Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Page 4

  ‘Milk is a poison, you know, Michael,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’ Michael had not known this. He had drunk milk seldom after leaving primary school where he had to finish up one of those little bottles every break-time before he was allowed out to play. He had not liked the stuff much then, and he had a squeamish loathing for the skin on custard or hot chocolate; but he would not have called it poison exactly. However, he was unlikely to oppose Alice on this matter, or any other. He drank his tea black and sugarless. He did not think it was worth trying for the sugar bowl.

  ‘What will you do?’ Alice asked. She finished her tea and was peering into the depths of her cup. ‘What do you plan to do with this house?’

  Michael gazed longingly at her. Blinkie, unseen in Michael’s baggy trousers, reared up and gazed longingly at her too.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Michael said weakly. ‘It depends, I suppose.’

  Alice’s eyes when she looked up from her cup were so misty that he was afraid she had scalded them with the steam. ‘Depends on what?’ she asked, her voice silky.

  Michael opened his mouth. All that came out was a pathetic squeak, wordless.

  Alice rose to her feet; she was humming as she had done in Aunty Sarah’s bedroom but this time the noise was more insistent, like the distant purr of a lawn-mower in an enthusiast’s garden. Slowly but surely she unwound one of the scarves at her throat and held it across her face. Above the gauzy top her dark eyes stared hypnotically at Michael.

  Her feet traced strange patterns on the flagstones of the kitchen floor. Michael crossed his legs in an effort to keep Blinkie aligned with at least some part of his body. She danced around in a little circle then she stood still and shivered her body in a sinuous snake-like tremble which set all the little beads and bells and discs on her scarves trembling and ringing.

  This was unfortunate. The cat, mistaking the noise for the welcome clatter of the tin-opener, came running into the kitchen and seeing there was nothing in his bowl let out a contemptuous bawl of disapproval. Alice ignored him completely and took one small step towards Michael.

  Michael pushed his chair back. He knew he was grinning in a village-idiotish sort of way but he could not manage his facial muscles at the same time as keeping everything else still.

  Alice shimmered with more energy, her rounded breasts vibrating freely behind the kaftan. Michael, who had a vivid recollection from last night of lying beneath Alice and heading first one perfect globe and then another like a wet-dreaming soccer star, gave his familiar wail of despair, collapsed head first on the kitchen table and gave up his essence once more – before Alice had dropped more than one scarf.

  Alice rested her face against his heaving shoulders and inhaled deeply. Though the essences slapped lightly into the tension areas of neck and around the eyes is best of all, the aura of yin is deeply restorative too. And, on a lower but none the less significant plane, it was a long time since anyone had shown much interest before veil number twelve.

  As they embraced thus, in silent communion, the tom cat came a little closer and sniffed at Alice’s bare feet. She looked down at him with her dark eyes.

  The cat looked back.

  Alice knew herself to be in touch with Nature and the Life Force in all its manifestations; she sensed the cat responding to that Force in her.

  The cat’s green eyes gazed inscrutably into Alice’s black ones. Anyone watching them would almost have believed that they were speaking to each other. Alice felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she sensed the cat willing her to understand something. Her fingertips prickled as their auras brushed, overlapped, mingled.

  The cat dropped its eyes first, turned from Alice, and then hesitated. Alice waited, unmoving, for whatever gesture the cat might make. Slowly and solemnly, the cat backed up and with its usual accuracy pissed all over the hem of Alice’s kaftan, her bare right leg, and her right sandal with the little bells on the straps.

  Alice gasped for a moment with shock and irritation but then exhaled deeply to bring herself under control. She released Michael and stepped away from him, saying nothing, though her right foot was warm and wet. Michael, still slightly shaky, sat up and poured himself another cup of sour tea.

  ‘That cat is blocking my Life Force,’ Alice said. Her voice was mellow and strong. ‘He has a negative presence. Can you feel it?’

  Michael shook his head, the round lenses of his glasses fixed trustingly on Alice’s face.

  ‘His aura is dark,’ Alice said certainly. ‘His magnetic field is distorted.’

  Michael looked at the cat, which was now sitting in a patch of sunlight washing his private parts with his back leg casually hitched over his shoulder and the air of a good job well done.

