Alice Hartley‘s Happiness. Philippa Gregory
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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 success 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