorry as he is when I start on about it. But God, Sue, I’m old. I’m so old. That’s what it is. It never matters if you’re a man. But for a woman – past fifty is shitsville.”

  Anne had never called her Sue. Anne perhaps, would never have said I am old. So who was this on the line?

  VII

  Outside the vegetable house, the vegetable trees of the maintained garden were putting on again their sticky, chestnut-red buds. A man came and gave the bench below Susan’s French doors a new coat of glaucous peacock paint. Later there was a solitary blue paw mark on her steps – the autograph of one of the pet cats. Probably not the white one though. She hadn’t seen it, nor had Crissie, ever again. That cold day of the bench painting, too, a letter came from Anne, the first for some time. The airmail envelope had come undone, which had happened once or twice with registered mail in the past, but the sheet of paper was not lost. Susan took it out with a definite feeling of unease.

  But, to begin with, there was no fresh update on adultery or arguments.

  ‘I’m coming over, across the Pond, to your neck of the woods, in a week, maybe two. I mean to London. It will be great to see you. This visit, let’s really have a good time. Wizz says stay ten days. And cash isn’t a problem. But of course I have to earn it. Even when he gave me those trips I took to Paris and Germany – did I ever mention those? I sent you postcards, I’m sure I did – even then I always had to go meet someone for him. Unpaid courier for the business. Although to be fair to him, I guess I do get paid, don’t I. And the couple in Germany were great. Anyhow, this time is the worst. It isn’t some packet to deliver this time. I have to bring this darn girl over to her father. Eve spoke to me about it, too. Eve is her aunt, or something, God knows and who cares. Obviously they don’t want this brat travelling alone, so I have to be the chaperone for the trip, and I am dreading it but dreading it. Can you picture me? Stuck with a twelve-year-old for eight hours in a plane. My favorite thing. And then an hour or whatever into London. Oh well. Why don’t you meet me – us – at the airport? I’ve enclosed details of a good cab firm Wizz knows, near London. I’ll pick up the check. All you need do is call them your end. Okay? Did I ever say Eve and I had a falling out, too? The bitch took his side, I mean Wizz’s side. Over this fooling around stuff. She said, men do it, I’d better put up or shut up. I’d suspect Eve of being part of the stuff done, only she’s two years older than me, and now she looks like a crow that’s been through a car-wash.’

  “I’m not looking forward to seeing her. I can’t help it. She says she may be here ten days. I don’t know if she’ll want to stay in a hotel or come out here. God – I really – I don’t want to see her.”

  Crissie nodded. “It’s difficult. Perhaps she won’t stay as long as she says. Or she’ll go off on her own like last time.”

  “I don’t think she will, now. She sounded so fed up on the phone. She must be very unhappy. I feel sorry – but I still hate the idea. And I hate saying I hate it, too.”

  “Whyever? Why lie to yourself?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not often, Susie-
Woo.”

  “Well, who do you lie to, then?” Susan said, unexpectedly.

  She answered thoughtfully. “Men, sometimes. I have to, or they don’t have the best sort of time with me. Let’s see, who else? Oh, you. About your birthday present. But that’s all I’m saying on that score.”

  Susan smiled a little. Then she said, “How is it I didn’t break all contact with Anne, as you did with your parents? I mean, I only had one to get rid of, and you managed both.”

  “True. But then I think they really wanted the break too.”

  “They wanted it –”

  “They were scared of me, Susan. I mean really scared. And even when everything was all right, and stayed all right, they kept expecting it all to happen again, despite what the psychiatrist, or whatever he was, said. Hence my dad’s awful little mantra, fine after nine. It was meant to keep the devilish bane at bay. To frighten me into suppressing – oh anything that might bring it on.”

  Susan sat, watching Crissie, the twilight deepening in the unlit room.

  Crissie looked down at the waxed floor, at her reflection in it. She said, “I know my mother was petrified when I began to have periods. She thought that would trigger everything again. But it didn’t.”