  ‘He may have fleas,’ Michael offered. ‘Aunty Sarah said he had when I was last here.’

  Alice nodded. ‘She would have sensed that he was flawed,’ she said. ‘His Life Force is very weak.’

  Alice went to the back door of the kitchen and opened it. Sunlight flooded on to the kitchen floor, illuminating Alice’s one wet footprint dot-and-carrying across the flagstones. Michael looked at it without curiosity.

  ‘Cat!’ Alice called peremptorily. The cat looked up at her and went trustingly towards her. Alice stepped out of Michael’s line of sight into the garden, the cat close behind her. There was a yowl of anger and dismay which was suddenly cut abruptly short. Alice came back into the kitchen with her wide-hipped swaying pace. She was trailing the limp cat by the tail, as lesser women trail mink coats. There was a dustbin by the door; she slung the cat into it and clanged the lid, then came back to sit down at the table.

  ‘I knew his Life Force was weak,’ she said conversationally to Michael.

  Michael, dumbstruck, nodded; gulped his tea. His teeth clattered a little on the rim of his cup. They sat in the silence of satisfied lovers for a little while.

  ‘So what will you do with this house?’ Alice asked again.

  Michael took a deep breath. ‘I wonder if I could live here while I finish my degree,’ he said. ‘I’ve never liked living in Hall. I could live here and rent some of the rooms.’

  Alice looked down into the bottom of her cup.

  ‘May I tell you what I see?’ she asked.

  Michael nodded.

  ‘I can see a place of growth here, of regeneration, of rebirth.’ She took his cup from his nerveless hands and clasped them in her own. ‘We could live here, you and I,’ she said, her voice husky with power. ‘We could run it as a growth centre, for people to try alternative medicine, alternative lifestyles.’ Her tongue flicked swiftly across her lips. ‘Therapies,’ she said. ‘Water therapy, mud therapy … sexual therapy, Michael.’

  She glanced at him. ‘It’s a perfect place,’ she said. ‘Privacy, large rooms, an air of convincing elegance. We could do it. We could do it together, Michael.’

  Michael gasped. He had been caught up by the soothing repetition of her voice into thinking she was telling his fortune. But it was more than that! It was an offer, a partnership. Him and Mrs Hartley! Together forever!

  Gosh!

  ‘I don’t know anything about alternative lifestyles,’ he said. He sounded feeble, even to himself. Especially to himself.

  Alice shrugged. ‘You could go on courses,’ she said. ‘You could go on retreats. I would teach you everything I know. You are sensitive, Michael. You know Yourself. The moment I saw your aura I knew you were one of those who Know. One of those who don’t have to learn everything from simplistic textbooks, who don’t have to have everything taught and written down.

  ‘Little bits of paper and examinations,’ she said bitterly, thinking of Miranda Bloomfeather and her A-minus. ‘Libraries of bits of paper, mountains of useless facts. You either instinctively know something or you do not. All the rest is just bureaucracy.’

  Michael heaved a great sigh of longing. He was, after all, a student approaching the final examinations of a three-year course upon which the succe
ss of the rest of his life would depend. It is a time when everyone feels a natural repugnance for academic information, and the appeal of an instinctive knowledge which can be learned without effort is particularly high.

  ‘Do you think we could do it?’ he asked longingly.

  ‘I Feel we could do it,’ she replied, condemning thought to bureaucracy as well. ‘I Know we could do it. I See it!’

  ‘Yes! Oh Yes!’ cried Michael. Blinkie, as if wakened from a doze by their raised voices, lifted his head. Michael got up as well and took Alice by the hand. He thought if he was very, very quick, and thought very hard all the time about Henry James’s literary technique in – say – The Turn of the Screw – No! not that word! Not that! in say – The Ambassadors – he might be able to get Alice’s kaftan up and his jeans down before Alice’s clever hands went down and drew his essences into her cupped palms instead of the place where he would really much rather they went.

  ‘Yes!’ he cried, nearing his goal as Alice obligingly sank to the stone floor. He captured both her hands and held them above her head. Alice, though mourning the loss of male essence for the tension areas of her epidermis, could not help but writhe in delight at being held with such dominance. And on a cold stone floor too! It really was too At One for words when …

  SUDDENLY THERE WAS A DREADFUL HAMMERING NOISE ON THE CEILING!

  ‘My God what’s that!’ cried Michael, leaping to his feet. Blinkie dived back inside his trousers like a seal off a rock in stormy weather.

  Alice scrambled to her feet and gazed wildly around her. The noise came from upstairs where there was nothing, could be nothing, but the stiffening mortal remains of Aunty Sarah.

  ‘Daisy!’ A sharp old voice, sharp as a cracked bell, echoed down through the empty house. ‘Daisy! Where’s my brandy and egg-nog? Daisy! You lazy bitch! Bring it up at once!’

  Michael was blanched white with superstitious terror.

  ‘That’s Aunty Sarah’s voice,’ he quavered, reaching instinctively for Alice. She brushed past him and went to fetch her rucksack from the hall. She poured out the contents in an avalanche of alternatives on to the wide kitchen table.

  ‘She’s coming through from the Other Side,’ she muttered. ‘It would be the essences which drew her, my sensitivity and your essences. If I can create the right ambience …’ One little jar after another she drew towards her, selecting, rejecting, then she spread out her kaftan like a peasant girl’s apron and loaded them in.

  ‘Upstairs!’ she hissed to Michael, her dark eyes blazing with excitement. ‘Upstairs! With a manifestation this strong we may even see her! The dear old lady!’

  Michael lagged unwillingly behind as Alice ran light-footed up the stairs, her bottles clinking in her kaftan. She strode into the bedroom and fell back, in shock.

  Aunty Sarah was sitting up in bed, hammering on the floor with a silver-handled ebony stick. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded as Alice abruptly halted on the threshold. ‘Where’s my morning tea? Where’s my newspaper? Where’s my brandy and egg-nog? And why isn’t Daisy here? If you’re a temporary you can just go straight back to Lithuania or wherever you’ve come from. I won’t have au pairs and they all know it!’

  ‘Aunty Sarah,’ Michael popped his head around Alice, ‘Aunty Sarah, do you know me?’

  Her bright gaze swept him pityingly. ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘You’re my nephew, that idiot Michael Coulter.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Michael weakly. ‘And Aunty,’ he said tentatively, ‘are you feeling quite all right?’

  ‘Of course I am!’ she snapped. ‘I’m half dead of hunger and thirst, but I’m all right! Where is Daisy with my tea? Fetch her at once!’

  ‘Did you say half dead, Aunty?’ Michael asked cunningly, trying to lure Aunty Sarah on to some common ground. ‘Did you say half dead?’

  ‘God give me peace,’ she exclaimed to the ceiling. ‘I’d rather be half dead than halfwitted. Michael! Go downstairs at once, and tell Daisy to come up here and bring me my tea and my brandy. Take this awful woman with you. She’s obviously one of those au pairs from the agency who can’t speak a word of English. Here!’ This was directly to Alice who still stood, frozen, her kaftan loaded with herbs and oils which were to aid communication with the other world, her head still full of dreams of an alternative lifestyle and a young lover. ‘Here! Heidi! Go away! Gotterdammerung! or whatever. Skit! Skedaddle! And send up Daisy to me.’

  Michael stepped backwards, he laid hold of one of Alice’s floating scarves and tweaked it gently. Without a word she let him reverse her from the room which they had entered so blithely with such high hopes of astral communication.

  All gone.

  All gone.

  And nothing left but a bad-tempered old lady who looked, as Michael had so rightly said earlier, as if she would live, occupying this perfect alternative therapy centre, forever.

  They slumped side by side at the kitchen table. Alice listlessly took up one of her jars of herbs.

  There was another abrupt banging on the ceiling.

  ‘And bring up Thomas my cat!’ yelled Aunty Sarah. ‘Where is he? I want Thomas!’

  Alice and Michael exchanged one appalled look and then found their eyes drawn irresistibly towards the dustbin. Neither of them would have been in the least surprised if the lid had risen and Thomas also had returned miraculously to this material plane.

  They waited a few moments.

  Nothing happened.

  Michael, exercising some manly courage, went across the kitchen floor, which was still puddled with Thomas’s final act, lifted the bin lid and looked in.