  Susan undid her mouth. Then closed it.

  Crissie said, “I’ve never told you this. It isn’t that I’m afraid of myself, I’m not, although I don’t understand it. Or ashamed, either, as I think I was meant to be. But not everyone wants to hear about things like this.”

  A swift nausea wriggled through Susan’s stomach and mind.

  What had Crissie done?

  “This was the thing you said happened when you were small.”

  “Yes. The daft thing is, I don’t remember any of it. Well, not much. Do you remember when I asked you what your earliest memory was, and you said around three, or four.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I don’t have – how shall I say – proper memories, not until I was nine.”

  There was silence.

  Susan held the coffee cup, which had ceased to mean anything, though half-full. Crissie sat quietly, looking down into the lake of her waxed floor. She seemed as ever serene, perhaps just a little melancholy. And all around the grey-blue shadow bloomed like fog.

  “Had there been an accident?” said Susan at last.

  “Amnesia? No, it wasn’t that. Nothing happened. My mother had a perfectly ordinary pregnancy, gave birth, according to Dad at least, without much bother. It was a quick birth, he said, only a couple of hours from start to finish, they barely got to the hospital in time. And I was a healthy six pound baby, just a week early.”

  The silence began again. It was like a noise, a recollected noise, but of what?

  Beyond the arched French door, so reminiscent of Susan’s, the blue-grey garden sank into the space and oblivion of night.

  “You see, I say I don’t have real memories, but I do have a type of memory. From the beginning, I think. I’m not sure, I never have been.”

  And silence again.

  This time it went on and on.

  “Crissie, if you don’t want to talk about this, please don’t.”

  Crissie looked up. Across the silent blurring of all things, her eyes shone, clear and feral as a cat’s, but colourless as a cat’s never were.

  “I’m concerned that you might rather not hear.”

  It was true. The hair moved slightly on Susan’s scalp. Suddenly, though she had never thought of it, or no more than once, before this hour, she recalled that they sat in what remained of the sunken rooms of the insane metamorphic house of her grandmother.

  “Maybe you’re right, I don’t want to – but – look, can I put a light on?”

  “You know you can.”

  Susan got up. As she crossed the room she blundered against the table with the fruit bowl. The tangerines leapt and rolled away. “Sorry.” Then the light came on to her touch. The room moved from nothingness to a golden magical normalcy. Even Crissie’s books gleamed in the bookcase, the beautifully illustrated fairy tales, and books of photographs of India and Egypt, the Shakespeare in red and the Chaucer in black.

  Crissie had also got up. She switched on the three other lights.

  She turned back in her dancing, dancer’s way. “It’s still me, Susie.” It was not a plea, not a challenge. Only an absolute.

  “Yes, sorry. That was just sitting here in the ’tween-light, greeking of auld ghoosties, or whatever.”

  “It wasn’t a ghost,” said Crissie. “It was a poltergeist.” She stood on the floor, on her reflection. “Look, here it is. No sooner did they get the baby – me – home to their posho house in Kent, than things started to happen. At first not every day. But then, every day. The things that happen with poltergeists. Psychokinetic activity. Lights blew out, furniture moved dramatically, pictures flew off the walls, even some of the windows broke, apparently. My parents would hear banging noises, knocks and thumps. My mother said on one occasion something had mowed through the dining-room carpet – as if a lawnmower had gone over it, she said. My mother was the one, you’ll gather, who made sure I had all the details as soon as I was ‘old enough’. At first, when it started, they tried to ignore it. They got panicky. They attempted one or two solutions, which achieved nothing. Then they found this man near Harley Street. He explained about the phenomena. He said this happened sometimes round young children, even adolescents. He said it would stop. But they still had six and a half more years of it. And then – then it did stop. By then they’d got well used to it. Which meant Dad drank and went out a lot, and my mother was on tranks. The au pairs regularly left, too. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Susan woodenly. She said, “This was in Kent?”