  At least the cat was still dead.

  ‘What will you do?’ Alice murmured dully.

  Michael shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose I shall go and find Doctor Simmonds,’ he said. ‘He’ll have to come back and see her. He’ll know where Daisy lives. She’s in one of the houses in the village but I don’t know which one. I’ll ring up my Dad and tell him Aunty Sarah’s been ill. I’ll drive us back to campus. The van’s got to be back at midday. Where shall I take your furniture?’

  Alice looked at him blankly. The alternative therapy centre was fading so fast that Michael had almost forgotten it already. All there was for her in the future might be an occasional share of his narrow bed in the little room, and the nightly wheezes of her husband as his fevered imagination placed him and Miranda Bloomfeather in more and more exotic locations and in foreign countries too. There would be the grisly support and sympathy of her women friends. There would be interminable counselling sessions in which Alice would be made to feel obscurely to blame and clearly in the wrong. There would be a long, hopeless seeking through esoteric and unlikely therapy, for such scant legal fun is available to a forty-year-old woman whose husband despises her. Alice knew that without regular sex and lots of essence her neck would go crepey. She did not need a spiritual guide or a tarot reading to recognize the chance of a lifetime when it came on a plate.

  She rose to her feet.

  There was another banging on the ceiling. ‘If Daisy is not up here in five minutes with my tea and my brandy and my cat I shall dock ten shillings off her wages,’ came the ringing voice.

  Alice’s eyes hardened. Her mouth was set. ‘Your Aunty Sarah is a negative Life Force,’ she said firmly.

  Michael’s eyes goggled behind the round lenses.

  ‘She has a bad aura,’ Alice said. ‘Her magnetic field is distorted. She is trying to fight her destiny. She has a weak Life Force. She is ready to Go Over.’

  Michael tried to speak but found his voice had gone. ‘What d’you mean?’ he whispered.

  Alice had turned her back on him. She was switching on the kettle and fetching a clean cup and saucer from the Welsh dresser.

  ‘She has a negative Life Force,’ she said quietly. ‘She needs help to be At One with her destiny – her move to another plane.’

  The kettle boiled. Alice picked up the tea caddy and spooned tea into the pot. Sh
e added boiling water. She put the teapot on the tray with the milk jug and the sugar bowl. Then she took a slim dark bottle and measured four precise drops of a clear odourless liquid into the teapot.

  ‘I’m giving her a nice herbal tea,’ she said.

  Michael leaped to his feet but became entangled with the table leg. By the time he was free of the furniture Alice was carrying the tray upstairs, her face Madonna-like in its serenity.

  ‘Please don’t, Mrs Hartley!’ he cried. ‘Please don’t give her a herbal tea, Mrs Hartley. It’s much better not! Please not a herbal tea, Mrs Hartley!’

  Aunty Sarah was sitting up in bed scowling at a handsome gold hunter watch when Alice and Michael tumbled into the room, Alice holding the tray and looking determined, Michael with a frightened grip on one of her trailing shawls.

  ‘Thought I’d told you to get lost,’ the old lady said acerbically. ‘What’s that?’ she demanded, pointing to the tray. ‘And where’s Daisy?’

  ‘Daisy’s not here today,’ Alice said in a confident tone. She put down the tray on the bedside table and nodded pleasantly at Aunty Sarah. ‘I’m a friend of Michael’s,’ she said. ‘Your doctor sent a message to say you weren’t well so we both came over to see you. I shall look after you until Daisy arrives.’

  ‘Oh,’ the old lady said, unconvinced. She shot a look at Alice’s flowing kaftan and the scarves with the glittery coins. ‘Not one of them Harry Krishners, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said levelly. She reached over and poured the tea into the cup. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘No sugar,’ the old lady said, irritated at the suggestion. ‘Not one of the Mormons? Seventh Day Adventists? Quakers? Anarchists? Socialists?’

  ‘I have no god but the Great Earth Mother,’ Alice said calmly. ‘Drink your tea, Aunty Sarah.’

  ‘Miss Coulter to you,’ she replied instantly and with malice. She dipped her puckered old face towards the teacup. Michael held his breath, about to cry out, about to dash the cup from her hand.