  “Marion Hill, Kent. Yes.”

  “And you don’t remember –”

  “What I remember is this. A kind of blaze without colour or light. Being furious and frustrated. I remember walking and walking through a sort of – well, I thought, when I was older, it was a kind of train tunnel. The light there was very faint, but I could see, and I wanted to get somewhere. Only I didn’t get there. And of course, how could I be walking in a tunnel like that, it must have been a recurring dream. I remember striking at things too – what things? I don’t know – but it made them shake, only I don’t think I did it with my hands. I remember being lonely in a way I never have since. I remember being in the dark.”

  Again silence. The light flickered in the lamps, but sometimes that happened here and elsewhere. The lamps might flicker as the electric grid was overloaded, or the power source changed over.

  “My first distinct, logical memory,” said Crissie, “is of my father saying to me, You’ve been a good girl. And I didn’t know what he meant, but my mother nodded, I can see her now, nodding. And I felt pleased with myself for being this Good Girl. The poltergeist activity hadn’t happened, apparently, for a month, which till then was unheard of. My father said, Now you can have that bike I promised. And I didn’t know what he was talking about. But you see, I understood language. I’d learnt how to talk and walk. I could even read and write, rather well actually. I just couldn’t recall how I’d learnt any of it. Like I didn’t recall the paranormal stuff that seemingly I’d caused until it stopped and I was a Good Girl, and earned the bike.”

  Susan said, “There was a poltergeist here, in this building, before it was converted into flats. So I’ve heard.”

  Crissie glanced at her. She looked intrigued not dismayed. “Really? I know they crop up here and there. Mine wasn’t the only case.”

  “Why did you take the flat here, Crissie?”

  Susan heard the churlish, Inquisitional note in her voice. Perhaps Crissie didn’t.

  “The agency found it for me. They’re really helpful that way. I was living in Highgate but I wanted a bigger place. They sorted it all out. I just moved in. That was the first time I saw the flat.”

  What is it?

  Look
at her. She’s twenty years old now. She looks it tonight. No make-up, her old sweater that cost perhaps only a hundred pounds. Barefoot.

  No it isn’t anything.

  A coincidence.

  It could all be rubbish, lies, anyway. She could be a total fucking romancer. Even all this about her job – whore – how do I know? All I know is what she’s told me. And that one man I saw her with – some rich old sugar-daddy – even, for God’s sake, her daddy, the builder. Her money comes from somewhere, but why from working at anything? She’s out a lot, so she goes out a lot.

  I don’t know a thing about her. Have taken her on trust, like I take everyone. Ghastly useless selfish Patrick and conniving oh-so-genuine R.J., and my bloody slapper of a mother, who is the real hooker, if anyone is, lapping up Wizz’s dollars, first in exchange for sex, then in exchange for keeping quiet about his sex with all the little Madisons.

  Christ, this sounds like my mother, like Anne, as she is now.

  I feel like her.

  I am not Anne.

  I am me.

  And Crissie?

  I don’t know what the fuck Crissie is.

  “Crissie, look, I’d better go. Thanks for telling me. But I shouldn’t have stayed so long – I’ve got to organise a few things, if Anne’s coming.”

  Crissie smiled. Nothing to it. Unfazed. Knowing.

  “Yes, Crissie, it did sound a bit weird. Sorry. But.”

  “It’s okay, Susan. I’ve got some washing to do anyhow. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She has conned me.

  She is the con artist.

  Lulled me and listened, and been lovely, and then told me her ghost story and made my skin crawl –

  In her own flat, Susan switched on all the lights. Then she pulled the wire out at the telephone point, afraid the phone would start to ring and ring.

  The driver wanted to chat all the way to Heathrow. He began by asking Susan where she was flying to, though she had no luggage. Then, when she said she wasn’t going anywhere, he commenced asking in-depth questions about who she was going to meet, where they had come from, why they were here – it was, Susan thought (inaccurately) like an interrogation.